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NT Lesson 1 (Jesus)

4 January 2015 / Daniel Midgley / 1 Comment

“That Ye Might Believe That Jesus Is the Christ”

Isaiah 61:1–3; Joseph Smith Translation, Luke 3:4–11; John 1:1–14; 20:31

LDS manual: here

Purpose

To help readers think critically about the story of Jesus, as well as competing ideas.

Reading

After the insanity of the Old Testament, it’s finally time to study the New Testament. The NT is a fascinating story of sin and redemption, and the start of — oh, dear — yet another major world religion. God, upset that everyone sinned against him, decided not to just forgive everyone like a benevolent deity. Instead, he decided that sending his son — formerly the psychopathic bully Jehovah — down to earth to be tortured and killed would make him feel better about having a relationship with us.

In his wisdom God decided that, rather than getting Jesus to write about himself, it would be a better idea to have his plan communicated by contradictory stories cobbled together from legends, written decades after the events they discuss. This freed Jesus up to perform party tricks for his friends, and these events are recorded in the Gospels.

After spending a weekend dead, Jesus then came back to life

and instructed his apostles to spread the word. Christianity did very poorly among the Jews, who already had a religion. But once the apostles recognised the potential among the heathen, and relaxed the entry requirements, the new religion did quite well. The Acts and the Epistles show how the Apostles (particularly Paul) managed to retool Old Testament scriptures in an effort to get the Christian story straight.

Everyone thinks of the New Testament as the nice one, right? No more God killing people, and it’s all about the lurv. Well, we’re going to see that the New Testament has its share of barbarity and injustice.

It also has:

terrible advice
scientific inaccuracies
rules that believers routinely ignore

and above all, loads of conflicts between the various versions of the myth.

Yes, there are cases of Jesus doing some nice things, but in rather trifling ways for very few people. Normal people can and have done much more to help mankind. A real supernatural being could do better.

Show this video from nonstampcollector.

Ask: What could a supernatural being like Jesus have done to help humanity, but didn’t? How does this make you feel about his priorities?

Main points from the lesson

Did Jesus exist?

Christopher Hitchens articulated the view that there’s no direct evidence outside the Bible for the existence of Jesus.

The idea that Jesus simply didn’t exist is not currently a majority view among bible scholars. This could be because so many bible scholars have been well-disposed toward Christianity, if not Christians themselves. This is changing, with more non-theist scholars taking an interest in the question of Jesus’s existence. One is Richard Carrier, who discusses his views here.

This recent episode of “The Thinking Atheist” has three scholars — Carrier, Fitzgerald, and Price — talking about the issue. Christians often tell me about quotes from Josephus and Tacitus as evidence for Jesus, and these scholars discuss this is the podcast as well. Very entertaining, and worth a listen.

My take: If someone named Jesus existed, it’s okay with me. Evidence for the existence of a Jesus of Nazareth would not necessarily validate the supernatural claims about him. If, however, he didn’t exist, it would obliterate those claims. I really don’t envy the Christian position here. It’s kind of like “heads, they lose; tails, they still don’t really win”.

Was the Jesus story a copy of existing gods?

It’s easy to believe that the story of Jesus was simply a remix of the stories of gods that were floating around in every culture. How could it not be? Human imagination tends to take some predictable forms. Moreover, a story will be more believable if it matches stories that people already accept.

Recently, though, some atheists have made the more direct claim that specific elements of the Jesus story were borrowed from other gods point for point. The movie Zeitgeist is one example. This graphic is a summarisation of some of its claims, but there are other similar ones.

I decided to check how well the accepted facts about these gods matched the graphic, and the short answer is: not great.

Comparisons of this nature tend to use bad sources, accept dubious near-matches (Krishna was killed by an arrow? That’s kind of like crucifixion!), and generally play things fast and loose. We have to be careful about this kind of stuff, and not accept it too uncritically.

Even though the close analysis falls down, some points of comparison do stand up: the virgin (or divine) births, miracles, and resurrections. These are elements of stories that people have told about their gods since there have been gods. It shouldn’t be surprising that they also appear in the Jesus story.

Additional lesson ideas

Doubtful goals of the atonement

This lesson features a scripture from the Joseph Smith “Translation” of Luke, in which Smith puts words into the mouth of John the Baptist. Here are the things the LDS lesson manual says Jesus was to have done.

a. “Take away the sins of the world” (verse 5).

We’ll be discussing this alleged sin-removal in Lesson 25, but for now, I’ll just ask: Why would Jesus die to remove the effects of sin, but without making any effort to prevent sin from happening? It’s a dumb method, and just one reason why this is an incoherent system.

b. “Bring salvation unto the heathen nations” (verse 5).

Christian meddling in indigenous culture has been the source of great injustice as missionaries have interfered with native languages, sexual practices, and social attitudes.

c. “Gather together those who are lost” (verse 5).

It’s condescending to teach that people who aren’t Christians are lost. People probably think I became lost when I left the Church, but I count it as gain. I gained the ability to value my limited life, to love my wonderful wife, and to allow my children to become the people they are, without the destructive and pernicious influence of religion.

d. “Make possible the preaching of the gospel unto the Gentiles” (verse 6).

The spread of Christianity, with its attendant violence, power, and control is one of the saddest stories I can think of.

e. “Be a light unto all who sit in darkness” (verse 7).

Christianity has no special claim to being “a light”. Having been a Latter-day Saint, I now try to live by the light of reason and science, and this works much better.

f. “Bring to pass the resurrection from the dead” (verse 7).

We’re all still waiting on that one. Everyone who has died is still dead.

g. “Administer justice unto all” (verse 9).

Divine justice does not really seem to be a thing.

h. “Convince all the ungodly of their ungodly deeds” (verse 9).

Ah. Now this is one that Christians have worked hard on. There seems to be no shortage of deeds that are classified as “ungodly”, or believers eager to chastise us about them.

One out of eight. That’s above their usual hit rate. Well done, fake John the Baptist.

Is the possessive Jesus’, or Jesus’s?

When I was a kid, I learned a rule about adding apostrophe -s to people whose names end in s, like James or Ross. The rule was: just add an apostrophe, but no extra -s. That worked fine for a while, but then I started noticing the extra s popping up in books. Was there a shift?

It now looks like the rule has indeed shifted. We can use Google’s Ngram Viewer to search massive numbers of books over hundreds of years, and when we do, we see that, while either one is okay, the -s variants are more popular. At least that’s true for James and Charles.

Boris has switched. No idea why. Sparse data, most likely.

But Jesus is a bit of an exception. Notice the continuing popularity of Jesus’, even today. (u/FHL88Work pointed out that Moses follows this pattern as well.)

So what should you do? Unless you’ve got some compelling reason, write Jesus’ instead of Jesus’s. That way, you’ll be in step with the overwhelming majority of writers.

OT Lesson 41 (Jeremiah 1)

2 November 2014 / Daniel Midgley / Comments Off

“I Have Made Thee This Day… an Iron Pillar”

Jeremiah 1–2; 15; 20; 26; 36–38

LDS manual: here

Reading

Thank goodness we’re done with Isaiah. But no sooner do we get done with him then — oh, no — it’s Jeremiah. Jeremiah is just like Isaiah, except more depressing. This could be because, whereas Isaiah got to walk around naked a lot — some people find naturist culture very relaxing — Jeremiah spent a lot more time in dungeons. And little wonder: he scolds and harangues people, and then wonders why they can’t stand him. Jeremiah spent so much time haranguing people that he inspired a word for a long and tedious harangue against people: it’s a jeremiad.

And predictably, Jeremiah’s screed is full of blood and fire. There’s one thing we can say about the god of the Bible: he’s consistent. He tells people about the atrocious acts of murder he’s going to wage against them. For instance:

Jeremiah says that God is tired of holding back his fury, and wants to kill everyone.

6:11 Therefore I am full of the fury of the LORD; I am weary with holding in: I will pour it out upon the children abroad, and upon the assembly of young men together: for even the husband with the wife shall be taken, the aged with him that is full of days.
6:12 And their houses shall be turned unto others, with their fields and wives together: for I will stretch out my hand upon the inhabitants of the land, saith the LORD.

Their dead bodies will be eaten by birds and beasts.

7:33 And the carcases of this people shall be meat for the fowls of the heaven, and for the beasts of the earth; and none shall fray them away.

God will punish them by killing their sons and daughters.

11:22 Therefore thus saith the LORD of hosts, Behold, I will punish them: the young men shall die by the sword; their sons and their daughters shall die by famine:

And God will lift their skirts, non-consensually.

13:26 Therefore will I discover thy skirts upon thy face, that thy shame may appear.

But why is God going to kill everyone? Because their fathers didn’t believe in him enough.

16:10 And it shall come to pass, when thou shalt shew this people all these words, and they shall say unto thee, Wherefore hath the LORD pronounced all this great evil against us? or what is our iniquity? or what is our sin that we have committed against the LORD our God?
16:11 Then shalt thou say unto them, Because your fathers have forsaken me, saith the LORD, and have walked after other gods, and have served them, and have worshipped them, and have forsaken me, and have not kept my law;

Walked after other gods? Could you put this into a sexual metaphor for me?

3:1 They say, If a man put away his wife, and she go from him, and become another man’s, shall he return unto her again? shall not that land be greatly polluted? but thou hast played the harlot with many lovers; yet return again to me, saith the LORD.
3:2 Lift up thine eyes unto the high places, and see where thou hast not been lien with. In the ways hast thou sat for them, as the Arabian in the wilderness; and thou hast polluted the land with thy whoredoms and with thy wickedness.
3:3 Therefore the showers have been withholden, and there hath been no latter rain; and thou hadst a whore’s forehead, thou refusedst to be ashamed.

Keep going, but now incorporate primitive sex toys.

3:9 And it came to pass through the lightness of her whoredom, that she defiled the land, and committed adultery with stones and with stocks (trees).

I actually enjoy this imagery:

5:7 How shall I pardon thee for this? thy children have forsaken me, and sworn by them that are no gods: when I had fed them to the full, they then committed adultery, and assembled themselves by troops in the harlots’ houses.
5:8 They were as fed horses in the morning: every one neighed after his neighbour’s wife.

But remember: God is warning people about all the evil he’s going to do, so that maybe he won’t have to do all the evil to them. So that’s good.

36:3 It may be that the house of Judah will hear all the evil which I purpose to do unto them; that they may return every man from his evil way; that I may forgive their iniquity and their sin.

But “Obey me, or I will have you killed” is not much of a choice, is it? Many times in church, I would hear speakers or teachers say something like the following: “God gives us commandments, and invites us to obey. If we obey, we get blessings, and if we don’t, then there will be consequences to our actions.” Which is all very well, but the picture that emerges from our reading of the Old Testament is that God gives commandments, and then threatens us with death if we don’t obey them (or if our fathers don’t).

At least at this stage in the OT, the threats only extend to death. Jesus will update that to include eternal punishment in hell.

Main points from this lesson

Is it good to be ‘an iron pillar’?

Jeremiah says God told him this:

1:18 For, behold, I have made thee this day a defenced city, and an iron pillar, and brasen walls against the whole land, against the kings of Judah, against the princes thereof, against the priests thereof, and against the people of the land.

In case the class hasn’t seen anything made of iron before, the real lesson manual helpfully suggests:

Display a metal bar and invite a class member to try to break it. Then ask the following questions:
• If this object represented a person’s characteristics, what would it suggest about him or her?

I imagine they’re shooting for ‘strong’, which is very positive. But take a guess: is it positive in the following scripture?

Isaiah 48:4 …thy neck is an iron sinew, and thy brow brass;

Answer: Not here. Here, it’s symbolic of an inflexible nature. For Jehovah, it’s bad to be inflexible by not believing in him, but good to be inflexible in his service — just like with murder, genocide, and a lot of other nasty things.

One of the things I’ve been learning (post-religion) is the importance of being able to change my mind when the facts require. It’s one of science’s great strengths that it can update to accommodate new facts. And it’s good to be able to change one’s mind on an individual level, as everything we think is probably at least a little bit wrong.

Richards Dawkins tells this story:

I have previously told the story of a respected elder statesman of the Zoology Department at Oxford when I was an undergraduate. For years he had passionately believed, and taught, that the Golgi Apparatus (a microscopic feature of the interior of cells) was not real: an artifact, an illusion. Every Monday afternoon it was the custom for the whole department to listen to a research talk by a visiting lecturer. One Monday, the visitor was an American cell biologist who presented completely convincing evidence that the Golgi Apparatus was real. At the end of the lecture, the old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said–with passion–“My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.” We clapped our hands red. No fundamentalist would ever say that. In practice, not all scientists would. But all scientists pay lip service to it as an ideal–unlike, say, politicians who would probably condemn it as flip-flopping. The memory of the incident I have described still brings a lump to my throat.

I respect Dawkins most when he admits his lack of knowledge in some area, as in this clip (question starts at 38:04, Dawkins’ comment at 47:50)

Chairman: I just want to hear from Richard Dawkins. The same debate essentially has been going on in the U.K. and in fact right across Europe. Your thoughts on hearing it repeated here?
Richard: I’ve been rather moved to hear the very humane statements that have been made. I don’t feel I should contribute to this debate. I know nothing about the Australian situation, but I was moved especially by what the Rabbi was saying.

