Monthly Archives: October 2022

Following Jesus’s rules isn’t so hard

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The rich young ruler asked Jesus what he needed to do to earn eternal life. Jesus said that he must keep the commandments. He had done so his entire life, the man told Jesus. The final requirement, Jesus said, was to “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me” (Mark 10:21–2).

The man left in despair because he had to choose his wealth and power over Jesus.

Anyone can stay on a diet if it only lasts a couple of weeks.

What did Jesus demand?

Jesus saw Peter and Andrew fishing and told them to abandon their lives and follow him to become fishers of men. Jesus said to love your enemies and turn the other cheek. He said to not worry about impermanent treasure on earth “but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven” (Matthew 6:20). He illustrated the importance of helping the needy by saying, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matt. 25:40).

Walking the narrow path would be difficult to sustain for a lifetime. Paul showed a similar short-term focus when he said, “Were you a slave when you were called [to be a Christian]? Don’t let it trouble you…. Each person, as responsible to God, should remain in the situation they were in when God called them” (1 Corinthians 7:21–4).

We also find indifference to slavery elsewhere in the epistles.

Slaves, be obedient in everything to your earthly masters (Colossians 3:22)

Slaves, in reverent fear of God submit yourselves to your masters, not only to those who are good and considerate but also to those who are harsh (1 Peter 2:18)

What explains this attitude?

The end is nigh!

Anyone can stay on a diet if it only lasts a couple of weeks, and remaining a slave or always putting others’ needs ahead of yours might be bearable if you only need to sustain it for a couple of years. Turning the other cheek isn’t too hard if the End is around the corner.

Jesus saw the End coming soon, and that is apparent when he speaks in apocalyptic terms. Note that “apocalyptic” can mean “having to do with the end times,” or it can refer to the specific movement called Apocalypticism. This was a movement popular in Judaism during the intertestamental period (that is, the period after the Old Testament and before the New). We see this in the New Testament when Jesus was asked, “What will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” (Matt. 24:3). Apocalypticism taught that we live in a bad Age, controlled by a bad supernatural being but that a new Age with a good ruler would begin shortly.

Apocalyptic books told their readers that the end was near. Daniel was one such book, and it said that the final seven-year period before the apocalypse (171–164 BCE) was already half over. (For more see “Daniel’s End Times Prediction: a Skeptical Approach.”)

Jesus also spoke about an imminent end. He said, “This generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened” (Matt. 24:34). A few verses earlier, Jesus identified “these things”: “The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, [and] the stars will fall from the sky.” Since that obviously didn’t happen, some apologists reinterpret Jesus’s statement about the imminent end by saying that it referred to the destruction of the Temple or some other first-century calamity. No, we’re talking about a cosmic catastrophe that no one living anywhere on earth would miss.

In the same chapter, Jesus used a harvest parallel to explain the urgency. “Now learn this lesson from the fig tree: As soon as its twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near. Even so, when you see all these things, you know that it is near, right at the door” (Matt. 24:32–3).

The New Testament also emphasizes the imminence of the end when Jesus is called the firstfruits by Paul (1 Corinthians 15:20–23) and Matthew (27:51–3). The firstfruits of the harvest were the grain and fruit that ripened first. A farmer would have gone for a long time since eating the produce of his farm and would be hungry for the result of his hard work, but this first portion was to be offered to God. The relevance of the reference to firstfruits is that the full harvest would be soon.

What to do with Jesus’s life philosophy?

So how noble was Jesus? He apparently didn’t intend for his policies to be a lifelong philosophy if the end was just months or few years away. And while Jesus said that those following him would suffer persecution in this life, he said in his analysis of the rich young ruler’s actions that those who left family and occupations for him would receive a hundred times as much in return in this life and they would receive eternal life (Mark 10:29–30).

I’d like to see in society more of the self-sacrifice and generosity that Jesus preached, of course, but that ignores the imminence of the end, which is central to his message.

Taking no thought for the morrow is no way to live. Nor is excessive generosity—Jesus said, “If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well” (Matthew 5:40). Maybe that explains why he does a few healings but doesn’t bother to eliminate any disease. And why Paul tells slaves to just deal with it.

