THAT'S NOT FUNNY!!!

As the late great Ellen Willis wrote in the late 1970s: 

Humorless is what you are if you do not find the following subjects funny: rape, big breasts, sex with little girls. It carries no imputation of humorlessness if you do not find the following subjects funny: castration, impotence, vaginas with teeth.

 Jon Schwarz posted the other day:

 

This is a recurring theme for him, as I've pointed out before.  It's not that I think the Right is good at being funny, though as Willis's joke indicates, a lot of humor depends on whether you're the target.

There's not much to add to my previous disagreement with Jon.  I reminded him that it was thanks to him that I learned about Barack Obama's "joke" about killing the Jonas Brothers with predator drones, so I know he knows how unfunny liberals can be.  And he's no fan of liberals or Democrats in general.  (For what it's worth, Obama's latest forays into humor as he campaigned for Abdul El-Sayed are not an improvement over his past performances.)  

But the line "hate & fear inherently can't be the basis for good comedy" irked me.  It reminded me of Mel Brooks's posturing about comedy as a sort of holy vocation. I think hate, at least, definitely can be the basis of good comedy, but there probably can't be any consensus about good comedy.  It's legitimate to object that you don't find a particular bit or joke amusing, just as everyone has the right to be offended by whatever offends them.  

What annoys me about the Babylon Bee is its own brand of piety, which is the same as Brooks's: the Bee also decries political correctness as the death of comedy, and boldly proclaims its readiness to offend even liberals.  Fine, but offending liberals is like offending the right.  It's very easy to do, but it's not enough in itself to make good comedy.

What Happens When You Send a Boy to Do a Man's Job

A couple of weeks ago a right-wing activist tried to heckle the Democratic candidate for Senator from Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, at a rally.  It's fair to say that it didn't go as he expected.  He asked El-Sayed to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood.  El-Sayed did so without missing a beat, and asked the guy, Thomas "Tommy" Teepell, why he'd asked the question.  Teepell replied that he hadn't heard him disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, and El-Sayed did so again, then pressed him on why he'd asked the question - had he asked everyone in his own life if they disavow the Muslim Brotherhood?  Teepell simply repeated that he hadn't heard El-Sayed disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, and El-Sayed rolled right over him (rhetorically) as he stood there with no more to say for himself.  

El-Sayed draped himself in the Constitution, in freedom of and from religion (I give him credit for the latter, for rejecting an evergreen right-wing shibboleth), invoked John F. Kennedy, who'd also been interrogated on potential dual loyalty because of his Papist faith.  Kennedy's answer, El-Sayed declared, was that he wasn't running to be a Catholic president, but to be a president who happened to be Catholic.  El-Sayed then asked Teepell if he was religious, and Teepell declared that he is a Christian. "So I'm going to ask you," El-Sayed continued: "Do you disavow any attempt to read any religious doctrine into the laws of our country?"  "I do not," Teepell replied.  "So I think it's you who needs to understand the Constitution, not me." The audience cheered, and Teepell skulked out of the room.  El-Sayed's team posted a video of the exchange online, and it got millions of views - ten million on his X acccount alone.

I thought El-Sayed handled himself well, declining to indulge in the usual liberal oh-how-can-you-say-such-awful things approach or flailing around helplessly as though no one could ever have imagined that someone would be so mean to him. As he says in the video, this wasn't the first time he'd had to answer such a question, so of course he was prepared.  He might also have pointed to the Constitution's prohibition (Article 6, Clause 3) of religious tests for public office, though that's exactly the kind of thing right-wing Christians want to get rid of. 

El-Sayed has also replied cleverly to Donald Trump's pretending not to be able to pronounce his name: "He says the name just fine when he’s begging the Qataris for a personal jet or the Saudis for funding for his son-in-law’s private equity firm. Wonder what’s changed?"

 

I was a bit put off by El-Sayed's paraphrase of John F. Kennedy's 1960 response to accusations of dual loyalty: "I happen to believe I can serve my nation as President - and I also happen to have been born a Catholic."  It's not that important, but there's a difference between "happen to have been born a Catholic" and "happened to be Catholic."  Religious affiliation is not a trivial accident, it's a lifestyle choice, and when I think of the hushed awe religious belief enjoys in this country it seems disrespectful to religion to speak of it as if it were the result of a roll of the dice of no more importance than, say, skin color.  El-Sayed reduces it to how he prays.  I wonder how he'd react if someone said that his "faith" is just a skin-deep affectation.  I know that his wife wears a headscarf, so I suspect that religion is taken just a bit more seriously than "happens to be" in his household. I don't feel threatened by his religious affiliation, since he's just adopting -- assimilating, if you will -- American liberal discourse on religion, which treats religious affiliation both as a profound and secret personal mystery and as a skin-deep consumer brand choice.

Then I saw this post from El-Sayed's campaign account:

 

This is a rhetorical move I'm all too familiar with from my fellow-boomer right-wing Facebook friends.  If Americans would spend more time on their knees, we'd be so much better off and we wouldn't have all this division and crime and twerking!  I pointed out to one such person that America is and has always been a religion-crazed country, more than most nations outside of Iran or Saudi Arabia, and that this was even more true when we were slaughtering Indians and selling slaves south to hellholes. The Confederacy was an explicitly Christian nation.  But leave ancient history out of it.  Right now the people who talk most about turning America back to God are pushing all kinds of hateful agendas.  Her response: the people in the past were thinking as men think, not as God thinks.  And if more people were on their knees today, "we wouldn't be having this conversation."  Oh, I think we would, though if she were on her knees she wouldn't be posting theocratic bullshit on Facebook, would she?

I think El-Sayed is equally full of shit.  If there's one thing that Washington DC doesn't lack, it's faith in the corridors of power.  I suppose that he would reply that what Washington has isn't real faith, not the right kind of faith -- just like my racist boomer friend thought. It's also what many liberal Democratic Christians say, like this person responding to another El-Sayed performance: "This is the way. Just as James Talarico is taking back Christianity and refusing to let the religious right define it, we need to take back capitalism and refuse to let corporatists define it."  It's not up to the government or government officials to define Christianity, but even a lot of my fellow atheists think they know what Jesus really taught and what Christianity really is, and that our government should reflect that. This is why I distrust Talarico and other liberal Christians who are waving around their religiouis beliefs on the campaign trail. Even if they happen to be right about what Jesus really taught, his teachings aren't the law in this country, thanks to the Constitution El-Sayed invoked to Thomas Teepell. I don't live in Michigan or Talarico's Texas; if I did, I would vote for them, but they're not making me feel very good about that decision.

The Training Schools of Socialism

  

I enjoy Ari's snottiness and general good sense (most of the time), and appreciate the irony of a Libertarian endorsing socialist "public" libraries, but I feel compelled to point out that "the consolidated publishing industry" is people. 

Not Everybody Agrees with Him? Really?

For some reason Morning Edition decided to interview the controversial Turkish-American streamer Hasan Piker today.  I haven't paid much attention to Piker, except to notice that the Right (in both parties) has been trying to use him to discredit the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed.  The Republicans got some unexpected publicity, however, when they showed a picture of Piker in his underwear to the attendees at their midterm convention in September, "during a video montage aimed at depicting the left as radical."

Reporter Leila Fadel didn't seem to know what to do with Piker, which is normal for NPR when it tries to deal with left-wing subjects.  In particular she tried to pick at him for being, you know, extreme, comparing him to the right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson.

PIKER: ... And, you know, I'm still very critical of Tucker Carlson because I find his worldview to be not dissimilar to the ideology that he criticizes in Israel, Zionism being an ethno-supremacist, religious supremacist ideology that...

FADEL: That's how you see it.

PIKER: ...Accepts the extermination - yes, that's how I see it. And that...

FADEL: Not everybody sees it that way.

PIKER: No, I understand. ...

I think you have to listen to the audio of this part, because Fadel whispers her responses to Piker's characterization of Israel. She's almost inaudible. Why?

Of course that's how he sees it. Of course not everybody sees it the way he sees it.  This is a surprise?  I'm reminded of antigay bigots on social media who tell gay people that we should be aware that not everybody agrees with our lifestyle - as if we didn't know that, as if it weren't what we're yelling about.  NPR, like American news media, has real trouble dealing with controversy, though with a lot more tolerance for right-wing figures.

