Week 5 of 5: Interracial Marriage, Secular Culture, Gender Roles, and Suicide

This week's sermon wraps up the You Asked For It series one week earlier than their previous projections, so it also wraps up my Rebutting Southland Series.  We have four topics today, interracial marriage, secular culture, gender roles, and suicide.

First, interracial marriage is the first topic throughout this lecture series that has been given adequate consideration from the pulpit.  Jon says "Racism is dumb."  I agree.

Second, secular culture is largely a treatment of how church people should approach things like smoking and drinking and R-rated movies.  The larger message of "focus on what is beneficial... do what is best" strikes me as sound.  But Jon does take one profoundly unbiblical stance here.  He says "Getting drunk is sinful.  Drinking, the Bible doesn't say anything about it."  To begin with, the first miracle, Jesus Christ turning water into wine at the wedding (John 1:11) serves as a direct Biblical endorsement of social drinking, at least on special occasions.  The passage specifically talks about how where most hosts put out the best wine first, so that guests will be too intoxicated to care too much about the inferior wine later, the miraculous wine was better than what the hosts initially served.  More than that, though, the Bible only presents two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper.  At the founding of The Lord's Supper (Luke 22:14-23), Jesus commands believers to consume wine in ritual remembrance of his blood.

Third, on the subject of gender roles, Dan presents a sound distillation of the egalitarian and complementarian positions.  Complementarians seek to deny women full authority to teach and lead in the church and at home based on sexist bible verses.  And Egalitarians seek to afford women full standing in the church and in the home.  Dan & Jon say they're on the same side in this debate.  And then the refuse to admit which side they're on.  They cite time pressures.  But they've brought these time pressures on themselves.  They've decided how many topics to address, and how many weeks to address them in.  They have no one to blame for their time pressures but themselves.  And from the outside, saying that there's a right answer here and then refusing to explicitly defend it reads to me as cowardice.

There's a bigger issue with their treatment of gender, though.  Both Complementarians and Egalitarians would claim that the bible values men and women equally, a position Dan explicitly reiterates.  The Bible does not value men & women equally, does not treat them with equal dignity.  The Bible's treatment of women is malignant and horrific.  Women in the Bible aren't even second class citizens; they're simply male property,  which I'll expand on in The Bible and Women section, below.

Finally, on the topic of suicide, the approach of encouraging depressed people to seek counselling and to seek community is sound.  But Jon's underlying claim that "there is never a circumstance in life that you will find yourself in that God's power can't get you out of" is simply false.  I have known strong, lifelong Christians who have struggled throughout their lives with depression.  Christianity simply does not cure depression.  And Jon's unwillingness to acknowledge that, in cases of painful, terminal illness suicide can be clearly beneficial serves to potentially extend the pain and suffering of members of his congregation, without necessity or benefit.  This is a clear example of where belief in Christianity leads people to inferior ethical behavior.  If we begin from a perspective of helping people, of caring about people and their suffering, we will seek to extend to terminal patients the ability to choose when and how they die, rather than forcing them to live in agony out of fear of angering a vengeful superstition.

The Bible and Women

The Bible’s treatment of women reflects the social environment of the circumstances of the times of its writing.  That’s not an excuse that I’m making on its behalf.  I’m pointing it out as a clear indictment.  If the Bible’s origins were in any way divine, if it was the most important message to humanity from an all-loving God, it wouldn’t reflect the horrific social environment of its times.  It would criticize them in the clearest, sternest terms, and call on believers to do and be better. 

Noah’s Nameless Wife,  and Other Nameless Women

            “On that very day Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, together with his wife and the wives of his three sons, entered the ark.”

            - Genesis 7:13 (NIV)

            So, according to the Genesis stories, the human population of the ark numbered 8:  Noah, and his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japeth.  And Noah’s wife, and the wives of his sons.  Noah’s wife is, in the story, the most recent female common ancestor of all living human beings.  She’s the great-to-the-nth grandmother of EVERYONE.  And the Bible doesn’t care about her enough to so much as give her a name.  Her name, her title, her identity, everything the Bible has to say about the woman who birthed the population of the world fits into two words: ‘Noah’s wife’[1].  And one of those words is someone else’s name.  She gets no accomplishments, no laud nor deference.  She just gets an owner.  Compare this to the genealogies of Genesis 4 & 5.  Men’s names.  All of them.  Some of these guys never get mentioned once in all of Biblical history except as a bullet point in a genealogy, and every last one of them gets a name.

            This isn’t an isolated occurrence.  Cain, Seth, and Methuselah[2] also had nameless wives, as did several other lesser Biblical patriarchs.  Abraham’s mother is nameless, as are Lot’s two daughters and his wife.  Potiphar’s wife who tries to seduce Joseph has no name, and neither does the daughter of Pharoh who pulls Moses out of the river in a reed basket.  Job’s wives, both the one who Jehovah lets Satan kill as part of the bet between them, and her replacement that arrives after Jehovah’s won the bet, are both unnamed.  At no point does the Bible refer to a character solely as “<biblical woman’s name>’s Husband” and not give him a name of his own.

Silent Women

^“Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.  If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.”

            - 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 (NIV)

            “I also want the women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, adorning themselves, not with elaborate hairstyles or gold or pearls or expensive clothes, but with good deeds, appropriate for women who profess to worship God.

A woman should learn in quietness and full submission.  I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.  For Adam was formed first, then Eve.  And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.  But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.”

- 1 Timothy 2:9-15 (NIV)

            “For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.”

- 1 Corinthians 11:8-9 (NIV)

           

These are New Testament texts that clearly state that women are inferior and secondary to men in the eyes of the church.  They must remain silent while in church, and are only allowed to make religious inquiries of their own husband, and even then, only at home.  They must dress modestly, wear their hair simply, and not wear jewelry.  The conservative Mennonites are an example of contemporary Christians who actually put this into practice, not any of the supposedly Bible-literal evangelical denominations.  Note that the author of Timothy here explicitly blames Eve for the Fall of Man.  He founds his reasoning for subjecting women to male rule on a literal read of a demonstrably literally false story.  And then he suggests that the only redemption for women comes by birthing children.

The gender politics presented by the Bible are significantly more regressive than those typically enacted by even conservative evangelical Christian denominations.  This is, to me, a clear example of a case where being a Good Christian and being a Good Person are in direct conflict.  The more closely one follows the Biblical direction for human behavior, the more repressive to women one will behave.  Contemporary American Christians largely choose to ignore the clear Biblical direction here, and American society is better because they do… I just wish they’d apply that further and abandon all the rest of the regressive baggage of Christianity too.

Rape

Here are the Ten Commandments[3]:

1 – Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

2 – Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.

3 – Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

4 – Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.

5 – Honour thy father and thy mother.

6 – Thou shalt not kill.

7 – Thou shalt not commit adultery.

8 – Thou shalt not steal.

9 – Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

10 – Thou shalt not covet.

Note the things that God hates more than he hates rape.  Feeling jealous?  Worse than rape.  Talking back to your Dad?  Saying ‘God damn it’?  Working on Sunday[4]?  All worthy of their own special mention, their own bullet point spot on the list of the Top Ten Things Jehovah Wants To Command Of You. 

