Liveblogging The Rapture
So the Rapture is supposed to happen today.
Personally, I don't believe that bit of theo-prophecy, but since I could be wrong, I'm going to keep an eye on things today, and post periodic updates.
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
Star Trek as The A-Team
From Miss Cellania...
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
Tick Tock… (UPDATED)
It is a little over a month before Judgment Day, according to Harold Camping1.
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":
- According to Camping, the number five equals "atonement", the number ten equals "completeness", and the number seventeen equals "heaven".
- 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.
- 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.
- The time between April 1 and May 21st is 51 days.
- 51 added to 722,449 is 722,500.
- (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.
New Book Time – Forged by Bart Ehrman
I just received my copy of Bart Ehrman's new book, Forged: Writing in the Name of God - Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are. This isn't going to be a full review - while I hope to have time to write one, it's more realistic for me to assume that I won't. Instead, it's going to be a brief treatment of what Ehrman is doing when he writes books like this, and why I think his work is relevant.
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.
Teaching The Bible In Kentucky Public Schools – 2011 Edition
The Louisville Courier-Journal ran an article on 21 Feb 2011, originally by William Croyle from the Kentucky Enquirer discussing Senate Bill 56, which specifically allows the teaching of the Bible as an elective course in social studies.
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).
- 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.]
- 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?]
- 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.]
- 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...]
- 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...]
- 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
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