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“Noah” Movie Review

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Noah movie

I expected the Noah movie to be a fairly careful following of the Bible story, where the fun would be in quibbling about how various verses were interpreted, but the movie was (surprisingly) more interesting than that.

It has Noah, his wife, and the three sons. There’s the enormous ark, the animals, and the flood. And then there are tangential bits that are nevertheless still in the Bible—the Nephilim, Methuselah, Tubal-Cain, and Noah the angry drunk.

But that’s about it for the Bible. The rest is Hollywood. Perhaps that’s to be expected when you must expand four Bible chapters into 138 minutes.

Spoiler alert: you’d think that everyone already knows the story of Noah (“Omigod! You mean that everyone else drowned? Wow—I didn’t see that coming!”). Not this interpretation.

The Nephilim

In the verses immediately before the Noah story (Gen. 6:1–4), the Bible introduces the Nephilim. Before the Flood, angels came to earth and fathered children with women, and these were the “heroes of old, men of renown.” It’s unclear whether “Nephilim” refers to the angels or their children, but the Bible doesn’t condemn them.

Other ancient Jewish texts do. The Nephilim taught man the secrets of metalworking and weaponry, as well as makeup and jewelry (read: adultery and killing), and one of the purposes of the flood was to get rid of them.

Noah shows these Nephilim as fallen angels and calls them “Watchers,” the term used in these ancient Jewish texts. They came to earth to help man with the gift of technology (nothing about getting frisky with their women), but were cursed by the Creator so that they became gigantic multi-armed rock monsters (duh—what else would cursed angels look like?). Since their previous contact with humans led to no good, the Watchers are ready to kill Noah and his family, but he befriends them and they help build the ark.

There’s nothing like a dozen 20-foot-tall immortal monsters to help make that tough job go a little easier.

The Others

Noah is in the line of Seth, Adam’s third son. They’re the last of their kind. But there are thousands of others living nearby who descended from Cain, Adam’s first son—the one who killed Abel. These are the bad people corrupted by the art of metalworking. They’re led by Tubal-Cain, who the Bible tells us was the first metalsmith—again, with no hint of condemnation.

This distinction between the bad men of Cain, corrupted by weapons and killing, and Noah’s noble line of Seth doesn’t hold up, however. Noah uses metal, both as tools and as weapons, and he kills people when he has to.

The Plot

This is a world of magic. There are visions, spells, incense that makes the animals on the ark hibernate (nicely solving the problem of how to feed them and their eating each other), and lots of magical plants. (The clash between those on the side of magic and those who favor technology reminded me of the 1977 movie Wizards. Technology loses in that one, too.)

The harsh terrain (it was filmed in Iceland) and the clothes (more Viking than Bedouin) made me think of Middle Earth rather than the Middle East.

The Bible says that the three sons have wives. Not so here. There is only an adopted daughter, found as an injured girl, and she and the oldest son are something of a couple. Noah tries to find wives in the Man Village, but the savagery is so extreme that he returns empty-handed and convinced that their job is simply to convey the animals safely on the ark, not to continue humanity. Humans are so inherently evil that their line must end.

On the boat, Noah passes on to his little band the seven-day creation story. Though the flood is accurate to the Bible when geysers burst from the ground, which points to the Sumerian cosmology of water beneath the earth and in a canopy above, the visuals that accompany Noah’s story would be at home in Neil deGrasse-Tyson’s Cosmos series. We see the solar system coalescing and a protoplanet crash into the young earth to form the debris that became the moon. Evolution is shown, as animals evolve from fish to amphibians to reptiles to mammals to primates. Creationists will find no support in this depiction.

Noah says that the Creator demands that humanity must end with them. This causes some friction on the boat when the son and daughter get pregnant with twin girls. It’s not enough that they ignored the sounds of the drowning multitude at the beginning of their voyage, but now Noah is determined to kill the babies. Luckily, love overcomes the wishes of the homicidal Creator in the end.

One wonders where girls will find a husband. I suppose the logical choice is the last of Noah’s sons, their uncle.

