The N. T. Wrong Blog

from an article in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, back in 1999 …

“A literal biblical chronology would mean a world created in seven days, about 4000 B.C., give or take one or two hundred years. But many creationists do not want to be biblical literalists. Of course the Bible in a general way is a big source of inspiration for their movement, but the exact figures of the Bible are not a matter of principle for them, as I understand them. In my opinion, it was a big mistake for many of the mainline religious organizations when they opposed the creationists by saying that the Bible should not be taken literally. This is not what the creationists do. It is, on the contrary, what the churches and other organisations should do: that is, to argue that, in this respect, the Bible’s figures should be taken literally, because it is when they are taken literally it becomes clear that they are not historically or scientifically true.”
- James Barr

Hoorah for Barr!! Damn it, but I so often relish his words, like those of few other biblical scholars.

James Barr set himself against those who would construct an artificial separation of theology and science/history, realising that both stand and fall together. The attempt to defend the bible as ‘theologically true’ but not a ‘textbook’ on history or science is, first, a false dichotomy, and, second, a division that its authors simply could not have conceived of. The bible is ‘theologically’ false because it is ‘historically’/’scientifically’ false - if these categories are understood emically (and so, non-exclusively). Disproof of the bible’s own conception of history or science (not our categories, mind you) is disproof of its own theology. Any denial of this stems from an imposition of modern categories which attempt a separation where none was thought possible.

So, heed James Barr’s call from beyond the grave: Take the Bible literally (don’t impose your own ill-fitting concepts on it).

Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams wrote ‘A Common Word for the Common Good’ (a letter to Muslim leaders and scholars) on July 14, 2008. In one part of the letter he explains the Trinity affirms God’s oneness and self-sufficiency while not positing any other beings alongside God (consistent with the teachings of Islam), yet further affirms that the divine life is lived “as three interrelated agencies” (the Christian peculiarity, par excellence). Williams is quite orthodox.

And he doesn’t shy from explicating the Christian distinctives, either. Rowan Williams acknowledges that the doctrine is difficult for, and sometimes offensive to, Muslims. But he notes that this offensiveness provides all the more reason to clarify the peculiarities of the Christian doctrine:

“… ‘God’ is the name of a kind of life, a ‘nature’ or essence – eternal and self-sufficient life, always active, needing nothing. But that life is lived, so Christians have always held, eternally and simultaneously as three interrelated agencies are made known to us in the history of God’s revelation to the Hebrew people and in the life of Jesus and what flows from it. God is at once the source of divine life, the expression of that life and the active power that communicates that life. This takes us at once into consideration of the Trinitarian language used by Christians to speak of God. We recognise that this is difficult, sometimes offensive, to Muslims; but it is all the more important for the sake of open and careful dialogue that we try to clarify what we do and do not mean by it, and so trust that what follows will be read in this spirit.

In human language, in the light of what our Scripture says, we speak of “Father, Son and Holy Spirit”, but we do not mean one God with two beings alongside him, or three gods of limited power. So there is indeed one God, the Living and Self-subsistent, associated with no other; but what God is and does is not different from the life which is eternally and simultaneously the threefold pattern of life: source and expression and sharing. Since God’s life is always an intelligent, purposeful and loving life, it is possible to think of each of these dimensions of divine life as, in important ways, like a centre of mind and love, a person; but this does not mean that God ‘contains’ three different individuals, separate from each other as human individuals are.” (p. 4)

But that’s not what you’d understand from the media reports of Rowan Williams’ letter, which have been as wilfully (or perhaps ignorantly) inaccurate — much like the general misreporting of his comments on sharia law.

The Telegraph simply states that there is a conflict between the Christian Trinity and the Muslim Allah — the very conflict which Rowan Williams was attempting to challenge or at least nuance:

“Discussing differences between the religions, Dr Williams acknowledges that Christian belief in the Trinity is “difficult, sometimes offensive, to Muslims”. The Trinity is the Christian doctrine stating God exists as the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and conflicts with Islamic teaching that there is one all-powerful God.”
- The Telegraph

Rowan Williams’ comments are taken out of all context with the opening line of the Daily Mail’s article, which generalises even more broadly:

“Christian doctrine is offensive to Muslims, the Archbishop of Canterbury said yesterday.”
- Daily Mail

And of course, the comments by readers of these newspapers misrepresent his comments even further.

