Do We Just See What We Want to See?

pic source

Last year I started this blog to read the Bible and find out what is in it for myself. My motivation from the beginning was that I would often hear atheists claim that the bible is full of really terrible things and Christians would always claim that it was full of really wonderful things. Both sides seem to think that if you read the Bible you would come around to their way of thinking. A very curious situation indeed. Before I started I figured there were a couple possibilities for what I would find.

1. The Atheists were completely right, the bible is full of horrible things, God is a jerk, Jesus is overrated, and while there are a few good verses here and there, they are vastly outnumbered by bad verses
2. The Christians were completely right, the bible is full of good things. Sure, there are a few passages that look bad in isolation, but when taken as a whole even those passages make sense coming from a loving God
3. The truth lies between both of these extremes. There are enough passages on both sides of the ledger that each group can pay attention to stuff that fits their point of view and ignore things that don't. 

When I started this, I assumed that 3 would be reality. The interesting part would be to discover how much it leans towards either option 1 or 2. I think it is important to be as fair as possible, to count both the good and bad equally. In fact, given my bias I think it is important to push things in the opposite direction a bit, try to highlight any little bit of good I come across, and dispense with the nitpicky bad things (or at least admit they are nitpicky). I think I succeed pretty well in this matter most of the time, I really try to highlight good aspects of the reading, the Christian commentaries have definitely helped me on that account a few times.

Nevertheless, after reading all of the New Testament and Genesis all I see is number 1. There are terrible things everywhere and there's not that much good stuff. What's more, the good stuff is usually mixed up with an equal portion of bad (take the sermon on the mount for example). It's hard to me to imagine someone sitting down and reading this book and thinking it came from a loving God, and yet they do. I used to think that Christians must just not read the thing, but I come across people all the time who do read it. People say they have read it cover to cover X number of times in their life. I will occasionally see someone post the challenge to read the whole bible in 90 days and chart their progress. 

What the hell is going on here? How can we both read the same book and have such a different impression of it? Is it not as bad as I think and not as good as they think? I think I can make a pretty compelling argument that there is a ton of horrible things in the bible, but am I also missing a bunch of good stuff? Honestly, I don't think so. I think there are many stories that I count as bad and they count as good. Look at when God commanded Abraham to kill Isaac for example. I read that story and I'm horrified at what I see, obviously both the God character and the Abraham character here are terrible. And yet Christians will almost universally describe this as a good story because Abraham is obedient. They want the bible to be a good book, and so they twist their perception to make it good even when it is plainly not. They are seeing what they want to see.

Now the question is, am I doing the same thing from the other side? Am I looking for the bible to be a piece of shit and that is what I'm finding? I feel like I try to be as fair as possible and highlight the positive as well as the negative. I really try not to be bias, but it's pretty hard to explain the disconnect without it. Is it really reasonable for me to think they are taking a book that is THAT terrible and twisting their perception to see it as good, or am I also twisting my perception to make it worse than it is? While I think it is important for me to be self-reflective and consider my own bias here, looking at a few examples such as the Abraham and Isaac story it really does seem that I'm on solid ground. In that story there's no middle ground to be reached. God is a horrible character and so is Abraham. The question then becomes whether that story is typical of the bible or an extreme example.

Highlights Around the Web

These are some interesting things I heard or read this week.

This was from the Adam Carolla podcast with Adam Bornstein and John Romaniello. I'm not sure which one of them was talking so I left them both in the picture. Also, he said he was quoting Alan Cosgrove, I don't know who that is, but I apparently agree with at least one thing he has said. (It was at about 1 hour 11 minutes in the show)

This one is from a blog I found recently I am an atheist and this is why. Simple and to the point. I love it!

This was also from a blog I found recently God is a myth! The post was talking about how how the religious will often say that the bible leads people to the truth, but then asks the question of why there are so many denominations.

(Note: I'm assuming that since I saw these quotes in a public forum and linked back to the source they are pretty much fair game. If I quoted something you said and would like me to take it down just let me know)

Why Do We Keep Repeating Ourselves?

