Thank You Baby Jesus for Literacy

In this fictional scene, Jesus and

Mary are historical figures.

At Christmas time, if you live in the States, you’re liable to see nativity creches on display on church property and sometimes on city property. Mary, Joseph, and a motley crew surround a feeding trough, in which lies the holy infant. There’s a church near my place that brings in a live camel, which is pretty cool as religious traditions go. The Christmas creche reportedly originated with Francis of Assisi in the 1200s, when it was well understood that the child in the trough was God. Today, however, there are conflicting opinions about how one should interpret Jesus as a historical figure. If you’re not the sort who’s grateful to Jesus for your eternal salvation, let me suggest a down-to-earth reason to remember Baby Jesus this Christmas season. Thank him for universal literacy. Jesus was Jewish, and that meant he was devoted to the written word in a way that no fatherless laborer in any gentile land would have been. Through the Jewish sect that Jesus founded, he passed along the Jews’ love of literacy to Europe and beyond.

Jews of Jesus’ day were known for their holy book, which commanded the respect of the Romans. While pagan religions were largely ceremonial, Judaism featured the synagogue, where the community gathered and heard the word of the LORD read aloud. The center of the religion was not an idol but the written Law (Torah). Most Jews at the time were still illiterate, as Jesus probably was, but they demonstrated a remarkable devotion to scripture.

Jesus founded a Jewish sect that survived after his execution. The sect really took off once Paul, a Hellenized Jew, convinced the leaders in Jerusalem to accept non-Jews into the movement. Paul personally took the “good word” to the gentiles, spreading Jewish scripture along with faith in Christ. Soon his own letters were being copied to be read aloud in Christian assemblies across the Roman Empire. Then, one by one, anonymous Christians composed the gospels, including many noncanonical ones. Soon Christians were busy copying texts and distributing them far and wide. They copied so many texts that they established the codex as a popular new written medium. Unlike a scroll, the codex had separate pages stacked on top of each other, bound together along one edge. Yes, early Christianity gave us the book.

When Christianity turned into Rome’s official religion, it replaced ancient religious practices that were cultic and ceremonial, with no holy books comparable to the Christians’ newly expanded Bible. This was before the Dark Ages, and Christianity lived peacefully alongside the intellectual, literate tradition of the ancient world. For example, Christians considered people in India to be saved if they adhered to the Word of God as the Buddha had preached it, presuming that the Word had inspired people all over the world.

When Rome fell and the Latin-speaking West fell with it, Western Christianity entered the Dark Ages. With civilization in ruin, the schools were closed, and intellectual life collapsed. Later, Christian missionaries from Ireland brought a superstitious version of Christianity to mainland Europe. That’s where you get Purgatory, which you could reportedly locate if you went into a particular cave in Ireland. The Mass, said in Latin rather than the vernacular, sounded like magical incantations. The Bible was rarely translated into the common tongue.

Despite the decline of the Church, it still supported literacy. With the fall of Rome, the Church became the only international institution in the West and the sole preserver of books and literacy. Churchmen were commonly among the first people to leave written records in a language with no previous literature. Sometimes the Christians provided a language with its first alphabet. Wherever Christians spread their faith, they spread literacy. As in the early days, churchmen hand-copied a lot of texts over the centuries. A “cleric” is a “clerk,” someone who reads, writes, and does numbers. Commoners went to the clergy for help with written documents. The Church Council of 1179 mandated free Latin instruction at cathedrals to benefit poor scholars, combining Christianity’s interest in charity and literacy. This practice soon developed into Europe’s first universities.

As civilization recovered, the Church continued to support learning. Copernicus, for example, was funded by the Church. The first book printed on Gutenberg’s press was a Bible. With that technology, the Bible was translated into every major European language and printed in large numbers. Martin Luther’s challenge to the Church was a written tract, one that was soon printed up and distributed. The Reformers emphasized that Christians should be able to read the Bible themselves, all the way down to the simple plowman in his field. Rather naively, Martin Luther thought that everyone would naturally interpret the Bible his way if only they had a chance, and he translated the Bible into German to give that chance to more people. The ideal medieval Christian listened to church authority, but the ideal Reformation Christian had read the Bible for themselves. In Denmark, Protestant ministers taught the peasants to read and write, which allowed the peasantry to participate in the politics of their kingdom, perhaps for the first time anywhere in the world. Sunday school, an institution hated by children from Tom Sawyer to me, began in the 1780s as an effort to teach poor children to read. It had to be on Sunday because the kids would be working the other six days. Today we take it for granted that a public school is going to teach kids to read for free. Historically speaking, however, a culture’s ruling power structure usually hasn’t wanted the commoners to be able to read. Literacy might let them read laws for themselves, draw up proper legal documents, sue in court, and pass along subversive messages. Universal literacy began as a Christian project. Across the globe, missionaries opened schools and even taught girls to read. Today universal literacy is a secular ideal, but the original momentum was Christian.

