Jesus, Interrupted by Bart D. Ehrman

I believe The Bible can be a very dangerous book.  For most people The Bible is a book they read occasionally, and use it for inspiration to be a good person.  There are better books to teach ethics but we can overlook that like we can overlook casual drinking, a minor indulgence.  I use the drug metaphor very intentionally, because I believe The Bible alters people’s mind and how they see reality.  Because some people take The Bible too far, into cocaine, heroin and LSD levels of use, and they become addicted, deluded and cut themselves off from reality.

The Bible can be like a computer virus that infects the minds of those who read it.  This is true of any religious literature.  The Bible does not describe reality. The Bible can not predict the future.  And most important, The Bible does not describe God (if there is a creator), at best The Bible presents very ancient theories about God.  In terms of philosophical theology, it is very important to separate the concept of God from any description about God.  Holy books captures how people thought thousands of years ago and that’s a huge danger because people minds become paralyzed by seeking closure on mysteries that will never be solved.  It’s mental quicksand.

The reason why I call myself an atheist is because I’ve never heard a definition of God that I could accept.  If there is a God he is unknowable in the same way that a bacteria in our blood can never know who we are.  People want a personal God, and that’s understandable, because life is scary and we’d love to have a spiritual parent to protect us.  But that’s a dangerous desire because it causes people to avoid real sources of strength, other people and ourselves.

There are many reasons why people seek religion and embrace holy books:

  • They want answers about reality (knowledge)
  • They want to know how life began (ontology)
  • They want a history and genealogy
  • They want instructions on how to be a good person (ethics)
  • They want to worship and be thankful (appreciation of life)
  • They want rules for equal justice for all people (law and order)
  • They want to know the future (prophecy)
  • They want a promise of protection (security)
  • They want an afterlife 

The reason why holy books like The Bible are so dangerous and powerful is our minds are extremely powerful.  Holy books transmit powerful memes.  All books do, but holy books come with extra-strength memes.  The concept of God is a meme.  Once an idea is let lose in culture it’s very hard, if not impossible to erase.  What happens instead is people alter memes.  Think of a virus mutating.  If you study just The Bible you’ll actually come up with dozens, if not hundreds of meme variations for the original meme for God, which was created thousands of years before the Jews existed.  There is no one God in The Bible.  There is no one Jesus, which brings us to the book Jesus, Interrupted by Bart D. Ehrman.

Jesus-Interrupted

Many people divide the world into the secular and the divine.  Believers in divine knowledge think its more important than down to Earth knowledge.  That’s an illusion.  The divine is a meme too.  Beliefs are more powerful than reality.  In fact, all we have is beliefs.  What we want is to keep beliefs that validate reality and jettison fantasies, but religious beliefs can’t be validated, but how you got them can.  That’s what Bart D. Ehrman is doing in his writing.

For example, do you believe that Jesus is a divine being?  Who gave you that idea?  How old were you?  Why did you believe them?  Where did they get the idea?  What Ehrman is doing in Jesus, Interrupted is working on a cold case that goes back 1900 years.  Where did the origin of the meme that Jesus was divine come from?  He calls this research a historical approach to Bible study. 

Jesus, Interrupted is a significant book on many levels, but proving that will be difficult because what he says challenges people’s beliefs.  Bart D. Ehrman is most famous for his book Misquoting Jesus, but this newer book is even more exciting to read, that is, if you find history and academic research exciting.  Ehrman claims he is not trying to be sensational with his books on The Bible, and claims he is only relating what any mainstream seminary teaches.  Ehrman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He started out as an evangelical Christian but after many years of studying The Bible became an agnostic.  Since I’m an atheist, reviewing a book about The New Testament written by an agnostic will be hard to convince Christians the value of reading Jesus, Interrupted.

I don’t ever expect Christians to give up their faith.  I figure most will ignore this book, but I expect others will combine the knowledge that Ehrman provides with their faith and create a new synthesis.  Whether this leads to a new reformation is another issue, but in cruising around the net trying to find reactions to Ehrman I was surprise by some reactions of the faithful.  Some reviewers say Ehrman goes too far, others just dismiss him, but others have jumped in and started their own analysis using his historical approach to test and validate Ehrman’s ideas.

