My Grandfather Didn't Flee the Potato Famine for America to See This Country Overrun by Refugees

John Scalzi's got another post up about the refugee question, this one titled "Frightened, Ignorant and Cowardly Is No Way to Go Through Life, Son."  (I don't know about that: it seems to work for a lot of people.)  One commenter especially amused me, by saying that "Refugees are less likely, statistically, to commit mass murder than white people are." I love the assumption embedded there, that refugees aren't white; it's similar to the popular assumption, now being challenged, that terrorists aren't white.  (Or that "Hispanics" or Mexicans aren't white.)  It's not even clear that Syrians aren't "white," but then such words mean what we choose them to mean.

Along the same lines, a meme I saw today features Ron Paul saying "Here is the solution to the refugee problem: stop meddling in the the affairs of other countries."  Once again Paul shows his great knowledge, wisdom, and compassion.  Leave aside that the issue right now is what to do with the refugees we and others have already created.  Refugees can be generated simply by oppressive government action within a country. An obvious example: Nazi Germany created many refugees. The US created internal refugees by its treatment of Indians and people of African descent. So yes, not interfering in other countries' affairs is a good idea, though it's not always easy to determine what is interference and what is wise interaction. But it won't solve "the refugee problem."

But back to Scalzi.  He wrote that, "as many have noted, there is irony in the freakout about Syrian refugees coming into a season which celebrates a notable middle eastern family who famously were refugees at one point in their history, according to some tales."  This trope has been popular among liberals on social media lately, but it has problems.

Scalzi presumably was referring to Joseph and Mary, who indeed could be viewed as refugees at one point in their lives.  That would be when King Herod, alerted by the Three Wise Men that his replacement had been born in Bethlehem, ordered the killing of all male children two years old and younger in Bethlehem and its vicinity (Matthew 2:16).  An angel warned Joseph and Mary of the coming trouble, and they decamped to Egypt, where they remained until Herod died.  One might ask why Yahweh couldn't have somehow prevented the Slaughter of the Innocents altogether, perhaps by giving Herod an embolism; killing turbulent kings is certainly in his repertoire.  The answer is that the killing was Yahweh's plan and will, in order to fulfill a prophecy of Jeremiah's (Matthew 2:17-18).  Otherwise prophecy would not be fulfilled, which would undermine God's credibility.  When Herod died, an angel let Joseph know it was safe for the Holy Family to go back home.

On this analogy, we should suppose that ISIS is an instrument of the Lord, carrying out his murky and mysterious intentions.  Who knows?  If Babylon was doing his work by conquering Jerusalem, destroying Solomon's temple, and carrying the children of Israel into exile, then perhaps ISIS is doing the same.

But as the meme I posted above shows, the Flight into Egypt isn't what these folks have in mind.  When I've seen Joseph and Mary referred to as refugees (or, sometimes, "homeless"), it has always been in connection with the Nativity as told by the gospel of Luke, which depicts Mary depositing the baby Jesus in a manger, "because there was no room for them in the inn" (Luke 2:16).  Luke, who doesn't seem to know about the Slaughter of the Innocents or the Flight into Egypt, isn't depicting Joseph and Mary as refugees.  According to him, they were in Bethlehem because Caesar Augustus had ordered a census of the Empire, which required that "all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.  And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David) ..." (2:3-4).  So he wasn't in Bethlehem to seek refuge from state violence, nor was he homeless; he had a home in Nazareth.

It seems odd that Joseph had no relatives to stay with in Bethlehem, but according to Luke he had to go there because he was remotely descended from King David.  Also, Yahweh couldn't arrange housing for his only begotten son, though he could send vast heavenly choirs to announce the blessed event and send shepherds to pay homage.  None of this makes any sense, and there is no evidence either of a Roman census at the time Jesus was probably born, nor that men had to uproot their households and travel to the hometowns of their distant ancestors to be counted.  Luke's Nativity story is almost certainly a fiction he invented, as is Matthew's.  Matthew, by the way, has the baby Jesus and his parents staying in a house in Bethlehem (Matthew 2:11).  Why they moved to Nazareth when they returned from Egypt is not explained, unless it's to fulfill a bogus prophecy that Teh Christ would be a "Nazarene."  (I say "bogus" because there's no such prophecy in the Hebrew Bible.)

