I haven't died since my last post.

In August.

Of last year.

Nor was I raptured in October.  Harold Camping was wrong again.

I have, however, been a victim of a busy schedule and probably some degree of overall burnout.

Anyway, new year - new goals, which include more writing, less me (and possibly a new bike...), and a few other things that are long overdue.

Let's start with the first.

For Christmas, I found myself the owner of a new Kindle Fire.  I fully accept that the Fire is, out of the box, basically an Amazon Vending Machine.  I'm good with that.  It's got potential, and I like the form factor better than the iPad.

I'd gotten my mom the DVDs of the Swedish versions of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who Played with Fire, and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.  I'd watched them last year, and Mom had been reading the books, so we ended up more or less swapping.  (NB - I haven't seen the new American version of the first film, so any comparisons I make between the books and the films will refer to the Swedish productions.)

What I'd like to do here is capture some of my thoughts on the series without spoiling too many important plot points.  Thus this won't be a full-on review but rather some loosely connected thoughts and observations.  Bear with me while I try to re-engage the writing cogs.

I suspect that most people are familiar with the basic outline of the books - Swedish investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist finds himself drawn into an increasingly complex web of conspiracies when he's asked to help investigate a decades-old mystery and makes the acquaintance of hacker Lisbeth Salander and her aforementioned tattoo.

The first thing to note is that the original Swedish title of the book - Män som hatar kvinno - translates as Men Who Hate Women.  That proves to be the thread that ties the entire series together, and indeed the thread that has defined most of Salander's life.

(Larsson witnessed a rape when he was young, and never forgave himself for failing to help the victim.  The theme of the trilogy is derived from that event.)

In telling Salander's story of victimization - initially at the hands of her father and later at the hands of nearly every authority figure she encounters - Larsson also addresses issues of gender inequality in the workplace, in government, and in the perceptions of the population as a whole.

Lisbeth's brilliant intellect and single-minded thirst for revenge is set against her tiny, doll-like physique.  Her refusal to conform to social norms is used in the second and third books to attack her in the press and in the courtroom.¹

Annika, Blomkvist's sister (later Salander's lawyer) draws on similarities between her youthful behavior and Lisbeth's to point out the double standards at work. Erika Berger, Blomkvist's married lover (and a very shrewd businesswoman) finds herself under attack because of her sexual habits. Female police inspectors in the story are looked down on by their male counterparts.

An interesting thing to notice is that Blomkvist (in the books - they leave out most of this in the movies) is portrayed as quite the player.  During the course of the books, Blomkvist carries on extended affairs with:

• Erika Berger - his married lover who he has been with off and on for 20 year or so.
• Cecilia Vanger - a woman who he investigates in connection with a decades-old possible murder.
• Lisbeth Salander - who seduces him during the investigation of the Vanger case, and with whom he has a fairly lengthy relationship.
• Harriet Vanger - Cecilia's long-lost cousin.
• Monica Figuerola - a special police investigator helping to work out the conspiracy surrounding Salander's father.

I'm not sure if Blomkvist is written this way in order to serve as an example within the story of a man who can relate to women as equals, or if he's written as a typical Swedish male and I'm simply trying to view Swedish attitudes about sex through an American lens, or if there's something else going on.  The end result is that Blomkvist is clearly not a white-hat good guy, but is instead somewhat ethically suspect.  Ordinarily, I tend to like characters with some moral ambiguity, since it makes them more interesting, but I've got an issue with this sort of thing.²

There are a few other interesting characters spread across the books.  One of the most interesting, in my opinion, is Alexander Zalachenko.  Zalachenko, a Russian assassin who defects to Sweden in the 1970's, is Lisbeth's father.  The Swedish authorities recognize the value of the information Zalachenko can provide, and consequently give him a long leash, turning a blind eye to his violent habits and criminal endeavors.  After the fall of the Soviet Union, Zalachenko's value diminishes, but it's far too late to rein him in.  His activities form the nucleus of the conspiracies against Salander, but it's clear that the Swedish authorities who cleaned up after him and failed to control him are at least as culpable as he is.  What makes him interesting is that he's not just evil for the sake of being evil.  His actions seem consistent within the limits of his own self-interest.  He's aware enough to manipulate others into doing what he needs to be done, he thinks through the consequences of his actions, and he needs a motivation to do things beyond simply causing problems for a hero to solve.³

Overall, I enjoyed the books.  Having already seen the movies, I knew generally what to expect, but there was enough new and expanded material to keep me interested, especially the more detailed insight into Lisbeth's character.  The nuggets of Swedish political history that are sprinkled through the books give them some grounding in actual events, which is a nice touch.  Parts can be difficult to read - the assault on Salander in the first book, and some of the graphic descriptions of crimes throughout leave little to the imagination - but such scenes are important to advancing the plot.

