Bibliography of Fighting misinformation, populism, and propaganda

Dual State Theory: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, 1941 Ernst Fraenkel

The War on Science, Shawn Otto  2020

Witches, A Tale of Terror, Sam Harris narrates the audio and has commented on how, once you accept a few basic principles as if they are factual, the men who prosecuted witches proceeded in a scientific manner. They were the "evil" ones, the men, but the managed to get others to believe the witches were working with Satan. 

Calling In - It took years for this to come out but it's finally available. Just got the eBook. 

I Never Thought of it That Way

Misguided, Matthew Facciani 2024

    Which has a massive bibliography and footnotes of studies

Karl Popper 

The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt

Politics of Meaning

The Ideological Brain

https://www.youtube.com/embed/P6KTCjwmdzs

Daryl Davis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis

Fiction

The Brothers K - David James Duncan

Quotes 

Dalai Lama Art of Joy

Morality is Reasonable

 

Another one of my “not sure where this is going or if I’ll finish it posts”. Probably multi-parts. It started by being reminded of this thread on CFI, and the associated blog from Richard Carrier. Carrier always puts many links in his blogs, so this will weave in a few of them. I will add some of what I think Carrier does not address. Some of that might be implied in the works I cover, but I will do my best to be explicit.

I WILL START WITH THE GOAL, THE CONCLUSION:

To determine our path forward in building a moral world, we can learn from our past. This goes all the way back to our early Hominid beginnings and to the rhythms of the planet itself. I won’t offer a perfect solution. It is one of the lessons from the planet that we are not perfect, and nature does not direct anything toward a goal.

To judge the data that we observe, we can apply three metrics; how societies go well or poorly, how human lives go well or poorly, and how human individuals’ inner quest for satisfaction goes well or poorly. “Satisfaction” includes happiness but extends it to reflecting on who we are as compared to who we were. Are we happy not only with our own pleasures and achievements, but has life around us done well, and did our actions along with others acting together with us contribute to the whole? The reflection is selfish only in the sense that we are judging what leads to the satisfaction of others using our own desires and senses as a basis.

I will posit (I’m not sure I will provide a complete defense) that including the needs and desires of others, including non-human life, and non-living things that support life, are helpful to the three metrics.

From the imperfect and incomplete system we have, we can extrapolate and come up with experiments and envision frontiers to discover and that will lead to solutions to the challenges before us. The same system that got us where we are can be used to see what we need because that system is based on finding what is true in his world.

TRUTH, IS THAT IT?

It seemed too simple to me at first and led me think of all the problems with determining what is true, but, yes, that’s it.

Note that we don’t need to find the truth before we can decide what is moral, we only need to set that as the goal. Carrier’s themes are mostly about showing how religion doesn’t work, and while doing that, he compares it to what does work. Religion sometimes contains good ideas, but it fills in what it doesn’t know with false beliefs in an attempt to create a moral system. It fails when it gets away from the pursuit of finding what truly does work. I’m speculating, but it could be that those early gurus set out to speak the truth then found it harder than they thought it would be, so they made up an ultimate truth and mysterious ways to find it. This is pretty much admitted by Plato in his “Myth of the Metals”.

Religion (and we can include failed philosophies of other types) fail because they provide an untrue basis for what is moral and build a stack of immoral rules on that basis. Rules like; the strongest warrior is also the smartest, or an arbitrary boundary can’t be crossed without punishment. A moral system includes; women voting, abolition of slavery, democracy, animal rights, equality, sexual freedom, and spiritual freedom. It does not include burning people for witchcraft. Even a claim of a temporary system, one that uses violence as a means, is always found to be untrue when power is gained over a large area, but the violence continues, and life does not improve for individuals or society.

Included in this reflection on ourselves is the violence we have done to the earth. We now know that large areas of the Americas, including rain forests, were managed and nurtured millennia ago with future generations in mind. It didn’t look like the European cities that were built using technology that extracted resources, so it wasn’t recognized as human achievement, or if recognized it was not considered better because it was not fast enough or didn’t prioritize enough short-term creature comforts over long-term stability.

In the few centuries when we were discovering the full size of the globe and thus the limits of our expansion, we could have spent some of our resources learning how to live within those limits. Instead, we brought slavery and ideas of constant growth into a world with ever increasing means to enforce them but not increased reflecting on their destructive nature. Ironically, those means created a class of people who had more time to reflect on how those same means were immoral. New technology created ways to document and disseminate those reflections. We broadened the discussion of morality across cultures while simultaneously acting immorally toward those cultures. We increased our ability to pursue what is true but continued to hold on to false beliefs as guides.

WHERE DID WE GO WRONG?

My brief history above could be expanded upon in many ways, maybe I will link to some of it later. We could look at how Muslims first spent some of their resources gathering knowledge from around the world while they were expanding their empire but were then diverted by the fundamentalist ideals of Al-Ghazali. We could critique the British Empire and colonialism and point out that to this day their museums are full of artifacts they acquired by force while spreading the good word of peace. The many alliances with Christianity and military power are too easy to point at, right up to the Third Reich.

My answer then to “where we went wrong” is there is no point in history when that happened. We didn’t “go wrong”, rather, “we aren’t perfect.” This could be a cause of despair. Psychology recognizes that for some people the thought that we can’t know everything is debilitating. They are unable to make any decision because they are overwhelmed with the need to consider all possibilities and the knowledge that they can’t do that.

Some can find comfort in an easy, pre-packaged answer, a moral system that comes with a community that believes in it. Many mistake the sense of community as evidence that the moral system is functioning. They stop questioning it, which puts an end to one of the keys to creating a moral system that is functioning. Instead they turn to defending the system as a replacement for strengthening it. It may feel like that defense is making the system better because it is helping to bond the community, but the bonding is not a replacement for reflection.

We have the ability to reason and to reflect, we should use it. We can gather data and test our hypotheses. This is demonstrated in laboratories with biology and the chemicals that comprise living things, and the same principles can be applied to the emergent properties of those living things. David Hume said we can’t figure out what we “ought” to do based on what “is”. He understood what a hypothetical imperatives is, but he argued that reason could not provide us with unconditional imperatives.

An example of a hypothetical imperative:

In the mid-20^th century, famine cycles were a real problem. We wanted to increase how much food we could grow and avoid blights, we used the hypothetical imperative, “if you want X, you do Y”, and created genetically modified crops. Or, the “is” form of these statements is something to the effect of “when you want X, know Y best achieves it, and seek the best means to achieve your goals, you will do Y.” I use this example because this solution did not solve the problem completely and created new problems. I will refer back to it later.

But what makes it a moral imperative?

If I said, “if you don’t want a beating, then obey me”, that’s a moral command from an authority, not a universal moral imperative. A moral imperative is an imperative that supersedes all others, which implies they are true and testable. They maximize the chances of our own personal satisfaction through our actions that create the better society and the better world we live in.

A moral imperative maintains “self-interest”, not “selfishness”. Self-interest warrants generosity and concern for others. Moral imperatives usually involve long-term payoffs, which might explain why people don’t like grappling with them.

The logical proof of how all moral systems break down into hypothetical imperatives can be found by following a couple of links that are in the John Davidson post and often are used by Richard.

·         The Real Basis of a Moral World

·         All your moral systems are the same

·         Or skip straight to the source he sites, Phillipa Foot

o   Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives

I won’t try to recreate them. In a sentence it’s something like all of moral systems are consequentialism in some form but to really work, they need to be based on reason so you can truly be convinced that X is the right thing to do to achieve a Y that meets the three metrics, universally.

