Wanna Die for Jesus? (2 of 2)

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Let’s conclude our look at the perplexing idea that Jesus would want you to die for him or at least be willing to (part 1). This idea comes from “Dying for Jesus” by David Mills.

There’s an important symmetry. (Or is there?)

I’m groping for the logic here. Maybe . . . Jesus was willing to die for you, so you should be willing to reciprocate? That might work if you and Jesus were in the same infantry unit. You’d risk your life to protect your buddies, and you’d expect them to do the same. But how does that make sense when Jesus is invulnerable? If you’re in the same platoon as Superman, what you’d never think is, “He’d risk his life for me, so I’ll do the same for him.”

If I sacrificed my life for Jesus, I’d be dead. When Jesus “sacrificed” for me, he wasn’t really dead, since he popped back to life in a day and a half. (More on how Jesus’s crucifixion doesn’t make sense here.)

Where is this die-for-each-other symmetry in the Bible? The closest I can find is Paul encouraging Christians to “[offer] your bodies as a living sacrifice” (Romans 12:1), but this is a basically a call to dedicate one’s life to God. That’s quite different from dying.

You’ve probably heard the mindless Christian aphorism, “God never gives you more than you can handle.” The idea is that if you ever reach your limit of anguish, God will ensure that conditions don’t get worse, but there’s no evidence for this. It’s wishful thinking. Christians die painful, tragic deaths just like anyone else. Ask the people who commit suicide if they’ve been given more than they can handle.

Who does this make Jesus look like?

Dying for Jesus makes so little sense that I wonder if they’re imagining themselves in the role of Isaac, making this just a perverse loyalty test. An angel will zoom down at the last minute, right? But this turns Jesus into Jim Jones. Close to a thousand followers in Jones’ crazy jungle cult were occasionally forced awake in the middle of the night and ordered to drink what they were told was poison. After 45 minutes, they were told that it wasn’t, that it had been a loyalty test, and they were sent back to bed. This training disciplined them to accept suicide when the time eventually came. How can this be any parallel to the religion of a loving god? Is Christian judgment this distorted?

This is persecution porn. Christians in the U.S. are so persecuted, amirite brother? One of the comments to Mills’ article quoted early church father Tertullian: “The blood of martyrs is the seed of the church.” For Tertullian, martyrdom was a thing. It’s not for Christians in America today, but if they want to imagine how tough it is for Christians today, they can do so without much consequence. We live in a society with airbags that coddles Christians, allowing them their fantasy. Christians can be like the person who thinks that sitcoms are real or that food comes from the back of the grocery store.

Been asked to die for Jesus lately?

Christians today aren’t asked to die for Jesus, but no thanks are due Jesus. Church-state separation is why Christians of the wrong denomination (or indeed anyone with any worldview) aren’t tortured to death in the West today.

Remember Edmund Campion from part 1. He returned to England as a Catholic priest in 1580 and conducted services in secret, which was very illegal in Elizabethan times. He was captured, convicted of sedition, and executed slowly. With church-state separation in England, Campion the martyr would’ve been Campion the footnote of history.

The lesson of Campion’s story isn’t “What marvelous devotion to the Lord!” or “That’s why you should be Catholic and not Anglican.” No, the lesson is that free speech shouldn’t be a capital crime. Anyone moved by Campion’s story should ensure it doesn’t happen again by working to keep church and state separate. In the U.S., that protection comes from the First Amendment to the Constitution. If you want to declare yourself for Jesus in the presence of men (see Matthew 10:32–3), you’re welcome to. Thanks, First Amendment.

Let’s be clear on the hero in this story. It’s not Jesus. Jesus didn’t swoop in to save Campion. The hero is secular government. In a secular society, non-believers as well as believers of all kinds are allowed to think and believe as they choose.

Note also that this gives no evidence for the correctness of the claims of Christianity. There’s not even a claim that Campion received any special revelation or confirmation to provide some sort of comfort that he’d backed the right horse. The opposite is true, because this was a missed opportunity for Jesus. He not only failed to tell English society the correct resolution of the Campion matter, he didn’t bother to step in to resolve the other Christian conflicts—the Thirty Years War, the Crusades in the Middle East, the Albigensian Crusade in France, the Inquisition, and so on.