Ehrman says many times in his book that he has no wish to destroy anyone’s faith, but anyone with a deep faith in The Bible being the absolute word of God will be tested by Ehrman’s books.  Ehrman started out as a person believing God inspired The Bible and it had no errors, but his desire to study it deeply and thoroughly led him to believe that it is the work of men, chock full of errors, forgeries, and contradictions.  I think anyone examining the historical evidence will also conclude that men wrote The Bible without guidence from God.

The next logical step in theology is to ask how God might inspire men to write about the metaphysical.  I don’t believe in the divine, but most people do.  I expect them to keep looking for the doorway between the physical world and the spiritual world.  And that’s okay.  Religion is deeper than memes, and I expect humans to always invent new and better religions.  Some atheists want to throw off religion and God, but that’s like being a vegetarian wanting the rest of the world to give up eating meat.  Evolution is a nasty word to the righteous, but everything evolves.

So why should agnostics and atheists even concern themselves with this book?  Ehrman still believes The Bible is the greatest book ever written and still provides inspiration.  For me, I want to understand Christians and how they evolved in history.  Jesus, Interrupted is a quick survey of the first four hundred years of Christianity and how The New Testament was written.  I think it explains why we have hundreds of different Christian faiths, and it also explains part of the psychology of conservatives and liberals, something Ehrman wasn’t intending.

Ehrman says most people study The Bible devotionally, but for the last two hundred years scholars have applied a historical approach to understanding it.  Ehrman also says most people only read The Bible randomly, just studying a few lines here and there.  Even if you read it vertically, from top to bottom, Ehrman believes you will miss much of what’s in The Bible.  He recommends studying it horizontally, comparing one gospel against another, or how one incident is depicted by multiple writers.  Jesus, Interrupted focuses almost exclusively on The New Testament except where gospel writers claim events were foretold in The Old Testament.

When you study the gospels this way you quickly see they conflict.  And not in minor narrative details, but in great theological differences.  In fact, much of what Christians believe today does not come from The New Testament at all, but from later theologians.  What many Christians might be shocked at is the gospels were not written by the disciples that knew Jesus, but educated people writing decades later, living in another country, speaking a different language than what Jesus and his apostles spoke.

The reason why there are so many conflicting stories in The Bible is because it was written by many different people, each with their own agenda.  I cannot do justice to the vast research the Ehrman puts into his book, so don’t trust me, and read Jesus, Interrupted for yourself.  Then read reviews by people who oppose Ehrman, and there are plenty.  Interpreting The Bible is a academic black hole that I want to avoid, but I do think it’s possible to study The Bible without falling into its gravity well.

I think there will be many different audience reactions for this book.

  • Atheists will get a good overview of Christianity, but also find intellectual support that The Bible is not a divine communication to the human race.  If they have any residual guilt about religion from early Sunday School programming, this book will help deprogram those feelings.  I found the book a fascinating history, explaining much of Western culture in a surprising way.  It was a real page turner for me.
  • Liberal Christians will expand their theological foundation and maybe invent a new synthesis.  Ehrman explains how new theological concepts developed in the first few centuries of the common era shaped The New Testament, but Christian evolution did not stop there.  Christianity is always evolving and diverging, and modern Christianity has little resemblance to Jesus and his times.  I think Ehrman’s book should have been called The Evolution of Christ.  I think books like this, using historical studies to examine spiritual doctrine, will inspire some folks to invent new theological memes.
  • Conservative Christians can choose to ignore the book, or counter it.  I think Christians constantly redefine and reinvent God.  God is a mutating meme.  Creationism and Intelligent Design are fundamentalist adaptations to their philosophy from reacting to science.  I expect similar ideas generated from reacting to historical studies of The Bible.  Theological evolution does not have to be logical, for example, look at the doctrine of the Trinity.  Essentially, a monotheistic religion accidently reinventing polytheism while trying to rationalize how a human could be the one and only God.  And don’t get me wrong, I’m not making fun of this theology – it’s a deadly serious pursuit by some folk to grapple with reality, but my point is religion doesn’t stand still, it’s constantly being reinvented to jive with current knowledge.
  • Believers from other religions will find a concise overview of The New Testament that might quickly explain the diversity of Christian faiths and sects.