As a set of interconnected mysteries, the books work very well, and I highly recommend them on the strength of that alone.  If you happen to find topics of social justice and the treatment of women in different layers of society are more your thing, you'll find a good helping of those in here, too.

-Jay
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¹In some ways reminiscent of the way women like Monica Lewinsky and Casey Anthony have been portrayed in the media. Guilt or innocence often seems secondary to digging up lurid personal details.

²I suppose it's worth mentioning that all of Blomkvist's liasons are consensual, and none of his partners have an expectation of long-term monogamy. Nevertheless, his characterization reminds me a bit too much of people who I know who think with their penises.

³Writing convincing villains is hard.  Too often you end up with a 2-dimensional character that exists solely for the purpose of doing bad things.  Like Darth Vader.  He was nothing but a glorified errand boy.  When George Lucas tried to give Vader some depth in the prequel trilogy, all he really succeeded in doing was establishing that Vader was a whiny, arrogant errand boy.  Or consider the typical characterization of the devil, who seems to turn up for no reason other than to function as an agent of evil.  That's a topic for another day.

So it looks like the Montreal authorities are finally taking Dennis Markuze, AKA David Mabus, seriously enough to act.  (Thanks, Greg Laden.)

Markuze has spent the last several years spamming the inboxes and comment threads of various and sundry scientists and bloggers.  He tends to target skeptical, scientific, and atheist folks, although he's not above assuming guilt by association and firing off some of his well-written and insightful prose verbal effluvia to anyone he finds interacting with his usual targets.

A typical Mabus missive might contain death threats, links to sites he thinks are somehow relevant, healthy doses of vulgarity and profanity, and possibly some random sprinkles of batshit crazy raving.  He generally confines himself to cyber-threats, but on at least one occasion he's turned up at a skeptical conference in person.  There's quite a bit of concern that he might eventually act on one of his threats.

One of his more >ahem< interesting threats was that he was going to crawl out of the TV and kill my associate Skippy, rather like the evil ghost girl from Ringu.

I'd have paid good coin to see David Mabus crawl out of a TV...

As it is, that didn't happen.

Mabus is often characterized as a crazy extreme Christian, but I think it's probably more accurate to say that he's a guy with some serious issues who happens to be a Christian.

I hope that the authorities in Montreal are able to build a solid case against DM.  He clearly needs some help before he harms someone.  There should be no shortage of evidence against him, as many folks have forwarded his messages to the police.  (ObDisclosure - my comment and email filters don't let much of his material through.  I kept a couple of emails for a while, but deleted them a while ago.)

I'm sure there will be more news to follow as the folks up north conduct their investigation.

-Jay

'round and 'round we go...

I think this point needs to be more widely understood - it's lost on so many folks.

-Jay

Through some odd coincidence, I've recently had the opportunity to be on both sides of the offended/not offended table.

a couple of weeks back, I rented a copy of a movie that's likely to become a cult favorite - Hobo with a Shotgun.

I'd initially planned to write a review of it, figuring that Rutger Hauer as a shotgun-wielding hobo trying to clean up a corrupt town might be good for some Badgering.

The first, I don't know, 20 minutes were pretty well what I expected.  Then it brought in some elements that seemed maybe a bit over the top, and ultimately went down some paths that I found to be grossly unnecessary and just vile.¹

While I ultimately did finish Hobo, it came very close to earning a place on my list of Films That I Couldn't Force Myself To Sit Through.  That list currently has one entry.²

Now, as it happened, fresh off of my encounter with Hobo, there was some mandatory training at work.

We get a lot of mandatory training, including training on avoiding and preventing sexual harassment and sexual assault in the workplace.  I'd been through this training a few weeks back, but some friends in another department were in a later session.  There are some videos that go along with the training, and they're fairly graphic in content and language.

My session showed one of the three.  The other two were "suggested", which I interpreted as meaning "optional", so I took the "don't watch them" option.

My friends saw a different one in their session, and chose to watch the others at their desks.

Now, the video they saw in their session was, according to them, useful and appropriate.  I have no reason to doubt them on that.

The video that they watched at their desks that I didn't see, they both found inappropriately graphic - to the extent that someone watching similar material at work outside of the context of official training could well have been written up for it.  Again, I have no reason to doubt them on that.

The video that all three of us  saw is the interesting one.  When I watched it, I thought that it was somewhat raw and had some crude language in it, but didn't find it unusually shocking.