What was Jesus’ role in all this? Jesus didn’t do much directly to promote literacy, but he did say things that were noteworthy enough that others wrote them down. He also led a life that was so dramatic that early Christians invented a new literary form to narrate that life: the “gospel.” Somehow he expressed the humanism and piety of his Jewish tradition in such an arresting and accessible way that it appealed to Paul, a Hellenized Jew, and to the gentiles among whom Paul lived. Jesus’ predominant contribution to world literacy was that he founded a sect that would metamorphose into a world religion, and that he was Jewish. That seems to have been enough to get the ball rolling toward universal literacy. So the next time you drive past a nativity creche, thank Baby Jesus for our literate culture.

2013

This year's ad ends with happy holiday cheer.

Are Atheists Softening?

It’s Christmas once again, a time of caroling, brightly wrapped gifts, holiday cheer, and anti-religious billboards from the American Atheists. True to form, they are sponsoring an animated billboard in Times Square that insults Christians and features ALL CAPS, as if yelling is the atheist idiom. But wait, it’s not that simple. The 12-second ad ends with a cheery Christmas scene and holiday wishes. The ad might lead someone to suspect that atheists are regular, reasonable people who like the holidays just like anyone else. It's a step forward from the mean-spirited billboards that AA put up two years ago. Maybe in some future Christmas they’ll set aside the negativity and insults altogether. Meanwhile on the West Coast, the Freedom From Religion Foundation has put up billboards in Sacramento featuring smiling local atheists, each with a short phrase about their beliefs or lack thereof. These images imply that atheists can be friendly and thoughtful. Could it be that atheists are learning that a little niceness can go a long way? The general public distrusts us from the start, so anything we can do to show our human side has got to pay off.

This shift in public presentation comes alongside a growing number of atheist books that have challenged the anti-religious stance of the New Atheists. Recently I’ve read three books that offer atheist perspectives on religion as an admirable human endeavor: Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists (2012), Christ Stedman’s Faitheist (2012), and Frans de Waal’s The Bonobo and the Atheist (2013). Without denying that religions have dark sides, these authors address their light sides. De Botton examines the valuable social organization that religion can provide and that secular groups could emulate. Stedman encourages atheists to participate in interfaith movements to help fight religious extremism. De Waal criticizes the militance of the New Atheists and asserts that religion can have emotional benefits event if its supernatural claims aren’t true or even really believed. Together, atheists like these three are offering a more broad-minded take on what atheism means. I find it a welcome change.

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AA billboards from 2011.

Christmas Unitarian-style

Nordics like to honor Santa Lucia,
a figure of light in the darkness.
Her name means “Holy Light-Girl”.

If you’ve ever wondered how a church congregation might handle Christmas when it’s not a Christian church, you’re in luck. The Unitarian Universalist church where I teach Sunday school is big enough to offer a variety of Christmas-themed events, and they provide a special insight into how a congregation without a creed conducts itself. Here’s a rundown, with commentary.

Festive solstice potluck: First off, if you want some holiday cheer but don’t want to honor the Christmas tradition, per se, you’re covered. Local “Freethought” groups, such as Humanists of Washington and Seattle Atheists, gather at the church for a “Winter Potluck”. Lots of atheists attend but think it’s weird to meet in a church.

Family holiday service: This is my favorite, where the kids do a semi-traditional Christmas pageant, with little kids dressed as sheep, wise men, and the rest. It’s not all by the book. The number of wise men expands to keep kids from getting left out. Sometimes we Unitarians are smeared as “atheists with kids,” and this event plays to that stereotype. Where else could my atheist daughter have ever played Mary?