Throughout the Bible, female consent is never mentioned.  It’s not an important concept to any of the authors of the books of the Bible.

“Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.  For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior.  Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.”

- Ephesians 5:22-24

The Bible never mentions spousal rape because, under the Biblical worldview, there’s no such thing.  Women are just male property; a wife’s consent is irrelevant.  In the ten commandments passage, women are explicitly just an item in a list of things men own:

 “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

            -Exodus 20:17 (NIV)

And here’s a New Testament’s expansion of the subject:

“Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.  For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior.  Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.”

- Ephesians 5:22-24

The command of a husband to a wife comes straight from Jehovah.  Whatever it is, “in everything”, wives must “submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.”  Biblical marriage is an institution of ownership, and an affront to human dignity. 

Worse still, Jehovah is universally unsympathetic towards rape victims (even those who don’t happen to be married to their rapists), and sometimes He actively encourages child rape.  For instance:

“So there were recruited from the divisions of Israel one thousand from each tribe, twelve thousand armed for war.  Then Moses sent them to the war… And they warred against the Midianites, just as the Lord commanded Moses, and they killed all the males.

And the children of Israel took the women of Midian captive, with their little ones, and took as spoil all their cattle, all their flocks, and all their goods.  They also burned with fire all the cities where they dwelt, and all their forts.  And they took all the spoil and all the booty—of man and beast.

Then they brought the captives, the booty, and the spoil to Moses…   But Moses was angry with the officers of the army, with the captains over thousands and captains over hundreds, who had come from the battle.

And Moses said to them: “Have you kept all the women alive?  Look, these women caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to trespass against the Lord in the incident of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the Lord.  Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man intimately.  But keep alive for yourselves all the young girls who have not known a man intimately.”

- Numbers 31:5-18

In Malachi 3, Jehovah says “I am the LORD, I do not change.”   This is your unchanging Jehovah, right here.  According to its own tenets, that same unchanging monster encouraging soldiers to rape the child daughters of the enemy’s slaughtered wives after they’ve slaughtered their husbands and child sons is the same Jehovah currently the object of the worshipful devotion of contemporary Christianity[5].  Deuteronomy goes into detail about how the law should treat rapists and rape victims:

“If a young woman who is a virgin is betrothed to a husband, and a man finds her in the city and lies with her, then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city, and you shall stone them to death with stones, the young woman because she did not cry out in the city, and the man because he humbled his neighbor’s wife; so you shall put away the evil from among you.

“But if a man finds a betrothed young woman in the countryside, and the man forces her and lies with her, then only the man who lay with her shall die.  But you shall do nothing to the young woman; there is in the young woman no sin deserving of death, for just as when a man rises against his neighbor and kills him, even so is this matter.  For he found her in the countryside, and the betrothed young woman cried out, but there was no one to save her[6].

“If a man finds a young woman who is a virgin, who is not betrothed, and he seizes her and lies with her, and they are found out, then the man who lay with her shall give to the young woman’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife because he has humbled her; he shall not be permitted to divorce her all his days.”

- Deut 22: 23-29

If a married woman gets raped in the city, she gets put to death, just like her rapist because Jehovah apparently believes that it’s magically impossible for a rapist to prevent a woman from successfully calling for help inside city walls.  The rapist isn’t being punished for the harm he caused his victim, he’s being punished for the harm he caused her owner, her husband.  Rape here is a sin corollary to vandalism.  The rapist damaged another man’s property.  And if a man wants to force a young virgin to be his wife for the rest of her life, all he has to do is rape her, and pay off her father.  That’s Biblical marriage.  One girl, one rapist.  And fifty shekels to the girl’s previous owner, her father.  For the damage to his property.

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[1] Non-canonical Jewish texts refer to her as Naamah.  That is to say, the texts that bother to include a name for her didn’t get canonized.

[2] “But who’d call that livin’ when no gal will give in to no man with nine hundred years?” – Heyward/Gershwin

[3] Actually, these are the Protestant Ten Commandments.  Catholics treat #’s 1 & 2 of the Protestant numbering system as just 1, and separate out Protestant #10 into not coveting your neighbor’s wife (Catholic Commandment #9) and not coveting your neighbor’s stuff (Catholic Commandment #10).  Two groups of serious religious scholars, faced with the same source text and the task of removing from that text a simple numbered list came to incompatible conclusions about which points get a bullet in the list.  Which, to me, gestures towards the ways that this whole Christianity thing is just a human invention.  Your gestures may vary.

[4] Or Saturday, if that’s when you take your Jehovan day of rest.

[5] I’ve heard preachers suggest that when evaluating questions where different parts of the scripture suggest different answers we should weigh the scriptural claims against one another as on a balance.  Write all of the scriptures that seem to lean one way on one half of a piece of paper, write the scriptures that indicate the other answer on the other, and count them up.  And never think about the implicit acknowledgement of scriptural self-contradiction inherent to the process.  And never think about how different counting methods affect the outcome: Most verses? Most Chapters?  Most Books that seem to comment one way or the other?  New Testament verses count for one point, and Old Testament verses count for 3/5 of a point? Like I say, it depends on the method.  But when I run the numbers for the question “Is Jehovah in favor of or against rape?” I see a terrible, terrible diety.  That’s really how far into monstrosity we are: did Jehovah encourage rape more or less often than he discouraged it?  It depends on how you run the numbers.  Different people are going to get different answers.  Read in the most positive light, the very best thing you could say about Jehovah on the subject of rape is “he discouraged it slightly more frequently than he actively endorsed it”.

[6] Seriously?  What about Jehovah?  Why wasn’t Jehovah there to save her?  

Week 4: Dinosaurs, Premarital Sex, End Times, and Other Religions

It continues to baffle me why they'd give such short shrift to the topics their members think are most important.  This week, they've given a quarter-sermon each, split up between two preachers, to topics that easily warrant a sermon each, if not a whole sermon series each. 

I. Dinosaurs:

The dinosaurs segment opens with a reasonably sound casting of the various ways different Christians think about origins into four broad categories (though, obviously, the categories as presented leave out vast tracts of Christendom; there are as many Christianities as there are Christians):

1 - Young Earth Creationists think that the days of creation presented in Genesis represent literal 24 hour periods, and that the universe is roughly 6,000 years old.

2 - Day Age Theorists think that the days of creation in Genesis represent potentially vast tracts of time.  They believe in an old universe/creation, but otherwise consider the Genesis account of creation factually reliable.

3 - Theistic Evolutionists believe that the facts of origins are exactly in line with known scientific fact, including a universe and an Earth billions of years old, and an evolutionary origin of life.  They graft onto science the belief that Jehovah guided evolution to give rise to humanity.

4 - Literary Framework Theorists claim that Genesis ought be read in a largely metaphoric light, that it addresses why & who made the universe, but not when and how. 

