A Secular Look at the Bible

a review by Edd Doerr

Noah's flood and the David/Goliath story  are pure fiction, based on the many centuries earlier Epic of Gilgamesh. So begins Allen Wright's interesting, naturalistic, secular, humanistic summary of the books of the Bible from Genesis through Kings II, the first half of the Jewish Bible and the first third of the combined JudeoChristian scriptures. The author makes repeatedly clear that these writings are pure fiction, but goes on to show when, why, how and for whom they were put together. These anonymous writings were  developed during the Hebrews' Babylonian Captivity of 586 to 537 BCE, probably begun around the time of the death of the Babylonian empire's King Nabuchadnezzar in 562 BCE.

When the Babylonians occupied Judea in 586 BCE they hauled off to their capital only the Hebrew upper classes, leaving the commoners or lower classes behind in Judea. Beginning around 562 BCE Jewish writers in Babylon wrote these books to "sustain their ancient civilization and society during the years of the Babylonian-imposed exile of their upper classes", to "prevent the cultural  demise that had befallen the Judeans' northern brothers and sisters in Israel".  It worked, and when Christianity developed and spread, the whole collection of the books called the  Bible came to be an important and influential cultural artifact, even though very largely fiction.

Reading the Bible can be very boring, but Allen Wright's condensed summary and explanation of its earliest portions is useful and not lacking in  humorous touches. It fits nicely on the shelf with humanist rabbi Sherwin Wine's magisterial A Provocative People: A Secular History of the Jews (2012), which I have also reviewed for this blog.

Did the Gay Rights Decision Make an Intolerant God Angry?

By Gary Berg-Cross


The recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings ruling on DOMA and gay marriage is rightly celebrated as a civilized advance. But it has caused some cultural consternation in conservative and religious circles who see rights as something God provides rather than something human's decide. Dan Cathy son of founder Truett Cathy & president of the closed-on-Sunday fast-food restaurant chain Chick-fil-A bull-tweeted his way into the debate. According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution he tweeted:


"Sad day for our nation; founding fathers would be ashamed of our gen. to abandon wisdom of the ages re: cornerstone of strong societies," The post was later deleted but not before the paper and others captured screenshots of it.

As reported in the Atlanta Journal Constitution Chick-fil-A founder Truett Cathy had earlier told an online religious magazine that he was “guilty as charged” in his opposition to gay marriage.: “We are very much supportive of the family — the biblical definition of the family unit,” Cathy edged into harsher comments of vengeance: “we’re inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say we know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage,”

That’s not the tone of some mainstream religious groups even if they support the religious conception of marriage and speak of gay marriage as some type of sin. Their compromise position is to “tolerate” gays. But as reported by Crooks and Liars tolerance wasn’t the tone taken by televangelist Pat Robertson who pointed to HebrewTestament style vengeance: 





"Look what happened to Sodom. After a while, there wasn't any other way, and God did something pretty drastic."

Robertson also had some thoughts on how we’ve come to this. It the fault of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who may have law clerks "who happen to be gays." Another sign of faulty reasoning about why the arc of history bends towards justice.  And another sign of embedded intolerance among some who are very sure of their god-generated wisdom. As the Dalai Lama said:

“In the practice of tolerance, one’s enemy is the best teacher.”

  Images 

Tolerance: http://toppun.com/Political/Pro-Tolerance-Designs-Products-Merchandise-Store-Shop.html
 Chick-Fil-A: http://www.stitchinc.org/apps/blog/entries/show/17764427-the-true-debate-of-chick-fil-a
Tolerance?: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/karenspearszacharias/2011/06/13/why-i-refuse-to-tolerate-gays/

Secular and Religious Cities

By Gary Berg-Cross

It is perhaps not surprising to find studies measuring various religious qualities in the United States. One from 2010 is aptly called the, “2010 U.S. Religious Census: Religious Congregations & Membership Study (RCMS)”.  The report was the work of Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies (ASARB). It provides detailed county by county information on congregations, members, adherents and attendance for 236 different faiths groups.

Perhaps most interesting are the summaries of which are the most “religious” city/metropolitan areas.  And the results aren’t that surprising.  Salt Lake City comes out as the most religious city ( of 52 with populations > 1 million) based on what the study called its 74 percent population identifying as a religious adherent (73,487 religious adherents per 100,000 persons). Most of the other top cities (or states) were in the South as one might expect. A slightly different study, focusing on Bible belief and including smaller cities finds Knoxville TN as what they called the most Bible-Minded city.

Where are the more secular cities and states?  Again not surprising the research found them in the West and Northeast. The greater area of Portland, OR-WA was the least religious/most secular city with about 32 percent identifying as a religious adherent. States like NY and Rhode Island are about the same level. That’s less than half of Salt Lake or Mississippi which is the most religious state. DC came in as the 3^rd most secular city.

It is a bit interesting that the surveys of religious observance provides an inverse look at secularity. It will be more interesting when we have funded surveys of the various forms of secularity and non-belief.  Just as some surveys covers a wealth of religious sects, it would be interesting to see a bigger spectrum on non-belief.  We might need a comparable large secular/humanist organization to fund such a detailed look, but it might be an important barometer to measure trends. We might just need a secular angel to fund it.  Perhaps the next Reason Rally will generate enough interest to pull that off.

See a HuPo article for more on this topic.