The comparison / contrast with Carlson is one more example of centrist media's inability to deal with complexity.  They don't know what to make of Carlson's recent about-face on Israel, for example, though it's not new or surprising that people at widely different places on the political map sometimes agree on hot issues if you frame them like poll questions and don't go into their rationales.  The pseudo-philosopher Ayn Rand opposed the US war in Vietnam, for example, based on a typically incorrect explanation of US reasons -- that we invaded Southeast Asia and killed millions of people out of "altruism."  She still opposed US withdrawal, and "although Rand was a staunch opponent of the draft, for those draft dodgers who avoided military service simply because they did not want to fight communists, she stated that “not only do they not deserve amnesty, but they deserve to be sent to Russia at public expense, or North Vietnam, and stay there."  A superficial agreement on one or another political issue doesn't mean equality of opinion.

Based on this sample, I'm not interesting in giving Piker more of my attention, not even in the extended interview available on the NPR app, YouTube and elsewhere.  But to each his or her own.

The South Has Risen Again!

Jamelle Bouie posted a video about Marco Rubio's recent performance in Athens, which was another example of Jake Bacharach's dictum about the defenders of Western civilization. Other commentators have detailed Rubio's many historical inaccuracies, but Bouie latched onto this bit:

And so we tore down our monuments; we condemned our own history. 

The monuments that were torn down weren't "ours," unless you identify with the Confederacy.  Maybe Rubio does; many Americans do, as shown by the popularity of the Stars and Bars even in formerly Union states today.  Rubio's complaint reminded me of what someone posted on Facebook when Confederate monuments were being removed during Trump's first term:

Yes American should remember the history off our great nation when people fought to make are country a better place to live for all of are people do think people of our older generations would put up with the bullshit that's going on in our country?? I think not!!

As with Rubio, I wish I could believe that this person didn't confuse the Confederate rebels who tried to make slavery the law of the land with those who really did fight "to make are [sic] country a better place to live for all of are [sic] people", but I know better.  Rubio went on, by the way: "And in too many places, we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit."  "Countries" might be a typo - after all, that's how it appears in the official State Department transcript - but it's all too plausible to me that he meant the countries, plural, that our oligarchs and their children will inherit to their enrichment: Venezuela and other Latin American countries, Gaza, Greenland, etc.

This is an unwelcome reminder of how many people saw, and still remember, the demolition or removal of monuments to Confederate criminals.  It was an attack on their America. They are vaguely aware that the Civil War happened, but only vaguely.  I suspect that doublethink, the maintaining of two opposed ideas at the same time, is involved.  Maybe they think that any statue of a guy in uniform on a horse must represent a good guy who fought for "are country," regardless of which side he fought on.

Besides, it's so hard to tell which team somebody is playing for.  For example, 

in the 1990s historian H. Bruce Franklin found that most college students recognized the famous image of a prisoner being executed by a man firing a pistol inches away from the victim’s temple. But most of the students believed the shooter was a communist officer, rather than General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of the South Vietnamese national police, an American ally.

The historian Sam Wineburg showed people a 1970 news photo of US "hardhats" (construction workers) rallying in support of President Nixon and the US war against Vietnam. 

Sixty percent of students turned the picture of flag-waving hardhats into a protest against the war.*

As Wineburg commented, "Vietnam, as remembered by these youths, was a war waged without supporters."  But that may not be fair.  These youths didn't live through that period, they lived a generation later, and as Wineburg found, many Americans learned what they knew about the Sixties by watching the movie Forrest Gump.  When Ken Burns' TV series on Vietnam aired a couple of years ago, even people my own age, who were old enough to remember the war, found how little they knew about it.

Most people don't think historically, they think mythically, and "myth" doesn't necessarily mean stories with supernatural or magical content: it means stories which are structured to give meaning to the world we live in, to teach simple lessons about right and wrong.  Even when a story is more complex than that, people tend to boil it down to good guys vs. bad guys, as I realized when I read Homer's Iliad last winter  It's much more ambivalent than I thought it would be.  Before I read it, I saw some online arguments about whether it's pro-war or anti-war, with people arguing passionately on both sides of the question. I suppose both sides were partially, arguably right.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  

Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, Temple University Press, 2001.

 

Who Knows Where the Sun Goes?

I've been spending far too much time in a Theists vs. Atheists Facebook group.  In many ways it's depressing, but it also has encouraged me to sort out my thoughts in new ways.

One cliche catching on among atheists, to judge from the comments on posts in that group, is "Why should I take moral guidance from people who didn't know where the sun goes at night?"  Morality isn't based on astronomy, oddly enough, but more to the point, the sun doesn't go anywhere at night.  Maybe the problem is that clashing with religious nuts can be distracting and may nudge people to foolish positions.

To repeat, morality isn't based on astronomy or other sciences.  If knowing that the earth goes around the sun rather than vice versa makes someone more moral, why was the Nobel winner James D. Watson a lifelong racist and male supremacist?  Why did the atheist journalist Christopher Hitchen enthusiastically support Dubya's criminal invasion of Iraq?  Why are evolutionary biologists so often morally clueless?  I don't mean that they're wrong (though they are) as much as that they don't understand morality to begin with.

Theists like to point to the ubiquity of belief in gods in most human cultures as something that shows theism to be plausible.  It's not, of course, any more than the commonsense plausibility of geocentric astronomy proves that the sun really does go around the earth.  But I can imagine evolutionary psychologists conjecturing that belief in gods, being so common, might have a genetic basis. Actually I don't have to imagine it, because at least one geneticist, Dean Hamer has done it, and published a book with the title The God Gene. I haven't read it, mainly because the promotional material indicated that Hamer's as confused about religion as he is about sexuality and scientific ethics. Among the many objections I have is that religion isn't a thing that can be explained scientifically.  Anthropologists and sociologists have found that they can't define religion in a way that covers all the social phenomena that modern European Protestants call religious, or that excludes social phenomena that aren't considered religious.  (This is why it doesn't bother me when theist apologists claim that atheism is a religion too.  Yeah, so?)  It's highly unlikely, then, that a biological explanation for "religion" can be found.

Suppose, nevertheless, that some scientist did find and prove a biological cause for religion.  Biological determinists, given their record, would then want to argue that everybody should join a religion - it's in our genes!  Evolution made us, and She doesn't make trash!  You can't go against Science!  It wouldn't prove any such thing, of course, but then I could point out that atheism is a religion and I'm already religious.

Actually, I thought first of the ubiquity of women covering their hair in cultures around the world.  Like religion, it's not universal but it's common enough to make me wonder why so many cultures agree that women's nekkid heads are a problem.  As the feminist Christine Stansell wrote some years ago (quoted here):

Around the world past and present, women cover their heads before God and man. That is, they veil. A dispassionate list of veils would include nuns' cowls, saris, lace mantillas for Mass, peasant babushkas, brides' veils, church ladies' Sunday hats, the wigs and headscarves of Orthodox Jews, and the headscarf my mother (middle class, Midwestern, Protestant) threw on in the 1950s when she ran across the street to the corner store. All these forms of veiling refer, religiously or secularly, to the old idea that women have something that should be hidden. Call it modesty, or propriety; but at heart it is about the sexual shame that women incur if they reveal themselves in public. In this regard, culture and tradition may be more decisive than religious belief: my mother wore a scarf because "ladies" didn't go bareheaded in public, not because the Apostle Paul told women in the early Church to cover.

Notice that Stansell doesn't probe beneath the surface: where does this "old idea" of "sexual shame" come from?  I began wondering what fiercely anti-Muslim male atheists would say if it were proved that women veil themselves because their genes tell them to, and if a woman doesn't listen to her genes, let her be anathema!  The Apostle was, albeit unconsciously, a proto-biologist!  Since most of them aren't distinguished for their deep feminist consciousness, I'm sure they'd adjust.

I think it's worth thinking about this question because so many atheists take for granted that Science is authoritative on social and moral questions in a way that Religion no longer is. A common trope is that religion is all about control, replete with paranoid suspicions of a mysterious They who brainwash and control us.  Scientists have been all too happy to move in and take Religion's place in that area. My concern is that no one is qualified to occupy that space as Authority.  Skeptics should be readier to deploy their critical faculties against Science too. 

