The Postmodernism Translator

James T. Kirk using the Postmodernism Translator to learn deep thoughts from the French.

Over at Why Evolution Is True, Jerry was having trouble with a paragraph from postmodern scholar Bruno Latour. I happen to speak postmodern, so the table below gives Latour's sentences on the left and my liberal translation on the right.

Latour

Tanner

In religious talk, there is indeed a leap of faith, but this is not an acrobatic salto mortale in order to do even better than reference with more daring and risky means, it is a somersault yes, but one which aims at jumping, dancing toward the present and the close, to redirect attention away from indifference and habituation, to prepare oneself to be seized again by this presence that breaks the usual, habituated passage of time. As to knowledge, it is not a direct grasp of the plain and the visible against all beliefs in authority, but an extraordinarily daring, complex, and intricate confidence in chains of nested transformations of documents that, through many different types of proofs, lead toward new types of visions that force us to break away from the intuitions and prejudices of common sense. Belief is simply immaterial for any religious speech-act; knowledge is not an accurate way to characterize scientific activity. We might move forward a bit, if we were calling “faith” the movement that brings us to the close and to the present, and retaining the word “belief" for this necessary mixture of confidence and diffidence with which we need to assess all the things we cannot see directly. Then the difference between science and religion would not be found in the different mental competencies brought to bear on two different realms—“belief ” applied to vague spiritual matters, “knowledge” to directly observable things—but in the same broad set of competences applied to two chains of mediators going in two different directions. The first chain leads toward what is invisible because it is simply too far and too counterintuitive to be directly grasped—namely, science; the second chain, the religious one, also leads to the invisible but what it reaches is not invisible because it would be hidden, encrypted, and far, but simply because it is difficult to renew.

Religious people take "leaps of faith" [in talking about the substance of belief]. But it's not just fancy, meaningless talk, and it's not trying for mere poetry or emotion. Instead, it attempts to articulate the wonder and extra-ordinariness of the present moment, of its present-ness. Where the events of our lives could be seen indifferently and as mundane happenings, in a religious frame the events are grand and worthy of amazement. Religious knowledge--that is, feeling sure that God exists, is watching, and is at work--is not like knowing in everyday life. It is, rather, a heroic assertion and a point of view that finds new and beautiful ways, every day, to confirm that assertion. The assertion, perspective, and continual connecting of the two make the knower a supremely open-minded learner. Religious belief therefore transcends ordinary speech. Language cannot convey the complexity of what the religious seeker is actually doing and learning in active seeking. Neither is the word knowledge appropriate to the learning done by anyone who actively looks at and in the world. Current discussions of religion and science might progress if we all shared a more nuanced understanding of the difference between "faith" and "belief." The more nuanced understanding would help locate the real difference between science and religion: the different cognitive skills and ideological commitments each brings to bear in inquiry. Science and religion are, in other words, different ways of knowing and and of advocating for personally held values. Science orients the thinker to the invisible reality that only mathematics and high-powered instrumentation can access. That reality is far from us and behaves in ways we often find counter-intuitive. Religion also orients the thinker to the invisible, but this invisible reality is the now, the unique present. It's here and close, but only momentary and unrepeatable.

Latour's prose is dense, but not inscrutable. Unfortunately, it's hard to be overly impressed with the logic of his grand--and beautiful--claims for what religion is, does, and knows.

For Latour, to be religious, to think in the religious mode, is to elevate oneself and the now. One is introspective and amazed to be part of a singular narrative in time. Every facet of one's life now is imbued with higher meaning and purpose. And exercise of religious thinking is equally noble and equally important compared to the exercise of scientific techniques.

His aspirations and dancing prose notwithstanding, Latour ultimately fails to make his case. Religious thinking and talk, by his characterization, are little more than very deep navel gazing. They are solipsistic exercises, the dramatic cry of one unable to escape time, and thereby death. In Latour's ornamented formulation, religious introspection re-states William Saroyan's famous quote: "Everybody has to die, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case." Religion is the fantasy invoked to come to grips with the fact that no exception will be made.

The Why Evolution Is True crowd notes, as I do, the rhetorical game Latour is playing: "science" is the standard, and Latour wants to bring religion up to or--even better--past the standard. Science has a presumed preeminence and authority he wants conferred also to religion.

It's a silly game, and unnecessary. Religion can be very beautiful. It can make one introspective, and it can yield breathtaking insights into one's life and one's moment. It can help one question common sense and one's own prejudices.

But religion really isn't like science and today bears no relation to it. There's no basis for comparing the two.

Religion is not about truth or knowledge, even self-knowledge. Rather, religion is about understanding, about feeling rationally justified to hold a certain view. The key here, as far as I can tell, is "feeling rational." We're not talking about pure rationality but emotional sanctification with the idea that one is intellectually attuned to forces at work in the universe.

Religion taps into an enticing fantasy, the fantasy of somehow knowing something. But it's just a fantasy. It isn't true, not in the sense of modelling, observing, or schematizing a phenomenon.

I wish people could be OK with that, with the fact that religion isn't true. After all, they can still go to church. They can still pray. They can still observe the rituals and special days. They can still read holy books and discuss teachings. They can still imagine heaven. They can still contemplate hell.They can still fantasize about knowing, all by themselves, deep secrets of the universe.

Religion does not need to be true for people to be interested in it, inspired by it, educated by it, moved by it. But it needs to be true if people are going to learn about the universe and about people.

And it's not true, so let's not ask it to be, and let's not try to extract knowledge where there is none to be had.

In the end, Latour's prose and point are ineffectual because they misguidedly inflate religion into areas it cannot influence. A reformed postmodernist myself, I hope my prose and my arguments are more compelling than his indulgent apology for the unsubstantive.

The Plan Is Launched

Excellent!

This past weekend, I was elected to the Executive Board of my local parent-teacher organization. The group supports enrichment programs for students, runs events to encourage parental involvement, and keep lines of communication going between parents and teachers.

I am grateful for the chance to be a voice for quality educational programs and standards. As the parent of an autistic child, I will represent many more who want the system to reach out to their children too. Finally, the participation and networking will help me gain local notoriety as I work toward future involvement in the town's school committee and board of selectmen.

Summer Reading

Among my goals for the summertime is to read and finish several books. In no particular order, here are the ones I most want to tackle:

1. How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clay Christensen et al. A book on principles of success in business, ethics, and life from a highly regarded Harvard Business School lecturer.
2. The Art of Strategy by Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff. Game Theory in real life.
3. Britain BC by Francis Pryor. An expert surveys what we know about ancient Britain and Ireland.
4. Sublime Dreams of Living Machines by Minsoo Kang. A scholarly account of the automaton in the Western imagination.
5. The Information by James Gleick. The story of Information Theory.
6. Good and Real by Gary Drescher. Reconciling a mechanical view of the world with observations and issues in physics, ethics, and more. 
7. The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole by Brian McHale. A former instructor of mine on postmodernist long poems.
8. Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory. King Arthur's life, court, and death.
9. Paterson by William Carlos Williams. A book-length poem on Paterson, New Jersey.
10. Retrieving the Ancients: An Introduction to Greek Philosophy by David Roochnik. More than just Plato and Aristotle.

