BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: Religious Education
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Religious Education
This clip from The View is making the rounds, for good reason. It's funny, but also quite painful. Check it out, and wince at the ignorance. Worse than ignorance, really.
The clip is from a US TV show called The View, a daytime talk show I've only heard of when one or more of the female hostesses says something newsworthy celeb blog-worthy in its stupidity. This happens less often now that Rosie O'Donnell quit and Elizabeth Hasselback is on maternity leave, but apparently the producers managed to find a grinning idiot named Sherri Shepherd to fill the dumb void Rosie and Liz left behind.
Who? I'd never heard of her before, and her wikipedia page is notable primarily for discussion of this latest embarrassment, and one earlier one, from The View, when she said that she wasn't sure if the earth was round or flat. That earlier case she's kind of got an excuse. I'll quote Wikipedia, despite the [sic]-worthy punctuation:
she was asked by co-host Whoopi Goldberg "is the world flat?" She first responded "...I don't know" and expanded that she "never thought about it", the co-star of two network programs continued that it was more important to her that she thought about how she was "going to feed my child". Barbara Walters replied to this defense of her scientific illiteracy, "You can do both." She then went on to quote scripture.
The next day, Shepherd explained that she never had to defend her religious beliefs before, and that she became overwhelmed with the many questions that were being thrown at her. By the time Goldberg added her question, Shepherd was nervous and did not fully comprehend what was being asked. She stated that she knows that the world is round.
I'll give her the "overwhelmed by questions" defense. After all, it's not as if she's paid to work on a talk show and enunciate her opinions. Oh wait...
I would like to direct your attention to her claim that she's never had to defend her religious beliefs before. I'll take her at her word on that, since it seems to be the key to this whole issue. She's never had to defend them, which means she's never given them, or much of anything else, any critical thought. She's just taken whatever ridiculous fables she's been given and swallowed them whole, since like Barbie with math, Sherri + thinking = hard. Her wikipedia bio says that she started out as a Jehovah's Witness before becoming a Born Again Christian, a dumb to dumber devolution that certainly fits with her demonstrated cognitive abilities.
We've all had fun laughing at the various blonde Teen Miss America types in recent weeks, who thought Europe was a country, and other similar crimes against thought. But in those cases, the people just didn't know. Sure, it's sad when someone doesn't know the planets revolve around the sun, or that Europe's a continent full of individual countries, but at least they're just ignorant, and they know that they don't know what they're talking about, but they were put on the spot to answer a question.
Sherri View here is ignorant, but intentionally. No one asked her if there were Christians in 1000 BCE; she volunteered that information, and then defended it when corrected, ever-so-gently, by people who seem to know only slightly more than she does. (Though I think Whoopie knew pretty definitely; she was just being polite.) She's sure she knows about things she could not be more ignorant about, and she's happy to leap in and state her uninformed opinion when given the opportunity.
If you're wondering, I might as well briefly lecture, since we covered this exact issue about 4 weeks ago in my World Religions class. I think it should be fairly obvious to anyone smarter than Sherri that there were no Christians before Jesus Christ. Just as there weren't any Confucians before Confucious, or Buddhist before Buddha, etc. The names kind of give it away, huh?
Judaism has existed as a religion since around 3200 years ago, when the (mythical) exodus from Egypt occurred. According to the legend, those early Israelites wandered the desert (basically modern day Jordan, or northern Saudi Arabia) until they reached Mt. Sinai, where Moses spoke with God and the Covenent was formed. The Covenant states that the Hebrews are God's chosen people and that if they life their lives in upright fashion, the one true lord will sustain them and bring them to the promised land. Caanan in those days, also known as Palestine, home of the Philistines. Had you always wondered who the "Philistines" were? Me too; I'd never connected that with Palestine, oddly enough. Just a slightly changed pronunciation in 3000 years.
The people settled in that land, now known as Israel, and lived there in a semi-constant state of low level warfare with other neighboring tribes for hundreds of years. While there they continued to create a religion, adding to the earlier writings and editing and codifying (Dead Sea Scrolls type stuff; tons more written than preserved in later editions). The Hebrew holy writings compiled in canonical form are called the Tanak. The Torah is the first part of those writings, and they were codified and finalized and closed to further addition in about 100 BCE. This is what Christians now refer to as the Old Testament.
Jesus, a probably-historical figure, came along a few years BCE. Not 0, scholars are fairly sure, but in that general range. And no, it's fairly certain he wasn't born any time near Christmas. The spring is most likely since it corresponds to some parts of the mythos, since that's when shepherds are out in their fields at night, helping their ewes foal. Sheep and shepherds are in caves staying warm at night in December. There's also speculation that Joseph and Mary were in Bethlehem for Passover, which falls on April 2nd. It's very certain that there's no point in debating events of Jesus' life, since if he even existed, there are no records from his life, none of the gospels were written less than 30-40 years after he died, and none were written by anyone who actually knew the man or was around at the time before he was crucified.