Noah the drunk

The Bible says that Noah took to drink after the ark landed (Gen. 9:18–27). Perhaps he was due a little celebration after all that work, but it got a bit out of hand, and he passed out naked in his tent. His son Ham saw his father in this embarrassing state, but the other two brothers covered him without peeking. Noah discovered this and bizarrely responded by cursing Ham’s son Canaan, presumably to support Israel’s future conquest of the land that Canaan’s tribe would occupy.

Bible scholars have woven many interpretations out of this odd curse, trying to figure out what is euphemism and what is literal, but the Noah film takes a different approach. It presents this wine scene literally, but Ham and Noah had friction that went back a long time. Before the flood, Ham had found a girlfriend, but Noah refused to help save her. On the boat with every eligible female in the world dead, Ham was angry enough that when he discovers the single stowaway—Tubal-Cain, of course—he listens to him.

Tubal-Cain says that the Creator (“God” is never mentioned in the movie) made man in his image to subdue nature. And he kinda has a point. In the creation story that Noah just told, the Bible says, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground” (Genesis 1:28). But you can imagine who wins in the fight scene.

The trailer ends with the text, “The film is inspired by the story of Noah,” which tries to placate everyone. It’s a “story,” so that doesn’t offend those who don’t follow the Bible. It’s “inspired by,” so it apologizes to Christians, Jews, and Muslims who think that it takes too much license. At the premiere, the director Darren Aronofsky said, “Anything you’re expecting, you’re f***ing wrong.”

I explore the various story strands that make up the Bible’s Noah story here.

No prophet of God hates people. . . .
“Noah” is wrong about everything.
— Glenn Beck

[Christians are] mad because this made up story
doesn’t stay true to their made up story.
— Bill Maher

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/28/14.)

Photo credit: IMDb

Ray Comfort Says We’re in the End Times® (2 of 2)

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House fire

Let’s wrap up Prophet Ray Comfort’s Top Ten list of surefire clues that “the end of the age is happening now,” as he puts it. We’ve explored the first half in part 1. Let’s finish up to see if Armageddon really is around the corner.

Ray’s Bible verse #6:

For [although] they hold a form of piety (true religion), they deny and reject and are strangers to the power of it [their conduct belies the genuineness of their profession]. (2 Timothy 3:5, Amplified Version)

Fortunately, we have Ray to translate: this means that religious hypocrisy will be prevalent. He illustrates this by interviewing people on the street who claim to be Christians but who attend R-rated movies and have premarital sex. This is hardly a statistically sound study showing that hypocrisy within Christians worldwide is markedly greater now than it was in the past, which would be necessary to show that conditions have gotten much worse. (I’m beginning to sense that scientific rigor isn’t one of Ray’s goals.)

In the last days scoffers will come. . . . But they deliberately forget that long ago by God’s word the heavens came into being and the earth was formed out of water and by water. By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. (2 Peter 3:3, 5–6)

So in the last days, people will deny that God created everything and flooded the world.

Ever the evolution denier, Ray scratches his head trying to figure out the logic behind panspermia. He interviews people who also don’t understand it to make his point. (No, I don’t see the relevance, either.)

Ray asks, “Do you think 70% of the earth being covered with water is a good clue that there was a worldwide flood?” Nope. The water likely came from comets, the earth may have been seeded with the components needed for abiogenesis from planets with different initial conditions than earth (that’s panspermia), and there is no evidence of a worldwide flood.

Next, Ray defends the plausibility of the Noah story. He says that the ark was enormous and that only representatives of biological families were taken on board, not species. (I’ve written about the many problems with taking the Noah story seriously here.)

Ray is right that people reject the ridiculous Flood story, and they’ve been doing so ever since science provided an alternative. I wonder, though, if gullible acceptance of Bible stories is more prevalent in recent decades with the success of fundamentalist Christianity. Ray’s concern on this point may be unfounded.

People will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken. (Luke 21:26)

In this long description of how the end will unfold, Jesus says six verses later, “This generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.”

Didn’t happen. Apologists have tried to reinterpret this to avoid the embarrassing fact that the Son of Man was wrong, but their attempts are themselves embarrassing. The real test is to imagine Jesus actually saying this and then asking how his followers would have interpreted it—obviously, that the end would come within a few decades.