Historical Jesus Is Here!

R. Joseph Hoffmann has issued the The Jesus Process, a series of essays (one by him) discussing the historicity and non-historicity of Jesus, and the processes of scholarship used to adjudicate between historical arguments on Jesus.

This is a moment of supernova-esque importance because, for the first time that I know, the public (indeed, the world) has quasi-direct access to academic scholars in the process of making scholarly arguments. This is not a journalist's report of an academic conference or paper. This is not a mass-market book made by an academic. This is not a non-academic book challenging academic scholarship.

This is the academy on the "home turf" of the public. This is the opportunity for the academy to show how and why its professionalism serves the world better than amateur scholarship in books and blogs. Now, alert readers may note that one of the three essay writers, Stephanie Louse Fischer, is a graduate student and not yet a professional academic.

Nevertheless, professionalism is what is at stake in this academic volley against prominent mythicist bloggers. This essay series puts professionalism at the center of its concerns. The facts, the knowledge, the inferences and interpretations all serve the application of professional methodologies and techniques. The final outcome of these essays and their aftermath will be both the definition of professionalism and the professional viability of mythicism. This is why the moment is so fascinating.

I am very excited about this moment and these essays. I plan to read and analyze every one. I encourage others to do so, too. From there, we on the sidelines will await what I am sure will be an equally momentous reply from Richard Carrier. There may be other mythicists, academic and non-academic, who chime in on The Jesus Process essays, but now that the essays are out, Carrier is the man. Initially, no reply will matter more than his.

Indeed, the credibility and reputation of non-academic scholarship may rest on what Carrier does with this opportunity. If Carrier can make a strong scholarly case in favor of both his use of Bayesian techniques and his mythicist position, he will have achieved something very significant and unique in modern scholarship.

But Hoffmann's essays are determined, make no mistake about it, to go after Carrier and expose his mythicism as less than professional grade. One of the essays of The Jesus Process is by Hoffmann, a long piece called "Controversy, Mythicism, and the Historical Jesus." In it, he promises that the weight of history is "decisive" in favor of the historicity of Jesus. On this point, Hoffmann offers his thesis as follows:

It is my view, simply stated, that while facts concerning the Jesus of history were jeopardized from the start by a variety of salvation myths, by the credulity of early believers, by the historiographical tendencies of the era, and by the editorial tendencies of early writers, the gospels retain a stubbornly historical view of Jesus, preserve reliable information about his life and teachings, and are not engulfed by any of the conditions under which they were composed. Jesus “the Nazarene” did not originate as a myth or a story without historical coordinates, but as a teacher in first century Roman Palestine. Like dozens of other Hellenistic teachers, but lacking sophisticated “biographers” to preserve his accomplishments, Jesus is distinct only because the cult that formed around him perpetuated his memory in ritual, worship, and text, while the memory of other attested personalities of antiquity, even those who enjoyed brief cultic popularity like Antigonus I, Ptolemy I and Demetrius of Macedon are known to us mainly through literary artifacts.

You'll have to read the rest of the article to see how Hoffmann defends the thesis. Let me note, however, that Hoffmann's use of the gospels in his argument may have similarities with the narrative-based methodology employed by Joel S. Baden for the Pentateuch. Both Hoffmann and Baden are interested in immediate sources of religious texts. Hoffmann argues that a person, the subject of the texts, is probably a source for his texts; Baden argues that earlier, separate versions are the sources for his.

In addition to the positive case for the historical Jesus, Hoffmann holds the mythicist position "as fatally flawed and subject to a variety of objections." Here, Hoffmann's thesis is, well, devastating:

The attempt of “mythicists” to show that Jesus did not exist, on the other hand, has been largely incoherent, insufficiently scrupulous of historical detail, and based on improbable, bead-strung analogies.[1] The failure of the myth theory is not the consequence merely of methodological sloppiness with respect to the sources and their religious contexts; that has been demonstrated again and again from as early as Shirley Jackson Case’s (now dated) study, The Historicity of  Jesus (1912). It is a problem incipient in the task itself, which Morton Smith aptly summarized in 1986: The myth theory, he wrote, is almost entirely based on an argument from silence, especially the “silence” of Paul. “In order to explain just what it was that Paul and other early Christians believed, the mythicists are forced to manufacture unknown proto-Christians who build up an unattested myth . . . about an unspecified supernatural entity that at an indefinite time was sent by God into the world as a man to save mankind and was crucified… [presenting us with] a piece of private mythology that I find incredible beyond anything in the Gospels.”[2]

As I said, Hoffmann's essay is long, yet it's well worth careful reading and re-reading.

So, grab your popcorn and read up. I won't say "This is gonna be good," because it already is good.

To a Student in My Composition and Rhetoric Class (Introduction to Literature)

Dear Student,

I was very happy you recently emailed me about a research essay topic you want to pursue. That you felt strongly enough to ask a question is gratifying. You wouldn't know this, but I begin every semester hoping that students find plays, poems, and stories that move them profoundly, or at least profoundly enough to ask such questions as you have.

Unfortunately, after fifteen weeks of class this term, you alone have fulfilled this hope. Your classmates, though nice people and smart enough, have rarely shown the desire or self-motivation to vigorously explore the literary texts in our course. They have read, or skimmed. They have glibly opined. They have written papers. However, I feel they have not been taken by any of our texts. They were unimpressed by Hamlet's grief and by how severely he reckoned every possible course of action. They eschewed, or seemed to, the lonely and noble reflection of Jane Kenyon's "Let Evening Come." They saw no kinship between themselves and proud Sylvia in Toni Cade Bambara's "The Lesson." 

It takes passion to read anything, but especially drama, poetry, and fiction. It takes conviction to write, but especially to write an academic essay. What I have really been trying to tell and teach all of you is to be passionate, assertive, bold, and confident. If you can muster these attitudes for a class, you can muster them in your life. As much as any knowledge, skill, or wisdom that you take from school, these attitudes will serve you well in life and carry you far.

But there is more than utility to these attitudes. They have more value than getting you a job and helping you succeed in a career. No, these attitudes are the formula of emotional depth and perspective. The happiness literature offers is understanding happiness. From our best writing we learn that happiness is complex, fleeting, easily unrecognized, and surprisingly connected to outlook and effort. And the wisdom literature offers is that of adventure, for the worlds created in literature lead out to reality and to knowledge that spans centuries of human endeavor.

Just two examples of the happiness and wisdom I mean, and then I will close. Think on the rich, lasting happiness from the end of Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind":

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Shelley describes a happiness greater, if less pure, than a child's. It's a lasting, hopeful happiness. It's the happiness of knowing life continues inexorably. To Shelley, we are instruments of a powerful universe in motion. Such happiness comes from being bound sonically and temperamentally to that universe. We readers, too, joyfully recognize the intertwining rhyme Shelley uses. We see it and connect with him, and his world. We hear the trumpet tones and know this sound calls just as well in our world.

