- There was a big unresolved nuclear warfare introduction.
- The universe itself was created with morality in mind.
- Morality and mortality are inextricably linked.
- Abraham was called by God to be different - signified by a physical marker.
- Moses and the 12 Tribes of Israel were called by God to be different - signified by a legal marker.
- The law serves as the foundation of God's standards for morality, anchored to three different reasons for obedience:
- Material prosperity
- Because God said so
- Pursuit of Holiness
And now... a segue!
When God set up the Law, He filled it with some pretty strict punishments. Ostracism from the people of Israel, death by stoning, banishment from the presence of God in the tabernacle or, later, the temple... Pretty harsh stuff.
In today's laissez-faire society, insistent that morality is merely subjective and personal, it's hard to see how commandments to stone blasphemers or to deny someone's sacrifice and cut them off from the people of Israel for eating their leftovers on the third day make any sense. What we forget, though, is that the Law was not born in a vacuum. Israel was surrounded by other cultures who held worship practices that were similar in many ways. Israel was not the only culture to practice circumcision. Israel was not the only culture to sacrifice the firstborn of their flocks. Israel was not the only culture that viewed certain animals as clean and others as unclean.
I have heard people say before that all of the dietary restrictions are there for health reasons. For instance, God did not allow the Israelites to eat pork because Bronze Age understanding in the Near East had not yet developed to a point that pork was cooked throughly enough to avoid the dangers of trichinosis. That's a cute theory and everything, but it's also completely wrong. For starters, Isaiah 65:4 mentions people "who eat the flesh of pigs." Obviously somebody in that time period had figured out how to make pork chops without getting sick. It's really not that hard to figure out. Besides the Biblical evidence, there is plenty of archaeological evidence of pig bones in the areas surrounding Israel. Bacon is not a new thing.
Now I will admit that God probably was putting up a few health codes for His people with some of the Law (take a look at Leviticus 14:33ff), and it's perfectly OK to recognize that God created the Law with at least some practical down-here-on-the-ground purposes in mind. But there are some things - a whole lot of things - in the Law that just don't make ANY sense unless we understand that it is God's Law, and that God's Law is meant to set Israel apart from the cultures around her. (While you're in Leviticus 14, read verses 1-7. Go ahead, tell me the medicinal value in that one. I dare you.)
The Law, for whatever practical purposes it may have served, had one primary purpose: to make the people of Israel different from the cultures around them. These differences served one purpose - making Israel holy.
It's not that wearing clothes made of two materials is an especially profane act, or that any one material is more holy than another; it is the attention to detail, the observance of regulation in every aspect of daily life, that serves as a step-ladder to holiness.
And here's how that works.
The law of the LORD is perfect,reviving the soul.The statutes of the LORD are trustworthy,making wise the simple.The precepts of the LORD are right,giving joy to the heart.The commands of the LORD are radiant,giving light to the eyes.The fear of the LORD is pure,enduring forever.The ordinances of the LORD are sureand altogether righteous.They are more precious than gold,than much pure gold;they are sweeter than honey,than honey from the comb.By them is your servant warned;in keeping them there is great reward.
- Psalm 19:7-11
Let love and faithfulness never leave you;bind them around your neck,write them on the tablet of your heart.Then you will win favor and a good namein the sight of God and man.Trust in the LORD with all your heartand lean not on your own understanding;in all your ways acknowledge him,and he will make your paths straight.Do not be wise in your own eyes;fear the LORD and shun evil.
- Proverbs 3:3-7
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.- Deuteronomy 6:4-9
Even from the very beginnings of the Law, when Moses told the Israelites the terms of the covenant laid out between them and God, there has been an impetus towards a holistic inclusion of the Law into one's life, ingraining it into not only the soul of the personal self, but into the corporate soul of the family, the community, and the nation. God set up the Law not to keep Israel in line, but to transform them. The Law was meant to rewrite the Israelite culture, separating them from the cultures they were surrounded by, but also instilling them with a sense of what it means to live for God.
Think about it like this. In the United States, we take for granted our freedoms of speech, press, assembly, petition, and religion. If you're a native-born American, you've just lived with that understanding your whole life. You have the right to say what you want. You have the right to believe what you want. You have the right to be who you want.
But imagine the difference it must be for someone who leaves a strict totalitarian rule and comes to America. Imagine their awe at the permissiveness of our country. It is ingrained in our culture - soaked all the way through to our cores - that we have those basic freedoms, and that idea shapes how each American lives. Our laws shape the national moral fiber, one way or another. The American view of inalienable rights is passed down even to young children, establishing a framework for how we all think, and therefore how we act.
God's Law for Israel was designed to meet the same end. If Israel had stayed true to the Law and had allowed it to change their hearts, change their minds, change their lives on an intimate level, they would have found themselves living lives singularly dedicated to a pursuit of holiness, focused solely on understanding the wisdom of the Law, and applying it to every single aspect of their lives, putting God first in all things, and reaching out to those around them with every action they made.
But that didn't happen.
And when Israel messed up, God had to use pretty strong corrections - punishments, even - to remind them to get back onto the path. In the years between the Exodus and entering the Promised Land of Canaan, God uses disease, poisonous snakes, 40 years of walking around in the desert wilderness, and even mass deaths to remind His people that there are consequences for straying away from the Law.
So how is that "the love of God"? How could God send so much destruction and pain to His people if He really loved them?
Well...
My son, do not despise the LORD's disciplineand do not resent his rebuke,because the LORD disciplines those he loves,as a father the son he delights in.
- Proverbs 3:11-12
Didn't your parents punish you when you did something wrong?
"Oh, well, sure," you might be saying to your monitor, which is dumb because it can't hear you, and neither can I. "But the worst thing that happened to me was that I couldn't sit down for a while - they didn't KILL me."
And that's a fair objection - IF we're only focusing on the moral growth and quest for holiness of an individual. God is not focused on YOUR moral growth or MY holiness. He is focused on the holiness and morality of the entire world. Think back to Exodus 32, the story of the golden calf. God was ready to wipe out all of Israel and start His whole plan over with Moses. Moses managed to talk God out of a complete annihilation, but the Levites still killed about three thousand people (v. 25-29) and God still sent a plague on top of all that (v. 35).
So, yeah, that's a pretty strict punishment. But hey, it's a pretty big sin! Worshiping a false idol at the very base of the mountain where God was giving Moses the Ten Commandments?
The life of holiness is a war. It is a war between our own personal will and the will of God. Sometimes God has to use the nuclear option (you thought I'd forgotten all about that, didn't you?) to push us, to break us, towards a more complete and more perfect surrender. Sometimes He had to push Israel really hard.
But even in God's anger, we still see His love, at least in His restraint - God was perfectly within His rights to kill everyone at that moment and start all over - He is, after all, God, and the cost of sin, since the beginning of time, has been death. That any of us - here and now or then and there - survive our first sin is a testament to the grace of God.
It is this transformative power of the Law that sparked Jesus' ire at the Pharisees in Matthew 23.
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men's bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.
- Matthew 23:23-28
That whole chapter is nothing but Jesus roasting the Pharisees, the scribes, and the teachers of the Law on a spit over an open fire. Their dedication to carrying out the letter of the Law had blinded them to the transformation that the Law was designed to spark inside the souls of those who followed it. In Matthew 9, Jesus, quoting Hosea, says "I desire mercy, not sacrifice." The Law is not the ultimate will of God. The entire point of the Law was to guide people into an understanding of how to behave in a life that pursues God's righteousness.
But if the Law was God's guide for Israel to lead them to righteousness, why don't we observe it anymore? What about Jesus' words in Matthew 5:17-20?
Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.- Matthew 5:17-20
The question here becomes one of discerning what Jesus meant by saying that He came to "fulfill" the Law.
Think about the sacrificial system required under the Law. Sin meant death. Sacrifice - specifically a sin offering - was the shedding of blood that satisfied the wrath of God. By blood, Israel's sins were forgiven. But these sacrifices had to be made regularly - a bull or a goat had to be sacrificed for every sin!
But in Jesus, we have a sacrifice that blows bulls and goats out of the water. God Himself came down to earth and shed His own blood to satisfy His own wrath to take away the guilt of His own creation. The law was fulfilled. The sacrifice was finally big enough to cover everything.
This is why the veil on the Holy of Holies ripped in the temple. The Law has been fulfilled in the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross. By fulfilling the Law - ALL of the Law - the physical marker of circumcision was no longer a prerequisite to a relationship with God. The legal marker of the Mosaic Law was no longer the only steps that could be taken to approach God.
God used circumcision to separate His people from the world. God used the Law to tell His people how to behave in His world. God used Jesus to show us how to behave, how to escape this world, and how to focus on the next.
Christ is the ultimate fulfillment of the moral training of God for His creation, mankind. Jesus takes the Law and tells us to look at its intent. Jesus tells us that the Law was only the beginning. Living a life that abides by the rules is good. But living a life that understands the holiness at the core of the rules is better.
You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
- Matthew 5:43-48
Jesus was telling people not to treat the Law as a limitation on how bad they could be, but as a guideline for how good they should be! It's not enough to JUST love your neighbor - you've got to love EVERYBODY! That's the point! That's what the whole Law is about!
Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question:"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?"Jesus replied: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."
- Matthew 22:34-40, emphasis added
The former regulation is set aside because it was weak and useless (for the law made nothing perfect), and a better hope is introduced, by which we draw near to God.- Hebrews 7:18-19
The Law would never have been able to make men perfect. The Law served a purpose in showing a standard of righteousness. But nobody could keep the Law perfectly - so it also served as a standard of sin. God's Law paved the way for the moral development of Israel, and through Israel, the moral development of the world, through its sanctification through the blood of Jesus.
So that's what I've got. That's how I see it. I believe that God loved Israel, but He had to rewire an entire culture, and that takes a lot of time. Sometimes He had to use drastic measures to get their attention, to correct their behavior, to remind them to focus on Him. Sometimes we - at least some 3,000 years removed from the events recorded - look back and want to say that God wasn't justified in His use of such extremes.
But doesn't God sometimes use drastic measures to get your attention, to correct your behavior, to remind you to focus on Him?
And don't you feel the pain when it happens?
But doesn't it lead you back to Him?
And can't you look back on it now and say, "Wow, God has brought me closer to Him through all of it"?
And since He loves you enough to do that for you, wouldn't you agree that it was worth it for Israel?
Aaron, if we are being intellectually honest, I think we have to say that you just dodged the tough questions with these posts. You introduce the topic alluding to some of them, but then you go on to talk about other things that are not answers to the questions.
ReplyDeleteI think the two hardest criticisms of the Bible that attack the OT are that the God/morality portrayed in it is
1) inconsistent with the loving, merciful, nonviolent message of the NT; and
2) objectively immoral (things like genocide, rape, child murder, slavery, etc.) by enlightened standards
The point of these attacks is not to try to accuse a divine being of being immoral, but to discredit the Bible as a valid source of understanding of the divine/morality. If the Bible contains ethical inconsistency and immorality, then it is not useful at all, except for its literary value. These attacks need to be dealt with philosophically before it makes sense to quote Bible verses about God>leviathan, Abram, and other characters. Are you going to address these attacks directly?
