41% of Americans Want More Religious News

New Pew Forum Report—

Religion and spirituality: 41% of Americans say there is not enough news coverage of religious and spiritual issues. Women (44%) are more likely than men (37%) to seek more coverage of this area; young adults ages 18-29 (49%) are more likely than those over age 50 (35%) to say this; and bloggers (50%) are more likely than non-bloggers (40%) to say this. Race/ethnicity is also a factor, with African-Americans (57%) significantly more likely than both whites (38%) and Hispanics (43%) to say they would like to see more coverage of religion and spirituality.

This is just behind...

Science news and discoveries: 44% of Americans say there is not enough coverage of science-related news. Younger adults are more likely than senior citizens to express interest in increased coverage. Some 52% of those ages 18-29 would like more coverage of this news, compared with 41% of 50-64 year-olds and 34% of those age 65 and older. Those who use the most news platforms (between four and six on a typical day) are among the most interested in getting more science news: 48% of them say so.

Unfortunately, the breakdowns don't cover the same groups in this reporting, so it's not possible on the basis of this information to compare interest in science with interest in religion among the same demographics, except to say that young adults are the ones who desire the most coverage in both science and religion.

Here's the link, but the total relevant content is what i just quoted; the report is actually about how the internet has turned "news" into a more participatory experience.

A Sea-Change

On a blog called "Hesed we Emet" (that's hebrew for 'mercy and truth') by John Anderson at Duke University—A Blog on the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Genesis, and the Life of a Ph.D. Candidate— there's an interview with Duke U Professor Richard B Hays, author of a number of very important books about the Old Testament in the New. In the course of the interview, he says this:

Much of your work has focused upon the use of the Old Testament in the New. Why do you think this is an important aspect of NT studies? What remains to be done in your view in this area? What questions or issues remain unexplored or have not been answered satisfactorily?

It’s an important issue because nearly all of the NT writers are pervasively engaged with the reception and reinterpretation of Israel’s Scripture! You can’t understand what these authors were talking about if you don’t understand that they lived and moved in the symbolic world of the texts that Christians later came to call the OT. I’m working on a book on the ways that the Evangelists read the OT.... I am constantly amazed by all the interconnections that emerge when we read the NT texts with an eye to their scriptural antecedents and allusions. So I’m not sure I know what needs to be done next. Every time I teach a graduate seminar on this topic, my students come up with fresh insights that are very exciting. It’s important to emphasize that I’m not simply talking about questions of sources and influences. If there is a major unfinished agenda, it has to do with thinking more deeply about the semantic effects of a canonical intertextuality in which the OT is re-read in light of the New and vice-versa to produce fresh and unexpected configurations of meaning. (See the theoretical essays on this topic in Reading the Bible Intertextually, co-edited by Stefan Alkier, Leroy Huizenga, and me [Baylor University Press, 2009].) This also involves studying more deeply the way in which Christian tradition, especially early patristic interpreters, understood these intertextual relations. My own training as a NT scholar was impoverished by a lack of emphasis on patristic readings, and I’m now constantly involved in educating myself about these matters.

I think something very powerful is happening not only in the world of biblical studies, but in western culture generally, and it's very good. Let me take a detour, and then explain:

It can't be said that the Orthodox have been too much in favor of modern critical biblical studies at all. With his usual inimitable candor, Fr Hopko says somewhere in Speaking the Truth in Love that most of what passes for biblical scholarship among us is whatever was "generally accepted practice" in the last generation. That's what our much self-vaunted "conservatism" means!— otherwise, we're rather afraid of critical scholarship and don't trust it. A gander at the Orthodox blogosphere should serve to convince any who doubt what i say. "Tradition!"