We take from Shelley a wise happiness, a kind of knowledge not found in movies, television, games, or other activities--all of which possess their own wisdom. Yet we talk about wisdom and knowledge as if they were only about having facts and being able to recall them. Consider, then, the wisdom of the speaker in James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues":

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours. I just watched Sonny's face. His face was troubled, he was working hard, but he wasn't with it. And I had the feeling that, in a way, everyone on the bandstand was waiting for him, both waiting for him and pushing him along. But as I began to watch Creole, I realized that it was Creole who held them all back. He had them on a short rein. Up there, keeping the beat with his whole body, wailing on the fiddle, with his eyes half closed, he was listening to everything, but he was listening to Sonny. He was having a dialogue with Sonny. He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny's witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing -- he had been there, and he knew. And he wanted Sonny to know. He was waiting for Sonny to do the things on the keys which would let Creole know that Sonny was in the water.

The man admits at the outset he is limited in his knowledge about music. Yet, like the improvising musicians he observes and hears, he builds on what he knows and tries to expand it. Baldwin's writing here focuses on hearing and watching--listening to Sonny play and watching him expend effort. Baldwin searches and finds in the music a dialogue between Creole and Sonny, a dialogue that turns into Sonny's musical exodus or perhaps a musical baptism.

This is the wisdom of hearing and observing, yes, but more the wisdom of sharing and connecting. What sings in this prose is how the speaker voices--attempts to articulate on the fly--how he understands Sonny and Creole. He wants to partake of their interplay. He learns by doing and by actively being.

The happiness and wisdom of literature are unfathomably rich. My student, I wanted you and all your classmates to learn this. Excepting you alone, I failed this semester. I failed because your classmates did not want to be reached and did not think it was worth their energy. I failed because I was not focused or skilled or apt enough to overcome their extraordinary apathy and complacence.

I will retire as a college teacher at the end of this semester. I cannot foresee teaching an Introduction to Literature course again. After 17 years of teaching, I have lost the drive to lead any more classes on the perilous journey through the language and stories of the past, and through the struggle of writing now. I have ceased to be an effective teacher, if ever I was one.

My student, your letter is a comfort to me as I depart. As you go your own way in life, I hope some of what we have read this term stays with you and grows with you. I bid you, as Tennyson's "Ulysses," to seek newer worlds beyond the sunset. That is my intent. Perhaps we will meet again.

Larry Tanner, a teacher

Open Letter to the Spiritually Unequal/Unequally Yoked Communities

Dear Christian married to a non-Christian, agnostic, or atheist:

I'm writing this letter to try and explain what's going on with us, that is, with those of us who don't share your passion and devotion for Christianity. I can draw only upon my specific experience and attitudes, but I hope to shed light on what many of us actually think and how we all can move forward together...happily.

The first thing you should know is that, yes, we are hostile to religion, and Christianity in particular. One reason for this is your immersion in Christianity tells us you want more than us and more than our relationship. Your adoption of Christianity and injection of it into every facet of your life seems a clear message that our love is not enough. We don't make you happy, in other words. Our marriage doesn't fulfill you.

And there's an asymmetry here: we love you, just you. We're fine with only you. We don't need to love God or to love Jesus in order to love you. We don't need anything to enhance our love for you. Yet you need help to love us. You need strength to be with us. Now, you can talk about how much better your love for us is because you've found Jesus, but we know that we have become second place. Frankly, we don't get why this should be so. We didn't marry you to be second place in your life.

We're also hostile to Christianity because, honestly, you can be rather oppressive with it. Your declaration of KNOWING (in all caps) that God is real and Jesus died for your sins is made too confidently. The truth is you feel strongly, not that you know.

You believe. You really, really believe. But belief doesn't make facts. Every time you talk about what God really wants and what Jesus's true message is, we think you are acting arrogant and unfair. If God is who you say he is, then you cannot know his desires or will. His desires and will are beyond your ability to fathom. And if Jesus is who you say he is, then his message really could have been made more clearly. Surely, one part of the triune God could have made it so that his very important message was understood by all people in the way he intended. Yet, Christianity is fractured into tens of thousands of denominations, each claiming to have the authoritative reading of Jesus.

So yeah, we're a bit hostile because we feel hurt and we feel attacked.

What's more, you don't seem to treat our view seriously. You pray for us to find God or to have our hearts turned, which is insulting. You don't accept our non-religiousness, yet you demand that we accept your religiousness. You don't grant that skepticism of Christianity is reasonable and legitimate. You are as hostile toward our skepticism, maybe more so, as we are toward your Christianity.

We need you to accept and understand our skepticism as being our idea, as belonging to us. It's not the influence of the evil one. It's not our vanity or a desire to worship ourselves. It's not running away from a truth in our hearts. It's not rebellion, immorality, or parroting atheist blogs. It's what we actually think, and it's what we have learned after a long period of trying to understand these topics. We have read the Bible, and we know what it says. We understand the Bible no less than you do, and to us it appears to be a man-made book.

Please, understand that we are skeptical because we have studied and considered the relevant matters seriously, and we think atheism is probably correct. Please, understand that it's possible to know the Bible as you do and still conclude that Christianity probably isn't true.

If you can understand this, then we can certainly talk about religion without attacking each other. We can do other things, too. You can ask us to come with you to church as your companion. And we hope you will be willing to take some Sundays "off" and do things together with us.

We understand that your religion is important to you. We want to support you, and we want to be part of things that make you happy. We also want you to support us and to be part of things that make us happy. We're sorry that we don't agree with each other about religion. Maybe our lives would be a little happier or a little easier if we both believed exactly the same thing in exactly the same degree. Maybe not.

We love you, and the life we have with you. We want to spend the time making life better and better. Our differing views of religion don't have to be a cancer in our marriage. We already have differences: we like different activities, different foods, different movies, different political candidates, and so on.

Let's not just co-exist with different religious views. Let's flourish. We'll enjoy how happy your religious activities make you, and you can enjoy how happy our skeptical and non-religious activities make us. We can both embrace the fact of our difference.

Yes, we are still growing. Our views are never static and final. Who knows how our minds will change and grow? But let's agree not to try to change each other. Let's agree not even to want that. Let's agree to enjoy the people we are now, the people who are married and building something unique together.

Love,

Your non-Christian, agnostic, or atheist spouses

You Should Abandon Your Religion Now

Is your religion really the way to "true happiness"?

You should abandon the doctrines and beliefs of your religion. If you must, go to church, synagogue, mosque, or community center. But stop advocating for religious beliefs.

You no longer need to say Jesus died for anyone's sins, or that Israel received the Torah from God, or that Mohammed wasn't a delusional asshole. I know that you know religious traditions are bunk. I know that you suspect no clergyman or theologian has any real idea about God, gods, supernatural beings and realms, and so forth.

But I am not focusing here on the falsity of religions. Instead, I want you to try dropping the pretense of belief. I want you to imagine what would happen if you simply acknowledged to yourself that religion altogether stops or retards your personal growth .

Here's how we know that religion is poisonous. First, have a look at the top five regrets of the dying, as summarized by Hank Fox:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish I had let myself be happier.

