This is an illustration from So Long Ago, a book written and illustrated by E. Boyd Smith, a prolific children’s author back in the day. When I was quite young, only four years old, my parents would take me to the library to check out books and I would check out this one over and over again for my parents to read to me. I loved being read to, probably because this “forces” your parents to pay attention to you and all you have to do is just sit there, something I’ve always been good at.
I doubt very much if my parents actually read the full text to me, which is fairly extensive and also curiously incoherent—at first “Bobby Reed” is being lectured to by his uncle, “Doctor Peter”. Then the book shifts briefly to an impersonal third-person narration and then apparently both doctor and Peter are transported back in time to a “world” where dinosaurs go to the beach and play tricks on one another, to the good doctor’s discomfort. “I don’t see why he behaves like that,” Doctor Pete says of the rock-rolling sauropod. “We’ve worked out their habits quite differently.” Are Doc and Pete somehow viewing a “movie” depicting Pete’s anthropomorphic fantasies about the way dinosaurs behave? It’s not clear.1
I only had access to So Long Ago for a few months, because we moved to a new community, whose library didn’t have the book, but the Darwinian world view presented in the book stayed with me. We did not attend church when I was very young, but a few years after we moved my parents got to know a “charming” young Episcopalian minister and his wife who lived nearby. The minister was starting a new congregation and my parents chose to take us, though I’m not sure why. My father had been “officially” raised as an Episcopalian, but I don’t think it held much of a place in his life. My mother, a bit surprisingly, had never even been baptized.
I was in the second grade when we began attending “St. Andrews”, which placed me in a Sunday school class that was patiently working its way through the Torah, having completed “Genesis” and was just starting “Exodus” when I showed up. The idea was that each Sunday we would arrive having read perhaps four or five verses and then our teacher, a young man with round glasses, would quiz us on it. Looking back, I’m surprised that, at age seven, I could actually read the Bible, but I could, and I enjoyed the class because I usually knew the answers, and most of the other kids couldn’t—because, I suspect, they couldn’t read very well.
Sunday school was the only part of the services that I enjoyed. I am not very musical and don’t enjoy singing, and I also don’t enjoy kneeling, something Episcopalians do a lot of. But my real problem came in reading the Bible, in particular the passage where the Pharoah’s magicians turn staffs into serpents. “No,” I thought to myself, “that couldn’t happen.”
This put my back up and it stayed up all the way through all the “miracles” in Exodus. I had missed Genesis, but I was already somehow aware that there were no dinosaurs in Genesis, which, to my mind, “proved” that Genesis had it wrong.
My skepticism was not confined to biology. I also began to find fault with the larger narrative. How could the Israelites be so stupid? After “seeing” one miracle after another—and I did not believe there had been any miracles in the first place—they still refused to believe in the divine power of Yahweh, constantly backsliding and even worshipping a “Golden Calf” the minute Moses’s back was turned. The persistent repetition of this motif quickly convinced me that this was a contrived morality tale rather than “history”—that is to say, “fact”. I had already developed an appetite for “big book of science” publications, reading them over and over, or at least looking at the pictures, and I found “science” far more satisfying than religion.
At any rate, my pursuit of Bible study ended abruptly. I’m not sure how or why, but shortly after we completed the rise of David (not sure which book covers this) our young man with round glasses disappeared and was replaced by an older, good-natured man who talked to us—as I remember, for I found him much less memorable—about Christian morality in everyday life.
From age eight to nineteen I never read a word of the Bible. This was quite unusual back then, at least in suburban Virginia. Most people went to church, and all of the kids I knew seemed to accept the Bible as “true” and to know quite a bit about it. I concealed both my doubts and my ignorance. When I was nine I had a Jewish friend, David Lane, who, I suppose, sought to shock me by saying that he didn’t believe that Christ was the Messiah. I didn’t tell them I didn’t either, and I also didn’t say “Sure, Jesus wasn’t the Messiah, but you Jews have it wrong too. You think the Messiah is coming, but there won’t be any Messiah, because there isn’t any God.” I had already developed an “instinct” for avoiding comment on anything that I somehow assumed was controversial. How I made these distinctions I do not know.
