When it comes to irrational right-wing extremism, Joseph Farah lives in a surreal bubble of his own special brand of derangement. He is the founder of WorldNetDaily, a Web-based journal almost impossible not to cite as WorldNutDaily. WND serves up regular heaping helpings of paranoia, propaganda, and crackpottery.
Farah has been wringing his hands over the fate of traditional biblical marriage. (Please note: “Traditional” marriage means the one-man/one-woman definition from the Bible exemplified by Adam and Eve—and not the one-man/two-women example of Jacob with Leah and Rachel nor the one-man/seven-hundred-wives/three-hundred-concubines example of good old King Solomon.) In his WND column of June 3, 2015, Farah proposes secession from the United States if the Supreme Court allows same-sex marriage throughout the nation.
Is there one state in 50 that would not only defy the coming abomination, but secede in response? The rewards could be great. I would certainly consider relocating. How about you?
The founders of this country found a place of refuge in America and shaped it into the greatest self-governing nation in the history of world. Just think what one state could do if it simply stuck to the principles that made this country great? Americans wouldn’t have to cross an ocean to rediscover what brought most of our ancestors here. We could simply drive.
Are any states so inclined?
I haven’t heard this question raised by anyone else. So I’m raising it now. We don’t have much time before the nine high priests in black robes decide to follow Baal instead of the One True God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Okay, that mention of Jacob is a trifle unfortunate, but at least his wives were of the opposite sex.
Farah calls his proposal an “Exodus strategy.” Commenters on sites like Crooks & Liars have been quick to suggest that Texas is the state that should secede (or be thrown out) to serve as a haven for Farah and his followers. I think this is much too generous. Abandon Austin? Dump Dallas? Leave Houston high and dry? (Actually, I guess they might appreciate that right about now.)
I have a counter-proposal. Let Farah and his crazies colonize the Texas panhandle. Let's carve out a nice rectangular space for an independent nation named Gilead. (There's a nice literary reference for you.) Amarillo and Lubbock would probably fit in just fine. While saner people might flee to the greater portion that remains as Texas, there should be plenty of opportunities to obtain good deals on the residences left behind by the flight of Farah's adherents (especially in Plano). A plebiscite could determine whether Oklahoma's panhandle should be included for good measure. (Those who think Panhandler would make a good name for this new nation should take into account that the imbalance between taxes paid and federal dollars received would no longer be an issue—unless the new nation demands a lot of foreign aid from the US, in which case Panhandler might be exactly right.)
There are other aspects to this win-win situation: (1) Texas goes blue more quickly. (2) Jobs are created in the border patrol and border-crossing stations will have to be constructed. (This would be true in New Mexico and Oklahoma, as well as in the new Texas. Possibly in Colorado and Kansas, too.) (3) Other parts of the United States would improve as their nutcases emigrated to Gilead. (4) Ted Cruz would lose his political base (unless he moves to the new country to become its Priest-King).
I'm not certain what would support the economy of Gilead, though it's likely that Lubbock's cotton industry and Amarillo's meat-packing would remain mainstays. However, opportunities to promote tourism might be sketchy. Would Americans be eager to visit a nation based on a Christian version of sharia law?
Protestants often pride themselves on being “Bible-believing Christians” and excoriate Catholics for relying on clerical authority instead. There are two good reasons for regarding this Bible-centric position with skepticism. For one thing, Catholics are exposed to readings from the Old Testament and New Testament every time they go to mass. For another, despite the noisy evangelists who love to spout chapter and verse, Protestants are less familiar with the Bible than they think they are—or think they ought to be.
Some entertaining anecdotal evidence to this effect was presented in the Sacramento Bee in an article on Wednesday, April 16. One of the state capital's Lutheran churches has embarked on a program designed to guide its members through the entire Bible in three months' time. There have been surprises:
It’s been an eye-opener: The violence—the sheer level of bloodshed in the Old Testament—has taken many of them by surprise.
“Your Sunday school teachers didn’t tell you about that,” associate pastor Leslie Welton said to a recent class of almost two dozen people.
It's another example of Christians not being fully aware of what their holy book contains. Cherry-picking Christians can be shocked when they try to plow line-by-line through the text of scripture:
“How many of you are shocked by the blood and gore and carnage?” asked Welton.
There were nods of agreement around the room: Page by page, chapter by chapter, class members are deeply shocked. With its betrayals, infidelities and lessons stubbornly unlearned, its epic levels of carnage and vengeance, this wild ride through the Old Testament is not the Bible they expected.
What is a good apologist to do? The preferred approach seems to be “Look over there!”
The Old Testament also depicts a world in which God’s grace shines amid the violence
Really? That's the best you can do? God's grace shines amidst all of the God-induced violence?
Thanks to Language Log, it didn't take me long to dig out several examples of an old (possibly apocryphal, but definitely old) story:
Prof. Adolphe Cohn of Columbia University recently, in discussing the teaching of French and German in public schools, said that the attitude of a good many people on that subject was explained to him very aptly by a remark he had once overheard in a street car. Two elderly Irish women were talking about their children, when one remarked: “I won't let my child be taught Frinch.”
