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Friendly conversations are wonderful - but beware of atheists and false religions applauding you; it might mean you are sleeping in the wrong bed.I'll say it again: it's impossible to offend me. I see all this as entertaining fun.
But you always appear to have a good heart David. Bless you buddy.
Jesus said"I thank you Father that you have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and revealed them to babes. For this seemed good in your sight."
haha. There is great wisdom in the foolishness of God.
Stuart wrote
"God outside the human imagination"
I already told you but you do not believe therefore you cannot listen.
@David
great work, I am reminded again that Jesus spoke in parables for a reason. Some people aren't supposed to understand.
This article seemed like it might relate, somewhat, to our discussion:http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...
Rod - are we the theology police now because we read the Bible and speak out against sin?
David wrote: "This article seemed like it might relate, somewhat, to our discussion:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/..."
Hmm ...
Things can be true even if no one can prove them. For example, it could be true that there is life elsewhere in the universe even though no one can prove it. Conversely, many of the things we once “proved” turned out to be false. For example, many people once thought that the earth was flat. It’s a mistake to confuse truth (a feature of the world) with proof (a feature of our mental lives). Furthermore, if proof is required for facts, then facts become person-relative. Something might be a fact for me if I can prove it but not a fact for you if you can’t. In that case, E=MC2 is a fact for a physicist but not for me.
But second, and worse, students are taught that claims are either facts or opinions. They are given quizzes in which they must sort claims into one camp or the other but not both. But if a fact is something that is true and an opinion is something that is believed, then many claims will obviously be both. For example, I asked my son about this distinction after his open house. He confidently explained that facts were things that were true whereas opinions are things that are believed. We then had this conversation:
Me: “I believe that George Washington was the first president. Is that a fact or an opinion?”
Him: “It’s a fact.”
Me: “But I believe it, and you said that what someone believes is an opinion.”
Him: “Yeah, but it’s true.”
Me: “So it’s both a fact and an opinion?”
The blank stare on his face said it all.
This is precisely the sort of nonsense that convinced me 40 years ago that "philosophy" was nonsense - and it still is ... for me.
This is just playing with the meaning of words and their use. I "believe" George W was president is a linguistic convention. "Philosophers" know this fine well, and they know that people use the word "believe" in a very loose way - because there is a language shortage here, and no alternative.
We need a word other than "believe".
I use the portmanteau "accond" - to accept conditionally.
One "believes" the universe was created by Jesus.
One "acconds" to evolutionary facts.
Facts are "person-relative" - you really have to have your hand in yours pants to give that any sort of credence.
Then again, you just dodge and duck and weave around the meaning of the word "fact".
"Philosophy" is as much rubbish for me as it was 40 years ago. It can stay in the bin.
Of course the Sunday schoolers are going to applaud - they have no idea, but it sounds like something that fits with their simplistic beliefs.
And if it doesn't fit with their beliefs, then it MUST be "sin". Simple.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/..."
Hmm ...
Things can be true even if no one can prove them. For example, it could be true that there is life elsewhere in the universe even though no one can prove it. Conversely, many of the things we once “proved” turned out to be false. For example, many people once thought that the earth was flat. It’s a mistake to confuse truth (a feature of the world) with proof (a feature of our mental lives). Furthermore, if proof is required for facts, then facts become person-relative. Something might be a fact for me if I can prove it but not a fact for you if you can’t. In that case, E=MC2 is a fact for a physicist but not for me.
But second, and worse, students are taught that claims are either facts or opinions. They are given quizzes in which they must sort claims into one camp or the other but not both. But if a fact is something that is true and an opinion is something that is believed, then many claims will obviously be both. For example, I asked my son about this distinction after his open house. He confidently explained that facts were things that were true whereas opinions are things that are believed. We then had this conversation:
Me: “I believe that George Washington was the first president. Is that a fact or an opinion?”
Him: “It’s a fact.”
Me: “But I believe it, and you said that what someone believes is an opinion.”
Him: “Yeah, but it’s true.”
Me: “So it’s both a fact and an opinion?”
The blank stare on his face said it all.
This is precisely the sort of nonsense that convinced me 40 years ago that "philosophy" was nonsense - and it still is ... for me.
This is just playing with the meaning of words and their use. I "believe" George W was president is a linguistic convention. "Philosophers" know this fine well, and they know that people use the word "believe" in a very loose way - because there is a language shortage here, and no alternative.
We need a word other than "believe".
I use the portmanteau "accond" - to accept conditionally.
One "believes" the universe was created by Jesus.
One "acconds" to evolutionary facts.
Facts are "person-relative" - you really have to have your hand in yours pants to give that any sort of credence.
Then again, you just dodge and duck and weave around the meaning of the word "fact".
"Philosophy" is as much rubbish for me as it was 40 years ago. It can stay in the bin.
Of course the Sunday schoolers are going to applaud - they have no idea, but it sounds like something that fits with their simplistic beliefs.