XKCD

Most importantly was the hover-over text

Saying 'what kind of idiot doesn't know about the Yellowstone supervolcano' is so much more boring that telling someone about the Yellowstone supervolcano for the first time

I've only been blogging about religion for a little over a year, and I already feel like I've seen everything. I've seen every apologetic and argued for why they fail, I've looked into why many religious people don't believe in evolution, I've posted about direct arguments against religion and answered the religious people's criticism of these arguments, and I've talked about a whole host of related things. Any atheist blogger who has been blogging for any reasonable period of time will be in the same position. It's easy to get into the mindset of "I've said this all before, everyone should know this, why am I repeating myself?" But I think this is a bad state of mind to get stuck in. You never know if someone reading your post on the Euthyphro dilemma is seeing it for the first time.

I do believe that most of my readers are other atheists, but you never know who is reading. I like to try to imagine I am writing to myself when I was a Christian. This could be either when I was fully buying into everything, or when I was asking questions and looking for answers. If the internet had been as pervasive as it is now when I was going through this process, I could totally imagine myself looking for answers on the internet. I see search terms hitting my blog all the time that could easily be people in this position. Whenever I have trouble with motivation, I focus on writing to them.

Guest Post: Communication Breakdown

As I mentioned yesterday, I am out of town for a few days and a few blogger friends of mine have agreed to write some guest posts for me to fill in the gaps. Today's post comes from TWF of The Wise Fool and Speaking in Foolish Tongues. He has many great insights, much of which center around the bible. I would say if you like what I write here you would most likely enjoy his writing as well, go check his stuff out if you haven't yet. Now on to today's post: Communication Breakdown (pic added by me found here)

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I work in an industry were people get killed, and multimillion dollar pieces of equipment get turned into scrap metal faster than you can tie your shoes.  That's not the way it's supposed to be.  I'm not in the military, after all!  In fact, like many others, my industry spends millions in training each year to help prevent these catastrophes.

Training? Yeah, training.  A very significant portion of these disasters are the result of human error, and a hefty chunk of those are due to communication mistakes.

When you have a conversation, you are constantly translating, even when you are speaking your native language, because your precise definition of "is" may not match my definition of "is," and visa-versa.  Even when you think that you understand someone, the truth is that you only have an impression of what they have tried to tell you, and that may or may not be accurate.

So in my industry, we've implemented various Human Performance Tools to help mitigate these issues.  One of the best is 3-way communication.  Calm down.  It's not that kind of a 3-way.  ;-)

The principle is dirt simple, and incredibly effective.  It goes like this:

You say: "Bob, I want you to go turn on switch 1A."
Bob then replies "Surely you want me to go over to switch 1A and turn it on."
You then reply "Yes, I want you to go turn on switch 1A.  And don't call me Shirley."

OK, it doesn't go exactly like that.  I couldn't resist throwing in the classic Airplane surely/Shirley joke.  ;-)  But you get the idea.  You say something.  The person hearing repeats it in their own words, verifying that they have understood it.  You say it one more time again to verify that verification.  That simple step saves a lot of miscommunication, and a lot of lives.  And that brings us back to the Bible...

In the realm of religion, not only are lives on the line, but the eternal fate of souls are on the line as well.  It's pretty damn important to get the message out there correctly, and in a fashion which is easily understood.  Verses like Luke 9:45 and John 8:27 make it obvious that Jesus was pretty hard to understand at times.  Not only that, but a legacy of hundreds, if not thousands of Christian denominations have spawned over differences in interpretation.  Those differences arise mostly because things are not well defined and clearly communicated, which again leaves us interpreting our own particular meanings.
While this is squarely in the space of circumstantial evidence, I think that the lack of clear communication in the Bible is just one more reason to consider it to be the false workings of man.  Unless, of course, God is not really interested in saving everyone, as some of Hausdorff's posts have illustrated.  :-)

In case you are interested to know more about Human Performance Tools, I found this great summary of many of the common tools used in hazardous industries at the TVA website.