Using UK Civilians as Human Shields

One big story from the weekend seems to be slithering away quietly, despite Administration attempts to goose it back.

Five British men in their twenties were arrested outside the RAF airbase at Fairford, which has been used by the US as a base for attacks on Iran.  A farmer reported suspicious activity in the middle of the night, and the police moved in.  A bomb-hunting robot was brought to search the suspects' vans.  The reports I've heard do not mention that no bomb was found, perhaps out of embarrassment, only that the five suspects were released on bond.  This police official confirmed to UK news that no bombs were found, only an "accelerant."  That could mean anything from lighter fluid to cans of gasoline.  According to that clip's description, it was "a quantity of petrol."  A quantity?  How much, exactly?

The Only President We've Got was not pleased.  NPR's Morning Edition reported that Trump complained:

FRAYER: Well, President Trump initially said about the suspects, quote, "we had them under investigation," and, "we know everything about them," suggesting some sort of transatlantic intelligence collaboration.

INSKEEP: Yeah.

FRAYER: Then in the Oval Office last night, he expressed surprise when asked by reporters about the suspects' release.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Over there, I'm surprised that they released them. I wouldn't have done that. Look; they've been very good. They worked with us very closely. We know everything about them. We would not have released them.

FRAYER: Trump was also asked whether Iran is linked to these suspects. He said it might be, but he'd rather not say.

I suppose it's too much to ask of NPR to mention that Trump has established a pattern as a liar, but some skepticism is in order.  It might conceivably turn out that the US knew the suspects and had been following them, but this is the sort of thing he says routinely and then forgets, and is eventually confirmed to be fantasy if anyone bothers to follow up on it.

Correspondent Lauren Frayer continued:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio was also asked about this. He told Fox News it, quote, "clearly involves the hands of a foreign actor" but did not name a specific country. Iran, for its part, denies any involvement. The embassy here in London calls that malicious speculation.

Rubio also has a long history of lying, even when he supplies more details.  Maybe this time he wasn't, but I wouldn't count on it.  Given the events of the past seven or eight months, I'm more inclined to believe Iran over Trump or Rubio or any other US official.

What those five guys with their quantities of petrol were up to, I don't know.  I expect more facts will emerge in time, but for now the British police's comparatively (and uncharacteristically) cautious actions make it plausible that the whole thing is overblown.

I've previously expressed my opposition to free-lance guerillas taking up arms against the Machine.  Accept for the moment that these men did intend to attack the Fairford air force base.  It would not have been an act of terrorism, because military targets are legitimate targets for attack.  I've upset liberal friends by saying this in the past, and I'll say it again.  We live in a time when this is forgotten, and governments claim that the civilians they slaughter are actually not civilians at all, because they live within five hundred miles of a "terrorist" target.  If the Fairford RAF suspects turn out to have had violence on their minds, they should suffer the consequences, just as if they were regular military who were captured or killed in action.  But terrorists?  No, not from what we know now.

The Best Banned in the Land

The big story this week has been the Trump White House's retraction of press credentials to reporters from MS NOW, CNN, and Politico.  A judge issued a temporary restraining order last night, and the crews have been reinstated for now, but as one observer remarked hopefully on MS NOW today, it isn't over yet.  The order will expire in two weeks, Trump can kick out the reporters again, and the cycle will continue.

I really intended to write about this last week, but things have been hectic around here.  My first reaction to the news was to remember the independent journalist I. F. Stone's quip that being kicked out of the White House press corps during the Truman administration was the best thing that ever happened to him. He continued to work as an investigative journalist, started his own newsletter long before the Internet, blogs, and Substack, and broke numerous important stories simply by doing research.  He also said that having access to government officials was hazardous at best to journalistic integrity: you hang around with these guys, you get friendly with them, and eventually you begin to understand why it's in the interest of the public to be lied to. 

In Trump's case, he has (as some of his defenders pointed out) been much more accessible to the press than Biden or Obama.  He spars with reporters face-to-face constantly, though that produces nothing but soundbytes as far as I can see, sometimes a shocking! shocking! insult directed at a (usually female) reporter, but he has the power and can dance around, play, and simply lie at his pleasure.

Trump is certainly in the wrong.  It was funny when he slipped and declared, "I don't have to let them into my — into the people's house," but it didn't change anything.  The invocation of "national security" is transparently bogus, but the courts have generally declined to push back on that sacred value, no matter how unjustified it is, since the Nixon administration at least. 

NPR admitted: "As Trump noted, there is no constitutional or legal right that requires the president to let any particular journalist — or anyone at all — to report on federal matters from the White House grounds. The administration has argued in public statements that reporting from White House grounds is a privilege not a right."  But that works both ways: US presidents have come to take for granted that, like Jesus in the gospel of Mark, they can simply summon the multitude at whim, and a crowd will magically appear to drink up their words. Presidential access to the press is also a privilege not a right.  A clutch of news organizations - even Fox News! - banded together to withhold their microphones from Trump, with entertaining results.  The same networks ran the same video clip of Trump at a ribbon-cutting ceremony with no microphones to catch his babble, and the anchors giggled nervously at how much he must be suffering.  But the suffering was obviously mutual.  Trump still found some microphones elsewhere to speak to, and the networks ran the video.

I'm old enough to remember when the news media were wailing that Obama's disinclination to hold press conferences often enough threatened the First Amendment.  That was a nothingburger too.  I think it was on NPR earlier this week, but can't find it now, that some champion of the press fumed that journalists are professionals! who've studied for years! ... This can't be taken seriously.  Reporting is something you can learn on the job; journalism school isn't necessary.  And I don't see much payoff from those years of studies in the Washington press corps, especially those who fence with the Presidents or their proxies in front of cameras.  (Some of them do good work -- but in print, not on TV or radio. I think I've mentioned before that I listen to my NPR affiliate for its very good local news coverage, and secondarily to the national reporters only to infuriate myself out of bed in the morning.)  

The press secretaries, regardless of their party, are professional liars, and they give away very little, often nothing. There's little to choose between, say, Karine Jean-Pierre rolling her eyes like a bored teenager and Carolyn Leavitt singing the praises of her Supreme Leader; not to mention the other press handlers like Matt Miller, who couldn't help smirking as he defended killing Gazan children. At best, press secretaries are butts for comedy.  (Remember Sean Spicer and Sarah Huckabee Sanders?)  And I don't think that's enough to justify the time and expense of press interaction with them.

One, Two, Three, Many Kash Patels

This tweet, with its accompanying photograph, went viral this weekend. With any luck at all, it will cost Bo French the election for Texas Railroad Commissioner.  Even Karl Rove, Ted Cruz, and other Texas Republicans were offended, though others were reluctant even to pretend they were.  French has a long history of racist remarks, but he won the primary election for the post and has the support of the oil and gas industry.  He's borne down on this tweet, mocking his critics.

Liberals too scolded French for his bigotry.  Most of what I saw was in the "Oh, how can you say such awful things?" mode, which is fair enough, but there was little if any attempt to go beyond that and dismantle the assumptions that underlay French's tweet, which was something of a dogwhistle but obvious enough. Take this Houston public-media call-in show.  The hosts spend twelve minutes being indignant, but I expect more and better from public media.  (Not that I get it.)  French would prefer that there be no non-white students, or residents for that matter, in Texas.  From his responses to criticism, I gather that he assumes (or knows that his backers assume) that Indians and other foreigners are crowding out "American" (i.e., white) kids for admission to the University of Texas.

Politico reported, though:

Two of the students in the photo told the Dallas Morning News that they’re U.S. citizens. Most UT students are Texans — state law requires that 90% of each freshman class come from in-state — and there is no evidence that the students in the photo French posted are foreigners.

The Texas Tribune was helpful:

French said UT was “filled with foreign nationals” and argued that the school has prioritized foreign students and workers. However, under state law, 90% of UT freshmen must be in-state residents, while the remaining 10% are international students or out-of-state students. International students comprised about 4% of undergraduates in the 2025-26 school year.