I spent quite a bit of my boyhood wandering about the woods near our home, communing with Nature rather than studying it, for I lacked entirely the sort of close application that is the mark of a real scientist. The great bane of my existence back then was poison ivy, to which I was very susceptible and which was unfortunately plentiful in our area. At about age eleven I was once confronted by a particularly intimidating batch and I thought to myself “If there were a God, everything would have a purpose. But poison ivy has no purpose. Therefore there is no God.” Of course, poison ivy has the same Darwinian purpose of every other living thing—to thrive and prosper—but I was defining “purpose” anthropomorphically.
I assumed, as a boy, that Christian belief, since it was so obviously false, was simply another of the many hypocrisies of the adult world—shibboleths that “everyone” paid respect to but which no one took seriously. I worked it all out as follows: Jews went to synagogue on Saturday, Protestants on Sunday, and Catholics (usually the most tedious) went to church on both Saturday and Sunday. I dearly loved to eat as a child, and I deeply disliked having to pray before meals, something we did not do in our family. Many times to come when dining among strangers I would sit down at a meal only to discover that I was staring at a line of bellies, forcing me to stumble awkwardly to my feet and, on particularly unfortunate occasions, join hands.
In my teenage years I gradually became convinced that many people did take religion seriously, though I couldn’t imagine why. When I entered Oberlin College in 1963, it was still a bastion of “modern Protestantism” and it had an excellent religion department and even a graduate school of theology. I was required to take a religion course anyway, so I figured that here was my chance, taking classes in both “Religion and the Bible” and “New Testament Religion”.
I read a great deal of the Bible in these classes—all of the Torah, all of the Psalms, and, I believe, all of the Prophets, as well as the entirety of the New Testament. At the same time, I was introduced to what was known, back then, as the “Higher Criticism”, developed by German scholars back in the 19th century, which sought (unsuccessfully, in my opinion), to “demythologize” Christianity while somehow still assenting to its divine nature as the only “true” religion. The “Theolog”, as the grad school was called, had a wonderful old nineteenth century library, all dark wood and wrought iron, and I remember as I entered it for the first time that I thought—pretty shrewdly, I believe, in retrospect—“this library is its own refutation”. For if there were a true “Word of God”, why would it require so much explanation?
When I actually started reading the Bible as an adult I was struck by how bad so much of it was, not only the infamous “begats” but the frequent, unexplained, and often contradictory repetitions—of the Creation, for example—and the frequent “reboots”. After Abraham obeys the Lord’s command to take Isaac to the mountain in order to sacrifice him, we get the famous passage as follows (Gen 65, 15-19, RSV):
The angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven, and said, “By myself I have sworn, says the Lord: Because you have done this, and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will indeed bless you, and I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of their enemies, and by your offspring shall all the nations of the earth gain blessing for themselves, because you have obeyed my voice.”
And so, end of story, right? They all lived happily ever after. Except that it isn’t the end of the story. We get another patriarch, and another, Jacob, who, with his mother’s cunning assistance, outmaneuvers his older brother to claim privileges he does not “deserve”. The story doesn’t end there. The narrative is always being restarted. Even when we reach the reign of David, who is told, in 2 Samuel 7:16, that “Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever,” well, that doesn’t happen either. Solomon, though he does great things, is clearly inferior to his father, and after Solomon, Rehoboam is so brutal that he causes Israel to split into two kingdoms, ultimately resulting in the Babylonian conquest and the destruction of the First Temple and the loss of all the sacred relics dating from the time of Moses. So much for “forever”.