“Why not?” inquired the other.
“Sure,” replied the first, “if English was good enough for St. Paul to write the Bible in it's good enough for me.”
—New York Time, January 15, 1905 (Sunday Magazine), p. 8
Makes sense. I mean, it's not as if we're better than St. Paul, now are we? As we know, St. Paul is a great figure in Christian history, the bachelor saint who gave tons of marital advice to those who chose to marry rather than burn. He's the saint that denounced the Judaizers for their continuing espousal of the practice of circumcision—not required for followers of Christ, he insisted—and then promptly turned around and sliced off Timothy's foreskin. No doubt Timothy's guard was down.
But Paul is not really the subject of this post. Ray is. I mean Ray Guarendi, a clinical psychologist who is a fixture on Catholic Radio and is usually called “Dr. Ray.” I recently heard him featured as a guest on Marcus Grodi's “Deep in Scripture” program. Grodi and guest were trying to parse St. Paul's teachings on love, as embodied in the apostle's first letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 13:4-7). Guarendi was stressing the difficulty of Paul's statements with some mocking banter: “Love is patient? Where? Love is kind? When?”
That, however, is not what caught my attention. I startled chuckling at a statement in Guarendi's amazing preamble, which immediately reminded me of the old “good enough for St. Paul” story. Check it out for yourself. At 6:45 in the video below, Guarendi offers this startling pronouncement: “You're familiar, Marcus, with the inadequacy of language to express truth. We have these infinite truths that God wants to give us, and he binds himself to the English language.”
[Pilate] took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.
These lines from chapter 27 of the gospel of Matthew are notorious in history for their use as warrant for the persecution of Jews. The supposedly inerrant word of God has put self-condemnation in the mouths of the Jewish people who called for the death of Jesus. Anti-Semites thus justified their characterization of Jews as “Christ-killers.”
The Roman Catholic Church did not scruple to join in the persecution of the Jews, although popes like John XXIII and John Paul II took particular pains to disavow this less savory aspect of past centuries. Benedict XVI is eager to follow in the footsteps of his distinguished predecessors. While John convened the Second Vatican Council (which declared that the Jewish people were not to be held responsible for deicide) and John Paul paid his respects at the Great Synagogue of Rome, Benedict intends to outshine them both. He figures to do so by rewriting the plain language of Matthew's gospel. One has to admire the German pope's boldness.
Of course, “rewriting the Bible” has long been charged against the popes of Rome by those who disagree with the centuries-old accumulation of Catholic dogma and tradition. It seems unkind to single out the papacy for this practice, given that all branches of Christianity regularly indulge in it. As an unchurched materialist, I don't feel any particular need to choose sides. However, Benedict's new gloss on Matthew 27 seems exceptionally egregious and worthy of note.
The pope's reinterpretation of Matthew is included in the second volume of his treatise Jesus of Nazareth, recently published in the United States by Ignatius Press. Robert Moynihan, editor-in-chief of Inside the Vatican magazine, waxed ecstatic in an article in the April 2011 issue.
What is new about the Pope's interpretation of the cry “his blood be on our heads” is that Benedict makes explicit an argument, a truth, that I don't think any other Christian teacher has ever proposed so strongly in this way: not that this cry (“let his blood be upon us”) was not uttered; not that the Jewish crowds did not say this; but that they did not have any comprehension, not the slightest inkling, of what they were actually crying out for: that they would have upon them or over them a protection of innocent, sacrificial blood, the blood of this sinless, rejected king, who, though rejected, would not, in the end, be a curse to them, but a blessing, not their condemnation, but their salvation.
Did you follow that? According to Moynihan, the pope is arguing that the first-century Jews were inadvertently calling for their salvation—asking to be bathed in the blood of the Lamb. Of course, that's not usually what someone intends when calling for a person's blood, but what a nice thought to contemplate the happy circumstance of accidental salvation.
Contemporary Christians who avoid the sin of anti-Semitism usually deal with Matthew by acknowledging that it's improper to blame the entire Jewish race for the blood-lust of those who screamed in favor of crucifixion. They still treat the gospel as a historical account, but try not to read too much into it. Benedict has instead decided to read more into Matthew than anyone has ever done before, finding a novel slant on bloodthirstiness. As Moynihan puts it, “This is a profound religious and mystical insight on the Pope's part, and, as far as I know, completely original.”
No, this is not a post about Conservapedia's hilarious project to create a more conservative Bible translation. Plenty of sharp bloggers have already offered wrycomments on Andy Schlafly's misbegotten endeavor.
A post on Daily Kos drew my attention to a wacky editorial in the Portland Press Herald endorsing the anti-gay Proposition 1 on the Maine ballot. Orono resident Linda E. Pletka is the writer. She is upset about the possibility that Maine's voters will allow a marriage-equality measure to become state law by opposing the Proposition 1 referendum:
Do a majority in Maine really wish we would revert back into a heathen nation?
“Revert back”? Those words are an indication of the fantasy world in which Ms. Pletka resides. The correct phrase is “advance forward.”