Family candlelight service: This one’s a little more serious, taking place in the evening, with kids doing readings. Our Seattle congregation has a large number of Nordics, so we do the Santa Lucia bit, where a teen girl with candles on her head walks through the sanctuary with attendants, all in white. There’s nothing particularly universal or unitarian about this ceremony, other than that as Unitarian Universalists we can do whatever we want, and this is one of the things that we want to do.

Candlelight Christmas Eve service: This service is the most traditional of our services, for those of us who really want to get our Christmas fix. Christmas Eve services are beautiful whether you believe in anything or not, and especially if it plays into your nostalgia.

Messiah Sing- and Play-Along: For the real music lovers, there’s an event the day after Christmas where you can sing along to Handel’s Messiah, solos and everything. If you’re handy with an instrument, bring it along and play. It’s so popular that you have to buy tickets, and they always sell out.

Blue Christmas: This special Christmas service says something about how intentional we are about our church experience. This service is especially for people who are sad around the holidays, which is a lot of people. For people in grief, all the holiday cheer, Christmas carols, and kids’ events can make things worse. This quiet service is for them. What other church acknowledges how many people feel the holidays as a time of loss?


In the nineteenth-century, Unitarians and allies, such as Charles Dickens, were central in the successful campaign to transform Christmas from an adults’ drinking party to a tender-hearted, family-oriented holiday. Our congregation continues in that tradition, honoring Christmas, but taking it on our own terms. Our approach is customer-centric. There isn’t any church hierarchy telling us to do anything other than what the various people in our congregation want to do. Merry Christmas!

Onward Liberal Soldiers

Calling for a hypothetical

revolution, ignoring the real one.

In a BBC interview in October, comedian Russell Brand called for a revolution. He denigrated the everyday political process as not worth his time, to the point of not voting. The irony is that global culture has already undergone a breathtaking revolution, but no one talks about it. In the last two hundred years, we have abolished slavery, rebranded war as an evil, enacted universal suffrage, advanced women’s rights, made racism unacceptable in polite company, established better rights for the accused, provided institutional support for the poor and elderly, and more. There’s plenty of work left to be done, but the work remaining need not blind us to the phenomenal social progress we have made since 1800. Neither conservatives nor liberals like to talk about this revolution because it doesn’t fit either side’s narrative. The liberal narrative is founded on how bad things are and how desperately we need change, so liberals don’t want to talk about how much progress we have already made. Conservatives don’t want to tout our progress because it’s been liberal progress and they don’t want to remind everyone that they’ve been on the wrong side of history. 

One way to look at our progress is from the perspective of the vulnerable people that are being protected by the modern state, compared to how they were treated 200 years ago.

Women: equal rights in voting, property, work, and education; legal contraception; wife beating and marital rape outlawed.

Children: child labor laws, free education, child abuse laws.

Elderly, widows, orphans: social insurance programs.

Poor people: free education, welfare benefits, voting rights, subsidized healthcare.

Sick people: reform of nursing practice, universal health care, disability accommodations.

Prisoners: rights of the accused, rights of convicts, abolition of the death penalty almost everywhere.

Slaves: slavery abolished.

Racial minorities: voting rights, civil rights, discrimination prohibited.

Religious minorities: religious freedom, discrimination prohibited.

Soldiers, POWs: Geneva Conventions.

Workers: safety standards, fair labor laws.

Consumers: anti-trust laws, truth in advertising laws, consumer safety standards, labeling requirements.

Russell Brand wants a revolution but doesn’t vote. In the past 200 years, voting has gotten us a revolution. Whatever we are doing, we should damn well keep doing it. The status quo is progress.

As for which historical figure is most responsible for this social revolution, Friedrich Nietzsche named a candidate. He hated the spread of equal rights for all, and he laid the blame first and foremost on the historical Jesus. But that would be a topic for another post.

2013

Infant baptism reflects traditional family values.

Jesus’ Family Values

Jesus never said, “The family that prays together stays together.” Instead, he said that his disciples were to hate their families: their parents, their siblings, and their children. As Bible verses go, Luke 14:26 doesn’t get a lot of play in Sunday school. Jesus preached about the Reign of God, a blessed spiritual state that people could enter, but only after they cut ties to the everyday world. “Let the dead bury the dead,” said Jesus to the man with a duty to bury his father. For early Christians, joining the church generally meant renouncing one’s family. In the gentile congregations that Paul founded, a convert underwent baptism, in which they died and were reborn into a new family, the “body of Christ.” In general, once you were baptized, you were then expected not to sin for the rest of your life. Abstention from sex was the ideal, even for married Christians. Becoming a Christian in the first century was sort of like joining a monastery, a convent, or a cult today. It set you apart from your family and from your society.

