The Boy Scouts of America first allowed openly gay scouts in January, 2014 and openly leaders and employees in July, 2015. Let’s look back on an article written in protest, immediately after the national council voted to allow gay scouts: “Why my family is quitting the Boy Scouts.”
It begins with an introduction of the author.

John Stemberger is an Eagle Scout and president of On My Honor, a coalition … united in their support of Scouting’s timeless values and their opposition to open homosexuality in the Scouts.

I was also an Eagle Scout. Patrol Leader. Order of the Arrow. Philmont. Scouting was a big part in my life and, more importantly, a big part of my father’s life. My grandfather died when my father was three, and to a young man growing up fatherless in New York City, Scouting was fundamental in shaping who my father became. I’m an Eagle Scout because he was, too. I understand how important Scouting can be to someone.
Mr. Stemberger doesn’t pull any punches in his critique of the policy.

This organization that has stood the test of time will probably be destroyed now that they have decided to admit openly gay boys as Scouts.

Why? Was marriage destroyed when they let black folks and white folks marry each other?
Membership in Boy Scouts is declining, but it’s been declining for decades (2.4 million now from a high of 6.5 million in 1972). Society changes, and apparently Boy Scouts has become valuable for fewer boys. Almost three years after that prediction, there’s no evidence that their policies have “destroyed” the organization.
Stemberger is now the chairman of the board of Trail Life, a Christian alternative to the Boy Scouts that unsurprisingly forbids homosexual boys and leaders. He apparently sees homosexuality as something that society can keep in the closet. He’s taken the divisive approach, going home to start his own club. In his mind, he’s standing for moral principles. However, in the judgment of history, I suspect that he’s backed the wrong horse, and his principled stand will be seen like George Wallace’s principled stand for racial segregation.
Stemberger seems to imagine Boy Scouts as an immutable organization, built perfect a century ago with no need to change today. But it has evolved as society has evolved. For example, its rule on race in the early days was that local scouting organizations should follow the local school district’s policies, which meant that troops were racially segregated if the local school system was segregated.
But that rule was changed. Sometimes change is good.

The policy fails to respect or revere the religious beliefs, values and theology of the vast majority of Christian churches, which charter more than 70% of all Scouting units.

What if a church had a racist policy for leadership—should that be respected when picking a scoutmaster? What if a church rejected conventional medicine in favor of prayer—should that be respected when a boy is injured on a hike?
Religion isn’t a trump card in a society governed by a secular constitution. “However free the exercise of religion may be, it must be subordinate to the criminal laws of the country” (1890 Supreme Court case Davis v. Beason).

The new policy also leaves all Scouting units with no options and no legal protection if they refuse to allow open homosexuality among the boys of their units.

Troops would also be without legal protection if they wanted to discriminate based on race. Does that trouble you as well?

Most important, the new policy robs parents of Boy Scouts, like me, of the sole authority to raise issues of sex and sexuality with their kids.

I hate to tell you, but the issues of sex and sexuality will be raised among teenage kids whether you like it or not.
You do know that these open homosexuals are attending public school with other kids, right? Of course parents have the right to steer their boys on the path that they think is best, but unless your kids are in solitary confinement, don’t imagine that they won’t be exposed to—and even seek out—information on sex from other teens. If you’re concerned about misinformation, talk to your kids early, often, and honestly about sex.
And what do you fear will now be discussed around the campfire? Sex? It can’t be news to you that sex has always been a topic of interest with teenage boys.

[My wife and I] are concerned for the safety and security of our boys, as are many other parents who are considering leaving as well.

Safety? Is homosexual rape what this is all about? I’m pretty sure that the new policy doesn’t condone that. Why think that rape would be any worse after the new policy, when gays can be out, than before the policy, when gays were closeted? Surely there have always been gay boys in scouting.

I love the Boy Scouts and want my boys to enjoy the same great experiences as I and millions of others have had over the years. That’s why I regret that Thursday’s vote refused to keep sex and politics out of the Boy Scouts and stand firm for those timeless principles.

What timeless principles?
Slavery used to be legal, polygamy used to be legal, racial discrimination used to be legal. Now, not so much. Society changes. Don’t you applaud at least some of society’s changes?
The Scout Law says that a Scout is brave. The oath from which your organization takes its name includes this obligation: “To help other people at all times.” How about showing a little of that bravery and commitment to doing the right thing?
Maybe instead of digging in your heels, you could see how our future leaders could learn from this. We can’t go back to the fifties and fight to end to Jim Crow laws, but we’re right in the middle of another civil rights issue. We have a small opportunity to nudge society in a better direction. Why shield your boys from that? How about instead give them front-row seats to social change, a change that surely won’t be society’s last?

