The beginning of the end

So, Bush has told Saddam to hit the road.

I haven't been blogging about the war for pretty much the same reason as Charles Murtaugh -- I'm in the agonized middle about it, and it's too depressing. So much is based on what is hard to really know. Is Saddam Hussein just a dangerous nutball, or is he a dangerous nutball of world-threatening proportions? And what's going to happen in Iraq once he's gone?

Meanwhile, there's our own leader at home to figure out. Posting on Josh Claybourn's blog, Brian Logue complained about the press' alleged fear of Bush's religion:

Here is a survey of this charge against our President. I wonder if this would be tolerated if our president was New Age or some other chic religion that is non-western in origin? How can a Christian Society be so biased? How is it that some would deny what we are at the core?

In the comments, Jon Darby said roughly what I was thinking:

The press seemed to have a field day with the Reagans when it was learned they used astrologers.
http://www.who2.com/nancyreagan.html

Whether the media would be gentler and kinder if he were New Age is moot since I think we'll see a midget in the White House before we see somebody who belongs to a non-mainstream Christian religion. JFK's Catholicism was a major issue, you'll recall.

Actually, given that Gore-Liebermann won a slim majority of votes, I can imagine a Jew getting there in my lifetime. (For that matter, a midget doesn't sound that unthinkable either!) But it's true, if some New Ager won the presidency our culture would be so different that any comparison is useless. If the press now tends to go mushy on people like the Dalai Lama, it's because he has no real power in our society. If the Dalai Lama were president and had control over the purse strings and the nukes, you betcha there'd be scruitiny.

It seems to me that the real question regarding Bush's faith is whether it's a source of humility or self-aggrandizement. Critics fear that he has a messianic sense of mission, and imagines himself specially chosen by God to fight evil. Dave Neiwert expressed this fear a while ago, though his chosen example, lifted from a Progressive article, doesn't seem very impressive to me:

That Bush believes he was assigned the Presidency from on high comes through in another passage of Frum's book. After Bush's September 20, 2001, speech to Congress, Gerson called up the President to compliment him: "Mr. President, when I saw you on television, I thought--God wanted you there," Gerson said, according to Frum.

"He wants us all here, Gerson," the President responded, according to Frum.

If anything, that sounds like he's disclaiming special status -- sure, God wants me here, but he wants everybody here! The other direct quotes from Bush that the article cites seem similarly ambiguous. When Bush says, "I could not be governor if I did not believe in a divine plan that supersedes all human plans," is he saying he's specially appointed for leadership? Or just that without his faith he'd be a drunken shlub who never got anywhere?

I think part of the problem here is that evangelicals tend to see the hand of God in everything. I've certainly noticed this since I've been hanging around them. They tend to see God at work in what secular types would call chance or fortune or personal strength or other people's decisions. A lot of it seems pretty silly to me, frankly, but the point is that they don't imagine they're special. They think God works in everybody's life.

All of which isn't to say definitely that Bush doesn't have a messiah complex. I certainly hope not. But psychoanalyzing somebody from a distance was always a tricky business anyway.

Exodus 24-31

This section I admit to skimming some, because it's a very long and tedious set of directives on how to build the Tabernacle, what the priests should wear, how they should sacrifice, etc. Through most of it God sounds like the world's most exacting interior decorator:

You shall make an altar on which to offer incense; you shall make it of acacia wood. It shall be one cubit long, and one cubit wide; it shall be square, and shall be two cubits high; its horns shall be of one piece with it. You shall overlay it with pure gold, its top, and its sides all around and its horns; and you shall make for it a molding of gold all around. And you shall make two golden rings for it; under its molding on two opposite sides of it you shall make them, and they shall hold the poles with which to carry it. You shall make the poles of acacia wood, and overlay them with gold. (30:1-5)

And so on for seven chapters. I wondered at first why God would care about such things as the length of the priests' undergarments. Then again, I thought, this is the sort of thing the priests would want to know. If God just said, "Build me a good temple, dress nicely, and make some sacrifices," they'd be left wondering, "What on earth could we build that we know would please God?" And, no doubt, start arguing about it.

In fact, it would be nice if God were this detailed about everything. A lot of the most important commands -- "love your neighbor," "honor your parents" -- are rather widely open to interpretation. Much ink and blood has been spilled over the centuries trying to figure out exactly what it is that God wants.

On another subject, I'm wondering about this passage:

Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up, and they saw the God of Israel. Under his feet there was something like a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness. God did not lay his hand on the chief men of the people of Israel; also they beheld God, and they ate and drank. (24:9-11)

Back in the dying-for-sins debate, Tom wrote that no one before Jesus could survive looking at God, and quotes a later chapter of Exodus in support. So what were these men seeing up there? Did they see him but not see his face?

The trouble with taxonomy

I had an email exchange with Patrick Nielsen Hayden today about my blogroll categorization scheme. Among other things, he wondered why it seems like most of the bloggers people identify primarily as Catholic are conservatives. I seem to recall this question came up in the Catholic blogosphere itself not long ago, but I'm not going to try to dig up the debate.

Anyway, I pointed to Noli Irritare Leones and Not For Sheep as non-conservatives on my Catholic list. Thinking about it later, though, I wondered if NIL even belongs there. She seems to be involved in both Catholic and Quaker activities. So I decided to go back to her first post and see how she describes herself:

I'm a religiously eclectic Christian (raised Episcopalian, Quaker as an adult, married into Catholicism), politically mostly liberal, and professionally an engineer. My current reading material is Thomas Merton's Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander and Edward Schillebeeckx's Jesus. My volunteer activities include various things associated with my Quaker Meeting (Recording Clerk, Library Committee, currently on a First Day School teaching team, though I drop off the teaching team at the end of the month), moderating soc.religion.mormon (I did say I'm eclectic in my religious interests, didn't I?), and occasionally (like, every couple of months or so) helping prepare food at a local Catholic Worker house.

Darn bloggers. You try to pidgeonhole them, they go flapping out before you know it!

The telltale keyboard

Clive James' review of a new biography of Aldous Huxley is an interesting read. But I can't help noticing how well it fits David Sexton's description of a piece by a reviewer who hasn't actually read the book:

They take issue only with specific sections of the work. They never make sweeping negative assertions ("there is no mention anywhere in this book of ..."). They deliver wellturned essays about subjects they already know about (Napoleon, say, or the national health) and then add just a few kind words about the publication in hand ("as X says, in this lively account").

James writes a long and scholarly essay about Huxley and his books, with exactly two brief but complimentary mentions of the biography at hand. Wouldn't want to leap to conclusons ... but ...

Down among the reeds and rushes

Yesterday I took a break from Exodus and started rereading a short book I have about the first civilizations of the world. Among the people I read about was Sargon the Great, who sounds like a Star Trek character but was actually the first person to rule all of Mesopotamia, in about 2300 B.C. Civilization grew up in Sumer, in the southern part of the region, but Sargon was an Akkadian, from the north.

One legend has it that Sargon was an illlegitimate baby whose mother put him in a basket and set him afloat in the Euphrates, where he drifted downriver to Sumer and was brought up a Sumerian. The resemblance to the Moses story is obvious, and in fact, this isn't the only tale of this type. The ancient Indian epic the Mahabharata also has an illegitimate baby who was floated in a river and wound up in a royal court, though I forget now exactly who the character was.

I don't know if floating babies in rivers was common back then, or if this was just a story that bopped around the Middle East at the time. As the urban-legend trackers Snopes often find, a tale about one famous person will often get transferred to another one who seems plausible, especially if the original subject drifts into obscurity. The common thread between these characters is that they had unlikely origins for ending up among royalty, and yet they did. Possibly this story was simpler and more dramatic than however Moses did wind up in Pharaoh's household.

I have heard it suggested that Moses actually was an Egyptian, who married into the Hebrews and came to identify with their cause. Stranger things have happened. But personally, I don't see how it makes a difference either way. What he did as a grownup was a lot more important.

Exodus 20-24

This section is basically a Cliff Notes version of Leviticus, with God laying out the Ten Commandments and various other laws and penalties.

It made me think of a recent article about patterns of revenge in stateless societies. With no formal system of justice, things tend to spiral downwards into revenge and revenge for the revenge until the violence goes way beyond the original crime. Here's the "money quote":

"A life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth was not, for the tribal people who codified this rule, a recipe for unbridled violence, but rather an attempt to contain it," Dr. Beckerman says.

This is an important thing that a lot of moderns don't realize when they look at ancient law codes. The severity of the penalties -- death for adultery, for instance -- are not due to a tyrannically moralistic state but the fact that the penalties people exact on each other, when left to their own devices, are even more severe. There are societies in the world even today where, if you catch your wife with another guy, you're more or less expected to kill them. This attitude lingered on in the West for a long time -- the hero of Jane Eyre, for instance, isn't seen as especially evil just because he shot his mistress' boyfriend. This was not because of an abstract moral objection to adultery, but because of a natural rage at the injury.