And I respect him least when he’s dismissive of others, as in his recent Twitter squabbles.

As for me, I love being wrong. Well, not really — does anyone? But once I was talking to a listener of my podcast (Talk the Talk), and she said, “Have you ever gotten something wrong?” I thought for a second, and had to say, “No, I haven’t.” But then I realised, with some horror: I have gotten it wrong, and I just don’t know it!

Then on a later episode, someone pointed out that I’d made a mistake. And I thought, thank goodness! What a relief! For one thing, I didn’t have to think that wrong thing anymore, so I knew more than before. And for another, someone’s noticing my mistakes, so I’ve probably gotten most of the other things right, otherwise someone would have said something.

This willingness to change my mind is part of why I do this blog, and why I engage with believers. If I’m wrong about this religion thing, someone will tell me, and if they have the facts, I can be convinced. Based on the last million interactions, it’s not looking good, and I’m not holding my breath. It would take an awful lot to convince me that all the immoral things we’ve read are moral. If someone were able to convince me, it might have more to do with my moral failure than with their having a good argument. After all, what could make this god’s actions moral? But I have to, at least in theory, keep the door open, keep talking, and keep engaging. Not be iron.

“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee”

Mormons use this scripture to support the notion of a pre-mortal life.

1:5 Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.

I’ve mentioned before that the pre-mortal life was one of my favourite Mormon doctrines, mostly because of an epiphany I used to have when seeing tons of people at once in a public place. Oh, look, I’d think, all my brothers and sisters from the realms of glory, etc. It was a lovely thought, and after deconversion, one that I hated to lose. I didn’t think I’d ever have access to that again.

Of course, there are some aspects of the pre-mortal life that aren’t so lovely. It means that God made a whole lot of people, knowing in advance that they wouldn’t make it to the Celestial Kingdom, and that they’d therefore face eternal separation from their families / God / Ed McMahon and so forth. Why would his perfect system involve exclusion and isolation for so many? Not too cool, God. Why didn’t he use his all-knowingness to know who would make it back to his presence, and only create those people? Why wouldn’t he make a bar that everyone could clear? And the answer is that the system doesn’t have a way of controlling you if you don’t have something to lose.

A bit of an update: One bright, sunny day at the university where I teach, I was walking to my office, and noticing all the terrific students around the place. So many smart people! All a little different from each other; all carrying different DNA. And I started thinking about evolution, and how the genes of everyone that I was seeing had combined in partly random ways from parents to make gazillions of different people, walking around here on earth. I realised that was we call ‘humankind’ was nothing less than the sum total of all the humans who were alive today, and here we were, and it was all happening now! And we were all related! Wow!

It was the pre-mortal epiphany again. I was very pleased to find that, despite my lack of belief, I hadn’t lost access to it. But this time it was based in something real, and no less inspiring.

Additional lesson ideas

Of leopards and spots

You’ve probably heard people say “A leopard can’t change its spots” as a way of referring to the immutability of personality or motivation. Well, that saying comes from Jeremiah, except with a slight twist:

13:23 Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil.

It’s probably good that we don’t say the first part anymore. Totally not cool, Bible.

Don’t have Christmas trees

Jeremiah appears to condemn Christmas trees.

10:1 Hear ye the word which the LORD speaketh unto you, O house of Israel:
10:2 Thus saith the LORD, Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them.
10:3 For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe.
10:4 They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.

Of course, Jeremiah — having no actual prophetic powers — wasn’t referring specifically to Christmas trees. People don’t nail Christmas trees to the floor, anyway, but that’s easy to overlook when you read this passage and think “Christmas tree”. But it’s fun to float this scripture in a real Gospel Doctrine class, and watch the gymnastics that follow.

What’s with deck, anyhow? When we talk about decorating things, there’s nothing we would say that we deck. The usefulness of this word would appear to have shrunk to halls and trees.

Here’s the story. The word comes from Middle Dutch dekken, “to cover”, so you deck a tree when you cover it. For that matter, the deck of a boat is the part that covers the boat, so that’s related, too. And when you deck someone, you lay them out on the deck. (Those sailors; always fighting.) It’s fun to see how the meaning of words coincide.

Closing hymn

Here’s one of the more desolate passages from Jeremiah.

8:15 We looked for peace, but no good came; and for a time of health, and behold trouble!
8:16 The snorting of his horses was heard from Dan: the whole land trembled at the sound of the neighing of his strong ones; for they are come, and have devoured the land, and all that is in it; the city, and those that dwell therein.
8:20 The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.
8:22 Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?

That sounded pretty good, but it would sound better if it were set to music by… oh, say… Ralph Vaughan Williams. And look! it is. Here’s his Dona Nobis Pacem.

The whole thing is good, mostly thanks to the poetry of Walt Whitman, but for this lyric, start at 28:11.

OT Lesson 24 (David and Bathsheba)

29 June 2014 / Daniel Midgley / 2 Comments

“Create in Me a Clean Heart”

1 Samuel 18–20; 23–24

LDS manual: here

Reading

For today’s lesson, we’re blasting through all of 2 Samuel, and that means it’s all about David. In terms of kingliness, David was the apex. Israel had never seen anything like him. Imagine if John F. Kennedy, in addition to being a handsome president and a war hero, was also a rock star who wrote his own songs. That’s David for you.

And predictably, David collected a harem of women. Chapter 3 starts off with six of them.

3:2 And unto David were sons born in Hebron: and his firstborn was Amnon, of Ahinoam the Jezreelitess;
3:3 And his second, Chileab, of Abigail the wife of Nabal the Carmelite; and the third, Absalom the son of Maacah the daughter of Talmai king of Geshur;
3:4 And the fourth, Adonijah the son of Haggith; and the fifth, Shephatiah the son of Abital;
3:5 And the sixth, Ithream, by Eglah David’s wife. These were born to David in Hebron.

It wasn’t all slippery intercourse for David, though. There was also murder.

4:12 And David commanded his young men, and they slew them, and cut off their hands and their feet, and hanged them up over the pool in Hebron. But they took the head of Ishbosheth, and buried it in the sepulchre of Abner in Hebron.

He wasn’t too keen on lame and blind people.

5:8 And David said on that day, Whosoever getteth up to the gutter, and smiteth the Jebusites, and the lame and the blind that are hated of David’s soul, he shall be chief and captain. Wherefore they said, The blind and the lame shall not come into the house.

But he did like the women.

5:13 And David took him more concubines and wives out of Jerusalem, after he was come from Hebron: and there were yet sons and daughters born to David.

And one point, he danced — perhaps even cavorted — while not wearing very much.

6:14 And David danced before the LORD with all his might; and David was girded with a linen ephod.

Saul’s daughter Michal thought David was showing more of his body than was proper. So she complained at him.

6:15 So David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the LORD with shouting, and with the sound of the trumpet.
6:16 And as the ark of the LORD came into the city of David, Michal Saul’s daughter looked through a window, and saw king David leaping and dancing before the LORD; and she despised him in her heart.
…
6:20 Then David returned to bless his household. And Michal the daughter of Saul came out to meet David, and said, How glorious was the king of Israel to day, who uncovered himself to day in the eyes of the handmaids of his servants, as one of the vain fellows shamelessly uncovereth himself!

So David cursed her to be childless for the sin of sarcasm.

6:21 And David said unto Michal, It was before the LORD, which chose me before thy father, and before all his house, to appoint me ruler over the people of the LORD, over Israel: therefore will I play before the LORD.
6:22 And I will yet be more vile than thus, and will be base in mine own sight: and of the maidservants which thou hast spoken of, of them shall I be had in honour.
6:23 Therefore Michal the daughter of Saul had no child unto the day of her death.

Except she did have children. But David took care of that by killing them. More on that later.

He killed off two thirds of the Moabites, and took the rest as servants.

8:2 And he smote Moab, and measured them with a line, casting them down to the ground; even with two lines measured he to put to death, and with one full line to keep alive. And so the Moabites became David’s servants, and brought gifts.

We saw in the last lesson that the Israelites had a saying: “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands.” When you get a reputation like that, you have to keep it up, and David does, with the murder of tens of thousands of people — with Jehovah’s explicit encouragement.

8:5 And when the Syrians of Damascus came to succour Hadadezer king of Zobah, David slew of the Syrians two and twenty thousand men.
8:13 And David gat him a name when he returned from smiting of the Syrians in the valley of salt, being eighteen thousand men.
8:14 And he put garrisons in Edom; throughout all Edom put he garrisons, and all they of Edom became David’s servants. And the LORD preserved David whithersoever he went.
10:18 And the Syrians fled before Israel; and David slew the men of seven hundred chariots of the Syrians, and forty thousand horsemen, and smote Shobach the captain of their host, who died there.

And now the famous story of Bathsheba. David sees her bathing, and invites her over for a bit.

11:2 And it came to pass in an eveningtide, that David arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king’s house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon.
11:3 And David sent and enquired after the woman. And one said, Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?
11:4 And David sent messengers, and took her; and she came in unto him, and he lay with her; for she was purified from her uncleanness: and she returned unto her house.

But whoops, she’s pregnant. Now David has to invite Uriah back, to establish plausible paternity.

11:5 And the woman conceived, and sent and told David, and said, I am with child.
11:6 And David sent to Joab, saying, Send me Uriah the Hittite. And Joab sent Uriah to David.
11:7 And when Uriah was come unto him, David demanded of him how Joab did, and how the people did, and how the war prospered.
11:8 And David said to Uriah, Go down to thy house, and wash thy feet. And Uriah departed out of the king’s house, and there followed him a mess of meat from the king.

“Wash thy feet.” After the story of Ruth and Boaz, I’m wondering if this means feet, or if it means feet.

But Uriah frustrates David’s plan by refusing to sleep with his wife. Twice! Curses!

11:9 But Uriah slept at the door of the king’s house with all the servants of his lord, and went not down to his house.
11:10 And when they had told David, saying, Uriah went not down unto his house, David said unto Uriah, Camest thou not from thy journey? why then didst thou not go down unto thine house?
11:11 And Uriah said unto David, The ark, and Israel, and Judah, abide in tents; and my lord Joab, and the servants of my lord, are encamped in the open fields; shall I then go into mine house, to eat and to drink, and to lie with my wife? as thou livest, and as thy soul liveth, I will not do this thing.
11:12 And David said to Uriah, Tarry here to day also, and to morrow I will let thee depart. So Uriah abode in Jerusalem that day, and the morrow.
11:13 And when David had called him, he did eat and drink before him; and he made him drunk: and at even he went out to lie on his bed with the servants of his lord, but went not down to his house.

So David gets Uriah killed by stratagem.

11:14 And it came to pass in the morning, that David wrote a letter to Joab, and sent it by the hand of Uriah.
11:15 And he wrote in the letter, saying, Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten, and die.
…
11:26 And when the wife of Uriah heard that Uriah her husband was dead, she mourned for her husband.
11:27 And when the mourning was past, David sent and fetched her to his house, and she became his wife and bare him a son. But the thing that David had done displeased the LORD.

Instead of reading all this, you can just listen to the Pixies song, “Dead”, which is a micro version of David and Bathsheba. The song is something of a miracle of economy, conveying the frenzy of David’s adultery, with each chorus pounding in a single word — dead — conveying the emptiness of the whole tawdry affair. Notice also how the rhythmic structure is built around groups of 3, and not 4. I think this makes the song more unresolved and unsettling.

You crazy Bathsheba, I wancha
You’re suffocating, you need a good shed
I’m tired of living, Sheba, so gimme,

Dead

We’re apin’ rapin’ tapin’ catharsis
You get torn down and I get erected
My blood is working but my
My heart is,

Dead

Hey, what do you know?
Your lovely tan belly
Is starting to grow

Uriah hit the crapper, the crapper
Uriah hit the crapper, the crapper
Uriah hit the crapper, the crapper
Dead

The prophet Nathan chastises David in epic fashion, with a particularly scorching metaphor.

12:1 And the LORD sent Nathan unto David. And he came unto him, and said unto him, There were two men in one city; the one rich, and the other poor.
12:2 The rich man had exceeding many flocks and herds:
12:3 But the poor man had nothing, save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up: and it grew up together with him, and with his children; it did eat of his own meat, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter.
12:4 And there came a traveller unto the rich man, and he spared to take of his own flock and of his own herd, to dress for the wayfaring man that was come unto him; but took the poor man’s lamb, and dressed it for the man that was come to him.
12:5 And David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man; and he said to Nathan, As the LORD liveth, the man that hath done this thing shall surely die:
12:6 And he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.
12:7 And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man.

He explains that David’s wives will be given to other men, who will have outdoor intercourse with them.

12:11 Thus saith the LORD, Behold, I will raise up evil against thee out of thine own house, and I will take thy wives before thine eyes, and give them unto thy neighbour, and he shall lie with thy wives in the sight of this sun.
12:12 For thou didst it secretly: but I will do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun.

The child of their union dies.

