Randal Rauser's Blog, page 36

Biblical Violence Interview on The Curious John Podcast

Yesterday, I was on the “Curious_John Podcast” to talk about Jesus Loves Canaanites. John is a Nigerian atheist and as such, he has a unique perspective. You can find the episode on various platforms (e.g. Spotify) or listen via Google podcasts by clicking here. 

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The Most Common Early Objection to Jesus Loves Canaanites (And it’s not Good)

My latest book Jesus Loves Canaanites has been out for a month now. Overall, the response has been excellent, but I’ve heard a handful of criticisms from readers. Most of those are, frankly, misfires. But in this article, I am going to consider a more substantive objection which I have heard a few times, one that pertains to the alleged limited socio-historical horizons of my ethical argument.

Let’s begin with a quick overview of a couple of points from the book. First, I argue that we can grasp through moral reflection the intrinsic evil of actions of genocide, particularly in its most extreme form, that of the targeted mass killing of members of the target group. What is more, properly functioning human agents (i.e. those without a psychopathic personality disorder) can grasp these basic moral values and obligations through their immediate moral intuition. Like a flashing red light, moral intuition warns us off from committing moral actions that we recognize to be heinous.

Consequently, if we choose to ignore that flashing red light, and we instead opt to become complicit in the dehumanization and slaughter of another population, we will experience a deleterious effect on our psychological, spiritual, and emotional well-being. As I argue in the book, it is common for genocidaires to dehumanize the target population by way of actions like torture, mutilation, and rape. While these heinous actions of dehumanization make it easier to kill in the short term, the long-term impact on the population of genocidaires is devastating. When it comes to the ancient Israelites in Canaan, this yields a deeply ironic situation in which the very genocidal actions ostensibly undertaken to protect the spiritual purity of the Israelites end up becoming the very catalysts for the moral corruption of the Israelites.

That’s a quick summary of one line of argument in the book. And that brings me to the rebuttal that I’ve encountered from some readers. While I’ve heard it a few times now, the basic gist goes like this:

“Wait a minute, Rauser. Aren’t you naively projecting your modern values onto the ancient near east? After all, standards of warfare were different at that time and life was ‘nasty, brutish, and short.’ So we have good reason to believe that the Israelites would not have been emotionally disturbed by participation in the slaughter in the same way we would be today. And that means that they wouldn’t have needed to commit further acts of dehumanization of the victims to cope with the psychological stress, because they wouldn’t be stressed in the first place. In short, the Israelites could carry out their orders without all the negative effects that you describe.”

That’s the objection. So is it a good one?

Let’s concede, for the sake of argument, that the ancient near east was so brutish that the Israelites had been turned into callous killing machines that could slaughter Canaanite infants, small children, the mentally and physically handicapped, and the elderly, and they could do it all with complete disregard for the cries and groans and the desperate struggle to live of their victims. Fine, but how is that an improvement? To put it bluntly, this argument reduces to the claim that the Israelites could not be brutalized by the genocide because they were already hardened killing machines who looked upon their victims with the same dull detachment and callous disregard as a great white shark sinking its jaws into a desperate seal.

This is not a good argument. To put it bluntly, that objection is like arguing that you can prevent the loss of any fingers in the lawnmower if you preemptively amputate your fingers before you start cutting the grass. Likewise, you can prevent the psychological damage of complicity in genocide if you start by effectively “amputating” the moral sensibilities that render such an action unthinkable in the first place. If anything, objections like that merely underscore the strength of my analysis.

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Discussing Jesus and the Canaanites with Pinecreek Doug

Here is my appearance on Pinecreek Doug’s show discussing my book Jesus Loves Canaanites. It was a good exchange, wide-ranging and civil.

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God and Genocide: An Interview with Critical Witness

Today, I did an interview with an English podcast called Critical Witness. It was a very spirited discussion. These fellows aren’t afraid to push back and ask hard questions. Check it out!