The Bible is hard to understand for many reasons. Not only is the narrative full of contradictions, there is very little interest in “causality”: things just happen. Unimportant details are jumbled together with important ones, along with occasional, bizarrely “incorrect” statements like Genesis 6:4 “There were giants on the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men and they bore children to them, the same became mighty men who were of old, men of renown,” (KJ), paralleling the stories of Grecian demi-gods—though who the mother/s of God’s sons were isn’t at all clear, and the entire tenor of the passage clashes wildly with the general notion of a strict separation between human and divine, the monotheism that Jews and Christians generally like to emphasize as the “unique” calling card of Biblical religion.
Not only did I find “contradictions” within the Biblical text itself, I also found contradictions in the contemporary interpretations I read of it. There was clear process of gradual disengagement from the literal truth by the successive generations of scholars—whether the patriarchs were actual historical figures or not, for example—amusing to me, of course, for I had no doubt that they were entirely mythological. Eventually, this scholarly skepticism became, in effect, unspoken atheism, moving to the shocking suggestion that not only was there no parting of the Red Sea, the Jews/Israelites were never in Egypt at all, that Moses himself never existed, that virtually the entire Torah was a bundle of often heterogeneous myths, reworked over the centuries, first oral and then written traditions from a variety of sources blended, often unconsciously and often consciously, and into a supposed “whole” whose “absolute” truth had never even been doubted by individuals existing in the Christian tradition until recently.
The most dramatic “find” of the higher criticism, as I understood it at least, was the notion that the Torah combined narratives of several different authors, known as “J”, or the “Yahwist” (“Jahwist” in German) and “E” the “Eloist”, the Yahwist using the proper name ‘Yahweh” to mean “God” while the Eloist uses “El” or “Elohim”. The notion that the ancient Jews thought of “God” as having a proper name made Christians distinctly uncomfortable, because it cut strongly against the assumption that Judaism was monotheistic from the get-go, and indeed while much of the Torah can be read as monotheistic, much of it can be read the other way as well. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” implies more than excludes the possibility that there are other gods.
Beyond the question of monotheism, there is the obvious “fact” that, in the Torah, Yahweh behaves less like “God the Father” than “God, a father”, constantly losing his temper and vowing to take out his anger on the kids—“And this time I mean it!”—only to be talked down by a mere human. Perhaps the most striking case occurs at one of the supreme moments in the entire story of Israel, when Moses comes down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments, only to discover that the Israelites have abandoned Yahweh to worship a golden calf. Exodus 32:7-14 tells the story:
Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go down, because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt, have become corrupt. They have been quick to turn away from what I commanded them and have made themselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf. They have bowed down to it and sacrificed to it and have said, ‘These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.’
“I have seen these people,” the Lord said to Moses, “and they are a stiff-necked people. Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation.”
But Moses sought the favor of the Lord his God. “Lord,” he said, “why should your anger burn against your people, whom you brought out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that he brought them out, to kill them in the mountains and to wipe them off the face of the earth’? Turn from your fierce anger; relent and do not bring disaster on your people. Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Israel, to whom you swore by your own self: ‘I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and I will give your descendants all this land I promised them, and it will be their inheritance forever.’” Then the Lord relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened.
In other words, “you don’t want to embarrass yourself in front of the neighbors do you?” It is passages like this that make the Torah deeply human, but they also create vast difficulties for later, less naïve concepts of God, that portray God as the all-knowing creator and sustainer of the universe, completely transcending the mutability of human affairs, concepts that do appear in many later texts in both the Hebrew and Christian bibles and create endless difficulties for believers who want to insist that the holy texts lack any contradictions, when they most obviously do.2
In its full form, the “documentary hypothesis”, as it became known (after it was “refuted”), identified two additional “authors”, the “Priestly Source” and the “Deuteronomist.” The current state of biblical scholarship, from my very limited reading, seems to be one of almost perfect disagreement, but one very interesting (to me) fact remains: there is general agreement today, as there was not back in the 1960s, that the ancient Israelites thought of their god as “Yahweh”, indicating that the explicitly monotheistic tradition that characterizes the three “Abrahamic” religions did not actually emerge until after the return of the Jews from the Babylonian Exile around 539 BCE under the Achaemenid Emperor Cyrus the Great.