Wrapup

Mills gives this summary.

We have one way of knowing (as much as we can) if we would go all the way to death in serving Jesus. . . .

[Campion] practiced being faithful, in little things and big things. He grew both in his love for his Lord and his ability to say no to the world. When the persecutors threatened to kill him, he loved Jesus too much and was too well-trained to give in.

It’s true that Christians killed other Christians by the millions in the not-so-distant past, but that’s where Mills’ thinking is stuck. Don’t celebrate Edmund Campion dealing with an inhuman situation brought about by religion. Rather, celebrate modern secular democracies that make that situation inconceivable.

Common sense is not a gift, it’s a punishment.
Because you have to deal with everyone who doesn’t have it.
— George Bernard Shaw

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Image from jimmy brown (license CC BY 2.0)
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Wanna Die for Jesus?

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Would you die for Jesus? That’s the question asked to Christians in a recent article from the online ministry The Stream.

But hold on . . . does Jesus want Christians to die for him? What sense does it make for ordinary mortals like us to die for an immortal god? Who could possibly benefit? How could such a sacrifice possibly inform a god who already knows everything?

Let’s try to make sense of “Dying for Jesus” by David Mills.

Two contemporary lives that ended very differently

Mills illustrates serious devotion to Jesus through the lives of two accomplished men of Elizabethan England. The first was Tobias Matthew, who become the Archbishop of York in the Church of England and died in 1628 at the age of 81.

The second was Edmund Campion. Though he was a few years older than Matthew, the two were contemporaries at Oxford. Campion followed a different path. At age 24, he became an Anglican deacon, but he held Catholic views and soon had to retreat from public view, leaving England for Ireland and then the Continent. He became a Jesuit and, at age 40, returned to England to preach. At the time, preaching Catholicism was treason, and he held services in secret. He was soon captured and put in the Tower of London. When he acknowledged Elizabeth as the queen, showing that he had no goal of replacing her with a Catholic monarch, he was offered freedom and the position of Archbishop of Canterbury. He refused because he couldn’t renounce his Catholicism. He was tried, convicted of sedition, and executed painfully.

Mills’ point is that this is what true devotion to Jesus looks like.

God’s perfect plan

The article includes a bit of atheist wit. Under a painting of Christians being fed to lions in a coliseum is the line, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.”

(Which reminds me of another clever meme I saw at The Stream, to which I responded in this post: Prayer: Because Jesus Already Knows What You Want, He Just Wants to Hear You Beg.)

On the question of Christian martyrdom, Mills asks if your faith is strong enough that you’d die for Jesus. Would you have the mental strength of Edmund Campion?

And there’s the problem: where did this concept of dying for Jesus (rather than the other way around) come from?

In three gospels, Jesus told his disciples to take up their cross and follow him. That might mean living a life that sets a good example, sharing the Good News when the opportunity presents itself, and so on. But where does martyrdom fit in? Both testaments of the Bible make clear that God protects the righteous.

The LORD will keep you from all harm—he will watch over your life (Psalm 121:7).

No harm overtakes the righteous, but the wicked have their fill of trouble (Proverbs 12:21).

We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin; the One who was born of God keeps them safe, and the evil one cannot harm them (1 John 5:18).

(Yes, there are also verses that promise persecution. One example is 1 Peter 4:12: “Do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you.” The Bible, as usual, can be used to argue both sides. To any Christian who offers that argument, I say: you’re right; you win—the Bible is contradictory.)

Not only will no harm come to these people, but much good is promised in this life, not just in the hereafter.

[God said:] Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse . . . and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it (Malachi 3:10).

[Jesus said:] No one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age (Mark 10:29–30).

Where in the Bible is the demand to die for Jesus? Endure difficulties for the truth, sure, but die?

It’s all about Jesus’s honor

Mills’ point is that Christians have taken that first step already by committing to Jesus, but they must practice daily. Take out the Jesus part, and it sounds good to me. Mills said:

Do we walk the second mile, turn the other cheek, forgive those who hurt us, stand up for others who need our help, stand with Jesus when the world demands we give Him up?

[You try to avoid] complaining to yourself about your spouse or children when they annoy you. And cheerfully doing the little things for them you wish they’d do themselves.

