A new site for Biblical scholarship?

I have to admit, I enjoy reading about the gaming scene (I live my geek vicariously). I was therefore delighted/amazed/surprised/dumbfounded to read about a new MMO game called The Bible Online warning - extremely slow server The site describes the game as follows

<The Bible Online: Ch1. The Heroes> is based on the first book of the Bible, Genesis. Players can meet and play the real heroes of Genesis, Abraham and his descendants. The game is designed for users to actually experience the Book of Genesis by fulfilling quests of Abraham, which is based on the true stories of the Genesis. As a MMORTS, players are to lead their tribe, build buildings, maintain resources and engage in warfare with other tribes. However, players do not stay in one place, but will go on a quest to go to the Promised Land. Players will lead Abraham’s tribe from Ur to Haran and finally to Canaan.
Most game sites are very excited, but confidently expect the game to be 'adult only' due to the graphic nature of the sex, violence, and general debauchery inherent in the source material. [H/T - Destructoid and Penny Arcade]

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Religions, evolution and animals that look like people

The 80/20 Rule seems to apply to many areas of life, including the return for the investment one gets from reading. 80% of the excellent ideas I read seem to result from 20% of the authors I read. The trick, then, is to choose carefully when picking up a book. Make sure that the author is a high-quality thinker/writer, and you'll end up getting a mind expanding education merely by following a few dozen authors. That is my experience, anyway. For me, one of those high-quality authors is primatologist Frans de Waal. I have just finished De Waal's most recent book, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society (2009) (here is my earlier post on this same book). De Waal makes so many compelling points in his book that I'm tempted to simply throw up my hands and urge everyone to go read this book. Truly, there is a terrific new idea or two every few pages, most of which have application to the increasingly strained modern human condition. Image by s-dmit at Dreamstime.com (with permission) Starting around page 206, De Waal makes a strong case for the emotional continuity between all animals (and especially other primates) and human animals. Yet, so many people or uncomfortable with the existence of this continuity. They would much rather believe that humans are not animals, and that humans somehow stand outside of nature, whereas all the other animals are part of nature. I have written before about the importance of recognizing that humans don't stand outside of nature, but that we are full-fledged animals. De Waal believes that this reluctance to talk about our animal emotions is caused by certain types of religious, "particularly religions that arose in isolation from animals that look like us." He explains:

With monkeys and apes around every corner, no rain forest culture has ever produced a religion that places humans outside of nature. Similarly, in the East--surrounded by native primates in India, China, and Japan--religions don't draw a sharp line between humans and other animals. Reincarnation occurs in many shapes and forms: a man may become a fish and a fish may become God. Monkey gods, such as Hanuman, are common. Only the Judeo-Christian religions place humans on a pedestal, making them the only species with a soul. It's not hard to see how desert nomads might have arrived at this view. Without animals to hold up a mirror to them, the notion that were alone came naturally to them. They saw themselves as created in God's image and as the only intelligent life on earth. Even today we're so convinced of this that we search for other of such life by training powerful telescopes on distant galaxies.
De Waal describes how shocked Westerners were when chimpanzees and monkeys started arriving at Western zoos in the 1830s. He points out that this exposure to other primates occurred relatively recently for many Westerners, "long after Western religion had spread its creed of human exceptionalism to all corners of knowledge." De Waal's idea is as powerful as it is elegant. It makes good sense too. People who are exposed to a variety of animals with various gradations of "humanness" would certainly be more comfortable with the idea of biological continuity, with his Darwinian idea that human animals are cousins with every other living thing on the planet. De Waal clarifies that we Westerners are actually inconsistent with regard to our resistance to this idea that we are continuous with all other life forms. We stack the deck:
When it comes to characteristics that we don't like about ourselves, continuity is rarely an issue. As soon as people kill, abandon, rape, or otherwise mistreat one another, we are quick to blame it on our genes. Warfare and aggression are widely recognized as biological traits, and no one thinks twice about pointing at ants or chimps for parallels. It's only with regard to noble characteristics that continuity is an issue and empathy is a case in point.
De Waal points out that many well-accomplished scientists have worked feverishly to seek "specialness" in humans. They focus their efforts on trying to find something to distinguish humans from the "animals." As De Waal suggests, they are likely to "discover" that these differences are most pronounced in the noble traits. It's time to recognize the one-sidedness of these efforts, however.
My main point, however, is not whether the proposed distinctions are real or imagined, but why all of them need to be in our favor. Aren't humans at least equally special with respect to torture, genocide, deception, exploitation, indoctrination, and environmental destruction? Why does every list of human distinctiveness need to have the flavor of a feel-good note?

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Mark Tiedemann wraps up

Over the past few days, I've been publishing sections of an engaging discussion with Mark Tiedemann that I videotaped about a year ago. I only recently got around to cutting the session up into individual videos, but the delay allowed me to enjoy the discussion anew, and it also allowed me to appreciate more than ever that the topics that draw Mark's attention tend to be relatively timeless. As you can probably see, this discussion was spontaneous. I went to Mark's house with a video camera and a few general topics scribbled down, no specific agenda. We both allowed the conversation go where it wanted to go. In these final two videos from last year's discussion, the topics are VI) The importance of knowing history and VII) Church and State. I hope you've enjoyed getting to know Mark as much as I have. If you'd like to know more about Mark's way of viewing and analyzing the world, he has already posted almost 200 articles at DI, all of them readily available.

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Mark Tiedemann Interview – Parts IV and V

This is a continuation of my interview of Mark Tiedemann, who is both an established science fiction writer and an author here at Dangerous Intersection. In the first video in this post, Part IV, Mark discusses science, religion and morality. In the second video in this post, Part V, he discusses sex. I had an extensive discussion with Mark, and I will actually have one more post featuring video of our conversation. I expect that those will be published tomorrow night.

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Mending Fences – Part V – the Final Installment

This post contains the final section (Part V) of Mending Fences, my attempt to grapple with how to handle religious differences (here is Part I of this series). Where do we go from here? It doesn’t take a genius to see that religion is deeply important to believers. You can see it in their eyes when a skeptic questions their tenets of “faith.” To me, that “look” is as though the skeptic is trying to tempt them to abandon the safety of a pre-modern community, which would cause them to get eaten by wolves in the forest. That's the look I often get (or perhaps I'm projecting). Even if the crazy things believers say aren’t true, they seem important to believers. When skeptics start to circle believers and display their skeptical questions, it seems to believers that we are tying to destroy something that is vitally important to them. Most good-hearted believers change the topic or run away. Other believers become aggressive or even violent. This puzzle some atheists, but wouldn’t you become violent if someone tried to destroy something you believed to be critically important? How, for example, would you feel if someone defaced your mother’s grave? Would you stay calm? Or would become angry? Maybe we don’t understand why believers believe their far-fetched religious stories, but certainly should be able to understand their emotional reactions when skeptics seem to take delight defacing and destroying aspects of religion that (somehow) have value for a believer. Still, where does this bizarre stand-off leave us? [More . . . ]

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