Reply to Cate's "Commandments"

See, I found that part really interesting -- I'm not sure if the society was polygamous at the time, but it seems to be an "incest law" for a polygamous society, where blood ties are a little harder to figure out.

This passage confused me, because it took a while for me to realize that "Uncover the shame of X" was a euphemism for "See X naked". It's a list of folks you shouldn't lust after because they're your family. "No man shall uncover the shame of one with whom he hath kinship; for I am the Lord" ... makes sense to me! As Machiavelli would argue, the best place for laws to be handed down from is God Himself, since then they're really hard to amend on a whim. So the folks that count as family are:

• your father's wife (not just your mother)


• your sister (daughter of your father or mother or father's other wife)


• your grandchild, from a son or a daughter


• your aunt, maternal or paternal


• your uncles' wives


• your son's wife ... I find the tone here amusing "Thou shalt not uncover the shame of thy son's wife, for she is thy son's wife". The idea of God's exasperation with having to lay down the law so specifically for his depraved creations makes me laugh.


• your daughter


• the wife of your nephew


• your brother's wife (as long as he's living)


• this last one is confusing, but I think it's saying don't marry a woman and her daughter at once, or a woman and her granddaughter at once, or two sisters

If religion is the source of laws, then it makes sense for religious documents to include some laws! And -- I mean, this is pretty much more comprehensive than "Thou shalt not covet thy neigbor's wife" -- it's a complicated system of social taboos, covering under incest a whole number of people who one isn't really related to by blood. I don't know, it doesn't bother me. It seems like the kind of thing a document like Augustine's would consider one of the "remnants of its times" which wouldn't inform 'present-day' religious belief.

Religion for Public Order

So once upon a time, when I was a preteen, I saw the movie Kundun, and having been brought up with no religious background, I immediately thought the beliefs/rituals that went on were so strange that no one, especially not someone so apparently intelligent as the Lama, could seriously believe them -- it made sense to me that the Lama was perpetuating the Tibetan religion to stay in power, his real concern was the political future of Tibet re: China. The same would be true for all religious leaders -- all Catholics are being put on by the Pope, all Muslims first by Muhammad and later by the religious scholars and Caliphs...

I've learned better since then. But it was interesting to come across my old "instrumentalist" perspective on Religion while reading (for another class), "The Discourses" by Machiavelli.

In book 1, chapter 11, "On The Religion of the Romans" Machiavelli talks about Romulus' successor, Numa Pompilius:

The Romans of his day were completely wild, not domesticated; he wanted to train them to live a sociable life and to practice the arts of peace. So he turned to religion because it is essential for the maintenance of a civilized way of life, and he founded a religion such that for many centuries there was more fear of God in Rome than there has ever been anywhere else. Such piety was of considerable assistance whenever the senate or one of Rome's great leaders undertook any enterprise. ... Anyone who reads the history of Rome with care will recognize how useful religion was when it came to commanding armies, inspiring the populace, keeping men on the straight and narrow, and making criminals ashamed of themselves."

Well this view is fine, for a Medieval Christian looking back on the pagans, but Machiavelli completely fails to do the things you'd expect of a Medieval Christian -- namely, demerit the Pagans for their idol-worship (he finds Roman religion a great source of order),
call the Christian religion superior (in fact he blames the Pope for a divided Italy),
or claim that REAL Divine support gives the most weight in political matters (he never speaks about Jesus, though he calls Moses a great military leader, and he gives corresponding advice on how YOU TOO can make people believe God speaks to you...)

He emphasizes that the 'front' of religion must be kept up, and while it may be manipulated, that manipulation can never come to light without a political disaster. He criticizes the Christian authorities in Rome for being way too blatant with their corruption and vices -- if the modern Church looked (and 'looked' is all Machiavelli cares about) at all like the early Church, citizens would, in effect, be peer pressured into acting better.

The religious life of the pagans was base on the replies given them by their oracles and on the cult of divination... These oracles came to speak as they were instucted by the powerful, and the deception involved was recognized by the populace. Thus men came to be skeptics, and became inclined to overthrow every good institution. So the rulers of a republic should uphold the basic principles of the religion to which they are committed. ... Everything that happens that fosters religious faith, even if they privately judge it to be false, they should support and encourage; the more prudent they are, the more scientific their outlook, the more they should do this. It is because sensible men have adopted this policy that belief in miracles has taken hold ... since wise men supported them without worrying about the truth of the claims.