Now, let's consider each regret individually.

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
The sine qua non of religion is to tell you how to live your life. Religion tells you the values and expectations to which you should adhere in your life. Yes, some values and expectations are good in some contexts, but the point is that religion has no intrinsic claim on how you live. Don't give religion authority that properly belongs to you.

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
The regret focuses mainly on professional work--one should scale back on the 80-100 hour weeks and so forth. Those who wish they had not worked so hard tend to feel they missed time with children, spouses, and friends. But the practice of religion doesn't always offer time for relating with others. On Easter, for example, the family may go to church together, but then everyone is just sitting or standing there while the people up front yammer at them about zombies. The actual relating that's done on Easter is the egg stuff and the traditional meal. The public worship aspect of many religions is antithetical to individuals communicating with one another and relating. The real interpersonal and social activity that people love and need have no special dependence on religion, and religions often serve only to defer that activity.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
Religions by and large traffic in the suppression of feelings and intuitions. Are you uncomfortable with God's anger, misogyny, and penchant for killing (and see Exodus 4:24-26)? Are you in love with someone who does not share your religion or who is the same gender as you? Are you incredulous that so many animals and eight frakking humans could exist for 40 days on a single boat? Are you pretty sure that virgin birth is impossible for humans, and same for physical resurrection days after death? Do you think Pope Ratzi and Bernard Cardinal Law should be in jail? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, then you must know that religion is not particularly interested to delve deeply into these questions today. The sages and fathers of bygone days tended to assume the orthodoxies were true, and reality would bend to accommodate. But now it's best not to think too hard about all the poop that would have been on the poop deck of Noah's Ark. It's impolite to say out loud that a sitting pope enabled pederasty and valued his "church" over the suffering of real people. Religions do not advise you to share your feelings. No, they tell you "to keep an open mind" about it all. They tell you God will help you carry your burden. In other words, they are telling you to shut the hell up and deal.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
Religions cast suspicion on anyone who is not part of the in-group. You are encouraged to stay in touch with friends only insofar as you talk to them about the Lord Jesus Christ or the wonderful way Allah has provided clarity in your life. Religion sets its own terms on your relationship with anyone and everyone: that's pernicious.

5. I wish I had let myself be happier.
This is the big regret, and the one where religions obstruct people the most. All religions talk about offering transcendence, a way to commune with something "bigger than yourself." They promise happiness as if it were a secret that only they knew. To religion, happiness is only defined and sanctioned by them. All else is not "true happiness."

And it gets worse. No religion is in the business of letting you be happy all by yourself. To religion, your happiness is selfishness. Your fulfillment is one step toward a society of Jeffrey Dahmers. Your independence is confusion. Your curiosity is foolishness. Religions are admittedly and decidedly opposed to your being happier; they favor instead your "voluntary compliance" to god-inflected happiness.

*  *  *  *  *

Religion is bad, not just untrue. The happiness it offers is happiness you can generate yourself. The happiness it scorns is none of its business.

Can you imagine lying on your deathbed saying "I wish I had gone to church more often"? Who could possibly utter, "I sure regret not having davened a few more times"?

Life is for doing stuff, folks. And it's for engaging others, talking and sharing adventures with them. It can't be about denying bacon and making solitary wishes for blessings.

Lose religion. Let it go. This is not about hating religion or being an angry atheist. This is about life. Your life.

Don't you at least owe it to yourself to consider it?

Alpha Course Overnight Getaway: Parting Is Sorrow

This is a special, mini-series within my larger series on the Alpha course. I am a Jewish-raised dude and now Gnu Atheist who has taken the Alpha Course along with my Christian wife. Names have been changed to protect privacy.

Part IV, Final Thoughts
On the second day of the Alpha retreat, after the morning events and concluding pleasantries, my wife and I packed up and headed home. I left with mixed feelings about the whole getaway and about Alpha. Clearly, many people participating in Alpha had personal hurts and trials to work through. They saw the group and its Christianity as helpful, as “safe” places to be themselves.

The group is safe because everyone has the same shared experience of Jesus, God and Holy Spirit. One’s personal senses of failure, weakness, or shame become released in a controlled environment of love and support. I can talk about how selfish and anxious I really am, and my prayer partner will call to God on my behalf.

What’s more, the worship is more active and personally fulfilling. People are not simply singing and reciting stock prayers. They are not merely sheep led by a pastor. No, they come to invest themselves emotionally in the act of worship. They come to release passion and to exercise emotional muscles that they cannot in public or even in one’s family. This church is perhaps the one place on earth where they feel encouraged to surrender to their passions. They get to surrender to their passions without restraint, and to express them openly. And they get to do it in a group, thus making it “normal” behavior. The whole thing is probably quite healthy.

What is the triune god, really? It’s an elaborate metaphor for our personal psychodrama. It’s a general code of conduct, yes. It’s a call to do and say--or not do and not say--certain things. But mostly, I think, it’s a screen upon which one unfolds and inspects a tightly wound psyche. Besides religion, there is no grass-roots social mechanism for helping people connect face-to-face with a community of people who also feel screwed up in the world. God-language provides the vocabulary and concepts for capturing that screwed-up-ness.

But I have some reservations about the whole Alpha thing, and this overnight thing in particular. The friendly face of the course doesn’t hide some rather nasty views on homosexuality as immoral, on eternal damnation, and on the supposed goodness of God. As usual, I find God (and Jesus and the Spirit) superfluous. In principle, the personal sharing and healing could have happened without reference at all to God or Spirit or anything like that. Any group devoted to sharing and talking could have accomplished the same thing--talking about fears, self-doubts, and so on--with equal or better long-term success.

The orgiastic atmosphere of the evening witness event was just creepy. It was a lot of effort to get to a point where people could say “I’m afraid and I want to talk with someone.” And as I said before, none of what we heard or felt in the witness event overcame the facts that we have no evidence of God, no evidence supporting the divine and supernatural claims of the Bible, no evidence of the patriarchs, no evidence of the exodus, no evidence of Jesus, no evidence of miracles.

Most of all, though, I realized (or remembered) that I needed to stand together with my wife. I want to stand with her. She wants to be a Christian. Fine. It’s her life and her call. I’ll help her be the best damn Christian she can be. I don’t need to be a Christian myself. I don’t need to agree with her about Christianity, and I don’t need to say I agree. Regardless of what I think or don’t think about Christianity, I support her. I respect her. I will not do anything to violate her right to think for herself and to form her own opinions. Likewise with all the folks in my group. I will never stop being an atheist. I will never stop critiquing religious doctrine. But I do genuinely support the people.

It was a success, I think, that I “came out” as an atheist. I had never done this before in a face-to-face group setting. But it was a failure that there was not quite an environment created whereby a Christian-atheist dialogue could take place. I have said I don’t want to be a “token” atheist, but I am now out as a real atheist. I have claimed a place in my group, and I have forged bonds. It will be interesting to see if anything changes over the next few weeks.

Dear Believers: Embrace Your Doubts

No gurus.