Some questions that come up, might be, “if we can do this, and have done this, why hasn’t it worked so far?” Or more simply, “Now what?”

Why Philosophy Matters - Introduction

 Welcome to another blog series. Sometimes, I don’t complete the series that I start, but in all cases, something along the way is worth it. Thanks for reading this far. To keep this from being 100,000 words, I will need to refer to other existing discussions, like the title itself. Bigger thinkers than me have questioned the usefulness of philosophy in an age of science. People like Lawrence Krauss and E.O. Wilson. I won’t recreate their arguments here and may not specifically reference them as I address their concerns. It’s a big question. I’m not out to win the debate.

Succinctly, for me, it matters because in this age of science, we have people with uniforms, authorized by their government, to cut off the breath of life of another, in public, until they are dead. This is debated. In some countries, if you try to debate it, you will join the dead. In industrialized democracies, you still need lawyers and new legal precedents to win the case that such actions are wrong. That is a debate I am out to win.

Very recently, I purchased a beverage, legally, publicly, that was made by a company owned by women. The beverage contained some THC. A half of a lifetime ago, there were very few companies owned by women, and buying, selling, and imbibing THC was illegal. Because of that, I lived outside the law for a couple decades, risking a felony offense almost every day. I had a lot of time to think about what is moral and right. For this one example, the state I live in finally caught up to me.

When a rich and powerful person claims they can act in ways that others can’t, that is an expression of a philosophy. It’s a statement that human nature and some imagined natural laws justify oppressing others, taking what isn’t theirs, and invading others bodily autonomy. To me, it shows that powerful person did not spend much time reflecting on what it is to be human and how we develop society to match natural laws, or if there are any. It shows that anyone can jumble words and have them appear to have a basis in logic and reason. I want to talk about how we can examine if those words are reasonable.

Corona Blog

So, I’m a blogger, so I guess I should do this. It’s about change, about lots of changes through history and what that means to us now. I might seem a bit annoyed. If you want to get a teenager to read this, preferably one who doesn’t want to, they might get the proper tone of voice for it.

Everybody is talking about change. Of course we will change. Hasn’t every President run on that platform for the last 50 years? Make America Whatever or Hopey Changey, I don’t care. Throw the bums out. That’s a desire for change. But there is always tension, against the fear. Too much rapid change to greater rights for more people and a move toward socialism resulted in populism, on the left and the right. I have watched the constant battle between the dawning of the Age of Aquarius and the good old traditions since I was born in 1960. Look at what’s happened in the last 100 years since the 1918 flu pandemic. That’s in your parents’ or grandparents’ lifetime if you are older, so hopefully you talked to them. If you are younger, hopefully you know someone in the next generation up. They might have an old recording or at least some pictures.

They went through:
Nuclear weapons
Invention of vaccines
1918 flu
World War I (1914 to 1918)

Despite the pace of change having increased in the recent centuries, we haven’t developed new ways to cope with it. I don’t have much to suggest for that, but for me, getting some perspective on how much has happened, how far we have come in a short time, and how it has always been the people pushing leaders to change. That has helped me understand it.

My Public Education history spent too much on the days before the Revolution in this country, that’s my opinion. I always wanted to get to the World Wars and why those happened.

It was a major change in how the world worked. Before then, we were a world of royal families. Generals road on horses with colorful uniforms and battles lasted for a few days. With the arms buildup of the late 19th century, a result of the industrial revolution, these in-bred idiots who had no idea how to live in a time of electronic communication and world travel, put a match to the powder keg they built. To defend against heavy artillery, they created trench warfare, to breakthrough that they invented tanks, and on and on.

If you don’t want to have a love for history, don’t click here. Dan Carlin has a great ability to tell the story and provide the facts. His “Blueprint for Armaggedon” series is the story of WWI. 

Going back through the 19th century further you had:
The Industrial Revolution, steam engines, mechanics, oil. Horses were no longer the best source of power, but we still use the term “horsepower”.
Darwin published the Origin of Species in 1859.
Michael Faraday, who died in 1867, advanced our understanding of electromagnetism. That’s kind of important to whatever device you are reading this on.

Pause for a moment on this guy. He discovered the mysterious energy floating around that we could use to move things and to communicate across miles. Click to see David Tong giving a lecture in the same hall where Faraday gave his. Tong is talking about the newly understood forces of quantum physics, that we now understand are the fundamental forces behind all things. He’s giving that lecture in the same hall, with the same desk, that Faraday did. It’s like we just figured out stone tools yesterday, and now we all have scalpels in our medicine cabinets. 

While Faraday was alive, we were finally throwing off the last myths about race and changing laws so we could no longer justify slavery. There are still slaves in the world, I know, but most people know that’s wrong now. What will be commonly thought of as wrong by end of your lifetime?

Change takes a little longer in the centuries before that, but let me connect just a few more things. Once the empires that grew out of ancient history started bumping into each other and “discovering” each other, we started accumulating our knowledge, sharing it actually, but not always in a nice way. You might have heard of Thomas Aquinas, who tried to reconcile the Catholic religion with Greek philosophy. He had a little help from the Muslims by the way. Not too long after that, we had Protestant kingdoms, so there was a lot of fighting with the Catholics.

At the end of all that fighting, after the Thirty Years War, 1648, a treaty was signed called the Peace at Westphalia. It took away powers from the Pope and created a new type of nation. That’s what you live in, a Westphalian nation-state. Sure, your way of life is rooted in a Judeo-Christian/Western Civilization/Constitutional Republic/Democracy/melting pot, sure. But the basic structure of our politics has only been around for 400 years, and it was formed under duress, and it’s not working. A bunch of morons from the Middle Ages made it up to get the Pope out their business and we can get the billionaires out of our pockets if we create the next system.

Something else happened once the European Princes and Bishops quit making us kill each other. It was the British Royal Society, founded in 1660 to promote scientific thought and learning. It was the fertile ground where Isaac Newton flourished. Newton created the mathematics that got us to the moon (along with some of those other folks above). Computers were first put to the test during that work. That pretty much brings us up to where we are now.

To have that sort of creative energy, to allow the brilliant people of the day to discover something, you have to first have some degree of peace. You have to have a little extra left over at the end of the day to give to the general welfare, to build some roads, to have some nurses ready to take care of us instead of working overtime to pay off student loans and a mortgage from that house they bought before the bankers destroyed the economy.

What gets left out of historical discussions like this is none of it happens if we don’t care about people that we will never meet; people on the other side of the world and people who are not born yet. If we aren’t keeping the world clean and free from violence and filled with beauty, if we aren’t nurturing the people who grow our food, or who are sitting in a room somewhere coming up with formulas that who knows what they will do, but we can bet they will do something, then none of this happens. Then we slip back into using those stone tools to harm each other and take whatever we can just because we can. None of this happens if we don’t realize we need each other.


A note on the present: We aren’t purposely crashing the economy by shutting it down, just so we can save a few million lives. The economy would have crashed if we didn’t do anything because the hospitals would have been overrun. People would have chosen to quit interacting with others after it was far too late. Services would be much more disrupted because the closures would be random; we wouldn’t be choosing to keep groceries open as opposed to restaurants, we would be choosing from far fewer options.

It would not be some simple math of 2 or 3% more people dead. We would be surrounded by sick people and no one would want to touch them for fear of getting sick themselves. This would multiply the problems. Any normal illness or regular medical attention needed would be almost impossible. We would have new priorities, like disposing of the bodies.