In fact, some legal codes of the day went a lot farther than the Bible on the tit-for-tat scale. As I recall, in the Code of Hammurabi if someone killed your child then one of his children would be killed, and in the Assyrian code if you raped someone's wife then your wife would get raped. (Who the lucky party was who carried out this punishment, I don't know.) Of course, this also reflects the fact that women and children were regarded as property of men, which the OT basically agrees with, but not (fortunately) to that extreme.

If we don't look at things that way in the West today, I suppose it's because we've moved so far away from the lawless state that justice has become depersonalized. Adultery is, for most people, a lot more painful than getting their wallets snatched. But sex is seen mostly as a ''private" matter, which is a distinction I don't think the ancients would have understood. Law isn't really about personal pain any more; it's about abstract concepts like individual rights and property rights. (Although civil law still has that element, as in damage awards for "emotional distress.")

On another note, I thought this was interesting:

When a man seduces a virgin who is not engaged to be married, and lies with her, he shall give the bride-price for her and make her his wife. But if her father refuses to give her to him, he shall pay an amount equal to the bride-price for virgins. (22:16-17)

This is a more pragmatic attitude about premarital sex than you might expect from the Bible, given what is usually taken to be the "Biblical" position on the subject. Not that that mightn't come later; it wouldn't be the Bible if it were perfectly consistent...

UPDATE: Getting back to the subject of revenge, here's another suggestive bit:

Whoever strikes a person mortally shall be put to death. If it was not premeditated, but came about by an act of God, then I will appoint for you a place to which the killer may flee.(21:12-13)

The notes explain that an "act of God" basically refers to an accidental killing. If it was an accident, why would the killer have to flee? I can only think it would be to escape distraught relatives who would want to kill him, even if they knew it wasn't his fault.

In fact, though the above article doesn't mention it, one striking thing about vigilante justice in tribal societies is how little intent actually matters. Kenneth Good, an anthropologist who lived among the natives of the South American rainforest and married one of them, wrote that if a woman was raped in that society her husband would usually beat her out of sheer hysteria, even if he believed that she didn't consent. Her fault wasn't the issue; it just drove him crazy to think she had sex with someone else. Or think of Oedipus, whose whole family was cursed for his patricide and incest, even though he didn't know at the time that he was doing them. It's interesting that God seems to be considering intent but also allowing for the feelings of the family.

Exodus 17-20

Here we have a few different episodes -- Moses draws water from a rock, fights with the mysterious Amelek, and learns to delegate. But the important part of this section is the build-up to the revelation on Mt. Sinai. What's most striking to me about it is the conditions of God's appearance:

...the LORD said to Moses: ‘Go to the people and consecrate them today and tomorrow. Have them wash their clothes and prepare for the third day, because on the third day the LORD will come down upon Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people. You shall set limits for the people all around, saying, “Be careful not to go up the mountain or to touch the edge of it. Any who touch the mountain shall be put to death. No hand shall touch them, but they shall be stoned or shot with arrows; whether animal or human being, they shall not live.” When the trumpet sounds a long blast, they may go up on the mountain.' So Moses went down from the mountain to the people. He consecrated the people, and they washed their clothes. And he said to the people, ‘Prepare for the third day; do not go near a woman.’

God seems a tad unapproachable, doesn't he? Actually, at the last Alpha the lecturer remarked upon how strange Jesus was to this tradition: God being among people like any other person, visible and touchable. In Exodus, so far, he's appeared mainly in the form of fire: the burning bush, then as a "pillar of cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night" (which my study notes claim are one phenomenon: "The Lord, depicted as a storm god, radiates light from within a cover of cloud...by day only the cloud is visible, by night only the light"). On this occasion Mt. Sinai is "wrapped in smoke, for the Lord had descended in fire." The whole mountain shakes.

I've heard it said by many Christians that Jesus "bridged the gap" between God and humans, so he would no longer appear as a terrifying destructive force. Although nowadays we seem to have the opposite problem -- not if he appears as fire, but whetehr he appears at all...

I guess it's not just me, then

An interesting discussion has broken out over on Josh Claybourn's blog about Christian pacifism, and how to interpret the violence in the Old Testament. Short answer: it's not easy.

BibleGeek has more on what all of Jesus' sword imagery means.

Pax Camassiana

Telford was not happy with the way the Bible discussion was going, and looking back at my snarly post I don't blame him. So herewith, no more criticizing each other's Scriptural interpretations in public. Of course, other folks can still respond however they like... just keep it polite ...

Exodus 13-16

Here we have the famous parting of the Red Sea, Moses' song of victory, and the Israelites moving into the desert and receiving manna from heaven.

While Exodus flowed pretty smoothly up to now, this part really brought to mind the J-E-P theory that the Pentateuch was stitched together from several different sources telling the same story, because it really feels like that. I've been writing up to now as if Exodus really happened exactly like it says, but there is, in fact, a smell of poetic exaggeration through the whole episode with the plagues. The Torah was probably written down several centuries after the event, and it feels sort of like the Iliad. There really was a Trojan war, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna buy everything Homer says.

Nonetheless, there are parts of Exodus that feel realer than others. The most striking part in this section was the description of the manna, which is so painstakingly detailed:

When the layer of dew lifted, there on the surface of the wilderness was a fine flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground ... The house of Israel called it manna; it was like coriander seed, white, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey.

Clearly the author is trying to describe something with no clear equivalent in the reader's life, and resorts to approximations: "It was like this, but sort of like that..." At the end of the section Aaron puts an omer (2.2 liters) of manna into a jar for posterity, and I wonder if they still had it when the author was writing. Either way, it's a detail that seems to bring the story out of the mythological and into the concrete.

Out of the ruins

Telford gamely defends Yahweh against my criticisms of his behavior in Exodus. First, the heart-hardening thing:

Here I do not see a "hypercalvinistic" fatalism at work, in which Pharaoh's will is utterly manipulated. Instead I see cooperation. Moses' signs proclam that YHWH is friend of the Hebrews. Pharaoh and his courtiers are enemies of the Hebrews, and that makes them enemies of God. So the signs of YHWH's power provoke fear during the plague and resentment afterwards, rather than compassion and joy. Pharaoh's court has set itself against YHWH and YHWH's people, and it will go down fighting rather than concede the obvious – because to them it is not yet obvious!

Well, Pharaoh may not have been a nice character to begin with. But this repeated "The Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart" is explicitly stated to be God's doing so that "Egypt will know I am Lord." Like I said, this didn't even really work anyway, since Egypt went on worshipping its gods, so it's hard to see what drawing out the death and destruction in releasing the Hebrews even accomplished.

Telford also addresses collective sin:

Regarding collective sin, Exodus does show us that Pharaoh's people, and not just Pharaoh himself, approve of the oppression, share in dreading the Hebrews, and rule over the slaves (1:9-14). This sense of collective sin does not wash out individual people, but it does rightly stress human interconnectedness. Sin is not just an individual thing; it is a social thing, because humanity is intrinsically social.

However, his comparisons with American slavery and today's Iraq seem to only complicate the matter. Not all of "the people" did approve of slavery, and indeed, they fought a nasty civil war over the issue. Moreover, not even in Exodus does God say slavery is inherently wrong, just that it's wrong for his chosen people. (More on this later.)

Iraq is even problematic. One of Bush's arguments in favor of war is that it will liberate the Iraqi people. Whether or not you believe him, the fact that he's pitching it that way speaks to a moral sense on the part of Americans that's decidedly lacking in Exodus. If the White House brushed off fears of civilian casualties by saying, "Sin isn't an individual thing, it's a social thing" -- well, aside from totally confusing the press, I don't think it would play well even with the hawks. Distinguishing between combatants and non-combatants is one of the most basic rules of war, and it's a large part of what distinguishes us from terrorists. Yahweh goes out of his way to hurt everyone in Egypt. Even the animals lost their firstborns, for frick's sake.

Telford sez:

It is here that we see the full point of God's grandstanding as announced in Ex. 10:

I could have stretched forth my hand and striken you and your people with pestilence, and you would have been effaced ffrom the earth. Nevertheless I have spared you for this purpose: in order to show you my power, and in order that my fame may resound throughout the world (10:15-16).

Now why would the God of one people, Israel, care what the world's other peoples think of him? The reader has long known the short answer (Gen. 12:2-3), and Paul will develop a longer one (Rom. 9-11).

Romans I've already mentioned, but Genesis 12:2-3 says:

I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’

Seems contradictory -- I will curse those that curse you, and yet everybody will be blessed. But, like I keep saying, this God's fame didn't seem to spread throughout the world until Jesus. One is tempted to bring up a cliche about flies, honey and vinegar...

I've read further into Exodus but I'm too groggy to post more tonight. See you tomorrow!

Exodus 9-12

This section concludes the previous one: we have the rest of the plagues, and the Hebrews take off into the desert. I have pretty much the same feelings about it as I did in the last section.