They did, and they told me about it quite clearly.³

I'm somewhat ashamed to say that my knee-jerk reaction to their concerns was to think "it didn't really bother me much, so it shouldn't bother them."

I hope that didn't come out in my initial response to them, because if it did, I was a complete assclown.

The fact of the matter is that whether I found the video offensive or not is completely immaterial to whether or not they did.  That point took a few minutes to sink in, but part of the reason that it finally did was because my reaction to Hobo was still fresh in my mind.  I don't get to declare my perspective to be the correct one simply because it happens to be mine.

As it turns out, the question of whether or not someone finds a particular video (for example)⁴ offensive isn't even the interesting question.  Why someone finds a particular video offensive is more intriguing because discussion of those reasons offers opportunities for people to learn from one another.

It can be a tricky discussion to have, though, because of the all-too-common view that we have some right to not be offended, and if I dare question your offense, I'm guilty of violating that right.  Such discussions can easily collapse into arguments and personal attacks.

But you have no more right to not be offended than you have a right to drive around in a brand new red Corvette.  Neither do I.  Neither does anyone else.  That doesn't mean that I have a right to go out of my way to offend you just for the sport of it, or that crudeness and vulgarity should be the norm.

I think that deliberate offensiveness can serve a purpose - witness the cigarette warnings used in Canada - because offensive things can stick in your head whereas milder approaches might not.  I also think that it's sometimes a good idea to seek out things that you find offensive and try to understand the other perspective.⁵

Now, the thing that I'm having trouble with is this:  Given that certain things offend me (or you), just how much effort should I put into avoiding those things?  Should I go out of my way to avoid them?  Should I accept that some level of offensiveness is just a part of life and deal with it?  Should I develop a thicker skin?  What's an acceptable daily allowance of offense?

Feedback wanted!

-Jay
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¹It was suggested to me by a colleague that perhaps it was necessary to make the villains in the film extra-reprehensible in order to make a shotgun-toting vigilante vagrant into a more sympathetic character. That's a good point.

²As distinct from the very long list of Films That I Have No Desire To Sit Through Again.  That list includes some excellent films, such as The Exorcist, and some not-so-excellent films, such as anything directed by Uwe Boll.

³If there's one thing I can usually count on these two for, it's brutal honesty.

⁴Or word.  Profanity can be a fun topic to discuss.  Odds are that you use a somewhat different vocabulary when you're by yourself vice with a group of people, and a different vocabulary if you're in a social situation vice a business setting.

⁵Politics and religion tend to be the heavy hitters in this scenario.  Remember that understanding another perspective doesn't obligate you to agree with it.

It didn't take long for my classmates to suggest alternatives.  One of those was Speed Racer, the American dub of the Japanese series Mahha GoGoGo.

My mom objected to shows like this and the old Spider-Man cartoon most vocally on the grounds of the excessive violence, which served only to increase my desire to see them.  Forbidden fruit and all that.

Speed Racer, to my young eyes, was all about the car - the Mach 5.

This was gonna be my first car...

Speed Racer and the Mach 5 might be claimed as a source of inspiration for many vehicle-themed shows that later followed - Knight Rider, for example.

So, a few years back when the Wachowski Brothers, still riding the cachet they'd built with The Matrix¹ and its sequels, got attached to a live-action version of Speed Racer, I was intrigued.

The film tanked at the box office when it was released in 2008, and drew generally negative reviews.  I picked up the DVD about a year ago at Target for the princely sum of $5, but it gathered dust on the shelf until last night, when a combination of insomnia and lack of anything better to do led me to pop open a beer and throw Speed Racer into the player.

I'll say up front that not even reviewing films like Mega Shark Vs. Crocosaurus could have prepared me for the Wachowski Brothers' take on Speed Racer.

Let's begin.

We meet a young Speed Racer in school, unable to concentrate on his work.  Constantly caught up in daydreams about racing, he's considered an outsider by his classmates and a poor student by his teacher.  We come to learn that his father builds race cars, and his brother Rex drives them.  These aren't just any race cars, either.  They're impossibly high-performance machines that race on tracks that look more like fancy Hot-Wheels setups:

Not your father's race track

In Speed Racer's world, physics doesn't seem to have much use.  Cars spin, flip, drift around turns, spring over other cars, and travel at speeds approaching 500 MPH.

Speed's brother, Rex, is a very talented racer, but has a fallout with their father, Pops (a horribly under-utilized John Goodman), and leaves home on a dark and stormy night.