Jesus was speaking only to his peers. Let’s not pretend that Jesus addressed his message at us today. With the End around the corner, Jesus didn’t think Christians two thousand years in his future would exist.

I don’t want to see religious bigotry in any form.
It would disturb me if there was a wedding between
the religious fundamentalists and the political right.
The hard right has no interest in religion
except to manipulate it.
— Billy Graham, Parade Magazine, 1981

Conspiracy theories and poor thinking without facts, oh my!

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Help me decipher the article I just read. (I responded to it here.) I’m used to some sort of argument when reading articles from the other side, but this one stands alone. There were plenty of claims—climate change is not detectable, the COVID vaccine was mishandled, the scientific consensus is meaningless, and so on—but there were neither justifications for those claims nor links to justifications. The article might serve to remind the faithful of popular talking points, but it did nothing to justify any argument.

Oddly, the question of evidence and justification did come up.

There’s little point engaging the [Leftist] cult on the surface, getting tangled in its least important, largely decorative aspects. That is to say, in the rational arguments and factual claims that leftists present.

Ah—problem solved. It must be the Left that doesn’t have arguments.

Read Zmirak’s article to see that he has conclusions but no argument. He fills the gap with confidence and bluster. This attempted reversal is like the lawyer’s adage, “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither, pound the table.”

The tagline for The Stream is, “Equipping Christians to Think Clearly About the Political, Economic, and Moral Issues of Our Day.” They’re certainly not equipping any clear thinking with this argument-free article. I propose instead, “The Stream: now with bigger bravado and fewer facts!”

This handwaving sounds like Two Minutes Hate from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was two minutes of unhinged ranting aimed at the listeners’ emotions, not their intellects.

Those darned elites, always messing things up

Here’s a puzzle maybe you can help unravel. Sprinkled through the article were various references to how the Left is trying to accumulate power, with climate change just the latest in a series of invented calamities.

What they care about [among other things is] the political or economic power they gain over helpless strangers, whom they can corral, starve, geld, or even (if need be) kill … as if they were cattle.

Huh? What power is he talking about? This and the Nazi agenda need to be spelled out and justified.

And are we to believe that the Right is now the champion of the downtrodden, the voice of the disenfranchised?

You’re the target of a global influence campaign by wealthy, white elites in a small number of countries who wish to centralize all economic and political power in their own hands. They might call it “sustainability” or “the Great Reset,” but what it amounts to is a planetary coup d’etat by the richest of the rich, who wish to pull up the ladder behind themselves, and enshrine their power as permanent.

(The Great Reset is a 2020 initiative from the World Economic Forum [the group that meets in Davos every year] to rebuild after the COVID pandemic.)

Wait a minute—isn’t Zmirak himself in this category of wealthy, white elites? I don’t know how wealthy he is, but as an editor of The Stream, he’s certainly influential. Maybe he’s okay with wealthy, white elites accumulating power if he’s part of the group. And maybe whatever he’s railing against is just hollow conspiracy theories whipped up for that purpose. That would explain why he can’t support his claims with evidence.

Remember the past “scientific consensuses” that just happened—by sheer coincidence—to demand the centralization of power over the masses in the hands of rich, white elites.

Germ theory is a scientific consensus. Are you furious at the power that doctors have when they prescribe antibiotics? Or Big Bang theory or atomic theory or Newton’s laws of motion? Or continental drift, thermodynamics, Relativity, or heliocentrism? I didn’t get the memo—point out the available political power behind these scientific theories, because I might like a piece of that.

And what’s up with the evil elites being white? That makes him sound surprisingly woke.

The fact that a claim by elites about an “apocalyptic” crisis would grant them vast, arbitrary power over millions or billions of people is by itself sufficient to make their claims highly dubious. They’re partisan, they’re biased, their hands are in your pockets already stealing your wallet and keys.

This handwaving sounds like Two Minutes Hate from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was two minutes of unhinged ranting aimed at the listeners’ emotions, not their intellects.

Here again this sounds like projection—seeing in your opponent your own bad traits. Or maybe since grabbing power, seemingly at all costs, is how they operate, they can’t imagine their opponents not doing the same.

Am I missing something? You may understand the thinking on the Right better than I do and can find the inner logic in this rant. Share your thoughts in the comments.