UT offers automatic admission to all in-state residents in the top 5% of their high school graduating class. Under state law, 75% of UT’s freshman class must be admitted under this policy. The remaining students are admitted through a holistic process that considers factors such as grade point average, extracurriculars and personal essays.

French doesn't care about facts, of course, and I don't think most liberals do either.  But they should at least pretend to. I watched a YouTube video today on American slavery by Jamelle Bouie, in which he acknowledged a bit sheepishly that many people on all sides of American political debates don't really care much about facts, but said that it's still good to be armed with them when you encounter bad claims and arguments.  I agree.  

Remember Kash Patel's locker-room celebration with the US hockey team in May?  I do, but I'd forgotten that "In 2019, an event at a Houston stadium headlined by Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi drew over 50,000 attendees.  French’s comments could alienate those same voters, said Brendan Steinhauser, a Republican consultant in Austin."  Republican elites are quite cozy with right-wing Hindus of the sort that currently run India.  That's not why Bo French wants to run them out of Texas, of course.  Racists pretend to care that immigrants won't "assimilate."  The kids in that photo sure as hell have assimilated.

Do You Want to Know a Secret? Do You Promise Not to Tell?

Well, this is a mess. The advertised subject, "The Original Jesus Was Hidden in Mark" never turns up. Ehrman keeps getting distracted, but then I know from his podcasts that he's eminently distractable.  So is Derek the interviewer.  It makes for a toxic combination.

I've now watched a number of Bart Ehrman's podcast videos, and one or two interviews he's given other podcasters. Even on his own turf he is a poor speaker, badly organized, prone to fits of maniacal giggling. I wonder what he was like in the classroom, but the lecture he gave when he retired suggests that he can do better than he does in his podcasts. I would expect, however, based on my own experience speaking to college classes from the 1970s to the 2010s, that Erhman would have organized his thoughts on a basic and familiar topic that he must have covered in his undergraduate classes over decades. Instead he sounds as if this is all new to him and he's never talked about it before. The same applies to interviews.  Interviewers love to distract their subjects, if only because of their own ignorance, and someone who gives interviews regularly should learn how to push the discussion back in the direction he wants to go. With all due immodesty, I think I could do a better job on this topic than Ehrman did here.

But going with where Erhman let himself be led: I agree that the empty tomb is a legend; I figured that out soon after I began studying the New Testament and the scholarship in the early 1980s. I suspect that Mark invented the legend, though of course there's no evidence either way and we'll probably never know.

The stuff about "the Jews expected a military messiah and couldn't cope with Jesus being all peace-and-love-and-shit" motif was popular in mid-20th century New Testament scholarship, and I see it's still with us. It's not necessary to invoke it to explain the disciples' cognitive dissonance, though. Mark shows Jesus preaching the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God, and most scholars agree that there's no reason to think he was at odds with the normal messianic expectations of his day, though it's not certain what those were.  There's a famous old article by Morton Smith, "What Is Implied by the Variety of Messianic Figures?" (Ehrman surely knows it),* which shows that a wild variety of contradictory messianic expectations were current and not grounds for serious dispute. That article is still often cited.  According to Mark and the rest of the New Testament, Jesus expected the Kingdom to arrive with violence and the punishment of poorly-defined evildoers. But the cognitive dissonance came from the fact that the Kingdom not only didn't arrive, its announcer was crucified. (Mark's stories about Jesus predicting his death are also probably legends, as I think Ehrman would agree.)

What I was expecting from this video was some discussion of Mark's theme of secrecy around Jesus and his mission, which has been much discussed, especially since Wilhelm Wrede's 1901 book The Messianic Secret,** though Wrede has frequently been misunderstood and misrepresented. His discussion is detailed and complicated, which helps to explain the misunderstandings.  For example, he often paraphrases other scholars' attempts to explain the problems he discusses, then refutes them, so I think some of his readers mistook the paraphrases for his own position.  I'm rereading it right now, so I was interested in Ehrman's take on secrecy in Mark.  Not enough to pay money for the lecture series, though, sorry. His endless cackling and preacher-style jokes are just too annoying.

Ehrman has written about Wrede and the messianic secret on his blog, I see. I think he got it wrong, partly because of the need to simplify for his non-academic fanbase; under one of those posts, a commenter asks "Isn’t it your view that Jesus did think he was the messiah and only told his inner circle about this? So in a sense it is historical that he kept it a secret?" and Ehrman replies "Yup." I disagree, but neither of us knows for sure, because there's no reliable evidence about it.

Briefly, in Mark's gospel Jesus goes around exorcising demons and healing the sick and dying. The demons he drives out recognize him as the Son of God, and he tells them to shut up. Several though not all of his healing miracles are done privately, with only his inner group of disciples (Peter, James, John) present, and he then tells the people he's healed not to tell anyone about his work. Naturally, they tell everybody.  The more he tells them not to, the more they do it anyway.  And some of his miracles are done in public, so I don't know who he was trying to kid. The theme continues through Peter's recognition that Jesus is the messiah, which Jesus also orders to keep secret, until Jesus' triumphant entry into Jerusalem just before his arrest and execution; but he still has some secrets, like the prediction the Temple would be destroyed and he would come on clouds of glory within a generation.  Because Matthew and Luke left out most of this secrecy, I suspect that most Bible readers just assume that Jesus did everything in public; but Mark said otherwise.  If this interests you, try reading the gospel of Mark yourself - it's not very long - and pay attention to its depiction of Jesus' secrecy.

Another motif Wrede discussed that I think is important is Mark's frequent alternation between Jesus teaching his disciples in private and Jesus teaching the crowds in public. No matter where he is - in town, by the sea, on a mountaintop - Jesus will suddenly interrupt himself and call the crowd to him, as though hundreds of people were waiting to be summoned and then dismissed.  As Wrede said, this is not plausible or possible, and it shows that Mark isn't writing history but a sort of drama.  My favorite example, though I don't remember if Wrede mentions it, is in Mark chapter 13.  Jesus has taken Peter and James and John and Andrew aside on the Mount of Olives and predicted the bad times to come. Mark (I suppose, but it could be Jesus, why not?) interjects "Let the reader understand" at 13:14 about "the abomination of desolation" that will be set up in the Temple, and finally warns in verse 37, "What I say to you I say to all: Watch."  The crowd is always there, out of earshot but ready to come running at a moment's notice.

The theme of secrecy is bigger than these details, though. Dramatic irony runs throughout Mark, and to some extent through all the gospels. That is, the reader knows from the beginning who Jesus is, and how the story will turn out; but the people, the disciples, the priests and the Pharisees and the scribes, don't know.  Think of Sophocles' Oedipus: the audience knows from the beginning of the play who Oedipus is, what he did and what it all means, but the characters in the play don't.  Mark tells the reader too (1:1, RSV): "The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God."  No surprises there!

In The Cost of Authority (Fortress Press, 1982), Graham Shaw suggested (I think reasonably) that Mark's stress on secrecy may have reflected his own intention (p. 189): 

It was, for example, never intended to be printed, so that everyone might have a copy. The stress on the esoteric within the book suggests that access to the text may itself have been a privilege which the reader could not take for granted. Although it very quickly acquired a public use in the new Christian community, ... a much more private use may have been the original intention.  The injunction 'let the reader understand' (13.14) seems to envisage an individual rather than a colletive audience... The phrase in ch. 13 already quoted assumes that the reader will come to the text well furnished with a knowledge of Christian lore. 

I like this, but I'm not sure about it.  While Mark does stress the esoteric, he also is revealing those secrets, publicizing them, letting the reader into the privileged circle of them who know.  To this day people write similar books; the Amazon algorithm points me to them daily.  These secrets were hidden for thousands of years from everyone but the Elect, but now I am revealing them to you for the price of this book!  

Remember that the Greek word apokalypsis means "revelation," and that Mark includes some typically apocalyptic material.  I still think that Mark could be classified as an apocalyptic book like Daniel, Enoch, or the New Testament Revelation.  One of the things it has in common with Daniel and Enoch is the motif that these truths were kept hidden, secret, sealed until now, which explains why they weren't known before, but also implies that the End has arrived.  The New Testament book of Revelation is different on that: John is told not to seal up the book (Revelation 22:19, RSV): "And [the angel] said to me, 'Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is near.'"  Oops!  Well, nobody's perfect.