And if it doesn't fit with their beliefs, then it MUST be "sin". Simple.
So Stuart is your reformation hypothesis based on facts or opinion?
Stuart, you dismiss philosophy then your post is philosophy. Discussing what words mean, saying we need a word other then "believe", that is philosophy. And you must have missed something in the 1970s. I mean, did you go to Bible college or something? The most influential philosophers in the 20th century are not Christians and rarely give Christians reason to applaud - Foucault, Nietzche, Camus, Sartre, Deleuze, Russell, Derrida. I'd bet that more professional engineers are Christians then professional philosophers are.
#5 Brent wrote: "Quite precisely.The truth is that on atheism or naturalism there can be no moral "ought to." That doesn't mean they can't adhere to the moral ought to whilst still denying God, but what it does mean is that there simply is absolutely no foundation for any moral ought to because their ontology lacks any τέλος whatsoever. There is no design, and hence, can be NO goal or orchestration: no "you ought to so this over that." There is only change and fluctuations vis-à-vis anyone's specific relative moral judgments at the time."
You're a Humean, Brent? Trains "is" dangerous. Therefore you "ought" not to step in front of one. Seems pretty simple to me.
Perhaps I should clarify. I do think that an "ought" can be derived from an "is" on grounds of general revelation, viz. Romans 1. All human beings are accountable to God on the basis of creation alone.It occurs to me that you were probably talking about materialistic, philosophical naturalism. In other words, you were speaking hypothetically. Then, we agree.
Ned wrote: "#5 Brent wrote: "Quite precisely.The truth is that on atheism or naturalism there can be no moral "ought to." That doesn't mean they can't adhere to the moral ought to whilst still denying God, b..."
[Re:110]Ned, I think I see what Brent is saying:
-Trains are dangerous. [indicative mood—simple statement of fact]
-If you step in front of one you will die. [Indicative mood—simple statement of fact]
... now one can't get to the imperative mood— unless one introduces a value [dying is bad]; then you can say "I ought not to step in front of a train." If dying doesn't matter; if dying is not valued as a negative then it seems to me one can't get to the "ought."
In other words I'm arguing that you implicitly introduced a value into your sequence without stating it.
If I understood [111] correctly, then I agree with you: from materialistic philosophical naturalism one can't get to values. One might get to behaviour that mimics values—my biochemical impulses might force me to run from a train. However, I don't think that behaviour corresponds to an "ought" but is simply an involuntary reaction and does not correspond to a moral choice.
Peter,I think we are on the same page. Suppose I escalate things by saying one ought not to throw toddlers in front of trains. The is-ought problem only arises as a result of mechanistic materialist philosophy. That is why philosophical naturalism is patently false. It produces such obviously absurd results. No one lives like that or is even capable of living like that. If we were to encounter such a person we would rightly remove them from society.
On the general revelation view I didn't introduce a value at all. It is already implicitly there, written on our hearts and revealed in nature as a gift from God. We know very well that it is bad to throw toddlers in front of trains and that our reluctance to do so is more than mere social convention. To assert otherwise is to "suppress the truth in ungodliness."
I am talking to Stuart. He is idolatrous, which always leads to a low view of humanity as just one symptom. I've been pretty busy lately but I am going to try to return and address some of his statements when I get time.
Stuart Says [multiple posts]:[Ethics/Values are] "glaringly obvious without reference to any imaginary super-being or son of a super-being."
"Christian beliefs and ethics and mythology legacies of more ancient cultures (the only unique thing about Christianity is its claim to be unique - and it's the only religion I know that claims that its founder actually IS God - and we may ask where the pride and arrogance really lie)"
Too funny. The assertion that there is nothing unique about Christianity contradicted by the accuser in the very same sentence, e.g. "the ONLY religion I know that claims that its founder actually IS God." Logical consistency is not the atheists strong suit. Christianity is and always has been looked upon as radical. A threat to the status quo. Stuart's very demeanor testifies to his realization of that fact even as he denies it.
Let's return to Stuart's first assertion that ethics are "glaringly obvious" without introducing God into the picture. This is similar to the following imaginary conversation.
Person 1: There is no such thing as oxygen. I can't see it, feel, it taste it, or touch it. No one has ever proved its existence to me.
Person 2: Oxygen exists.
Person 1: How do you know?
Person 2: Because without it, you couldn't breath.
Person 1: Well it is "glaringly obvious" that I am breathing just fine!
Thus, Stuart's reasoning is circular. He asserts that God cannot be the originator of values/ethics/morality since he is implementing them just fine, supposedly without Him. His denial becomes its own sufficient evidence. In fact, Stuart, and all unbelievers, are freeloaders of God's common grace. God, the Lawgiver, placed every human within a universe of laws and general predictability, with a rational foundation. Moreover, He imparts to each of of us personal agency, intellect, consciousness, free will. It is "glaringly obvious" that self consciousness cannot arise from purely physical causes. A cause cannot give to an effect that which it does not have to give.