Everyone feels like they are an expert on The Bible, even if they’ve only read a few passages.  I think the historical studies of The Bible will up the ante for anyone getting into the game.  Ehrman claims that most mainline ministers know what’s in this book already, but they seldom preach this knowledge to their parishioners.  I don’t know if that matters. 

Most people only want simple answers.  They are happy with a very few concepts to embrace.  There is a God.  There is a heaven.  Believing in Jesus is the way to heaven.  Period.  No more study.  This covers all the bases for this life and the next.  As long as these believers stay out of politics I don’t want to challenge their beliefs.  Don’t read this book. 

No use confusing the simple faithful by trying to explain that heaven is a theological invention that came well after Jesus.  Nor should we cloud the water by proving the God of Moses is not the God of Paul, even though some modern apocalyptical Christians want to bring back an Old Testament genocidal God.

Ehrman proves The Bible can be a black hole of academic study, but it’s also an endless engine that justifies hatred and intolerance.  Ehrman illustrates this with a quick lesson in how Christianity created anti-Semitism.  And I certainly wanted to read more about the development of the Orthodox Church at the expense of heretical sects.

Jesus, Interrupted is an important book beyond Bible studies because it explains so much modern psychology.  Rush Limbaugh is not just a conservative Republican, but an apostle of orthodoxy attacking the heretical liberals.  What Ehrman shows is Swift Boating a technique well illustrated in The New Testament.  Jesus, Interrupted unintentionally shows a relationship between the Bible belt and conservative thinking and behavior.  If someone like Lee Atwater had lived in the first century he might have written a gospel to get his point across.

Liberals who want to understand why conservatives are the way they are should study Jesus, Interrupted carefully.  I always assumed Republicans got their rhetorical skills from the Greeks, but that is only half-right, and they might have studied classical Greeks, but they also learned rhetoric from the Greek speaking writers of  the New Testament.            

JWH – 6/8/10

Lightspeed – A new science fiction ezine

Lightspeed is a new online science fiction magazine edited by John Joseph Adams.  Adams was an editor for the print magazine F&SF for nine years, as well as ongoing editor of many exciting theme anthologies, so he has lots of experience looking for good SF stories.  It’s an exciting time for short story writers as they transition to online and ebook markets.  Lightspeed is a good looking site, offering a number of innovative options, including audio versions of stories, as well as the ability to purchase issues in a variety of ebook formats, including Kindle, iBook, ePub and Mobipocket.

Lightspeed

Reading Lightspeed online is apparently free, with “Our regular publication schedule each month includes two pieces of original fiction and two fiction reprints, along with four nonfiction articles. Fiction posts on Tuesdays, nonfiction on Thursdays,” but you can buy the entire monthly issue for reading immediately on your ebook reader for $2.99.

I tried to buy the first issue online, with the hope of using PayPal, but aborted my order when asked for my address and no payment method was stated.  Since they take donations via PayPal that might be an option.  It would be nice if that information was at the top of the checkout page.

I’m thinking about buying an iPad, so I’m looking forward to seeing Lightspeed on the beautiful iPad screen.  I also discovered I can buy Lightspeed as a Kindle edition through Amazon and read it on my Kindle Reader for my iPod touch, so I purchased it that way for now.  That took less than 30 seconds, and maybe less than 15.  I wish all ebook magazines were this easy to get, and $2.99 is a very fair price I think.

I’m glad I didn’t buy the first issue online now because I would have had the hassle of downloading it to my computer, importing it into Stanza Desktop, and then going to my iPod touch and copying it over by WiFi.  The Amazon method was much more direct. 