Matthew and Luke threw open the doors, which indicates a change in the knowledge ordinary Christians were allowed or expected to have. (And not only Christians: by the mid-second century, hostile educated pagans wrote attacks on Christianity based on some knowledge of Christian writings.)  If so, it happened fast, like other developments in early Christianity that we'll never be able to reconstruct now but which are visible in the New Testament writings. Paul, for example, also refers to esoterica in his letters.  Later on, the Gospel of Thomas would begin, "These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down." As with Mark, we're entitled to ask how secret those teachings were by the time they were written down.  This is the sort of stuff I thought Ehrman would touch on in this interview.  No such luck.  But maybe only the truly worthy are given to know the original Jesus who's hidden in Mark.

No, wait: I don't really mean that. For one thing, I see no reason to believe that Mark knew anything about "the original Jesus", and Ehrman probably would agree, so the title is a misleading come-on. That's complicated by the fact that at times Mark, or some of his sources, show accurate information about first-century Judaism.  That's why this MythVision video is so frustrating: like Mark, Ehrman promises to reveal "the original Jesus hidden in Mark," but it's just a tease.

If, as most scholars think, the gospel of Mark was the first of the four to be written down, its success indicates that it found a market and an audience rather quickly.  Very soon afterward, the authors of Matthew and Luke produced new, improved gospels based on Mark's outline, which overtook it in popularity.  Mark was bumped down to second place, after Matthew, in the emerging canon.  More imitators followed, and "gospel" came to mean a particular kind of book about Jesus.  (Similarly, the success of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings made it the three-volume template for many imitators.)  I don't think the author of Mark foresaw that.

----

*Journal of Biblical Literature 78 (1959): 66-72. 

** English translation published by James Clarke & Co., 1971.

A Diller, A Dollar, A Ten O'Clock Scholar

  

By Grabthar's Hammer, these two are insufferable.  But I see from the comments that many find them adorable.

I'll concede the necessity of providing a general background, but it takes Ehrman far too long to get to the ostensible subject of the video, and then he sort of dances around it in a way that will probably just confuse most of his audience.  If I were going to try to answer the question of whether Paul was an eyewitness to the resurrection of Jesus, I think I'd begin by explaining who Paul was, what he said about the resurrection, compare it to the accounts in Acts, and if there was time, maybe compare the gospels.

There is some useful information here, scattered among the giggling and smirking: the research on memory and eyewitnesses Ehrman refers to, especially, which he wrote about in Jesus Before the Gospels, one of his better books.  I find it hard to believe he spent two years boning up on it, it sounds like a pastor's exaggeration to me, and he's so disorganized that I wonder how many viewers will be able to follow what he's talking about.  (I encountered some of the literature on memory in the 1990s, in the wake of the Ritual Satanic Abuse scare, and much on the Jesus tradition before the gospels in the 1980s and afterward.)  

One thing that has long bugged me is the inexactness of "the resurrection" in Christian discussion of the subject.  It seems to me that it should refer specifically to the restoration of Jesus' body to life on the Sunday after his crucifixion, and by extension to his visits with his followers immediately afterward. In that sense there were no witnesses to the resurrection, at least according to the gospels. (Interestingly, the non-canonical Gospel of Peter depicts the disciple Simon Peter watching as Jesus or a symbolic avatar is carried out of the tomb.  That gospel is not recognized by any church today, and the only existing copy dates from several centuries after Jesus' death.  Some scholars speculate that it may draw on earlier traditions, but nobody knows.)  But after awhile I realized that Christians, including scholars, used "resurrection" to refer to the cosmic fact of Jesus' victory over death, in which his raising is almost incidental. The empty tomb is equated with the resurrection, though it's not the same thing. 

"Witness" has a similar vagueness.  It refers not only to someone who saw the risen Jesus but to anyone at any time afterward who testified that the resurrection had happened.  "Witness" and "testify" (not to mention the Greek martyr, which means "witness" and didn't originally denote someone who died for his or her beliefs) are basically synonyms.  Someone who testifies that he believes that Christ was raised is also a witness to the resurrection, even centuries later.

"Eyewitness" at least seems more exact, though again, no one actually was an eyewitness to Jesus getting up from the slab, shedding his grave wrappings, and emerging (nekkid?) from the tomb. They were eyewitnesses to the appearances (another interestingly vague word) of the risen Lord.  Although the gospels stress the fleshly, meaty substantiality of his risen body, the risen Jesus flits around the vicinity of Jerusalem, popping in and out of locked rooms, sometimes recognized by his followers and sometimes not. According to Paul in I Corinthians 15, however, the risen body was not and could not be of flesh, but of spirit.

So, what about Paul?  One frustrating thing about him is that in his letters he's very coy about his witness to the resurrected Jesus.  Maybe he said more when he was making converts and founding his churches.  In I Corinthians 15 he says he's reminding them of what he preached to them:

3 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. 8 Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. 

When I first sat down and compared Paul with the resurrection stories in the gospels, I was startled by the differences.  He doesn't mention Mary Magdalene, and only Luke among the gospels mentions Jesus appearing to Peter ("Cephas" comes from the Aramaic for "rock," as "Peter" comes from the Greek, so most scholars believe that Paul is referring to Peter here).  That's odd if Mark's gospel was written from Peter's preaching, as tradition claims; maybe Peter was just too modest ever to mention it?

The Twelve can probably be harmonized with appearances to the Eleven in the gospels, since Judas was no longer with them, but this too is a strange lapse.  Didn't Paul know about Judas?  Some scholars think that the betrayal of Jesus by Judas is a later legend, and I agree, but no one knows.  The appearance to "more than five hundred brothers at one time" has been getting some attention lately from fundamentalist YouTubers, but it's more of an embarrassment: why do none of the gospels mention it?  According to Acts, all of the brothers present after Jesus' ascension into Heaven numbered 120.  What happened to the other 380?

"James" is generally thought to be the brother of Jesus.  Again, this appearance isn't mentioned in any of the gospels or in Acts, though in Acts 15 this James is an authoritative figure in the Jerusalem church.  "All the apostles" is confusing, aside from the fact that it doesn't appear elsewhere either. How many apostles were there?

And then, Paul says, Jesus appeared to him.  As Ehrman asks rhetorically in the video, how did Paul know it was Jesus?  He could have asked the same question about Ananias of Damascus, to whom Jesus appeared "in a vision" in Acts 9 after he appeared to Paul. (So Paul wasn't "last of all" after all.)  Ehrman tosses out several possibilities, none of which seems plausible to me.  In Acts Jesus tells Paul who he is, and would Jesus lie?  (That sort of circularity is popular among apologists.)  Maybe more to the point, does a vision count as "eyewitness"?  Acts isn't a reliable source, but Paul is no help either.

Paul says he "received" the list of resurrection appearances.  Where, from whom, did he receive it?  Most scholars assume that he received it from Peter and James when he met them in Jerusalem.  There are several reasons why this isn't a good answer, such as how Paul preached this stuff during the long period after his conversion but before he went to Jerusalem.  Paul insists in Galatians that he received his gospel directly from Jesus, by revelation.  Even fundamentalists are reluctant to take him at his word, for some reason. Don't they believe that the risen Lord could instruct Paul personally?  I don't, but I'm an infidel.

Again, we'll never know.  I've noticed before that Paul says he "received" his version of the Eucharist, the Christian communion meal, from "the Lord," and again I take him at his word, that this is what he believed even if I don't.  Interestingly, though, his version agrees closely, almost word for word, with the versions in the synoptic gospels. (Mark, Luke, and Matthew.)  Maybe Paul and the gospel writers drew on the same branch of tradition.  If that's the case, then why are their accounts of the resurrection so wildly, impossibly different?  I've been wondering lately if the gospels based their accounts of the Eucharist on Paul's, but if so, why did they ignore his list of resurrection appearances?  I mean "ignore" deliberately: they knew it but didn't feel bound to follow it.  Oral tradition varies a great deal in how well it preserves material.  Sometimes a story will be passed along verbatim very accurately, while other stories are changed freely.  That might have happened here.

