The Questioning Christian

Jim Jones's lover thought he was God

From a NY Times on-line piece about Jim Jones, who led some 900 followers to their deaths by cyanide suicide in Jonestown, Guyana:

Ms. O’Shea joined the Peoples Temple as a secretary in 1971, when she was 19. She said she eventually became Mr. Jones’s confidante and lover; “I thought he was God,” she said. “I thought God had picked me to be a mate.”

Some Sarah Palin supporters are akin to biblical inerrantists - James McGrath

I'm beginning to be a fan of Dr. James McGrath. His recent post on the Christian Century blog, Inerrancy of the Bible and Sarah Palin, addressed those who would rewrite history when it doesn't fit their preconceived notions. He was on the money in this passage:

I suggested recently that one of the most fundamental elements of Christianity is repentance – acknowledging we were wrong and making efforts to be less wrong in the future. And one can see a faithful expression of this core Christian conviction in the history of Liberal Protestantism and its role in developing and embracing the tools of critical study of the Bible, and the integration of new scientific knowledge.

Admitting the Bible was wrong, admitting Jesus was wrong, when the evidence points in that direction, is not a denial of the Christian faith, but an expression of one of its most basic tenets: the fallibility of human beings and the resulting need to be open to correction.

(Links omitted.) I made a couple of comments in the discussion following his post.

It's been said that we're all entitled to our own opinions, but we're not entitled to our own facts. Fidelity to the First Commandment dictates that we live in the world God wrought, not in a 'world' that we create in our imaginations -- and inerrantists of all kinds are guilty of violating that corollary.

After bin Laden's death, a made-up quote from MLK Jr.; what does that suggest about the Gospel of John?

The Atlantic's Megan McArdle, after doing some Google searching, is pretty sure that a quote attributed to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the wake of Osama bin Laden's death, is a fake:

Shortly after I posted my piece on feeling curiously un-thrilled about Bin Laden's death, the following quote came across my twitter feed:

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

I admire the sentiment. But something about it just strikes me as off, like that great Marx quote about the housing bubble that didn't appear anywhere in Das Kapital.

Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalised, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism. Karl Marx, Das Kapital, 1867

Like the Marx quote, 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?

UPDATE: Getting in on the fun, Drew Grant at Salon.com asks, "Why did Penn Jillette create a fake [MLK] quote yesterday?"

So apparently there are people who think it's OK to put words in the mouth (so to speak) of an historical figure, presumably for greater authority.

Surely this sort of thing could never, ever have happened in the early church, right? Surely (for example) the author of the Fourth Gospel couldn't possibly have put words in Jesus' mouth decades after the fact?

Um, except that we already have compelling evidence that this sort of thing did indeed happen. Consider Paul's warning to his readers about forged letters circulating in his name, in 2 Thessalonians 1-2:

Concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered to him, we ask you, brothers and sisters, not to become easily unsettled or alarmed by the teaching allegedly from us — whether by a prophecy or by word of mouth or by letter ... [Emphasis added]

As someone else has pointed out (Bart Ehrman, maybe?), there are two possibilities:

• if 2 Thessalonians was in fact written by Paul, then Paul himself is warning his readers about forged letters bearing his name; presumably he didn't issue that warning for no reason;
• on the other hand, if 2 Thessalonians was not written by Paul, then that epistle is itself a forgery, Q.E.D.

So this apparently-bogus quotation from Dr. King gives us still more reason to conclude that respectful agnosticism is the appropriate view to take of Scripture.

 

Related posts:

• Synoptic Christians versus John Christians: A Critique
• Evaluating scriptural evidence

No, there weren't 27 people killed at UT Austin

From the Distortions Happen department:  My daughter was one of the many students locked down at the University of Texas at Austin this morning.  Shortly afterwards, she emailed to let everyone know she was OK (she was several blocks from where the gunman was), and said they'd heard 27 people were killed.  No one was killed except the gunman, who turned his weapon on himself, so I wonder where in the world the students got that information?  