12:15 And Nathan departed unto his house. And the LORD struck the child that Uriah’s wife bare unto David, and it was very sick.
…
12:18 And it came to pass on the seventh day, that the child died.

But Solomon springs from their loins. More about him in future lessons.

12:24 And David comforted Bathsheba his wife, and went in unto her, and lay with her: and she bare a son, and he called his name Solomon: and the LORD loved him.

Now a subplot about Absalom. Apparently, he was a handsome guy, with hair that weighed 2.2 kilograms.

14:25 But in all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty: from the sole of his foot even to the crown of his head there was no blemish in him.
14:26 And when he polled his head, (for it was at every year’s end that he polled it: because the hair was heavy on him, therefore he polled it:) he weighed the hair of his head at two hundred shekels after the king’s weight.

Absalom conspires against his father David.

15:10 But Absalom sent spies throughout all the tribes of Israel, saying, As soon as ye hear the sound of the trumpet, then ye shall say, Absalom reigneth in Hebron.
15:11 And with Absalom went two hundred men out of Jerusalem, that were called; and they went in their simplicity, and they knew not any thing.
15:12 And Absalom sent for Ahithophel the Gilonite, David’s counsellor, from his city, even from Giloh, while he offered sacrifices. And the conspiracy was strong; for the people increased continually with Absalom.
15:13 And there came a messenger to David, saying, The hearts of the men of Israel are after Absalom.
15:14 And David said unto all his servants that were with him at Jerusalem, Arise, and let us flee; for we shall not else escape from Absalom: make speed to depart, lest he overtake us suddenly, and bring evil upon us, and smite the city with the edge of the sword.

and even goes in unto his father’s concubines.

16:21 And Ahithophel said unto Absalom, Go in unto thy father’s concubines, which he hath left to keep the house; and all Israel shall hear that thou art abhorred of thy father: then shall the hands of all that are with thee be strong.
16:22 So they spread Absalom a tent upon the top of the house; and Absalom went in unto his father’s concubines in the sight of all Israel.

Absalom is killed in battle with David, when he’s devoured by a hungry tree.

18:8 For the battle was there scattered over the face of all the country: and the wood devoured more people that day than the sword devoured.

Well, no, the tree didn’t kill him, but he got stuck in one of its branches. And then run through with a dart. Very GoT.

18:9 And Absalom met the servants of David. And Absalom rode upon a mule, and the mule went under the thick boughs of a great oak, and his head caught hold of the oak, and he was taken up between the heaven and the earth; and the mule that was under him went away.
18:10 And a certain man saw it, and told Joab, and said, Behold, I saw Absalom hanged in an oak.
18:11 And Joab said unto the man that told him, And, behold, thou sawest him, and why didst thou not smite him there to the ground? and I would have given thee ten shekels of silver, and a girdle.
18:12 And the man said unto Joab, Though I should receive a thousand shekels of silver in mine hand, yet would I not put forth mine hand against the king’s son: for in our hearing the king charged thee and Abishai and Ittai, saying, Beware that none touch the young man Absalom.
18:13 Otherwise I should have wrought falsehood against mine own life: for there is no matter hid from the king, and thou thyself wouldest have set thyself against me.
18:14 Then said Joab, I may not tarry thus with thee. And he took three darts in his hand, and thrust them through the heart of Absalom, while he was yet alive in the midst of the oak.

David’s grief is “characteristically intense“.

18:33 And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went, thus he said, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!

And the concubines? David punishes them by keeping them under house arrest for the rest of their lives.

20:3 And David came to his house at Jerusalem; and the king took the ten women his concubines, whom he had left to keep the house, and put them in ward, and fed them, but went not in unto them. So they were shut up unto the day of their death, living in widowhood.

For all this, David sings about how righteous he is.

22:21 The LORD rewarded me according to my righteousness: according to the cleanness of my hands hath he recompensed me.
22:22 For I have kept the ways of the LORD, and have not wickedly departed from my God.
22:23 For all his judgments were before me: and as for his statutes, I did not depart from them.
22:24 I was also upright before him, and have kept myself from mine iniquity.
22:25 Therefore the LORD hath recompensed me according to my righteousness; according to my cleanness in his eye sight.

Main points of this lesson

God punishes people for arbitrary things that they haven’t even done

There are loads of things in these chapters that deserve punishment — murder being the main one – but as usual, the god of the Bible chooses to punish people, when the blame more properly belongs to someone else.

We’ve already seen how Jehovah/Jesus kills the baby of David and Bathsheba for his father’s sin.

But later, there’s a famine, and Jehovah/Jesus blames the famine on… David? No, Saul, who’s already dead. Why is he punishing people for the actions of a dead man? Who can fathom the divine mind?

21:1 Then there was a famine in the days of David three years, year after year; and David enquired of the LORD. And the LORD answered, It is for Saul, and for his bloody house, because he slew the Gibeonites.

So David asks the Gibeonites what he can do for them. Answer: kill the supposedly non-existent sons of Michal from chapter 6.

21:6 Let seven men of his sons be delivered unto us, and we will hang them up unto the LORD in Gibeah of Saul, whom the LORD did choose. And the king said, I will give them.
…
21:9 And he delivered them into the hands of the Gibeonites, and they hanged them in the hill before the LORD: and they fell all seven together, and were put to death in the days of harvest, in the first days, in the beginning of barley harvest.

And then God punishes Israel for taking a census — that he moved David to take!

24:1 And again the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them to say, Go, number Israel and Judah.
…
24:9 And Joab gave up the sum of the number of the people unto the king: and there were in Israel eight hundred thousand valiant men that drew the sword; and the men of Judah were five hundred thousand men.
24:10 And David’s heart smote him after that he had numbered the people. And David said unto the LORD, I have sinned greatly in that I have done: and now, I beseech thee, O LORD, take away the iniquity of thy servant; for I have done very foolishly.

God hates stats.

So what’s going on? I think there’s something we can learn here about the way religious people attribute causation. When something bad happens, like a famine or a death, it’s normal for us to try and figure out why it happened. That might help us avoid the problem. But we humans, with our monkey brains, have trouble attributing causality.

I know a voice teacher who tells everyone to gargle with zinc when you get a sore throat. Every time she gets the first sign of a sore throat, she’s hitting the zinc. And she always gets better — or at least she hasn’t died yet. Is the zinc helping, or is she getting better by herself? Well, in the absence of a carefully designed experiment, it’s hard to say. She’s certainly convinced. But she could be falling for a very compelling illusion: the placebo effect.

Theism adds another layer: When you believe in a mysterious being who does things for his own reasons, and who isn’t directly available to answer questions, it’s easy to pick up and use the supposed motives of this being as an explanation for everything. This makes people think that:

It’s a very convenient form of reasoning. The cause of the trouble is always something the religious person doesn’t like.

Thomas Gilovich has an interesting case from Israel in his book, “How We Know What Isn’t So“.

“A flurry of deaths by natural causes in the northern part of the country led to speculation about some new and unusual threat. It was not determined whether the increase in the number of deaths was within the normal fluctuation in the death rate that one can expect by chance. Instead, remedies for the problem were quickly put in place. In particular, a group of rabbis attributed the problem to the sacrilege of allowing women to attend funerals, formerly a forbidden practice. The remedy was a decree that subsequently barred women from funerals in the area. The decree was quickly enforced, and the rash of unusual deaths subsided — leaving one to wonder what the people in this area have concluded about the effectiveness of their remedy.”

Religious reasoning. It’s not for nothing that they think God is the answer to everything, because to them it is.

Steadying the Ark

Here’s the story of Uzzah, who Jehovah/Jesus killed because he tried to help. Unfortunately, helping in his case meant trying to touch God’s favourite piece of furniture.

6:6 And when they came to Nachon’s threshingfloor, Uzzah put forth his hand to the ark of God, and took hold of it; for the oxen shook it.
6:7 And the anger of the LORD was kindled against Uzzah; and God smote him there for his error; and there he died by the ark of God.

And God’s all: NO TOUCHING MY FURNITURE! *Zap.*

This is the way the god of the Bible works: kill tens of thousands of people, and you’re a hero; try to keep the Divine Toybox from tipping, and you’re dead.

Uzzah’s death seems unnecessarily harsh, even to Mormons, who have to explain why it was actually okay for God to kill him. For Latter-day Saints, Uzzah’s story is most often employed as a cautionary tale about not correcting the leaders of the church. It’s always seemed odd and self-serving to me that leaders of the church warn against correcting or criticising leaders of the church.

Brian Ricks’ symposium talk about Uzzah is fairly representative of the Mormon view and the Mormon arguments:

We live in a day when we are bombarded with temptations to leave the path of obedience to follow the path of good intentions. There are those who criticize the Brethren, thinking this loyal opposition will help the Church.

This interpretation of Uzzah’s death worked its way into the Doctrine and Covenents:

85:8 While that man, who was called of God and appointed, that putteth forth his hand to steady the ark of God, shall fall by the shaft of death, like as a tree that is smitten by the vivid shaft of lightning.

The real Gospel Doctrine manual skips Uzzah, but the D&C manual says,

In modern revelation the Lord referred to this incident to teach the principle that the Lord does not need the help of men to defend his kingdom (see D&C 85:8). Yet even today there are those who fear the ark is tottering and presume to steady its course. There are those who are sure that women are not being treated fairly in the Church, those who would extend some unauthorized blessing, or those who would change the established doctrines of the Church. These are ark-steadiers. The best intentions do not justify such interference with the Lord’s plan.

Yes, let’s talk about women being treated fairly in the church, shall we?

For decades, the LDS leadership has engaged in double-talk regarding the role of women in the church. They’re equal. But separate! Which means “not equal”.

And while there’s a lot of sexism in our society, we don’t tend to take kindly to ‘old boys clubs’, of which the LDS priesthood is a glaring example. Every male from the age of 12 gets the priesthood, and no woman does.

It was inevitable that there would be a movement to ordain women, and lawyer and feminist Kate Kelly spearheaded just such a movement. Her subsequent excommunication has opened up a huge problem for the LDS Church. With more and more people resigning, converts down, and alternative communities becoming more available, the LDS Church can ill afford to alienate half of its membership. If I cared about the church, I’d be very concerned right now.

And yet it’s the same old story: when you think you speak for a god, it often means you’re not good at listening. Mormons think the church will never fail, and overreach is impossible. And so, predictably, LDS leaders and members are throwing up Uzzah’s ark-steadying story as a way of shutting down the discourse.

The leadership of the LDS Church wants to convince people that they know what they’re doing, it’s all under control. But as the church lurches from PR crisis to PR catastrophe, this becomes harder to believe.

Additional ideas for teaching

The manual conflates premarital sex and sexual assault

We’ve already seen in Deuteronomy how rape is just another way of getting a wife. This lesson tells of the sexual assault of Tamar by her brother Amnon.

13:1 And it came to pass after this, that Absalom the son of David had a fair sister, whose name was Tamar; and Amnon the son of David loved her.
13:2 And Amnon was so vexed, that he fell sick for his sister Tamar; for she was a virgin; and Amnon thought it hard for him to do anything to her.
…
13:10 And Amnon said unto Tamar, Bring the meat into the chamber, that I may eat of thine hand. And Tamar took the cakes which she had made, and brought them into the chamber to Amnon her brother.
13:11 And when she had brought them unto him to eat, he took hold of her, and said unto her, Come lie with me, my sister.
13:12 And she answered him, Nay, my brother, do not force me; for no such thing ought to be done in Israel: do not thou this folly.
13:13 And I, whither shall I cause my shame to go? and as for thee, thou shalt be as one of the fools in Israel. Now therefore, I pray thee, speak unto the king; for he will not withhold me from thee.
13:14 Howbeit he would not hearken unto her voice: but, being stronger than she, forced her, and lay with her.
13:15 Then Amnon hated her exceedingly; so that the hatred wherewith he hated her was greater than the love wherewith he had loved her. And Amnon said unto her, Arise, be gone.
13:16 And she said unto him, There is no cause: this evil in sending me away is greater than the other that thou didst unto me. But he would not hearken unto her.

Amnon pays with his life.

13:28 Now Absalom had commanded his servants, saying, Mark ye now when Amnon’s heart is merry with wine, and when I say unto you, Smite Amnon; then kill him, fear not: have not I commanded you? be courageous, and be valiant.
13:29 And the servants of Absalom did unto Amnon as Absalom had commanded.

A very sad story. But now here’s the kicker: the real lesson manual takes the story of this sexual assault, and uses it for a discussion about extramarital sex.

2 Samuel 13 contains the story of David’s son Amnon and David’s daughter Tamar. Amnon was attracted to Tamar and forced her to commit fornication with him.
• 2 Samuel 13:1 says that Amnon loved Tamar. How did Amnon’s feelings for Tamar change after he had sinned against her? (See 2 Samuel 13:15.) Why does hatred, rather than love, often result between people who violate the principles of morality?
President Gordon B. Hinckley said: “I heard Elder John A. Widtsoe . . . say,
‘It is my observation that a young man and a young woman who violate the principles of morality soon end up hating one another.’ I have observed the same thing. There may be words of love to begin with, but there will be words of anger and bitterness later” (“True to the Faith,” Ensign, June 1996, 5).

