Who Cares What the Bible Says About Gays? Look What it Says About Banks!

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The second-century Apocalypse of Peter surveys the eternal punishment that God delivers to people according to their crimes. In his visit to hell, Peter saw blasphemers hanging by their tongues, murderers bitten by snakes, liars with fire in their mouths, the greedy rolling on stones that were razor sharp and red hot, transvestites and lesbians thrown off a cliff repeatedly, and apostates roasted.
“And in another great lake, full of pitch and blood and mire bubbling up, there stood men and women up to their knees: and these were the usurers and those who take interest on interest.” (The Apocalypse of Paul changes the punishment to consumption by worms.)
Who says that religious studies can’t be fun?
The Bible says nothing about two loving homosexuals wanting to get married—see my recent post here—but it says plenty about usury. (Usury can be either charging excessive interest or charging any interest on a loan.) Why get in a lather about vague statements about homosexuality in the Bible when it’s quite explicit about usury? Shouldn’t the Christian anti-gay crowd focus their attention here instead?
The Old Testament declares lending with interest sinful
The vision of hell from the Apocalypse of Peter isn’t in the Bible, but all the sins that it discusses are there, including usury. Here’s how Ezekiel describes an evil man.

He defiles his neighbor’s wife. He oppresses the poor and needy. He commits robbery. He does not return what he took in pledge. He looks to the idols. He does detestable things. He lends at interest and takes a profit. Will such a man live? He will not! Because he has done all these detestable things, he is to be put to death; his blood will be on his own head (Ez. 18:11–13).

Given the crimes that he categorizes it with, Ezekiel clearly doesn’t like lending with interest.
There are a few special cases. Jews can’t take interest from poor Israelites (Ex. 22:25, Lev. 25:35–7). They can’t take interest from any Israelites, but it’s allowed for foreigners (Deut. 23:20). And the same laws apply to resident foreigners as to Jews (Num. 15:15, Ex. 22:21, Deut. 10:19, Lev. 19:33, and others).
(This clear distinction between “us” and “them” is also present in the rules for slavery. For Jews, it was indentured servitude; for non-Jews, it was slavery for life.)
The Old Testament makes clear that, aside from foreigners, lending with interest is forbidden.
Christian thinking on usury
Wikipedia summarizes the progression of thinking about usury within Christianity. First, clergy were forbidden from engaging in usury in 325, though it was defined as interest greater than one percent per month. Next, this prohibition was extended to the laity. In the Middle Ages, things became more strict.

[The Third Lateran Council in 1179] decreed that persons who accepted interest on loans could receive neither the sacraments nor Christian burial. Pope Clement V made the belief in the right to usury a heresy in 1311, and abolished all secular legislation which allowed it. Pope Sixtus V condemned the practice of charging interest as “detestable to God and man, damned by the sacred canons and contrary to Christian charity.”

Usury today
We’ve made banking (including lending with interest) a central part of our modern economy, but the problem of wrongful lending still exists. Predatory lending is lending with unfair or abuse terms.
Payday loans are another issue. According to the FDIC, “The typical charge is $15 to $20 per $100 advanced for a two-week period, resulting in an APR [annual percentage rate] of nearly 400%.” A Muslim player on the Newcastle United soccer team has refused to wear his club’s jersey because the sponsor is short-term loan company Wonga, which charges interest rates of up to 6.56% per day.
Payday loans have declining in the U.S. to $3.3 billion per year, though economics and policy drove this, not Christian outrage.
Consistency, please
As you may have guessed, lending with interest isn’t a primary issue for me. I am outraged when powerless people are gouged by excessive interest rates, but that isn’t on topic for this blog. What does concern me is consistency. How can you rely on the Bible to support a stand against homosexuality and not be anti-usury? It’s not like usury existed thousands of years ago but doesn’t in our modern economy.
Christians may say that this anti-usury thinking in the Old Testament doesn’t apply anymore. Fair enough, but then why imagine that any anti-gay sentiments in the Old Testament apply?