Be a decent person—I get it. Things go off the rails, however, with his conclusion:

And most important, standing up for Jesus when you need to. That’s the best training and the best test. Will you really face the lions if you can’t face the conceited atheist at the office?

Being a good person is important, but defending Jesus’s honor is more important? Let me suggest instead that we focus on what we know exists (you and your interactions with family, friends, and others) as our first priority and let the mythology prove its worth before we worry too much about it.

If Jesus’s honor is being defamed, why can’t he deal with that himself? He could do a much better job. And where’s the evidence? Why isn’t Jesus’s good name as widely accepted as that the sky on a clear day is blue?

Take another example: suppose a gunman said to you, “I say your father is a rotten scoundrel. Contradict me, and I’ll kill you!” What would you do? What would your father want you to do? No father worth the title would consider his own honor to be more important than your life. I respond to another Christian apologist and explore the question of a gunman asking, “Are you a Christian?” here.

And why are we worrying about something so petty as someone’s honor anyway? That’s the last thing an actual god would want your help with.

Think about this idea of dying for Jesus. Suppose you were a king. Would you accept a barricade of three-year-old children or puppies sacrificing their lives for, not your life, but your honor? What heroes need ordinary people to defend their honor or would want to test the allegiance of their followers?

(More on the illogic of all-wise gods needing worship here and on how the Great Commission doesn’t apply to you here.)

Conclusion in part 2.

Quantum Hermeneutics
n. The principle of biblical interpretation
whereby a verse changes meaning
each time an inconsistency is discovered,
thereby rendering it impossible to directly observe a mistake.
— Neil Carter

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Image from engine ekyurt (free-use license)
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Christianity’s Immovable Rock vs. Its Irresistible Force

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Christianity has two conflicting schools of thought. One says that evidence is the Christian’s friend and that an open-minded skeptic who follows the evidence will soon become a Christian. The other school cautions that such an empirical belief is grounded in science rather than God, and if science changes (as it sometimes does), that belief would then rest on nothing.

So which is it? Are science and evidence reliable paths to faith or just temptation from Satan?

I do enjoy watching Christian-on-Christian action, so let’s get the popcorn, explore these two options, and enjoy the show.

Science supports Christianity

Lord Kelvin said, “If you study science deep enough and long enough, it will force you to believe in God.” Modern apologists make a similar argument, though they often give themselves license to select the science they like and reject what they don’t. For example:

Throughout the ages true science has repeatedly confirmed Christ’s words. True science is the Christian’s friend, and the enemy of the evolutionist.

(Unsurprisingly, this claim, with its anti-evolution bias, was made by a not-biologist.)

There are many organizations like the Discovery Institute, Stand to Reason (Greg Koukl), Reasons to Believe (Hugh Ross), Cold Case Christianity (Jim Wallace), and Reasonable Faith (William Lane Craig) that enthusiastically point to science to support their Christian position.

One extreme approach is to simply declare your faith position correct with respect to science. For example, here’s a tenet from the faith statement of 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. Of primary importance is the fact that evidence is always subject to interpretation by fallible people who do not possess all information.

You see, if there’s a conflict, it’s because fallible people got it wrong. Cuz Jesus.

Science makes a poor foundation for faith

Other Christian sources see science as the bad guy.

The faith which the Christian has cannot be destroyed by the results of scientific study either, since that faith doesn’t depend on science. To base our faith on the proposition that a particular scientific theory is true or false is to build it on the wrong foundation. (Source)

Here’s input from Ken Ham of ICR:

We should be very wary of any idea about life that has a consensus among non-Christians. Sadly, many Christians listen to the ideas of secular scientists and try to add these to the Bible. This shows that they have the same problem as the non-Christian—they don’t want to submit to God’s Word.

This is sometimes put more forcefully: don’t use a scientific conclusion as part of the foundation of your faith, since science is always tentative. That foundation might crumble as science changes, which would put your faith at risk.

A weakness of this position is that such an apologist is never committed to the argument. They might say, “Well, how do you explain abiogenesis?” or “You can’t tell me what caused the Big Bang!” but those are just ploys. When science reaches a conclusion about any of these questions, the apologist will drop it and pick up the next challenge du jour. Nothing’s at stake. They demand that you question your worldview but refuse to reciprocate.