About a decade after I encountered the higher criticism at Oberlin, I had a fascinating “second encounter” when I discovered the works of Benedict Spinoza, particularly his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, the only work he was willing to publish in his lifetime, though he did so anonymously. Spinoza, since he read the Torah in Hebrew, and because he read it with the eye of a radical skeptic, noticed the frequent inconsistencies in the use of the word for “God”, which was almost invisible in Christian bibles, thanks both to translations and the almost overwhelming assumption that the bible could not contain any inconsistencies.
Spinoza’s calm dismantling of the almost universal assumptions of his time, assumptions that had remained unquestioned for almost two millennia, fascinated me. Perhaps inspired by Spinoza, I have begun a little deconstructing of my own.
If you come to the bible as an adult, as I did, without any “indoctrination”, formal or informal, in the Christian faith, you are liable to come up with some “interesting” questions. One of my favorites was “Why isn’t ‘St. Peter’s’ called ‘St. Paul’s’?” Because if you read the New Testament, St. Paul is “the guy”. Yes, Peter is easily the most “important” of the apostles, but the story of the gospels is the story of Jesus, not the apostles, whereas Paul is the great teacher, the author of the some of the most celebrated passages in all of Christianity— “I may speak with the tongues of angels and of men”. Furthermore, he “developed” Christ’s own words, “He that seeks to save his own life shall lose it, but he who gives up his life for me shall live forever” to mean that man’s depravity is such that by seeking his salvation through his own efforts man only guarantees his failure. Only by recognizing his own helplessness—his complete dependence on God’s mercy—can he be saved—and saved, of course, by God rather than himself. This message would be rediscovered and reworked over the centuries by some of the leading figures in Christianity, notably St. Augustine and Martin Luther, and comes up (a lot) in the thought of the famous Christian existentialists Blaise Pascal and Soren Kirkegaard.
But there’s very much more to St. Paul than that, I believe. Without him, or “someone just like him”, Christianity would very likely be no more than a blip on the cultural radar screen, a Jewish cult built around some sort of “Messiah” that ended after Romans destroyed the last remnant of the Jewish province of Judea following the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132–136 CE), murdering or dispersing nearly the entire Jewish population of the area. Paul, as the self-appointed “apostle to the Gentiles” provided the indispensable link to the greater non-Jewish world, carrying a message of hope and emotional coherence in a time when, to a “remarkable” number of people, ordinary life seemed to lack either.
That’s more than enough for one man, but I also find Paul “entertaining” for, as I read him, he also offers a “refutation” of two of the most basic doctrines of the Catholic church, the “Petrine theory” and the doctrine of apostolic succession. The Petrine theory is based on a single sentence, in Matthew 16:18-19, Jesus speaking to Peter: “And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock” is Christ’s famous pun on Peter’s name, “Petras” in Greek, or “rock.” According to the Catholic Church, this means that as the “rock”, Peter had the authority to determine the explicit doctrines of the Christian faith, the “rules” for salvation and damnation, exercising that authority specifically as the first bishop of Rome and that the succeeding bishops of Rome, later to be known as “Popes”, inherit that authority. “Apostolic succession” refers to the Catholic doctrine that spiritual authority descends, and descends only, in an unbroken line from Christ through the apostles—Peter, of course, chief among them—and their successors, the Popes and the bishops appointed by them, the “magisterium”.
