Same-Sex Marriage Leads to Police State

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Same old story—same-sex marriage is a slippery slope. Once we allow 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 anti-miscegeny laws 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.
Don’t open that Pandora’s Box labeled “same-sex marriage”!
Here’s a new variation on the Chicken Little fear that the sky is falling. Fellow Patheos blogger Dwight Longenecker doesn’t wonder what’ll come after same-sex marriage. He knows: the U.S. will become a police state.
Hold your arms out for balance, and let’s step through the argument. First, he points to a recent 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—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!

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 get “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 reach for 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. 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.
(Point #2 is where the argument teleports to Crazy Town, IMO.)
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.

Happiness is the only good,
reason the only torch,
justice the only worship,
humanity the only religion,
and love the only priest.
— Robert Green Ingersoll

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Thoughts on the Boston Bombing

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By now, you’ve heard of the explosions at the Boston Marathon. I wasn’t there on Monday, but I was at the finish line years ago when I lived in Boston while attending college.
In the late seventies, the race ended at the Pru in Back Bay. It’s always held on Patriot’s Day, and we had no classes that day. Some friends and I would climb on a particular sign that was wide enough to sit on and which gave a nice view of the finish line. I think it was my idea for us to “air paddle” in unison while astride the sign. A photo of us got into the Boston Globe one year. We made a few people laugh.
This year’s marathon won’t be remembered for much laughing.
At this writing, there is no conclusion about who executed this bombing, and I imagine it’ll be a long time for the clues to be discovered, pieced together, and made public.
This reminds me of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Though this event preceded the 9/11 attacks, rumors immediately spread that a Muslim organization was behind it. That this turned out to be domestic terrorism was a reminder that there’s lots of violence to go around, and we mustn’t jump to conclusions.
Another bombing
Speaking of bombs, did you hear about the dirty bomb plot planned for Obama’s first inauguration in January, 2009? This wasn’t something caught at the border or uncovered in another country. This one was being built domestically.
As with Oklahoma City, the guy behind the plot wasn’t an Al-Qaeda terrorist. James Cummings lived in a small town in Maine. He was a 29-year-old white supremacist who displayed a swastika flag in his home and claimed to own pieces of Hitler’s personal silverware. He was furious at Obama’s election and the bomb was to be his response.
Oh yeah—and he reportedly received $10 million per year from a trust fund.
But here’s the really crazy part of the story: detective work didn’t uncover this plot. Investigators only found out about it after Cummings’ wife killed him with two bullets to the head while he slept, barely a month before Obama’s inauguration. He was well on his way to making the bomb, and investigators found thorium and depleted uranium (bought online) as well as instructions and ingredients for making a bomb.
This doesn’t sound like someone who fit into any of the usual bins. Sounds like a man-bites-dog event that should make it a widely distributed story. Or is its violation of the stereotype why the story isn’t more widely known? Would a Muslim plot foiled in Yemen have made news while a millionaire, wife abusing, white supremacist plot foiled by accident in small-town Maine didn’t?
Maybe Muslim anger is behind the Boston bombing; maybe it’s not. Let’s not speculate too much until the facts are in.
News outlets not 100% reliable.
There’s another takeaway from the Boston bombing for me. A powerful emotional story like this one is a good place to look for change over time. For example, I heard that police had found one unexploded bomb in addition to the two that exploded. Later, I heard that they’d found five.
It turns out that authorities never found any.
And did you hear about the guy who planned to propose after he reached the finish line, but his fiancée-to-be was killed in the blast? Did you hear about the young girl, “running for the Sandy Hook victims,” who was killed? Did you get the tweet that race organizers would pay a dollar for every retweet?
These are sticky stories, but all of them are untrue.
Celebrities have (predictably) jumped in. Many have already speculated about the causes. Michael Moore tweeted “2+2 =.” What’s that supposed to mean? That it’s easy to connect the dots to point to some right-wing nutjob?
A conservative radio commentator tweeted, “[the bombing] stinks to high heaven #falseflag,” which presumably suggests that the bombing isn’t what it appears to be. Maybe that it’s a conspiracy by some left-wing nutjob?
The more important a story, the more it will pick up “improvements” over time. Given what we’ve seen in the first 24 hours after the bombing, imagine how the story of Jesus would’ve changed over its first 24 years.

