Is objectivity about Israel and Palestine possible?

One does despair. The nearest I have read to an objective account is an ageing book called The Palestine-Israeli Conflict by Dan Cohn-Sherbok and Dawoud El-Alami (Oxford, Oneworld 2001) – and that achieves “objectivity” by placing side by side a Jew and a Palestinian with space at the end for “addresses in reply”.  It seems you can buy a used copy from Amazon for one cent!

So I was surprised to find an evangelical writer – albeit what I would call an “informed evangelical” – veering very close to objectivity on the question of who “owns” Jerusalem. While the opening chapters of Whose Holy City? (Lion 2004) treat the accounts of Genesis through to Judges less critically than I would – for example I don’t believe the stories of Abraham, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim, are strictly in the realm of history – or no more or less so than tales of the Trojan War, Colin Chapman becomes a very reliable guide to what happened from the reign of Constantine to close to the present day. He does concede that the Book of Daniel was written some four centuries after its apparent date, and further that it is reading against the grain to use it as any kind of road-map of the future.

A former Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Near East School of Theology in Beirut, Chapman well understands the claims of all parties to the “Holy City”. His solution is, unfortunately, not one the current Israeli government is likely to countenance.

One very useful contribution Chapman makes – just one of many – is to unmask the currently fashionable “rapture/Christian Zionist theology” as, well, heterodox in the extreme, a Johnny-come-lately in Christian history and, frankly, a parodic interpretation of the Bible. On that see too this page of quotes and reviews of another book, Stephen Sizer, Christian Zionism, Inter-Varsity Press (an evangelical publisher) 2004. I haven’t read it.

Related too is the Joint declaration by Christian Leaders on Israel’s 60th Anniversary, signed by, among many others, our own Tim Costello.

We, the undersigned, church leaders and representatives of our different denominations and organisations, join together on the 60th anniversary of the Israeli state to offer a contribution to that which makes for peace.

We recognise that today, millions of Israelis and Jews around the world will joyfully mark the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel (Yom Ha’atzmaut). For many, this landmark powerfully symbolises the Jewish people’s ability to defy the power of hatred so destructively embodied in the Nazi Holocaust. Additionally, it is an opportunity to celebrate the wealth of cultural, economic and scientific achievements of Israeli society, in all its vitality and diversity.

We also recognise that this same day, millions of Palestinians living inside Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and the worldwide diaspora, will mourn 60 years since over 700,000 of them were uprooted from their homes and forbidden from returning, while more than 400 villages were destroyed (al-Nakba). For them, this day is not just about the remembrance of a past catastrophic dispossession, dispersal, and loss; it is also a reminder that their struggle for self-determination and restitution is ongoing.

To hold both of these responses together in balanced tension is not easy. But it is vital if a peaceful way forward is to be forged, and is central to the Biblical call to “seek peace and pursue it” (Ps. 34:14). We acknowledge with sorrow that for the last 60 years, while extending empathy and support to the Israeli narrative of independence and struggle, many of us in the church worldwide have denied the same solidarity to the Palestinians, deaf to their cries of pain and distress.

To acknowledge and respect these dual histories is not, by itself, sufficient, but does offer a paradigm for building a peaceful future. Many lives have been lost, and there has been much suffering. The weak are exploited by the strong, while fear and bitterness stunt the imagination and cripple the capacity for forgiveness.

We therefore urge all those working for peace and justice in Israel/Palestine to consider that any lasting solution must be built on the foundation of justice, which is rooted in the very character of God. After all, it is justice that “will produce lasting peace and security” (Isaiah 32:17). Let us commit ourselves in prophetic word and practical deed to a courageous settlement whose details will honour both peoples’ shared love for the land, and protect the individual and collective rights of Jews and Palestinians in the Holy Land.

See also Changing Sides in the Middle East: Zionist and Palestinian Exchange Opinions about Jerusalem.

 

Bad Archaeology

And is there a lot of it around! Bad Archaeology explains itself thus:

We are a couple of real archaeologists fed up with the distorted view of the past that passes for knowledge in popular culture. We are unhappy that journalists with no knowledge of the methods, aims, techniques and theories of real archaeology can sell hundreds of times more books than real archaeologists. We do not appreciate news programmes that talk about ley lines as if they are real. In short, we are Angry Archaeologists.

One of us is Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews, who began work on a version of this site as part of his personal home pages as long ago as 1999. Keith is a local authority archaeologist in North Hertfordshire with a long-standing interest in Bad Archaeology and who has grown increasingly concerned at the profession’s evident unwillingness to deal with it. He is also worried at the growth of anti-Enlightenment attitudes during his lifetime, which he worries may return us to a Dark Age of superstition-based belief.

The other of us is James Doeser, who is currently trying to finish his PhD in government and archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. James is interested in the way efforts to increase public understanding of archaeology (museums, media, tourism etc.) collide with a the belief that everybody has a right to understand the past in whichever way they want. We can’t all be right, can we?

Highly commended. Just to name one field, there is unfortunately a great deal of nonsense out there in the realm of Biblical archaeology. In that area you may also look at another good site, The Bible and Interpretation.

There are many other sections in Bad Archaeology. I will certainly be spending time on it.

Bad Archaeology is all around us: many of its ideas are pervasive in popular culture; its publications sell more than Good Archaeology publications; its web presence is much stronger than that of Good Archaeology. What we are trying to do with this site is to show the utter vacuity of most Bad Archaeology and provide a reference point for Good (or at least, Better) Archaeology.

At the same time, we hope that this site will be a useful resource to people puzzled by various claims about the past, about apparently anomalous artefacts, about religious claims to knowledge that are in conflict with those of science and about assertions that just seem a bit dubious.

Above all, we hope that this site will entertain and amuse you!

 

Joshua to Gaza 2009

It is somewhat ironic that my private Bible reading scheme, which often follows the US Episcopalian lectionary, brought me today to the Book of Joshua.

¹ Now after the death of Moses the servant of the LORD it came to pass, that the LORD spake unto Joshua the son of Nun, Moses’ minister, saying,

² Moses my servant is dead; now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, thou, and all this people, unto the land which I do give to them, even to the children of Israel.

³ Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that have I given unto you, as I said unto Moses.

⁴ From the wilderness and this Lebanon even unto the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, and unto the great sea toward the going down of the sun, shall be your coast.

⁵ There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life: as I was with Moses, so I will be with thee: I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.

⁶ Be strong and of a good courage: for unto this people shalt thou divide for an inheritance the land, which I sware unto their fathers to give them.

⁷ Only be thou strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law, which Moses my servant commanded thee: turn not from it to the right hand or to the left, that thou mayest prosper withersoever thou goest.

⁸ This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success.