David -
ReplyDeleteCriticism #1 was what these last two posts were specifically about. Things only seem inconsistent if you're operating with a picture of God as the eternal hugger instead of the occasional chastiser.
Sometimes folks gotta be punished before they understand morality. That's just how it works.
Criticism #2 - Things like that are why I mentioned specifically that Abram was called out of a specific culture, why Israel was called to be different from their surrounding cultures. We have to take a viewpoint that understands that the Israelites were a part of the ancient near eastern world, and that in that worldview, certain things were acceptable.
You mentioned "objectively immoral things... by enlightened standards" - 4000 years from now, our standards will look just as barbaric then as the ANE's do now.
There is actually no such thing as "objective" morality, enlightened or not - UNLESS there is actually an original objective moral code presented in the first place. This is what I believe God did through the Law and then through Christ.
God presented the objective morality - laid out even in the fabric of the universe, but also spelled out in the Law, the Prophets, and Christ - to the subjective creation, and everything since "Let there be..." has been in attempts to get us to follow that morality.
Fair points.
ReplyDelete1. Acceptable things. When you talk about the ANE and say "certain things were acceptable," it sounds nice. But wait, we are talking about some really grotesque things. God is alleged to have ordered soldiers to slaughter noncombatants including children, take pretty girls as sex slaves (after killing the parents and brothers), and so on. It takes some real moral flexibility to call those things "acceptable," and I am a pretty tolerant guy when it comes to cultural relativism.
I do not question that what we now call war crimes were common in the ANE. The same goes for sexism, slavery, rape, and all sorts of other things. Accepting that, it argues even more strongly for the Bible to be merely a product of the times instead of some revealed, timeless truth. If you do hold the typical views that God is unchanging, God inspired the Bible, the Bible reports that God condoned genocide/rape/slavery, then I don't see the leap where you as a modern Christian can judge those things as wrong today.
Wait, do you judge those things as wrong today? I am not mocking, but I don't mean to presume.
2. Objective morality. I made a poor word choice there. If you'll allow me, I'd like to revise what I was trying to say. If the non-Christian view of the Bible is correct, then it is an interesting book that reveals how ancient people viewed morality and what stories they told to explain their beliefs. It may be worth reading for fun, but it does not have a relevant voice in modern ethical thought. How could a book that condones and encourages such atrocities be viewed as a trusted source of moral authority in today's world?
3. Punishment. You say:
"Sometimes folks gotta be punished before they understand morality. That's just how it works."
That's a very folksy way of putting it, but I wouldn't say it's a very good way or a very accurate way. The things I am citing as examples were not examples of redemptive violence, and there is no honest way of interpreting them as such. You don't teach folks morality by killing them and raping their women. I don't, anyway. The character Jesus as portrayed in the NT seems to realize that, too. That is where the inconsistency happens.
I may have misinterpreted your explanation of the apparent moral inconsistency between the OT and NT. But it seemed to me that you just cited more God violence in the OT. Where is Jesus/NT God violent? Where do they condone violence?
Here's the thing...
ReplyDeleteGod IS unchanging.
Humanity isn't.
You say God is alleged to have ordered slaughter of noncombatants and take pretty girls as sex slaves... Are you the one making the allegations, or are you just quoting other people's ignorances?
"When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. When the LORD your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the LORD your God gives you from your enemies. This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby.
However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the LORD your God has commanded you. Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the LORD your God."
- Deuteronomy 20:10-18
The complete destruction of the "-ites" recalls the "vomit" passage in Leviticus 18, and also foreshadows the events of Judges where, since the Israelites didn't actually completely destroy those cultures like God told them to, they were repeatedly conquered by those cultures and assimilated their gods into Israelite life.
For further reading, I suggest Deuteronomy 21:10-14 and Numbers 31:15-24. The accusations against God simply don't hold water.
Blaming God for the actions of the Israelites really misses a whole lot of the point of the Bible.
Let's say that you, David, suddenly found yourself living in the ancient near east in the 21st century B.C. with your charming wife (tell her I said hi), your 12 sons, their wives, and your 36 grandsons and their wives. Kind of a silly example, I'll admit, but follow me on this.
Let's say you are the Manes clan. You're shepherds. You've got around 100 people stomping around with you, so that's a whole lot of sheep. Now, it is entirely possible - and I would in fact say probable - that there's gonna be another clan that comes along and wants your sheep, your wife, daughters-in-law and granddaughters-in-law, and basically just wants you out of the way so they can do whatever they want on the spot of ground you happen to be occupying.
The way I see it, in the early-mid bronze age ANE setting that you find yourself in, you have three choices.
#1 - You can appeal to the attacking clan's innate morality. This will get you killed.
#2 - You can plead for your life and agree to live as a slave. This won't save your marriage or any of the marriages below you, but hey, you'll get to live a while longer!
#3 - You can fight. You might die, yeah, but then, maybe God will deliver you from your troubles. Or maybe the attackers don't think sheep are worth the fight.
Now, regardless of the choice that you would personally make, the typical choice of the time by anyone who actually found themselves in that situation was going to be option #3. That's just how clan life goes. Clans develop into tribes, tribes develop into nations, and everything's still pretty much staying the same. One nation wants what another nation has, so they either agree to become slaves or they fight.
ReplyDeleteSo God's Law applies to that time because it came out of that time. The civilization around you doesn't care what your moral code is. They're going to kill you just to get your sheep. So you've got to have a way to operate within that system that will let you actually live to see another day. What's the point of God calling a culture to be holy if that entire culture is wiped off the face of the earth?
So Israel went from clan to tribes to nation and had the Law. Then - since they didn't actually listen to what God told them to do - they were overtaken by (whoever you want to put here because it happened a lot). The Amalekites, the Hittites, the Jebusites, the Philistines, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans...
But by the time we get to the Romans, civilization has changed a good bit. There is a standard of law not only in a religious sense, but in a very real cultural sense. Remember back to when I used the example of how American free speech is ingrained into our culture? Well, Roman law was pretty well ingrained into Roman culture, too. Rome ran the show, and there was Pax.
During that peace, life settles down. Instead of having to worry about if the guy across the river is going to kill you, now you just have to worry about whether or not he's got the best price on fish.
Morality changed in the 2000 years from Abraham to Jesus, sure. But that's largely because civilization changed. Morality had a CHANCE to change.
If you're going to be open-minded about cultural relativism, you've got to be open to cultural progression, too.
That's what the change between the Law and the Gospel is. It's a progression. Mankind had reached a new plateau, a new way of living, something that was ready for a new definition of what it meant to be good. (Make sure you read Wednesday's post for more on that.)
If you'll go back to the paragraph in this post that starts with "Christ is the ultimate fulfillment..." and read to the end of the post again, you'll hopefully see what I'm talking about.
Is the NT far less violent than the OT? Yes, completely. But even to that end, Genesis-Judges are far more violent than 1 Samuel-2 Chronicles, and 1 Sam-2 Chron are far more violent than Ezra-Malachi. As history progresses, so does Israel. That's what God has been after since the beginning. We're not going to be perfect, we're always going to be coming from where we are when we show up, and we're always (hopefully) going to try to make tomorrow a little better than yesterday.
And so as humanity progresses, God reveals more of how He wants things to go. It's not even until the 8th century B.C. that we get Hosea 6:6, which says, "For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings." And then when Christ comes, we get another - more perfect - glimpse into God's desire for mankind's behavior.
But at the same time... Jesus made a whip when He cleared out the temple, and God drops Ananias and Sapphira like they're hot in Acts 5. So violence is still around, it's just that the cultural mode has shifted.
God's prescription for morality is not such that, if followed by a group of semi-nomadic people in the 15th century B.C., the world would suddenly become perfect. Nor was it that way in the 1st century A.D., even if it spread like a rash all through the Roman Empire. Nor is it that way now, even if it makes it across the globe. The world is still a messed up place, and we've still got to live in it as best as we can. Part of that struggle means living within the culture that we are surrounded by and striving towards holiness. It is impossible to completely separate ourselves from our cultural surroundings or upbringing, and God knows that. So He's just asking you to be the best for Him that you can be where you are with what you have.
ReplyDeleteI am definitely open to models of anthropology that talk about ethical progress. I think our way of approaching morality today is far superior in today's world than it was 200 years ago when we still owned women and slaves. It is absolutely superior to 2000 years ago and 3200 years ago. There is no problem with that.
ReplyDeleteI just don't see any reason to give God credit for that human moral progress. At every significant step of what I consider moral progress, traditional religion has been more heavily on the side of, well, tradition. The Bible was used more to support slavery than to condemn it (that's easy, because the Bible does support slavery). It was used more to oppose women's rights than to support them (that's easy too). Today, we are on the brink of another moral step - equality and tolerance for LGBT individuals. This one is obvious. Tomorrow, the moral battle will be over animal rights. I can already see what side Bible-followers will be taking.
I think you give the God character portrayed in the OT a lot of leeway. So much so that you are willing to defend everything this deity is supposed to have said and done.
Your analogy doesn't work unless you imagine the Manes clan wanting to take someone else's land, going in and not only taking it, but killing innocents and taking young pretty girls as sex slaves. The violence I am talking about isn't teaching violence or defensive violence. It is aggressive, merciless violence.
I'm not sure it's clear where I am coming from, so let me be frank. I used to be a Christian, and I know all the rationalizations. I took several of John Fortner's classes, and I know all of his lines (you use them well, btw). But I have come a long way since those days, and I do not think that way anymore. I know that from the inside, it is possible to plug the gaps of inconsistency when outsiders attack the Bible. Once you drink the Kool-Aid, it is the only thing to do, and it seems quite natural. From the outside, though, the whole thing seems so cracked and the efforts of the pluggers seem to desperate. To me, a supposed God character who just so happened to favor a certain tribe and told them to rape, pillage, and kill, and that they were better than everybody else was obviously a creation of that certain tribe. There is no reason to read the OT objectively and come to any other sort of conclusion, unless of course, you are already drinking the Kool-Aid and really really want to come to that conclusion.
To answer your question, this is me making the allegations. When I was a Christian, I studied the Bible a great deal and I know what it says. Here are a couple supposed commandments from God that permit soldiers to take pretty young girls as sex slaves:
ReplyDeleteNumbers 31:17-18
“Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”
Deuteronomy 21:11-14
“If you notice among the captives a beautiful woman and are attracted to her, you may take her as your wife. Bring her into your home and have her shave her head, trim her nails and put aside the clothes she was wearing when captured. After she has lived in your house and mourned her father and mother for a full month, then you may go to her and be her husband and she shall be your wife. If you are not pleased with her, let her go wherever she wishes. You must not sell her or treat her as a slave, since you have dishonored her.”
You act like the God character would be hamstrung when interacting with ANE people by ANE ways of thinking. I agree, but that is because I think the Biblical God is a figment of ANE imagination. It doesn't make sense why you think God would be transcendent, yet still hamstrung in the ancient world. Not just a little hamstrung, but hamstrung to the extent that he had to accept (what I consider to be) the worst moral offenses possible for humans: murder of innocents, rape, genocide, and slavery.
I'm serious, I don't think it gets any worse than those things.