Awkward.

… in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. They will say, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised? Ever since our ancestors died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.” (2 Peter 3:3–4)

Good question! Where is this imminent “coming” he promised 2000 years ago? Of course there are scoffers. Given the Bible’s poor track record, what else would you expect?

The rest of this chapter clumsily tries to rationalize away the problem. You see, God has a different sense of time than we do. And isn’t it handy that the end has been delayed since it allows more people to be saved? Still, you must be ready! It could come at any minute!

As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. (Matthew 24:37–39)

Ray takes this as license to give his famous Ten Commandments test. He asks people if they’ve ever stolen something (even once), ever lied (even once), and so on. He concludes by declaring that, by their own admission, each person is a lying, thieving, blasphemous adulterer at heart. The next logical step, apparently, is to assume God’s existence and ask these sinners how God should treat them on Judgment Day.

Sorry, Ray. The Ten Commandments test assumes what you’re (ineptly) trying to prove. Your Top Ten list of Signs of the End is no better.

Religion is regarded 
by the common people as true, 
by the wise as false, 
and by the rulers as useful. 
— Seneca the Younger

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/15/14.)

Image credit: Modern Event Preparedness, flickr, CC

 

Ray Comfort Says We’re in the End Times®

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Meteor destroys London

We dodged an apocalyptic bullet a few days ago. The number of years of Jesus’ life and the number of times the Bible mentions “Elohim” (the other name for God) are both 33. Count 33 days from the date of the solar eclipse, and you get September 23! There you go—end of the world.

You want a second opinion? No problem: the eclipse was on the 21st of August, hurricane Harvey began on the 25th, and flooding started on the 26th. Use those numbers to point to Luke 21:25–26:

There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars. On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea. People will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken.

How much more evidence do you want that the End will come last week? You just can’t argue with science—though you can certainly argue with numerology, wishful thinking, and whatever other nonsense is behind this argument.

Time to bring in an expert

End times prediction is strangely attractive to some apologists (I’ve written more here and here). It’s a shiny thing to a baby. Ray Comfort has made a movie about our own imminent end (“Noah and the Last Days”), and it has that je ne sais quoi that only Ray can provide. Or maybe it’s WTF.

Ray gives ten New Testament passages that make clear that we’re in the end times. “The end of the age is happening now,” he says. Let’s take a look to see if we can see it as clearly as Ray can.

He begins with 2 Peter 2:1–3:

But there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them—bringing swift destruction on themselves. Many will follow their depraved conduct and will bring the way of truth into disrepute. In their greed these teachers will exploit you with fabricated stories. Their condemnation has long been hanging over them, and their destruction has not been sleeping.

Yes, there are lots of false prophets in our time—Hal Lindsey vaguely predicted the end in 2000, Harold Camping in 2011, Ronald Weinland in 2013, John Hagee in 2015, and there have been others. But don’t imagine that naively idiotic prophecies are a recent thing. There’s the Great Disappointment of 1844. And the many failed predictions by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. This is no sign of the end. These Christian doomsday prophets have always been with us.

And now Ray Comfort is yet another prophet. Give us a specific date, Ray, so we know when to add you to the false prophets list. But be careful: the passage you just gave us says that God will judge these liars like he judged the wicked people he drowned in the Flood.

On to Ray’s next verse of what to look for in the end times:

Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places. (Matthew 24:7)

Yes, there are wars, but no more now than in the past. The incidence of famine and pestilence is far less today (no thanks to Christianity), and science is helping predict earthquakes and make cities more resilient. This argues against Ray’s claim. And the movie itself was shot in tourist areas of Southern California, with beautiful blue sky and palm trees (not desolation and death), a poor location to make the claim that social conditions are going downhill.

Next up:

The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. (Acts 2:20)

Consider the context of this verse. The disciples were gathered for the feast of Pentecost, shortly after Jesus had returned to heaven, and the Holy Spirit descended on them. They all spoke in tongues, and passersby marveled that each could hear God praised in their own language. In this verse from Acts, Peter is explaining that this was a fulfillment of a prophecy from Joel.