While this sort of evenhanded treatment is interesting, because it seems to be a sort (a strange sort) of equality among religions, in Machiavelli's mind, a step more towards actual equality than, say, the post-Reformation equality among Christian sects in the American colonies... I think this view of religion is at least as damaging as Sam Harris's. Not only does it look down on the real religious faith of the many, it sort of denies access to religious faith by the 'ruling class' or the 'intelligentsia" who ought to know better, or think more rationally.

Response to Catrina's "Contradictions of Solomon"

... I'll type this one up once my copy of the KN has printed and I can quote easier..

Ethiopian Tassel Worship

I can't find the quotation to support this now, but in the Kebra Nagast, Sheba asks Menyelek to bring back a tassel from the covering of the Tabernacle, so the Ethiopians can worship it. This reminded me of The Book of Idols we read in Hajj to Mecca last term, ... I even have the printout so I can cite it.

The reason which led them to the worship of images and stones was the following: No one left Mecca without carrying away with him a stone from the stones of the Sacred House as a token of reverence to it, and as a sign of deep affection to Mecca. Wherever he settled he would erect the stone and circumambulate the stone in the same manner he used to circumambulate the Ka'bah...In time this led them to the worship of whatever took their fancy."

Does it seem like the Ethiopians are disposed to polytheism already? Is the Queen of Sheba still too used to worshipping the sun to really get her head around the strict monotheism of the future? It seems strange to me that the fact that she wants to worship a tassel isn't called out as wrongheaded, when the "Orthodox Fathers" are commenting on other things.

Ethiopian Sun Worship

It is interesting that this book is derivative of the Bible -- and just like the Torah (among many other things) is the history of God's chosen people, the Kebra Negast is an attempt to sort of claim part of the inheritance. It is sort of infused with stuff that was important to the Ethiopians...

I'm not sure whether this is because of the translator, or because of the era/background in which this was written, or because the story is new to me, but this was (to me) a much better story than many Bible stories. The characters seem more realistic and well-rounded.

For example Sheba explains the religion of her people:

"Tell me now: whom is it right to worship? We worship the sun according as our fathers have taught us to do, because we say that the sun is the king of gods...And we worship the sun, for he cooketh our food, and moreover, he illumineth the darkness, and removeth fear; we call him 'Our King', and we call him 'Our Creator', and we worship him as our god; for no man hath told us that besides him there is another god."

and Solomon explains that the God of Israel did one better than that, and created the sun... And later Sheba promises:

"And the people shall not worship the sun, and the magnificence of the heavens, or the mountains and the forests, or the stones and the trees of the wilderness, aor the abysses and that which is in the waters, or graven images and figures of gold, or in the feathered fowl that fly; and they shall not make use of them in divining, and they shall not pay adoration unto them."

This seems like an unusually neutral, or even favorable treatment of polytheism by a Christian book. It seems understandable, for the Ethiopians, to be polytheists, and their style of worship is reasonable since their objects of worship aren't useless images but the Sun, which provides some useful services.

Might this dialogue between Solomon and the ancient Queen of Sheba have been used to convert polytheists? It seems like it would be much more convincing than the sort of condescending 'your gods are worse than powerless' approach.

Sam Harris and Muslim Fundamentalism

This lady (I'm sure you've seen this photo before...) is Wafah Dufour, niece (among many others) to the Big Bad, Osama bin Laden. I think she's a good posterchild (along with Uncle, not pictured) for the West's flat and schizophrenic picture of Islam and Muslims.

But we'll probably talk about that in class. (Let me say that Harris's argument degenerates pretty quickly into insults, calling Muslims 'sexually repressed', and Qu'ranic descriptions of Paradise 'unimaginative'. I'm sort of gobsmacked that he's taken seriously.)