As for Jesus’ own mother and brothers, he said they were not his true family. His brothers may have been upset at him for not setting up shop in Nazareth and bringing gifts their way. Once Jesus was dead, his family moved in. His brother James took over as the leader of Jesus’ sect, centered in Jerusalem. Other relatives apparently led congregations of Jewish Christians in the surrounding area. This Jewish phase of Christianity, however, got written out of history after Jerusalem was destroyed and Paul’s gentile-friendly version of the sect became the norm.

The idea that Jesus supports conservative family values reflects Christianity’s later development into a mainstream religion. Baptism became a baby’s initiation into society, and gospel verses about forsaking your family were quietly neglected. Before Christianity turned mainstream, however, it rejected the mainstream way of life, right down to family ties.

Gospel Verses

Hating your family: Luke 14:26. The Jesus Seminar rates this saying as pink, or “probable.”

Dead bury the dead: Matthew 8:22, Luke 9:59-60. Rated pink.

Jesus’ biological family is not his true family: Matthew 12:48, Thomas 99:2. Rated pink.

More on Jesus’ Family

Was Jesus a bastard?

Whose Father in Heaven?

The Lord’s Prayer can be traced
back to the historical Jesus, sort of.

One single word in the gospel of Matthew symbolizes the work that early Christians had to do to turn Jesus’ Jewish sect into an independent religion. The historical Jesus taught Jews to pray to God as “Father.” This instruction was recorded in an early written collection of Jesus’ sayings, the so-called Q document, and it turns up in Luke’s gospel. In Matthew, however, the anonymous evangelist has improved the wording. Matthew has Jesus teach people to pray to “Our Father.” Jesus was a mystic, independent of any religious structure, but Matthew needed him to be the founder of a church, so he inserted the word “our.”

The Jews had a formal, communal religious practice, headed up ultimately by the leaders of the Jerusalem Temple, but that wasn’t Jesus’ way. Like John the Baptist before him, he led a ministry that implicitly challenged the spiritual authority of the Temple and the Jews’ religious leaders. True to mystic practice everywhere, Jesus taught people to pray privately. About a generation after Jesus’ calamitous death on a cross, his followers wrote down the sayings they remembered, often arranging them in groups by theme. The Lord’s Prayer, which starts “Our Father,” is one such collection. Historians consider it plausible that the prayer was assembled by early Christians rather than being a formula that Jesus literally told people to use. Referring to God as “Father” was typical of Jesus, and he probably really did teach people to pray to God as a father in the sky (“heaven”). Luke includes the Lords’ Prayer from Q, and in Luke the prayer starts, “Father…”

That’s all well and good for an individual, but it doesn’t do for a church. The author of Matthew was particularly concerned about the church, and he’s the only evangelist to refer to the church (or “assembly”) in his gospel. Unlike Jesus, this evangelist didn’t want people praying in their closets. He needed a prayer for a Christian congregation to pray publicly and in unison. For that purpose, the prayer in Q needed to start with “our.” With that addition, it could be a congregation’s prayer, with a group of people saying it together. All across the Christian world down through the centuries, Matthew’s version of the prayer has been the one recited in church, just as the evangelist intended. The prayer is known as the “Our Father” (or “Pater Noster”).

We humans evolved religion to bind ourselves together in community. Mystics, such as Jesus, promote a more personal and internal spiritual experience, and in every religious tradition they face resistance from priests, who prefer uniformity and conformity. Jesus was charismatic enough to found a sect that continued among pious Jews after his execution, but it was a counter-culture movement within Judaism, not a new religion. In order to be suitable for an independent church, Jesus’ tradition needed some revising, and the author of Matthew was evidently up to the task.

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Jesus’ reference to God as "father" or "dad" (abba) may have a special meaning if indeed he was a bastard.

Was Jesus a Bastard?

Baptism (“washing”) was for sinners, so Jesus’
baptism required some explanation. 