Now consider the entire quotation (2:17–21). Joel was listing what will happen in the last days, and Peter said that this visitation of the Holy Spirit indicated that Joel’s clues to the end were happening at that moment. Yes, the sun will turn to darkness and the moon to blood, but it will happen in the time of Peter and the apostles.

Another fail, Ray. You’ve really got to read these things more carefully.

There will be terrible times in the last days. For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, blasphemers . . . (2 Timothy 3:1–2)

Ray’s focus here is naughty words used in movies. I’ll grant that there are more R-rated movies now than centuries ago, but this seems a tiny point to put in a Top Ten list. And he’s concerned about f-bombs in movies but not concerned about the insane violence in Passion of the Christ? I’d rather have a society comfortable with rude words than violence.

It was the same in the days of Lot. . . . But the day Lot left Sodom, fire and sulfur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all. It will be just like this on the day the Son of Man is revealed. (Luke 17:28–30)

Ray interprets this as an increase in the acceptance of (shudder!) homosexuality.

You know you live in strange times when the atheist has to explain to the Christian what Bible passages mean. No, Ray, that’s not what we’re talking about here. The point is suddenness. The wicked people during Noah’s time were going about life as usual and were caught unawares by the Flood. The people in Sodom were surprised by the hail of destruction. The section continues with admonitions against going back to your house for your stuff when the end comes—just run for safety.

Yes, we’re more accepting of homosexuality. No, that’s not what this passage is about. In fact, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19 isn’t even about homosexuality (more).

Finish up Ray Comfort’s Kant-Fail® Signs of the End in part 2.

If you’re a “Bible prophecy scholar,”
then everything is a sign of the End Times—
eclipses, earthquakes, floods, droughts, Wednesdays, dandelions,
war in the Middle East, peace in the Middle East,
Middle Eastern restaurants in the Midwest. . . .
— slactivist

 (This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/14/14.)

Image credit: Ben Sutherland, flickr, CC

A Call for Honesty in Christian Scholarship

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faith statement

At first glance, faith statements seem reasonable. There’s plenty to criticize, but let’s first see them from the standpoint of the Christian organizations that use them.

What’s a faith statement?

Faith statements are declarations like these.

  • “The mission of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture is to advance the understanding that human beings and nature are the result of intelligent design rather than a blind and undirected process.”
  • A fragment from the faith statement of Houston Baptist University: “[Those connected with HBU must believe] that man was directly created by God, the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, as the Son of God, [and] that He died for the sins of all men and thereafter arose from the grave.”
  • A fragment from Answers in Genesis: “By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record.”

There are lots of interpretations of Christianity. If you want to donate to a Christian organization, you need to see if their beliefs line up with yours. The faith statement helps make that evaluation.

Academic freedom and conflicts of interest

Faith statements are good for donors, but they’re bad for the institutions that have them. A faith statement is a commitment to a conclusion. By accepting the conclusion beforehand, institutions governed by them forfeit their ability to defend or even comment on the points in those statements.

When a scholar from HBU concludes that the virgin birth is history rather than mythology, why believe it? That’s just the faith statement talking. The same is true when the Discovery Institute reports that intelligent design beats evolution or Answers in Genesis argues for a 6000-year-old earth.

Might the scholar simply have come to an unbiased conclusion? That’s possible, but how would we know? Mike Licona is a Christian scholar who found out the hard way that faith statements have teeth. In 2011, he lost two jobs because, in a 700-page book, he questioned the inerrancy of a single Bible verse (more here).

There is a stick raised above these Christian scholars that demands that they toe the line or else. With some conclusions predetermined to be correct and others incorrect, how do we know that their work is an honest search for the truth? We don’t, and indeed the work of every Christian scholar constrained by a faith statement is suspect.

By committing to the faith statement, they are ruling out certain conclusions before they’ve done any research. For example, the HBU statement says Jesus was born of a virgin. By signing that statement, a professor is publicly stating (among other things), “I promise to never conclude that the virgin birth was just a myth.”

Accepting and rejecting claims because of dogma rather than science got the Church into an embarrassing situation when it rejected Galileo’s heliocentric solar system. They only publicly retracted their error in 1992.

