You know, I love the way that science works, whereby things are only ever disproven, not proven. This's very powerful. It just occurred to me, as I was having supper w/ my beautiful wife, that not only are (Christian) fundamentalists wrong, but we know they're wrong. Pope Benedict has recently said that the Bible's statements shouldn't be taken as "scientific" statements describing a literal truth, and here he points at Gensis specifically. In my case, I don't have a particular gripe with Genesis per se, and, while I applaud his statement, I think there's a better tack to take as regards falling into the fundamentalist error. This error is at the crux of Protestantism, the idea that anyone should be able to read the Bible, when it was never meant as literal truth (including the Revelations of John of Patmos being included in the canonical books only w/ the specific understanding that they not be taken literally). An unfortunate result of the otherwise laudible democratization of Bible-readership, though, is exemplified by the Left Behind series and all the Apocalyptarian horse-manure from which it's grown. We all know that the King James Bible is not, in fact, a literal translation, but a poetic one. But, even if we didn't have the historical facts that point to this (and I don't have them at my fingertips to cite them), the translation is immaterial: the stories are not all factually true in the scientific sense. My counterexample, which I raise to the fundamentalists, comes thanks to good old Bill Cosby. I was thinking about his story of Noah and bringing in all the animals two-by-two--his joke goes to the difficulty of selecting one each male and female mosquito. It's a funny dialog. The thing is, though, that there is only one (vertibrate) animal species on the planet that has decended from a single male-female pair: cheetas. The genetic record conclusively demonstrates that cheetas suffered a total genetic bottleneck, but they're the ONLY animals we're aware of, humans included, for which this can be shown. All other (vertibrate) animal species alive today have groups of breeding pairs as their ancestors, or came down to such near-extinction during more recently recorded history. It's not that other species might be found to have had such a bottle-neck, but the sheer overwhelming percentage of species for which such a bottle-neck has been conclusively ruled out. If you assert, as do the Fundamentalists, that the whole Bible is the literal truth and Word, then such truth stands or falls on the validity of any portion thereof, and, since we know the story of Noah not to be literally true, we therefore know the Bible as a whole not to be so, even without the other evidence to the contrary (like, for example, the fact that the happy ending in Job wasn't part of the original text, &c).
This does nothing to refute any portion of Judeo-Christian morality. Mitzvahs are still Mitzvahs; Cheeks should still be turned, &c. But, it puts another skewer through the program of all the neuvo-Pharisees promenading around calling themselves "Christian".
12 comments:
cheetaH
You are forgetting one of the crucial 'arguments' fundamentalists use to back up their interpretation of the Bible as literal truth. There is a passage that goes something to the effect of "The ways of God will confound the science of man". Therefore, to a fundamentalist, you can't disprove anything as they will just fall back on this.. Convenient, huh?
I often come back to Eddie Izzard's comments about Noah.. What about the ducks? Ya know.. go ahead.. flood the world.. All that happens is the ducks are 18 feet higher than they used to be, looking up at the two ducks on the Ark and asking "Hey.. what are you guys doing up there?"
Umm...You mean Noah, not Moses.
Um, yeah, lemme edit that. Sorry, I was also thinking about Red Sea wind conditions while I was typing that.
Genesis itself demonstrates that the Bible cannot be read as literal truth in our understanding. Why? There are days ...before there are stars!
Therefore, a literal reading of the bible is an admission of fundamentally being TOO LAZY to actually READ the Bible.
Just to play devil's advocate.. why does it matter that there are days before there are stars? Wouldn't that just mean that the concept of time has always existed?
It matters because it means that you can't take it as literal, uninterpreted truth. Because we know how day and night are defined. UNLESS one takes this passage literally, in which case one has to come up with a planet-independent, sun-independent concept of "day," thus wrecking the notion that you can just read it, and take it literally in your current vocabulary. The whole passage is written according to old hebraic rhetoric...
And then, if you don't like that one, you can always ask "how long did the Great Flood last?" The Bible gives two accounts, one saying 40 days and 40 nights, another saying 100 days... both of which are ancient rhetorical devices for "a long damned time," but which preclude the possibility for divinely-given unaffected-by-humans literal truth.
Well I don't think the Bible is truth let alone literal truth.. I think most of it is a bunch of metaphors and control-mechanisms assembled by a Roman emperor so as to make it easier to assimilate the Pagans..
That being said though, the bible also says "A day in Heaven is as 1000 on Earth".. So it has already been quantified in a method that makes it independent of a planet.. Well, ours anyway..
Russ, what you've said is true, but is too sophisticated. Forget rhetorical devices: we simply know that the stories at face value aren't literally true. The reason I point this out is that there are plenty of people who think that science is opposed to religion; what it's opposed to is fundamentalism, at least in the Judeo-Christian context.
Chris,
No, at the time the first books were written, the Greeks hadn't even invaded yet, much less the Romans. You've got to wait get all the way past 1st & 2nd Macabees before the Romans even consider marching in. (Macabees is considered apocryphal, which's a great irony since if memory serves, that's where Hanuka comes from.)
Yes but when people talk about 'The Bible', they are generally referring to the combination of the OT and NT (at least that's been my experience).. The OT is largely just old Hebrew law (Deuteronomy, Leviticus, etc).
I mean, look at all the Apocrypha and other such 'prophetic' books that date to around the same time and have comparable historical validity, that aren't in the Bible.
Is my history-channel (you gotta be careful with them I realize) understanding incorrect that the current 'Bible' was basically assembled around 300-400 AD by Roman Emperors?
I'd have to defer to Russ & them for the details, but, yes, the Christian "Bible" as it stands now was assembled by committee about then.
Yes, that is correct: this is, in fact, Chris, one of the main arguments of the Orthodox Church against scripture-only... they turn around and saying "well, then what do you think they were doing for three hundred years before the scriptures were written?"
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