Of the four canonical gospels, Mark is the earliest and the most reliable. Mark’s style is frank and hasty, reporting rather too frankly on some of Jesus’ embarrassing biographical details. Later gospel writers “improved” on Mark’s embarrassing stories by omitting them, revising them, or explaining them away. For example, when Jesus was crucified, did he cry out in despair, like a mortal man? Yes, says Mark. No, say Luke and John. Did Jesus get baptized as a repentant sinner? Mark says yes, but the other three gospels finesse the issue away. Mark wrote about Jesus getting angry at a pathetic leper. Imagine that, sweet Jesus being angry at a sick person! Later, a scribe changed Mark’s text so that Jesus felt not anger but compassion. In addition to all these questionable details, Mark makes Jesus look bad by implying that he had no father. There’s no Joseph, and Jesus’ neighbors in Nazareth refer to him as “Mary’s son.” In Jesus’ patriarchal culture, if you were a woman’s son, that meant you had no father.

Being a bastard fits the life story of the historical Jesus, a penniless hillbilly. When he talked about the poor and the hungry, he wasn’t making it up. His charismatic career took place in the hinterlands of Galilee, where rural Jews were being systematically impoverished by the Greek-speaking foreigners in the cities. In Jesus’ insignificant home village of Nazareth, people lived in built-out caves. In Jerusalem, Jews were having a tough time of it, but at least they could look down their noses on the racially impure Jews in the hills of Galilee. Jesus wasn’t an aristocratic philosopher like Plato. He wasn’t a learned poet like Lao Tzu. He wasn’t a prince (the Buddha), a priest (Zarathustra), or a merchant (Muhammad). He was a country preacher, a faith healer, and an exorcist. How perfect, that this poor indigenous laborer, sent to his death by the elites of Jerusalem, should also be a bastard.

After the gospel of Mark, Matthew and Luke assign Jesus a respectable father: Joseph. This addition was part of the same campaign that edited out Jesus’ mortal cry on the cross, “My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?” No one wants to worship someone who felt abandoned by God, and no one wants to worship a bastard.

Readers' Questions

Q. When you say that the gospel writers after Mark finessed Jesus’ baptism away, what to do you mean?

A. Bible scholars conclude that Jesus’ baptism was embarrassing (and probably factual) because of the way the other gospel writers minimized it. Matthew leaves the baptism in, but explains it away. Here, Jesus isn’t repenting of sins and he doesn’t need baptism, but he goes through the motions because it’s proper. Luke mentions Jesus’ baptism in passing, and he has the heavens open up when Jesus is praying, not when he’s baptized. In John, Jesus isn’t baptized at all. In fact, Jesus one-ups John by leading an even bigger baptism campaign of his own.

Q. Even with the addition of Joseph, isn’t Jesus still a bastard because Mary got pregnant before he had sex with her? Didn’t early Christians consider him a bastard based on that story?

A. In Jesus’ culture, a man’s father was the man who publicly proclaimed him as his son, biology aside. In Matthew and Luke, Jesus has a father and is not a bastard by local standards. That’s why Matthew changes Jesus from being a carpenter (in Mark) to being the son of a carpenter (that is, not a bastard).

Hunger Is Our Secret Weapon

Nosy and hungry, she's the mother of us all

As mammals, we have big appetites. Cold-blooded bugs, fish, and lizards can get by on less food. A constrictor snake can go months without eating. We hot-blooded critters don’t have it that easy. Without food, a shrew dies in 5 hours. Keeping your body hot costs energy, even with fur. A mother secreting milk for her young uses up even more energy. It’s physiologically expensive to be a mammal, so mammals have no choice but to eat a lot more than reptiles. The need to keep eating or die seems like a hefty drawback, but we turned it into our special power. Hunger drove us mammals into evolutionary high gear.

Reptiles lead a slow motion life and spend a lot of time just hanging out, conserving their energy until it’s needed. The first shrews, on the other hand, learned to hunt quickly, racing through the night stuffing their toothy snouts with bugs. In the great Darwinian contest of life, reptiles competed against each other on a weekly schedule, but we mammals lived and died by the day. Natural selection worked faster with us, clearing out the less fit and rewarding the winners with multiple litters. And now we mammals dominate every environmental niche worth dominating.

What’s more, we humans have big, hungry brains. Our brains use up a fourth to a fifth of the body’s metabolic energy. Pressed to feed these hungry brains, our hominid forefathers ventured out onto the African savanna and began scavenging meat. In terms of sheer nutritional density, meat beats plants hands down, and hunger made meat eaters out of us. Returning to the tribe with meat, males finally had something special to offer their mates and children. With their new role to play as meat providers, males stopped being mere rabble rousers and became fathers. It’s incessant mammalian hunger that got us where we are today.