Maybe my imagination is just a little better, but I can imagine a real trancendent God appearing to a tribe in the ANE and ordering them with lightning and thunder "Do not rape any woman, whether in your tribe or another;" and "Do not take or keep slaves, whether from your tribe or another." How hard would that be for a real transcendent God to order? If I were a real transcendent God, I would certainly give those orders. Even if I thought that I didn't have the political capital to make them go along with my rules, I would never give them orders to do the opposite and commit those acts. Would you? Imagine you were the transcendent God.
Instead, it took humanity centuries to evolve to the point where we accepted these commandments as truths. In the ancient world, eyebrows would be raised at any prophet who told them not to rape or enslave, especially when it concerned foreigners. Over time, we had the enlightenment and the modern age, and we have outgrown that primitive thinking. Now, the opposite is true. We would think a person crazy if he advocated that rape or slavery were morally permissible in any circumstance.
We have made a lot of evolutionary progress as human society. We have made progress with technology, culture, and morality. But this progress has come from us, not from God whispering in our ears ineffectually for a long time.
Here we have come to loggerheads.
ReplyDelete"There are two ways to live your life - one is as though nothing is a miracle, the other is as though everything is a miracle." - Albert Einstein
I'm glad you've got enough faith in humanity to think that we could get anywhere without some direction. I don't.
Also - I REALLY find it interesting that your association from the passages in Numbers and Deuteronomy is just straight to "sex slave." There's an entire MONTH of mourning where sexis forbidden, as well as a ritualistic cleansing which would serve as an introduction into Israelite culture, and then that little bit about "don't treat her like a slave" happens to be there, too.
The passages you quoted don't say, "If you notice among the captives a beautiful woman and are attracted to her, you may just do whatever you want with her. Rape her, marry her, whatever, doesn't matter. It's all cool." There is a protocol being presented here that still mandates treating the captured woman as a person, not just as a slave. In fact, the Deuteronomy passage SPECIFICALLY DETAILS not treating her as a slave.
If you're gonna judge God by what He said, make sure you go by what He actually said.
Was the Bible used to defend slavery? Sure. More than it was used to condemn it? Well... I kinda doubt that, since the Abolitionist movement was largely started by religious groups who had been opposed to slavery long, long, LONG before the Enlightened man came to the conclusion in his Age of Reason.
Notice, too, that even within the Biblical discussions of slavery, every single one of them, there is a continuation of the discussion of morality. Is it to what we would see as the proper standard today? No. But it is different from the rest of the surrounding culture, and that's a pretty big step.
But I may just be chasing my own tail on this. You seem to be convinced that God doesn't exist, at least in the way that He is revealed in the Bible, and I am fully aware that I do not have the wisdom or the power to show you that He is exactly who He has said He is. I am sorry that the passages you present create a problem for you in faith - that's exactly what I was trying to work through with this post and the post before it.
I wonder, though - what do you believe to be the origin of the species? Undirected evolution or intelligent design? That question is a pretty important step towards helping me understand where you're coming from and therefore helping you understand where I'm coming from.
Yes, I know it says not to sell the girl for money as a slave, but it is a non-consensual physical taking from the home to "become the wife" of the captor. That euphemism thinly covers what is occurring - rape, by any reasonable definition.
ReplyDeleteThat month of no sex is awfully generous, but this is still a shocking thing to have occurred and certainly not something a real God would have commanded. I'm not judging God at all; I am just judging the Bible on the evidence as an ANE creation reflecting ANE morality. Great for the ANE, but way behind by today's standards. Just imagine this thing happening today - American soldiers are permitted to kill Afghanistan men and boys, and take the virgin (pre-pubescent) women as their sex partners. Oh, they don't do anything for a month, but the girl who lost her family has to live with the soldier for forever and, just like all the other women, has no independence of her own. This is not something that is defensible. I'm surprised you don't just cut and run from passages like this. I think most people do.
As for the historical slavery debate about what Christians said what and when, it is a messy debate. Obviously at some point, the balance tipped in favor of Christians being anti-slavery (look around today and you will find very few pro-slavery Christians). But rewind to the 1600-1700s and there were almost no Christians who were anti-slavery. My point was not to deny that Christianity caught up eventually, but to show that Christianity failed to provide the moral guidance to abolish slavery.
The "continuation of the discussion of morality" reminds me of Fortner, and I don't disagree with this kind of thing. I just see a continuing discussion as evidence of evolving morality due to human development. If a supreme being were involved in the discussion, one would expect the discussion to be quite different. The god would probably not be entering into the discussion saying things like "It is okay to take unwilling girls as 'wives' now, but at some point, maybe we should reconsider the whole women's rights thing. That can wait until the nineteenth century, though." I have a hard time understanding what you really believe about this ongoing discussion. Maybe you could shed some light on what you really mean when you say that and when you defend apparently immoral commands attributed to God. When Fortner answers questions like these, he intentionally obfuscates with fluff instead of addressing the questions head on. I think that is because his views are too far outside the mainstream for his habitat. But really, be frank with me here. Describe to me how you think this ongoing discussion went down with God involved and why he would discuss the way he did - like a contemporary human instead of a transcendent god.
This is getting outside the scope of your post, so we don't have to chase it too far, but no I do not believe in any God or any intelligent design. Passages like these from the OT were not the biggest factors that led to me moving on from my Christian background, but they helped.
I don't expect either of us to convince the other or anyone else who might be reading, but I do enjoy discussions like this. I am always curious to hear what other people have to say and how the explain their beliefs. So I am not really interested at all in convincing you to renounce your faith or anything, I just want to know how you defend the holes in your reasoning. It's especially interesting for me because I used to be there myself. Nobody from the outside ever really convinced me to stop being a Christian. The more I talked about it and reasoned with it and defended it, I found Christianity to be untenable.
David, I know you spent a lot of time in the Ganus building, but your grasp of history is not quite as strong as you might think if you're thinking that the debate about the Christian view of slavery took 18 centuries to move towards "Hey, slavery's probably not a good thing."
ReplyDeleteAs early as the 5th century there were movements within Christianity towards the abolition of slavery. St. Patrick - himself a former slave - is a good example of this. Yes, I'll admit that it was in the minority view then, but it was spreading. In the 7th century, there's St. Eloi (also called St. Eligius) who bought up something close to 100 Anglo and Saxon slaves just to free them. St. Thomas Aquinas taught that slavery was a direct result of sin. Even in America, as early as the mid-1600s, with the establishment of the Dutch colonies that eventually became Pennsylvania, there was - from the beginning - a deep-seated religious movement against slavery.
Were those views in the minority? Unfortunately, yes. And that's tragic. It's sad that it took so long for people to get it.
But where your argument is falling apart is that you're assuming that today's cultural standards are the ultimate definition of what is good and true. This is a very silly position.
You have repeatedly brought up "today's standards" as the benchmark by which we are to judge people from thousands of years ago.
It doesn't work like that.
And here's where things get really fun...
If you don't believe in God or any intelligent design at all, guess what! The standards you adhere to today? They're completely worthless anyway. Not only do they not hold any meaning for people who lived thousands of years ago, they don't actually hold any meaning NOW, either.
This goes back to the discussion we had earlier about whether or not morality can be objective, or what enlightened morality means.
If there is no intelligent design, no God, nothing providing meaning to the universe, then enlightenment is a crock. If the universe merely the result of chaos, then everything we're doing is still the result of chaos. That which we perceive to be order is simply a fluke accident, akin to the infinite number of monkeys on the infinite number of keyboards eventually producing Hamlet.
Enlightenment views the savagery of the past as bad, while the civilization of today is at least better, if not yet altogether good.
Where that falls apart when viewed in coupling with an entirely chaotic universe is that there's nothing to say what "good" is in the first place. It simply happens to be the system we prefer, and that doesn't really mean anything. There's nothing objective about it.
Progress means moving forward. But if there's no goal, then the movement is all in vain. There's no actual progress when there's nothing to progress toward.
I hope you're familiar enough with Calvin and Hobbes to understand me when I say it's basically like playing a gigantic game of Calvinball - if you're just making the rules up as you go, the game is absolutely pointless, and you can't hold any fault to anyone for playing by a different set of rules since the rules are, by their very definition, arbitrary in the first place.
So now I'm wondering what makes rape, murder, genocide, etc... bad in your book. If we're all accidents, then there's no point in treating anyone on the planet like they're anything less than an accident. The chaotic universe, the undesigned world, certainly has not placed any value on them. In fact, if we are to take our morality from the uncreated universe, then the most moral thing that we can possibly do is just go ahead and fire the nukes and kill everyone on the planet, because we're all zooming right along to heat death and universal singularity anyway.
I must admit that I am having a problem shedding more light on what I believe, because I'm not really seeing what you're not understanding. I feel like I've been doing a pretty solid job of laying it all out. If you've got specific questions, I'd love to answer them. Otherwise, I don't know what holes you're seeing.
ReplyDeleteI can say that where you're attributing moral development to man, I'm attributing it to God. I believe that God worked through man to bring about moral changes. I believe it has been a slow work, but I do believe it has been God's work.
The Calvinball reference is interesting, and I know it's frustrating. But just because it would be nice to have a secure objective morality and a direct line to it doesn't mean that it does exist.
ReplyDeleteThe thing I am not getting is still back to these "tough questions" that you promised to answer. Yeah, I've read what you've written so far. It's not just that I want different answers, I want more direct answers.
So this God character in the OT ordered his people to do some pretty hairy things (we needn't haggle over the details, eh?). I can understand the whole "ongoing dialog" thing because I know Fortner. It maybe explains why a transcendent God wouldn't spring global tolerance and nonviolence on the unsuspecting ANE 3200 years ago. But that doesn't explain why a transcendent God would give orders for his people to do hairy things. How do you explain God giving those orders? It's not like he just turned his back while his chosen people killed and raped and thought "tsk tsk, they'll grow out of it someday." He told them to go ahead and go crazy. That is the tough question here, and all I want is a direct answer to it minus all the preacher fluff that doesn't really answer the question.
[when we argue about some of the other things, like -
ReplyDeleteGod vs. no god
objective morality vs. not
God responsible for moral progress vs. not
- it is like arguing whether unicorns exist. We don't have any common ground on which to meet, and neither of us has any compelling arguments or self-evident evidence with which to convince the other. I'm fine with that. But we can discuss some issues that I have with your explanations because they are completely on your turf. That's why I want to focus on those things.]
Yeah, David - I'm still not understanding what I haven't answered so far. God never ordered rape. God never ordered the Israelites to even take foreign brides from nations they conquered.
ReplyDeleteHe did order exterminations of people - but that was a punitive extermination based on the depravity of those cultures. Israel was just the tool used for that extermination, as opposed to the raining fire of Sodom and Gomorrah.
I am sorry if I seem to be dense here, but I'm seriously not understanding what I haven't answered.
Let's try it one step at a time. Do you think that God gave these orders?
ReplyDeleteNumbers 31:17-18
“Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”
Deuteronomy 21:11-14
“If you notice among the captives a beautiful woman and are attracted to her, you may take her as your wife. Bring her into your home and have her shave her head, trim her nails and put aside the clothes she was wearing when captured. After she has lived in your house and mourned her father and mother for a full month, then you may go to her and be her husband and she shall be your wife. If you are not pleased with her, let her go wherever she wishes. You must not sell her or treat her as a slave, since you have dishonored her.”