If there’s one thing we can agree on, it’s that rape is not the same as sex. But the lesson manual conflates them. This is inexcusable.

Lest we think this is isolated, let’s remember the story of Elizabeth Smart, who was kidnapped and was forced to live and travel with the rapist. She commented on why she didn’t try to escape:

Smart said she “felt so dirty and so filthy” after she was raped by her captor, and she understands why someone wouldn’t run “because of that alone.” Smart spoke at a Johns Hopkins human trafficking forum, saying she was raised in a religious household and recalled a school teacher who spoke once about abstinence and compared sex to chewing gum. “I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m that chewed up piece of gum, nobody re-chews a piece of gum, you throw it away.’ And that’s how easy it is to feel like you know longer have worth, you know longer have value,” Smart said. “Why would it even be worth screaming out? Why would it even make a difference if you are rescued? Your life still has no value.” . . . Smart says children should be educated that “you will always have value and nothing can change that.”

I heard the ‘chewed gum’ analogy growing up in the church, and it was designed to induce sexual guilt, but in the context of consensual sex. It’s awful that this gets rolled into rape. This attitude harms people, and this part of the manual needs to be retracted immediately.

Interesting language note

This passage caught my attention:

17:29 And honey, and butter, and sheep, and cheese of kine, for David, and for the people that were with him, to eat: for they said, The people is hungry, and weary, and thirsty, in the wilderness.

What’s with the word kine? It’s a rather unusual plural because it shares no letters with its singular companion, cow. How did it get to be this way?

Back in the early days of English, there were a lot of ways to pluralise things. There was the occasional plural -s that we know so well, but there was also a lot of vowel-raising going on, too. For this, you would swap the vowel for one that was higher in your mouth. That’s why we have

man → men, or
tooth → teeth.

But there was another method, and that was to put an -n on the end. That’s how we get oxen and brethren. Some people still say eyen for eye.

For its part, cu appears to have gotten a double shot of plurality: both the vowel raising and the -n on the end. But nowadays, we find it much easier to just put a plural -s onto cow.

If you’re curious about English plurals, you can hear me talking about them with Ben Ainslie on my podcast ‘Talk the Talk’, episode 158.

I also found this construction to be a little unusual: “The people is hungry”. While in American English usage, collective nouns like team or organization are considered singular (as in ‘the team wins’, not ‘the team win’), the noun people is almost always plural. This verse is evidence that, at least in the Jacobean English of the 1600s, people could take a singular verb. A singular observation, to my way of thinking.

OT Lesson 23 (David and Jonathan)

22 June 2014 / Daniel Midgley / Comments Off

“The Lord Be Between Thee and Me For Ever”

1 Samuel 18–20; 23–24

LDS manual: here

Reading

Last week, we saw how Jehovah/Jesus rejected Saul and chose David instead. Saul hasn’t been too happy about that, so Saul and David have been having what I can only describe as a murdering contest, and David’s winning. At least, he has all the fans.

18:6 And it came to pass as they came, when David was returned from the slaughter of the Philistine, that the women came out of all cities of Israel, singing and dancing, to meet king Saul, with tabrets, with joy, and with instruments of musick.
18:7 And the women answered one another as they played, and said, Saul hath slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands.
18:8 And Saul was very wroth, and the saying displeased him; and he said, They have ascribed unto David ten thousands, and to me they have ascribed but thousands: and what can he have more but the kingdom?
18:9 And Saul eyed David from that day and forward.

As a result, Saul tries to kill David a number of times. But it’s not really his fault; he’s under the influence of another one of those evil spirits from the Lord.

18:10 And it came to pass on the morrow, that the evil spirit from God came upon Saul, and he prophesied in the midst of the house: and David played with his hand, as at other times: and there was a javelin in Saul’s hand.
18:11 And Saul cast the javelin; for he said, I will smite David even to the wall with it. And David avoided out of his presence twice.

As before, Joseph Smith is here with his very helpful reimagining of the Bible, and he rushes in to tell us that this evil spirit was not of the Lord.

JST 1 Sam. 18:10 And it came to pass on the morrow, that the evil spirit which was not of God came upon Saul

Ah, the creative not. Smith must have felt that it was very important to point out that God does not send out evil spirits into the world. But wait — what about Satan? And one-third of the spirits from the War in Heaven? Didn’t he cast them down to earth to tempt and deceive us? How is allowing that different from sending them around to Saul directly? Is that really an important distinction?

If Saul can’t get David by javelin, maybe he can get him killed in battle. Saul offers David his daughter to wife, and all he has to do is get 100 Philistine foreskins. David, realising that a simple request would probably not be well-received by these guys, kills 200 men — you have to admire him going the extra mile — and takes their foreskins to Saul.

18:27 Wherefore David arose and went, he and his men, and slew of the Philistines two hundred men; and David brought their foreskins, and they gave them in full tale to the king, that he might be the king’s son in law. And Saul gave him Michal his daughter to wife.

It seems a bit wasteful to kill a man just for his foreskin. In some places, they use every bit of the Philistine.

Saul’s quite impressed by the haul; 200 foreskins would make quite a pile. And the pile would have been even bigger if David had rubbed them a little.

Sorry.

18:28 And Saul saw and knew that the LORD was with David, and that Michal Saul’s daughter loved him.

Ask: How can we recognise when someone has the Spirit of the Lord with them?
Possible answer: They’re carrying lots of bloody foreskins from people they’ve just murdered.

The rest of the reading is devoted to Saul chasing David around, and David escaping.

At a few points in the story, David has the chance to kill Saul (when Saul is ‘covering his feet’, or as we know it, taking a leak). But he refuses to do so. Instead, he cuts off part of Saul’s robe. Then, at a safe distance, he tells Saul that he doesn’t want to kill him.

24:10 Behold, this day thine eyes have seen how that the LORD had delivered thee to day into mine hand in the cave: and some bade me kill thee: but mine eye spared thee; and I said, I will not put forth mine hand against my lord; for he is the LORD’s anointed.
24:11 Moreover, my father, see, yea, see the skirt of thy robe in my hand: for in that I cut off the skirt of thy robe, and killed thee not, know thou and see that there is neither evil nor transgression in mine hand, and I have not sinned against thee; yet thou huntest my soul to take it.

Saul is chastened, and promises not to kill David.

Interestingly, this episode happens twice: once in chapter 24, and again in chapter 26. I’m beginning to suspect that this might be a composite story, as we saw in the last lesson. There might have been two versions of the same story floating around, and they were both added in when it was time for compilation.

Main points from this lesson

David and Jonathan’s deep love for each other

The LDS Church is terribly homophobic as religions go, and it’s worked hard to block equality for people in same-sex relationships. With that in mind, it’s nice to see the appearance of David and Jonathan in this lesson. The question is often asked: Were they gay?

The lesson manual attempts to pass them off as ‘friends’. Other people are happy to say, yes, D+J: totes gay.

And then there are a lot of people who say that David and Jonathan weren’t ‘gay’ as such because gayness in the sense that we know it is a modern social construct. Well, okay, so maybe they weren’t listening to the Pet Shop Boys or anything, but is it so hard to believe that at this place and time in history, there wasn’t a boy that had a thing for another boy?

I don’t know what David and Jonathan had. But look at the way the Bible describes them.

18:1 And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.
18:3 Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul.
18:4 And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and his garments, even to his sword, and to his bow, and to his girdle.
19:2 But Jonathan Saul’s son delighted much in David
20:42 And Jonathan said to David, Go in peace, forasmuch as we have sworn both of us in the name of the LORD, saying, The LORD be between me and thee, and between my seed and thy seed for ever. And he arose and departed: and Jonathan went into the city.

And when Jonathan was killed in battle:

2 Sam. 1:25 How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! O Jonathan, thou wast slain in thine high places.
1:26 I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.

Follow on to the Brick Testament.

And consider: David had usurped Jonathan, who would no longer get to be king. And yet they loved. Regardless of your orientation, your politics, or your religion, isn’t that kind of beautiful?

How to act like a prophet

We’re starting a new segment on GDG: how to tell if someone is a true prophet. This is one of the most difficult things I had to deal with as a Mormon. You see, the leaders of the church are supposed to be prophets, seers, and revelators. You would think that having access to a god would mean that you were more accurate than some normal person, but this is not necessarily so; many pronouncements from prophets have been retroactively disavowed when they’ve proven to be embarrassing (Adam God) or just plain wrong (moon Quakers).

I sometimes wondered if there was a way to know in advance whether a statement from a church leader was official, binding, and approved by the Lord. About the best I could come up with was: A doctrine is provisionally official if it hasn’t been thrown under the bus yet.

That was fine for me at the time — continuing revelation being what it is — but as I got older and had more experience in the church, I noticed that leaders were disavowing things I’d been taught, one by one.

Leaders who once taught that Africans were neutral in the War in Heaven claimed that the doctrine had never been taught
The ‘Family Proclamation’ saw the role of women shift from unequal to almost-equal-but-not-quite
More recently, the teaching that you can have dominion over your own planet bit the dust.

And when Gordon B. Hinckley was asked about Mormonism’s pinnacle doctrine — godhood — and vacillated on it, it became clear to me that everything was more or less up for grabs.

At the time, I made up a sardonic joke: What’s the difference between true Mormon doctrine and false Mormon doctrine? About 40 years.

But occasionally in the Old Testament, a prophet will do something that makes everyone realise: “Wow, he’s really a prophet.” Surely these things must have some relevance to the modern church. So we’re going to compile a list of these items when they come up.

The suggestion for this lesson: You know someone’s a prophet when they strip off all their clothes, lay naked all night, and prophecy.

19:20 And Saul sent messengers to take David: and when they saw the company of the prophets prophesying, and Samuel standing as appointed over them, the Spirit of God was upon the messengers of Saul, and they also prophesied.
19:21 And when it was told Saul, he sent other messengers, and they prophesied likewise. And Saul sent messengers again the third time, and they prophesied also.
19:22 Then went he also to Ramah, and came to a great well that is in Sechu: and he asked and said, Where are Samuel and David? And one said, Behold, they be at Naioth in Ramah.
19:23 And he went thither to Naioth in Ramah: and the Spirit of God was upon him also, and he went on, and prophesied, until he came to Naioth in Ramah.
19:24 And he stripped off his clothes also, and prophesied before Samuel in like manner, and lay down naked all that day and all that night. Wherefore they say, Is Saul also among the prophets?

Additional ideas for teaching

The witch of Endor

With all the murder in the Old Testament (oh, but those are Philistines, so they don’t count), it seems strange to get one’s underwear in a wad over something trivial like divination. It’s especially strange when Joseph Smith and others in frontier New York were so commonly engaging in folk magic, like using seer stones to look for buried treasure and so on.

And yet, when Joseph Smith reworked the Bible, he took pains to adapt the story of the witch of Endor (Endora, if you will). Saul wants to speak to the by-now-very-dead Samuel, and so heads to a medium.

Mediums aren’t what they used to be. Nowadays, they just say, “I’m getting an M!” But back in the day, they could haul up a prophet from the Great Beyond.

Yet Joseph Smith tried to write Samuel out of it, as though the witch of Endor had merely seen “the words of Samuel”, and not Samuel himself.

JST 1 Sam. 28:12 And when the woman saw the words of Samuel, she cried with a loud voice; and the woman spake to Saul, saying, Why hast thou deceived me? for thou art Saul.

KJV 1 Sam. 28:12 And when the woman saw Samuel, she cried with a loud voice: and the woman spake to Saul, saying, Why hast thou deceived me? for thou art Saul.

The church (through the chapter headings in its scriptures) also goes to some length to say that it was the witch and not Samuel that foretells Saul’s death.

Saul enquires of witch of Endor for revelation—She foretells his death, that of his sons, and the defeat of Israel by the Philistines.

I can only assume that when the story was written, the Hebrews were in a bit of flux, somewhere between mono- and polytheism. Other gods existed, but Jehovah was the most powerful. And so with a lot of competing forms of magic around, maybe it didn’t seem unusual for a witch to come and dig up a prophet.

Now that Jehovah has been established as the only god in the minds of his followers, obviously this kind of thing is unacceptable, and the witch of Endor has to be explained away somehow (e.g. It wasn’t really Samuel, or it was just his words). This scripture, then, is a snapshot from a time when Jehovah was still establishing his cred.

Something else is odd about this: modern Christians believe that there’s an afterlife where the spirits of the departed live, but the Hebrews of the Old Testament didn’t appear to have any such belief. This is the first time I can remember where someone’s come back. Moses didn’t come back. Adam didn’t come back. Let’s look at this as an interesting step on the road to a belief in spirits. This theme will pop up a few more times in the Old Testament before coming to full strength in the New.

Piss

I love the King James translation. Where else could you find the word piss in the Bible? And not once, but six times! It appears twice in chapter 25 alone.

In this case, it’s in the phrase “him that pisseth against the wall”, meaning the males.

25:22 So and more also do God unto the enemies of David, if I leave of all that pertain to him by the morning light any that pisseth against the wall.

