Monday, January 14, 2019

Finding Facts in Belief


Several of my religious Facebook friends have been rattling on about the development of species.  Naturally, they are convinced that all creatures came into being at one moment, created by God.  Scientific research, the constant discovery of new species, of course, mean nothing to them since such findings contradict belief.

They are locked into a position because of their beliefs and must ignore any research that offers a conflicting view.  In contrast, I shy away from belief.  In my classes, I tell students to leave their beliefs in a box outside classroom door.  They can retrieve their beliefs when class is over.  I really don’t care about individual beliefs.  I have my own.  I won’t burden you with them.  After all, they are no more or less valid than anyone else’s.   Everyone may believe his/her belief is correct, but no one really knows. 

Mostly, I refuse to be straitjacketed into something in the face of incontestable facts.

With belief, we can accept anything: my late uncle can be reborn as a cow; a god died for my sins; heaven awaits believers; etc.  However, that belief is the result of happenstance: what did the family I was born into believe?  If our parents had been Catholic, we would have been taught something totally different.  And, we would have believed it.  I'm not in favor of chance.  I would like to know what I believe actually has some validity.  That's why the Da Vinci Code was so devastating to Christianity: millions worldwide believed the book was valid because previous stories about Jesus have been shown to have little historical base.  Christians quickly and amazingly accepted a novel as being real. 

Psychologists have no trouble explaining why such farfetched tales (and absurd conspiracy theories) gain credence. They point out that whatever is claimed must be believable while the actual truth seems to have some gaps.  The idea that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and that their lineage affected world history seemed plausible in contrast with Christian beliefs.  It didn’t matter that the Priory of Sion, a supposed secret religious group protecting Jesus’ descendants, was invented in the 1960s or that the existence of any children fathered by Jesus would immediately destroy the claim of his divinity, which remains the whole point of the religion.

I find validity by studying and reading about archaeology and history.  What I believe requires that kind of underpinning.  As such, I can discard what does not fit into known historical evidence.  Take the cow and my late uncle.  That's belief.  No amount of history will show that people are living multiple lives or come back as cows, mosquitoes or other humans.  Besides, the whole idea of cow worship was invented in the 1800s.

Ruins of Jericho
That's not true with the Exodus.  It had to have taken place in a particular time and place.  The Bible is our only source for this important event since no Egyptian records mention it.  The holy text provides some details that can be examined and verified.  Unfortunately, all the known facts simply do not match up with history.  No known pharaoh ever drowned.  Slaves did not build Egyptian cities.  No evidence of anyone living in the Sinai around 2,500 years has ever been found, even though evidence of prehistoric man has.  No mountain fits the description of Mt. Sinai.  Jews never went back to Mt. Sinai, the only known people who did not have regular pilgrimages to the site of an epiphany with their god.  Canaan was never invaded by Jews.  Cities supposedly destroyed by invading Israelis were sometimes burned down in different eras; were already in ruins; were never destroyed; or did not exist then.  Cultural artifacts in Israel show no change across more than 1,000 years, conclusively indicating no influx of new people.

The latest theory on the origin of Judaism is that an impoverished portion of Canaanite society rebelled under the banner of a different god and succeeded in achieving some freedom.   Scorched wealthier sections of some ancient cities support that theory.

As such, I cannot "believe" in something that did not nor could have taken place, any more than I can "believe” in Noah's ark, Saul talking with the ghost of Samuel or any other lovely biblical story.  Besides, I do not know how to pick and choose between one thing I'm supposed to believe in and something I can't.  If I can believe in the Exodus, where do I stop?  Why not believe in Jesus, Mohammad, Joseph Smith etc.?  If I draw a line, then I'm being capricious accepting one thing for no reason while rejecting another without any better reason.
Artists's view of the Sacrifice of Isaac

I can’t use the Bible as bedrock.  After all, the Jewish section differs from the Christian portion.  In the “Old” Testament, for example, God condemns human sacrifice and demonstrates that by stopping Abraham from ritually killing his son.  Yet, in the “New” Testament, he blithely sacrifices his own son.  That’s one of a legion of discrepancies.

That leaves only facts and one question for anyone coping with the unfathomable idea of belief:   If I cannot base my belief on known facts, what could I possibly base my belief on?

