[Vision2020] Religion and Morality

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Note: Most Visionaries I'm sure are tired of this debate, but just in case there are a few who are still interested, I've chosen not to respond off list.  The delete key is just 10 inches from your right pinkie.

Dear Chris:

Let me start, as you did, with the issue of personal bias and peer-reviewed scholarship.  (Or do you prefer Courtney's rude phrase "smear-reviewed"?)  
At my professional conferences I always observe the following: (1) the respect that each participant gives to the others regardless of theological persuasion or personal bias; and (2) the intellectual honesty that results from open debate and the requirement that participants back up their arguments with the best available evidence. 

Papers based on personal bias alone do not get a very nice reception at these conferences.  Nobody at these scholarly gatherings say, as you seem to do: "Our personal biases cancel each other out, so we'll chuck next year's meeting."  No, each year we all make a little more progress in reaching the truth. Just for the record, when I hosted the AAR/SBL regional conference here in Moscow, 40 percent of the papers were presented by faculty from conservative evangelical schools. NSA was conspicuously absent.

With this professional context in mind, let's look at one of your claims: "We have to deal with the fact that Ezekiel mentions Job, and Ezekiel predates the Babylonian Captivity. This is important because of Job's very clear testimony in a belief in the resurrection of the dead."  

Biblical scholars at my conferences would have many difficulties with this.  First, there is a strong consensus that Ezekiel was written during the captivity; second, the identity of Job is problematic (as the book itself is also) because the reference to Daniel is most likely not the biblical Daniel but a Canaanite "Dan'el," as the authors of Ezekiel actually spell it; and Job is not a resurrectionist and neither are any other early Hebrew writers.

You must be referring to Job 19:26, the message of which is contradicted by Job himself: "He comes forth like a flower, and withers; he flees like a shadow, and continues not" (14:1-2).  Unlike a severed trunk that will sprout new branches, "man lies down and rises not again; till the heavens are no more he will not awake, or be roused out of his sleep" (14:12). The general Hebrew view of the end of life is roughly like the Greek view: everyone goes to Sheol or Hades, never to return. 
 
Gen. 22 says nothing about the possible resurrection of Isaac. Your suggestion that Abraham doesn't have to worry about killing his son because he knows he will be resurrected takes all the Angst out of this horrible temptation, not to mention the weak consolation that Abraham would not see is his son again until a very distant Last Judgment, which, in any case, is not part of early Hebrew eschatology.  By the way, today Abraham would be arrested for conspiracy to murder an innocent child, and his defense that God told him to do it would be laughed out of court. 

The new references you cite for Zoroaster's dates are not contemporary scholarship.  Are you going to say that somehow the author of a 10th Century text showed up 400 years after it was written? (I suppose Yahweh could have arranged it.) I'm stunned by your remarkable confession that you would allow an earlier date for Zoroaster if it did not impact on the evolution of basic religious doctrines that Zoroastrianism and Judeo-Christianity share.  You are defying logic in your intellectual dishonesty: you cannot allow the former without accepting the latter.

I really like the following "cheater clause" in one of your evangelical references: "It would not do violence to a high view of inspiration to admit that God could have used Zoroastrianism as a means of stimulating the Jewish mind to think on these subjects . . . ." (Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, p. 1202).  As L. H. Mills confesses: "It pleased the Divine Power to reveal some of the most important articles of our Catholic creed first to the Zoroastrians, and through their literature of the Jews and ourselves." 

My challenge to you about Zoroaster had only to do with his dates, not his influence on Judaism.  Influence such as this is difficult to prove, but suffice it to say that long before (at least several hundred years) the Hebrews thought of these ideas, Zoroaster preached a belief in one God in a double Trinity, individual personal responsibility, Satan as God's opponent (rather than a major Son of Yahweh making bets with Yahweh on Job's fate), bodily resurrection, Heaven and Hell. Early Hebrew scripture does not have any of these concepts; indeed, henotheism (Yahweh ruling in a council of gods) dominates early Hebrew Scripture.  See my essay at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/henotheism.htm.

