The Fallibility of Scientific Researchers

On the subject of expert-worship and the elevation of science above all else, we have this entry from Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution blog:

[R]esearcher fallibility remains an undertreated topic.  It should be at the center of any approach to method or philosophy of science, rather than the abstract principles we are usually fed. In any case, [this] is from a new paper … [boldface added]:

We report the results of a forecasting experiment about a randomized controlled trial [RCT] that was conducted in the field. The experiment asks Ph.D. students, faculty, and policy practitioners to forecast (1) compliance rates for the RCT and (2) treatment effects of the intervention. The forecasting experiment randomizes the order of questions about compliance and treatment effects and the provision of information that a pilot experiment had been conducted which produced null results. Forecasters were excessively optimistic about treatment effects and unresponsive to item order as well as to information about a pilot. Those who declare themselves expert in the area relevant to the intervention are particularly resistant to new information that the treatment is ineffective. We interpret our results as suggesting that we should exercise caution when undertaking expert forecasting, since experts may have unrealistic expectations and may be inflexible in altering these even when provided new information.

 

Books and Movies on Everyday Satanic Behavior

In another post, I mentioned that Warnke’s Satan Seller (1972) generated a lot of excitement back in the 1970s, during my years in the Jesus Movement. I recalled that, and C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters (1942), as rare attempts to visualize the practical, day-to-day operation of dark forces within our world.

It seemed that most other Christian accounts of satanic activity were vague, mysterious, full of fear and warning, but short on specifics. A person couldn’t tell whether Lucifer was supposed to be a towering majesty or a sniveling worm, a lone actor or the leader of a chaotic gang or the head of a massive bureaucracy in Hell. Not that these two books were exceptionally clear – but at least they provided some semi-realistic, contemporary Christian ideas as to how certain aspects of the dark side might work.

A question along these lines came back to mind, the other day, and I posted it on Christianity Stack Exchange. The gist of the question was, are there any other books like this? I phrased it as a question of genre, and several responses fairly construed that as a question of what to search for. As I dug into the suggestions offered in response to my question, I wasn’t sure it would be couth to editorialize on the subject at length within the Stack Exchange format, so I opted to expound here instead. As the following discussion proceeded, I developed more of a sense of what I was looking for.

Nonstarters

Before exploring the most helpful possibilities, let me eliminate the less promising leads. In the Stack Exchange question, I signaled a dearth of interest in theology. I didn’t believe that Satan existed. I just wanted to learn more about what a being of that nature could be like. In the best of circumstances, I would have to be uncertain how much weight to accord to Bible passages, and in any event I wanted contemporary, not antique, visualizations of satanic activity.

This meant that, to cite the classic, I was not interested in re-reading Dante’s Inferno (c. 1314/2009). Great literature, everyone says. In a recent article of interest, Scharl (2023) characterized Dante’s Satan as “bestial and gibbering,” a creature who “has lost not only his own reflected beauty but even his mind.” I didn’t see a lot of possibilities there. I thought maybe it would be more appealing to someone raised Catholic, which I wasn’t. I wasn’t really into it when I did read it – in my Literature Humanities course at Columbia, I think.

My Stack Exchange question also meant that I wasn’t interested in Bible-based commentaries. I was clear on this: I stated that I didn’t want to rehash that familiar material. I wanted imaginative extensions or departures from biblical texts. So I wasn’t interested in the suggestion that I read Sproul’s Unseen Realities: Heaven, Hell, Angels and Demons (2011) – even if I did appreciate the earnestness pervading the answer provided by the person (Lesley) who suggested that book. Later, when I got into book lists (below), similar thoughts excluded stories about Armageddon and the End Times (e.g., Left Behind), in which Satan could appear.

My lack of interest in conservative Bible studies grew out of personal exposure to that literature. I was not familiar with more liberal studies. The key difference seemed to be that conservatives strove to force-fit potentially divergent texts into a single coherent theology provided by God in an inerrant Bible. Scholars not driven by that agenda were free to interpret early Christian sources, from within the Bible and also from non-canonical works, according to their actual words, regardless of whether the results supported conservative dogma.

In that regard, I reviewed a number of sources, before concluding that Wikipedia actually provided a relatively thorough sketch of scholarly debate on the development of Satan’s persona and roles throughout ancient Jewish, early Christian, and more recent periods. For instance, Wikipedia observes that Satan does not seem to have been associated with the serpent in the Garden of Eden until the second century AD. For present purposes, the apparently diverse Satanologies of the New Testament (de Bruin, 2022) and of related literature seemed too thin, conflicted, and ethereal to deliver a functional concept of Satan in day-to-day terms.

Within today’s popular literature, I could have expanded my search to include works that presented psychopaths and other evil or horrific humans as exemplars of satanic vice. I declined to do this. I was not sure that, within Christian doctrine or otherwise, one could assume that all evil came from Satan, or that evil was his defining (much less his sole noteworthy) characteristic, or that he was always necessarily worse than all humans. Rather than assume such things, I was hoping that, among various characterizations of the devil, some would be especially convincing. I hoped to find a concept of Satan that would include arguably realistic ideas about his character, priorities, and behavior.

I ran searches for several other names whom Lesley suggested: James Perloff, Vernon Coleman, James Musker, and Bob Mitchell. Results of these searches reminded me that there could be a fair amount of fiction and fantasy in supposedly Bible-based sermons and writings. No doubt a person could assemble a highly inventive account of satanic activity by compiling and editing such sources. I just didn’t want to have to undertake that chore. I was looking for a book or other source in which someone else had already done that work, or something like it.

Those several searches also reminded me of some of the fringe right-wing periodicals that Dad used to receive occasionally. For instance, Wikipedia described the Illuminati – one of the most prominent targets of the conspiracy theories endlessly indulged in such periodicals – as a secret society founded in 1776 and dedicated to good causes, but allegedly devolving in later years into a shadowy cabal seeking to control governments and world affairs. For my purposes, the connection was tenuous: the Illuminati might or might not have been controlled or influenced by Satan. Again, I was looking for the book that said so, with supporting detail, and these searches didn’t give me that. Ditto for material on the Rothschilds, the Freemasons, and other targets of such publications.

Searches pertaining to Lesley’s suggested writers did lead to a few specific works. Perloff’s Truth Is a Lonely Warrior (2013) appeared to be an exposé of the alleged truth behind many disconcerting political events (regarding e.g., the sinking of the Maine), but satanic connections seemed to be secondary. Coleman evidently generated something called The Satanic Wars Have Started, but all I found on that was a funky 14-minute video that I watched only briefly, and an opportunity to enter the website of Godlike Productions, which claimed to be “based in the country of Jersey” (sic).

Suggestions by Lesley and others pointed toward QAnon, universally condemned by mainstream media.  Britannica (Holoyda, 2023) echoed the standard impression (e.g., Wikipedia) that the “QAnon conspiracy theory … adherents believed that U.S. Pres. Donald Trump was waging a secret war against a cabal of satanic cannibalistic pedophiles within Hollywood, the Democratic Party, and the so-called ‘deep state’ within the United States government.” I did not pursue this line of inquiry in detail. It appeared, however, that one of Lesley’s suggested writers (above) would fit here: see Musker’s New World Religion and The Beliefs of the Elite (2018). See also Enders et al. (2022), Jones (2023), and Miller (2023), as well as searches pertaining to demonic forces in politics, and QAnon articles at Vox, U.S. News, and Pew Research.

Deals with the Devil

We were closer to pay dirt with Lesley’s link to the Wikipedia page on “Deals with the Devil in popular culture.” But with a few exceptions that I will get to later, these still turned out to be not quite on target, for me, because – as the list’s name suggests – the usual concept was that someone made a deal with Satan or some other comparably evil figure, most commonly involving the sale of their eternal souls, but sometimes featuring some other sort of interaction (e.g., Rosemary’s Baby). The evil one would appear at the start and the end of the story, and maybe on a few occasions in between, implementing the trade and then seeking his part of the bargain. And that would be pretty much the extent of what we’d learn about him – which was to say, nothing new. For the most part, these weren’t stories about the devil; they were stories about people who were in some sense compromised by the devil.

That was what I expected from that Wikipedia list. But to make sure, I glanced at the linked Wikipedia pages, for the ones that had such links. In this process, I realized – to refine my Stack Exchange question – that I was particularly interested in material that could be at least imagined to be somewhat realistic. For instance, I didn’t think The Screwtape Letters described an actual situation, but at least (as I recalled) it broke down the larger satanic malice into plausible everyday tinkering. Another way to say it: I seemed to be looking for insights into the satanic personality, something more informative than just “He’s a bad guy who does bad things.” This orientation seemed to be going in more or less the opposite direction from grand fantasy dramas involving the Antichrist (e.g., The Omen) or war between angels (e.g., The Prophecy) or sci-fi stories of interplanetary aliens posing as Satan (e.g., Stargate SG-1).

With that refined understanding, I found it interesting that Baron Mordo imagined that Mordo (a Transylvanian nobleman) was “skilled at astral projection and hypnosis” as well as black magic and summoning demons, and that “Mordo’s use of these darker arts would sometimes backfire”; and I appreciated the apparent ability of Marvel Comics to build a whole fantasy world, complete with characters named Mephisto and Satannish. But it seemed Marvel (as well as DC Comics, the two accounting for many entries in Wikipedia’s list) was primarily interested in selling me that fantasy world, not in saying anything related to the biblical Satan. No doubt there were numerous stories featuring mystical bad players with imagined supernatural abilities cavorting in make-believe realms. But I wasn’t looking to become knowledgeable about make-believe realms.

In that sense, the compiler(s) of Wikipedia’s list seemed to be going well beyond the classic concept of deals with the devil. I surmised that the same might be true of manga and other material based in Asia or other non-Christian lands (e.g., Vathek): unless I happened to notice something in a Wikipedia page to the contrary, I had to doubt that their concept of the dark side would be informative with respect to the Christian concept of Satan – though Belladonna of Sadness looked like an interesting exception. It was also unclear what some entries (e.g., Team Fortress 2) were doing in Wikipedia’s list, given that their writeups made no mention of Satan, the devil, or demons. I excluded others that were more in the nature of vampire or over-the-top horror stories because, again, these did not seem to have any potential relevance to reality, and in some cases also had no explicit link to Satan.

Further, I found that I wasn’t interested in witchcraft tales that resembled the stories of selling one’s soul: a little unexplained and very unlikely black magic and presto! all kinds of crazy things happen. I could maybe be interested in a Devil’s Cookbook that would feature a recipe followed by an anecdote about the effects of the recipe upon some unsuspecting target, maybe with a matter-of-fact explanation of how the result would have changed if you’d used eye of newt instead of maple sap extracted under a February blue moon – though the inclusion of outlandish ingredients could easily trigger problems of credibility. For me, probably the better Devil’s Cookbook would be written by a pharmacist or psychiatrist and based in psychoactive medications prescribed at 2 PM on a Tuesday, not in a kettle bubbling and boiling on Halloween. It seemed that this sort of book could veer toward either left- or right-hand magic – that is, toward either the malicious or the beneficial.

I hadn’t seen many films or read many stories in which Satan was a steady presence throughout. I guessed that I would find this sort of thing most persuasive if he was a calm and timeless presence, along the lines of The Man from Earth; see also Wandering Jew. Efforts to position him in some mundane bad guy role (e.g., The Devil’s Advocate) left me cold.

Those exclusions left me with a short list of entries, on Wikipedia’s list, that seemed most likely to convey a relatively imaginative or informative sense of who the devil is and/or what he does. Faust, surely the most famous entry on the list, also seemed to feature an above-average amount of interaction with the bad guy (i.e., the demon Mephistopheles). I supposed that Faust and its many spinoffs (e.g., Mephisto) could at least generate some ideas. It seemed that Young Goodman Brown could at least contribute a sense that interaction with evil forces could leave a person cynical and bitter. The Master and Margarita evidently did feature a Satan who filled much of the book with various criticisms of Soviet citizens’ behavior.

Other Portrayals in Popular Culture

Along with the preceding section’s list focused on deals with the devil, Wikipedia offered a larger list of instances of appearances by the Devil in the arts and popular culture. That list was quite long; fortunately, it included a brief synopsis of each entry. Thanks to the guidelines worked out in the preceding section (above), this time I had a better sense of what I was looking for. Here are a few examples of works that were respectable, in some sense of the word, but that I could dismiss quickly:

• Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger: based on the brief Wikipedia writeup; didn’t seem particularly insightful.
• The Exorcist: I didn’t believe in demonic possession or exorcism. It wasn’t clear to me what a demon would gain by occupying the body of a girl, much less abusing that body instead of using it for some practical purpose. There seemed to be a lot of counterintuitive rules, such as the one that evidently prevented such a creature from immediately leaping to the body of a more powerful adult. In short, it did not appear to me that the author had worked out a credible theory of what a demon or Satan could be like, or might want to do.
• God, the Devil and Bob: funny, but not remotely plausible.
• Fallen: fantasy TV comparable (for present purposes) to the Marvel fantasy universes (above). Similarly Legend.

After eliminating works like those, that were more obviously incompatible with the interests described above, I took another pass through that Wikipedia list and eliminated some of the remaining entries that were noteworthy, for one reason or another, but not really on target.

• Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: I had appreciated other McCarthy works, and it sounded like I would find this engrossing. But for present purposes it seemed to convey only a vague sense of the Devil, as a supernatural being who contributed to a good (anti-)Western story, but who didn’t seem to translate very well into the larger world. In a similar vein, Stephen King’s Needful Things.
• Good Omens: another one that seemed interesting, and could maybe contribute to an imaginary background story.
• To Reign in Hell: Wikipedia’s remark – “The novel appears to be heavily influenced by John Milton’s Paradise Lost” – persuaded me to prioritize the latter, which I had not yet read.
• Memnoch the Devil: potentially useful if – after finishing Paradise Lost – I still wanted a cosmology presenting a devil’s-eye view of how God and everything fit together.
• Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell: sitcom portrayal of something like the hellish bureaucracy of Screwtape Letters – but by this point I had encountered enough other interesting material to find that vision less intriguing.

Along with those works of fiction, Wikipedia offered a list of historical figures who had supposedly made deals or otherwise been involved with the devil, ranging from Pope Sylvester II (946-1003) to certain present-day figures.

By this point, I had accumulated a number of potentially interesting items deserving a closer look. Before turning to those works, however, I wanted to complete my review of the sources suggested in response to my Stack Exchange question.

Satanism

Lesley, one of the Stack Exchange respondents (above), inspired me to suppose that Satanists might be a good source of information or speculation about Satan.

If that seems obvious, maybe it shouldn’t. Satanists ain’t what they used to be, according to the BBC (Geohegan, 2019). That article, a review of Hail Satan?, described the Satanic Temple (founded in 2013) as a “religion” with a primarily sociopolitical purpose. (See also Columbia Magazine, 2022.) According to one spokesperson, “We want people to evaluate the United States being a Christian nation …. It’s not.” Geohegan said,

[A]lthough there is a certain theatrical, horror movie side to their Black Mass rituals in which they do invoke Satan, they freely admit none of them actually believe in Satan as an actual spiritual entity, leaning instead on the accurate translation of the Hebrew word Satan, which means “adversary”.

One of their concerns, Geohegan indicated, was with the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s and 1990s. Again quoting the Satanic Temple spokesperson:

It was this 10 to 15-year period, where there was a basic idea that there was a kind of organised, underground, secret conspiracy of Satanists that were … doing evil things like murder and torturing animals and raping children and doing it in the name of Satan. … Many people had their lives ruined and in the most extreme example, went to prison for a very long time. … [T]here’s been no attempt publicly, to come to terms with that period. … [T]he Satanic Temple really does want people to remember and to know more about what happened ….

It was certainly interesting to see the view of the U.S. Department of Justice (Daniels, 1989): “A “self-styled satanist” is a sociopath, psychopath, or drug addict who justifies criminal acts through a belief system centered in Satan.” A search for “Christian demonic fiction,” recommended in response to my Stack Exchange question, led to lists and discussions highlighting works from that (1980ish) period (e.g., Reddit). One name stands out: Frank Peretti, labeled by Publishers Weekly (2013) as “the father of Christian fiction.” Vox (Romano et al., 2022) said that he earned that status – and would be revived again, more recently, in the QAnon era – for his viral This Present Darkness (1986) and Piercing the Darkness (1989) duology, both of which imagined “Angels and demons engaged in very real, literal battles for humanity, often just out of sight of their impassioned human charges.”

The 1980s’ Satanic Panic wasn’t the first such episode. Time (Rothman, 2015) told of a Satan scare in the early 1970s. Earlier still, Dyrendal (2018) described

the (probably) most infamous hoax of the late nineteenth century: the string of publications by Léo Taxil (Gabriel Jougand-Paget) and his collaborators alleging a Masonic-Satanist world conspiracy. Unfolding over a period of many years, the story is well known; like “Romantic Satanism,” it has been studied multiple times before. … [I]t is a fantastic story …. [I]t was one of Taxil’s purposes to make people laugh at the credulity of believers.

Dyrendal was reviewing a book by Luijk (2016), whose first chapter’s abstract read, in part, as follows:

While the concept of people worshipping Satan was actually an invention of Christianity to demonize its internal and external competitors, this dark stereotype created by the Church eventually came to be embraced as a positive (anti)religious identity by some in the modern West. … The emergence of new attitudes to Satan proves to be intimately linked to … the ideological struggle for emancipation that transformed the West and is epitomized by the American and French Revolutions.

The chapter thus appeared to contend that the medieval church used the concept of Satan, typically a fallen angel and thus immortal, as an enduring and deplorable focus of loyalty that could be ascribed to anyone who didn’t behave or believe as the church demanded. Linking someone to Satan (or, in recent decades, to Hitler – see Godwin’s Law) was an arguably more refined way of echoing a little kid’s inarticulate accusation of “Bad”: those people are bad, and that’s enough to condemn them, seeking details only to seal the indictment and/or for entertainment. But (the chapter evidently said) that game lasts only so long. At a certain point, some alleged deplorables might start to take pride in departing from the official ideology – and then you could have a movement.

Seen that way, a modern Satanist’s concept of Satan could be less about doing bad things and more about deliberately not being counted among the self-congratulating “good” hypocrites. As a derivative movement, Satanism of this nature might have an appeal no stronger than that of the church itself. One visualizes a future era in which, just as Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken have now merged in such a way as to sell both previously competing fast foods from a single outlet, the marketing wizards of Christian and Satanic churches will someday work together in an increasingly desperate attempt to persuade an ever more thoroughly secular society to pay attention to either of them.

It did appear that Satan tended to be defined as primarily an antithesis to various Christian virtues and priorities. Even the Order of Nine Angles (sic) – which Britannica (White, 2023) characterized as the “best-known example” of a more radical Satanism – traced its origins (according to Wikipedia) to “a secretive pre-Christian sect” that had survived for centuries in Wales. Note that its origins were distinguished by being pre-Christian – that is, as an alternative to Christianity.

And yet, as just suggested, the most effective antithesis to the message of Christ has been, not a dramatic Satanism, but rather our indifferent secularism. What has gained mass traction – what wields enormous power in our world – is most certainly not the Nine Angles calls for human sacrifice or for the breakdown of society, not to mention the worship of bizarre gods. Such antics have been completely overwhelmed by an aspiritual materialistic consumerism. What won, in the last half-century at least, was Nietzsche‘s recognition that God is dead, especially in the sense that modern society has rendered him irrelevant for most purposes in most lives.

Among the small minority of people who have nonetheless gravitated toward Satanism, Wikipedia cites Dyrendal (above) and others for an identification of Theistic Satanism as a subset whose primary belief is that “Satan is an actual deity or force to revere or worship.” Nontheistic alternatives seem to tend, instead, toward a “self religion” (i.e., emphasizing improvement of the self) with transgressive, nonconformist, elitist, self-reliant, and otherwise individualist values.

Evidently such scholars also distinguish reactive from rationalist forms of Satanism. The former apparently presents itself (and presumably Satan, to the extent it is theistic) as an opposition to Christianity and/or to Christian-based society, while the rationalist variety concerns itself more with its concept of the good life (e.g., hedonism), regardless of how Christians might react.

In seeking an understanding of Satan as an existing or at least hypothetical personality, these remarks seemed to suggest that I would be looking for perspectives from theistic Satanism. Within that sphere, I was already familiar with the reactive interpretation common to Christians – with, that is, the belief that Satan was simply an antichristian sort of character, one who spent his time finding gratification in being deliberately contrary.

To me, that sort of character seemed tedious and weak if not childish. If that’s all it was about, my work was largely done: there was little more to understand. Just figure out whatever God is about, and you can find Satan clowning around with it, trying to mess it up, basically just killing time until his eventual assignment to the lake of fire. That seemed to be a sort of straw man character, the kind of stupid Satan that a Christian would invent, in order to make the godly path seem so obviously superior.

I would expect a real spiritual opponent to God to have a much greater sense of himself. This would not be the unimaginative politician who tries to define him/herself as merely the opposite of his/her opponent. This would be, to the contrary, a real leader, someone with a vision of what needs to happen, leaving it to Christians to get up to speed on his message if they were able. This Satan would present good reasons to question the Christian God’s preferences, to set forth on his own path. He would advocate individualistic, rationalistic (e.g., hedonistic), or otherwise self-gratifying and/or self-improving priorities for mankind, possibly knowing that this was a dead end, but more likely believing that this was really the best path. That seemed to be the sort of Satan I was looking for, the one I would find most competent and convincing as a serious answer to – indeed, conceivably even an apparent refutation of – the Christian God. That was the whole idea, right? – that he would be capable of luring away vast numbers of people, for real.

Within my limited searching, it did not appear that Satanic churches, cults, or groups had written any really compelling books about Satan. LaVey’s Satanic Bible drew mixed reviews on Goodreads and Wikipedia but strong positive reviews on Amazon; it looked like a possible exception. Even so, it seemed that I would probably get a more compelling, possibly even exciting, sense of a proposed satanic personality by concentrating on the best literature about Satan.

Another Round of Eliminations

The preceding section refined my sense of what I might be looking for. Within the realm of literature especially, I had identified a number of works tentatively worth considering, but now it seemed I could reduce that list. For the time being, at least, I discarded the following:

• Lewis, The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast. Although The Screwtape Letters was one of the examples that I cited at the start of this post, I now saw it as clearly dependent upon a “tempter” persona, implying that Satan and his minions were merely reactive. For those interested in more material along these lines, Wikipedia provided lists of sequels and adaptations.
• Hill, Horns. An interesting take on the powers that a man might have if he were magically transformed into something of a demonic figure. But it wasn’t a Satan’s-eye view; it still depended somewhat on the tempter mentality; and magic just generally had no credibility for me.
• Pullman, His Dark Materials. Popular, and apparently well done, but reactive against (rather than independent of) Christianity; featuring daemons rather than Satan; and apparently a retelling and rearrangement of Milton’s Paradise Lost, which (again) it seemed I should prioritize.
• Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan. Contended that Satan, above all others, “most truly believes in the Gospel – and yet he is forbidden ever to partake of it.” It sounded implausible, on both sides, but it might be a worthwhile read for those who favor a reactive rather than independent Satan.
• Madach, The Tragedy of Man. Another tempter story, but apparently a good one.
• Gibson (director), The Passion of the Christ. Blockbuster film, but highly biblical and thus not much of a source of potential new ideas about Satan.
• Lucifer (TV series). Tom Ellis got some strong reviews for his role as the Satan who became proprietor of a nightclub in L.A. But the idea was wrong. Wikipedia said he was “[b]ored and unhappy with his life in Hell,” and therefore chose to find action among humans. For those who conceived of Satan as a proud deity, leader of millions, this would be like saying that a bored human decided to look for adventure by hanging out with cats, using his/her powers to play little tricks on them. It might be entertaining for a while, but eventually it could seem pathetic.

This left me with a still-considerable list of possibilities to examine more closely. For the moment, I had to merely list most of them. Time permitting, I hoped to return to this page with an update. The materials yet to be read or at least reviewed more closely included these:

• Peretti, This Present Darkness (1986). Although this volume seemed to be more about forces of darkness generally than about Satan specifically, as noted above, its reputation as a page-turner and its revival in recent years (with Vox (2022) characterizing it as virtually a script for the QAnon movement) suggested that it could serve as something of an update to The Screwtape Letters on the question of what a powerful, arrogant Satan could be imagined to be trying to accomplish these days. Throughout my life, evangelicals had surreptitiously loved the story of Satan in these End Times because they knew, thanks to their interpretation of biblical prophecy, that he was going to lose in the end. Possibly Peretti would color that contest as more of a real battle, mounted by a Satan who knew what he was doing.
• Mitchell, Satan’s Seed (2022).
• Milton, Paradise Lost (1667). This still appeared to be pretty much the mother lode.
• Heinlein, Job: A Comedy of Justice (1984).
• Duncan, I, Lucifer (2002).
• Hancock, Arena (2002).
• Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack (2006).
• Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824).
• Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793).
• Eberstadt, The Loser Letters: A Comic Tale of Life, Death and Atheism (2010).
• Kazantkakis, The Last Temptation of Christ (1955; movie 1988). I had enjoyed both, but it had been a while. It seemed I could review both for ideas.
• Generally, searches for demonic forces within contemporary literature and Christian demonology.

How Did We Get the Bible?

In traditional (also known, with some variation, as conservative, evangelical, fundamentalist, or Bible-believing) Christian practice in America today, the Bible is treated as if God handed it directly to mankind. People avoid asking the obvious questions – which language, which version, when, where? They just take it as, well, gospel.

Ministers trained in the traditional Christian denominations may learn that the truth is not so simple. For instance, in my first year of college, I was enrolled in the pre-ministry program at Concordia Lutheran Junior College in Ann Arbor, MI. If I hadn’t known it before then, presumably the full eight-year program for ministry would have notified me that the Bible did not simply drift down from heaven.

The Christian Bible consists of two or three sections. Christians commonly refer to the first section as the Old Testament. Starting with Luther’s Bible of 1534 A.D., some Bibles contain a middle section, called The Apocrypha, consisting of texts that some Christian denominations (e.g., the Catholic Church) accept as canonical – that is, as authoritative, authentic, holy, God-given – but that others reject or, at best, treat as useful for study (Wikipedia). The New Testament is the final section of the Christian Bible. In most Bibles in the U.S. today, there are only the Old and New Testaments, without the Apocrypha.

Contents

Summary
The Ketef Hinnom Inscriptions
Qumran
The Work of Scribes
The Old Testament Canon
Versions of the New Testament Canon
New Testament Apocrypha
A Speculative Psychohistory of Early Christianity
Selection Criteria for Books of the New Testament
Original New Testament Manuscripts
Translation of the Bible into English
Bible Interpretation
Dogma

.

Summary

The Hebrew Bible – what Christians call the Old Testament – originated centuries before Christ. Our oldest evidence comes from a small inscription onto silver. The Dead Sea scrolls, accumulated in the centuries surrounding Christ’s ministry, provide far more detail. Nonetheless, the oldest surviving manuscripts that contain more or less the full text of the Bible were created several hundred years after Christ.

From the early years, we have only fragments, and even the oldest of those were created a century or more after the biblical events they report. We don’t know how accurately the ancient scribes copied the originals, but we have a great deal of evidence that their work was imperfect. We have enough fragments to see that there were many variations among the ancient manuscripts comprising a given book of the Bible. In thousands of instances, scholars still don’t know – they probably never will know – exactly what the original author wrote.

There was, and to some extent there still is, disagreement over the “canon” that lists which books belong in the Bible. That issue remained unsettled for centuries after the last events reported in both the Old and New Testaments.

In the case of the New Testament, the Roman Catholic Church settled that question by force – destroying manuscripts that did not conform to its conclusions, and persecuting (sometimes executing) the people who wrote or distributed such manuscripts. The final selection of books of the New Testament was based largely upon acceptance of what the early church found most appealing, with the aid of some rather arbitrary decisions. If the church had been following the principles that various writers claim, our New Testament would look rather different.

Note, again, that this is merely a summary. The following sections present the details.

One section of this post presents my imagined re-creation of the flow of events in the first two centuries A.D. A key element in that speculation is the proposal that the first half of the second century saw considerable interest in consolidating the faith. An important point in that process: Marcion’s rejection of links between Old and New Testaments in the wake of the bar Kokhba revolt, when Christians had an incentive to distance themselves from the Roman persecution of Jews who participated in that revolt.

The Bible began to transition into the English language at or before the time of King Alfred the Great (c. 880 A.D.). That process picked up speed in the centuries leading up to the Reformation. The first authorized (i.e., non-persecuted) English translation arrived about 80 years before the famous King James Version (1611 A.D.). There are now more than 100 English translations.

Translation into English (indeed, into any language) is a complex undertaking. Demands for literal “word-for-word” translations generally do not make sense: in very many instances, across the 140,000 words of the Greek New Testament, the result of such an approach would be unintelligible. This post cites numerous examples where the translator must draw upon apparent meaning, and knowledge of the culture, to provide an approximation – in some instances, no more than an educated guess – as to what the original author meant.

Bible interpretation is a part of the final step of giving us today’s Bible. To varying degrees, people prefer translations that support their preconceived interpretations. Hence the translator’s decisions are driven by market pressures, in both economic and theological senses: if you don’t give people more or less what they want – including what their denomination authorizes – they won’t use your translation.

For purposes of giving us the Bible in a form that we will use, the effects of artificial intelligence remain to be seen. One may expect that AI will facilitate access to a great deal of commentary, from published (i.e., human) as well as artificially generated sources. Such commentary, along with automatically detected links among Bible passages and concepts, may usher in an age in which those who read or otherwise experience Bible texts are freed to follow biblical and historical threads across denominational lines, potentially merging the translation and interpretation functions. Conceivably AI could make immersion into the mind of the Bible vastly more interesting than traditional Bible reading tends to be.

Altogether, the process by which we came to possess the modern Bible has been fraught with gaps, imperfections, mysteries, falsehoods, guesswork, and politics. That could make it the work of a divine being. But there are no signs that it is the work of the God of the Bible. The manuscripts we possess, and the condition in which we possess them, are consistent with an entirely human effort, on the part of political powers based in Rome, to preserve materials conducive to one’s purposes, and to suppress materials contradicting one’s preferred narrative. It appears possible that interpretation, and ultimately the choice of Bible, would be greatly improved or at least helpfully informed by greater attention to competing early Christian manuscripts and beliefs.

With that summary behind us, we turn to the details.

The Ketef Hinnom Inscriptions

The first part of this post’s question is, how did we get the Old Testament?

To that, there tend to be two sorts of answers. The traditional answer is that the books of the Old Testament were mostly written by the important historical Jewish figures who are literally or traditionally associated with them. For instance, David wrote the Psalms, and Daniel wrote the book of Daniel. Part of the modern (a/k/a liberal, nontraditional) answer is that, as Wikipedia says, “The oldest books began as songs and stories orally transmitted from generation to generation,” before eventually being written down on papyrus scrolls.

