Sigh

People are getting a lot of justified amusement out of Harold Camping's prediction of the Rapture tonight. This thing with a few gullible Christians, like most problems Christians have, would not be a problem if we would actually read and follow the Bible.

21 You may say to yourselves, “How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the LORD?” 22 If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the LORD does not take place or come true, that is a message the LORD has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously. Do not be afraid of him.
Deuteronomy 18:21-22, 1984 NIV

The last date Harold Camping predicted for the rapture was Sept. 6, 1994. Didn't happen then either.

What if it was Sept 5, 1994, and we didn't already know Harold Camping was a false prophet? Well, that's covered too.

36 “No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. 37 As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. 38 For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; 39 and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. 40 Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. 41 Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.

42 “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come. 43 But understand this: If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. 44 So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.
Matthew 36-44. 1984 NIV

I'm going to be in New Jersey with my parents for dinner where I don't have all the guns and food. Definitely not what I would be doing if I were expecting earthquakes.

Evolution and Genesis

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.
--Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, translated by John Hammond Taylor

St. Augustine made that comment in the early 400s AD, about 1450 years before Darwin's On The Origin Of Species, and went on at some length in that vein. The idea that the account in Genesis recounts the Earth's natural history in a simple way is an old one, but it was rarely taken seriously until recent centuries. This is why when Augustine wanted to explain how to take Genesis literally, he wrote a 400-page work on the topic, not a pamphlet that said it's all simple. (I have not read this work yet; I just found out about it and ordered it while researching for this post.)

I think the straightforward natural history reading of Genesis was largely invented recently as a reaction to the medieval Roman Catholic church. At one time, when the Church was a career, social, and political organization, they strongly discouraged Bible reading, including forbidding the translation of the Bible to "vulgar tongues", e.g. not Latin; and they held that all Bible interpretation was a matter of complex allegorical interpretation only to be undertaken by Church professionals. This helped keep people away from finding out inconvenient doctrines like the priesthood of all believers and our direct unmediated access to God through prayer. Martin Luther and the Protestant church reacted to this by encouraging the most literal interpretation possible, which in the case of Genesis gave us young-earth creationism.

In Biblical interpretation (exegesis), it's important to take an originalist view rather than a textualist one. The contains many styles of literature, not all of which are suitable for literal interpretation. When Jesus says "I am the true vine," he doesn't mean he has leaves, and when he says "I am the door," he doesn't mean he has hinges. If you are looking for the meaning, it is immediately apparent; if you strive for a literal meaning, it is absurd.

Or take this beautiful passage from Job:

Then the LORD answered Job out of the storm. He said:
"Who is this that darkens my counsel
     with words without knowledge?
Brace yourself like a man;
     I will question you,
     and you shall answer me.
"Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?
     Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
     Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set,
     or who laid its cornerstone-
while the morning stars sang together
     and all the angels shouted for joy? (Job 38:1-7, NIV)

The Bible only needs one true meaning. Even if you thought the Earth was flat, you would not imagine that instructing the reader about geology was point of this passage. You don't need to know that the Earth is round to see that this is about God's incomparable majesty, not the Earth's construction. And that's why early Christians were generally not confused by Genesis.

It is impossible to look at Genesis and believe that its main intent is natural history. It makes a spectacularly bad natural history. Light is created on the first day, and there is evening and morning each day, but the Sun, Moon, and stars aren't created until the fourth day. What was evening and morning with no sun? Where was the light coming from? A natural history would answer this; Genesis does not because that's not the point. Or, Genesis says,

And God said, "Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky." So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, "Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth." And there was evening, and there was morning &mdash the fifth day.

And God said, "Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind." And it was so. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1:20-25)

So when were grasshoppers or cockroaches created? They move along the ground sometimes, and fly sometimes. Or bees, or bats? How about all the sessile sea animals? They aren't plants but they don't move. Natural history was never the intention.

I can't imagine anyone who's been a serious churchgoer and didn't hear a sermon on Genesis. There must be tens of thousands of volumes of commentary that have been written about it. But all of these words fail to convey more about human nature and God's nature than the compact little story as it is. It doesn't need to be natural history to be true.