Shortly after, a racing accident kills Rex, who was living under accusations of cheating.  The Racer family is crushed.  Mom (played by Susan Sarandon, who spends most of her scenes looking like she's trying to find an escape from the set) takes Rex's death particularly hard, but provides the emotional glue that holds the family together.  (Ms. Sarandon was given possibly the most well-written dialog in the entire film.  Nevertheless, one must wonder just what sort of leverage the Wachowski's had on her to get her into this thing.)

Speed grows up (portrayed by Emile Hirsch)  to become a fine racer in his own right, and after dramatically winning a local race, is approached by Royalton (Roger Allam) to join his stable of racers.  The Racer family, long an independent racing team, is suspicious of Royalton's offer, but goes with him to visit his headquarters, accompanied by Speed's long-time girlfriend, Trixie² (Christina Ricci).

After the initial visit, Speed and Trixie discuss Royalton's offer and Speed's future.

Trixie and Speed

The Wachowski's aren't subtle.  Anyone who can't figure out that Royalton isn't one of the good guys is either dead or asleep (which, by this point in the film wouldn't be out of the question.)  We can tell because his eyebrows have a sort of villainous arch to them.

All he's missing is a waxed mustache...

Really, they could have made it a little less obvious.  Anyhow, when Speed declines Royalton's offer of indentured servitude employment, Royalton tells Speed that the Racer family name won't even have any cache on a late night infomercial, let alone in the racing world.  (Apparently the sport of auto racing in the reality of Speed Racer is little more than a front for corporate manipulation of stock prices, and the winners of every major race are negotiated beforehand.)

Sure enough, before you know it, things have gone bad for the family.

Enter the mysterious RacEr X and (in what has to be one of the most ridiculous names ever) Inspector Detector of the CIB (or something - it's a group that investigates corruption in the racing business).

Racer X (left, duh.) and Inspector Detector

They have a proposal for Speed - team up with RacEr X and some other driver who we were introduced to a few minutes ago that I didn't bother to mention to win a big road race that will lead the third driver to give up a file he has on corrupt drivers and team owners and put people like Royalton with funky eyebrows out of business.  (You'll note that Inspector Detector is clearly a good guy - nary an arched eyebrow in sight.)

Speed and Trixie decide to accept the offer against the wishes of Speed's parents, and head to the race under cover of a skiing trip.

The bad guys put a bounty on Speed's team, and automotive hijinks ensue as the various drivers deploy whatever dirty tricks they have at their disposal to win.

Some dramatic tension unfolds as the race goes through the same cave that Speed's brother, Rex was killed in - a stretch of road that RacEr X seems unusually familiar with.

Speed and company ultimately prevail and win the race, only to discover that the third driver really didn't have a file on all the corrupt players, and was simply using Speed and RacEr X to win the race and boost his father's stock price.

Disillusioned, Speed heads home, but has finally used his keen senses of observation and logic to almost figure out that RacEr X showed up shortly after Rex's death, and that Rex's body was unrecognizably burned, and that RacEr X drives like Rex and knows Speed's moves!  OMG! RacEr X must BE Rex!

Speed soon confronts the mysterious masked man about it, who removes his hood to prove to Speed that he isn't his brother, but knows that his brother would be proud of the man Speed has become.  (Speed, demonstrating that he's not the sharpest tool in the garage, appears never to have heard of plastic surgery...)

The third driver's sister shows up with an invitation for Speed to participate in the Grand Prix, which is his life's dream.  The family has less than two days to rebuild Speed's car and get to the race, which we know they'll do for no other reason than that this would be a very bizarre way to end the movie.

The Grand Prix race, as presented by the Wachowski's is an eye-scorching, ear-splitting eruption of garish color and noise:

Really, the whole movie looks like this...

Basically, if you've ever played a Mario Kart game, the Grand Prix is Rainbow Road with the volume turned full-up on the TV.  The long and the short of it is that Speed wins, the Racer family regains its lost honor, and the corrupt businessmen like Royalton are exposed for the wretched villainous scum they truly are.

Meh.

This was a very difficult movie to watch for a number of reasons.

First off, the characters were uniformly uninteresting - even the leads.  John Goodman, Susan Sarandon, and Christina Ricci are all talented, but they aren't really given anything to work with here.  Emile Hirsch seemed to be asleep most of the time, even in the "intense" racing scenes, and it went downhill from there.  Even the Mega Shark films have something to their characters that makes them less of a chore to watch.

Second, as the screenshot of the Grand Prix should illustrate, the visual style of the film seemed designed mainly to make the viewer's eyes bleed.  I understand the challenges in making a live-action film from a cartoon.  Trying to keep the original visual style probably won't work, but neither will going with a fully real-world approach.  Nevertheless, the source material for Speed Racer would have allowed a much more realistic approach that might have made the film less exhausting to endure.