To illustrate the difference between those traditional and modern answers, we might consider the book of Numbers, also known as the fourth of the five books of Moses (i.e., Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), collectively forming what is known in Hebrew as the Torah, and in Greek as the Pentateuch.

Reflecting the traditional view, Bible Gateway offers an Encyclopedia of the Bible whose relevant entry claims that the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt occurred sometime between 1440 and 1260 B.C., and that Moses (leader of the exodus) probably wrote most if not all of Numbers. By contrast, Wikipedia says, “The majority of modern biblical scholars believe that the Torah … reached its present form in the post-Exilic period (i.e., after c. 520 BC).”

The Ketef Hinnom scrolls, unrolled

I chose Numbers as an example because, at present, it is the book for which we have the oldest physical evidence. That evidence comes in the form of two little silver scrolls, found at Ketef Hinnom, near Jerusalem, dating back to sometime around 600 B.C. On one of those scrolls, someone inscribed words similar to the text of Numbers 6:24-26 in today’s Bible (Biblical Archaeology Society, 2023; Barkay et al., 2004; Wikipedia). That choice is famous: “The Lord bless you and keep you: The Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you: The Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.”

Obviously, a blessing of that nature could be widely quoted; it could float around in the culture, independent of any book of Numbers. Indeed, that is exactly what it did, within the culture of my youth: it was the minister’s common benediction at our Lutheran church throughout my childhood, when I had no idea where it came from. Its existence c. 600 B.C. does not demonstrate that Numbers existed in final form at that point; the artisan may have been inscribing a widely approved sentiment that would not be combined with other materials to form Numbers until some later date.

Qumran

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, starting in 1946, provided what are now some of our oldest copies of books of the Old Testament. Those manuscripts appear to have been created across a period of several centuries, c. 250 B.C. to 100 A.D. (Wikipedia).

By the time of discovery, the passage of millenia had reduced most of the original scrolls to fragments, mostly containing only brief bits of text. Fewer than a dozen scrolls survived as nearly complete texts of books of the Bible. (See Gnostic Society Library, n.d.; Martinez & Tigchelaar, 1999, p. 1311; Israel Museum, Jerusalem, n.d.; Florentino et al., 1992, p. 474.)

Even in fragmentary form, the scrolls show that, during those centuries, there was “no uniform text” comprising a settled version of the Hebrew Bible (Wikipedia; see also Tablet, 2013). To illustrate, Wikipedia compares three versions of Deuteronomy 32:43:

• One is a fragment found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
• Another comes from the Septuagint, a Hebrew-to-Greek translation created by Jewish scholars over an extended timespan, possibly starting as early as 285 B.C. and ending as late as 100 B.C. Wikipedia says “the oldest-surviving nearly-complete manuscripts of the Old Testament in any language” are two versions of the Septuagint created after 300 A.D. (See Sundberg, 1958, p. 213.)
• The third comes from the Masoretic text, prepared by Jewish scholars between 600 and 1000 A.D. The Masoretic text – the authoritative text of today’s Hebrew Bible – is memorialized in the oldest complete Hebrew manuscript of the Old Testament, known as the Leningrad Codex (1008 A.D.) (Wikipedia). (Law (2013) reportedly argues that, at least in some places, Luther would have been drawing upon a more ancient source if he had based his Old Testament upon the Septuagint instead of the Masoretic text.)
• One might expand that comparison by adding the Samaritan Pentateuch, composed in the early centuries B.C., which differs from the Masoretic text in more than 6,000 places.

(Note: a codex is the historical descendant of the scroll, and the ancestor of the book: it contains pages, like a book, but the pages are made of ancient materials (e.g., parchment) rather than paper, and are bound in a more primitive manner. For a look at a very old book, see my video from the Lilly Library.)

Briefly, Wikipedia’s comparison of that passage in Deuteronomy shows the Masoretic text missing things that appear in the Qumran version (e.g., a claim that God “will recompense the ones hating him”), and the Qumran version missing things found in the Septuagint (e.g., “And let all the angels of God be strong in him”). The point, for present purposes, is that the identities of the five books of the Pentateuch may have been established much earlier, but the exact contents of those books were still unsettled during the centuries when people used or lived in or around the caves at Qumran.

The Work of Scribes

In what one could interpret as a warning to present-day Christians who obsess on the text of the Bible at the expense of its principles, Jesus railed against the scribes of his day. Britannica (n.d.) explains that, in Jewish culture of that time, scribes were essentially lawyers, found at work in every village, typically drafting legal documents.

Within the scribal profession, some worked at the task of copying old Hebrew scriptures onto new parchment or other materials, so as to preserve them for future generations. That may sound straightforward. In practice, however, it seems that scribes could and often did produce works whose texts were not exact copies of the old documents they were copying from.

If we continue with the previous section’s attention to the ancient book of Numbers (above), we find Pike (1996, p. 174) indicating that the copies of Numbers found at Qumran varied considerably from one another. Barr (1987, p. 1) further indicates that Qumran provided “a Hebrew text which shows in some places a substantial variation from the text previously known to us” – from, that is, the oldest manuscripts we had prior to the discoveries at Qumran.

Taking one example, Jastram (1998, p. 265) studied what he called an “expansionistic” partial text of Numbers found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. In using that term, he was drawing upon prior scholars who had identified four stages in the treatment of ancient manuscripts by scripture-copying scribes:

In the first stage [i.e., before the book in question had an established status] there was still freedom to make major additions and alterations. In the second stage there was freedom for minor expansions and alterations [harmonizations or explanations]. In the third stage only what were perceived as mistakes in the [received text] could be corrected. And finally in the fourth stage not even obvious mistakes could be corrected.

In other words, scribes typically started out with a manuscript that had not yet been reified into a holy work that one dare not change. They felt relatively free to fix or improve it as they saw fit. But as the centuries passed, the most revered manuscripts were increasingly put on a pedestal, until the scribe was expected to achieve perfect copying without the slightest change. (Even then, various sources discuss examples of, and reasons for, scribal errors in copying.) Within those four stages of increasingly strict transmission, Jastram (1998) found that his selected Numbers manuscript, at Qumran, was still early in the sequence: scribes displayed a willingness to make relatively large changes to it.

To recap, the traditional view holds that Moses was the primary author of the so-called Books of Moses before 1200 B.C. In this view, the quality of the book of Numbers deteriorated, as scribes made mistakes in transmission. The liberal view is rather the opposite: Moses did not write the book of Numbers. Instead, it originally existed as an assortment of ancient stories and records, written and oral, that gradually coalesced over a period of centuries until finally, sometime after 520 B.C., they reached a form that was roughly similar to today’s version. Either way, from that point forward – as we know from the Septuagint, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and the Dead Sea Scrolls – the precise contents of the books of the Hebrew Bible remained subject to substantial variation until at least 100 A.D.

The Old Testament Canon

As just described, the wording of texts within the Hebrew Bible varied, from one source to another. But whatever their exact wording, when did authorities finalize the canon – that is, the list of books contained in that Bible?

According to Britannica (n.d.; see Lizorkin-Eyzenberg, 2014), Jewish scholars decided, at the Council of Jamnia (90 A.D.), that the books later identified as Apocrypha in Luther’s Bible did not belong in the Hebrew canon. Note that these were the close contenders for inclusion; there were many other Old Testament apocryphal works that did not attract comparable interest and support. Contra Britannica, the current view is that, in fact, there probably was no Council of Jamnia (Wikipedia; Lewis, 1999).

Catholic Answers (Rose, 2014) speculates that

[Jews] were still awaiting the advent of the New Elijah [whom Christians take to be] (John the Baptist) and the New Moses (Jesus). … Jews would expect these two great prophets to write books as well. Closing the Hebrew canon before the prophets’ advent, then, would have been unthinkable.

If that is so, it is not clear why the Jews did close the canon, apparently by 200 A.D. (New World Encylopedia, n.d.). What seems more likely is Neusner’s (1987, pp. 128-145; 1988, pp. 1-22) suggestion (see Wikipedia) that Jewish scholars circa 1 A.D. were simply not very interested in the concept of a canon. As discussed below, their eventual decision to do so may have been due primarily to a conservative desire to consolidate existing knowledge and/or to protect the Hebrew scriptures against possible corruption by popular revisionists, exemplified by Marcion in the case of the New Testament.

Sources cited in the previous section gave me the impression that the contents of many books of the Hebrew Bible gradually became more finalized, less open to change. The theory, there, was that this process unfolded as each individual book became more established. But I wondered whether the better explanation might be that, for Jews and Christians alike, the concept of scripture itself was changing.

For instance, maybe the Christians introduced the previously alien idea that, in effect, it was time for God to stop talking, because they had everything they needed from him, now that Jesus had come and gone: the gospels and the book of Revelation had pretty much laid out the divine plan.

The Jews may have become similarly receptive to the closing of their canon, though for a different reason. Maybe, with the fall of Jerusalem and the transition to Rabbinic Judaism starting in 70 A.D., or in the wake of bar Kokhba’s revolt (below), Jewish leaders concluded that the age of the kings and prophets was over, and it was time to firm up the scripture that would bind them together during what could be another Babylonian exile – during, that is, a potentially long period of dispersion. Britannica (n.d.) says that, ultimately, it is not clear exactly when or how – or, apparently, why – the Hebrew canon was settled.

The finalization of the Christian Old Testament was more complicated. The Hebrew-to-Greek translation effort produced the Septuagint (c. 200 B.C.), with a structure that departed from the Hebrew Bible – dividing the Hebrew books of Samuel and Kings, for instance, and including books not found in the Hebrew scripture. As noted above, in 1534, Luther’s Bible would set the latter aside in their own section, labeled as “Apocrypha: These Books Are Not Held Equal to the Scriptures, but Are Useful and Good to Read.” In this, Luther seems to have followed the view expressed by Jerome (below) more than a thousand years earlier (Root, 2016, p. 9). New Advent (n.d.) contends, however, that Jerome’s view was both eccentric and incorrect, and explains that Catholics believe the so-called Apocrypha are more accurately characterized with the term “deuterocanonical” (coined in 1566 A.D.) meaning “second canon.”

Title page from Luther’s Apocrypha

Luther’s view, adopted by almost all Protestant denominations, was consistent with his prioritization of Jewish scholarship over that of the Catholic church. In favoring the Hebrew canon, Luther seems to have followed the earliest known Christian canons, which acknowledged few if any of the apocryphal works. For instance, the first Christian list of canonical Old Testament books (and the term “Old Testament” itself) seem to have been produced by Melito (c. 170 A.D.): his list excluded the Apocrypha – but possibly also the book of Esther.

While that move on Luther’s part may seem to make sense, it may have departed from prevailing practice in the first-century church. Catholic sources contend that the apostles and other writers of the books of the New Testament drew frequently on texts and ideas found in the Septuagint (e.g., Scripture Catholic, n.d.; Akin, n.d.; contra Salter, 2021). New World Encyclopedia (1 2) argues that the early church did substantially approve the deuterocanonical books of the Septuagint. Schenker (Foreword to Daley, 2019, p. XIV) agrees that, in the first several centuries, “the churches of the Greek, Syrian, and Latin speaking areas … accepted the view that their [Old Testament] was not completely identical in all points with the Jewish Bible.”

The Catholic church finalized its canon (including most of the deuterocanonical books) in 382 A.D., at the Council of Rome. The man whom Catholics now call St. Jerome promptly commenced a project that, in 405 A.D., produced the Latin Bible that eventually became known as the Vulgate. The Vulgate supposedly included a new Latin translation of the Hebrew Bible, but apparently relied to some extent on older Latin translations of the Greek Septuagint’s apocryphal books (Wikipedia; Britannica, n.d.). The Catholic church adopted the Vulgate – though centuries would pass before it fully replaced the older Latin version in practical usage – and has retained it (with revisions) to the present day.

Originally, the Hebrew Bible seems to have had 22 books. Josephus (c. 95/1926, p. 179) quoted that number, but did not name the specific books, and may have been reflecting just one view, within canonical debate at that time (Wikipedia; Bruce, 1988, p. 58). The first ancient source saying there were 24 books in the Hebrew Bible (i.e., the number found in today’s version) was the apocryphal book of 2 Esdras (c. 95 A.D.) (see Orthodox Essene Judaism, 2016).

Wikipedia’s table and other sources tell us that the original 22 books of the Hebrew Bible became (with splitting of books and the addition of the Apocrypha) the 51 books of the Septuagint, later evolving into the 46-book Old Testament of the Catholic Bible, the rather different 46-book Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo canon, the 49 books of the Eastern Orthodox canon, the 39-book Old Testament and 14-book Apocrypha of Luther’s Bible, and the simpler 39-book Old Testament of modern Protestant translations. Wikipedia suggests that the larger numbers of books in non-western (e.g., Eastern Orthodox, Syriac, Armenian, Coptic) Old Testaments were due to a greater willingness to recognize spiritual value in books that the Catholic and, more so, the later Protestant churches excluded.

Versions of the New Testament Canon

As just noted, early Christian sources seem to have produced canons – notably the Bryennios List, whose antiquity is disputed, and Melito’s canon (c. 170 A.D.) – that listed books from the Old Testament era. The first effort to formalize Christian writings as official additions or alternatives to those Old Testament canons occurred around 140 A.D., when Marcion suggested there were two Gods: the vengeful creator described in what we now call the Old Testament, and the Heavenly Father described in writings about Jesus. Multiple scholars suggest that, while Marcion was deemed a heretic for his trouble, at least his canon provoked the early church to move toward its own statement of a New Testament canon.

Being included in the canon would be a challenge for books that did not yet exist. While it is difficult if not impossible to identify the precise date when a given New Testament book was written, certain factors can help at least to narrow down the timeframe of composition. Those factors can include internal contents (e.g., reference to a contemporary political event), external references (e.g., where some ancient Church father refers to the document), archeological context (e.g., finding a partly burned scroll in the dateable remnants of a building that burned down), use of terminology that did not exist before a certain date, the date or era of an identifiable handwriting or literary style (if not faked by a later pretender), and radiocarbon dating (but note that parchment and papyrus could be scrubbed and reused, so the text might be newer than the material) (see Text & Canon Institute, 2022; Wikipedia 1 2 3; Ehrman, 2015).

Except where one believes that a book’s author was foretelling the future (as in the belief that Revelation was written before 70 A.D.), common sense pegs the earliest possible date at the time of the reported events. For instance, a book providing details about the life of Jesus was probably not written before Jesus existed. The latest possible date is the date of a physical manuscript. If we have a written copy that can be reliably dated at, say, 150 A.D., we infer that the original version of that document must have been written by then.

Such factors can still leave a lot of latitude. Bernier (2022, p. 3) offers a table contrasting scholars’ proposed earliest, middle, and latest possible dates when the books of the New Testament were written, and argues that the early dates are most likely. Conservative Christians (e.g., Bible Gateway, n.d.) tend to favor early dates, so as to encourage trust in the accuracy of New Testament. An early date minimizes the number of years during which stories related to Jesus may have been floating around in oral or informal (e.g., poorly or incompletely) written form, subject to inaccurate recollection and to distortion, before becoming relatively finalized in texts similar to the ones we possess today.

According to Bernier’s list, scholars favoring early dates tend to believe that the books of the New Testament were all composed between 45 and 68 A.D. By comparison, in Bernier’s list of the view of scholars favoring late dates, only seven were written before 70 A.D.; most were written between 100 and 150 A.D. A chart of Bernier’s list of middle dates – which he says are favored by a majority of contemporary New Testament scholars (see Wikipedia) – displays early dates (46-62 A.D.) for ten of the New Testament’s 27 books, middling dates (80-110 A.D.) for 12, and dates elsewhere in the 65-130 A.D. spectrum for the rest (right-click to open in a separate tab, Ctrl-Plus to enlarge):

Years of composition of New Testament books – distribution of moderate estimates

Within such general timeframes, we may consider several elements of particular interest. First, returning to Marcion (c. 140 A.D.), we might expect that his attempt to form a canon would make specific note of the books he had encountered. Wikipedia says, “Marcion’s writings are lost …. Even so, many scholars claim it is possible to reconstruct” many of his views, by reading what critics said about them. This appears to be the basis on which Schaff (1819-1893/1910, p. 301) inferred that Marcion specifically rejected everything in the Protestant New Testament except an altered version of Luke, Romans through Thessalonians, and Philemon. But it is not entirely clear which books Marcion did reject. Ehrman (2003, p. 107) observes that perhaps some “were not as widely circulated by Marcion’s time and that he himself did not know of them.”

Another early canon, the Muratorian fragment (full text), is an 85-line text, apparently copied in an Italian monastery in the 8th century, originating in a document that seems to have been created sometime between 170 and 400 A.D. If it was first composed around 170, it would be (as claimed by New Advent, 2021) “the oldest known canon … of the New Testament.” Unfortunately, that seems not to be the case. Rothschild (2018, pp. 79-82) concludes that it is a fourth-century fake that tries to position itself as a second-century text.

The fourth century would be of interest because that seems to have been when the church finally got serious about forming a New Testament canon. According to Ehrman (2003, p. 3),

The first instance we have of any Christian author urging that our current twenty-seven books, and only these twenty-seven, should be accepted as Scripture occurred in the year 367 CE, in a letter written by the powerful bishop of Alexandria (Egypt), Athanasius.

Progress before then appears to have been slow. New World Encyclopedia (NWE, n.d.) tells us that Irenaeus argued, in 170 A.D., that the four gospels were “pillars” of the church, possibly in response to Marcion’s decision to keep only an altered version of Luke. Elsewhere, NWE (n.d.) admits “a good measure of debate in the Early Church” regarding the canon, with particular reference to disagreements, starting in or before the early 200s A.D., about the canonicity of a half-dozen books located toward the end of today’s New Testament, sometimes collectively referred to as the antilegomena (below).

NWE (n.d.) disputes the foregoing quote from Ehrman: NWE contends that Bishop Cyril of Jerusalem “formally established” the “canonical Christian Bible” in 350 A.D. That is incorrect. Cyril included Edras and Baruch in the Old Testament and excluded Revelation from the New (Lane, n.d.; New Advent, n.d., ¶¶ 35-36). Revelation (and those and other Old Testament apocryphal works) were similarly treated at the Council of Laodicea (363 A.D.), contradicting NWE’s (n.d.) further claim that that council “confirmed” the Christian canon.

The Roman emperor Constantine I called the Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.) to respond to the Arian heresy, which held that Jesus was distinct from and subordinate to God the Father. That Council remains famous as the birthplace of the Nicene Creed. The Council did not, however, reach any conclusions regarding the canon. The notion that it did so originates in an old fake history which claimed that the Council chose the books of the Bible by placing them on an altar and keeping the ones that did not fall off.

In short (as most sources seem to agree), in the words of Britannica (n.d.), Athanasius “delimited the canon” in 367 A.D. But Britannica’s own remarks somewhat undercut its suggestion that Athanasius thus “settled the strife.” Among other things, the Greek churches continued to doubt Revelation; the Codex Alexandrinus (dated c. 400-440 A.D.) included New Testament apocryphal works not appearing on Athanasius’s list; and the Syriac canon did not even include Paul’s letters until the third century, and would continue to differ from the Roman canon for another 400 years.

Christian History Institute (Thiede, 1990) observes that the Roman church wrote Codex Vaticanus – “the oldest extant copy of the Bible” (Wikipedia) – in 340 A.D., suggesting a careful prior effort to investigate and display the full text of the books that were going to be included in the Athanasian canon. Even so, Thiede says, after 367 A.D. there were many subsequent instances in which scholars disputed that canon, such as the decisions by Didymus the Blind to treat several books of the New Testament apocrypha (below) as canonical (see Ehrman, 1983, pp. 11-19).

The point seems to be, not that Athanasius laid down an iron rule from which nobody dissented, but merely that no such dissents were effective in changing the New Testament canon that he established in 367 A.D. As Thiede (1990) puts it,

Martin Luther would dearly have loved to have excluded James, which he regarded as contradicting Paul. Indeed, why not add Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” of 1964, as was suggested by some modern writers, or eliminate epistles [that exist in today’s New Testament, but are] currently thought to be inauthentic?

The “closed canon” that prevails in all Christian churches forms a consensus that prevents such eccentricities. And that canon can be traced back to Athanasius, and to the year 367, which justly remains an important date in church history.

Wikipedia states that church councils in 397 and 419 essentially ratified the Athanasian canon – but also, oddly, that “full dogmatic articulations of the canon” by Rome and other churches would only begin more than 1,100 years later, starting with the Canon of Trent (1546 A.D.) – two months after Luther died.

New Testament Apocrypha

The preceding section introduces the fact that there were apocryphal works, not only for the Old Testament, but also for the New. Old Testament apocrypha typically pertained to ancient Jewish themes linked to the Hebrew Bible, and were often written in Hebrew (Davies, 1939), while New Testament apocrypha tended to address Christian themes (e.g., stories about Jesus, teachings of the apostles) (Wikipedia). Together, these form the biblical apocrypha, mostly written between 200 B.C. and 400 A.D.

(Note: some sources refer to pseudepigrapha. That word simply means “false attribution.” Example: Pseudo-Aristotle includes the spectrum of authors whose works were falsely claimed (by themselves or others) to have been written by Aristotle. Within biblical literature, modern scholars consider the book of Daniel an example of pseudepigrapha because, contrary to its own claim, it seems to have been written 400 years after the real Daniel. Many scholars hold that numerous canonical New Testament works are pseudepigraphical. For instance, Britannica (n.d.) states that the Letter to the Hebrews, attributed to Paul, was actually written after his death. A non-canonical New Testament example is the so-called Gospel of Barnabas, written in the late Middle Ages but purporting to have been written by Barnabas, a disciple of Jesus. One obvious motive behind pseudepigraphy would be to seek greater status or attention for a work. Another motive in some cases is the desire to honor or give credit to a leader or teacher who is believed to have made the work possible, or to position the work as part of that person’s rightful legacy. (See Garrison, 2012.) In any event, this post does not dwell upon the phenomenon of pseudepigraphy.)

There is a long list of New Testament apocryphal works, mostly hailing from the early centuries A.D. It includes, among others, a variety of gospels (e.g., Life of John the Baptist; Gospel of Peter), Gnostic dialogues with Jesus (e.g., Gospel of Mary), Sethian texts (e.g., Trimorphic Protennoia), Acts (e.g., Acts of Paul), Epistles (e.g., Epistles of Clement), Apocalypses (e.g., Apocalypse of Stephen), and so forth. There are also numerous fragmentary works (e.g., The Fayyum Fragment) and lost works known only from third-party references (e.g., Gospel of the Seventy). New Advent (n.d.) summarizes some New Testament apocryphal works. Ehrman (2003) provides much more detail on some.

There would probably be many more apocryphal works, and more information on developments in the first centuries of the church – but Britannica (n.d.) states that, to those whose Christian beliefs were in the process of becoming dominant within the church, such books conveyed the kinds of seemingly “obsolete” beliefs that “church leaders were trying to prune and shape from the 1st century onward” and, elsewhere, that “virtually all [New Testament apocryphal works] advocating beliefs that later became heretical were destined to denunciation and destruction.” (For fictionalized development of related themes, see Brown’s (2003) best-selling Da Vinci Code.)

Britannica (n.d.) cites Marcionism (above) as an example of beliefs that the church sought to suppress: “A number of popes … were involved in fighting the spread of the Marcionite movement.” Britannica (n.d.) likewise describes Montanism as “an attack on orthodox Christianity” whose “writings have perished” because “mainstream Christianity vigorously opposed” it (Tabbernee, 2007, p. 404). As another example, Jewish Christians reportedly continued to worship in synagogues for centuries, apparently encouraging “[v]arious forms of Jewish Christianity” to survive until sometime in the 400s A.D. and to canonicalize “very different sets of books, including Jewish-Christian gospels” that were gradually eradicated from the historical record.

The forms of belief now called Gnosticism were prominent among those suppressed views and texts. While that line of belief deserves a closer look, I will simply summarize it by quoting Wikipedia at length:

Gnosticism [Greek for “possessing knowledge”] … is a collection of religious ideas and systems that …. [distinguishes] a supreme, hidden God and a malevolent lesser divinity (sometimes associated with the God of the Hebrew Bible) who is responsible for creating the material universe. … Gnostics considered material existence flawed or evil, and held the principal element of salvation to be direct knowledge of the hidden divinity ….

Efforts to destroy [Gnostic] texts proved largely successful, resulting in the survival of very little writing by Gnostic theologians. … For centuries, most scholarly knowledge about Gnosticism was limited to the anti-heretical writings of early Christian figures …. There was a renewed interest in Gnosticism after the 1945 discovery of Egypt’s Nag Hammadi library, a collection of rare early Christian and Gnostic texts ….

Gnostic belief was widespread within Christianity until the proto-orthodox Christian communities expelled the group in the second and third centuries …. [It originated] in the late first century AD in nonrabbinical Jewish sects and early Christian sects [but had roots in Zoroastrianism, among others]. …

[In] the angel Christology of some early Christians … [such as in The Shepherd of Hermas,] Jesus is …. [perceived as] as a virtuous man filled with a Holy “pre-existent spirit”. … [Some Gnostics saw him] as an embodiment of the supreme being who became incarnate [or, in other views, had no physical body,] to bring gnōsis to the earth, while others … [considered him] merely a human who attained enlightenment through gnosis and taught his disciples to do the same. …

Initially, [Gnostics and proto-orthodox Christians] were hard to distinguish from each other. … [Bauer (1979) observed that what would later be called] “heresies” may well have been the original form of Christianity in many regions …. [Pagels (1979, 1988) reportedly contended] that “the proto-orthodox church found itself in debates with gnostic Christians that helped them to stabilize their own beliefs.” …

[Gnostic texts] may contain information about the historical Jesus …. [They also seem to convey an earlier view that the kingdom of heaven is already here, and not a future event. But possibly that view was a 2nd-century revision, adopted when the end time failed to arrive.]

The prologue of the Gospel of John …. [arguably] shows “the development of certain gnostic ideas, especially Christ as heavenly revealer, the emphasis on light versus darkness, and anti-Jewish animus” … [Some see John as] a “transitional system from early Christianity to gnostic beliefs in a God who transcends our world.” …

Tertullian calls Paul “the apostle of the heretics” because Paul’s writings were attractive to gnostics, and interpreted in a gnostic way, while Jewish Christians found him to stray from the Jewish roots of Christianity. … Many Nag Hammadi texts … consider Paul to be “the great apostle” … [partly because] he claimed to have received his gospel directly by revelation from God …. However, his revelation was different from the gnostic revelations. …

[Elsewhere, Marcion’s] teachings clearly resemble some Gnostic teachings. … [and] snake handling played a role in ceremonies [of the Serpent Gnostics].

Boryanabooks (2013) summarizes the situation:

The faction [of the early church] that became Catholicism confronted not only the Gnostics but endless other claimants within the Christian fold …. [W]hen Christianity became the Roman state religion Emperor Constantine … [gave that faction] the military power to physically crush their religious rivals. … The victorious faction … burned the Gnostics’ books and their churches, and sometimes the Gnostics themselves.

Schaff (1890-1907) draws upon Eusebius, among others, for the historical record regarding Constantine and subsequent emperors. Wikipedia’s (1 2) summaries of some of those “endless other claimants” range from the first official execution of a heretic in 385 A.D. to the last one in 1826. Swartz (1927) says that – thanks to persecution that was “almost as aggressive” as the Roman Empire’s persecution of the early Christians – by 600 A.D. “all serious opposition to the Roman Church lay effectively crushed.”

After that, it was largely a matter of wiping out pockets of heresy that would pop up from time to time – such as the Waldensians (c. 1200 A.D) – a movement begun, according to Wikipedia, by “a wealthy merchant who decided to give up all his worldly possessions and began to preach on the streets of Lyon,” whose followers “endured near annihilation.” (New Advent’s (n.d.) Catholic coverage of that genocide is far more muted.) The madness largely ended with the wars of religion (1522-1712 A.D.), which gradually established that the Catholic church had finally lost the power to torture and kill in order to maintain its political and theological dominance.

Image of the Shepherd of Hermas, from the Roman catacombs

Not surprisingly, these factors did not foster a repeat of the Old Testament pattern, where apocryphal works continued to emerge from the source religion’s culture until that culture was dispersed. Rather, as noted above, New Testament apocryphal sources were largely eliminated by around 400 A.D. Even so, a few early works now considered apocryphal continued to be treated, at times, as serious candidates for inclusion in the New Testament canon. Notably, Codex Alexandrinus (above, c. 400-440 A.D.) included 1 and 2 Clement; Codex Sinaiticus (c. 330-360 A.D.) included Shepherd of Hermas and Epistle of Barnabas; Codex Claromonanus (c. 550 A.D.) contained those last two plus Acts of Paul and Apocalypse of Peter; some ancient manuscripts treated 3 Corinthians and Didache as canonical; and numerous early English Bibles included the Epistle to the Laodiceans. (For other canons, see Wikipedia 1 2 and Davis, 2010.) The Clementine Vulgate (1592 A.D.) contained a number of works that were largely not seen in those earlier manuscripts, as does the present-day Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo canon.

Just as that handful of apocryphal works came close to acceptance, so also a handful of early Christian works that did ultimately become established were left out of various early canons. These antilegomena (from a Greek term used to denote “written texts whose authenticity or value is disputed”) have been listed toward the end of the New Testament at least since the time of the Vulgate (405 A.D.; see Council of Rome, 382 A.D.): everything after Philemon (except 1 Peter and 1 John) was suspect. According to Birner (2019, p. 13), Eusebius distinguished antilegomena (“disputed, but recognized [as canonical] by the majority”) from spurious books (i.e., not canonical, but not to be rejected altogether) (see Christian Cyclopedia, 2000).

A Speculative Psychohistory of Early Christianity

As indicated in the preceding paragraphs, assorted early Christian preachers, writers, and political figures entertained various ideas about putative scriptures that they created, favored, or criticized. Evidence and cold rationality certainly played a role in their debates and conclusions. But they also seem to have been influenced by mental preconceptions and emotional precommitments regarding a number of matters, ranging from political objectives to personal religious experience. In response to the dearth of ancient documentation on such matters, this section speculates about historical and psychological phases leading up to Athanasius’s final New Testament canon (367 A.D.).