Here's a quote that relates pretty well to stuff I've blogged about before:

Let us imagine that peace one day comes to the Middle East. What will Muslims say of the suicide bombings that they so widely endorsed? Will they say, "We were driven mad by the Israeli occupation?" Will they say "We were a generation of sociopaths"? How will they account for the celebrations that followed these "sacred explosions"? ... If they are still devout Muslims here is what they must think: "Our boys are in paradise, and they have prepared a way for us to follow. Hell has prepared for the infidels." It seems to me to be an almost axiomatic truth of human nature that no peace, should it ever be established, will survive beliefs of this sort for very long.

Sam Harris, "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason" pp 126-7

Though I don't want to be a jerk and quote myself, I think this fits into my earlier post about religion as a chain (or web) and how it changes through time. Sam Harris here seems to be neglecting a few things. First of all, Islam is just one aspect of Muslims' lives -- the great majority of Muslims, after all (2.8 million in the US alone!) are doing things OTHER than blowing themselves and civilians up, in fact they are not being violent at all. So the phenomenon of suicide bombing can not be attributable to Islam alone.

Second of all, hypothetical-future-peaceful-world-Islam is not the only religion that has to deal with a violent past. The first example that jumps to mind is the Papal Inquisition, or the early American (and contemporary English) witch trials. I don't find it inconsistent to explain these events with sociological explanations (scapegoating, groupthink, etc...) without having to find all the foundational principles of the religion itself bankrupt.
Sam Harris deals with the examples in favor of Muslim culture, like al-Khwarizmi (You'll see his picture on a stamp in Briggs Hall) by claiming (it seems) he was PRIMARILY part of the empirical/scientific tradition, and SECONDARILY a Muslim. Similarly, a 15th century Inquisitor can be seen PRIMARILY as a murderous sociopath, or a manipulated (a la Stanley Milgram) believer, and secondarily as a representative of Catholic faith.

Since there is already this pretty potent example of a tradition taking its violent, unsavory past and digesting it (It wasn't until our recent Pope John-Paul II that the Vatican officially apologized for not believing Galileo... but the Church had taken a neutral stance on science for quite a long time in between, and certainly in the present day, no one advocates Inquisition-style attempts to eradicate heresy) it does not seem difficult for another culture to do a similar trick.

...we must take care not to regard something in the Old Testament that is by the standards of its own time not wickedness or wrongdoing, even when understood literally and not figuratively, as capable of being transformed to the present time and applied to our own lives. A person will not do this unless lust is in total control and actively seeking the complicity of the scriptures by which it must be overthrown.

St. Augustine, "On Christian Teaching" p. 81

Here another example, St. Augustine expressly forbids interpreting the lives of the OT Prophets as literally worthy of emulation. The idea that Islam could not produce a theologian like Augustine (or another Al-Ghazali or...pick your favorite theologian...) seems a little implausible.

"Extra" post -- God-Emperor of Dune

Because I didn't get to bring up Frank Herbert as much as I wanted to during Hajj to Mecca:

The very physical movements that, at an earlier time, would have constituted a brave act of counting coups are now a somewhat pathetic expression of nostalgia.

This line from Charles Taylor's Radical Hope reminds me of an aspect of the Sci-Fi novel "God-Emperor of Dune", where the ultra-long-lived cult object-slash-dictator of the Galaxy attempts to preserve the severe desert culture where he came to power, even though the first success of his ruler-ship was turning that desert planet into a temperate earth-like one.
This scheme results in the unimpressive "museum Fremen", who seem to recite lines from a standardized book of Fremen Culture as the communitarian cultural system which was based on strict water conservation is made more and more meaningless when even in the most desert-ish desert, it rains sporadically.

It's interesting that Herbert has his God-Emperor ignore this aspect of change, when the same character has mutated the Fremen's messianism into a religion that can command brainwashed-dogmatic style loyalty on skillions of other non-desert planets with different cultures... Ah well, you can't have everything.

Anyone else up for a seminar: religious themes in contemporary sci fi? hehehe.

That's about all I have, no real conclusions just a parallel example. I hope someone else in this class digs Dune. :)

Religio-web, Origen's metaphors

I'm responding to a few blogs at one go -- taking Dave's post about personification in Lamentations and Origen, and Imitaz 's metaphor about religion as a chain...