I have some more words for young-earth creationists:

Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to his neighbor, for we are all members of one body. (Ephesians 4:25, NIV)

Young-earthers tend to display a horrifying indifference to the truth of what they say. Almost all the science is nonsense, only fit to deceive people who know nothing of the field; much of it is based on never having bothered to really understand Darwin in the first place. When you point out that one scientific claim is false, they just move on to another from the same bogus-science source. A bunch of little lies cannot shore up a big truth. When a Christian find out that one of the claims they've been repeating is a lie, that is "disgraceful and dangerous" as Augustine puts it, and they've been making Christians look vastly ignorant, they should step back from all the ideas they got from that source. Learn about each topic before you repeat it; learn the reasoning of the enormous majority of scientists who think that the young-earth claim is wrong. This page, http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/creation.html is a really good start but it's down as I write this.

Or if that's too hard, (and deeply understanding some things like radiometric dating is hard), don't say anything about it. Learn from Paul:

For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. (1 Corinthians 2:2)

Onanism, Masturbation, and the Bible

I think most Protestant Christians have actually dropped the idea that masturbation is forbidden in the Bible; the most recent source I heard calling masturbation a sin is C.S. Lewis, who died in 1963. (I have tremendous admiration for Lewis, but disagree with this, which was a throwaway comment illustrating some other point; I don't know that he ever really considered it.) There was, for a while, a fashion for calling masturbation "onanism" along with any other nonprocreative sex which caused a male orgasm; according to Wikipedia, the first use of "onanism" for masturbation specifically was 1716.

This instance of Not In The Bible is a relatively easy one; it just makes remarkably little sense. Setting the scene we have:

If brothers are living together and one of them dies without a son, his widow must not marry outside the family. Her husband's brother shall take her and marry her and fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law to her. The first son she bears shall carry on the name of the dead brother so that his name will not be blotted out from Israel. (Deuteronomy 25:5-6, NIV)

Then we have the actual story of Onan.

Judah got a wife for Er, his firstborn, and her name was Tamar. But Er, Judah's firstborn, was wicked in the LORD's sight; so the LORD put him to death.

Then Judah said to Onan, "Lie with your brother's wife and fulfill your duty to her as a brother-in-law to produce offspring for your brother." But Onan knew that the offspring would not be his; so whenever he lay with his brother's wife, he spilled his semen on the ground to keep from producing offspring for his brother. What he did was wicked in the LORD's sight; so he put him to death also. (Genesis 38:6-10)

So what we have here is a case of Onan defying one known commandment, and God punishing him; and people who read this tend to ignore the known commandment and instead make up a new one based on whatever in the story they think is gross, and assert that God was punishing Onan for that instead. It's as if people read the story of Cain the farmer murdering his brother Abel the hunter, and decided farming was a sin. It's a wild violation of common sense and Occam's Razor. In fairness, the law about the brother marrying the widow was one of the laws not carried into the Christian Church, and thus many people may not have been familiar with it just like most Christians couldn't tell you offhand whether stork is kosher.

As a note for understanding Onan's motives, I am under the impression that Tamar's son by Onan would have inherited Er's estate, which would otherwise go to Onan and his heirs.

Porn and the Bible

I think I'm going to write up a little series of things that I disagree with many or most of my fellow Christians about. Here's why I disagree with my fellow Christians on porn.

There are two passages generally quoted; one is the italicized one in here:

Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never! Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, "The two will become one flesh." But he who unites himself with the Lord is one with him in spirit. Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.(1 Corinthians 6:15-20, NIV).

The argument is generally that porn is sexual immorality and forbidden here, but that argument is perfectly circular; the whole question is whether porn is sexual immorality, so a passage forbidding sexual immorality doesn't prove anything. Also the context implies it's the kind of thing you could do with a prostitute. My take is that it's more a prohibition of what is sometimes called 'saddlebacking' with someone you're not married to; e.g. it's not OK if your do oral with your intern but stop short of orgasm.

The other passage is the italicized

You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.' But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.(Matthew 5:27-30, NIV)

There are a couple of interpretations of this, which involve the interpretation of the whole chapter. One is that it is hyperbole, but still truth. Jesus is making a point about the fact that everyone is a sinner; we all all sinners because the true standard we must measure ourselves against is perfection, as explained in the concluding verse of the chapter: "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." (verse 48) Our eye or hand does not actually cause us to sin, we would sin just as much without them. But the standards and stakes are both so high that if they did cause sin, we'd be better off performing home amputations.