Still, both Matthew and Luke probably intended to move their audiences with the pathos of the Messiah, the Son of God, passing his infancy in humble, even difficult circumstances, just as Scalzi and other people today want to move us with the plight of Syrian and other refugees.  And of course it's hypocritical of American right-wing Christians to try to gin up panic about people who are refugees as a direct result of US policy and aggression in the Middle East.  If you're going to mock their ignorance and distortion of the Bible, though, you need to be more scrupulous in your own account than they are in theirs.  After all, there are plenty of other Biblical passages that could be used, on the theme "Do not oppress or mistreat a foreigner, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt" (Exodus 22:21; compare Exodus 23:9, Deuteronomy 10:19, Leviticus 19:34) This fine sentiment was honored by Israel more in the breach than in the observance, like most of the Torah's ethical teachings; especially when you consider that Israel occupied its land by massacring and enslaving its inhabitants rather than coexisting with them.  And besides, Christians are free from the restrictive Old Testament law.

It's fun to throw Christians' hypocrisy in their faces, as long as they're the right Christians.  (Liberals aren't hypocrites by definition.)  As Christmas approaches we're going to see more convenient distortions of biblical material by all and sundry; I figure it's not too early to start the corrections.

Don't Worry, Be Happy (or Sleepy, or Dopey, or Doc ...)

While I was surfing the Web last weekend I stumbled on a blog post about the "atheist bus" ad campaign that I've written about before. This post was by a Christian writer who found the campaign's slogan strangely attractive:

There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy with your life.

His answer was predictable, at least to me.

Then it slowly dawned on me. This ad is a cry for freedom; a cry against the tyranny and oppression caused by a diabolical god. For once, I find myself fighting alongside the atheists. A god who paralyzes with fear, overburdens with guilt, and replaces the joy of life with sorrow and regret is no God at all. This god is an idol that demands tribute and can never be feed enough. The atheists are avidly fighting against a god who takes life rather than gives it.

In this instance, perhaps the cry of Ariane, Dawkins, and others is not far from the cry of Jesus, “And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them… you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering.” (Lk 11:46, 52).

Sometimes I wonder… Would Jesus ride the atheist bus?

I joked in my first post on the Atheist Bus Campaign that an 'atheist bus' must be a bus that doesn't believe in gods, but this guy wrote as though he thinks that were true, or that riding a bus means agreeing with all the advertising it carries. That's presumably why a Christian bus driver refused to drive a bus with the atheist ad on its side; or maybe that driver knew that many riders would think so, and blame him -- not the bus company -- for the ad. ("Presumably," another blogger shrewdly speculated, "he was previously perfectly happy to drive about in buses advertising capitalist multinationals, bearing exploitative images of women and encouraging us to go out and spend money on goodness knows what rubbish – but there you are, that’s Scummerland for you.") And presumably, I as an atheist should refuse to ride a 'Christian bus' displaying a Christian ad. People are scary.

But I think that our blogger knows better, and is just constructing a sermon theme, a superficially startling opener that in the end turns safely home to the faith you know and love. What I don't get is how he can claim Jesus as an opponent of what he calls "the tyranny and oppression caused by a diabolical god." The Jesus of the gospels is a preacher of hellfire and damnation. Shortly after the passage the blogger quotes, Jesus tells "the crowd," "I tell you my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that can do nothing more. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him!" (Luke 12:4-5, NRSV). Be afraid, be very afraid! This heartwarming passage, which is followed immediately by more of the same, can be read as referring either to Yahweh or the devil, or to Jesus himself, whom the gospels depict as having "authority to cast into hell." It doesn't much matter, though, for the ultimate source of that authority must be the same: Yahweh, the god of Israel. Jesus' promises of reward usually alternate with threats of eternal punishment.