• Documentation. Within a relatively short time after the crucifixion – say, 20 to 30 years – some of the first Christians were no doubt dismayed that the end of the world and the return of the conquering King had failed to occur promptly, as they had originally expected. Some of the older witnesses of Christ’s ministry had already died, disappeared, gone senile, or otherwise showed signs of forgetting or confusing important aspects of the story. Belief in Jesus gained only limited traction among the Jews who had encountered him firsthand: plainly, Judaism as a whole was not convinced, either in Palestine proper or in the cities abroad that Paul visited. Within the relatively small world of Judeans who had witnessed the phenomenon of Jesus, or among kids of the next generation who found the stories fascinating, a few had the skills, the motivation, and the means to collect information and to write it down. (Dartmouth Ancient Books Lab (2016) says that parchment was expensive. But Skeat (1995, contra Akin, 2016) says that, labor aside, papyrus was cheap.) There may have been some resistance to writing it down, even within the influence of a Jewish culture oriented toward written scriptures: Wheeler (2018, summarizing relevant pages in the Oxford Companion to the Bible) cites early writers who ostensibly encouraged oral rather than written transmission of the gospel – even as they, themselves, contributed to the written corpus. Mark may have been the only one within the proto-orthodox community who undertook such journalism in the early decades; he may have become the one who compiled multiple written and/or oral records into a single manuscript; or at least he was among the few whose relatively early work survived. It appears that the logic of Mark’s project became more compelling within the next few decades. We have three other presumed-authentic gospels that that community adopted; possibly others materialized as the number and quality of firsthand witnesses continued to decline, and as potential writers accumulated information and perspectives with which to supplement or revise Mark’s portrayal (see Mowry, 1944, p. 76). Presumably they were especially likely to do so as they detected a growing audience for such material. Possibly those three gospels did not start out in finalized form; possibly there were preliminary drafts, beefed up as readers shared their own recollections and reactions, and revised as the collective understanding of Jesus and of their religion evolved. Indeed, reasons for the brevity and the early dating of Mark’s gospel may be that, within the decades after its completion, he was dead, or stubborn, or intent upon keeping it simple or preserving its original clarity or making it available in an authoritative, final form sooner rather than later. Possibly he concluded that it all seemed to depend on him – that nobody else was doing it; that if he didn’t do it, maybe nobody ever would.
• Promotion. The first Christians didn’t want the story of Jesus to die – but it didn’t seem to be going very far. For those who believe that Acts 2:41 is historically accurate, the summary seems to be that, shortly after the crucifixion, on May 28 of the year 30 A.D., God gave the early church a huge shot in the arm with the miracle of Pentecost, when the disciples suddenly began preaching the gospel in the assorted languages of their Jewish audience. This amazed everyone and resulted in 3,000 conversions to Christ in one day (with another 2,000 added later). It is not clear why that had to be a one-time stunt, when there was an obvious ongoing need for it. Books of the New Testament (Acts, especially) report that the apostles performed many additional miracles. But then the apostles died; we are left to infer that God mostly withdrew for the next 2,000+ years – as far as we know at present, he withdrew forever; and presumably many of those who were briefly deceived about the realities of Christian life by such extraordinary events gradually dropped it, and went back to their former beliefs. By 49 A.D., there were apparently enough Jewish Christians fighting Jewish non-Christians, in and around the Roman synagogues, to prompt Emperor Claudius to tell them to get out of Rome. But the new faith was still just a Jewish sect. The New Testament essentially says that the first Christians waited more than 20 years, after the crucifixion, before they finally found a salesman who could really make something of their raw material. Fortified with at least an oral if not a written gospel, along with any other helpful documentation that he could find in the small and perhaps increasingly lukewarm Jerusalem bubble, Paul had what he needed to start purveying it to the Gentile masses. By roughly 54 A.D., he appears to have founded congregations at Ephesus, Corinth, Thessalonica, and elsewhere. This was not a matter of dropping a few seeds in the ground and moving on: it appears that he might devote months to nurse a new congregation to some degree of stability. In the big picture, Paul had to pull Christianity out of Judaism before it would be recognized by the larger Roman world. He was modeling an evangelistic faith, not only as an example to the folks back in Jerusalem, but also for his own second-order teachers and missionaries. This project did not work out well for him in physical terms: he was reportedly executed in Rome c. 64 A.D., apparently due to Nero’s blaming Christians for the Great Fire that year. Thanks primarily to Paul, the second half of the first century presumably saw rising demand for material to feed believers who were applying the gospel to their own myriad life contexts. Simple letters from Paul (first collected, perhaps, by the church at Ephesus – see Mowry, 1944; compare Price, 1997) and a few others were placed upon a pedestal as manifestations of God’s wisdom, applicable not just to the individuals and churches to whom they were written, but to all believers everywhere. Seeing the need – variously attempting merely to help out, to share the joy, or to capitalize upon an opportunity – random individuals started cranking out pseudepigrapha, generating excitement and zany ideas and more than a little confusion.
  

  Medieval image of St. John and Marcion (c. 1050 A.D.)

• Quality Control. In the first half of the second century, the mood turned more conservative. There was no longer any question that the miracles of Jesus and the apostles had ceased to occur. It was also more obvious that it might be a long time before Jesus returned. Therefore, it became increasingly important to preserve the memory of how great the church used to be – and also to swat down those who would confuse or pollute that memory by carrying the Christian faith in undesirable directions. Notably, in 132-135 A.D., Jews of Judea rallied around the messianic Simon bar Kokhba in a rebellion against Rome. Jewish Christians had to decide which messiah they would follow. Wikipedia says that bar Kokhba’s forces persecuted and killed Jewish Christians who did not join the rebellion – but that the Roman victory was even worse for those who did: “Judea was heavily depopulated as a result of … [an estimated 580,000 Jews] being killed or expelled, and a significant number of captives were sold into slavery. … [T]he Hebrew language … disappeared from daily use.” This event surely put a lot of weight behind Paul’s desire to free Christianity from entanglement with circumcision and other aspects of Jewish religious life and practice that Gentiles would tend to find complicated and unappealing. Now Judaism itself was suspect; “Christianity [was] increasingly recognized as a separate or independent religion” (Dunn, 2006, p. 315). Shortly thereafter, Marcionism (c. 140 A.D.) became popular – in part, presumably, because it minimized links between Judaism and Christianity, notably by rejecting the Old Testament God of the Jews. Marcion also tapped into Christians’ concerns about corruption of their faith by cutting back sharply against possible exposure to pseudepigrapha – by accepting, that is, only the few New Testament books listed above. The numbers of Christians throughout the early centuries can only be estimated (e.g., Stark, 1996; Schor, 2009; Wilken, 2012, p. 65) – but in any case, each year, an increasing number (and, in later centuries, an increasing percentage) of believers were born into the faith, rather than being converted to it. These born Christians (and others who shared their priorities) presumably formed a relatively stable and influential conservative bloc within their congregations – one that had become disillusioned with flash-in-the-pan zeal, with apocalyptic fantasy, and apparently even with Christlike self-sacrifice, and had instead become more interested in establishing their religion as an institution that would endure to educate their children’s children in the stories and principles they held dear. (After writing this paragraph, I discovered Greenwald’s (1989) hypothesis that knowledge was consolidated in the second century. Greenwald’s article (1987, p. 244) doesn’t seem to anticipate the ideas suggested in this paragraph.)
• Explosive Growth. In the short term, the early conservatives lost. Counting from the time of the apostles, it would take more than three centuries for their vision of Christianity to become concretized in a state religion, officially endorsed and protected from persecution, and relatively immune to disruption by frauds and by the people they considered heretics. It is easy to imagine that vast numbers of citizens of the Roman Empire would decide to call themselves Christians in the 300s A.D., when that affiliation became safe, popular, and finally almost mandatory. What is harder to understand is how the paltry number of Christians as of 100 A.D. – less than 10,000 altogether, according to some of the estimates cited above – managed to reach that level of power. Obviously, their numbers grew exponentially – but why? If it had been simply that their gospel was undeniably fantastic, we would see that in today’s Christianity or, even if that magic got lost somehow along the way, at least we would hear specifics of what was so fantastic about it back then. That doesn’t seem to be the case. To the contrary, the horde of heresies springing out of a Christian foundation during those centuries suggests that a great many people were not, in fact, very contented with Christianity as they encountered it, and took it upon themselves to improve it. The better answer appears to be that Christianity grew so fast precisely because it was so open to innovation. As Sheeley (1998, p. 515) puts it, the New Testament apocrypha supported “an early Christianity of extraordinary diversity.” Just as a free market induces inventors to come up with new solutions to old problems as long as they can count on certain basics (e.g., protection from criminals), maybe a free religion has an advantage in attracting participants and fostering innovation, as long as it starts from a plausible connection with things that people want in their belief systems (e.g., forgiveness, love, a purpose in life, a sense of the divine, an endorsement of oneself as basically a good person). Like excessively restrictive bureaucrats in the economic realm, the religious conservatives understandably squelched the variant ideas of the early church as departures from a safe, orthodox faith – but perhaps, in doing so, they also squelched the thing that had made Christianity such a powerhouse, offering something for everyone. The numbers of Christians continued to grow, notwithstanding the fall of Rome, as the geopolitical reach of the church expanded into the Middle Ages. But the prioritization of control undermined those essentials of a dynamic religious marketplace: it made the church an ugly monolith that murdered people merely for their intellectually defensible differences of scriptural interpretation, and for psychospiritually persuasive differences of opinion and belief. Through such processes, what would become mainstream Christianity continued to stray from the message of Jesus. Centuries would pass until, leading up to the Reformation, the Christian public began to understand the extent of that departure. Eventually the church became steadily less of a thing that people wanted to get into, and more of a thing that they wanted to get out of. Meanwhile, as of 2023, it was not clear whether there ever was an original, lost core of Christlikeness that deserved a central presence in the world’s heart and, if so, whether the world would ever find and be open to it.

Selection Criteria for Books of the New Testament

Given the historical, cultural, theological, and other concerns stated or implied in the preceding sections of this post, one might pause at the questions posed by Peckham (2011, p. 215):

If the Bible consists merely of books selected based upon human whims and power structures, why should one accept it as trustworthy and authoritative today? Why adopt such texts instead of any others that might be popular or personally palatable? Indeed, why accept any writings as authoritative at all?

A page from the Vulgate

The discerning reader may detect that Peckham’s phrasing primes the pump in favor of a conclusion that God must ultimately have chosen the books of the New Testament, leaving it to the community of believers to catch up and adopt them. As noted in another post, this is blasphemy, insofar as it makes God responsible for an incredible history of horrendous acts that were supposedly required by a New Testament that Jesus, himself, seems to have shown no interest in creating. We want the canon, yes – but is there any evidence that God does?

One need not read far into the history and theology of the New Testament canon to detect indicia of its decidedly human (i.e., not divine) origins and outcome. Heaton (2023) identifies two rationales that various scholars have cited to explain how the New Testament was formed: either Athanasius in 367 A.D. simply codified what others had already decided, or the collection “was formed by the application of three or four or six criteria for canonicity.” The discussion of Athanasius (above) has already demonstrated that the first of those two rationales is not correct: Athanasius did not merely endorse biblical authorities’ prior determinations. The second rationale is illustrated by Becerra (2019, p. 780):

During the second through the fourth centuries, as early Christians sought to define and distinguish between authoritative and nonauthoritative texts, there were primarily three criteria by which canonicity was determined: apostolicity, orthodoxy, and widespread use.

Arguably the most important criterion for church leaders was a text’s apostolicity, meaning its authorship by or close connection with an apostle. … Hebrews, Revelation, 2–3 John, James, and Jude were slow to be formally accepted on a large scale owing to some doubts regarding their apostolic origins.

Another criterion was a text’s conformity with a tradition of fundamental Christian beliefs. … [That is, the text had to agree with established beliefs regarding such matters as the Trinity], the reality of the incarnation, suffering, and resurrection of Jesus, the creation and redemption of humankind, proper scriptural interpretation, and the rituals of the church. The texts known as the Gospel of Peter and Gospel of Thomas, to name two examples, were rejected on the grounds that their portrayal of Christ was incongruent with this inveterate tradition of orthodoxy.

Another criterion for canonicity was a text’s widespread and continuous usage, especially by respected Christian authorities and in the large metropolitan centers of the Roman Empire, such as Rome, Ephesus, Antioch, Alexandria, and Constantinople. The broad use of a text implied its value for determining matters of faith and practice on a large scale and thus its relevance to the church beyond specific regional locales. … [In this sense canonization is a recognition of] already-authoritative literary works.

In other words, books were most likely to be chosen if they appeared to have an apostolic connection, were popular, and agreed with what people already believed. Regarding the first of those criteria, it is interesting to consider that people supposedly believed the text of the New Testament when it said that the apostles had lots of disagreements and made lots of mistakes – and yet those same people were confident that the apostles’ mere proximity to a text would magically signal its divine inspiration. Becerra also implies that the antilegomena were accepted because almost everyone’s doubts about them dissipated – but that is not true, as indicated in a StackExchange answer:

[T]he Nestorian churches still leave Revelation out of their canon. … The Syriac Peshitta omits it, and the Council of Laodicia did not recognize it. As late as 850, the Eastern Church listed the book as disputed. They still do not read from Revelation regularly.

Closer to the mark, Farmer (2013, p. 6; archive) observes that the alleged criteria by which the church ultimately chose the books of the New Testament were “by and large ex post facto and do not reflect the actual decision-making process.” Contrary to the supposed claim of apostolicity, Farmer cites “scholarly consensus that … 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus are pseudonymous and were composed … [long after Paul’s death, presumably] by the first generation of Paul’s followers” (p. 8). Farmer characterizes Becerra’s criterion of “widespread use” as “an explicit attempt to … fashion the Church into a more unified whole, based on those elements which the greatest number of Christians can agree” (p. 9). In a similar vein, Carrier (2004) summarizes Metzger (1987) thus:

[The selection of the canon] was largely a cumulative, individual and happenstance event, guided by chance and prejudice more than objective and scholarly research ….

[S]ince there was nothing like a clearly-defined orthodoxy until the fourth century, there were in fact many simultaneous literary traditions. … [The Catholic church] simply preserved texts in its favor and destroyed (or let vanish) opposing documents. Hence, what we call “orthodoxy” is simply “the church that won.” …

Indeed, the current Catholic Bible is largely accepted as canonical from fatigue, i.e., the details were so ancient and convoluted that it was easier to simply accept an ancient and enduring tradition than to bother actually questioning its merit. …

[W]e know of some very early books that simply did not survive at all, and recently discovered are the very ancient fragments of others that we never knew existed, because [none of the surviving manuscripts] had even mentioned them.

Heaton (2023) contends persuasively that Athanasius played a novel role by going beyond merely issuing a preferred list, as scholars and others had done previously, to the point of wielding power to state a final determination (and departing in various regards from those earlier conclusions), to which the church as a whole would then submit. In short, the answer appears to be that no selection criteria were enforced consistently, nor was there any controlling prior consensus. Athanasius considered what others had advocated; he observed what was politically feasible; and he flip-flopped as necessary (with, in Heaton’s example, the Shepherd of Hermas) to choose a solution that, in his judgment, the church would accept. And that’s how we got the New Testament. Centuries later, as Wikipedia indicates, Luther would insist that the Bible is “the sole infallible source of authority for Christian faith and practice” – but he would not explain how the Protestant believer could know which books God intended for it to contain, apart from his own (which was ultimately Athanasius’s) somewhat arbitrary selection.

Original New Testament Manuscripts

We have already seen that the text of the Hebrew Old Testament has emerged in various forms from preserved (original and translated) ancient manuscripts and from archeological sites (e.g., Qumran). Some of the same things are true of the New Testament, as detailed by Crossan (1992, pp. 425-426):

[S]cholars know, even if the laity does not, that the very Greek text of the New Testament on which any modern translation must be based is itself a reconstruction and the result, however executed, of a scholarly vote in a committee of experts …. The United Bible Societies’ third edition of The Greek New Testament [1975] grades disputed readings as A, B, C, or D …. “The letter A signifies that the text is virtually certain, while B indicates that there is some degree of doubt. The letter C means that there is a considerable degree of doubt whether the text or the apparatus contains the superior reading, while D shows that there is a very high degree of doubt ….” [T]hat scholarly reconstruction is made by collating manuscripts, all of which date, with one tiny and textually insignificant exception, from around 200 C.E. or after. Hence this warning from Helmut Koester [1989]: “The problems for the reconstruction of the textual history of the canonical Gospels … are immense. … Textual critics of classical texts know that the first century of their transmission is the period in which the most serious corruptions occur.” … And again, from François Bovon [1988]: “We must learn to consider the gospels of the New Testament canon, in the form in which they existed before 180 C.E., in the same light in which we consider the apocrypha. At this earlier time the gospels were what the apocrypha never ceased to be.”

That last remark is worth taking to heart. There is a real possibility that, within the first hundred years after Christ’s ministry, many committed followers of Jesus felt that beliefs we now consider standard were, in fact, heresies, comprising a disturbing departure from the dominant interpretation of Christ within their own belief communities. The early manuscripts destroyed or simply not copied by the Catholic church may have included some that would have introduced us to views that we have never heard, or that we may consider unsupported. Such possibilities encourage awareness, when the New Testament reader encounters things that do not add up – things that lost scriptures may have done a better job of explaining.

Discussing the most recent version (5th ed. (UBS5), revised 2018) of the Greek New Testament (known in Latin as Novum Testamentum Graece), Wikipedia quotes Aland (1995): “For over 250 years, New Testament apologists have argued that no textual variant affects key Christian doctrine.” That is certainly an interesting claim. The idea seems to be that the experts of the United Bible Societies did give grades of B, C, and D to numerous passages, indicating mild to extreme uncertainty as to what the original wording of those passages might have been – but by some miracle, not a single one of those passages had anything to do with any key Christian doctrines.

A page from a Greek New Testament (1887 A.D.)

That seems unlikely. What seems more likely is that this is what one would expect to hear from apologists – that is, people precommitted to “the intellectual defense of the truth of the Christian religion” (Grace Theological Seminary, 2021). Can an independent thinker trust such people to be honest about anything that could undermine their religion? I’d say no, they aren’t exactly famous for that sort of truthfulness.

Getting a little closer to the facts of the matter, Aland (as quoted by Wikipedia) goes on to say,

[I]n nearly two-thirds of the New Testament text, the seven editions of the Greek New Testament which we have reviewed [that is, the UBS version and six others] are in complete accord, with no differences other than in orthographical details (e.g., the spelling of names, etc.). Verses in which any one of the seven editions differs by a single word are not counted. This result is quite amazing, demonstrating a far greater agreement among the Greek texts of the New Testament during the past century than textual scholars would have suspected […]. In the Gospels, Acts, and Revelation the agreement is less ….

Wikipedia clarifies that wording somewhat. Of the 7,947 verses in the New Testament, almost 3,000 (i.e., 2,948, or 37%) contained differences in at least one (or perhaps two) significant words. Some of the worst percentages were in the most important books – specifically, the gospels, where the percentages of significantly varying verses were as follows: Matthew, 40%; Mark, 55%; Luke, 43%; and John, 48%. One-third (33%) of the verses in Acts contained significant variances, as did 47% of the verses in Revelation.

Aland is right: there is something “amazing” about that. What’s amazing is that half of the verses, in two of the four gospels, could contain significant textual discrepancies – and yet, again, miraculously, not a single “key Christian doctrine” would be affected.

Possibly the explanation for such nonsense is that the outcome is assumed, under the doctrine of verbal plenary preservation (VPP). That is, we know in advance that there couldn’t possibly be an adverse impact upon any Bible passage, because God wouldn’t allow it. According to Far Eastern Bible College (n.d.),

[VPP] means the whole of Scripture with all its words even to the jot and tittle is perfectly preserved by God without any loss of the original words, prophecies, promises, commandments, doctrines, and truths, not only in the words of salvation, but also the words of history, geography and science. Every book, every chapter, every verse, every word, every syllable, every letter is infallibly preserved by the Lord Himself to the last iota.

Wikipedia quotes various sources expressing a range of views – that VPP means that God perfectly preserved only “the original Hebrew and Greek manuscripts,” or also preserved the medieval Masoretic Hebrew text, or the even more recent selection of Greek manuscripts used for the King James (KJV, 1611) version of the Bible or, instead, that God’s textual insurance has continued right up to the present moment.

Such deeply troubled theories leave Wallace (2004) bemusedly speculating that “Scripture does not state how God has preserved the text. It could be in the majority of witnesses [i.e., ancient manuscripts], or it could be in a small handful of witnesses. In fact theologically one may wish to argue against the majority: usually it is the remnant, not the majority, that is right.” (See also MacLochlainn, 2015, favoring a belief or hope that the Holy Spirit resolves issues of divine inspiration in translation.)

It is pretty hard to believe – it is very unkind to our alleged Father to claim – that God was in the driver’s seat when the KJV became the dominant version in most English-speaking lands, misleading countless readers over a period of 400 years. Wikipedia mentions a handful of the KJV’s apparently incorrect passages, most notoriously the ending of Mark (16:9-20), with its bizarre claim of supernatural snake-handling powers for believers – a claim that has cost an unknown number of lives over the centuries. Other passages that may or may not have been in the original include those referring to Jesus sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, the story of the woman taken in adultery, and an instruction that women should remain silent in churches. It is simply ridiculous to pretend that no textual discrepancy affects any key Christian doctrine when one of the contested passages listed in Wikipedia (1 John 5:7-8) contains an extraordinary reference to the Trinity.

Echoing earlier remarks (above) about ancient Hebrew scribes, Ehrman (2015) summarizes some of the issues surrounding the Greek New Testament manuscripts:

The vast majority of these hundreds of thousands of differences [among the full collection of New Testament manuscripts] are completely and utterly unimportant …. [But many of those differences] do affect how we interpret important passages of the books of the New Testament, and sometimes they affect significant teachings of the biblical authors. …

Having a few scraps from within a hundred years of when the New Testament was written does not give us what we’d really like to have: complete manuscripts from near the time the authors published their books. If our first reasonably complete copies of the New Testament do not appear until two or three centuries after the books were first put in circulation, that’s two or three hundred years of scribes copying and recopying, making mistakes, multiplying mistakes, changing the text in ways big and small before we have complete copies. We can’t compare these, our oldest surviving copies, with yet older ones to see where their mistakes are. There aren’t any older ones.

And the problems get worse. In later times, when we have an abundance of manuscripts, the copyists of the New Testament were trained scribes—usually monks in monasteries who copied manuscripts as a sacred duty. … In the earliest centuries, the vast majority of copyists of the New Testament books were not trained scribes. … The earlier we go in the history of copying these texts, the less skilled and attentive the scribes appear to have been. … If our earliest known copyists made tons of mistakes, how many mistakes were made by their predecessors, who produced the copies that they copied? We have no way of knowing.

That doesn’t mean, however, that we should give up all hope of ever discovering what the New Testament authors wrote. It simply means that there are some places, possibly a lot of places, where we will never know for sure.

For more on the dates of New Testament manuscripts, see Orsini and Clarysse (2012). For a general discussion of other problems addressed in this section, see Ahmad (2009).

Translation of the Bible into English

Once the scholars and authorities decided which books are in the canon, and which Greek and Hebrew manuscripts seemed to do the best job of capturing what those books originally said, all they had to do was to translate them into English, right?

Translations were theoretically possible as soon as the English language came into existence (c. 450-700 A.D.). Translation could have been made from Hebrew and Greek sources (above) or from the Vulgate (405 A.D.), which was itself an officially approved translation into the Latin vernacular.

Early translation would have been more compelling if there had been a substantial English market for it. King Alfred the Great (c. 880 A.D.) “clearly regarded the appearance of those who could read English but not Latin as a recent development” (Wormald, 1977, p. 103) and responded with a program (in which he may have personally participated as translator: Bately, 2009; see The Last Kingdom) that sought to translate a small number of important books into the contemporary (Old) English, including the book of Exodus (for its laws) (Wikipedia; see also partial Old English Bible translations predating Alfred). It appears, however, that English-language literacy remained an afterthought during Alfred’s time and, if anything, waned thereafter (Wormald, pp. 109-114). Calder (2015) asserts that literacy rates in Britain climbed from 7% to 16% later, between 1450 and 1550 A.D. Whether that was literacy in English specifically (as distinct from literacy in any language, including Latin) is unclear.

An early translation would also have needed approval from the church. Expressing a view repeated across multiple sites, My Catholic Source (n.d.) insists that the church hesitated to permit translations into the vernacular, “not to conceal scripture from people, but to protect scripture from corruption.” Yet numerous sources quote multiple popes for highly restrictive views, even in later centuries, that favored a flat prohibition of public access to scripture. For example:

[W]hat should we not fear if the Scriptures, translated into every vulgar tongue whatsoever, are freely handed on to be read by an inexperienced people who, for the most part, judge not with any skill but with a kind of rashness?… (Pope Pius VII, 1816 A.D.)

In similar spirit, an Encyclical of Pope Pius XII (1943, ¶ 16) says,

[We ought] to explain the original text which, having been written by the inspired author himself, has more authority and greater weight than any even [sic] the very best translation, whether ancient or modern; this can be done all the more easily and fruitfully, if to the knowledge of languages be joined a real skill in literary criticism of the same text.

The idea seems to be that you should not read translations; instead, our priests – all skilled in literary criticism – should explain the Greek and Hebrew sources to you. It is not clear why explanations of the original text require papal or priestly control, or why such control has been necessary at any point in the modern age of widespread literacy – or, indeed, why the Catholic church did not historically promote public literacy. Plainly, starting with the invention of the printing press (c. 1436 A.D.) and increasingly during the past few centuries, anything that a priest might say could instead have been provided in competing commentaries, written by people with excellent skills across multiple forms of biblical criticism (see Britannica, n.d.), and open to evaluation and critique by competent, disinterested reviewers whose remarks might have imposed some constraints on the church’s vast system of abuses and atrocities.

In the Middle Ages, the practical effect of Catholic restriction seems to have been severe. Wikipedia lists medieval laws against translations into the languages of common people. For instance, “At the synod of Béziers … in 1246 it was also decided that the laity should have no Latin and vernacular … theological books.” In England, the Arundel Constitution (1407 A.D.; see Hudson, 1975) banned translation of scripture into English, punishable as heresy (i.e., death by burning at the stake). After beng denied permission to print his English New Testament in England, William Tyndale tried in (but had to flee) Cologne, before finally publishing in Worms (1526 A.D.). That and Tyndale’s subsequent Old and New Testaments were banned and burned by Catholic authorities in England, where Tyndale himself was strangled and burned in 1536. Ironically, the Coverdale Bible meanwhile became the first officially approved English Bible (1535).

Life is simpler for the modern English translator, politically speaking. American translators, in particular, have extensive freedom, under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, to publish versions of the Bible in whatever form they see fit, limited only by issues that are unlikely to arise in a typical translation (involving e.g., defamation, breach of the peace, obscenity) (Legal Information Institute, n.d.). Not surprisingly, there have been more than 100 complete known translations of the Bible into English, along with countless unfinished and unknown projects – not to mention partial or complete translations into more than 1,300 other languages (Britannica, n.d.).

Other English Bibles emerged between Coverdale (1535) and the KJV (1611) – which, contrary to Luther’s determination to make the ancient Hebrews sound German, was more a work of art than of everyday language. Tomlin (2010) elaborates: “[I]f it is an exaggeration to say that the KJV was written for an audience of one [i.e., King James – then at least] that particular reader loomed large in the thoughts of the translators …. Also absent is any sense of a desire to express the Bible in colloquial English.” Tomlin says the KJV attempted “a strict neutrality” in matters of doctrine – except that “there will be little quarter given to Calvinist subversion of royal rule.”

In Luther’s very different version, Tomlin (2010) sees a decision to subordinate literalism to other priorities. For instance, Luther’s translation emphasized the Protestant belief in salvation through faith, in contrast to the Catholic emphasis upon earning one’s salvation through good works. Sometimes, though, Luther emphasized his preferred doctrines to a fault. Among multiple examples, Tomlin points out that Luther twisted the seemingly straightforward language of James 2:24 (“You see that a person is justified by what he does, and not by faith alone”) to fit that same Protestant belief, rather than let the actual wording of the Greek text contradict him.

Today’s many English translations exist for a reason – indeed, for many reasons. A Catholic reader, seeking to become stronger and more knowledgeable in his/her faith, may simply not wish to fight mentally against a Protestant translator a dozen times in every chapter. A reader with weaker reading skills, or who is still learning English, may appreciate a more readable translation. The faith of a feminist Christian may arise from discovery of a translation that highlights or resists patriarchal assumptions inserted by author or translator and arguably not warranted by text or context, and similarly for minority vs. majority cultures. Jews and Jewish Christians may find the New Testament more familiar or sensible when translated from their perspective. Bible scholars may prefer a version that injects assorted notes and refinements into text, margins and/or footnotes. And so on.

A page from the Dake Annotated Reference Bible

Without denying such concerns, it may nonetheless seem that translation tends to be a relatively straightforward matter of expressing the source terms in the target lingo. There’s not much complexity in replacing the words for “tomorrow” or “speak” or “tree.” As I have seen firsthand, this belief can generate suspicion – indeed, harsh accusations – toward the translators who produce Bible versions that do not say what believers want them to say. It may therefore be helpful to explain why literal, word-for-word translation, which can seem like the obvious solution for people who love the Bible, is simply not a good answer in a wide variety of situations.

Idioms are a particular source of translational difficulties. An idiom is defined as a group of words whose literal meaning is not its intended meaning. For instance, our phrase, “raining cats and dogs,” would sound like absolute nonsense in a language that didn’t use that idiom. Among the many biblical examples, the New International Version (NIV, n.d.) and Blue Letter Bible (BLB, Stewart, 1 2) offer these:

• 1 Samuel 24:3 reads word-for-word, in the KJV, as saying that Saul went into a cave “to cover his feet.” Since that makes no sense, the NIV translates it more helpfully as a Hebrew idiom meaning that Saul pooped: in theory, his robe covered his feet as he squatted.
• The literal translation of Matthew 4:24 is “having it badly” – which doesn’t tell us anything. In fact, it is an idiom that means being sick.
• Matthew 1:18 says, literally, that Mary had it in the stomach – Greek for being pregnant.
• 1 Peter 1:13 is, literally, “Gird up the loins of your mind” – but it means either “pay attention” or “prepare for action.”
• Psalm 23:5 says, literally, that they “anointed my head with oil,” an idiom for they “welcomed me as an honored guest” – which, at least in America, probably won’t entail people rubbing grease into your hair.
• 2 Corinthians 6:11 is, literally, “Our mouth is open unto you” – which is pretty far from the idiomatic meaning, “We have spoken frankly to you.”

A basic yet sometimes important set of translation problems involves punctuation and capitalization – for which, again, word-for-word translation provides no guidance. Punctuation was scarce in early New Testament manuscripts – so NIV (n.d.) points out that the translator of Luke 23:43 has to choose among these options, without guidance from the original text:

• “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise”: the thief on the cross will die today, and will go straight to paradise.
• “Truly I tell you today, you will be with me in paradise”: I’m telling you this today: the thief will go to paradise at some point.
• “Truly I tell you today you will be with me in paradise”: the reader has to guess or assume a meaning.

BLB (n.d.) says that, since the Greek didn’t have quotation marks, the translator has to figure out whether the quotation of Jesus in John 3 ended at John 3:15 or continued, instead, to John 3:21. Other punctuation and formatting issues: do you format poems differently from prose? Do you add paragraph breaks and, if so, where? Should you break up long sentences into shorter ones that are easier to follow?

Word-for-word translation doesn’t help you with capitalization, which doesn’t exist in the ancient Hebrew and isn’t used in the English way in ancient Greek. For instance, do you translate the word as “spirit” or “Spirit”? When speaking of God, do you capitalize He/Him? Indeed, should you avoid pronouncing his name at all, or at least eliminate the vowels so that you can’t be sure of the correct pronunciation – instead using “Lord” or “G-d” or “YHWH” (instead of Yahweh or Jehovah) as in some Hebrew manuscripts and/or English translations?