⁹ Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the LORD thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.

The first thing that must be said is that we are reading saga and legend here, not history. One may as well take Beowulf literally, though of course Beowulf is very informative about the life and times of its culture and milieu and reflects history, which is also true of Joshua. It is pretty much certain that what really happened was nothing like what we read in this book. I don’t find that a problem, personally. One can be inspired by the words of the last verse there without believing that verses 3 and 4 represent some real kind of divine decree still relevant in 2009. Sadly, not everyone agrees.

Israel and Palestine: A Brief History – Part I on the Middle East Web captures this quite well.

The archeological record indicates that the Jewish people evolved out of native Cana’anite peoples and invading tribes. Some time between about 1800 and 1500 B.C., it is thought that a Semitic people called Hebrews (hapiru) left Mesopotamia and settled in Canaan. Canaan was settled by different tribes including Semitic peoples, Hittites, and later Philistines, peoples of the sea who are thought to have arrived from Mycenae, or to be part of the ancient Greek peoples that also settled Mycenae.

According to the Bible, Moses led the Israelites, or a portion of them, out of Egypt. Under Joshua, they conquered the tribes and city states of Canaan…

Paragraph one indicates what really may have happened; the next paragraph recounts the hallowed legend.

Leaping forward around 4,000 years we find ourselves where we are. You can trace that in varying degrees of depth on that Middle East Web, which I referred you to in my update yesterday on A whiff of sanity.

Long term the approach I commend there will be what must happen, but in the world as it is it will be a long time before such an approach is taken seriously by those in power. The point is, however, that we have been told. What looks like good strategy in current Washington and Tel Aviv or Jerusalem – which really should be an international city as the United Nations long ago proposed – or among irredentists in the Muslim world is actually short-sighted policy. Given that Israel may attain its objectives – more about that in a moment – the true cost is incalculable. In brief it involves fuelling further the problem. It inflames further the grievances that have made too many turn to terror as an appropriate response.  The present cost in human lives and suffering is only too manifest.

In today’s Sydney Morning Herald Paul McGeogh offers an interpretive report that rings true.

THE revelation of the daring objective at the heart of Operation Cast Lead calls for Israel’s air-and-ground assault on Gaza to be given a new name. As the rhetorical layers are peeled back, what we are hearing makes Mission Impossible a more worthy contender.

Tel Aviv’s early insistence that this massive military exercise was about putting a halt to Palestinian rockets being fired into or near communities in the south of Israel never rang true.

Measure it by the number of rockets – 8000-plus over eight years – and indeed it sounds like a genuine existential threat. Consider the toll – 20 Israeli deaths spread over eight years, which is about half the number of deaths in just a month of Israeli traffic accidents – and it all loses its oomph as a casus belli.

Israel does not want to deal with Hamas – it wants to annihilate the Islamist movement.

The Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, said as much when she dashed to Paris last week to head off a French push for a 48-hour ceasefire. "There is no doubt that as long as Hamas controls Gaza, it is a problem for Israel, a problem for the Palestinians and a problem for the entire region," she said.

If there was any doubt after Livni spoke, it evaporated on Friday when the Deputy Prime Minister, Haim Ramon, told Israeli TV: "What I think we need to do is to reach a situation in which we do not allow Hamas to govern. That’s the most important thing."

And at the United Nations in New York, the Israeli ambassador, Gabriella Shalev, also seemed to depart the approved script. "[It will continue for] as long as it takes to dismantle Hamas completely," she said.

Analysis and commentary through the first eight days of this conflict have been about Israel’s goal of stopping the rockets. But if the objective is obliterating Hamas, it does indeed seem an impossible task….

Yesterday in Sydney

Good luck to Obama. Let’s hope for some shift in US policy, which is critical; I am not totally despairing on that front, nor am I totally hopeful.

Update

See Jim Belshaw’s post this morning: Gaza, democracy and the question of world government. Very thoughtful. I think Jim and I share both a certain tentativeness on the issue – which I am sure is a clear sign of intelligence!—and a desire to get beyond the reflex responses we’ve been seeing. That Jim has used one of my photos is of course a bonus.

 

Book notes and footnotes

On the right you will see a small stack of (bargain!) books, two that I have referred to just lately, and one that I am about to review.

The new book

Lawrence Potter (left) has inadvertently led me to a very good book blog via This May Help You Understand the World by Lawrence Potter. As that entry says:

In a confusing universe, it’s reassuring to find that it isn’t only you who doesn’t grasp the intricacies – or even the basics – of the world’s problems. We probably all feel that at some instinctive level we understand most of the big issues, but the truth is – certainly as far as I’m concerned anyway – that we couldn’t even begin to explain the difference between Shia and Sunni Muslims (and why it matters) or the US electoral system, or the Weapons of Mass Destruction controversy, or why the Palestinians are fighting each other or even why organic bananas are so much better for everyone, not just you.

In fact, I suspect that the number of people who could get any further in their explanation than “Err … well …” would be tiny.

Those are just some of the topics covered in this excellent and well-timed book…

I concur! The first entry is on jihad…

Potter is very thorough and up-to-date (as of early 2007 of course). Other topics include: Israel/Palestine, US elections, world trade, climate change, Darfur, Russia, nuclear proliferation, and China. On China, about which I know a bit, I find it very well informed. Back to the review:

Considering what a comparatively slim volume it is, the amount of information in it is amazing, and it’s just so pleasing to be able to listen to a news broadcast or read a paper and actually have a reasonably clear idea of what they’re talking about. In fact, smugness is in danger of setting in …

Oh … and Mr Potter also tackles the thorny question of whether George W Bush really IS stupid.

The answer may surprise you.

And any author who looks like that has to be credible. 🙂

Seriously, this is an excellent and very readable book. He avoids pomposity and excessive predictability or overdone PC. Not a bad achievement, eh! It’s another Best Read of 2008.

Footnotes

Well, that horrible set of events in Mumbai continues to distress and perplex, doesn’t it? In my post Some thoughts on Mumbai I ventured some background gathered from good sources, but the plot really is thickening, isn’t it? Trouble is there are so many vested interests at play here it is hard to know what is most likely. There can be no doubt none of it bodes well.

In today’s Australian one letter writer expresses quite a common view, which would seem to have much in common with what I tried to say in Dark energy, God and humility, which in a way is also about Mumbai…

IT’S all too easy to see the current terrorism in Mumbai as the work of an insane minority. These men are not deranged. They are intelligent and psychiatrically normal men who just happen to believe literally the words of their silly and dangerous religious books.

Both the Koran and the Old Testament frequently advocate violence towards those of differing religious beliefs. Most people, perhaps influenced by secular humanism, instinctively do not take these “silly bits” literally. Unfortunately, a minority of the devout can’t make a distinction.