The interesting thing about piss in the Bible is not that the word was acceptable to the Hebrews, but that it was acceptable to the translators of the KJV in the 1600s. It’s been 400 years, and the word piss has changed quite a bit in its acceptability since then. Tony McEnery, in his book Swearing in English, notes that piss, once fairly innocuous, became more and more sweary throughout the 1700s — so it was just in time to be included in the KJV. One hundred years later, and the scriptures would have been just a little more boring.

We’ll be monitoring the Bible for more naughty words, as they appear.

OT Lesson 19 (Judges)

18 May 2014 / Daniel Midgley / Comments Off

The Reign of the Judges

Judges 2; 4; 6–7; 13–16

LDS manual: here

Reading

You think Joshua was messed up? Welcome to Judges. Now that there’s no real leader of Israel, the violence begun by Moses and continued by Joshua just sloshes around the community at large.

Last week, we saw a quote from proto-atheist Robert Ingersoll about the book of Joshua. He continues, regarding the book of Judges:

Is there anything in Joshua—with its wars, its murders and massacres, its swords dripping with the blood of mothers and babes, its tortures, maimings and mutilations, its fraud and fury, its hatred and revenge—calculated to improve the world?

Does not every chapter shock the heart of a good man? Is it a book to be read by children?

The book of Joshua is as merciless as famine, as ferocious as the heart of a wild beast. It is a history—a justification—a sanctification of nearly every crime.

The book of Judges is about the same, nothing but war and bloodshed; the horrible story of Jael and Sisera; of Gideon and his trumpets and pitchers; of Jephtha and his daughter, whom he murdered to please Jehovah.

Here we find the story of Samson, in which a sun-god is changed to a Hebrew giant.

Now I don’t want to say any book that contains violence is bad. There’s a difference between portraying violence and approving of violence. Mormons I have known are slow to see this distinction, until it comes to Judges. Here’s a Christian saying basically this very thing:

I’d like to raise a point now that many people think that the Bible endorses everything it states. That because it’s “God’s Word,” that everything is caused and approved by God. That’s simply not so.

The book of Judges mostly describes what happened during those years. It’s not prescribing or commanding. It’s actually showing what the people did when they were left to themselves, not to worshipping and obeying God.

So anyone that brings up these chapters has to recognize this isn’t an endorsement of what’s being described.

Well, this writer hasn’t read Judges. When you do, what’s noticeable about the violence is how kosher it is. In almost all the cases, the killing was expressly commanded or motivated by the god of the Bible.

So during this lesson, we’re going to keep track of the times that the Bible says that a killing was approved of the Lord, and how many times it wasn’t.

• Kings’ thumbs and big toes cut off

1:5 And they found Adonibezek in Bezek: and they fought against him, and they slew the Canaanites and the Perizzites.
1:6 But Adonibezek fled; and they pursued after him, and caught him, and cut off his thumbs and his great toes.
1:7 And Adonibezek said, Threescore and ten kings, having their thumbs and their great toes cut off, gathered their meat under my table: as I have done, so God hath requited me. And they brought him to Jerusalem, and there he died.

Not sure if they killed the kings in addition to the phalangectomies, but this one’s approved of the Lord. ✔

Looks like God’s got a new plan though: whereas before he promised that he’d wipe out the Canaanites (a promise he couldn’t keep), now he’s decided to keep them around as a snare.

2:3 Wherefore I also said, I will not drive them out from before you; but they shall be as thorns in your sides, and their gods shall be a snare unto you.

• The manual skips one of the gorier murders in Judges:

3:14 So the children of Israel served Eglon the king of Moab eighteen years.
3:15 But when the children of Israel cried unto the LORD, the LORD raised them up a deliverer, Ehud the son of Gera, a Benjamite, a man lefthanded: and by him the children of Israel sent a present unto Eglon the king of Moab.
3:16 But Ehud made him a dagger which had two edges, of a cubit length; and he did gird it under his raiment upon his right thigh
3:17 And he brought the present unto Eglon king of Moab: and Eglon was a very fat man.
3:18 And when he had made an end to offer the present, he sent away the people that bare the present.
3:19 But he himself turned again from the quarries that were by Gilgal, and said, I have a secret errand unto thee, O king: who said, Keep silence. And all that stood by him went out from him.
3:20 And Ehud came unto him; and he was sitting in a summer parlour, which he had for himself alone. And Ehud said, I have a message from God unto thee. And he arose out of his seat.
3:21 And Ehud put forth his left hand, and took the dagger from his right thigh, and thrust it into his belly:
3:22 And the haft also went in after the blade; and the fat closed upon the blade, so that he could not draw the dagger out of his belly; and the dirt came out.

Ehud is praised as a deliverer: I think we can say this one’s approved. ✔

• We also see the start of the mass smitings of the Philistines.

3:31 And after him was Shamgar the son of Anath, which slew of the Philistines six hundred men with an ox goad: and he also delivered Israel.

Tick! ✔

• Heber’s wife Jael kills Sisera by pounding a tent stake into his skull.

4:18 And Jael went out to meet Sisera, and said unto him, Turn in, my lord, turn in to me; fear not. And when he had turned in unto her into the tent, she covered him with a mantle.
4:19 And he said unto her, Give me, I pray thee, a little water to drink; for I am thirsty. And she opened a bottle of milk, and gave him drink, and covered him.
4:20 Again he said unto her, Stand in the door of the tent, and it shall be, when any man doth come and enquire of thee, and say, Is there any man here? that thou shalt say, No.
4:21 Then Jael Heber’s wife took a nail of the tent, and took an hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground: for he was fast asleep and weary. So he died.
4:22 And, behold, as Barak pursued Sisera, Jael came out to meet him, and said unto him, Come, and I will shew thee the man whom thou seekest. And when he came into her tent, behold, Sisera lay dead, and the nail was in his temples.
4:23 So God subdued on that day Jabin the king of Canaan before the children of Israel.

The Lord evidently approved this murder, as seen in the song of the prophetess Deborah.

5:24 Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be, blessed shall she be above women in the tent.
5:25 He asked water, and she gave him milk; she brought forth butter in a lordly dish.
5:26 She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workmen’s hammer; and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head, when she had pierced and stricken through his temples.

It’s a hit! ✔

• Gideon and friends make a lot of noise, and the opposing forces set upon each other.

7:22 And the three hundred blew the trumpets, and the LORD set every man’s sword against his fellow, even throughout all the host: and the host fled to Bethshittah in Zererath, and to the border of Abelmeholah, unto Tabbath.

The Lord did this one himself. ✔

• The Danites slaughter the peaceful and unsuspecting people of Laish.

18:26 And the children of Dan went their way: and when Micah saw that they were too strong for him, he turned and went back unto his house.
18:27 And they took the things which Micah had made, and the priest which he had, and came unto Laish, unto a people that were at quiet and secure: and they smote them with the edge of the sword, and burnt the city with fire.
18:28 And there was no deliverer, because it was far from Zidon, and they had no business with any man; and it was in the valley that lieth by Bethrehob. And they built a city, and dwelt therein.
18:29 And they called the name of the city Dan, after the name of Dan their father, who was born unto Israel: howbeit the name of the city was Laish at the first.

Click to go to the Brick Testament version of this story.

While the record doesn’t say Jehovah was behind this, it wasn’t out of character for Israel. Let’s be generous and say this was off the Danites’ own bat. ✘

The Danites would eventually lend their name to a particularly frightening Mormon vigilante group, which you can read about on MormonThink.

• Finally, the gang rape and murder of a concubine. In a repeat of the Lot story, men surround a house and demand sex with a visitor.

19:22 Now as they were making their hearts merry, behold, the men of the city, certain sons of Belial, beset the house round about, and beat at the door, and spake to the master of the house, the old man, saying, Bring forth the man that came into thine house, that we may know him.

And as Lot tried to do with his daughters, the host throws them a concubine instead.

19:24 Behold, here is my daughter a maiden, and his concubine; them I will bring out now, and humble ye them, and do with them what seemeth good unto you: but unto this man do not so vile a thing.
19:25 But the men would not hearken to him: so the man took his concubine, and brought her forth unto them; and they knew her, and abused her all the night until the morning: and when the day began to spring, they let her go.
19:26 Then came the woman in the dawning of the day, and fell down at the door of the man’s house where her lord was, till it was light.
19:27 And her lord rose up in the morning, and opened the doors of the house, and went out to go his way: and, behold, the woman his concubine was fallen down at the door of the house, and her hands were upon the threshold.
19:28 And he said unto her, Up, and let us be going. But none answered. Then the man took her up upon an ass, and the man rose up, and gat him unto his place.
19:29 And when he was come into his house, he took a knife, and laid hold on his concubine, and divided her, together with her bones, into twelve pieces, and sent her into all the coasts of Israel.
19:30 And it was so, that all that saw it said, There was no such deed done nor seen from the day that the children of Israel came up out of the land of Egypt unto this day: consider of it, take advice, and speak your minds.

Truly a shocking story, but unlike the others, this one’s probably intended as a moral commentary and not a hero story. ✘

The real message of the Book of Judges

One of the things I notice from the real lesson manual is how Mormons take all the wrong lessons from the Bible. They make a big deal out of the Cycle of Apostasy. Wondering where Joseph Smith (or whoever) got it from when they were writing the Book of Mormon? It’s all right here in Judges. Here’s the chart you’ll see in this week’s Gospel Doctrine.

No wonder Mormons are terribly afraid of apostasy; they think it’s going to lead to bondage and warfare! They’re wrong about this, just as they’re wrong about everything else. Apostasy is awesome! It allows you to cast aside blinkered parochial notions without fear that a spirit will punish you. For once you can make your choices in life. No wonder the church can’t stand it. They need you to keep propping up the church in a ceaseless stream of activities that don’t really benefit you.

Also it’s no wonder they Mormons don’t have very good boundaries; they’re convinced that the apostasy of other people will cause bad things to happen to them, which makes it okay for them to police the behaviour of other people.

As it turns out, apostasy won’t lead to the collapse of society (Denmark and Sweden are doing fine.) It will, however, lead to the collapse of the church, and that’s why the church teaches against it. It’s the exact same reason why Jehovah commands the Israelites to destroy the religious icons of their neighbours. Remember, the primary goal of [ a god | the church | a corporation | any memeplex ] is self-perpetuation. Any entity that doesn’t do a good job of this doesn’t survive. So it’s normal for the church to act the way it does, but you must remember that it acts in its own interests, not in yours.

To my way of thinking, the so-called apostate times in Judges seem quite ideal. I don’t like war, I think having different cultural influences makes things interesting, and I’ve heard that genetic diversity is good for a population. And that’s what we’ve got here between the wars: Israel and the Caananites are living amongst each other, they’re marrying each other, and there’s a growing tolerance of each other’s religious beliefs.

3:5 And the children of Israel dwelt among the Canaanites, Hittites, and Amorites, and Perizzites, and Hivites, and Jebusites:
3:6 And they took their daughters to be their wives, and gave their daughters to their sons, and served their gods

Such a situation is potentially very positive; contact allows cultural and technological transmission, the end of tribalism lowers the risk of tribal conflict, and there’s a rise in religious pluralism. That’s really healthy! This could become a really advanced society if it could continue.

Unfortunately, it’s not what the god of the Bible has in mind. Diversity is bad for religious monocultures, which is turn is dangerous for gods, so it’s no wonder Jehovah (or Jesus) isn’t having any. He wants Israel to be an insular society, rejecting cultural advances by its neighbours and engaging in continual tribal warfare.

The Book of Judges does have a great lesson to teach humanity, but it’s not the one that it intends. Societies are always in cycles, swinging between — not apostasy and faithfulness — but fundamentalism and secularism. And just look at Judges — the times when people veer away from religious totalitarianism are the good times. That’s a cause, not an effect. Secular pluralistic societies do quite well. Then when the religious monoculture asserts itself, we get wars and strife. There’s a reason why we called the most religious time in European history “the Dark Ages”.

So my chart looks a little different, because I don’t see the process as entirely cyclical. It’s upward progress through secularism and science, interrupted by periods of religious influence.

All units approximate.

Jephthah sacrifices his daughter

For some reason, the manual doesn’t cover this chapter.

Jephthah, under inspiration, goes to kill some of those pesky Ammonites.

11:29 Then the Spirit of the LORD came upon Jephthah, and he passed over Gilead, and Manasseh, and passed over Mizpeh of Gilead, and from Mizpeh of Gilead he passed over unto the children of Ammon.

And he promises that when he gets home, he’ll sacrifice the first thing that comes out the door to meet him.

11:30 And Jephthah vowed a vow unto the LORD, and said, If thou shalt without fail deliver the children of Ammon into mine hands,
11:31 Then it shall be, that whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon, shall surely be the LORD’s, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering.

The battle goes well.

11:32 So Jephthah passed over unto the children of Ammon to fight against them; and the LORD delivered them into his hands.
11:33 And he smote them from Aroer, even till thou come to Minnith, even twenty cities, and unto the plain of the vineyards, with a very great slaughter. Thus the children of Ammon were subdued before the children of Israel.

But who should come to greet him? His daughter. Epic facepalm.