Telford mentions in one of his posts that he feels Christians often skip over most of the OT, going right from the Fall to Jesus. Telford is always emphasizing to me (since I am ever impatient about these things) that God's saving the world is a process, going from small things to large. I suppose that's the theory behind him picking one people, the Jews, to get things rolling, and then expanding to the rest of the world when Jesus arrives.

The thing that bothers me about all this -- and this connects to my complaints about collective punishment -- is that it seems to be saying that individuals don't matter. The people who live and die as God spends thousands of years working out his Great Plan are stuck with the luck of the draw. Maybe you're one of God's chosen people, and are subject to all his benevolence. Maybe you're an Egyptian slave girl who, as if a lifetime of oppression weren't enough, loses her firstborn because Pharaoh's heart is hardened. Maybe you're of in the majority of the world that Yahweh isn't paying attention to, worshipping gods that don't exist.

I realize that this emphasis on individualism is a rather modern way of looking at it, but not entirely. Everyone is a self, no matter how interconnected with others. And when people say God loves me, I wonder what "me" means to God. Am I an individual to him, or part of some group? If so, what group? America? My atheist family? The press? Womankind? God's attitude toward me might be rather different depending on how he categorizes me.

Well, I'm sure we'll have an interesting discussion at Alpha tonight...

Make a left when you see the cherubim

Tim Noah gives Congress' ridiculous culinary chauvinism the treatment it deserves, but this line threw me off:

A better idea would be to tear out every page in the Bible that features an Iraqi place name, such as Babylon, Babel, the Garden of Eden, Nineveh, and Ur.

The Garden of Eden is in Iraq? I always imagined it being someplace more ... verdant.

A semblance of order

The blogroll was getting pretty long, so I broke it up into subsets. The categories are ... well, pretty random, and certainly some blogs could work in more than one. But it's my blog, I do what I like!

Exodus 5-8

General: Conan, what is best in life?
Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of the women!
General: That is good.

I brought up this part of Exodus at Alpha a couple weeks ago, because God seems to be doing an awful lot of destruction here and seems to be enjoying it an awful lot. "I shall harden Pharaoh's heart," he says in 7:3, "and I will multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt...The Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord, when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring Israelites out from among them." And so we move on to blood, frogs, gnats, etc.

What's the purpose of all this? Why does God harden Pharaoh's heart? Telford, at the time, said Paul later wrote something about this helping convert the Gentiles. I don't see where Paul actually says that, but I think he's talking about Romans 9:

For the scripture says to Pharaoh, ‘I have raised you up for the very purpose of showing my power in you, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth.’ So then he has mercy on whomever he chooses, and he hardens the heart of whomever he chooses... What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience the objects of wrath that are made for destruction; and what if he has done so in order to make known the riches of his glory for the objects of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory— including us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles?

I suppose we should deal with this when we actually get to Romans, but in any case, it rather manifestly didn't work. The Egyptians were still pagan at the time Paul was writing; it was Jesus, not the plagues, that converted them.

There's also the question of the Egyptians' collective guilt. Telford said that Egyptians as a whole participated in oppressing the Hebrews. From what I know of Egyptian society, I have a little trouble seeing how most Egyptians could have participated; most were peasants, and many were themselves slaves. They were not in a position to object to Pharaoh's commands.

Still, it raises an interesting question: how guilty is a person for "going along"? For the most part, we don't expect everybody to be a hero. Countries like South Africa and former Communist nations have found it's better to forgive people for passive compliance, because otherwise you're indicting the majority of the population. Collective blame can also lead to torturous justifications for violence, as was on display after the 9/11 attacks. Charles Murtaugh noticed last year that both the far left and the religious right seemed to be forming a theodical explanation of the attacks. Jerry Falwell blamed it on our hedonism and Noam Chomsky blamed our imperialism, but both essentially said America's wickedness brought the attacks upon us. And if the victims were not active plotters in the thing, it was New York, after all, capital of hedonism and international capitalism.

So collective punishment is not a game I want to get into. But one thing about Christianity -- an admirable thing, really -- is that it demands that you don't just "go along." Being good is about what you do, not just what you don't do. Last month I linked to this article about Bono, and he had some very sharp words about his current cause, fighting AIDS in Africa:

There should be civil disobedience on this. You read about the apostles being persecuted because they were out there taking on the powers that be. Jesus said, 'I came to bring a sword.' In fact, it's a load of sissies running around with their 'bless me' clubs. And there's a war going on between good and evil.

No wonder he gets along with Jesse Helms and Orrin Hatch -- spiritual warfare, baby! But seriously, reading this tugged at my conscience, just as reading Jesus' uncompromising statements about helping the poor tugged at my conscience. I've long wanted to help the disadvantaged, and have done so in a spotty way, but I feel like I could do more. Telford assured me that "it will happen," but things don't happen by me sitting around. I don't have many vices, but the big one is sloth. I've come to realize that more and more lately. It's easy for me to disappear into my own mind, and hard to engage with the world. Will I be one of those that history judges harshly?

The SoCal Godblogger mafia expands!

I just found myself of the blogroll of Brasilianista Aspirante, a blog by an L.A. grad student and aspiring "Brazilianist" (whatever that is exactly). She's an Orthodox Christian (of the Serbian branch, apparently) and likes Gerard Manley Hopkins. Wow. I haven't read Hopkins since college, I really should get back to him.

Exodus 1-4

Looks like Telford got the jump on me -- three posts already! Fortunately, though I haven't posted yet I did the reading last night, so I should be able to catch up. (And on the "smoothing it out" score, I can report that Exodus goes down very well with Ben & Jerry's Coffee Heath Bar Crunch.)

First, a technical point. It may be foolish to dispute a professional on this, but I feel Telford must be mistaken here:

God may want to invite Pharaoh to relent with as little force as necessary, and on the most favorable terms. Yet all the signs harden Pharaoh's heart, so perhaps it is better described as a matter of truthtelling. The sequence of events certainly reveals the heart of Pharaoh (and remember, it is hardly soft; this king is already guilty of genocidal infanticide).

Unless there's some other infanticide here that I missed, aren't these two different pharaohs? The Pharaoh who orders the mass infanticide that Moses narrowly escapes, and who gets mad when Moses kills the Egyptian, is declared dead at the end of chapter 2. After all, the whole reason Moses can go back to Egypt is that everyone who had it in for him is dead, right?

On another subject, it's funny that Telford thought of France and the U.S. in regard to Egyptian resentment of the Hebrews, because I did too. Although I didn't quite think the same thing. Actually, the first thing I thought of was Daniel Drezner's post last month objecting to the idea that France owes us for saving them back in WW2. "First of all, what's the statute of limitations on such gratitude? Surely we Americans owe a debt to France for their invaluable assistance during the Revolutionary War -- not to mention the Louisiana Purchase. How much does this place us in France's debt?"

I thought of this in regard to Egypt's debt to Joseph for saving them from famine a generation earlier. How long does the debt run? My feeling about the Egyptians' mistreatment of the Hebrews was that it's bad in itself, not because the Egyptians owe something. As Telford says, the real problem is envy: the Jews are a minority that's doing too well, and multiplying like rabbits. Certainly the Pat Buchanans of the world know the feeling.

But anyway, the really interesting thing about this part of Exodus is the character of Moses that emerges. He has a strangely in-between life, nursed by his Hebrew mother but adopted by Pharaoh's daughter, who gives him an Egyptian name. Despite this largesse, he identifies so strongly as a Hebrew that he kills an Egyptian for beating a Hebrew slave. Thinking of Moses living in Pharaoh's court I can't help thinking of Moll Flanders growing up in the house of the wealthy man who took her in off the street. She was never allowed to forget that she was basically an inferior being who lucked out, thanks to her benefactor's generosity. She was treated as almost one of the family -- emphasis on "almost." I wonder if Moses felt the same.

Moses certainly shows signs of what we might call an inferiority complex when God starts talking to him via the burning bush. He raises all sorts of objections and what-ifs to the plan, wondering how it could possibly work. Even with those out of the way, he's so terrified of public speaking that he gets Aaron to do all the talking for him.

Moses' and Aaron's partnership is one of the most interesting things about this story. I don't think it was unusual in those days for an oracle to have an interpreter, such as the Greek Sibyls, who apparently chattered incomprehensible things that were translated by someone else. I expect that a lot of those people were actually schizophrenics who got opportunistic PR people attached to them. But Moses and Aaron remind me more of the way family members often end up specializing according to temperament. For instance, when I or anyone else in my family is out with my brother-in-law, we let him do the stuff that requires gregariousness -- asking directions, haggling with salespeople, that sort of thing -- because he's so much better at it than anyone else. If you want advice about clothes or other aesthetic matters, ask my sister. When it comes to researching arcane facts, everyone turns to me. I get the feeling Moses and Aaron had a similar thing going on.