I also wonder why Ehrman in his videos seems to be talking about his topics almost for the first time, as if these issues wouldn't have come up often in the courses he taught for decades.  It seems to be his shtick, and I find it annoying. If I were new to biblical studies, I think I would find it confusing and unhelpful.  Judging by the comments, I'm not sure that many of his fans really follow him.  They're impressed by his credentials, which are certainly real enough, and by his opposition to fundamentalist Christianity, but they  seem to miss a lot of what he says, and miss that his positions are as much at odds with their liberal, feel-good vision of Christianity as they are with conservative evangelicals'.  Like C. S. Lewis's fans, they bask in the aura of his superior learning; it's not vital that they themselves learn.

What Can You Say About an Old Lady Who Died?

Dolly Parton died today at the age of eighty. Her nephew and security chief Bryan Seaver announced it in a moving video on behalf of her family.  He says Parton asked him to do it several years ago. That impressed me, because it suggests that Parton planned ahead, aware of her mortality before it really caught up with her.  Maybe she'd had some health scares even then? There were bursts of publicity in the past year when she had to cancel appearances, but she always minimized them in her public statements. Probably that was a good idea; she was always a canny manipulator of her image.

Many people, predictably, are going nuts. One old friend of mine, a highly educated and intelligent person in her sixties, wailed on Facebook that she'd believed Dolly would live forever, and said Willie Nelson should be wrapped in cellophane bubble-wrap to protect him.  To be fair, she's dealing better with her own mother's failing health, having just moved her to a closer care facility as her memory gets worse.  I suspect that people are more realistic about the people they are close to and must care for, while celebrities just aren't real to them and they can fantasize that they're immortal. I shudder to think what will happen to her when her idol Bruce Springsteen (age 76) buys the farm.

I've written before about this, how people refuse to let their heroes go, when I saw the mass tantrums over Nelson Mandela's long decline. 

For years before [his death], he had "retired from retirement" because of his failing health.  2013 was a morbid death watch, the way millions of people panicked every time Mandela went into the hospital.  At 95, after a very long life of public service, I'd have thought he had earned the right to rest.  But people still wanted a piece of him, and wanted him to go on living no matter what.  They saw this craving as love, but I think it was something else.  Selfishness is when you let your wishes override the wishes of another person, and I think that selfishness was the dominant emotion in those who wanted Mandela, or anyone else, to be kept alive forever, no matter what.

Robin Williams was another morbid case.  I know people who are still obsessed with him. 

My friend is a Parton fan, and I'm not.  I like some of her music, but country has never done much for me.  What mattered to me was that Parton transcended her background, wandering beyond country as she pleased, while insisting that she was just a simple country girl all along. I will always wonder how much of that was a conscious act, though it doesn't really matter.  Her philanthropy is also important - as a reader I naturally admired her books for kids initiative, and will forever hate my state's governor, for cutting off funding to it. (I know, others did too.)  It didn't really affect the program, it was more a show of allegiance to Trump and his own MAGA base.  Parton's openness and humanity is her legacy.  I expect we'll see more of her planning in the days and years to come; she didn't let death take her by surprise. But like all of us, she was never going to live forever.  I'm seventy-five myself, my health is tolerably good, but I know my days are numbered.  I need to do some more planning myself.

In one of those meaningless coincidences that make life interesting, Parton's death was announced just as I was coming to the end of David Lodge's 2008 novel Deaf Sentence.  Lodge died last year at the age of 90, which I didn't know until I looked him up just now.  The protagonist of Deaf Sentence is a retired professor of linguistics in his 60s. He's progressively losing his hearing and the novel is largely about his struggle to adjust.  But it's also about mortality and the meaning of life.  The protagonist encounters a young American graduate student who's studying the rhetoric of suicide notes.  His first marriage ended in his wife's death of cancer, and he's caring for his elderly father; he makes a lot of dad jokes about deafness, playing on the word's closeness to death, such as I had not known deaf had undone so many, and of course the novel's title. In many ways it's a dark, disturbing book, but it has Lodge's typical humanity and humor.  I was annoyed when I read a recent review of another novelist's survey of The Novel, who singled Lodge out as an especially bad novelist.  I disagree vehemently, but then I don't much care, and Deaf Sentence is a reason why, apart from the fact that I happened to read it at an appropriate time.

P.S.:

 

Vote DSA All the Way

This week's batch of primary elections had some promising outcomes.  I'll start with Missouri, a red state. Cori Bush was decisively defeated for the Democratic congressional nomination from St. Louis by Wesley Bell. It wasn't a rejection of a progressive, because Bell is also apparently progressive, but he had AIPAC support, so Bush's Israel-critical stance took a hit. 

More important, though, two proposed amendments to the state constitution were rejected by Missouri voters.  Amendment 4 would have made it much harder for citizen-based ballot initiatives to amend the state constitution; this was an effort by Republican elites to block initiatives they find distasteful - for example, to expand Medicaid or protect abortion rights in the state. Voters defeated it, roughly 82-17%. Amendment 5 would have abolished the state income tax; it too went down in flames, 83-16%.

MSNBC commentators, including the obnoxious Rachel Maddow, exulted over this result.  They were delighted that Missouri voters had slapped back at the Republican leadership and insisted on People Power.  Fair enough; I agree.  This was, however, on Tuesday night, when the results of another closely-watched primary were still uncertain, in Michigan.  Here too, party elites and special-interest money had played a major role with the aim of defeating Abdul El-Sayed, who was running against Haley Stevens for the Democratic Senate nomination.  El-Sayed is not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, but he ran on a strongly progressive platform and is vehemently critical of Israel's war crimes and US support for them.  Stevens notoriously said "Israel comes to me in my dreams", is strongly supportive of Israel, and received massive campaign donations from AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups. She outspent Sayed by a factor of 9 to 1. Liberal Democrats supported her and attacked El-Sayed harshly as a communist, an anti-Semite and an Islamist. But he defeated Stevens anyway, though very narrowly, by one percentage point.  I don't know whether Rachel Maddow is as happy about this outcome as she was of the one in Missouri, but as a matter of principle she ought to be.

Progressives did well elsewhere in Michigan; there's a good discussion here.  The funniest upset involved a Trump-approved Republican who lost by double digits to a competitor who had stopped campaigning weeks ago.  The winner said he'll accept the nomination and run in the general election this November.

Mainstream Democratic celebrities have moved to pledge support to El-Sayed's campaign. Haley Stevens herself has taken the high road; good for her.  Kamala Harris even sent out a fund-raising letter to her list to try to piggy-back on his success.  "It is so important that Abdul enters the general election with a strong start," the letter says.  This is perhaps unfortunate rhetoric, given that Harris's 2024 campaign also had a strong start, with a huge war chest; I hope that El-Sayed will have learned from Harris's mistakes.

Harris's letter also mentions that Republican attacks on El-Sayed have "already begun."  True, but so have right-wing Democratic attacks from the usual scum.  CNN aired an attack interview with him. He calmly batted aside the purity-test questions. Comments under that post, ostensibly from Democrats, are the kind of bigoted froth that was aimed at Zohran Mamdani, and at El-Sayed himself during the campaign; "communist", "mandatory Quran classes in elementary school," "Russian agents but little investigation into it due to fear." Some are probably from MAGA and some are bots, but some are clearly from Democrats.

Democratic Congressman Dan Goldman of New York complained: "All three of us who lost in NYC had very progressive records (including supporting Medicare for All) and we all had the overwhelming support of actual working families — labor unions, public housing residents and immigrant communities."  That's interesting, because I can remember when supporting Medicare for All marked you out as a radical Marxist, and reasonable Democrats pledged to block it.

It's true, supporting Israel is no longer a safe position for Democrats, and even Republicans are less enthusiastic than they used to be. Now we're going to see how firmly Democrats will hew to "Vote Blue No Matter Who."  Some of the terminally online are ready to jettison it and have been since Mamdani won his primary, though I don't know how representative they are.  But I've seen enough frenzied accusations that El-Sayed and Mamdani are communists from Democrats I know personally to feel sure that a significant number of them yearn to make common cause with MAGA. MAGA-adjacent? MAGA-lite?  MAGA-curious?  Whatever you call them, they're a blight in the party, and in the country.  Meanwhile, though I'm gratified by leftish victories, most of them are just primaries. The generals are yet to come.