What evidence, other than wishful thinking, can you give that the Hebrew Bible was intact ca. 1,000 BCE?  Moses could not have been the author of books in which his own death is duly recorded. No self-respecting Bible scholar would say that Gen. 3 or even Ps. 16 refer to a Messiah. Furthermore, the Suffering Servant of Isaiah is not the Messiah.  (See www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/gre8.htm last section.) 

You are as bad as Matthew, desperately combing the Hebrew Bible looking for messianic allusions when none exist in the text. Such a cavalier treatment of texts amounts to hermeneutical abuse, showing great disrespect for the texts as they stand in their own Sitz in Leben.

While we are talking about the Bible, I will note how rude you were (blah, blah, blah, etc.) in responding to my serious questions about formulating the Trinity.  As a Bible believer you have to tell me why the doctrine is absent from the Hebrew Bible and has at most five references in the New Testament. If you have read my essay, which I now doubt that you have, you will find a very respectful tone about traditional contributions to this doctrinal debate.  The title "Wondrous Trinities Everywhere" indicates that I truly appreciate (without personally accepting the idea) the theological imagination involved in conceiving divinity in threes, fours, sevens, and nines.

I have no trouble with orthodox trinitarian doctrine, starting with Augustine through Luther/Calvin to Barth, all of them preserving monotheism by tending towards modalism.  I was shocked that Jones recommended an author who admitted that calling Christianity monotheistic was a mistake! 

At no point in my theological discussions do I make any claim to comprehend the divine nature. You claim to know far more about that than I do, so I allow far more mystery in the divine nature.  Anyone with any philosophical/ theological training should be able to see the clear tritheistic implications in your thinking.  That's the exact opposite of what Christian theologians wanted the doctrine to do. 

You trot Jones' ridiculous straw man about Unitarianism's Hermit Deity, to which I have already replied in my trinity essay.  Yes, a Unitarian deity can be omnipresent without being pantheistic.  Yes, a Unitarian God is a creator if she allows other creatures to create as well.  (Traditional omnipotence kills free will.) Yes, the Unitarian God of process theology communicates with everything that exists, something impossible for the orthodox Christian God, who was unfortunately made immutable on a Greek rather than a Biblical model. See www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/process.htm. 

OK, Japan had legalized prostitution before World War II.  The Netherlands currently has legalized prostitution, and yet neither population has been corrupted by it, as their low crime rates indicate.  A true libertarian, not the fake ones at www.LewRockwell.com, argue that legalizing drugs, pornography, and prostitution removes organized crime from the picture and in the case of prostitution forces sex workers to get regular medical checks.  Perhaps that is why the Dutch have such a low STD rate.

Denmark, Sweden, and Germany legalized pornography and their rape rate remained at 10 per 100,000 between 1964-1984.  During the same time that the U.S. was resisting legal porn, rapes rose from 10 to 35 per 100,000.

I don't care if Dalrymple was a prison psychiatrist; the Department of Justice hires criminologists not doctors.  The Department of Justice wants data, not stories from behind bars or from the cop's beat.  Contrary to your implication, the criminologists I know (my best fishing buddy is one) frequently visit prisons and take their students there for field trips.

So you are now saying it will take millennia before we see the moral effects of Christianity.  At the beginning of this debate you claimed that we could see profound effects after two millennia.  It hasn't happended even in the most Christian of countries, so why should it happen anywhere else?  

Besides, I thought Pauline Christianity was about Gospel (redeeming incorrigible sinners) not Law, to which Paul believes it is impossible to conform. That's what was so wrong about Falwell's Moral Majority.  Why has Japan been able to produce a moral majority without Jesus?

With regard to women not voting, I gave you the reference, but still Wilsonian apologists refuse to accept the fact that Wilson, Grant, and Wilkins declared, in the documentary "My Town," that only propertied males should vote.  (Wilson has not said that the film has been doctored.) The Christ Church women who vote are honorary males because they are single.  If they were married, their husbands would vote for them.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have a paper to write for presentation at Tokyo's Institute of Oriental Philosophy next week.  I'm afraid my post on the oxymoron Calvinist Libertarianism will have to wait until I'm finished, or even when I get back.

Thanks for the dialogue,

Nick Gier