Translators also have to clarify all sorts of other matters. For instance:

• Bible Society (2021) asks whether the translator should tell readers that “a sabbath day’s journey” (Acts 1:12) means “half a mile,” or that “a denarius for the day” (Matthew 20:2) means “the usual day’s wage.” And how about cubits – what does that mean?
• Ancient Greek and KJV English made clear whether “you” meant “you, singular” (“thou,” in the KJV) or “you people, plural” (“you,” in the KJV). Modern English has only one second-person singular and plural pronoun (“you”), so the translator into today’s English has to figure out how to clarify whether the original text is referring to just one person, or to more than one.
• “Adam,” in the Hebrew, could be either a proper name or a word meaning “man.”
• In Psalms 84:6, the Hebrew word baca can be taken as a proper name (“Baca”), but it can also mean “a balsam tree” – or it can mean “weeping.”

BLB (n.d.) says the Bible contains several hundred words that appear nowhere else in any Hebrew or Greek literature. An example: the Greek word in the Lord’s Prayer (i.e., Matthew 6:11 and Luke 11:3) that is typically translated as “daily bread.” What does it really mean? Some say it should be “bread for tomorrow.” There is no way of knowing for sure. Here, again, you can read a commentary, or you can rely on a seemingly competent translator. But “word for word” provides no guidance: it is not known what the word meant literally.

BLB (n.d.) offers the example of the chiton (e.g., Matthew 5:40), a garment for which there is no English word. It is something like a tunic – but that is not a familiar word to a lot of people. So do you baffle your readers with “tunic,” or incorrectly call it a “coat” as in the KJV – or do you add a few words of explanation that exceed the literal text? Maybe stick the explanation in a footnote, and turn off people who don’t like footnotes, or whose reading glasses don’t help with that tiny print – or convey the mistaken impression that the footnote was part of the original text? Speaking of footnotes, translators have to decide which ancient manuscripts to translate from (above), and whether to add footnotes highlighting points where manuscripts are unclear or inconsistent.

Barr (1987, p. 5) offers the example of Psalm 2:11-12, where translators generally assume that the prevailing form of the Hebrew text contains an error that they must correct. As another example, Barr (p. 7) says textual treatment could interpret the verb in Isaiah 44:8 as either “fear” or “be arrogant,” while philological treatment may point more toward “be stupefied.” Barr proceeds to fill a book discussing similar examples of difficulty in understanding what the established Hebrew text means.

Wallace (2012) provides interesting data on word-for-word translations of the New Testament. He observes that the Greek New Testament contains about 140,000 words. In his research, translations into other languages ranged from 111K words (Modern Hebrew NT) and 126K words (Vulgate) to 185K words (two French versions). The 16 English translations on Wallace’s list ranged from 173K (RSV) to 193K (TEV). The key point: even the English translations that sought to be literal, word-for-word translations wound up using far more words than were in the original Greek. For instance, Wallace says, “[W]hen the RV [Revised Version] came out (1881), one of its stated goals was to be … much more literal than the KJV.” How did that turn out? Word counts: KVJ, 181K; RV, 180K.

Why did that happen? Because (read my lips): Greek and English are different languages. Not even Old English (which a speaker of modern English will find largely unintelligible) has any significant connection with ancient Greek (McArthur et al., 1996, p. 417). The primitive roots of today’s English and New Testament Greek seem to have separated roughly 5,000 years ago. Anyone who has read English literature from a mere 200 years ago can imagine that languages that don’t even use the same alphabet might become very different over a period of five thousand years.

In these and more matters, further detailed by multiple sources (e.g., Spackman, n.d.; Chatzitheodorou, 2001; Fields, 2018; de Hulster, 2020; Naudé, 2002), most readers want and need to be able to leave the difficult decisions up to the experts. People are reading the Bible while lying in bed or traveling on the bus. They lack the time, money, circumstances, inclination, and/or ability to wallow around in learned commentaries and other tools. For the most part, they just want to read the Bible, and they want to understand what they read. Telling them to stick with word-for-word translations is mostly less helpful than identifying translations that follow the original text but are able to draw upon other guidance when the original is unclear, or when a literal rendering would be confusing or misleading.

The concept of verbal plenary preservation (VPP, above) was strange enough when it appeared to be focused on the original Greek and Hebrew manuscripts or, at most, on official translations like the Vulgate and the KJV. It goes beyond strange when it is applied to the innumerable complexities and differences of opinion that translators have encountered while arriving at their collective millions of decisions as to how to render various Bible passages in English and other languages.

Translation is an undeniably complex, imperfect, and altogether human process. It is yet another mile in the long slog from the original words and acts of God, Israel, Jesus, and the other players in the Bible’s dramas. We are making progress toward the goal, but to get there we are shedding every last bit of luggage and spare clothing – that is, we find ourselves compelled to abandon all sorts of myths and fantasies about God’s written communication to man. And we still haven’t reached the destination.

Bible Interpretation

The last stage of the journey – the last part of the answer to this post’s titular question of how we got the Bible – involves interpretation. We have dug up the manuscripts; we have decided which ones count; we have translated them into English. Now comes the last and in some ways the hardest task in developing a Bible that people will actually understand and use: figuring out what it means.

It may seem that translation – and, implicitly, publication or other sharing – are the final steps in getting the Bible. Yet the reality is more complex. Often, the process and choice of translation, and the method and extent of sharing, depend upon interpretation.

Specifically, most Christian readers already know what they believe about various Bible passages. So if, for instance, they look into a Jehovah’s Witness translation, they may quickly encounter important passages whose phrasing seems alien. They may also have strong reactions to what they see in, say, the feminist translation mentioned in the previous section. Indeed, vast numbers of readers over the past 400 years have felt that no other version has been able to match what they consider the “original” KJV.

A page from the first edition of the King James Bible (1611 A.D.)

What we don’t have is a world in which the most successful translators tell us to like it or lump it. For the most part, in the sink-or-swim world of Bible translation, what floats tends to be what is best supported and most effectively marketed. Many people still use the King James Version, rather than the Coverdale version, because people tend to have at least a vague concept of who King James might have been. You can’t say that about Myles Coverdale.

As an example from the present moment, ChristianBookExpo offers its list of bestselling Bible translations. In August 2023, the top six were the New International, Christian Standard, English Standard, King James, New Living, and New King James versions. (I list six to emphasize the enduring popularity of the KJV, original or revised.)

Among those, Battles (2023) offers a comparison of the top two. Battles, himself, is apparently in his late 30s, and thus may have grown up with the New International Version (NIV, 1973). That could explain his indication that the NIV is his personal reading favorite. But he says that, for preaching, he prefers the Christian Standard Bible (2017), in part, because its creators “made wise translational and promotional decisions,” notably following the Colorado Springs Guidelines on gender-inclusivity. Those Guidelines (1997) seem to allow gender-neutral language when it does not impair translation accuracy. For example, they say the Greek word tis can be translated as “anyone” rather than as “any man.” The idea seems to be that a conservative-friendly translation should stick with the original language, but that it need not go out of its way to make the text more male-dominant than it has to be.

The point here is not that the CSV is, or is not, a superior translation. The point is that its creators appear to have their finger on the pulse of what contemporary readers want. Their translation decisions seem to explain why Battles found it easy to switch his preaching to the CSV: he noticed that many members of his congregation were using that version already. It wasn’t purely a question of translation. It was a question of translation shaped by awareness of how consumers want to interpret the Bible.

Of course, not everyone wants the same thing. What Battles didn’t see was the people who are not attending his church. Absent sociological research, maybe nobody knows exactly who they are or why they maybe considered going to church, but didn’t notice his place or didn’t find anything resonant in it. Presumably that large pool of possible attendees includes people for whom the bestselling translations are pretty much plain vanilla. It’s still the Bible, with the same stories and ideas, no matter how you phrase it. You might need a rather remarkable departure to perk up some interest in most of the people who opt out of church attendance.

Many of today’s relatively successful English translations emerged during the era of globalization, when it was assumed that the world would simply continue to become more tightly knit through various economic and cultural links – often depending upon shared use of the English language. It seemed that English speakers in South Africa reading a Bible passage about Jesus, or about ancient Israel, would get approximately the same meaning from it as English speakers in London or Kansas City.

Whatever the prior credibility of that assumption, the situation seems less clear in the present era, when globalization has become less of a given. For one thing, increasing awareness of non-Anglophone cultures could help to generate productive questioning of what the Bible is really saying.

Scorgie (2009, pp. 32-34) cites the example of the Hebrew word translated as “righteousness” in the KJV. Righteousness, he says, is a matter of personal morality. It sounds individualistic – like what one might expect in a translation written for England, whose king would soon be rejecting papal authority and going his own way (1529-1536 A.D.). But in the Spanish Bible, Scorgie says, that same Hebrew word was translated as the much less individualistic “justice.” Justice is a community value. In Catholic belief, Kodell (2002) says – and specifically in Catholic Spain – the idea seems to be that

The Bible was given to the believing community of Jesus’ disciples, not to individuals, and only the community, acting under the Spirit’s guidance through its appointed leaders, is empowered to define its teaching.

To the extent that the world moves away from globalization, and from the accompanying assumptions of universal values prioritized identically across cultures, the scope of legitimate Bible interpretations may expand in directions not contemplated within today’s English translations. In particular, future translations may favor specific religious cultures over arguably universal individualism. Munday (2001, p. 133) quotes Spivak (1993) on where this might lead:

In the act of wholesale translation into English there can be a betrayal of the democratic ideal into the law of the strongest. This happens when all the literature of the Third World gets translated into a sort of with-it translatese, so that the literature by a woman in Palestine begins to resemble, in the feel of its prose, something by a man in Taiwan.

One interpretation of that remark is that, instead of hiring with-it translators, possibly the views of the Palestinian woman would be better communicated, to at least some English readers, if it were expressed in the less cosmopolitan language of a particular American subculture, such as that of Angelica Garcia’s “Jicama” (American Songwriter, 2019).

A more radical interpretation would challenge the homogenizing effects of a canon. It would push instead for a disestablishmentarian liberation of Genesis, and Psalms, and Job from their forced consolidation into a dubious anthology of allegedly harmonious works. We would stop privileging the concept of a Bible designed to satisfy those who commit themselves to the sometimes laughable fictions of sclerotic religious institutions’ synthetic dogma. Instead, the Bible’s so-called books – more aptly and variously called letters, poems, and histories – would be freed to participate, on their own, in the languages of a thousand cultures. Each would be suddenly reconceived as its own separate enterprise, in a long-overdue revival of explosive, censor-free, second-century Christian exploration and speculation.

The Bible is not, after all, the copyrighted intellectual property of the Catholic church, nor of anyone else. There is no legal prohibition against ripping out the pages of the Gospel of John and treating them, in Marcionite fashion, as comprising an officially endorsed and supposedly infallible guide to one legitimate conceptualization of Christlikeness. Instead of a weekly gathering of the sheep for a tiresome repetition of tedious intonations, the assembly of believers could reunite the followers of John’s Christ, of Luke’s Christ, of Paul’s Christ, each reflecting their own divergent applications of scripture to daily life. Christian belief could then consist of X and Y and Z, instead of X and X and X. And, with luck, the lying would stop.

The point of this speculation is that perhaps the end of globalization would not be a bad thing, for purposes of finding a concept of God that is not so outrageously arrogant and abysmally blasphemous. Instead of imaging that we have all the answers, it might be better for us to become more aware of how much we don’t know.

We may be approaching an era in which that can become a real possibility. Artificial intelligence (AI) is commonly viewed as the consummate consumer information service, in the sense that it strives to give you whatever you want to express, or to know, in any field of knowledge. As such, AI may compel a broad retreat from a depiction of the Bible as a global store of knowledge, equally applicable to everyone. Instead, AI may eventually offer a deeply absorbing and highly individualistic immersion in the mind of the Bible, casting universal (e.g., denominational) rules and principles as invariably patchy and contradictory attempts to restrict the free pursuit of insight.

In that more radical scenario, AI collapses the global Bible, the regional (e.g., Spanish, Palestinian) culture, and the denominational doctrine as well, treating them all as human-generated abstractions and distinctions that impair rather than aid individual processes of learning about and participating in the message of Christ. If there is a possibility of community in this, it seems more likely to consist of sharing one’s discoveries about the fit of faith to oneself, and less a matter of mutual participation in the study and contemplation of someone else’s selected passage.

Experience of the Bible commonly entails dwelling upon some books or passages while avoiding others. AI appears likely to expand that phenomenon, providing a more thorough review of Bible contents and affirming, in effect, that there really isn’t much of interest to this particular user in most of the Bible. Such a conclusion would be hard to ignore if it emerged from, say, a report on the user’s total of 231 Bible AI sessions to date. Targeted inquiry might confirm that substantial portions of the Bible are not merely irrelvant to the user’s situation, but are rather in conflict with what much of the Bible says about it. Further exploration could reveal that Bible users who do make use of those seemingly irrelvant sections tend to be profoundly unlike oneself.

Users of biblical AI may thus find themselves invited if not compelled to liberate their favorite biblical books or doctrines – indeed, to participate in a shared, AI-configured worship experience based upon them. Without even staking a position on a canon or on biblical inerrancy, the user may find de facto that the pursuit of insight into John’s perspective on Christ calls for attention to a different biblical thread (e.g., that of Mark), resort to extrabiblical (e.g., apocryphal) sources, or abandonment of the Bible altogether.

The point of all this is simply that we may be approaching a world in which interpretation swallows translation. We will have the opposite of the traditional assumption that, first, we get our translation, and then we try to figure out what it means. In the new world, seamless translation – that is, AI’s constant shifting among translation wordings and philosophies according to the question of the moment – may become an invisible, back-end affair supporting the dominant function of interpretation, where giving the consumer what s/he wants is the whole ballgame. From the user’s perspective, AI may be nothing but interpretation, the ultimate source of interactive multimedia informative processes drawing upon indefinitely many and varied human and artificial commentaries.

Dogma

The previous section discusses interpretation as an important part of the explanation of how we get the specific Bible that we find ourselves using. In that section’s speculation, the interpretive functions of AI become so powerful as to reduce translational issues to the level of technical trivia, as readers or listeners interact dialogically with an AI capable of explaining, linking, and synthesizing Bible passages in countless ways.

The use of AI in Bible exploration is, of course, very different from the traditional Catholic emphasis upon the use of priests to present and explain biblical concepts to the laity. It is not merely that priests become superfluous. In seamless AI, priests may emerge as one part of the problem in which the Bible and its interpretation have been historically subject to the control of religious authorities who twist religious doctrine to serve their own ends.

The Center for the Study of Global Christianity (2019; archive) estimates that there are about 45,000 Christian denominations. Fortunately (for those of us who favor simplicity), there don’t seem to be nearly that many formal Christian belief systems, using that term to denote relatively comprehensive sets of explanations of the Bible. The Catholics have gone over the whole thing with a fine-toothed comb many times, and so have the major Protestant denominations and some others, in their efforts to assemble customized, systematic sets of doctrine that would take root and become established among their members. But it appears that the denominations that have had the time and resources for a thorough job of that may number in the hundreds, not in the tens of thousands.

The world’s Christian denominations have largely come into existence through historical processes of disagreement with and separation from other denominations. Using my own background as an example, the branching process seems to have been as follows: first, two thousand years ago, it was Christians vs. Jews; then, as Rome split and fell, it became Western vs. Eastern Christians; then, in the Reformation, it was Western Protestants vs. Western Catholics; then Lutheran vs. Calvinist (vs. other) Protestants; then Lutheran World Federation vs. International Lutheran Council (vs. other Lutheran groupings); then Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) vs. Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod (LCMS) (vs. other American Lutheran denominations); and finally it was my next-door LCMS church vs. me.

At any point along that branching tree and its variations, you could dig in and find the issues and events that were persuading people to splinter. This chart (Richards, 2016) provides more detail on such issues, for the Lutheran denominations just mentioned:

It seems that American Lutheran congregations and denominations have been dividing and reassembling in various configurations for quite a few years. The LCMS evidently remains firmly committed to theological and sociopolitical conservatism. In the view of the LCMS (n.d.), its key differences from the ELCA (i.e., the only American Lutheran denomination larger than the LCMS) involve biblical inerrancy; ordination of male ministers only; rejection of homosexual behavior; commitment to a historical Lutheran creed; and intolerance of disagreement in core doctrines, some of which can be quite abstruse (e.g., the nature of Christ’s presence during Holy Communion).

It appears reasonable to describe the LCMS as a true heir of Luther’s doctrinal determination and rigidity. According to Britannica (n.d.), “The Missouri Synod has often been at odds with other Lutheran groups because of its insistence on strict conformity with its interpretation of ‘pure doctrine’ based on the Bible and Lutheran confessions.” If Martin Luther came back to life right now, complete with an ability to speak English, he would probably be comfortable as an LCMS preacher.

That appears to be a formula for decline. There is no longer a politically dominant Catholic church against which one might visualize oneself as a Luther-like hero. The Lutheran creed has its place in history, but hardly anybody cares about that old fight anymore. Most people, however conservative theologically, will not understand why such ancient trivia should prevent the dwindling number of LCMS congregations from joining forces with generally likeminded conservatives from other denominations. But, so far, it looks like the LCMS will be very slow to do anything of the sort. In words that capture the denomination’s politics as well as its dogmatism, the LCMS motto should be Dead Right.

So that’s one way to go about the process of Bible interpretation, translation, and selection. Get yourself born into a church whose members largely originated in central and northern European cultures in which substantial numbers of people shared similar values toward life generally and the Catholic church specifically; become especially rigid on supporting Luther’s doctrines where he was wrong, and on theological hairsplitting whose picayune precision has no support in the gospel; generally, do whatever else seems necessary to insure that your church will steadily become a safer and more invisible backwater, insulated from the world; and take pride in the purity of your convictions. Remind me – whom are we serving here?

The ELCA alternative appears to be simply not to be like that. Yes, you were born Lutheran, in one shape or another, that’s what you’re familiar with, and you’d just as soon not have to switch denominations; but the rigidly homophobic, creationist, pro-choice, and patriarchal values of the LCMS are just not going to cut it. The Bible says what it says, and you appreciate a lot of it, but you’d have to be brain-dead or a liar to treat it as an unerring guide to truth and life, when anyone can plainly see that it simply isn’t.

Despite the potential intellectual appeal of liberal views like those, it appears that – as indicated in something I posted four years ago (2019) – membership in liberal denominations like the ELCA continues to plummet. It still seems that, if you want to be part of a church that may survive and grow, you may want a conservative denomination where you can fit – in other words, one that doesn’t need to be quite as difficult as the LCMS (see Religion Unplugged, 2023; So What Faith, 2022; see also Pew 1 2.)

Families may not tend to form and preserve a multigenerational commitment to a denomination that is primarily oriented toward trendy sociopolitical issues – not when one is already able to indulge that sort of thing at work, at school, in the media, and elsewhere. As people mature and become more anchored in families, friend networks, and communities, the thing that will get you all packed into the family car on Sunday morning may be a need for a kind of institution that offers something you won’t get elsewhere. Maybe that’s a religious tradition that adds meaning to holidays (e.g., Christmas) and other appealing aspects of traditional American life and culture. Maybe it’s an arguably superstitious belief that an actual divinity, operating in real time, is connected to an arguably fantasy-based scripture. It could just be a form of fellowship whose values offer a refreshing departure from the rat race.

Biblical interpretation surely matters mostly to people who have a reason to care what the Bible says and what it means. If you already know that you’re going to reject biblical teachings that contravene your sociopolitical precommitments, and if in any event you doubt the Bible is all that it’s cracked up to be, you may be unlikely to feel any intense need for its stale stories from ancient cultures and beliefs that have nothing to do with you.

The question here is whether that formulation captures a undeniable problem of Christian belief, or is instead a mere consequence of the power games by which institutional religion shut down the best things about Christ. The question, “How did we get the Bible?” implicitly acknowledges that a great many people don’t get it at all, possibly for reasons that derive more from the centuries of denominational efforts to prevent it from being interesting and relevant.

With or without AI, perhaps the general message of these last several sections has been that one may profitably revisit the question of how we get the Bible, as this post has enlarged upon it. What should we infer from the textual variations at Qumran, and the seemingly halfhearted commitment to documentation in the first century, and the explosions of Christian converts and heresies that appear to coincide in the second and third centuries? Attention to these and other matters may help us to turn from the question of how we got the Bible to the question of what we should do with it.

Notes from Underground, or Wherever

[Found these pages in 2014; posting them now.]

Notes from Underground, or Wherever

by Marcus Heath
November 12, 2008

So I died. I know, not what I intended. But it happens. It’s really frustrating, because there were all these things that I wanted to say to people, and now I can’t.

You’d think I could just wait until they get here, and tell them then. But I’m not sure it works that way. I’m in solitary confinement. The only living thing I’ve seen since I got here is Max, a therapist who stopped in briefly. No windows. It seems like I woke up in this cell, and that’s where I’ve been ever since. I asked Max how long I’m here for, and what comes next. He just shrugged. He may be a good listener, but he’s not much for conversation.

I told Max there were all these things I wanted to say. He suggested I write them down. He got me some paper and a couple of pens and said he’d check back. Not sure how long ago that was. It feels like it’s been a while.

Chapter 1
God and His Mercy

My cell seemed to be all concrete. No windows, in the door or anywhere else. No handle on the inside of the door. I went over and gave it a shove. It didn’t budge.

My cell didn’t have a lot in it. A bed, a table, and a Bible.

I wasn’t sure what to make of that Bible. I didn’t recall the Bible saying anything about being put in a solitary cell and visited by a therapist. Maybe that copy of the Bible was there for the particular torment of people who had wasted their lives believing it?

Some people, I knew, would take that Bible as a hint. Time to clean up your act and be holy. This has never been my style. A thousand preachers and random Bible-thumpers had told me, all through my life, how it works: you make your decision about God, you roll the dice, and you see how it turns out. No such thing as a redo after the fact. Anyway, if there was a God, he already knew me inside and out. Nobody’s fool. Which would probably explain why I was in solitary, and appeared likely to stay here.

But waste not, want not. I got the idea to use that Bible as a guide for my writing. I would open it to a random place, put my finger down, and use that passage to tell me what I should write about. I flipped it open, and here’s what I got first:

Luke 6:36. Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.

Well, that was true. My dad was merciful. Not often, but he was. But of course Luke was referring to God, my Father in Heaven.

As I thought about it, I realized I really didn’t have a lot to say to God. Probably a bad place to start my little writing effort. For one thing, I doubted there was such a thing as the Christian God. He seemed to be an invention, like Citibank or the USSR, by people for whom there is no such thing as too big. This God, they said, could do anything! I was still waiting to see if he could create a rock so big he couldn’t lift it. He knew everything! Which meant that all his believers were just living out their lives, waiting for whatever he had already decided should come next. And it showed in their lack of creativity and zest for life.

Of course, if I had believed in the Christian God, by this point I would have had endless things to complain about. How could he this, why did he that. Evil, and torture, and the deaths of children and kittens. Why doth the evil man prosper, etc. All good questions. Maybe this cell had seen others before me who had raged thus. Maybe this Bible had answered their concerns. Odd that the warden didn’t include a Koran or a Book of Mormon, but maybe they had separate cells for those types. Maybe I had a Bible because God’s sources were misinformed. Don’t tell me they were relying on the membership rolls of the Lutheran Church, in which I was confirmed after the eighth grade. Those people weren’t even speaking to me anymore. Well, they definitely weren’t, now that I was dead.

I thought about raising this with Max, next time I saw him. But not to complain. They might replace the Bible with something worse – the ravings of some religious psycho, or the Bhagavad-Gita, which I had found completely inscrutable, the one time I looked at it. Besides, I was not yet finished with this old black volume. Black, the color of death. I thought it might be nice, not only to get some mileage out of it, but also, eventually, to kiss it goodbye.

It occurred to me that, in writing these words, I had made the mistake so many people make. I had become preoccupied with the part about God, in that Bible passage, and had neglected the part about mercy.

It would be hard to agree that God is merciful if you don’t believe he exists. But I didn’t say there was no God; I just said that the Christians seem to have walmarted him. The problem with a bloated God was that he couldn’t win. When you control everything, you don’t deserve credit for doing nice things; you ought to be doing more nice things. Everything ought to be nice. We expect a congenial suburban God who will make things as comfortable across the universe as he has done for us right here in our little cul-de-sac.

It would be very refreshing to discover that God was just a god, just one more badass on the local divinity front, hanging out and maybe sometimes screwing up. In that case, being merciful would be a sign of good character; there would be other badasses who weren’t.

I did believe that God, or god, or the gods, were merciful. I’d had a good life. I’d been damn lucky in a lot of ways.

The Bible was telling me to be merciful too. I realized that I should. And, weird thing, in the moment when that occurred to me, it felt like I saw a glimmer of light straight from the first century, like candlelight through a crack into the room where Luke was writing those words. Like the programmer has broken the code: the door is opening. Nothing supernatural; it was just a little feeling. Obviously my imagination – no candles here – but a cool little head trip nonetheless.

It did appear that I might have a lot to say about God after all. But there didn’t seem to be any rush. And, after all, this was the Bible. It’s not as if this would be the last time the subject would come up.

Chapter 2
Sold Down the River

While writing the foregoing words, there in my solitary cell, it felt normal, like when I’d written things during my lifetime. I could write a paragraph and stop, and it would feel like that had taken maybe three or four minutes. But for some reason, by the time I finished that first chapter, it felt like I had been at it for a week.

Anyway, I opened the Bible and punched my finger down onto another page, and this time, here’s what I got:

Genesis 37:31. And they took Joseph’s coat, and killed a kid of the goats, and dipped the coat in the blood.

I remembered this story. Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery, and then used the bloody robe to make their father think he had been killed by a wild animal. And then Joseph wound up in Egypt, Pharoah’s right-hand man, rich and famous, and his brothers came in, years later, poor and desperate, and bowed down to him, not recognizing him.

This, I felt, was going to happen to me too. Or at least I used to think that, before I died. The bastards had sold me out – referring, here, to all the bastards in the world at large, and especially those whom I’d had the misfortune to meet – but I was going to hang tough, and my day would come, and they would all be sorry. It was a little embarrassing to recall those feelings now because, oops, turns out I was wrong.

I had been sold out lots of times. I vividly recalled when I innocently tried to kiss Debbie, in the first grade, and she immediately said she was going to tell the teacher. I had thought, hey, maybe we had a thing going. But no. Still, it was just in the spirit of good clean fun, right? No. Tried to persuade her that we were going to grow up and go to college someday and needed to be mature about this, but for some reason I just couldn’t talk her out of it. I don’t recall that I was punished for it. It was just the principle of the thing.

Well, and matters had gone downhill from there. Liars and suckups and backstabbers. Life was full of them. Friends who share your personal secrets with your enemies. Cheating women. Thieving corporations, always trying to steal another dollar. Like you spend your life with these cockroaches crawling all over you, and the only deliverance short of death is that eventually they feel normal.

Which moved me to pause and reflect. Suddenly it seemed there might be no more of that for me. Hard to tell what Max & Co. might have in store, if I ever got out of my cell. Maybe that would never happen; maybe I would always be here. Well, if so, it could have been worse. I would probably go insane from the solitude eventually. Couldn’t decide if that would be a bad thing. Might help me pass eternity. Especially if there would be no embarrassment to it, nobody but Max to notice. He probably would have seen it a thousand times before.

But it did seem that, while I was in here and maybe afterwards as well, there might be no more scummy parasites, waiting to feed on my body or soul. Odd to feel a sense of freedom, or of lightening my load, while being held in solitary confinement in hell, or wherever I was. But I did, suddenly, a little bit.

This line of contemplation was not helping, however, in my mission to relate what I had been wanting to say to people, during my life. I had wanted to tell those people off.

As I thought about this, I started crying. Well, not crying, exactly, but a tear came to my eye. Caught me off guard. Not sure exactly why it happened. Suddenly there was nobody left to fight with; just me and all that anger. It was, like, You guys, you should not have treated me like that. I loved you! But wait – was that true? Well, yeah, sometimes. It felt like I really had loved some of them. I had definitely wanted them in my life. I had trusted them. They had been my friends. Or pretending to be. It really hurt, now, to feel like such a loser, a fool, a joke to them.

I say I got just a tear in my eye but, truth be told, I’m not sure how much time passed in that sad state. It seemed like these moments of feeling and reflection got stretched out somehow, like what I was saying before. Somehow it felt like I was spending a lot of time sitting and thinking. I’m not sure I actually was; that’s just how it felt.

What I had wanted to do, in my life, was to get even. My turn would come, and I would feel righteous, as I stood there watching them suffer for what they had done to me. It was a natural human urge. No, a divine urge. It was exactly what the Hebrew God would have done: identify your enemies and nail them. An eye for an eye, and then some.

As I dwelled on this, it occurred to me that maybe those cockroaches, the enemies of my lifetime, would have their own turns someday, in cells like this one. Then they would be glad for the times when they had delivered payback to someone who had done them wrong, and they would feel cheated for the times when they could not get even. They would not be troubled by what they had done to me, but they would sure feel bad about what someone else had done to them.

So, yeah, they would still be scum, even after death. They would be feeling exactly what I was feeling. Served them right.

But then, that made me out to be exactly like them. Like I was one more cockroach of life. Because I knew that, out there somewhere, there were people who had wanted to pay me back, and now would never have the opportunity.

Or, shit, maybe they would. I wouldn’t be around to defend my reputation, or the people I loved. I thought about that for quite a while, going back and forth with the flood of emotions, visualizing good people being harmed, gradually calming down into the belief that, actually, it would be only the rare psychopath who would punish someone else for their anger against me. For the most part, you get your chance, you die, and then you are out of the picture, and people have someone or something else to worry about instead.

That was calming. There was a sense of finality about it, a sense that this part of the story was done. The scores were about as settled as they were ever going to be; and even if they weren’t, it seemed I wouldn’t be hearing about it. I couldn’t do any more harm, according to everything that I knew and believed about life after death, and it was possible that nobody was going to harm me anymore either. Max & Co. might have to keep me in protective custody for all eternity, here in this cell, to make sure of it. But from what I could see at present, that was how it was going to work out. I could live with that – or I guess not, but you know what I mean.

So I picked up the Bible and read the rest of the Joseph story. It wasn’t entirely clear what happened, sounded like a lot of back-and-forthing, maybe some game-playing on Joseph’s part. But in the end he didn’t punish his brothers for selling him into slavery. And that was fine with me. Now that I was dead, and couldn’t do anything about it, I decided I might as well get over the idea of getting even. Not that I actually would, but it was a nice way to think.

Chapter 3
Me

I was not sure exactly who I was, there in my cell.

My thoughts were definitely my own. I was still me. I didn’t have the sense that God or anybody else was playing with my mind, or that there was anything fake or imaginary about what was going through my head. It was weird to have the sense that I was spacing out, in my reflections, and letting minutes (or years, or whatever it was) go by. But it still felt like it was good ol’ me, experiencing that.