The truth of the matter is that 
you always know the right thing to do. 
The hard part is doing it. 
— General H. Norman Schwarzkopf

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/24/13.)
Photo credit: Wikimedia

Civil rights are again in the news. A month after Charlotte, North Carolina passed an LGBT anti-discrimination measure, the state general assembly convened a special session for the first time in 35 years just to pass a law that blocks such measures. That LGBT rights continue to be debated provides an opportunity to revisit a prediction about the frightful consequences of same-sex marriage.
The prediction
Conservatives claimed that same-sex marriage is a slippery slope. Once we legalize this change, what will come next? Will people demand to marry their children or pets or sex toys?
Many traditionalists back in the sixties had their own version of this: “Once black folks can marry white folks, who knows what’ll come next?”
The sky didn’t fall after Loving v. Virginia eliminated laws against mixed-race marriage in 1967, and it didn’t when the Netherlands became the first country to grant same-sex marriages in 2001 or when Massachusetts became the first U.S. state to legalize them in 2004.
And despite what conservatives said a year ago, the sky didn’t fall when the United States legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015 with the Obergefell decision.
Don’t open that Pandora’s Box labeled “same-sex marriage”!
It hasn’t been quite a year since Obergefell, but it’s easy to forget the hysteria that surrounded it. For example, fellow Patheos blogger Dwight Longenecker didn’t wonder what would come after same-sex marriage. He knew: the U.S. would become a police state.
Hold your arms out for balance, and let’s step through the prediction made two years before Obergefell. First, he points to an article titled “Legalize Polygamy!” Written by a woman, it argues that a pro-woman attitude should allow women the freedom to enter into polygamous marriages. She argues that marriage is plastic—that it can be molded to take on new shapes.
America has dramatically rejected many of the marriage customs decreed in the Bible, so, yeah, marriage is plastic. But have you considered the consequences? Longenecker has.

Marriage is only plastic … because everything else is too. In other words, there is no such thing as Truth.

This big-T Truth presumably means objective or absolute truth. And here again I agree with Longenecker’s antagonist—I see no evidence for objective truth in issues that affect society such as morality or the definition of marriage. But Longenecker wails and rends his garments:

For the Catholic everything is connected. If marriage is plastic … then everything is plastic … Everything is up for grabs, there is no certainty and if no certainty, then no security.

Changing the definition of marriage pulls the thread that unravels the entire fabric of your reality? I guess it sucks to be you then, since we’ve already resoundingly rejected many of the Bible’s conceptions of the male/female relationship.
The Bible’s nutty interpretation of marriage

• “Do not intermarry with [those in the Canaanite tribes]” (Deut. 7:3).
• King Solomon famously had 300 concubines (1 Kings 11:3).
• A raped woman must marry her rapist (Deut. 22:28–9).
• “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.” (Num. 31:17–18)
• God said to David, “I gave your master’s house to you, and your master’s wives into your arms. I gave you the house of Israel and Judah. And if all this had been too little, I would have given you even more.” (2 Sam. 12:8). God has his complaints about David, but polygamy isn’t one of them.
• Paul said, “Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry” (1 Cor. 7:8–9). Marriage is clearly the second best option. Celibacy is what we should actually strive for.
• Paul also rejects divorce (1 Cor. 7:10–11).

The Bible isn’t much of a marriage manual.
The sky is falling!
Longenecker again:

In a society where anything goes everything goes…downhill fast. Where moral disintegration exists societal disintegration soon follows. Everything starts to come apart at the seams. Societal chaos threatens.

I missed how we conclude “anything goes” from expanding one institution of society to include a disenfranchised minority.

When there is no certainty in a society–no moral absolutes and no reason and no rules …

As for no moral absolutes … well, yeah. Why? Do you have any evidence of moral absolutes besides some vague feeling? And here again, the only one who imagines no reason and no rules is Longenecker himself.
And now the punch line:

When there is no certainty in a society–no moral absolutes and no reason and no rules, then something must be done. People demand security. As disorder and chaos increase people demand order and control.

But, of course, this dystopia that’s around the corner won’t seek out Longenecker’s Yahweh, darn it. This obvious answer will be right in front of us, but our fallen race will appeal to government, and the government’s way to provide order and control is a police state.