There are close to a thousand religiously affiliated U.S. colleges and universities plus many more ministries that make intellectual claims. The cloud of scholarly untrustworthiness hangs over a lot of Christians.

How things work in the real world: disclosure

Faith statements are a restriction on academic freedom according to The American Association of University Professors. But that’s not enough. In other areas of intellectual discourse, this constraint would be disclosed. Many medical journals have policies that demand that authors disclose conflicts of interest. The same is true for science journals (source). The American Historical Association’s “Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct” calls for historians to disclose any research assistance that could bias their conclusions.

Journalists are careful to avoid not only conflicts of interest but even the appearance of such conflicts. You’ve probably seen articles with an aside such as, “Full disclosure: I have a close relative who works for the company that is the subject of this article.”

The equivalent in judicial, legal, or governmental fields is called recusal—abstaining from participation in an issue that would cause a conflict of interest.

Does it matter when research about climate change is funded by a fossil fuel company rather than Greenpeace? Does it matter when research about smoking is funded by the Tobacco Institute rather than the National Institutes of Health? Does it matter when research about gun violence is funded by the National Rifle Association rather than the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence?

Just because research is funded by an organization with an interest in the result doesn’t mean that the research is flawed. The point is simply that that all potential biases should be made public.

Carry this thinking into Christian scholarship. Every blog post, journal article, book, or lecture from a Christian scholar constrained by a faith statement should have that faith statement disclosed.

The parallel world of Christian scholarship

Christian scholars seem to admire the respect given to fields like journalism, medicine, science, and so on. But rather than earning that respect the old-fashioned way, Christian scholarship creates a parallel world with training wheels.

Creationists can’t get published in Nature or Scientific American? No problem—Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis has created its own “peer-reviewed journal,” Answers Research Journal. The problem is that this is a journal constrained by yet another faith statement. The author submission guidelines make clear that any paper will be rejected if it “conflicts with the best interests of [Answers in Genesis] as judged by its biblical stand and goals outlined in its statement of faith.”

Christian colleges can teach whatever they want and call it “science.” Their religious shibboleth for science make it noteworthy when they teach evolution—that is, when they teach actual science.

They give themselves the right to domesticate science to avoid anything that steps on their theological toes and have their own science-y books, conferences, and home schooling curriculum.

But their parallel world is just a play table with clay and crayons. They only dream that they’re sitting at the adult table. Christian scholarship has sold its soul.

Here’s the cause and effect relationship. Donations power the Christian machine, and they don’t happen without a faith statement; a faith statement means that any “scholarship” is suspect; poor scholarship means that Christian scholars can’t play with the big boys; and that leads to their parallel Christian world with a low bar that they can cross.

Correcting the problem

With this article, I’m calling on Christian scholars to, as a first step toward legitimacy, disclose faith statements they’re bound by. Not admitting to a faith statement that prevents honest research is to break the ninth commandment against lying. Unfortunately, any who read this will ignore it because to do otherwise would risk breaking the spell. It would call attention to a weakness.

What’s surprising is that they will ignore it without embarrassment. They don’t need to whisper about damage control among themselves. They can publicly use the word “recant” when demanding that an errant scholar return to the fold, unconcerned about how that makes them very unlike the scientists, historians, and the other conventional scholars they admire. That was the word used with Mike Licona, the Christian scholar called to account (above). They used “recant” four centuries ago for Galileo; why not for Licona now?

But times are changing. In the time of Galileo, the church wasn’t questioned in the West. They held the intellectual high ground. That’s no longer true, and I expect that the need for credibility will increasingly conflict with the need for donations. Ignoring conflicts of interest and doing “scholarship” with Christian training wheels will become less acceptable.

This crime called blasphemy was invented by priests
for the purpose of defending doctrines
not able to take care of themselves.
— Robert Green Ingersoll

Image credit: Denise Krebs, flickr, CC

Daniel’s End Times Prediction: Take Two

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Sunset

Wait a minute—another interpretation of Daniel 9? We recently explored one Christian interpretation here. If several interpretations are possible, this is clearly a malleable text, which doesn’t give much confidence in any clear and unambiguous prophecy in the Bible.