We cannot know that Santa definitely doesn’t exist.
This is technically true.
But what’s your best guess?
Go on. Be bold.
— Ricky Gervais

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Objective Truth: Does the Bible Speak Plainly About Homosexuality?

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Say you’ve got Christians on two sides of an issue. Maybe some say that abortion is okay and others say that it is not. Some say that capital punishment is okay and others that it’s not. Some say that gay marriage is okay and others that it’s not.
What do we make of this? Both sides use the same Bible. Is the Bible then ambiguous?
Before you conclude that it is, consider this exchange during an interview with Greg Koukl (Unbelievable podcast for 7/13/13). A caller asked about ambiguity in the Bible and gave as an example the recent debate about gay Anglican clergy in civil partnerships becoming bishops. (In the beginning of 2013, the church decided to allow it as long as they remained celibate, though celibacy isn’t demanded of straight priests.) There were honest, well-intentioned Christians in the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches arguing both sides of the debate using the same Bible.
Koukl’s answer
Koukl used arithmetic as a counterexample. Suppose one person argued that 2 + 2 = 4, while another said that 2 + 2 = 9. The honesty and decency of the participants is irrelevant—there are objective truths here, and these two antagonists can’t both be right.
I agree. But are there also objective truths in the gay bishop case? I see none, and I see no evidence that the Bible’s position on this matter is clear.
Koukl says that, like checking which sum is correct, we must look to the Bible to see what it says.

In this regard, there is very little ambiguity as to what the bible teaches … between the Genesis passage, the Leviticus passage, and the Romans passage, there is a very, very clear statement about homosexuality.

That so? Let’s check the Bible to see what this “clear statement” is.
Old Testament passages against homosexuality?
The Genesis passage is Gen. 19:4–9, the Sodom and Gomorrah story. But remove the presupposition that the lesson is “homosexuality is bad” and see what crime actually is: rape. For the details, see my posts here and here. This informs us about the topic at hand—which, let’s remember, is a committed gay couple—not at all.
Strike one.
There are two Leviticus passages.

You must not have sexual intercourse with a male as one has sexual intercourse with a woman; it is an abomination (Leviticus 18:22).
If a man has sexual intercourse with a male as one has sexual intercourse with a woman, the two of them have committed an abomination. They must be put to death; their blood guilt is on themselves (Lev. 20:13).

“Abomination”? Ouch—that sounds pretty harsh. But look at the other things that are labeled in Leviticus as abominations—eating forbidden food, sacrificing blemished animals, performing divination, women wearing men’s clothes, and so on. Clearly, these are ritual abominations, out of date tribal customs. These are bad by definition, not because they actually hurt anyone.
Christians don’t care about these ancient customs today. The logic is that the sacrifice of Jesus got rid of them (see, for example, Heb. 7:11–12). Fair enough—then get rid of them. Don’t sift through them to keep a few that you’re nostalgic for.
I’ve also written in detail about this here.
Notice also something else that we dismiss today: the punishment for homosexuality, which is death. How can you dismiss the punishment but cling to the crime? Without a punishment there is no crime.
Strike two.
New Testament passages against homosexuality?
Finally, here is the Romans passage.

Because of [mankind’s sinful desires], God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error. (Rom. 1:26–7)

Notice the verbs here: God “gave them over,” women “exchanged,” men “abandoned.” Paul imagines going from the natural (men with women) to the unnatural. That is, he imagines straight people engaging in homosexual sex. Yes, that is weird. And, strike three, that has no bearing on what we’re talking about: homosexuals doing what comes naturally.
Koukl’s conclusion
After referring to these passages, which do not address the question at hand, Koukl wraps up:

The evidence is there to come to a clear conclusion about what the spiritual sums are with regard to homosexuality. That people who are dedicated, who pray, who are honest, who have a relationship with God don’t agree on that, does not mean that the text is unclear, and what one needs to do in those kinds of things is go back to the text. This is not a case where God has been hidden in the information.

I’m a little surprised to say this, but I agree with Koukl here. There is no ambiguity. It’s clear both what is said in the Bible and what is not said. These passages say nothing about the case of gay Anglican clergy that is the topic.