11:34 And Jephthah came to Mizpeh unto his house, and, behold, his daughter came out to meet him with timbrels and with dances: and she was his only child; beside her he had neither son nor daughter.

But a deal’s a deal.

11:35 And it came to pass, when he saw her, that he rent his clothes, and said, Alas, my daughter! thou hast brought me very low, and thou art one of them that trouble me: for I have opened my mouth unto the LORD, and I cannot go back.

She’s game. What a little trooper.

11:36 And she said unto him, My father, if thou hast opened thy mouth unto the LORD, do to me according to that which hath proceeded out of thy mouth; forasmuch as the LORD hath taken vengeance for thee of thine enemies, even of the children of Ammon.
11:37 And she said unto her father, Let this thing be done for me: let me alone two months, that I may go up and down upon the mountains, and bewail my virginity, I and my fellows.
11:38 And he said, Go. And he sent her away for two months: and she went with her companions, and bewailed her virginity upon the mountains.

Remember that when Abraham was going to sacrifice Isaac, God put a stop to it. No such luck here.

11:39 And it came to pass at the end of two months, that she returned unto her father, who did with her according to his vow which he had vowed: and she knew no man.

You know, when I discuss genocide in the Old Testament with Christians, there’s one justification that they always come back to: The Canaanites sacrificed their children to the god Molech (so that makes it okay for Israel to have murdered them all). But the story of Jephthah shows that human sacrifice is acceptable to Jehovah. Isn’t it a bit rich for Christians to claim that genocide is okay if you’re wiping out people who sacrifice children, when here in Judges, we have a God-approved case of child sacrifice? And when in fact their entire religion is predicated upon human sacrifice?

Ask: Is this story meant to show how awful it was, in the context of Israel’s apostasy?
Answer: No, verse 29 shows that the Spirit of the LORD was on him when he made that vow, and Jehovah must have known in advance what would happen. Notice also that Jephthah makes his vow, and then Jehovah (or Jesus) delivers the Ammonites into his hands. This is a bargain made and accepted. ✔

Ask: Did Jephthah suffer any negative social consequences as a result of killing his daughter? Did he become a pariah to his group?
Answer: No way; in the next chapter, his friends are dead keen to go kill some more Ammonites! They’re so mad they missed the last slaughter, they’re gonna burn his house down!

12:1 And the men of Ephraim gathered themselves together, and went northward, and said unto Jephthah, Wherefore passedst thou over to fight against the children of Ammon, and didst not call us to go with thee? we will burn thine house upon thee with fire.

And Jephthah’s like: No, guys, c’mon, let’s go get some more. With friends like these, right?

There’s a hand at the back. Yes, Brother Hickenlooper?

Brother H: Did later revelation clarify Jephthah’s actions?

Yes, indeedy. The apostle Paul specifically mentions Jephthah as someone who did great deeds because of his faith.

Hebrews 11:32 And what shall I more say? for the time would fail me to tell of Gideon, and of Barak, and of Samson, and of Jephthah; of David also, and Samuel, and of the prophets:
11:33 Who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions.
11:34 Quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.

Matt Dillahunty of the Atheist Experience referenced Jephthah in particular when vaporising this Christian caller John. Both parts worth watching.

Part 1:

Matt: Have you not read the story of Jephthah, who offers to sacrifice the first thing that comes out of his house to God, if God would let him win this battle? God supposedly does let him win the battle, knowing in advance that it would be his daughter, therefore God endorses human sacrifice— did you not read that part of the Bible?
John: Uh — no.
Matt: Then how can you tell me that the Bible is an accurate representation of God?
…
John: Did they go through with the sacrifice?
Matt: Yes!
John: Okay, so then at that point, if God allowed that sacrifice to go through, if he allowed that individual to sacrifice that other individual, then there was a bigger purpose and a bigger plan for that.
Matt: Okay, I’m glad you said that, ’cause now we’re done. And here’s why. You just said that if that’s what happened, — and it is; you can go read your Bible; I’m sorry you don’t know it as well as we do, but it’s there — that to me tells me is that if there is a god, and this is an accurate representation of his standard, then mine is superior. I don’t care what his standard is; I don’t care that I don’t live up to it, because he supports slavery. He supports child sacrifice. He rewards belief over deeds. He doesn’t care a whit what your life is like. He cares what you believe. He endows salvation — depending on what your soteriological claims are — based on faith or grace or anything else, yes, deeds come along afterward. But the tenet of Christianity, at least for most believers, is that you can live a good, decent life and still fry in hell.

Part 2:

Samson

Samson is everyone’s favourite murderous lunkhead. How could you not love a guy who evades capture by carrying off the gates of a city? What he lacks in brains, he makes up for in raw bull-headed determination.

Samson was the son of yet another barren woman, the type that were so common in those times.

13:2 And there was a certain man of Zorah, of the family of the Danites, whose name was Manoah; and his wife was barren, and bare not.
13:3 And the angel of the LORD appeared unto the woman, and said unto her, Behold now, thou art barren, and bearest not: but thou shalt conceive, and bear a son.
13:24 And the woman bare a son, and called his name Samson: and the child grew, and the LORD blessed him.

Samson’s not a bright boy, but he knows what he wants.

14:1 And Samson went down to Timnath, and saw a woman in Timnath of the daughters of the Philistines.
14:2 And he came up, and told his father and his mother, and said, I have seen a woman in Timnath of the daughters of the Philistines: now therefore get her for me to wife.

Nice going, Samson. You’ve just made the list of Top 10 biblical ways to acquire a wife. The rest are right here on pages 14–15 of this Sunstone issue.

The thing that strikes me about Samson is not his strength as such, but his murderous rampages, and the equanimity with which the townsfolk accept them as part of life.

• He kills 30 men to pay off a debt when his friends trick him in the riddle contest.

14:19 And the Spirit of the LORD came upon him, and he went down to Ashkelon, and slew thirty men of them, and took their spoil, and gave change of garments unto them which expounded the riddle. And his anger was kindled, and he went up to his father’s house.

Ask: What do you think of as ‘the feelings of the Spirit’?
Answer: Love, joy, peace, and according to Judges, the desire to smite the ever-living tar out of a bunch of dudes. ✔

• He causes ‘a great slaughter’ when the Philistines burn his wife and father-in-law to death over the Foxtails Incident.

15:4 And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails.
15:5 And when he had set the brands on fire, he let them go into the standing corn of the Philistines, and burnt up both the shocks, and also the standing corn, with the vineyards and olives.
15:6 Then the Philistines said, Who hath done this? And they answered, Samson, the son in law of the Timnite, because he had taken his wife, and given her to his companion. And the Philistines came up, and burnt her and her father with fire.
15:7 And Samson said unto them, Though ye have done this, yet will I be avenged of you, and after that I will cease.
15:8 And he smote them hip and thigh with a great slaughter: and he went down and dwelt in the top of the rock Etam.

We can only assume God’s okay with this — he doesn’t revoke Samson’s powers. ✔

• He kills a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass.

15:11 Then three thousand men of Judah went to the top of the rock Etam, and said to Samson, Knowest thou not that the Philistines are rulers over us? what is this that thou hast done unto us? And he said unto them, As they did unto me, so have I done unto them.
15:12 And they said unto him, We are come down to bind thee, that we may deliver thee into the hand of the Philistines. And Samson said unto them, Swear unto me, that ye will not fall upon me yourselves.
15:13 And they spake unto him, saying, No; but we will bind thee fast, and deliver thee into their hand: but surely we will not kill thee. And they bound him with two new cords, and brought him up from the rock.
15:14 And when he came unto Lehi, the Philistines shouted against him: and the Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon him, and the cords that were upon his arms became as flax that was burnt with fire, and his bands loosed from off his hands.
15:15 And he found a new jawbone of an ass, and put forth his hand, and took it, and slew a thousand men therewith.

Approved of the Lord. ✔

• Then he takes a break and goes to see a prostitute. God’s unfazed by this; Samson’s strength is uncurtailed.

16:1 Then went Samson to Gaza, and saw there an harlot, and went in unto her.

• No, what causes his strength to fail is a simple haircut. By Delilah’s treachery, he is blinded and mocked. But Jehovah gives him the strength to kill just one… more… time!

16:27 Now the house was full of men and women; and all the lords of the Philistines were there; and there were upon the roof about three thousand men and women, that beheld while Samson made sport.
16:28 And Samson called unto the LORD, and said, O Lord God, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes.
16:29 And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars upon which the house stood, and on which it was borne up, of the one with his right hand, and of the other with his left.
16:30 And Samson said, Let me die with the Philistines. And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.

And tick. ✔

There are a number of problems with the story of Samson.

First, God’s moral commands seem especially arbitrary here. He punishes Samson not for murdering over a thousand people, nor for having sex outside of marriage — that’s all okay. No, what really tears the deal for God is Samson getting a haircut that he didn’t even want. How does that square with divine justice?

But the other problem is: why does God have different deals for different people?

One of the things about Mormon doctrine is that the same requirements apply to everyone. Fair’s fair. You’re gay? No sex before marriage, just like straight people. You lived and died before Jesus? Well, you have to get baptised just like everybody else. God’s no respecter of persons.

But what the story of Samson shows is that God is a respecter of persons. If you’re a Nazarite, you follow a different set of rules to everyone else. So how does that fit into the system? Is Samson not supposed to cut his hair because cutting one’s hair is morally wrong? That would be weird. So why is this the thing that undoes Samson?

(This takes us into the territory of Euthyphro’s Dilemma, which we’ll discuss in a future lesson.)

Is it all about the kind of deal you make with God? If so, is it possible to hold out for a better deal? Do you just have to invent a sect, and God will respect it? This seems distinctly post-modern to me, like the new age friend who once implored me not to be an atheist, because if I thought there’d be nothing after death, that’s what would happen to me! Having God honour the deal you make with him would be terrific, if you could write your own deal. If it’s a custom-made deal that God handed down to the Nazarites, then not so much.

Additional ideas for teaching

Gods can take care of themselves.

Ask: What would you think of someone who committed an act of religiously motivated vandalism?

Such was Gideon, one of the heroes of Judges.

6:28 And when the men of the city arose early in the morning, behold, the altar of Baal was cast down, and the grove was cut down that was by it, and the second bullock was offered upon the altar that was built.
6:29 And they said one to another, Who hath done this thing? And when they enquired and asked, they said, Gideon the son of Joash hath done this thing.

The men of the city go to Gideon’s father Joash, who says something quite sensible: Why does your god need protection? If he’s such a hotshot, let him do his own dirty work.

6:30 Then the men of the city said unto Joash, Bring out thy son, that he may die: because he hath cast down the altar of Baal, and because he hath cut down the grove that was by it.
6:31 And Joash said unto all that stood against him, Will ye plead for Baal? will ye save him? he that will plead for him, let him be put to death whilst it is yet morning: if he be a god, let him plead for himself, because one hath cast down his altar.

Ironic, coming from an Israelite, but a good point nonetheless.

The Abrahamic god must be truly powerless to need a small army of apologists, legislators, missionaries, and defenders to make his case for him.

Click to see the whole Jesus and Mo cartoon.

Shibboleth

A shibboleth is often a word or phrase that identifies someone as a member of a group. The word comes to us from Judges 12. It seems that child-killer Jephthah took his friends the Gileadites to battle against the Ephraimites. The Gileadites won, and cut off the Ephraimites’ route of escape. The problem then became: how to tell the Gileadites from the Ephraimites when everyone was leaving the site of battle? The solution was linguistic: The Gileadite dialect used a /ʃ/ sound, as in shin; the Ephraimite dialect didn’t. So they got everyone to say the word shibboleth, which meant ‘ear of grain‘, and if they couldn’t say the /ʃ/, that marked them as an Ephraimite. They killed 42,000 people that day.

12:5 And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay;
12:6 Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.

The takeaway here: A knowledge of phonology could save your life.

God can’t beat iron chariots

Perhaps his omnipotence was a later invention?

1:19 And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron.

Shoot, what’s an almighty deity to do?

Iron Chariots is also the name of a wonderful counter-apologetics site. Worth a look!

And the murder tally is:

God: From the above, I get 46,704 dead people, plus an entire army of Midianites and an unspecified Samsonian ‘great slaughter’ of Philistines. (That’s not counting the 300 foxes.) All commanded, inspired, or actually performed by the god of the Bible.
Man: One concubine, plus the City of Laish. I think I was being generous there.

Activity for Gospel Doctrine attenders: If the instructor tries to pull the old ‘reporting is not approval’ trick, just show them the stats. Don’t let them get away with it. The violence in Judges is mostly god-approved, and in fact the whole setup is Jehovah’s doing for deciding to keep the Canaanites around, contrary to his earlier promise in Joshua. The cycle of violence between Israel and its neighbours — and all its attendant misery — is worth it to Jehovah (or Jesus), so that Israel will remember him.

Thanks for playing, and we’ll see you next week.