So if you’re an ebook reader, check your different ebook stores for Lightspeed.  It would be helpful if the Lightspeed site had a page about all the various ways to get it on your ebook reader program and device.  This magazine is perfect for the iPhone crowd, and it would be extremely cool to see them combine their print and audio editions into an iPhone App.

I hope Lightspeed plans to distribute with Fictionwise because they are great at selling editions for almost any kind of ebook reading device, and they are a great site for getting all the major science fiction magazines in ebook editions.

Ebook editions might be the future of science fiction magazines.

JWH – 6/6/10

Don’t Fear the Future

Whenever our country goes into an economic downturn we have outbreaks of Chicken Littles crying the sky is falling.  In today’s New York Times there is an article “Imagining Life Without Oil” by John Leland.  Leland profiles new groups claiming the end is near because oil is running out.  Kevin Kelly gives all Chicken Littles a modern name,  Collapsitarians, which is a good enough word for me.  Science fiction has always loved Collapsitarian stories.  While some people like to plot a future where everything gets better, other people like to plot a downward slope for civilization. 

These end of oil is near folks will love The Windup Girl, which just won a Nebula and has a good chance of winning the Hugo in a few months.  But bleak stories of the future should only be lessons in teaching us what to avoid.

We have a weird national psychology, when things are booming on Wall Street everyone thinks they’re going be billionaires, but when stock prices head south, everyone thinks the USA will become a set for Mad Max chaos.  Few people see life as merely a bumpy road.

Our world has only depended on oil for a little over a hundred years.  Even if we’ve reach peak production like the Collapsitarians claim, it doesn’t mean all our tanks will go empty on the same day.  It will take decades to finish off the global supplies of petroleum.  We should have plenty of time to transition to new energy technologies.  Oil disasters like current Gulf Coast nightmare, and the evil Avatar like rape of the Amazon, only illustrates it’s time to give up the oil habit.

The problem is not oil, but people.  What the Collapsitarians fear is society going through withdrawal from it’s oil addiction and how painful that will be.  The Gulf Coast oil disaster only teaches us how painful living with oil is, like a heroin addict realizing their drug is destroying their body.  What we need to do is man up, admit our problem, go on a global 12 step treatment program, and change our lives.  That will certainly be less painful than what the doomsters are predicting.

Many Americans have embraced Big Oil like evangelicals embracing Jesus – they put all their faith in the word of Big Oil.  Whereas, the Big Oil companies should merely transition to thinking of themselves as Big Energy companies and embrace alternative forms of energy themselves, rather than trying to stomp out alternative energies as heretics of the faithful.

Just applying conservation techniques and energy efficiency should match the rate of oil production decline for a few decades.  The eight Bush years has nearly ruined our chances of becoming the world leaders in green technology, but we could still catch up if we stop running around crying the sky is falling.  We must fight the Drill Baby Drill desire with Build Baby Build competition of constructing massive green energy producing sites.  We have to transfer our faith in oil and coal to wind, solar, bio-fuels,  geothermal, nuclear and all the other emerging technologies.

Actually, we have two major addictions, oil and coal, like heroin and cocaine, that we need to throw off.  The way to fight negative addictions, is with positive additions, like a alcoholic who goes on the wagon and takes up running.  Things might look bad now, and bad on numerous fronts, but there are lots of positive fronts too.  Too many people see the gloom in each scenario.  For example the health care crisis.  Yes, it’s costing us too much.  But on the other hand, modern medicine is working miracles.  Oil is running out, but technology is inventing numerous alternatives.  The sky is not falling.  It’s just a little cloudy.

The key is always us.  The future only looks dark when millions get scared.   When those same millions find hope, people start seeing the return of good times.  We need to be realistic Pollyannas, because when we get depressed we’re our own worst enemy.  Don’t listen to the Collapsitarians.   

JWH – 6/6/10

Are You Willing to Pay for News?