If you come across such an argument, you can dispel the smoke screen by asking if they would drop any part of their faith after science answered their question. If the answer is no, responding to their question is a waste of time.

Let’s consider this science-averse position. “Faith” is popularly defined by many apologists as synonymous with “trust”—that is, belief firmly grounded in evidence. If that’s what faith means to you, you should lose your faith when popular apologetics arguments are answered by science. Or, if your belief depends on nothing tangible, admit it, say that you “just believe,” and drop any pretense of grounding your worldview in evidence or having an argument that would convince someone else. (More on faith here.)

The Christian rebuttal

Apologist Jim Wallace makes an excellent argument against this position. He considers evangelical Christians who justify their belief in some experience or feeling and asks,

Could my Mormon friends and family make the same [experiential] claim? If they could, then your claim probably is insufficient. (Cold Case Christianity podcast for 5/12/16 @15:00)

That is, if you would reject Mormons grounding their faith in nothing more than a powerful feeling, why think that grounding is justified for you?

Conclusion

So which is it? One option is to keep faith and science separate and look for God to show you with some feeling or experience that you’ve chosen the right path. But then your position is no more compelling than that of anyone claiming a similar experience from their deity.

Or do you ground your faith in science? But then you risk a change in science undercutting that foundation.

Sometimes Christians do my work for me.

See also: Science and Christianity: A Dangerous Mixture

If you were convinced that elves make it rain,
every time it rained you’d see evidence of the existence of elves.
— seen on the internet

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/15/16.)

Image from Amit Patel (license CC BY 2.0)
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Can a Moral Person Eat Meat?

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Morality changes, and we shake our heads in disbelief at the conditions that Western society tolerated just a century or two ago—slavery, child labor, mental hospitals as warehouses, voting for white men only, and so on. But let’s not pretend that we’ve now got it all figured out. A century in our future, society might look back on our world in disbelief at the moral errors (from their standpoint) that we found acceptable. Raising animals and then killing and eating them may be one of these moral errors.

There is a solution: cultured meat.

The moral issue

How many of us know someone who studied where meat comes from or took a tour of a slaughterhouse and became a vegetarian as a result? Some cows, chickens, and pigs live fairly natural lives before they are killed for meat, but millions don’t.

I eat meat. What’s my moral excuse? If pressed, I’d argue with a combination of “I enjoy eating meat” and “Yeah, but everyone else is doing it.” There is a health benefit—getting the right amino acid mix is easy from meat, but from plants it requires some effort—but that is easily resolved. By eating meat, I’m taking the easy route, but I don’t have much of a moral defense.

Five years ago, I listened to a Sam Harris interview with Uma Valeti of Memphis Meats, one of the first companies working on cultured meat. I’ll review that interview and summarize what’s happened since.

The environmental issues

The magnitude of the environmental problem is as shocking as the moral one.

  • Land use. Pastureland (land used for open grazing as well as that used to raise crops for livestock) is one quarter of the earth’s land area (Annenberg). “Only about 20 percent of the planet’s agricultural land is used to produce food that is eaten directly by people, while about four times as much is used to feed livestock” (Union of Concerned Scientists). Cultured meat may use 98% less land.
  • Greenhouse gases. Cows produce a lot of methane. The agriculture contribution to worldwide greenhouse gases is 15% (UN FAO). Cultured meat may reduce that by 95%.
  • Deforestation. The need for more pastureland is a major driver of deforestation (Union of Concerned Scientists).
  • Water use. “The consumption of animal products contributes to more than one-quarter of the water footprint of humanity.” Source
  • The environmental impact of beef is especially large: “Nearly 60% of the world’s agricultural land is used for beef production, yet beef accounts for less than 2% of the calories that are consumed throughout the world. Beef makes up 24% of the world’s meat consumption, yet requires 30 million square kilometres of land to produce. In contrast, poultry accounts for 34% of global meat consumption and pork accounts for 40%. Poultry and pork production each use less than two million square kilometres of land.” Source

These problems also touch on political tensions caused by scarce fresh water and climate change. There’s also the energy used and the pollution caused by raising livestock.