I’ve responded to other articles in The Stream:

Make the lie big,
make it simple,
keep saying it,
and eventually they will believe it.
— a paraphrase of Hitler’s definition of a “big lie”

Christian rant against climate change is a paper tiger

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The Stream is your one-stop shopping site for hateful Christianity and conservative politics. I’m sure plenty of sites are worse, but this stream of toxic waste is all I care to take.

What passes for intellectual thought today is “Why I’m a Climate Denier and You Should Be Too” by John Zmirak. The post is a scattered mess of fact-free claims and unevidenced attacks, but I found this exercise helpful to better understand their position. Let’s start with the section titled,

“The Climate Cult, worse than the Aztec Creed”

Zmirak is surprisingly easygoing about the science behind climate change. He says, “I don’t know how much the earth’s climate is warming, or what might be causing it.” Well, that humility is refreshing. But then he says, “Neither, for all their credentials, hubris, and arrogance, does anybody else.”

He tells us where that confidence comes from:

Nobody really knows, because the earth’s climate is a fundamentally chaotic system, enormously complex and still poorly understood. It may be so complex that predictions are literally impossible. Or maybe not. We don’t know, and won’t know for decades or even centuries.

He has retreated into a cocoon of ignorance and is curled up inside reading his comics. He can justify not worrying about it anymore. Problem solved.

That small bit of science might have come from the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change):

In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.

Sounds like Zmirak has a valid point. But the IPCC quote continues:

The most we can expect to achieve is the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions. This reduces climate change to the discernment of significant differences in the statistics of such ensembles.

In other words, while we can’t simulate the single correct way that the climate will evolve, we can create many plausible approximations and use statistics to understand the big-picture features of climate change: if weather will become more or less extreme, if storms will become more or less intense, if deserts and glaciers will expand or retreat, and so on. Zmirak’s easy dismissal is premature and—who knew?—climate science does have a plausible basis.

But in his mind, there’s not a lot you can trust when it comes to climate change. Or scientists.

When you read the claim that “97 percent of scientists” or some such made-up figure believe in the theory that man-made carbon use is raising the earth’s temperature and rendering the planet less inhabitable, you’re being manipulated. You’re being played.

“Made up”? “You’re being manipulated”? How do we know this? (This article is light on supporting facts.)

Like Zmirak, I also don’t much care about 97 percent of scientists. But when there’s an overwhelming consensus of climate scientists agreeing on something about the climate, that might be very much worth listening to.

“Caesar, Mammon, and Sodom”

Zmirak has a lot on his mind, and it’s not just climate change.

This is the creed your kids are likely learning in college, or high school, or grammar school—maybe even in Sunday school. When you see a rainbow flag hanging over a church, you know that it has defected, that it now venerates the Woke trinity of Caesar, Mammon, and Sodom. Avoid it like a sex shop or a crack den.

This hated triumvirate is presumably the State (Caesar), love of Money (Mammon), and sexual Sin (Sodom).

But think it through a little, and we see that Caesar is what guarantees religious and other freedoms to Christians and everyone else in the United States through the Constitution. I imagine Zmirak would retort that his rights are actually guaranteed by God. To that, I ask for evidence, since “God” sounds as likely as “Osiris.” We have tangible historical evidence for the rights enshrined in the Constitution and its amendments, not for God’s existence.

As for money, sure, many of us are too caught up in work or status, but I’d like to first see Christianity clean up its own scandal-plagued financial house. And while conservative Christians might give generously to their church, they have a reputation for being stingy in response to taxes that would help their fellow citizens.

The Bible makes clear that Sodom’s sin wasn’t homosexuality but arrogance and inhospitality:

Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen” (Ezekiel 14:45–50).

See also: The Sin of Sodom was Homosexuality … Or Was It?

“Remember How Safe the Vaccine Was Supposed to Be?”

I do. And that promise was fulfilled. A few people died from the vaccine, but the COVID death rate remains far higher in the unvaccinated than the vaccinated. (That is nicely illustrated here.)

Zmirak is concerned about the scientific consensus. Outsiders get no say in the making of the consensus, and scientists who disagree with it are cancelled.

He’s right that outsiders to science get no say. He seems frustrated that people outside a scientific field who don’t understand it don’t get a vote, but I can’t imagine an alternative.