One Verse Test

I'm in the midst of doing my review posts for the new testament. My original plan was to simply do those every day, but it turns out they take a long time to write and I need a little breathing room, so today I want to  quickly talk about something that came up in the comments of my recent post about women. TWF mentioned something he calls the one verse test, basically, if you are making an argument that a particular position is supported biblically, find the verse that supports your position the most and remove it from the discussion. If you can still support your argument biblically then great, but if your argument falls apart then this shows how weak it really is.

Things that seem to be important to the authors of the bible are said over and over. A great example of this is that the apocalypse is right around the corner, I found 17 different verses that forward this idea so this argument is quite strong. On the other hand, I have only found one verse (Luke 20:35) that supports the idea that married people are not eligible for resurrection, so my case for this argument is much weaker.

A nice thing about this idea is that if you only have one verse supporting your argument, you are very vulnerable to translation issues, or even things being manipulated (either intentionally or accidentally) by the early church. And there is even the possibility that you are simply misreading something or misunderstanding what is really written in the book. But the more verses you have supporting the argument, the less chance there is for these types of mistakes. It's much more likely that there was such an error in one verse compared to 17 separate verses.

Literal Versus Figurative

I recently started reading Revelation, and there was a discussion in the comments section about whether things in this book should be taken literally or figuratively. My original position was to assume everything is supposed to be literal unless there is a pretty explicit reason to think it is intended to be figurative. For example, many times when Jesus would tell a story, he would say it was a parable, which means we are not supposed to think it really happened. Without some explicit indication that a particular passage is intended to be taken figuratively, I would think the natural conclusion would be that it should be taken literally.

dsholland challenged my interpretation of the first book in revelation and relayed a story about a time him and a friend were not confused about the figurative nature of a drawing he had done. I argued that the situation is different because he wasn't trying to forward the idea that it was literal, while the bible is. TWF then argued that there are some pretty heavy metaphors in the bible and he thinks that most of Revelation is supposed to be metaphor. When I asked him how he determines it to be metaphor, he said that is a very hard question. Since it is communication via text it can be hard to figure these things out sometimes, but it is dangerous to start off with the assumption that things are either always literal or always metaphor. The best thing to do is to get a feel for the text and then take it on a case by case basis. I'd like to quote a paragraph of his

We use figures of speech, similes, and metaphor all the time in our speech today, and most of the time we understand the meaning because we've learned the cultural groundings for those phrases. But looking back on the Bible, so far removed from that era, is extra challenging to parse correctly. There are at least a handful of phrases in the original Hebrew text which even the Jews today do not really understand the meaning of.

He makes a really good point, it is very difficult to figure out the intent of the original author. It is probably too hasty of me to assume that everything is literal unless explicitly said otherwise, and yet part of me still wants to hold on to this. Perhaps it is because I was raised in a fundamentalist church, and to them we were always supposed to take the bible literally. Perhaps it is because this is an excuse I see some Christians make when things seem to be going against them. Don't like the way a bible verse sounds? Must be figurative. This is an annoying tactic, especially when abused by some Christians. However, even if they don't have a good reason to declare something figurative, even if they are simply declaring a verse to be figurative as a defense mechanism, it doesn't necessarily mean they are wrong. For me to claim that everything must be literal as a preemptive strike against such tactics is also crap.

So where does that leave me? I think the only reasonable course forward is to try to always consider literal and figurative interpretations. On one hand, I'm interested in what lessons people could get from reading the bible, and I know there are people in the world who interpret passages both literally and figuratively. I would like to consider what both groups could potentially get out of the reading. I am also interested in what the original authors actually intended by their writing, and as TWF pointed out, this is not always easy to figure out.

Understanding the text on a literal level is easy, I think I can do that without any problem. Understanding the symbolism is not going to come so naturally to me. I'll do my best, but I will mostly rely on the Christian commentaries I read, and on my readers to catch anything I miss. Let me know if you ever catch me being to literal, and I promise to do a better job at considering the alternate interpretations in the future.