This is a case where a lot of people have changed their mind under public pressure.

Social improvement comes from society. We used to chop off hands for stealing, we used to burn witches, and we used to enslave people. It’s not thanks to the Bible (which doesn’t change) but to society (which does), that we’ve put that behind us. “Public pressure” isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but we must weigh the consensus of our community to see if it’s going in the right direction or not.
The problem is as Koukl identifies it: people reading into the Bible what they want it to say. And Koukl is a great example. He takes the passages from Genesis (that argues that rape is bad), Leviticus (made irrelevant thanks to his savior’s sacrifice), and Romans (which talks about some irrelevant orgy in which straight people dabble with homosexual sex) and concludes that the Bible makes plain that loving gay relationships can’t be embraced by the church.
For people like Koukl, the Bible is a sock puppet that they can make say whatever they want.

If you are depressed after being exposed to the cosmic perspective,
you started your day with an unjustifiably large ego.
— Neil DeGrasse Tyson

(I recommend a resource that has been helpful with this post: “Homosexuality and the Bible” by Rev. Walter Wink.)
Photo credit: Chick tracts

Can Christian Scholars be Objective?

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In a 2010 book, New Testament scholar Michael Licona said that the zombie apocalypse of Matthew 27:52, where many of the dead came back to life after Jesus died, didn’t literally happen. To many of us that’s an unsurprising observation, but this caused quite a controversy within the scholarly evangelical community.
According to Christianity Today:

[Norman] Geisler accused Licona of denying the full inerrancy of Scripture. He also called for Licona to recant his interpretation, labeling it “unorthodox, non-evangelical, and a dangerous precedent for the rest of evangelicalism.”

“Recant”? Is this the Inquisition? Was Licona, like Galileo, shown the instruments of torture and encouraged to choose the correct path?
To be clear, the only objectionable item in Licona’s entire 700-page book was the reinterpretation of this one incident in Matthew, and yet he was pressured out of his job as professor at Southern Evangelical Seminary (SES), and his position as apologetics coordinator for the North American Mission Board was eliminated. A single question about biblical inerrancy was, for some, intolerable.
The other side of the issue
We can try to see this from the standpoint of SES. They have a purpose statement, which says in part that the institution assumes “the infallibility and inerrancy of the Scriptures.” Licona was likely asked to commit to this statement, and his book could be seen as a breach of this commitment.
These kinds of statements of faith are common, and I found them for Bob Jones University, Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, and others. I attended the International Academy of Apologetics in 2011 (admittedly an odd place for an atheist to be for two weeks, but that’s another story), and their statement of faith, binding on the faculty, said that the Academy “accepts the Holy Scriptures as the revealed and inerrant word of God.”
Biola has a statement of faith that students must sign. No pretense of free intellectual inquiry here—students must accept the conclusions before their first lecture. In a scene vaguely reminiscent of the Inquisition, in 1997 Biola put three suspect faculty members “through multiple interviews to gauge their adherence to Biola’s doctrinal stances.”
Unexpected consequences
Let’s grant that a university can dismiss a professor for breaching a contract, even one so odd as the one at Licona’s former home. What’s rarely discussed is the consequence of these mandatory statements: they mean that Christian scholars at evangelical institutions are unable to be objective. With their job on the line, their hands are tied. They can’t always follow the facts where they lead. The public pillorying of Licona shows the consequences of intellectual honesty.
This incident has opened my eyes. Whenever I see or hear claims by Christian scholars, I will now wonder if a statement of faith applies. The next time I read an article by William Lane Craig, for example, I will read it with the caveat that he’s bound by Biola University’s doctrinal statement that says, in part, “The Scriptures … are without error or defect of any kind.” When he argues that the Bible is accurate, I won’t know if that’s really his honest conclusion or if that’s just his institution talking.
This even affects Norm Geisler, Licona’s chief accuser. Geisler is a professor at Veritas Evangelical Seminary, whose statement of faith says, “We believe the Bible … is verbally inerrant in the original text.”
How can we take seriously anything said about Christianity by Craig, Geisler, or indeed any scholar who is intellectually constrained in this way?