The stock market selloff was recognition by those who understand how their system works, that it is not working, that it is not designed to respond to a problem like this. It is not designed to take care of the people that actually create the wealth that they accumulated. Ironically, it created the problem by changing the environment, putting workers under stress, and prioritizing profits over health. It put messaging over science. They know this, they saw it coming. They didn’t tell us until they cashed out. But cashing out is a strategy of the dying system. I don’t know what the next system will be, but it won’t be the current leaders who create it.

Atheism for the Religious and/or Spiritual 2

If this [the Mysterium cosmographicum] is published, others will perhaps make discoveries I might have reserved for myself. But we are all ephemeral creatures (and none more so than I). I have, therefore, for the Glory of God, who wants to be recognized from the book of Nature, that these things may be published as quickly as possible. The more others build on my work the happier I shall be.

— Johannes Kepler (1595)

Beginning of this series                                                                               Next

I am goingto get into the problems of 4th century Christianity and other dark periods, but first I want to talk about the problems of the Enlightenment. These are less often discussed. I don’t mean that the Enlightenment was a problem or that it is at the root of “our” problems today, but there were aspects of it left incomplete and some of its reasoning was misused. We have not corrected for these errors and we can’t if we remain unaware of them.

To be clear, I think this was one of the most significant phases of human development. From the time of the Buddha and Socrates until into the 15^th century if a person who had absorbed all the knowledge of their day could time travel throughout those centuries and sit down for a discussion about the universe and how it works, they would be able to understand each other. Barriers of language aside. By the end of the 16^th century so much had changed that parents would have trouble conversing with their children. Anyone who didn’t have a cell phone when they were a child knows this feeling.

Douglas Adams calls these the first two ages of sand. We took sand and molded it into lenses and looked out at the stars and realized they weren’t what we thought they were. We looked closer at everything with microscopes and began to deconstruct how things were made. We applied first principles and built on what we could demonstrate to be true. These concepts had been incubating since the dawn of human tribes but now they were seen not just as tools but as a philosophy. This new philosophy said we could experiment with everything around us and learn from it. We could read the book of nature. The concepts and discoveries from people like Newton led to the third age of sand, the silicon chip. Formulas developed at that time were used to put us on the moon and theorize how the universe began.

But I’m getting lost in the arc of progress and wonders of science and that is perhaps one of the mistakes I said I was going to talk about. There was an overwhelming faith in the ideas coming out of the Enlightenment. I’ll leave the philosophical discussions of what is good or bad about scientific progress for now and look at the problems created by this shift to rational thinking.

Rationality was not invented 500 years ago. Even if you are trying to figure out if your neighbor is a witch, you will use a certain degree of investigative thinking. Once you accept that there are witches, and come up with some basic ideas about what they are, the process of working out the logic is very much like that used in a laboratory. If the experiment you devise involves dunking in water, because witches float, this could work out bad for the person being tested, so when we talk about rationality today, we mean a much larger context, one that involves not just a single test, but proven techniques, repeated trials, and the ethics of the test as well. But still, the idea of performing an experiment was always there.

This era that led us away from burning witches and produced so much of what we now considered the modern world, also has an end. The effect of it never ended, but the movements and the people who can be said to be part of it, ended. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “the arc of history bends toward justice”, but it is an arc, not a straight line. What began as a reaction to a bloody 30 years of war (1618 to 1648) ended with more war and more conquering by people like Napoleon. One of the last, perhaps the last, philosopher of this age was MarieJean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet.

Condorcet was a contemporary of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His philosophies, like the “general will” were the inspiration for revolutions against despotic rulers with slogans like “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”. A century before the abolition of slavery in the United States, Condorcet founded the Society of the Friends of the Blacks. But these ideas, no matter how noble, still had detractors and they required enforcement. Other men, like Robespierre did not have the patience for them to permeate into the world peacefully. The king was replaced by the assembly and anyone who deviated from what the assembly determined was the general will would be subject to its force.

This new idea of laws coming from nature was an early Enlightenment idea put forth by the likes of Francis Bacon. He felt that our destiny was in our hands and if we deny that dream we will return to barbarism. But perhaps we didn’t spend enough time understanding our nature before some decided to start enforcing its laws. In his final work Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, Condorcet applied to ethics and morality the idea that there are laws of physics that are consistent throughout time and space and that principle can extend to how we operate in the world. But even as he wrote this, the dream seemed to be dying.

Robspierre and the Jacobins were in the process of arresting some 300,000 and killing nearly 17,000, eventually this included Condorcet. These numbers sound terrible and they are in fact called The Reign of Terror, but as with all such state sponsored terrorism, they were justified by the political climate. France was surrounded by monarchies and they were prepared to join forces and restore Louis XVI. To preserve the newly formed country, they needed to ensure the loyalty of all of its citizens. A prime focus of this was religious authority and its ties to the aristocracy. While America was forming around states founded by religious groups seeking a place to practice their faith freely, France was stripping power from the Church and killing priests. Religious ideas that many Americans say their country was founded upon were considered barriers to the new government of France.

People who have faith in gods or spirits or anything non-material will criticize proponents of scientific methods by saying they put their faith in reason. The above brief look at the history of the movement toward science and reason demonstrates there is some validity to that sentiment. Much more could be said about the advancements in our ability to feed and heal the ills of human race, and that again could be countered by the ills that have been wrought by our own hands. This is the conversation in which we are currently stuck. The work of science is not likely to stop any time soon. The answers it provides lead to more questions and they provide the impetus to keep looking for answers. Faith is not likely to disappear any time soon. The answers it provides often resonate with us in a way we can’t necessarily articulate and scientific explanations for those feelings are not coming quickly.

Religion spends a lot of time addressing the big questions of meaning. Books like The Purpose Driven Life have been wildly successful while books by 17^th century philosophers continue to collect dust. This could be more a matter of public relations rather than actual content. People say they get something from going to church, people who read philosophy might also say so but not in a way that is terribly inspirational. Philosophers of course have something to offer in that market, but they also have detractors and they argue amongst themselves. Comparing and contrasting philosophers is part of how you do philosophy. Some people shop for a church, but most go on the advice of someone close to them, and once they find one they are comfortable with, they don’t keep comparing.

Enlightenment philosophy and the movements that came with it took power away from the church. This had the appearance of taking away a moral anchor for society. Friedrich Nietzsche said, “God is dead”. He on went to say that it was we who killed him and to note that there was a great danger to this. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra he portrays a man who seeks only his own comfort, unaware of what he has been given by previous generations. Men like that are subject to those who understand and use their will-to-power. Interpretations of these characters are endless, but there is definitely a shift to seeking human will rather than the will of any gods. Eventually, these philosophies came to be blamed for everything from slavery to Nazis.

Without going off into a long history lesson, slavery was not invented by Columbus or plantation owners in the Southern United States. It may have been one of the longest running and most brutal forms of institutionalized human trafficking, but the idea of people owning people was around before written language. The oldest decipherable writing of significant length is the Hammurabi code, a code of laws that includes slavery. Empires conquered smaller tribes and brutal dictators reigned back in Biblical Times. Separating this warring nature of ours from our higher aspirations is one of the promises of the Enlightenment that has been left unfulfilled.

The modern world can be blamed in part for these ills. Certainly it has provided new and improved tools for warfare. Strong militaries have always included protecting trade as part of their mission. The Golden Triangle of tobacco and sugar to Europe, manufactured goods to Africa, and slaves to America is no exception. But there are no simpler idyllic times to return to. The Romans had the Pax Romana. Pax means peace, but what it meant was criminals who interfered with trade along their roads were strung up to set an example for others who might consider anything similar. Many examples can be found in between. Any culture carries with it the baggage of our baser instincts, making it difficult to sell its ideology as more progressive than any other.