Related Post

Meet Your Maker: Evolution

2013

Robust Knowledge Versus Flimsy Knowledge

Creationism purports to be a rival of evolution, an explanation of where we come from that deserves to be given respect comparable to the respect that Darwin’s explanation enjoys. It’s hard to argue facts with creationists because they come equipped with their own facts. But even if we set aside the facts, we can still see that creationism is a pseudoscience. We can judge these two bodies of knowledge, creationism and evolutionary theory, by how robust they are. Knowledge is robust when it is dense, thorough, useful, interconnected, predictive, teachable, measurable, falsifiable, and growing. Creationism and evolutionary science present a clear case where one side’s knowledge is robust and the other side’s is slim.

Consider, first, everything that evolutionary scientists have learned in the last 100 years. Their discoveries incorporate new evidence from genetics, paleontology, game theory, and more. What have the creationists discovered in the last century? If the creationists are right, they should be able to use genetic analysis to trace the races of humanity back to Noah’s three sons and their respective wives. That would be exciting confirmation of Noah’s flood and useful information for understanding humanity’s origins. But creationists aren’t even trying to do link human genetics to the Flood. Instead, secular scientists have traced humanity’s genetic lineages back to our evolution in Africa about 200,000 years ago. The theory of evolution also proves itself by being useful to people other than evolutionary scientists. People use evolution to understand the spread of viruses, the control of agricultural pests, and the nature of living things in general. If you ask a creationist why birds have feathers, the answer is that God created them that way. A biologist, however, can tell you a detailed story about scaly dinosaurs evolving feathers and eventually flight. The right paleontologist could talk you to sleep with what we know about the evolution of birds, far more than a creationist can tell you about all of creation. Evolutionary scientists also demonstrate that their theories are based on evidence when they debate each other. As new evidence comes in, it gives scientists new information to disagree about. For instance, consider the question of whether humans have evolved into five or more distinct “races,” or whether evolution has resulted in a single, basically homogeneous human race. Scientists are studying genes to find out, and in the mean time, there’s heated debate. Creationists don’t debate each other. There’s a split between “new earth” and “old earth” creationists, but there’s no public debate over the issue. Old-earth creationists think the new-earthers are blind to science, and the new-earth creationists think that the old-earthers are blinded by Satan, but both factions work happily together on the “Intelligent Design” team. The amount of intellectual work being accomplished with the theory of evolution swamps the work being done with creationism. You don’t even have to look at the facts that each side proclaims. The two bodies of knowledge aren’t comparable, and creationism isn’t even in evolution’s league.

Naturally, other bodies of knowledge besides creationism also fail the test of robustness. Compare, for example, everything that astronomers have learned about the stars in the last 100 years to everything that astrologers have learned. Is there a correlation among genes, star signs, and personality? Do animals have star signs, too, or just humans? Or maybe just humans, apes, and whales? These are interesting questions, but no astrologers are looking into them. Astronomers learn countless new things every year while astrologers reiterate traditional ideas. Furthermore, the only people who use astrology in their businesses are astrologers. Astronomy, on the other hand, is useful for understanding tides, getting to the moon, and putting satellites in orbit. And what about debates? You never read about a hard-hitting debate between astrologers. Twentieth century astronomers, on the other hand, hotly debated whether our Milky Way was the whole universe, or whether it was just one cluster of stars among many others. Astronomers were able to resolve the debate with cold, hard facts because their body of knowledge is based on evidence. For another example, let’s consider Mormon archeology. The Mormons claim to have secret knowledge of past civilizations in the Americas, but this knowledge doesn’t help them do archeology better than anyone else. No one takes anomalous archeological finds to the Mormons for their inside knowledge and superior perspective. In one field after another, the people who are doing real research have robust, growing bodies of knowledge, and they offer useful expertise. By comparison, fringe theories are flimsy.