My physical body, if that was the right term for it, felt real too. I was definitely imprisoned. I couldn’t walk through the walls of my cell. I was breathing. I could see my pulse on my inner bicep. I didn’t try to draw blood, but it certainly looked like there was blood there to be drawn, if I found a pin or a knife.

This was problematic. I knew I had died, and I was willing to bet that my real physical body had remained there on Earth (assuming I wasn’t still on Earth myself, or inside Earth somehow). I doubted that God or whoever had done a swap, putting a fake body there for the mortician to gut and stuff with goo, or whatever morticians did.

I guessed it was possible that there was a parallel universe, and that this body I was using now had always been kept here, waiting to be inhabited with my mind. But if it had been sitting around in this alternate universe, it wouldn’t look exactly like mine. I checked: yes, there was the scar from last year’s bike accident on my right elbow. Definitely me.

To look like mine in every detail, this body would have had to go through exactly what I was going through during my life on Earth, except maybe for the final moment of death. Anything was possible, but I doubted this was the situation.

I decided the best explanation was that they kept something like an inflatable body on hand, or maybe more like a stem cell. At the moment of death, this body seed would take on the form and condition of the mind that had been inserted into it. God or his deputies had been tracking what my body was like, or maybe my own mind had mapped my body in such detail that no divine intervention was required: just insert the mind and let it tell the body seed what it’s supposed to look like.

I wondered how that would work with a little baby that died shortly after birth. I wasn’t sure about fetal development and all that. I guessed that even the newborn has a sense that it has arms or it can cry and make noise. Maybe the body seed for a dead newborn would look more like a vague puff of pink flesh. Or, hell, maybe nobody would see it except the newborn itself, here in solitary. In that case, it could look like anything at all, and nobody would know the difference.

Except Max. Max would see that blob of pink flesh. Max would see my body. But, jeez, what if the body I saw was not what Max saw? Maybe my mind had said, this is your body; this is what your body looked like, last time you checked; and therefore that’s what I would think I was seeing, when I looked at myself – but meanwhile, maybe what Max saw, when he looked at me, was a funhouse image, or a sailboat, or just another blob of pink flesh. Or a cockroach.

No telling where this was going to end up. If I did actually have the body that I seemed to have, here, then maybe I would be able to change it. Maybe I would be learning cool tricks to make myself look better or be stronger. Or maybe I would just be imagining it. No clue.

I thought to write about who I was, there in my cell, because of the next Bible passage I selected at random:

Jeremiah 33:3. Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not.

I had already done a bit of musing on the “me” part, referring there to God; the question at hand was, who was the “thee” (i.e., the me) to whom God was speaking? Not that I was entirely sure he had intended to be addressing me in particular. The adjacent passages seemed to suggest he was speaking to the people of Israel, and I was just this latter-day interloper who had been taught to assume that every word of the Bible was meant for me personally. Well, whatever. This was my book, and I say that Isaiah was talking directly to me, here in hell, two thousand years later. Seemed reasonable.

I couldn’t say that my body was exactly the same as before, because I hadn’t eaten a thing since arriving here in this cell, and that had been, what, weeks ago? I didn’t seem to be hungry. Hadn’t drunk anything either. I didn’t seem to need to go to the bathroom. I tried to pee a bit in the corner of my cell, as an experiment, but nothing came out.

So, OK, that was not a normal physical body. Didn’t mean my new body was fake. That might just have been how this place works. You get your sustenance from the air or something; your cells operate on some new principle. It was possible to run the same software on different kinds of hardware; maybe that was the situation here with my body and my mind.

I did miss food, especially at the beginning. Not so much as a chronological habit, telling me it was time for breakfast or lunch. I had no idea what time of day it might have been, if “day” was even a coherent concept here. What I missed was the variety of activity. You write for a while, you pace back and forth in your cell, it occurs to you that it might be nice to have some pizza and watch a movie on the tube. And then go to bed. I hadn’t slept either. Or at least I don’t think I had.

I wondered why I would still have a body that looked like it could eat and pee, if there was not actually going to be any eating, yawning, or peeing in this place. Maybe those things would be optional, if you were in the right place or state of mind, or if you really wanted to experience them. Or maybe my mind was just temporarily inhabiting this form of body: maybe God or my mind would change the body as my thoughts gradually moved away from the old familiar habits of life on Earth. Use it or lose it. Which, horrors, could have adverse implications for my penis size.

There were obviously some puzzles here. But they didn’t seem to merit much intensive speculation. Whatever the situation was, I had no doubt that the people in charge had covered their tracks. I would be able to see and learn what they wanted me to see and learn, and nothing more.

Chapter 4
The Lord’s Precepts

This time, when I spun the wheel and pointed to a passage in that Bible, I got something from the Psalms:

Psalm 119:93. I will never forget thy precepts, for by them thou hast preserved my life.

Verse 93, eh? This long Psalm seemed to be about law. And that was about right. It would probably take at least 93 verses to write a psalm about law and anything, including law and the Lord. Law is longwinded.

I knew a bit about law. I had once been an attorney. Then I had abandoned that abominable profession and never looked back. Ah, but the law did. It always looked back, forever backwards.

I was not going to be able to write down all of my law-related thoughts and experiences within a reasonably brief space. I would have to keep a pretty tight focus, here, on just what David had said in verse 93. (As I recalled, the traditional Christian view was that Israel’s King David had written all of the Psalms, though it also seemed to me that some people thought that some of them must have been written by someone else.)

Well, on this subject of law and the Lord, I could start with the number of the verse, 93. Believe it or not, God had forgotten to supply that number. The whole Bible – he put it together, sent it out for printing, and then smacked his forehead: I completely forgot to add chapter and verse numbers! His mistake had to be corrected by anonymous scribes, somewhere along the line, so that people could argue about individual statements as lawyers would. Because this was the Lord’s will.

I didn’t recall what the ancient Hebrews used for a numbering system, but I was pretty sure it was neither Roman nor Arabic. Maybe this is why God did not bother David about it: he knew that people of some other ethnicity, hundreds of years later, would have a numbering system superior to the one possessed by his Chosen People. No point bothering David about that. He had enough on his mind, on his way to becoming the Bible’s greatest king. Screwing his best general’s wife, for instance. She was reputed to be a looker, a regular Star of David.

But what were we saying – oh, yes, that David was assuring God that he would never forget his precepts. I knew the word, “precept,” but wasn’t sure of its exact definition. Rule, I suspected. And that would be about right. David would never forget the rule against adultery, for instance. It would be right there in his mind. A bit off to the side sometimes, but never entirely forgotten.

I couldn’t tell why David would say that God’s rules had preserved his life. The previous verse said, “Unless thy law had been my delights, I should then have perished in mine affliction.” Not sure when “then” was. David probably wrote these things when he was a young man, lurking by a stream with his lute, or mandolin, or whatever musical instrument he happened to play. His teacher in Hebrew school was probably encouraging him to take pleasure in the limited set of Jewish scriptures available at that time. Back then, they didn’t have movies. They weren’t waiting for the next show in the James Bond series. It was more like hanging out at the scroll store in case there were any new prophets in the pipeline.

I bet nobody at the time thought to themselves, “Young David’s poetry is inspired by God.” It’s not the most lyrical stuff. There are exceptions. Everybody has heard of Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” But that one was only, let me check, six verses. Probably the shortest of all the Psalms. Take a hint, David: what did we do to deserve the 176 verses of this monstrosity of Psalm 119? A hundred and seventy-six verses. No wonder it came up when I opened to a random page: it fills half the Bible by itself. You can imagine the daring Hebrew editor who said, “Why don’t we cull out the worst of these psalms? Publish the best; maybe offer the rest in a supplementary volume for the king’s hardcore groupies.” Next thing you know, that editor has been drafted and finds himself in an army unit fighting the Midianites, or whoever was standing in for the Palestinians at that point.

When David wrote Psalm 119, he was probably just one more busker, like those guitarists playing in subway stations and on street corners. My bet was, his poetry made it into the big leagues only because he became king. History is written by the victors; maybe the Psalms had to be too. And David definitely was a victor: if memory served, there was a saying, somewhere in the Bible: “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands.” So, wow, good for you, and for God, and for another one of those rules: “Thou shalt not kill.” Win-win, all the way around.

What we seemed to have, here, was a forerunner of the present-day sanctimony in which your televangelist gets up in front of the camera and rants about ungodliness, and then goes off and buggers boys or robs his congregation’s elderly members or whatever the scandal du jour may be. It’s like a version of Thoreau’s advice. Thoreau said, “If you see someone coming to help you, run for your life.” Here, the rule is, if you hear someone preaching, “Thou shalt not steal,” make sure you still have your wallet.

Which, as I thought about it, raised the question of whether David was in fact even the author of these psalms. What I recalled was that he sent Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah the general, into a battle where he would be killed. This is the mind of someone who, after shipping that editor off to the Midianite front, would look at the poems written by that banished editor, decide that they should not just go to waste, and claim them as his own. When the king says, “Have I ever shown you the fine poems I composed as a young singer in the subway?” you don’t reply, “David, do you think I don’t remember how we spent our days smoking Turkish hash?” You say, “Your highness, it is lovely poetry indeed.”

I mean, yes, no doubt David was a skilled general. But this is not Julius Caesar we’re talking about. This agent of God’s will did not quite manage to united the known world under his brilliant leadership. Not quite. His sprawling kingdom would have fit inside the borders of, what, New Jersey? Lord, thy works are a marvel to all who witness them, thy laws a testimony to thy wisdom, their observance the pride of thy chosen people.

Chapter 5
L’Chaim/Gesundheit

The weird sense of time continued. By this point, it felt like I had been writing for months. And yet I only had four chapters finished. Also, as far as I could recall, I had not slept.

I opened the Bible and put my finger on a verse. Here is what it said:

James 5:14. Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.

Now, I could not really fault those early Christians for making the best of a bad situation. You’re a persecuted minority. You’ll be thrown to the lions if the authorities even find you with a copy of – well, of whatever New Testament books had been written and distributed, at the time when James wrote. Or I guess the lions came later.

Point is, they were dealing with limited healthcare resources. Even if you could afford a doctor, the doctor would just pour lye on you, or make you drink urine or something. Hell, yes, have the elders pray over you – what do you have to lose? It’s safer than some of the alternatives. I wasn’t sure what the purpose of the oil would be, other than to make you slippery.

The instructions weren’t specific as to what the elders were supposed to pray for, or how long they were to go at it. Would it be OK to say, “Lord, I personally do not like this person, but please heal him anyway, just for the sake of appearances”? Or did they really need to put heart and soul into it, throwing themselves down on the floor and rending their garments and gnashing their teeth? Although I knew that the gnashing of teeth was a biblical concept, I had never been clear on whether it would involve grinding them together, or chomping down and then releasing, and what noises would accompany this act. But clearly it meant something serious.

The passage also had a distinct sex bias. Let the “elders” pray over “him.” What if the sick person is a girl – would she not get the prayer therapy? Since the elders would be greybeards, maybe a sick girl’s illness would require a convocation of the congregation’s battleaxes? Maybe they would not be allowed or expected to pray; maybe instead they’d just sit around and trade stories. Maybe women mystified James. God only knew what made them tick. He may have decided that this was a can of worms best left closed. He only had so much papyrus, and no doubt other things to say within the space allotted.

But I didn’t mean to be writing a Bible commentary, here. My mission was not to find fault with the Bible per se. My mission was to use it to provoke and structure a presentation of the things I wanted to tell people during my life. What mattered to me were not the historical realities surrounding people like James and King David. Those people mattered to me only because of their direct and indirect impacts on the world in which I had lived – direct, because there were people who had made that world a worse place through their faith in writers like James and David, and indirect, because they exemplified beliefs and tendencies that did so much harm.

The direct harm caused by this passage from James was that it became one more way in which Bible-believers fought against anything new and intelligent. Long after medicine had developed into a relatively scientific profession in which people were expected to test hypotheses and experiment with alternate solutions, our world was still cursed with these flat-earthers who considered it sinful to do anything other than pray and then watch their kids die. The idea was that God was smarter than the doctors. If the child dies, it was his will – implying that modern medicine was not his will.

I mean, no doubt God could play a pretty good hand of poker, but deliberately stacking the deck to put him on the losing side seemed a tad disrespectful. My God is so great and wonderful that I can portray him as a complete moron and he will still love me – and, praise God, he will send you to hell, where you belong for picking on saints like me.

The people who bought only part of this fiction would not be very happy either. They would believe the propaganda – the claim that God wrote the Bible, and thus was behind James’s instructions – and then they would be bitter about the implications. I prayed, but God let my baby die anyway; therefore, I hate God. It would never occur to many of these people that possibly none of this had anything to do with God – that he didn’t inspire James to write those words or that, if he did, he only meant to be conveying a message to the actual recipients of James’s letter.

Like, instead of the mysterious God who would fool around with having James write an ordinary letter to convey secret divine instructions to billions of people, why not a straight-up God who would be a kindhearted and practical communicator? That, over there, is just a letter from James; this here is my official announcement to the people of the world. I want to be clear about it, so there is no confusion.

That’s not God’s style, if you believe the believers: everything has to be tricky, because this is how you fool people and find your true friends. And what friends this tricky God had found. Along with the philandering preachers and the baby-killing morons, he had millions of believers who were ready to do anything to praise his name. Anything. Even making him out to be heartless and stupid, and incapable of composing a simple message without sowing dissension and ultimately murderous hatreds spanning centuries. We praise the God who requires our assistance to bail out his inept scriptures; we love the God who has left us to contrive excuses for the Bible’s patent absurdities. In a world providing no immediately obvious object of worship, the nature of the object invented tells you a lot about its worshiper.

Not that all of my world’s fundamentalists did still believe in faith-healing. People seemed to come around to reality at different rates. Some would stay holed up in their hermitage, back that long lane with the mean dog, long after others gave up and moved to town. Many believers had grown to appreciate the merits of a staged retreat, that is – caving in on modern medicine when that became convenient, just as their great-grandparents had accepted that dancing might not be sinful after all (if only because that’s how they had met their future spouses), but still holding the fort on the evils of television.

It turns out that God did not intend to be taken literally about faith-healing, except when it seems to work – but he definitely did mean to be taken literally (and don’t ask me how I know this) in all cases regarding the Ten Commandments, except for the ones involving people like King David. Or if that’s not worded quite right, let me know and I’ll check again with my theologians and scriptural lawyers.

This got to some of the direct harms wrought in my world by certain uses of that passage from James. I would have to get to the indirect harms later.

Chapter 6
The Sons of Lotan

This time, I drew one of those Bible passages that you look at and ask yourself, who in the world would care about this?

1 Chronicles 1:39. And the sons of Lotan; Hori, and Homam: and Timna was Lotan’s sister.

I went back to the start of 1 Chronicles chapter 1. It started with Adam, and kept listing names up to . . . I dunno. I started flipping pages, but at chapter 4, I realized I didn’t care, and anyway it would have nothing to do with my purpose here. The sons of Lotan were apparently some people who were born, lived, and died at some point in the history of the Hebrew nation.

This reminded me of the first chapter of the New Testament, in the book of Matthew. It traced the lineage of Jesus, starting from somewhere. From David, I suspected, because the word “lineage” recalled a Bible passage that I think I’d had to memorize for a Christmas play, when I was a little kid: “of the house and lineage of David.” Apparently it was important that Jesus was demonstrably a descendant of David. This was long, long before God invented DNA testing.

But to whom was it important? In the case of the New Testament, not sure. I had been told – did I mention that I had been a student of religion myself, for a while, back in my youth? – that of the four Gospels in the New Testament (i.e., Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), the book of Matthew was the Jewish gospel. It told the story of Jesus in terms that were supposed to be interesting to Jews. The idea was that the Jews would care about Jesus’s lineage, just as they apparently cared about whatever Chronicles was telling us. Or at least they used to care about this. I had never heard anyone, Jewish or Gentile, make much of these lists of names.

The idea seemed to be that God wrote this stuff for the ages. Some of it was for people like me, and some was for people who had died more than 2,000 years ago. Actually, a lot more of it seemed to be for them, and about them, than for and about me.

But that raised a question. I was already convinced that the God invented by the Hebrews and tweaked by the Christians was a hoax. They had no idea what they were talking about. And like many, I had been distracted by their hoax. Instead of focusing on the real God, or gods, or whatever there was, I had been busy with my theology study, and then with my reaction against it, and then with my reaction against those who did not react against it. All very nice, but not leading anywhere. Those people weren’t going to listen, think, or tell the truth. I was wasting my breath.

So, fine. I could make an effort to focus these pages – this book that, I guess, I was going to be writing – more on the real God, or at least on the issues that had been truly important in my life, and less on religious liars and frauds. No doubt about it: I did have other fish to fry.

Let us exercise that muscle, then. What could I learn about the real God, if there was one, from this passage in Chronicles?

It seemed I could learn that he . . . no, wait a minute. God was not my fricking grandfather. This was not some big old guy with a beard and a hellacious dick. I was not made in his image. This was an alien creature. If you believe the Christians, God knew everything and could do anything. Decidedly not human. And unless there was an undisclosed she-god, God was not male. Being a male without a female would not make sense. It would be like being the left-hand wire in the light socket. Incomplete circuit; nonworking device.

God, I felt, was probably an It – capitalized, here, for clarity of reference. God, the Thing. It needed only Itself to complete the circuit. God might dress Itself up as a man, perhaps to make Itself more understandable or familiar. But even that was unlikely: such a masquerade would generate mistaken ideas; it would be a deception to some and a discouragement to others. The man would not necessarily be very familiar to a woman, and even less familiar to a dog, the kind of dog that should go to Heaven and would probably be welcome there, as welcome as I was, if I was really not created in Its image – if this Thing found value in the endless varieties of things It had placed on the Earth.

So. From Chronicles, it seemed that I might learn something about God. God was not dumb enough to record Its thoughts in a book. Books become outdated as soon as you finish writing – except for this one. Seriously, any dumbass would anticipate that a list of dead Hebrews would have zero meaning to billions of people, a couple thousand years down the line.

I did used to think that at least God would have been smart enough to use video or holograms, if It had wanted to send a message that would avoid the difficulties of written texts, with their contradictions and their promotion of misunderstandings among readers. But that wouldn’t solve the Chronicles problem. This stuff about the sons of Lotan, or any other historical report, would have been as archaic in video as it was in print.

What I was seeing in Chronicles was what I had just seen in James. No honest person, uncorrupted by preexisting religious agenda, could construe the Bible as anything more than a human invention, not only in what people made of it but in its very concept. It was a device for the storage and perhaps the generation of human knowledge, the latter being the use I was trying to make of it. But where that fact might lead, I could not tell.

Chapter 7
Ye

Next time around, my finger came down upon the reported words of Jesus himself for the first time in this enterprise, in his Sermon on the Mount:

Matthew 5:14. Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.

And for all the times I had read or heard those words, I had never before encountered the thought that hit me this time. I got as far as the word “ye,” and I wondered: who is Jesus talking to?

It sounded like his disciples were the audience. But really, it was unlikely that crowd control in the first century would have prevented others from tagging along. He was probably talking to most but not necessarily all of his disciples, a few of their girlfriends or brothers or sisters, some groupies enjoying the Jesus groove but only able to do it part-time, a village idiot, a sharpie tagging along to see if s/he could get anything out of this crowd, etc.

My question: was Jesus talking only to these particular individuals, or to some among them (e.g., the designated disciples), or did “ye” include some larger section of the general public – like maybe the other groupies who couldn’t make it, or some random Joe in Tennessee in 1957 who would desparately wish not to be left out? Who was the “ye” who was/were the light of the world?

The analogy of the city on a hill suggests that he was not thinking in terms of multiple individuals, but rather of the group. You are the light, singular. You are a city on a hill. One city, not cities.

Maybe he meant, You, my disciples, will become the light of the world. But it didn’t sound like that. He didn’t seem to be laying out a projection of what as going to happen as the disciples become more sophisticated followers. He was talking in the present tense. Looking ahead to verse 16: “Let your light so shine before men.”

It certainly might have been a different kind of Christianity that I would have experienced, during my lifetime, if the message from our preachers had been that we were all in this together: that we were the body of Christ, that it was not a question of our individual experiences of courage or cowardice, on behalf of the gospel or otherwise; it was not even a question of our own personal salvation.

I mean, can you imagine what our world would be like, all these centuries later, if Jesus had been something other than a Jew? No offense to Karl Marx, but for the most part the Jews seemed to have always had an individualistic philosophy. They had not struck me as a particularly group-oriented people, except when defending their tribe against outsiders.

But Japan, or someplace like that: what if Jesus had landed in a collectivist society? Christians would have spent 2,000 years leading spiritual banzai charges, sacrificing their own interests left and right for the sake of their spiritual nation. It would have been obvious that Matthew was saying, You are all part of the city on the hill. You, all together, are the light of the world. The individual believer is nothing on his/her own; s/he can only aspire to become part of that larger conflagration.

What I had seen, in my life, was “divided we fall.” And no doubt about it, we had fallen. Everybody was in it for themselves; everybody could be bought off. The idea of being integrated into and subordinate to something larger than oneself was almost completely dead. With occasional exceptions – your platoon, perhaps, or your gang or team – the closest we got to that was in the parents who sacrificed themselves for their children. Even there, for every parent who truly put his/her children’s interests first, there was another who made a good show of it but who nonetheless remained first in his/her own priorities.

Or maybe I was understating. I knew there were teachers who would really struggle to help their kids, and doctors who really cared about their patients, and so forth. Lots of dedicated people in this world. Or, should I say, that world, the one I came from. I guess the point was more that the system tended to be set against these people. Doctors got burned out from the malpractice litigation. Teachers got hassled by the principals and the parents. It was dog eat dog. That was the real problem.

I didn’t know that it had always been like that, or that it had to be that way. I had occasionally seen Asian girls walking together, holding hands, and I had seen that kind of exceptional closeness in some European literature from previous centuries. Before the industrial era, I think. Even within my own life, there had been a sweetness in the rural community where I grew up – not perfect, not shared by everyone, but definitely there nonetheless – that had since vanished.

Somehow, we had wound up with an almost completely selfish life, and world, in which even the question of salvation was to be decided, in the end, by how well you could look after your own soul. Sure, you could preach to others; you could tell yourself that you really cared about what happened to them; but it was all too likely that what you really cared about was trying to avoid feeling guilty for abandoning them. It would be a rare Christian who would say to God, I’m not going with you unless you take my friends too – a Christian who would not only say it, but live it, refusing to have anything more to do with that God, living love for one’s friends instead of just talking about it.

I didn’t know what Jesus had in mind. But it did seem that what needed to happen in the world – what I had wanted to say to people, without necessarily having thought it through to this extent – was that we needed to get away from the extremely selfish, individualistic worldview that made selfishness and corruption the only sensible way to live. I wasn’t sure if this was the whole story, but it seemed that we had gone down a blind alley – one that might very well have been created or abetted by the Hebrew scriptures – in which it was all about those who succeeded (at the expense of others, if necessary) or failed (and drew the concomitant punishment).

It seemed that, for the past 2,000 years and more, we should have been less preoccupied with detecting and punishing individual human imperfections, and more concerned with collective improvements and positive outcomes. We somehow needed to rediscover, or to invent, a creed that would value the character traits that made our societies worth living in: goodness, courage, honesty, and all the rest. We needed a life redeemed by the marvelous quality of the people with whom we would live it.

I really wanted to tell people that. I hadn’t seen it quite that clearly while I was alive. Now I did. And I guess that was what being dead was all about: looking back and seeing it all more clearly, but too late.

Chapter 8
Sheep?

God wanted me to have no delusions that It was leading my Bible verse selection process. Or at least I assume that is why God blessed me with a random flip to this passage:

Numbers 31:36. And the half, the portion for those who had gone out to war, was in number three hundred and thirty-seven thousand five hundred sheep.

I looked at that and I knew, in my heart, that that was a lot of sheep. And now I understood why they called that book of the Bible “Numbers.”

Given such a useless passage, I decided to take this opportunity to reflect further on my sense that time was passing and yet I was not sleeping. Maybe the reference to sheep reminded me of counting sheep. Or maybe sheep made me think of . . . uh, never mind.

I knew that what I had written, so far, would have taken only a few hours, or at most a couple of days, to compose; and yet by this point it seemed that I had been in my cell for weeks if not months.

I still wasn’t sure how I knew, or why I felt, that time was passing. There was no mold growing on the walls, no stubble on my chin. I didn’t have a mirror, but it felt like my hair had not grown at all. Still, there was a definite impression that I’d been at this for a while.

Maybe some of that was fatigue. Not boredom. I was interested in what I was writing. But it felt like work too. I had a lot to say; I wanted to write words that would make sense; and yet I also had to struggle with the awareness that this was not going to amount to anything, that it could not possibly make a difference in the life I had left behind.

It didn’t leave me with a sense of futility. It wasn’t like I would write a sentence and then ask myself, “Now, what was the point of going to that trouble?” My writing was like a kind of therapy, as Max had no doubt anticipated. It’s just that I did seem to be carrying a weight, in this knowledge that my words were going to be just for me.

As I thought about it, I realized there was more to it than fatigue. It was like that feeling you get in a dream, where you are in a place that you have never been in your real life – and yet it feels very familiar, like you’ve been there before, or like you’ve been there for a long time. Maybe you get that feeling because you’ve been there in previous dreams. Like maybe I had been here in previous thoughts. There was this sense of time depth – a sense that, when I resumed my writing in my cell, it was something I had been doing for quite a while.

I’d heard of dark matter, which I think was stuff that physicists could not detect directly, but they knew it was out there somewhere because, I dunno, there was too much gravity or something. There was a force, anyway, that they could measure, and the known contents of the universe did not amount to enough to explain that force. That’s what it was like: I was experiencing dark time. I was getting the effects of being here for weeks or even months, the fatigue and the sense of time passing, without any direct awareness or experience of that time.

Well. There were a couple of possible explanations. Maybe my afterlife brain was foggy: maybe it was taking me a long, long time to put my thoughts together, and maybe this version of my brain was also not very good at self-inspection. So I could be slow, and not know that I was slow. I knew that brains could be damaged in weird ways, so that was possible. But there really didn’t seem to be anything wrong with my brain otherwise. So this, I felt, was not the best explanation.

Another possibility was that, when I would pause to reflect, I would get lost in my thoughts, and my head would go down some rabbit hole of contemplation or unconsciousness, and minutes or months would be ripping on by. But if that’s where the time slippage was happening, you’d think I’d be able to pinpoint it: no sense of time slippage in the first two paragraphs of this chapter but then – whoosh! – suddenly, in the third paragraph, it feels like a month has gone by.

I tried to pay very close attention to myself, to see if there was even a trace of a lurch in time. As far as I could tell, there just wasn’t. My consciousness of time seemed to be smooth. The delays felt organic. Like, this was just how time worked here. Somehow, it seemed that – without brain damage, without anything different in what I was doing or how I was doing it – it would take a week, or something, to produce a chapter that I could have written in an hour or two on Earth.

Chapter 9
The Big Fix

This time, I hit pay dirt. Forget Numbers of sheep – this time it was a prophet, with a stirring vision of the future:

Isaiah 25:8. He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from off all faces; and the rebuke of his people shall he take away from off all the earth: for the LORD hath spoken it.

I guess I died too soon. This writing project was interesting, but I believed I might have preferred to let my death be swallowed up in victory instead. Victory over whom, I was not sure, but that’s OK: win first, ask questions later.

This, I felt, was one of the passages that the Christians would later seize upon, in the story of Jesus rising from the dead. He would have “victory o’er the grave,” as they sang in, what song was it . . . right, the Christmas carol: “Rejoice, rejoice / Ema-a-an-u-el / Shall ransom captive I-i-is-ra-el.” Jesus would rise from the dead, Isaiah tells us, and then the Lord God will wipe the tears off all faces, after a brief 2,500-year commercial interruption that Isaiah had forgotten to mention. Or however long it might take, because we had been waiting all this time and it still hadn’t happened.

The rest of the passage didn’t interest me much. God is going to take away the rebuke of his people of the tribe of Israel. I suspected Isaiah was thinking in the short term – they were in captivity in Babylon, or otherwise having a hard time, and that would end, but no doubt there was a different Christian interpretation. Or a dozen different Christian interpretations. Whatever.

What did interest me was the promise of a coming Golden Age, when there would be no more tears. God was going to bring this about. That’s why Bible believers did not bother to try to create a better world: that was God’s responsibility.

There never seemed to be any specifics as to how God would shape this Golden Age of no more tears. Was he going to make the other driver less of a pig, so that I wouldn’t get nearly run off the road on my way to work? Was he going to remake the world out of rubber, so that when kids tumble in the playground and planes fall from the sky, they just bounce?

My own prescription was a little different. I felt that people needed to take responsibility for setting things straight in real time, right now. This would be difficult even in the best of conditions. It was impossible in a mega-world of huge corporations, huge government, huge forces all around. Whatever you might do in that world, it would make no difference. Pick up the trash in front of your house, and it’ll be back tomorrow. You can’t fight the tide.

To believe that you can change the world, you have to live in a human-sized world, where your efforts make a visible difference. Looking to a Lord God for the fix was exactly the wrong thing to do. You’d need a federal government that would devolve to the states, and then devolve again to the cities, and yet again to the communities, with the cop on the corner being someone who lives on that same street. You’d need to splinter the corporations and then splinter them again and again, until sales and service are what you do for your neighbors and friends.

Beyond 150 people, I think the research said, your network is too big to have personal meaning, and you disengage. I wondered if people who lived happy lives, in communities that felt like real homes, would see any sense in having a Lord God bigger than the whole planet, promising pie in the sky. I wondered if a super-God was the placid person’s version of the criminal’s armory – a response big enough to counterbalance anything that the controlling authorities could muster.

Little Israel, surrounded by big adversaries, had probably always needed to believe that it held the trump card. It believed that it had survived all these millenia, not because it was propped up by the contributory superstitions of billions of Christians and Muslims, but simply due to its God, or its faith in Him.

Chapter 10
The Bigger Fix

The next passage my finger landed on was of the same nature as the last one, but on an even grander level:

John 1:12. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name.

Is your old deodorant leaving you in a stunk? Switch to the New God, and he will make you even bigger than a mountain. You will be a Son of God!

Nice promise, if you can deliver. I was thinking of the sons of God who lived in states like Mississippi – high religiosity, low income, low educational level, high crime . . . I couldn’t remember all the indicators, but it seemed that being a son of God was not all it was cracked up to be. I mean, pardon my irreverence, but some would say it sucked.

This marketing problem – this hype, this overselling – pervaded the life I had lived, positive and negative. People said, and were allowed to say, the most ridiculous things – and were especially likely to be believed by those most desperate for hope, and most in need of the truth.

The problem, I felt, was the so-called free press. Nothing free about it. You’ve got to pay the bills somehow. Paper and ink and printing press repairs aren’t free. So you run ads. And over the years, the people who design the ads become very good at it. They find ways to learn all about you, and they use that knowledge to push your buttons. If the websites of CNN or Fox News were boyfriends or girlfriends, we’d call them manipulative psychos, and run away screaming. But there on our daily computer, no problem, tell me more.