Paul, in his remarkable “Letter to the Galatians”, implicitly yet aggressively rejects these doctrines, doctrines that in their explicit state did not exist, since “Galatians” was written circa 55 CE, before the gospel of Matthew (circa 70 CE), and well before the Catholic Church had formulated either the Doctrine of Apostolic Succession (first argued around 100 CE) or the Petrine Theory (not really shaped until the bishop of Rome began to style himself explicitly as the divinely authorized head of the Christian church, circa late 4th century CE). Paul wrote the letter to denounce the “new” (new and pernicious) doctrine being pushed in Galatia, where he had previously evangelized, that to become a Christian one must follow Jewish religious practices, including dietary restrictions and, most “difficult” of all, circumcision, in direct contrast to Paul’s teaching, that Christ’s sacrifice had erased the need for compliance with Jewish religious law— “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (2 Corinthians 3:6). To justify his right to prescribe the true faith, Paul gives a remarkable account of his life and mission:
You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life in Judaism. I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it. I advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors. But when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with any human being, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me, but I went away at once into Arabia, and afterwards I returned to Damascus.
Notice the extraordinary claims that Paul is making for himself—set apart before he was born! Peter is vaguely estimated to have been born perhaps five years before Christ and Paul five years after. So Paul was already destined by God to perform his great and unique service to mankind as apostle to the Gentiles when Christ was still a child, decades before he began to make himself known! Notice as well that Paul makes it explicitly clear that his conversion came, not from hearing the apostles speak, but rather from a direct revelation from God. Paul worked for three years as the apostle to the Gentiles three years before he even bothered to seek out the apostles, the men who had actually known Christ.
Then after three years I did go up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas [Peter] and stayed with him fifteen days; but I did not see any other apostle except James the LORD's brother. In what I am writing to you, before God, I do not lie! Then I went into the regions of Syria and Cilicia, and I was still unknown by sight to the churches of Judea that are in Christ; they only heard it said, “The one who formerly was persecuting us is now proclaiming the faith he once tried to destroy.” And they glorified God because of me. [Galatians 1:18]
Notice how Paul goes out of his way to dismiss the other apostles as having nothing to teach him—the men who sat at Christ’s feet, who shared the Last Supper and who witnessed the resurrection,3 men spiritually privileged as no man or woman ever since. Notice also that Peter claims that his “authority” (in the eyes of others) came, not from his association with the Peter and James but rather from his reputation as a former enemy of the Christian faith.
Paul also has to “prove” that Christ’s sacrifice eliminates the need to obey traditional Jewish law—though it does not prohibit continued obedience to it. To do so, he recounts his second encounter with Peter and James, fourteen long years after the first:
Then after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along with me. I went up in response to a revelation. Then I laid before them (though only in a private meeting with the acknowledged leaders) the gospel that I proclaim among the Gentiles, in order to make sure that I was not running, or had not run, in vain. But even Titus, who was with me, was not compelled to be circumcised, though he was a Greek. But because of false believers secretly brought in, who slipped in to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus, so that they might enslave us — we did not submit to them even for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might always remain with you. And from those who were supposed to be acknowledged leaders (what they actually were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality) those leaders contributed nothing to me. On the contrary, when they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel for the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been entrusted with the gospel for the circumcised (for he who worked through Peter making him an apostle to the circumcised also worked through me in sending me to the Gentiles), and when James and Cephas and John, who were acknowledged pillars, recognized the grace that had been given to me, they gave to Barnabas and me the right hand of fellowship, agreeing that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised. They asked only one thing, that we remember the poor, which was actually what I was eager to do. [Galatians 2:1-10]
Again, notice that Paul describes Peter, James, and John as “acknowledged leaders” but later “explains” that whether they were “real” leaders is known to God rather than us and also “explains” that “those leaders contributed nothing to me”. Furthermore, these “acknowledged pillars” (certainly not recognizing Peter as having priority) “recognized the grace that had been given to me”—that is to say, they recognized that Paul’s authority came from God and not from them, or any other mortal.
