In in Forthcoming Book, Bart Ehrman Discusses the Book of Revelations

I don't hear much from the religious right these days, but I do know quite a few people who believe strongly in the Bible (some of them actually read it).  I have a lot of posts early in my writings criticizing Bible cherry-picking (here's an irreverent look). Here are my top eight parts of the Bible that are ignored by most Christians.

I have also praised parts of the Bible, including the advice that one should always "Love your enemies." Most people who tell you that the Bible is the Way only tell you about their favorite parts and suppress the embarrassing parts.

I've commented on Bart Ehrman's writings before. He is a Bible scholar, a fundamentalist turned agnostic/atheist (his position--I agree--is that one can be both of these simultaneously).  In a post I wrote in 2006, I summarized Ehrman's findings that many parts of the Bible are not as written by the original authors (whoever they might be). Who changed the Bible and why? That post drew many hundreds of comments, back in a time when far more people claimed to be practicing Christians (30% of Americans are now religiously unaffiliated). Ehrman is about to release a new book on Revelations and he has some strong critical opinions about its message and tone, about its attempts to censor and violently coerce (and see here).  Here's an excerpt from his website:

The overwhelming emphasis of Revelation is not about hope but about the wrath and vengeance of God against those who have incurred his displeasure.  For the author of Revelation, that entails the vast majority of people who have ever lived, including, perhaps surprisingly, a number of committed Christians.  The book repeatedly indicates that God is angry and that Christ seeks to avenge his own unjust death, not just on those who were responsible for it; his vengeance falls on the “inhabitants of earth.”  His followers too want revenge and are told to go out and get it.  The largest section of the narrative thus describes God and his “Lamb” inflicting horrible suffering on the planet; war, starvation, horrid disease, drought, earthquake, torture, and death.  The catastrophes end with the Battle of Armageddon, where Christ destroys all the armies of earth and calls on the scavengers of the sky to gorge themselves on their flesh.  This, then, is the climax of the history of earth.

But it is not the end of all things.  After that there will be a final judgment.  God’s faithful followers, his “slaves,” will be saved; everyone else who has ever lived will be brought back to life, judged for their wickedness, and then thrown, while still alive, into a lake of burning sulfur. Afterward, God will reward his obedient slaves by giving them a glorious new city of gold with gates of pearl.  They then, the followers of Jesus, will rule the earth forever.

That is indeed a happy ending for some people.  But it not because God loves them deeply – at least the book never says so.  The saved are God’s enslaved minions who do what he demands.  The love of God – for anyone or anything – is never mentioned in the book, not once.  The book is instead about the “wrath of God” — as stated repeatedly — as well as the wrath of Christ, and the violent vengeance wreaked on the inhabitants of earth leading up to the appearance of the glorious city from which God’s slaves will rule the planet.

At first glance this summary may seem slanted and implausible.  I will try to show, however, that it is exactly what the book itself repeatedly emphasizes.  Its troubling emphases have been seen by other modern readers, of course, including, rather unexpectedly, D. H. Lawrence, who described Revelation as the “dark side of Christianity.”  I could not agree more.

Continue ReadingIn in Forthcoming Book, Bart Ehrman Discusses the Book of Revelations

What if You CAN Take it With You?

What if, when you get to heaven, they tell you that everything costs money and that your earthly bank account has been converted into “heaven-dollars” as of the moment you died? What if you find out, however, that there is a cloud rental fee and a daily fee for the manna food bar and everything else heavenly costs money too?

What if you complain and those in charge tell you to go get a job? “There’s a lot of work that needs to be done up here. Go make yourself useful.”

You start belly-aching again, telling them how hard you worked while on Earth, blah blah blah.

They aren’t impressed. They tell you: “This is heaven, not paradise.”

Continue ReadingWhat if You CAN Take it With You?

The Sinning and Sad Atonement by the Editor of an AMA Journal

Andrew Sullivan describes the situation and the pathetic spineless nebulous apology by the Editor of journal of the American Medical Association. I invite you to visit (and support) Sullivan's excellent substack website, "The Weekly Dish," for the full article and a steady stream of excellent writing by Andrew Sullivan. Here's an excerpt regarding the AMA Editor. This is who we are becoming:

I was just reading about the panic that occurred in the American Medical Association, when their journal’s deputy editor argued on a podcast that socio-economic factors were more significant in poor outcomes for non-whites than “structural racism.” As you might imagine, any kind of questioning of this orthodoxy required the defenestration of the deputy editor and the resignation of the editor-in-chief. The episode was withdrawn from public viewing, and the top editor replaced it with a Maoist apology/confession before he accepted his own fate.