I like the idea that religion throughout time is like a chain, where one link depends on all previous links, but I'd like to complicate it a little. Each individual religion doesn't just stand alone once it emerges, adding links to its chain in isolation. Religions are influenced in a number of ways:

• By coming into contact with other religions, and 'taking' things, either by converting individuals who find it hard to put earlier ideas out of their worldview, (For example, turning Hindu deities into Buddhist bodhisattvas) or by filling in a theological gap with someone else's plausible answer


• By coming into contact with past religions, and incorporating them (for example ancient Greek philosophy influencing Christian theology)


• By changes in society, environment, and technology changing a group's priorities (Modern physicians don't use Leviticus to diagnose diseases)

(This would make Imitaz's 'chain' something more like a "web", but anyway.

Assuming most people throughout time saw their own religion (and others) as not being influenced in these ways, but instead being like a chain, the 'aftereffects' of these changes would have been hard to deal with. Here is where I come to Origen. Because he was not looking at (and didn't have the information about) the changes that went on to Judaism and Christianity, throughout their histories, since Lamentations was written, he had to go at the text with the assumptions he was already equipped with: that Scripture was divinely inspired and full of interpretable meaning, and that the Gospels/Christ story can be used to retroactively inform and explain the Old Testament/Torah. ("Someone might investigate why, since the title of the book, "Lamentations" is in the plural, it says "this lamentation" in the singular in the prologue." p 75 The simplest answer seems to be "typo" -- Origin is obviously looking very hard for deeper meaning.)

Because the historical sack of Jerusalem was not important to Origen, (and a historical interpretation alone would not square with the idea of Scripture as a divinely-inspired guidebook for the Christian) he had to make something useful out of what was there.

But that much we talked about in class.

Right at the beginning of the commentary, (p 74-75, section III) Origen states that "The Hebrews say that the books of the Old Testament have the same number as the letters of the alphabet because they are an introduction to all knowledge of God, just as the letters of the alphabet are the introduction to all wisdom for those who learn." This itself could be a metaphor, -- maybe the books just happened to have the same number, or no one wrote more because 22 seemed like an 'even' number, maybe later the correspondence was given mystical meaning... Origen attempts to add on to this, saying a division by four is meaningful, (according to things HE found meaningful) because of the four elements or four humors.

Basically, I don't feel like metaphorical reinterpretations ONLY happened in 'official' and formal documents like Origen's exegesis, but also happened/happens every day as people try to square texts with their assumptions about those texts.

(blog tangent)

Does anyone here know more than me about CSS? I'm trying to edit my layout to look a specific way, and right now the html is pretty impenetrable. Help! ... I may, in the end, just give it up. But I think my blog would be improved with a little Flammarion Woodcut guy looking up from the bottom-left corner.

Grizzly Man's religion

That's "Big Bear, Little Bear" by Hibbary, on gallery site DeviantArt.

I thought I could stretch far enough so it was related.

In class we talked about the similarities and differences between Grizzly Man's way of life and the hypothetical religion and way of life of Paleolithic people. Obviously we found significant differences.

I think it's interesting to note that the sort of Grizzly-Man style reverence/love for the natural world seems like it only could come out of a modern technology-heavy urban way of life -- when you're disillusioned with the apparent spiritual poverty of human life, it's easy to fall for the "simple life" in a tent in Bear Sanctuary, living "like your fellow animals". On the other hand, when you're hunting bison with stone axes so not to starve in a cave in the winter (no matter how beautifully painted a cave), it would be much more difficult to find the lifestyle "simple" and a thing to enjoy.

I'm not sure we know enough about the specifics of Paleolithic religion to point to the similarities, in terms of "big picture" religion; I think Paleolithic people and Grizzly Man would be related by only the broadest possible definition.

Important in the case of the Wisconsin mound-builders are several elemends missing from Paleolithic and Holocene art. (Coincidentally elements I recently blogged about). Most strikingly is the portrayal (in mounds and in ceramic) of imaginary creatures -- the turtle/lizard/underground water panther, the thunderbird, and the hero character. Reading that the horned-man shaped mounds may represent a legendary hero and not just a generic human reminded me of the class discussion where we talked about how Paleolithic humans would understand the imagery of a Christian church -- missing from Paleolithic art are the representation of specific people. Not only are the mound-builders portraying a specific person, it is one, larger than life, that no one knows personally.