Thus the ultimate irony that those who wanted a society “completely free” from absolutes where everything was plastic will end up with a police state where nothing is plastic and the total control is drastic.

This breathless argument distills down to this:

1. A same-sex marriage proponent is now advocating that polygamy be legalized. See? Didn’t I say this would happen?!
2. (Here is where the argument teleports to Crazy Town.) A flexible definition of marriage means that everything is flexible. Absolutes of any kind and even truth itself are no more. Anything goes.
3. Moral disintegration and social chaos follow.
4. The public clamors for order, and government responds with a police state.

I’ve scanned Father Longenecker’s blog for posts about marriage since Obergefell. I count four of them, none of which revisits his bold prediction. And now I feel a prediction coming on: I predict we won’t see a retraction, just a closing of the ranks and an adoption of a not-so-bad reality.
The slippery slope argument is popular, but I reject it. The definition of marriage does change; that’s a simple fact of history. Instead of focusing on that, focus on the test that doesn’t change: does it cause harm?
Does polygamy cause harm? Does same-sex marriage cause harm? These are the questions to ask. As we near the anniversary of Obergefell, the answer so far is that it doesn’t.

The very being or legal existence of the woman
is suspended during the marriage,
or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband;
under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs everything.
— Sir William Blackstone, 1765

Photo credit: Wikimedia
 

Christians often point to chapter 15 in 1 Corinthians as important evidence for the resurrection. This book, Paul’s first epistle (letter) to the church in Corinth, was written roughly a decade before the earliest gospel of Mark (written in c. 70 CE). This makes it the earliest claim for the resurrection of Jesus.
Let’s see if the story holds up. Here’s the section that many Christians point to:

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to [Peter], and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have [died]. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. (1 Corinthians 15:3–8)

Claims about the dating of this important passage are all over the map. Some argue that it actually precedes Paul’s writing. They say that it appears to be in a different style, as if it were a creedal statement (like the modern Apostle’s Creed) that would have been recited by believers. That is, though Paul wrote this epistle 25 years after the crucifixion, it had been an oral creed since as early as a few years after Jesus’ death. They cite this as evidence that belief in the resurrection was years earlier than Paul’s writing.
But if it’s a creed, it’s not evidence. A creed is a faith statement—a statement of what people believe. It even sounds like one. There is no mention of time or location, like a police report or newspaper article would have, and “Christ died for our sins” isn’t an observation, it’s a faith statement.
Others propose a very different interpretation: that the different style suggests that it was added to copies decades after Paul wrote the original. The gap from the creation of this epistle to our oldest copy of it is about 150 years. That’s a lot of opportunity for hanky-panky as scribes copied and recopied the letter, especially during the early turbulent years of the new religion of Christianity. We can’t know for certain what the original said.
Let’s sift through some particulars from this book that undercut the view that this passage is an important bit of Christian evidence.

• Jesus was “raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.” This is a reference to Jonah 1:17 (“Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights”), but how can the resurrection of Jesus be “according to” this scripture? That verse in Jonah is hardly a prophecy. And Jesus wasn’t dead for three days and three nights; he was out of action for a day and a half, from Friday evening to Sunday morning.
• Jesus appeared “to the Twelve”? But they were the Eleven after Judas was gone, and his replacement was elected after the ascension of Jesus.
• The gospels make clear that women were the first to see the risen Jesus. Why are they not on the list?
• “Christ died for our sins”? Here, the sacrifice of Jesus parallels the Old Testament animal sacrifices. But later in this chapter, Paul discards this by saying, “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins” (15:17). So he’s apparently changed his mind, and now it’s the resurrection that is the saving act.
• Paul says, “and last of all he appeared to me also.” But the appearance to Paul as recorded in Acts 9:3–9 was a visionary sighting, and his companions at the time saw nothing. The same Greek word optanomai is used for each of the appearances: to Peter, the Twelve, the 500, James, the apostles, and then Paul. If the post-resurrection appearance to Paul was a vision, is that true of the others? If so, that contradicts the gospels.
• Later in the epistle, Paul says, “For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive” (15:22). This is nice symmetry—we didn’t do anything to get tarred with the brush of Adam’s sin, and we don’t need to do anything to get the redemption of Christ. He’s even clearer in another book: “For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous” (Romans 5:19). Christians who celebrate Paul as an important and reliable source need to realize what comes along: Paul argues that all of us are going to the same afterlife.
• Paul says, “the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all” (15:28). This subordinate position for Jesus isn’t too surprising since our concept of a Trinity of co-equal persons was developed in the fourth century, but it does show that Paul would be shocked at how Christianity has evolved.
• Paul says, “The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable … it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body” (15:42–4). This makes clear that the resurrected Jesus was spirit, not flesh. This sounds a lot like docetism, a heresy that was rejected in the First Council of Nicaea. It also contradicts Luke’s physical post-resurrection Jesus: “Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have” (Luke 24:39).
• We’re told that Jesus “appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time.” But later, after Jesus rose into heaven, the believers were “a group numbering about a hundred and twenty” (Acts. 1:15). The 500 can’t have been too impressed with what they saw if they weren’t all believers. And if Paul’s claim is such compelling evidence, why didn’t any of the gospels include it? (More on the claim of 500 eyewitnesses here.)