But I was most struck by the statement put out in response by a group called “The Institute for Antiracism in Medicine.” Here it is:

The podcast and associated promotional message are extremely problematic for minoritized members of our medical community. Racism was created with intention and must therefore be undone with intention. Structural racism has deeply permeated the field of medicine and must be actively dissolved through proper antiracist education and purposeful equitable policy creation. The delivery of messages suggesting that racism is non-existent and therefore non-problematic within the medical field is harmful to both our underrepresented minoritized physicians and the marginalized communities served in this country.

Consider the language for a moment. I don’t want to single out this group — they are merely representative of countless others, all engaged in the recitation of certain doctrines, and I just want an example. But I do want to say that this paragraph is effectively dead, drained of almost any meaning, nailed to the perch of pious pabulum. It is prose, in Orwell’s words, that “consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.” It is chock-full of long, compounded nouns and adjectives, riddled with the passive voice, lurching and leaning, like a passenger walking the aisle on a moving train, on pre-packaged phrases to keep itself going.

Notice the unnecessary longevity: a tweet becomes an “associated promotional message.” Notice the deadness of the neologisms: “minoritized”, “marginalized”, “non-problematic”. As Orwell noted: “the normal way of coining a new word is to use a Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the -ize formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentatory and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning.” Go back and see if you can put the words “minoritized” or “non-problematic” into everyday English.

Part of the goal of this is political, of course. The more you repeat words like “proper antiracist education” or “systemic racism” or “racial inequity” or “lived experience” or “heteronormativity,” the more they become part of the landscape of words, designed to dull one’s curiosity about what on earth any of them can possible mean. A mass of ideological abstractions, in Orwell’s words, “falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.”

In modern America, this is how easy it is to get intelligent people in high places to stop saying what they are thinking. You have probably wondered, like I have, why the German people didn't rise up to overthrow Hitler. Now think about what is happening today in the United States. People are not being sought out and killed. Their relatives are not being threatened with death. They are not being thrown into education camps. They are merely being threatened with social disapproval and economic loss. But they are so terrified, their assholes so incredibly puckered, that they are refusing to ask obvious questions and to say obvious things. Highly trained medical professionals are afraid to stand up and acknowledge the obvious need to conduct multivariate analyses to understand complex situations.  They are willing to look in their mirrors in the morning knowing that they are living and speaking lies. That's how powerful and perverted the Woke Movement is. That is why I have a difficult time walking away from this topic.

Wokeness (including the modern version of CRT) is clearly a religion (as John McWhorter argues). I've been through this kind of thing all my life, given that I am both an agnostic and an atheist. I've seen the Overton window closing on me. I've seen the disappointment in others as I ask obvious questions and acknowledge obvious things around me. This is giving me something like PTSD, bringing me back to the days when my well-meaning father worked overtime to jam overly-pious Catholicism down my throat. I've been there, seen this, and don't know what to do about it, given that those who are captive have done the equivalent of constructing "electric fences" around numerous critically important topics in their minds, thereby nullifying the possibility that we can move forward by using Enlightenment Principles. Too many of us can't (or won't) talk anymore, even about the Emperor's state of undress.

Continue ReadingThe Sinning and Sad Atonement by the Editor of an AMA Journal

Religion to the Left of Me, Religion to the Right . . .

New religions are springing up in America, both on the left and the right. Click these Tweets and weep. You'll learn some surprising things. For instance, "Our Constitution is based on the Bible, Period!"

BTW, this is also what Michael Flynn is up to these days:

And here is the religion to the left of me:

As you can hear, above, you will learn things like this from properly indoctrinated children (despite the teacher's claim that "the children guide the learning"): "White people make other people think that they are bad." No nuance in any of this, so just write it all down and believe it.

I suspect that a large part of the American rage machine (online and in-person) is the far right and far left antagonizing each other. We need to discover a new version of Australia and ship both fringes there so that the moderates of each party can demonstrate how to communicate with each other and strike meaningful adult-like compromises.

Continue ReadingReligion to the Left of Me, Religion to the Right . . .