What I am curious about is the moment in history when people "switched over", from creating purely literal and figurative art to depicting mythological creatures and imaginary people in their art. Might Paleolithic groups have had myths like the Woodland peoples that fail to be represented in their cave paintings?

The reading mentions the fact that several mound groups are oriented to celestial phenomena, which are important to agricultural societies for predicting the seasons. Is it possible that turning to agriculture not only gave communities a food surplus (and therefore a free time surplus) but also no data to inform myth and story creation? Not only (as we talked about in class) are agricultural communities more at the mercy of natural forces, they have more elements to account for in their life -- rain and thunder and sun and the planet venus, and pests like rabbits and crows -- not only large game animals. This 'richer' mental life may have given the future mound builders a better foundation for the myths which developed into a religious tradition.

Paleolithic Symbols

Oliver wrote, about abstract symbolism among Paleolithic peoples:

If there was a common religion among all members of this band, symbols would lack a practical use as an identification marker. This lack of utility would likely provide more than enough reason for the paleolithic people, who probably spent most of their time working on providing their basic needs, not to expend the energy in their creation.

This makes perfect sense – while symbolic thinking worked wonders for early humans in terms of problem solving, art is to some extent a 'luxury' in terms of survival value. While it's not that creating systems of more abstract symbols would be “too much work” for paleolithic humans, the way of life that they led seems to make that unnecessary. The Guthrie book continually references how the paleolithic art incorporates intricate details of the animals portrayed, that is evidence of the very close-contact relationship these people had with them. Maybe this alone – focusing on specific details when portraying the animals that framed their lives – led more abstract symbols (or 'background' subjects like trees and flowers and celestial objects and weather) to not occur to Paleolithic painters.

Another aspect of Paleolithic life that would make abstract religious symbolism “unnecessary” depends on the hypothetical extent to which religion was complicated, and visible, and what role it played in everyday life. Perhaps if religion informed (for example) the method by which a leader was chosen, then “dogmatic” differences between groups might be obvious. But if (what I think is more likely) religion existed more fuzzily, and more integrated into daily life without harshly enforced specifics, individuals could move between groups (by inter-'marriage' perhaps) without there being a noticeable difference in religious life. There would be no need to call members of Clan A Religion one thing, and Clan B Religion another thing, because the distinction wouldn't exist.

lascaux 'temple'

Cos I just read a whole ton more than I need to (and love it), I'm gonna add a long quote from Karen Armstrong's "History of God" that gave me a little bit of context imagining early human religion.

One of the reasons why religion seems irrelevant today is that many of us no longer have the sense that we are surrounded by the unseen. Our scientific culture educates us to focus our attention on the physical and material world in front of us. ... One of [this pov's] consequences, however, is that we have, as it were, edited out the sense of the "spiritual" or the "holy" which ... was once an essential component of our human experience of the world. ... Naturally people wanted to get in touch with this [spiritual/supernatural] reality, but they also simply wanted admire it. ... This sense of the numinous was basic to religion. It preceded any desire to explain the origin of the world or find a basis for ethical behavior. The numinous power was sensed by human beings in different ways -- sometimes it inspired wild bacchanalian excitement; sometimes a deep calm; sometimes people felt dread, awe and humility in the presence of the mysterious force inherent in every aspect of life. When people began to devise their myths and worship their gods, they were not seeking a literal explanation for natural phenomena. Their symbolic stories, cave paintings and carvings were an attempt to express their wonder and to link this pervasive mystery with their own lives; indeed, poets, artists and musicians are often impelled by a similar desire today.

I don't want to keep kicking a dead horse because I want to be right, but I feel that the "traditional" explanation for cave paintings (especially the Hall of the Bulls at Lascaux) i.e. that they have a religious/ceremonial purpose, isn't completely off base. Because language, art, and religion are so tied up with symbolic thought, which was (as we've talked about) humankind's new 'feature', they are sort of mushed together.