But the writer wants us to know that she has the Bible on her side. For some people, that's a pretty powerful argument. The bachelor saint Paul of Tarsus was pretty explicit in his letter to the Romans about how much he disliked gays, perhaps because they used to flirt with him (or perhaps because they didn't; maybe it was his companion Timothy who got all the action). But Linda Pletka doesn't quote St. Paul. No, she doesn't settle for epistles. She goes straight for a gospel:
“What God has joined together—as he made them, man and woman—let no man put asunder.” (Mark 10:9)
Killer quote, right? A perfect prop for Pletka's argument.
Tiny problem. That's not Mark 10:9. This is Mark 10:9:
What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.
The interpolated phrase “as he made them, man and woman” is missing from the King James Version. (Perhaps the king's boyfriend made him leave it out.) But the New International Version is no more helpful to Pletka's cause:
“Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.”
Oops! It's just not there.
Make no mistake. The rest of Mark 10 makes it abundantly clear that the topic is opposite-sex marriage. I am not arguing otherwise. I am merely pointing out that Ms. Pletka has taken it upon herself to rewrite the Bible. How dangerous! If this gets out, her most devout fellow-travelers might find it necessary to stone her or burn her at the stake.
You can't be too careful when it comes to Christian love.
One of the comments on the Portland Press Herald website may have said it best:
MudDoctor of Portland, ME
Oct 31, 2009 9:36 AM
This op-ed piece couldn't come at a better time for the No on 1 campaign.
Do you read the Daily Mail? Neither do I. But perhaps I should. The entertainment value of Britain's foremost right-wing tabloid seems to be rather high. In a “news” story published this month, the Daily Mail reports on the scientific message embedded by God in the Bible. The subtle message was supposedly uncovered by Oxford University research fellow Andrew Parker, who has been moved to publish a book on his discovery.
Here are some excerpts from the Daily Mail's report, which is a kind of combination news-story/book-review:
The Genesis enigma: How DID the Bible describe the evolution of life 3,000 years before Darwin?
By Christopher Hart Last updated at 12:13 AM on 18th July 2009
The revalation [sic] came to Professor Andrew Parker during a visit to Rome. He was in the Sistine Chapel, gazing up at Michelangelo's awesome ceiling paintings, when a realisation struck him with dizzying force.
‘A Biblical enigma exists that is on the one hand so cryptic it has remained camouflaged for millennia, and on the other so obvious one cannot miss it.’
The enigma is that the order of Creation as described in the Book of Genesis, and so powerfully depicted in the Sistine Chapel by the greatest artist of the Renaissance, has been precisely, eerily confirmed by modern evolutionary science.
Yet how on earth could this be possible? And why had nobody noticed it before?
Such was the starting point of Parker's jaw-dropping new book, The Genesis Enigma: an astounding work which seeks to prove that the ancient Hebrew writers of the Book of Genesis knew all about evolution—3,000 years before Darwin.
And poor Darwin never realized it. He thought his principal rival was Alfred Russel Wallace, when in actuality it was the divinely inspired authors of the Bible who had scooped him by a few millennia.
Andrew Parker is a leading scientist in his field: a research fellow at Oxford University, research leader at the Natural History Museum, and as if that weren't enough, a professor at Shanghai's Jiao Tong university.
As a scientist he never paid much heed to the Book of Genesis, assuming, like most of his colleagues, that such primitive mythology—which is believed to have been compiled from several sources between 950 and 500 BC—has long since been ‘disproved’ by hard scientific fact.
But after his Sistine Chapel moment, he went back to look at Genesis in more detail. And what he read astonished him. It was even, he says, ‘slightly scary’.
Somehow—God alone knew how—the writer or writers of that ancient text had described how the evolution of life on earth took place in precise detail and perfect order.
It sounds as though Professor Parker found himself a pair of Bible goggles. Everything looks different when you look at the world through your Bible goggles. For example, the Flintstones turns into a science documentary. (Ken Ham would be so proud!)
It is always disturbing and haunting to encounter an ancient wisdom that seems to anticipate or even exceed our own.
More fanciful writers immediately start to theorise wildly: that those who built the pyramids, or Stonehenge, must have been guided by super-intelligent aliens, that sort of thing.
Andrew Parker, a scientist and proud of it, has no time for such twaddle. But he does gradually come to understand, in the course of his investigations, that our ancestors of thousands of years ago, though they may not have had iPods and plasma-screen televisions, nevertheless possessed a wisdom that was, quite literally, timeless: as true now as it was then.
In the Book of Genesis, God first and most famously creates heaven and earth, but ‘without form’, and commands: ‘Let there be light.’ A perfect description of the Big Bang, that founding moment of our universe some 13 billion years ago, an unimaginable explosion of pure energy and matter ‘without form’ out of nothing—the primordial Biblical ‘void’.
Wow! A cosmic epiphany! “Let there be light” is indisputably a “perfect description” of the origin of time and energy and matter. Of course, it doesn't actually mention matter or hint at mass-energy equivalence, but let's not quibble. If we don't quibble, we can agree that the description is perfect.
He then creates the dry land out of the waters, but it is the water that comes first. As Parker points out, scientists today understand very similarly that water is indeed crucial for life.
When ‘astrobiologists’ look into space for signs of life on other planets, the first thing they look for is the possible presence of water.