This list of problems with the Enlightenment is not exhaustive, but I’ll end with the bogeyman; postmodernism. Whatever you think about religion and its ability to deliver on a meaning for life, it’s hard to argue its ability to claim that it is doing just that. The early Enlightenment thinkers made similar claims, but then didn’t deliver. Philosophers today might be coming together around something called Moral Realism but of course it has its detractors and it mostly suffers from a century of more esoteric moral arguments that led to ideas about nothing having any meaning. And morality isn’t necessarily a reason for being anyway. As the world has shrunk, cultures have come into constant contact and although you could say it is progress that we are living next to each other without killing each other, we are also having trouble figuring what strange behaviors we should accept in our neighbors and what we should consider just plain wrong.

It didn’t help that around this time Einstein came up with his theory of the physical world and the phrase, “it’s all relative” became popular. His theory involves travel at very high speeds and calculations that only come into play if you are trying to land a probe on Mars, but no matter. In the past, the realization that Muslims were enslaving Christians was used as an argument for why Christians should not be enslaving Africans. Either owning another person is wrong or it is not. Now, a justification based on a tradition can be dismissed because it is a tradition in a certain part of the world. It might be wrong to discriminate against women and not educate them according to people who live in the Midwestern United States but it is okay in Afghanistan because it has always been that way. This is not a way of determining what is ethical that can be traced to any particular Enlightenment thinker or writing, but many consider it an effect of that movement.

I can’t summarize the centuries that it took to develop this strange way of thinking, but it probably has something to do with the sudden unmooring of that anchor of morality, the Catholic Church. Once that curtain was pulled back, and the arbiter of all that is good in the world was accused of perpetrating evil, it could not be covered up again. Once the constant fighting stopped, when we realized one religion was not going to win out over the others without killing us all in the process, we had to figure out how we could live together. We’re still working on that.

Douglas Adams Speech at Biota, Cambridge UK, 1998

Commentary on a mention of philosophy in Collosians

Witch, A Tale of Terror

Consilience, EO Wilson

MelissaChen at Mythcon #4 "Enlightenment Values and Why We Need to Safeguard Them"

Jesus didn't say that

A response to a response, from the Counter Apologist.

http://counterapologist.blogspot.com/2018/08/atheism-is-preferable-to-christianity.html

There are few ways to go with this. CA’s original statements stands well on its. Also, in any current form of religions I know, there is no preferable universalism that I know of. My problem with Randal is, he doesn’t go far enough with interpreting hell out of Christianity. I think that can be done, although it strips Christianity down to its Jewish roots, even into some type of Reformed Judaism, so it probably is not a popular route. My problem with the Counter Apologist is the use of assuming beliefs by the gospel writers when it’s convenient while claiming we don’t know what they meant most of the time. I think this hinders the very reforms we want to see in religion.

Starting with the reforms; I don’t think it’s a stretch to say the arc of the Biblical narrative is that history has a goal, that there is some inherent reason for our existence, and it’s something good, and we need to discover our part in making it happen. This is the MLK thesis on justice and even if you take the atheist view of meaning created by the individual, it is compatible with a goal oriented form of utilitarianism as a theory for morality. To have this discussion across cultures, we need to be reasonable and accept that neither modern philosophers nor the Bible have a clear sense of what “justice” and “good” are. Modern philosophy accepts that, practically as a premise. The Bible has its moments, like Job arguing with God, but for the most part modern day practitioners of Abrahamic religion believe a supernatural force is the source of “good” and don’t care if they can’t prove it with scripture.

The above point is somewhat proven in the way Randal backtracks on his own religion when confronted with a rather straightforward problem like eternal or long lasting punishment. So let’s look at how CA supports the argument.

If atheists want to make the point that the Christian version of hell is wrong, I don’t think they need to stray deep into what the Bible says hell is. The Bible is not clear on that, that’s clear. Atheists don’t need to quote Jesus to prove Jesus was saying something. This degrades their own arguments since they begin with the understanding that the gospels are a poor reflection of any actual Jesus. This is the consensus of scholars, including religious scholars, but it seems to get forgotten when atheists start looking for proof texts. We are always quoting unknown authors and worse we might be quoting many authors in the course of just one passage.

For example, “torments” and “flame” in Luke 16 might be an allegory of justice for the rich man who neglected to care for the poor man at his gate. The thrust of the parable up to that point is about upending the power structure, and rewarding goodness for goodness sake instead of rewarding the powerful just because they do their rituals. This passage looks like a Greek version of hell getting tacked on to an earlier tale. Whether that was for better marketing of the book or because that belief was creeping into Jewish culture is debatable and barely relevant to a debate on the reality of hell.

What I think is important here is to recognize the opening Randal gives us. Christian scholars are quick to say things like Hellenism had crept into and corrupted Judaism at the time the gospels were being written, but they are slow to say exactly how. Christian scholars probably won’t lead those discussions because they suspect or fear they will result in less believers. This is exactly why atheists should be pushing in that direction.  Two passages from Revelation were included in CA’s list. Maybe Randal is open to eliminating Revelations from the canon. It has been debated since it was first proposed and is not in some Bibles. If it is an inaccurate depiction of hell that is incompatible with 1^st century teaching, then let’s settle that and then move on to the next misinterpretation, redaction or mistranslation.

This might sound daunting, but I don’t think every line of scripture will need to be addressed before Christian culture begins to change. This approach to the Bible has been happening for a long time and has altered many denominations and led to reforms like women and gays being accepted. Atheists would do well to understand it.

Trust is earned

History of the last 100 years. Who are the baby boomers?

1918 – WWI. A horrific experience following a massive build of arms due to the industrialization of the world. It brought family monarchies and isolated tribes all into one giant playing field. They now saw how small actions on one side of the world affected others  far away. And the President was a racist.

1928 – Things were looking pretty good. People were partying. A technological boom was occurring. If you don’t know why 1929 was famous, look it up.

1938 – Hitler and Mussolini are in power. People saw it coming but did little.

1948 – Hitler was defeated. Soldiers had to find their own way home, many died in that journey. Parts of Europe were flattened. The Mideast was carved up by the 3 superpowers. China was having a civil war that would end with Mao. Baby boomers were just being born, not yet affecting anything except causing people to buy washing machines and convenience foods. 

1958 – Starvation was rampant throughout Central America, India and Africa but technological solutions were solving many of the problems. America invested in its veterans, had brought electricity to rural areas, grew its suburbs, but argued about what to do about communism. Baby Boomer children were shown images of their cities being obliterated by nuclear explosions.

1968 – Moon landing, Robert Kennedy shot, MLK shot, riots in major cities, corruption exposed in politics. The baby boomers were starting to get a voice since the universities were well funded and well attended. They supported civil rights, they protested war, they wanted workers to be treated fairly, unions were strengthened.

1978 – After being shot at and arrested, the baby boomers retreated and tried more traditional ways of influencing policies. Meanwhile evangelicals in America and other traditions were also discovering political power. Some baby boomers had helped end the Vietnam war, so now they were divided:Veterans who thought they should have bombed more and those who had avoided the draft or who were talking about how they were given orders to fight an unjust war. The superpower’s dominance was also in retreat.  Secret operations were getting exposed, colonies were getting independence, or they were fighting back in low level wars.

1988 – Reagan (not a baby boomer) is fighting new secret wars while also turning us from the largest loaner nation to the largest debtor nation mostly through the buildup of nuclear weapons. Many Baby Boomers return to protesting, along with a new younger generation. Starvation is seen as a world problem, but some of the solutions are just causing more problems. All over the world leaders point to other nations as the cause of problems, old tribal differences turn into modern wars in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central America and elsewhere.