To paraphrase Stuart, I am "asking atheists, from Dawkins to Darwin, to produce the tiniest shred of independently verifiable evidence that intelligence arises from their version of matter.
No one ever does.
Ever."
All Stuart, et al can produce are bare assertions and question begging. I.E. "Matter is sufficient to produce all that exists because matter is all that exists." Logic and rationality are on the side of the believer.
Take, for example, a triangle. A triangle is defined by three points, connected by three straight lines, the interior angles of which must add up to 180 degrees. These features comprise a "good" triangle, yet they are idealized features. No perfect measurements exist in reality, but we do the best we can. It is evident that triangles drawn as carefully as possible with sharp pens and straight edges, or in a CAD program, are "better" than ones carelessly freehanded with a marker on a whiteboard. The "best" triangles are those which most closely achieve the ideal.
Are triangles mere social conventions? Did humans invent them or discover them? Did they exist prior to anyone's awareness of them? Surely the answers are obvious. Triangles are the product of laws and purpose, just as many other features of nature attest. Society is not "free" to make triangles into any image they prefer while still trying to define them as triangles.
Therefore just law arises from 1) honestly naming things what they are, 2) treating things according to their nature, and 3) most closely approximating the purpose or end of a thing.
The best hearts are muscles that efficiently pump blood. Such is the purpose of hearts. If someone "decides" that hearts should instead digest food the teleology of hearts is violated. Injustice ensues.
Teleology only makes sense if God, as designer and lawgiver, exists. The problem is widely recognized in the sciences. To make sense of things the "secular" scientist must lie to himself ("suppress the truth") and split his worldview into contradictory factions. One with purpose, which is the very engine driving scientific inquiry, and one without.
See this page from Stanford for a discussion of the problem: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/tel...
And this from law-of-noncontradiction-challenged Dawkins:
“Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” The Blind Watchmaker, 1996, p. 1
“We may say that a living body or organ is well designed if it has attributes that an intelligent and knowledgeable engineer might have built into it in order to achieve some sensible purpose… any engineer can recognize an object that has been designed, even poorly designed, for a purpose, and he can usually work out what that purpose is just by looking at the structure of the object.” {Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 1996, p. 21}
Internal inconsistency and contradiction are the marks of a false worldview.
"socially advanced Roman Empire."
Must be why it collapsed. In truth it was an empire in a "socially advanced" state of decay, replete with extreme cruelty. In first century Rome 85-90% of the population were slaves. Infanticide was rampant. So was crucifixion. In short, you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
"This is what "God-inspired" morality can - and obviously does - lead to... [cites terrorists.]
What a ridiculous comment. Not all conceptions of God are true or equal. Islam is unjust because of its false conception of God. Moreover, atheistic/pagan/anti-God morality has led to multiple times the atrocities. I won't bother linking to Mao worshipers. Ever hear of the terror of the French revolution? You fail to apply your own critique. Besides, isn't Islamic custom simply that? A system they chose to adopt for themselves? How morally judgmental you are!
"When you can demonstrate - outside the religious promotional literature - that Yahweh/Jesus/Holy Ghost was/were behind a single law/moral/ethic..."
Your characterization of the Bible (which I can only assume is your target) as mere "promotional literature" is self serving and false. You are welcome not to do your homework, but your discounting of evidence as evidence is your problem.
You can't get there from here. First, one must honestly recognize God's existence. Only then will honest inquiry and further due diligence make sense to you.
Ned wrote: "Stuart Says [multiple posts]:
[Ethics/Values are] "glaringly obvious without reference to any imaginary super-being or son of a super-being."
"Christian beliefs and ethics and mythology legacies ..."
Yes indeed, good point on the contradiction: I rattled out two points that should have been kept separate.
However - as is so often the case - you led us off on distractions on minor points, and conveniently dodged the major ones. Cheap tricks.
You spouted a lot of words without offering a scintilla of independently verifiable evidence that the genocidal, misanthropic, homophobic, misogynous old Jewish deity, Yahweh, is anything more than imaginary and mythological - just like the fantastical super-beings of every other culture.
"God" - whatever that may mean - may exist. I challenge you to demonstrate that YOUR Yahweh/Jesus/Holy Ghost version of "God" exists. Without dishonest distractions away onto Stalin or Darwin or Allah or whatever - keep the spotlight on YOUR claims and back them up.
Quoting the writings of the followers of Yahweh/Jesus/Holy Ghost is not independently verifiable evidence.
I put it to you that you have no such evidence and you have been brainwashed into believing Judeo-Christian propaganda. When brainwashing is effective, you are convinced you have not been brainwashed - no matter what the lack of evidence for universe-creating, planet-flooding, virgin-born, death-defeating god-men. And the absurdity of the first Homo sapiens male being created by the mythological Jewish deity Yahweh, out of mud 6,000 years ago, and the first female out of his rib.
It's delusion.
You have been brainwashed.
It's why churches are emptying in educated cultures.