Another hit! A most palpable hit! Today scientists search for water as a prerequisite for life on other planets. That is certainly why God made it first! (On the second day. After light.)
On the third day, we are told: ‘God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.”’
Now factually speaking, grass didn't evolve until much later. In the Triassic and Jurassic epochs, the dinosaurs knew only plants such as giant conifers and tree ferns. But since grass did not in fact evolve until much later, a sternly literal-minded scientist would declare the Bible wrong, and consign it to the nearest wheelie bin.
But wait a minute, says Parker. If you take ‘grass, herb and tree’ to mean photosynthesising life in general, then this is, once again, spot on.
Parker is indisputably right: If you ignore the errors, then the Bible account in Genesis is correct!
The very life forms on earth were single-celled bacteria, but the first truly viable bacteria were the ‘cyanobacteria’—those that had learned to photosynthesise.
As a result, they began to expire oxygen, creating an atmosphere that could go on to support more and more life. They were the key to life on earth.
Naturally, says Parker, ‘the ancient Israelites would have been oblivious to any single-celled life form, let alone cyanobacteria’, but ‘grass’ as a loose description of life forms that photosynthesise?
Parker is really slacking off here. I have it on good authority that all of the letters required to spelled out “cyanobacteria” and “photosynthesis” occur in the first chapter of Genesis. Parker is missing some really compelling evidence!
On the fourth day, Genesis famously becomes confusing. On the first day, remember, God has already created light, and made Day and Night. But it isn't until day four that he makes the lights in heaven, the greater light to rule the day and the lesser the night.
Hang on—so he made ‘Day’ three days before he made the Sun? Houston, I think we have a problem.
Yet the writers of Genesis were just as well aware as us, surely, that the sunrise causes the day. You don't need a degree in astronomy to work that one out. What on earth did they mean?
Here, The Genesis Enigma comes up with a stunningly ingenious answer.
Brace yourselves, folks. Here it comes. Biblical exegesis at its most eye-opening!
For Parker argues that day four refers to the evolution of vision.
Until the first creatures on earth evolved eyes, in a sense, the sun and moon didn't exist. There was no creature on earth to see them, nor the light they cast.
When Genesis says: ‘Let there be lights... To divide the day from the night,’ it is talking about eyes.
‘The very first eye on earth effectively turned on the lights for animal behaviour,’ writes Professor Parker, ‘and consequently for further rapid evolution.’
Didn't see that one coming, did you? How could we have been so blind! (That may have been a joke, but you'll forgive me if I'm just a little bit befuddled right now.)
Almost overnight, life suddenly grew vastly more complex. Predators were able to hunt far more efficiently, and so prey had to evolve fast too—or get eaten.
The moment that there were ‘lights’, or eyes, then life exploded into all its infinite variety.
And yet again, that's what Genesis says happened, and in the correct environment too. In the sea.
For on the very next day of Creation, the fifth day: ‘God said, “Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life.”’
That is exactly what happened. Life that had hitherto been lived in the dark, by simple, slow-moving, worm-like creatures, erupted into dazzling diversity. We know all about it from the world famous Burgess Shale fossils.
They were discovered in the summer of 1909 by one Charles Doolittle Walcott, on holiday with his family in the Canadian Rockies. Walcott began to chip away at the shale with his geological hammer, and quite by chance stumbled upon one of the greatest finds in all science.
For the shale records what happened on our planet around 508 million years ago, long before the first dinosaurs: the ‘Cambrian explosion,’ which most scientists now think was indeed the direct result of the evolution of vision.
Poor Stephen Jay Gould wrote an entire book on the Burgess Shale without ever realizing it contained a vital key to the truth of Genesis. Professor Parker is running rings around him with his superior intelligence.
How does Genesis describe the teeming aquatic life of the Cambrian explosion? ‘And God said, “Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life.”’
How did the writer/writers know that life suddenly diversified into this rich and staggering variety, under the oceans, not on land? Why would a very much land-based people, pastoralists and shepherds, even think like this?
These are excellent questions. Assuming, of course, that the Bible scribes intended “bring forth abundantly” to indicate variety as well as quantity, and assuming further that God's holy stenographers also implied an “explosion” of sea life, and assuming even further that they did not simply flip a coin in deciding to discuss sea creatures before land animals, then we must confront the issue head on: How did these harmless rustics have the imagination to write about (by implication, anyway) suddenly burgeoning varieties of innumerable sea creatures arising before life on land? God must have whispered in their ears, right?
And after the sea monsters come the birds, the animals, cattle, and finally, homo sapiens. All present and correct, and all still in the right order.
Don't forget, we're still awarding God a mulligan on that unfortunate business with the premature citation of “grass,” which has been known to muddle the recollection. I'm not sure, either, how “cattle” got separated from “animals,” but I'm a farm boy who is aware that cattle can be sly little rascals.
Once again, ‘In describing how the planet and life around us came to be, the writer of the Genesis narrative got it disturbingly right’.
Except, of course, where he (they?) got it wrong, in which case we forgive them.