Another interpretation, in no way conflicting with the first, is that this is about training and mental preparation, rather like I talked about here. This is where I originally got that concept. If you are fantasizing about how you'd seduce the people around you, you are preparing yourself to do that; you are seducing them in your heart. I don't see porn as connected to that at all. Porn isn't exactly training the viewer to seduce the people around; for one thing I'd need to be a plumber or pizza delivery guy first. And of course her reactions would have to be totally implausible. It's just all too disconnected from reality. If my favorite porn star, Aria Giovanni, showed up on my doorstep and propositioned me, I don't think the time I've spent with her pictures would incline me to accept one bit; I'd just be looking for the hidden cameras and trying to figure out what's really going on.

I do think as a Christian that I shouldn't be paying people to commit sins, and since I think sex with people you're not married to is a sin, that rules out most everything besides softcore and hentai; I include in that thinking the fact that I'm implicitly paying porn sites with pageviews/ad views. I do have some hardcore porn I collected before coming to that conclusion, which I didn't feel it necessary to delete after the fact.

Nonchristians are not damned in the Bible

There is a common but Biblically unsupported idea that all non-Christians go to hell. As far as I have been able to find out it has rarely or never been an official doctrine. It isn't addressed by theologians very often that I know of, and it doesn't have such an easily tracked history as the major doctrines do, such as those that are part of the Creeds. I've found resources that say Calvin believed that all non-Christians go to hell, while other resources indicate Wesley, Zwingli, C. S. Lewis, and the medieval Catholic Church all believe non-Christians may sometimes be saved; I've further heard indications that the official doctrine of the modern Roman Catholic Church (generally radically different that what your Catholic neighbor will tell you) indicates non-Christians may be saved.

So what does the Bible actually say? The verses which are quoted to support the idea that all non-Christians are always damned are John 14:6

Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (NIV)

and Acts 4:12

“Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.” (NIV)

For either to imply that all non-Christians are unsaved, we must assume that Jesus is unable or unwilling to work except in those who identify themselves as Christians; that He is kept out by any kind of ignorance on this topic, or that He has no power where there are no Christians. This is assumption is clearly unacceptable to a Christian when squarely looked at, but it rarely is so examined. These verses do say that Jesus's way is the right way and Mohammed's or Buddha's way the wrong way, but that does not imply that therefore Jesus is incapable of saving any Muslims or Buddhists without help from Christians. The Bible doesn't get that specific in terms of what happens to those who don't hear the message from us, but there are hints :

I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd. (John 10:16, NIV)

The Bible is clear that those who have faith in Jesus are saved and those who reject Him are damned, but it does not say much about those who haven't heard His name at all or those whose idea of Him is grossly incorrect. In fact every example I can think of discussing people's eternal disposition divides everyone into categories based on accept or rejecting Him, and they picture that as happening at the Judgement not before death.

All this is not to say that there isn't value in spreading the Word; the Bible makes that clear, and we are unequivocally commanded to do it. It is only to say that failure to do so is not an automatic sentence of damnation.

I think there are several contributing factors making idea that non-Christians are all unsaved so common.

1) A Christian backlash against two unbiblical doctrines; that of Universalism that states everyone without exception is saved, and the warm, fuzzy, but anti-rational concept that all paths lead equally. The first (Universalism) assumes a God that takes you whether you want him or not; to borrow a phrase from Hank Hanegraaff, not the lover of your soul, but a supernatural rapist. The second (all paths are equal) makes as much sense as saying Aristotelean, Newtonian, and Einsteinean physics are all equally good for calculating an orbit. Both are extensively refuted in Scripture.

2) A meme. I'm not fond of the term because it's commonly used as a substitute for debating an idea on it's merits, but we addressed those already and "meme" applies well. The idea is simple and very motivating in terms of evangelism; those who have it pass it on to others efficiently.

3) Human desire to be in control. All religions are constantly fighting the human tendency to turn them into magic in order to put the religious practitioner in control. Religion is about describing supernatural forces, and also requesting their help; the decision and most of the initiative remain with the supernatural. Magic is about ways to effectively control the supernatural forces; do X and they will respond in Y way. The initiative moves to the human.

In evangelical churches the world tends to be viewed as divided into the saved and the unsaved, and they are divided by participation in what's very like a magic ritual; the recitation of the Sinner's Prayer. (There isn't actually any Sinner's Prayer in the Bible, but it's one of a whole class of prayers made up with reference to Biblical principles.) The distinction I'm making between magic and religion can get pretty fuzzy in the case that the supernatural side takes the initiative to make a promise, which God does in this case. Jesus does in fact say that he will save us if we believe:

I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life. (John 5:24, NIV)

We tend to make it a magic ritual rather than the true worship of God when we imagine it all depends on us; we reach the lost, we convince them to recite the prayer; it's like we saved them.