Of course, the free press also gives you people like me, toiling away here to express my opinions, feeling compelled to vent even when there was no audience at all. Maybe Max had endorsed this because the writing process would enable people to kiss goodbye the last of the unfulfilled fantasies lingering from their years on Earth. Maybe it oriented them to the weird sense of time and other realities of this afterlife. Hard to say.

My own little writing project was not, in fact, a demonstration of the free press. Writing does not mean publishing. To publish this book-in-the-making, I needed, first of all, a life on Earth, and secondly a publisher, or something providing approximately the same services, including a marketing and publicity department. Again, you got to pay the bills, and hype is what does that.

What John was illustrating, in this passage, was that there was no such thing as a belief too preposterous to be entertained by millions upon millions of people. Being a son of God might be a silly claim in the abstract. But just build it into a web of stories and beliefs about Jesus and David and, what do you know, it does not seem silly at all. Not too much to ask; just the way God does things.

Maybe the most remarkable part of the whole scheme was that people would cling to it despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It wasn’t just the sons of God in Mississippi. It was virtually anything that Christians would say – or, I supposed, Muslims or followers of any religion, modern or primitive. You could show people that they were horrible, that everything about their religion was a lie, that their preachers’ predictions had failed every time, and they would have an answer for you. They would come out with a passage about how the Lord tests our faith, or something.

There was a Harvard philosopher named Willard Van Orman Quine. Or Ormand. Something like that. His opinion, as I recalled, was that people can maintain a web of beliefs by making adjustments. No matter how you cut and slice, they will piece it back together. I believe some other philosopher pointed out that this was not quite right, but I didn’t recall the details of that argument. For present purposes, it seemed like Quine had the basic picture.

So what we got, with the free press, was not just a newspaper. We got a package, including some news and some advertising. The news part hyped and distorted the day’s actual developments; the ad part hyped and distorted the product’s actual capabilities; and together they trained us, over the years, to accept action movie heroes who would survive a hail of bullets and being hit over the head with a baseball bat, with nary a scratch or concussion. If we could be sons of God, surely a 110-pound woman could fly through the air and deliver devastating kicks and chops to the physique of a massive male adversary, armed with a flamethrower and a submachine gun, whose only true sin was to be the bad guy.

Chapter 11
A Crank

As I continued in this writing project, a certain fear grew in me. I had ignored it to this point, but now my random Bible flipping took me back to the Psalms:

Psalms 30:2. O LORD my God, I cried unto thee, and thou hast healed me.

I think what set me off was thinking about Max and therapy. Let us review my situation. I was in solitary confinement in the afterlife. Yet I felt a need to vent my opinions about things in my life on Earth, which had now come to an end. For this purpose, I was writing pages to express my views, with absolutely no plan or concept of how anyone would ever see them.

Or maybe that wasn’t quite true. I had vaguely thought that maybe Max or someone else would read what I had written. Max surely wasn’t the only other person here, wherever we were.

But now there was the question of what they would think, whoever might read these pages. No writer, familiar with the many undesirable reactions that readers can have, would naively expect someone to read what I had written and say to me, in all sincerity, that I had expressed matters with a clarity and persuasiveness never before encountered. Especially not Max, who probably had a much better idea of what was going on than I did.

There was, in other words, the fear that I was in need of healing, as the Psalm put it, and Max – well, if not exactly acting on the impetus of the Lord God of Israel, was at least proceeding in similar spirit.

To put it plainly, my situation seemed somewhat reminiscent of an aging crank, living by himself in a dirty little apartment in a dingy neighborhood, full of angry views about everything, and ready to share them with anyone who would listen.

This, I knew, was not me. I knew in my heart that I was sweetness and light.

Oh, all right. I knew that I was capable of being sweetness and light, on a good day, when I felt like it. I actually was pretty pleasant to people, as long as they didn’t cross me. I seemed to be accumulating pages, here, in an inadvertent documentation of the ways in which people had been able to do that.

Was that the nature of Max’s therapy? Was he giving me enough rope to hang myself, letting me bluster on and on about all the ills, real and imagined, against which I would have liked to protect the world, or the U.S., or myself?

I reviewed what I had written. I cannot say how long this took. When I was finished with my rereading of the preceding pages, I came back to the same mental place: I felt that I had made worthy points in an intelligible manner. This was not the idle ranting of a mentally ill individual. I was doing something that seemed at least somewhat constructive, in a place where entertainment was scarce.

I won’t say that these conclusions entirely reassured me. But it did seem that this was about the best I could do under the circumstances.

Chapter 12
Sex

My next spin of the roulette wheel brought me something interesting:

Song of Solomon 3:7. Behold his bed, which is Solomon’s; threescore valiant men are about it, of the valiant of Israel.

I guess it took a valiant man to stand guard around Solomon’s bed. Read the rest of Song of Solomon, and you start to see why.

Or maybe not. I didn’t actually remember much of Song of Solomon, other than that it was the one with the passages about sex and breasts and so forth. It didn’t fit into what the Christians of my lifeworld believed Christ was all about, so it was ignored. Couldn’t be completely deleted, thanks to those pesky Hebrews and their preexisting canon of scripture, but it certainly could be shunned, and it was.

I couldn’t quite make out who was being talked about in this particular passage. God, in his all-knowingness, had somehow overlooked the possibility that the modernizing English-speaking world would be saddled for centuries with a King James translation that would alternately entertain, thrill, and baffle his followers.

The book was called Song of Solomon. I thought that meant that Solomon was writing it. I flipped back to the beginning. Chapter 1, verse 2: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.” So either Solomon was gay, or this was some woman’s words. Seems like something I should have researched, during my years of Bible reading, but somehow I never did, or else I forgot the explanation.

I guessed that Solomon had 60 men around his bed for reasons of security. This would be enough of a royal guard to protect him against anything short of a full-on military assault. But why not around the palace, or wherever he lived? My guess: he was as afraid of inside schemers, a quiet knife while he slept, as of external foes. I wasn’t sure where he would enjoy his sexual carryings-on. Surely not on the bed, in the presence of the Mighty Sixty. Maybe in the walk-in closet.

Then again, maybe he did do it right there on the bed, in full view. Maybe it was a group effort. Maybe he conducted seminars. In my time, I had encountered reason to believe that sexual repression was much more typical in Great Bend than in Manhattan. It was the Christians, not the Jews, who had made sex dirty and hidden . . . well, that’s not true, the Jews came up with the Garden of Eden and the fig leaf, but still there was definitely a difference. The Hebrews had evidently not seen Song of Solomon as a bad book, else it would not have been in their book.

It seemed to me that western culture was now experiencing an extended reaction against those centuries of Christian repression. There was not, after all, anything intrinsically exotic about sex. Our primate cousins, the bonobos, made a life out of it, screwing for all sorts of reasons, any old time. Not sure why the chimpanzees preferred war over love. We seemed to have inherited some of each. But the bonobos could do it endlessly without making a big deal out of it. My sense was that we would too, eventually, as the worst extremes of Christian belief slid into the past and people became more free to enjoy and use sex as a powerful tool for social harmony.

It wasn’t that I was personally waiting for that day in the presumably distant future. For one thing, I wouldn’t be there; I was dead. Besides, I was somewhat repressed myself. I would have felt a bit awkward, screwing people at the office; moreover, I had not a gay bone in my body. So I was already at a considerable disadvantage vis-à-vis the bonobos, if (as I vaguely recalled) they would happily do anyone, anytime.

The point was, anyway, that maybe we still had a juvenile thrill about sex because our culture was in a juvenile phase of getting over its hyperparenting Christian phase. Another couple hundred years down the line, sex would probably be established as just part of a normal life. Maybe David assumed as much. Maybe he had made a point of putting bonobos in the Jerusalem zoo.

Chapter 13
Love

I had wondered when we would be getting to this. Love is such a big deal in the New Testament. But now the moment had arrived:

Romans 12:10. Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love; in honour preferring one another.

Years earlier, I had sat through plenty of sermons about eros, philos (or was it philia?), and agape, the ancient Greek words for the three kinds of love mentioned in the original New Testament texts. I didn’t remember from my long-ago study of Greek, but this passage seemed to be talking about philia. Christians had treated that as second-best when compared to agape, divine love. But in our world, any port in a storm. Any lovin’ is good lovin’.

At the moment, I was not inclined to harp again on the hypocrisy of Christians who talked a mean talk about love, but were then to be seen out there engaging in the most vile acts. I’d read Gregory of Tours; I knew they’d always been like that, as far back as the Dark Ages. Love was supposed to be powerful; it was what Christianity was supposed to be all about; and yet it was just not there.

But, as I say, at this point I was not inclined to go on about that. Stick the knife in, give it a twist, but then move on and whistle a little tune; that’s me. What I wanted to talk about, rather, was a bit of my experience of Christian love.

Part of what had got me into the theology thing, back in my youth, was the experience of being in a prayer group in my high school. We all loved each other. I mean, sure, it was mixed up with horniness and attraction and the lovely fragrances that those Christian girls wore. But nobody to my knowledge was actually getting it on, and meanwhile there definitely was a lot of innocent sweetness and mutual support. It was a really nice experience.

My feeling was that, by the time we got to the 21st century, the Christians were as corrupt as everything else, except that no doubt there were still idealistic teenagers. Christians as a whole were so preoccupied with their lies about a perfect scripture, and their political hostilities about abortion and so forth, that they just didn’t have time for love. Behavior of that sort would evidently have to be modeled by someone else, someone committed to being Christlike, someone who cared more about the practice of love than about the legalistic preconditions and complications heaped up in fundamentalist rumor and lore.

This, I guessed, was no job for anyone flying solo. Life was too full of harsh realities. To build up love, you would need a community. Not a nation or an international church or online group of some kind. A real community, right where you live. People still needed real hugs; they needed someone who would drop what they were doing to come lend a hand or a hundred bucks in a pinch. And it had to be shared. If it comes down to just one or a few people bearing super burdens to create a sense of community, you’re in trouble: those few overachievers will quickly get used up and burned out. There’s a reason why nobody else is pitching in, and that’s what you need to figure out before your community will get off the ground.

I had often wished I could have experienced the fellowship of first-century Christianity. My sense of it was that they all wore plain white robes, all treated each other as equals, all ate and socialized with one another. I guess that, like any utopian movement, it was bound to fall apart eventually, due to internal quarrels and/or external attacks. The worse problem is that it was apparently too weak to bounce back and become the dominant model for Christian communities worldwide, except to some extent in monasteries and convents.

I wasn’t sure what to say about that. Maybe my own experience was instructive: maybe real fellowship could only be experienced by young people, before everyone pairs off into their own private sexual worlds. I didn’t really believe that – I knew, and had experienced at times, that there could be bonhomie among adults. Maybe the real solution was to begin with that youthful bonding, and never let it end: structure society and the community to protect and build upon it, so that young people of the future would always have a place where they truly belonged.

Chapter 14
Eternity

The next time, the Bible fell open to a place where I had already opened it. I was going to have to make sure to shuffle the deck more thoroughly from now on. But at least my blindfolded finger landed on a different verse:

Psalm 119:160. Thy word is true from the beginning: and every one of thy righteous judgments endureth for ever.

Psalm 119, my favorite. All about the law, and about God’s righteous judgments. I’d already had my say on that, however; now I was interested in the “for ever” part. As everyone knows, the Christian God puts you in heaven or hell when you die, and that’s where you stay until the end of time – although special arrangements could apparently be made for Catholics and their purgatory.

Until I got here, I had not thought too much about the concept of eternity. I knew heaven sounded super-boring, standing around on clouds and singing God’s praises endlessly. There was a serious lack of vision, not to mention prudent marketing, in that whole scenario. If I was really in a Christian afterlife, here in my cell, I don’t know that anyone would be too excited about what I was experiencing. Behave yourself and avoid sin and go to church and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ for your whole life long – for this? I guess this could have been Hell, but with nearly the same conclusion: was this really that horrible?

It was not clear to me why David thought that God’s laws needed to endure forever. That would imply that human habitation would continue forever, and this was not what the astronomers said. They said that stars burn out, and that someday this would happen to our Sun too.

I wondered: would God have the same laws for aliens (and would those laws also endure forever) – laws about not copulating with your sister, or whatever they were going on about, in Bible books like Leviticus and Deuteronomy? Maybe aliens had no sisters. Maybe they had no Leviticus. This suggested a possibility: I might not qualify for salvation on Earth, but I might have a shot on the third planet rotating around Arcturis Minor, or whatever.

David’s concept of forever was surely just “a long time.” God, speaking through David, was surely not trying to make a precise statement of what lay ahead. Deuteronomy contained no information on how the ancient Hebrews’ descendants should proceed when building colonies on Mars, where there would probably be no sheep and goats to sacrifice, nor any temple to sacrifice them in.

For that matter, what did “forever” mean? I’d heard that mathematicians and physicists considered time a dimension, the fourth dimension, right along with the familiar three spatial dimensions. To measure space, we had length, width, and height. But we had only one functional time dimension, and really, only one direction within that dimension: forward. Wasn’t that like having only one spatial dimension? Like length: if that’s all you had, you’d be pretty limited. How tall are you? Sorry, I have to lie down to find out.

I could have used a better understanding of time-related dimensions as I sat in my cell. It had felt like it was taking weeks and months to write pages that would have taken hours on Earth. I had wondered if there was something wrong with me – if I was spacing out or going unconscious for long periods of time, cumulating into a sense of time passage that I could not quite pin down. That was still a possibility. But now it seemed that maybe there was nothing wrong with me, other than being dead. I might just be operating in a different kind of time.

The idea seemed to be that you can’t directly measure space with a ruler: you need to take measurements going in three different directions at the same time. That technique would work OK with spatial dimensions, with the aid of a little multiplication. But it would be useless with time: unfortunately, there is no such thing as measuring multiple time dimensions at the same time.

I wondered if maybe this, what I was experiencing now, was the real time – if maybe what we thought of as “time,” during my life on Earth, was somehow a distortion or a poor reflection of the realities. Like if you had to represent a video just using photos: you could do it, with something like Picasso’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” (if I remembered the title right) – a series of cubist snapshot-like images representing, I believed, a rebellion against the limits of the canvas.

You could represent real time with your clock, but you’d get a poor result. Some moments would drag by, like when someone would de-pants you in public, and for a very long fraction of a second, you’d stand there and see all the heads start to turn toward you, all the mouths start to open in laughter, before you could register the need for action and could get your hands down there to pull them back up. And at other times, you could lose days, months – in some cases, most of a lifetime – just by being busy and not really having the inclination and the opportunity to pause and reflect on it; and even if you did have such inclination and opportunity, there would still be the fact that you’re just along for the ride, with nothing much that you can do to slow it down or change what it means.

Sleep, I thought, would be an excellent example of what might be the distortion of time during our lives on Earth. Sleep was weird. You could lay your head down for a few minutes or hours and feel refreshed, or you could spend the whole night in a half-dazed state, waking up nearly as tired as you were when you started. Or how about the occasional dream that seems like real life, or those people who supposedly had dreams that predicted the future? Not to mention déjà vu and being unconscious.

Measurements with a ruler, I decided, were ways of interacting with space. To get a grip on time dimensions, I would need ways of interacting with time. In my cell here in the afterlife, I didn’t seem to have any new tools or abilities for that purpose. I did have this sense that time was flying by, but there did not seem to be anything I could do with that.

But I tried. I thought it might help if I could come up with different ways of understanding time. Maybe that would give me a clue on what these other dimensions might be like.

After thinking about it for a while, I decided there was a difference between mechanical time, as shown on clocks, and experienced time, like what I was actually feeling. I would interact with mechanical time by observing the clock; I would interact with experienced time by living through certain moments.

So when David referred to “for ever,” that seemed to be more like theoretical time. No actual clock was going to measure eternity, and nobody was going to experience it. Even if we lived forever in the future, we hadn’t lived forever in the past, so we had already missed out on half of eternity. And even the part that we did experience would only be a part of the eternal future. The rest of theoretical eternity would stretch out in front of us forever. We could never experience it all.

Seen in that light, David’s “for ever” was like the mathematician’s talk about an infinitely long line: it would be neither measured nor experienced. It was just something that might be able to happen in theory.

Chapter 15
Dust

I sat there for quite a while, just thinking about time. Eventually I realized that my logical division of mechanical, experiential, and theoretical time was very nice, but in the end it didn’t explain anything.

The problem at hand was entirely experiential. I was having weird time experiences. It wasn’t a matter of theoretical or mechanical time. I wasn’t theorizing very much about eternity, or watching a clock’s hands spin around. It was more of a psychological or social matter.

In my life, experiencing time had been like driving down a road: some of it was up ahead, and some was in my rearview mirror. I wasn’t usually too focused on the question of whether the road went on forever, and I certainly didn’t plan to measure it; I just wanted to cover the part I was on. Sometimes it went fast, sometimes it went slow, but it always went forward.

But now I realized that I’d been thinking of time simplistically. On the clock, sure, it passed at a steady 50 MPH. But in real experience, there were slowdowns and speedups. Sometimes it was the freeway; sometimes it was the traffic jam; sometimes it involved left turns and running over stray animals.

I wondered whether the time I had experienced in my life was more like a piece of string that somebody had gotten all tangled up. I picked it up, and it became mine. It had some knots and kinks. I couldn’t straighten it out, so I just wound it up in a ball, knots and all, and put it down somewhere.

So now, what if I was an ant, walking along that string? I’d be on that ball, going around and around. A real ant couldn’t follow the string through every knot. So another example: a piece of wire, knotted and tangled and wrapped into a ball. You’re an electron, a bit of electricity going through that wire. To you, it’s a linear process, going from one end to the other. Knots are irrelevant. But to anyone with a bigger perspective, once again, you’re actually going around in circles around that ball. The knots and tangles don’t change the big picture. The big picture is that, at some point, someone disconnects the battery and puts your ball of wire on a shelf and closes the door, and there you sit in the dark, wondering what happened to your feelings of significance.

Maybe time in life seemed meaningful because it was so complicated. It kept changing its pace and intensity. You could go a long time without even noticing it; and then, at another part of your life, you’d be aware of every minute. Experienced time was like this because it was experienced. It was constantly being interpreted, like I say, in the psychosocial conditions of the moment.

We took that kind of time experience for granted. It was all we had ever known. But imagine what would have happened if Jesus really was God, and came to live among humans. The experience of time as a human could feel freaky. It slows down, it speeds up, it’s all over the place. I can’t keep up with it. It takes you all day to adapt to it, and then it’s bedtime and sleep and, whoa, more weirdness, and then tomorrow morning the rollercoaster starts over again.

Maybe that’s what I was really experiencing here. Not so much the pace of time passing as its constancy. I couldn’t identify any particular activity – writing, rereading what I had written, sitting back and thinking – that seemed especially slow or fast. My psychosocial conditions were about as unchanging as they could be. So time went by at a steady pace, and for some reason it was a fast steady.

Interesting speculations, but still not leading to any great insights. Being a man of the book, I flipped open the Bible and jabbed a passage at random, for inspiration:

Genesis 3:19: In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

For a moment I thought, ha ha, fooled you: I didn’t go down into the dust after all. I died, and here I am! Then I sobered up and asked myself, here I am, but where is “here”? Maybe I was going to live forever, or whatever you’d call this state in which I found myself. But there were no guarantees of that. Maybe I was just in a holding pen, on my way to lie in the dust with my fathers, which I recalled as being something that the Bible said somewhere.

I mean, there was the problem of my circumstances. I wasn’t exactly traveling among the stars here. I wasn’t seeing God or talking to angels; I wasn’t witnessing a golden city. I was in a cell, writing stuff that seemed likely to have no consequence. An ending in the ground was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility. To be alone here in my cell, wondering about time, seemed about as significant as training a camera on that ball of string and hiring an announcer to keep the world informed, as it sat alone there on its shelf and did nothing.

When I first thought of time having extra dimensions, it sounded intriguing. Instead of just the boring old tick-tick-tick of the clock, I would be experiencing time in multiple layers, or something. So far, though, it wasn’t turning out that way. Honestly, time in this cell seemed likely to become more tedious than time had been during my life. Not only was I not experiencing new aspects of time; I didn’t even have sleep and dreams and challenging moments to change its pace.

There was always the possibility that something would happen, and then I would see those multiple dimensions of time. But we weren’t trending in that direction. If anything, the situation seemed likely to get worse, not better. No matter how many things I had to write about, surely at some point I would get tired of the writing project. Then where would I be?

Chapter 16
Wasn’t Born Yesterday

Nothing against speculations about time, but I had gotten distracted from the original mission. I was overdue to dial into a Bible passage that would remind me of things that I had wanted to tell people during my life. I opened the book and flipped at random to this gem:

Isaiah 66:8: Who hath heard such a thing? who hath seen such things? Shall the earth be made to bring forth in one day? or shall a nation be born at once? for as soon as Zion travailed, she brought forth her children.

I couldn’t remember for sure what “Zion” was. I knew there was a Mount Zion, but this was probably referring to either the land of Israel or its people. I scanned the verses before and after. It sounded like Isaiah was saying that the Jewish nation was formed in a day. Which day would that be? When Moses parted the Red Sea for the Israelites and then smashed it back together on the pursuing Egyptians, I’d guess. Definitely a teambuilding exercise.

Isaiah was writing some nasty stuff here. Verse 16: “For by fire and by his sword will the Lord plead with all flesh: and the slain of the Lord shall be many.” That’s right: law enforcement. It worked so well for the United States, spending billions on its prison-industrial complex, buying its way down into the ranks of second-tier nations in terms of literacy, infant mortality, etc. No need for trials and civil rights and all that; should have just massacred our suspects, like Isaiah said. Or like he could be imagined to have said. Surely this had appeared in a sermon sometime, somewhere.

I confess, the first thought that came to me, when I read this particular passage, was that Isaiah sounded a bit high. Hisaiah. Did they have peyote in the land of Canaan? And would it do this to a guy? Not sure.

I wondered: was the Lord going “to render his anger with fury” (verse 15) against everybody who transgressed any of those endless detailed rules in Deuteronomy, or was that just reserved for those who broke one of the Big Ten commandments? Might come to the same thing: wasn’t there a commandment against coveting? You could nail pretty much everybody with that one.

But enough. I had already vented on the law. It wasn’t my fault that the Old Testament was so riven with talk about it, but I needed to break free. Let me be cheerful: let me find something positive in Isaiah’s words.

So, OK, let’s see. Well, the nation of Israel was born in a single day. This was cause for hope. If something as enduring as the Jewish people could be formed out of a single group activity, it was at least possible that your average married couple could rekindle the spark if they just had some fun together once in awhile.

I know, that’s pretty lame. I had often heard people talk about how great the book of Isaiah was. I wasn’t sure why they said that, but whatever – we were at the heart of the law and/or the prophets here.

I mean, definitely some inventive literature – pleading by way of a sword, and so forth. But for some reason, it just left me cold. Maybe you had to be a believer to read this and think, Wow, God is great. I myself had read it a number of times, back in the day. But my head just wasn’t there anymore.

Chapter 17
The Peace of God

I might have been able to do a better job with that Isaiah passage if my concentration had been fully present. But the time thing was still gnawing at the back of my mind. It felt like I hadn’t finished with that topic, like there was more to it, something that I had overlooked.

I reviewed what I had written. Time: ball of string (or wire), sitting on a shelf. You go around and around on the string, and end up very near to where you started. One dimension, traveling along the length of the string, missing the bigger three-dimensional picture.

The bigger picture, it seemed, was that you would spend your life navigating all kinds of kinks and bends, going around and around, and in the end you would have produced something. It may just be a ball of string. But sometimes it was exactly what somebody needed. It wasn’t useless or meaningless. It was just a lot less useful or meaningful, overall, than it had seemed at the time, when I was finding my way through all those tangles.

So, fine, my life had had at least some meaning. That and five bucks and a coffeeshop would get me a cup of coffee. There didn’t seem to be any immediate way to use that information. I was more curious about whether my present existence, here in my cell, had meaning. Had I begun winding another ball of string? If so, apparently it would be a lot less kinky than the first one, considering how smoothly time flowed here.

It was still weird to think of my life as something all wrapped up and finished like that. It was like when you start to grow old, and you think to yourself, “I can’t really be 60! I feel like 40 inside!” I felt like I could still be back in my life back on Earth, even though I definitely wasn’t.

Maybe what I was experiencing now was the way time was supposed to work. No more weird time-telescoping experiences – no moments that lasted an eternity, no time flying when I was having fun. No dreams. Just a steady march forward. No clocks, as far as I knew; it wasn’t measured time. But it was experienced time, because I was experiencing it. I was experiencing it as a steady whoosh.

Then again, what if that’s what time really was? What if it was exactly that grand mix of dreams and embarrassing experiences that had formed the ball of string comprising my life? What if that was the only kind of situation where there could be “time”?

Those seemed like silly questions. Obviously, I still had time, here in my cell. I had space, and I had time, and time endures forever.

Except that I didn’t have space anymore, not in the old familiar sense. I didn’t think I was now in a physical “where” – in the center of the Earth, or on the far side of the Sun. My cell seemed physical enough, but I figured it probably wasn’t in a spatial location that physicists could detect, else they’d have detected it. There was no Planet of the Dead just beyond Pluto.

If my present “physical” location was not really physical, then presumably my present “temporal” location was not really temporal. If there’s no “where” here, then maybe there’s no “when” now. No time.

There had to be something wrong with that reasoning. If I didn’t have time, how could I write things? Besides, I was in the afterlife, in eternity, and everyone knows eternity is a time concept. Sure, no measured time, but I still definitely had theoretical time, going on forever.

Well, but wait a minute. Eternity could go on forever and yet not go anywhere. I was not mounted on a timeline, riding off into an infinite sunset. I was right here. I was on a dot, not a line. An eternal point could happily stay exactly where it was until the oceans evaporated.

In other words, I could be completely stuck.

What were we saying. The years of time comprising my life on Earth had formed a ball that would sit eternally in a single place, back there in the past. I did believe that might be the situation.

And now I was in a different place, timewise. Maybe I would spin another ball here. Maybe, a long time from now, they would move me on to a third location; maybe I would spin a new ball there. Maybe I would keep getting moved, keep spinning new balls of experience. Maybe, over the course of eternity, these multiple dots would comprise an infinite line. Or maybe not.

I looked around my cell. I definitely had space here. And immediately it occurred to me: maybe this is where I have time too. Outside the cell, maybe there is no space and time; but inside the bubble world of my cell, I have a table and chair, and the passage of time as I write these words.

So, what, was this some kind of hoax? They were just setting me up to believe I was writing at a table, when nothing of the sort was actually happening?

Or maybe it wasn’t a setup. Maybe it was all in my head. Maybe I was seeing a table, seeing myself write words, seeing a cell, and none of it was real.

That would not be a surprise, exactly. It all looked real. But it couldn’t be. I’m in hell, for chrissake – what would I want with a fricking ballpoint pen?

I looked at the pen, and suddenly it hit me. Not the pen; the reality. What if time, as I knew it, had stopped at the moment of death? What if this was like that Vietnam War movie – couldn’t remember the name – or what if it was like “The Last Temptation of Christ,” of all things, where time telescopes and suddenly, after all that long agony, after enduring the belief that you have lived for additional months and years, you find yourself back at the moment of dying, and all that after-death experience was just a delusion?

I would have thought that a person in the grave might experience terror right from the start. Ghosts or maggots or the fires of hell or horrible regrets or just plain old fear of death. But in fact I had not. Not until this moment. Now, suddenly, I felt my skin crawl. Where was I?

It wasn’t so bad to think that my cell could be on the far side of the Sun. What was scary was that it could still be inside the brain of my mortal body, lying freshly dead in the emergency room. My friends and family and the rest of the world could be right outside my cell’s door, but they might as well be a million miles away. You couldn’t get there from here.

That would be the situation, right? The moment of death had arrived. It had been announced by the attending doctor. And yet, somehow, I was still here, somewhere. There might be someone in the emergency room who would feel my spirit depart, or they might imagine that I was still with them. But that didn’t happen. I didn’t go anywhere. Time ended for me, and now I was trapped in my cell. They were moving on. They had already left me. I wasn’t moving forward in time with them anymore. I was alone.

Suddenly, for the first time, it felt like I was in a real cell in solitary confinement. No, not like a mere cell. It felt like a tomb. I could sit here and write if I wanted. But I was trapped.

That feeling was enormously claustrophobic. I wanted to see my people. But even if they weren’t outside my cell, I had to get out. I needed air. Out, now!

It was essentially a panic attack. I freaked. I hit the door. It didn’t budge. I cursed it. I slammed my shoulder into it. I called it a fucking goddamn . . . I don’t even remember what I called it. I kicked it. I might as well have been a dying Jew in a Nazi gas chamber. I screamed. Nobody came.

I shoved it and hit it again. I tried to look under it; I tried to listen. I got nothing. I yelled out under the door. I didn’t even get an echo. I put my back to the door and tried to shove with my legs. Nothing. I shoved some more. I shoved and cursed and tried to think.

I slid my back down the door and sat on the floor.

Was this for real? It took a while to calm down. Eventually, I had to admit to myself that it was weird that time seemed to be ripping past so quickly in here. I was willing to grant that I might be a tad disoriented.

Maybe I had been inventing something that felt like time, to compensate for the loss of the core life experience of time. Maybe my sense of time was screwed up because there was no longer any passage of time at all. Maybe I was like a headless chicken, still definitely capable of running, just not too sure of where I might be going.

Without time, I would not be spinning any new ball of string in here. I would not be constructing some new lifetime of experience that would matter to someone. What could that mean? Consider the chicken: behold, a blade severs its head. In that precise instant, its time has ended. It may run wild, spilling blood and slamming full-tilt into solid objects, but its story has been told. The exercise will soon conclude; the carcass will soon subside into random kicking and then stillness.

Well, screw that. I got up off the floor and grabbed the Bible. If there was a time when I was sincerely interested in what it might say, this was it. I didn’t even finger a page. I just opened it and looked at it, and here is what I saw:

2 Corinthians 13:14: The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen.

That meant nothing to me. But it did immediately remind me of another Bible verse, or maybe it was just part of some famous creed or prayer. The part I recalled went like this: “The peace of God, which passes all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus something something something, Amen.”

The peace of God be damned. The chicken’s time was up when the blade fell; its possibilities without a head were limited at best. That was me. I was a headless fowl, slamming pointlessly into conceptual objects, signifying nothing. I was fake-living in an imaginary cell world, with its phony-time and its pseudo-space.

Chapter 18
A Good Word

I needed another Bible passage. I rolled again, and this time I got a lucky seven, or actually a 12 and a 25:

Proverbs 12:25. Heaviness in the heart of man maketh it stoop : but a good word maketh it glad.

Although I hated to admit it, in this instance a Bible passage actually made me feel better.