[Ethics/Values are] "glaringly obvious without reference to any imaginary super-being or son of a super-being."
"Christian beliefs and ethics and mythology legacies ..."
Yes indeed, good point on the contradiction: I rattled out two points that should have been kept separate.
However - as is so often the case - you led us off on distractions on minor points, and conveniently dodged the major ones. Cheap tricks.
You spouted a lot of words without offering a scintilla of independently verifiable evidence that the genocidal, misanthropic, homophobic, misogynous old Jewish deity, Yahweh, is anything more than imaginary and mythological - just like the fantastical super-beings of every other culture.
"God" - whatever that may mean - may exist. I challenge you to demonstrate that YOUR Yahweh/Jesus/Holy Ghost version of "God" exists. Without dishonest distractions away onto Stalin or Darwin or Allah or whatever - keep the spotlight on YOUR claims and back them up.
Quoting the writings of the followers of Yahweh/Jesus/Holy Ghost is not independently verifiable evidence.
I put it to you that you have no such evidence and you have been brainwashed into believing Judeo-Christian propaganda. When brainwashing is effective, you are convinced you have not been brainwashed - no matter what the lack of evidence for universe-creating, planet-flooding, virgin-born, death-defeating god-men. And the absurdity of the first Homo sapiens male being created by the mythological Jewish deity Yahweh, out of mud 6,000 years ago, and the first female out of his rib.
It's delusion.
You have been brainwashed.
It's why churches are emptying in educated cultures.
Stuart you assume because Bill Nye gave bad science "his full approval" that means something?There are many more scientists that don't have a HATE ON for Biblical Christianity. Be careful who you trust Stuart - your soul depends on it.
One of the best reasons I am a Christian: is because of how the world HATES Jesus and everything that points to him. There is endless data there.
This debate on secular values covers a lot of material at this point. Some of the discussion has become locked in a back-and-forth round, or a dialectic if you prefer fancier words. My response as an integrator is usually to risk pleasing no-one by providing another perspective.
As the author of a longish book, I've had a chance to let characters express some of my viewpoints. Writing for them has allowed me to use their voices and their situations to put some zip into what might otherwise be a dull essay. I am going to quote a chunk that addresses Stuart's points about the apparent arbitrariness and grotesquerie of the Mosaic law (if I can put adjectives in his mouth) and how such balderdash could relate to a God who is a source of ethics. This discussion won't completely scratch the itch - it leaves some obvious questions unanswered. But it's a start, in that it explains the unifying theme of the so-called Laws of Moses.
It may run over the post word length and if so I'll pop the rest over into another frame.
My science-fiction character here, Marrik, has traveled from his rather modern (Western civilization-like) country of origin to a much larger country next door that is based (although the reader is not told this directly) on the ancient kingdom of Mitanni north of Babylon (source of the biblical Horites according to some analysts, known to archaeology as the Hurrians). He's become trapped in a wicked city where he and his friends have become penniless and are faced with being taken up as slaves, for life, in order to survive. The only alternative is to temporarily make a lot of money by working as one of the unofficial street prostitutes who compete with the official sacred prostitutes at the temple of the goddess Shawushka (better known among us by her Assyrian name, Ishtar).
Marrik and his friends are on a mission, and he decides slavery isn't an option: he resolves to sacrifice himself as a prostitute. (Spoiler: it never actually happens, but it's a close call). Here's his rationalization:
"And then, in my thinking process, there was the religious aspect of going whoring for a winged goddess,graven in stone. This was certainly on my mind, though others might dismiss my concern as folly.
Even those who think that religious ruminations are foolish, though – or, in plain language, jack-shit – may nonetheless find themselves to be under the influence of the same ideas I have. Many humans bear the legacy of long chunks of Earth history where biblical matters shaped much of what nations recognized and believed. The great Torontonian English-lit prof Northrop Frye said, “The bible is clearly a major element in our own imaginative tradition, whatever we think we believe about it. It insistently raises the question: why does this huge, sprawling, tactless book sit there inscrutably in the middle of our cultural heritage, like the ‘great Bøyg’ [a very large fictional troll] or sphinx in the middle of [Hendrik Ibsen’s play] Peer Gynt, frustrating all our efforts to walk around it?”
It’s a good question; and if you decide that you’re not so interested in how my religion got along with my prostitution plans, you may want to ask yourself where your own attitudes about prostitution come from. Or, if you actually are a prostitute right now, and you feel that experience has outworn attitude, then where your mother’s views came from, or the ones you had when you began. Most views of prostitution have either been religious or anti-religious; very few have ever been truly secular. The topic touches on the varying qualities of human relationships, a subject area that is always of concern wherever religion is found, made or rejected.
Sacred prostitution has a special name and a special place in the history of my religion:
“(The kingdom of) Judah (under Rehoboam, son of Solomon) did evil in the sight of the Lord, and they provoked God to jealousy more than all that their fathers had done, with the sins they committed. For they also built for themselves high places and sacred pillars and Asherim [fertility poles dedicated to the Canaanite goddess Asherah] on every high hill and beneath every luxuriant tree. There were also male cult prostitutes in the land. They did according to all the abominations of the nations which the Lord dispossessed before the sons of Israel.”
