Kim Davis and same-sex marriage revisited

This post is a follow-up to commentary I made Sept. 4, 2015, on county clerk Kim Davis’ refusal to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in Rowan County, Ky. Here is the original post: Judge: On same-sex marriage, ‘personal opinions … not relevant.’

For those who haven’t followed Davis in the last year, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, a Republican, signed a bill into law back in April no longer requiring county clerks in the state to put their name on marriage licenses, thus giving Davis and other public officials who object to same-sex unions a way out, as it were, from being associated with the sinful act of joining two people who, you know, actually love each other. The bill also stipulated that the state will use one marriage form, whereby couples can simply mark whether they considered themselves the bride, groom or spouse. Most recently, Davis has asked the 6th U.S. Circuit Court to dismiss her appeal because the new law makes her complaint null and void. Happily, the ACLU, which was representing four couples in a lawsuit against Davis, agreed with the motion to dismiss.

Credit: Chris Tilley/Reuters

Credit: Chris Tilley/Reuters

Amid a heavily divisive atmosphere in Washington and in politics in general, here is an example of a Republican-dominated state led by a conservative governor coming up with a common sense solution to a contentious problem. As I said in the previous post, echoing the sentiments of a judge who ruled on the original case, the conscientious objector provision does not apply in this case, and Davis’ opinion or convictions about same-sex marriage does not, and should not have, relieved her of her responsibilities as a public servant whose salary comes from the pockets of straight and gay people alike.

If she felt that strongly about it, she should have resigned and sought work in the private sector, where she is free to exercise all of her rights and freedoms as an American citizen. But all things considered, we have to conclude that this was a positive outcome for all parties, and Kentucky lawmakers should be commended in this case for making a smart decision. Of course, I can’t say the same thing about the state’s move to give $18 million in tax breaks to Ken Ham’s abortive $92 million Ark Encounter monstrosity under the leadership of, you guessed it, Matt Bevin.

But back to same-sex marriage. Essentially what I have argued previously was that religion has already and will continue giving up ground to modernity, and increased equal rights and protections under the law for members of the LBGT community are certainly no exception. Indeed, the church’s insistence on holding back progress in this way was, as I have said, “anathema to any kind of successful PR campaign church’s might hope to launch.”

Here is what I said about Davis’ biblical misgivings about issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples:

Refusing to issue the licenses, and thus breaking the law, should have been outside her set of possible actions in any case because breaking the law itself seems to antithetical to biblical law. Doesn’t the Bible say to render unto Caesar that which is the state’s and to obey civil authorities? I am aware that the Bible also suggests that believers should obey civil authorities unless the law contradicts God’s law, but this presents another problem for modern Christians because in a great many cases, Christians happily ignore Old Testament law. They do this whenever they hungrily gulp down shellfish, fail to stone gay people, demure from killing witches and fortunetellers or fail to carry out any of the scores of capital crime punishments listed in the Old Testament. And since homosexuality is barely mentioned in the New Testament, and not mentioned at all by Jesus himself, this amounts to one of the many instances in which Christians cherry pick parts of the Bible to read carefully and other parts that they readily scrap precisely because their conscience was forged by modern sensibilities.

To which, I got the following fallacy-ridden reply from a reader named Larry:

You … clearly don’t understand God or the Bible. Your education has failed you. Just by your statements in the old Testament and shellfish as well as stoning gays. You no nothing about the things of the Bible and now I understand clearly your beef with Christians. It isn’t because of things we believe it more about things you are totally uneducated on. So much for so called education.

I can’t find any semblance of an argument anywhere in there, but essentially, he says I don’t really understand the Bible and that I have a “beef” with Christians — I don’t on any personal level — and that my lack of understanding is at the center of this alleged “beef.” Since he didn’t bother to explain exactly how I was mistaken, I’ll do the work for him.

He might have argued, for instance, that laws in the Old Testament, like banning shellfish and admonishing believers to stone gay people, no longer have to be followed because of the new covenant of Jesus. But since many Christians obviously still read and draw a certain amount of inspiration from parts of the Old Testament, I think it’s still an open question: Should Christians adhere to Old Testament law or not? If so, which ones? Just those that do not condone violence or abuse? Let’s assume that the new covenant superseded or did away with adherence to the old laws. What do we do with the Ten Commandments? If Old Testament law is more or less irrelevant to modern Christians, why do believers spend so much time and energy protecting the inclusion of the Commandments on public property? The Bible’s position on these considerations is so far from cohesive as to make it all but unintelligible.

Whether the Old Testament should be followed to the letter of the law depends, of course, on which passage one chooses to read.

Take Deuteronomy 7:9:

Know therefore that the LORD thy God, he is God, the faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations.

What about Psalm 119:160?

Thy word is true from the beginning: and every one of thy righteous judgments endureth for ever.

These passages, and many like them, suggest that God’s law is immutable and timeless.

Even Jesus seemed convinced about the unchangeable nature of Old Testament law even though he is supposed the architect of the new covenant itself!

For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or tittle shall nowise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven. — Matthew 5:18-19

But many others, Romans 6:14, Galatians 3:13, Galatians 5:18, Ephesians 2:15, Romans 6:14, suggest the law was temporary and no longer valid.

The point is that Larry, Kim Davis and millions of believers like them don’t have a firm biblical basis for their strong convictions on same-sex marriage or homosexuality and since they probably have interacted or had a conversation with few, if any, actual gay and lesbian people, they can’t draw from personal experience either.