You like your religious beliefs and your religion. You like the stories--most of them, anyway--in the holy texts. You admire the central characters. You enjoy hearing and singing the devotional songs. You have a nice time at your place of worship, and the people there are very nice. You relate to them. You know the clergyman is pretty smart. He explains so clearly where the religious doctrines come from, and how they apply to the live we lead today. It is amazing, that the wisdom of old can resonate with each one of us. What's more, the sayings and the stories apply differently to such a variety of situations.

But you also have doubts. You pray, and you believe, but you have a twinge. How is God actually working in your life, how does that happen? When you look at your life, at the day by day of it, at the way the world works, how is it that God is so absent?

You have doubts. You wonder whether the religion's doctrines on gods and heaven and sins...are wrong. Maybe God didn't send Joseph down to Egypt or speak to Israel at Sinai or grant them victory over Jericho. Maybe Jesus wasn't the Son of God or the savior of humanity's sins or the conqueror of death. Maybe Mohammed wasn't a prophet. Maybe Joseph Smith made a mistake. Maybe Paul of Tarsus was a zealot. Maybe L. Ron Hubbard was only kidding. Maybe Mary was a regular mother.

My message to you, believers, is to embrace your doubts. I am not saying you should become an agnostic or an atheist. I am not saying to doubt everything or to believe everything. That's not at all what I want. Instead, I want for you to accept that it is right and good to have doubts. It is right and good to explore them, to understand them, to seek answers to them from various sources.  It's not a bad thing to enjoy doubt because doubt helps you to look for more information, and the more you look the more you will see.

I'm saying it's OK that your religion does not have all the answers, and I'm saying that your life is fine. Life can be a struggle. It can be unfair. It can be maddening. It can be lonely. It can be scary. Your life has all sorts of stresses, setbacks, and sonofabitches.

But your life also has greatness. It has you, first of all. You're pretty neat. It has a sun, a sky, and stars. It has the most amazing animal and plants all around. It has color, sound, and texture. It has friendly people, wacky people, kind people, generous people, smart people, and super people. Your life has its own story and possibilities. Your life has love, laughter, interest, music, value, potential, significance, and consequence. It has all these things, just by virtue that you are here.

Embrace your doubts. Don't think that doubts are bad or shameful. Don't be afraid or embarrassed about them. Don't ignore them, but explore them.

Investigate your unbelief as much as you have investigated your belief. Give yourself permission to follow every question.

Dear believers, this is my message. What is yours?

Interview Me! Debate Me!

I'm your huckleberry!

Readers here will have picked up that I like to argue and I like to talk (in writing more so than verbally.)

If you want someone whose interested in getting to the heart of the matter, rather than to the same, pat talking points we always get--then I am your huckleberry.

Leave a comment to this post if you want either to interview me or debate me. I'll email you back for details.

Come on, bring it!

Birthday Lesson: All In

For the past two years I have used my birthday to reflect on life lessons. I have no lessons this time. My 42nd year was trying in a number of ways. That's not to say it was a bad year or a troubling year, but I was very busy and often stressed. Although many great things happened this year, I can't say I fully enjoyed myself as much and as often as I should have.

I know the reasons for this. I have taken on too many activities and responsibilities. I have divided my thoughts and emotions into excessively small portions. It may not be that I'm doing too much but rather that when I do anything I need to be more present and engaged.

So, there is a lesson: full immersion; all in. Here's to being there in my 43rd year.

Religion and Smallness

Checking in from dissertation land. As I get into the work, I tense up at how great the labor is, and how small I am before it. It's a multi-colored mountain of junk, trinkets, nuggets, knick-knacks, gems, and rotting fruit all piled higher than Babel. And I stand in front of it with slacked shoulders and bent knees, grabbing an item here to make a sort, walking around there to something else for a different sort. To say I'm daunted is way beneath understatement.

But continue on, I do. So Yoda has instructed.

My leisure thoughts turn to reflecting on 2011. My birthday approaches and I want to clarify one or two truths I've pulled from that other Babel pile, my life. More than anything else, the year was demanding. If last year I appealed to myself and to the blogosphere for peace, perhaps I sensed my desire to be--or at least feel--less put upon.

Didn't happen.

I was needed. My family needed my presence and engagement. My ambitions demanded my time and my mind. My work had its requirements, too.

Life is a wave passing by the center of the ocean, as far away from land as one can be. It has a force that I can't resist. I don't think anyone can. Some lucky folks keep their balance as the force moves them in the wave's direction. Some struggle in the sea for equilibrium. Others rotate around and around, unable to stop what the rushing wave caused for them.

In this image, I finally see what religion and religious experience really are. I don't mean the political religion of the popes and pastors and rabbis and mullahs and masters. I mean the private religion of people such as those I knew in my Chabad days and those I met at Alpha. I mean the faith of individual men and women trying to adjust to the wave.

Yes, religion involves community and stability. Yes, it feeds on family togetherness. Yes, it declares the believer's trust in what admired elders and righteous ancestors have openly, publicly shared. And yes, it helps one feel more certain that she is doing right.

These are all symptoms of a more basic awareness: that one is small and alone. When we get sick or scared, the awareness re-emerges. What drives religion more than anything else? What's the source of religion's symptoms and political fingerprints? It's not quite fear, as Bertrand Russell concluded, but both understanding the basic human situation and instinctively reacting to it.

It's a process. One slowly comes to grips with his smallness and solitude. One performs being small and alone, and one conjures a figure for the bigness and everythingness of the passing wave. One deals with oblivion by doing something, anything. It's something meaningless and pointless, but it orients one and directs his desire.

That's religion. Doing something for a release and for a wish. It might look like floating, or swimming, or surfing, or drowning. It might look like fun or fear or deference. But it's actually futility playing futility, an actor playing the part of herself. It's an undercover cop who actually is corrupt.

This is not a criticism of religion. How could it be?

How I'm Writing the Dissertation

People may be interested to know how I intend to go about writing my dissertation this year. My topic is medieval English literature, and I will write a software program to do a special sort of parsing for several texts in the corpus. I have three different types of parsing I want to do, and most of the dissertation will concern recording and analyzing the results generated by the program.

The project is pretty exciting, which is not an unimportant point because one reason I didn't finish my first dissertation back in 2001 was that I fell out of love with the topic. Back then, I had written two decent chapters but couldn't do the research or find a focus for the remaining chapters. My prospectus and plan were hardly helpful and I eventually had to resign myself to the idea that the project was untenable.

As I see it, once the software program is sufficiently developed, the dissertation itself should be relatively easy to complete. Of course, herein lies the major technical challenge: my ability to write the program. Software developing has been much more difficult than I imagined, but I'm working it. My hope is to have the program ready for trial by the end of this month or middle of next month.

Another challenge is my lifestyle. After all, I am a professional with a full-time salaried position. I'm not a graduate student with a few classes to teach and chunks of time that can be dedicated to library work and writing. I also have a household to care for, which means my family and my home. My kids want attention from me. My wife needs me to help out around the house. Bills need to be paid, errands need to be run, neighbors and friends need to be connected with. Finally, I need to manage my health and fitness.