The passage in Numbers is an example of the punitive extermination that I just mentioned in my previous comment(s). The specific context of the passage you're quoting is in reference to Israel going to war against the Midianites. The Midianites had caused trouble for Israel before, back in Numbers 22 by trying to use God - the God of the Israelites - through Balaam - who was not an Israelite but apparently at least knew of Yahweh God and tried to call out curses from God on the Israelites. This is the first theological offense. The second is when the Midianite culture begins to infiltrate the Israelite culture in Numbers 25, where the Israelites are turning away from God due to the influence of Midianite intermarriage. So God wipes out the Midianites in order to keep the Israelites focused on Him. So, yes, God gave that order, and - again - it was a punitive cleansing for the sins of the Midainites. #1 - Trying to use God to curse His own people, and #2 - pulling God's people away from Him.
ReplyDelete"If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, "Let us go and worship other gods" (gods that neither you nor your fathers have known, gods of the peoples around you, whether near or far, from one end of the land to the other), do not yield to him or listen to him. Show him no pity. Do not spare him or shield him. You must certainly put him to death. Your hand must be the first in putting him to death, and then the hands of all the people. Stone him to death, because he tried to turn you away from the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. Then all Israel will hear and be afraid, and no one among you will do such an evil thing again."
- Deuteronomy 13:6-11
God ain't jokin' around. Leading someone away from God - even trying to - is a sin punishable by death.
As for Deuteronomy, yes, God lays out that conditional aspect of how to treat a captive woman in a situation where an Israelite wishes to marry her. In Numbers 36, we have some evidence that it was generally the accepted norm to marry within Israel anyway, and then in Nehemiah 10, we see that in post-exilic thought, there was a firm vow not to marry any non-Israelite at all. Yes, I realize that's several hundred years later, but the point is that by then Israel had actually realized that bringing in outsiders was always pretty bad.
And you've got to recognize that the Deuteronomy passage you're quoting is not a COMMAND to marry captive foreign women, it's a conditional statement. IF you're going to marry a captive foreign woman, this is how you do it. This isn't something that happened all the time.
If that law was actually followed, it's really a pretty generous set up within the context of the ANE, considering that other nations were just pretty much sticking to the "Well, you can be my wife and I'll at least feed you for having sex with me, or I can rape you right here" way of doing things. It's not great, sure, but it's better than what's going on around them.
And while you may not think that's good enough, apparently it's good enough for God. Baby steps. Taking people from where they are and leading them to where they're supposed to be. Since you remember Fortner so well, I'm sure you remember the Apollo 13 metaphor. Just because Fortner said it before me doesn't mean it isn't a valid point.
You ever have a point you want to make, and you know you've got the book laying around somewhere but you can't find it and you don't remember it quite well enough to quote it and be SURE you're not wrong? This is one of those moments.
ReplyDelete"To the LORD your God belong the heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it. Yet the LORD set his affection on your forefathers and loved them, and he chose you, their descendants, above all the nations, as it is today. Circumcise your hearts, therefore, and do not be stiff-necked any longer. For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and clothing. And you are to love those who are aliens, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt. Fear the LORD your God and serve him. Hold fast to him and take your oaths in his name. He is your praise; he is your God, who performed for you those great and awesome wonders you saw with your own eyes. Your forefathers who went down into Egypt were seventy in all, and now the LORD your God has made you as numerous as the stars in the sky."
- Deuteronomy 10:14-22
"'When an alien lives with you in your land, do not mistreat him. The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the LORD your God."
- Leviticus 19:33-34
"Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt."
- Exodus 22:21
There are more verses I could point out, but these three passages are underlining God's true intentions for Israel - love. Even in the midst of all the cultural context of the ANE, God is trying to get Israel to move towards love.
Okay, so we don't need to go any further with the baby steps. We have established that God is specifically authorizing (fine, it isn't "commanding") his people to take these girls (probably 8-12 years old) as their lifelong sex partners against their will. Look up from the Bible and ask any girl you know if a free month and a free hair cut would make that any better.
ReplyDeleteThere are maybe even bigger problems than that and you are admitting them. This God of yours in the OT believes in a kind of morality that is really kooky. And maybe you do too.
"God ain't jokin' around. Leading someone away from God - even trying to - is a sin punishable by death."
Is that something these 9-12 year old girls were probably doing? How about the younger ones? How about the babies and just regular people? Do you think that the entire nation right down to the children are morally culpable for the sins of - as you cited - one particular ancestor? Even if it were lots of ancestors? That view of morality is bogus and not even the Bible supports you there.
Whenever you reference the Deuteronomy passage, you always refer to "marriage." Can you look past the euphemism and see the reality of what was going on there? This was not a happy peaceful thing. Going in and "making a girl his wife" was rape when we can assume the girl's lack of consent.
Just because you call it "punitive extermination" doesn't mean that that's what it was or that that makes it morally acceptable. I've already said it isn't valid to punish the decedents for the crimes of their ancestors and it isn't valid to sentence innocent children to death regardless of the offense. Furthermore, before you can use a word like "punitive" instead of "vengeful" or "spiteful," there has to be some pedagogical or criminal justice theory to support it. I don't see any greater teaching purpose here, it is just one tribe killing another tribe because it wants their stuff. Sure, they say their God told them too because that's what they all said back then. Why are we still believing this particular tribe and none of the others?
"And while you may not think that's good enough, apparently it's good enough for God."
ReplyDeleteYou can't let this God character off that easily. Because the question isn't whether God committed some sort of sin in reality at some point. The question is whether the Bible paints a picture of a believable moral God. I am arguing that it doesn't. It paints a picture of a God who looks just like one you would expect ANE tribes to make up.
This response of yours doesn't work because, instead of analyzing the question and constructing a rebuttal, you assume the answer to the entire debate. What we are trying to decide is whether the Bible is a reliable source of information about God/morality. I am citing evidence against that proposition and you are supposed to reconcile the contradictions. It isn't a valid response to these attacks to just assume the ultimate conclusion - the Bible is reliable. If someone ever did raise a credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution, it would not be a valid response to ignore the challenge and say "well I guess that's how evolution happened, then." Not good enough.
"Baby steps."
I already talked about this too and asked you a specific question. If we as mere mortals can see that things like killing and raping children are bad things, why can't this transcendent God character in the OT? The Apollo 13 analogy doesn't work here. It's not just a limitation of the tools available to the people. It would have been easy for God, instead of specifically authorizing this kind of immoral action, to specifically prohibit it. An eleventh commandment: Do not rape any women or girls, including foreigners. I've already said that if I were a God in the ancient world that I would give similar commandments. Wouldn't you? I have also said that I would never ever authorize despicable behavior like what we see in these examples. Would you? (Specific questions)
Whenever you talk about the sins of the Mideonites that supposedly make them deserve the death penalty (or worse), I can't help but think - what could anyone possibly do that would deserve that? The worst moral crimes I can come up with are mass murder and rape. There is nothing worse. Yet that is what the perpetrators are doing against the victims here, in the name of God.
"Do you think that the entire nation right down to the children are morally culpable for the sins of - as you cited - one particular ancestor? Even if it were lots of ancestors? That view of morality is bogus and not even the Bible supports you there."
ReplyDeleteActually, you're wrong.
"You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand {generations} of those who love me and keep my commandments."
- Exodus 20:4-6
God just laid out the "third and fourth generation" rule there, so He's still following His own moral code.
So, yes, I believe that the Bible is a reliable source for information about God and morality.
And while we're at it...
"But if out in the country a man happens to meet a girl pledged to be married and rapes her, only the man who has done this shall die. Do nothing to the girl; she has committed no sin deserving death. This case is like that of someone who attacks and murders his neighbor, for the man found the girl out in the country, and though the betrothed girl screamed, there was no one to rescue her.
If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay the girl's father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the girl, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives."
- Deuteronomy 22:25-29
I think that covers "Don't rape."
You're challenging me to look up from the Bible. I'm challenging you to look outside of yourself. You are presenting YOUR understanding of morality as the ULTIMATE understanding of morality. Since these things violate YOUR conscience, violate YOUR sensibilities, violate YOUR concept of how things ought to be, they obviously cannot ever have been accepted.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
- Hamlet I.v.166-7
Yes, there was extreme violence in ancient Israel. But it served a purpose ordained by God. It may offend your morality, but guess what! You're not God!
This is why I brought up the intelligent design question. You're right in saying that we don't have a lot of common ground between us, and this is one of the places where we don't have any commonality, apparently.
Your definition of morality is based on YOU.
My definition of morality is based on God.
You may balk at that, but since you don't believe in a God or any greater truth to the universe, your source of morality is completely without transcendent foundation, based entirely on the workings of man, who is just a drop in the cosmic bucket, a tangential product of chaos. You're taking moralities you like and pressing them together and presenting it as "Enlightenment." Enlightenment of what? If there's nothing THERE in the first place, there's nothing to enlighten. There's nothing in the darkness, so turning on the light has no point. It's still just empty.
This is a major philosophical difference between the two of us that gets in the way of me answering your questions the way you think I ought to be answering them. You don't believe in the same morality I believe in, so how can I fit my God to your morals?
"You don't believe in the same morality I believe in, so how can I fit my God to your morals?"
ReplyDeleteWe don't have to have the same fundamental beliefs about all morality in general to have this discussion because I am trying to play on your turf. Do you accept this moral principle?
"A man should not force a girl to have sex with him without the girl's consent."
Sure, maybe this kind of principle is something relatively new in human society. I rarely find a moral rule regarding a prohibited action that is as universalizable as this. I cannot imagine any circumstances under which violation of this rule would be justified. Can you (specific question)? Do you disagree with the validity of this moral principle (specific question)?
By that moral principle, I am judging the character God as portrayed in the OT as morally inferior to current non-Biblical standards that we can all agree on. I am saying that our current secular understanding of morality is superior to the morality taught by the Bible. And I am not trying to start with my assumption that morality is a human construct, I am asking you to start with the assumption that the moral principle I identified is a good one. You could disagree with it.
It is somewhat circular, just like your position, but if you want to defend against my attack on God, you need to either disagree with the moral principle I articulated or explain why God was justified in breaking it with his authorization.
Now, you don't have to agree with me about objective morality, you just have to agree with the moral principle I used as an example. So if you do, then we've got a ballgame. We're playing the game on your turf using common ground.
It seems like you are not willing to play the game, though. I'm asking you, based on the moral principle I identified and the example of God's authorization I provided that conflicts with the principle, to reconcile them and defend my charge that this God character is being immoral. Your response amounts to "he is God, he can do whatever he wants." But that is intellectually weak. It jumps to the conclusion and ignores the question at hand, which is whether we should rely on the Bible for our understanding of God/morality.
On a separate note, no, those passages do not amount to "do not rape." The penalty for raping a virgin (9-12 year old girl) is that the girl has to be married to him and live with him forever. Who is being punished there?
Once a man is involved, then the rape of his future property (oops, I mean wife) is really punishable. And you passed over the one where the victim is executed because she was raped in the city. Yikes.
Yes, David. Rpae is bad. No, I don't disagree with that principle, and no, I do not think there are instances where it's ever justifiable.