And here I was, planning to fake it as a קָדֵשׁ (qadesh), a sacred male cult prostitute. Wasn’t this just a little wrong in terms of my newfound faith?
I didn’t have any idea how I could talk myself around this one. OK, it wasn’t the worst thing anyone had ever had to do to survive. In a conventional war, one must commit murder after murder, and if one is high-ranking enough, one must organize murders by the thousands. It’s not good, and yet, even I accept that there were times in history when it was inevitable and even honourable, when someone else started the war and when sey had even worse brutality in seir plans than what occurred when sey was opposed.
I decided that, as a whore, I wouldn’t do anything that would confirm someone in seir devotion to the goddess – I would just have sex with them. I hoped that, as unofficial devotees, they were really just looking for sex anyway. That would downgrade me from qadesh to zanah, the regular type of harlot. Without any intention to betray either Yith (Marrik's partner) or my loving creator through my actions, I hoped I would also upgrade myself from the worst kind of Judeo-Christian sinner, the betrayer of an existing or potential bond of love and trust, to the arguably lesser category of sinner, the ignorer of a recommended ideality.
The latter category may seem mysterious, and to show what I mean by it, I can take you on a mini-tour of an extreme example that has often baffled people in later times, namely Deuteronomy 22:11. This verse of scripture seldom, if ever, features in Christian sermons. It’s so bizarre that, in Christianity, it’s not really considered religious at all. It comes from the Law of Moses, which Christians are officially allowed to ignore the details of.
“You shall not wear a material mixed of wool and linen together,” the commandment says.
Now, why on Earth not? Or on Ullikummi, for that matter. It’s not just that you might produce linens that make you itchy.
The same point is even made again in the book of Leviticus: “You are to keep my statutes. You shall not cross-breed two kinds of cattle; you shall not plant your field with two kinds of seed, nor wear a garment consisting of two kinds of material mixed together.”
Skeptics on Earth loved this stuff, because it seemed to prove that God, seen as a projected image of human superstition, had been duly stamped with the silliness of the whole project. ‘God,’ despite ‘his’ non-existence, was a flake. He asked for a lot of stuff that was just incredibly weird.
This impression, though, was the result of reading out of context. The improbable statute about linen was part of the law of Moses, and the main project of the law code was given in Leviticus chapter 20. That chapter listed an array of kinds of incest, and then stated:
“You are therefore to keep all my statutes and all my ordinances and do them, so that the land to which I am bringing you to live will not spew you out. Moreover, you shall not follow the customs of the nations that I will drive out before you, for they did all these things, and therefore I have abhorred them.”
The Canaanite groups ... had a reputation for perfecting the arts of rapacity. They engaged in all possible self-indulgences, including all the permutations of incest and sexual surrogacy. This ‘state of grabbing everything’ went along with the worship of profuse numbers of different gods – gods of celestial and terrestrial phenomena and even house gods who watched over hearth and home. The Canaanite lands also had ‘pits’ that connected soothsayers to the underworld for contact with elemental spirits, including the ostensibly good and the ostensibly evil.
The hardness of the heart inherent in the ‘everything I take a fancy to, I get’ approach, with its array of gods matching every indulgence and trepidation, culminated in child sacrifice. I guess if you know you’re living a richly self-centred life, inevitably at the expense of others, you have moments of guilt about the damage you’ve caused, so you feel you must make a really big sacrifice to reconcile yourself with your divinities. One of the early tales of the bible starts off with God instructing Abraham, the patriarch of the Jews and Muslims, to sacrifice his son Isaac on a pyre. As Abraham is stolidly complying with this request, God turns around and stops the procedure, guaranteeing Abraham that he would never actually ask such a thing. People who interpret God traditionally as a sort of celestial warlord assume that God was testing Abraham’s loyalty in a particularly heartless way. I think that instead, the test was designed to show Abraham that even he, a good and kind man, was capable of going this far in religious devotion, unless he was aware that no loving god would ever ask such a thing. Sometimes good people can be persuaded to commit horrors out of religious loyalty, and I think, in that story, God was setting boundaries against that tendency. That idea is so important that it doesn’t matter to me if the story was a literal truth or an instructive parable like Adam and Eve – it’s there in the bible as a commentary about love and human fallibility in the worlds, not as a piece of history.