Given my technical and time constraints, here is how I have game-planned the dissertation:

• At least 15 minutes per day learning and doing software development.
• At least 15 minutes per day planning dissertation content.

Fifteen minutes may not sound like a lot of time, but it can be. Besides, I often work for much longer than that. The main thing is to dedicate some time every day to being productive on the main elements of the project. In this way, I'm approaching the project similarly to how I conduct an exercise program or business project.

Indeed, the formal 15 minutes are "executive sessions" and not necessarily the execution work of programming or writing. These execution activities can take place throughout the day, even while I'm at my day job. Although I am at work during the day and have a full schedule of meetings and tasks, I also have pockets of time where I can focus exclusively on some part of the dissertation. What's more, I often have opportunities to work the dissertation as part of a multi-task scenario. In fact, that's how I blog as much as I do. Beyond the execution work, the 15-minute executive sessions will allow me to develop and refine the big picture of the dissertation, its important arguments, lines of support and evidence, critical background and objections, and paths forward.

The innovation (for me) of my approach lies in how I'll actually write the chapters. In short: I won't write. Instead, I am going to spend most of my time, at least in the early stage, using a storyboard process. Storyboarding is a technique I use in my job to help our technical teams develop proposal content. It's like a very robust outline that accounts for what information customers have asked for, what knowledge we bring to the subject, and what features and benefits distinguish our offering from other companies competing for the same business.

The advantage of storyboarding for the dissertation is that it allows for capturing a lot of data in individual sections while also making it possible to find places in the large-scale outline for new information and arguments. My dissertation writing plan, to make it basic, is to storyboard the dissertation so completely that it's practically written when I put everything together.

I have a high degree of confidence in this process because I've used it dozens of times at work. Nevertheless, it doesn't make completing the dissertation any easier or less labor intensive. But it will help me work on all of the dissertation instead of on individual chapters in sequence.

I'm excited about the project and about how I intend to conduct it. All that's left is to do it!

Jazz Died in 1959

For me, Coltrane is the best of those who pushed jazz music beyond the jazz label.

Trumpeter Nicholas Payton has gotten attention with a post called "On Why Jazz Isn’t Cool Anymore . . . ." Payton's piece is not so much about the coolness of jazz as it is about what defines jazz as a genre.

I like pieces like this because the challenge is enjoyable. I happen to love jazz. I love Miles and Coltrane, Monk and Ornette, Art Tatum and Keith Jarrett, Wayne Shorter and Tomasz Stanko, Bobo Stenson and Marilyn Crispell, Mingus and Avishai Cohen, Evan Parker and Charlie Parker. And many others. I love the music, that daring improvisational music.

So Payton has written something daring. In sprawling, swirling fashion, he says:

Jazz is a brand.

Jazz ain’t music, it’s marketing, and bad marketing at that.

It has never been, nor will it ever be, music.

Here lies Jazz (1916 – 1959).

Too many musicians and not enough artists.

I believe music to be more of a medium than a brand.

Silence is music, too.

You can’t practice art.

In order for it to be true, one must live it.

I agree with Payton on the main part of his argument, that the name "jazz" no longer has any useful or meaningful resonance for working artists who are placed under the jazz umbrella.

In the 1960s, Miles Davis started to place "Directions in Music by Miles Davis" on his albums. The term "jazz" no longer described what he was doing, according to his own conception. The contemporary artists I listen to, such as the Esbjorn Svensson Trio and The Bad Plus, do not consider themselves jazz artists, although they clearly love and respect jazz.

I part company with Payton on at least one distinction. I don't see why he separates musicians and artists as groups of people. This seems a self-serving and doctrinaire classification.

I like better the salvo Payton gives in a follow-up post:

The music was just fine before it was called Jazz and will be just fine without the name.

There is nothing to be afraid of except yourselves.

I am Nicholas Payton and I play Black American Music.

I appreciate that he stands his ground, that he defines his own music and makes it available to us. Maybe one day, Payton will decide he no longer plays Black American music but rather plays Nicholas Payton's music. That will be good, too.

Announcements

First, I am not moving over to Freethoughtblogs.com. I haven't been invited. Waaaah!

However, I have had my responses to set questions posted over at You, Me & Religion. Check it out. I answered the questions in the springtime, as you'll see by the reference to Pesach.

I have recently returned from an overnight getaway with my Alpha course group. It was a...a...a...an interesting experience, both personally and intellectually. I think I am going to start posting from my notes on the weekly sessions.

Kuzari: A Reply to Dovid Kornreich on Evidence and Hypotheses

I have yet to fulfill my promise to Dovid Kornreich: I agreed to explain how I think the Sinai story originated and developed.

Today I want to take yet another step toward directly formulating this explanation, but let me first review earlier steps:

• In "Kuzari: Belief and Evidence (and Bias, Oh My!)," I bracketed the task--i.e., my speculative explanation on the Sinai story--to give what I hope is proper perspective on its value. The best I can hope for is a fair approach to and accounting for the observed evidence. This means we cannot simply grant that the story might be true as it appears in the Torah because that smuggles in the assumption (among others) that the God of Moses existed. Anyone who wants to claim that the story is true as reported in today's Torah must show both evidence and argument for the existence of that God and his involvement in the event in question. Incidentally, that anyone might also want to show both evidence and argument for Moses, as the existence of Moses is considered unlikely.
• In "Kuzari: Deuteronomy Doesn't Validate the Sinai Revelation" I examined Deuteronomy 4:9-40 and concluded that it presented a later account of the Sinai event and interpretation of it. The passages did not, I said, provide us with a report of Sinai as it was happening. My reading was based in part on understanding the context established in Deuteronomy 1. I concluded that we could not use the Deuteronomy 4 passages to validate the Sinai event itself, but that we could use them to discuss the understanding of the Sinai story.
• I presented the Sinai stories from the J, E and P sources in "Kuzari: Three Sinai Stories." They are quite different and remarkable accounts. J is about the coming of God to Sinai and the establishment of Moses and Aaron as the official go-betweens of God and Israel. The account is more personal in E. There remains a distance between God and the people, but Moses functions as more a translator in E, whereas I see him as a representative in J. God is a black box in P, and Moses alone enters. All knowledge and authority rest with Moses.
• Most recently, I posted "Kuzari: Why Aren't There More Sinai-Like Stories?" to address the question in the title. My answer is that we have three Sinai-like stories: J, E, and P. We also have stories with one or more elements such as we find in the Sinai story. What we do not have is another story from another tradition or culture that is exactly like Sinai. But we don't need carbon copies of Sinai, and a demand for them is unreasonable.

Before I can get to a direct formulation, I have to address one more topic, which comes from comments made by Dovid Kornreich:

Please specify (in future posts, perhaps) 1) the observed evidence and 2) tested hypotheses which reconstruct the textual history of Deuteronomy--which do not commit logical fallacies. Namely: of assuming the conclusion at the outset. Meaning they do not initially view the evidence through the prism of the conclusion.

I have yet to come across such fallacy-free evidence and hypothesis testing in Biblical scholarship.