A thorough reading and understanding of the Bible
is the surest path to atheism.
— Donald Morgan

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 11/14/11.)

Photo credit: Vectorportal

Bible Interpretation Works Like the Paul-is-Dead Rumor

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Have you heard of the “Paul is dead” rumor that started around the time of the release of the Beatles’ 1969 Abbey Road album? Paul McCartney had supposedly died and been replaced by a lookalike several years earlier. Fans eager for confirmation discovered clues in this and earlier albums.

  • The cover of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) shows the four Beatles dressed as if to a funeral. In flowers in the foreground is “Beatles” and a guitar—Paul’s instrument. The back cover shows the four Beatles with Paul the only one facing backwards.
  • The song “Revolution 9” on the White Album (1968) contains the phrase “number nine” repeated many times, but this becomes “turn me on, dead man” when played backwards. There are also clues in other songs.
  • The Abbey Road cover (pictured) of the four Beatles crossing a street shows Paul (second from left) portrayed differently once again. He’s taking a step with his right foot, while the others are all stepping with the left foot. And here again, we have the elements of a funeral: George, wearing jeans, is dressed as a grave digger; Paul, with bare feet, is the dearly departed; Ringo, in black, is a mourner or the undertaker; and John, dressed in white, is the preacher or a heavenly symbol.

You tend to find what you seek, and fans have found many more clues, though Beatles publicists rejected the story.
What could explain this? Could there have been no deliberate clues at all in these albums? Of course! The covers could simply be enigmatic or artistic, with motivated fans cobbling together what seems to them to be clues. They could find their own meaning, even if none was put there by anyone.
Comparison with the Bible
We see this with Bible interpretation: you find what you seek. Anything that contradicts the Christian’s particular view of the gospel can be reinterpreted and made captive to that view.

  • The idea of the Trinity took four centuries to congeal, with many (now) heretical views discarded along the way. Still, the modern Christian might see the Trinity plain as day in the New Testament, even seeing Old Testament polytheism as instead referring to the Trinity.
  • Jesus talks about secrets: “The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to others I speak in parables, so that, ‘though seeing, they may not see; though hearing, they may not understand’” (Luke 8:9–10). “Secrets”? Mystery religions like Mithraism or Gnosticism have secrets available only to the initiated, but what aspects of Christianity are secret?
  • We find the influence of Marcion. “No one has seen the father but the son” (John 1:18) contradicts the stories of Abraham and Moses seeing God, unless you accept Marcionite thinking in which the father of Jesus is a different god than the one in the Old Testament.
  • Also consider Jesus’ comment to a mob: “Is it not written in your Law …” (John 10:34). “Your law”? Wouldn’t Jewish Jesus say that it was our law? Not if he comes from a different god.
  • John 20:26 says, “Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them.” This is docetism, the heresy that Jesus had a spirit body and only seemed to be human.
  • Or consider the curious “the last will be first, and the first will be last” from Matt. 20:16. Sure, some bad people are at the top of pile, but aren’t there any good people who became rich or powerful by honest toil? Not according to apocalypticism, in which our world is ruled by the bad guy and the next world by the good guy. Anyone doing well in this world can only be doing so by being in league with the bad ruler, which is why everything is turned upside down in the next world.

Each of these odd ideas is absorbed, Borg-like, into the presupposition. Christianity becomes the ultimate unfalsifiable hypothesis.
Religious belief as conspiratorial thinking
Professor Stephan Lewandowsky talks about something similar, the “self-sealing” nature of conspiracy theories. Imagine an inflatable lifeboat in which any puncture would quickly seal itself: “Any evidence against the conspiracy is interpreted to be in actual fact evidence for the conspiracy.”
For example, consider the statement: The arguments claiming that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an inside job are pretty laughable. Ah, that just shows that the 9/11 Truth movement itself is part of a bigger conspiracy!
If the U.S. moon landing was a hoax, the Soviets had the technology to discover it and would’ve been eager to point out the lie. Ah, that just shows that the Soviets were in on the hoax!
The resurrection of Jesus just steals an element from the stories of prior dying-and-rising gods. That it wasn’t new suggests that it was made up. Ah, but that’s exactly what Satan wants you to think! And why he put those stories into history—just to fool you. (This was Justin Martyr’s argument).
But what about the verses above that are nicely explained by our New Testament being a mosaic of ideas, the aftermath of a tug of war between many different ideologies? Ah, God is simply trying to test us! His message is plain to those with the right faith.
Someone determined to hold onto their presuppositions ride in a self-sealing ideological lifeboat, but they’ve also insulated themselves against any information showing their initial views to be wrong.