The law of Moses opposed grab-everything rapacity with a radical kind of moderation, a tactic the Book of Power calls ‘monotypic ideality.’ The basic idea is that you don’t need to scrape all the potentially pleasurable sensual phenomena of the world into your body – you can abstain from many of them and be better off for it. Why not limit yourself to the ideal, the best of everything, and leave the rest? The ‘monotype’ in ‘monotypic ideality’ is the concept-image, the Platonic Idea, of the best thing in each category. Starting at the top with the prototype that everything else is a metaphor for, take the one God, the eternal creator, and forget the smaller stone and wooden ones that are just placebos for all your injunctive machinations. Take the top kind of meat animal – the ungulate, that is, the cow, sheep and goat – and leave all the dubious things that eat garbage and flesh, like pigs, donkeys and dogs. Birds? Eat clean, grain-consuming pigeons and partridges, but not hawks, vultures, crows, or even ostriches. (There were no chickens in the Middle East yet when Moses was issuing law; they were grandfeathered in as kosher later on, as relatives of the partridge). Seafood? Just eat the typical fish with fins and a tail – you don’t need to get into the odd wormy, snaily and spider-like creatures of the water. Sexuality – if you’re heterosexual, don’t mess with same-sex or bestial side-trips. They don’t maximize your love and familial bliss – they’re just exploitation. Just go with the crème de la crème of your sexuality. And all the deformity-producing cringeways of incest – you really don’t need to go there. There are enough partners around who aren’t the spouses or parents or children of your closest relatives. Find someone who’s more-or-less ideal for you.
And if you’re planting a field, isn’t one crop enough? If you’re making a piece of clothing, do you really need to mix in all manner of threads? Unity, purity, ideality – adhere to the zenith. Just take one good thing at a time and be happy with it. That’s the very direct thrust of traditional Judaism, where the kosher tailor still certifies that a suit only has one type of thread in it, even on this planet. (cont.-->)
As the author of a longish book, I've had a chance to let characters express some of my viewpoints. Writing for them has allowed me to use their voices and their situations to put some zip into what might otherwise be a dull essay. I am going to quote a chunk that addresses Stuart's points about the apparent arbitrariness and grotesquerie of the Mosaic law (if I can put adjectives in his mouth) and how such balderdash could relate to a God who is a source of ethics. This discussion won't completely scratch the itch - it leaves some obvious questions unanswered. But it's a start, in that it explains the unifying theme of the so-called Laws of Moses.
It may run over the post word length and if so I'll pop the rest over into another frame.
My science-fiction character here, Marrik, has traveled from his rather modern (Western civilization-like) country of origin to a much larger country next door that is based (although the reader is not told this directly) on the ancient kingdom of Mitanni north of Babylon (source of the biblical Horites according to some analysts, known to archaeology as the Hurrians). He's become trapped in a wicked city where he and his friends have become penniless and are faced with being taken up as slaves, for life, in order to survive. The only alternative is to temporarily make a lot of money by working as one of the unofficial street prostitutes who compete with the official sacred prostitutes at the temple of the goddess Shawushka (better known among us by her Assyrian name, Ishtar).
Marrik and his friends are on a mission, and he decides slavery isn't an option: he resolves to sacrifice himself as a prostitute. (Spoiler: it never actually happens, but it's a close call). Here's his rationalization:
"And then, in my thinking process, there was the religious aspect of going whoring for a winged goddess,graven in stone. This was certainly on my mind, though others might dismiss my concern as folly.
Even those who think that religious ruminations are foolish, though – or, in plain language, jack-shit – may nonetheless find themselves to be under the influence of the same ideas I have. Many humans bear the legacy of long chunks of Earth history where biblical matters shaped much of what nations recognized and believed. The great Torontonian English-lit prof Northrop Frye said, “The bible is clearly a major element in our own imaginative tradition, whatever we think we believe about it. It insistently raises the question: why does this huge, sprawling, tactless book sit there inscrutably in the middle of our cultural heritage, like the ‘great Bøyg’ [a very large fictional troll] or sphinx in the middle of [Hendrik Ibsen’s play] Peer Gynt, frustrating all our efforts to walk around it?”
It’s a good question; and if you decide that you’re not so interested in how my religion got along with my prostitution plans, you may want to ask yourself where your own attitudes about prostitution come from. Or, if you actually are a prostitute right now, and you feel that experience has outworn attitude, then where your mother’s views came from, or the ones you had when you began. Most views of prostitution have either been religious or anti-religious; very few have ever been truly secular. The topic touches on the varying qualities of human relationships, a subject area that is always of concern wherever religion is found, made or rejected.
Sacred prostitution has a special name and a special place in the history of my religion:
“(The kingdom of) Judah (under Rehoboam, son of Solomon) did evil in the sight of the Lord, and they provoked God to jealousy more than all that their fathers had done, with the sins they committed. For they also built for themselves high places and sacred pillars and Asherim [fertility poles dedicated to the Canaanite goddess Asherah] on every high hill and beneath every luxuriant tree. There were also male cult prostitutes in the land. They did according to all the abominations of the nations which the Lord dispossessed before the sons of Israel.”
And here I was, planning to fake it as a קָדֵשׁ (qadesh), a sacred male cult prostitute. Wasn’t this just a little wrong in terms of my newfound faith?