ReplyDeleteBut - once you read the text as a whole, understanding what the Law is meant to do, integrating all of the aspects of it into one tapestry and looking at the whole thing - it is pretty clear that God doesn't think is OK, either.
Again, we have come to the issue of cultural relativity, which you're not applying across the board.
Yes, modern understanding of morality is better than the understanding of morality as was exhibited in the ANE, even specifically within Israel.
But when taken as a whole, the Law sets up the beginning of a movement towards morality for the entirety of God's creation.
To judge God based solely on Levitical law and its failures - or successes - to meet modern standards of morality is a culturally arrogant position, one which assumes that pre-industrial semi-nomadic civilizations focused on their own survival in the midst of warring nations can be judged by standards that are the product of THOUSANDS of years of historical progress. And that's true whether God is real or not.
Again - and I realize this may not be good enough for you, but it is my position - God took Israel where they were, in the ANE setting, and gave them a Law that was meant to elevate them, even if just a little bit, closer to where He is.
The Law was not laid down for you and me in America in 2010. It was designed to rewrite a culture that lived over 3,000 years ago.
Think about US law as it exists now. It's not illegal to sneeze openly on somebody without covering your mouth. It's not against the law to refuse to listen to anybody else's music on a long car ride. It's not against the law to laugh at people with handicaps.
All of those things just kinda make you a jerk. Not illegal, though.
US law is primarily concerned with "Here's what you can't do, and here's what happens if you do those things." So can we judge the US for not having laws on the books that say "Hey, maybe just don't be a jerk"?
God's Law - I don't know how to make this any clearer, I swear - was meant to call Israel out of the cultural surroundings they were born into and elevate them to another understanding. Yes, we now can see that the stipulations for as outlined in Deuteronomy are not the most gender-equal. But when you consider that THE ENTIRE WORLD was not gender-equal at that time, it's a BIG STEP.
What we've got is God providing stipulations for when humanity is going to act like humanity. No, it isn't perfect by our standards, but it brings Israel into a different light than the nations surrounding them.
We also have to consider that the Law was not the only laws Israel followed. We have the Halakah, the Sea Scrolls, the Kaballah, and plenty of other laws laid down (and referenced at numerous points in the Bible - Genesis 38, 1 Samuel 18, Isaiah 24, etc..) besides the Law of God. God's Law is the foundation - the beginning of the search for holy morality.
So, again, yes, moral understanding today is better than it was 3200 years ago.
But I believe - and, again, I'm sorry if I'm too folksy for you and can't get past the Bible when I say this - that God laid down the foundation for the morality that we hold today. It is through God's guidance that we have come to the mores we live in today. As time went on, as Israel (and later all mankind) learned more of what it meant to live lives like God wanted them (us) to live, God revealed more of His instruction.
You can't teach a kindergartener Calculus, and you can't teach a culture that views women as property that men can't just marry whoever they want. You've got to lay down the basic foundation. You've got to re-write the cultural understanding of women and personal rights.
I hope that makes sense. I REALLY hope that makes sense.
wow, there's some interesting stuff going on here.
ReplyDeletedavid, if i understand your basic criticism correctly, it's that (1) there are some serious divergences between what we know regarding moral behavior and what we're told about god's commandments regarding moral behavior, specifically in the law and the accounts of the judges; and (2) the bible isn't even self-consistent regarding its morality (i.e. there are similar divergences between these same law/judges passages and what we find in the new testament). and these differences have to be reconciled in some way to support the claims made for god that he is a god of love and mercy and justice, etc. and aaron, you're essentially arguing that since god is the standard for morality, what he commands must be moral, and we have clear evidence of his commands in the text, and any divergence between his morality and ours is the result of our status as still developing and incomplete moral beings (way oversimplified, i know, but i'm just trying to draw a baseline here).
i know you both well enough to know that you've both thought about this a lot and your conclusions aren't hasty or unfounded. and honestly, i doubt either of you is likely to change your mind based on an internet blog conversation. but we can all hopefully get something from the discussion (i certainly have just from reading it), and maybe challenge each other to think a little more deeply than any of us would have otherwise.
here's the thing: david's fundamental criticisms are strong criticisms, and they're criticisms that every thinking person interested in christianity has to struggle with. and i think aaron's is the most common solution for people who manage to keep some kind of faith.
i don't think it's the strongest solution, though. both the criticism and the proposed answer are based on a couple of assumptions that need to be reexamined, about the way we understand the constitution and continuity of the bible as a text and about the way we read its revelatory function.
the problem starts with the way the text is divided into two parts, each supposedly self contained and internally consistent and only related to each other as brothers of sorts, with the new one pushing the old one out of the way into a position where its only remaining value is to affirm the authority of the new. the truth is, first that the division is narratively arbitrary (although it seems at first shallow reading to make sense), and second that neither part is either self-contained or self-consistent in the way that we typically envision them.
the biblical text does not exist in two parts. 66 parts is closer, but that's still not exactly it. we have to start by understanding that the biblical text is not written by one mind with the entire narrative structure and content envisioned in its entirety from the first verse of genesis until the end of john's revelation. the bible is written by men (and some women), each individuals, and each with a severely limited perspective on absolute truth and god and the grand eschatological movement of god's purpose.
so what we have is a series of documents that chronicle the evolution of man's understanding of god and god's plan and god's desire for the way men ought to live. it's not just that our understanding of morality evolves as culture progresses; our understanding of god himself grows. so the god the genesis author understands is significantly less sophisticated than the god known by isaiah near the height of near eastern civilization or the god experienced by paul. it's not that god is different, it's that he's complex, he is large, he contains multitudes.
and i think you're both largely in agreement with me here about the nature of progressive revelation, but it needs to be emphasized that the consistency of the biblical text is not in the completeness of its vision, but in the trajectory of its narrative progress. the bible is a story. it tells, not the immediate revelation of the whole of god's character and the history of man's failure to respond correctly, but of the gradual unfolding of god's character and of man's struggle to understand and relate to this god who is increasingly more complex and subtle and challenging than man could have imagined. each generation builds upon the understanding of its precursors, and reinterprets them, and the whole body of dialogue shifts and realigns itself with the addition of each new voice. and that story is only half finished by what we call the old testament, because the new testament writers keep right on rereading and reinterpreting their fathers as the significance of jesus as christ becomes more evident and its implications are slowly grasped.
ReplyDeleteand even though the bible is the record of the experiences and understanding of men and women who have heard in some way the voice of god, they're still just human beings, and that voice in the text is still filtered through their minds and their prejudices and their misunderstandings.
most of the books of history were written long after the events themselves took place. the earliest most of the j text of the pentateuch and judges and big chunks of samuel and kings could have been written was late in the reign of david or early solomon. that's a long time after the invasion of canaan. and the purpose of the histories is not just to record the facts of israels past, but to record the facts and to demonstrate the author's understanding of how god's hand was at work in those events. quite simply, when we won, it's because god was with us and whatever we were doing pleased him. when we lost, he was against us because we were displeasing him.
it's a mechanistic, retributive theodicy that leads to justification of rape and genocide and whatnot, and we find it despicable. but ironically, so did the later israelites, because that whole retributive system of thought is thoroughly and beautifully deconstructed in job and ecclesiastes. they were learning too, and if you read the later prophets, like jeremiah and others, you'll find a strong condemnation and rejection of the very attitudes that the early israelites attributed to god.
it's not the inconsistency of an incoherent bundle of superstitions (at least, it doesn't have to be). it's the maturation of a people's understanding of god and morality across centuries of experience and revelation.
so david, to address your basic criticisms. they're hard questions, and i still struggle with them. but the best i can come up with is (1) yes the moral message is inconsistent, but only inconsistent in the way my moral understanding today is inconsistent from my moral understanding as a third-grader--that is to say, they are not the same, but the one can serve as a starting point to reach the other, even if the first must ultimately be rejected; and (2) yes, absolutely, terrible and immoral things are attributed to god in the old testament, but they are the attributions of confused individuals who were trying to give meaning to things as they saw them, though they saw them unclearly and without the perspective of later generations of understanding and revelation.
granted, this solution raises all sorts of questions about the nature of so-called inspiration and how we interpret the text. if some things can just be thrown out as being the results of the misunderstandings of the author, then that leaves us without a lot of firm ground from which to base hermeneutic excursions. and those are the questions i'm struggling with right now, and i'm sure you're familiar with them too. but i think it's probably a topic for another discussion, or at least another day.
ReplyDeleteKurt, in your last couple paragraphs, you summarized exactly where I was in my thinking at the tail end of my Christianity. As I found traditional CoC Christianity less and less philosophically tenable, I built bridges like your theory that the less savory parts of the OT were not "inspired" and were just written by less developed theologians trying to explain things without any special insight or revelation. Then I figured that's what the rest of the Bible was, too, just how ancient Israelites interpreted the world around them theologically. It probably passed as pretty good wisdom in the time, and maybe it even passed for God-inspired wisdom. But that inevitably led me to the question that I will ask you. After you realize that the Bible is just written by people who tried to write about theology and morality using their own best understanding in the context of their own culture and traditions, why should it be given special authority today? Why shouldn't we prefer our own contemporary writers who write on theology and morality since they draw on a much broader wealth of wisdom?
ReplyDeleteI think you summed up what has been said pretty well, Kurt. The only point that I would modify would be the "progressive revelation" part, since I don't see any reason to assume any part of the moral evolution was revealed. I think that religion has provided some of the vocabulary and imagery as people made moral progress, but I don't think the moral progress came from the religion or from any supernatural entity. Not only is there no good evidence to suggest revelation, the facts seem to me to utterly contradict that idea.
If morality were at any point revealed to humans from some divine creator, the reasonable expectation would be that the revelation would surpass the contemporary wisdom and morality. For instance, if we had evidence that out of nowhere, ancient Israelites claimed to have "received" a revealed morality that included gender equality or sexual orientation equality, that would be strong evidence that their claim of revelation were true. But in fact, Israelite "revelation" mirrors the contemporary morality in neighboring societies. There are some differences, but not of any huge moral significance. Other societies completely isolated from the Israelites making no claim to revelation from Yahweh made similar moral progress in other places. The slow evolution of morality doesn't inherently disprove revelation, it just contradicts the expectation and fails to support the idea.
On the other hand, gradual moral progress is exactly what you would expect if the non-theistic explanations for moral progress are accurate. Secular scientific explanations start with evolutionary biology as a basis for some of our moral impulses, like the impulse for empathy with those with whom we identify and even selfless altruism for the benefit of genetic offspring. As societies developed, those with more developed ethical systems would be more stable and would thrive and have a higher rate of survival while the more anarchic would tend to collapse. Once communication was prevalent, the survival of the fittest would move from the biological and the social to the ideological. The marketplace of ideas would lead to rapid progress in moral development as better moral theories gained acceptance at the expense of others. This completely natural explanation fits very well with observed reality and history regarding morality. There was never a point where some outside source seemed to propel humanity forward with some great revelation. Why give credit for the gradual growth to a supernatural entity when that conclusion doesn't match reality?
good point david, and "progressive revelation" was poor word choice on my part. i just meant to emphasize the evolution of moral systems, whether that progression is revealed or developed. i'm not sure i'd reduce the contribution of religion to moral discourse as far as you do, but it's not a point i'm invested in enough to argue right now.