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[Later addition to this post] In defense of my insistence to at least consider the literal interpretation of every passage, people make pretty crazy sounding claims all the time. Consider people who think they have been abducted by aliens. They will tell you detailed stories about what they saw and what happened to them while they were on the alien ship. Someone reading their account later might think it is so crazy they must not have meant it literally, but they would be wrong to assume that. How do I know that John is not the alien abductee of his day?

James 1

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As usual, when I start a new book I like to check out the wikipedia page. I looks like this is a letter written by James, although I didn't see anything about who he was writing it for. It says that "[James] consists largely of moral exhortations and precepts of a traditional and eclectic nature." so perhaps it is intended as a letter for a general audience. Hopefully this means there will be plenty of material that will be of interest for me if it focuses on morals. Apparently our earliest copies are from mid to late 3rd century, although it is attributed to James the Just who died in 62 or 69. I'm not really sure how that works out, I guess the early copies were lost?

Greeting (v. 1)

Apparently I was right, James is writing "To the twelve tribes in the Dispersion", I guess it is just written for all.

Testing of Your Faith (v. 2-18)

You should be happy when you face trials, when you stand up to tests of your faith you become more steadfast, and letting this steadfastness have its full effect makes you perfect and complete.

This idea I find interesting, because I find grains of truth in it, but it's all mixed up with stuff I don't like, and the conclusion is pushed way too far. We'll start with the idea that you should be happy to face trials. I was arguing recently that we should accept challenges to our ideas because it is a chance for growth. We can find out if we are wrong and improve our positions, or we can be more confident in our previous position if our ideas hold up and have one more piece of evidence that are are indeed correct. This sounds like I am saying the same thing, we become more steadfast, but what I'm talking about isn't the same as what is written here. I'm talking about becoming more steadfast by employing error correction. Without the option to change your opinion if you are proven wrong this whole thing is worthless. The verse is about faith, it is about standing up to a challenge and never moving an inch. This is a very bad thing, this is the basis that people use to deny evolution or climate change given the ridiculous amount of evidence that we have at this point. Furthermore, I mention that we improve through these trials, which is similar to what is written here, except it says you become perfect. There is really no ideal, there's no end to the pursuit of knowledge. There is no room to improve yourself if you think you are already perfect. This is similar to something good, but it is poison, it is the evil twin of a good message.

If you lack wisdom, ask God and he will give it to you. But you must ask in faith without doubt. If you doubt you should expect to get nothing from the Lord, as you are double-minded and unstable.

So basically, if you ask God for wisdom and you don't get it, then it is your fault. Also, when it says that doubts are not allowed, it is basically saying that skepticism is bad.

Don't blame God when you are tempted, for God cannot be tempted by evil and God tempts no one. You are tempted by your own desires, which grow into sin and then death.

Reading this, I just knew it had to be bullshit. I generally try not to read SAB while doing my blog, but this time it seemed like a perfect time to use it. With it's help, I discovered that God can indeed be tempted, and God does indeed tempt people. 

Everything good comes from God.

Well that's a nice blanket statement. I love that God gets credit for everything good and washes his hands of everything bad. If he created everything and set up the rules for everything, shouldn't he have to take credit for the good and the bad?

I didn't really have time to do my normal inspection of christian commentaries today, but I did glance really quick through Guzik's (if anyone is wondering why I use his so much, they are generally pretty good, and the format is excellent for scanning for specific items) and he seems to have accepted the things I have complained about hook line and sinker.

Hearing and Doing the Word (v. 19-26)

You should be quick to hear, slow to speak and slow to anger.

Now that's good stuff! We should not only listen to the words other people say, but really hear it. Being slow to speak suggests we should truly listen and understand, instead of waiting for the other person to stop talking so we can start talking. And of course being slow to anger is great as well. Patience is a great virtue, and that is really what we are talking about here.


For the overview post (If you think I should add or remove stuff from this list please let me know, I think it would make good conversation)

Good:

1:19 Be a good listener and be slow to anger

"Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger;"

Bad:

1:6 Skepticism is bad

"But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind."

1:13,17 God takes credit for good and distances himself from bad

"Let no one say when he is tempted, "I am being tempted by God," for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one."

"Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change."