I didn’t have any idea how I could talk myself around this one. OK, it wasn’t the worst thing anyone had ever had to do to survive. In a conventional war, one must commit murder after murder, and if one is high-ranking enough, one must organize murders by the thousands. It’s not good, and yet, even I accept that there were times in history when it was inevitable and even honourable, when someone else started the war and when sey had even worse brutality in seir plans than what occurred when sey was opposed.
I decided that, as a whore, I wouldn’t do anything that would confirm someone in seir devotion to the goddess – I would just have sex with them. I hoped that, as unofficial devotees, they were really just looking for sex anyway. That would downgrade me from qadesh to zanah, the regular type of harlot. Without any intention to betray either Yith (Marrik's partner) or my loving creator through my actions, I hoped I would also upgrade myself from the worst kind of Judeo-Christian sinner, the betrayer of an existing or potential bond of love and trust, to the arguably lesser category of sinner, the ignorer of a recommended ideality.
The latter category may seem mysterious, and to show what I mean by it, I can take you on a mini-tour of an extreme example that has often baffled people in later times, namely Deuteronomy 22:11. This verse of scripture seldom, if ever, features in Christian sermons. It’s so bizarre that, in Christianity, it’s not really considered religious at all. It comes from the Law of Moses, which Christians are officially allowed to ignore the details of.
“You shall not wear a material mixed of wool and linen together,” the commandment says.
Now, why on Earth not? Or on Ullikummi, for that matter. It’s not just that you might produce linens that make you itchy.
The same point is even made again in the book of Leviticus: “You are to keep my statutes. You shall not cross-breed two kinds of cattle; you shall not plant your field with two kinds of seed, nor wear a garment consisting of two kinds of material mixed together.”
Skeptics on Earth loved this stuff, because it seemed to prove that God, seen as a projected image of human superstition, had been duly stamped with the silliness of the whole project. ‘God,’ despite ‘his’ non-existence, was a flake. He asked for a lot of stuff that was just incredibly weird.
This impression, though, was the result of reading out of context. The improbable statute about linen was part of the law of Moses, and the main project of the law code was given in Leviticus chapter 20. That chapter listed an array of kinds of incest, and then stated:
“You are therefore to keep all my statutes and all my ordinances and do them, so that the land to which I am bringing you to live will not spew you out. Moreover, you shall not follow the customs of the nations that I will drive out before you, for they did all these things, and therefore I have abhorred them.”
The Canaanite groups ... had a reputation for perfecting the arts of rapacity. They engaged in all possible self-indulgences, including all the permutations of incest and sexual surrogacy. This ‘state of grabbing everything’ went along with the worship of profuse numbers of different gods – gods of celestial and terrestrial phenomena and even house gods who watched over hearth and home. The Canaanite lands also had ‘pits’ that connected soothsayers to the underworld for contact with elemental spirits, including the ostensibly good and the ostensibly evil.
The hardness of the heart inherent in the ‘everything I take a fancy to, I get’ approach, with its array of gods matching every indulgence and trepidation, culminated in child sacrifice. I guess if you know you’re living a richly self-centred life, inevitably at the expense of others, you have moments of guilt about the damage you’ve caused, so you feel you must make a really big sacrifice to reconcile yourself with your divinities. One of the early tales of the bible starts off with God instructing Abraham, the patriarch of the Jews and Muslims, to sacrifice his son Isaac on a pyre. As Abraham is stolidly complying with this request, God turns around and stops the procedure, guaranteeing Abraham that he would never actually ask such a thing. People who interpret God traditionally as a sort of celestial warlord assume that God was testing Abraham’s loyalty in a particularly heartless way. I think that instead, the test was designed to show Abraham that even he, a good and kind man, was capable of going this far in religious devotion, unless he was aware that no loving god would ever ask such a thing. Sometimes good people can be persuaded to commit horrors out of religious loyalty, and I think, in that story, God was setting boundaries against that tendency. That idea is so important that it doesn’t matter to me if the story was a literal truth or an instructive parable like Adam and Eve – it’s there in the bible as a commentary about love and human fallibility in the worlds, not as a piece of history.
The law of Moses opposed grab-everything rapacity with a radical kind of moderation, a tactic the Book of Power calls ‘monotypic ideality.’ The basic idea is that you don’t need to scrape all the potentially pleasurable sensual phenomena of the world into your body – you can abstain from many of them and be better off for it. Why not limit yourself to the ideal, the best of everything, and leave the rest? The ‘monotype’ in ‘monotypic ideality’ is the concept-image, the Platonic Idea, of the best thing in each category. Starting at the top with the prototype that everything else is a metaphor for, take the one God, the eternal creator, and forget the smaller stone and wooden ones that are just placebos for all your injunctive machinations. Take the top kind of meat animal – the ungulate, that is, the cow, sheep and goat – and leave all the dubious things that eat garbage and flesh, like pigs, donkeys and dogs. Birds? Eat clean, grain-consuming pigeons and partridges, but not hawks, vultures, crows, or even ostriches. (There were no chickens in the Middle East yet when Moses was issuing law; they were grandfeathered in as kosher later on, as relatives of the partridge). Seafood? Just eat the typical fish with fins and a tail – you don’t need to get into the odd wormy, snaily and spider-like creatures of the water. Sexuality – if you’re heterosexual, don’t mess with same-sex or bestial side-trips. They don’t maximize your love and familial bliss – they’re just exploitation. Just go with the crème de la crème of your sexuality. And all the deformity-producing cringeways of incest – you really don’t need to go there. There are enough partners around who aren’t the spouses or parents or children of your closest relatives. Find someone who’s more-or-less ideal for you.