And there’s still more, because Paul wants to establish that he is correct on the issue of the irrelevance of the law to salvation, proceeding to demonstrate with a “crushing” anecdote. In a convoluted passage, Paul sets the scene as a confrontation between Peter and himself as to whether Gentiles need to comply with Jewish law to receive Christ’s forgiveness:
But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood self-condemned; for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction. And the other Jews joined him in this hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that they were not acting consistently with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?” [Galatians 2:11-14]
In other words, Paul was eating with Gentiles in contradiction to Jewish practices, until some Jewish Christians particularly associated with James showed up, at which point Peter left, apparently (my “guess”) fearing that his “inappropriate” conduct might be reported back to James, who, as the brother of Christ, might have more authority than himself. But, asks Paul of Peter, if you don’t follow Jewish law, why should you demand that of non-Jews?
Instead, as Paul continues in the next paragraph, “we have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not by doing the works of the law, because no one will be justified by the works of the law.” Further on in the paragraph, Paul restates the argument: “And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing.” (Galatians 2:14-16) And so poor Peter, the supposed “rock”, is crushed. Of course, the Catholic Church can explain this—or at least explain it away, for why else did God create Jesuits—but we atheists are nothing if not skeptical.
There is much more to chew on when one reads the New Testament with “innocent” eyes—for example, the Jesus that we encounter in St. Paul is, very largely, “Christ and Him crucified”, the Son of God dying on the cross to take upon himself the task that we corrupt humans cannot perform—to take away the sins of the world. The compassionate Christ of the gospels—the “human” Christ, the Christ of the Sermon on the Mount, the Christ that weeps—is very largely absent. Since Paul was writing before the gospels, and because, as he tells us, he was “on the road” seeking converts most of the time rather than spending time with the apostles and other people who had actually heard Christ speak, was it the case that he wasn’t that familiar with the stories associated with Christ’s ministry? Or did he fear that he might “get the stories wrong” or be contradicted by the “real” apostles, Peter in particular? Hard to say, but the contrast is there.
Another nit an innocent atheist can pick the role of the apostles. The apostles are immensely celebrated in the traditions of the Christian church, but, if you rely on what’s in the New Testament, only Peter emerges as a real force, and most of them do little or nothing. There is also the “curious” fragment in Matthew and Luke about the assignment of the twelve to rule over the twelve tribes of Israel once Jesus is proclaimed Messiah, an idea that comes to nothing, but certainly also suggests that there weren’t really twelve apostles, or rather than there had to be twelve, so that all tribes could be governed, an idea strengthened by the fact that after Judas’ treachery is revealed, the remaining apostles select a replacement, by lot, no less, a nobody named “Matthias” who, once he’s selected, immediately drops out of the narrative.
In Mark, certainly, the apostles serve very much as the “Israelites” did in Exodus, constantly not getting it, a literary device to demonstrate the burdens Jesus faces in making his truth known. Also “interesting”—if the apostles can’t understand Christ, how can the “common people” be expected to? In Luke 9:1 et seq we have the following:
And he called the twelve together and gave them power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases, and he sent them out to preach the kingdom of God and to heal. And he said to them, “Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money; and do not have two tunics. And whatever house you enter, stay there, and from there depart. And wherever they do not receive you, when you leave that town shake off the dust from your feet as a testimony against them.”
But if the apostles themselves can’t understand Christ, how can “the people” be expected to? And if they do fail to understand Christ’s message more or less immediately, does that mean they will be “cut off”? It certainly sounds like it. According to the gospel of John “It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that city.” What kind of “compassion” is that?
Unless you have a strong bias against the Christian religion—and mine is not that strong—I think it is impossible to read the gospels without being moved—and moved deeply—by the power of Christ, however you may reject the detail of his message. A “westerner”, at least, will be irresistibly reminded of Socrates, but while Socrates is endlessly subtle, always retreating and drawing you after him, making you make the decisions, Christ is at once infinitely demanding and infinitely accepting.
I have a “theory” about human nature, and my theory is this: when our hominid ancestors first began shaping pebbles by giving them a cutting edge, they were, to use rather Hegelian terms, preferring the “ideal” to the “real”. Instead of simply responding to their environment, they were, all unconsciously, shaping it.