Third, the characters were all different from how they "should" have been.  In the cartoon, Speed was more confident, Trixie was less aggressive, Racer X more edgy.  Here, we have a Speed who can't seem to look anyone in the eye, Trixie exuding a smoldering sexuality that seems out-of-place (I think that's really more just Ricci...), and Racer X who never lives up to his potential.  This wasn't Speed Racer so much as something that superficially resembled Speed Racer.

Fourth, and finally, by the end of the film, nothing had really changed.  The family still thinks Rex is dead.  Pops still builds his own cars without any sponsorship.  Speed is still racing, and the racing world, now that its most corrupt players have been rooted out, is the honorable world that Speed and his family believed it to be at the start of the film.

They're all right back where they started, and I'm out five bucks.

-Jay

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¹As visually innovative as that film was at the time, it just doesn't grab me much now for some reason .  And the sequels always seemed unnecessary to me.

²In the original cartoon, it was easy to come to the conclusion that Trixie was Speed's sister, especially if you were watching the show at six or seven years old.  Even when I watched most of the series a few years back, their relationship still seemed fairly low-key.  Christina Ricci, however, brings a more aggressive Trixie to the screen.  It's a PG-rated movie, so she doesn't go overboard with it, but still...

0700 - Woke up.  Not surprising.  Checked news out of Australia, since it's already 2100 in Sydney.  No reports of anything unusual.  Harold Camping's website is taking too long to respond, so Firefox craps out.

0800 - Still here.  News media still hasn't reported anything interesting.  Maybe they're keeping things quiet to head off a panic.  Wondering whether I should bother cutting the grass this evening.  Camping's website still fails to load.  Probably because a bunch of other skeptical yahoos got up before I did and are overloading their servers.  Getting ready to run some errands.

0808 - Heard a loud thump upstairs.  Just the cat jumping off the bathroom counter.  Whew!

0900 - Dropped the elder child off at school for an activity.  The doors we were told would be open were locked, causing momentary concern.  Turns out we needed to go to the other side of the building.

1005 - Camping's site still won't load.  I wonder if he's checking his math yet...

1150 - Rapture or not, I need some lunch. Nobody at Panera seems worried. Harold Camping, are you out there? You need to explain what's (not) going on!

1250 - Surely all of the roadkill possums and raccoons I've seen today are a sign of something...

1501 - As commenter Skippy points out, at least one of Camping's sites is up, but it's conspicuously void of any useful information.   I'm thinking that perhaps there were some misunderstandings about Camping's true message.  Perhaps he wasn't talking about the Rapture at all.  Perhaps he was talking about something else...

Save The Date! The Raptor Returns! May 21, 2011

And honestly, using packs of these critters to cull the wicked would probably make a pretty convincing statement...

1800 - Nothing. Not a bloody thing. Just a bit overcast. And now word is starting to get out that Camping and his organization are gearing up to admit failure, or may have already. That's in contrast to their earlier absolute certainty.

A key lesson here: in the long history of human endeavor, no activity has such a spectacularly consistent record of total failure as end-of-the-world prediction.

Another important lesson: think very carefully before you pin your plans to the speculations and claims of doomsayers like Harold Camping. Ask yourself - is it more likely that he finally got it right, or that he's just using Stupid Math Tricks to support his claims.

-Jay

I wouldn't find this nearly as funny if I hadn't been a nearly fanatical watcher of both Star Trek and The A-Team as a kid, and recently watched the big-screen remake of The A-Team (which was much better than I personally expected...)

-Jay

Harold Camping, circa 2008

Earlier this month, followers of Camping put a couple of billboards similar to this one on the main road I drive to get to work.  This is one of them:

May 21 - It's Getting Close

Camping is a kook.  There's really no more polite way of saying it.  He previously predicted that the end of the world would occur on September 6, 1994, which it clearly didn't.  Camping's excuse,  presumably given on September 7, 1994, was that he'd made a math error.  I suspect he'll have a similar excuse on May 22.

Here, from Wikipedia, is a version of Camping's "proof":

1. According to Camping, the number five equals "atonement", the number ten equals "completeness", and the number seventeen equals "heaven".
2. Christ is said to have hung on the cross on April 1, 33 AD. The time between April 1, 33 AD and April 1, 2011 is 1,978 years.
3. If 1,978 is multiplied by 365.2422 days (the number of days in a solar year, not to be confused with the lunar year), the result is 722,449.
4. The time between April 1 and May 21st is 51 days.
5. 51 added to 722,449 is 722,500.
6. (5 x 10 x 17)² or (atonement x completeness x heaven)² also equals 722,500.