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From Ancient Israel to Boko Haram: On the problem with defending human rights atrocities

Today, I posted a tweet on how Christians who defend genocide in the Bible often find themelves backing into cultural relativism. That prompted a reply from a fellow named Andrew who read and appreciated the book but who didn’t agree with it. What followed was a civil exchange which I have included below. From my perspective, Andrew ends up endorsing a claim that our moral knowledge is limited to what is described in the Bible, a stance which is factually incorrect: as I argue in the book at length, we indisputably have extra-biblical moral knowledge. Moreover, that claim about the Bible is not itself taught by the Bible and is, in fact, explicitly denied by the Bible in many passages (I cite Romans 2 as an example). Perhaps most disturbing, from my perspective, is the fact that Andrew is unwilling to say that the girls captured by Boko Haram did not willingly consent to sexual contact with their captors.

Randal: One of the predictable objections to my argument in Jesus Loves Canaanites is that I’m naively projecting “western values” onto the ancient near east. It’s interesting how biblical violence forces many Christians to defend cultural relativism…

Andrew: You assert, over and over in the book, that the events prescribed by God in Deuteronomy and described in Joshua are “genocide” according to a word that was invented in the 20th century and condemn the bible according to an international law established in 1948. Seems you are importing things from modernity and imposing them on scripture. Is that an unfair critique?

Randal: If you have read the book you should know that I explain that there is nothing “anachronistic” about applying a legal definition retroactively to show that past events satisfy the definition. Indeed, that is what is done when we call the Holocaust a genocide.

Andrew: I did read it and I agree, but both can be true at the same time. The events of the conquest fit modern standards and definition of genocide, but are still morally good by God’s definition, which is divine judgment. The Rwandans committed genocide and should be condemned .because they were following the evil intentions of their hearts. The Israelites were following righteous commands by a holy God and should be vindicated.

Randal: Can God command rape?

Andrew: No

Randal: What is your basis for saying that?

Andrew: There is no righteous reason to command it.

Randal: How do you know?

Andrew: Sexual ethics in the bible do not include forced intercourse. There IS an ethic about capitol punishment in scripture. The wages of sin, which is death. All are in Adam and all die. God has the right to take the life of anyone he has granted it to, and in any fashion he desires.

Randal: 1. What is your basis for claiming that the Bible delimits the range of what God can possibly command? 2. What is your response to the Midianite virgins of Numbers 31? You think they could consent to sex when their families were massacred?

Andrew: 1) Well, we know God cannot lie (Heb 6:18). So there are things God can’t do. I see no reason to think God would command rape and he has not commanded it in Scripture. 2) I think the burden of proof is in you to showthat any Midianite virgin was raped. I say that none were,

Randal: You didn’t answer the question. What is your basis for claiming an action must be commanded in scripture to show that God can command it? So you think the burden is on you to show Boko Haram raped their Nigerian girls they kidnapped?

Andrew: How else would I know what God can command outside of the book of his commandments? I do know God can’t do certain things. Therefore,why would I believe God commanded a sin that has no redeeming qualities? Pretend I know nothing about Boko Haram. Why should I make assumpions  about Boko Haram and their rape patterns?

Randal: The Bible never claims it is the only source of moral knowledge. Indeed, it refutes that claim in passages like Romans 2. You know Boko Haram killed families and kidnapped girls but you believe those kidnapped children may have consented to sexual relations with their captors?

Andrew: No, but the bible does claim to be the only infallible source of moral knowledge. The law is stamped on the human heart, but that same heart is deceitfully wicked and suppresses the truth in unrighteousness. I don’t believe anything about Boko Haram, as I know very little about them. I do know that God forbids rape, so, if any Israelite men raped Midiananite girls, he did so against God’s will.

Randal: The Bible doesn’t claim that. And the same ‘deceitful wickedness’ that affects our reading of the innate moral law also affects our Bible reading.

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Jesus and the Canaanites

Here is a short interview I did on the topic of Jesus and the Canaanites a couple of months ago.

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Why the Logic of the Canaanite Genocide is Fundamentally Flawed

In this short video, I rebut the claim that the Israelites needed to kill the Canaanites in order to maintain their own moral purity. On the contrary, I point out that participation in war crimes like genocide and ethnic cleansing is fundamentally corrupting for the moral status of a people. Thus, the Israelites would have morally corrupted their own community by participating in such war crimes, thereby defeating the very rationale for their actions.