Jesus' message in the New Testament would be meaningless if there weren't a Hell, created by Yahweh for the devil and his angels, awaiting those who fall short of whatever standard Jesus demanded of people. Being "saved" is only a concern if you're in danger, and Jesus is clear and explicit about what the danger is. The cosmology of the New Testament is incoherent -- it's impossible to know exactly what one must to do avoid Hell and be admitted to the Kingdom, since different requirements are declared at different points. The function of this incoherence -- not necessarily its intent -- is to foster that paralyzing fear and anxiety that our blogger objects to. First you have to create the danger, then you can sell the remedy for the danger.

On one of my first trips to Korea, my friends took me to a famous and very old Buddhist shrine at Seokguram Grotto. I wrote in my journal:

HK told me, as we continued downward, about the meaning of the white paper lanterns that were hanging above our heads; they were in memory of the dead. They're part of the rituals intended to help the dead make their way to paradise more quickly. HK said she'd been surprised to find no such elements in Christianity when she was in the US. I explained to her about masses for the dead in Roman Catholicism, and prayer to saints for intercession, which are intended to shorten people's stay in Purgatory. I also told her the rabbinic story of Rabbi Aqiba saving a spirit from Hell, and mentioned Wittgenstein's remark from the Tractatus that any afterlife would be as mysterious as this life.

It's odd to me that people invent hell, and then invent ways to get other people out of it. Which comes first, the punitive impulse, the construction of a system of posthumous spiritual "justice", or the construction of loopholes in the system in the name of mercy? It's commonplace, a cliche really, for unbelievers whether atheist or just members of competing cults, to blame these systems on the greed of priests and other religious professionals. There's probably some truth in that notion, but it also seems to me that laymen like the process, the system, the game, the complications.

There's certainly a human impulse toward elaboration, and one toward creating obstacles so as to have something to get around. The iconoclasts who smash one such game will see it replaced with another by their followers, if they don't invent the replacement themselves. Jesus was no exception, for what it's worth. He was in some kind of competition with the Jerusalem temple cult. Rather than deny outright the need for expensive atonement, he (or his disciples) established the cut-rate alternative of baptism -- but inflation inevitably set in. If Jesus himself instituted baptism, he was in on the process himself, and by the time Paul became a Christian, Jesus' followers certainly had such a system in place. If we knew that people really needed this sort of help after their death, it would be perfectly reasonable and rational for their friends and relatives to give it. But we don't know any such thing, and that is the problem.

So, like a true fundamentalist, our blogger puts the blame on Jewish "lawyers" in the gospels, and on modern churches that interpret the gospels differently than he does, trying to divert attention from the fact that it was Jesus, as far as anyone knows, who preached the "diabolical god" he objects to. Since he can't believe in the Jesus of the gospels (and who can, really?), he constructs a Jesus he can believe in. Would Jesus join the Atheist Bus Campaign's protest against such beliefs? I see no reason to think so.

In his 1958 Critique of Religion and Philosophy (Harper & Brothers), Walter Kaufmann wrote a dialogue between Satan and a Christian, which concluded (chapter 59):

Christian: You always harp on hell.

Satan: There is no place like home. And you might as well get used to the idea: haven't you been told that I enjoy the company of those who cannot answer me any better than you?

Christian: But I don't understand at all. Only hysterics think of going to hell themselves.

Satan: I know: good Christians consider hell a place for others. But don't you realize that if you are right about everything, you, and those like you, are undoubtedly headed for hell? Don't you see how immeasurably you stand to gain if Christianity is untenable? It is I that bring you glad tidings. Believe me and you are saved. That God exists, that is a ritual phrase, charged with emotion and a thousand connotations: some sheer superstition, some myths, some true, some false, and most of them vague. But here is the truth that shall make you free: I do not exist.

Christian: If Satan does not exist, I must have dreamed. So I can go on believing what I have always believed. But what exactly do I believe? That is the question.

(image link)