 

Images

 

Secular City: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1396331.The_Secular_City

 

 

Abelard's Early Humanist Reasoning

by Gary Berg-Cross

At a recent conference a lunchtime conversation turned to examples of sound reasoning and the scholar Peter Abelard was raised as an interesting example.  Abelard is better known to most of us as a tragic love story.  Abelard and Heloise remain one of the more a celebrated couples of all time, in part from their writing and in part from the classic tragic events that eventually separated them:

1.    two well-educated people, brought together by their passion they fell in love;

2.    Heloise became pregnant, so

3.    they married secretly in 1118.

4.    Her uncle Fulbert, a canon of Paris,  had Abelard castrated by thugs believing that he had abandoned Heloise,

5.    after which he became a monk and

6.    Sent to a convent by her uncle, Heloise later became a nun

In a letter to Abelard, Heloise reflected on her loss:

"You know, beloved, as the whole world knows, how much I have lost in you, how at one wretched stroke of fortune that supreme act of flagrant treachery robbed me of my very self in robbing me of you; and how my sorrow for my loss is nothing compared with what I feel for the manner in which I lost you."

This part of the history I knew a bit, but Peter Abelard (1079-1142) as an12th century medieval French philosopher, theologian, and logician I had heard less about.  After all these are the Middle Ages, so I was pleasantly surprised to learn the history and form of his thinking.

It goes something like this. A bright boy he rapidly jumped from school to school gaining an easy rise to fame. He wound up in a pre-University of Paris setting to study under William of Champeaux, head of the cathedral school and archdeacon of Notre Dame. Along the way his brilliant reasoning and debate were matched by a Chris-Hitchens-like arrogance. As with Hitch he generated many foes as wells as admirers. His mentor William, for example, was famous for a realist stance on the nature of universals, while pupil Peter took a nominalist and soundly won a series of debates. This success lead to a following, among students who provided a core for what was late to become the great University in Paris. Abélard's deep understanding of Aristotle's theory of knowledge surpassed anything widely available in 12^th century Europe, which he cultivated in his Paris students. His was an example of great teaching that came to live as a Liberal Arts curriculum and style of teaching when universities were formally founded.

One of his important contributions was a work on ethics which took as its title the Socratic admonition, "Know thyself." In this work Abelard veered from the established course of strict commandments to stress the importance of intention in evaluating the moral/immoral character of an action. This was a step towards more nuanced reasoning about moral action.

Some of his early persuasive arguments swayed leaders like Pope Innocent III, who accepted Abelard's Doctrine of Limbo – children are innocent before the age of reason. But reasoned debate about reason itself was his real forte and passion - outside of Heloise. A famous debate was with Bernard of Clairvaux over the conflicts of reason and religion.  This conflict that made him a hero of the Enlightenment.

In Dialogue of a Philosopher with a Jew and a Christian Abelard plays a combination of a Socrates and Swift like character as he debated religious dogma. Abélard juxtaposes apparently contradictory quotations from the Church Fathers & the Bible on many of the traditional topics of Judeo-Christian theology (he was the first to use ‘theology’ in its modern sense) only to “discover(ed) the Jews to be stupid and the Christians insane.”  As you can imagine making common folks reasoning look foolish does get noticed. His teachings backed by sound reasoning were controversial, and he was repeatedly charged with heresy. His book on the Trinity was condemned to be burnt at Soissons in 1121.

One can see the controversy in one his works on Logic Reasoning "Sic et Non," an early scholastic teaching text whose title translates from Medieval Latin into a simple “Yes and No" dichotomy (for more on limitations of dichotomy see my article on Binary Thinking). As in his previous “Dialog” we see what happens when we apply reason to the teaching of revelation or at least questions that come out of revealed truths.

In the Prologue, Abélard outlines logical rules for reconciling contradictions but the core of the book is a list of 158 philosophical and theological questions.  The first five questions give a sense of these:

1. Must human faith be completed by reason, or not?
2. Does faith deal only with unseen things, or not?
3. Is there any knowledge of things unseen, or not?
4. May one believe only in God alone, or not?
5. Is God a single unitary being, or not?

Abelard laid down four basic principles of reasoning:

• Use systematic doubt and question everything
• Learn the difference between statements of rational proof and those merely of persuasion
• Be precise in use of words, and expect precision of others
• Watch for error, even in Holy Scripture (danger Will Robinson!!)

Wonderful advice even today.  Maybe especially today.

One can why Peter got in trouble as the rational arguments on the non-doctrinaire side seem as good as the Church’s position. And rational argument is still getting freethinkers in trouble.

Abelard was probably not the forerunner of modern atheism as some have argued. He seems more comfortably fit into a proud humanistic tradition–extending from Socrates. He takes a  bold Medieval step towards human centering in ethics by taking moral authority and responsibility away from gods and their servant. Intentions and reasoning make it our responsibility.  Bravo Peter A for your love of reason and balance along with the worthy Heloise.

Images

A & H : http://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson/2012/04/sic-et-non-why-the-title.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_philosophy

A Dialogue of a Philosopher With a Jew, and a Christian: http://books.google.com/books/about/A_Dialogue_of_a_Philosopher_With_a_Jew_a.html?id=j6lLgt-bhBAC

 

Sic et Non: http://www.amazon.fr/Sic-Et-Non-Critical-Edition/dp/0226000664