Atheists & Scripture

A thought-provoking essay in The Chronicle takes a measured approach to assessing how atheists both do and should respond (in popular culture, at least) to the holy texts of religion.

Many atheists who have a relatively clear idea of what they mean by "God" when they reject His, Her, or Its existence, possess little knowledge of the sacred texts that animate religions. Indeed, Jacques Berlinerblau, in his book The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously (Cambridge University Press, 2005), opens his study by declaring, "In all but exceptional cases, today's secularists are biblically illiterate."

My first gut reaction is to respond, "nonsense, there are lots of former believers who come to see the holes in their own faith through study of it;" the second is to say, "and if so, then so what? How many people who reject Hinduism are intimately familiar with its sacred texts?" If we're all required to be familiar with a religion in order not to believe or practice it, then we are all in trouble.

I am in the first category -- an ex-believer who used to actually teach/preach out of the Bible and feels that his knowledge of it is far above average among believers or unbelievers. The more I know about the Old Testament, the more ridiculous belief in its inerrancy is, as A. A. Milne wrote,

"The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief — call it what you will — than any book ever written: It has emptied more churches than all the counterattractions of cinema, motor bicycle, and golf course."
- A. A. Milne, Recalled on his death: January 31, 1956 (source)

The author's thesis:

The simple answer, then, to how atheists should respond to sacred texts is: politely, if possible, employing all the wry ambiguity book critics use when awkwardly trapped with the author or admirer of a book about which they have reservations. "It's really quite amazing," one might say, or, "You know, I was just reading it the other day — it's as good as ever."

But when believers start to use sacred texts to oppress, the atheist must attack and reject the "divine" aspect of their books, out of self-defense and because it interferes with the individual's freedom of conscience and behavior.

Some things, after all, are sacred.

It seems that the author is assuming, here in his former scenario, that the typical setting in which conversation about the Bible or Qu'ran comes up is one in which this sort of response is merited; a sort of intellectual discussion. Unfortunately, that accounts for maybe 1% of 1% of all the times I've discussed Scriptures with believers. The other 99.99% of the time, the latter scenario applies -- "when believers start to use sacred texts to oppress" -- it is in the context of converting me using the book(s)...so the article sounds good and all, but I'm willing to wager that all this doesn't really make much of an impact on the average atheist's real life.

NYT on the Myth of the Exodus

I mentioned a great resource and summary on the myth of the Exodus on Monday. On Tuesday (yesterday), Michael Slackerman of the NYT printed, "Did the Red Sea Part? No Evidence, Archaeologists Say." Check it out below:

North Sinai Journal
Did the Red Sea Part? No Evidence, Archaeologists Say
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

NORTH SINAI, Egypt, April 2 — On the eve of Passover, the Jewish holiday that celebrates the story of Moses leading the Israelites through this wilderness out of slavery, Egypt’s chief archaeologist took a bus full of journalists into the North Sinai to showcase his agency’s latest discovery.

It didn’t look like much — some ancient buried walls of a military fort and a few pieces of volcanic lava. The archaeologist, Dr. Zahi Hawass, often promotes mummies and tombs and pharaonic antiquities that command international attention and high ticket prices. But this bleak landscape, broken only by electric pylons, excited him because it provided physical evidence of stories told in hieroglyphics. It was proof of accounts from antiquity.

That prompted a reporter to ask about the Exodus, and if the new evidence was linked in any way to the story of Passover. The archaeological discoveries roughly coincided with the timing of the Israelites’ biblical flight from Egypt and the 40 years of wandering the desert in search of the Promised Land.

“Really, it’s a myth,” Dr. Hawass said of the story of the Exodus, as he stood at the foot of a wall built during what is called the New Kingdom.

Egypt is one of the world’s primary warehouses of ancient history. People here joke that wherever you stick a shovel in the ground you find antiquities. When workers built a sewage system in the downtown Cairo neighborhood of Dokki, they accidentally scattered shards of Roman pottery. In the middle-class neighborhood of Heliopolis, tombs have been discovered beneath homes.

But Egypt is also a spiritual center, where for centuries men have searched for the meaning of life. Sometimes the two converge, and sometimes the archaeological record confirms the history of the faithful. Often it does not, however, as Dr. Hawass said with detached certainty.

“If they get upset, I don’t care,” Dr. Hawass said. “This is my career as an archaeologist. I should tell them the truth. If the people are upset, that is not my problem.”

The story of the Exodus is celebrated as the pivotal moment in the creation of the Jewish people. As the Bible tells it, Moses was born the son of a Jewish slave, who cast him into the Nile in a basket so the baby could escape being killed by the pharaoh. He was saved by the pharaoh’s daughter, raised in the royal court, discovered his Jewish roots and, with divine help, led the Jewish people to freedom. Moses is said to have ascended Mt. Sinai, where God appeared in a burning bush and Moses received the Ten Commandments.

In Egypt today, visitors to Mount Sinai are sometimes shown a bush by tour guides and told it is the actual bush that burned before Moses.

But archaeologists who have worked here have never turned up evidence to support the account in the Bible, and there is only one archaeological find that even suggests the Jews were ever in Egypt. Books have been written on the topic, but the discussion has, for the most part, remained low-key as the empirically minded have tried not to incite the spiritually minded.