Until the major world religions, be they Muslim or Christian, are prepared to “clean up” their violent and often murderous literature, they deserve to be proscribed just like any other terrorist group.

David Phillips
Southport, Qld

As John Dominic Crossan says in God & Empire, however, it is not quite as David Phillips and many others portray it. If one considers a dual portrait of God as a God of Violence and/or a God of Love:

It is positively, absolutely not that one solution is found exclusively in the Old Testament and/or the Jewish tradition while another is found exclusively in the New Testament and/or the Christian tradition. It is not ecumenical courtesy, political correctness, or post-Holocaust sensitivity but simply biblical and historical accuracy to insist that both solutions run side by side, and often in the same books, from one end of the biblical tradition to the other. They are asserted relentlessly as the twin tracks of the Divine Express…

He’s quite right, an assertion I base on having read the Bible and Apocrypha from one end to the other, not cherry-picking as I went, and much the same can be said for the Qur’an, a substantial amount of which I have also read. (Few books are more bloodthirsty than The Apocalypse of John, after all.) It is what you do with this that matters. Crossan comes up with one solution, which I am not sure works, but at least leads to a rather healthy analysis of life and politics… I can’t help thinking, though, that the life-time study of the biblical traditions and the Ancient Near East/Greek World/Roman World has led to an only too understandable cultural myopia… We’ve all been there. What he knows he knows in depth and explains very illuminatingly, however. Can’t see fundamentalists liking it one little bit.

I make a case in that “Dark energy” post for quite a radical rethink by believers of their sacred scriptures, one that is not I have to say original to me. At the same time there are those not willing to be quite so radical who can still be perfectly harmless, even desirable, as neighbours and fellow-citizens, even if they regard me with suspicion and I regard them as being a bit cracked. Only through such benign tolerance do any of us have much hope, after all. We don’t have to be right, you know…

And the excellent blog I found…

… It’s Vulpes Libris (The Book Foxes). Have a look.

On Mumbai

This is pretty impressive: Terror in India — Dileep Premachandran. (ABC Unleashed)

 

Dark energy, God and humility

I’m afraid that for me theology really is a branch of poetry. When at Christmas we sing “He came down to Earth from Heaven” we know the preposition is objectively meaningless, that the whole expression reflects a long gone cosmology which saw the sky as a vault or “firmament” with God sitting above it. But I can sing it as a human and traditional way of asserting that the indefinable Ground of Being is close to us, in us, sustaining us. That is by no means a scientific proposition, and I have now lost the attention of just about everyone from more literal-minded Christians on the one hand to atheists on the other, who probably wonder why we bother. By “we” I mean those who share in the kind of theology I am alluding to, but which I do not pretend to expertise in. Explore it (and other theologies) on my links page, if you care to, bearing in mind those are just starting points.

A number of things bring all this forward here again. First, Christmas is coming. Second, I happened to catch Australia Talks on Dark Energy – fascinating, and well worth downloading while you can. You have about two weeks.

It’s called dark energy and it makes up about 73 per cent of the universe but the scientific community isn’t really sure what it is: is it matter, is it a vacuum, is it a constant?

The mystery emerged back in 1998, when astronomers discovered that the expansion of the universe was accelerating; according to theories of gravity and general relativity, it should actually be slowing down. So what’s happening? Enter the idea of dark energy. Could it be a previously unknown fifth force and what does its existence mean for ideas about the big bang and, what’s more, the theory of everything? If you’re a science buff, a star gazer or just interested in new ideas, this is your chance to join the discussion with three of our leading astronomers. We’ll look at Einstein’s theories, glance back to the work of Edwin Hubble, and look forward to what the unravelling of the dark energy mystery might mean.

It was revealed that what we can actually detect with our senses of the universe is just part of 4%, in fact 90% of that 4% is invisible…  That we now exist in such a state of uncertainty is, as one of the guests on the program said, humbling.

Theology and religion need to be humbled too, but the stumbling block, I’m afraid, is the outdated – now so far past its use by date as to be toxic, indeed lethal – view that God has actually spoken or written infallible things which we can now read and follow. This particular teaching is unfortunately at the centre of all the Abrahamic religions, though the way it is manifested or understood varies.

I can believe God “speaks” – but I see that as a metaphor at best. I do not believe God has uttered contracts or documents untouched by human hands. Yet in those various scriptures, and not only on those of the Abrahamic faiths, one may be said to hear the spirit of God, just as long before Abraham was even born, if indeed he was an historic personage, my Aboriginal ancestors heard that spirit by other means, long before the putative era of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, which, it is interesting (as John Dominic Crossan does in God & Empire) to note, is very near the time agriculture and settled town life emerged in the Ancient Middle East. At that time, it could be argued, their world was created.

It is a big issue, this one of sacred scriptures. Even moderate Muslims, for example, are locked in the main into such a belief: “It is a tenet of the Islamic faith that the Qur’an is considered to be the literal, authentic, and unadulterated word of God. It is a tenet of the Islamic faith that the Qur’an is completely authentic; it has not been redacted, altered, revised or corrupted in any way.” – Khaled Abou El Fadl, The Great Threat: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists (Harper San Francisco 2005). That book does go on to say that there are other traditions as well within Islam that need to be considered, and that the way in which the Qur’an’s teaching has been understood or mediated has been rich and various, and this is true. He also sets out to show that there is no necessary contradiction between adhering to Muslim belief, including the tenet under discussion at the moment, and living in a pluralistic or democratic society such as his own USA. Needless to say he does not accept the arguments of the terrorists.

Nonetheless, there is a problem, isn’t there, even if it is not necessarily a problem of being able to get on with one another whatever our beliefs. All that takes, naive as it seems, is the will on both sides to do so. However, see also What Is the Koran? from The Atlantic Monthly January 1999 for, I think, a fair assessment of what the shape of the problem might be.

In mainstream Christianity and in Judaism there are a range of views about their Scriptures, but the recognition they are human documents, albeit “inspired” in some way however that may be defined, has been gaining ground for the last 200 years. Some see this as a degeneration, of course. Unfortunately, the Jewish and Christian scriptures just are fallible human documents, and to pretend otherwise is (I believe) both pointless and dishonest. Also once they are seen for what they are and seen increasingly in their real contexts, the more interesting and relevant they often become. Or so I find.

And yes, there are big issues here about just who Jesus in fact was/is, and what he is for us today. Not to mention that we no longer believe that either Jerusalem, Rome, or the Mediterranean is the centre of the world, but rather that God’s “speech” has been rather more scattered and diverse than we suspected. But that’s enough theology for now.