The preacher, Dan, claims that Literary Framework Theorists find the evidence presented by both the Young Earth Creationists and actual scientists inadequate, but many theistic evolutionists also fall into this category; they read Genesis metaphorically and understand scientific fact.  The thrust of the sermon is to downplay the importance of these distinctions, to refocus Christianity away from origins, and instead on Christ.  He goes on to incorrectly posit that all things that have a beginning must also have a creator.

Questions of the origins of the universe, of the Earth, of life are both important and directly addressable with evidence.  Simply by counting rings of trees, we can demonstrate that life on Earth is over 10,000 years old.  By looking at the annual layers in permafrost (which work much like tree rings do), we can demonstrate that the polar ice caps are hundreds of thousands of years old.  By looking at the speed of light and the distance of other galaxies we can demonstrate that the universe is billions of years old.  And by looking at the DNA of life on Earth we can demonstrate a shared ancestry, a single family tree tying us all to a common ancestor. 

But the Bible doesn't point to any of that.  The origins answers presented there directly contradict observable fact.  Dan says later in this sermon that it's important to think of how the authors thought about what they were writing, not just to read their words through our 21st century eyes.  And the authors of the Bible had no idea that the Earth is old, no idea that all life shares a common ancestry.  They hadn't even realized that the Earth is a spheroid and not flat (it's usually presented as rectilinear, as in Isaiah 11:12[1]).  The presumption of a flat Earth underneath a dome (referred to in the Bible as the firmament), with heaven on the other side of the dome permeates several Bible stories, including the Flood story, where Jehovah opens up physical doors in the firmament letting water pour through, and the Babel story, where Jehovah is afraid that people will build a tower high enough that they can reach heaven. 

This continues into the New Testament, into the stories of Jesus Christ.  First, the Devil takes Christ to the top of a very high mountain, from which they can see all the kingdoms of the Earth.  This only works on a flat Earth; on a sphere it’s impossible.  But more critically, it’s a fundamental part of the story of Christ’s final miracle.  The Bible claims that Jesus Christ, after living the life around which the entire history of the human species revolves, levitated up from this flat Earth into the physical plane of existence physically above this Earth, to Heaven.  The author of this portion of the book of John wrote the story this way because he believed the earth to be flat, and directly, physically located beneath a literal, physical Heaven. 

Once you acknowledge that the Earth is a sphere the story falls apart as any kind of literal historical event.  What could possibly have occurred?  Was Jesus Christ standing on a hill, saying goodbye to some of his followers, then taken up toward outer space?  Why?  The contemporary Christian conceptualization of Jehovah is no more or less present in outer space than on a hill in Judea.  Neither is the contemporary Christian conceptualization of Heaven some other planet Christ can be said to have flown to.  Did he vanish, fade into some other Heavenly dimension once he was beyond the clouds?  That’s directly contrary to the way the author and all readers for thousands of years understood the story.  Besides that, it makes no sense.  If he just faded into a Heavenly dimension once he got past the clouds, why ascend at all?  Why not merely vanish?  To make a more impressive final miracle?  Christians cannot credibly claim in one moment that Jesus Christ was not merely a true historical figure, a man who actually existed, but was, in fact, the purest physical manifestation of Truth itself in all history: objective reality itself distilled into physical form and given a pulse, and then in the next moment, claim that his final act on Earth was a willful deception of everyone present and millions of readers thereafter about the fundamental nature of the universe… for the sake of a cheap publicity stunt.

II. Premarital Sex

Mike Breaux presents this section of the sermon.  His position is that the only Jehovah approved sexual activity occurs within a heterosexual marriage that lasts a lifetime, and that sexual intercourse fuses the souls of the participants.  He presents a quote from an author stating that people who are happy with sex outside those bounds are “severely emotionally dysfunctional”.

As I have no evidence to point to that indicates the existence of a soul, I feel like any position I could generate on his sex fuses souls hypothesis would be purely fictional.  Much like the position itself.  A couple of weeks ago, in this sermon series, Jon Weece spoke very highly of his marriage.  And I’m happy to take him at his word.  He seems to have found, in marriage, a deep source of ongoing emotional and social dividends.  Which is obviously wonderful.  But it’s unconscionably dismissive of him then and of Mike today to suggest that that’s how all marriages turn out, even among dedicated Christians.  And, equally, that the only way to find that is within a marriage.  Marriage is a miserable, rotting sort of experience for many, many people.  And many, many people find relationships, including relationships with a sexual component, outside of marriage profoundly rewarding.  Which in no way makes them “severely emotionally dysfunctional”.  People for whom monogamous marriage works should work to be in a monogamous marriage.  Other people should not.  The human experience is far to complex and diverse for their one-size-fits all solution to be in everyone’s best interests.

Further, the Jehovah of the Bible does not share Mike’s stance that monogamous life-long marriage is the only valid outlet for human sexuality.  See Figure 1 for a few of the various types of marriages presented in the Bible.

III.  End Times

Dan’s position on the end times strikes me as, among the Christian alternatives, fairly reasonable.  I’d very loosely paraphrase it as “we can’t possibly know when the Second Coming will occur – live well today; it may be your last, or you may live another hundred years.”  Being explicitly aware that the second coming may not happen in your (possibly long) lifetime is a good start. 

“For the Son of Man is going to come in the glory of His Father with His angels, and will then repay every man according to his deeds. Truly I say to you, there are some of those who are standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom.“ (Matthew 16: 27, 28)

Here, in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus Christ claims that some of his audience will live to see the second coming.  They’ve all been dead for millennia.  These stories were written by people centuries before anyone realized that the Earth is a sphere.  They are demonstrably fictional.  There is no magical Jehovahn cavalry coming to right the world, and it’s irresponsible to behave otherwise.  If we want a better world, we’ll have to build it ourselves.

IV.  Other Religions

This sermon series is entitled “You asked for it”.  Southland’s members asked for a sermon addressing other world religions.  They didn’t get it.  Mike Breaux’s treatment of the subject of the entire spectrum of all world religions lasts for less than three minutes.

He makes two points.  First, he quotes the Gospel of John, in support of the correct position that Christianity treats the figure of Jesus Christ differently than any other world religion:

Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.” (John 14:6)

Then he divides all world religions in to two categories, those that require human acts to placate an angry god/God/gods (not Christianity) and those founded on faith in already-enacted salvation through Jesus Christ (Christianity alone).

Members of any religion could describe what sets their religion apart from all the others.  They could succeed, as Mike does here for Christianity, in painting those differences in a positive light for their respective religions.  But each of those presentations would, like Mike’s treatment of Christianity, lack the support of external evidence.  Christians can claim that Jesus Christ is the Messiah, and Jews can claim that he isn’t; Muslims can claim that Mohammed is the last true prophet, and Mormons can cite Joseph Smith as a more recent one.  Hindus can tell stories about Shiva, Vishnu, and Shakti, while Nordic believers spoke of Odin, and Loki, and Thor, and Greeks spoke of Zeus, Hades, and Apollo.  In the absence of evidence, regardless of the details that endear a particular faith to a given believer, this is all just competitive fiction, spinning of myth.

