"We stand in awe…"

A thread over on scienceblogs reminded us of this article by Prof. PZ Myers of the University of Minnesota: We stand in awe at the heights our people have achieved.

Cultural Mormanism

The author of Letters from a Broad, an expatriate ex-Mormon in Switzerland, writes about chatting with Mormon missionaries in France. She writes:

Everyone knows that apostates like me are supposed to hate the church and everything about it with a fiery passion! The crazy thing though is that even though I think the Book of Mormon is a work of fiction, for some reason I don’t hate the church or its members. Even though they may not be too thrilled about it, in some ways they’ll always be my people.

I live in France. I’ve chosen to live here, this is where I want to live, and in fact I’ve gone native to the point where I’ve practically become a French person myself. Still, when I see a pair of LDS missionaries walking down the street, I see something familiar from back home in the old country. And I know that I share a common background with them that we don’t share with anyone else walking down that same street.

The author has since moved to Switzerland.

Ex-Mormon on polygamy

C. L. Hanson, the author of Letters from a Broad, explains why she touches on Mormon polygamy in a sub-plot of her novel:

Since Exmormon is about the mainstream LDS church, some might object to the fact that I included a significant sub-plot involving modern-day polygamy, which the mainstream church has disavowed.

But the specter of polygamy still haunts the mainstream church. It affects people who are raised in the LDS church — even far from Utah — as they learn that the early Latter-day prophets taught polygamy as an eternal principle and taught that not only is there polygamy in the afterlife but that God Himself is probably a polygamist. The manifesto putting a stop to the practice of polygamy did not address the doctrinal questions.

Random thought: "Can’t think for myself…"

Here’s a random thought from Atheists online:

A day in the life of a Zen Buddhist

This looks soooo peaceful…

See the whole thing at Sinfest.

Stupid court!

The U.S. Supreme court has reversed the decisions of 3 district courts and 3 circuit courts and declared Bush’s 2003 ban on “partial birth abortions” to be constitutional. There’s no such medical procedure. The Center for Reproductive Rights says:

April 18, 2007: In a stunning reversal, the Supreme Court rules against women’s health and in favor of abortion restrictions. In its ruling upholding the Federal Abortion Ban case, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively overturned 30 years of precedent and announced that women’s health is no longer a paramount concern. The Center for Reproductive Rights said the Court’s decision paves the way for state and federal legislatures to enact additional bans on abortions as early as 12 weeks, including those that doctors say are safe and medically necessary.

Books about Science vs. Religion

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, David P. Barash briefly reviews eleven recent books about the gulf, or conflict, between science and religion.
Caution: in transcription to a Web page, some of the words in the review were mashed together: appealto, authoras, theirsto, etc.

The books reviewed are these:

• Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel C. Dennett (Viking Press, 2006)
• The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, by Edward O. Wilson (W.W. Norton, 2006)
• Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, by David Sloan Wilson (University of Chicago Press, 2002)
• Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist, by Joan Roughgarden (Island Press, 2006)
• Evolving God: A Provocative View of the Origins of Religion, by Barbara J. King (Doubleday, 2007)
• The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)
• The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, by Francis S. Collins (The Free Press, 2006)
• Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris (Knopf, 2006)
• Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, by Pascal Boyer (Basic Books, 2002)
• Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief, by Lewis Wolpert (W.W. Norton, 2007)
• The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, by Carl Sagan (The Penguin Press, 2006)

Hat tip to PZ Myers at Pharyngula for the book reviews. As he rightly points out, these reviews are too brief; but if any of the books sound interesting, you can look them up.

Update: ChemBob mentions another book: Victor J. Stenger’s “God, the Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist” (2007).

Who does what around the house?

A man and his wife were having an argument about who should brew the coffee each morning. The wife said, “You should do it, because you get up first, and then we don’t have to wait as long to get our coffee.” The husband said, ” You are in charge of cooking around here and you should do it, because that is your job, and I can just wait for my coffee.” Wife replies, “No, you should do it, and besides, it is in the Bible that the man should make the coffee.” Husband replies, “I can’t believe that, show me” So she fetched the Bible, and opened the New Testament and showed him at the top of several pages, that it indeed says
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
…”HEBREWS”

Did Christ exist?