Jesus, whether he was historical or wholly fictional or (most likely) a composite of a real man with a great load of myth and legend and lore heaped on top to make a better story, lived about 33 years, was crucified around 30CE, and spent the last years of his life as a crusader for religious reform of the Jewish faith, raising a ruckus that upset the leaders of the Jewish powerful in Jerusalem, who were then happy enough to let their Romans take care of the rabble-rousing prophet.
To digress a bit, it's fairly clear from Biblical scholarship that Jesus did not set out to found a new church. He wanted to reform some of the corrupt and caste-like practices of the Jewish faith, not become the basis of a splinter sect. Furthermore, it's very clear that almost all of the magical acts attributed to him (AKA miracles) are evidence of the creative license taken by his chroniclers, decades after his death. Primarily by the Gospel of John, which is non-synoptic; meaning it does not agree (at all) with the events told in the other 3 gospels.
All of the gospels have major disagreements; all four tell very different stories about the resurrection, in terms of who first saw the empty tomb, who was there when it was seen, when the resurrected JC was first sighted, etc. But John goes a lot further, and makes almost all of the biggest supernatural claims that evangelists swallow uncritically. In the other gospels JC frequently denies being anything special, being holy, knowing God, having any relation to God, being able to work miracles, etc. Boring! So almost all the money quotes are from John, the last of the four gospels to be written, and the one that takes the most creative license to spice up the story. Numerous events are described in John and other, earlier gospels, and in every case John's version has more magic and miracles. John is the source of almost all of the famous lines, like that John 3:16 you see crazy people holding up on signs, about God so loving his us that he sent his only son to die for our sins.
Not according to Jesus, he didn't. There's nothing like that in the other gospels. In fact, there was a great deal of argument over that in the first few centuries, and not until the Council of Nicea in 325 (invoked by Roman Emperor Constantine, whose conversion to Christianity led directly to it becoming the official faith of the fading Roman Empire) was it decided that yes, the doctrine of Incarnation (which is utterly illogical) was part of canon, and that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine, and worked miracles, etc. Interesting to flash back to Sherri View's first faith, and note that Jehovah's Witnesses take a pre-Nicean viewpoint, and do not believe in the Trinity, or the Incarnation. Which is why I don't hesitate to say that while they're dumb, the Born Against are dumber.
Anyway, miracles and creative biography aside, the first influential followers of Christ were not his apostles, and none of them wrote a damn thing about him. All four gospels were written in educated Greek, and the peasants and fishermen hanging with Jesus spoke Aramic and were largely illiterate. Not one thing Jesus said in life was recorded (quite unlike Mohammad 600 years later, who claimed direct dictation from God, usually via Gabriel and had most of his bits of wisdom accurately transcribed during his life) and every quote or teaching or sermon in the gospels and the Bible was invented, or at best, recreated, usually without any witness testimony, decades later. The first major evangelist of Christianity was Paul, who never met Jesus and was a skeptical Jew until the famous "scales fell from his eyes" blindness cure. Paul then became a one man traveling revival show, touring around the eastern and southern Mediterranean, mostly through Turkey and Greece, from around 48-62CE. He really got people to start converting, though Christianity remained a persecuted cult until 313, when Emperor Constantine converted.
So, to return to the original argument much, much later, there (obviously) weren't any Christians until Jesus, and there weren't enough to matter until several decades after his death, and there weren't a lot until after 313CE. Major civilizations such as those in Sumeria, Babylonia, Egypt, China, and others rose and fell thousands of years before Abraham, Moses, Isiah, and other foundational figures of Judaism, the faith which Jesus was born into many centuries later. No one, even young earth Creationists, deny this, so in a way, Sherri's View (ignorant) views are kind of irrelevant, since they're just laughable. Even the craziest people in her own faith don't believe what she says she believes; it's just sad that a woman with a major American TV show for a mouthpiece could be so abysmally ignorant of not just human history and culture and the historical rise of her own religion, but even of the largely mythical teachings of her own religion. I imagine her preacher or reverend or whatever smacked his forehead when he saw this clip.