I reject your reality and substitute my own.
— Doctor Who television show (1974)?

Photo credit: Wikipedia

An Inept Attempt to Dismiss the Problem of Evil

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In an article titled “Everybody’s Got the Same Problem,” apologist Greg Koukl attempts to turn the Problem of Evil, often admitted by Christians as their biggest challenge, into a selling point for Christianity.
The Problem of Evil is this: how can a good and loving God allow all the bad that happens in the world? The simplistic answers fail to explain the woman who dies leaving young children motherless, the child that dies a lingering death from leukemia, or the Holocaust.
Koukl begins by saying that he’s found a debating technique that turns this problem into a benefit. Instead of being solely a problem for the Christian, he turns the tables on the atheist.

Evidence of egregious evil abounds. How do I account for such depravity?
But, I am quick to add—and here is the strategic move—I am not alone. As a theist, I am not the only one saddled with this challenge. Evil is a problem for everyone. Every person, regardless of religion or worldview, must answer this objection.
Even the atheist.

Of course evil is a problem for everyone, but that’s not what we’re talking about. Koukl made clear that we’re talking about the Problem of Evil. We’re talking about how a good and loving God can allow all the bad that happens in the world.

What if someone is assaulted by personal tragedy, distressed by world events, victimized by religious corruption or abuse, and then responds by rejecting God and becoming an atheist (as many have done)? Notice that he has not solved the problem of evil.

The atheist hasn’t solved the Problem of Evil; he’s eliminated it. A God who loves us infinitely more than we love ourselves and who stands idly by as rapists or murderers do their work is no dilemma for the atheist. But, of course, the problem still remains for the apologist. Koukl can’t simply redefine the problem away.

The atheist cannot raise the issue, turn on his heel, and smugly walk away. His objection is that evil actually exists, objectively, as a real feature of the world.

Where did objective morality come from?? That’s certainly not something that I would argue for. Are some moral truths objectively right or wrong? If so, show us.

The atheist still has to answer the question, “How do I explain evil now, as an atheist? How do I answer the problem of evil from a materialistic worldview?”

Why—is this difficult?
Richard Dawkins observed, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” The atheist embraces the obvious explanation for evil, that in a natural world bad stuff happens. It’s just that the Christian doesn’t always like that explanation.

There is only one solution for him. The atheist must play the relativism card. Morality is either the product of a social contract or a trick of evolution. That is the best materialism can do. His own answer to the problem of evil, then, is that there is no problem of evil. Morality is an illusion. Whatever is, is right.

Ah, it’s our old straw man friend, moral relativism (I explore that more here). This is the idea that (1) you decide what’s moral for you and I decide what’s moral for me and (2) I have no right to object to your morals. I’ve never met anyone who accepts point 2, which means that I’ve never met such a moral relativist.
One explanation for morality is that there are absolute or transcendental or supernaturally grounded morals. This kind of grounding is what Koukl claims.
But take away divinely grounded morality, and you still have morals that come from humans’ shared moral instinct and the moral customs of each culture. Koukl imagines that this is an illusion?
Here’s some homework, Greg: look up the word morality in the dictionary and show us where it says that morality must be grounded in something absolute, transcendental, or supernatural.

The great 20th century atheistic philosopher Bertrand Russell wondered how anyone could talk of God when kneeling at the bed of a dying child. His challenge has powerful rhetorical force. How can anyone cling to the hope of a benevolent, powerful sovereign in the face of such tragedy?