Besides, belief changes and has across generations.
Dayton believers

For example, in the classic movie, Inherit the Wind, the religious townspeople of Dayton, Tennessee battled the forces of evolution and sang choruses of an 1873 Gospel song titled “Give Me that Old-Time Religion.”

Some of the lyrics include:

It was good for the prophet Daniel
It was good for the prophet Daniel
It was good for the prophet Daniel
And it's good enough for me.

It was good for Hebrew children
It was good for Hebrew children
It was good for Hebrew children
And it's good enough for me.

Give me that old time religion
Give me that old time religion
Give me that old time religion
It's good enough for me.

Artist's depiction of Daniel
The impromptu choir was comprised of residents convinced that what they believed simply continued what every Christian believed before them and would afterwards. They were wrong. So are people who think the same thing now.

The error starts with the lyrics since neither Daniel nor the Hebrew children believed anything close to what each other believed or what the good people in Dayton believed in 1925.  Daniel is a Jewish prophet who supposedly lived in the 6th century BCE; Hebrew children presumably lived in Canaan and Egypt where Jews were called Hebrews.  The term is not used in the Bible after the Jews settled in the Promised Land under Joshua. The word “Hebrew” is linguistically similar to “Habiru,” the name given to a swath of nomadic people.  Based on surviving documents, the Habiru were a significant menace in the second millennium BCE.  If so, they cannot be the Hebrews, who are repeatedly described by the Bible as nothing more than a single family.

Daniel lived when Judaism was a monotheistic faith; prior to the seventh century, it was a form of polytheism called henotheism with Yahweh identified as the chief god entrusted with the Jews as “his portion,” to quote the Bible.  Other gods existed in this concept.  That’s what any Hebrews in Egypt would have believed.

Such changes are hardly unusual. Karen Armstrong detailed how belief in God has evolved in her masterful book A History of God.  What believers think about God today would astonish true believers of centuries ago,.

To give you some idea how much belief changes, originally, Christianity did not claim Jesus was a deity or performed miracles.  The great apostle Paul, the first known person to write about Jesus, knew of no miracles: “Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” (1 Cor. 1:22–3) He has no concept of a virgin birth either. Jesus was "born of a woman, born under the law." (Galatians 4:4) To Paul, Jesus was chosen by God on the cross and nothing he did on Earth mattered.  His view was supported by the Nazarenes (also called Ebionites), the original followers of Jesus, who otherwise rejected Paul and the emerging, alternative Christian theology.
Council of Nicea

They failed to convince enough people.  By the fourth century, Jesus had evolved into the human form of God by a vote of some 300 bishops meeting in Nicaea in 325 CE.  Prior to that, the tri-part God dutifully worshiped by Christians today was considered a heresy.  By Nicaea, too, the bishop of Rome, once one of several, equal church leaders, had emerged as the pope.

Other debates over time involved the use of religious icons and whether communion wafers and wine really mutate into the body and blood of Christ.  The idea that Mary was immaculately conceived comes from the 1800s; so does the claimed infallibility of the pope on liturgical matters.  Prior to that, espousing such ideas might have gotten a theologian labeled a heretic.
The changes have continued.  The Second Vatican Council met in the early 1960s.  Every theologian there was male.  If there is a third council, constituents are likely to be largely female, according to T. Howland Sanks, professor of historical and systematic theology at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University in Berkeley, Calif.  “These are the people doing theology today. To see them, look at the theological faculties in the graduate and professional schools and at the students currently enrolled in doctoral programs. These are the future theological experts,” he said.

At the same time, Catholic theology has been affected by the swelling ranks of religious leaders from outside Europe and North America.  At a meeting in 2010, for example, some 600 theologians came from 75 countries, including Kenya, Ivory Coast, South Africa, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Cameroon; Brazil, Peru, Argentina, Bolivia, El Salvador and Chile; India, Sri Lanka, Australia, Japan and the Philippines.

Their views of inclusivity are rupturing old-time beliefs.

Along the way, Christian religious dogma has been affected by enormous gains in science.  Pope John XXIII was part of that.  He ordered the Vatican Council sessions in the 1960s that removed Latin from the liturgy.  He also asked Catholic historians to examine the evidence to determine if what other scholars were reporting about Christian history was correct, in particular the accuracy of the Christian Bible.  They reported that the findings indeed stood up to scrutiny.  Official dogma now states that the gospels now represent the “belief of the authors.” The Church, the world’s largest Christian sect, subsequently endorsed the Big Bang theory and evolution, removing any props under official Roman Catholic teachings.