The result of it is that while Moses ultimately runs the show, Aaron has the greater visibility. From the point of view of the average Hebrew, it must have seemed like Aaron was leading them as much as Moses. I wonder if God intended leadership to be divided that way, to keep people from investing too much in one person. In the age of the god-kings, that could certainly lead to trouble, as it can today...

Watch this space

The lecture subject at the last Alpha session was the Bible, and why we should read it. I have read parts of the Bible in years past, and sometime around the start of this blog I started reading the New Testament. I read all the way through First Corinthians, and had a brief exchange with Telford about part of Acts. But I fell off the habit when it became apparent that Telford wasn't going to be available for further discussion. For me, taking the Bible straight is kind of like taking vodka straight. As Victor Erefeyev put it in the New Yorker a few months ago, "The Russian gulps his vodka down, grimacing and swearing, and immediately reaches for something to 'smooth it out.'"

OK, so it isn't quite that bad. But whenever I hear Telford -- or just about any other Christian, for that matter -- talking about the Bible, it sounds like a different book from the one I've read. There's also a whole lot of context that I just don't know. So I really don't like to read the Bible without someone to bounce it off of.

Meanwhile, this year our church has started a daily Bible reading/journaling program. I have not been doing it but Telford has, turning some journal entries into blog posts (see here and here, for instance), though lately he's fallen behind. Talking it over at church today, we decided to combine these two projects by having me join the Bible reading schedule, and discussing it on our blogs. That gives Telford extra incentive to keep up and me something to, er, "smooth it out."

The reading schedule is somewhat peculiar. Every day covers two chapters, plus a Pslam and/or a proverb. It alternates between Old Testament and New. They started with Genesis, then moved to Luke; now they're in Exodus, and next will move to Acts. I'm bummed I missed Luke; it would have been interesting to discuss, and Acts, which I read just recently, seemed rather tedious and confusing. But maybe it will be better with help.

So starting tomorrow I'm going to plunge into Exodus, and I hope a fruitful discussion. If anyone else wants to join in, of course, feel free.

Whoa!

Telford's gone all Sekimori. I like the Dead Sea Scroll look...

Crack Iraq

Matthew Yglesias contemplates breaking Iraq in two. It's a tempting idea because the state is so jerry-rigged to begin with, but he points out a problem:

The main point is that the populations of multiethnic countries don't really come in neat geographical bits that you can just pull apart. Big cities, in particular, tend to generate multiethnic populations (see, e.g., Montreal in Canada). This means that your new states are going to need to deal with the problem of multinationality just as much as the big state was going to need to. But by making the size of the new minority groups smaller relative to the overall population than they were in the old state you make finding an equitable solution more difficult. You also can get problems where, say, the Kurdish state tries to interfere with the conduct of the Arab state vis-à-vis the Arab state's treatment of the Kurdish population.

This is true. Wherever there have been empires -- and Iraq is smack in the middle of many past empires -- you have all these layers of peoples who've moved in over the millennia. So Iraq doesn't just have Arabs and Kurds, and Shi'ites and Sunnis. It's got Assyrians, Turkmen, Persians, Armenians, and several other little groups. Any Mesopotamian state is going to have to deal with minorities.

Europe used to be more like this, back when Europe had empires. The Hungary part of Austria-Hungary, for instance, used to encompass Slovakia, Croatia, Transylvania (now part of Romania) and small parts of neighboring states. After WWI Hungary was pared back to the land where Hungarians were a majority -- its present boundaries. But fully a third of ethnic Hungarians were left outside Hungary. Ethnic Germans also used to be more scattered around, and there were Yiddish-speaking Jews all over the place. Successive wars and population shifts solidified states to their current tidiness, though you could say the violence in the Balkans is the last spasm of this kind of ethnic state-building.

The larger problem lurking behind Iraq, though, is that the Kurds got royally screwed at the end of WWI. The Kurds are not a small group like the Assyrians: there are about 11 million of them in all countries, and they occupy a fairly contiguous area. The victors considered carving Kurdistan out of what is now Iraq and Turkey. But they wanted to make Iraq majority Sunni, because they feared Iranian influence in a Shiite state. This meant not only Kurds in Iraq but Kurds in Turkey, and now that Turkey is no longer a defeated enemy but a valued ally, nobody wants to get the Turkish Kurds excited by making a truncated Kurdistan.

Our chance to solve the Kurd problem peacefully, alas, seems to have gone by 80 years ago. I fear this problem isn't going to go away until there's a full-blown Kurdistan, but I don't know how that will happen.

Shrinks and shirkers

The Chronicle Review has an interesting article about tensions between psychologists and psycotherapists. I sympathize with the author's complaints -- I've certainly met people who insist blithely that psychology isn't a science, based on the pop versions. A big problem, I have to say, is Freud. Actually Freudians don't seem to be that common among psychologists these days, but he's become so entrenched in the culture that there's no getting away from him. I remember at college I chatted with a student who remarked, "In my sociology class we're learning about Freud, in my women's studies class we're learning about Freud, in my philosophy class we're learning about Freud..."

Bias cut

Mindles Dreck has a good post about media bias, which about sums up my own view of it.

On the same blog, Jane Galt also writes a post about PETA that I can get behind. The few loyalists who were reading me back in November may recall that I vowed to eat only humanely treated animals, and I've stuck with it. I've discovered some interesting companies, such as Petaluma Poultry, with its disconcerting habit of naming its chickens. As Lewis Carroll wrote, never eat anything you haven't been introduced to!

Actually, if I'm at someone's house (or at Alpha) I eat what's served to me regardless of origin. But in my own purchases I try to stick to my conscience.

Popularity

Sheesh, I'm gone for a couple days and my visit count drops through the floor! Sorry for the absence, folks. No real excuse, just wasn't in the mood.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden links to an interesting essay by Paul Graham theorizing about why smart kids tend to get picked on in school. He seems to be on the same wavelength as Glenn Reynolds and me about the unnatural hothouse atmosphere of today's high schools:

Where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do. This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things that could endanger children.

And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids all locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.

What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren't told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they're called misfits...

Bullying was only part of the problem. Another problem, and possibly an even worse one, was that we never had anything real to work on. Humans like to work; in most of the world, your work is your identity. And all the work we did was pointless, or seemed so to us at the time.

At best it was practice for real work we might do far in the future, so far that we didn't even know at the time what we were practicing for. More often it was just an arbitrary series of hoops to jump through, words without content designed mainly for testability...

When groups of adults form in the real world, it's generally for some common purpose. The leaders end up being those who are best at it. The problem with most schools is, they have no purpose. Their ostensible purpose, scholarship, is a joke, not taken seriously even by those who are best at it. But hierarchy there must be. And so the kids make one out of nothing.

We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings have to be created without any meaningful criteria. We say that the situation degenerates into a popularity contest. And that's exactly what happens in most American schools. Since the group has no real purpose, there is no natural measure of performance for status to depend on. Instead of depending on some real test, one's rank ends up depending mostly on one's ability to increase one's rank. It's like the court of Louis XIV. There is no external opponent, so the kids become one another's opponents in an inexorable zero-sum competition.

He also makes some good points about the psychology of bullying:

Like a politician who wants to distract voters from bad times at home, you can create an enemy if there isn't a real one. By singling out and persecuting a nerd, a group of kids from higher in the hierarchy create bonds between themselves: attacking an outsider makes them all insiders. This is why the worst cases of bullying happen with groups. Ask any nerd: you get much worse treatment from a group of kids than from any individual bully, however sadistic.

If it's any consolation to the nerds, it's nothing personal. The group of kids who band together to pick on you are doing the same thing, and for the same reason, as a bunch of guys who get together to go hunting. They don't actually hate you. They just need something to chase.

Because they're at the bottom of the scale, nerds are a safe target for the entire school. If I remember correctly, the most popular kids don't persecute nerds; they don't need to stoop to such things. Most of the persecution comes from kids lower down, the nervous middle classes.

That last point has, in fact, been borne out by social-psych research. Bullying isn't so much done by the strong to the weak as it is by the weak to the weaker. Bullies tend to lack social skills and don't figure out how to get what they want by peaceful means, so they resort to abuse. It gives them a short-term fix, but in the long run they fail. In Teresa's comments, Erik Olson explains this well:

There's always a few jocks who insist on ostracizing anyone else who isn't "cool", and typically manage to browbeat thier fellow jocks into going along. In football, they tend to be in the "small" positions -- QB, WR, FS and the like. Why? Because they know, deep down, the only thing they have going for them is that they're good at sport element X, and if it gets around that they can't read, they'll be ridiculed. So, the defense mechanism is to make intellegence uncool, and sports cool -- esp., of course, sport element X, which they just happen to "excel" at.

(Aside, in the real world, they find out throwing a football throw a 5' ring at 30 yards is pretty cool -- but the guys getting free rides to college are throwing them into 3' rings at 50 yards. Oops. This does *very* bad things to thier psyche. Remember this point, later.)