Mozart effect turns out to have been an urban-legend distortion of the original science

From the Distortions Desk:  NPR explains this morning that the so-called Mozart effect is actually an urban legend, a distortion of the much-more-limited research results reported by a scientist in 1993.

“… people are rather cavalier about the facts”

Over the years various posts in the "Distortions" category of this blog have linked to the famous Snopes.com Web site, which specializes in checking out urban legends and the like. This past Sunday the NY Times profiled the site and its founders, a married couple, who now make a living from the site's ad­ver­tis­ing revenues.

(It's ironic that the Times published the piece on Easter Sunday, which commemorates an event that, as longtime readers know, I strongly suspect was just such an urban legend, a story mutation arising from Jesus' disciples' efforts to make sense of the catastrophic events they'd just witnessed, and the fact that his body was no longer where it had been put on Friday night, and the fact that some of his followers concluded that they had seen him alive.)

Here's an excerpt:

The popularity of Snopes — it attracts seven million to eight million unique visitors in an average month — puts the couple in a unique position to evaluate digital society’s attitudes toward accuracy.

After 14 years, they seem to have concluded that people are rather cavalier about the facts.

* * *

“People keep falling for the same kind of things over and over again,” Mr. Mikkelson said. Some readers always seem to think, for instance, that the government is trying to poison them: Mrs. Mikkelson said rumors about AIDS have been recycled into rumors about swine flu vaccines.

For the Mikkelsons, the site affirms what cultural critics have bemoaned for years: the rejection of nuance and facts that run contrary to one’s point of view.

“Especially in politics, most everything has infinite shades of gray to it, but people just want things to be true or false,” Mr. Mikkelson said. “In the larger sense, it’s people wanting confirmation of their world view.”

(Emphasis added.)

Read the rest.

The unreliability of eyewitness accounts - Scientific American article

From Hal Arkowitz and Scott O. Lilienfeld, Why Science Tells Us Not to Rely on Eyewitness Accounts, from the January 2010 Scientific American Mind:

The uncritical acceptance of eyewitness accounts may stem from a popular misconception of how memory works. 

Many people believe that human memory works like a video recorder: the mind records events and then, on cue, plays back an exact replica of them. 

On the contrary, psychologists have found that memories are reconstructed rather than played back each time we recall them. 

The act of remembering, says eminent memory researcher and psychologist Elizabeth F. Loftus of the University of California, Irvine, is “more akin to putting puzzle pieces together than retrieving a video recording.” 

Even questioning ... can alter the witness’s testimony because fragments of the memory may unknowingly be combined with information provided by the questioner, leading to inaccurate recall.

(Extra paragraphing added.)

Karen Armstrong: Itinerant prophet of the Golden Rule

My wife and I enjoyed hearing renowned religious historian Karen Armstrong last night at Houston’s Wortham Center, as part of a Progressive Forum of Houston lecture series. Some observations:

• Armstrong is delightful.  Her lecture style is passable; to me, though, the most enjoyable part was her living-room conversation afterwards, in the style of Inside the Actor's Studio, with Progressive Forum founder Randall Morton, who posed questions previously submitted via the Web.
• Armstrong emphasized the commonality of the Golden Rule in world religions. That resonated with me, of course (see my various postings here on the fundamental importance of the Summary of the Law in human cultural evolution).
• She claimed that it’s only been in the last few hundred years that people took the Bible’s creation accounts lit­erally. She said that those accounts used to be re­garded — correctly, in her view — as mythos, a story setting out a program for action, as opposed to logos, a description of the way things really are. (Doubtless this one-sentence summary fails to do her justice.)
• Armstrong pitched the Charter for Compassion movement that it sounds like she’s spearheading.
• She pronounces her first name CAR-rin.
• The event looked to be sold out – I saw only a handful of empty seats here and there in the Cullen Theater, probably from no-shows. We ended up sitting in the mezzanine, which I think was our first time ever in that section. The seating there is pitched incredibly steeply, more so than any stadium I’ve ever been in.
• It was announced that Armstrong would do a book-signing for her latest, The Case for God, being sold on-site by co-sponsor Brazos Bookstore. I wanted a signed book, but the line was at least 30 minutes long, so we headed home.  I’ll check with the Brazos to see if they have any signed books there.
• I’ve never seen so many Toyota Priuses in one place as there were in the parking garage afterwards; draw your own conclusions about the audience ....
• Armstrong is not without her critics – see that section of her Wikipedia entry.