Okay—this is an example of the injustice that prompts the Problem of Evil.

Then Christian philosopher William Lane Craig offered this response: “What is the atheist Bertrand Russell going to say when kneeling at the bed of a dying child? ‘Too bad’? ‘Tough luck’? ‘That’s the way it goes’?” No happy ending? No silver lining? Nothing but devastating, senseless evil?

Whaaa … ? “No happy ending”?? The child is dying! No, there’s no happy ending, you insensitive idiot!
And you imagine the atheist has nothing to say? Maybe you mean that the atheist has no happy but groundless stories to weave. That’s true. Atheists won’t tell as true the afterlife stories from the Egyptian Book of the Dead or the Greek myth of Hades or the Hindu idea of reincarnation. Atheists won’t tell the afterlife story of whatever religion happens to be dominant in their culture.
But anyone in this situation with any rudimentary compassion would offer sympathy and try to make the child feel better. They’d read books or tell jokes or weave stories or sing songs or reminisce about happier times or play games with the child. Isn’t that what you’d do, Greg?

They cannot speak of the patience and mercy of God. They cannot mention the future perfection that awaits all who trust in Christ. They cannot offer the comfort that a redemptive God is working to cause all things to work together for good to those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. They have no “good news” of hope for a broken world. Their worldview denies them these luxuries.

Yeah, let’s think about that. Christians could say, “You’re going to heaven,” but is that grounded on anything more substantial than that it’s the predominant myth in our culture? Or do you recommend just lying to make people feel better?
They could say, “Your death is part of God’s plan,” but what kind of comfort is this? And what kind of SOB deity would kill a child, especially an omniscient deity who could surely find a workaround? What kind of savage religion must you invent to support this platitude? (And Christians wonder why atheists get annoyed with their religion.)
Atheists don’t speak of “the patience and mercy of God” just like they don’t speak of the patience and mercy of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Atheists usually prefer the truth, and they tend to believe only things well-grounded in evidence. And this approach has benefits. As George Bernard Shaw observed, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” People seeing things for what they really are gave us the medical and technological progress we see in society today.

Which brings me to the most important question to ask of the problem of evil: Which worldview has the best resources to make sense of this challenge?

Do we take the approach that Ricky Gervais’s character did in the film The Invention of Lying? We just tell people stuff that will make them feel better?
Notice that Koukl has made no attempt to argue that the Christian view (including any rationalization to explain the Problem of Evil) should be accepted because it’s true. I don’t want to mischaracterize his conclusion, but it appears like he argues that it’s preferable simply because it’s nicer. Are we children here? How can any thoughtful, rational adult promote this route to truth?
Let’s recap and see how Koukl did with his stated goal, turning the Problem of Evil into a tool against the atheist:

  • Koukl claimed that objective morality exists, but he provided no evidence.
  • He imagines that without objective morality there is no morality, despite what the dictionary says to the contrary.
  • He imagines that explaining the existence of evil is impossible for the atheist (apparently meaning that it’s impossible to explain in a pleasing way). In fact, atheists do just fine at explaining reality, and whether it’s pleasant or not isn’t the issue.
  • He advocates telling the nice story rather than the accurate story.
  • And he tried, unsuccessfully, to slide away from the Problem of Evil by redefining it.

The Problem of Evil stands, untouched by this clumsy attempt to dismiss what may be Christianity’s toughest problem.

If you want to assert a truth,
first make sure it’s not just an opinion
that you desperately want to be true.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 11/9/11.)
Photo credit: Wikimedia

Armageddon Within Our Lifetime? (2 of 2)

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In part 1, we considered the signs that the gospel of Luke gives for the end times. Pestilence, famine, earthquake? Despite what excitable television personalities would like to believe, these are not increasing, and modern technology is doing a lot more than Christianity ever did in addressing them.
There’s one more in Luke’s list that we should consider: war.
Steven Pinker: is war decreasing?
There are always lots of conflicts in the world. Are they increasing?
Steven Pinker looks at history and draws an optimistic conclusion in his TED video “The Surprising Decline in Violence” (2007). He says, “Today, we are probably living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence.”
He argues that violence has dropped over time and that this can be seen on a fractal scale. That is, violence has consistently dropped whether you look over the long term (millennia), medium term (centuries), or short term (decades).