Could cultured meat be the answer?

A 2013 article titled, “A quarter-million pounder and fries” documented the taste test of a €250,000 hamburger, the first made from cultured beef. We have a long way to go, but, as Sam Harris noted, the cost to sequence a human genome is now around $1000, while the first one, sequenced in 2003, cost $3 billion. There is room for optimism.

Valeti of Memphis Meats cites the problems with the status quo, both moral and environmental, as the motivation for cultured meat.

  • No antibiotics would be needed with cultured meat (70% of antibiotics used in the U.S. today are for livestock).
  • The amount and kind of fat in cultured meat can be tuned.
  • There are more than 2 million illnesses every year from eating meat and poultry in the U.S.
  • Eliminating animal breeders would reduce the likelihood of pandemics.
  • Prion disease such as BSE (mad cow disease) would be eliminated.
  • The cultured process is more efficient. It now takes 23 calories to make 1 calorie of beef, while Valeti’s process should require just 3 calories.

How will the public respond?

Harris said that his own informal Twitter poll reported that, while most people would switch if the cost and taste were identical to conventional meat, the creepiness factor was a problem to some. I suppose they imagine peacefully grazing cows tenderly managed by hay-chewing cowboys on horseback replaced by bubbling vats of chemicals monitored by white-coated technicians. So they’re grossed out by vats but okay with a slaughterhouse?

“Natural” as a trait of food is in vogue, and there will be pushback against cultured meat. But how natural is our food today? Jason Matheny, a director of a nonprofit that funds research on cultured meat, said:

Cultured meat isn’t natural, but neither is yogurt. And neither, for that matter, is most of the meat we eat. Cramming 10,000 chickens in a metal shed and dosing them full of antibiotics isn’t natural. I view cultured meat like hydroponic vegetables. The end product is the same, but the process used to make it is different. Consumers accept hydroponic vegetables. Would they accept hydroponic meat?

We’re not there yet

We must hold off on the celebrations. Hamburgers and sausage may happen soon, but complex structures like steak will take longer. A technology maxim that we often forget is that you can’t schedule a breakthrough. And the politically powerful ranching industry might put up regulatory roadblocks to defend the status quo.

But cultured meat seems inevitable. Memphis Meats has raised the most funding so far (nearly $180 million), and there are about 30 cultured meat startups worldwide.

The switch to a diet with meat has been credited with changing our genus and permitting our large human brain. Maybe we’ll soon be able to eat that diet with a clear conscience.

In 50 years, I personally believe that
the thought of slaughtering animals for meat
will be laughable.
— Uma Valeti of Memphis Meats

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/11/16.)

Image from IQRemix (license CC BY-SA 2.0)

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Abortion: Does the Bible Say When Life Begins?

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does the bible say when life begins?

Does the Bible say that life begins at first breath? If so, that strengthens the pro-choice argument.

Tim Barnett from the Stand to Reason ministry uses his background as a teacher to grade the logic of arguments that attack his conservative Christian beliefs. His video series is called Red Pen Logic. Today’s topic is, “The Bible Doesn’t Say What He Thinks It Says.”

The problem comes from actor and political commentator John Fugelsang, who attacked the popular Christian claim that life begins at conception with this tweet:

Well don’t tell God [that life begins at conception], bc the Bible says Life begins at First Breath.

Sorry, I didn’t write it.

Fugelsang is probably referring to this verse from the Garden of Eden story: “Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7).

The importance of “breath”

Barnett responded that God breathed into Adam, and then Adam came to life. The “breath” wasn’t Adam’s first breath, like a newborn’s first breath would be. This is a unique situation and doesn’t apply elsewhere.

But the Jewish interpretation disagrees, and this is critical since Jesus was a Jew. Breath is central to the Genesis idea of life. In the verse above, “the man became a living being,” is literally translated as, “the man became a breathing creature.” Breath is roughly synonymous with life.

Not only does the Bible say that the “breath of life” is what living things have, it’s what they don’t have when they die. This is what the dying animals during the Flood lost: “Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died” (Gen. 7:22). Another example is from the Canaanite genocide: “But as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive” (Deuteronomy 20:16). One commentary says, “Breath is understood to be essential to life; and that when the breathing stops, life ends.”