My point of course is that theology is a very uncertain art, and should be seen by all to be such, whatever the religious tradition it inhabits. (And no, in case you are wondering, Popes are not infallible; even Popes only claim that some of the time, but I don’t believe it is so at all… That is not to say that they are never worth listening to.)

Back to the Science.

I was struck by the fact that the scientific view of the universe has made such a leap since just 1998! It is hard on us oldies, eh!  Now take something as muddled and unscientific as education. Theory there, some would say, oscillates rather than progresses! I know my 1998 essay on literacy is as up to date now as it was then, especially with some web links to places where other more recent discussions might be found.

Ah me, I am a back number, you know. Let’s face it… 😉

• On Dark Energy Fascinating stuff.

 

US election via George Negus, and the language of religion

Well, no doubt about it. Historic is no exaggeration; hence my previous entry in tribute to Martin Luther King, someone on the minds of many people just now. I will come back to that.

Last night I watched George Negus’s Dateline, mainly because here in Elizabeth Street Surry Hills something weird has happened to our communal TV antenna so that we now get SBS on around 4 channels – including digital, which is odd as my TV isn’t digital – but no ABC, except for an unwatchable VHF version. Still, watching George was fine.

GEORGE NEGUS: Martin, if I could go to you. We journalists tend to use
words like ‘historic’ freely as though we really know what it means. But this is probably an occasion when the word ‘historic’ is not out of place, is it?

MARTIN WALKER, POLITICAL ANALYST: ‘Historic’ would be an underestimate. I think the word is ‘epochal’. This is a new epoch in America. It’s also a new epoch for the world, because – let’s be frank – what we’ve really elected here is the guy who is the nearest thing to president of the world, particularly as we’re going into this global recession, because if this guy and his team can’t crack it then we are all in trouble.

GEORGE NEGUS: Clarence, I read a quote the other day from Anita Hill, who most of us know only too well – a person who’s been campaigning and working for this sort of thing for years. And she said that what Barack Obama’s election as president means, is that no longer will black Americans feel as though they can’t hold office in any job in this country, from president down. She also said that it indicates how far this country has come in the last 40 years.

CLARENCE PAGE, CHICAGO TRIBUNE: It does. I started in this business almost 40 years ago. Time does fly. I’m old enough to remember that when I was my son’s age I still had to go to ‘white’ and ‘colored’ water fountains in the South. Virginia just put Barack Obama over the top – that was one of the states of the old South, it was the capital of the old Confederacy. I always told my son, "This is your century – I’m just walking around in it." He has been out there knocking on doors in New Mexico for Barack Obama and when the man went over the top I congratulated my son because he put his work into it. But this is really hard for me to fathom now, because I’d been imagining this day – I wasn’t expecting it to come this soon. I saw Jesse Jackson crying at the celebration, and I think about my 101-year-old grandmother who died last year – didn’t quite live to see this – and you think of all the people who’ve gone before us, and what that means. It is epochal. This is changing the way that Americans look at themselves, I’m sure. It’s not just black Americans, I think, everybody. After eight years of really dwindling image around the planet, now all of a sudden the world is looking at us and seeing once again something to look up to in America. We kind of like that…

The full transcript is available on the link above.

GEORGE NEGUS: Joining us now from New York Australian James Wolfensohn who stepped down three years ago I think it was after 10 years as president of the World Bank, now a US citizen. James, thanks for your time. Good the talk to you.

JAMES WOLFENSOHN, FORMER WORLD BANK PRESIDENT: Nice to talk to you.

GEORGE NEGUS: I was wondering, given your expertise and your experience with the world economy, would you really like to be Barack Obama at the moment, having to take over the reins of the American economy and the impact it’s had upon the world economy?

JAMES WOLFENSOHN: Well, I think he has the most difficult job that any American president Elect has had coming into the global scene. He’s got a $10,000 billion deficit in the United States. He’s got a banking situation where the world central banks have had to come in and pump nearly $9,000 billion into the banks and he has a huge overlay of bad debts around the world and within all of that, he’s got to try and get the economy moving again and stop a decline. So, he has a very, very tough job to do.

GEORGE NEGUS: Do you think he’s up to it from what you have seen and heard?

JAMES WOLFENSOHN: Well, I think he has around him some very good people that he could bring in. People like Bob Rubin, Larry summers and my friend Paul Volker. There are many people around him who have the expertise to try and help, so he could bring in an excellent team. I think he himself has not had a lot of experience, but I think he has both the brains and the judgment to bring in the right people.

GEORGE NEGUS: Jim, your experience of the world economy is vast, as we know, but on a more general level, the rest of the world’s attitude towards selection has been intriguing. The Europeans are 60% in favour of Barack Obama becoming the US president, the Chinese wanted him US President and other countries have. Obama-mania seems to have spread throughout the globe. Is that going to make his job easier or harder, because Joe Biden reckons he will be tested?

JAMES WOLFENSOHN: He will be very much tested. He and Joe Biden will be the most difficult challenge, as I said, that any incoming president or Vice President could have. I think there is a welcome to him because I think the rest of the world felt that the Republicans have not done a great job in the last eight years. But the task ahead of him is not just to provide liquidity to the banks, what has to work through the system are all of the bad debts that are there and to try and restore some sense of enthusiasm so that the economies of the world don’t go into a recession. It is almost certain now that there will be a recession and then Barack Obama has to lead the world by trying to turn that around, as the leader of the largest economy in the world.

GEORGE NEGUS: Do you share John McCain’s view that he is a redistributionist?

JAMES WOLFENSOHN: Well, I think he’s a redistributionist that is clear. It is part of the democratic platform, but the issue for me is not the re-distribution, the more particular issue and the great focal issue at the moment is not changing the tax rates. It is really getting the economy moving again and we have to get the American economy moving again if you are going to get the rest of the world to have the sort of optimism and drive that is necessary…

And there was this:

MARTIN WALKER: George, I’m just remembering that it’s 40 years ago when Martin Luther King was shot, and the day before he died he gave a speech in which he said "I’m not going to get there to the promised land with you, but you’re going to get there, this country will get there". In a way, tonight it’s got there.

CLARENCE PAGE: "One day soon we will get to the Promised Land" that’s what he said. Moses wandered in the Promised Land for 40 years. I did a column earlier this year, about…Isn’t this a coincidence? 40 years later this black man has the possibility…And Barack himself preached in Alabama about "the Joshua generation". It was Joshua who took ‘the children of Israel’ into the Promised Land.

GEORGE NEGUS: We’re getting biblically poetic here – we’re saying that the USA has come out of the wilderness!