There are always a few jocks who don't play along with this -- but they can get away with it. They've got the atheltic ability to stay on the team (which means they can't be attacked, for fear of weakening the jock class-as-a-whole) and the brains to look others in the eye and say "Bull. You're just covering for your own weakness." They're not really common, but there's one or two on every team.

How do we fix this? How do we break this clique?

Simple. Get coaches out of school. What do washed up jocks with little other skill become? High school coaches. Not only do they tend to the petty tyrant, the setup means they're in close contact with the jocks for many hours a day -- during gym, after school, often, before school as well.

Go read it all.

Holy fools

The Gutless Pacifist is upset at Christianity Today's coverage of Bono. I only read the main article, which is basically quite sympathetic, and includes an interesting bit about Dublin's religious atmosphere at the time Bono converted:

Bono's spirituality is more than just a reflection of antisectarianism, said Steve Stockman, a chaplain at Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and author of Walk On: The Spiritual Journey of U2 (Relevant, 2001). "At the time Bono was involved with Shalom, something unique was happening in Dublin," he explains. "There was a movement of the Holy Spirit that you simply cannot deny. In some ways I think it was the Jesus Movement hit Dublin eight years late. That radical, almost hippie attitude at some level, that this is a radical thing to live in the Spirit . . . It gave Dublin something that was vibrant and exciting and trendy, almost. Bono and [Alison] were certainly caught up in the middle of that. They've never been able to get over that, no matter how their faith has changed. The roots of what they're doing now are in whatever the Spirit was doing back then."

I have been thinking of this in context of what I wrote in the previous post, about American religious vitality vs. European secularism. There have been new religious movements in Europe, but they don't seem to really take off the way they do here. I don't know enough about European culture to really know why, but it does seem to follow that if you're in a society where almost everybody at least nominally belongs to one church, it'll be harder to bring in a new one.

Some hint of that attitude, I think, can be seen in the European moves against "cults." As the State Department reported, several European countries in the last few years have fought against small religious groups working in their countries. And their ideas of what makes a "cult" are, uh, different from Americans'. As the report says: "In Belgium, the Center for Information and Advice on Harmful Sectarian Organizations collects and disseminates information on harmful sectarian groups and devises evaluative criteria to assess the risk for brainwashing, financial exploitation, and isolation from family. The Belgian list of sects includes Baptists, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, the Roman Catholic prelature of Opus Dei, and the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA)."

Any country that thinks the YWCA is a dangerous cult has got to be a tough place to start a new church! Although Americans have our own intolerances, of course, we seem to accept religious weirdness a lot more easily than Europeans. If it produces the occasional disaster like Jim Jones or Heaven's Gate, we accept that risk. So to reiterate my original point, I think cultural factors are influencing Europe's and Japan's secularization at least as much as wealth and education are. There's no rule that because it happened a certain way in a couple cultures, it will play out the same in all of them.

I can't help myself, it's a new religion

David Brooks opines in this month's Atlantic that predictions of the death of religion have been greatly exaggerated:

Until September 11 I accepted the notion that as the world becomes richer and better educated, it becomes less religious. Extrapolating from a tiny and unrepresentative sample of humanity (in Western Europe and parts of North America), this theory holds that as history moves forward, science displaces dogma and reason replaces unthinking obedience. A region that has not yet had a reformation and an enlightenment, such as the Arab world, sooner or later will.

It's now clear that the secularization theory is untrue. The human race does not necessarily get less religious as it grows richer and better educated. We are living through one of the great periods of scientific progress and the creation of wealth. At the same time, we are in the midst of a religious boom...

Moreover, it is the denominations that refuse to adapt to secularism that are growing the fastest, while those that try to be "modern" and "relevant" are withering. Ecstatic forms of Christianity and "anti-modern" Islam are thriving. The Christian population in Africa, which was about 10 million in 1900 and is currently about 360 million, is expected to grow to 633 million by 2025, with conservative, evangelical, and syncretistic groups dominating. In Africa churches are becoming more influential than many nations, with both good and bad effects.

Chris Mooney begs to differ:

A recent poll of 44 nations by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that on the whole the secularization theory is correct, with the following exception: The U.S. is both modern and wealthy but also very religious. This puts us in start contrast with other industrialized nations in Europe and countries like Canada, South Korea, and Japan...

I think you'll find that he basically fudges the difference between developed and developing nations in order to support his thesis. But a comprehensive picture of the world does indeed show wealthy developed nations growing more secular -- with one glaring exception.

Let me try to split the difference here. Religiously speaking, modernization -- including the phenomena of increasing wealth and education -- has brought profound changes in both the U.S. and the other nations that have been through it. The difference is that, while a lot of people in other countries have responded by losing interest in religion altogether, the U.S. responds by generating new sects.

Brooks mentions a fact that often surprises observers, that it's the churches "refuse to adapt" that are growing fastest, rather than liberal ones. That's true in the sense that they tend to stay morally strict, but that does not mean they're identical to pre-modern churches. In fact, many of those churches and movements are new and non-traditional. As Brooks says elsewhere in the article, the biggest movement in Christianity today is Pentecostalism, which is just over 100 years old. And I can tell you that the Pentecostal church I attend, with its unstructured service, casual dress, and raucous approach to worship, is anything but traditional. (And then there's the funky business of speaking in tongues, which I've never actually seen in my church.)

Even fundamentalism, which often styles itself as the protector of old-time faith, is a new movement, even younger than Pentecostalism. And dispensational premillennialism -- the colorfully literal interpretation of the Book of Revelation featured in the Left Behind novels and a lot of cheesy movies -- only dates back to th 1820s. American Christianity has changed profoundly in the modern era. It just hasn't changed in ways that people expected.

America was initially colonized by followers of then-new religious movements, and it has continued that bottom-up approach to religion to this day. Europe and Japan have had state churches (if you can call Shintoism a church), and their top-down models haven't aged so well. What happens to the rest of the world as it modernizes depends on whether it's more like America or more like Europe/Japan. Outside of the Islamic world, poorer countries don't seem to be going for the state-religion approach. Africa has already turned into a major generator of new sects, much like early America. So it seems unlikely to me that, just because America is an anomaly today, it will always be so.

Fred Rogers

Jeanne d'Arc does a stunning tribute. What could I possibly add?

Loving your enemies

There's been a discussion going on among Catholic bloggers about praying for your enemies. Karen at Disordered Affections claims that some people (Hitler, Osama bin Laden) are "perfectly possessed," the embodiment of evil, and shouldn't be prayed for. Minute Particulars has a knockout post in response, pointing out, among other things, the actual nature of prayer:

Whatever it means to "pray for someone," it surely doesn't simply boil down to "wishing them well." But this seems to be a notion of prayer that many have, especially those who object to praying for the enemy or a human being who seems utterly evil. After all, the objection seems to be something like this:
Okay, let me get this right. You want me to pray for _________ so that ______________ will have health and prosperity . . . so _________ can then continue to slaughter the innocent!?.
This, of course, would be absurd and it's not what most have in mind when advocating that we pray for the enemy or a person who seems "the embodiment of evil."

I'm only beginning to pray in a halting sort of way (especially since Pentecostals, unlike Catholics, don't have any programmed prayers you can just recite), but I've always figured praying for someone doesn't mean asking God to give them whatever they want. In fact, I came up against this a few weeks ago when I was praying with Telford a few days before this Important Event he had coming up (I'm still not sure if he wants it public, so I'm still being vague). I wanted to pray for it to go well for him, but it felt kind of ridiculous to just ask that it turn out the way Telford hoped it would turn out. Aside from the fact that it felt vaguely like a child asking a parent for some toy that caught her fancy, I knew that I ultimately don't know, and he ultimately doesn't know, what's best for him in the long run. So I said something like, "Help Telford find his way in life, and find where he belongs."

I see no reason why I couldn't ask for the same thing for Saddam Hussein. If the Christian God exists, the best thing for Saddam in the long run is that he become Christian, and surely that's the last thing Saddam actually wants. It would probably get him killed, though it would win him eternity in heaven. Is it really Christian to hope he doesn't repent just so he stays out of heaven?

I don't know if "perfect possession" exists, but it seems arrogant to believe we can really know if someone's perfectly possessed. We can't look inside Hitler's and bin Laden's heads. If we pray for them and we're mistaken, is that so awful? When did Jesus ever criticize anybody for meaning too well, for being too merciful? (I mean being truly merciful as opposed to lazily letting things slide, like the authorities letting the money-changers in the temple.) I just remember him criticizing people for being too judgmental.