OT Lesson 13 (Exodus)

29 March 2014 / Daniel Midgley / 4 Comments

Bondage, Passover, and Exodus

Exodus 1–3; 5–6; 11–14

LDS manual: here

Reading

Ch. 1–2: All Joseph’s family moves down to Egypt, where they reproduce with speed that could only be described as Nephite. In just a few hundred years, from the original gang of seventy, there’s millions of them. But there’s a new Pharaoh in town, who enslaves the Hebrews and orders midwives to kill all the boys. Moses escapes. (We’ll see this story remixed into the Jesus legend.)

Ch. 3–4: Moses is raised by Pharaoh’s daughter, but after killing an Egyptian — first making sure no one is watching — he’s forced into hiding. While there, God appears to him in a burning bush.

He explains that he intends to “smite Egypt”.

3:20 And I will stretch out my hand, and smite Egypt with all my wonders which I will do in the midst thereof: and after that he will let you go.

Who the hell listens to a bush anyway? Frankie Boyle, everyone.

Just to be extra convincing, God gives Moses a stick that turns into a snake, and water that turns into blood. And for an encore, by reaching into his cloak, Moses can give his hand leprosy! That’ll do it.

Moses complains that he’s not very eloquent, but God’s like “I know that — who do you think makes people deaf or blind?” Wow, okay, God. Not only that, he explains in advance:

4:21 And the LORD said unto Moses, When thou goest to return into Egypt, see that thou do all those wonders before Pharaoh, which I have put in thine hand: but I will harden his heart, that he shall not let the people go.

God starts to act a bit erratic, though. He inexplicably decides to kill Moses, but it’s Moses’ wife to the rescue!

4:24 And it came to pass by the way in the inn, that the LORD met him, and sought to kill him.
4:25 Then Zipporah took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet, and said, Surely a bloody husband art thou to me.
4:26 So he let him go: then she said, A bloody husband thou art, because of the circumcision.

I can see why God would be impressed and leave them alone. He probably put his sunglasses on and said, “You just bought yourself six more months,” and walked away.

Bizarre stuff. Could this be why the manual skips chapter 4?

Ch. 5–10: Moses goes to Pharaoh and gives him a rather ominous first discussion: God Has a Plan for You. Pharaoh won’t let the Israelites go, so after a brief magic contest with Pharaoh’s magicians, Moses smites the place with plagues: bloody water, frogs, lice, flies, dead livestock, boils, thunder and hail, locusts, and darkness. With every plague, God hardens Pharaoh’s heart; he wouldn’t miss a chance to kill some kids.

Ch. 11: God says: ‘Okay, so here’s the plan. We’re gonna blow this place, so first, everyone “borrow” everything you can from your neighbours. Then, I’ll kill all the firstborn Egyptian children to create a diversion. Meanwhile, you guys kill lambs, and smear the blood on your door posts.’

Why did he have them do that? Well, the lamb was a symbol of Jesus, and God liked people to act out things symbolically. So when people say that God is a great scientist or a great engineer… no. Apparently he’s an Arts major. Great. That explains everything.

Ch. 12–14: The Israelites flee toward the Red Sea, with Pharaoh’s army in hot pursuit. God pulls his shenanigans: he blocks them with a cloud, and personally pulls the wheels off of their chariots. Finally, God parts the Red Sea, allowing the Israelites to pass through on dry ground. The Egyptian armies follow, but — kersplash — they’re sunk and no trace of them is ever found.

No, seriously, no trace of an Egyptian army has ever been found in the Red Sea.

Main points from this lesson

No evidence for Hebrews in Egypt

There’s no evidence that a large number of Hebrews were in Egypt during this time.

Linguistics: If Hebrews and Egyptians lived in the same place for four hundred years, then we should expect them to have borrowed words from each other. Sure, they both would have had their reasons not to share vocabulary; Egyptians, because the Hebrews were slaves; Hebrews, because the Egyptians weren’t Hebrews. But we should expect a great number of words to have filtered in. Instead, we find only a few words that could be explained by later contact.

Archeology: If a migration of Hebrews came into Canaan from Egypt after living there for 400 years, we’d expect the pots we find in Canaan to change style suddenly. In fact, we see no sudden change.

There’s a Reddit thread for everything, and this one on the imaginary Exodus looks pretty near comprehensive. Browse if you have the time.

Does it matter if god kills people?

If there’s one thing about children that we can agree on, it’s that they shouldn’t be murdered. Yet the god of the Bible kills kids again and again. Knowing this could have certain advantages:

Yet when I bring this point up with Latter-day Saints (and other Christians), they’re quite unbothered by it. Which is very strange — on the one hand, they’re sincerely pro-life when it comes to foetuses, but they’re frighteningly blasé about this tendency of their god to kill them once they’re born. (They seem to forget that their god only allows about one embryo in five to make it to birth, making God the greatest abortionist of all.)

Mormons that I’ve encountered tend to give the following excuses for God’s predilection for filicide:

It doesn’t matter because the children get whisked up to heaven where they play with puppies and eat ice cream.

This is a presupposition, not an argument. You can get away with a lot if you’re allowed to magic up a fictional rationale, but it will be unconvincing to anyone who doesn’t share your presupposition.

It doesn’t matter because everyone has to die sometime.

Even though I have to die someday, I’d rather not be murdered, especially not in childhood. Being killed often entails some kind of pain, and as a moral person, I have this idea that it’s wrong to cause pain unnecessarily.

It doesn’t matter because God made us, so he gets to destroy us.

This argument reminds me of a passage from Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger, about a boy with strange powers, including the power to fashion live animals from dirt. This is a longish excerpt, but imagine how you’d feel if you saw this scene.

At last I made bold to ask him to tell us who he was.

“An angel,” he said, quite simply, and set another bird free and clapped his hands and made it fly away.

A kind of awe fell upon us when we heard him say that, and we were afraid again; but he said we need not be troubled, there was no occasion for us to be afraid of an angel, and he liked us, anyway. He went on chatting as simply and unaffectedly as ever; and while he talked he made a crowd of little men and women the size of your finger, and they went diligently to work and cleared and leveled off a space a couple of yards square in the grass and began to build a cunning little castle in it, the women mixing the mortar and carrying it up the scaffoldings in pails on their heads, just as our work-women have always done, and the men laying the courses of masonry—five hundred of these toy people swarming briskly about and working diligently and wiping the sweat off their faces as natural as life. In the absorbing interest of watching those five hundred little people make the castle grow step by step and course by course, and take shape and symmetry, that feeling and awe soon passed away and we were quite comfortable and at home again. We asked if we might make some people, and he said yes, and told Seppi to make some cannon for the walls, and told Nikolaus to make some halberdiers, with breastplates and greaves and helmets, and I was to make some cavalry, with horses, and in allotting these tasks he called us by our names, but did not say how he knew them. Then Seppi asked him what his own name was, and he said, tranquilly, “Satan,” and held out a chip and caught a little woman on it who was falling from the scaffolding and put her back where she belonged, and said, “She is an idiot to step backward like that and not notice what she is about.”

It caught us suddenly, that name did, and our work dropped out of our hands and broke to pieces—a cannon, a halberdier, and a horse. Satan laughed, and asked what was the matter. I said, “Nothing, only it seemed a strange name for an angel.” He asked why.

“Because it’s—it’s—well, it’s his name, you know.”

“Yes—he is my uncle.”

He said it placidly, but it took our breath for a moment and made our hearts beat. He did not seem to notice that, but mended our halberdiers and things with a touch, handing them to us finished, and said, “Don’t you remember?—he was an angel himself, once.”

“Yes—it’s true,” said Seppi; “I didn’t think of that.”

“Before the Fall he was blameless.”

“Yes,” said Nikolaus, “he was without sin.”

“It is a good family—ours,” said Satan; “there is not a better. He is the only member of it that has ever sinned.”

…

Two of the little workmen were quarreling, and in buzzing little bumblebee voices they were cursing and swearing at each other; now came blows and blood; then they locked themselves together in a life-and-death struggle. Satan reached out his hand and crushed the life out of them with his fingers, threw them away, wiped the red from his fingers on his handkerchief, and went on talking where he had left off: “We cannot do wrong; neither have we any disposition to do it, for we do not know what it is.”

It seemed a strange speech, in the circumstances, but we barely noticed that, we were so shocked and grieved at the wanton murder he had committed—for murder it was, that was its true name, and it was without palliation or excuse, for the men had not wronged him in any way. It made us miserable, for we loved him, and had thought him so noble and so beautiful and gracious, and had honestly believed he was an angel; and to have him do this cruel thing—ah, it lowered him so, and we had had such pride in him. He went right on talking, just as if nothing had happened, telling about his travels, and the interesting things he had seen in the big worlds of our solar system and of other solar systems far away in the remotenesses of space, and about the customs of the immortals that inhabit them, somehow fascinating us, enchanting us, charming us in spite of the pitiful scene that was now under our eyes, for the wives of the little dead men had found the crushed and shapeless bodies and were crying over them, and sobbing and lamenting, and a priest was kneeling there with his hands crossed upon his breast, praying; and crowds and crowds of pitying friends were massed about them, reverently uncovered, with their bare heads bowed, and many with the tears running down—a scene which Satan paid no attention to until the small noise of the weeping and praying began to annoy him, then he reached out and took the heavy board seat out of our swing and brought it down and mashed all those people into the earth just as if they had been flies, and went on talking just the same. An angel, and kill a priest! An angel who did not know how to do wrong, and yet destroys in cold blood hundreds of helpless poor men and women who had never done him any harm! It made us sick to see that awful deed, and to think that none of those poor creatures was prepared except the priest, for none of them had ever heard a mass or seen a church. And we were witnesses; we had seen these murders done and it was our duty to tell, and let the law take its course.

Ask: How would you feel if you saw someone squash a bunch of people flat, even if he had created them?
Answer: It seems like the kind of thing a morally callous individual would do, and one would wonder if there weren’t something wrong with his moral sense.

Ask: Could God have accomplished his purpose to liberate Israel without killing anyone? If he was able to harden Pharaoh’s heart, could he have softened it?
Answer: If he’s omnipotent, then yes.
Ask: Then why didn’t he?

It’s bizarre and cruel for a god to decide to enact his will in this way, when other avenues are available.

A question on a Facebook thread caught my attention. It’s from Alan Gegax, and I’m sharing it here with his permission:

I was thinking about the God who is presented in the Bible. He had a problem in the beginning when Adam and Eve gained moral knowledge. Part of his solution, introduce death into the world. He had a problem with the world turning to shit. His solution, drown everyone and everything. He had a problem with Jews being kept in Egypt. His solution, kill everyone’s firstborn, then kill the chasing Egyptian soldiers. He had a problem with Jews who needed a homeland. His solution, genocide against the Canaanites. He had a problem with forgiving sins. His solution, kill Jesus.

Has there ever been a major problem in the world that God didn’t solve via murder? I know He’s claimed to heal individuals (though not as often as He smites them), but on large-scale stuff, it kind of seems like murder is His go-to solution. Am I wrong here?

No, I don’t think so. And next year when we get to Revelation, we’ll see how he solves the ultimate problem of evil on earth by killing billions more. This god has a fairly uncreative approach to problem-solving.

Additional suggestions for teaching

The church offers counterfeits

The real lesson manual points to the magicians’ ability to imitate Moses’ rod-snake, and asks:

What are some ways Satan counterfeits God’s power and blessings today?

From time to time, I’d hear in church that Satan had counterfeits for God’s favourite things: Satan’s counterfeit for revelation was divination, the Lord had his church, Satan had counterfeit churches, and so on.

But to say that the LDS Church is real, and other things are counterfeit is upside-down; it’s the church that offers counterfeits.

Counterfeit family The church tries to build a counterfeit family by co-opting kinship terms (Brother, Sister), referring to the “ward family” with the Bishop as the “father of the ward”, and of course a Heavenly Father and Mother that children are taught to look to and feel love for. Having a family is a normal human thing, but the church trades on this family metaphor in order to turn the feelings one has for one’s family toward itself. I think the goal of the church is not to strengthen the family; its goal is to supplant it.
Counterfeit way of finding information In science, you learn things by observation, experimentation, and careful control for bias. What’s the church’s method? Knowledge from feels! A burning in your bosom means something’s true. This is epistemic hedonism — if it feels good, believe it — and a disastrous counterfeit that sees people making bad life decisions based on no evidence.
Counterfeit history We’ve already seen how the church has an alternate version of history that contradicts the evidence that we have from multiple disciplines. There’s no evidence for events like the Creation, the Fall, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, and so on, but Mormon doctrine falls flat without them.
Counterfeit morality A healthy approach to morality gives guidelines on how to treat other people. When Mormons talk about ‘morality’, what are they talking about? Basically just sex. If you’re engaging in non-church-sanctioned bonking, you’re immoral and unclean, even if you’re doing so consensually and responsibly. If you’re celibate, you can pass for all kinds of morality in the church, no matter how unethical a person you really are. How did they manage to hijack the language this way? This is a one-dimensional view of morality, and it’s a counterfeit.
Counterfeit healing Mormons try to cure each other of diseases by rubbing oil on each other. In the 21st fucking century. The largest prayer studies have shown no effect, but medical science does.
Counterfeit authority You have to check out the Benson talk “Fourteen Fundamentals in Following the Prophet“. Here are some of the points:

4. The prophet will never lead the Church astray.
5. The prophet is not required to have any particular earthly training or credentials to speak on any subject or act on any matter at any time.
…
8. The prophet is not limited by men’s reasoning.