I instantly got the reference, as most biblically literate people would. That same “Joshua generation” theme caused some heartache earlier this year with someone on the Daily Kos: The potential naming problem for Obama’s "Joshua Generation Project". The writer went deep into the sewers and drains of US fundamentalism – from the Dominionists to Bob Jones “University” – to show that there were some nasty bits of baggage attached to the name of Joshua. I think it is fair to say that most of those who heard Obama make the allusion would not have linked it to any of that, just as they would not have linked it to the sad but true fact that the Book of Joshua, seen objectively, is something of a tale of genocide, but also a highly unreliable pointer to what actually happened in ancient Palestine some time in the second millennium BC. The power of the allusion derives from the tradition in which Martin Luther King was working — “I have a dream” is a virtual anthology of biblical allusions; it is based on an appropriation of biblical language and hope, not on any consideration of what that language might mean to an ancient historian or a right-wing fundamentalist wingnut. It’s a discourse Americans are accustomed to, and it is indeed very powerful poetically.

In the latest Monthly Don Watson, hardly an evangelical theologian, but rather Paul Keating’s speech writer, has some very interesting things to say, in an aside to an article about Louisiana, about why such language resonates. Unfortunately this article is only available to subscribers.

… In election season the media sea foams with embarrassingly lame professions of understanding, management cliches and stupefying patriotism. While politicians and technocrats of all varieties flounder in phoney empathy, the Bible and the church speak straight to the poor: their metaphors are stronger, their mix of poetry and intellect more potent by far.

People looking for another reason why so many Americans have more use for religion than for politics might begin by listening to a good preacher, and then to the average modern politician. While they’re at it, they might ask where the bullshit is deepest and truth hardest to recognise – in religion or a presidential election…

Martin Luther King was such a good preacher, and so in his own way is Jim Wallis: I have heard him. See Dear Mr. President-elect Obama. I refer you too to an article in Harpers which I first mentioned back in 2005: The Christian paradox: How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong by Bill McKibben, which reflected on what it means to be a Christian in America.

Meanwhile, back to SBS. Clarence Page said he congratulated his son on Obama’s election, because he, Page, felt this was his son’s world now, and he was just walking around in it. I feel rather the same, I have to say. This is the world of The Rabbit, Thomas, and other 20-somethings, and I am just walking around in it. Let’s hope it is a better world.

 

The unexamined religion…

… is not worth believing?

You will find relevant tags and categories in the side bar, and I also refer you to On the awkwardness (and fatuity?) of discussing religion, a post from January 2007, and to the relevant part of the Links Page here. All that is hedging around what may be a can of worms, if you will forgive the mixed metaphor.

I was drawn to this topic by Why I don’t envy Mormon apologists, a thoughtful post from a few days back on Runtu’s Rincón. This is a newish blog from “the heart of Zion in Provo, Utah.”

When I was an “apologist” (read: rationalizer) for Mormonism, I used to talk about the “shelf.” You know, there were things that we couldn’t quite explain, so we put them on a shelf, figuring that eventually God would sort it all out, and we’d see how everything fit together.

Somewhere along the line, the shelf collapsed, and I’m happy to say I don’t have a shelf anymore. Once you acknowledge that Mormonism is not what it claims to be, there is nothing about the religion and its claims that is so difficult to explain that it must go on the shelf until God explains it. But for the apologists, holy crap, what a shelf…

I don’t see this as a bitter post, and you really should read it. Mormons, for whom as people I have respect, do have a problem compared with other fundamentalists in the Abrahamic tradition. It is impossible for a Mormon to engage in any kind of real scholarship on their additional holy book, as there is no trail to follow. All they have is a translation, allegedly, of texts which can no longer be examined. I don’t envy Mormon apologists either. My own feeling, I’m afraid, is that The Book of Mormon belongs to the canon of 19th century American fiction, or pastiche. At least the many texts which make up the Bible, not to mention the ticklish question of the Quran, have a provenance in some cases even firmer than that of some of the Greek and Roman classics. Critical study of that provenance does not deliver what fundamentalists desire, however, as it shows an evolving set of human texts rather than the much desired infallible word of God. While there are many questions of detail to be settled — room for scholarship of the best kind — there is, it seems to me, no doubting that conclusion. Those who resist this scholarship, it seems to me, delude themselves and others.

All of this is in my view consistent — and do note this insistent qualification — with a humble theism. It’s terribly undramatic, I’m afraid, but there you go, and there I am.

As I said, explore what I have said before, and check the links. This is a work in progress, and certainty is not the goal. In fact, I rather see certainty as something of a problem, indeed as a very great danger. Some people are so certain they are willing to kill others who are less certain, or whose certainty does not match that of the homicidal zealot.

We could all do with being more rather than less postmodern in such matters.

 

Bigotry is not confined to the religious or the right wing

AV has made a kind and much appreciated allusion to this blog’s recent travails. However, when he attributes the event to right-wing authoritarianism he is not entirely correct; certainly an authoritarian cast of mind and an antidemocratic spirit are involved. However, the source of the attack was not necessarily motivated by conventional right-wing politics, and certainly not by religion. On the other hand, excessive certainty and intolerance of criticism or difference were part of the picture. In those respects, the spirit of the attack was indeed, as AV notes, antidemocratic.

I can say that it is fairly certain where the attack came from, and what motivated it — the attacker’s problem, that, not mine. The attacker as good as left DNA all over the scene of the crime. In attacking me he also attacked WordPress.com, and I am sure they are not taking it kindly. They are also far more expert in these matters than either the attacker or I. It did amuse me to witness a log file from the time of these events which included a suggestion, obviously emanating from WordPress, that the hacker apply for a job with AutoMattic — the company behind WordPress. I take it that was ironic…

That brings me to two articles and a book which, it seems to me, are the antithesis of bigotry, whether that is religious or antireligious bigotry. I am not saying I agree with them, but I do say they are worth reading. The book is one of my Best Reads of 2008.

My theism is of the most modest kind and would deeply offend fundamentalists. I am thus a great admirer of the former Anglican bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, “a man who, for many conservative Christians, has stretched the definition of liberal theology past breaking point, while remaining for many non-believers the most humane and persuasive apologist for faith.” That comes from a review just published in New Statesman: Doubting Dawkins. Rather than quoting it further, I will simply commend it to your consideration. Holloway’s emphasis on the primacy of compassion does appeal to me.

The second article is from the USA and does raise some interesting questions: Jonathan Haidt, What Makes People Vote Republican? from Edge.org. Again, while not necessarily endorsing all that Haidt says, I do commend it as worth consideration.