If you subscribe to newspapers or magazines then you are already paying for news, so the precise question is:  Are you willing to pay for news on the Internet?  One June 1 The Times (London) is going behind a paywall, and The New York Times is planning on trying yet another online subscription plan next year.  The gold standard of news has always been to read a world-class newspaper.  For years people have gotten used to reading these papers online for free, but now it looks like free days are over.

For most of my life I got my news from the plebian news source, television.  Since the 1990s, Internet has introduced me to the world’s great newspapers and I now realize their value, and I have decided to become an online subscriber.  I just have to decide which paper to marry for my news partner.

The old way of doing things was to subscribe to the local paper and it would include a syndication of state, national and international news stories.  Newspapers were the world wide web before the WWW.  Now, I’m not sure that’s the way to go.  I’m thinking I’d rather have the best news writing, and go with something like The New York Times.  But if everyone thought like that, we’d end up with half a dozen newspapers for the U.S.A.

But then I’m not typical.  I think most people prefer local news.  It’s sad to admit, but I pay zero attention to what goes on in my city and state.  My local paper has a beautiful, and extremely easy to read, free web site, but I don’t read it.  They also offer a modest $10 a month digital edition that’s closer to the looks of a newspaper, but their free site is so nice I can’t imagine even spending that much money.

I think it’s going to be awhile before people pay for local news online, but if The New York Times and the The Times are indicators of the future, will people be willing to pay for a national newspaper?  I don’t think we will know until publishers cut off the free news spigot.  And that’s what the The Times is doing June 1.  The Times will even cut Google off from indexing the paper.  That’s going to be a major experiment. 

So far The New York Times has always kept it’s free web edition going concurrent with any of its paid experimental editions, which have always failed.  I do read the free portions of TimesReader 2.0 that I got when downloading Adobe Reader.  The full edition is $4.62 a week.  $20 a month seems steep compared to what I get from Rhapsody for $10 a month – access to 9 million songs across many major and minor record labels.  The New York Times is preparing a new paid edition for iPad owners, and I think that might be the turning point for switching from paying for printed news to paying for online news.

If I had an iPad I would subscribe to The New York Times, if the web site edition closed down.  I would also consider subscribing to magazines for the iPad.  Again, which magazines I bought would depend if they weren’t available online.  Right now I have little incentive to subscribe to electronic editions of The New Yorker or The Atlantic or Wired because they offer too much content for free.

I used to spend hundreds a dollars a year for magazine subscriptions, but cut them all out because I believe it’s more Earth friendly to read the content online.  And I don’t always expect to get a free lunch, but as long as the content is free I have no incentive to pay either.  I pay Rhapsody $10 a month because I want the music and I don’t want to steal it.  There’s plenty of free legal music on the web, but it’s too much trouble to collect.  For $10 a month I get legal access to 98% of what’s for sale.  I’d rather pay $10 a month to a service like Rhapsody if they distributed legal news and magazines reprints, than make individual subscriptions, but that’s not available.

I’m currently pay Safari Books Online $34 a month for online access to 10,000 plus computer books.  Thus, I’m proving I’m willing to pay for online content.  But I don’t always like the deals being offered.  The online editions of The New Yorker and Scientific American are more expensive than discount offers I get for the paper editions.  No incentive there to subscribe.  I don’t like paying print edition prices for digital editions – it feels like I’m getting ripped off.  Publishers are saving on paper, printing, shipping, distribution, and postal costs, and they aren’t passing any of those savings on to me.

Rupert Murdoch wants people to pay for what they read on the net, at least when they are reading something he’s selling in the analog world.  Now that’s totally against the way the Internet works now.  The reason why the Internet is great is because you can share links.  If some content goes behind paywalls, the Internet will fork into the free and non-free, that which can be linked, and that which can’t.

The Internet is big enough to handle such diversity, but what does that mean at the social level?  We get part of the population reading high quality paid journalism, and the rest will live off of free blog news.  It will also mean those sites that depend on ad revenue will have more readers, those fleeing the paid sites, thus beefing up their financial model.