Though an important bit of history, this chapter may not be as compelling as believers think.

The book [of Mormon] is a curiosity to me. 
It is such a pretentious affair and yet so slow, so sleepy, 
such an insipid mess of inspiration. 
It is chloroform in print.
— Mark Twain

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/8/13.)
Acknowledgements: I’ve gotten some of these points from The Atheist’s Bible Companion to the New Testament by Mike Davis and Nailed by David Fitzgerald.
Photo credit: Codex Sinaiticus project
 

Dan Barker of the Freedom From Religion Foundation has a new book, God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction, that builds off Richard Dawkins’ famous quote:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.  — Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

In his book, Barker’s theological expertise shows that Dawkins’ eloquent summary is actually understated.
What’s curious, though, is that Christians seem to cite the Dawkins Quote more than atheists. On the Unbelievable radio show for 12/7/13, Christian Chris Sinkinson gives his critique:

[The Dawkins Quote] is clearly a very slanted view of how to read the text of the Old Testament. Most of us would take the clearer passages to interpret the harder passages. We would be talking about Leviticus 19 “Love your neighbor as yourself” before we look at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. We would have an approach to scripture that would weight things in such a way that that description of God just does not sound like the god who I believe in or the god who I worship. (@ 36:23)

For starters, “Love your neighbor as yourself” means, “Love your fellow Jewish neighbor as yourself,” so let’s not imagine a big worldwide hug from Yahweh.
But set that aside. I can see that Christians prefer “love your neighbor” to death and destruction, but they make a mistake when they call the former a “clearer” passage when it’s actually just a more pleasing passage.
You can see that in the last sentence: “We would have an approach to scripture that would weight things in such a way that that description of God just does not sound like the god who I believe in or the god who I worship.” It’s clumsily worded, as live radio often is, but he’s saying that he adjusts how he interprets the Bible to preserve his preconceived god belief. That is, he hammers the copper of the Bible on the anvil of his belief, not the other way around.
I see this approach frequently, though it’s unusual to see it so plainly stated.
Thought experiment
My study of the Bible has been haphazard, and I jump around based on whatever I’m researching at the moment. But suppose I wanted to improve my understanding by reading the Bible cover to cover. I find an experienced Christian friend who will mentor me and give me their interpretation as needed.
At any point, I might have a question about social customs at the time, or I might complain about the miracles. But things get interesting when we get to the morally questionable activities—God hardening Pharaoh’s heart to prevent him from giving Moses what he wants, demanding genocide, supporting slavery and polygamy, insisting on a human sacrifice to satisfy his divine wrath, and so on.
When we hit one of these, my mentor will say, “Okay, now let’s take things slowly to unpack this one.” But what’s to unpack? Seen from the standpoint of modern Western morality, God is obviously a savage monster—what’s confusing or difficult? It’s just that my mentor doesn’t like that.
He can respond by saying that God is unjudgeable or that God’s ways are not our ways so it shouldn’t be surprising that we don’t understand. He can say that that reading of the passage is displeasing. What he can’t say is that it’s unclear. He can say that acceptance of chattel slavery (Leviticus 25:44–6) is unpleasant or disturbing and “For God so loved the world” (John 3:16) is happy or satisfying, but only an agenda would cause him to say that those verses are unclear and clear, respectively.
Continue: I critique five online guidelines for biblical interpretation that are variations on this biased approach to the Bible here.

One of the saddest lessons of history is this:
if we’ve been bamboozled long enough,
we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.
We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth.
The bamboozle has captured us.
It is simply too painful to acknowledge—
even to ourselves—that we’ve been so credulous.
(So the old bamboozles tend to persist
as the new bamboozles rise.)
— Carl Sagan, “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection”

Image credit: Marcin Chady, flickr, CC