Tunnel vision is the source of so many of our troubles

David Broder writes that President Obama’s quest for rational, evidence-based public policies is likely to be derailed by the tunnel vision of people acting like heat-seeking missiles, pushing and shoving in their single-minded struggles to get what they want:

… [This highly rational, comprehensive approach fits uncomfortably with the Constitution, which apportions power among so many different players, most of whom are far more concerned with the particulars of policy than its overall coherence.

The energy bill that went into the House was a reasonably coherent set of trade-offs that would reduce carbon emissions and help the atmosphere. When it came out, it was a grab bag of subsidies and payoffs to various industries and groups. Now it is stymied by similar forces in the Senate.

Schambra's essay anticipated exactly what is happening on health care. Obama, budget director Peter Orszag and health czar Nancy-Ann DeParle grasp the intricacies of the health-care system as well as any three humans, and they could write a law to make it far more efficient.

But now it is in the hands of legislators and lobbyists who care much less about the rationality of the system than they do about the way the bill will affect their particular part of it.

Everyone has a parochial agenda.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, for example, wants to be sure a new cancer treatment center in Nevada has favored status.

(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

Of course, at an individual level this tunnel vision makes perfect sense. Harry Reid knows full well that his chances of reelection hinge more on his being able bring home the bacon than on whether he enacts policies good for the country as a whole.  (On a related note, see also this post about a mother whose tunnel vision enabled her to rescue her child from a polar bear.)

A theologian proclaiming the reliability of the gospel authors is like a lawyer proclaiming that first-century midwives didn’t need to wash their hands

Adapted from a comment I posted in a dialogue with “dwstroudmd,” a commenter at T19:

Setting up the analogy

Suppose that I, having only basic first-aid training, were to insist that it didn’t matter whether first-century Jewish midwives washed their hands before delivering babies. According to me (let’s suppose), the extant religious standards called for all devout Jews to wash regularly.  Surely that would have been enough to guard against infant mortality and death in childbed, right?

You, an experienced modern-day obstetrician, would smile tolerantly, or even laugh.  And rightly so:  If I’d had the benefit of your training, I’d have known that your profession has established (not without controversy) that mother- and baby-killing infections can sneak in via even the cleanest-looking unwashed hands. 

(We can’t mock first-century midwives for not knowing this, though; they lacked the necessary underlying knowledge about infectious microbes and their transmission.)

Ancient storytelling practices weren't necessarily a sufficient guard against distortion, just as ancient sanitary practices weren’t necessarily a sufficient guard against infection

Now let’s reverse the roles.  Certain modern theologians make the claim that it doesn’t matter whether the NT accounts are hearsay, or (if in fact they were eyewitness accounts) whether they were first written down decades after the witnesses’ observations, without the opportunity to dig into what the witnesses actually saw as opposed to what they claimed they saw.

According to these theologians, various first-century storytelling practices — "sanitation" practices, if you will — would have been enough to guard against distortion of the NT tales, even the most extraordinary ones.

It turns out, though, that at least so far as we can tell) these theologians have little or no training in interviewing actual, fallible human witnesses (let alone in cases having real-world consequences).

Our modern theologians apparently know little of the the vicissitudes of human perception and memory, as demonstrated convincingly by modern journalists, police detectives, and lawyers, not to mention by experimental psychologists.

That might give you an idea why I react the way I do when reasserters make such grandiose claims: When you [reasserters] make such confident assertions about first-century storytelling practices, to me it sounds just like a non-physician who claims that first-century midwives didn’t need to wash their hands.