He’s outraged that doctors like Robert Malone and Peter McCullough “were suddenly canceled, censored, and sued,” but they were spreading misinformation. When hundreds of thousands of COVID deaths in the US were caused by people being unvaccinated after the vaccine was available, misinformation carries big consequences.

He also characterized COVID vaccines as “serums developed with organs stolen from aborted babies,” so let’s look at the abortion connection. Cells from two abortions, one in 1972 and one in 1985, have been used in vaccine research, but a vaccine ethics backgrounder says, “the vaccines themselves do not contain any aborted fetal cells” and “vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna do not require the use of any fetal cell cultures in order to manufacture (produce) the vaccine.”

The man who is his own doctor has a fool for a patient.

“Past Scientific Superstitions”

Another thing that apparently grinds his gears is overpopulation. He tells us that mass starvation because of overpopulation was another scientific consensus.

The population explosion was definitely a thing. Remember this hockey stick chart?

Zmirak has an aversion to citations, but I’m guessing he’s thinking of the bestseller The Population Bomb (1968), which did predict widespread starvation. But was this the scientific consensus?

He says that “No such famines materialized,” but he’s wrong. There was a famine in Biafra (part of Nigeria) that killed over a million people by 1970. And the Bangladesh famine in 1974 that is estimated to have killed 1.5 million. And the one in Ethiopia that killed almost that many and was the focus of the 1985 Live Aid concert.

The Population Bomb predicted far worse, but its failure does nothing to shame the scientific consensus when Zmirak has done nothing to argue that it was the consensus.

“Won’t You Help Stop Hereditary Feeble-Mindedness?”

Next up is eugenics. I agree that eugenics as practiced in the U.S. a century ago was terrible, but it was policy, not science. Zmirak can’t tar science with this one.

And is it always unethical to argue that some couples shouldn’t reproduce? We do that today with genetic testing. When each potential parent is a carrier for Huntington’s disease or Tay-Sachs or sickle cell, they should reconsider.

I don’t know when I’ve read an article so free of supporting facts. But maybe the fault is mine for expecting supporting facts.

Next time I’ll take a step back to look for the underlying logic in Zmirak’s article.

He who joyfully marches to music rank and file
has already earned my contempt.
He has been given a large brain by mistake,
since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice.
— Albert Einstein

Yet more Bible reboots

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God in the Bible will make a covenant with his people, and you’d think that since he’s made the sale, the book will end. But then the Bible stories keep coming. In part 1, we saw how God made covenants with Adam, then Noah, and then Abraham. After each one, you’re ready to read The End or “And they lived happily ever after” or some other wrapup. Perhaps after the covenant with Abraham we’re finally finished?

Nope—God wants to reboot this story yet again.

The Bible, take four (Moses)

Abraham begets Isaac, who begets Jacob, who then begets twelve sons, one of whom is Joseph. Joseph is annoying, and his brothers sell him into slavery. Joseph winds up in Egypt, but you can’t keep God’s man down, and God makes Joseph the Pharaoh’s right-hand man. That’s a nice bit of luck, because famine forces Jacob and sons to Egypt, and they could do with a family member with lots of power.

Generations go by, with Jacob’s descendants happily living in Egypt, still divided into twelve tribes according to the lineage of Jacob’s sons. But somehow the Israelites go from being guests to slaves.

And then Moses is born. He goes from the child of slaves to member of the royal household when he’s found floating in a basket (as coincidentally happened to Sargon, the founder of the Akkadian Empire, centuries before).

Moses first hears from the Almighty through a burning bush. Now on a mission from God, Moses and his brother Aaron haggle with Pharaoh for the freedom of the Israelites. The ten plagues helped. Weighed down with gold and silver taken from the Egyptians, they’re off for a quick trip across the Sinai to Canaan that takes forty years.

You’d think that if Jesus were the point of God’s story, if he were the person necessary for people to avoid hell, Jesus would be in the Garden of Eden in Genesis.

At Mount Sinai, God tells the Israelites (Exodus 19), “If you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession,” and the people agree. One chapter later, God gives what’s popularly known as the Ten Commandments. The covenant is confirmed with sacrifices and blood sprinkled on the people (Exodus 24).

So we’re good?