We are told that the practice of homosexuality is a sin based on the Bible. OK, but the only passages that talk about it openly are in the Old Testament.

When people like myself make the rather obvious case that passages about stoning innocent people or burning witches are among some of the most reprehensible passages in all of literature — thus casting an unmistakable cloud over the supposed omnibenevolence and just nature of the god, Yahweh — we are referred to the more peace-loving and palatable New Testament with its tales of human blood sacrifice, vicarious redemption, scapegoating and eternal torment. So far as we know, Jesus never said a word about homosexuality and the only passages that could refer to it, Romans 1:26-27, 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, 1 Timothy 1:9-10 and Jude 1:7, issued from the mind of man. I happen to think all of it came from the mind of man, but the strongest case Christians can hope to make against homosexuality and same-sex marriage would at least need to come from a source that is attributed to God or someone claiming to be God, even if the texts were fabricated or embellished.

The vote is out on whether the Bible, from the Christian perspective, even takes a firm stance on homosexuality, and when it does take a stance, it comes off as brazenly barbaric and immoral. [note]Dismissing the primitive barbarity of the Old Testament on grounds that it can’t be judged based on today’s standards of morality gets believers nowhere either because they use their own modern standards to make judgement calls on everything else in life, and even about the wanton morality of opposing religions, so why should the Bible, which is presented to us a cohesive book from start to finish, be any different?[/note] We may go so far as to say that since the character of God in the Old Testament is supposedly the same today as he was yesterday (Malachi 3:6), maybe he actually does want us to go around killing gay people in the streets and torching witches in spite of the new covenant.

Comically, we might even imagine Yahweh and Jesus — if we can imagine them at all — bickering over these points. The best we can say, then, is that the Bible is incoherent on the topic of homosexuality. So, where do Christians and conservatives get the idea that they should oppose equal rights for members of the gay and lesbian community, most of whom they know nothing about, at every turn? Maybe that’s a question Christians should ask themselves.

The truth is that sooner or later, the church and conservatives as a whole, are going to have to exercise a small amount of reason and reform their thinking and behavior on same-sex marriage, just as they will, or already have, on other topics — the persistent and morally bankrupt resistance to potentially life-saving stem cell research comes to mind — or face continued irrelevance because they will ultimately lose the argument, as the wave of progress moves forward with or without them tumbling wayward in its wake.

[Credit: Cover artwork, “Falling in the Ocean,” by DeviantArt user kil1k.]

Human origins of the biblical canon

One component of counter-apologetics, and certainly Christian apologetics, that isn’t discussed very often, but perhaps should be, is the creation of the Bible itself; that is, the series of events leading up to what we now have as the supposedly signed, sealed and delivered version of the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament.

The running assumption in Protestant Christian circles, of course, is that the current work we now refer to as the New Testament was written and inspired by God shortly after the death of Christ in the 1st century and then compiled as the complete Bible with 66 books telling a cohesive narrative about man’s fall in the garden, his wandering in the desert, God’s followers prophesying about a coming messiah, Jesus’ birth, baptism, his miracles, his trial and execution and finally, his ascension and eventual return. Although doubting believers or inquisitive types may, on occasion, look outside the accepted apologetic literature in book stores and churches, most lay churchgoers simply take it as a given, as I did for so many years, that these books came together in a packaged, unaltered form straight from scribes and teachers in Jerusalem and Rome. Pastors, of course, know full well that this almost certainly is not the case, that the real history of the biblical canon is a lot messier than all of that, which is why it’s rarely, if ever, mentioned inside the walls of Protestant churches. If believers knew that the Bible was cobbled together piecemeal over the course of centuries, well then, they might begin to wonder about other aspects of scripture that look altogether manmade, and if that happened, pastors might have fewer numbers in the flock and so, the dominos might fall …

Church leaders can’t have that, so they sell a narrative about the divine origins of scripture, and simply leave it at that. And if an inquisitive mind does, by chance, raise a hand to ask how exactly these books came to us in modern form, they no doubt will answer in platitudes and vagaries, and make references to other apologetic works, as does Don Stewart, a contributor for the Blue Letter Bible, in response to the following question:

(Question): Who Decided Which Books Should Be Placed in the Bible?

The simple answer is that God decided which books should be in the canon. He was the final determiner. J. 1. Packer writes:

The church no more gave us the New Testament canon than Sir Isaac Newton gave us the force of gravity. God gave us gravity, by his work of creation, and similarly he gave us the New Testament canon, by inspiring the individual books that make it up (J. 1. Packer, God Speaks To Man, p. 81).

Stewart then quotes from someone named F. F. Bruce, author of “The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?”:

One thing must be emphatically stated. The New Testament books did not become authoritative for the Church because they were formally included in a canonical list; on the contrary, the Church included them in her canon because she already regarded them as divinely inspired, recognizing their innate worth and generally apostolic authority, direct or indirect. The first ecclesiastical councils to classify the canonical books were both held in North Africa — at Hippo Regius in 393 and at Carthage in 397 — but what these councils did was not to impose something new upon the Christian communities but to codify what was already the general practice of these communities.

The implied argument here is that early followers of the Christian church were already adhering to a set of traditions and teachings that were most likely passed down verbally through the generations. The church simply codified that which was already accepted as a coherent narrative carrying through from Genesis to the supposed events of the New Testament. Bruce only tells part of the story here. The work of shoring up various points of theology and developing what would later become the biblical canon actually began with the First Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. and subsequent synods, like those at Hippo Regius, Carthage and Constantinople through the 4th century. Although earlier writers like Origen and Tertullian had mentioned the concept of the trinity, now a central doctrine of Protestantism and Catholicism establishing Jesus as equal and distinct from the Father and Holy Spirit in the godhead, only at the council of Nicea was this idea solidified, despite the fact scriptures do not contain a trinity concept.