 

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So You Want to Publish a Book? Thoughts from a Seasoned Author

My first book was a modest little volume published with RTSF back in 2001. You can find it for free here. Since then, I published thirteen more books with several publishing houses (Edinburgh University Press, Paternoster, Biblica, InterVarsity, Baker, Oxford University Press, Prometheus, Wipf and Stock). In recent years, I have tried self-publishing. And through it all, I have had some interesting experiences. In this article, I am going to list briefly some of the things I’ve learned working with publishers and self-publishing. So if you’ve ever thought about publishing a book, definitely read on.

First, and above all, I have learned that publishing is absolutely cutthroat and nobody cares about your book. I’m being hyperbolic, but only a bit: every year in North America there are hundreds of thousands of completely new titles published in addition to the millions of book titles already crowding the marketplace. The average new book sells approximately 200 copies (including, one assumes, a good number of charity purchases from family and friends). So even as you enthusiastically seek to promote your work, you should still prepare mentally for the idea that your book will quickly sink beneath the waves and be forgotten. This mix of enthusiastic optimism and painful realism can be a difficult balancing act, and I have struggled myself not to sink into cynicism about the entire enterprise. But forewarned is forearmed. And on the upside, the second you can crest more than 200 copies sold, you’re already in the top half of new titles in sales: so there is that!

Working with a Publisher

Now let’s talk about publishing houses. Since I’ve been with many different publishing houses, I’ve seen a lot of variety here. Some contracts are gold, but others are not worth the paper they’re written on. First, pay attention to the downpayment on royalties. When you sign a contract, it is standard for the publisher to negotiate a lump-sum payment based on the anticipated sales in the future. A lucrative downpayment tells the author that the publisher is willing to invest in the book to recoup their investment.

However, there is a downside as well. If you receive a sizeable downpayment and your publisher fails to recoup their investment, that will stigmatize your book as a commercial failure. Let’s say you sign a contract and receive a downpayment of $10,000. Eventually, your book earns $5000. Your book is a failure. However, if you had signed a lower downpayment at the beginning (let’s say, $1000) your book would be considered a success. Of course, in the latter case, you end up pocketing less money because you only ever earn $5000. But because the publisher made money, you will be building a reputation of success that promises an established and healthy publishing relationship for the future.

Next, a word on the editor: some editors are really involved in shepherding your book through the publishing process. They know the manuscript intimately and they care about you as a person. They may become a friend and mentor through the process. In the end, you can’t imagine the finished product existing without their input. You cannot put a dollar value on that kind of relationship.

But other editors are very different. They have a hundred things on the go all the time. Their input to your work consists of little more than skimming and rubber stamping your final draft. There is little-to-no input beyond that.

The original Biblica cover

Many other editors exist somewhere in the space between these two extremes. Unfortunately, beyond carefully scanning the contract for the description of an editor’s obligations and asking other authors, it is difficult to anticipate what kind of relationship you will have. However, keep this in mind: you will likely not be a favored author after a single contract. The most meaningful and productive relationships with an editor are built over time so if that is what you seek, you should be prepared to invest in it from your end.

I have also seen the enormous contrast between publishers in terms of their graphic design and marketing. For example, in one case, my book The Swedish Atheist, the Scuba Diver, and Other Apologetic Rabbit Trails, I had a contract with one publisher (Biblica) which was later transferred to another (InterVarsity). Before the transfer, Biblica produced a cover for the book which I thought was okay at the time: they definitely attempted to catch the quirkiness of the book. However, the font for the book title was terrible. It was small and hard to read. And my name on the cover also was so small that it almost looked like a header on a page. The cover is pictured to your right.

The InterVarsity cover

I didn’t realize how poor the Biblica cover was until InterVarsity took over the book and produced a few possible covers for me to choose from. (Not all publishers do that: some tell you what the cover is going to be. I am always grateful for options.) I thought InterVarsity did a great job with the cover for the book. As a licensed scuba diver, I immediately recognized that they had included a deep-sea diver rather than a scuba diver image on the cover. But that was a minor quibble: the cover was clever and attention-grabbing and far, far better than the original cover.