Yep, the prophet is right, he doesn’t have to know anything to be right, and he’s righter than people who do know things. Wow — do you think you could convince people to give you an intellectual pass like this? With religion, you can.

The church offers counterfeit love, counterfeit friendship, and in the form of the Relief Society, its own counterfeit women’s organisation. It takes normal human things and subverts them for its own benefit.

OT Lesson 6 (Noah)

8 February 2014 / Daniel Midgley / 8 Comments

“Noah… Prepared an Ark to the Saving of His House”

Moses 8:19–30; Genesis 6–9; 11:1–9

Links to the reading in the SAB: Genesis 6, Genesis 7, Genesis 8, Genesis 9, Genesis 11
LDS manual: here

Background

This lesson is about two of God’s worst atrocities: drowning almost all the people and animals in the world in a flood when they got out of his control, and scrambling humanity’s languages when they committed the sin of cooperating on a building project.

I’m a bit stuck as to how to present this lesson. Do I make it a straight takedown of biblical literalism? That’s easy and fun. And not only that, the literal approach is the one that’s taken by the LDS Church in its official instruction manuals, so it’s pertinent besides. On the other hand, do I take the view of Very Sophisticated Theologians and Apologists, and go for a figurative view? That has the benefit of being true, but has the unfortunate effect of negating the entire basis for the Gospel, as we saw in a previous lesson.

We’re at a weird point in LDS doctrine as of last week. That’s when the First Quorum of the Anonymous released its ‘Book of Mormon and DNA Studies‘ essay, which uses sources that acknowledge that people immigrated to the American continent 10,000 years ago, which is a few thousand years before Adam and Eve. So what’s the story here; thousands of years, or millions?

What’s happened is that, because of the Church’s failure to clarify its own doctrine, two parallel streams of doctrine have grown up in the last several decades: a literal one that’s taught in Sunday School, and a figurative/metaphorical one that’s accepted in apologetic circles and on the Internet. The parallel approach has worked out well for the Church; they don’t have to go out on a limb officially, and everyone gets to believe what they want. It works for them, as long as — like we learned in Ghostbusters — you never cross the streams. Because crossing the streams is Bad. But in the DNA essay, what we saw is the Church crossing the streams.

It was inevitable that they’d have to do this, as science has been putting pressure on the literal story for a couple of centuries. Something was going to crack. But it does reveal the Mormon Church’s doctrinal incoherence, and this causes headaches for a diligent Gospel Doctrine teacher.

Not for me, though. In this lesson, I’m taking an axe to the literal view because it’s not the dead horse it’s made out to be. We live in a world where a sizeable number of adult humans are willing to say that they believe the story of Noah’s Ark to be “literally true” — 61 percent, according to a 2004 Gallup poll of American adults. That’s right; three out of five.

Even just last week, we saw a debate between Bill Nye, a guy of science, and Ken Ham, looking lost with only the Bible for support — poor sap. Not only does Ham cherry-pick the evidence that leads to his worldview, he admitted that he would never change his mind about the Bible.

The fact is, many religious organisations are promoting the idea that Noah’s Ark was a true, literal, non-allegorical, and (importantly) global event that took place about 2350 BCE. And one of them is the LDS Church, which as of today continues to teach — in its official lesson manuals, on its website, in its official magazine, and in General Conferences — that God once committed the most complete act of genocide ever recorded upon humankind.

We would now like to turn the time over to Brother Gervais for the story of Noah.

Main points from this lesson

A global flood is implausible.

Many others have done detailed takedowns of the Flood, so I’ll just link to them here, in the order that I like them:

Talk Origins: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html
Rational Wiki: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Global_flood
Biblical Nonsense: http://www.biblicalnonsense.com/chapter6.html
National Center for Science Education: http://ncse.com/cej/4/1/impossible-voyage-noahs-ark/
Skepdic: http://www.skepdic.com/noahsark.html

And of course, the Brick Testament.

Here’s a quick run-through of my favourite points:

• The Ark, as described, is way too small

Show the class this graphic from the manual, which even as a TBM I couldn’t believe they printed.

Ask: Would you be able to fit millions of animal species in there? Including millions yet unclassified? In a ship half the size of an ocean liner? (Unless you think they speciated wildly after the flood, but wait, no, that would be evolution.)

Show the class this video by the always-wonderful NonStampCollector, detailing the gargantuan (but not very realistic) labours of Noah.

• Parasites!

You can’t just save all the nice animals; you also have to rescue the parasites. That means Noah and family would have had to be infected with every parasite that humans are prone to.

How many parasites are we talking about? Well, according to the Wikipedia page, about 73! Yep, they’d have been crawling with liver worms, tapeworms, flukes, bedbugs, pubic lice, and fleas. They would scarcely have a healthy eye, ear, urinary tract, or crotch among them! And this would be at the same time that they had to be at the peak of their reproductive fitness, in order to repopulate the earth.

• Other problems

A tiny crew of eight people would have had to do the work of many zoos, and do it all with zero animal deaths.

What about plants? Keeping them underwater for a year would have killed them. It’s a bit moot, though — there are trees just under 10,000 years old, and they show no signs of a flood.

After the flood, the animals would have had to make their way from (apparently) Turkey, the ark’s landing site, to wherever they would eventually live. Cold-weather animals wouldn’t have done well migrating from Turkey. And apparently they didn’t have to, since bones of every animal on earth don’t appear along the way.

Perhaps God teleported them to their new abodes magically. In fact, magic could explain a lot in this story. Whenever I discuss this with creationists, they always fall back on magic eventually. In which case, wouldn’t it be better to go with the magic from the start? Why try to make it sound sciencey, and then revert to magic? Just start with magic! It would save a lot of time!

A local flood doesn’t fit the requirements of the text.

Could we circumvent the plausibility problem by assuming the Flood was a local event, as LDS apologists try to? Unfortunately for them, no. That would mean that the Flood no longer fits the script.

Gen 7:19: All the mountains under heaven were covered with water.

Gen 7:21: All flesh died that moved upon the earth. (Watch as apologists attempt to redefine the word earth. Good one.)

Gen 9:13–16: After the flood, God sent a rainbow as a promise that he would not make another flood like that. But there have been plenty of localised floods since.

There’s a hand up. Yes, Brother Hickenlooper?

Brother Hickenlooper: I was always taught that the whole earth had to be under water because the Flood was the earth’s baptism. Did the church ever really teach that?

Indeed they did, Brother Hickenlooper. From the church essay on “Noah”.

What is the symbolism of Noah and the flood?
God uses symbols to teach gospel truths. In the New Testament, Peter explained that the flood was a “like figure” or symbol of baptism (1 Peter 3:20–21). Just as the earth was immersed in water, so we must be baptized by water and by the Spirit before we can enter the celestial kingdom.

The Flood is at the wrong time.

There were contemporary cultures who didn’t notice the global flood.

A Flood would be the action of an immoral being.

Okay, so the Flood is fictional. No need to get worked up over it. It’s supposed to be an allegory of God’s love, although not from the perspective of everyone who drowned, including children and babies (born and unborn). But all this tells us is that, even as portrayed by his followers, the god of the Bible is a murderous bully who kills men, women, and children in order to fix problems that he created.

Worse, after committing this atrocity, he makes no effort to prevent it from happening again.

Ask: What kind of parent would decide that the correct way to deal with his errant children is to drown them? This is what we should be thinking when we hear “Parenting the Lord’s Way”.

Ask: Why would anyone worship such a being?
Answer: Under duress, Stockholm syndrome.

The Tower of Babel is a myth.

Ah, now we’re in my area. At one point, I was a young linguist, and a true believing Mormon (or TBM). How did I reconcile the two? By not thinking about it very carefully!

No serious linguist would accept the story of the Tower of Babel. You’d have to believe that all humans were speaking the same language after the Flood (so around 2300 BCE).

In fact, the Bible contradicts itself — Genesis 10 says that there were multiple languages, but in the next chapter, there was only one.

In reality, there’s no evidence of any kind of language bottleneck, where everyone is speaking the same language around 2300 BCE. Human languages have been diversifying since people started speaking.

At one point, there may have been one human language, but this would have been maybe 60,000 years ago, when early humans first left Africa.

We know quite a bit about one language family in particular: Proto-Indo-European. This is the language that led to many languages spoken today, like English, Greek, Russian, and even Persian and Sanskrit.

Even though it’s hard to tell exactly when things happened so long ago, we do know that Proto-Indo-European had already split off from its sister languages somewhere between the 4th millennium and the 7th millennium BCE — about 2 to 5 thousand years before Babel. In other words, there was no language bottleneck at the time of Babel.

It’s pretty clear that Babel is a myth that’s intended to explain the diversity of languages in the world, but it’s not the only one.

In African tales, a famine causes the people to wander the earth jabbering nonsense.
In the Dreamtime legend of the Gunwinggu of Australia, a goddess gives each of her children a language to play with.
And for the most plausible explanation of language diversity, a Native American legend has it that disagreement between people caused them to move apart and speak differently.

By comparison, the Abrahamic God just looks petty and insecure, condemning people for working together. One of the best things for advancing our knowledge is collaboration.
Ask: Why might working together help to increase knowledge?
Answers:

Groups of people working together can do more work than one person can do alone.
One person can be subject to bias, but getting more people to review the results helps to control for that; not everyone will have the same biases.
If one person uses deception, other people can try to replicate their results, and they’ll likely be caught. This is a powerful motivator to stay honest.

Working together in science sometimes takes the form of peer review. Peer review helps to correct for error, bias, and deception. This is why biased and mistaken people (like creationists and pseudo-scientists) despise peer review, claiming it represents a conspiracy against them.

Mormons have to take the Tower of Babel story at face value.

I mentioned that, as a young linguist, I didn’t think too much about the Babel story. I took it as largely allegorical, or as a primitive explanation.

That was to change on one of my readings through the Book of Mormon, which relates the story of the brother of Jared. He’s meant to have been at Babel in a very non-allegorical sense. Like many Mormons (and Christians), I habitually dismissed the parts of the Bible that seemed fantastical, but dismissing the Book of Mormon as non-literal is much more difficult. It’s not intended to be read as allegory, at least according to the standard line you get from church. (Then again, neither is the OT, so what did I know?)

So here I had two facts that couldn’t be reconciled:

The Book of Mormon told a story that was intended as factual.
The story was clearly wrong.

This was quite jarring, and I think it was the first real earthquake that led to my deconversion. After the fall of Babel, it became much easier to see how the Church got things wrong, including history, dinosaurs, geology, linguistics, and Mesoamerican archaeology. But more on those later.

Additional ideas for study

Man, I’m glad the creationist crazies haven’t launched into linguistics with the same fervour with which they’ve besieged biology. Otherwise, we’d have the theory of Wrathful Dispersion.

An ex-Mormon take on LDS Sunday School lessons

Category: linguistics (page 2 of 2)

“That Ye Might Believe That Jesus Is the Christ”

Isaiah 61:1–3; Joseph Smith Translation, Luke 3:4–11; John 1:1–14; 20:31

Purpose

Reading

Main points from the lesson

Did Jesus exist?

Was the Jesus story a copy of existing gods?

Additional lesson ideas

Doubtful goals of the atonement

Is the possessive Jesus’, or Jesus’s?

“I Have Made Thee This Day… an Iron Pillar”

Jeremiah 1–2; 15; 20; 26; 36–38

Reading

Main points from this lesson

Is it good to be ‘an iron pillar’?

“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee”

Additional lesson ideas

Of leopards and spots

Don’t have Christmas trees

Closing hymn

“Create in Me a Clean Heart”

1 Samuel 18–20; 23–24

Reading

Main points of this lesson

God punishes people for arbitrary things that they haven’t even done

Steadying the Ark

Additional ideas for teaching

The manual conflates premarital sex and sexual assault

Interesting language note

“The Lord Be Between Thee and Me For Ever”

1 Samuel 18–20; 23–24

Reading

Main points from this lesson

David and Jonathan’s deep love for each other

How to act like a prophet

Additional ideas for teaching

The witch of Endor

Piss

The Reign of the Judges

Judges 2; 4; 6–7; 13–16

Reading

The real message of the Book of Judges

Jephthah sacrifices his daughter

Samson

Additional ideas for teaching

Gods can take care of themselves.

Shibboleth

God can’t beat iron chariots

And the murder tally is:

Bondage, Passover, and Exodus

Exodus 1–3; 5–6; 11–14

Reading

Main points from this lesson

No evidence for Hebrews in Egypt

Does it matter if god kills people?

Additional suggestions for teaching

The church offers counterfeits

“Noah… Prepared an Ark to the Saving of His House”

Moses 8:19–30; Genesis 6–9; 11:1–9

Background

Main points from this lesson

A global flood is implausible.

A local flood doesn’t fit the requirements of the text.

The Flood is at the wrong time.

A Flood would be the action of an immoral being.

The Tower of Babel is a myth.

Mormons have to take the Tower of Babel story at face value.

Additional ideas for study

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