According to the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia:

In Scripture there is as yet no single term by which the Three Divine Persons are denoted together. The word trias (of which the Latin trinitas is a translation) is first found in Theophilus of Antioch about A.D. 180. He speaks of “the Trinity of God [the Father], His Word and His Wisdom (To Autolycus II.15). The term may, of course, have been in use before his time. Afterwards it appears in its Latin form of trinitas in Tertullian (On Pudicity 21). In the next century the word is in general use.

And here is Gregory Thaumaturgus in the mid-3rd century as quoted from the encyclopedia:

There is therefore nothing created, nothing subject to another in the Trinity: nor is there anything that has been added as though it once had not existed, but had entered afterwards: therefore the Father has never been without the Son, nor the Son without the Spirit: and this same Trinity is immutable and unalterable forever.

The idea of a holy trinity, then, was “deduced from a collocation of passages” and developed over time, as early church officials read the concept back onto scripture rather than pulling it directly from the teachings of Paul and the gospel writers, and since church leaders could not agree on the trinity through the 4th century, nor on which texts were indeed, canonical, until that time, what constituted “general practice” seemed far from certain, as it does today, given the sheer volume Christian denominations and myriad interpretations of scripture still in circulation. Here is a detailed look at the development of the New Testament from what appears to be a Christian perspective, which is an exception to the general rule I mentioned above that many apologists simply gloss over the information on the various synods that helped develop what would later become the Christian canon.

Of course, the best way for Christian leaders down through the generations to try to prove the Bible is the authentic word of God was to either ignore the early history of the canon, which many of them happily did, or purport that the book was formed at some point early in church history as a complete work. Indeed, as I implied earlier, if the Bible did not come to mankind as a complete work, and with it, the story of man’s redemption beginning in Genesis through the gospels and Revelation, is incomplete, or at least it was incomplete for the better part of three centuries until church leaders decided it was time to pull together what they thought was the authoritative word of God. By the time the council of Laodicia rolled around in 363 A.D., all the books of the final canon were included, with the exception of the story’s culmination in Revelation.

As this article on the origins of the Old Testament points out, the Hebrew Bible was not even complete in the 1st century:

… the traditional presupposition that the Hebrew Bible was closed by the end of the first century is simply unhistorical. James VanderKam explains, “As nearly as we can tell, there was no canon of Scripture in Second Temple Judaism.” … So how did the Jewish rabbis come to agreement over which books to canonize? There is no clear answer. It seems as though the canonical status of the books were decided, at least in part, on the grounds of the date of their composition—no books believed to be written later than the period of Ezra were included. This was based in large part on the Pharisaic thesis that prophetic inspiration ended after Ezra and Nehemiah.[44] However, this presupposition is a problematic criterion for Christians who affirm that the Spirit inspired the books of the New Testament.

Although the majority of believers remain completely in the dark on all of this — church leaders are hoping they remain that way — this information is now readily available for anyone who might go looking for it, so pastors and “theologians” have had to spin a new yarn. The new argument among apologists goes something like this: While believers have disagreed about a few details here or there — a few? — the central tenets of the gospel were preserved by word mouth for centuries before it was ever written down and canonized, so surely this speaks to the truthful, authenticity, poignancy and durability of the message? I know longer have a copy of Handbook of Christian Apologetics, but I am certain that I read some version of this argument in that book years ago.

Daniel F. Lieuwen articulates the argument this way:

… Clearly, it was possible for people to be Christians with something less than total clarity about the contents of the New Testament. They were able to be Christians because they belonged to the Church which existed before the New Testament existed and has frequently been forced to make do with no written copies in whole areas due to persecution or poverty. The Church preserved and preserves the teaching of Christ and of His apostles, and not only the words on the pages of sacred scripture, but also the correct set of presuppositions, the authentic tradition which is required to interpret scripture correctly. …

Clearly it was possible, since Christianity is still with us, but this argument falls apart when one considers the nature of God and the actual claims contained in the Bible. In numerous places in both the Old and New testaments, numerous commandments are given forbidding followers to add or subtract anything from the “unalterable” word of God. Here is Deuteronomy 12:32:

What thing soever I command you, observe to do it: thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish from it.

One has to wonder if that includes the 27 brand new books that Yahweh, omniscient as he is, would eventually add to the mix. How about Proverbs 30:5-6?

Every word of God [is] pure: he [is] a shield unto them that put their trust in him. Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar.

Or the ultimate rejection of addition and subtraction from Revelation 22:18-19:

For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and [from] the things which are written in this book.

The irony, of course, is that the church didn’t even accept Revelation as part of the canon until well into the 4th century, as Revelation itself represented a violation of God’s longstanding “don’t add, don’t subtract” message dating back well before Jesus issued his “new covenant,” another violation.

An omniscient and all-powerful god overseeing the dissemination of his one and only transmission to mankind and inspiring the writer of Deuteronomy would have known, at the very moment of inspiration, that parts of the Bible would eventually be added to and embellished and poorly translated, such that Deuteronomy and all the other books of the Old and New testaments read precisely as they should if penned by isolated, fearful desert wanderers grappling in the dark. Indeed, the Bible as a whole, pieced together a little here and a little there, developed exactly as we would imagine it would in the hands of imperfect humans.

