Digging through God's Play Box

QJ.net is looking forward to the "playing God" debate that will sure to follow the development of "wet artificial life." So am I.

Bible Bending Conspiracy?

Michael Ireland, a freelance journalist who writes for ASSIST News Service, reports that Pat Robertson "has influence on both the East and West coasts." How so? By sending graduates from his university (Regent University) to Washington and Hollywood.

I have reported on Regent University's influence on politics before, but influencing Hollywood is different. Even if we allow that Robertson has sway in Hollywood (and it is a stretch to connect one writer and director with mild success to Robertson), it is Hollywood's job to sell what people are buying. Ireland's only revelation is that writers trained to communicate a message "through the lens of scripture" are creating a product that is selling.

Like 911 conspiracies that attempt to assure us that the White House was really in control all along, perhaps this "Robertson Factor" is about an allusion that some maniacal Right Wing Christian mastermind is in charge, not the free market. I think it might be time to stop playing "follow that Regent graduate!" and ask ourselves why we care so much anyway.

Cartoon by John Cox, posted in accordance with the Cox and Forkum Terms of Use policy.

Academics Fight Back!

Eric H. Cline, the archaeologist and historian of National Geographic, shines "new light on questions that have intrigued scholars and believers for centuries" with his new book From Eden to Exile: Unraveling Mysteries of the Bible. Questions such as where Eden, the Ark, and Sodom and Gomorrah are located, and why mention of the Exodus is conspicuously absent from Egyptian records.

Although USA Today makes it sound more like The Da Vinci Code than SBL material, Cline presents a long awaited challenge to the community of biblical scholars. In the The Chronicle of Higher Education's podcast, Cline argues that "Bible studies have become dominated by 'junk science' (Noah’s ark found in Turkey!) because academics have yielded the field." To which I say, here, here! The field of Biblical Studies is in desperate need of a Skeptic magazine or the James Randi Educational Foundation to respond to this "junk." Or course, there is always Bible Bending...


(The above picture is from National Geographic's Kids News--an article on the discovery of what could be Noah's Ark in Turkey)

Evil Bible.com

By this point it should be clear that figuring out "what the Bible says" and "what the Bible means" is a national pastime in many countries. When it comes to the Bible, everyone's a scholar and thanks to the Internet, everyone is also a student (albeit, not always a willing one).

I am not breaking any earth-shattering ground here. But in my defense, neither does Evil Bible.com, the official website of The Church of Theists Suck. Its primary purpose is to point out the Bible's cruelty (or, in its own words "to spread the vicious truth about the Bible") by highlighting instances of rape, murder, slavery and human sacrifices. It also counts 143 inconsistencies.

This need to vent about the Bible--its ridiculousness, its inapplicability to modern life--is an itch many have needed to scratch. And not just recently. Thomas Jefferson cut out all the bits he did not like, Mark Twain's wrote his own hilarious account and Robert Ingersoll in the late 19th century offered a large sum to any pastor who would preach the passages he chose.

It is an understandable itch. Of course, I have to ask the same question of Evil Bible.com as I have of Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris: who is your audience?

The fire to talk about the Bible is coming from all directions. So how do we get light out of this heat?

You say "Allah," I say "Jehovah," let's call the whole thing off!

Or so says Tiny Muskens, the Bishop of Breda (Netherlands), who says that Christians should replace the word "God" with "Allah." While it works well in Indonesia, 92 percent of the Dutch are opposed to the idea.

The Chicago Tribune wondered rather 'God' by any other name would be just as holy. Many readers responded either with their choice words for God or by pointing out that the God of the Bible and the God of the Quran are different. Here is my favorite:

Sorry, but the God of the Christian faith is a different deity than the god the muslim faith!!!!!!!! It would be like having 2 children, but using only a single first name for the both of them.

Bible Bashing Bestsellers?

Steven D. Levitt, author of the widely popular book Freakonomics, asked his blog readers a few days ago why all these "anti-God" books have been selling so well. In the last two years, Atheists have made a dent in the bestseller list with books such as Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Victor Stanger's God the Failed Hypothesis ,Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great, Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation, David Mill's Atheist Universe and John Allen Paulos' Irreligion (coming out Boxing Day 2007).

But Levitt, who is after all an economist, cannot grasp the motivations behind people who buy "anti-God books." Since he doubts that religious people would spend time or money reading why they are wrong, he wonders, "Do the people who despise the notion of God have an insatiable demand for books that remind them of why? Are there that many people out there who haven’t made up their mind on the subject and are open to persuasion?"

Levitt received dozens of responses (178 at last count). Most readers gently pointed out that people care about God. A lot. In the words of one blogger, "'apatheism' is much less common than you imagine." Others went on to say that Atheism is a belief-system and requires nurturing and mulling over details like any other "faith." This is especially true since Atheists are the most hated minority in America. But all this talk of where the "anti-God" market comes from got me to thinking if this is more about an "anti-Bible" market. After all, as many responders noted, this deluge of books declaring that God is Not Great is more a reaction to Judeo-Christian religion than the esoteric spiritualism trumpeted by authors such as Deepak Chopra and Karen Armstrong.

Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, and Hitchens each include numerous mentions of the Bible's inconsistency and inapplicability to 21st century life (I have not read Stangers' or Mill's book, though I would be willing to bet that they could not avoid mention of the Bible either). Dawkins, for example, responds to Stephen Jay Gould's suggestion that religion has a different sort of truth then science does by asking: "To which chapter, then, of which book of the Bible should we turn--for they are far from unanimous and some of them are odious by any reasonable standard?"

Dawkins and others seem to be under the impression that the Bible is the infallible foundation of faith. But many people these days are "freelance monotheists" (as Armstrong calls herself) who considers the Bible to be more a poetry of the sacred than a history of the profane. This crowd can "Amen" to much of these books, only pausing to add that where these authors looked at the evidence and said "no," they have decided to say "yes."

Perhaps we can say these books are more about "To Hell with the Bible" than declaring that God is Dead. Aren't people more enraged when Bible creeps into science textbooks, political debates, and social policy than when people gather to pray after a disaster? I may be accused of pointing out the obvious on these posts, but isn't Bible bending what is really on people's minds?

(The above picture is from the website of the James Randi Foundation.)

Atheists are good too

The Chicago Sun Times reported last week on a study which concluded that non-religious medical personnel were just as likely to care for those without insurance as religious doctors (actually, the non-religious doctors were slightly more willing: 35 to 31 percent, respectively). In the puerile spirit of this study, I would like say: see? I told you you didn't need the Bible to be good.