ReplyDeletebut you ask an interesting question:
"After you realize that the Bible is just written by people who tried to write about theology and morality using their own best understanding in the context of their own culture and traditions, why should it be given special authority today? Why shouldn't we prefer our own contemporary writers who write on theology and morality since they draw on a much broader wealth of wisdom?"
first of all, i'm not ready to grant that there's no inspiration or at least some kind of transcendence involved in the writers of the text. just that that transcendence isn't perfectly contained in the text. however, i also have no problem saying that the bible isn't outstanding as a moral document, and in fact that i find equally strong moral critiques in kant and kierkegaard and marx and several others.
however, i think the bible's primary value is not as a moral document but as a narrative depiction of the relationship between god and men. it's a dialogue. it does have moral content, but apart from that it has aesthetic value, and theological value, and philosophical value and social criticism and all sorts of other stuff.
from those questions, coupled with something you said in your initial response to aaron's post--
"If the Bible contains ethical inconsistency and immorality, then it is not useful at all, except for its literary value."
--it strikes me that even though our thinking is very similar in many areas, there's a fundamental reason you're doing grad work in law and i'm doing grad work in literature (i'm not going to preference one over the other, but it's going to be obvious from here on that what we find valuable in a text differs pretty strongly). granted, it's a subject i may be too close to for objective judgment, but i think you're making a mistake in separating literary and theological value. it sounds hokey and romantic, but the narrative power of the text and the way it anticipates and envelops everything that comes after it are strong arguments for me, and they're difficult to make convincing for someone whose mind has been trained to think and read so differently. there is stuff going on beneath the surface of the text that just doesn't happen anywhere else, and it's not obvious without a lot of narrative and poetic theory to support where you're looking. it's certainly not an argument that holds water for everybody, but ultimately the strength or weakness of arguments has very little to do with the faith choices we make (as much as we like to believe differently.)
Kurt, I don't strongly disagree with anything you said, but I think you are either holding on to relics of a religion you no longer subscribe to or constructing one of your own that bears little relationship to the commonly understood signifier "Christian." I don't mind either, but I thought I would point that out. It seems that your view of the Bible is fairly unorthodox, which is fine, but you must recognize that my initial comments were not directed at someone who shares your sorts of views.
ReplyDeleteI spent a lot of years of my life enjoying the Bible and I do still enjoy discussing it for its literary values - the kinds of things you talk about. Even since I stopped being a Christian in any meaningful sense, I have taught classes at church and lead home Bible studies where I think I helped other people appreciate the underlying value in the Bible. I sometimes had to be careful with what I said, because I didn't want to be intellectually dishonest, and at that point, I had stopped believing in the supernatural elements. I have no problem with people like you ("us?") who read the Bible and appreciate its narrative, literary, and historical value.
But that is not the reality for most Bible-readers. It isn't presented in traditional churches as an aesthetic narrative. Neither is it presented as one voice in a broad moral discussion with voices from other branches of philosophy. That is how the Bible is viewed in academic circles, but not generally among believers.
When I say something like, "...it is not useful at all," I mean that in the context of confronting reality. In the academic world, it has the values you identify. But in reality, it is held up as a pristine direct revelation from God. It is the reason given by millions for why they view homosexuality as an abomination and it has led a lot of people to do and say insane things. The perception of the Bible as a perfect moral document needs to be debunked wherever it is found in reality.
I used to be very open and tolerant towards believers' views of the Bible because I could appear to agree with them about the value of the Bible while secretly valuing it in a completely different way. Then I became more hostile because I thought it was duplicitous for me to present a facade of philosophical endorsement when I disagreed so fundamentally. Now, I am more curious than anything else. I have read dozens of books about religion, psychology, and politics, and realized that most people are virtually immune to changing their minds no matter what arguments they encounter. But I am still insatiably curious about how religious minds work and how they defend their positions, especially when confronted with inconsistencies.
When you say you're not ready to grant that there's no inspiration or transcendence in the text of the Bible, I wonder, what do you mean by that? I am more sympathetic when you say that the Bible is not an outstanding document. Is this just a hedge or a diplomatic bow to those who view it as outstanding? Do you really suspect supernatural intervention in the composition of the Biblical text? Do you believe that other texts contain comparable supernatural intervention under whatever definition you give the phenomenon?
hmm. i don't think i'm doing a very good job of communicating the nuances of my position here. let me be clear about where we disagree:
ReplyDeletei believe that jesus of nazareth was the son of god. i believe that he died and was resurrected and that his life and death and prophesy was the culmination of god's historical relationship with israel. and i believe that that life has implications through history into the present. these reasons are why i consider myself a christian.
i will grant that much of my understanding does not fit within the framework of mainstream fundamental protestantism, and there's a lot of dogma and doctrine that i either resist or reject outright, but there's a lot more to christianity than the church of christ, and i think i'm not as alone in my beliefs as you're suggesting. in fact, i think that even though they aren't capable of enunciating it that way, a lot of christians tend to live a narrative that's pretty close to what i've described.
but i think there has been a misunderstanding, because i never said that the bible is not an outstanding document. what i said was that it was not an outstanding *moral* document. i think it most certainly is outstanding, and i tried to list several of the ways in which i find it so. and i think you critically misunderstood what i meant by narrative power. it's not that i find the bible aesthetically pleasing in a detached intellectual sort of way--it's that i find the biblical narrative to be a story that captures me and contains me and penetrates me. this is the ground i mentioned before where i think you and i differ: narrative value to me is not a beautiful or sophisticated story, it's more of a structural framework that gives shape and meaning to the fabric of my experience.
i'm perfectly aware that reason has nothing to do with my christianity. it's most definitely a phenomenological choice and not an empirical one. but i'm okay with that. so when i talk about transcendence, i'm talking about men experiencing something sublime, and struggling to find a way to take that experience and make it fit with what they know of the world. and that same foundation of transcendence may very well exist at the root of other texts. in fact, i think it probably does. and i'm okay with that, too.
i suspect your opinion of my intellectual rigor and self-honesty is probably swirling down the toilet right about now. i think the biggest difference between you and me (and this may be presumption on my part) is that i don't have much trust in logic and reason as modes for adequately describing or containing the complexities of reality. i guess you could say that as a product of a thoroughly post-modern hegemony, i'm pretty comfortable with ambiguity and inconsistency and the lack of any firm underived ontological foundation.
David - I've been letting Kurt run with his thing here for a while since you've only been replying to him, but this seemed like a really good time for me to jump back into the conversation.
ReplyDeleteWhere Kurt has said that reason doesn't have anything to do with his Christianity, and you have said that reason has everything to do with you rejecting Christianity, I find myself standing in the middle, and yet still fully embracing God through Christ (and the Bible) as much as I possibly can.
Again, Kurt says that he doesn't "have much trust in logic and reason as modes for adequately describing or containing the complexities of reality," where it has become pretty evident (although, like Kurt, I will admit that this is possibly just presumption) that you DO see logic and reason as not only sufficient, but also the only things that can possibly serve as worthwhile explanations of reality.
And so, again, I find myself in the middle.
I do very much try to use logic and reason to help me come to what I see as the explanations for the world. But where my logic seems to take an illogical step for some people is when I tie my logic and reasoning inextricably into the experience of God.
Karl Marx once said, "Since only what is material is perceptible, knowable, nothing is known of the existence of God."
The thing about that, though, is that it really only means that nothing is known of the existence of God... to Karl Marx.
I know that I have brown hair and brown eyes, because my experience every time I've ever looked in a mirror has consistently been that I see the reflection of my brown hair and brown eyes. I know that I really like hot pizza and cold beer, because when I experience hot pizza and cold beer, I really like it. I know that 2 plus 2 equals 4 because when I have two things and then get another two things, I turn around and I have four things.
I realize that's some pretty basic stuff there, but so is my faith in God. And my faith in God is not based on the stories I've been told since I was a kid, it's not based on what some preacher or youth minister (definitely not my youth minister) told me, it's not based on anything Dr. Fortner said. My faith in God is based entirely on my own personal experiences, my own exploration, my own logic and reason.
I gave up on God for a good while. I was where you said you had been - I went to church, I read the Bible, I spoke up in class... But didn't really actually believe in God as a deity. (This was most of high school for me, and a couple of spots in college.) But as time marched on, I began to see things in my life that I had absolutely no choice but to attribute to direct divine action. Coincidences are one thing - completely life-altering sequences of events are another.
My entire understanding of the universe - from a physical viewpoint, taking in the glory of the night sky, to a moral viewpoint, understanding the failures of my fellow man as inevitable but redeemable, to a sociological viewpoint, loving my fellow man despite his failings as well as my own - is based on two things: logic and faith. Logic led me to a point not where I had conclusively proven the existence of God, but where I could see absolutely no other way for anything in existence to at all begin to make sense. My faith stepped in at that point and showed me - even if only in brief, shimmering, fleeting glimpses - that my logic was sound, and that I have truly found a path - THE path - that leads "farther up and further in," as Aslan would say.
My hair and eyes are brown, I like hot pizza and cold beer, 2+2=4, and God is DEFINITELY real, He is DEFINITELY active in today's world, He has DEFINITELY taken an active interest in my life, Jesus Christ is DEFINITELY His Son, and His Holy Spirit DEFINITELY speaks to me. For me to even entertain notions to the contrary is to deny my own experience. And once you can't trust yourself... well, where are you then?
Aaron, I don't mean to sound offensive, but I fail to see any logic in what you might think was your presentation of your "proof" of God. You place specific knowledge of God in the same self evident category as knowledge of your own hair color. In reality, your Christian beliefs are conclusions resting on a long and precarious string of assumptions and leaps of reasoning.
ReplyDeleteThe existence of a supernatural deity is most certainly not self-evident, so it is not at all sufficient "proof" for you to just state that it is, even if you use capital letters. When you make specific claims about the particular character Jesus as you understand them based on your English translations of surviving ancient texts from the New Testament supposedly written from eyewitnesses or their followers... well, maybe you see where some reasoning should come in.
The intellectual weak point for your beliefs is this unwavering support of the Bible as a valid authority, whether in morals or anything else. In any way that can be scrutinized, the Bible fails to be authoritative, although it remains interesting.
Not everything is known through experience, and in fact, experience of the sort you identified is inherently unreliable. If I am to trust other people's experiences, then I must believe in UFOs (many allege to have been abducted and probed) and ghosts (many allege to have seen them) and all the other religions of the world (many allege personal revelation regarding them). I'll give you a more scientific example of something that can be known without experience. You cited addition, which is a weird math phenomenon because it is sort of observable. But almost all of the rest of math is not. Math is built on a series of assumptions and constructed through logical proofs. This is how philosophy, politics, and religion work for intellectual people.
If intellectual Christians adopt your approach, that the truthfullness of Christianity is as self evident as the color of your hair, then they have no way to engage nonbelievers except through capital letters and incredulity. It must strike you as baffling how anyone, let alone a growing number of the educated and enlightened world, could reject your beliefs. To you, it looks like you are walking around talking about brown hair. To us, it looks like you are talking about UFOs.