In fact, it’s worse than that. This has been fertile ground for imaginative Christians for two millennia, and many conflicting ideas have arisen. For a long list of scholars and amateurs who weighed in with their interpretation of the evidence, go here and search for “List of Historicist Biblical Expositors.”

(For the first post in this series, go here.)

Christian interpretation #2

This is the Dispensationalist interpretation (which gets into the rapture, premillennialism, Revelation as prophecy, and so on). I summarized Daniel 9:24–7 in a previous post, so go there if you need a refresher on the steps in that prophecy.

With this interpretation, start the clock with the Decree of Artaxerxes to rebuild the Temple given to Nehemiah in 444 BCE (Nehemiah 2:1–8). If we count ahead as before using 7 weeks + 62 weeks (–444 + 483 + 1 = 40 CE), the final week would be 40–47 CE. This is obviously too late to align with any popular dates associated with the death of Jesus.

The clever (or desperate) solution is to declare a “prophetic year” to be twelve 30-day months, creating a 360-day year. Supporters defend this by pointing to several verses where round numbers are used (42 months are equated with 1260 days, for example).

If this is correct, our years have been too long. They need to be scaled by 360 (days in a “prophetic year”) divided by 365.25 (days in a Julian year). Our 483-year jump is now only 476 years, and the final week begins in 33 CE. If we say that Jesus died in this year, we have the Anointed One dying at the right time (again assuming that we can add 7 weeks to the 62 weeks).

But what about that final week? Proponents of this hypothesis imagine an unspecified amount of time before this Tribulation Period starts, though the prophecy says nothing about this. If we allow this, however, the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE can explain the reference to destruction. But that has its own problems: the “ruler who will come” who destroyed the Temple is the one in the final week, so the Tribulation must’ve already happened in the first century, which means no rapture or tribulation in our own future.

Some proponents go so far as to imagine that this prophecy accurately predicts the crucifixion to the day. To those prophecy enthusiasts, I ask if anyone decoded the puzzle before the event. If it’s clear to you, some of the smart Jews of that time must’ve figured it out. They had almost five centuries, after all.

And what about Jews today? Daniel is their holy book, too. Are they convinced by this claim that Jesus is prophesied within Daniel? If not, I wonder what possible use this undecipherable prophecy could’ve had.

(For a detailed slap-down of this claim of to-the-day accuracy, I refer you to Sandoval.)

But this interpretation don’t work so good either

The first Christian interpretation of Daniel didn’t work, and this one is also full of problems.

Problem 1: We still have the initial verse saying that the atonement is at the end of 70 weeks. Christian theology says that the death of Jesus is the atonement, but this interpretation of Daniel demands that the final week is still in our future.

Problem 2: The “prophetic year” is nonsense. The Jewish calendar alternates between 29- and 30-day months, giving a 354-day year, and it has a complicated mechanism that adds months to keep it in sync with the solar year. Yes, there are Bible verses that give time spans of days that, if precise, would point to a 30-day month. No, there is no reason to think that a special, grossly wrong calendar was ever used. Do those who argue for the prophetic year use it to calculate the millennium as only 985 years? Do they scale time periods used in other prophecies? Consistency, please.

Problem 3: A floating final week isn’t what the prophecy says. There was no gap after the 7 weeks; why imagine one after the 62 weeks (I mean, besides that you’re trying to shoehorn the facts into your presuppositions)?

And most of the problems from the previous attempt apply as well. It makes no sense of the 7 week/62 week distinction, there is no justification for picking this start date out of the alternatives, and it ignores the evidence in Daniel that the final week was roughly 171–164 BCE.

Looking back to Daniel chapters 11–12, the prophecy discussed earlier, we saw the same idea of half of a 7-year period. Clearly, chapter 9 is yet one more interpretation of the same time period, and we need to bring in Antiochus Epiphanes, the Seleucid mustache-twisting villain of the Maccabean Revolt.

Reinterpreting the end as being during this time makes a lot more sense of the text. We’ll explore that interpretation in the final post in this series.

 To surrender to ignorance and call it God
has always been premature,
and it remains premature today.
— Isaac Asimov

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/27/14.)