Religious leaders no longer oppose the research. “We live in a universe of unfathomable temporal depth and spatial extension,” wrote John F. Haught, of the Woodstock Theological Center in Washington, D.C.  He added that the university is 13.7 billion years old and of an estimated 125 billion galaxies racing away from one another at an ever-increasing rate of speed.  There’s also the likelihood of intelligent alien life, he said. The Church condemned such thinking in the Middle Ages, censoring scientific books and consigning astronomer Galileo to house arrest for daring to confirm that the Earth orbits the sun. Not anymore.  The Church has also apologized for the treatment of Galileo.

The mound of research that countered Church dogma is one reason Vatican II broke with Catholic traditions by conceding that “there may be truth, grace and even salvation through non-Christian traditions.”   Pope Francis more recently added atheists and gays to the list of those who are acceptable into a Catholic heaven, another idea transformed over time.

Early Christians accepted the after-life ideas circulating through Middle Eastern culture: a few worthy souls take up residence in a pleasant place modeled on the Elysian Fields of Greek mythology.  Everyone else wandered about as a shade.  As such, early Christian writing barely mentions afterlife.  Gradually, heaven evolved into a kind of Garden of Eden, built around images created by later poets like Dante, Bunyan and others.
Gospel of Nicodemus

Hell didn’t take on grand proportions until no earlier than the fifth century when the non-canonical Gospel of Nicodemus offered the first detailed version.  The idea of rapture – when the faithful are lifted bodily into heaven – has become a fixture of Christian theology these days, but it’s less than 200 years old.  John Nelson Darby, originally an Anglican minister, taught that the accepted concept of clergy violated the Bible and proposed the rapture in 1830.

Today, opinions about heaven and hell fill the airwaves as if the ideas have been part of Christian faith from the first.  Actually, maybe 200 or so years from now, Christians of the future will probably be laughing at what believers today insist is the “true” faith.

Judaism is no different.  Several traditional Jewish prayers I heard at the funeral contained the phrase: “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.”  However, they added, “God of Sarah, God of Rebecca, God of Rachael,” the three wives of the biblical patriarchs.  As far as I could tell, in a bid to widen Judaism to include women, prayers have been revised at some point in recent years.  Since the words were in Hebrew, I don’t know if they struck a chord with the mourners.  This was a Reform Jewish congregation, the most liberal among the various Jewish denominations, and many of the worshipers probably can’t read Hebrew. I can. In addition, many were non-Jewish, attending to honor the deceased, who touched many lives in our community through her philanthropic efforts.
Jewish funeral service

The other prayer that struck me was one that called on participants not to let “knowledge lead them astray from belief in God.”   That had to be very new.  For centuries, Jews have emphasized education and learning.  That was necessary to read and understand the increasing distant sacred texts

Until the 1920s, Ivy League schools used to have quotas to limit Jewish enrollment because of young, highly educated Jewish applicants would have overflowed their classes.  Jews today are still expected to be educated.  The last figure I could find showed that 59 percent of Jews have college degrees compared to 27 percent of all Americans.  The percentage is even higher for Reform Jews – 66 percent.

And people at this funeral were asked to pray for less education?

I would rather the move be in the other direction.

In one of my classes, a clergyman named Rev. Brown told me that he attended various programs such as mine to eliminate mythology with his beliefs.  A devout Christianity, he had no problem accepting the latest scientific and historical findings and incorporating them into his faith without being forced to accept beliefs shown to be based on shifting sand or nothingness.

I regularly tout his example.  There’s no benefit to ignorance in belief or anywhere else.

Long-time religious historian Bill Lazarus regularly writes about religion and religious history with an occasional foray into American culture.  He holds an ABD in American Studies from Case Western Reserve University.   He also speaks at various religious organizations throughout Florida.  You can reach him at He is the author of the recently published novel The Great Seer Nostradamus Tells All as well as a variety of nonfiction books, including The Gospel Truth: Where Did the Gospel Writers Get Their Information; Noel: The Lore and Tradition of Christmas Carols; and Dummies Guide to Comparative Religion.  His books are available on, Kindle, bookstores and via various publishers.  He can also be followed on Twitter.