“A good word” reminded me of another famous bit of advice: you can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word. Although, as soon as I thought of that, I remembered someone telling me about a Woody Allen movie. I didn’t see this particular one, but she was telling me about a scene where Woody goes to rob a bank. He presents a note. The teller looks at it, squints, says, “What’s this say? You have a gub? What’s a gub? Flo, what does this note say?”

Something like that. Like I say, I didn’t see it. But that’s OK. Sometimes movie scenes were like those old radio dramas: what you can see is nothing, compared to what you can imagine. And that, I felt, was a good start for this chapter. People need hope. They don’t need to win the lottery or become President, but they do need to have at least a good word. They need the belief that they could live in the White House or drink champagne from a slipper. Hope springs eternal, they say; just give it a start, and it’ll take off.

That was one of the big problems of American society. We were not big on giving people hope. Much of it went back to that vicious uprightness I was complaining about earlier, that belief in the law as a cure-all. People don’t need to be whacked over the head again. They need a positive objective, something that they believe is achievable for them, something that’s going to get them out of bed in the morning – an encouragement, not a threat. They all need that.

And that was where the U.S. got it wrong. First of all, our Constitution did not have a Hope clause. There were a lot of other things that it lacked, too, but the point here is that there was nothing to prevent the high and mighty from legally treading on the hopes of the little guy. And all too often, you know, that’s exactly what the high and mighty did. They lost perspective. No surprise; they’re not superhuman. Put them in boardrooms and offices and in front of large assemblies of people all day, and of course they forget what’s real. No wonder they’re clueless about what it’s like to be one of those people whose lives they are making harder.

The root of the problem was our competitive society. Competition had its place. But it had gotten out of hand. Anyone who has ever sung in a choir knows that the world is filled with beautiful voices. But instead of making those myriad tenors and sopranos feel good about themselves, we built a country that constantly reminds them that they are not as good, or as cool, or as popular as some singer on TV. There are tons of good-looking people out there; but everyone thinks they could not be as attractive as some Photoshopped star.

I saw an interesting thing, one time. There was this book, Middletown, presenting a study of Muncie, Indiana in the 1920s. They interviewed people who remembered the 1890s, and asked them what had changed since then. One answer: it used to be that people would go visit each other, and when they all got together, they would sing. But by the 1920s, they had radios and recordings, and now they all felt they did not sound so good by comparison; so they stopped singing and started playing prerecorded songs instead.

In the America of my lifetime, the hypercompetition was pervasive. It had become ridiculous. You could be getting encouragement because you were the best quilter or the fastest runner in your county; but no. Instead, all eyes were on the international quilting bee or the Olympics. What you were doing – you, an ordinary person – was just a private hobby, not important. You didn’t count.

And just like in baseball, the hypercompetition all tended in the same direction, toward consolidation. There are the semi-finalists and then, at the very top of the heap, there is the World Series winner. You go from singing competitions at the county fair to the popular song on a 45-RPM record to the most famous singer on Earth. A dozen ginger ales are reduced until Canada Dry is the only choice at any convenience store. Your local grocer gets bought out by a regional chain, which gets sucked into a national chain, which is forced out of business by an international chain. The rich get richer, beyond belief and even sanity; everyone else gets poorer.

Well, by God, we were not going to have any consolidation in my cell. It was just me, and that’s how it was going to remain, as long as I had anything to say about it. Which, of course, I didn’t. But at least I could come up with a positive word for myself, something better than the desire not to die a chicken’s death.

Yes, I did believe time had ended for me. It was possible that I was going to be stuck on a single temporal dot, marked by the moment of my death, forever and ever. But that did not have to be a completely bad thing. I believed I could see how that might be OK.

When I was a kid, in the early 1970s, my brother would bring home his books from college. One semester, he had a literature course, and in that course he was learning about existentialism. I remember him sitting in the bathroom, explaining it to me. He was capable of passing hours on the toilet, and I’m afraid I was only encouraging him.

I guess it must sound terribly primitive to have perched on the tub while your brother perdures on the pot. I admit, it could be tough sailing, in the more olfactorily volcanic moments. But he was my brother, and I loved to be with him. I did doubt that he knew what he was talking about, in the area of existentialism. But he gave me something to think about.

Somewhere, I got the idea that living as an existentialist meant living in the present moment. I don’t know if my brother said that, or if I picked it up somewhere else. Point is, now it seemed I would have to live existentially, which was another way of saying that I would have to live in the present moment. Of course, I could not live at all, but that was beside the point.

I believed I could become an existentialist, here in my cell. I believed that because, in my experience, the mind was a very flexible thing. You could go to bed doubting a story, and wake up the next morning absolutely believing it. Like when you go to see a lawyer, and s/he decides s/he can make money on your case. In that process of careful legal analysis, the mind becomes thoroughly committed to an argument that sounds completely absurd to everyone else.

So, you know, if I was stuck in the present moment, at least I could have a good word about it. I could come to see the present moment as a great place to be. If only because I had to – because, for all I knew, if I stopped writing and thinking, and started just lying around depressed because my life was over, it really might be. I might become like those people who slip into a coma and never wake up.

Chapter 19

There just had to be more to the afterlife than this cell. I mean, where was George Washington? It didn’t necessarily mean that they would ever let me out. But what I was doing in here was, well, it was kind of odd. I was in the afterlife, in a place that everybody wonders about for their whole lives, and instead of seeing the sights, I was cooped up with a pen and paper, scribbling away. I had wanted to process my thoughts, but at some point a guy wonders, what the hell am I doing?

It really might be that life provided a temporary (possibly illusory) exception to the rule of the present moment – that life was like one of those people-mover escalators at the airport, where for a while you don’t have to walk, you can just ride along. No clue about what the situation might have been before life, but at this point after life, the present moment was looking like my last hope. It seemed like a pretty small hope, at that. But it was a start.

It was a little weird that, in all my hours or weeks of writing, here in my cell, I had not paused to think about the people I loved, or about the experience of actually being alive. I had been all wrapped up in my big ideas.

[That’s all there was. Apparently he didn’t finish the manuscript.]

Attempting Dialogue with a True Believer (politics example)

Contents

Background
Discussion Review
Discussion Analysis
Conclusion

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Background

This blog is oriented toward such matters as God, religion, spirituality, belief, and skepticism. Attempts to discuss such matters often collide with the fact that people become attached to their beliefs, and cannot or will not consider anything else.

Notoriously, people often believe they are being openminded. They think they are open to countervailing evidence. No doubt some of them are.

A number of posts in this blog have criticized the blindness and deceitfulness of religious thinking, by believers and nonbelievers alike. Those posts have illustrated that such behavior is available for everyone – that stereotyped ignorant evangelicals are not the only ones who behave like this, contrary to what one might infer from overexposure to mainstream media.

The present post reframes the problem of belief-based self-deception by looking at a discussion of a political (i.e., not religious) event. As I well know, not everyone is interested in dissecting old conversations. I am certainly not forcing anyone to read what I’ve written on the subject. This material is here for those who share my belief that, while it is not the most exciting stuff to read, it can be useful for purposes of learning what goes wrong in conversations.

There are also those who can’t bring themselves to move along, and yet who are not interested in studying problems in interpersonal dialogue. I don’t know that every person who would ridicule this sort of inquiry is necessarily a cynical manipulator who does not enjoy having light shined upon his/her abusive behavior. But it may not be unfair at least to ask what would motivate someone to find fault with an attempt to learn from misunderstandings and disagreements.

In the discussion that this post analyzes, I was one of the two participants. That was advantageous, for present purposes, because my participation motivated me to work through it, and also because that proximity to events enables me to say what I was feeling and intending. I would not have comparable access to the inner content of a discussion between two other people.

When I discuss a conversation in which I was a party, of course, what I report may be distorted by flaws in what I see and how I see it. That is indeed a drawback, but not necessarily a major one. If I were to relate a conversation between me and a person who was tripping on LSD, the reader would probably decide, pretty quickly, that biases due to my personal involvement were far outweighed by the much more dubious if not insane statements made by the other party.

That LSD example may seem far-fetched. The problem with true believers is that, unfortunately, while their views may be more superficially plausible, the underlying implications or priorities may be rather irrational. As an example, The Daily Beast (McWhorter, 2017) argues that today’s so-called antiracism functions as a sort of religion:

“Why is the Bible so self-contradictory?” Well, God works in mysterious ways—what’s key is that you believe. …

It stops there: beyond this first [superficial level of questioning], one is to classify the issues as uniquely “complicated.” They are “deep,” one says, looking off into the air for a sec in a reflective mode ….

Antiracism requires much of the same standpoint. For example, one is not to ask “Why are black people so upset about one white cop killing a black man when black men are at much more danger of being killed by one another?”

Vox (Illing, 2021) elaborates:

For McWhorter, antiracism functions more like a religion than an ideology or a political project. And its adherents are obsessed with “performing” virtue, not for the sake of societal change but because of the sense of purpose it offers them.

For generations, conflict-avoidant people have recognized that religion and politics are best not discussed in most settings. On the occasions when I have disregarded that advice, such as the one discussed here, I have done so in the belief that people can learn that sometimes they are wrong, and that the person who disagrees with them is not necessarily evil.

Discussion Review

This section reviews a discussion I had on Facebook. The other party to this discussion – let’s call her Ann – had just become my Facebook friend, during a prior discussion of the attack on the U.S. Capitol that occurred on January 6, 2021. That discussion was triggered, in June 2022, by congressional hearings into the January 6 attack. Those hearings were conducted by a U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee, referred to below as simply the Committee.

I asked participants in that prior discussion for links to informed sources that would tell me how many of the rioters (or attackers, or whatever term is most appropriate) illegally entered the Capitol on January 6, and where they went after entering. Nobody in that discussion seemed to have specific information on that. So I wrote a blog post presenting what I learned on that subject. Ann responded to that post, as follows, and I replied (I assume “45” is shorthand for President Trump, the 45th president):

Ann would return repeatedly to the notion that I should sit and watch hours of video presenting the case against Donald Trump. I had been reading about his administration for years. I didn’t need the events of January 6 to form my impressions of his qualifications as a leader. Briefly, I felt that he was a remarkably skilled politician; that if he was not more corrupt than most, certainly he was more brazen in his corruption; that his effects upon domestic politics were mixed, with some beneficial and some harmful consequences; and that he was pretty much a disaster in international politics, though again some of his antics had unanticipated beneficial effects.

That said, I was kidding when I wrote that part (above) about irritating Trumpists. I was also aware that the “mission accomplished” part could be construed as a jab at Republicans. Thanks to people like Ann, I am now closer to voting Republican than ever before, but generally that’s still a heavy lift for me. The parties continue to evolve, however, and so do I. Anything is possible.

I don’t know whether Ann was unintentionally conveying a sense of her own approach to evidence-gathering, as she watched her hours of video pertaining to January 6. I wasn’t at all inclined to just start watching random video about January 6 – and if I did, I could watch a ton of it and still not necessarily wind up where Ann thought I should be.

I felt that, if the Democrats had a legal case against Trump, they were obviously super-motivated to make it; they didn’t need me to obsess on that. I was content to wait and see how it turned out. I also wasn’t terribly interested in wasting a lot of time arguing about any of that. I didn’t see how such argument would help anyone. But I did make an exception for the relatively limited question of people entering the Capitol.

For me and, I think, for many Americans, interest in the events of January 6 was tempered by fatigue. Vox (Beauchamp, June 8, 2022) expected that the upcoming hearings would struggle to change many minds. My own attitudes were worn out by years of hype by media and by the Democratic Party – about the pussyhats protest, about the Mueller report, about two impeachments that did not seem to accomplish anything. I who was once an ardent reader of the New York Times had also become much more aware of partisan distortions and blatant falsehoods, there and elsewhere. As discussed in another post, I felt the Democrats and the mainstream media had done pretty much everything possible to undermine their own credibility. Despite (or perhaps because of) the many Trump-related scandals that they spent years obsessing on, by this point they seemed incapable of developing and executing an effective plan regarding Trump.

For me, regarding these January 6 hearings, it seemed best to wait for the hype to diminish, and then see what had changed. This attitude was obviously very different from the juvenile impatience of the Twitter crowd, for whom everything had to be decided instantly, and with a higher likelihood of potentially harmful error. I was content to wait for a final statement, appearing either during a prosecution of Trump or, more likely, in the Committee’s final report in September 2022.

Despite what my post said, I don’t think Ann understood that my questions at this point were simple and limited: who entered the Capitol, where did they go, and what did they do once inside? If she had understood that, surely she would not have kept urging me to watch video about people who didn’t enter the Capitol.

Now that we have laid that groundwork, we move closer to problems of mutual understanding in discussions of politics and, perhaps, of religion. Here we have Ann’s next reply, and my next response:

Ann began with the claim that she tried not to form opinions “unless I have facts or have done a study of the situatuon.” She felt that I lacked this ability, and that I should try “to use a bit more intellectual curiosity” in my writing.

That was odd. Ann had just read my 9,500-word writeup. I haven’t done an actual count, but a quick search in source code suggests that my post contains more than 90 links to other sources. Against this, Ann did not seem to have done any study at all. She only kept referring to things she had seen on TV or other videos. There was no sign that she exercised “intellectual curiosity” regarding anything in the Committee’s activities or in the videos she recommended. She seemed to construe them as original sources of information, which they were not. They were partisan compilations intended to support a preconceived conclusion.

So, at this point, I thought I detected glimmers of a couple of issues that seemed to have more to do with personal psychology than with the January 6 riot. First, Ann seemed to be trying to position herself as superior – but, perversely, she was doing it on the basis of factors that argued against her. She, not I, seemed to be the one lacking in intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, and comparison of sources.

Ann was a lawyer. I had mentioned that I got my law degree from Columbia in 1982. Possibly she went to a lower-ranked law school and, as such, felt a need to assert that she did not consider herself intellectually inferior.

Yet that would raise another question: what compelled her to make this an adversarial fight in the first place? I felt that I, myself, had taken a friendly, almost chatty tone in my initial reply. I certainly didn’t think I was inviting these small insults in return. Possibly she lacked the basic social ability to detect my attempted friendliness. For that, there was only so much I could do. Ann was a big girl. For purposes of setting the tone of our discussion, she had as much opportunity and responsibility as I.

This was not the first time I had encountered gratuitous sniping from someone who attended a less prestigious law school. Experience suggested that people from such schools could spend years getting over the fact that an Ivy League admissions committee had rendered a negative judgment of their capacity for legal practice. I appreciated the committee’s positive judgment in my case, but it had been 40 years since I had learned that prestige does not guarantee competence. There were things that I could do well in the legal world. But I hadn’t practiced law since 1985. Surely I was not the first ex-attorney that Ann had encountered.

Whatever the precise issue there, it did appear that something was going on, in Ann’s head, that compelled her to convert what could have been a positive interaction into a negative one.

I asked Ann whether it was OK to append her remarks, anonymized, to the January 6 blog post. She said she would rather that I not do so. That, too, seemed odd. If she felt she was making sense, why would she not want others to see her rebuttal of my supposedly flawed article? As I said, I would be happy to post her remarks anonymously.

In any case, I was not offering her editorial control over my blog. I asked because asking was the polite, friendly thing to do. She did not reciprocate that politeness or friendliness. That was her choice. I did not owe her a code of silence under all circumstances. Ultimately, if someone wants to make themselves an object of curiosity by snubbing a person who tries to be friendly to them, the most appropriate response may be to highlight, critique, and discourage that gratuitous meanness. It should not generally be allowed to persist without any pushback. Given anonymity, the pushback here is very mild. But it is still better than nothing.

One other point, in passing. Note that I told Ann (above) that “there have always been the Never Trumpers.” I did not say that the Committee’s Republican members or witnesses were Never Trumpers. I had no idea as to the state of affairs on that question, nor much interest in it.

Continuing with Ann’s next reply:

As usually happens in discussions of this sort, our comments were getting longer. That was especially true on my side. I seem to have slipped into the role of the person who tries to repair misunderstandings, in response to a person who seems to be trying to expand them. The behavior of the latter can be manipulative; it can be one in a series of instances where, perhaps without specific intent, the person repeatedly teases others with a faked or superficial interest in further discussion – only to pull back when the other party takes the bait and makes clear his/her eagerness to achieve a genuine rapport.

Obviously, I was not interested in avoiding Ann’s views on my central question, having to do with the number of people who entered the Capitol building. My research did not find a clear answer on that. Possibly she did find a claim that there were 2,000 to 2,500 on the Capitol grounds, but that would not tell me how many entered the building, nor would it explain why the Department of Justice seemed to anticipate more like 1,000 (not 2,500) arrests altogether.

As I told Ann, going into that and her other remarks would have made my reply even longer than it was already. I wasn’t aware of any particular rush. There didn’t seem to be an urgent need to respond immediately to everything she said.

On that, Ann apparently disagreed. She did reply to that last post immediately. She may have likewise replied immediately to the others. I wouldn’t know: I only visited Facebook twice a week, and tried to stay no longer than necessary. I noticed her immediate response this time because I was still on on Facebook when she replied.

Over the years, I have gradually become more aware that, sometimes, I do try to save dialogues even when it becomes obvious that the other party is trying to derail them. In this case, Ann finally decided to “disengage” because “this convo is going nowhere and has turned into a snoozefest.”

Plainly, Ann was not behaving as someone who wants to build rapport. It goes without saying that it can take some time and effort to understand where another person is coming from, on any potentially controversial subject. It would not be surprising if one party to such a discussion quit because of frustration. But it was strange to quit due to boredom.

Ann’s response didn’t seem consistent with her indication, in our prior interaction, that she was willing to talk with me about several other topics. You don’t “disengage with” someone whom you want to talk to.

The explanation seems to be that Ann didn’t like the way I reacted, when she suggested that we needed to “back up” to analyze our conversational dynamics.

Ann would not be the first woman to recognize that some people – men, especially, I’m told – tend not to be very good at (or very interested in) parsing specific statements in conversations. Perhaps Ann had found that she could throw the other party off-balance by suggesting that they needed to “back up” to discuss the tone of a debate.

I may have surprised Ann with my willingness to do exactly that. When I backed up and took stock of the situation, my response was that I felt attacked. I pointed out that it was unwise to attack me gratuitously, when she could have adopted a more collegial tone. I was surprised that someone of her seniority would make that rookie mistake.

Details of Ann’s situation, not disclosed here, suggest that she may have been able to do some unchallenged coasting in her career. She may just not have very much experience with people who don’t have to back off and say, “Yes, Ma’am.” As in this instance, she may avoid people who call out her abusive behavior.

The interpretation, in that case, is that maybe “snoozefest” was not exactly what Ann was experiencing. The more accurate statement may be that this wasn’t turning out to be that much fun for her.

What was she looking for instead? It certainly appears that what she wanted was an opportunity to rant. Nothing in her remarks expressed uncertainty or invited discussion. She presented herself as someone who knew it all.

That is the behavior of a lawyer. It is not the behavior of a scholar or truthseeker. Anyone who makes a serious attempt to know it all will quickly discover how much there is to know. Lawyers don’t usually get that far: they are only interested in the parts of the truth that they can use to make someone look bad.

Ann’s style became clear enough in her remarks about that American Conservative article (Van Buren, June 20, 2022). She seems to have believed that she was expressing the insights of a superior intellect when she dismissed it as “misguided.” Instead, she was showing that she did not even understand it. And that was an achievement, because it was not hard to understand. As the article made clear at the outset, you cannot have a coup attempt if what you are attempting could not result in a coup. It is a matter of simple logic. You may have an attempted assassination of Mike Pence. You may have other interesting or dramatic events. But if the result could not be a coup, then you do not have a coup attempt.

In the same lawyerly spirit, Ann misrepresented what I said about the Never Trumpers. She apparently didn’t bother to review the actual words, even after I pointed out her error. That, too, was the behavior of a lawyer: forget the truth; just keep repeating anything that might make the other side look bad.

The notorious advice to lawyers is, “When the facts are against you, argue the law. When the law is against you, argue the facts. When the law and the facts are against you, pound on the table and yell like hell.” Ann persistently tried to muddy the water. She avoided the specific questions addressed in my blog post – the questions of how many people went into the Capitol building, where they went, and what they did. From the beginning, she wanted to talk about the composition of the Committee and other tangential matters. I’m sure she found those matters interesting – they gave her opportunities to attack the other side – but, as I said, I didn’t plan to spend a year exploring the full story of January 6.

The closest Ann came to actually addressing the central issues in my blog post was when she claimed that the “DOJ estimates that between 2000 and 2500 people invaded the Capitol on Jan 6th.” In response to her suggestion, I searched for exactly that claim. That search led directly to one article (Daily Beast, January 6, 2022) that used such numbers. But that article’s remarks fit within what I had already written. We knew that many people had passed the original police line, at some point after the police abandoned that line. But how many of them actually entered the building? That was my question. Ann pretended that everyone knew the answer to that. But she did not provide the answer, nor did she direct me to anyone who might have it.

Generally speaking, lawyers are not intellectuals. Law is not about exploring and developing knowledge. Law is about winning. Thus, few lawyers are scholars. They are not truthseekers, except in the deceptive, partisan sense of seeking those parts of the truth that will help them to win. Some of them congratulate themselves on the supposedly moral core, within them, that hesitates to deceive people. But they will go ahead and try to deceive people anyway. That is the nature of the job.

Ann complained that I did not ask for her views, choosing instead to infer them from her statements. But as any social scientist knows, what people report about themselves (e.g., their views or priorities) often fails to match up with their actual behavior. I have met more than one Trump-deranged Democrat who believes herself to be the very model of an honest, neutral seeker of truth. I mean, if someone is already frothing at the mouth about Trump, it is not rocket science to infer her views on related matters.

In any case, if Ann felt that my inferences were incorrect, she was free to explain why. She chose not to do that. The truth of the matter is probably that she did not want to have to discuss inconsistencies between her self-image and her behavior. Her choice left me with the impression that she was acting like a lawyer. She didn’t want to learn, to seek the truth. She clearly did not want to participate in a dialogue. What she wanted was to attack, and to be told that she was right. I originally found her swimming in a school of likeminded fish, there on Facebook, and a quick glance confirms that she has returned to that.

Discussion Analysis

The preceding section dissects a Facebook discussion of politics, in an attempt to learn why that discussion failed. The premise is that this effort may yield insights into problems in discussions of religion. I am particularly interested in the sorts of discussions that I have had with evangelical Christians, or in my former experience as an evangelical Christian; but evangelicals aren’t the only ones who have such discussions.

On the question of why my discussion with Ann failed, ego seems to be part of the answer. People pat themselves on the back for being clearsighted atheists, or for knowing God’s truth. They aren’t interested in seeking the real truth, in all its awkward and indeterminate permutations. They are the opposite of that: they want a simple and settled form of “truth” that affirms their personal (e.g., intellectual, moral) superiority. They are not remotely interested in uncomfortable questions about, for instance, what the Bible really is, or what we can and should make of it.

Power seems to be another part of the problem. To protect Ann’s identity, I cannot elaborate on the impression that she is in a position where, aside from a relatively limited number of higher-ups within her organization, her interactions with others generally allow her to have the last word. Her behavior in this instance suggests that, when she does encounter someone who won’t be bullied, she claims to be bored, and quickly disengages.

Believers are like that too. Down through the centuries, they have been happy to talk about good things, like love and honor … and to enforce them with the sword. The preacher with his sermon models the attitude you will carry with you through the coming week. Like Ann in the political sphere, the preacher affirms the proud method of telling people what needs to happen, rather than the humble method of asking what we need to learn, or how we can help. In this instance, I asked a question – how many people entered the Capitol? – and I got an attack. In many other instances, so-called Christians have grown hostile when someone asks the questions that thoughtful people have been asking for centuries. The believers simply don’t want to hear from truthseekers; they will use what power they have to discourage and silence them.

Those remarks about power suggest a problem of aggression. People who initiate or welcome political or religious discussions often do so in the belief that they have a right and/or an obligation to impose their views on others. Essentially, what you believe is wrong and what I believe is right, and God has sent me to help you see that. Ann’s remarks reek of a pompous certainty that she was entitled to push people around. Belief means certainty; and once you have certainty, there is no longer a reason to hesitate. So you use everything you’ve got – not only the kings, the laws, and the bankers, but also the malicious gossip and, where possible, the criminal deed – to compel others to think, do, and say what you demand. Ann is just one among a vast number of people who, given a little power, seem willing, indeed eager, to abuse it – not just for the cause but, again, for the ego.

Underlying all this, there appears to be a failure of epistemology. Like a person who hands you a Bible while telling you that Jesus is the answer, Ann directed me to spend hours staring at the tube. She seemed to think that only a moron would fail to find Jesus, if the person would simply start reading at page 1, in Genesis. That is, she studiously avoided the obvious fact that a person could watch a great deal of video and might still want to know what was not being shown, what had been edited out by the palpably one-sided producers of that video. Ann showed no awareness of what the other side might say. It seemed that her many years of education had completely failed to train her to think critically. Like a believer who wants you to read the Bible without asking where it came from or what others say about it, she expected me to simplemindedly accept her chosen sources at face value.

Apparently I was supposed to read Ann’s rants and just say, Oh, yes, everything you say is so right. That’s not discussion. DIscussion doesn’t start until the ranting ends – until the person drops the fantasy that s/he has all the answers, and is entitled to inflict them on others. It is one thing to consider yourself intelligent. It is another thing to suppose that your intelligence automatically confers knowledge. Not only do you not have essential information about most of this world’s innumerable issues, in politics or religion or elsewhere; you won’t even begin to acquire that knowledge if you think you already know everything you need to know.

It is not hard to imagine how a cooperative, mutually encouraging discussion might have gone. Ann would say, “Interesting post. Regarding X, have you looked at the ProPublica videos?” I would reply, as I did, “Which video were you thinking of?” Ann would say, “Try the one at this link …” I would respond, “That’s interesting, but it doesn’t seem to say how many people entered the Capitol, or what they did once they were inside.” Having thus worked our way through the process of getting Ann to focus on the actual question, we would finally be ready to determine whether she had information that I had overlooked.

Why doesn’t that happen in religious discussions? Why, for instance, do traditional Christians invent falsehoods to try to explain away obvious contradictions in the Bible? The reason seems to be that people have a precommitment to a certain point, and they are quite willing to try to deceive others about it, so as to avoid any self-questioning or real learning about it. It is this stupidity and dishonesty – more than any other single thing, I think – that so thoroughly deters people from trusting religions. There are all sorts of religions, of course, and a wide variety of styles within them. But in too many cases, the story seems the same. It is all about lying to everyone else and, ultimately, to oneself.

Yet why does that happen? Why do people who are certain of their own honesty make such efforts to be dishonest? Maybe the common thread is that, in politics and religion alike, the penalties for being really honest are too great. The single greatest penalty may be that, if you are honest, you will wind up with the bad people. In religious terms, that may mean that the God of your imagination would burn you in Hell forever, as a punishment for being truthful. In politics, it may mean that being honest would make you an outcast from your friends, and might even force you to try to talk to the people whom you have spent years ridiculing – the rednecks, the Marxist intellectuals, whatever. It is virtually unthinkable. People just don’t go there.

Conclusion

I spent a bunch of time looking into the locations and activities of people who entered the Capitol on January 6, 2021. I probably would not have done that if Ann had not signaled an interest in talking about related matters. I wasn’t investing all that effort in her personally. Her interest just seemed like a prompt, like maybe it was time for me to get up to speed on that subject.

I am sorry, now, that I invested that time. The subject did not interest me all that much. What I needed to know about it, I could surely have picked up by reviewing summary materials, a month or two later. Writing this follow-up piece has represented an additional time investment. For me, this was actually the more useful of the two blog posts.

Granted, I did not have to write either of these posts. I wrote this one as a semi-structured way of trying to understand what went wrong. Most people wouldn’t spend the time. But they often lose time to such interactions in other ways – in distraction, in lost sleep, in preoccupation with the other person’s unexpected unfairness or hostility, and so forth. Blogging about such matters takes more time and, in exchange, it usually gives me (and, hopefully, others) some insight into the situation. As illustrated in my several posts about abusive behavior in online tech forums, I find that thinking about and articulating such experiences can contribute to an improved understanding of such abuse, and of how to oppose, reduce, or avoid it.

I don’t mean to be ungrateful for the opportunity to learn something new. The problem is that my plate is already full of things I don’t understand. For practical purposes, I am sorry that I ever met Ann, I wish that I had not been fooled into thinking that she had a sincere interest in the subject, and I come away feeling that I must do a better job of making sure that people really want to talk, and know how to talk, before I let them distract me from other priorities.

In the story of the blind men and the elephant, everyone thinks he knows what an elephant is shaped like, because he has grabbed onto a leg (“an elephant is like a tree”) or a tail (“an elephant is like a snake”) or whatnot. My legal background may mislead me into thinking that lawyers are the problem, when in fact lawyers are only a symptom of something else.

I don’t mean to suggest that America’s (or the world’s) problems would be solved if we could just kill all the lawyers – or, if you prefer, all the preachers, atheists, or whatever. But I do believe that legal thinking has poisoned America – that not only the churches, but the business relationships, interactions with our children’s teachers, even our marriages – have been badly polluted by the grossly corrupt legal mentality, in which there is ultimately some asinine excuse for virtually any form of abuse short of criminal prosecution.

Law is the enemy of trust. In law, everything is constantly up for grabs. Anytime anyone wants to accuse you of anything that is not completely ridiculous on its face, the legal system is ready to help them chew up your time and money. It doesn’t matter at all that the person may be someone whom you’ve known and trusted for 10, 20, 30 years. Indeed, the more deeply you’ve trusted them, the more the law will use their trust as a weapon at your throat.

Lawyers live in a world of constant distrust. They do not necessarily understand that trust isn’t like accuracy. It’s OK to be accurate most of the time. Nobody’s perfect. Being 80% accurate is great, if nobody else is above 50%. But being 80% trustworthy means being completely slimy, regardless of where everyone else is. If your marital fidelity is only as good as your score at target shooting, you’d better start looking for a divorce lawyer.

Perhaps I am belatedly learning what seemed to be standard wisdom among most people of my parents’ generation: it is best never to talk about religion and politics. You can’t trust anyone to be honest or fair in such matters. I have resisted that because it seems like a slippery slope. As just indicated, I have encountered comparable meanness and stupidity in tech. I would probably encounter it elsewhere too.

Maybe I am the problem. I have a habit of trying to get to the truth of things. It tends to mean that, wherever I poke my nose, I am soon saying things that people don’t want me to say. Maybe I am an enemy of trust, in the sense that I oppose those comfortable fictions that help people to form bonds with one another, in mutual rejection of – often, hostility toward – those who don’t share their views. Maybe trust works best when you share a perceived adversary, against whom you must make common cause. In marriage, maybe it’s “you and me, against the world”; maybe marital trustworthiness weakens when the world no longer seems like such a bad place.

I spent several days researching and writing that piece about January 6. I have now spent some hours assembling this piece about that one. I don’t come away with a simple solution. I guess I think I have been on the right track, in mostly avoiding discussions on Facebook. Social media seem to be designed for flaky and insincere people. I have mostly limited myself to books and articles, where writers use their real names and often make a serious attempt to know something about their topic. That’s no substitute for real relationships. But neither was this.