The importance of a cover can hardly be over-estimated so it is essential that a publisher has a skilled graphic design team who are willing and able to invest in the success of your book. I have appreciated most of the covers that publishers have given for my books: Oxford University Press did a great job capturing the essence of Theology in Search of Foundations with their cover, for example. Biblica may have dropped the ball on the Swedish Atheist cover but my first two books with them (Finding God in the Shack, You’re Not as Crazy as I Think) both had excellent covers. Indeed, the cover for Finding God was brilliant and likely boosted the sales of the book significantly.

The worst cover of any of my books is for my Wipf and Stock title, Is the Atheist My Neighbor? The book was to be released shortly back in 2015 and I still hadn’t seen the cover so I emailed the editor. He forwarded the email to someone in graphic design and they sent a cover within the day. Okay, so the book is ultimately about the importance of Christians exercising hospitality toward their atheist neighbors by rejecting the common (and false) idea that atheism is always borne of sinful rebellion. There were countless possibilities for a rich cover exploring the notion of hospitality and neighborliness. But instead, the guy sent me this cover of, uh, a bare room with a grey wall and wood floor. It’s clear he didn’t spend more than five minutes thinking about this.

And that brings me to marketing. Some publishers, like Wipf and Stock, do the bare minimum in terms of promotion: they send you a press sheet based on information you send them and they send out a press release. But given that Wipf and Stock churns out countless titles every year, you can bet that yours will likely not get much attention unless you fight for it: in short, you’re pretty much on your own in terms of promotion.

In other cases, a publisher assigns an actual publicist to your book who aggressively promotes it, lining up interviews on radio and podcasts, soliciting reviews from magazines and bloggers, and securing banner ads on various websites. Active promotion from the publisher can be all the difference between a bestseller and publishing oblivion.

All this is to say that getting a contract for your book doesn’t mean much. What really matters is what kind of contract and with which publisher. Keep in mind that when you sign a contract, you are giving over the rights for your hard work to someone else so that they now own your ideas. Don’t give away your intellectual property just because someone is willing to publish it under their imprint. Wait for the right contract. And if you’re like me, you may get to the point where the diminishing rewards of the traditional publishing house leads you to look elsewhere. I will now conclude this article with a few thoughts on self-publishing.

Self-Publishing

Back in the day, self-publishing commonly consisted of a contractual model in which the author needed to commit to a particular print run (e.g. 500 copies). Alas, that would often result in that author being left with boxes of unsold books in their garage. Thankfully, those days are no more: Today, one can publish with Kindle Direct Publishing, an Amazon company. KDP is print-on-demand which means the only unsold books you’ll have in your garage are books you chose to buy. Further, KDP allows you to set your own pricing and run promotions (e.g. temporary 99 cent or free Kindle downloads) and they give the authors options to purchase hard copies at a very good discount.

At this point, I’m going to discuss my experience with KDP at some length, so let me state explicitly that I am not receiving any payment to promote their services. I assure you, they don’t need my endorsement! That said, I have been regularly solicited over the years to include content on my blog in exchange for payment and I have declined all such requests. With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s return to my experiences.

I like KDP for a few other reasons. First, after you upload the manuscript and covers, they place a barcode automatically on the back cover and after a review process of a few hours to a day, your book should be available for sale. Contrast that to conventional publishing where the time gap from manuscript submission to publication can take anywhere from 6-18 months. (Publishers typically space out their new releases to a few periods during the year like late August/September, December, and spring. You need to fit into their schedule. However, Wipf and Stock is an exception: they publish throughout the year.)

Second, after you submit your book to a conventional publisher, you might wait a year for it to be published and then another year for the first royalty check to come in. Unless you had a lucrative downpayment on royalties, that’s a long time! By contrast, KDP pays royalties monthly. So you will begin to receive payments within weeks.