Somewhere along the way, pre-sapiens hominids began to master fire, to learn to control their fear. They also learned to control their fear in another way—to use the sound that signified “snake” for example—not as a physiological stimulus—a warning—but as a topic of dispassionate discourse, allowing them to “explore” both past and future. Being human meant separating oneself from nature—the distinction between the “raw and the cooked” or “clean and unclean”, as previous analyses would have it. As Burke put it, “art is man’s nature”. As Pascal said “nature is only a first habit and habit a second nature”. What we learn is what we are, although the great mass of learning is done unconsciously rather than consciously, by the withholding or granting of approval by the people around us.
Hobbes famously tried to strip human life to its basics—the desire to live as the single source of all human behavior. However, he stripped too much. What humans desire even more than life is acceptance. Hobbes recognized that men—some of them—desire glory without limit, but he didn’t realize that everyone has an immense longing for acceptance, though it takes other forms than the lust for power and glory. Suicide—particularly among the young and healthy—would be impossible without this longing for acceptance. And we seek acceptance as humans by being human, by being in control.
Unfortunately, by being human, by cutting ourselves off from nature, we cut ourselves off from ourselves, for we are natural beings. It wasn’t God who kicked us out of the Garden of Eden, but ourselves. As natural beings, we have functions that our nature demands that we perform. There are the “awkward” needs of urination and defecation, which become particularly awkward once life is conducted in settled communities, along with the need to eat and the need to procreate. These are the functions that are hard-wired into all living things, but they also involve the loss of control, and to lose control is to deny one’s humanity.
Even in “modern” times, we have all sorts of taboos regarding food—though we don’t call them that—but it is, of course, sexual reproduction—the fury and mire of human veins, as Yeats has it—that causes a good 40% of the angst we poor humans endure. The remaining 50% is caused by “death”, the greatest loss of control of all. The human ability to foretell our own demise has had an overwhelming effect on shaping human life for thousands of years.
Naturally, all the actions of “release” are surrounded by all sorts of “rules” that are entirely “constructs”—irrational taboos when seen from the outside—but that does not mean that they are simply arbitrary, to be accepted or discarded at will. They are our second nature—learned not by study but by which behaviors earn our acceptance and which our rejection—emotional displays of approval or scorn by the people around us.4 And our second nature is our nature, all the nature we have. We can redefine ourselves, but we cannot escape ourselves.5
Religion’s power—going back to the “shamans”, whoever they were and whatever they did, and the “godkings” of the early civilizations, which seem so arbitrary and exploitative to us today—managed somehow to heal the separation of human from nature in feasts and ceremonies and rituals. It is impossible to say how, and impossible to say why, in Christ’s time, the people of the classical world felt such desperation at their inability to “control themselves”, why men and women would pursue “unnatural” celibacy with such obsessive fervor, why it would be admired so much, as a sign of virtue. But surely it did. Marriage, as both Jesus and Paul present it, was an enormous gift from God, allowing us to indulge in what was otherwise damnable through and through. I find this most “unfortunate”, for by my lights the expression of sexual love is endowed with meaning that surpasses that of mere “reason’ with infinite ease, a knitting together that which reason rendered asunder.
The early Christians had a different solution for healing this divided world: it was coming to an end, and those who scorned the flesh would be rewarded with infinite life in the companionship of God. It is a remarkable testimony to the radical frustration that humans feel is their necessary lot that the idea of the end of the world has such perennial charm.
The picture of the life of the early Christians that we obtain from the New Testament is also “ testimony”—testimony to the enormous release of tension that the Christian faith achieved. Christians were accepted by God himself into eternal life and happiness, accepted fully through full knowledge of all that was in their hearts, not because they had “purified” what was in their hearts but rather by opening their hearts to God regardless of what was in it—the justification by faith alone, for that was what God required.