Nope—we need lots more laws and rules. Moses is finally ready to return from Mount Sinai, but by this time the impatient and fearful Israelites (with Aaron’s help) have made a golden calf to comfort themselves. God wants to press the Big Reset Button in the Sky again, but Moses talks him out of it by referring to the perpetual Abrahamic covenant. (It must not have been that great a plan if God let himself be talked out of it.)

Moses smashes the stone tablets of the Law on the golden idol. The people are punished, and Moses goes back up for a duplicate set of Ten Commandments (which isn’t even close to being the same set), and that set is stored in the Ark of the Covenant.

There’s plenty more about the Mosaic covenant being a perpetual contract. The priesthood of Aaron’s descendants is “permanent” (Numbers 25:13, also Exodus 40:15), the Day of Atonement is a “lasting ordinance” (Leviticus 16:34), God says about the laws, “Do not add to what I command you and do not subtract from it, but keep the commands of Yahweh your God that I give you” (Deuteronomy 4:2), and so on.

Finally! We’ve got to be done now, right?

The Bible, take five (Jesus)

You’d think that if Jesus were the point of God’s story, if he were the person necessary for people to avoid hell, Jesus would be in the Garden of Eden in Genesis, and it wouldn’t take a bunch of reboots and irrelevant covenants to get here. As it is, the Old Testament becomes just long-winded throat clearing, and much of the New Testament must rationalize away the incompatibility.

We read in the Law, “All your words are true; all your righteous laws are eternal” (Psalm 119:160). But God’s words aren’t particularly eternal according to the author of Hebrews, which weaves a legal case that Jesus was a priest “in the order of Melchizedek.” Since Abraham honored Melchizedek long before Moses, Jesus trumps the Levitical priesthood that was created from the Mosaic covenant. Or something.

This New Testament reboot upsets a lot of assumptions from before. What does it say about God that Jesus had to come down to straighten out his story? You’d think that an omniscient creator of the universe could convey things clearly. Here are a few things Jesus had to clarify.

  • The afterlife is no longer a vague existence in Sheol but is either bliss or torment, depending on your beliefs (or maybe depending on your works).
  • God isn’t just a monotheistic Yahweh but has become a Trinity (in Christianity though not in the New Testament).
  • In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes several corrections of the “You have heard it said … , but I tell you” form. Jesus redefines murder, adultery, divorce, the correct response to injustice, prayer, and so on, making one wonder if it makes sense to correct the omnipotent creator of the universe.
  • The “death” of Jesus is said to be the sacrifice to (literally) end all sacrifices. (Let’s ignore the fact that no provision in the Law is ever given to permit the sacrifice of a human; Jesus wasn’t burned, which was required for any sacrifice; Jesus wasn’t part of any tribe and so couldn’t hold the office of Levitical priest to offer a sacrifice; and Jesus wasn’t physically unblemished, as was required for any sacrifice.)
  • And that whole Chosen People thing for the Jews? No—Yahweh is now everyone’s god.

But surely this is the last reboot, right?

Nope—Islam was another reboot, Mormonism was another, and Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church was another. Even the form of God evolving from Jewish monotheism into a Trinity at the First Council of Nicaea (325 CE) and the First Council of Constantinople (381) could be seen as a reboot.

Christians can hardly criticize reboots when their own religion was built on them.

What explains this?

There are at least four possible explanations for why we see these reboots in God’s instruction manual.

First, God kept changing his mind. This doesn’t put omniscient God in a good light if he kept forgetting the point or changing his mind.

Second, humanity kept changing, and God’s plan had to adapt. This makes no sense since a baby taken from an Israelite family 3000 years ago and raised in the modern world would have the same potential as other babies growing up in its new environment.

Third, the fault is with the human scribes and keepers of the Bible, and if it had just been written and copied correctly, it would make sense. One wonders, then, why God would allow his message to become so muddled.

Finally, God doesn’t exist, and the Bible is just the blog of a desert tribe from long ago. It’s no more accurate than the pre-scientific musings of hundreds of other religions.

I think this last interpretation paints the most dignified picture of God. Instead of a forgetful dolt or an inept manager, God was just the best explanation that one tribe could put together in a frightening and insecure time.

See also:

The problem with religions
that have all the answers
is that they don’t allow questions.
— seen on the internet