Next week the sermon will be glossing over Interracial Marriage, Secular Culture, Gender Roles, and Suicide.  I’m sure I’ll come up with something to say.

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[1] “Four corners of the Earth” wasn’t just a figure of speech when this verse was written; it became a figure of speech because it’s in the Bible.

Week 3 of 6: Judgemental Christians

Judgemental Christians:

There's much less to comment on here, really.  Much of the content is directed at Christians about how to be a better Christian.  As an outsider, I am far less relevant to the conversation.  Obviously, I can support the underlying thesis that a more constructive approach is preferable to a more judgmental one, particularly when seeking to help your friends and family do and be better.

The sermon ends with a video segment of a testimonial of a woman whose life has been turned around by her new-found faith.  She does a wonderful job presenting herself and her deeply sympathetic story.  I do not doubt for a moment that her life has been radically improved by her Christian beliefs, that they have been a profoundly valuable tool in her personal development.  Which is in no way evidence that her beliefs are factually accurate.

There's this nuance to having recovered from Christianity where, you occasionally encounter people who are probably better off, in the near-term, continuing in belief.  I was always the sort of Christian who was in it because I thought it was true, rather than for the emotional benefits.  When it became apparent that the fundamental claims of the vast majority of Christianities are demonstrably false, while I found deconversion emotionally unpleasant in the short term, I also found it inevitable.  But I know that that other sort of Christian, who cares more about how faith makes them feel than about actual facts exists.  Has every right to exist.  I tend to casually avoid religious conversations with these people, unless they're actively propagating malignant ideologies.

Next week they've decided that it's sensible to give the topics Dinosaurs, Premarital Sex, and End Times a third of a sermon each.  I'm sure I'll have much more to say then.

Sermon 2b: Singleness

In Jon Weece's second sermon from the "You Asked For It" series, he addresses two topics, Abortion, and Singleness.  I've discussed his treatment of Abortion in the previous post.  I find his treatment of singleness largely unobjectionable.  It strikes me as substantially in line with what the Bible says about marriage and singleness.  I agree that either state represents an opportunity, each with its own unique concerns.

Sermon 2a: Abortion

In his second sermon in the “You Asked For It” sermon series (delivered March 16, 2014), Jon presents comments on the topics of Singleness and Abortion.  This post will address his position on abortion, and a subsequent post will comment on his treatment of singleness.  Jon’s treatment of abortion hinges on three claims, that his position is Pro-Baby, Pro-Woman, and Pro-Scripture.  His position is none of the above.  The content of his sermon runs directly contrary to the best interests of mothers and babies and society, and, further, runs directly contrary to the Biblical position on abortion[1].

Restrictive abortion laws do not have fewer abortions[2].  They just increase the rate of dangerous abortions[3].  Jon’s failure to address these facts massively undermines his claims to be “Pro-Woman” and “Pro-Science”.  Restricting access to abortion simply makes people’s lives worse, at no benefit to anyone, not even to fetuses. 

Contrary to Jon’s claims, there is not necessarily a contradiction between a law that allows abortions and a law that allows fetuses to inherit property, or for people who kill fetuses against the wishes of the mother to be tried for manslaughter.  He is not arguing for equal human rights for fetuses, he is arguing for special rights for fetuses at the direct expense of mothers.  If a person, an adult, with full rights and standing in society is unable to survive unless you give them a kidney, or you give them your blood, or you donate any of your body to their survival, you have every right to deny them that.  If Jon still has two intact kidneys, that does not make him a murderer, even if he could literally go to the hospital today and save someone’s life by donating one of them.  Similarly, refusing to carry a fetus to term is in no way murderous. 

But Jon presents the claim, currently fashionable in evangelical Christian circles[4], that Jehovah reads abortion as an example of murder, and, relatedly, that He begins human life at conception.  As it happens, the Biblical treatment of these subjects runs directly contrary to his claims. 

Jon cites several verses that indicate that Jehovah takes an interest in the unborn.  Such as:

            Even before I was born, God chose me and called my by his marvelous grace.

-Galatians 1:15 (NIV)

All of which are directly in line with another passage, that he didn’t cite:

            The word of the Lord came to me, saying,

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
 before you were born I set you apart;
 I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”

- Jeremiah 1:4-5 (NIV)

The Jeremiah passage makes it clear though, that the Jehovah of the Bible takes no special interest in the moment of conception.  All of the passages that talk about an interest from before birth talk equally about an interest from before conception.  They claim that Jehovah had an interest in these particular individuals from before we were even conceived.  They do not speak at all to the issue of abortion, or to life beginning at conception.

Jehovah’s law, presented in the Old Testament, clearly directs that murders should be executed:

Anyone who hits and kills a fellow human must be put to death.

- Leviticus 24:17 (MSG)

Compare that with this:

“When there’s a fight and in the fight a pregnant woman is hit so that she miscarries but is not otherwise hurt, the one responsible has to pay whatever the husband demands in compensation. But if there is further damage, then you must give life for life—eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.  

- Exodus 21:22-25 (MSG)

Explicitly, Jehovah treats fetuses as property, which, if destroyed, lead to a debt of compensation, just like any other possession, and unlike the mother.  If the mother is harmed, then a life debt is incurred.  In the eyes of Jehovah as presented in the Bible, a fetus is not a human life.

Jon in this sermon actively avoids mentioning the one passage of scripture that explicitly deals with the abortion, which I’ll explore in detail here.  It’s a passage that I have never heard any contemporary Christian mention in any context.  The official party line seems to be to just pretend that it doesn’t exist.  Here’s Numbers 5:11-29:

 “If any man’s wife goes astray and behaves unfaithfully toward him…[5]if the spirit of jealousy comes upon him and he becomes jealous of his wife, who has defiled herself[6]; or if the spirit of jealousy comes upon him and he becomes jealous of his wife, although she has not defiled herself- then the man shall bring his wife to the priest… The priest shall take holy water in an earthen vessel and take some of the dust that is on the floor of the tabernacle and put it into the water… And the priest shall have in his hand the bitter water that brings a curse. And the priest shall put her under oath, and say to the woman, ‘If no man has lain with you, and if you have not gone astray to uncleanness while under your husband’s authority[7], be free from this bitter water that brings a curse.  But if you have gone astray while under your husband’s authority[8], and if you have defiled yourself[9] and some man other than your husband has lain with you… the LORD make you a curse and an oath among your people, when the LORD makes your thigh rot and your belly swell… Then the woman shall say ‘Amen, so be it.’… When he has made her drink the water, then it shall be, if she has defiled herself and behaved unfaithfully toward her husband, that the water that brings a curse will enter her and become bitter, and her belly will swell, her thigh will rot, and the woman will become a curse among her people.  But if the woman has not defiled herself, and is clean, then she shall be free and may conceive children… Then the man shall be free from iniquity, but that woman shall bear her guilt[10][11].”