This isn't so much a proof as it is Camping pulling some numbers out of his ass and fiddling with them until he comes up with a date that he thinks fits.  Where did he get the idea that "atonement x completeness x heaven" is the key to anything?  Why square the product of those numbers?  What about the numbers 7 and 12?  You can't swing a dead cat in the Bible and not hit the numbers 7 and 12 somewhere.   Given a little time and creativity, I have no doubt that Camping (or some other enterprising doomsayer) could come up with a superficially interesting "proof" to peg Judgment Day at just about any date they wanted to.  (Really, anyone who tries to extract a hard date for the end of the world out of the Bible is pulling numbers out of thin air.  No human endeavor has such a consistent history of spectacular and invariable failure as Bible-based end-times prediction.  Refer to the books by Johnathan Kirsch and Sharan Newman that I linked to here.)

Some writers have compared Camping to a cult leader, in that he's telling his followers to abandon their existing churches and join his movement.  I can see some validity in the comparison, and in clips of his sermons and radio call-in show, he comes across as very authoritarian and refuses to acknowledge that he might be wrong.  The few comments I've read from his followers suggest that they've bought into his claims completely, and have internalized the view that if they're still here on May 22, it's because they weren't good enough, not because Camping is a batshit-crazy lunatic, and that sort of blind devotion to the leader's pronouncements is a common feature in cults.

What's not clear at all is how those people will respond when they are here on May 22 and nothing magical has happened.  Maybe they'll all re-set and get ready for October 21.  Maybe they'll realize that Camping is just a religiously deluded old man and try to regain something of their previous lives.  Or maybe not.

I sincerely hope they don't do anything rash.

-Jay

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¹Camping predicts Judgment Day for May 21, 2011, and the actual end of the world on October 21, 2011.  Not that the distinction makes Camping's ravings any more credible, but I wanted to point it out in the interest of accuracy.

Ehrman's popular books are usually very accessible, and I expect Forged to be the same.  In broad terms, it looks at issues of authorship and attribution of various books within the Bible.  Many people assume that the traditional attributions are correct, but for many reasons, most modern scholars don't believe that to be the case.

I've seen criticism directed at Ehrman for overstating the significance of the material he presents.  Such criticism often comes from individuals who end up arguing for inerrancy¹ or infallibility.  Typically, though, Ehrman is clear and forthright, and caveats his criticisms appropriately.

Some critics also attempt to paint his work as the fringe research of a disgruntled ex-fundamentalist with an axe to grind, as if he's attempting to justify his shift from fundamentalism to agnosticism by nit-picking the Bible.  Rather than discrediting Ehrman, this approach simply reveals the ignorance of his critics.  The topics that he writes about, far from being Bart's wild ideas about why the Bible isn't God's word are instead distillations of the last century or so of critical Biblical scholarship.  He's not making this stuff up.  He's pulling together a vast amount of information that's already in the literature and putting it out there for non-specialists to discover.

That's important.

It's important because most people who claim to put a lot of value on the Bible have never read it cover to cover.  Or if they have, they tend to read the constituent books in relative isolation from one another.  It's fairly common during a church service or Bible study group to read from the Bible with the desire to figure out what God might be trying to say². If you happen to find yourself in a fairly liberal church, you might be encouraged to consider this question in the context of when the particular part of the Bible you're reading was written.  There are numerous problems with this approach, but one of the biggest is that it masks the fact that the books of the Bible have numerous and often fatal contradictions with one another, and that (far from presenting a unified theology with consistent underlying messages) they present a largely incoherent jumble of orthodoxies that is more reflective of the turmoil and struggle for identity within the early Christian churches than of a transcendent divine message.

Let's consider Paul, both because Paul is arguably the single most important figure in the New Testament behind Jesus and because Ehrman treats Paul at some length in Forged.

There are 13 books in the New Testament that are traditionally ascribed to Paul.  Of these, seven (Romans, Philippians, Galatians, Philemon, 1 & 2 Corinthians, and 1 Thessalonians) are considered by most scholars to be authentic - they were actually written by Paul.  The other six (1 & 2 Timothy, Titus, Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians³) are generally considered to have been written by others - that is to say, they're forgeries⁴ written in the name of Paul.  The reasons for this division are straightforward - the seven works that are considered authentic are consistent in their theology and their structure.  The others aren't.  If we are to consider all 13 to have been written by the same individual, then we have to explain why, in many important respects, Paul can't seem to agree with himself⁵. If you read these books in isolation from one another, it's very easy to miss the fact that they are poles apart on many key issues.  (To be fair, much of the linguistic structure of the Bible gets lost in translation, so people reading the Bible in English can certainly be excused for not being aware of issues in that arena.  However, the theological differences are plain to see for anyone who bothers to read closely.)