On this count, Christians give their deity far too little credit in imagining such a sloppy creator who, when we apply just a touch of logic, disintegrates into absurdity.

Creationists and intelligent design advocates want us to believe that God, in his immense power, fashioned a world as complex as the one we live in, supposedly uniquely fitted to our purposes, innately understands every single nuance of the universe, from biology, physics, atomic theory and quantum mechanics, yet when the time came to deliver his preeminent message to the world, God somehow forgets all that information about science and the physical world and suddenly becomes limited by the middling rhetorical and intellectual power of semi-literate scribes.

What we have in the Bible is essentially a period-piece that is, predictably, built on archaic notions of sun worship and blood sacrifice trending across many mythologies and ancient civilizations at the time:

A truly impressive god, perhaps one even worth admiring, could have, with a single utterance or wave of the finger, delivered an impressive, noncontradictory book that accurately anticipates, to the stupefaction of his chosen writers, all the wonders of modern science and all the tragedies and triumphs of mankind without compromising on a basic message of peace, hope and love.

Judge: On same-sex marriage, ‘personal opinions … not relevant’

While I have been engaged in a debate on social media about the Rowan County, Ky., clerk who has refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses after the Supreme Ruling legalized such unions across the nation, I thought I would offer some thoughts on the issue here so that they are all in one place.

Credit: https://twitter.com/chipcoffey

Credit: https://twitter.com/chipcoffey

As most of us who keep up with the news know by now, a judge has held Kim Davis in contempt of court and ordered her to be jailed until she is willing to become compliant with the law. This week, U.S. District Court Judge David L. Bunning has received commitments from five of the office’s six deputies — the sole holdout being Davis’ son, Nathan Davis — and the office planned to issue licenses to same-sex couples today.

Bunning, who the Washington Post described as a “devout Catholic,” had this to say in issuing his ruling:

Her good faith belief is simply not a viable defense. … I myself have genuinely held religious beliefs. … (But) I took an oath. … Mrs. Davis took an oath. Oaths mean things.

And this:

Personal opinions, including my own, are not relevant to today. The idea of natural law superseding this court’s authority would be a dangerous precedent indeed.

To the surprise of no one, the old divisions lines were drawn up after the ruling, with same-sex advocates lauding the decision, while some evangelical Christians played the victim card and others claimed believers should not be forced to go against their conscience, even in fulfilling the duties of public office.

Republican presidential candidate Gov. Mike Huckabee came down in the latter camp, tweeting:

Kim Davis in federal custody removes all doubts about the criminalization of Christianity in this country. We must defend #ReligiousLiberty!

As I pointed out in the conversation on Facebook, religion has and will continue giving up ground to modernity for the simple reason that many aspects of evangelical Christianity, most notably in this case, a contempt for LGBT rights and denialism that homosexuality comes hard-wired through genetics, is incompatible in an increasingly secular society.

The idea that people like Huckabee — and I would wager he represents are large block of evangelical conservatives — think that Christianity is somehow being criminalized in America is laughable. Indeed, here in the South, one can find a church on nearly every block and in every city. Even in the more progressive north, while some churchgoers hold more liberal ideologies than their counterparts in the South, one doesn’t have to venture far from home in New England to find a place to attend mass or Sunday school. What is happening, however, is that society as a whole, notwithstanding periodic flareups of racial tensions, has become increasingly more diverse and less tolerant of overt prejudice in all its forms, such that, except in parts of the South and pockets of the Southwest, believers are having to rethink how they approach society. Pew has provided a telling look at how believers’ views on same-sex marriage has changed since 2001. For sure, shilling a literal interpretation of odious Old Testament law is anathema to any kind of successful PR campaign church’s might hope to launch here in the year 2015.

So, what of Kim Davis’ particular case? My friend on Facebook seems to think that she should have been allowed conscientious objector status so that she would not have had to violate her conscience in issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. When asked on what authority she refused to issue the licenses, she simply said she was acting — or failing to act — on “God’s authority.” Davis, of course, had options for moving forward that did not include breaking the law and going to jail. She could have ordered one of her deputies to issue marriage licenses. She could have resigned. The conscientious objector statute in U.S. law narrowly applies to those who have a moral hangup about fighting in combat, and the statute does not abdicate someone from their responsibility to serve.

Refusing to issue the licenses, and thus breaking the law, should have been outside her set of possible actions in any case because breaking the law itself seems to antithetical to biblical law. Doesn’t the Bible say to render unto Caesar that which is the state’s and to obey civil authorities? I am aware that the Bible also suggests that believers should obey civil authorities unless the law contradicts God’s law, but this presents another problem for modern Christians because in a great many cases, Christians happily ignore Old Testament law. They do this whenever they hungrily gulp down shellfish, fail to stone gay people, demure from killing witches and fortunetellers or fail to carry out any of the scores of capital crime punishments listed in the Old Testament. And since homosexuality is barely mentioned in the New Testament, and not mentioned at all by Jesus himself, this amounts to one of the many instances in which Christians cherry pick parts of the Bible to read carefully and other parts that they readily scrap precisely because their conscience was forged by modern sensibilities.

In any case, Davis did not get to endow the public office in which she serves with her own personal beliefs on same-sex marriage. Regardless, issuing the licenses would not have amounted to an endorsement of gay marriage on her part. I can imagine an instance in which a county clerk might not necessarily agree with interracial couples, but they would still be duty bound to issue licenses as per their job description.