            -Numbers 5:11-31 (NKJV)

To reiterate the content of the text:  If you[12] get jealous and think your wife has cheated on you and she’s pregnant, take her and with a shame offering (to emphasize to everyone in your community how shameful she is) to the priest.  When you get there, in addition to horrifically shaming her, the priest will force your pregnant wife to ingest an abortifacient.  If the baby dies, she’s a cheat, and will, for the rest of her life, be utterly shunned by society.  If the baby doesn’t die, she’s not a cheat, and you’ve just publicly humiliated her, terrified her, and tried to kill off her fetus for nothing, but at least you know the baby’s yours… and since you’re a man, there are no negative consequences whatsoever to you for any of this.

So, this text presents contemporary Christians with a dilemma.  In my experience, again, they solve the dilemma by never ever ever acknowledging that this verse exists.  I spent, at a bare minimum, two hours a week, every week, for decades in my young life in church.  It easily adds up to over two thousand hours of exposure to Christian propaganda on a wide range of subjects while particularly young and impressionable, and it featured a perversely disproportionate emphasis on the subject of abortion.  And these verses were literally never mentioned.  They are absolutely everything the Bible says directly about abortion.  And in all that time they weren’t mentioned once.  Anyway, on to the dilemma:  there exist only two possible answers to the obvious question ‘does the magic abortifacient actually work in the way the Bible claims that it does?’  The possible answers are ‘yes’ and ‘no’. 

Socially conservative Christians who claim to take the text literally (like Jon) will tend to lean ‘yes’.  In which case, if the magic abortifacient works as described, if it genuinely uses Jehovahan magicks to never endanger fetuses that got half their chromosomes from their mother’s husband, but kills fetuses that got half their chromosomes from a married woman and half from someone other than her husband, then Jehovah stone cold kills fetuses.  There’s no trace of mercy or acknowledgement that the circumstances of its conception are no fault of the fetus.  This Jehovah is an enthusiastic aborter.  Bastard?  Dead.  So sayeth the Tetragrammaton.  And, as it happens, that’s the less malignant option.

Christians of a less literal bent may lean toward ‘no’, possibly seeking to avoid blaming Jehovah for the monstrous framework presented by Scripture as law.  But if the magic abortifacient is a lie, the framework’s implications get even more horrific.  There are two possibilities for how this will play out, if the aborting dustwater doesn’t work as advertised, and both of them are terrible.  If Jehovah isn’t magically directing the dustwater to be a perfect paternity test, it still either does or does not have abortifacient properties.  Maybe the priest’s dust just makes the water taste bitter and has no abortifacient effects at all.  In that case, accused innocent women who miscarry for any reason after taking the infidelity test will be shunned for the rest of their life.  The test will ruin their life, irredeemably and forever, all on a lie from Jehovah.  Also, the husbands of cheating women who happen not to miscarry will invest untold resources in raising some other man’s child in a society where social identity centers on lineage, and will continue living with and trusting a cheat, also, all on a lie from Jehovah. 

Worse still, what if the dust actually is an active abortifacient, but is in no way imbued with magic (despite the spell the priest said over it)?  Then Jehovah through His priests is killing or sparing women’s fetuses indiscriminately, legitimate and illegitimate alike, while also indiscriminately ruining the lives of women cheaters and non-cheaters alike.

So, to Christians, the question is “which monster do you think you worship”?  The bastard-fetus killer, or the life-ruining liar?  I think my beliefs about Jehovah are actually much kinder to Him than the options open to Christians here.  I see Jehovah as a fictional deity imbued by his authors, through no fault of his fictional own, with their own eccentric, misogynist monstrosity.  Which strikes me as significantly less malignant than the theist alternatives. 

---

[1] Jon often throws around statistics and data without citations.  In so doing, he’s directly denying his audience the opportunity to fact check him and his sources.  He includes citations to bible verses when he quotes scripture; it would be no more work to include citations to his scientific or statistical claims.  In this sermon, for instance, he misuses the uncited statistic “84 percent of all expecting moms decide not to have an abortion after seeing the ultrasound of their baby.”  He’s trying to support forcing women who seek an abortion to look at an ultrasound of their baby, but his statistic presumably includes women who planned and wanted their pregnancies.  

[2] Sedgh, G., Singh, S., Shah, I. H., Åhman, E., Henshaw, S. K., & Bankole, A. (2012). Induced abortion: incidence and trends worldwide from 1995 to 2008. The Lancet, 379(9816), 625-632.

[3] Grimes, D. A. (2003). Unsafe abortion: the silent scourge. British Medical Bulletin, 67(1), 99-113.

[4] This anti-abortion stance hasn’t always been fashionable among evangelicals.  For a discussion of how it fell into vogue, see: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/30/my-take-when-evangelicals-were-pro-choice/ 

[5] You should always be skeptical of ellipses in quotes.  They implicitly mean ‘trust me, I’m not leaving any important context out’.  And the last person you should trust is anybody who says ‘trust me’.  So I’m explicitly saying the opposite here.  Don’t trust me.  Dig out your Bible, or point your browser to biblegateway.com.  Read the whole text.  Interrogate everything.  Ever.  I feel that I’ve included all of the relevant content in the quotes.  But don’t take my word for it when I do it, and certainly don’t accept the word of a preacher when they do it.

[6] Seriously?  “Defiled herself”?  No blame for the man involved in this extracurricular defilement?  What the flaming crap, Bible?  It’s almost as if you were written by men, for men, in a world where women aren’t yet even second-class citizens or something.

[7] I’m just going to go broken record if I keep footnoting all the marginalization of women in all the Bible quotes.  But then if I don’t footnote every glaring instance, we’ll all just go back to ignoring how the anti-woman sentiment utterly permeates the entire book, which is even worse… so, footnotes it is, I guess.

[8] Women, man.  They just can’t catch a break in this book.

[9] See Footnote 2, again.

[10] If your wife (always your wife… you are never the wife… the Bible never adopts the woman’s perspective: it remains of, for, and by men throughout), who can under no circumstances divorce you, ever has sex with anyone else, she’s 100% guilty.  And you’re not.  Completely regardless of how you’ve treated her.  You are 100% innocent.  Because you’re a man.  This was all clear already, from the content of the chapter.  The Bible just wanted to reiterate it here in the last verse.  I want to say out of spite, but that’s not quite right.  It’s really just for emphasis.  Like when you add exclamation points and big arrows in the margin next to text you’ve already underlined and hit with your highlighter.

[11] Note that if the magic infidelity test comes back negative, there’s no shame whatsoever directed towards being a paranoid husband and publicly, permanently, humiliating your wife by falsely accusing her of cheating on you.

[12] Again, ‘you’ are always the man; the phallicentrisim is in the original text.  I feel like I should add (pic) for “Phallicentrism In Source” everywhere this comes up, like (sic) for spelling errors in quotes, but I’ll resist the urge.

Sermon 1: Gay Marriage and Biblical Contradiction

You Asked For It

Head pastor (or, as he puts it, "Lead Follower") Jon Weece has just begun a six week sermon series entitled "You Asked For It", in which the sermon topics were chosen by popular vote by his congregation.  These are the subjects that matter most to the audience that gives his professional life meaning, the topics that give his (fellow) followers the most difficulty, cause them the most concern in their daily lives.  And he's decided to preach just half a sermon on the first two of them.  He decided that half an hour of his pulpit time was too much to spend on the most important topics in these Christians' lives, and to give, in Week 1, 15 minutes each to the massive topics of Gay Marriage and Biblical Contradiction.