There are many reasons why the authors of these works might have written in Paul's name.  But regardless of how they justified their forgeries at the time, we have to deal with the inconsistencies they introduce now - if in one set of letters, Paul claims that males and females are equal, that marriage and sex are bad, and that Jesus is going to return soon and unannounced, and in others "Paul" claims that church leaders should be married, that women should keep quiet and stay pregnant, and that Jesus will only return after lots of signs and observable events happen, clearly both can't be correct.  And since both can't be correct, any statement of faith that tries to claim that the Bible is inerrant is simply wrong before it even gets out of the gate.

And at the heart of it, that's why Ehrman's work is important - he's pointing out why the Bible shouldn't be unquestioningly assumed to be God's Little Instruction Manual.  It's demonstrably not a coherent, clear guide to how the world works, but is rather an often disjoint, contradictory, and internally inconsistent collection of works written to address different needs and situations in times long past.  More importantly, people today are using that collection of works to justify wars, subjugation of women, and demonstrations at the funerals of dead soldiers.  People use that collection to rationalize withholding medical care from their children, to claim that natural disasters are some sort of punishment, and to assert that dinosaur fossils only look ancient because Satan made them look that way⁶.

I suspect the largest part of Ehrman's readership consists of people who have already rejected many of the traditional claims about the Bible.  Some small part probably consists of people who have made an a priori decision that anything that he has to say is wrong, and are merely looking for ways to discredit his conclusions.  But some people will read his material with an open mind and, even though his conclusions might make them uncomfortable, will realize that his points are valid.

That can be a difficult step to take.

-Jay

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¹And inerrancy often gets phrased in terms of "inerrant in the original monographs", which is a useless term.  We don't have the original monographs -the Rylands Papyrus P52, usually dated to around 125 AD, is generally considered the earliest fragment from the New Testament - so the point is moot.  I suspect that such phrasing isn't much more than a tacit acknowledgement that the Bible as we have it now is anything but inerrant...

²There are several crucial presuppositions to this approach, but perhaps the most obvious one is that God could come up with no better way to communicate with mankind than a collection of documents cobbled together a couple of thousand years ago.

³Hebrews has, in the past, been postulated as one of Paul's epistles. Modern scholars are nearly unanimous in rejecting Pauline authorship, though.

⁴I'm adopting Ehrman's use of the word forgery here: the author knowingly claims to be someone else.

⁵Examples include the role of women, the acceptability of marriage and sex, and the nature and timing of Christ's second coming.

⁶During the homily today at the Catholic church I belong to, the priest made a reference to a 4+ billion-year-old Earth.  Such a reference shouldn't have raised an eyebrow, but it did, and he knew it would because he paused as soon as the words left his mouth and looked around to gauge the reaction.

Legislators tried to get a similar bill, SB 142, passed last year - I wrote about that one here and here.

The summary of this year's bill follows:

AN ACT relating to Bible literacy courses in the public schools.
Create a new section of KRS Chapter 156 to require the Kentucky Board of Education to promulgate administrative regulations to establish an elective social studies course on the Hebrew Scriptures, Old Testament of the Bible, the New Testament, or a combination of the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament of the Bible; require that the course provide students knowledge of biblical content, characters, poetry, and narratives that are prerequisites to understanding contemporary society and culture, including literature, art, music, mores, oratory, and public policy; permit students to use various translations of the Bible for the course; amend KRS 158.197 to permit a school council to offer an elective social studies course on the Hebrew Scriptures, Old Testament of the Bible, the New Testament, or a combination of the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament of the Bible.

Compare this to the summary description of SB 142 from 2010:

AN ACT relating to Bible literacy courses in the public schools.
Create a new section of KRS Chapter 156 to require the Kentucky Board of Education to promulgate administrative regulations to establish an elective social studies course on the Hebrew Scriptures, Old Testament of the Bible, the New Testament, or a combination of the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament of the Bible; require that the course provide students knowledge of biblical content, characters, poetry, and narratives that are prerequisites to understanding contemporary society and culture, including literature, art, music, mores, oratory, and public policy; permit students to use various translations of the Bible for the course; amend KRS 158.197 to permit a school council to offer an elective social studies course on the Hebrew Scriptures, Old Testament of the Bible, the New Testament, or a combination of the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament of the Bible.

Jenkies!  It's exactly the same!

Jenkies!

What happens when we get into the bills themselves?  (SB 56, 2011 is here, SB 142, 2010 is here.)

If you compare them side by side, they're identical, apart from the date, bill number, and sponsors.