The bigger issue, I think, and something I talked about in one of the speeches in my stupid and pointless GE requirement Speech/Rhetoric class, was how silly any religious/mythological beliefs are, especially those that claim to be the one truth. Very, very briefly, and I may elaborate on this one at some point since I've already got all the notes typed up on it: Modern humans, homo sapiens, have existed on Earth for a minimum of 100,000 years. Most anthropologists and archaeologists would put it closer to 200,000, or 250,000, but no one with any knowledge in the field would say less than 100k. There are countless fossil finds, campsites, burial sites, animal bones showing tool damage, etc, all dating back that far, or further. Those people had religions and origin myths. No culture any anthropologist has ever studied, present or past, has lacked a religion. Humans have always, always, invented creation myths and legends since we've had brains big enough to do so.
The three big questions must always be answered, in some fashion: Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going?
Since no humans, until very recently (on a geological timeline) had any scientific, verifiable answers to these questions, people had to invent myths and legends, religions, to get them through the night. There are estimated to have been more than 100,000 such religions, a number arrived at by estimating how many distinct cultures and societies there have been in homo sapien history, and multiplying that number by 1. (It's obviously an imprecise figure, since many cultures have more than one religion, and the line between a sect of a religion and a cult that's a new religion is very fuzzy.)
The point though, is that every society, culture, and even tribe has had their own religion. All different, all with some overlapping elements, and that none of them came up with anything in any way resembling Judaism, or its same diety offshoots, Christianity or Islam. So if one believes in any of those faiths, all of which say they're the one true, (Christianity and Islam most stridently) one must believe that God created all this, kicked back and watched for a few hundred thousand years, before finally deciding to intervene and give out his true nature to Moses on Mt. Sinai, or by sending down JC a thousand years later, or by having Gabriel finally dictate the true version of the faith to an illiterate caravan driver in Saudi Arabia in 600 CE.
Which is more likely; one of those myths, which means that all the 99,999 other religions humans invented before and after were bullshit, bullshit God saw no reason to correct for tens of thousands of years, or that all religions are human inventions. After all, it's undeniable that they all reflect the values, ideals, technologies, gender relations, location, etc, of the cultures that created them, and that they all look exactly as they would if they were creations of man, rather than divine revelations.
The answer seems pretty clear to me. I don't know how it went over in my speech class, though. I was the only student in that class over about 21, and none of the kids seemed too ready to think critically about the issue, or to consider the odds that the one faith they believed, which was (coincidentally) the one their parents fed to them from infancy, might not be the one true faith ever revealed on this earth in 200k years of human culture.
To anyone with even a passing knowledge of history, what she said does seem absolutely ignorant. However, I would be willing to bet that there are a large percentage of Christians who actually believe (at least did believe prior to this) that Christianity predates every other religion.
Having grown up as a churchgoer, I was spoon-fed the specific portions of the bible that they wanted me to know, as I am sure most Christians are. What that actually boiled down to was basically this: Genesis and the creation was followed pretty immediately by the ten commandments. Then there was Noah and the great flood. Then we turned the bible directly to John -since that was where the money quotes were.
In fact it was that method of teaching that actually started making me question the truth of it all. While the actual timeframe between creation and the birth of Jesus was never discussed (at least not in my church), it was made to seem that it was a pretty short span. I imagined that Adam and Ever were probably only a dozen or so generations back; As if they were within a hundred years of Noah. But then I learned about someone named Methusulah(sp?) having lived for hundreds of years. How could that have happened in the time as I understood it? Was he there in the beginning? Did he live through Noah's flood?
That was the very critical thinking that led me to actually read the bible cover to cover. I was pretty young at the time, and I can's say that I much enjoyed it. I do recall that with every page I turned, I got a little bit less religious.
Take Babel for instance. They were building a tower to heaven but got too close. God made them all speak different languages in an attempt to keep them from being able to communicate. So they didn't finish the tower. Sure that explains why there were so many different languages, but it doesn't explain how heaven was once reachable by piling dirt, but was never seen with the new technologies of airplanes or space travel. When I asked asked my Sunday school teacher about this, she said that it was a metaphor. But if the bible is filled with stories that require interpretation, not the literal truth, it's possible that it could be misinterpreted, right?
That same Sunday school teacher pretty much put the nail in the coffin when she told me that people in other countries (I believe I asked about China in particular, since I was digging a hole there at the time) were all going to go to hell because they didn't worship the right God. That made me wonder what if they were worshiping the right God. What if Christianity had it wrong? Better to not worship a God than to worship a false one, I figured.
But that has all gone far away from my point. I doubt that the way the bible was taught to me is much different than for other Christians. There is never a discussion about the Greeks or Romans, so they just leave it to you to figure it out. And you will likely assume that it must have all happened after Jesus. If it wasn't, why didn't the (part of the) bible (that they let you read) make mention of it?
Still, if you are going to be talking on national television, you really should use some discretion.