Third, while you receive a sales report from conventional publishers with your annual royalty payment, typically sales are a black box until then. By contrast, on KDP you can track your sales daily both in Kindle and hardcopy. And your daily tracking also tells you the sales in different countries.

So consider my most recent book Jesus Loves Canaanites. I had no inkling to write that book until December 26, 2020. On that day, I started writing. I finished the manuscript two months later in mid-February and I submitted the manuscript to KDP on April 17. It has now been on sale for one month. If this was conventional publishing, the book likely wouldn’t be released until spring 2022 at the soonest.

One more thing in terms of the upside: self-publishing offers total control over the process. You control your cover layout. You control the book’s typesetting. And the promotion is all on your shoulders.

That, of course, is also a big challenge. I don’t have the skills to design book covers and while KDP offers an economical self-serve cover design option, that is not an area that I believe should be done on the cheap. For my three self-published books, I used Darryl Frayne of Steady Digital. Darryl is an old friend and I’m happy with his work on the cover design.

For the most part, I have done my own typesetting, though that requires investment in a monthly subscription to Adobe InDesign software (about $21 US monthly). InDesign can be difficult to learn, so I suggest you find web tutorials or a good book to guide you through InDesign and book design. I recommend this volume: Book Design Made Simple. I’ve used it now to design three books and I find their instructions clear, simple, and intuitive. Of course, you can outsource typesetting but that can get expensive very quickly. And once you get the hang of it, it can be really satisfying to plot out the interior design of your book.

You might be tempted to try publishing in Microsoft Word. I don’t recommend that: invest the time in software that can make your book look professional. Also, keep in mind that once your book is done, you will need to convert it over to another form (e.g. Word) and make other changes (e.g. removing headers/footers) in order to make the Kindle version.

Let me conclude with a few remaining thoughts. First, while I publish under KDP, I do so with my own imprint: Two Cup Press. I cannot stress enough how important it is to make the extra effort to publish under your own imprint. There is a significant, and largely deserved, negative stigma with self-publishing. While a handful of self-published books like The Shack and Still Alice may find critical and commercial success, most are just bad and frankly earn their place in publishing oblivion. That stigma will weigh down your book at the outset if you publish with a well-known self-publishing imprint like Xlibris or KDP. You can avoid that by publishing under your own imprint.

Unfortunately, you will soon discover that there is another challenge in terms of closed markets. Conventional publishers get their books in libraries. But libraries do not stock self-published books, period. (The only exceptions are those rare critical and commercial successes that I mentioned above. In my case, the library for my seminary has published my self-published books, but that’s about it.) So you automatically lose the option of library sales. What is more,  you also lose the revenue that comes from library borrowing. In Canada, for example, I make hundreds of dollars annually from Public Lending Rights for my books being borrowed by library users.

Not only will libraries not purchase self-published books, but they also won’t even accept them as donations. While that might seem surprising if you think about it, it makes sense: if libraries accepted self-published book donations they would open themselves to a flood of poorly written Xlibris vanity publications. After all, what better way to get rid of those boxes of books in your garage, right?

Self-publishing also means you won’t be in bookstores, though you can comfort yourself by noting that few book titles are ever sold in brick and mortar bookshops these days. The vast majority are only ever available online.

One last thing: while KDP offers relatively lucrative royalty payments for books sold through Amazon globally, the royalties are significantly lower for books sold through other online sellers. But I’m just glad to know I’m doing my part to help Jeff Bezos pay for his new half-billion-dollar yacht.

So those are some quick thoughts on my experiences publishing and self-publishing. By the way, I am currently thinking about writing my fifteenth book. I haven’t decided, however, whether I will continue with the self-publishing route or whether I will again try my luck with a conventional publishing house. That chapter, it would seem, has yet to be written.

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The Bible and Genocide: The Adherent Apologetics Interview

In this interview, I discuss my new book Jesus Loves Canaanites with Zac of Adherent Apologetics.

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Deconstructing a Frank Turek Tweet

In this video, I explain how a recent tweet from Frank Turek unfairly stigmatizes people who deconvert from Christianity as being motivated by a desire to justify a particular type of ‘sexual behavior’.

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