The Christian case

And now comes the obligatory dueling Bible quotes part of the argument. Barnett says that the Bible recognizes life before “first breath” and says, “The Bible consistently elevates the status of unborn humans to valuable individuals.”

He cites two Bible passages. First, “You formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13). That sounds pretty bland, but Barnett interprets this to mean that we exist “as ourselves” before birth.

I don’t see it. First, “knitted” (Strong’s #05526) is more literally “wove,” as would be done with a protective screen or fence woven from branches, and by implication it can mean to fence in, cover, or protect. Yes, it’s important for a fetus to be in a protective womb when it is developing, but this simply acknowledges the gestation process. During that process, you aren’t you, but (with luck) you will be by the end.

Read that entire psalm. It’s a worshipful acknowledgement of God’s omniscience and power. Some variation on “you were you even at the beginning of the gestation process” is not the message.

Barnett’s second Bible response is Luke 1:41–44 where John the Baptist (as a fetus in his mother Elizabeth) leapt for joy when he first came in contact with Jesus (as a younger fetus in Mary). He tells us, “Jesus and John were themselves long before first breath.”

What does that even mean? Yes, the process of gestation was underway. That’s it. At that stage, they might have looked to the untrained eye indistinguishable from an elephant. “[They] were themselves” distills down to their DNA being in place and functioning, I guess—pretty underwhelming.

Passages on the other side of the question

Let’s return to the Bible for verses showing God’s attitude toward life. Exodus 21:22–3 says that if a man injures a woman and causes a miscarriage, he is only fined. If instead he causes an injury to the woman, he is penalized “an eye for an eye.” In other words, a fetus is less important than an adult.

Here, though, experts differ on the best interpretation. Are we talking about a miscarriage (the fetus dies) or just a premature birth (it lives)? If the latter, just a fine might be reasonable. This passage doesn’t help us much.

Another is the “trial of the bitter water” in Numbers 5. Here, the issue is a husband who suspects his wife of adultery. The priest creates a potion for the wife to drink, with a curse if she’s guilty. To be clear, the problem isn’t “My wife is pregnant, and I want that fetus gone if it’s not mine” but rather “I need to know if my wife has been unfaithful.” (More here.)

God’s judgment on the woman, if guilty, sounds like a prolapsed uterus. And if the woman were pregnant, that curse would likely cause a miscarriage. God clearly doesn’t much care about a little collateral damage in the pursuit of justice. Maybe pro-lifers like Barrett should take the hint.

The hint gets far louder when you remember God’s rampages. He drowned almost all the life on the planet, and he commanded genocide.

He even demanded human sacrifice. First, he created the law:

Consecrate to me every firstborn male. The first offspring of every womb among the Israelites belongs to me, whether human or animal (Exodus 13:2).

And later, he mocked Israel for it:

So I gave them other statutes that were not good and laws through which they could not live; I defiled them through their gifts—the sacrifice of every firstborn—that I might fill them with horror so they would know that I am Jehovah (Ezekiel 20:25–6).

And the Bible contains a scattering of killings to show that God doesn’t place the lives of babies at the top of his list (see here and here).

Jewish sources on abortion

The Talmud is the source of religious law for rabbinic Judaism. It draws the rather common sense conclusion that the fetus, especially in its earliest days, has a very different moral value than a human child or adult: “The [Talmud] states that: ‘the embryo is considered to be mere water until the fortieth day.’ Afterwards, it is considered subhuman until it is born” (source).

Another source says,

Unlike in Catholicism, in Judaism the fetus isn’t a legal person until it’s born, so abortion can’t be murder. (This isn’t even as different from Catholicism as it seems. The Catholic Church itself didn’t insist that life began at conception until 1869. Before that, the Church tolerated abortions through the 40th day of pregnancy.)

About the abortion debate, one rabbi said,

Most of the [Old Testament verses] that [conservative Christians are] bringing in for this are ridiculous. They’re using my sacred text to justify taking away my rights in a way that is just so calculated and craven.

When does life begin?

This is Barnett’s final question, and here he turns to science rather than the Bible. He cited a book on embryology that said, “[an embryo] is a human being from the time of fertilization.”