As Bunning rightly said, personal beliefs do not and should not factor into the decision-making calculus when a public servant has taken an oath to serve the public, and if Davis had been granted some kind of exemption excusing her from her responsibilities as county clerk, this would have set a dangerous precedent and left the door open for other Bible-believing public office holders to claim that issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples likewise violated their conscience, thus sending us careening down a slippery slope whereby any perceived offensive law or regulation can just be dismissed on the whims of public opinion.

This a road on which we cannot travel. For the law to mean anything, the door to duty abdication based merely on personal beliefs has to remain shut.

His kingdom cometh, haven’t ya heard?

Doesn’t the Book of Revelation say a thing or two about a prohibition against adding or taking away from the Bible? No matter. A would-be prophet in Arkansas has apparently divined a revelation of her own from on high, Joseph Smith-style, that she deems the “True and Unfolding Story of Revelation 12”:

FROM THE MOUNTAIN PROPHECIES

BOOK TWELVE

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWO

The Kingdom of our God is coming into the Earth!

Oh Lord, my God, this is an evil world, truly a wicked and perverse generation! And, oh Lord, a nation of mockers has arisen before Your face, this nation of America, a nation, which loves a lie, a nation, which loves every kind of perversion, a nation, which takes pride in the killing of the innocent and the unborn! Planned Parenthood is now posting it and surely bragging that they killed more than 325,000 of the unborn and innocent babies in 2014! Oh, God, how we have fallen!

Oh, America, how you have fallen! Witchcrafts, pornography, adulteries, fornications, lying and stealing and covetousness abound! Oh, Blessed Saviour, how the people have fallen into these and into every pit of the flesh!

Oh, Blessed Saviour, hear my cries; for a great wickedness is upon this nation and upon all nations! Oh, Blessed Saviour, hear my cries! For a great wickedness is upon the nations and evil is thick and covering this nation and all nations …

And it goes on at length from there, rattling on about a mouse crawling up Obama’s leg and — spoiler alert — the mouse is none other than Pope Francis himself.

This is proof positive that anyone — and I do mean anyone — can put pen to paper, claim divine revelation out of thin air and it has precisely the same amount of legitimacy as anything written 3,000 years ago in Palestine.

John 3:16 revisited

If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things? No one has ascended to heaven but He who came down from heaven, that is, the Son of Man who is in heaven. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. − John 3:12-16, NKJV

***

Note: I am remiss to even add this disclaimer − and don’t plan on doing it in the future − but to my dismay some Christians have actually made the claim that since I sometimes speak about God as if he is real for the sake of argument, I must subconsciously or otherwise actually believe that he does exist. In this post, as in any other on the topic of religion, I am speaking about God as a character in the Bible and considering the implications if certain parts of Christianity are actually true, again, for the sake of argument.

John 3:!6

John 3:16

Now, with that out of the way, a few days ago I heard a Christmas commercial on the radio from a church, and a man said something to the effect of, “God loved us so much that he was willing to sacrifice his son,” which is basically a paraphrase of John 3:16.

This got me thinking about the first part of one of the most often-quoted versus in the Bible: “For God so loved the world.” Let’s stop there and go back way before any events of the Bible allegedly took place. Let’s go back to before the beginning when this almighty god was first hatching his plan to create a world, inhabit it with animals and conscious beings that would later be called man and woman.

How much did God really love the world? A quick revisiting of the story will show that either a) not all that much and quite possibly the converse of that or b) he had good intentions that somehow went awry as soon as the serpent showed up in the garden, an option that itself belies the very nature of an all-knowing, all-powerful God.

I’ll take second option first. Let’s assume that an autonomous God, for reasons we can’t possibly understand, wanted or needed some type of relationship with a new creation that couldn’t be supplied by those groveling angels. He wanted a relationship with a being that could choose whether to love him or not. Thus, he created man in the garden and endowed him with free will and the ability to think and act on his own. Now, God had man’s best interests at heart, so instead of simply removing the tree of the knowledge of good and evil from the Garden, he told them to avoid fruit from this tree because their lives will truly be worse if they were to become aware of evil and things like guilt, shame, etc. Presumably, he wanted his creation only to think on things that were good, which oddly enough, aligns quite well with preachments from the New Testament, particularly Philippians 4:8.

That’s admirable, I suppose, but it’s here where the disconnect begins. This all-powerful, all-knowing God truly wanted the best for his creation, yet he either allowed the devil to enter the garden or he simply missed the fact that the serpent had breached the gate. By the first option, God is evil and not as benevolent as we were led to believe. By the second, he is incompetent. So much for good intentions and omniscience.

But let’s ignore all that. Let’s assume that the Genesis story of creation is bunk and the god of the Bible simply guided the mechanism of evolution by natural selection and got us to the point in human history of Christ being born in the manger. “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son so that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” This verse means that before sending Christ to earth, God had an immense amount of love for mankind, such that he was willing to watch his own son die a horrible death for the salvation of man. He loves the world so much, yet if you fail to be convinced by the so-called “evidence” of the Bible about Jesus or if you fail to believe the testimony of his followers, that immense love will, in the blink of an eye, turn to judgment and wrath.

If God really had this deep and abiding love for man, the loss of just one person in hell, much less billions of people in eternal torment, should be enough to make this deity weep for all time. Presumably if this love were genuine, he would do everything in his power to prevent the spiritual death of billions of people for whom he told us he was willing to sacrifice his only son. The New Testament tells us his love has one important condition, however, namely that people accept Jesus Christ as savior or perish forever.