A personal interest of mine is Jesus scholarship, where you might not be surprised to find a similar split. A few scholars say Jesus didn’t exist at all, and the world-renowned experts, most of whom are agnostic, say he did. The skeptics make simple judgments and blanket statements, such as dismissing all the written evidence equally. Mainstream scholars, on the other hand, differentiate minutely between evidence that’s more reliable or less. Of the four gospels, for example, they regard John as not useful on the subject of the historical Jesus and the gospel of Mark less touched by authorial bias than Matthew or Luke. The mainstream scholars also have an ever-growing body of historical information about Jesus and his time, while scholarship that counts Jesus as mythical peaked about a hundred years ago and has declined since then. If Jesus didn’t exist, then there are a number of exciting historical problems that could have been explored over the last century. Who was it who first said, “Blessed are the hungry”? The phrase appears in different contexts in Matthew, Luke, and Thomas. Someone must have said or written it first. Who was it? And where did the baptism and crucifixion stories in the gospels come from? Both events are exactly the sort of thing that a first-century Jew would never invent because each event was embarrassing in its own way. Jesus’ baptism made him look like a follower of John the Baptist and a sinner. His crucifixion marked him as a failure of the worst sort. If there wasn’t any Jesus getting baptized, blessing the hungry, and getting crucified, then there are remarkable historical discoveries to be made about the origins of these gospel accounts. But there’s no such research being done. The scholars who say Jesus didn’t exist just stop there and have nothing else to show for their perspective. No iconoclastic graduate student is using unorthodox scholarship to promote a bold new vision of Christian origins, one in which Jesus didn’t even exist. Instead there’s more and more research that ends up in line with the well-established view that Jesus was an historical Jewish prophet, albeit one who never claimed to be God and didn’t intend to found a new religion.

I like using the robustness argument because it works regardless of the facts of the case. Ideally it’s a neutral perspective, looking at each body of knowledge from the outside and getting away from each side’s debating points. Everyone in the debate can see for themselves how one body of knowledge stacks up against another. Fans of any given fringe theory will always be able to find reasons that the robustness test doesn’t apply to their particular perspective. Reason is notoriously ineffective at making people admit that they’re wrong. Still, in the scope of centuries reason seems to be winning out, one winning argument at a time.

(The thinking in this post is inspired primarily by similar observations made by Steven Pinker in his book The Blank Slate. It is similar to earlier posts about magic not working and about Intelligent Design lacking controversy.)

2013

War flag of al-Shabaab

Islam and Terror

With another terrorist attack by Muslims in the news, this time in Nairobi, people are ready to criticize Islam or to defend it. On the left, people like to say that the terrorists are driven by geopolitical pressures and that Christians and other non-Muslims can be terrorists, too. On this side of the debate, it’s important to know that the iconic bomb-laden suicide vest was invented not by Muslims but by the secular Tamil Tigers. On the right, people point to the lines in the Quran that call for violence against infidels and that promise heavenly rewards for martyrs. Given the long history of attacks that Muslim terrorists have made against Western targets, it doesn’t take much evidence to get Westerners to associate Islam with terrorism. Human brains are good at pattern-matching, and people are quick to spot the pattern in these attacks. As is often the case, both sides are right.

The liberals are right that Islam itself doesn’t explain the motive for these attacks. There are countless regular people who happen to be Muslim but are no more prone to terror that you or I. Christians have considered Muslims their enemies ever since they expanded into Christian territory in the 600s. Today’s right-wing hostility to Islam is simply more of the same. Far from being a source of terror, Islam was instrumental in bringing stability, peace, justice, and learning to a culture that spanned continents and centuries. Americans as diverse as Thomas Jefferson and Joseph Smith admired Islam, which ironically is closer to Jesus’ unitarian religion than Christianity’s trinitarian theology is. If Islam isn’t a font of terror, where do these attacks come from? Nonreligious motives for terrorist attacks are easy to find in the history of the West’s mistreatment of Muslim people and nations. Muslims see their countries being threatened by the West on one level or another: by military force, through covert manipulation, or by Western media and culture. As the Tamil Tigers, the KKK, and other groups have shown, Muslims aren’t the only people who resort to extremism when their way of life is on the line.

That said, I can’t support the common liberal assertion that religion plays no role in these attacks. From the modern day all the way back to the dawn of humanity, religious behavior seems to establish tribal identity, especially to prepare the tribe for battle. Historically, religious rites have helped unite larger and larger tribes, then larger and larger nations, and finally entire empires. Religion helped warriors love the “tribe” so much that they would die for it. Sometimes warriors have been explicitly promised rewards in the afterlife, as with the Norse berserks, Christian Crusaders, Japanese kamikaze, and Muslim suicide bombers. The light side of religion is that it brings people together. The dark side is that in-groups often oppress or attack out-groups. If there is a religious motivation to a terrorist attack, that should come as little surprise.