Glory days

Cinderella Bloggerfeller writes about the Hungarians, Romans, and ethnic origin myths:

Of course, as Molnar points out, providing an illustrious ancestry for your people or your dynasty was hardly confined to the Hungarians and, indeed, was pretty widespread in Medieval Europe. One of the most common ideas was the belief that your people were descended from the Trojans, presumably in an attempt to rival the Roman claim that the descendants of the Trojan prince Aeneas founded their city. Molnar cites the example of the French. The capital of France is Paris, Paris was the prince who stole Helen- geddit?- so there is obviously a link between the French and the Trojans. Bad puns and wordplay are the stock-in-trade of the cranky linguistic genealogist. Actually, the name Paris comes from a local tribe, the Parisii. This didn’t stop the French from creating a mythical history in which their kings were ultimately descended from Francus, or Francio, a prince who had fled the sack of Troy. Across the Channel, Geoffrey of Monmouth provided a similar genealogy for the British, claiming their nation was founded by Brutus, a descendant of Aeneas, meaning they had connections with both Troy and Rome. Brutus was said to have founded Troynovant, or New Troy, later renamed “London” (again, the name “Troynovant” was probably suggested by a local British tribe recorded as living in Essex, the Trinobantes). These fanciful myths often took on the status of official history, promoted for political reasons, and it was sometimes a very bad idea to challenge them. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the French scholar Nicolas Fréret was slung into the Bastille for claiming the Frankish founders of his country were in fact a Germanic tribe with no connection to the Trojans. As this site puts it: “At the end of the reign of Louis XIV, it wasn’t a good idea to contest his descent from King Priam.”

This brings to mind the amusing scene from Spenser's The Fairie Queene (which I'm sure Eve will recognize!) where the lady knight Britomart and some swain recount their genealogies over dinner, leading back to -- you guess it! -- Troy. It also reminds me of college, and the whole "Afrocentrism" debate. That seemed to be a similar quest: trying to descend yourself from "ancient greatness," however torturously.

The funny thing is, if you want to be on top today or in the near future, it seems like it's better not to be descended from ancient greatness. It means your best days are probably behind you. Look at the countries that have the longest and most storied histories today: Iraq, Egypt, Iran, India, Greece. Not exactly ruling the joint, are they? The younger offshoots are doing better: America is more powerful and dynamic than Europe, China has been eclipsed by upstart Japan.

Some old civilizations do resurge: China has had a few resurgences in its history, and it may yet have another. But overall, getting hung up on a glorious past seems like a good recipe for stasis. Give me a bunch of unlettered barbarians with big dreams, and I'll show you the rulers of tomorrow.

(Via Ideofact, who disputes part of what I quoted above. CB responds here.)

You can't beat the system

I went to Alpha again last night, although I seem to be attending less and less of the actual course part of the Alpha course as I go. Last week Telford and I got deep in conversation over dinner, and kept talking at the table while the singing was going on in the next room (since I was getting sick, I wasn't much up for singing anyway). This time we deliberately played hooky from the singing again to keep talking, but wound up talking all the way through the lecture too, so when the people came back for the discussion we were still sitting there.

Telford was embarrassed and apologized to the discussion leader, but she cheerfully said that this was what Alpha was for. And I suppose I knew that all along: the real purpose of Alpha is to get people together and talking about Jesus. The lectures explain basic concepts, but they are mostly there to provoke discussion. Of course, some of us need no provocation; we'll talk about God all night. And since the discussion leader knew Telford, I'm sure she figured I was in capable hands.

In this case, our conversation didn't even stop when the people came in, because there were so few of them. As I said before, the larger group broke into three for the discussion, but for some reason our usual people weren't there last night. So we were joined by just the leader and one other person, who was not a seeker (he had, in fact, just come back from evangelizing in Asia). It made for an intense evening, as I talked and questioned and debated with these three committed Christians. Being an introvert, I was totally exhausted by the time ten o'clock rolled around (unlike the extroverted Telf, who can keep talking till Judgment Day).

We discussed a lot of things, but the basic theme was systematic theology. There had been a bit of a strain developing between Telford and me about my basic approach to understanding Christianity. I tackled it pretty much the way I tackle anything intellectually, by trying to understand the system as a conceptual whole first, and then getting to the specifics. So I kept asking questions about the overarching structure, God's intent in creating the worlds, the origin and nature of evil, that sort of thing. Telford got frustrated by this and kept telling me that to understand Christianity I really needed to start with Jesus. That was part of what provoked the dying-for-sins discussion that some readers will remember from last month; I was trying to understand the Crucifixion as a starting point. But as you will recall, I approached that systematically too, trying to grasp it from theory and general principles. Again, I was told by a lot of people that I was looking at it the wrong way.

A couple days before Alpha, I wrote Telford an email basically saying: look, you can't ask me not to think systematically any more than you can ask me to turn my eyes blue. It's the way I think. I'm so fascinated by systems that back when I lived in northern California, and didn't have a car, I taught myself the whole public-transit system in my county. Partly because I used it, of course, but also for fun. (Yes, I have a weird idea of fun.) Whatever I seek to understand, I start with the big picture.

Once I explained it to Telford like that, he was more sympathetic. For me to walk into theology as a total outsider, he explained, was like walking into a room after there's been an argument: whatever I say, however innocently, might set people off again. In this case, my rationalist, systematic approach pushed his "anti-modernist" buttons, so he kept steering me towards Karl Barth and his anti-modern, Jesus-centered theology. But Telford's own area of specialty is actually systematic theology (somehow I hadn't quite realized that), so he understood my desire for conceptual scaffolding.

I think it has been hard for a lot of people, both in Alpha and in the blogosphere, to understand why I have such a burning need to see a system underlying everything. I think it's just one of those inborn differences in people's brains. A few days ago Mysterium Crucis reminded me, via the whimsical Bloginality, of the whole Myers-Briggs personality-type systems that I used to be into about 15 years ago. Like a lot of personality systems, it oversimplifies, but it serves the useful purpose of explaining people to other people who are vastly different from them. I have kind of a split personality in that system, because I'm about equal parts INTP (that's the rational systematist in me) and INFP (that's the quixotic God-seeker in me). The fact that I have both these personalities often clashing within me probably explains why I'm so terminally ambivalent, seeking faith and yet always arguing with the faithful. I appreciate the forbearance of those who have put up with my endless grappling, both in the blogosphere and in the flesh.

You'll put your eye out with that!

Mark Kleiman has an action movie pet peeve:

Just once, I’d like to see someone in an action flick get hit by a car as he or she blindly rushes across the street through heavy traffic, either pursuing or being pursued. It could be the good guy or the bad guy; I’m not picky. I mean, didn't their mothers ever tell them to look both ways before crossing?

Here's my peeve, or rather my whole family's peeve: people going through windows without a scratch. I say this because when I was about seven or eight I was playing Tag with my sister and her friends, and my sister's arms went through a window. She screamed like I have rarely heard her scream, because she had little shards of glass embedded in her skin all over her arms, and it hurt like a motherf@#$er. My father (who is, conveniently, a doctor) had to pick them all out and sew up some of the bigger holes. She still has visible scars.

So shattering glass may be a cool visual, but treat it with respect, boys and girls.

Blinking into the sunlight

Whenever I'm home sick for a few days I seem to go into this mental cave, completely inward and detached from things. I was back at church yesterday and at work today, but I'm still in a daze. An appropriate time, I suppose to read Jonathan Rauch's humorous piece about the care and feeding of introverts. Patrick Nielsen Hayden also blogged it, with a typically interesting comments discussion ensuing.

This reminds me that long ago I had a boyfriend who was that odd creature, a shy extrovert. It was proof that introversion/extroversion isn't the same as shyness/boldness, though they often overlap. My boyfriend was soft-spoken, awkward and easily embarrassed. Yet everywhere he went he seemed to make lots of friends, and whenever there was a social event he wound up in the middle of it. It was because he drew energy from being with people -- he felt a magnetic pull to wherever the social action was, even though he lacked confidence in his conversational abilities. This made him a charmingly good listener, in contrast to a lot of extroverts.

Sick days

Have caught a cold or something, so posting will be light for a while. Not as bad as poor Eve, apparently, but my brain is blurry...

Natural history

Since I didn't have anything special to do on the long weekend, I took myself to L.A.'s Natural History Museum today. I grew up loving the science and nature museums in San Francisco, so I was pleased to find that L.A. has some good ones. The NHM is in a big, beautiful 1930s-era building, and has a large and interesting collection of stuff. My only complaint is the sloppy upkeep -- some of the displays are unlabeled and many are underlit. But overall, it's a neat place to be.

Not surprisingly, I was sharing the museum with an awful lot of small children. I've wondered before why it is that, while art museums remain firmly adult territory, science museums have become so heavily child-oriented. There's nothing inherently childish about being interested in science, or wanting to see artifacts of nature. It's true that as I've grown older my scientific pursuits have gotten more intellectual and theoretical, but reading about, say, a T-Rex isn't the same as actually going and seeing the skeleton of a T-Rex looming over you.