Be a good guest at the dinner table of life
— A.C. Grayling

Photo credit: TMZ

Attack of the Angry Atheists!

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Some years ago, I attended a lecture by conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza. He began by asking why atheists care about religion. No one goes around complaining about those who believe in unicorns or mermaids, he said, so why should an atheist complain about theists? Theists and atheists should be allowed their separate viewpoints so that everyone’s happy.
The proper place for religion in society
Atheists are annoyed, and yet they have no reason to be, right?
Wrong. But before I get into that, let me briefly summarize the religious aspects of American society that I’m happy with. It’s okay to hand out leaflets in public places (not government buildings or schools—I’m referring to parks or sidewalks) or proselytize from a soapbox. Free speech is great. We all have to put up with hearing stuff we don’t want to, but the good (each of us getting the same rights) outweighs the bad. Churches are fine. I have no problem with someone saying “Merry Christmas” or religious displays on private property. These are all guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The problem
But I do draw a line, so let me summarize some of the things that concern me. I don’t like the tax support for churches ($71 billion in lost taxes each year in the U.S. because church donations are tax deductible). That’s tax money that the rest of us have to make up. I don’t like that all nonprofits’ financial records are available for public scrutiny except those of churches and ministries.
I don’t like “In God We Trust” as my country’s new motto (that change was made about 50 years ago) or on my money. I don’t like “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance (also added about 50 years ago). I don’t like the idea of the Ten Commandments displayed on government property, and I don’t like prayers opening government events like city council meetings.
I don’t like that “I’m more religious than you are” seems to be an important claim to make in politics. In 2002, the Senate passed a resolution in favor of “under God” in the Pledge when that phrase was under attack in the court system. The senators then made a pompous photo op on the Capital steps to demonstrate the God-pleasing (or voter-pleasing?) manner with which they could say the Pledge with “under God.” Even Democrats need to make public pilgrimages to churches to prove their godly credentials.
I don’t like revisionist historians claiming that this country was founded as a Christian nation (an empty argument given the clearly secular nature of the Constitution).
I don’t like religion clouding policy decisions. President Bush reportedly said in 2003, “I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan. And I did, and then God would tell me, George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq … And I did.”
Why is it that if Bush had said, “Poseidon told me to end the tyranny in Iraq,” he would be laughed at, but when he refers to God, it’s okay? I know the answer, of course—it’s because most of the people he’s talking to are comfortable with the idea of God—but is reason a majority-rules kind of thing?
Political lobbyists of any kind can be a problem, of course, but I don’t like the special influence of religious leaders (James Dobson, Pat Robertson, etc.).
I don’t like that policy questions like abortion, gay marriage, and stem cell research are partly driven by religious concerns. I don’t like religion in the form of Intelligent Design masquerading as science in the science classroom. Despite the Dover decision, ID will doubtless reappear, like a hydra.
I don’t like that children are indoctrinated into religion when they’re young and defenseless. I’d like to see religion treated as an adult issue, like cigarettes, sex, or alcohol—something that you can get involved with if you choose, but only after you’re mature enough to weigh the issue properly. Adults are very good at justifying beliefs they arrived at through poor reasoning—that’s why adults from a myriad of religions can each argue with a straight face that theirs is the one true religion. And, of course, this explains why religion must maintain access to children’s minds: their market share would plummet without it.
I don’t like people using religion as a proxy for moral behavior. For example, you’ve probably heard about the survey that ranks atheists as the least trustworthy minority in America.
For more reasons why atheists have a right to be angry, see Greta Christina’s list.
D’Souza is right about one thing—no one complains about belief in unicorns or mermaids. That’s because those beliefs don’t cause harm in society. Contrast that with Christianity.

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force
for atheism ever conceived.
— Isaac Asimov

Photo credit: Dan Santat

500 Eyewitnesses to the Risen Christ? Not Likely.

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The apostle Paul throws down the gauntlet in 1 Cor. 15:6, and many apologists see it as powerful evidence in favor of the resurrection story. Paul in effect dares his readers to go check out his claim if they want. Who would make a claim like this, making himself vulnerable to readers catching him in a lie (or at least an embarrassing error), if he didn’t know it were true?