This is a great comment deserving serious consideration, and the topic it raises concerns the nature of evidence. What is the evidence? What does it mean for something to be taken as evidence? What is the relationship between evidence and hypothesis?

These are huge questions that I think can be usefully approached by first establishing the big picture. For us, the big-big picture is essentially a model of the world and how it works. There are several ways to specify the model, but let's try this:

1. The natural world operates according to physical laws.
2. Events in the natural world have physical components.
3. Events can cause other, subsequent events.
4. Some events can literally be more effective than other events.
5. Some events are more likely to have regular causes than other events.

I assume we all can agree with the general outline of this model, although some may question or object to specific elements. It is hopefully beyond question that the natural world, per specifications 1 and 2, has enough regularity and predictability to allow us to develop a stable picture of it. Now I'm aware that our human ability to apprehend and describe the world breaks down at some extremes, and this is fine. Ultimately, however, with physical laws we know we are talking about the measurable behavior of matter and the transfer of information.

If someone wants to modify the model by saying--for example--"The natural world operates according to physical and spiritual laws," then I need to know what we are talking about when we use the term spiritual laws. I need to know what spirit is, what it does, and how we build knowledge of it.

But I want to return to the model I sketched out before because we do not need to commit ourselves to it. We can test the model and ask questions about it:

• (a) Given the model I described, how do we assess the likelihood of specific observations?
• (b) Given a set of observations and the model above, how do we choose the cause-effect chain that best explains the observations?
• (c) Given a set of observations and different models or different variations within the model above, how do we find the best model or model variation that best explains the observations?

Using all the above, let's consider a statement such as we find in Deuteronomy 16b:

there were thunder claps and lightning flashes, and a thick cloud was upon the mountain, and a very powerful blast of a shofar

In our model, how likely are thunder claps, lightening, and clouds by mountains? Likely within normal ranges. In other words, weather events fit right into our model. So far as I know, there is nothing related to climate or geography that would make a weather event practically impossible at Sinai.

Now, what happens if we use our model and the second bullet (b) above? Well, we can establish different configurations of natural causes and events that would lead up to thunder, lightening and clouds on Sinai at a particular time. Our proposed configuration may or may not be close to the truth, but they will be complete. We have no need to invoke anything beyond the model to develop a minimally viable hypothesis.

How about using our model and the third bullet (c) above? This could be the time to ask whether a model that included "and spiritual" might perform better than the original model for the given observation. It won't, unless we have a way to identify what specifically is spiritual in the observed event. In other words, unless and until we can agree on what information does and does not fall within the category "spiritual," then the concept is superfluous for our purposes.

We can now return to Dovid Kornreich's question to me and talk about the observed evidence. I'll cite biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman (from The Bible with Sources Revealed) and list the evidence of the multiple source hypothesis as follows:

1. Linguistic evidence (p. 7): The different sources reflect the Hebrew language of several distinct periods. The change in language is attested through Hebrew texts outside the Torah.
2. Terminology (p. 8): Certain words and phrases appear disproportionately and even entirely in some sources but not in others.
3. Consistent content (p. 10): This is the "different sources use different names for God" line of evidence. More correctly, the sources differ on when the name of God was first revealed to humans. A second line of evidence in this same category concerns sacred objects such as the Tabernacle, the Ark of the Covenant, Urim and Tummim, and so on. Some sources dwell excessively on one or more of these objects while other sources make no mention at all.  A third line of evidence involves the priestly leadership. In the P source, the line of Aaron has exclusive access to the divine. The arguments for this line are more substantial than I can relate here and now, so do read Friedman and others on this. Finally, P is unique among the sources in its concern over ages, dates, measurements, numbers, order, and precise instructions.
4. Continuity of texts (p. 13): When the sources are separated from one another, each makes a flowing, sensible text. In discussing this line of evidence Friedman addresses an objection I already know is coming, as it is expressed in Kornreich's question. The objection is that the multiple source hypothesis came first, and then the Torah was divided to produce this result. Friedman anticipates this type of objection:

   So much of the text flows smoothly flows smoothly...that it is not possible that any scholar could have constructed it to do so while keeping all the evidence consistently within sources. The scholar would still have to keep all the sources' similar versions of common stories (known as "doublets") separated. The scholar would still have to keep all of the characteristic terminology of each source within the passages attributed to that particular source. The scholar would still have to keep all of the linguistic  evidence for the stages of Hebrew intact, all the occurrences of the divine name consistent within sources, and all the other lines of evidence intact--all of this while producing stories that flow smoothly.

5. Connections with other parts of the Bible (p. 14): I'll let Friedman's words make the case here.

   When distinguished from one another, the individual sources each have specific affinities with particular portions of the Bible. D has well-known parallels of wording with the book of Jeremiah. P has such parallels with with the book of Ezekiel. J and E are particularly connected with the book Hosea. This is not simply a matter of a coincidence of subject matter in these parallel texts. It is a proper connection of language and views between particular sources and particular prophetic works.

6. Relationships among the sources to each other and to history (p. 18): We see that each source has connections to specific circumstances in history and to other sources. J appears connected to the kingdom of Judah in the south of Israel. E has connections with northern Israel. Our time frame here is between 922 and 722 BCE. P is connection to the time of Hezekiah, king of Judah from 715-687 BCE. D is associated, as we have previously discussed, with the reign of Josiah, king of Judah from 640-609 BCE. Finally, the P source has a consistent relationship with the prior sources J and E. Its content and order of episodes show it to be an alternative composition to JE.
7. Convergence (p. 27): I'll once again let Friedman state the case:

   Above all, the strongest evidence establishing the Documentary Hypothesis is that several different lines of evidence converge....The most compelling argument for the hypothesis is that this hypothesis best accounts for the fact that all this evidence of so many kinds comes together so consistently.

We now have the set of seven observations listed above and a hypothesis purporting to describe the causal chain accounting for the observations. This puts us in range of the second bullet item (b) above. With a set of observations and a viable hypothesis, we can propose a model of how the Torah was constructed and then test it through bullet points (a) to (c). The model must recognize all of the seven observations as possible outcomes. The model must also be generally compatible with our big-picture model from before.

I will apologetically avoid sketching out a personal, provisional model of how the Torah was constructed. One reason for this is that Kornreich's question to me can be fully addressed now without such a model. The second reason is that I may need to provide it in the next post, which I expect will be my promised explanation of how the Sinai story originated and developed.