This doesn’t help. It just raises the question, what is a “human being”? If it’s by definition a Homo sapiens life form from single fertilized egg cell until death, then sure. But quoting a definition is no argument.

Let me respond with three points. First, the answer to “When did life begin?” is “Life began on earth about 3.5 billion years ago.” The egg and sperm are already alive, so when they join, the fertilized egg cell doesn’t then become alive. What begins is the gestation process for a new offspring.

Note how off-target the mindless celebration of “life” can be. Slugs and mosquitoes are alive, but pests don’t have much inherent value. There’s a range of value here, and we kill living things all the time. We’re all on the same page about the value of a newborn. The problem is giving that single cell the value of a newborn right now, not nine months from now.

A newborn is really complicated

And finally, that brings us to the strangely appealing desire that sucks in many conservative Christians, the need to dismiss the changes that happen during the course of a human pregnancy. Comparing the two ends of that process, there are a few things that are the same. The single cell and the newborn are both alive, and they both have H. sapiens DNA. That’s about it.

But there are some things that are radically different. The newborn has about one trillion (1,000,000,000,000) cells, each one differentiated and fitted with other cells in a precise arrangement. The single cell is . . . 1 cell. The newborn has arms and legs, eyes and ears, a stomach and digestive system, brain and nervous system, heart and circulatory system, skin, liver, and on and on. The single cell doesn’t have a single cell of any of this.

If you want to define “human being” so that it includes both newborn and single cell, that’s fine. But then you need to come up with some term that describes that gap. We have lots of words for subtle differences among young children—newborn, baby, child, infant, toddler, and so on—so surely we can find a word for the enormous change that happens from fertilization until birth. For example, I’d say that a newborn is a person while the single cell isn’t. If you object to the word “person,” then suggest something better. We need a term like “personhood” to describe the enormous spectrum from single cell (not at all a person) to the newborn (100% person).

Biblical arguments have no place in making laws in a country governed by a secular constitution like the United States. And even when we look in the Bible to see what it says, the pro-life argument is poorly supported.

Abortion—the issue that gets followers of Christ
to vote against everything Christ talked about,
by talking about something Christ never talked about.
— @JohnFugelsang

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Image from Kelly Sikkema (free-use license)
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Christianity Missed the Opportunity to Advance Civilization by 1500 Years

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In the first century CE, Hero of Alexandria described the aeolipile (pronounced “ee-oh’-la-pile”), the device shown in the drawing above. A fire below heats water in a boiler. Steam from the boiler enters the hollow ball through the two horizontal pipes that form the ball’s axle. The steam exits the ball as two jets and makes it spin.

We have no evidence that this was more than a curiosity, which, when you think about it, is remarkable. The Roman Empire (of which Alexandria was one of its biggest cities) built roads, bridges, coliseums, temples, and aqueducts that weren’t surpassed in scale for centuries. If they had redirected their engineering genius, could the Romans have launched the Industrial Revolution 1700 years before it actually happened?

The Industrial Revolution

That would seem possible since the Industrial Revolution began in England in 1733 with a far more mundane invention, the flying shuttle. This increased weaving speeds fourfold. The spinners who made the thread now became the bottleneck, but the invention of the spinning jenny a few decades later made them more productive. To spin a pound of cotton had taken five hundred hours by hand. Machines reduced this to twenty hours by 1780 and just three hours a few decades later.

The weavers in this arms race shot back with the water-powered loom in 1785 and later, steam-powered looms. Cotton suppliers became a bottleneck, and the cotton gin (1793) boosted their productivity. By 1830, England had roughly ten million spindles for spinning thread and over 100,000 looms, most powered by steam. One worker had become as productive as several hundred with manual equipment. The mills in Lowell, Massachusetts at this time were producing a hundred miles of cloth per day.

Like the trickle over an earthen dam that becomes a torrent, the change spread and grew. The equipment that worked so well with cotton was applied to silk, flax, and wool. The Jacquard loom wove elaborate designs with punch cards.

The innovation spread to other industries. The manufacture of glass and pottery were automated. More demand for steam power meant more demand for coal, so coal mining ramped up in response. Tin, copper, and lead mining also expanded. Thousands of miles of canals, followed by tens of thousands of miles of railway as well as steamship routes, connected mines to factories to markets.