…This research led me to two conclusions. First, when gut feelings are present, dispassionate reasoning is rare. In fact, many people struggled to fabricate harmful consequences that could justify their gut-based condemnation. I often had to correct people when they said things like “it’s wrong because… um…eating dog meat would make you sick” or “it’s wrong to use the flag because… um… the rags might clog the toilet.” These obviously post-hoc rationalizations illustrate the philosopher David Hume’s dictum that reason is “the slave of the passions, and can pretend to no other office than to serve and obey them.” This is the first rule of moral psychology: feelings come first and tilt the mental playing field on which reasons and arguments compete. If people want to reach a conclusion, they can usually find a way to do so. The Democrats have historically failed to grasp this rule, choosing uninspiring and aloof candidates who thought that policy arguments were forms of persuasion.

The second conclusion was that the moral domain varies across cultures. Turiel’s description of morality as being about justice, rights, and human welfare worked perfectly for the college students I interviewed at Penn, but it simply did not capture the moral concerns of the less elite groups—the working-class people in both countries who were more likely to justify their judgments with talk about respect, duty, and family roles. (“Your dog is family, and you just don’t eat family.”) From this study I concluded that the anthropologist Richard Shweder was probably right in a 1987 critique of Turiel in which he claimed that the moral domain (not just specific rules) varies by culture. Drawing on Shweder’s ideas, I would say that the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way.

When Republicans say that Democrats “just don’t get it,” this is the “it” to which they refer. Conservative positions on gays, guns, god, and immigration must be understood as means to achieve one kind of morally ordered society. When Democrats try to explain away these positions using pop psychology they err, they alienate, and they earn the label “elitist.” But how can Democrats learn to see—let alone respect—a moral order they regard as narrow-minded, racist, and dumb?…

The book is John Dominic Crossan, God & Empire: Jesus against Rome, Then and Now (Harper San Francisco 2007). You may read the Preface on that second link.

For a very long time I have been pondering the texts and wandering the ruins of the Roman Empire. Initially, I did so as a biblical scholar doing research for books I was writing on the historical reconstruction of earliest Christianity from The Historical Jesus in 1991, through The Birth of Christianity in 1998, to In Search of Paul, co-authored with the archaeologist Jonathan Reed of the University of LaVerne, in 2004. I presume those three books as prelude and preparation for this book on God and Empire.

I have always thought of the historical Jesus as a homeland Jew within Judaism within the Roman Empire. I have always thought of the historical Paul as a diaspora Jew within Judaism within the Roman Empire. For me, then, within Judaism within the Roman Empire has always been the absolutely necessary matrix rather than the annoyingly unnecessary background for any discussion of earliest Christianity. You can see that three-layer matrix, for example, in the sub-titles to the first and last books above. For the historical Jesus, The Life of a Mediterranean Peasant, emphasizes Rome,  Judaism, and Jew.   For the historical Paul, How Jesus’s Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom, emphasizes Jew, Rome, and Judaism. Whether you start or end with the Roman Empire, the Roman Empire is always there.

But there is now a further reason for studying the textual and archaeological history of the Roman Empire. Here is that newer but now accompanying reason. I have been hearing recently two rather insistent claims from across the spectrum of our religio-political life. The first one claims that America is now and/or was always an empire. That, in fact, the virus of imperialism came—like so many other ones—on those first ships from Europe. The second and subsidiary one claims that we are in fact Nova Roma, the New Roman Empire, Rome on the Potomac…

— from the Preface

Certainly the opening chapter is a brilliant exposition of the nature of Rome under the Julio-Claudians, a subject I have studied both at University, and as a sometime Ancient History teacher. Many of the remarks about contemporary America are also apposite. It is also good to find a very learned man who writes like a human!

That said, I am not entirely convinced by all that Crossan says. Yes, he does get up the noses of fundamentalists — and as far as I am concerned that is a big plus. (A Muslim Crossan — and I am sure this is possible and may even exist — would be highly desirable.) I also have to say that the agnostic side of my humble theism is offended by the unspoken assumption that the Mediterranean really is the centre of the world, as the Roman conceit of Medi + Terranean implies. A similar conceit made China, about which Europe and Palestine in the first century knew little and cared less, call itself Zhong Guo or Middle Kingdom. In all our historical and religious considerations, we need above all in the 21st century to take that fact on board. It is an uncomfortable consideration. It does not impact one way or another on our ideas about the existence of God, whatever that word actually means; but it does impact on our views about what God is alleged to have said or done. Inevitably, I would have thought.

TRIVIAL FOOTNOTE

My traditional “Saturday Stats” will appear on Blogspot.

 

Yin/Yang beats Either/Or time after time…

I never said my Christianity was orthodox, though I am happy it is acceptable to South Sydney Uniting Church. In fact I am close in spirit, though not in intellectual stature or importance obviously, to the new Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia who is reported as saying he is an “agnostic with a sense of wonder” despite a Jesuit education. Incidentally, it is one of the more encouraging signs of the times, contrasting with the dark side of the Howard era, that  this happened:

ON his first day as the country’s top judge, Robert French set an early precedent by acknowledging the land’s traditional owners at a ceremony that marked a new era for the nation’s highest court.

Chief Justice French, who has helped to shape the nation’s native title law, said his recognition of the Ngunnawal people was “no mere platitude” and reflected an awareness that indigenous history was “becoming, if it has not already become, part of our national history. The history of Australia’s indigenous people dwarfs, in its temporal sweep, the history that gave rise to the constitution under which this court was created,” he said. “A proper perspective reminds all of us who occupy public office … to see ourselves as other Australians see us. This will often be at best with a kind of sceptical respect.”

That’s not political correctness; it is a healthy decency and a proper pride in this country in all its manifestations over time. Seems we’ve had a good appointment there.

So back to my somewhat Taoist version of Christianity. You do know yin/yang don’t you? M’s pic on the right we called “Yin and Yang” for reasons some will understand. There are so many occasions when Yin/Yang is preferable to the Western insistence on Either/Or. Are you Pro Life or Pro Choice? I would cut out “or”. Are you for socialism or capitalism? I would cut out “or”. I would further say this is not sitting on the fence. It is recognising that the fence is not there. Similarly, at the end of John C Lennox’s often interesting defence of theism God’s Undertaker, Lennox comes up with the classic Either/Or:

Either human intelligence ultimately owes its origin to mindless matter; or there is a Creator.

I would cut out “or”. Further, even if faith makes me lean towards the second it does not make the leap that impels me to accept the Bible as a literal Word of God, because I know from reading it for decades and from studying both history and theology that it is not — and yet there are respects in which I can say it is, or includes words that send me God-ward, and thus I am inspired by those old texts, or some of them. All that will revolt fundamentalists, and other people with tidy minds, but that’s no bad thing. Check the religion section in my links for more resources I do find interesting…

On a dubiously related track: Palin’s pro-life code, loud and clear in today’s Sydney Morning Herald. I refer to Peter Hartcher’s celebration of “the conscience vote.”