Ground Work

Jon opens this sermon series by laying out some principles from which he plans to work.  He suggests that we, as readers must not take verses in isolation, but in the context of the Bible as a whole.  And I’m happy to work within that framework.  Then he suggests that we should read the Bible with an awareness of its history, seeking a sense of what the verses meant to their authors, and to the people who first read them.  And I like that guideline as well.  But then he goes on and states that a fundamental premise of his reading of the Bible is that “the Bible is without error.”   The Bible contains lots of errors, lots of false claims, lots of demonstrable contradictions with both other parts of the Bible and observable fact.  His fundamental premise is untenable, which systematically undermines his ability to read the Bible clearly and then to apply it to contemporary life.

Gay Marriage

Jon claims to present what Jesus said about gay marriage.  At no point in the text of the Bible does Jesus ever say anything about homosexuality.  But Jon, massively overreaching, presents Matthew 19: 4-6 as if it’s a direct condemnation of gay marriage.  It’s not.  It’s a condemnation of straight divorce.  Here it is with a bit more context:

The Pharisees also came to Him, testing Him, and saying to Him, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason?”

And He answered and said to them, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.”

They said to Him, “Why then did Moses command to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?”

He said to them, “Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery; and whoever marries her who is divorced commits adultery.”

-Matthew 19:3-8 (NKJV)

Jon claims that these verses present Jehovah’s one valid framework for human sexuality, one man, one woman, within the bounds of monogamous marriage.  But in so claiming, he’s willfully ignoring numerous other models of marriage presented in the bible.  Biblical Kings, including both David and Solomon were polygamists with many, many wives.  Other biblical patriarchs, including Abraham, kept concubines.  Neither Jehovah nor His prophets raise an objection to this behavior, though they do object to other behaviors by these kings.  Indeed, the law makes specific provision for multiple wives, demonstrating that they are permitted^[1], that the Jehovah of the Bible does not solely endorse sexuality within the context of monogamous straight marriages.

Jon tells a story from personal experience of having seen an angry Christian family protesting a gay pride parade.  He tells this story in an effort to contrast his own behavior (which he presents as correct Christianity) against their behavior (incorrect Christianity).  He says he's not a bigot for thinking and for saying that homosexual behavior is detrimental to people emotionally, physically, and spiritually.  And he's not.  He's a bigot for being against extending basic human rights to people based on their membership in a minority group, for begrudging the social progress that is, painfully slowly, putting an end to the bigoted discrimination of the laws of the past.

He says if a gay couple came and asked him to perform their marriage, he’d decline, in all cases.  Clearly, as a pastor, he has every right to perform or not perform whatever weddings he chooses.  But I notice that he doesn’t also say that he’d decline to perform any second marriages, or any marriages where one person isn’t a born-again Christian (both of which, unlike gay marriage, actually are condemned in the New Testament^[2]).  He says nothing whatever to demonstrate that his marriage policy isn’t uniquely discriminatory against gays, even compared to marriages explicitly condemned by the very passage he misuses to condemn gay marriage.

Leviticus calls gay sex an abomination^[3].  And Leviticus calls eating shrimp an abomination^[4].  And Jon only ever preaches against one of these things.  Jon would only prefer to live in a country that denies basic human rights, including marriage, to people who do one of these things.   And Jon only presents one of these things as a sin, because Jon’s ideology has less to do with what the Bible says than it has to do with perpetuating contemporary American church culture.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Actually basing your belief system on the actual Bible would be monstrous, but I still object to the pretense, to the claim that this is about the Bible.

He closes the gay marriage portion of his talk saying “if you consider yourself a tolerant person, you will love and accept me, the way that I love and accept you.”  And he’s wrong.  If I cut off my love and tolerance the way he does I would never be able to consider myself a tolerant, loving person.  So I’ll go much farther.  I won’t begrudge Jon’s marriage.  I won’t pretend that it’s somehow less valid than anyone else’s.  I won’t delight in or pursue the denial of his right to marriage, or adoption, or inheritance, or to visit his loved ones when they’re sick in the hospital.  I will, when he says that he finds his marriage spiritually, physically, and emotionally rewarding, take him at his word.  I will not suggest that his primary human relationship is a blasphemous lie.

Biblical Contradiction

To open his Biblical Contradiction sermon, Jon presents an extremely weak example of Biblical contradiction, and then successfully refutes it.  He rightly points out that when Matthew says that two blind men were sitting by the roadside[5], and Luke says that a blind man was sitting by the roadside[6] that does not present a contradiction.  In any situation where two blind men are sitting by the roadside, it can be accurately stated that “a blind man was sitting by the roadside”.    Jon compares the Biblical perspectives on events to the multiple cameras used to record a football game:  all accurately recording actual events from different, but completely factual, perspectives.  In another weakness to his chosen example, the number of blind men present isn’t particularly important to the narrative.  One or two, it doesn’t change the themes or the message of the story in the slightest.  In using this supposed example, Jon is actively implying that all of the instances of internal contradiction in the Bible are of this “not really a contradiction, and even then it’s just meaningless details that are in disagreement” sort.  He’s presenting the very weakest kind of example of Biblical contradiction, successfully arguing its irrelevance, and then claiming to have demonstrated the internal consistency of the Bible.  This represents a profound intellectual dishonesty. 

Jon didn’t talk about any of the clear examples of Biblical self-contradiction in narratively significant contexts, but I will.  In the interests of space and time, I’ll pick just one example out of the many Biblical contradictions.  I’d like to discuss the two incompatible deaths of Judas.    The Gospel of Matthew presents the story this way:  

“Then Judas, His betrayer, seeing that He had been condemned, was remorseful and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, saying, 'I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.'

And they said, 'What is that to us? You see to it!'

Then he threw down the pieces of silver in the temple and departed, and went and hanged himself.

But the chief priests took the silver pieces and said, 'It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, because they are the price of blood.'  And they consulted together and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in.  Therefore that field has been called the Field of Blood to this day.”

            Matthew 27:3-8

The critical aspects of the story are that Judas felt remorse at having betrayed Jesus Christ, tried to return the payment he received for the betrayal, and was refused by the priests.  He left the money at the temple and then committed suicide, hanging himself.  The priests then bought a field with the money he tried to return to them, which they used to bury strangers.  From then on, the field was called The Field of Blood, because it was bought with “the price of blood”, the blood in question being that of Jesus Christ.

The Acts of the Apostles (written by the author of the Gospel of Luke), on the other hand presents this account of the death of Judas:

Now this man purchased a field with the wages of iniquity; and falling headlong, he burst open in the middle and all his entrails gushed out.  And it became known to all those dwelling in Jerusalem; so that field is called in their own language, Akel Dama, that is, Field of Blood.