If religion in general includes an element of warlike tribalism, Islam in particular is no exception. While Muhammad was known as a peacemaker, and he was merciful in victory, he was after all the commander of a conquering army. From Muhammad’s lifetime on, the doctrines of Islam have been used to bolster the courage of soldiers, inspiring them to fight the enemies of the faith. If Islam is being used to motivate revenge attacks against infidels, that’s partly the sort of thing that Islam was designed to do.

Like government, religion is a way that people coordinate their behavior, sometimes on a continental scale. As with government, people sometimes use religion for good, use it sometimes for evil, and usually use it for themselves. It would be simplistic to paint an entire religion as evil, but it would also be simplistic to consider it entirely innocent.

Welcome Ceremony at Burning Man

The Baggage Check dome in 2009. My friend and I
slept in the rental truck on the far right.

Penn Gillette is an outspoken atheist, but in his book God, No he speaks highly of the time that the guests at his party all sang “Kumbaya” together. God might not exist, but “Kumbaya” is real. My atheist “Kumbaya” moment happened at Burning Man this year. At Camp Baggage Check, we performed a welcome ceremony that I had invented for us. It was a little dorky, but it went over well.

Here’s how I introduced the ceremony to the camp, as we were gathered in a circle in our central dome. “Camp Baggage Check is a place that we set apart. Here we come together intentionally, and we behave differently toward each other from how we would in the everyday world. One way that we designate this space as a special is by sharing a welcome ceremony together. For this ceremony, we use three things that humans have used in community-building ceremonies for a hundred thousand years: shared vocalization, shared music, and shared gesture.”

During the ceremony, each camp mate in turn says, “Hi, my name is BLANK,” and then the other forty people in the circle chant in unison, “Welcome home, BLANK!” The chant has a simple melody, just enough to count as music. We included arm gestures, first throwing the arms wide open and then pantomiming a hug. For laughs, I call that the “astral hug." This simple ritual is a far cry from singing and dancing all night around a fire like our ancestors did, but it has vocals, music, and motion. Some researchers say that we evolved particular mental adaptations that help us use these shared activities for group bonding, and I think they’re right.

This year was the first time we did the ceremony with the melody and the astral hug, and I was worried that my campmates would find it too dorky. Frankly, it sounds pretty dorky. But it went over well. People respond warmly to everyone else in the camp chanting a welcome for them. Now we're talking about adding a brief ceremony to do each evening before our shared dinner. It will be an original Burning Man version of saying grace before a meal.

Link

Singing Changes Your Brain, by Stacy Horn, 2013

The Burning Man Temple

The Burning Man Temple is different each year.
This is 2011's Temple.

New Atheist Sam Harris says that if we all magically forgot our religious traditions, we would find no use for our churches, mosques, and other places of worship. In his mind, we would go about our lives without whatever it is that happens in churches and never miss it. It's easy to find fault with organized religion, but I suspect that there is something of value going on in a church or other sacred space. The story of the Temple at Burning Man is an interesting case in point, in which a sacred space insinuated itself into a raucous festival.

In 2000, artist David Best lost a close friend just two weeks before he was scheduled to erect a wooden “Temple of the Mind” at Burning Man. Instead of cancelling their plans in grief, Best and his friends turned their temple into a memorial to their friend. In true burner fashion, they encouraged other people to use the temple to memorialize their own dearly departed, and since then the Temple has been a fixture at Burning Man, rivaling the Man itself in its power. Best is a professional artist with work in museums, but his “Temple” built of waste wood touched people in a way that none of his previous works ever had. To this day, burners gather at the Temple to write messages of loss on the surfaces of the wooden Temple. The Temple and the memorials left in it go up in smoke one day after the Man itself burns. The Temple is a beautiful place where a full-on atheist like me can leave a memorial alongside someone who expects to be reunited with their lost loved ones on the astral plane. It seems as though a spiritual place like the Temple is serving such an important role that it appeared spontaneously in the middle of a wild festival and immediately became part of the culture.

Most people are surprised to hear about Burning Man’s spiritual side, but there are many sides to Burning Man.

Here’s a story about a memorial by law enforcement officers at 2013’s Temple (click).

And here is an online paper that describes the Burning Man Temple (click).

A previous post about my own experience with grief (click).