At Present, Religion Seems to Beat Science in Explaining the Origin of Life

As a matter of simple honesty, there is not yet a scientific explanation for the origin of life. In that sense, creationist accounts tend to be superior: they offer an explanation with less need for deliberate misrepresentation.

This claim arises from an update in Popular Mechanics (Brouilette, 2022). According to that article, scientists at Hiroshima University have demonstrated that molecules colliding in a primordial soup could have assembled themselves and multiplied.

Not to get our hopes up, however, the article goes on to quote scientists who are not terribly impressed. For instance, as one points out, the molecular activity captured in the study is not actually the kind of self-assembly and self-multiplication found in living things.

Evolution is most compelling to those who are determined to believe that faith is no substitute for evidence. The phrasing falsifies itself: they believe what they will hopefully be able to prove, at some unspecified point in the future. Faith now, science later (maybe). Fake it until you make it.

The theory of evolution continues to rely entirely on faith rather than evidence at crucial points in its tale – including the one just mentioned, at Hiroshima University. The evidence is not there. It may never be there. All that’s there is the faith that someone, someday, might find the evidence somewhere.

Obviously, creation accounts are exceedingly dependent on speculation and wishful thinking. What makes them superior, in situations like this, is that at least they’re honest about it.

I say that in a qualified meaning of “honest.” Many creationists will lie to you about the evidence supporting their beliefs. What makes them more honest than scientists is that you can tell it’s all for show. They don’t really care about the evidence. Yes, they talk out of both sides of their mouth; but at least they do admit that theirs is a religion of faith.

At various times, and in various ways, creationists tend to take pride in believing what they want to believe, regardless of evidence. They are generally not consistent in misrepresenting what they’re up to. Unlike evolutionary science, creationism does not uniformly seek to deceive anyone into believing that it relies solely upon empirical fact.

Truthseeking: Correlation Is Not Causation

One of the most oft-repeated mantras in the entire field of research methods is that correlation is not causation. The oft-used Latin phrase for the associated logical fallacy is post hoc, ergo propter hoc, which means “after this, therefore because of this.” It’s an old one: according to Britannica (n.d.), Aristotle included its earlier Greek version in his list of material fallacies.

The post hoc fallacy observes that two events occur in sequence, and assumes that the first must have caused the second. There was the sound of a gunshot; Mike went running down the street; therefore Mike’s running was due to the gunshot – when in fact Mike is deaf; he started running just to catch up with his friend.

A related fallacy differs only in its first word: cum hoc, ergo propter hoc, apparently best pronounced with a mix of short and long O sounds (i.e., “koom hock ergoh prah-pter hock” or, to some, “hoke” instead of “hock”). The first word, cum, means “with” rather than “after.” In this less commonly noticed logical error, the two things occur at the same time, and yet one is believed to cause the other. People start wearing shorts at around the same time as when ice cream sales rise; therefore wearing shorts causes people to want ice cream. For more examples, see Tyler Vigen’s book – providing, for instance, a graph of a very close correlation between U.S. spending on science and technology with suicides by hanging, strangulation, and suffocation.

In another post, I provided a real-world example of the post hoc fallacy, in a discussion of potentially erroneous interpretations of research into the relationship between insufficient sleep and Alzheimer’s disease. In that post, I said,

[W]riters about relevant research often make the post hoc logical error. For instance, among the top results in a search for relevant studies, I saw a Harvard Medical School article (Budson, 2021). … [That article’s title said,] “Sleep well – and reduce your risk of dementia and death.” [Budson] based that claim on two studies. But both clearly spoke in terms of associations; they did not claim to find a cause-effect relationship. As one of them … stated, “[S]hort sleep duration in midlife is [merely] associated with an increased risk of late-onset dementia” (emphasis added).

MathTutorDVD (2017) explains: “Correlation between two events or variables simply indicates that a relationship exists, whereas causation is more specific and says that one event actually causes the other.” As Amplitude (Madhavan, 2019) puts it in a different context, “[Y]ou might think you know which specific key activation event results in long-term user retention, but without rigorous testing you run the risk of basing important product decisions on the wrong user behavior” (emphasis added).

In the Harvard Medical School example, Budson (2021) said that sleeping well would reduce your risk of dementia and death. But that causal relationship has not been established; indeed, a causal relationship is often very hard to establish. According to Chambliss and Schutt (2013, p. 104),

Five criteria should be considered in trying to establish a causal relationship. The first three criteria are generally considered as requirements for identifying a causal effect: (1) empirical association, (2) temporal priority of the independent variable, and (3) nonspuriousness. You must establish these three to claim a causal relationship. Evidence that meets the other two criteria—(4) identifying a causal mechanism, and (5) specifying the context in which the effect occurs—can considerably strengthen causal explanations.

As Chambliss and Schutt explain, “empirical association” or “correlation” means the two fluctuate together. The shorts-and-ice-cream example might pass this test, whereas a claim that chewing gum is associated with changes in the wind’s direction would be nonsense: there would be (as far as we know) no correlation whatsoever.

Second, Chambliss and Schutt say, “temporal priority” means that the alleged cause comes before the alleged effect. The ice cream example would have a hard time with this test; ice cream and shorts seem to happen at roughly the same time. It would be pretty difficult to prove that a candle causes a match to catch fire; in human experience, it actually happens the other way around.

Third, “nonspuriousness” means you can’t have a spurious (i.e., false) association. This is where the ice cream example dies. Wearing shorts and eating ice cream are both caused by (or at least associated with) the arrival of warm weather. Take away shorts, keep the warm weather, and you still have people eating ice cream.

In the Harvard Medical School article, the problem was that researchers are not claiming to know that going short on sleep increases one’s risk of dementia. They don’t do that because the connection between sleep and dementia may be spurious. The one may not influence the other at all; both may instead be due to a third (often called a confounding) factor, or a combination of multiple factors. For instance, it could be that, in people with dementia, both insufficient sleep and dementia are caused by a combination of genetics and a particular type of impact to the head at some point in life – or maybe by exposure to a certain molecular compound in infancy, found perhaps in dust, or in some kinds of pollen.

The other post‘s exploration of links between insufficient sleep and Alzheimer’s noted another unfortunate tendency in the research literature. As SBU (2020) says, “risk factors” are often treated as if they were causal, when they may not be (see Wikipedia). For an example of problematic usage, Li et al. (2022) assert that “Nighttime sleep disturbances are known risk factors for developing cognitive impairment or dementia.” In that remark, Li et al. seem to be claiming a degree of certainty (i.e., these are “known” risk factors) that exceeds what the underlying research supports. All 1 2 3 of their cited studies speak clearly of mere “associations.”

It is not sufficient to find that an association is “strong”; that could merely mean that the underlying cause (e.g., mild brain injury in childhood) almost always yields both dementia and (to cite one such “risk factor”) sleep fragmentation. Indeed, the causal direction could be the opposite of what such writers believe: the underlying cause could trigger early brain changes that begin the progression toward dementia; that progression could then cause sleep fragmentation. Such a hypothesis would be consistent with the impression that Alzheimer’s seems to aggravate sleep problems.

Gianicolo et al. (2020) find roots of causation – and problems for medical researchers – in Hume:

According to the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume, causality is present when two conditions are satisfied: 1) B always follows A—in which case, A is called a “sufficient cause” of B; 2) if A does not occur, then B does not occur—in which case, A is called a “necessary cause” of B. …

In many scientific disciplines, causality must be demonstrated by an experiment. In clinical medical research, this purpose is achieved with a randomized controlled trial (RCT). An RCT, however, often cannot be conducted for either ethical or practical reasons. If a risk factor such as exposure to diesel emissions is to be studied, persons cannot be randomly allocated to exposure or non-exposure. Nor is any randomization possible if the research question is whether or not an accident associated with an exposure, such as the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster, increased the frequency of illness or death.

Gianicolo et al. (2020) seem to think that medical practitioners are practicing a form of science that must assume causation when nothing more than association has been established. An assumption of causation may be relatively easy when the association has been well-studied, as in their example involving cigarette smoking and lung cancer. But most medical associations have much less scientific support. As I have learned from my own exposure to sometimes ill-advised tests and treatments, medicine today is often a mélange of the semi-known, the unknown, and the misunderstood – not to mention the unaffordable.

Strictly speaking, even an RCT that may seem to establish causation remains vulnerable in principle to further questioning, as indicated by the University of California’s Museum of Paleontology (n.d.; see also InfluentialPoints, n.d.):

The concept of proof — real, absolute proof — is not particularly scientific. Science is based on the principle that any idea, no matter how widely accepted today, could be overturned tomorrow if the evidence warranted it. Science accepts or rejects ideas based on the evidence; it does not prove or disprove them.

That view may be consistent with Karl Popper’s philosophy of science. McLaughlin (2006) summarizes Popper as contending that “a knowledge claim is scientific … not when it is true or proven, but when it [survives] systematic attempts to falsify it.” This is widely understood as an obligation to “rule out” as many competing explanations as possible. It’s not that we know the truth; it’s that at least we are not spouting demonstrable falsehood.

In law – to cite another example of a practical field that tries to apply rules to ascertain truth – Popper’s “systematic attempts to falsify” are generally presented by the opposing side. The Paulson & Nace law firm (n.d.) illustrates this in the context of medical malpratice litigation, where they say causation is proved when the plaintiff shows that a doctor-patient relationship exists, the standard of care was breached, the negligent care directly caused the harm, and demonstrable damages occurred. That’s legal causation, not proof of the truth. There could be persuasive evidence out there somewhere, not discovered or presented effectively by the defendant, that the harm was actually caused by something other than what the plaintiff alleges.

In fields like epidemiology, where RCTs are typically infeasible, researchers often look to the classic Bradford Hill (1965) criteria for identifying causality. Others (e.g., Fedak et al., 2015; Lucas & McMichael, 2005) have sought to refine those criteria in light of contemporary research practice. The Bradford Hill criteria, listed by Wikipedia, may be characterized as follows:

1. Strength (effect size): the larger the association, the more likely that it is causal.
2. Consistency (reproducibility): causation is more likely when findings are consistent across multiple studies, in different places with different samples.
3. Specificity: causation is more likely if there is a very specific population at a specific site and outcome with no other likely explanation.
4. Temporality: effect follows cause, and also follows any expected delay between the cause and the expected effect.
5. Biological gradient (dose-response relationship): greater exposure to the alleged cause will usually yield greater incidence of the effect.
6. Plausibility: to the extent feasible within existing knowledge, it helps if the alleged cause-effect relationship makes sense.
7. Coherence: causation is more likely if epidemiological and laboratory findings agree.
8. Experiment: supportive experimental evidence is a plus.
9. Analogy: similarities between the observed association and any other associations may help to support causation.

As such criteria suggest, Popperian attempts to falsify a truth claim can generate many reasons to doubt causation. Returning to the example of the claim by Li et al. (2022) (i.e., that “Nighttime sleep disturbances are known risk factors for developing cognitive impairment or dementia”), there is a problem with the Specificity criterion, insofar as it appears that none of the underlying studies sought to rule out caffeine as a “likely explanation” – as, that is, a potential cause of fragmented sleep and, over the longer term, of dementia. That oversight is remarkable in, for instance, the study by Lim et al. (2013), which explicitly controlled for “the use of common medications which can affect sleep.” In the Lim study, there is also a problem with the Strength criterion: some study participants with little to no sleep fragmentation still wound up with dementia. There may be other problems as well, in that and/or in the other studies that Li et al. (2022) relied upon.

Readers of scientific literature may encounter terms like “association,” “correlation,” and “risk factor” on a daily basis. Over time, it can become difficult to remember that research finding links between two phenomena may not at all establish that one caused the other. The scientific knowledge underlying most science-oriented fields of endeavor is a hodgepodge of findings and ideas that vary greatly in the extent to which they have survived thorough testing.

State-of-the-art research can be interesting and even exciting – and it can also be completely mistaken, though it may take years to demonstrate that. The urge to interpret correlations as causation can seem natural – and it can kill people. The pursuit of truth calls, not only for the thrill of new insights, but also for patience and caution developed through experience with false hopes of the past. So, no, correlation is definitely not causation.

Supernatural Dreams

I had a dream the other night. We all have dreams, every night apparently, but this one was a little different.

What I remember from the dream is that I was hanging out with some friends. We were in maybe our 30s. Not sure of the location, but it was vaguely like a rooftop bar, at night. It felt like the place might soon be showing a movie on a wall screen.

So I’m sitting there in a chair, and one of our friends comes up the stairs and says, “The most beautiful woman I have ever seen is coming up right behind me.” I didn’t look around; I guess I didn’t think much about it. I had no thoughts on who she might be. But then, a moment later, a woman leans down behind me and kisses me on the cheek. It turned out that the most beautiful woman was my girlfriend!

I’ve had dreams where I was in control, where it was more like a dry run. Like, wait, let’s replay that scene, but this time I’m going to say X instead of Y. And I’ve had dreams where the action proceeds in a flat, linear fashion: something happens, and then something else happens. I might just be an observer; I might say or do something; and then events go on from there.

What mystified me about the beautiful woman dream was that I didn’t see this coming. The “me” who was living through the dream was not aware, at all, of what was going to happen next. In other words, it was like real life.

So my question was, how could that happen? I guess the answer may be that there is a subconscious part of your brain that invents the scenario, and then a conscious part of your brain that lives through what the subconscious part has designed. And to the conscious part, it feels like it’s really happening — you can be genuinely surprised — but it’s all just a story that your mind creates for its own amusement, or for whatever purpose dreams may serve.

In this particular instance, the beautiful girlfriend turned out to be something of a cluster. She proceeded to announce that she had brought a $20 bottle of champagne, so then I had to shake down my friends to chip in and help pay for this extravagance. Then it develops that her beautiful long blonde hair is a wig; it falls off and reveals that she actually has unattractive, short-cropped black hair. And while she did seem very pretty at first, when I got a full, straight-on view of her face, I saw that she resembled Minnie Mouse, with these big, flat, dipshit eyes that made her look like she might be stoned.

But those developments didn’t obscure the feeling that something weird had happened. It stuck with me, as you see: I did not understand how my own mind could surprise itself.

It would have felt like a better answer if someone had explained that, actually, I was getting a glimpse of things that were transpiring, at that very moment, in a parallel universe. It felt real because it was; it just wasn’t real here. Never mind the expensive champagne and the Minnie Mouse face; maybe that was something that my own mind inserted, as it recoiled against what it had just seen, converting a legitimate glimpse of a true alternate reality into the scrambled eggs of a normal dream.

Obviously, me wanting to believe that there was an alternate universe would not make it true. But it also wouldn’t make it false. I didn’t want it to be true because of some prior metaphysical commitment. I wanted it to be true because the woman kissing me on the cheek felt so real, and so unexpected — like what might happen, in real life, if she was a new girlfriend and I hadn’t expected her to find me at that bar.

Or if you don’t like the parallel universe hypothesis, how about this: I have a guardian angel who sees that I’m lonesome, and she sends me a little company, in the form of a memory of what it was like to be in my 30s and have a pretty new girlfriend who would show up and kiss me.

From there, granted, it’s only a hop and a skip to the point where the person feeling sorry for me is not an angel; it’s just me. Some subterranean part of my mind is inventing narratives that my conscious self follows, in my sleep, naively believing whatever the subconscious part tells it.

That, or some more fully informed scientific alternative, may truly be the best explanation. The problem is that this sort of explanation feels like something that science pulls out of a hat, to dazzle us for a moment and then be mostly forgotten. It is like an intellectual bill of attainder, designed not to provide a real explanation, but just to criminalize a line of thought that science dislikes.

I mean, if this subconscious part of me is cranking out random narratives to fit the mood of the moment, why is it only doing so when I’m asleep? It seems suspiciously convenient to use this mechanism to explain away what I imagine in my sleep, but to completely disregard it in waking life.

If we really believed that the subconscious mind explained our mental wanderings at night, why wouldn’t it dominate accounts of our daytime thoughts too? Why are we not constantly referring to that interior storyteller, every time we think about a career decision or discuss a murder trial?

We take our surface-level thoughts and feelings at face value for purposes of interpreting waking reality; but since our sleeptime thoughts and feelings don’t fit with waking reality, we assume they must be wrong. We let people tell us that there’s no accounting for the goofy stuff that happens in our heads at night, yet nobody is willing to extend comparable latitude to what happens in our heads in the daytime.

Those thoughts may just reveal my ignorance. But this is the crucial fact: science does not respond to my ignorance — or, more to the point, to our interesting and sometimes disturbing nighttime mental experiences — with genuine curiosity, always seeking to find out whether, hey, maybe there really is a guardian angel. Science is the one with a religious commitment, the one that already knows what it wants to believe. There is by God not going to be any guardian angel. There is going to be an alternate universe only if a physicist can explain how that could possibly occur — and, even then, the physicist is going to tell me that, in my lifetime, there will probably be no scientific explanation that could connect a parallel universe with my funky dream.

So it’s a sort of bait-and-switch: we know that we are not going to treat what you saw in your disturbing dream as part of an alternate reality; we also know that it is not due to any supernatural phenomena; we just can’t explain how we know these things. That is what passes for science these days. It is truly closer to medieval religious belief than it is to genuine curiosity and a desire to learn.

I came to that impression of the situation because, after having the dream, I went looking for the best book that would offer a sympathetic yet knowledgeable consideration of the things I have just said. I wanted a book that was informed about the science of dreams, and yet was not blinded by prior commitment to an atheistic dogma that already “knew” all about my dream. I wanted something that would rise above the secular conviction that, regardless of the facts, my dream could never, ever be what it felt like. I was looking for curiosity, as I say — not for a tedious precommitment to explain away everything that didn’t fit within the dominant creed.

There may be such a book. If so, I didn’t find it. I found what seemed to be scientists who considered themselves oh-so-brilliant as they talked down to us superstitious fools who would be deceived by our own thoughts and feelings.

I am the first person to say that I don’t trust the thoughts and feelings of the ignorant masses in matters of politics. I certainly don’t believe that my thoughts and feelings are more reliable than the things that a careful scientist can figure out. Unbiased expertise is hard to beat. But the emphasis is on the word “unbiased.” Show me a scientist who is seriously asking whether my dream may have been due to an alternate universe or a guardian angel. That’s the scientist whose book I’m looking for.

Evangelicals Who Pretend to Be Philosophers

In another post, I described the exotic experience of reading books like Francis Schaeffer’s True Spirituality and believing that this Christian minister had found the core truths in the works of great Western philosophers, and that those truths all pointed toward Jesus, but the philosophers were not smart enough to understand that. Such materials gave me the gratifying feeling that in philosophy, as in everything else, we Christians had the inside track. Our redeemed intellects enabled us to understand truths that the deluded, sin-corrupted minds of secular scholars would never comprehend.

An alternate interpretation is that sin had nothing to do with it — that Schaeffer wasn’t a philosopher, and didn’t know what he was talking about, but that he would always have an audience of people like me, who weren’t philosophers either, but who enjoyed the conceit that we had superior insight into what was true and important. I’m a little critical of that sort of thing, nowadays, because such pretenses can grossly misdirect the lives of young adults who need actual truthseeking rather than a self-gratifying religious pretense.

This topic arises due to an American Conservative review by Jordan Alexander Hill (2021). That review describes Hill as “an independent journalist based in Massachusetts.” A link in that bit of biography leads to a Western Canon Podcast webpage that says “Hill has a B.A. in Philosophy and also one in English Literature. Since earning his Master’s in Education, he has worked full time as an English and Philosophy teacher.” The blurb does not say which school(s) awarded these degrees.

It would be surprising if a young man (as Hill appears to be) — one who seems to have distributed his energies across the multiple fields of English literature, education, journalism, and perhaps others — had somehow found the time to master the western philosophical literature, sufficient to explain why we are in a “present philosophical crisis” that originated in “the ideas of Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.” Hill does pose as someone with the philosophical chops to determine whether the book he is reviewing “suffers from any flaw.” But his writing merely parrots what he liked in that book, without any sign that he has any serious grasp of its subject matter.

The book in question is Trueman’s (2020) Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. A person oriented toward truthseeking would surely not be so naive as to assume that this book, or any other, must be simply and perfectly correct. If education is to teach us anything, surely it must teach us that no book, including even the Bible, is ever a final answer — that any book of substance will inevitably inspire discussion, disagreement, perhaps even murder. It would be sad if Hill’s education taught him that his mission, in reviewing a book, must be simply to translate its divine enlightment into terms that the less gifted will be able to swallow without question — without asking themselves, for instance, whether the suggested message is consistent with the gospel of Christ.

On that level, Hill’s review disappoints. There is not so much as a whisper of critical thought in its entire length — no sign that Hill, himself, was able to question any part of its message. In his words,

If The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self suffers from any flaw—I strain to find a glaring one—it is its relative inaccessibility. Though well-edited, it does not seem to have been written with a mass audience in mind.

If one sought to assist Hill with the task of writing a competent review for publication in a national magazine, one might ask whether other comparably educated and intelligent readers have perhaps reached impressions that differ from one’s own. In place of Hill’s eagerness to explain how everyone else is wrong, one might try to learn something from such dissenting views.

In that pursuit, one might come to sympathize with the problem that Hill would have faced, had he done that. It seems that real philosophers, who actually know something about Rousseau, Nietzsche, et al., are not bothering to read this sort of material. One could claim that this is because they are willfully avoiding God’s truth. That would be an argument worth making. One would need to back it up with a solid review of literature, so as to rule out the more likely explanation: the experts don’t read books like Trueman’s because it is amateurish guff — because it makes assumptions or relies on arguments that were thoroughly eviscerated fifty, a hundred, two hundred years ago.

My own brief search for critical commentary on this book didn’t turn up much. In my Google search, I encountered the puzzling phenomenon in which Google promises several thousand hits, and yet actually delivers only a few pages’ worth. There, and at least in the early pages at DuckDuckGo, what I got appeared, overwhelmingly, to be material like Hill’s, in which allegedly Christian writers celebrate the book’s support for what they want to believe, rather than try to find out whether it makes sense or serves a constructive purpose.

As an exception to that tendency, I appreciated Kleiser’s (2020) suggestion, in Christianity Today, that Trueman’s book did seem to have some logical problems:

So, it could be that Wordsworth owes more to Rousseau than to these earlier poets, but the lack of a clear causal connection blunts Trueman’s dramatic claim that “Wordsworth stands near the head of a path that leads to Hugh Hefner and Kim Kardashian.” A similar lack of causal explanation blunts the force of other conclusions that Trueman makes throughout the book.

Kleiser goes on to suggest that Trueman’s book will be “indispensable” for purposes of understanding contemporary social upheaval — that its core message “should help guide the church’s response to the sexual revolution.” On that, I’ve got news. If your church is only now starting to figure out how to respond to a sexual revolution that began nearly 60 years ago, you’ve got bigger problems than any book review can tackle.

In the interests of moving a little closer to real time, it would be advisable to minimize the talking to oneself and the preaching to the choir, so as to attend instead to the question of what people of differing views are thinking and experiencing, and how they got there. I understand that a philosopher like Nietzsche can seem threatening because his beliefs do not comport with one’s own. But being afraid of that is an implicit acknowledgement that he might be right, and that we are going to refuse to admit it. That would not be truthseeking.

In my brief search, among the few reviews that did not seem to be blinded by religious wishful thinking, Publishers Weekly concluded that Trueman’s book “will only appeal to readers who already agree with Trueman.” The gospel as understood by Publishers Weekly seems to be a book-selling affair not concerned with the truth; apparently the main purpose of Trueman’s effort was just to reassure believers that, in the end, they are right.

For a few other heterodox views, consider these excerpts from a three-star review at Goodreads:

As a transgender person, a liberal, and an atheist, I am decidedly outside this book’s target audience, but I decided to read it anyway, in order to broaden my worldview. …

Reading this book made me sad. The Rev. Dr. Trueman is an intelligent, earnest, and moral individual. It’s intelligently written and easy to read (despite what other reviews say). It certainly kept my attention; I finished it in an afternoon. Yet it is very clear from reading it that the Rev. Dr. Trueman believes there can be no reconciliation between my world and his. I’d like to live in peace, he’d like to live in peace. …

I would recommend this book to those outside its target audience who wish to understand the conservative Christian mind of today. I have sympathy for the man and his views, and you might find such too. At the very least, it will be thought-provoking.

Or perhaps this one:

What do we have in this volume? Is it an academic piece, written as an attack on the contemporary cultural narrative? Or perhaps it is a cultural diagnosis for clergy looking to better understand their surrounding culture? Maybe a little reader on post-modern philosophy, queer-theory, and ethics? Somehow Trueman, the wonderfully intelligent man that he is, has managed to make this book simultaneously all of the above and none of the above. That is to say, the author’s confusion concerning his audience left me asking myself: “So what? I grant all your points, but what are we to do about it?”. The marvelous historiography of this book, without helpful application, makes it little more than polemic.

Let us not understate the potential for sharper critique, however, as expressed in this one-star Goodreads review:

Be warned: the blurb both here and on Amazon is 100% misleading. This is a fundamentalist conservative polemic very very thinly disguised as cultural history. Trueman recycles every anti-LGBTQ (along with a few racist and sexist classics just for good measure) straw man argument of the past forty years: gay men are pedophiles; legalization of gay marriage will lead to the legalization of incest (and pedophilia); women are too emotional to be trusted with decisions about their own bodies; black people don’t know their own best interests.

This is poorly written, ahistorical nonsense. Avoid.

The point is not that these perspectives are right. It is that Hill’s review seems unaware that they even exist. This leaves us with a remarkable irony. Hill says that, according to Trueman, Rousseau got us started down the path of prioritizing “how the individual feels inside” over the expectations of culture and society. And yet here we have Hill prioritizing his own “personal, psychological conviction” over society’s expectation that he should try to explain himself and make sense. He seems to feel exempt from that. Hill faintly ridicules what he describes as the belief that “Society itself must conform to me” — and yet he is, himself, an example of that thinking. To him, society is wrong, wrong, wrong: it is supposed to conform itself to him.

My real beef, here, is not with Hill personally. I doubt I had ever even seen any of his writing before; I really have no idea who he is. He is not a bad writer, and (depending on what they taught in his English and philosophy classes) it may not even be his fault that he wound up with this notion of what a book review should do.

I am concerned, rather, that an outlet like The American Conservative, with its professions of concern for quality education, should publish something so avoidant of critical thought. The message seems to be that saying what people want to hear is more important than insisting on the truth. For a periodical whose readers tend to dislike political correctness, that is unfortunate. Surely there are conservative writers who are capable of writing a competent book review, one that uses the book in question as a starting point toward further learning, not as a catechism that everybody should internalize without a second thought.

Maybe We Need Religion to Have a Society That’s Safe from Religion

In this blog, I have been sympathetic to but also critical of conservative as well as liberal Christian belief. Lately, however, I have become attuned to the possibility that conservative Christianity, especially, may have played an important role in freeing us from religious control.

I am concerned, in particular, that today’s younger generations may not understand what evil is, precisely because they are no longer raised with a personal understanding of the potential harms of religious or other anti-rational belief. Maybe they’ve had it too easy, intellectually speaking; maybe they are taking too much for granted.

This concern arises in, for example, this quote from New Discourses (Jones, 2020):

The woke have a messianic complex, a … goal to remake society, and view anyone who is opposed to their project not as simply having a different worldview, but as evil.

“Woke” refers, of course, to a belief that one has become truly aware of social injustice, and is now entitled to preach to others who lack such awareness (see Wikipedia). Preaching seems to lead naturally to accusations of “evil”: that is a word from religion. As the quote says, this quasi-religious belief isn’t focused on what makes sense; it only cares about enforcing its own orthodoxy.

We in older generations had the benefit of knowing something about the history of Christianity. We knew that the Middle Ages consisted of seemingly endless centuries of horrors, committed by the supposedly righteous Christians against the supposedly evil nonbelievers.

Here’s a quote from my blog post, reviewing a bit of that history:

It was heretical to eat meat on Friday, to read the bible, to know Greek, to criticise a cleric, to refuse to pay Church taxes, or to deny that money lending was sinful. … Franciscan spirituals were burned at the stake for such behaviour as claiming that Christ and the apostles had not owned property, preaching absolute poverty, wearing traditional hoods and habits and refusing to lay up stores of food. The Apostolicals, a sect founded in 1300, tried to live like the apostles. The luckier ones were burned at the stake like the sect’s founder, but others suffered worse fates. Dulcino of Novara, the successor to the founder, was publicly torn to pieces with hooks, as was his wife. … Cecco d’Ascoli, an Italian scientist, was burned at the stake in 1327 for having calculated the date of Jesus’ birth using the stars. . . . Heresy still covered everything from refusing to take oaths to refusal to pay church tithes. Any deviation from Church norms was enough to merit death: vegetarianism, the rejection of infant baptism, even holding the (previously orthodox) view that people should be given both bread and wine at Mass.

You can read that post in full if you want more. The history was unbelievable. And it just went on. Take the age of the United States and multiply it by five: that’s how long it continued. Once people latched onto the idea that they could be good just by believing something, they couldn’t let it go.

Somehow, the word “evil” has come back into fashion. And it occurs to me that possibly this is because young people are so much less likely, now, to have any deep personal familiarity with organized religion. Maybe we have had these last several centuries of increasing freedom from the insanity of religion precisely because we still had some cultural memory of what religion was.

You’d think people would be able to look at, say, violent Islamism, and grasp the importance of using science and reason to keep oneself safe from mindlessly destructive religious tendencies. But maybe that, too, is the thinking of my generation. Maybe that’s how you’d react if you were raised with some firsthand exposure to religious craziness. Maybe, when the destructive religion belongs to a culture that you have no personal investment in, it’s easier to downplay or disregard.

In 1971, we could listen to Jethro Tull, with lyrics like these:

If Jesus saves, well he better save himself
From the gory glory seekers who use his name in death
Oh Jesus save me

and we could feel that this was radical, outspoken, standing for something, against the hypocrisy of the older generations. But for young people who don’t have much personal exposure to what Christianity has made of Jesus, this could be like the Islamism thing. Saying stuff about Jesus nowadays may seem rather faraway and unimportant.

In 1971, only 4% of the U.S. population considered itself to have no religious preference. In 2019, that figure was 21% (Gallup). The percentages are similar on up the line, at all levels of religiosity. You’re much less likely to find intensely religious people now than you were then. Back then, Jesus freaks were controversial; now they would be more like a joke.

My question is whether maybe it has now become self-destructive to criticize good old-fashioned Christianity for its dishonesty. Maybe, if we don’t want quasi-religious people preaching a woke gospel and considering us evil for not sharing their delusion, we should consider preserving old-fashioned Christianity as an established part of legitimate American culture, so that we will always have that reminder of what can happen when you allow people to think in terms of religion rather than science or common sense.

It seems, on this day after Christmas, that maybe we should make sure our kids are always able to find value in the Charlie Brown Christmas story. When it ceases to play on a shared TV network on Christmas Eve, we may really be in trouble.