Kurt, I apologize for misinterpreting what you were saying. Instead of embarrassing myself more with presumptions, I'll try to stick to some questions, because it is still not clear exactly what you believe and why.
ReplyDeleteWhat exactly does intellectual examination of your own religious beliefs look like under your model?
I still don't understand what you mean when you say it is a phenomenological choice. What would it take, hypothetically, for you to change your views and believe something else instead of believing in Christianity? Is there any sort of disconfirmation that you could receive?
I may be wrong again, but it appears to me that your defense of your beliefs is little more than an arbitrary choice supported by self-justification. Consider this: I propose that if you arbitrarily decided to become a Buddhist tomorrow, and devoted your life to meditation, reading, and fellowship with other Buddhists, that you would be able to find incredible narrative meaning and explaining power in the way Buddhism describes the universe. The initial choice would be completely arbitrary and without intellectual justification, but I don't think that would be ruled out under your theory. Once you experienced Buddhism and saw the power of its narrative, I think you could very easily self-justify your initially arbitrary conversion. In any case, that appears to be what you have done with Christianity.
What differentiates a religious thought system from a political thought system? To me, they are very similar. Both contain some structure that not only describes how the world works, but how it should be and what should be done about it moving forward. Political allegiance, like religious preference, is largely not initially chosen through intellectual means. Most people born in liberal households turn out to be liberal, etc. but there is still intellectual political discourse.
How would you go about convincing a non-Christian to adopt your Christian worldview? If you thought such a thing was ever desirable, you would have to look to some common intellectual ground. I'm having trouble seeing where someone like me would have a foothold in your territory, so maybe this will help.
Kurt, I know it's going to sound like you are saying that reason doesn't provide the support for your beliefs and then I ask you to give me the reason to explain it, and that seems kind of silly. It's just as circular as any good postmodernist argument. But I am trying to understand why you would jump into a dialog if all you have is a personal preference for a certain religious narrative.
ReplyDelete"little more than an arbitrary choice supported by self-justification."
ReplyDeleteessentially, yes. here's the thing, david. despite the modernist fetishising of reason and introspection and the individual, intellectual reason has (in the vast majority of instances) very little to do with religious/political/social ideology (because yes, they do all operate in the same way). look how people are converted into or out of any religion--even though in some instances the final step probably looks like a rational decision to choose logical truth over illogical self-delusion, that's not how conversion works.
it has to do with community, and how we relate to the community. when i say it's a phenomenological choice, i mean it depends more on our experiences than on our rationale. put a christian in a church full of people he despises--people he thinks are stupid, shallow, uneducated, boring, unsophisticated, or whatever--and given time, he will lose his faith. likewise, conversion to christianity happens when someone is looking for something, and they find it in a community that is open and welcoming and fulfills whatever psycho-social needs they have. the illusion of reason is always, as you have (maybe accidentally? or at least not in this context) pointed out, self-justification to satisfy our bizarre cartesian need to come to it from within our own minds.
so yes, if you want to convert me to buddhism, don't try to convince me it's true. put me in a temple filled with monks who are also good people, and leave me alone there long enough. and yes, i'll admit that christian communities where i actually find myself completely immersed and totally comfortable are pretty scarce. but they do exist, even if just as a virtual network of brothers and sisters scattered across the country.
as to why i'm interested in this dialogue, two reasons. first, i suspect that a large part of your own interest is not in actually changing anyone's mind, but just in the act of dialogue itself. likewise for me. and second, you say that you feel the need to step in wherever the bible is held up as a moral standard and cut that standard down. in a similar vein, the idea that anyone "reasons" their way alone to any state of belief bothers me, and i just wanted to point out that not only do i get my religion from influences largely outside of myself, everyone else does too.
Kurt, instead of letting this digress into a modernist vs. postmodernist (zzzzz) debacle, I've tried to find as much common ground as we can so that we are actually talking to each other instead of past each other.
ReplyDeleteOf course, this is difficult since the critique of reason undercuts all (?) opportunities to bridge gaps between different ideologies. Under your approach, there is really nothing that can be said for one person to convince another based on reason. The only thing to do is for each side to state its own beliefs. If even internal consistency (highly tied to reason) is ruled out as a universal standard, then there is no way to criticize any other ideology, even on its own terms.
When these things are purely personal and purely abstract, it really doesn't matter. If some people want to hold what I consider to be absurd, irrational, and internally inconsistent beliefs, it doesn't affect me directly. But it doesn't stop there because frequently these people come out of the woodwork to vote, proselytize, and lobby for public policy based on these beliefs. Then it affects all of us, and we need some way to engage in an actual dialog instead of just a sharing time.
I have my own issues with using even internal consistency as a basis for criticizing an ideology because inconsistency is impossible to escape and the ideologies with the highest levels of consistency are often not desirable.
"intellectual reason has (in the vast majority of instances) very little to do with religious/political/social ideology"
Quickly, I want to point out that while this may be true for a majority of people most of the time, it is not universally true. Some people are evidently open to being convinced by reason and abandon previously held beliefs when they are uncovered as unreasonable. Personally, I view this ability to think and reason in the abstract (as opposed to merely preferring tradition or comfort) is superior, and should be held up as the ideal.
You have observed the "vast majority," which I view as the inferior way of approaching a decision about things as important as these ideologies. Just because most people don't think, why should the rest of us give up on thinking?
David - Didn't I just get through saying that logic didn't comprise the whole of my belief in God? I could've sworn... Didn't I? I mean, I know you're not actually reading what I say, but instead just skimming through trying to find footholds for your smug contrarian replies, so you might have completely missed it, but I think I was pretty clear - more than once - in saying that logic alone is not my proof for God, and that my personal experience is, in fact, personal.
ReplyDeleteI never said that you have to - or would - believe in God because of my experiences. I said that my experiences have changed my beliefs. I'm pretty sure... OK, no, wait, I'm downright positive that the comment I posted about my experience and my logic and my faith was all about... ummm... me.
And here's where the argument gets really fun, chuckles - my "long and precarious string of assumptions and leaps of reasoning" is no shakier than your own. You don't believe there is a God... Because you have some objective revelation into this truth? Because some completely infallible source told you? Because of other people's observations? Because of your own experience and your own reasoning?
"Some hold the undemonstrable dogma of the existence of God; some the equally undemonstrable dogma of the existence of the man next door."
- G.K. Chesterton
It's pretty astonishing how you've attempted to construct your entire position against God, against the Bible, against faith, based entirely on your own understanding of reason. But where your understanding of reason falls apart - and I don't mean slightly unravels, man... I mean disintegrates - is that you fail to understand that you are operating on a system that fundamentally cannot actually be called reason.
Without a standard to define objectivity and therefore give meaning to a thing, it is impossible to judge something against that standard, right? If a professor doesn't have a rubric at least in mind if not in front of him as he grades, then there's no way to judge the actual success or failure of the student.
Now, for reason to work, at all, there has to be objectivity. There has to be a standard by which reason itself may be judged, because you can't judge a thing by itself, right?
Reason also requires a system of order. This is somewhat related to the requirement of objectivity, but it's different enough that it bears carrying out. An ordered system (as opposed to a chaotic system) has established rules that it follows and does not deviate from. A chaotic system... Well, that's just chaos, as its name implies.
Now... Within the confines of what you've said - "I do not believe in any God or any intelligent design" - it is impossible to actually observe any of the conditions that must be met in order to experience "reason."
If there is no ID, then order doesn't actually exist. If the universe was born out of chaos with no guiding hand to shape it into order, where did order come from? If the only thing that we ever had to begin with was chaos, then we're actually still just living in chaos.
Chaos never produces order. Order is the product of intent. Chaos produces chaos produces chaos. The chaos may become more complex, and that complexity may give rise to what can be perceived to be patterns but - like seeing Abraham Lincoln in a potato chip or the image of Jesus on a piece of toast - there's not actually a pattern there, it's just attractive chaos.
So, without a designer, without something to snap chaos into place as order, there is no room for "reason" to actually work in your professed world-view.
If what we perceive around us to be order is the result of chaos, then guess what? It's still chaos. It's just silly complex and very attractive, and we think we're seeing patterns when, in fact, there are none, which just poops all over reason.
Aaron, woah, I didn't mean for this to get that personal, and I didn't mean to present myself as smug. What is that, anyway? Why are atheists always called smug? Believers who appear confident in their beliefs are never called by that apparently derogatory term, they are called "faithful" or "devout."
ReplyDeleteYou can't call my system unreasonable by defining reason as the recognition of intelligent design. There has been a lot of circular reasoning in this discussion, but that is just, well, unreasonably circular.
Of course chaos produces order. According to the best astro-physicists in the world, the chaos of the big bang eventually led to galaxies and solar systems including our planet. I just finished reading a book by Stephen Hawking that is a great amateur-level description of how the order we see comes from chaos.
In other news, order is found to come from chaos in the absence of any higher being providing oversight or direction in self-organizing systems, emergent behaviors, and lots of other things. The modern worldwide economy is a chaotic system from which patterns and order emerge. Weather systems and flocks of birds are other examples.
Now back to my point and the point of your original post.
"long and precarious string of assumptions and leaps of reasoning"
My point is that your eventual conclusions about what is true or false, right or wrong, or whatever else with respect to your religious beliefs, are just that - conclusions. Conclusions are statements which ostensibly stem from reasoning which rests on assumptions. Somewhere way back there, you have certain assumptions about the universe, then you reason from those assumptions, and then you come to conclusions like the OT portrayal of Yahweh is an accurate depiction of a real and perfect deity and this book is an authoritative source of morality for my life.
The problem we have been having all along has been that you haven't seen the situation as I described. Any time I pull out an assumption and call it an unwarranted assumption or a line of reasoning and say it is unreasonable, you justify it by the conclusion. That is driving backwards on the highway of reason when you assume the conclusion to justify the reasoning which led to it. That was what I meant when I mentioned the long string and your inability to treat it as a string.
I don't feel like rehashing all my original criticisms about how Yahweh is depicted as inconsistent throughout the Bible and inconsistent with our more advanced understanding of morality, but it's all there if you are still curious. I brought these criticisms up attacking the string of reasoning that supports what you read and interpret in your English translation of the surviving texts of the Bible that were allegedly written by eyewitnesses or their followers several thousand years ago about alleged supernatural events.
Anyway, there's another thing I'd like to talk about that you referenced - the burden of proof regarding God. You don't directly state it, but you try to hold my lack of belief to the same standard as your very specific statement of belief. In the abstract, I argue that the burden of proof always rests with an individual alleging the existence of a certain thing.
ReplyDeleteIf person A says he believes in unicorns and person B says he does not, but neither provides compelling evidence, the dispute does not end in a logical tie. Person A failed to prove the affirmative position and the default position is non-belief of any particular thing or phenomenon.
The default position has to be non-belief because there are an infinite number of conceivable propositions, and a reasonable person should only accept those as true that can be demonstrated to be true.
Some things may be self-evident and others may be assumed. Still others may be reasoned from the first two. Since the existence of God in general - and certainly the existence of Yahweh, Jesus, and the inerrant Bible - are not self-evident and are not warranted assumptions, they must be reasoned.