To answer Kornreich's question, then:

• The observed evidence is such that is enumerated above. We observe, for example, words in the Bible from different periods in the history of the Hebrew language. One explanation for this observation is that preserved content from earlier times was later combined with other content and the whole thing became one composite text.
• The tested hypotheses are not only the species of the Documentary Hypothesis but species of what I'll call the Divine Inspiration Hypothesis. The latter set ranges from taking the Torah as the word of God transmitted through Moses to taking it as assembled (a la the DH) by divinely inspired redactors. The tests include incorporating new observations and data points and reconciling lines of evidence with each other. In other words, we are not looking simply for an explanation to the language history observation, we are looking also for an explanation that is compatible and consistent with other lines of evidence.
• Do modern biblical scholars such as Friedman presume the truth of the Documentary Hypothesis at the outset? Friedman's statements in the "Continuity of texts" line of evidence (#4) argue against circularity. These statements also suggest how circularity could be exposed and the DH challenged. Now, we do need to bring some assumptions to the table beforehand. For example, if we assume that there are no contradictions at all in the Bible, we can come up with all sorts of ingenious ways to explain apparent contradictions to make them "go away." The real question is how do we choose between the assumption that Torah contains no contradictions and the assumption that it may contains contradictory accounts and statements? I don't think that we can answer this question without thinking long and hard about our big-picture model.

To conclude, we arrive at the heart of the disagreement in my perspective and Kornreich's. If I understand his position correctly, he will argue that at least some of the seven observations do not constitute "problems" at all; that is, these are not things that need to be explained.

But this is where I really should invite Dovid himself to respond. And so...my questions to Dovid:

1. Are the seven observations valid? Which ones are not, and why not?
2. Of the observations that are valid, how do you explain what we see in the text? 
3. How do your explanations better account for the observations than explanations under the Documentary Hypothesis?
4. How would you modify or alter the big-picture model I developed earlier in this post?
5. Assuming you subscribe to a version of the Divine Inspiration Hypothesis, how do you personally avoid assuming its truth when you are reasoning about what you observe in the Bible and in the sacred works of other religions?

Dovid, I'll look forward to your answers. I'm willing to give them a full post here or to link to your blog if you like. Next up for me: My explanation of how the Sinai story originated and developed.

They Did Not Die For Our Freedom

 
Fervent US nationalism made an understandably dramatic spike following the events of September 11. Now, almost ten war-filled years later, we in the US come again to Memorial Day. Established following the American Civil War, the federal holiday today commemorates men and women who have died while in US military service.

These people--daughters, sons, mothers, fathers, friends--died in combat. They died in campaigns of aggression and defense. They died prepared and by surprise. They died in bravery and in fear, in clarity and confusion, instantly and after great suffering. They died because they volunteered, or because they felt pressured, or because they didn't really know what they were getting into. They died because there was a fight, because others planned a fight. They died as part of a strategy, one formulated far away in a board room and another drawn close by in the dirt.

Commemorate the dead and gone. Yes. Remember, too, those left behind--the families, the survivors, the planners. But I wonder also whether we ought to be more outraged than we appear to be.

*  *  *

I'm tired of receiving mass emails and Facebook posts urging us to remember and thank those who "died for our freedom." The patriotic souls behind these emails and posts are almost always not mourners or even vets themselves. Yet these folks publicly instruct us all to pause in solemn reflection before biting into our hot dogs. They lecture us: because of those who died and are dying, we can sit comfortably in our yards and share a cookout on this day. Had the soldiers not fallen in military service, we would be unable to have these hot dogs. Indeed, without the sacrifice of the killed, our lives now would be very different.

I don't buy the sanctimonious, self-righteous posturing that drives this Memorial Day moralizing. I don't buy it because it consents to the dead and to their manner of death as givens. But is it enough simply to remember the dead? Is it enough just to feel bad for the widower and the orphan? Does a momentary scowl in honor of the mother and father who lost their precious child give proper weight to this holiday?

No. I say, no. No, again.

May I suggest that we have had enough people die for "our freedom," whatever that is? May I put forth the proposition that we need more of us to live for "our freedom," whatever that is? Should we ask why our soldiers--and "theirs"--are killing and being killed? Should we not all read Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" every Memorial Day?

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots 
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Dulce et Decorum est / Pro patria mori, it is sweet and right to die for your country. The words, taken from an ode by Horace, become exposed as a lie. The reality of war and war-mongering reveal that we embrace that star-spangled lie with all joy.

But some of us think it is neither wonderful nor honorable to die for one's country.

Do we want people to die fighting? Do we want people to kill others? If the answer is no, then why don't we do more than simply remember the dead? Why don't we do more than just place a flag in our street? Why don't we do more than pause before scarfing down the burgers and chips?

In other words, why don't we pressure our governments and our leaders to cease making war? Why don't we voice outrage at what we have lost in our dead, and what misery their loss has created?

Commemorating the dead is a self-serving yet otherwise impotent gesture. If the dead really mean anything to us, we'll try to make our leaders more accountable for using non-violent means to improve safety and quality of life--locally and globally.

If instead we are content to shed mere tears and to do nothing else on behalf of those who killed and were killed in military activity, then we are like the crowd of people in Mark Twain's "The War Prayer," who ignore the words of the aged messenger:

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe.

O Lord our God,

Help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells;

Help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead;

Help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain;

Help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire;

Help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief;

Help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst,

Sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter,

Broken in spirit,

Worn with travail,

Imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it –

For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord,

Blast their hopes,

Blight their lives,

Protract their bitter pilgrimage,

Make heavy their steps,

Water their way with their tears,

Stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!

We ask it, in the spirit of love,

Of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts.

Amen.

Every Memorial Day, we offer Twain's sardonic prayer to those we fight and to ourselves. Tacitly, unconsciously, we accept the fate voiced in these words, and we approve of it.

See? People Do Declare to Be True That Which Can Easily Be Proven False!

I mentioned yesterday that "People lie all the time, quite convincingly, even when they know they could easily be caught in the lie." And even if we don't think are lying, necessarily, people can quite easily spread falsehoods and misinformation.

Exhibit A, Penn Jillette:

Yesterday, around 3 p.m., a trend started emerging on Twitter. People began reciting a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. that seemed strangely apt for this occasion:

"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy."

The first person to cite it on Twitter was the famous magician/Libertarian Penn Jillette, but the words quickly went viral, and the source got lost in the shuffle. The only problem? As Megan McArdle pointed out in the Atlantic, Martin Luther King never said that. Actually, the quote from MLK about enemies is:

"In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

How did this other quote get misattributed to King? As McArdle says in her piece, "It's a bit too a propos. What 'thousands' would King have been talking about? In which enemy's death was he supposed to be rejoicing?" She also wonders, "Why? What do you get out of saying something pithy, and getting no credit for it?"

Penn admits to being the originator of the quote on Twitter, though he claims it got messed up when he cut and pasted from a longer piece by King. I'm not sure if I believe him; I have a strong suspicion Penn just made it up in order to see how many people would blindly follow along and quote it as fact, without ever checking on the sources. After all, this is the guy who created the documentary "Penn and Teller: Bullshit!" and the subsequent Showtime series about how easy it was to dupe people.

Update: The source of the quote is a Facebook message by Jessica Dovey, where she goes on to quote Martin Luther King Jr. In this context, it's easy to see how a cut-and-paste job could have accidentally attributed the source to King. Congrats to Jessica, whose Facebook wall post is one of the more famous sayings on the Internet today. Salon has reached out to Penn Jillette for comment, but has yet to receive a response.

The lesson? A claim should not be considered true just because it could easily be proven false. If you don't do the work of actually researching and see if it is false, you may be misled.