The Daily Mail finishes up its report on Parker's Genesis Enigma with a few words of caution from the author, who does not want to be mistaken for a creationist:
So what should we make of the extraordinary findings of The Genesis Enigma?
Professor Parker is clear on this subject. ‘It would be a great shame if my findings were either misused in an attempt to suggest that scientists themselves are unsure about science, or pounded out of all recognition into support of the seven-day creation premise.’
Nevertheless, when Parker comes to explaining how the writers of Genesis knew what they knew, he can only conclude that it was due to ‘divine intervention’, or ‘a lucky guess’. Since the odds of the latter seem fantastically remote, Parker tentatively suggests the former.
He leaves out post hoc apologetics and special pleading, but he's a busy man who can't be expected to anticipate everything. (God may have divinely inspired Genesis, but he was less generous in the case of The Genesis Enigma.)
Parker clearly demonstrates what an extraordinary text the Bible is—and even more so, not less so, in the light of modern science. But he is surely wrong to think that the only way of coming by knowledge is either through science or ‘divine intervention’.
Oops! Where did that come from? Daily Mail reporter Christopher Hart gave Professor Parker a lot of leeway in laying out the argument of The Genesis Enigma, but Mr. Hart has been keeping some doubt in reserve.
The writers of Genesis didn't possess scientific knowledge, they didn't have Darwin, or the earth-shattering findings of Victorian geology. They didn't, as Parker himself says, have ‘so much as a magnifying lens’.
But that doesn't prove divine intervention either. Instead, they possessed an ancient, intuitive wisdom of great poetry and beauty.
One could compare this with the wisdom of other, pre-scientific cultures, which often turns out to correspond closely to the findings of modern science.
Darwinian evolution teaches us that all life on earth is related. We human beings are 99 per cent genetically identical to chimpanzees and orang-utans. But as the great Professor Steve Jones always loves to point out, we are also 90 per cent mice, and even 50 per cent banana.
Don't worry, Jones adds reassuringly. This doesn't actually make you half-banana—nor for that matter does it make bananas half-human, or the ethics of eating banoffee pie would just get too complicated.
The invocation of the name of Steve Jones certainly raises the level of the discussion, but the article is still sputtering to an awkward conclusion.
But the surreal comedy of this science aside, there is serious matter here. For just as Darwinian evolution confirms much of the Book of Genesis, it also confirms other, supposedly ‘primitive’ ways of looking at the natural world.
To appreciate the power of pre-scientific wisdom is not for a moment to downgrade the achievements of modern science. But it does emphasise incredible power and, more surprising still, the accuracy of more ancient, ‘poetic’ ways of seeing. As an ancient proverb has it: ‘The mountain has only one summit, but many paths up.’
Sorry, but that's just a little too evocative of Robert Jastrow's goofy coda to his book God and the Astronomers: “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting here for centuries.”
Yeah. Right.
And the writers of Genesis knew about the Big Bang, evolution, and the Cambrian explosion.
FightingAtheist posted a helpful video on YouTube so that theists could understand what it would take to turn him into a believer. FA suggested that a fulfilled prediction could fill the bill, supposing that the prediction had sufficient specificity to demonstrate genuine knowledge of the future and wasn't trivial in nature. He also observed it would have been impressive if Jesus had tipped off his disciples to the theory of relativity and Einstein's equation for mass-energy equivalence:
Just think, what if Jesus had said something like this? “My disciples, I say unto thee that energy is mass times the speed of light multiplied unto itself.”
Yes, that would have been a killer item to embed in the Bible and way better than most of the stuff you find there. I also agree with FightingAtheist that it would have made the Bible a much more credible tome. If Scriptures were that scientific, a lot of us would have to line up behind FightingAtheist to be inducted into the ranks of the believers.
Unfortunately, however, the Bible is more famous for things like the implication that pi might be 3 or that crickets have four legs. The Bible is not a work of science.
Or is it?
FightingAtheist challenged his theistic viewers to post videos explaining what it would take to change their minds about God and turn them into atheists. Some of the respondents, however, preferred to try to convert FA instead and prove to him the existence of their supreme deity. (No doubt FA could have predicted this without requiring any miraculous foreknowledge of the future.) I was especially taken by the rebuttal posted by h20Enthusiast, aficionado of quack energy schemes, Christianity, and 9/11 conspiracy theories. It is h20's contention that the Bible is a book of science. The Bible clearly identifies—with astonishing accuracy—the value of the speed of light. He can prove it mathematically!
Of course, you have to do a little work to winkle it out, because it's not like Jesus simply says, “Verily I say unto you, but light traveleth as many cubits in a day as the number of weeks in a year multiplied unto itself eight-fold. That's a lot, bitches.” (There are 52.177 weeks in a year and (52.177)8 = 5.49 × 1013, which equals a light-day for a cubit of slightly less than half a meter—which by most accounts it was in the time of Christ. It would certainly have been in the ballpark.) h20 says it's more subtle than that.