-Acts 1:18-20 (NKJV)

In this telling, Judas displays no remorse; he made no effort to return the money, and *he* bought the field himself, for himself with the money he made for his betrayal.  He died, not of hanging at his own hand, but of falling and bursting open (possibly from divine retribution for his betrayal), and the field was named the Field of Blood not in reference to the blood of Christ, but in reference to the bloody entrails of Judas Iscariot.  These two tellings are mutually incompatible thematically.  The first is about remorse and a failed attempt at redemption, where the second is about justice against the betrayer.   But more than that, they’re mutually incompatible factually.  In the one, the death was suicide, where in the other it was either accidental death or, in better keeping with the context of the story, Jehovahn wrath.   In the one, the priests bought the field, in the other, Judas bought the field.  And remember that in the Matthew account, the field isn’t presented as the place where Judas died at all, it’s just what the priests did with the money he left.  And the stories contradict one another about whose blood the name of the field represents.  

The usual claim among Christians who maintain that the Bible lacks any contradiction is to merely state that it’s possible, hypothetically, for a man to hang himself in a field, and for that body to later fall from its rope and burst open in a field, that is, to claim that this example of contradiction is, like that of the number of blind men by the road, a simple case of the presentation of different sets of non-contradictory facts about a situation[7].  But this position completely fails to address at least half a dozen other contradictions in the story.  If the facts are as the Matthew account presents them, the Acts account is simply wrong, either because it is based on false information, or if the author knew the facts of Matthew and presented them as he does in Acts, as an act of willful deception.  The differences, unlike those in Jon Weece’s cherry-picked example, are clear, and critically important to the meaning of the text.

This website presents an interactive visualization of hundreds upon hundreds of separate contradictions in the Bible.  Some of them are relatively minor, and fairly easy to handwave away, like, for instance, Jon’s example.  Many of them are not:

http://bibviz.com/

After failing to seriously address any of the substantive contradictions within the Bible itself, Jon goes on to fail to address any of the serious, direct contradictions between Biblical claims and basic observations of world we live in, either scientific or historical.  He begins his staggeringly brief treatment of this huge body of evidence against reading the biblical accounts as factual stories by positing that it’s a mistake to treat Genesis as a science textbook.  He continues:

“Genesis focuses on who created the world and why the world was created, which is very important, but it does not focus on how the world was created and when the world was created… I think, personally, that faith and science can be great dance partners without having to step on each other's toes.”

-Jon Weece

The Genesis accounts of the origins of the universe directly contradict the observable evidence of the world.  The biblical origins story is in error.  And Jon is in error in claiming that Genesis isn’t about how the world was created.  The story goes into detail presenting a fictional, incorrect order of creation.  It presents, not just a Who and a Why story, but also a How, and the How that it presents is demonstrably incorrect[8].  And I disagree about science and religion being great dance partners[9]. 

The clearest example I know of are the two incompatible answers presented by religion and science to the question “Is faith a good thing or a bad thing?” I don’t mean faith in the sense of a synonym for religion here, I mean the act of faith, the act of holding a belief in the absence of evidence.  So far as I can see, the religious answer is that belief in the absence of evidence is good.  And the scientific answer is that belief should be proportional to the strength of the evidence, that, in the absence of evidence, anything beyond the most tentative belief is bad.  The scientific response to the unknown, to any unknown, is to generate a hypothesis, a potential answer to the pressing question.  And then develop a method by which to test that hypothesis.  And then run that test.  And then develop a new, better hypothesis based on the evidence of the results.  And repeat.  Until the hypothesis fits all of the available evidence.  And if new evidence comes to light that undermines the existing hypothesis, be ready to begin the cycle again to generate new explanations that can address the new evidence.  At no point should faith enter the process.  

I’d like to respond directly to Jon’s position that the Bible presents historical fact.  Again for the sake of space and time, I’ll present just one example.  Many of the stories in the Bible directly contradict with historical facts.  The historical example I’d like to present here is the Census of Qurinius, an actual, historical census conducted in 6/7 CE, which was later fictionalized in the account of the birth of Jesus Christ in The Gospel of Luke.  

Here’s the Luke presentation of the story:

“And it came to pass in those days that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered.  This census first took place while Quirinius was governing Syria.  So all went to be registered, everyone to his own city.

Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be registered with Mary, his betrothed wife, who was with child.”

-Luke 2:1-5 (NKJV) 

The first major problem here is that this is not how censuses work.  Ever.  The idea of making people go back to the home of their ancestors to count them, rather than counting them where they live now is completely antithetical to the whole point of a census[10].  And it’s not how the actual historical census of Quirinius worked; it was a standard, functional, real, count the people where they live sort of census.

And the second major problem with the this Biblical story is that the Census of Quirinius occurred in 6/7 CE, which is why many Christians claim that Jesus Christ was born in 6 or 7 CE.  And the Bible also claims that Jesus Christ was born during the rule of Herod the Great.  It’s not just a throwaway line about Herod, there’s a whole story about him trying to use the wise men to find and kill the baby Jesus[11].  The problem here is that Herod the great died, in the year 4 BCE, a full decade before the Census.  The Historical events presented by the authors of Bible in an attempt to tie their stories of Jesus Christ to actual Historical facts, lending credence to their claims ultimately do precisely the reverse.  If, as Matthew claims, Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great, then Luke’s claim that he was born during the Census of Quirinius at least 10 years later must be false.  And vice versa. 

Jon goes on to inadequately address the possibility of translation errors in the Bible.  He flatly states “we have the original manuscripts of the Bible”.  This is ludicrously false.  I have no idea why he would make this claim.  I have no reason to believe that he’s just lying through his teeth.  If nothing else, this would be a profoundly stupid, easily disproven lie to tell.  And it seems like he’s studied enough to know that this is just dead wrong, but then listening to it, it doesn’t sound some casual a slip of the tongue, it sounds like it’s in the script as written.  Since I have no idea how to interpret what Jon was trying to do here, I’ll just go ahead and present the facts.   We have every reason to believe that, for instance, the Apostle Paul was a real person.  And that that real person really did write real letters to, for instance, the church at Corinth, if not by his own physical hand, by dictating the letter to another actual person, who was actually in the room with Paul at the time of the letter’s composition.  But that letter, that physical piece of paper that was in the room with the Apostle, does not, to anyone’s knowledge, still exist.  And the same is true for every epistle, every gospel, for every single book of the Bible.  Precisely zero pieces of the original documents are available to contemporary scholars.  It has been thousands of years since any of them have been available.  We have copied copies of copied copies several times removed.  

Jon suggests that this does not represent a lengthy game of telephone, with changes at every step, because the process is a written, rather than an oral tradition.  And he’s right that the changes creep in more slowly.  He claims that the discrepancies are extraordinarily rare, but does admit that, as an example, John 7:53 – 8:11 is probably apocryphal.  Written, after the fact, by another author, and not authoritative.    And these discrepancies are much more common than he suggests.    For instance, Matthew chapter 1 contains 4 of them.  Matthew 2 doesn’t contain any discrepancies that have been discovered yet, but Matthew chapter 3 contains two of them.  The New Testament is full of these things[12].   

