The Triumph of Folly

Not quite 2,000 years ago, a new religious movement arose in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. There was nothing especially startling about this – it was an age that spawned religious movements at a prodigious rate. And this particular movement had little at the outset to set it apart from all the rest, except perhaps for a couple of fairly serious handicaps.


For one thing, it was a sub-sect of a national or tribal religion that already had gained a fairly widespread reputation for rebarbativeness, Judaism. The people of Judea, and their compatriots scattered throughout the empire, were widely seen by their pagan neighbors as alien, rather odd, and at times even atheistic. They declined to eat certain tasty foods, they worshipped an invisible god, they refused to recognize or respect the gods of the pagans, and they had a custom of refusing to do any work at all on the seventh day of each week.


The new movement also suffered, in the eyes of pagan critics, from a serious lack of distinctiveness. Its central narrative involved a god-man born of a virgin, who underwent a severe trial, was killed, and rose from the dead as a savior for those who believed in him. This was very old hat indeed: Pagan mystery cults centered around virtually identical dying-and-resurrected-god narratives had existed for centuries already by the time this new movement came along – those, for example, of Dionysus (Bacchus), Orpheus, Adonis, Attis and, probably most successfully, Osiris/Horus (i.e., the mysteries of Isis).


On the other hand, in a time when originality was valued much less than tradition, the new movement suffered from the very fact that it was, indeed, new. The other mystery-cults could claim chronological precedence and the authority lent by “the test of time.”


A further obstacle faced by the new movement was the philosophical and rhetorical sophistication of the cultural leadership in the world where it was attempting to grow. It was one thing to preach a visionary and emotional message of “good news” and a coming reversal of status to the illiterate and laboring classes; it was quite another to get anyone in authority, political or cultural, to take it seriously.


Largely because of these factors, the first wave, so to speak, of this movement left nary a ripple on the historical record, except for a few letters written by one (or possibly a few) of its most articulate adherents. This letter-writer had experienced first-hand the humiliation of facing pagan sophistication without adequate dialectical firepower (Acts 17:18-33) and perhaps as a result began to preach the virtues of becoming a “fool” for his savior-god and rejecting the counsels of the “wise.”


As time passed, however, the new movement adapted to its environment. Significantly, it distanced itself as much as possible from its roots in Judaism, especially after that nation rebelled against Roman authority and suffered a comprehensive and cataclysmic defeat. It began to put its teachings into writing, and in those writings it declared a hostility to Judaism that matched that of the empire that it increasingly sought to woo to its cause.


In those writings, the new movement also sought to build a case for its philosophical validity – indeed, its superiority – by claiming a sort of vicarious chronological priority. It might be true, they argued, that their founder had lived and died in a very recent time, but his life had been foretold long, long ago – much longer ago, indeed, than any of those other savior-gods had lived and died (and lived again).


The groundwork for this argument had been laid by a Jew, Philo of Alexandria, who lived at roughly the same time as the new savior-god but whose project was to demonstrate that Moses – to whom, in keeping with tradition, he attributed the authorship of the foundational texts of Judaism – was in fact a philosopher – indeed, the greatest of philosophers – whose teachings represented a sort of quantum leap above the pagan philosophers because 1.) Moses lived much longer ago than they did, and 2.) his philosophy originated not from human reasoning but from divine revelation, and so was complete in a way that the merely human conclusions of pagan philosophers could not be.


The advocates of the new religious movement – apologists, as they’re called – happily adopted Philo’s rhetorical strategy and conclusions, and then took things much further.


Yes, they said, the writings of Moses and the Jewish prophets are much, much older than anything you pagans can offer (except perhaps the Egyptians, and no one understands their stuff anyway). But unbeknown to the Jews, their texts were foretelling the coming of our savior-god. In fact, their account of the history of the world from its very creation is really secretly an account of God’s plan to save humankind through the life, death and resurrection of our savior-god.


Now, plainly, this interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures required a certain amount of intellectual squinting. The apologists had to patch together widely separated verses and create a lot of doubtful equivalences, chief among which was the equating of the new movement’s savior-god with the hoped-for “messiah” of the Jews. This was a rather dubious enterprise, seeing as how the messiah clearly was expected to be a temporal, political leader who would “restore Israel” to its rightful independence and prominence among the nations of the world; while the movement’s savior-god had died ignominiously and obscurely without the slightest direct effect on Israel’s status as a nation.


What the apologists did to overcome this objection was to declare – and to inscribe into their own “scriptures” – that what the messianic prophecies had foretold, and what their own savior-god had accomplished, was the institution of a spiritual, “heavenly” kingdom that superseded the earthly kingdom of Israel.


That’s a neat rhetorical trick, and nothing more, and not many people early on were taken in by it, least of all the bulk of the Jewish nation. But the apologists had an even better trick up their sleeves that also didn’t fool many people at the time, but which they continue to play even today, and surprisingly with better results now.