Update: A later article by George Pitcher in The Telegraph is more judicious:

“… if you look at what Dr Williams said, over an extended and deep letter that lasts for 17 dense pages, you will notice two things. The “offence” to Muslims relates only to the doctrine of the Trinity, the most complex piece of Christian theology. Muslims worship a single unity in Allah. For some of them to be offended by this piece of Christian doctrine is hardly controversial … Christians who attack Dr Williams for trying to reach a mutual understanding with Muslims might dwell on how they would react if Muslims condemned their leaders for trying to engage in dialogue.”
- The Telegraph

In other News …

Tattooed Pork-eating Shellfish-eating Gay Cross-dressing Bastard Palestinian Wiccan Man with crushed testicles has sued the publishers of the New International Version for Zillions.

“We think he has a very good case,” said his lawyer, Denny Crane.

On May 5, 2008, Khaled Abou El Fadl examined how preconceptions of the ‘oriental’ Islamic have determined the way in which invading American soldiers have abused, tortured and raped Iraqi civilians. He delivers the 2008 Burke Lecture, provided here on YouTube by the video’s rightful owners, University of California Television (58:30):

Happy 4th of July! Remember, do what we say, or we’ll bring democracy to your country.

Karl Giberson, author of Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution (June 2008), is interviewed in Salon.

I tend to think that Christianity and Evoution are mutually exclusive. But Karl Giberson is one of those folk who think they can get along just fine.

And he does make some nice comments. Like this one:

Salon: What is it about our culture that has led to creationism’s popularity?

Karl Giberson: In short, intellectual laziness. We’re not prepared to do the hard work to make our culture more sophisticated. We don’t drill into our children in Sunday school or church the fact that ancient people thought differently about the world than we do. Even a modest amount of sophistication in biblical interpretation will show that the biblical authors, in both the Old Testament and New Testament, are not writing history.

And why is American evangelicalism much more popular than, say, European evangelicalism? Giberson says that American evangelicals have been quite successful in marketing Christianity to the lowest common denominator.

Karl Giberson: Biblical literalism is very simple. You read the Bible in English and you say to yourself that these are the things God wrote down through a secretary a long time ago, and all I need to do is read this in English and that’s all the work I have to do to understand it. Who wouldn’t want that to be the case? If you try to tell these people that they need some egghead scholar from Harvard, who can read Hebrew, to come in and help them with it, that seems offensive and alienating, and people aren’t attracted to that. So I think the ability of American religion to invent itself and to appeal to common denominators, sometimes the lowest denominator, has allowed these evangelical movements to flourish with their own agendas.

Good comments - I wonder what he thinks about Wiki-Bible?

… and Two out of Five Democrats:

“Between 43% and 47% of Americans have agreed [between 1982-2008] with the creationist view that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so. Between 35% and 40% have agreed with the alternative explanation that humans evolved, but with God guiding the process, while 9% to 14% have chosen a pure secularist evolution perspective that humans evolved with no guidance by God.”
- Gallup

I have always enjoyed Salman Rushdie’s books. My personal favourite, for quirky reasons — it appealed to me in many ways — is “The Moor’s Last Sigh”. I got it at a book-signing at which the author signed books and didn’t appear (he was hiding from certain Muslim nutjobs).

“When people ask me how the West should adapt to Muslim sensitivities, I always say — the question is the wrong way round. The West should go on being itself. There is nothing wrong with the things that for hundreds of years have been acceptable — satire, irreverence, ridicule, even quite rude commentary — why the hell not?”
- Sir Salman Rushdie

With the conferment of a knighthood on Sir Salman Rushdie on Wednesday June 25, 2008, it is time to remember the ’satanic verses’ - which Muhammad claimed Satan originally tempted him to place in the Qur’an.

As the story goes, Allāt, al-’Uzzā and Manāt were three Arabian goddesses, who were worshipped at Mecca before Muhammad took over. In an incident referred to as ‘the Gharaniq incident’, Muhammad wrote in one of the suras in his Qur’an (the 53rd; Al-Najm) that these goddesses could provide intercession. He was adopting the old monotheistic trick - rather than dismiss the other gods, it’s better to simply assimilate them into your new religion. But he later had a change of heart and claimed that these words had been inspired by Shaitan (Satan).

