Maintenance
Tonight at about 11pm (eastern time) this website will be undergoing maintenance for about one hour. Then we'll be back, better than ever, technologically speaking!
Reaching out
Lisa Rokusek often writes for Dangerous Intersection. She also writes for her own website, The Rhino and the Buddha. Lisa and her partner have made a cottage industry of reaching out to help others, including cats, and dogs, but mostly to other human beings. Lisa is a good friend of mine and she never ceases to impress me with her willingness to keep trying, sometimes against all odds. I'm not trying to embarrass her by saying this, but merely indicating that some of Lisa's bouts of empathy are endeavors that I would be hesitant to attempt. Framed with quotes by Pema Chödrön, Lisa's most recent post, "No Guarantee," is a charmingly well-written but less-than-satisfying episode that ends with several important observations:
Sometimes we sow seeds we don't get to see grow. Sometimes we expend effort and it has no impact. Sometimes little things we do without noticing make all the difference.
Animal cultures and overimitating
In the July 16, 2010 edition of Science (available online only to subscribers), Michael Balter opens his article, "Probing Cultures Secrets," with words that would have been considered blasphemous by scientists only a few decades ago:
Scientists once designated "culture" as the exclusive province of humans. But that elitist attitude is long gone, as evidenced by the recent meeting here on how culture, usually defined as the passing on of traditions by learning from others, arises and changes. The 700 attendees [of "culture evolves," held in London], a mixture of researchers and members of the public, heard talks on cultural transmission in fish, meerkats, birds, and monkeys, as well as in extinct and living humans.
Balter's question is "why do certain cultural trends, such as fashions, begin and catch on? To illustrate his answer, Balter refers to the work of anthropologist Susan Perry who described some unusual behavior of white faced capuchin monkeys in Costa Rica. Balter writes that some of these monkeys have adopted various traditions with "no clear survival purpose, such as sniffing each other's fingers and inserting them into a companions nose, or biting off a big chunk of another monkeys for and holding it in the mouth while he or she playfully tries to get it back."Definition of marriage
When social conservatives smugly lecture the rest of us on the definition of marriage, they tend to leave out "marriage," as it has existed in the many cultures described by Christopher Ryan at Psychology Today.
If the Bible is really the word of God, why aren’t more people actually reading it?
Sit back and enjoy Bart Ehrman's research regarding what we know about the origin of the Bible. Ehrman is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . I've previously posted about Ehrman's 2007 book, Misquoting Jesus. Ehrman starts by telling the audience about a question that he asked his students recently: If the Bible is really the inerrant word of God, why aren't all believers actually reading it? Many of Ehrman's own students truly believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God, but large numbers of them haven't yet read the entire Bible. Ehrman asks: "If God wrote a book, wouldn't you want to see what He said?" Most of this lecture concerns the origin of the modern version of the Bible. Ehrman presents a fascinating history of a book based upon thousands of incomplete and conflicting earlier versions. These versions are riddled with mistakes. The oldest copy that we have of any book of the new testament is a tiny scrap from the Gospel by "John" called "P52). It is about the size of a credit card and it only contains a couple sentences. It is dated at "the first half of the second century" (minute 15 of the video). Our earliest surviving complete copy of the Gospel of "John" was created about the year 200 A.D. Most of our manuscripts of the Bible are not anywhere near this old. Most of our manuscripts were created around the beginning of the third century (around the year 200). The earliest manuscripts of most of the books of the Bible date from the 7th or 8th century. By the time that a man named John Mill actually tracked the conflicts among the 100 manuscripts he reviewed (about 300 years ago), he noted about 30,000 differences. We now have about 7,000 manuscripts, and nobody has been able to add up all the differences among these copies (21:30). "There are more differences in our existing Greek manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament." So, then how can we really know what any of the writers really said? Ehrman characterizes this as "a problem." Most of these differences are "completely insignificant . . . mistakes." I especially enjoyed Ehrman's description of one scribe's mistaken version of the alleged genealogy of Jesus all the way back to Adam and Eve (27:00). Many other more significant translation problems have been detected by modern scholars (32:00). Unfortunately, this video has a glitch and it ended at the 34-minute mark. This is as far as I got tonight. I now see that there are other versions of Ehrman's lectures available in ten-minute chunks, starting here. I'm planning on viewing the remainder of Ehrman's lecture, and I'll report on it in the comments. I would add a few questions to the one Ehrman asked at the top of his lecture: If the Bible really is the inspired word of God, why aren't more believers taking the time to understand the genesis of the Bible itself? Why aren't they more interested in learning about the things that Ehrman has researched throughout his career. Why don't they care more about the inaccuracies and contradictions? As Ehrman asked, don't you need to be confident that you know the accurate version of the Bible before telling others how "important" it is? I raise these questions because, in my experience of having discussed the Bible with hundreds of Christian believers, almost none of them know about these critically important issues raised by Ehrman, and it's a rare American Christian believer who exhibits any curiosity regarding these issues. How strange, unless, as Daniel Dennett suggested, that most believers believe in belief, rather than in the religious stories that they claim to be true. [More . . . ]