The strange kind of love in John 3:16, a compulsory arrangement based on fear and shrouded in judgment, doesn’t even extend until the end of the sentence, much less past the tattered pages of the Bible.

Apologetic logic

I’m glad this guy readily admits that believers’ “proof” in the afterlife amounts to nothing more than “clues” and “circumstantial evidence” because he sure did whiff on the rest of his argument, issuing one fallacy after another:

If you forward to about the 40 second mark, he builds his case around our desires versus reality:

For example, Bill, human desires. C.S. Lewis said for every human desire, there’s a corresponding reality in nature. We get thirsty because there’s such a thing as water. We crave physical intimacy because there’s sex. The reason we may desire immortality is because it really exists.

In Christian apologetics, this is called the argument from desire, which essentially says that since humans have some kind of inner yearning for the transcendent, a transcendent reality (i.e. heaven) must exist. In logic, this is called an appeal to consequences and is very shoddy logic indeed. First, not every human being thinks living forever is actually desirable. Many believe, and I tend to agree, that eternal life would be woefully boring after the first couple hundred years. To assume that everybody inherently desires eternal life only leads the Christian apologist, as ever, into another fallacy. Second, we get thirsty not because water exists, but because our bodies cannot survive without it.

Third, and most importantly, we all might desire for a pot of gold to suddenly appear in our bedrooms. I doubt we would find many people who would not wish this to happen. Yet, just because millions of people might want a certain reality to unfold, doesn’t mean it’s going to happen or is even feasible.

The pastor then goes on to argue at about the 1:20 mark that the most compelling reason to believe in the afterlife is the fact that Jesus’ body has not been found in 2,000 years. While this is technically true, it’s again based on the false premises that Jesus lived and was executed by the Romans. I’ve shown several times how there is not one single contemporary source outside of the New Testament that verify the Gospels about Jesus, so I won’t belabor the point again. Second, even if we did find the bones of Jesus and could somehow confirm that he was Jesus of New Testament fame, this would only verify that he existed. This discovery would prove nothing about the virgin birth, the miracles or the resurrection. In other words, assumptions heaped on other assumptions equal nothing.

Nope

So, I was browsing Facebook today and found this odd meme:

jesus

OK first, I guess it goes without saying that Jesus the man (assuming he didn’t summon any godly powers at the time) would have, if he existed, fallen a time or two as he made his way up to Calvary, but this meme asks users to affirm that they would, indeed, help Jesus get back on his feet. So, from the Christian standpoint, if you answer “No,” you are an asshole, or worse, an atheist, and if you answer, “Yes,” you are admitting that the master of the universe, who in previous episodes fed 5,000 or more people, walked on water and claimed to be the direct conduit to God Almighty, can’t manage the physical weight of a cross, even though in his “human” form, he was still, technically speaking, a god. Makes perfect sense.

Real men (don’t) pray

I’m bothered by the “Real Men Pray” mantra that has been going around Christian circles for the last 20 years or so. I was inspired — if that is the word — to write this post because I noticed one of my Facebook friends had changed their profile picture to a meme with those words on it.

The reasoning beyond this mantra, which I believe came out of the Promise Keepers movement from the 1990s, is that real men recognize a power higher than themselves, God, and real men should grow in their walk with Christ to become more like Jesus and the heavenly father such that they should teach their children to grow up and become real men (or women) themselves. Real men read the Bible, pattern their lives after Christ, base their lives on faith, and of course, pray.

I’ve taken a whack at coming up with a few catch phrases of my own. Maybe some will stick:

  • Real men don’t mislead children into wishful thinking and false hope.
  • Real men don’t indoctrinate children with false information about the way the world works.
  • Real men don’t scare children into believing in God by telling them stories about hell and damnation.
  • Real men make decisions based on reason and logic and after careful consideration of the facts, not on a voice they think they heard.
  • Real men don’t huddle around an ancient book looking for answers.
  • Real men cast their cares on nothing but their own resolve and face life’s challenges with calm perseverance.
  • Real men take responsibility for their actions and don’t blame their “sinful” nature.
  • Real men donate to charities that actually work to improve the lives of human beings on the ground.
  • Real men teach children to think for themselves.

Feel free to send me some of your own.

On trial: ‘The Case for Christ’ part 3c

This is the continuation of a series on “The Case for Christ” by Lee Strobel. If you missed them, here are the other parts in the series: Part 1Part 2Part 3a and Part 3b.

***

When I left off last time, Lee Strobel was having what he might say was a well-reasoned and critical look at the gospels as part of a discussion with Christian apologist Craig Blomberg. In the opening pages of Chapter 2, Strobel is asking Blomberg about various elements surrounding the validity of the New Testament gospel writers, and Blomberg claimed that the authors intended to portray events as they happened (See here for my refutation of pages 39-40).

In the rest of the chapter, Strobel and Blomberg subject the gospel writers to numerous “tests,” including ability, character, consistency, bias, etc. In the ability section, Strobel questioned Blomberg on the writers’ ability to accurately relay information by word of mouth a good 30 years or more after the events of the life of Jesus took place. Blomberg noted that in Old Testament times, priests were well known to have committed the entire Jewish scriptures to memory, much like the hafiz in Islam.