  • Millennia. Hunter-gatherer societies of thousands of years ago were thought to have lived in primordial harmony. But if we compare modern hunter-gatherers with industrial society, we find that deaths from warfare is far higher in those societies than in Europe and the U.S. for the twentieth century, including both world wars.
  • Centuries. Centuries ago in Europe, crimes that today get you a fine might have been punished with mutilation or branding. Crimes that today get you a prison term might have been punished with torture and death. Slavery was common. Manuel Eisner studied homicide rates in Europe from the Middle Ages to the present and concluded that they have dropped by two orders of magnitude.
  • Decades. Since 1945, we have seen a steep decline in wars, ethnic riots, and coups in Europe and the Americas. Yes, U.S. homicides did double during the seventies and eighties, but they’re now back down to 1950s rates.

I confess that I’m not as optimistic. I can’t argue with these facts, but there are other facts (50 million people dead from World War II) that argue that we humans still need a lot of therapy. The best way that I see to illustrate our progress is to note that the average Joe in America today lives a far more comfortable and secure life than kings from the Middle Ages.
How do we get it so wrong?
Given these facts, most of which are well known, why are we susceptible to the Chicken Littles of the world? Why do we think things are getting worse when they’re clearly getting better? Pinker answers:

  • Modern news-gathering organizations give us a much more complete view of world problems than we’ve ever had. Every hideous death and every local skirmish are made available for our consumption.
  • Bad news is more memorable, is more easily recalled, and more powerfully colors our views of the state of things.
  • Good-works organizations don’t raise money by telling us how great things are.
  • We in the West feel guilty because of the bad stuff we’ve done—the treatment of native peoples, colonization, Dresden and Hiroshima, etc.—so we downplay the good we do.
  • Our standards are outpacing our behavior. It’s easy to identify problems and raise our standards bar so that past actions are no longer acceptable, but actually changing the behavior is tougher. This is a glass half full/half empty problem: we may lament that death-row inmates have been wrongly convicted while capital punishment is still legal, but we ignore the fact that people used to be tortured to death for merely insulting the king.

This touches a bit on the subject of my book, Future Hype: The Myths of Technology Change (2006). We focus on the latest technology and its impact on our lives, when this is minor compared to the social upheaval that the Industrial Revolution caused. We have temporal myopia: that which is happening in front of us we see clearly, but we think little of the past.
Rules of the game
Christian pundits know the emotional buttons to push to keep the fire stoked and themselves relevant. Even when they’re plainly and laughably wrong, some are able to stay relevant.
The apocalyptic book 88 Reasons the World Will End in 1988 sold 4.5 million copies. Oops—didn’t happen. Did that spectacularly bad prediction poison the well for future end-times prophets? Not at all. It’s a topic that can always be made fresh for a new generation.
Hal Lindsey and Pat Robertson made predictions that didn’t come true, but they’re still in the game. Evidence and accuracy are apparently malleable in this world.
That’s surprising, because the Bible itself cautions against charlatans. “We who teach will be judged more strictly” (James 3:1). The Old Testament punishment for a false prophet was severe, with no mention of second chances. God said:

A prophet who presumes to speak in my name anything I have not commanded … is to be put to death. You may say to yourselves, “How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the Lord?” If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken. (Deut. 18:20–22)

No, death isn’t the option. And consequences for ridiculous fear mongering apparently aren’t an option either. When close to half of Americans anticipate the second coming, these TV personalities will still be able to push Christians’ buttons.

Folks, the end time prophesies are literally exploding before our eyes.
That tells me the rapture of the church is even closer than we dared believe. …
I’m so convinced that we are in the final days of this age.
— Hal Lindsey (2011)

The decade of the 1980s
could very well be the last decade of history as we know it.
— Hal Lindsay (1980)

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