There’s a question that it seems hard to get an objective answer to. I’m looking for sources that are neither believers nor atheists. Here’s a review of the facts and who believes them, on religioustolerance.org.

From Impact Press, “Did Jesus Exist–and Does It Matter?“

Viewing the biblical Jesus as a pastiche woven from stories of various pagan gods, demigods, and heroes adapted to a first-century Jewish milieu, many scholars have noted striking similarities between Jesus and his pagan counterparts. For example, the Persian sun-god Mithra, widely worshipped in the Roman Empire before the inception of the Christian era, had 12 disciples, performed miracles, was buried in a tomb, rose on the third day, was called the Good Shepherd, identified with the lamb, considered “the Way, the Truth and the Light, the Redeemer, the Savior, the Messiah;” his principal festival was held on what was to become Easter, and he instituted a Eucharist or Lord’s Supper. When Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Empire in 313 C.E. (Common Era), he was influenced by the pell-mell conversion of Roman soldiers from Mithraism to Christianity. The biblical Jesus gave them a sort of home-grown Mithra

See also “Dates for early Christian writings” (previous).

Dates for early Christian writings

I always assumed that the order of the books in the New Testament echoed the order in which they were written. But that’s not true. The Epistles came first, then the biography of Jesus.

It’s notable that the epistles of don’t tell of Jesus as a person who, on a certain occasion, said a particular thing that would settle the current argument. Instead he speaks to the apostles in their hearts. The biographical details came a century later.

1. The letters of the apostles come first, but they are fifty or more years after Christ.
2. Then there’s the Gospel of Mark, 65 - 80 years after Christ. Mark is described by early writers as an apostle of Peter who never met the Lord (and he is clearly unfamiliar with Palestine).
3. The book of Matthew (80 - 100 C.E.) was copied from, and elaborated on, the book of Mark.
4. The author of Acts of the Apostles also wrote the Gospel of Luke some time between 80 and 130 C.E. This Luke was not an apostle of Jesus; as describe in “Luke” itself, he is someone who knew Paul and travelled with him.
5. John is a later author (90 - 100 C.E.), who is also not an eyewitness, as we can tell from the dates of the controversies and events that he mentions.

So what we have in the New Testament is a tradition of Christianity not by eye-witnesses, but by writers who believe in Christ and speak of him largely as evangelists do today when listening to the “voice of God.” Then we have later writings that spoke of Jesus as a person and were ascribed, based on tradition rather than scholarhsip, to his disciples.

On the cultural side we have the Hellenistic ideals that were sweeping Judea at the time, Greek ideals of the philosphical school called Cynicism, and a very standard hero myth.

This story was built up in a way that reminds me of Santa Claus. The story of Father Christmas, a generous ideal who would reward children who were good all year, came first. Only later was he transformed into Santa Claus with eye-witness accounts. His packsack became miraculous (magical), larger outside than in and able to supply multitudes. He acquired flying reindeer that carried him into the sky. Other writers added Mrs. Claus, elves, Rudolph, and a taste for cookies & milk. If Santa made all the toys in the world, he must have a factory staffed by elves and we began to hear about his labour troubles.

Similarly, in the American legend, Paul Bunyan the giant logger came first, then was given Babe the Blue Ox and miracles (called “tall tales”) such as creating the Grand Canyon by dragging his ax-head on the ground. Babe acquired verismilitude through detail such as the fact that she measured 42 ax-handles and a plug of tobacco between the horns.

So Jesus came first, then the iconic events of his life such as miracles, persecution, and death, and finally Joseph & Mary and a childhood. Instead of having details of his life fade away in later writings, they are added when he is outside the scope of human memory.

See also “Biblical scholarship” (previous) or “Did Christ Exist?” (next).

Tags: blog against theocracy