1998 – The first baby boomer President reduces the deficit, wants abortion to be “safe and legal”, tried to reform health care and started SCHIP, signed a gun control bill, loosened restrictions on gays in the military. He also signed the Defense of Marriage Act and reduced the number of legal immigrants allowed into the country. He also used cruise missiles in the Mid-East in his fight against terrorism. He modernizes the military, but spending is still high.

2008 – This year saw the near collapse of the world’s financial system as a Republican President and divided Congress had weakened banking regulations. Bankers had abused their lending power and gambled with one of the foundations of the system, home ownership by private citizens. Youth again took a leadership position in protesting these massive organizations and the people who once marched with MLK and against Vietnam are now in positions of power to help them. Another baby boomer President comes to power this year and again has to right the economy, reduce the deficit and bring the long awaited and desperately needed reforms to health care.

2018 –  Millenials now equal to Baby Boomers as a share of the electorate.

Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes of the 1960’s was when young people said “don’t trust anyone over 30”. I was still too young to even know what they meant, but it took me a long time to understand the contribution of the generations before me. The ones who fought fascism and built the schools that I attended. We can’t afford that long learning curve this time. Boomers have the traditionally strong voting block of older people and we might be seeing a long needed increase in the youth vote. Let’s work together.

Behold, I bring you tidings of great joy

We all know the verse that Linus recites at the climax of Peanuts Christmas. Charlie Brown is questioning what Christmas is all about. Linus ends his reading with “Peace on earth and goodwill toward men.” That’s great, and by 1965 when that was made, most Christians throughout the world agreed this is the meaning of Christmas. Trouble is, this was written before there was the modern version of Christmas and it originally said, "Peace on earth for those whom God likes." You need to understand a bunch of Greek and Latin to understand that, but simply, you drop one Greek letter and you have to also change the whole subject/object stuff of the sentence and that’s what you get.

I heard this a few times, and it just sort of passed by me. It’s an interesting artifact of history from a time when there were no copy machines. A simple mistake. No real harm done. Except, when you start digging through the various copies throughout history, it was not a mistake at all, it was quite deliberate. This didn’t just happen in the third century and now, with better tools of historiography, we are discovering it. This has been known throughout the history of Christianity by the few people who had control of these books. Just like now, where we have neighbors who are happy to break bread at their ecumenical gatherings and multi-denominational dinners and also fundamentalists who want holy war, there were people who said they wanted peace in the world and others who knew their scripture said only some of them should see that peace. Sometimes it was the same people, saying one thing while knowing the other.

http://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/manuscript-workspace?docID=20022

The difference between now and then is the balance of power. For the most part, those who truly believe in tolerance and peace are in power. But every day we see signs that it is still a struggle. Mainstream religion may appear to hold these values, but the facts of these discrepancies in our manuscripts raises some questions. If you accept the expert opinion on this, if you accept that people who spend their days pouring over these fragments of paper and studying the ancient languages actually got it right, then why don’t we change the Bibles? That is, correct them to what they originally were. Even if we don’t change the Bibles, why don’t preachers tell us this is only what modern people believe, not the people who first wrote the words. Those were the people who were closest to the events that inspired the words. If we are saying that we should listen to what they say, that their ancient wisdom has value, why shouldn’t we be listening to what they really said?

There are a few ways to go from here. We could believe that peace should be for only a select group. We can believe that something from outside of the physical universe somehow guided these hands and created these words on paper once, then had another hand erase it or misspell it and somehow that series of changes was slowly revealing this truth to us. We can believe that the original authors had some special vision, maybe divinely inspired or maybe just some special set of circumstances that they observed that helped them tap into this wisdom. Or, we can believe we are creatures with the ability to reflect on the past and future, trying to figure out what to make of our existence on this lonely planet. There may be millions of other planets like ours, but the universe is rather large, and we can calculate the odds of contacting one of those other planets, and they aren’t good. We might want to figure out how to get along with just each other for the time being.

To put it simply, we need to say that whoever wrote the gospel according Luke, was wrong. And when I say “we”, I mean it needs to come from the people who make a living interpreting this book. Those authors were wrong on this account, and they were wrong about some of the other things they said. We have fought wars based on religion. That includes Christians fighting over the meaning of words like these. We have had Kings anointed by gods and we have died for them. We have believed that the world could unite under one set of laws, inspired by some spirit, and experience a thousand years of joy. We were wrong.

We have found that allowing for borders and respecting the sovereignty of others is a way to deal with our differences. We found we have universal values despite theological differences and tried to create international laws, and sometimes we even got it right. Sometimes, nations put aside their differences to keep one nation from getting out of control and imposing its will on weaker people. It’s rarely pretty, but we muddle towards a world where we talk more than fight.

Instead of looking to something that was said hundreds or thousands of years ago, we look to what can be demonstrated by our senses. We extend our senses with tools created by an understanding of basic principles that have been tested over and over again. We know the sun has come up every day regardless of what sacrifices were made, so we don’t make ritual sacrifices anymore. We know the earth compressed the organic material from millions of years ago to give us fuel to light our universities so people can work late into the night curing what was once called a curse. To make that happen, we also know that we need to have some degree of peace with the people who are sitting on a lot of that organic material. The same goes for copper and materials needed to create more sustainable energy infrastructure. What is important is, so far, we just have this one planet.

You can accept what I’m saying or not. You also have the tools to research this yourself. The manuscripts with these words on them have been cataloged, numbered, digitized and are available to you free right now. The 1% of today only have power over us because we don’t do this work. The 1% in the time of Luke had a much easier time of it because they were the only ones who could read at all. The fact that I learned these things is the result of the accumulated knowledge I mentioned above and the cooperation of people across borders. The internet began as a way for scholars to share their work. It has become a way to avoid the lines during the Christmas rush. How it will be used tomorrow is our choice.

How many partners do you need?

When I ask people what we should do when we disagree, most people say we should go find people who do agree with us and work with them. At best they might make some sort nod to inclusivity. This worked fine for most of human history, but then we found out that what we do affects people on the other side of the planet. What we wear and what we eat can cause suffering for children on other continents. What we don’t do can result in death and disease just down the road from us. Even if we want to be selfish, ignoring that suffering will eventually result in problems for us and our loved ones.

There are answers to the question. We have rules of order for running meetings. We have neighborhood groups and community organizations. We have Constitutions and International Law. We have the Rule of Christ if you prefer, Matthew 18:15-20. But very few people know how these systems work and even fewer actually use them or use them wisely. All of them are designed to regulate common decency; take turns speaking, respond to what was said before starting a new topic, when consensus doesn’t exist take a vote, seek facts, agree on how to determine truth then stick to that agreement. Drawing a boundary and keeping some people outside of it is the last resort.

I left the 3^rd largest denomination of Christians because they couldn’t agree on how to deal with the issue of homosexuality. The United States moved on and I realized my church was no longer a leader on one of the most important issues of our time. But I didn’t blame all Christians. I blamed half of the people in my church and I blamed the poor system of decision making they all inherited. But I still acknowledge and support those who are fighting that fight from the inside of what I consider a flawed organization.

That’s around 6 million people I consider allies, not enemies. I’m sure I have many differences with many of them. But they have a voice that gets heard in tiny villages all across Africa where they still have the death penalty for loving someone in the wrong way. They have ways and means of building community that I don’t. My facebook post congratulating my friend and his husband doesn’t have that kind of impact.