And if you’re planting a field, isn’t one crop enough? If you’re making a piece of clothing, do you really need to mix in all manner of threads? Unity, purity, ideality – adhere to the zenith. Just take one good thing at a time and be happy with it. That’s the very direct thrust of traditional Judaism, where the kosher tailor still certifies that a suit only has one type of thread in it, even on this planet. (cont.-->)
(continued from previous post)
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Prostitution as a trade is plausible, especially on a planet completely lacking sexually transmitted diseases, but it offends monotypic ideality by taking many of the symbols of deep unity you could give to your one khandsh (= spouse) and selling them off as merchandise to all comers. No pun intended. It competes directly with the beatitude of your potential marriage. Thus it falls quite far from the ideal, and yet you can’t argue that it has no short-term practical advantages. All you can do is say that, in the end, it’s really not the best thing for you or those you lead in the same direction – it’s תּוֹעֵבָה, toÿabah, a thing to be disfavoured as anti-ideal. The Hebrew word I used there is translated in the King James bible as ‘abomination.’ Its root, תּעַב, tÿab, means to detest, abhor or reject.
Christianity, as a later offshoot of Judaism that was exported to diverse nations all over the world, got the divine green light to allow diversity of foods and even to permit multiple kinds of thread in one cloth. The monotypic idealities of a single culture could never be imposed on such a diverse group of believers. On the other hand, the new religion became even more monotypic than ancient Judaism in matters of monogamy. No more having kids with multiple wives and maidservants like Jacob, the father of Israel; and no more concubines. “And the two shall become one flesh, so they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate,” Yeshua said, reiterating the book of Genesis. This wasn’t a call to self-control and denial of pleasure; it was defense of an ideal of loving devotion. Many have fallen short of this ideal and felt compelled to submit to divorce; but, arguably, the ideal isn’t wrong – it’s just difficult, sometimes, to achieve. One always wishes someone had asked Jesus “what about the woman who married a man who just won’t stop getting drunk and beating her up for no reason? What should she do?” He tended to answer challenges very well. As it is, we have to figure this one out ourselves, but I am not worried that he would have said “stay as she is and get battered routinely.” That’s not the gist – staying locked into someone’s malevolence. The gist is trying to make the best of love.
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Prostitution as a trade is plausible, especially on a planet completely lacking sexually transmitted diseases, but it offends monotypic ideality by taking many of the symbols of deep unity you could give to your one khandsh (= spouse) and selling them off as merchandise to all comers. No pun intended. It competes directly with the beatitude of your potential marriage. Thus it falls quite far from the ideal, and yet you can’t argue that it has no short-term practical advantages. All you can do is say that, in the end, it’s really not the best thing for you or those you lead in the same direction – it’s תּוֹעֵבָה, toÿabah, a thing to be disfavoured as anti-ideal. The Hebrew word I used there is translated in the King James bible as ‘abomination.’ Its root, תּעַב, tÿab, means to detest, abhor or reject.
Christianity, as a later offshoot of Judaism that was exported to diverse nations all over the world, got the divine green light to allow diversity of foods and even to permit multiple kinds of thread in one cloth. The monotypic idealities of a single culture could never be imposed on such a diverse group of believers. On the other hand, the new religion became even more monotypic than ancient Judaism in matters of monogamy. No more having kids with multiple wives and maidservants like Jacob, the father of Israel; and no more concubines. “And the two shall become one flesh, so they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate,” Yeshua said, reiterating the book of Genesis. This wasn’t a call to self-control and denial of pleasure; it was defense of an ideal of loving devotion. Many have fallen short of this ideal and felt compelled to submit to divorce; but, arguably, the ideal isn’t wrong – it’s just difficult, sometimes, to achieve. One always wishes someone had asked Jesus “what about the woman who married a man who just won’t stop getting drunk and beating her up for no reason? What should she do?” He tended to answer challenges very well. As it is, we have to figure this one out ourselves, but I am not worried that he would have said “stay as she is and get battered routinely.” That’s not the gist – staying locked into someone’s malevolence. The gist is trying to make the best of love.
And no, it doesn't scare me. I trust in Jesus, my hope is in God's love and not your, or any other member of the theology police's approval. I am not trying to toe the line with you. You may want to add works to grace, I'll go ahead and trust in GOd's grace and not be afraid of having friendly conversation with atheists or whomever.