“Sometimes as archaeologists we have to say that never happened because there is no historical evidence,” Dr. Hawass said, as he led the journalists across a rutted field of stiff and rocky sand.

The site was a two-hour drive from Cairo, over the Mubarak Peace Bridge into the Northern Sinai area called Qantara East. For nearly 10 years, Egyptian archaeologists have scratched away at the soil here, using day laborers from nearby towns to help unearth bits of history. It is a vast expanse of nothingness, a flat desert moonscape. Two human skeletons were recently uncovered, their bones positioned besides pottery and Egyptian scarabs.

As archaeological sites go, it is clearly a stepchild to the more sought-after digs in other parts of the country that have revealed treasures of pharaonic times. A barefoot worker in a track suit tried to press through the crowd to get the officials leading the tour to give him his pay, and tramped off angrily when he was rebuffed.

Recently, diggers found evidence of lava from a volcano in the Mediterranean Sea that erupted in 1500 B.C. and is believed to have killed 35,000 people and wiped out villages in Egypt, Palestine and the Arabian Peninsula, officials here said. The same diggers found evidence of a military fort with four rectangular towers, now considered the oldest fort on the Horus military road.

But nothing was showing up that might help prove the Old Testament story of Moses and the Israelites fleeing Egypt, or wandering in the desert. Dr. Hawass said he was not surprised, given the lack of archaeological evidence to date. But even scientists can find room to hold on to beliefs.

Dr. Mohamed Abdel-Maqsoud, the head of the excavation, seemed to sense that such a conclusion might disappoint some. People always have doubts until something is discovered to confirm it, he noted.

Then he offered another theory, one that he said he drew from modern Egypt.

“A pharaoh drowned and a whole army was killed,” he said recounting the portion of the story that holds that God parted the Red Sea to allow the Israelites to escape, then closed the waters on the pursuing army.

“This is a crisis for Egypt, and Egyptians do not document their crises.”

This has been the excuse all along: the Egyptians didn't document it, but it still happened. By the way, the "one evidence" referred to above is this one:

The name "Israel" is mentioned in a single Egyptian document from the period of Merneptah, king of Egypt, dating from 1208 BCE: "Plundered is Canaan with every evil, Ascalon is taken, Gezer is seized, Yenoam has become as though it never was, Israel is desolated, its seed is not." (source)

That source document from Cornell library is worth reading. It documents the gradual breakdown of the biblical paradigm in the face of mounting counterfactual evidence. Check it out.

Sometimes the "Hyksos" are also called in to rescue the biblical narrative, but only serve to further undermine it as a likely alternative. The documentation of the New Kingdom era, the details of the reign of Ramses II, and its coincidence with the biblical stories, provide supercedent history. I found it fascinating that Seti I and Ramesses II were both circumcised, for instance, and this tidbit is a provoking hint at how the Jews got some of their traditions from the Egyptians (and not vice versa, it's quite absurd to claim that a Pharoah was ever a Jew). The story of the Sea Peoples is required reading for those interested in how some different historical contexts may have been "mushed together" to create the OT tales.
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Technorati tags: God, Religion

Medieval Irish Bible Found

(CNN) :
During construction, a very rare medieval Irish edition of the Bible (or part of it) was dug up recently. Interestingly, it was opened to Psalms 83, hardly what I would call a good example of the ethos that modern Christians want to develop, which they borrow from the secular humanism of the Enlightenment. Let's read it:

Psalm 83 (NIV)

A song. A psalm of Asaph.

1 O God, do not keep silent;
be not quiet, O God, be not still.
2 See how your enemies are astir,
how your foes rear their heads.
3 With cunning they conspire against your people;
they plot against those you cherish.
4 "Come," they say, "let us destroy them as a nation,
that the name of Israel be remembered no more."
5 With one mind they plot together;
they form an alliance against you-
6 the tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites,
of Moab and the Hagrites,
7 Gebal, [a] Ammon and Amalek,
Philistia, with the people of Tyre.
8 Even Assyria has joined them
to lend strength to the descendants of Lot.

Selah

9 Do to them as you did to Midian,
as you did to Sisera and Jabin at the river Kishon,
10 who perished at Endor
and became like refuse on the ground.
11 Make their nobles like Oreb and Zeeb,
all their princes like Zebah and Zalmunna,
12 who said, "Let us take possession
of the pasturelands of God."
13 Make them like tumbleweed, O my God,
like chaff before the wind.
14 As fire consumes the forest
or a flame sets the mountains ablaze,
15 so pursue them with your tempest
and terrify them with your storm.
16 Cover their faces with shame
so that men will seek your name, O LORD.
17 May they ever be ashamed and dismayed;
may they perish in disgrace.
18 Let them know that you, whose name is the LORD—
that you alone are the Most High over all the earth.

Footnotes:

1. Psalm 83:7[a] -- That is, Byblos

Now I don't know about you, but that sure makes me feel Jesus. Kill those bastard enemies of mine, O God...screw that turn the cheek BS! ;) (HT: New Humanist)
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Technorati tags: Theology