I just picked this one issue. If you think this post is about advocating for LGBTQ or whatever initials I forgot, you missed the point. Pick your issue; GMOs, Afghanistan, vaccines, big government, big organic, sending food to Kenya, choice, life, free speech, then think about who you can’t talk to because you disagree on those issues. Then pick an issue like breathable air or drinkable water or creating communities where children can grow and discover their place in the world. How many partners do you need to make that happen?

Resistance is inevitable

I was at a Christian camp the other day, not as a Christian, it was a cross-country skiing group. I like to poke around their libraries. This one was just a bookshelf will old Bibles, old Sunday School guides, except one book from 1982 by Francis Schaeffer, The Christian Manifesto. I didn’t have time to read the whole thing, so I’m not sure just what the “manifesto” was, but I’m pretty sure he was promoting violent overthrow of the US government. That might sound like something from a 60’s radical rather than a leader of evangelical conservative Christians, but it was definitely in there. His justification was that the government was allowing, and in fact supporting the killing of innocent children, via abortion.

I’m not going to dwell on the violence part too much, and he doesn’t lay out any kind of plan. What was interesting was how he made parallels to those 60’s radicals and lots of other radicals through history. He kinda of made violently overthrowing your government sound completely rational and logical. I’ve seen this sort of thing in my travels with counter cultures. When I took a paid position as a canvasser against the transportation of nuclear waste for example; it would have been right about the same time Francis was writing this book. One night, an anarchist joined us and took a few minutes to explain that she thought the only way to ultimately end the nation’s support of nuclear weapons was to violently overthrow the government, take control of said weapons, and of course, she and her minions would do the right thing and dismantle them. She didn’t say too much about killing untold numbers of people in gaining that power, but it seemed to be her plan. No one joined her army that night and I have no idea what became of her.

Schaeffer takes a longer view of history. In this book for instance, he builds his case by listing many of the wars that took place between Protestants and Catholics. When the Protestants won, he tells the story about an evil Catholic King who was deposed and the people of that kingdom were saved further oppression, because they now had a Protestant ruler and were free to be, well, Protestants. When the Protestants lost, he said they were martyred. Just as modern news of war talks of the brave soldiers defending freedom and is less generous about those who die daily from our constant shelling, these stories soften you up for the call to action.


He then further builds his case using a “just war” theory from Lex, Rex, or The Law and the Prince; a Dispute for the Just Prerogative of King and People, published in 1644. Apparently this is a quite famous work. As shown in the bottom paragraph here, Shaeffer, using Rutherford’s logic, believed it was the duty of the people to execute God’s will when the government body does not. On the next page, he compares this to Bob Dylan. He says the differences in language changes nothing, although I would say Rutherford is a little stronger in his suggestion of an actual uprising, and Schaeffer later minces no words at all.

There certainly were those who listened to Dylan and were inspired to shot at cops or bomb government buildings, but Dylan was not telling them to do that anymore than the Beatles were sending secret messages to Charles Manson. I couldn’t copy the whole book, but on page 110 Schaeffer says it is time to use appropriate forms of protest, and in other places, he is definitely leaning toward what Rutherford called “lawful resistance”. He was suggesting doing more than marching around with cardboard signs. On this page he is talking about how the ACLU  has taken God out of the schools. In later pages he speaks to the problem of the government supporting abortions.


To be very clear, I advocate none of this. I don’t want people to have abortions, but there are better ways to reduce the need for them than by picketing abortion clinics. Until it becomes a regular part of our government to throw people out of their homes, or force people to worship one way or the other, or to lock people up for their thoughts, I’m not ready to take up arms against them. I know those things happen, and more often than I’d like, but we still have legal means to undo them and to punish our police when they need to be policed. There was a time in my life when I broke the law on a daily basis, but I never thought that the system of law itself was unjust. It has unjust aspects, but that’s part of living in a democracy, you aren’t supposed to like everything about it. Nor are you required to. If you don’t, you can work to change it.

So, back to this book. I could be wrong about what Francis Schaeffer actually meant. A central point of it though, and I think he does a good job of making this point, is that the idea of there being a higher law, one that transcends temporary governments and power structures, has been around for a long time, perhaps for as long as there have been power structures. There has always been a resistance of some sort. Most of them we don’t hear about, because they don’t have the power and never get it.

It doesn’t matter if that resistance is fighting for “free love” or for “moral power”, the rhetoric will sound very similar in either case. They will call the law makers law breakers, or worse they will call them rapists and murderers. What Schaeffer is a little less quick to mention, is they, or someone who hears them, will then justify bending the rules just a little in the name of their higher authority. When you can convince someone that you have tapped into the transcendent reality, and that they are now privy to that special knowledge, you can get them to do just about anything.

I’m trying to present all of this without judgment. When you are unfamiliar with the background information of a culture, something like a doctor being shot in cold blood for performing abortions or a protest erupting into violence can be a shocking story with no rhyme or reason. But rarely do such things come out of nowhere. Manifestos by people living in shacks in the woods are rare, and typically less coherent. Anarchists like the one I met, show up, break a few windows and fade into the background. But organizations like the ACLU and the Evangelical Church will probably be around for a while. We’re going to need to find ways to get those two camps together.

If you click around the link to the L’Abri Institute above, it’s more than just an introduction to who Francis Schaeffer was. It tells of his work that included trying to understand just what the 60’s counter culture wanted, something I'd like to see more of from that side. If you follow the link to the ACLU, you’ll see they fight for everyone’s rights, not just against religion or for liberal causes. And as we found out last November, there is something they are not listening to either. If you are unfamiliar with one or the other of these histories, I can see how it would seem like there is some evil force in the world that needs to be countered. If you are unfamiliar with both, the world would seem chaotic indeed.

A case for humanism

I wanted to finish up something I said I would do. I said I would discuss the positive sides of the Phillip Kitcher interview by Ryan Bell. I ripped into them a few months ago for their vague references to atheist writers. The interview starts to pick up into a more positive side around a half hour. They start talking about how to build on what we've learned in the past. Some of that might have been encoded within religions.

As I mentioned back in June, Kitcher says opportunity should extend to everyone, with a few reasonable limits. Kitcher says things like extreme egalitarianism, the idea we are born dependent, and we need help becoming useful to that society that we depended are part of what religion has taught and passed on.

He goes on to ask, how do we make sense of the limits of a human life? And says that is answerable, but the bigger question is, how do we build a world where all people have the opportunity to be meaningful within those limits? Religion accomplishes the tasks of community and support, he says. They manage the claims we have on one another, he says. He mentions Bernie Sanders as someone who supports those values, and only for him does he say that Bernie didn't come up with the ideas. He doesn't discuss details of HOW religion does this job. But that is only criticism of exclusion, maybe he says that in one of his books, and he has some ideas about 5 minutes later, so hang in there, keep listening.

Kitcher says the message of the Sermon on the Mount includes the lessons of distributing wealth and giving others opportunities. That could be argued, but I won't because the reason he brings it up is to say this message is mostly ignored. Ryan compares this to the middle class humanist who is comfortable and doesn't notice or doesn't address the half of the world living in poverty. So there are many in this boat. We could discuss causes but Kitcher proposes some solutions, so let's stick to that. He says, what we need to provide for everyone is:

Opportunities, especially early in life, to be well educated
To have health taken care, or at least the means available
To be cared for by people who love them
Have the opportunity to participate in a nurturing society
To chose their own career paths
To discover where their talents lie
To choose their life path based on the above

Kitcher points out no government is providing services at this level. Ryan sees this as the responsibility of those who have these things, not just governments. Obviously we need an agreed upon way to manage services like this. Kitcher sticks to the ideals and talks about how our sense of purpose comes from our projects and our skills that we can employ that we see as part of something bigger, not the toys or even the political influence we might wield. That "competitive materialism" is unsatisfying. Kitcher attributes this thought to the Pope. Personally, I found it in Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, so I think we can say these ideas are integrated into modern society.