Image credit: DominÖ, flickr, CC

God Is Love—Does that Make any Sense? (2 of 2)

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sunset lovers

Let’s wrap up our look at the popular Christian platitude “God is love.” In part 1, Christian apologist Peter Kreeft handwaved a clever yet ridiculous argument about how God being love made the Trinity mandatory.

Let’s continue with more of Kreeft’s groundless speculation of what God’s love is all about.

God is like a father

Imagine the progression in wisdom from a fool, to an ordinary human, to a sage, to God. Along this progression, positive qualities are amplified—patience, consideration, kindness, thoughtfulness—and negative qualities reduced—impatience, anger, jealousy, ego. “My way or the highway” is replaced by a yielding, selfless, whatever’s-best-for-you approach.

Peter Kreeft gave his insights about what the God end of the spectrum looks like as he spoke about God’s love (“God’s Existence” @1:05:45). He gave the example of a child who didn’t want to show his bad report card to his father. Why not, since the father loves him? Because he’s afraid that the father will get mad at how the child fell short of his potential.

Now dial up that relationship from father/child to God/us. When we adults show our report card to God, does he respond in a patient and considerate way, trying to work with our limitations to find what’s best for us? Apparently not. Kreeft says that God’s perception of our failings is far more acute than the father’s and God gets into a justifiable rage when we make a mistake. So, you see, God’s throwing us into hell forever for the smallest sin is not petty vindictiveness but Deep Love. (And the inmates of hell get to feel the warmth of God’s love for a long, long time.)

Kreeft is our Virgil as he guides us through the afterlife. You might think that injuring or offending God would be as likely as injuring Superman. You might think that God is far more sage-like than any human sage.

Nope. Kreeft tells us that “Love makes God more formidable, not less,” and “Infinite love is utterly intolerant in any imperfection in the beloved.” Gee—who’d’ve guessed? Heaven sounds like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four where War is Peace and Love is Hate.

(Christians: when you puzzle over what atheists could possibly find troubling about your philosophy, this kind of groundless handwaving is part of the problem.)

See also: Why is God Hidden?

Does the Bible show us that God is loving?

“Love” is not the punch line of the Job story. Job was the pawn in a wager between Yahweh and Satan, and Job’s life was destroyed (but in the end God gave him another set of children to replace the ones that were killed, so it’s all good). Job complained about his undeserved bad fortune, and God made clear to Job that he (God) could do whatever the heck he wanted, and Job could just shut the hell up.

“God is love” isn’t the takeaway from the Old Testament. It isn’t interested in showcasing God’s love but rather his majesty and power in cases like drowning the Egyptian army or burning Sodom and Gomorrah. The lesson from the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac was not love but obedience. “ ‘Should you not fear me?’ declares the Lord. ‘Should you not tremble in my presence?’ ” (Jeremiah 5:22).

Christian children can be introduced to Old Testament stories with toys, but they omit the full story. The Noah’s Ark playset contains a handful of toy animals and people that survived, not the millions who drowned. The David action figure doesn’t come with a bag of 200 Philistine foreskins, Samson doesn’t come with the jawbone of an ass (with which he killed a thousand men), and Joshua doesn’t come with the corpses of any of the millions killed in the conquest of Palestine.

The New Testament isn’t much better, and it invented hell for most of us. Jesus makes this clear: “Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matthew 7:13–14).

Love isn’t the obvious theme in individual human lives around the world today, but as love-poor as the earth is, the empty space that composes almost all the universe contains none.

Former pastor Rob Bell wrote Love Wins, in which he argued for a kinder, gentler afterlife than the traditional Christian view. That was a little too much love for one traditionalist who spoke for many when he said, “Adjusting the gospel to placate human rebellion against God transforms the good news into a compromise with worldliness, something we should earnestly avoid.”

Let me close with a fragment from a modern hymn.

Scorned by the ones He came to save.
Till on that cross as Jesus died,
The wrath of God was satisfied.

This portrait of God was so unpleasant that the hymn was finally removed from a hymnal.

There’s not a lot of love happening here. When listing God’s attributes, love isn’t on the short list.

Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
— Benjamin Franklin

Image credit: Bcow, flickr, CC