Garbage In, Gospel Out

[I hope that the clip I've embedded here from Facebook shows up; I'm trying to find it on YouTube and will replace it if I can. Failing that, I'll transcribe it later.]

I don't think that Brian Cox, who appears to be Britain's moptop answer to Neil DeGrasse Tyson, is fully responsible for this clip, at least not for the computer animations.  But the words appear to be his.

From one perspective I agree with him: he's addressing people who think that we live in an "advanced" society, and pointing out that compared to where human technology may go in a millennium, we're not all that.  But "advanced" is a relative term.  We are advanced compared to societies where human and sometimes other animals' muscles did all the work, where communication consisted of messages carried orally, or in one jump, in written form by human messengers. But what celebrant of Science doesn't know that, or hasn't imagined the far greater glories to come?  It's been a common trope of speculative fiction since the 19th century.

It's hilarious that so many of my fellow atheists jeer at the fantasies of Bronze Age goat herders that theists believe in, and then turn around and say "Look at this amazing imaginary civilization I made up, with computer animation to look real! I even have multiple categories of imaginary civilizations! This proves that I am smarter than Bronze Age goatherds with imaginary friends!" One way to get perspective on this is to look at scientific projections from 1900 or even 1950 of what the year 2000 would look like.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that other people who objected to Cox's spiel in comments under the clip, in the same terms I do. It wouldn't be as funny if Cox didn't talk about Type 3 Civilizations as if they exist. They don't, so he comes across like a Christian revivalist talking about the glories of the Kingdom of Heaven that await those whom God loveth. You think the riches of this world are something special? Compared to the shining garments prepared for you in the world to come, your so-called riches are but filthy rags!  

The fantasy Cox explores here is known as the Kardashev scale, proposed by a Soviet astronomer in the 1960s but boosted by Carl Sagan in the 1970s. According to the Wikipedia article, Sagan "found that the differences between the types Kardashev identified were so great that they did not allow for the best possible modeling of the evolution of civilizations. Consequently, Sagan proposes a more refined classification, still based on Kardashev's types, but integrating intermediate levels using the following logarithmic interpolation formula."  It's probably not fair to theology to say this, but this is theology, like disputing the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.  But then, Modern Science emerged from religion and magic, and it's hasn't left its origins behind.

Ba-ba-ba, Bar-bar-i-Ann

I just read this book (published by St. Martin's Press, 2012) and found it very interesting, but thought it missed something. It follows the history of the idea of "the savage" from ancient Greece to the present-day West, and for one thing someone should look at ideas of foreign barbarians in the East; what stereotypes did the Chinese, for example, have of outsiders?

 

The Greeks were of two minds about barbarians, though. On the one hand they were dirty and violent and lawless and hairy; on the other hand they were clean and pure and much happier than so-called "civilized" Greeks. This contradiction runs through the idea's later history. 

 

"Idea" is important because the Greeks knew nothing about distant peoples and just made up what they thought they were like.  According to the Greek historian and geographer Herodotus,

The farther one moved from Greece toward the distant edges of the world, the more strange and different are the lands and life-forms encountered there. Thus, Greece, Herodotus confidently tells his audience, sits at the stable center of the world, with “far the best and most temperate climate.” The most distant lands, he says, will likely have those things the Greeks think the finest and the rarest. He follows this ancient mythic geographic schema of distance determining the degree of cultural and geographical divergence from the comforting Greek norm at the center of the world throughout the Histories. The most remote lands also are where the strangest and most primitive tribes of fierce and ennobled savages are found. Nearer at hand are barbaric peoples, the nomadic livestock breeders, like the Scythians to the north, who are less savage but still practice ritual forms of cannibalism typical of highly uncivilized barbarians. Closest to Greece are those barbarians who are more or less civilized like the Greeks, with more or less sophisticated customs and belief systems.

The Romans took over this schema verbatim, though they knew of distant civilizations like China.  It persisted through the Christianization of the Roman Empire. After the European invasion of the Americas, European thinkers simply carried over ancient stereotypes to the native peoples there. They were lawless and cruel, always at war, and had no conception of property, therefore European Christians were justified in killing them, enslaving them, and taking their land. This was at a time when European Christians were constantly at war with each other, torturing and executing offenders in public, and were busily trying to steal each other's land and property. Down to modernity, they also invaded other civilizations that had laws and property, from the Middle East to the Pacific Ocean. (Just as the Greeks and Romans had.)  By that time, when Europeans had explored the entire world, it was no longer plausible to fantasize one-eyed people who walked upside down, and the main criterion for conquest was that a country wasn't Christian - though again, this didn't stop Christian countries from invading each other.  What's going on here is projection: by describing the savage, the barbarian, we are describing ourselves.  

And the mentality is still with us:

Think of all the different ways twenty-first-century politicians, military generals, and talking heads on cable news programs draw on a language of savagery to describe the West’s violent, dangerously opposed enemies in the “primitive” mountain ranges and “tribally controlled” territories of Afghanistan or Pakistan. People over there are stuck in the “Stone Age”; they are possessed of a “medieval” mentality. A distinctively Westernized language of savagery, dating all the way back to the ancient Greeks and their civilization-defining conflicts with the “barbarian” hordes of the Persian Empire, might have something to do with where these mental pictures in our heads originated.

I did some online searches, and it appears that the Chinese also had a concept that gets translated as "barbarians."  I doubt they got it from Herodotus. I don't believe "these mental pictures in our heads" originated with the Greeks, and I don't think they would have survived if people hadn't found them congenial.  I wouldn't go so far as to say that they're innate, but they're definitely ubiquitous, and probably older than the invention of writing; we just can't trace them farther back in time. It's probably useless to try to find an oridin of the idea in time; we reinvent it in every era.

Savage Anxieties is still a valuable work, though.  It goes well with Stefanos Geroulanos' The Invention of Prehistory (Norton, 2024), which shows European intellectuals and scientists similarly making up prehistoric humans based on fantasy, since they had no real evidence about their lives and cultures, in terms derived from Greek and Roman inventions about savages and barbarians.

Dad Always Liked You Best!

Recently another commenter under a Bart Ehrman video on YouTube told me irritably to read Henri Nouwen's book on the parable of the prodigal son. I don't know what he thought it would prove. The question, if I remember right, was whether Jesus thought that sin had to be atoned for through sacrifice. Ehrman thinks not, and that the material in the gospels which teaches atonement is a later accretion to Jesus' actual teaching. I'm not persuaded, for reasons I'll try to go into some other time, but I kept Nouwen in mind because a gay evangelical Christian article I read a couple of years ago mentioned him as a conciliatory voice on homosexuality and the church. I'd also picked up somewhere indications that Nouwen himself was gay, though closeted. Wikipedia assures us that he never did anything, though.

I didn't try to track down Nouwen's book right away, but one day I was rereading an article by one of my favorite New Testament scholars, Dennis Nineham, rebutting a critique of his work by another scholar.

... Edwards accuses me of ignoring the parable of the prodigal son as evidence for the meaning of Jesus' teaching.  In arguing that the connotations of the word 'father' were different in the time of Jesus from what they are now - a contention with which he seems to agree in his essay on John Bowden - I have, he says, ignored the evidence of the parable.  He must know that a plausible case has recently been made out for questioning whether the parable goes back to Jesus. (See John Drury, The Parables of the Gospels, 1985, which also gives grounds whether the parable of the good Samaritan goes back to Jesus - a question relevant to [Edwards'] p. 194. This book was reviewed by Edwards.)  In any case this is of all parables one of the hardest to interpret; Professor C. F. Evans, for example, has listed a number of conflicting interpretations.  Even if the one Edwards seems implicitly to choose is the right one, it by no means follows that the 'glimpse of home life' it affords is 'typical', or that the teaching of the parable, so interpreted, is 'not untypical' of the teaching of Jesus.  These are simply ipse dixits.*

At this point, let me admit that a plausible case can be made for questioning whether any individual parable goes back to Jesus, though the reverse is also true. Since the person who commended Nouwen's book to me was commenting under a video by a critical scholar who doesn't assume that everything in the gospels goes back to Jesus, however, I think it's fair to bring up the question. Just pointing to one parable that only one of the four gospels contains doesn't settle anything.  That there are numerous conflicting interpretations is also normal in the field; I suspect the other commenter didn't know this and assumed that there could be no question about what the parable means.  Anyway, Nineham's remarks nudged me to find a copy of Nouwen's The Return of the Prodigal Sun and read it.