You can (and should, but with the sound turned down) watch h20's video for the full impact of his reasoning (try not to be offended by his obligatory use of “Fools say there is no GOD” and “ATHEISTS are FOOLS”), but here's a summary of his delightful argument:
The second epistle of Peter, in chapter 3, verse 8, says, “But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.” It's obvious, of course, that 2 Peter 3:8 is referring to time dilation, right? How fast does one have to be traveling in order to achieve a time dilation where one day in the traveler's frame of reference equals a thousand years in the rest frame? It's simple algebra, right?
Hmm. It looks like we're about to subtract a number very close to zero from 1, leaving a number very close to one (just a tiny bit smaller, of course). Which means that we're about to discover that v, the speed of travel, is awfully goshdarn close to c, the speed of light. (But just a tiny bit smaller. Big surprise.) In fact, we get v = 0.999999999996c. To the utter amazement of h20Enthusiast, however, when he plugs in 299,792,458 m/s for c, he gets v = 299,792,457.999, plus some loose change and a bunch of exclamation points. (He's very good about showing all of his decimal places, less good in his prose style.)
h20Enthusiast finds the results compelling, astonishing, and thoroughly gratifying. You see, God encoded the speed of light into the Bible. Yes, indeed. You can tell, because when you apply Einstein's theory of relativity, which says that extreme time dilation occurs near the speed of light, and demand extreme time dilation equating 1 day to a thousand years, you get a velocity very near the speed of light. Awesome. And when you plug in a long decimal expression for the speed of light, you get it back!
Amen. And try not to laugh.
Addendum
h20Enthusiast may be pleased that his YouTube video went from 60 viewings to 300 in less than half a day after I cited it here (and drew a crowd of visitors from Pharyngula). He seems less pleased that his argument (which he attributes as original to xRevelator) is regarded as unpersuasive. He's posted some responses to the comments on the YouTube page for his video:
h20Enthusiast (1 hour ago)
I do understand your objection.... it doesn't look like evidence to you ... I get it.
h20Enthusiast (1 hour ago)
im implying the AUTHOR also CREATED the speed of light.
sorry if that doesn't fit inside your head.
Actually, it fits inside my head just fine. Perfectly comfortably. Vacuous statements don't take up much space.
Postscript
h20Enthusiast quickly grew tired of being assaulted by atheist hordes (or so it appears) and made his video private. Although I captured the key items in this post (and you can see other details at Good Math, Bad Math, the entire content of h20's video is essentially a video transcript (with a few anti-atheist insults sprinkled in) of xRevelator's screed on his YouTube page, which you can check out in its original form here. Or just pore over the following rant, where I quote xRevelator's statement in extenso for your edification:
STATEMENT OF BELIEF
Why do I believe in God? I am a scientific person and everything should be weighed carefully by facts and evidences. No compromises.
The verse that peaked my interest is this one:
Peter 3:8 NIV
"But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day."
One might ask, how can a day be a thousand years and a thousand years be a day? This sounds rather absurd. But, using scientific knowledge, the absurd becomes logical.
It is called Einstein's Theory of Relativity - Time Dilation.
Here is a mathematical explanation:
Say, if a spaceship traveling at 80% the speed of light for 1 hour, how much time has passed by relative to Earth?
Therefore, the spaceship is effectively traveling to the future as 1 hour on the spaceship traveling at 80% the speed of light equals 1.667 hours on Earth.
Reading the verse again (Peter 3:8), how fast is the Lord traveling so that a thousand years on Earth is like a day with Him?
Solution:
Δt=t_0/√(1-v²/c²) 1000 years=1day/√(1-v²/299,792,458² ) 365250 days x √(1-v²/299,792,458² )=1 day 133407562500 x (1-v² / 89875517873681764) = 1 133407562500-133407562500v²/89 875517873681764=1 -33407562500v²/898755178736817 64=-133407562499 -33407562500v²= -11990073767863191518066568236 v²=89875517873008072.672541095 531972 v=299792457.998876403809564537 24992
The answer is 299,792,457.998876403809564537 24992 m/s. The speed of light is exactly 299,792,458 m/s. It strangely yields a resultant of 99.999999999625% of the speed of light. This is truly baffling.
We should take note of the strange accuracy of the verse. It could result to any random number, but what is truly baffling is that it registers a resulting answer digit for digit accuracy of the speed light except for the last digit before the decimal.
The answer obviously should be less than the speed of light because time will cease to exist at infinity at the speed of light.
The Bible has clearly demonstrated by this simple verse on its precise accuracy of scientific facts way beyond its time. The first quantitative estimate of the speed of light was only made in 1676 by Ole Christensen Rømer and Time Dilation by Einstein only in 1905.
How is it possible that the ancient Bible holds hidden knowledge of time dilation and the speed of light? This is quite strange which offers no logical explanation.
Either we dismiss this as mere coincidence or we accept the Bible as a book of truth.
This is no longer a matter of belief, but rather a matter of accepting reality.
In the September 2007 issue of Acts & Facts from the Institute for Creation Research, executive editor Lawrence E. Ford argues that there is no middle ground when it comes to a literal interpretation of the Bible. Either its authority is absolute or it's not. As Ford puts it,
Question the creation account because of man's discoveries and one might as well question the virgin birth or resurrection or even the deity of Jesus Christ.
Hot damn! I agree with Ford completely. We are utterly as one in this regard.