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has given us an excellent insight into quality of the copying process.  In the mid-20^th Century, a cache of ancient scrolls were discovered in caves on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea.  These scrolls include the oldest surviving physical copies of many of the books of the Old Testament[13].   Before this discovery, the oldest extant copies of these books were Masoretic[14] texts from the 800s.  The Dead Sea Scrolls include multiple copies of the various Old Testament books.  And the various copies of some of the books (particularly Exodus and Samuel) have wildly disparate content and language.  The King James Version of the Old Testament was translated from the Masoretic texts.  Which are a thousand years younger than the oldest surviving copies of the source material (which are, themselves still copied copies of copied copies, several times removed).  And which differ wildly from the content of many of those older copies.  There exists no objective mechanism by which to claim any of these versions is the ‘real’ version.  But the copies written closest in time to the events described are not the copies translated for inclusion in our Bibles.  In no case, not for a single verse of the Bible, can we say with certainty that the contemporary text of the Bible is the same as the original text.  And in some cases we can demonstrate that the oldest available copies, oldest by hundreds upon hundreds of years, contain text that is profoundly different from the text that our Bibles were translated from.

CLOSING

Jon closes the sermon with a dizzying barrage of broken logic.  He says "Even if the bible is not true, if Jesus rose from the dead, Christianity is true.  If someone rose from the dead, that qualifies that person to be God".  The flaws here are clear.  From a Christian perspective, obviously Lazarus, for example, both rose from the dead and is not God.  Contemporary medical science occasionally revives people from death, and neither the raisers nor the resurrected are God.  Jon continues  “If there is a God, there is absolute truth”.  While I see no reason to doubt the existence of absolute truth (though I’d have called it “objective reality”), the causal link he’s pointing to here is weak.  I don’t see that the question of the fictional vs. nonfictional nature of Jehovah has any bearing on the fictional vs. nonfictional nature of absolute truth… still, I’m ready to join Jon in the assumption that objective reality does exist.  But then he says “If there is absolute truth, then there is a standard for living that every person on the planet has to measure their life by.”  By which he means one right way for everyone, and all the other possible ways are wrong.  And I think he’s wrong about that.  And I think he’s wrong to suggest that that means trying to convince gay people to pretend to be straight or to remain celibate for life.  And I think he’s wrong to claim that the Bible presents a unified, non-contradictory depiction of that One True Way.

Jon says he’s not worried about offending people.  And I agree that he shouldn’t be.  There was no sermon he could present on these topics that wouldn’t offend someone.  All he can do is present the best message he knows how, knowing that, no matter what, it will displease some people.  In this he has my full support.  But then he goes on: 

“I just understand the nature of Truth.  Truth, by its nature offends people.  And here’s why: it’s the only thing that sets people free.  And nothing breaks my heart more than knowing that there are people who would rather willfully live in the bondage of sin than in the freedom of salvation, so what keeps me up at night is not the prospect of offending you, but the prospect of offending God.  And I take that very seriously, and I hope you do as well.”

And I agree that truth can offend people.  But so can propagating bigotry and ignorance.  And the danger here is that, in light of verses like 2 Corinthians 12:10, where The Apostle says “I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in needs, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ’s sake” (NKJV), Christians may take human criticism as a sign that they are behaving righteously.  But they will be criticized for their immoral behavior too; the criticism is no indicator of the righteousness or the truth of their position.  And I agree that truth can be liberating.  And it saddens me to know that there are people who would rather willfully live in the bondage of ignorant superstition than in the freedom of an ideology based on evidence and compassion.

In his closing prayer, Jon says, ostensibly to Jehovah, that “few things grieve my heart more than to know that you have been portrayed as an angry, vindictive, sadistic being, when at your core is a sacrificial nature.”  The implication here is that those bad guys out there, those non-Christians are telling lies about Jehovah, casting him falsely and unfairly as angry, vindictive, and sadistic.  But this image of Jehovah comes straight from the Bible itself.  The Bible explicitly characterizes Jehovah as vindictive, angry, and sadistic.   For instance:

“God is jealous, and the Lord avenges; The Lord avenges and is furious.  The Lord will take vengeance on His adversaries”

-Nahum 1:2

Jehovah Himself says:

“My wrath will become hot, and I will kill you with the sword; your wives shall be widows, and your children fatherless.”

-Exodus 22:24

And He says:

“I have cut off nations,
Their fortresses are devastated;
I have made their streets desolate,
With none passing by.
Their cities are destroyed;
There is no one, no inhabitant.”

-Zephaniah 3:6

And then, in Numbers 31:18 Moses, acting under the direct command of Jehovah, actively endorses child rape.  These are not the acts and attitudes of an almighty, all-knowing embodiment of infinite Love.  They are the acts and attitudes of a fictional character, invented by flawed people, who sometimes use him to justify their own monstrous behavior. 

Tune in next week for my response to a half-sermon on Being Single paired with a half-sermon on Abortion.  15 minutes will undoubtedly be plenty of time for Jon to present enough relevant content on each of these subjects.  

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[1] See, for instance, Deut 21:15-17.

[2] One bit against second marriages is in Matt 19:9; a passage against marrying non-Christians is in 2:Cor 6:14.

[3] Lev 18:22 (NKJV)

[4] Lev 11:10 (NKJV)

[5] Matthew 20:30

[6] Luke 18:35

[7] Here’s a brief article arguing this exact position: http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2009/05/25/contradictions-how-did-judas-die

[8] The opening graphic of the sermon suggested that Dinosaurs would likely be a future topic in this sermon series.  In the interests of space and time, I’ll postpone any in-depth discussions of the direct contradictions between the Biblical origin stories and observable scientific fact until I’m responding to that sermon.

[9] Nice imagery, though.  It’s a lovely sentence.

[10] Christopher Hitchens uses this as evidence to support the claim that Jesus of Nazareth really was an actual historical figure, whose life the gospels fictionalize.  There’s an Old Testament prophecy that the Jewish Messiah will be from Bethlehem (Micah 5:2).  If, according to Hitchens’s logic, the writers of the New Testament were simply inventing the character of Jesus Christ out of whole cloth, they could easily have made him up to have come from Bethlehem.  On the other hand, if they were trying to paint an actual early first century figure as the Messiah, and that figure was from Nazareth, they’d have to come up with some story to retroactively fit the Old Testament prophecy.  A story like, for instance, a bizarre sort of census that required people to return to their ancestral homes.

[11] See all of Matthew 2.

[12] Here’s a link to the Bible Gateway’s entry on Matthew 1:

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%201&version=NKJV

scroll down to the footnotes to see the 4 discrepancies.  If you want to see more, just keep hitting the “next chapter” button on each page.  Not all chapters have them, but many, many chapters do.

[13] Also of bits of Apocrypha.  The scrolls were stashed in 350 BCE, give or take half a century, which was before the time (very roughly) around 200 BCE when the Jewish religious leaders decided which bits of their Bible to deem authoritative.

[14] ‘Masoretic’ after the Masoretes, the group of Jewish scholars who copied and edited the texts.