It’s a variation, or more accurately an extension, of the prophetic claim. The early apologists argued (if you can call it an argument) that the Hebrew scriptures told a story that the authors themselves didn’t understand. The authors thought they were telling the story of the relationship between Yahweh and his chosen people, but “we know better” – they were really telling the story of how God knew humankind would blunder into a state of unredeemable sinfulness, and he would enter into human existence at a certain time and place and fix the whole thing.


Okay, a lot of people (Christians all) have accepted this reading of the Hebrew scriptures over the centuries. But the apologists pushed this line of argument even further. In their time, there were lots of texts besides the Hebrew scriptures that were regarded as spirtually informative, from the deliberate writings of Plato to the recorded spontaneous utterances of the Pythoness of Delphi and the Cumean Sybil. There were all those mystery-cults, there were the long-standing and highly respected religious traditions of Persia (Zoroastrianism), Babylon, Egypt, and the native cults of every nation from Armenia to Greece to Rome to Gaul to Britain.


The adherents of the new movement acquired a bad reputation early on for frontally assaulting everyone else’s beliefs. But as time went on, they got a bit more subtle. They began acknowledging that the various pagan belief-systems contained an element of truth. But they went on to claim that any such kernel of truth served only to mislead.


You see, only when the movement’s own savior-god descended from timelessness into earthly manifestation did the full truth about existence become knowable. So anyone who sought to find truth before that could only have discovered a partial, and therefore untrue, truth – at best a “foreshadowing” of the full truth, just as the Hebrew scriptures “foreshadowed” the savior’s coming.


Worse, the eternal enemy of truth, Satan, was at large in the world long before the savior made his descent. But Satan knew that moment was coming (I’m not sure how; maybe the idea is that God told him to “test” us) and so he made it his business to confuse people’s minds by creating false precursors – anticipatory parodies – of the true savior.


Overall, the message of the apologists was this: The one and only god has made his one and only entry into material reality at this one and only time and place, and everything that anyone said or will say about divinity or spirituality is either a prediction of this one event or a lie intended to make you overlook it.


These were neat rhetorical tricks, but they didn’t fool many people in ancient times. The new movement remained very much a minority sect – its members far outnumbered by the devotees of Isis, certainly, and probably those of Mithras as well – until the Emperor Constantine threw the weight of his rule and his army behind it in the mid-fourth century.


Following this development, the apologists for the new movement came up with yet another sophism that still affects thinking about these things today: The fact that the new movement eventually gained enough power to crush all of its competitors demonstrates that God wanted this movement to “triumph” over all the other religious tendencies of the age.


The movement in question has of course splintered over the intervening centuries, but it’s interesting to note how much the various factions still rely on the same sophisms in their continuing project of dominating or eliminating the competition. That competition has broadened in ways that no one could have imagined in Constantine’s time, to include Islam and Buddhism and, perhaps most dangerously, the naturalist-materialist worldview.


If today’s apologists would just back away from some of their pointlessly but insistently held dogmatic positions – especially the claim to an exclusive, unique knowledge of divine truth – we might all make more progress toward real spiritual growth and social harmony. But alas, I fear that the apologists and their churches really have little regard for such things, and are really interested mostly in worldly power, and always have been.

Forget Darwin

My last post took a pretty hard swipe at science, so in the interests of balance I want to take hold now of the other horn of the contemporary culture-wars bull.

The term “fundamentalist” was invented by conservative Christians in the late 19th century as a self-description intended to identify themselves as the true bearers of the real principles of the uniquely true religion. Part of their self-conception was the claim that they were merely carrying forward ideas that were “fundamental” to Christianity from its beginning.

This claim is false, of course, because they were parsing their scriptural sources in an anachronistic way to come up with answers to the challenges raised in their own times. The concerns of the people who wrote the Bible were not the same as the concerns of late-19th-century Christian pastors, who were mainly appalled by the then-new doctrine of “Darwinism.”

What the original fundamentalists were responding to, however, was not just Darwinism but “modernism” in general, including especially the text-critical and historical-critical approaches to Bible scholarship. Studies in these disciplines had severely undermined a naïve belief in the Bible as “the Word of God,” and in many ways this was a more exigent challenge to faith than the findings of physical science.

Darwin’s theory, however, hit people on a more emotional level than arguments about source-texts and exogenous influences. On a gut level, many people just didn’t like the idea that they were cousins of chimpanzees. And we are still dealing with that reaction.

Scientists and their groupies are of course endlessly exasperated by all this. As far as they’re concerned, the theory of the origin of species through natural selection is “settled science,” and everyone should just accept it and get over it. And they’re probably right, though some of them seem inclined to extend this hypothesis to cover matters far beyond the biological where its applicability seems very dubious, as in the logically and morally questionable doctrines of Social Darwinism.

However, the ongoing argument over Darwin vs. the Bible or Darwin vs. God, though it seems to provide people on both sides with some sort of pleasure, is ultimately misconceived.