Here’s Blomberg:

Books — or actually, scrolls of papyrus — were relatively rare. Therefore education, learning, worship, teaching in religious communities — all this was done by word of mouth. … it would have been well within the capacity of Jesus’ disciples to have committed much more to memory than appears in all four gospels put together — and to have passed it along accurately.

Of course, Blomberg is making pure conjecture here about the gospel writers’ strength of memory, but in any case, his argument is actually strengthened if the gospels were passed down by oral tradition and not written down because at least then, we would not be able to piece together the puzzle of how these documents came to be grouped together as the New Testament gospels. They would simply stand apart as a collection of memories from some people named Matthew, Mark, Luke and John who managed to relay a remarkably cohesive narrative, even if we concede some errors in consistency. Minor flaws in the details, apologists will say, is to absolutely be expected if the gospel writers were working from memory. As we will see, however, a greater case can be made that the gospels were based on earlier works.

This article provides a wealth of examples suggesting that at least some ordinary people could read and write in Jesus’ day. Established estimates put the literacy figure at about 3 percent in first-century Palestine under Roman rule. As one example, the article points to the parable of the shrewd manager:

A deed of debt, dated 55–56 A.D., was discovered among the Second Revolt documents and may be an example of the debt notes Jesus referred to in the parable of the Shrewd Manager; in the parable, the manager instructs his master’s debtor, “Take your bill, sit down quickly and write half the amount.” It is taken for granted that an ordinary man would be able to write out a numerical sum.

In others examples, excavations have uncovered ossuaries with writing from family members of dead relatives, along with numerous potsherds with inscriptions in the Masada area:

While most materials that were written on—leather, papyrus and ossuaries—were expensive, one writing material was free and readily available: the potsherd. Ancient crockery was usually simple earthenware (terracotta), which broke easily. Pieces lay scattered in the streets and courtyards of towns and villages—free scrap paper. You could scribble a note on a suitable sherd, then throw it away once you were finished. A Hebrew alphabet found on a potsherd at Qumran is a good specimen of a pupil’s attempt at learning his letters.

Many inscribed potsherds, called ostraca, were found in the excavations at Masada and were left by the Jewish rebels who held out against the Romans until 73 A.D., three years after the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem Temple.

And then we have the case of the writer, Luke, who said in his opening that

Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.

While the Q document is lost to antiquity, numerous biblical scholars — not to be confused with the kind of biblical apologists Strobel “interviews” for his book — believe that similar content in Matthew and Luke were derived from the earlier text, Q ((Christoph Heil & Jozef Verheyden (Ed.) The Sayings Gospel Q: collected essays, Vol. 189 of Bibliotheca Ephemeridum theologicarum Lovaniensium, Peeters Publishers Pub., 2005 pp. 163 – 164)), while Helmut Koester, Ron Cameron and John Dominic Crossan have argued that Mark was a later version of an earlier work known as Secret Mark ((D. Crossan, Four Other Gospels: Shadows on the Contours of Canon, Minneapolis, 1985, p. 108.))

And M. Bar-Ilan, a Jewish scholar at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, has argued that because reading and writing was less essential in Jesus’ time than today, and while 3 percent may seem like a low figure to modern people, that’s not the case if we consider society at the time:

Literacy data from all over the world show the relationship and dependence between farmers (or the state of agriculture), and literacy. This tie has been found in various peoples and in the course of time. The data ‘create’ a world-wide rule.

The other facet of this dependence is population growth, urbanization and infant mortality that apparently go hand in hand with literacy. This connection enables the student of societies in the past to deal with the problem of literacy whenever the direct evidence is not available. This study offers a method to analyze processes that took place in a specific society so that the literacy rate may be derived.

Comparative data show that under Roman rule the Jewish literacy rate improved in the Land of Israel. However, rabbinic sources support evidence that the literacy rate was less than 3%. This literacy rate, a small fraction of the society, though low by modern standards, was not low at all if one takes into account the needs of a traditional society in the past.

Further, are we to believe that out of the 1.5 million-3 million people estimated to have been living in Palestine at the time, not even a few Christians in first century Palestine were literate enough to be able to pen the gospel narratives? While illiteracy does not necessary correlate with inaccuracy, but if I were going to trust a writer, I would certainly want he or she to have some farthing of journalistic ability in being able to give a detailed, error free account of what happened, rather than the fragmented and sophomoric tales before us. Thus, by attempting to argue that the gospels were handed down by an oral tradition, apologists essentially let these writers off the hook, as it were, in expecting them to provide a true historical record of the events.

***

Strobel’s short and largely irrelevant next section, titled “The Character Test,” questions whether the gospel writers were of sound moral rectitude. Since they claimed to be followers of Jesus, who again, claimed to have a monopoly on all that is good and loving in the world, I think it’s safe to say the gospel writers certainly thought of themselves as moral people. Of course, those of us who cringe at the noxious and immoral notion of vicarious redemption, that it’s right and just to heap a load of debt on an innocent scapegoat, might cast the writers in a different light.

***

The next session of Chapter 2 deals with the consistency of the writers, which I mentioned already, but will again address briefly. Blomberg gives the writers a pass of sorts by claiming that they provided an “extremely consistent” narrative

by ancient standards, which are the only standards by which it’s fair to judge them.

By ancient standards? Why is this the only standard by which we should judge whoever wrote Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? Their very anonymity is a problem. But the bigger problem is that the Bible claims to be the unalterable, inspired one and only written transmission from the almighty God of all heaven and earth. I think their standard of judgment should be a few ticks higher than the run-of-the-mill Josephus or other Jewish historian of the day.