They end on a well articulated point about how religion acts as a filter to our human connections instead of a highlight of the importance of those connections. It seemed to almost contradict some of the things he said earlier, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and hope he just didn't feel the need to mention it. Just slightly paraphrasing here, Kitcher says,

"It's not just that we have no evidence for transcendent reality, but it's a distraction. It invites us to think of our horizontal relations to one another as if they are sanctioned or rendered important by our vertical common relation to some transcendent something, i.e. 'We are all children of God'. It is an unnecessary and often problematic detour."

He goes on to paraphrase John Robinson from his book "Honest to God". The important thing is our relationship to other human beings, they shouldn't be filtered through the "fact" that we are all some servants or children or worshipers of God. The relationships to each other should just simply be there freestanding, independent and at the center and focus of all of our lives and all of our concerns.  So, humanism can make use of what religion has discovered, but in the end, it has to cut free.

Couldn't agree more.

Naturalization of teleological language. Say what?

I’ve been tracking Bart Campolo lately and finding him well worth a listen. In a section of this podcast, about 10 minutes long, so many things are tossed around, it could take hours to develop. It’s a rapid exchange. Bart was passionate about his desire to incorporate the many voices he hears on campus while Tripp was trying to explain the value of the language of the traditions he holds so dear. Both were pointing in the same direction, but many differences need to be worked out before they can really work together toward that same goal. Or maybe there’s a third way.

Listen to the whole thing, or jump to around 20 minutes in and try to catch up. I took their words for the next 15 minutes and made these “study” questions. Some of them get expanded on later, but mostly they are left unanswered. I hope the two of them get together for more.

Questions that depend on belief

Did the human technologies of eating together, singing together and performing rituals develop naturally, through evolution, and then get incorporated into religion, or were they developed by inspired religious leaders?

Did all of that get associated with a supernatural explanation at a time when the only explanations we had were supernatural, or do they actually have a supernatural origin? Is there another explanation?

Questions that could be separated from the belief question

Did science emerge from monotheistic assumptions then move through secularization, removing the supernatural aspects?

Since we are now developing more natural explanations, is theological language being “naturalized” to apply to our teleological relationship to creation?

How are these two sets of questions related?

How does our language hold our beliefs in place?

How do we develop the language to serve the need of bringing people together to lead happier and more productive lives?

21st Century speaking

I have two months "in the can", from June 12 to August 21. I'm not stopping to put them all up just yet, just offering these teasers for now. I do take requests. 

Link to this week's text

Explanation of the series

Luke 13:10-17

The symbols in the Luke verses have a little more meaning than many of the verses in recent readings. Jesus calls this woman to him. But he's teaching in a synagogue, that's male territory. The inclusion of women in the early movement may be a significant factor in why Christianity has survived. When men began fighting the Romans in the uprising of 70 AD, an exclusively male movement would have suffered. No doubt the women also contributed to the more compassionate nature of the movement. (See Richard Carrier's chapter in John Loftus' collection, "The Christian Delusion")

He also challenges the law. The details of exactly which laws were the right ones (the ones Jesus came to fulfill Matt 5:17) and which were wrong is not laid out in any detail. You only get clues like this, that healing someone is more important than watering your donkey. It doesn't seem that difficult of a choice. This story carries more weight if we understand how these additional laws, supported by the elites played a role in maintaining their status (as we saw in Luke 11 back in week 12).

You also might want to compare this to the similar story in Mark 2 and 3. Mark is the earliest written gospel that we have, and this similar story comes earlier in that gospel. It sets the tone in Mark. It's important to Luke, but Luke is addressing the growth of the movement into the upper classes.

Today, we are dealing with questions of moral law like family values. Some Christians say things like; staying in a marriage is the only right thing to do. This is sometimes followed so strictly that a single mother is shunned and her children are not given the support they need. This is done regardless of the circumstances of how she came to be a single mother. Hopefully, a thousand years from now, everyone will have difficulty understanding why someone would say that, just like we have trouble understanding why the Pharisees acted as they did.

Jeremiah 1:4-10

The book of Jeremiah may have actually been written by Jeremiah, a prophet in the time of King Josiah. As we get further along in the Bible we know more about the people discussed. Jeremiah probably also wrote Deuteronomy. This "second law" of Deuteronomy was intended to fix the problems of Israel being exiled by the Babylonians. Here he's proclaiming his authority by saying God literally put words in his mouth. And he gets to destroy and overthrow. This is why we have secular governments and democracy now.

As an aside, I live where there are lot of billboards about abortion. One of them uses this “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” partial verse. I'm pretty sure this is Jeremiah making this claim about himself and what God said to him, not every egg that has ever been fertilized or in this case, every soul that existed before it was even conceived. If I were to say that God speaks to me because he spoke to Saul, I'm pretty sure the people who made that billboard would have a problem with that. It's convenient to say that God can know us individually in that way, but inconvenient when someone says they have a relationship to God that doesn't fit their narrative.

Isaiah 58:9b-14

Often, an easy way to increase your understanding of the lectionary passage is to simply read the whole chapter that contains it. Verse 6 tells says the yoke is the yoke of the oppressed. In the included verse 9, it is also about not arguing with one another about what to do next. The other verses expand on the ideas of sharing bread with the hungry and bringing homeless into your home. Acts like performing a fast are said to be meaningless if these actions are not also taken.

However there is also mention of honoring the Sabbath, so ritual acts are not to be eliminated. This author, as many in the Bible do, sees the two things, ritual and working for the community as integrated, almost one and the same. As we've been seeing lately in Luke and some of the Old Testament passages, this theme of doing more than merely appearing to be godly is repeated throughout the Bible. The reminders to actually do some kind of work usually are often mixed with reminders to pray or to remember God. Here, the Sabbath is not just the day to stop working, it's the day to refrain from pursuing your own interests. It is not some arbitrary rule designed to oppress you, or to focus on something imaginary, it's a reminder of how to build a community, through peace, with justice.

I think the 21^st century speaker can repeat these themes of community building without the language of worship or “delighting in the Lord” or stopping to explain who the ancestor Jacob is. Our rituals can involve more direct symbolism of where our attentions should turn. Whether those attentions turn on a certain day at a certain time, is not always that important. And there doesn't need to be lot of promises about springs of water or our needs being satisfied. It doesn't hurt to talk about how investing in your community has a tangible return, but the work itself should be its own reward. You may not see a direct payoff to serving up a free meal, but someone in that line will undoubtedly go on to contribute in a way that benefits others. That's how it's supposed to work.

Pray

If you are trying to follow the lectionary series in order, I just skipped a few weeks. I will have a website up in the next couple months that follows the schedule.

Hosea

This week's text

Explanation of the series

For Old Testament help, I frequently turn to John C. Holbert. This week, he lays it out pretty clearly. After discussing the odd behaviors of other prophets, he says, “…, but the use of a woman of the evening for an object lesson is quite something else. For those of us who are feminists—and I hope all you readers consider yourselves feminists, too—it is deeply offensive to use a woman as a metaphor for human idolatry. Such literary effects do nothing but demean women and hold men up for the crude and misogynist beasts that they too often are.”

So, yes, this is saying what you think it is on the first read. We don't get any details about just what they did wrong here, but God is obviously fed up with it. Depending on where you want to go with your sermon, you may need to do some more research into the context.