Your argument about chaos is not really an argument so much as it is another unwarranted assumption.
This is getting pretty far from our original discussion about the OT God and whether the account is accurate, reliable, or relevant. But I like abstract things like this much more than arguing over the Bible anyway.
i understand your position pretty well, david, and i think you understand mine too. and i don't think either one of us is comfortable on enough common ground to take this conversation much further than it's already gone.
ReplyDeletethat said, i want to emphasize one final point.
"Some people are evidently open to being convinced by reason and abandon previously held beliefs when they are uncovered as unreasonable. Personally, I view this ability to think and reason in the abstract (as opposed to merely preferring tradition or comfort) is superior, and should be held up as the ideal."
i'm not holding up some sort of absurd insubstantial personalized ontology as an alternative to reason, i'm pointing out that reason itself is fundmentally unreasonable. that what appears to be reason is in fact an illusion stretched over a bundle of other competing impulses, and that logic is fundamentally incapable of describing and containing the complexities and ambiguities of reality.
the illusion that any ideological stance is rejected or assumed entirely by force of reason is, frankly, bizarre, and i don't know of anyone who seriously tries to defend that position (at least, not anymore). it's too self-reflexive--the deeper you look, the more reason appears to consume itself.
when i refer to the "vast majority" assuming ideological positions on grounds that exist outside of reason, i'm understating. ideology is a fundamentally social construct, not an intellectual one, and the idea of reason is itself the lynchpin of a particular set of ideological structures. postmodernism is pretty unstable itself, and it can't last except as a segue into something else, but as a critique of modernism and reason it is quite strong. and i don't see any way for us to get any further without resolving the tension between the two (which probably isn't going to happen anytime soon).
i understand the strong need for a way to immobilize certain fundamentalist movements in political/social/cultural spheres of action. but fetishizing reason creates too many dangers of its own for me to be comfortable with that as a foundation. and i'm aware that the critique of reason leaves us at an impasse. we're speaking, in a very real way, two different languages.
Kurt, I understand if you are done since we cannot fundamentally reconcile the two approaches in this case. But I have a little follow up question about what the dangers are that are created by "fetishizing" reason. What are those dangers, exactly?
ReplyDeleteRemember that whatever dangers may result from an over-reliance on reason must be balanced with the undeniable dangers of a society where two people from two different schools can never interact because the common language of reason has been critiqued out of use. Then there are the more practical dangers of fundamentalists and radicals whose claims can never be challenged in an acceptable way. So if you don't mind continuing, at least one step further, lay out some of reason's dangers and weigh them against the alternative dangers.
David, here's why your attempts to play on my turf have been futile: my turf is philosophically incompatible with your playing. I'm operating on beliefs (assumptions, sure) about the way EVERYTHING works that you completely don't agree with. Morality is tied directly into my belief in God. Reason itself is tied into my belief in God. Everything, everything, everything in my view of the universe is tied to God, and inextricably so.
ReplyDeleteAs for burden of proof...
Using your example - person A believes in unicorns, person B does not.
Person A says, "I have long heard other people talk about about unicorns, and there is a long-standing tradition - literally thousands of years old - of people who believe in unicorns. Yes, some people have misused others' belief in unicorns for personal gain, and some people have completely misinterpreted what unicorns are all about and have gone to war over minor differences of opinion about unicorns, but the fact still stands, completely undeniable, that belief in unicorns has completely changed the way the world works. So I decided to investigate the claims of unicorns. As I read the unicorn books more and more, I began to notice that the things they said held water. My experience lined up with what the books said. I began to see signs that more and more led me to believe that not only was the existence of unicorns possible, it was in fact probable. So I made the decision - based on my experience but also based on something that stands outside of pure logic and reason (for who among us exists solely as a creature of logic and reason?) and decided to accept - through faith - that unicorns exist, and I have allowed that belief to become integrated into every aspect of my life, transforming who I am from the ground up, and completely rewriting my life."
Person B says, "I don't believe in unicorns because I've never seen one."
Aaron, I'm surprised you went with the unicorn analogy because, most people now agree, there is no such thing.
ReplyDeleteYou know - or should know - that atheists refuse to believe in God for many more reasons besides the fact that he has never personally appeared. If you got that impression from my arguments, then I apologize for the confusion. We come to reject belief because the holes in religious belief structure are irreconcilable without a suspension of rationality. Some people are willing to suspend rationality and other are even able to do it without realizing it.
Even in the absurd unicorn monologue, I can find the point where I was trying to insert my criticism:
"So I decided to investigate the claims of unicorns. As I read the unicorn books more and more, I began to notice that the things they said held water. My experience lined up with what the books said."
That part about investigating the book and examining it critically when compared to outside things like experience and reason is exactly what I am talking about. Once again, though, when I point out that this is the step of the process at which my criticisms are directed, you jump to the very end of the process - the conclusion - and use it to defend the midpoint that is supposed to involve examining the unicorn book/Bible.
I'm no longer trying to make my original point and I never was trying to convince you - now I'm just trying to show you where my criticisms were aimed and why your responses have all been inadequate.
Say a third guy walks in, C, and tells you (A) that he believes in Islam/Allah/Muhammed/Koran and uses literally all the same arguments that you do. How do you respond? Are you convinced by his arguments or do you remain atheistic with respect to Allah?
ReplyDeleteThe way you would react to the Muslim is exactly how I react to you. You aren't using any arguments that aren't used by every other religion and from my perspective, they are all equally silly.
David, you've once again apparently skipped over what I've said and leapt to your own conclusion, skipping past the rest of my argument.
ReplyDelete"So I made the decision - based on my experience but also based on something that stands outside of pure logic and reason (for who among us exists solely as a creature of logic and reason?) and decided to accept - through faith - that unicorns exist..."
Reason is a wonderful tool for understanding the way the world works, but it isn't everything. It may be for you, and hey, if that's enough... Man, knock yourself right out.
I have not suspended rationality. I have superseded it. I have taken what I have observed and learned and experienced and put all of that together and taken an additional step - a step of faith - to come to my belief in God.
In my worldview, there is more to the world than logic and reason. Faith is the "more" part.
Yeah, there are some things that don't make sense. I believe it anyway, because the rest of the stuff that DOES make sense reassures me that I'll eventually get it.
And to the Muslim who uses all the same arguments I do, I would give him a pat on the back and say "Well, I commend you for your faith, and for your sake, I hope you're right."
The atheist argument fails to completely grasp the theist point in the first place.
"Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see."
"Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."
From a strictly rational point of view, sure I'm irrational. But I don't care about being rational - I have faith.
I guess I can't hope for more than an admission that your belief requires a leap of faith which is not rationally defensible.
ReplyDeleteOnce we reach that point, you won't listen to any reason that attacks your irrational leap of faith and I have no way to meet you on common ground. Congratulations, you have constructed an impermeable fortress that is unassailable by reality, logic, reason, evidence, or anything else.
I'm an atheist and I grasp your points fully and completely. I've preached sermons and prayed prayers and I had faith as strong as any of them. But the more I examined my own faith, the more I found it to be irrational and unsupportable. You can't dismiss my point by saying I don't understand where you are coming from. I know you realize at least partially where I am coming from by the way you dismiss the proverbial Muslim who echoes your arguments identically. You refuse to believe in a lot of things including a lot of gods. Compared to all the thousands of gods that have been believed in over the centuries, you are 99.99% atheist. I am just a little more atheistic than you.
OK, this? This right here?
ReplyDelete"Congratulations, you have constructed an impermeable fortress that is unassailable by reality, logic, reason, evidence, or anything else."
That's EXACTLY the kind of thing that led me to call your responses "smug."
Congratulations, you have constructed an argument that is built entirely on ignoring, demeaning, and condescending to the beliefs of others, in practice as well as theory. You hold your own understanding as the pinnacle of enlightenment, assuring me that though you are an atheist, you fully understand my faith. You've gone to church, so you know exactly what church is like for me. You've prayed prayers, so you know exactly what prayer is like for me. You've preached sermons, so you know exactly what applying a text to my life and encouraging others to do the same is like for me. And oh, if I would only see that .01% of atheism that you see, that .01% of truth that eludes me! Then my journey would be complete!
I'm glad you understand where I'm coming from. I'm glad you know what it's like to have a faith that can withstand the battery of doubt and the onslaught of questions. I'm glad you've had a relationship with God that completely rewires your entire personality. I'm glad you've known - on an intimate, completely personal, entirely unavoidable level - the presence of God in your life.
I'm glad you know where I'm coming from. I'm glad to know that you had that and walked away.
Congratulations.
"I have not suspended rationality. I have superseded it."
ReplyDeleteIf I were inclined toward personal attacks, I might call you names for saying something like this. Instead, I focused on the point itself. You are admitting that you cannot defend with anything resembling objective reason some parts of your faith in Christianity. That is fine, and I admit that I cannot pursue your beliefs past the boundary of rationality. Once we step into the realm of faith, people like me have nothing. All we can do is call things out of that realm of faith and shed the light of reason on them, and inevitably, they fall. Some things may never be called out, and I accept the limits of an argument like this in a forum like this.
If you hold some beliefs that are admittedly beyond the reach of my worldview, then yes, those beliefs are unassailable, just as I said in that line you quoted. Unfortunately for you, that means that you may never be convinced that they are wrong and if you are mistaken in your irrational (or extra-rational) beliefs, you may never come to know. That kind of safety can be very comforting, but you don't seem very comforted. I know you want to straddle the two worlds of faith and reason, and it is stressful when those two conflict so deeply. I don't know what else I can tell you.
I can apologize again if I came off as being personally insulting in any way. I told you at the beginning that I never entered into this discussion with the goal of convincing you. I enjoy the dialog for its own sake and I enjoy discovering how other people think and how they defend their positions. I can't apologize for thinking the way I do, for being honest about those beliefs, or for being confident in those beliefs. I fully expect that when I argue for fun with people like you that you will exhibit the same qualities and I would never hold it against you. I hope you have enjoyed our discussion more than your last comment indicates because I have.
David,
ReplyDeleteCuriosity makes me ask, in all seriousness, did you believe in the indwelling holy spirit when you were a professing Christian? I'd like for you to examine if you believed that the spirit was an active participant in your life or was your belief that the spirit was only active during the first century of Christianity.
I do have one observation. You are an evangelist for the a-theist belief. The belief that there is not a god whether that god is Allah, Yahweh, the Great Spirit, Isis, or countless others worshiped for eons, is still a belief which, even with reason, cannot be proven. As such, it is a belief system.
The intensity with which you attempt to tear down others' belief systems belies your statement that you do not want to convince others to join you. You have painted a blind spot for yourself that you are not a missionary for reason in a world of faith.
Whether you attack my beliefs or my writing on my son's blog or my lack of reasoning, it will make no difference to me and I will not respond to you further. You can have no perception of my faith without first knowing me personally. You have said so yourself. I have no doubt you understood your faith of the time and your adherence to reason now. You do not understand my faith, nor do I expect that of you in anyway. It is far too personal to be understood by anyone else. You do not understand Aaron's faith or Kurt's or any other believer's. Your understanding is limited by your own experience and your faith in your own perceptions.
http://politicalcartel.org/2010/03/31/is-atheism-belief/
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