Even the most fundamentalistically inclined televangelist makes use every day of the theories and discoveries of physics: Their pleas for money are beamed to homes around the world by way of radio waves to satellites in Earth orbit and back again to the TV receivers of their fans. And every step of the way, their broadcasts rely on the laws of motion and electromagnetism and relativity and so on that were discovered and described by science.

For anyone with the slightest intellectual integrity, there’s a hair-raising degree of self-contradiction in this: Fundamentalist preachers are taking advantage of the discoveries of physics to broadcast the message that physics is a lie.

All the quibbling about how to interpret the age of bones and why there are seashells on top of the Alps pales into insignificance when someone asks why we’re able to see stars and galaxies that are millions or billions of light-years away.

From Newton to today, science has discovered the laws of motion and gravity, the values of universal constants like the speed of light, the ways in which bits of matter and energy interact, and so on and so on. Even if science hasn’t come up with a convincing explanation of why all these things are what they are, it’s undeniable that it has come up with stuff that works. Any quibbles one might have about the details of quantum theory seem largely irrelevant if you’re talking with a resident of Hiroshima.

Fundamentalists need to forget Darwin and worry instead about Newton and Faraday and Einstein and Niels Bohr and the rest. They need to explain how the very same science that enables them to generate electromagnetic signals and put satellites into Earth orbit and draw electricity from nuclear generators is wrong about the size and age of the universe.

After all, we can see objects in the sky that, based on measurements using the same physics that enable them to broadcast their appeals for money, are millions or billions of light-years away, when, according to their supposedly Bible-based belief, the universe is only several thousand years old.

This leaves us with only two options: One is that every object in the sky is within 6,000 to around 10,000 light years of Earth, and only appears falsely to be farther away. But this means that all the matter in the universe is contained within a space with a radius of roughly 10,000 light years; based on the laws of physics, it all should have collapsed into a black hole long ago.

The other option, and the one that fundamentalists tend to fall back on whenever challenged, is that it’s all a “test of faith.” God created the universe on that fateful day in October of 4004 B.C. (or some other day, but within the past tens of thousands of years), and when he did, he scattered the stars and galaxies across the sky in such a way as to make us believe that they were farther away and older than they really are.

This is the one that really bothers me, because it says that God is a liar and the whole fabric of the universe is a deception. It says that no one who is not a human being on this one planet, Earth, can ever know the truth about existence, because it’s only here that we have this book, this Bible, that explains the hidden truth behind the falsehood that is the universe.

That is the real “fundamental” idea: Challenged by serious and thoughtful investigators of life, the universe and everything, a certain group of Christian pastors decided that the answer was to declare the Bible unarguably true and everything that contradicted it false.

But before conservative Christians invented fundamentalism, even before there was such a thing as Christianity, there were many who understood that the universe was much more “the Word of God” than anything written down in ink. We talk about trees being chopped down to make paper for books; one living tree tells as much truth as all the books ever written.

Illiteral

Having taken a broad swipe at the materialist-scientistic worldview last time, it seems only fair to balance that with a comment on the Christian fundamentalism that sets itself in opposition to science. Because I quoted Darwin in my previous posting, I was initially inclined to address the shortcomings of the literalist interpretation of the book of Genesis that underpins efforts either to ban the teaching of evolution or require the teaching of “creationism.” However, I think a more general comment may suffice.

So I’ll say simply that the fundamentalists’ claim that they interpret the Bible literally is false, or at least is only true some of the time – that is, when it suits them.

For example, we’ve all heard about TV evangelists’ use of the law of Moses to condemn homosexuality and anything else they don’t like. And anyone who belongs to a conservative Christian denomination is familiar with the use of the law to justify the practice of “tithing,” or donating one-tenth of one’s income to the church.

So how do those ministers justify those appeals to the ancient law of Israel if they take a literal view of these words from Paul’s letter to the Galatians (chapter 2, verses 16-21):

“Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified. But if, while we seek to be justified by Christ, we ourselves also are found sinners, is therefore Christ the minister of sin? God forbid. For if I build again the things which I destroyed, I make myself a transgressor. For I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live unto God. I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me. I do not frustrate the grace of God: for if righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain.”

Or these from Paul’s letter to the Romans (chapter 7, verses 4-6):

“Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ; that ye should be married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God. For when we were in the flesh, the motions of sins, which were by the law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death. But now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter.”

Returning to Galatians (chapter 5, verses 1-4), we find Paul issuing a specific warning to some early Christians who believed they needed to adhere to one particular point of the ancient law:

“It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery. Behold I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision, Christ will be of no benefit to you. And I testify again to every man who receives circumcision, that he is under obligation to keep the whole Law. You have been severed from Christ, you who are seeking to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace.”

It seems to me that Paul’s warning can be applied in reverse to those who pick and choose among the laws of Moses to rationalize tithing or to condemn practices they disapprove of: You are under obligation to keep the whole law. So you need to start keeping kosher, and you need to make an appointment with your local mohel or mohelot.