Paul’s frequent—very frequent—warnings against false prophets also demonstrates the fragile nature of such communities of saints. When everyone is speaking “from the heart” controversies and disputes can very easily arise—disputes that can wax exceptionally bitter because everyone is speaking “from the heart” and disagreement is necessarily rejection.
I have traveled a fair distance from rock-rolling dinosaurs and feel inclined to bring matter to a halt for the time being. I remain a convinced atheist, though the “new atheism” that flourished perhaps a decade ago struck me as very overwrought. Religion is not “stupid” or “evil”. It is, at its best, remarkably profound, yet the whole notion of a supernatural being or beings somehow shaping the reality we live in, is, I believe, entirely insupportable in this day and age. I don’t think any religion has a convincing explanation of “evil”. I like my own—the necessary split in human nature, for to be human is to be unnatural, guarantees that we will be divided against ourselves. The massive oppression of women throughout the history of “civilization”, which has been far worse in Asian than European cultures, is nothing more than the desire of men to control their sexual appetites by controlling women.6 This oppression is testimony to the endless need to resolve—often in spectacularly brutal ways—the differing demands of reason and passion.
1. It is “interesting” that “Doctor Peter”, like many paleontologists of the time, did not believe unreservedly in the doctrine that evolution occurred entirely through adaptation. They saw the many “extravagant” forms that some dinosaur species took as “proof” that Ma Nature occasionally came up with clearly ill-adapted species as, in effect, random experiments. For example, the good doctor “explains” to Bobby that the Stegosaurus is a “beautiful example of exaggerated specialization. He carries a much bigger load [of plates on his back] than he needs.” In fact, the Stegosaurs were not “overloaded” and existed as a species for 10 million years, from around 155 to 145 million years ago, far longer than homo sapiens. It was only when the “Modern synthesis”, blending Darwin with Mandel, became established that the Doctor Peters of the world had to change their tune and give up notions of “exaggerated specialization”.
2. Moses Maimonides, in his famous work A Guide for the Perplexed, spends a great deal of time trying to explain away these contradictions, “proving” that apparently anthropomorphic passages are really nothing of the kind, making himself look foolish in the process.
3. And who, of course, abandoned him when he was arrested, Peter “denying” him three times in a single night, and who did not attend his trial and crucifixion. The gospel of Mark is universally regarded as the “original” gospel, with Matthew and Luke being composed shortly thereafter and dependent on Mark, while John was composed “much later”, more Greek and less Hebrew than the others. The original text of Mark ends with Mark 16:8, with the women fleeing in fear after entering the empty tomb (without the apostles, it might be noted) and encountering the “young man dressed in white” who tells them “he is risen”. The text describing the apostles’ encounter with the risen Christ was added later.
4. One of my aunts had three daughters. She told me that she went through long series of questionings by each one over the topic of why it was “wrong” to run around without your underwear: “It’s wrong.” “Why.” “People don’t like it.” “Why?” “They think it’s nasty.” “Why?” The “correct” answer, of course is “It upsets people to see the orifices of elimination and generation”—though this will simply generate still another “Why”. The answer to that is that the processes of elimination and generation involve loss of conscious control, and this loss of control upsets people, threatens their sense of self as human. But it is difficult for two-year-olds to process this.
5. Eleanor Roosevelt liked to say “No one can make you feel small without your permission,” something she wished were true but is not. If you make an “honest” statement in the presence of friends and they erupt in “honest”, spontaneous laughter, catching you completely off guard, you will feel awkward and ashamed. If you pick up a two-year-old child to give it a hug (presuming that that is still allowed), and it pushes you away, exclaiming “Oooh! You stink!” you will feel angry and embarrassed. Unless we have deliberately “toughened” ourselves, we all “naturally” want the approval of children (also dogs). And if we don’t get it, we feel hurt and angry.
6. And to control property. The idea of a widow controlling “family” property—particularly real property, of course—made virtually every culture nervous. In Hindu India, widows were burned alive to “purify” (purify and dispose of) them, while in Confucian Asia they were often pressured to commit suicide.