Then we part ways, of course, because I do reject Biblical inerrancy and Ford clings to it. For me, the Bible is long since overthrown as a source of infallible truth. It contains, it seems to me, some interesting (and occasionally beautiful or inspiring) accounts of ancient tribal creation myths and practices, along with more recent accretions consisting of a patchwork (and not always consistent) history of the founding of Christianity. It is, however, neither a science book nor a history text. (Lawrence Ford would beg to differ, but that's his problem.)
Science so-called
ICR fancies itself a Bible-based scientific organization, ignoring the inherent contradiction in that description. The new Acts & Facts includes an exciting account of ICR's devotion to cutting-edge research:
Genetic research is a complicated undertaking. Although the complete human genome was published in 2001, only a portion of this genetic code is understood. A great deal of work remains to be done, and an abundance of raw data waits to be interpreted. ICR joined the field in 2005 with its GENE project...
New equipment and software continue to be developed to aid this investigation. For instance, bioinformatics offers the use of techniques such as applied mathematics, statistics, and computer science for the investigation of such aspects of genomic research as DNA sequence alignment, protein interactions, and prediction of gene expression. A team of scientists from around the country met in July to discuss ICR's genome project and the computer software and bioinformatic approaches that will best support their research efforts. The meeting also allowed the scientists to share updates on their current work and discuss directions for future investigation. The research is meticulous and time-consuming, but the new opportunities are exciting. Look for progress reports in Acts & Facts.
Sounds pretty scientific, doesn't it? In fact, ICR makes a remarkable contrast with the Discovery Institute. The latter organization claims its fosters a robust research program to demonstrate the viability of “intelligent design” as a scientific (and nontheistic) rival to the theory of evolution, but to date it's accomplished virtually nothing. ICR, on the other hand, vigorously attempts to make its case, dedicating itself to projects such as the one described in the above passage.
However... you may have noticed the ellipsis in the excerpt I quoted from Acts & Facts. Let me give you the entirety of the sentence I truncated:
ICR joined the field in 2005 with its GENE project, with a goal of analyzing the human genome in order to demonstrate that humans and animals are not distant cousins who sprang from the same microbe living in the primordial soup millions of years ago.
Yes, that was to be expected. ICR has already drawn its conclusions. Now it's time to bend the research results to fit the pre-selected creationist model.
ICR can call its GENE project whatever it wants, but science it is not.
While PZ Myers was trudging through the wild country of Minnesota, I was traveling the trackless wastes of California (well, okay, not completely trackless; U.S. 99 and Interstate 5 must count for something). The experience left us both a bit tuckered out. PZ noted his own exhaustion in a brief post that promised a quick return to his usual generous rate of blog posting. In the meantime, though, he left us with a teaser about future topics, including an animal growl in honor of one David Klinghoffer of the Discovery Institute. My curiosity piqued, I followed the link to Klinghoffer's opinion piece in the Seattle Times.
As usual, whenever the Discovery Institute in involved, unintentional humor is the order of the day. Get a load of this load:
Dawkins, for his part, mocks the God of the Hebrew Bible as “arguably the most unpleasant character in fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
Such a wild caricature will be unrecognizable to any believer (like me) in the God of Israel.
A caricature, is it? Klinghoffer must be one of those people who prefers not to pay much attention to the details of his own religion. (He is a practicing Jew who considers the Hebrew Bible—what most Christians call the “Old Testament”—to be the divinely inspired word of God.) That's par for the course in the United States, where religiosity is typically coupled with a profound ignorance of the history and tenets of one's faith. You can read all about it in Stephen Prothero's book on religious illiteracy in this country. Klinghoffer has written extensively about religion, so his outburst isn't based as much on ignorance as it is on a willful refusal to face the obvious.
Let's check out just a few of characteristics that Klinghoffer says are falsely imputed to this God fellow.
Control freak? Genesis 2:17: “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” There's a lot more in this vein, of course, but I think someone who promises death in retaliation for unauthorized nibbling can fairly be called a control freak. This one covers vindictive, too, I would say.
Bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser? Numbers 31:17-18: “Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.” Yahweh is a mean son of a bitch as he wipes out all of the Midianites except for the toothsome young virgins. Make sure the baby boys are killed. We won't get upset about this sort of thing till King Herod does it in the New Testament. Looks like infanticidal and genocidal both fit nicely in this category. Klinghoffer was a bit profligate with his adjectives, but the big bad Jehovah of the Old Testament is up to the task.
Misogynistic? This one is just too easy, isn't it? Leviticus 12:2 & 5: “If a woman have conceived seed, and born a man child: then she shall be unclean seven days.... But if she bear a maid child, then she shall be unclean two weeks....” Girl children: twice as dirty as boy children.
Filicidal? Oh, I've done this one already. Just think of God telling Abraham to kill his son Isaac as a human sacrifice and to burn the boy's body as an offering. I wrote up my opinion of this episode in Holy homicide. (I bravely come out against human sacrifice.)