… Australian abortion politics exist in a parallel universe. A Tasmanian Liberal, Senator Guy Barnett, is sponsoring a motion that would end Medicare funding for abortions carried out between the 14th and 26th weeks of pregnancy. It is expected to be put to a vote in the next couple of weeks.

This has the potential to ignite a great political conflagration as the pro-life and pro-choice lobbies fire up. Abortion remains one of the most emotionally powerful issues in human affairs. But are the Australian political parties gearing up for a mighty struggle on this?

Not a bit of it. The Labor and Liberal parties have both decided that they will not put a party position on this. Both parties will allow their members a conscience vote. There are to be no party positions; only personal ones.

This is the standard approach in the Australian system to difficult matters of reproductive morality. It is one of the starkest differences between the US and Australian systems. Passions over abortion are stepped down in Australia even as they are stepped up in America, defused here even as they become more highly charged there.

The chief reason is that the parties know that this is an issue that can tear them apart, both of them. For instance, the Liberal leader, Brendan Nelson, and the deputy leader, Julie Bishop, have diametrically opposed positions on another abortion-related measure – whether Australian foreign aid should be made available to countries so that they can provide abortion advice.

Such funding is now banned as a result of a deal between John Howard, who wanted the Senate to agree to the privatisation of Telstra, and the now-retired Tasmanian senator Brian Harradine, who wanted the abortion advice funding cut off. Both got their way. The Rudd Government is reviewing the policy. Nelson wants the ban kept in place; Bishop wants it scrapped.

The party chiefs allow conscience votes in order to avoid bitter division. Does this short-change Australian democracy? In the last parliamentary vote on an abortion issue, members and senators voted in 2006 on whether to retain the health minister’s power of veto over the abortion drug RU-486. In a conscience vote, 65 per cent of members voted to liberalise supply of the drug, and in the Senate 62 per cent supported liberalisation. Interestingly, this is broadly the level of polled community support for legalised abortion on demand.

So we get a broadly representative outcome, but without the bitter divisiveness. In a conversation with the conservative US political philosopher Francis Fukuyama last year, he asked what the Australian political position was on embryonic stem cell research. I told him that it had been approved by the Parliament but on a conscience vote, not on party lines. It was the way Australia handled all such issues. There had been impassioned speeches, but no great partisan clash. There was a long pause before he replied: “It must be nice to live in a country like that.”

It really is nice, at times…

 

Unleashed: Leaving home — on South Africa today and those who wish to leave…

I am blogging Unleashed: Leaving home by Johann Rossouw, a South African philosopher based in Pretoria, and its accompanying thread, which I urge you to read too, without adding my own two cents worth, except to say I am interested, having heard much through Sirdan and from other sources, and casting my mind back to a time when I worked with many South African Jews. I think it is sadly only too true that Thabo Mbeki in an infamous speech in 1999 wiped Nelson Mandela’s “rainbow nation” off the table; while there are still those carrying that torch forward, such as Desmond Tutu, the path of South Africa since 1999 goes a long way towards explaining the softness shown to Robert Mugabe in neighbouring Zimbabwe.

South Africa’s Complex Challenges (by Seth Naicker) from the God’s Politics Blog is also worth looking at. That’s him on the right, still carrying the torch.

People are feeling the pinch of living in a South Africa where democracy has seemingly celebrated a capitalistic culture that does very little for a large population of impoverished people in this developing country. Within an environment where democracy is in need of a social consciousness, reform is needed for the large majority of people who have been denied their rights to basic needs of education, housing, water, etc.

There are several more complexities that South Africa is dealing with, related to a failing democracy and a government that is losing sight of the vision for which it was elected. The complexities of corruption, fraud, arms deals, the Zimbabwe crisis, unemployment, HIV/AIDS, violence and crime, children living on the streets, extreme poverty, etc., are those foremost in my mind and in discussions I have been having with people working in development, child and youth care, corporations, churches, and mosques.

People are facing outrageous hikes in costs on their home loans, where monthly repayments have doubled in just two months. Prices of meat and vegetables, oil, rice, and maize meal have escalated so that a low-income family cannot afford to even purchase toilet paper and bathing soap.

However, among all the chaos of my current-day South Africa, there remains a mystical faith that propels people in the most adverse circumstances to look forward to a brighter day. I have found it most difficult at times to understand how people in such dire straits could still have the audacity to hope and have faith that things will work out right. That mystical faith, with which I have come into contact in the land of my dreams, encourages me, challenges me, and changes me. It further centers, conscientizes, and mobilizes me to continue believing, striving, pursuing, and demanding transformation that will ensure a South Africa that is caring for all its people: citizen, immigrant, and refugee.

Very much a Christian is Seth, of course…

On the broad issue of which South Africa is a part, and indeed of which Australia is a part, my slow ongoing reading of David Day’s important history Conquest is reshaping my views. I do commend it to you all. Day does not come at the issue from a religious viewpoint, and the review I have linked there is rather unfriendly — it appeared in the NY Sun — and its sticking point is this:

One also need not be a supporter of Israel to sense that Mr. Day’s discussion of its history is offered up in an exclusively negative context. From Mr. Day’s account, no one would imagine that the Jews had a connection with Palestine in some form or another for some 5,000 years, that early Jewish settlers often bought rather than stole Arab properties, and that Israel fought numerous existential wars against autocratic neighbors that sought to liquidate Israeli democracy and with it all traces of Jews in the Middle East. The 1 million Arabs who vote and participate in contemporary Israeli politics — uniquely so in the otherwise autocratic Arab Middle East — surely enjoy a much different status from the Untermenschen who were slaughtered en masse by Hitler’s Wehrmacht. There is also something jarring in reading about the plight of the Aborigines, Palestinians, and Native Americans juxtaposed with similarly brief accounts of Hitler’s Final Solution. Orders of magnitude, then, are of less importance to Mr. Day; thus the 4,000 lost along the Trail of Tears take their places alongside the million-plus butchered in Rwanda, apparently as proof of similar barbarism on the part of the supplanting society.

I find this unfair to Day, and I’m afraid too that while I can be accused of having been in many ways a supporter of Israel myself, I, not unlike many Jews in fact, have to concede that the issues Day raises on Palestine and the State of Israel are real issues. The author of that review is really nailing his colours to the mast, I would have thought. Realising that there have been and are big moral and practical issues wrapped up in the reestablishment of a State of Israel does not make one an antisemite. Jews had a connection with Palestine in some form or another for some 5,000 years is true up to a point, but also extremely  tendentious. It certainly is no justification for much that has happened since 1967.