But think of it this way.  Do you prefer paying for HBO shows, without ads, or watching NBC shows with tons of ads?  That also means, any content I subscribe to on the net better be ad free.  If the TimesSelect 2.0 was $5 a month, instead a week, I’d probably subscribe now if it was totally ad free.  The free, but extremely limited version, has a few ads, but they are still tastefully placed so I can ignore them.  And the amount of great content the New York Times provides with the free edition of the TimesSelect 2.0 also discourages me from paying.

Publishers are going to have a hard time selling content online, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.  It’s better for the economy, and creates more jobs if we pay for what we read.  And we get better written news.  But publishers can’t sell quality content in one place if they also give it away in another just as easy to get to location.

JWH – 3/31/10

Nebula Awards Showcase 2010

WTF?  You’d think an anthology with Nebula Awards in the title would be filled with all the award winners and as many of the nominees as they had room to cram in.  Not this one.  It has the winners for each category, and even an excerpt from the winning novel, but all the runner-ups get the hook.  See this Locus page for the entire list of nominees.  Winning must be everything to the editor Bill Fawcett, but I like reading all the nominees for the awards because more often than not, I don’t agree with the voting.

Everything else in these 420 pages is padding, and there’s lots of it.  And to be honest, I also bought the volume for several essays that promised to be a history of science fiction in the 20th century decade-by-decade, but even on that count I was burned badly.  But for a book subtitle, “The Year’s Best SF and Fantasy” I’d have to say I’m extremely disappointed.

To give the publisher and editor the benefit of the doubt, most of the 2009 nominees were available on the net for free reading during the voting period – but so was lots of the padding, like a listing of all the Nebula Awards back to the beginning.  The non-fiction portion of this volume was so slight in actual information, with some essays showing no more work than blog level nattering, that I’d rather trade them all for fiction from the non-winning nominees.

On the cover and title page is “Nebula Awards Showcase 2010 – The Year’s Best SF and Fantasy – Selected by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.”  From that I expected all fiction, no non-fiction filler.  I would also expect fiction that the SFWA endorses as their absolute best writing for the year.  Of course even this is confusing.  The title says 2010, because that’s when the volume is published, but it’s for the 2009 award year, for fiction first published in 2007 and 2008.  This volume contains two excerpts from novels that I wouldn’t have include either, to make more room for complete stories.  I would have called it Nebula Awards 44.

When I found Nebula Awards Showcase 2010 at my bookstore I thought cool, a good collection of stories to keep.  When I flipped through the table of contents and saw this listing of additional essays below, I bought the volume thinking it had two reasons to add it to be collection.

  • Early SF in the Pulp Magazines by Robert Weinberg
  • The Golden Age by David Drake
  • Science Fiction in the Fifties: The Real Golden Age by Robert Silverberg
  • Writing SF in the ‘60s by Frederik Pohl and Elizabeth Anne Hull
  • Science Fiction in the 1970s: The Tale of the Nerdy Duckling by Kevin J. Anderson
  • Into the Eighties by Lynn Abbey
  • Science Fiction in the 1990s: Waiting for Godot … or Maybe Nosferatu by Mike Resnick

These essays are really disappointing.  I’m sure part of their fault lies with my expectations.  I assumed in an anthology about great fiction, the essays would be surveys of the best fiction from each of the decades covered.  It appears the business of SF/F is more interesting to the SFWA writers. 

I was wanting to be reminded what were the best novels, novellas, novelettes and short stories from each decade.  How can you write an essay about SF in the 1960s and not mention the New Wave?  And, not mention work by Samuel R. Delany and Roger Zelazny, the two authors I think of as the decade’s brightest stars?  Delany won 4 Nebula awards in the five years they were given in the 1960s.

What I would have loved from these essays, is for their authors to list, with brief comments, the novels and stories that they felt were Nebula Award worthy before 1965, and for the years after that, comment on how the winners have been remembered and what stories have emerged as more memorable since the awards.

If the Nebula Awards Showcase 2010 had just included all the winners and nominees from the non-novel categories I would have been very happy with the collection.  It would have been a keeper, instead I’m going to leave it on the free table at work.

JWH – 5/31/10