Pestilential? Let's ask the Egyptians in the book of Exodus just how pestilential Yahweh can be when he gets his dander up. Exodus 9:14-15: “For I will at this time send all my plagues upon thine heart, and upon thy servants, and upon thy people; that thou mayest know that there is none like me in all the earth. For now I will stretch out my hand, that I may smite thee and thy people with pestilence; and thou shalt be cut off from the earth.” For I am the biggest and baddest god on the block, yo!
This, by the way, is just a couple of chapters after Yahweh laughingly nudged Moses in the ribs and said, “I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt.” Yeah, that's the ticket. The whole show would have been ruined if Pharaoh capitulated, so it amused Yahweh to use his special God powers to make sure that Pharaoh would remain steadfast in his defiance. That way God got to hit him with the whole divine wrath business. I know it seems just a tad unfair, but it's okay when you're God. I guess.
Go ahead and worship that, Klinghoffer. I'll pass.
Frankly, any day that George W. Bush is our president is a beastly day, but some days are still a little beastlier than others. As we know from Revelation 13:18,
Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.
Naturally, therefore, I felt a small frisson when earlier today the countdown clock in my blog's sidebar presented the message that only 666 days remain in the Bush administration.
Does that mean it's all downhill from here? Come to think of it, “downhill” is practically a one-word characterization of the entire Bush administration to date. Why should it change now?
The more suspicious among us may think that biblical obscurities are there for a purpose. If a passage can be interpreted in many different ways, then more people will be able to embrace it. Specificity carries great risks.
On the other hand, you'd think that people receiving dictation from an omniscient God should have been able to transcribe eternal verities of compelling clarity. To wit:
The heavens opened and the angels proclaimed, “Fear any literate man, capable of impressive facial hair, who is comfortable on boats, has a thing for finches, and is named Darwin, for he is basically an unrighteous phony. So it is said in the very literal Kingdom of God.”
Now that is specific and should have been embedded in Genesis if God had been serious about heading off evolution. God, however, did not inspire this particular bit of revisionist scripture. It is, rather, the mortal handiwork of David Ng (long may his name be praised). For a while, though, I though the text's “literate man, capable of impressive facial hair,” might be PZ Myers, to whom I am indebted for the link to Ng's revelatory writings.
Mortal discretion
A reticence similar to that of the scripture writers is exhibited by Dr. Henry Morris III, grandson and namesake of the old Flood geologist himself, in a commentary published in the January 2007 issue (Vol. 36, No. 1) of Acts & Facts from the Institute for Creation Research:
New Year, New Rulers, New Resolve
“Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth” (Colossians 3:2).
This month the 110th Congress will convene on Capitol Hill. New leaders will be elevated to posts previously held by the other political party. Many are fearful of what these changes could mean for our country.
Post-election pundits predict that previous economic accomplishments, such as lower taxes and sustained economic growth, will be overturned. Others see a battle mounting against President Bush on morality issues like abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell cloning, and the definition of marriage. However, regardless of the uncertainty of the coming months and years, I am reminded of three larger truths:
The election results did not surprise God. Romans 13:1 says that “there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.” In the Old Testament, God raised up Cyrus, a pagan king, to carry out His greater purposes. “For Jacob my servant's sake, and Israel mine elect, I have even called thee by thy name: I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known me” (Isaiah 45:4). God is sovereign.
The shift in policy will not last. In 2008, the citizenry will make their will known once more. But apart from that afar greater change is coming. Christ will return in glory as the King of kings to rule the world in righteousness. II Corinthians 4:17 assures us that “our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us afar more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” God's truth abides.
Now if only God had been smart enough to dictate some prophecies to David Ng, instead of wasting all of his time with that Isaiah guy, we could have had some catchy verses concerning events today, instead of all that bother about long-gone Cyrus and company:
For Nancy my servant's sake, and America my elect, I have even called the president a big fat loser: I have supplanted the blasted Bush with a Democratic Congress, for thou hast screwed up big time. (David 1:1-2)
See? That's much better!
Dr. Morris may warn us not to put our trust in princes, but he does seem to rest quite a lot of his hopes on the next elections in 2008. Sensing, however, that 2008 may not go exactly as he hopes, he hastens to remind us that Jesus is coming again soon, whereupon he will swiftly make the Bush tax cuts permanent. Yes, any moment now. (Impatient Christians are still wondering how to reconcile a two-thousand-year wait with the promise in Matthew 24:34 that “this generation will by no means pass away”; the folks who heard Christ say that are dead, you know.)
I take this as good news: Dr. Morris thinks the Democrats may be in charge till Jesus returns. Listen to the prophet!
Godamn this is a good blog. Godamn I am subscribing to it. (Godamn)
Posted by Hobo to Halfway There at 8/28/2006 09:30:02 AM
I consistently come away in awe of how eloquently you write, and how you make choosing exactly the right word seem so effortless. You also seem to find subject matter in a wide variety of places, and you link contemporary and long-past events in unexpected ways.
I found your blog about a month ago via your comments on Pharyngula and have fallen completely in love with your writing. Every entry is a pleasure to read.
Posted by sublunary to Halfway There at 8/21/2008 10:06 AM
Love your blog by the way. It's very measured, and you always have something interesting to say.
Posted by Aramael to Halfway There at 8/22/2008 6:50 AM
Posts