The so-called “satanic verses” follow the words “Have you thought of Allāt and al-’Uzzā and Manāt the third, the other?” in vv. 19-20:

tilk al-gharaniq al-’ula wa inna shafa’ata-hunna la-turtaja
(”these are exalted birds whose intercession is to be desired”).

Why did Muhammad later claim these verses were inspired by Shaitan? The conclusion on that seems to be that his monotheism was heightened later on in his life, and so the “satanic verses” needed to be erased. And they were erased. They don’t appear in copies of the Qur’an today. The story is most likely to be historically true, given the criterion of embarassment which would prevent a Muslim from inventing such a maligning story about Muhammad, and the inexplicability of a non-Muslim inventing the peculiarities of such a story.

The satanic verses provide a really interesting example of textual and theological development within the Qur’an. This is precisely the reason why Qur’an inerrantists try to deny the truth of the story. For those lamenting the pervasive influence of dogmatic theology on biblical studies, the world of Islamic scholarship is a whole different level of tendentious nonsense.

“Believers in the Prophet’s absolute infallibility deny the possibility of any occurrence inconsistent with that principle. They therefore treated the story as a fabrication and went so far as to excise the two sentences from the Qor’an. Nevertheless the evidence given in well-attested reports and in the interpretations of certain commentators makes it likely that the incident occurred. The two irreproachably pious authors of the Tafsir ol-Jalalayn consider it to have been the occasion of the revelation of verse 51 of sura 22 (ol-Hajj), which they interpret as a sort of divine consolation sent down to relieve the Prophet of the bitter remorse which he felt after his utterance of the two sentences … “
- ‘Ali Dashti, Twenty-Three Years: A Study of the Prophetic Career of Mohammad, 32

Sura 22.51 probably refers to the original writing of the satanic verses, under what Muhammad would later claim was satanic inspiration, and its subsequent withdrawal later in Muhammad’s life:

“And We did not send before you any apostle or prophet, but when he desired, the Shaitan made a suggestion respecting his desire; but Allah annuls that which is cast”.

The Qur’an, like any other work of a person written over a period of two decades or so, demonstrates the changes and developments in its author’s opinions and ideas.

U2 lead singer and anti-poverty activist, Bono received the NAACP Chairman’s Award on March 2, 2007. The pesentation by Tyra Banks and Julian Bond (0:00ff) and Bono’s speech ( 4:40ff ) were broadcast at the 38th NAACP Image Awards.

It’s available, appropriately, on GodTube - and Bono’s speech is well worth a watch if you haven’t seen it before.

There is half a bible verse that is widely quoted against atheists by some (foolish) Christians. It’s very popular amongst American evangelicals:

“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no god.’ “
- Psalm 14.1

Of course, there were no atheists in the ancient Levant. There were none who had no belief in one god or the other. Every man and woman said ‘There is a god’. So what did the verse mean? Well, you only have to read to the end of the verse: “They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is no one who does good.” The fool is the one who (even though they may confess belief in God) ignores or abuses the poor. The fool is the one who acts as if (in their own hearts) there is no “god”, that is, who acts as if it doesn’t matter what happens to the poor.

“The fool” of Psalm 14 is not the atheist. “The fool” is the American evangelical who is happy to live in a system which systematically rapes the poor.

In the context of Psalm 14, America is full of atheists.

Bill Maher takes the piss out of almost every religion you can think of in his upcoming movie, Religulous. The trailer is out now ( 2:10 ). The movie itself is out October. It looks a laugh a minute:

“Known for his stance against religion, Bill Maher’s views on the various world religions are explored as he travels to numerous religious destinations, such as Jerusalem, the Vatican, and Salt Lake City, interviewing believers from a variety of backgrounds and groups, including Jews for Jesus, Muslims, polygamists, Satanists, Hasidic scholars and even Rael of the Raelian Movement.”

… though, it’s kind of easy and obvious to just point and laugh at funny religious practices. I wonder if the analysis gets any deeper? I bet not.