It does seem that a lot of children are interested in animals. They figure heavily not just in things like science museums but in children's books and TV programs. I was certainly fascinated by them when I was a kid. Yet for a lot of people this interest is temporary. In our industrial world animals aren't part of most adults' lives -- except the occasional house pet -- and they ignore them. I've wondered if people are born with a natural interest in animals, but most lose it from disuse. There's also the odd business that happens to a lot of girls at around age 10 or 12: they become fascinated with horses. It didn't happen to me, so I really can't explain it. I suppose you could go all Jungian about horses as an image of masculine sexuality, but I wouldn't bet the bank on it.

I'm not one to idolize nature. My mother likes to go off camping in the boondocks, hiking and swimming in freezing lakes and that sort of thing, but I was never much into that. I like my creature comforts -- that's the sort of animal I am. But I do feel a deep connection to it; I'm aware always that it's out there, far bigger and far older than our human doings. I feel awe in the presence of its more impressive feats, like the windstorm a couple months ago. And I do feel a peculiar sympathy with animals, who occupy the same space that we do and yet live in different worlds. If I find God, I know he has to be big enough to encompass it all -- not just people and what we do to each other, but the whole thing, huge, ancient, complex, and awesome.

Crime and punishment

Since I hadn't been to Mysterium Crucis before today, I hadn't realized he'd weighed in on the Atonement debate last month. He pointed out that however God did the atonement, somebody was gonna be unhappy:

God could have snapped his fingers, in a spiritual sense of course, and instantaneously saved us. But I imagine if he had done that, theologians would sit around, nursing their pipes, pondering the ineffable mystery of the boring anticlimactic way in which God saved the world. Couldn't He have done it with a bit of flair? A little drama? Or perhaps God could have created this mandatory, purgatorial state that not only cleanses us of venial, but mortal and original sin. Which would have theologians and laymen rather angry, and I don't think the religion would taken off very fast. What? He's going to make us pay for all the things we did? That's not fair!

This brings back to my mind the fact that one way I seem to differ from a lot of Christians is in my attitude toward punishment. I mentioned before that when I last talked to Telford we had a digression about St. Anselm, and it hit on this subject. (I'm gonna milk that visit for all it's worth, apparently!) St. Anselm, apparently, wrote that once sin entered the world, God had three choices: destroy it all; forgive everything, which would be unjust because there'd be no punishment for sin; or do what he did, a substitutional atonement.

I objected to the premise of the second option. When I think about people who've wronged me, they were often people who were close to me; so I knew, even if I got extremely angry, that they were not all evil. If I could have removed the evil from within them, leaving everything else intact and healing the relationship, I wouldn't give a flip if they hadn't been punished.

Maybe it's my liberal humanist upbringing, but I think of punishment in practical rather than cosmic terms. It is, to me, a tool for minimizing evil. It can prevent people from doing something again; it can deter others; if properly designed, it might even make the wrongdoer learn something. But it's a crude instrument and it often doesn't work very well anyway, so if there is another way to minimize evil, I'm all for it.

It's for this reason that no matter how people try to spin it to me, I can't accept the concept of hell. Purgatory I can understand. Annihilation, even, I can understand. But what's the point of eternal punishment? Why keep someone around forever just to make them suffer? I don't see how that reduces the evil in the universe; in fact it's hard to imagine how, once the End Times have concluded, good can be said to have "won" if there's a pile of souls eternally in painful separation from God. I'm with the Zoroastrians here: good hasn't won until the gates of hell are closed forever. Until not just punishment but the need for punishment is gone.

The choice that isn't, part II

Tom at Disputations agrees with my complaints about the liar/lunatic/Lord gambit that was used at Alpha. He makes the added point that the choice assumes that the Scriptural account of Jesus is accurate, and a non-Christian wouldn't assume that.

Actually, I should say in Alpha's defense that it brought up the formulation after going over reasons why we should believe the Gospels are accurate. (Those weren't entirely convincing either, but that's a subject for another post.) The point I was making was that even if you grant that Jesus' personality was as it was portrayed in the Bible, the challenge still doesn't work. It assumes you can pidgeonhole people in a way you really can't.

Paul Zadik says in the comments that the three-way choice idea originally came from G.K. Chesterton to counter the then-common idea that Jesus was a great moral teacher but not actually divine. In that context, it's a good point: if you look at it that way, you'd have to discount so much of the Gospels that they become pretty useless as source material. And what you're left with is really not very helpful. Will at Mysterium Crucis (which Tom links to) puts it well:

Love your enemies. Turn the other cheek. Render unto Caesar. If you read the teachings of Jesus divorced from the context of his Godhood and divine mission, it's all pretty impractical. At its worse, it's self-evident nonsense. Take this little gem: the meek shall inherit the earth. Sure Jesus, whatever you say. Now if Jesus is God, and he can personally back up those words, I'll believe it. Barring that, the meek ain't gonna inherit jack sh!t.

The teachings of Christ only make sense when plugged into one interpretative matrix, one that assumes a set of transcendent absolutes that are morally right despite being devoid of any consideration for efficiency, practicality and self-preservation. Just read the Gospels. These aren't the teachings of a wise man. Wisdom is accrued over time, after the careful observation of a lifetime of experience. Wisdom says eliminate your enemies. Wisdom says fight back or you're going to live your entire life as a punching bag. Wisdom says screw Caesar. Wisdom says the devious and tenacious will inherit the earth.

Indeed. As I've said before, the real leap of faith in Christianity isn't recognizing Jesus' goodness, it's believing that goodness=God. I am reminded here of the ancient Chinese philosopher Mozi (or Mo-tzu, if you're being Wade-Giles about it), who preached the universal-altruism concept several centuries before Christ. His movement died shortly after he did, superseded by the much more practical Confucius. How could you possibly expect people to be as concerned with a stranger's welfare as they would be with a relative's? asked Confucius. It goes against human nature.

As Jesus (and that other successful preacher of selflessness, Buddha) knew, if you're going to tell people to so flagrantly go against their self-interest, you'd better back it up with some supernatural firepower. You are asking people to die to themselves, and you must reassure them that that kind of death is not simple annihilation. It leads to something better.

I've heard some progressive Christians argue that we should not even take the afterlife seriously; heaven and hell are simply metaphors for the worlds we'd leave our descendants if we behave well or badly. But if you're trying to build a good society, Jesus is a pretty lousy person to consult. He wasn't the least interested in building society; he told his followers to abandon their families and their jobs and be as carefree as the lilies of the field, and render the social order unto Caesar. That's why later builders of "Christian" societies wound up leaning heavily on the Old Testament, with all its helpfully detailed rules, and not on Jesus.

So I'm not inclined toward the "moral philosopher" idea of Jesus either. He was a real weirdo. Of course, so am I, so I gues there's something we have in common.

The choice that isn't

So, some of you might be wondering, how did the second Alpha go? It went all right. As with last time, the most interesting part of it was the discussion, but I don't feel free to talk about it.

The subject of the lecture this time was "Who is Jesus?" Like the last one, it said stuff I've heard before. But there was one formulation it raised that's stuck in my mind, because it irritates me so much. It basically says that there are three logical possibilities for Jesus: either he was lying, he was crazy, or he was everything he said he was. So, the theory goes, if he was a liar or a lunatic, how could he have said and done so many good things?

This is another idea I blame on C.S. Lewis, though I don't know if he originated it or just popularized it. It is based on a rather antiquated view of mental illness, to say the least, which had it that you could divide the world into the raving loonies and the perfectly sane, with no ambiguities. It also doesn't follow that someone who does something nefarious, like start a religious cult to serve his own ego, is incapable of saying or doing good things. In fact, many of them do say and do good things, which is why they attract followers. I suspect that many religious figures in the world, past and present, could pass the liar/lunatic/Lord test pretty well.

I doubt that Jesus was actually a fraud. It's hard to see what he gained from wandering the countryside with his scraggly band of followers; and certainly any con man worth his salt doesn't let himself get executed. I expect that something did happen when he got dunked by John the Baptist that convinced him (and maybe the Baptist too) that God had chosen him. I'm less certain that whatever happened was caused by God or that Jesus interpreted it correctly -- a lot of spiritual experiences are pretty ambiguous.

When I raised my objections in the discussion, the lecturer agreed with me. Everything she said had been evidence, not proof, she pointed out. Which makes me wonder what the point of it was. But I suppose I'd have to take that up with Alpha's inventor, who's back in England somewhere.

Trusting God, again

Mark Shea asked last week how atheists out there would feel if they met with incontrovertible proof of God (by which he meant the Catholic God), sparking a long, passionate comments thread. (Via Minute Particulars.)

He wasn't asking about seekers like me, but it got me thinking. It would, at least, simplify things. I would know to bone up on Catholicism, anyway, instead of going to a Pentecostal church and being haunted by the feeling that maybe I should really be off studying Catholicism or Buddhism or Islam. I would not have the same attitude as Jody, which is basically, "That God is a jerk, so I'm going to ignore him." I don't see how you could ignore him. And in any case, it seems arrogant to turn and judge your Creator in such a way. The human brain is a remarkable thing, but it's not capable of everything, and I would think assessing Supreme Beings would be outside its range. And if he created me, he could not have created anything unknown to him, including my morals.