Blomberg also argues that if the gospels were “too consistent” they would be invalidated because then it would look like the authors were just copying each other. First, where is the rule that says we had to have more than one author to tell the story of Jesus? Why couldn’t God have simply chosen one person, let’s call him Jesus — since he’s also God, we know for sure he’s literate — to write the gospels and the rest of the New Testament? Surely, he, of all people, could get the facts straight. Why not have Jesus be born and grow into an adult and receive the revelation from God, which would have contained all the information God wanted humanity to know and which we would come to know as the New Testament. Already we know about wide gaps in the life of Jesus. Certainly he would have had time to write his own story before the cross.

Rather, for reasons that escapes comprehension, God entrusts his one and only writing to mankind to humans, who, in his (God) mind, have already proven themselves untrustworthy in the Garden. Not only that, but God allowed his “unalterable” text to become translated and translated ad infinitum for the better part of 2,000 years. I mean, is the God of the Bible all-powerful or not? Can’t he guide human history in such a way as to maintain his untarnished text so that it could hold up against, not only by ancient standards, but by modern ones? No. What we have are ancient writers talking about yet another savior whose life looks suspiciously similar to any number of “dying and rising” gods that have been thrown into the dust heap of religious history, and meanwhile, the texts themselves, remarkably mediocre in their writing, read just as they should read if written in first century Palestine by fearful, trembling individuals always looking to the heavens for answers.

I’ll skip Strobel’s “bias test” because the writers’ bias toward Jesus is self evident. That they were willing to risk their lives for their message makes them no different than thousands of other believers down through history, from Muslims who refused to bow the knee during the Inquisitions to the Heaven’s Gate nuts who thought they were going to get redemption on back of a comet.

***

Strobel then asks Blomberg about some of the embarrassing or hard to explain details that pop in the gospels. Again, Blomberg argues that the existence of these details gives validity to the text because it would have behooved the authors to omit certain elements of the story.

For instance, John 6:5 suggests that Jesus could not perform miracles in Nazareth because the people there lacked enough faith. Jesus’s wonderworking power is stifled by heretics in his own hometown. Talk about embarrassing. Blomberg addresses this concern:

Now, ultimately theology hasn’t had a problem with these statements, because Paul himself, in Phillippians 2:5-8, talks about God in Christ voluntarily and consciously limiting the independent exercise of his divine attributes.

Here we have an instance of an apologist cherry picking from one part of the Bible to explain an inconsistency in another part. First, one has to wonder: What was so special about Nazareth? Jesus made a practice of hanging out with women of ill-report and, heaven forbid, tax collectors during his ministry, but the Son of God’s magic is quenched when he steps foot in Nazareth? Second, how are we to understand the phenomenon of God turning off the miracle machine in one specific moment in the New Testament when all throughout the gospels pages, Jesus is healing lepers, curing the blind, raising people from the dead and eviscerating demons from people before sending them into pigs. (A note on that last miracle: After Jesus sent the demons into the pigs, he then made the pigs run down a steep bank into a lake to die. Presumably, demons cannot die via drowning since they are spirits. So, here is a needless slaughter of pigs, but for consistency’s sake, at least this continued the anti-pork message that prevailed throughout the Old Testament. Further, was the global flood in Genesis another comical attempt to kill off all the demons living on earth at the time, along with all of mankind, save Noah and his soon to be incestuous family.)

***

Next, Strobel and Blomberg consider whether the gospels can be verified with extra-biblical source material. Without providing a single detail, Blomberg simply confirmed that when the gospels mention specific places and times, they have been confirmed by archaeology. Of course, many of the places mentioned in the gospels actually existed; it’s absurd to think otherwise, but I doubt evidence from archaeology is ever going to be strong enough to increase the overall validity of the Bible. By the way, the archaeological evidence for the Old Testament, as it happens, is pretty scanty, and the famous exodus probably never actually happened. See The Bible Unearthed series.

Blomberg did make one statement in this short section that was a complete lie, namely that we can verify the story of Jesus through non-Christian sources. Again, he gives not a single example, only saying:

… we can learn through non-Christian sources a lot of facts about Jesus that corroborate key teachings and events in his life.

It’s hard to fathom a more misleading statement. There is not one contemporary, non-Christian source in antiquity that confirms Jesus’ existence, much less any “key teachings” during his ministry. See this videothis video and see my previous post on this subject, “Josephus and the historical Jesus.”

***

Finally, Strobel describes something he called the “adverse witness test,” which is supposedly a way to check other sources to see if the gospel writers were not telling the truth about their claims surrounding Jesus. Here is a kind of last ditch effort by apologists to affirm the faith by saying something like, “Ah, hah! We can’t find any sources disputing that the miracles of Jesus took place, so they must have actually happened.” Of course, Jesus’ execution and the subsequent persecution of Christians for heresy might be proof enough since if Jesus actually healed people and actually raised Lazarus from the dead and this became public knowledge, wouldn’t Jewish leaders have had no choice but to bow the knee in reverence to the final coming of their long-sought-after messiah? Further, if Jesus was doing all these things, reason would suggest that not just one or two, but many historians of the day would have spilled gallons of ink on this miracle worker. But this is not what we have. We have four gospels written by people who loved Jesus and clearly had some kind of vested interest in seeing the new religion spread. We have no contemporary accounts of Jesus, and Josephus is the only one that finally gets around to mentioning him in 93 or 94 C.E., and that passage, much touted by Christians as  an extra-biblical account, is almost certainly a forgery.