Consequently, the concerns I had last year about this time still stand.  I'll include them here, and elaborate on some of them (elaborations denoted by bracketed italics).

1. Right out of the gate, there's a problem with defining what we're talking about when we say "The Bible".  Not only are there many different translations (e.g. NRSV, KJV, NIV, The Message), but there are multiple canons - Catholic Bibles have books that Protestant Bibles don't, Eastern Orthodox Bibles have yet a different canon, and the Tanakh has a different structure than the Christian Old Testament.  Additionally, English translation of the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts necessarily introduce subtle changes in meaning which can affect interpretation.  And then there are the issues with textual transmission in general.  [Discussions of the Bible need to acknowledge that there has been a considerable amount of tinkering with the text down through the centuries.  Some of this tinkering was likely by well-meaning individuals who sought to clarify points in the transmitted text.  On the other hand, some of this tinkering was very likely with the intent to advance agendas or favor one orthodoxy over another.  A truly objective course on the Bible would need to acknowledge these issues and not ignore them or gloss over them.]
2. Students of different backgrounds would necessarily bring different assumptions, presuppositions, and theologies to the class.  Teaching around those differences would be difficult, particularly if the teacher isn't knowledgeable about them and skilled at recognizing his or her own biases.   [ A teacher who cannot disengage from his or her own biases and preconceptions will have a very difficult time engaging with opinions and scholarship that disagree with their beliefs.  Do the sponsors of the bill really expect the people teaching these classes to compare the Genesis creation myths with the other creation myths, or to compare the stories of Noah's flood with the Epic of Gilgamesh?]
3. While the bill states that courses must maintain religious neutrality, it's difficult to understand how a course on the Bible can be religiously neutral.  Will there be a section on the Qu'ran?  The Book of Mormon?  The Śruti?  Dianetics? [It also occurs to me that in order to truly maintain religious neutrality, we have to revisit point 1, above.  Because the proposed legislation does not require a specific version of the Bible to be used in class, there will be different versions in play.  The Biblical influence on some issues is different depending on which translation one uses.  For example, translating a word as "kill" vice "murder" is significant.]
4. Specifically, what "knowledge of biblical content, characters, poetry, and narratives"  are prerequisites "to understanding contemporary society and culture, including literature, art, music, mores, oratory, and public policy"?  This looks suspiciously like code for a broad conservative Christian agenda, and not a non-sectarian discussion of the Bible's influence on modern society.  There are other, arguably more fundamental, "prerequisites" to understanding modern arts, culture, and policy besides the Bible, including ancient Greek literature, politics and mythology, the works of Shakespeare, and human sexuality.  [Further, the Bible (particularly - but not exclusively - the Old Testament) is rife with stories of genocide, incest, sexual manipulation, revenge, and feeding children to bears, all done by, directly or indirectly at the command of, or in the name of God.  Somehow I don't see this course covering material like the story in Genesis where Lot's daughters get him drunk, sleep with him, and become pregnant by him...]
   
5. Biblical "literacy" and "history" imply more than simply knowledge of the content of the Bible, which is what is called out in the summary.  While the text of the law itself specifies that students shall be familiarized with "(t)he history of the Hebrew Scriptures or New Testament" and "(t)he literary style and structure of the Hebrew Scriptures or New Testament", I seriously doubt that these concepts can be properly addressed within the context of a one or two semester elective. [I cynically wonder if the "history of the Hebrew Scriptures or New Testament" actually means "history as viewed through the lens of the Hebrew Scriptures or New Testament" rather than the history of how and why the material came to be written...]
6. Conspicuously absent from the bill are any specific references to the socio-political context during the periods of authorship of the various Biblical books, which have tremendous bearing on their content.  I do not think it is possible to adequately discuss the influence of the Bible on modern socio-political topics without discussing the contexts in which the Biblical books were written. [Consider, for example, the Book of Revelation.  It was written to and for people in a very specific set of circumstances, but it's significance has been horribly overemphasized by modern interpretations.  While it's true that Revelation has influenced the modern world, much of that influence has more to do with what more modern readers assume it means than what the original author intended his contemporaries to learn from it.]

In the end, I suspect what would likely happen is that courses offered under this law would end up being taught by and filled by people jumping at the chance to turn them into state-sanctioned Bible "study" sessions which are long on Bible and short on anything resembling actual study, and that would probably be more about the people in the class affirming their own beliefs rather than trying to learn anything new.

I've said before that I'm completely in favor of people learning about the Bible and its history and background, but if all you do in a Bible study is look at the material in terms of what the leader thinks God was trying to say and ignore what the humans who actually wrote it were trying to say to their contemporaries, you've missed the point.

-Jay