[Jesus] 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]. (1 Cor. 15:6).

But this confident defense of the resurrection wilts under scrutiny.
Let’s think this through. Imagine that we’re in that church in Corinth and we have just received Paul’s letter.
1. Who are these 500 eyewitnesses? Names and addresses, please? To find out, someone would need to send a letter back to Paul, at that moment 200 miles across the Aegean Sea in Ephesus. If a church member had the money, time, and guts to write this letter, why would Paul have deigned to reply?
Even if Paul had witnessed Jesus in front of the 500 (he hadn’t), it’s possible he wouldn’t have known a single person in the crowd. And even if Paul thought the number was accurate, “500 eyewitnesses” might be all he knew, and he wouldn’t have been able to back it up with any evidence.
2. How many will still be around? Paul writes 1 Corinthians in about 55CE about a supposed event that occurred over 20 years earlier. Of the 500 eyewitnesses, how many are still alive and still in Jerusalem, ready to be questioned?
3. Who could make this trip? Jerusalem is 800 miles away, and getting there would involve a long, dangerous, and expensive trip.
4. How many candidates for this trip? Paul had only started the church in Corinth a couple of years earlier. There would probably have been less than 100 members.* Would even one have the means and motivation to make the big trip to Jerusalem?
5. Who would challenge Paul? If the founder of the church says something, who’s likely to question it? There might well have been people who were unimpressed by Paul’s message, but these would never have joined the church. Others within the church might have become disappointed and left. Even if these people had wanted to embarrass Paul, they wouldn’t have been in the church community to learn of the claim.
6. What did the eyewitnesses actually see? Let’s imagine that we have the money and daring to make the trip, we have a plan for whom to interview in Jerusalem, and we’re rebellious enough to spit in the face of our church’s founder to see if he’s a liar.
After many adventures, we reach Jerusalem. What will the eyewitnesses say? At best they’ll say that, over 20 years ago, they saw a man. Big deal—that’s uninteresting unless they saw him dead before. Had they been close enough to the movement to be certain that they recognized Jesus? Human memory is notoriously inaccurate. There’s a big difference between the certainty one has in a memory and its accuracy—these don’t always go together.
7. So what? Suppose all these unlikely things happen: we make the long trip, we search for eyewitnesses, and we conclude that Paul’s story is nonsense. If we successfully make the long trip back, what difference will this make? Even if we had the guts to tell everyone that Paul’s story was wrong, so what? Who would believe us over the church’s founder? We’d be labeled as bad apples, we’d be expelled from the church, and the church would proceed as before. And Paul’s letter would still be copied through the centuries for us to read today!
In my recent post on the Shroud of Turin, I noted that our very first historical record of the Shroud is a letter stating that the shroud was a fake. That’s done nothing to steer people away from a belief they want to hold. As with the Naysayer Hypothesis, apologists imagine that this argument is far stronger than it is.
Who would imagine that a supernatural claim written two thousand years ago would be compelling when we wouldn’t find it compelling if written two minutes ago?
Let’s consider two possible conclusions about this verse.
1. The resurrection happened supernaturally as the gospels describe it. (Let’s suppose that the gospels all tell the same story.)
2. Tales circulated orally in the years after the crucifixion among Jesus’s followers, with the number of eyewitnesses to the risen Christ growing with time.
Why imagine a supernatural story when a natural story explains the facts?

If you can’t be a good example,
then you’ll just have to serve as a horrible warning.
— Catherine Aird

Photo credit: University of Michigan
* Prof. Philip Harland’s “Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean” podcast #1.5 (“Paul and the followers of Jesus at Corinth, part 2”) argues that each house church would’ve only had dozens of members.
(This is a modified version of a post originally published 12/21/11.)

A Critique of 1 Corinthians 15

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Christians often point to chapter 15 in 1 Corinthians as important evidence for the resurrection. This book, Paul’s first epistle 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 Cor. 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’s writing. The gap from the creation of this epistle to our oldest copy 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.
Now consider more questions about this chapter.