The names obviously have some symbolic meaning, so I'll cover those quickly. “Jezreel” is “God Sows”, in this case it will the bad kind of sowing. “Lo-ruhamah” is “not pitied”, that's followed by God's words about not pitying Israel. “Lo-ammi” is “not my people”. God is going back on his promise that Israel is his chosen people. It does get better, but scholars speculate that the verses about having pity on the house of Judah and how things are going to turn around, were added later, much in the way modern preachers would like to turn this whole passage around and make it something it's not.

Psalm

The Psalm goes perfectly with the Hosea passage. It accepts the idea that God can be vengeful and angry if he wants. It's saying its our job to let him know we are here for him and that we are certain he has a plan that we can all trust.

Colossians

I'm spending extra time on the parable this week, so I'm going to focus on only one aspect of the New Testament reading.

2:8 See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ.

Putting “philosophy” and “empty deceit” next to each other like that implies philosophy is deceitful. Bill O'Reilly now says Christianity IS a philosophy, so I guess he sees it different. Neither Bill nor the Bible discuss the details of this. Greek philosophy would have been known, certainly in the 1^st century, although we can't know how well versed in it the authors of the Bible were. There is no direct philosophical debate in the Bible. Here it is described as “according to human tradition”, so they are acknowledging that there is a distinction between Biblical teachings and some sort of secular school of thought. It also says, “elemental spirits of the universe”.

Rather than try to understand the mind of a 1^st century Palestinian who couldn't have heard of the word “science” since it hadn't been invented yet, I'll just make an observation. While Protestants and Catholics were killing each other for the right to worship differently, while thousands of new denominations were being created because new information about the Bible was coming to light and as people began to understand how the brain worked and that mental illness was not demon possession, we were also discovering that we are a small planet on the edge of a vast galaxy with galactic neighbors and all that took billions of years to come into being. We are gaining this knowledge so fast, the language is not keeping up. We are going to have to come up with a new word for “universe”. It's supposed to mean all that exists, but we are finding there is something before time and outside the boundaries of everything we know.

These discoveries, that the very fabric of our being was cooked in the first stars then blown apart only to come back together to form more stars and planets and atmospheres and creatures that could then reflect on all of this and ponder the mystery of it and experiment against that universe to discover why it is here and why we are here, none of this is covered in any part of the Bible or in any theology. We have discovered where we came from and evolution gave us a theory of how we came to care about each other. We found out that we were not put here as stewards of someone's creation with some unknown purpose, instead we are completely interconnected to that creation. We are part of its cycles on a biological level and if you get down to the smallest physical level, we are exchanging particles with everything around us. It is difficult to even find the boundaries.

These are profound discoveries that have altered the relationship of human beings to the planet, but religion refuses to integrate them. A few tepid attempts are made and they usually involve getting the science wrong. The Pope closed the universities in 1277 because he was afraid of anyone attempting to reach God using reason. If they had succeeded, why would we need a Pope, and if they failed, people would have to choose between thinking for themselves or not. He had to reopen the schools, but the world had already begun to move on.

There are references in this passage to pagan worship and other warnings to stay away from other religions. One of the few phrases I find agreeable is the one about not getting “puffed up”. That's wrong even if you happen to be technically correct. But I can't salvage much else from this passage. If someone has found a way to integrate all of our modern knowledge into their services, I would love to hear about it.

Luke

This passage starts with the Lord's Prayer, then tells us the parable of the Friend at Midnight, then tells us more about prayer. A basic reading might just see it as a suggestion to pray often. I will spend a little extra time on this parable because it is included in William R. Herzog III's Parables as Subversive Speech. This is a rare book that covers many modern interpretations and offers conclusions based on all data available to the modern reader. It considers the parables in light of Paulo Freire's work, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It covers 9 parables, and is an invaluable tool for anyone serious about Bible study. Thankfully, it also accessible to the non-scholar.

Herzog spends 11 pages on this passage, going into great detail on the Greek word anaideian, which appears in verse 8 as “persistence” or possibly “importunity” in some translations. Translators have had trouble determining if this applies to the neighbor being awakened, or the friend at the door. Applied the wrong way, it can appear that Jesus is portraying God as the neighbor, who is reluctant to bother with the petitioner at his door. This could be a parable about being persistent with your prayers, something Luke definitely advocates.

To unravel this, Herzog spends almost a page just on how the community that Jesus is preaching to would handle its bread making; small loaves or large, community oven or not, everyone baking on Monday or a system of rotation. If this is not interesting to you, serious Bible study may not be your thing. If you want to have “our daily bread” mean anything other than a vague analogy to eating, these are important details.

Herzog doesn't just jump around wildly speculating, he sights theological, archaeological and textual evidence and how they support the different interpretations they have published. Without this information, we would be left trying to apply this story to our own experience. Would you even answer the door at midnight, even if it was a friend? Do you expect friends to make appointments? This is a family with children, is the friend being inconsiderate? Almost every word needs to be carefully considered to get the correct interpretation.

Herzog considers one theologian that he, and many others, think got it wrong. Herzog only gives us the name Levison, who says anaideian should be applied to the sleeping neighbor. If it doesn't it would lead to the view that prayer is nothing more than badgering God into submission. Levison needed to translate the word to “strengthen” to make this work. Herzog calls this “theological slight of hand”.

Preachers often do this, but rarely will they tell you they are doing it. Your only clue will be if you have not heard it before. If you haven't, you can check with your favorite source or a more familiar preacher, but even then, you are limiting your sources. This is the problem with theology, there is nowhere you can go to get a consensus answer. There is no code book like there is for electricians. It's not a science where some things are still speculation and others are well established theories based on empirical evidence, and data that has been verified as factual after repeated experimentation. This citing of many sources and discussing them is what makes a work like Herzog's so valuable.

To help us understand the irony in this parable, Herzog spends a few pages on the idea of “The Moral Economy of the Peasant”. They had to deal with the reality of a subsistence lifestyle, where they felt that any gain of their own was done at the expense of their neighbors. They felt powerless to deal with the ways they were being exploited, so they looked for how those means resulted in something left over for them. It is hard to understand for anyone living in a society where much is provided. They knew there was an elite status that they could never obtain, but they expected those elites to draw a moral line at limiting their exploitation in a way that left them with their subsistence living.

In this system, reciprocity was a norm. You helped others when they needed it and they understood the obligation to reciprocate. Also important, as was discussed two weeks ago earlier in this same chapter, there was a tradition of itinerant preaching. This tradition of receiving a traveler is included in the Holiness Code of Leviticus. This is not simple utilitarianism. It is friendships developed to alleviate the increasing pressures of those elite patrons. This act of giving mere sustenance, bread, is a participation in the hospitality of Abraham. As Herzog says, “every time they place their meager resources at the disposal of the village, they participate in some small way in the continual redistribution of wealth for the sake of protecting and caring for the vulnerable, as envisioned in the Torah.”

I've left out a lot of the details, but Herzog concludes that the parable is breaking a boundary. Modern readers can recognize this, but they have a very different set of boundaries. Boundaries were set by the Torah in 1^st century Palestine, but the elites had rewritten those boundaries with an oral Torah. They used that to continue to pursue their acquisitive greed at the expense of peasants and rural poor and still be Torah-clean. To them, extending hospitality to a stranger was shameless, using the “importunity” interpretation of that difficult Greek word. They were fools.

The parable delivers the punchline in verse 8 with irony. Jesus turns that judgment into an affirmation of village hospitality. By doing so, they created a messianic banquet, making a mockery of the lavish banquets of the elite that were done to promote themselves, not the community. This was a system of justice by the impure that those practicing the purity laws couldn't comprehend. The villagers didn't cave in to the desire to hoard and accumulate. This ordinary action of sharing bread was no small matter.