England had gone in a few generations from a country like every other to a country like no other.

(Much of this is taken from my book, Future Hype: The Myths of Technology Change.)

Enter Christianity

The Roman Empire missed the boat of an early introduction of the Industrial Revolution, but there was another monumental change coming: the sweep of Christianity across Europe.

Emperor Constantine decriminalized Christianity in 313, and it became the state religion in 380. Labor-saving machinery would reduce or eliminate the need for slaves. Many Christian apologists today insist that not only does their religion hate slavery but that we have Christianity to thank for abolishing it in Europe and the United States in the early 1800s. They also tell us that not only does Christianity embrace science but that the Old Testament contains clues to scientific truths that preceded modern science by millennia.

With the Christianization of the Empire in the fourth century, Christians seem to be saying that society was fertile ground for the labor-magnifying ideas of the Industrial Revolution. We know that Christianity can drive innovation given the remarkable period of cathedral building beginning in the twelfth century and the commissioned artwork from the Renaissance. With Christianity newly empowered as it quickly overran the continent, was the first-century aeolipile too distant an invention to inspire the Industrial Revolution? Did the flying shuttle (or any other invention that might drive innovation) simply not occur to anyone?

Debunking the claims

Those are possibilities, but the bigger problem is that Christianity’s claims about slavery and science are false. While the Catholic Church did eventually disavow slavery, that wasn’t until 1965. Not only didn’t the Old Testament reject slavery, it regulated slavery with rules. Old Testament slavery was basically identical to slavery in America. The New Testament is no better, and it tells slaves to obey their masters.

Claims that the Bible anticipated modern scientific discoveries are also wrong. In fact, such claims are inept post-hoc attempts to imagine farsighted scientific observations in verses that said nothing of the kind, and the Bible makes plenty of false claims about science.

Christian Europe didn’t stand out for its nurturing of innovation. Yes, there was innovation during the medieval period (eyeglasses, the water wheel, the stirrup, metal armor, gunpowder weapons, castles, improved plows, crop rotation, and others), but that was in spite of Christianity, not because of it. In fact, much of this wasn’t native innovation but was simply the adoption of foreign inventions.

Christianity has had the opportunity to improve the lot of its flock. It was largely in charge from the medieval period through the Renaissance, but there is little to show for it. Modern apologists struggle to point to fruits of Europe’s Christian period, like universities and hospitals, though these examples wither on inspection. Christian Europe was ruled by superstition, not reason.

The technological and scientific advances that did happen—paintings, statues, cathedrals—were just the Church glorifying itself, rather like the whore in Ezekiel 16. Anything to help the people was inadvertent, and sponsoring or encouraging that wasn’t the church’s interest.

What explains Christianity’s missing its opportunity? We could find excuses. A society is a complex thing after all. For example, it’s possible that a successful society discourages innovation—why mess with it if it ain’t broke? But trying to find excuses for Christianity assumes that it’s just another manmade institution. And, yes, it is. That’s the problem—Christianity looks merely like another human institution. It’s not magical, and it doesn’t harness the power of the Creator of the universe.

Because it should: the Bible promised that God’s people will be vastly more prosperous than others. Jesus said, “No one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age” (Mark 10:29–30). God said, “Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse . . . and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it” (Malachi 3:10).

Science, not religion, has ushered in the health and prosperity that we have today. A peasant living in Europe in the year 1100 would’ve noticed very little different a century later. Contrast that with the enormous jump between 1900 to 2000. That might be worth keeping in mind during the upcoming U.S. presidential campaign.

(h/t: The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire by Richard Carrier pointed out that slavery didn’t hinder industrial innovation.)

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If all the achievements of scientists were wiped out tomorrow,
there would be no doctors but witch doctors,
no transport faster than horses,
no computers, no printed books,
no agriculture beyond subsistence peasant farming.
If all the achievements of theologians were wiped out tomorrow,
would anyone notice the smallest difference?
— Richard Dawkins,
Free Inquiry, 2004 Feb./March. p. 11

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/11/16.)

Image from Wikimedia, public domain
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