The parable of the prodigal son is in Luke 15:11-32.  Briefly, a wealthy man's younger son asked to be given his share of his inheritance so he could go and seek his fortune.  Granted his wish, he went away "to a distant country," where he fell into dissipation, drinking and partying with loose women. When his money ran out he had to work tending swine.  Finally he resolved to go home and beg his father to take him in. His father welcomed him and ordered a celebration. His older brother was working in the fields, and no one bothered to tell him of his brother's return.  When he came in he complained, and his father tried to reassure him: "Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.  But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found."  The end.

Now on to Henri Nouwen (1932-1996), a Dutch-born Roman Catholic priest.  I didn't dig deeply into his biography, just looked over his Wikipedia page, so I don't know how he became a celebrity cleric.  He wrote numerous books and traveled widely, taught at Harvard, Yale, the University of Notre Dame. If you're curious, you can find YouTube videos of his rather overwrought preaching style.

The Return of the Prodigal Son, published in 1992, is an odd book. In particular Nouwen focuses more on Rembrandt's painting of that name than on Luke's text. Someone showed him a print of the painting and he became obsessed with it. Eventually in the 1980s he was able to travel to the Soviet Union and see the original in the Hermitage there. Ordinarily tourists weren't supposed to dawdle in front of the painting, but thanks to some personal connections he was allowed to spend several hours looking at it, even getting a chair to sit in.  At this point I began to get annoyed with Nouwen's poor-little-me shtick, as if he was just a nobody who got a special privilege because of his purity of spirit, which the Hermitage guards generously detected. In fact he was a celebrity with an avid support network. Not that there's anything wrong with that!

It's a theme that runs through the book.  The Wikipedia article says that he "was known to suffer from loneliness and a need for interpersonal connection, which he wrote about openly."  Not surprising that it was "known," then, but most people need interpersonal connection.  At one point he writes, "I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found."  I can't take this very seriously, since he reports many people who gave him unconditional love. It seems to me that Nouwen was one of those people who suffer from what one wise writer called a spiritual vitamin deficiency, and who rebuff the kindness and love they are offered; but it's never enough. I sympathize with him, and recognize that his reactions were out of his conscious control, but the constant whining got tiresome as I read the book.**

Much of Nouwen's discussion of the parable centers around his struggle to make Luke's version agree with Rembrandt's. The painting shows the prodigal on his knees in his father's embrace, while a man who seems to be his brother looks on with displeasure. (There's ongoing debate among art historians and critics about who the different figures in the painting are supposed to represent. Is one woman who looks on impassively supposed to be the mother, for example?)  According to Luke, as I mentioned, the brother was at work in the fields when he showed up, and in fact the father saw the youth coming "while he was still far off," so he ran out to embrace and kiss him. Of course it's not unusual to shift things around when adapting a written story to a visual mode, but Nouwen seems very puzzled by it.  He seems to think that if he tries hard enough he can resolve the differences, but also that the painting takes precedence over Luke's original.

Nouwen seems determined to wring every drop of meaning he can from the parable, on every level, which is a traditional Catholic approach to Scripture.  The most obvious, I think, is the idea that Man has wandered wickedly away from his loving Father in order to wallow in sin, but God is waiting to welcome us back and kill the fatted calf for us if only we'll give up our selfish pride. The idea that God is actively looking for us, like a shepherd looking for a lost sheep, turns up elsewhere in the gospels. Nouwen seems much more interested in individual psychology, though: his obsession with finding unconditional love, his personal reluctance to be enfolded in the Father's embrace, and of course trying to join Luke's story with Rembrandt's painting. The most interesting part of The Return of the Prodigal Son for me was Nouwen's move from the prodigal's perspective to his father's to the elder brother's. I don't think Luke had that possibility in mind, but it's a fair approach.

The elder brother is the fly in the parable's ointment, not just for Nouwen but for most Christian interpreters.  If the point was just that God sits up waiting for us to return to him, it would be simple, but Luke complicates it.  It seems to me that the brother has a valid complaint: not only did his father take him for granted, not showing his love for him, but when the prodigal came home, the father forgot to tell him to hurry in and join the celebration: he let him go on working dutifully in the fields. (Nouwen only notices this as a discrepancy between Luke's version and Rembrandt's.) If he hadn't come back at all, would the father have noticed? Nouwen brushes aside the brother's complaint, as the father does. I don't think it's reading too much into the parable to guess that the prodigal was always the favorite.  In a human father, this would be all-too-human, but since the father represents God, he shouldn't get off as easily: he's neglecting those who love him for those who don't.  There's a parable in Matthew of a wealthy man hiring day laborers, who pays those who worked least the same as those who worked all day.  When those who worked more complain, the boss reminds them that he's the boss and he can do what he likes.  The first will be last, and the last will be first!  True enough, but it's not just or fair, and as even some Christian interpreters have pointed out, good luck with hiring workers tomorrow morning, buddy!

So one of the standard Christian readings of the parable of the prodigal son is that the elder brother represents Israel and the younger brother represents the gentiles who are being grafted into the Kingdom by Christ.  But this also implies that God has deliberately neglected his faithful people, fretting for centuries over the ones who got away. It fits with other of Jesus' reported teachings, such as that as a physician he was needed by the sick, not the healthy. But I thought that the Jews, far from being healthy, were the sickest, a bunch of wicked hypocrites, and therefore needed him at least as much. For Nouwen, as for Christian interpreters generally, it seems that the elder brother should have shut up and accepted his second-best status, grateful that his loving father didn't have him thrown onto the trash heap along with the other sinners.

The strangest of Nouwen's excursions is his claim that

I am touching here the mystery that Jesus himself became the prodigal son for our sake. He left the house of his heavenly Father, came to a foreign country, gave away all that he had, and returned through his cross to his Father’s home. All of this he did, not as a rebellious son, but as the obedient son, sent out to bring home all the lost children of God.

I have no idea where Nouwen got this "mystery."  Jesus in Christian mythology and theology was the willing agent of his Father, not a rebel. But this bit of wackery reminded me that the Jesus of the gospels was a rebellious son to his earthly parents. When, as a boy, he stayed behind in the Temple after Passover (Luke 2:41-52) and his parents found him discussing Torah with the "doctors," Mary told him "Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you."  He retorted that obviously he was "about my Father's business."  That was a slap in their faces.  According to the gospels he continued to reject those who'd raised this cuckoo in their nest, and to teach his followers to hate their parents (Luke 14:26).

Which makes me wonder how this theme relates to the prodigal son. I remember one Christian scholar who speculated that Jesus got his teaching about a loving Heavenly Father from the loving example of Joseph. I speculate that Jesus rejected his parents and invented a loving Heavenly Father who sighed to press him to his bosom and would make him feel as special as he wanted to feel. When he said to call no man father, only your father in heaven, I think he meant it.  Maybe his birth parents weren't so loving - we'll never know.  But sentimental fantasies about his upbringing just don't fit with the stories the gospels tell. (For what it's worth, Nouwen admits that his own earthly father was kind and supportive.)

To recap, the commenter who told me to read Nouwen did so under a Bart Ehrman video where Ehrman rejected the doctrine of atoning sacrifice and assumed that Jesus did too. The prodigal son was relevant because no sacrifice was required (what about the fatted calf, though?), just repentance. Ehrman has gone on to claim that Jesus "hated" atonement.  I wouldn't make too much of this myself.  After all, the gospels also show Jesus forgiving sins without demanding repentance (Mark 2:5ff), and some of the calls for repentance may well be later additions, just as the talk about atonement may be. While Nouwen's interpretations aren't without interest, they don't settle anything, especially since they spring from his personal hangups.

* David Edwards et al., Tradition and Truth: The Challenge of England's Radical Theologians 1962-1989 (Hodder & Stoughton, 1989), p. 298. Ipse dixit, by the way, is Latin for "he said it himself," meaning "an assertion made but not proved."

** As another very wise man once said, "Perhaps what you need ... is a good facial."