But here of course we have one of the world’s thorniest issues, bedevilled at every turn by fundamentalists of many stripes, most of whose assumptions are historically suspect, even  nonsensical. You see, Abraham is, was, um, a legend — literally, not in the everyday sense. No doubt about it… Many aspects of that legend and its playing out through Judaism, then Christianity, then Islam, have been and continue to be inspiring, but many have been pernicious. The more literal the clinging to the legend, the more pernicious the heritage tends to be. It is a troubled heritage… You may as well base a national claim, or a theological claim, around Robin Hood. That’s the inconvenient truth of the matter, by which I have now offended many people in the three major Book religions…

Back to David Day…

 

The bleeding obvious is still news to too many…

That was my initial thought as I read Freedom 2 b[e] :: View topic – …the death of alex…, which came my way through Anthony Venn-Brown’s latest newsletter, though this forum post is itself a couple of years old.  The writer is a gay Christian and the occasion of the text was a resignation speech delivered at a Christian school.

I have been involved in Christian education for over 15 years. It has been an amazing privilege to impact the lives of these kids and even more so now that they’re adults as some choose for me to continue to be part of their lives. As an art teacher you have a strangely close relationship as kids grapple with trying to best conceptually express some very personal ideas. Sometimes I feel like a therapist. The opportunity to produce major events and to have artistic licence with crazy creative teams has been fun for me. I really appreciate Sue taking a chance with me with my marketing suggestions and very casually telling the Exec to change the college’s name …and the blank expressions when I told them that their logo needs to be more organic! …and also for trusting me with Senior School and the strong team who has built this big HSC boat and have confidently set sail in choppy shallow water…

I find myself in a strange situation where as a gay Christian in a non inclusive Christian environment, I feel a little like the character Eliza Doolittle from My Fair Lady where she is from a working class background but trained to mix with the upper class. Towards the end of the story Eliza discovers, to her horror, that now after her training …she doesn’t appear to fit in either group! I have come to the same horrifying conclusion that I don’t really fit in. In the same way, being gay all my life but also a Christian for 24 years, I find that I can no longer live with the internal conflict between my sexual orientation and a Christian culture that views me as sick, dysfunctional or some kind of super sinner…

After 15 years, it has only since being at Charlton, I now realize that Christian education is not ready for the Iain Wallaces [the writer’s name] of this world at this point. I tell others that Charlton has the most caring staff I have ever experienced, but it is actually here that I…

– have been told to word advertisements in a way that gay Christians won’t apply for jobs.
– have been told by a staff member that all gay people are diseased
– have read the hatred of gays in most of the job applications …and we seem to be ok with this.
– have been told by a staff member that all faggots should be shot in the head

As Christians we have been trained to be black and white. The greyer cultural issues of the Bible are treated as some sort of threat. The church has changed its position over the years often embracing a new understanding but never actually admitting we got it wrong. We have to concede that it has not been Christians but the scientists and social commentators who have helped us see new truths about God and the Bible. For example, we know now that…

– mental disorders and epilepsy are not actually demon possession
– black people do not suffer under the OT’s ‘curse of Ham”
– women ‘deserve’ the relatively recent basic privileges of voting, holding office, manage a business or a school, preach or pastor a church.
– the OT and NT’s approval of human slavery is no longer acceptable.
– there are many good reasons for divorce other than infidelity
– killing other people because they worship other gods is intolerable …yet we seem to be more okay with men holding guns than with men holding hands…

 

 

A Life of Unlearning — a journey to find the truth — the book

A Life of Unlearning – a journey to find the truth, a new blog, provides several chapters from Anthony Venn-Brown’s book, with a preface by Justice Michael Kirby.

This is a book in which the author tells of how he ‘unlearnt the truths I’d been taught about myself and discovered how to live as the real me’. It is the story of his quest to find not only self-acceptance but one of the most powerful forces in nature—human love.

For most people, their search for love follows a predictable pattern. There are ups and downs. But heterosexuals do not generally feel a need to proclaim their sexual identity as such. It is just taken for granted. Society and its institutions are built around it.

 

Christianity’s coats of many colours

That of course is an allusion to the common mistranslation of the coat young Joseph had in Genesis.

Jacob loved Joseph more than he did any of his other sons, because Joseph was born after Jacob was very old. Jacob had given Joseph a fancy coat to show that he was his favorite son, and so Joseph’s brothers hated him and would not be friendly to him. — Genesis 37: Contemporary English Version. [Or “a coat of many colors” or “a coat with long sleeves.”]

My current reading following the US Episcopalian Daily Office — an eccentricity of mine — has been taking me through Deuteronomy. Aside from being a cat in T S Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, Deuteronomy is the fifth of the so-called five books of Moses. It was written much later than the other four, and contains quite obvious evidence of its late date. For example:

Chapter 17: The King

Moses said:

People of Israel, after you capture the land the LORD your God is giving you, and after you settle on it, you will say, ” We want a king, just like the nations around us.”

Go ahead and appoint a king, but make sure that he is an Israelite and that he is the one the LORD has chosen.

The king should not have many horses, especially those from Egypt. The LORD has said never to go back there again. And the king must not have a lot of wives–they might tempt him to be unfaithful to the LORD.  Finally, the king must not try to get huge amounts of silver and gold. The official copy of God’s laws will be kept by the priests of the Levi tribe. So, as soon as anyone becomes king, he must go to the priests and write out a copy of these laws while they watch. Each day the king must read and obey these laws, so that he will learn to worship the LORD with fear and trembling and not think that he’s better than everyone else. If the king completely obeys the LORD’s commands, he and his descendants will rule Israel for many years.

 

When it comes to apocalyptic texts, exercise restraint…

This is advice followers of the big three book religions really need to follow. My own view is that we are dealing in such texts as Ezekiel or Revelation with a literary genre which only fools would read literally, or in expectation of discerning the future. All of the various apocalyptic texts of the collection we conveniently if inaccurately call the Bible — inaccurately because the term lends unity to a collection spanning centuries at the very least that manifestly lacks unity — refer more to the circumstances of their composition than to any timetable of eschatology. For more on that, see my Good Friday reading where I review Jonathan Kirsch A History of the End of the World (Harper San Francisco 2006).

I found it curious that Ian McEwan’s The day of judgment (referred from Arts & Letters Daily) does not mention Kirsch’s book, given how similar McEwan’s article is to Kirsch. Nonetheless, it is a very good article.

End-time thinking – the belief in a world purified by catastrophe – could once be dismissed as a harmless remnant of a more superstitious age. But with the rise of religious fundamentalism, prophets of apocalypse have become a new and very real danger, argues Ian McEwan.