  • 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.
  • Jesus appeared “to the Twelve”? But they were Eleven after Judas was gone, and his replacement was elected after the ascension of Jesus.
  • “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 (his companions at the time saw nothing). Is Paul’s list of appearances above a combination of visionary and actual sightings? If so, which of the others are visionary as well?
  • 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—but most Christians don’t think everyone’s going to the same place.
  • 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 isn’t too surprising, since our concept of a Trinity of co-equal persons was developed in the fourth century, but it does highlight the fact that Paul might be shocked by what Christianity has become.
  • 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?

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

Acknowledgements: I’ve gotten some of these points from The Atheist’s Bible Companion to the New Testament by Mike Davis, Nailed by David Fitzgerald, and one particular sharp-eyed commenter.
Photo credit: Codex Sinaiticus project

Shroud of Turin: An Easter Miracle?

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The Shroud of Turin is a 14-foot-long linen cloth with the faint image of a man. Imagine the cloth going from feet to head along a man’s back, then folding over the head to continue back to the feet.
Many Christians think that it is the burial shroud of Jesus and that the supernatural energy of resurrecting his dead body burned an image into the cloth. It first appeared in history in 1390 in France, and it was moved to Turin, Italy in 1578. Fire and water damage from 1532 are visible on the shroud.
Proponents argue that marks from Jesus’s last hours are on the figure—the nail wounds, the scourgings, and the cuts from the crown of thorns—but is this the real burial shroud of Jesus?
The first problem is scriptural. The shroud doesn’t fit with the story of the empty tomb from the Bible.

[Simon Peter] saw the strips of linen lying there [in the tomb], as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head. (John 20:6–7)

Strips of linen (presumably for the body) and a separate head cloth is not a single shroud. And there is no evidence besides the shroud itself to imagine that first-century Jews buried their dead that way.

They took the body of Jesus and bound it in linen wrappings with the spices, as is the burial custom of the Jews. (John 19:40)

This wasn’t just a pinch of spice—it was 75 pounds worth (John 19:39). The bare body we see in the image shows no evidence of this massive amount of spice.
Next, an artistic problem. If a linen cloth were laid over a prone person, it would drape over the face. That is, it would wrap around to some extent.
A typical man’s face is roughly six inches wide. But it’s more like eleven inches from one ear, across the face, to the other ear. Granted, the shroud wouldn’t be vacuum-sealed to hug the face completely. But we would expect to see some wraparound distortion to the image when the shroud was later laid flat. The face image is actually thinner than an ordinary person’s face, not wider, as it ought to be.
Could this have been a hoax or some other fake? Traffic in holy Christian relics was common during the medieval period—it’s been said that there were enough pieces of the cross to build a ship and enough nails from the crucifixion to hold it together. And this wasn’t the only shroud—history records forty of them. Obviously, at least 39 of these must be false.
In fact, our first well-documented discussion of the shroud in 1390 states that it is a forgery and that the artist was known.
(An aside: I’ve written before about the apologists’ Naysayer Argument, the claim that the gospel story must be true because, if it weren’t, rebuttals from contemporaries would have shut it down immediately. The Shroud debate nicely defeats this argument. Our oldest reliable source is a rebuttal of the supernatural claim of the shroud, and yet this obviously didn’t eliminate Christian belief in it.)
Many problems argue against the shroud being the real thing. Carbon dating says that the linen is from the 1300s, there is evidence of tempera paint creating the image, 2000-year-old blood should be black and not red, pollen on the shroud seems to be only from Europe and not also Israel, the weave of the fabric doesn’t appear to be authentic, and so on. Christian apologists have a different way to rationalize away each of these problems, but the most economical explanation, the single argument that neatly explains the evidence, is that it’s a fake.
There’s a surprisingly large amount of information on this topic. It is clearly important for a lot of people. The best that can be said of the shroud is that we can’t prove that it wasn’t the burial cloth of Jesus. But that’s no reason to believe that it was, at least for anyone who cares to follow the evidence.

To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary.
To one without faith, no explanation is possible.
– Thomas Aquinas

Photo credit: Wikimedia

(This is a modified version of a post that originally appeared 4/4/12.)