Nonetheless, it would not put my worries entirely to rest. The questions and the problems that I've raised here (as well as many I haven't raised, and those raised by others, including Jody) would still be questions and problems. Yahweh's behavior has indeed been pretty alarming in a lot of ways. I think my biggest fear would be that he is not being honest with us. The Gnostics believed that the Old Testament God wasn't actually the Omnipotent Being, but one of a number of archons -- sort of limited deities like the Olympian gods -- who developed delusions of grandeur. That actually makes a disturbing amount of sense, judging by the OT. But if he were, how would we know? We humans are pretty puny, and a powerful being could flummox us without being the all-powerful being.

But I suppose the premise of Mark's question assumes proof of an all-powerful being (whatever that might look like). Even then I'd be worried, though, if God is really as he says he is. When I hear Christians go on about the goodness of God, and rationalize the suffering on earth and the concept of even more suffering in hell, I can't help feeling that they find God is so good to them that they can't deal with the idea that he might not be good to everybody.

This brings to sharp relief the difference between faith and trust. Even evidence that God exists would not make me trust him. What would? I don't know. I really wish I knew the answer to that one.

If you can't trust God, who can you trust, who can ya?

I'm going back to Alpha tomorrow, but without Telford, sadly. He has to get ready for an important happening the next morning. (Don't know if I'm at liberty to say what it is, but everybody pray or cross your fingers or whatever your belief system allows for him, OK?) In the meantime he wrote a post about how we have trouble communicating sometimes because he so implicitly trusts God, and I don't.

I think he had several reasons to be thinking that now, and one of them was probably the conversation we had at the last Alpha session. As I mentioned before, I started off talking about this post from Minute Particulars:

Our very existence is from God and is actively sustained by God, so much so that Aquinas claims that God could cause us not to exist, could annihilate us, without any prejudice to the goodness of His actions, i.e. He could annihilate us with perfect justice since He owes us, literally, nothing. Think about that for a bit because I think it's a very, very foreign notion. God creates freely and God creates everything that is. Not just all the "stuff" of the world, not just the space-time fabric of the universe, but existence itself if from God. There is no distinction sharper and simpler than that. God could reduce us to nothing with perfect justice.

Now consider that such a God has chosen to create each one of us, has given us free will to turn toward or away from Him, has chosen to send His only Son that we might know Him, has chosen to dwell among us, suffer and die at our hands, descend into Hell, and rise up in defeat of death.

There is no act more staggering in our history, in the history of all of Creation. It is staggering because it is something we could not deserve. It is staggering because every fiber of our being owes its existence to the One who created us and yet we can turn away from Him at any moment. It is staggering because He chose to redeem us from our turning from Him and show us the way back to Him.

I didn't mean for this to be pick-on-Mark week -- really, I didn't! But I was thinking about that comment after my convoluted discussion about sin with Tom and Louder Fenn, as well as after reading Isaiah. It all emphasized the unworthiness of humans before God, and how he was responsible for everything good about us but somehow we were responsible for everything bad.

I said to Telford that I didn't like this idea that God owes us nothing because he created us. God is constantly being compared to a parent, but isn't a parent responsible for his children? Don't you feel responsible for your children?

"But before God," he said. "So the analogy breaks down."

I wasn't sure what he meant by that, but I pushed on. If God is that powerful, the creator of everything, and yet we didn't turn out the way he wanted, isn't he responsible for that? Maybe not entirely responsible, but at least partly responsible?

Somewhat to my surprise, Telford warmed to the idea. When God makes a covenant with the Hebrews, he pointed out, he limits himself. He binds himself to keep his end of the deal, even when people let him down. That does seem to say something about God's character.

"I know," I said. "And actually, it's really tempting to think of Jesus as taking that responsibility. You know, coming down, taking on the burden of the world -- literally, in a way, taking up the cross... But no one ever spins it like that. It's all about how this was totally undeserved, and God just did it because he's such a nice guy."

We batted around the idea some more, and somehow got sidetracked on St. Anselm. Then the actual business of Alpha interrupted the talk. But after it was over we went on, lingering like the last couple drunks at a bar, sitting on a table because they were putting the chairs away. And to my surprise, Telford conceded still more. He said he thought this was something theology had not adequately covered, and he should look into it more.

"The thing that bothers me, though," I said, "is that you're always talking about the importance of looking to the tradition of the Church. And I don't see this in the tradition of the Church."

"It is in the tradition, though," he said. "Maybe not so much in the New Testament. But if you look at some of the Psalms, a lot of them are saying to God, 'Here's a problem. Do something.' Not 'Please please please help us,' but 'Well? What are you going to do?'"

"Yeah," I said. "You know, I don't know much about Judaism, but it seems to have more of a tradition of, I don't know..."

"Chutzpah?"

"Yeah. Actually, there's an interesting article in First Things this month by a rabbi, about the differences between Jewish and Christian attitudes about a lot of things. And part of it was about heaven. You know, Christians don't think they deserve to go there, so you can only get in by the grace of God. But Jews think they do deserve to go there. They followed the Law --"

"Yeah, but who gave them the Law, huh?" Telford said snarkily.

"I mean, I think they felt like they held up their end of the bargain. And he also describes how the Jews accepted the Law. God offered it to them, and they accepted by a sort of voice vote."

He smiled. "Yeah. That was pretty cool."

We haven't had a chance to talk about it further, but in an email the other day he remarked, "I haven't found a reason to take back my affirmation of your point that God has a responsibility to rescue the creation because he has invested it with his own glory. Hope that proves to be solid common ground for the conversations to come."

I don't know if that will help me trust God, but I do think I was put off by the feeling that God -- or his spokespeople on earth -- was evading a sort of parental duty by expecting the obligations to go only one way -- from us to him. Perhaps Mark's cosmic God who brings existence itself into being would look at it that way; it seems rather Calvinist, and hard to fathom how anything could have happened that he didn't intend. But if you're getting that cosmic, it's hard to see how we could deserve anything good or bad from God; what we deserve is what he decides we should have.

In any case, the God of the Bible doesn't seem like that. Otherwise, his anger and disappointment and regret would be an elaborate act. I don't know how to see such a human-seeming God as an omnipotent being. But as I said to Telford at one point in the evening, all I really have to go on is my sense of what's good. If the Christian God doesn't seem to harmonize with that, what can I do?

It seemed like a good idea...

I don't know why I get myself into these abortion debates, because I don't even have a firmly held opinion on the subject myself. But at any rate, Minute Particulars responded to my response to his post on the differing motivations of people opposed to and supporting legal abortion.

When I see the phrase "a study of _________" in an argument my lies-damned-lies-and-statistics sense tingles and lots of concerns click into play: correlation is not causation, many good studies are contradicted by other good studies, models of human behavior are probable at best and hollow when applied to the concrete particulars of individual actions, etc.

Well, you're right. I knew it was kind of weak to say that, especially since I don't have the study on hand and couldn't cite the authors or the methodology or anything like that. But it actually wasn't a data-points sort of study anyway; it was really a series of interviews with activists on both sides of the debate, illustrating their different worldviews. I just brought it up because I do remember many of the pro-life women they quoted really did sound personally threatened by abortion.

Actually, I don't have to imagine what a "devaluation of motherhood, and a shift in expectations of what women are supposed to be like" is like nor do I doubt the concern: I'm married to a mother and she combats it daily.


My wife's job makes demands on her that rarely include reasonable accommodations for nursing a child, general caring for a child, or even the plain fact that evenings and weekends -- time that she's not "officially" required to yield -- might be time she'd want to spend with her family, not with committee members who seem oblivious to the fact that she has a very young child at home.


I'm personally and painfully aware that our society sucks and that the world of work devalues motherhood and has reshaped expectations of what women are supposed to be like. But these are institutional trends and patterns, institutional concerns (cf. ENTERPRISES OF GREAT PITH AND MOMENT for an oblique comment on this) that are utterly trumped when compared with the concern for human life. My wife is not motivated in her position on abortion by discrimination or even the possibility of discrimination against her. She's motivated by the concrete reality of another human being unlike her in a predicament she'll never be in. And that motivation is different from the motivation of most moral issues.

Well, if you say so. I just can't help noticing how most people's view of whether a fetus is a person seems to frequently coincide with a lot of other social and sexual attitudes. Just as Mark would say the pro-choice folks are blinding themselves to the fetus' personhood for their own self-interest, most pro-choicers think the pro-life side is puffing up the status of the unborn because it serves their own ideas of how society and gender relations should be. Who's right? I dunno. It's this sort of issue that makes me pessimistic about really seeing anything without your bias glasses on.