Well, there's something to be said for that, especially when considering some high-profile (i.e., highly marketed) nonsense such as the Jesus Seminar or Elaine Pagels (go ahead, click the link, by all means). Still, there's nothing quite like working through all the layers of cross-reference and allusion that lurk in nearly any verse in St Paul or Mark or whomever, and coming finally to something like the big perspective that those writers assume and want you to see. Or even just tracing a theme thoroughly through the Bible, as i discovered when i first began to take an interest in biblical studies. I could see that these activities led only to valuable insights, not to loss of faith. So I have always believed that most scholars are primarily interested in getting at the truth, and that the truth would sooner or later emerge in biblical studies, even if some scholars seemed to be on the wrong path. It's not surprising, in any case, as in any other science, that some researchers have taken wrong turns and spent serious years exploring dead ends. At least we know now that those were dead ends, and why! And— let's not kid ourselves— given the utter depravity that "Christianity" had largely become by the Age of Revolution— and given that people didn't have any other viewpoint to which they could ascend and from which they could judge, the twists and turns that people had to take are not surprising. After all, one could not begin with "revealed truth", when the very nature of "revealed truth" was in question. We had only our own suspicions. But it was not wrong to ask, What does it mean that Noah was told to take the animals "two of each kind" (Gn 6.19-20) and then, five verses later, "seven of each kind" (7.2-3), and then again, "two of each kind" (7.15-16). Or even to ask, Can this be "history"? One had no choice but to begin with questions, not answers. But it was never true that the desire to learn the truth would necessarily lead away from faith. (though i suppose i should hasten to add that what i mean by faith is not what a lot of people mean by faith— as if christianity were about "believing" things "quia absurdum" ("just because they're absurd"), etc.)— although I fear that for many, it is.

So ok, now back to the main point: As i say, i think something interesting is under way, and i have always felt that we would get to this day sooner or later. And Hays just confirmed it.

Once we work through our naive assumption that the biblical texts refer to "history" pure and simple, we find we end up with a Text, as was obvious all along, though we just didn't appreciate it. The Text itself is what's interesting, not what was before or behind it, and not as some kind of launching pad for all kinds of later constructs, from "patristic interpretation" to Scholasticism to Lutheranism to Demythologization— only the Text itself, with its own patterns and structures, expressions and meanings, statements and withdrawals. Recognizing, finally, that Mark has just such an elegant seven-part structure which is totally literary and therefore also totally artificial— finally frees us to get Mark's point, which is very powerful, but which we'd miss entirely if we remained stuck in either a fundamentalist "historicism" or in "redaction criticism", Traditionsgeschichte and the rest. And it was only that we had missed, or rather had not yet seen, or rather no longer saw— the literary character of the Text, that made the field of biblical studies seem so destructive and off-base at times.

What's happening within the field of biblical studies is a rediscovery of the Text as such, and this has another name as well: the "New Perspective". Though plenty of "evangelicals" are fighting the implications, three things have been emerging in the field, which no one can really ignore:

The first is the Jewishness of Jesus, Paul, the Evangelists, and the New Testament— as we learn to appreciate this, we realize more and more deeply that the New Testament addresses its own milieu in its own language, and that its categories are those of the Old Testament, not those of some abstract, post-Kantian Bultmannian existentialism, for example.

Next, and a result of the rediscovery of the Jewishness of the New Testament (and of the Old, for that matter) is that the deeply narrative character of the Bible and of its parts, right down to the level of words, is emerging into view as well. That is, we are once again beginning to see that the Bible is first of all a story, not a sourcebook of abstract dogmas and moral rules. And that it invites us to be part of that story, that is, to bring our stories into relation to its story, which is the story of Adam and Abraham and David and Ezra, and finally of Jesus and Paul and the fathers of the Church. Particularly for what is called "mission", by the way, stories are much more workable than "systems" of salvation, whether Lutheran or Scholastic or Orthodox.

And finally, as a result of this double recognition of Jewishness and story, we are also coming to appreciate the profoundly political meaning of the Old and New Testaments— not by the mechanical and ideological appropriation of biblical prooftexts by some modern agenda of our own, but in terms of their own locatedness in a real world with real economic, political, and religious forces and a real empire. In other words, we're getting a sense again of how the Kingdom of God challenged and subverted (and hence challenges and subverts) the Kingdom of Caesar. This is bound to have a strong impact on society as people awaken to from the high-surveillance nightmare of facades and sales pitches that our fair republic(s) have become under the globalization of Capital.

Which is all why I got excited about Hays' comment above.

With only slight exaggeration, we can say that the Orthodox Church has completely forgotten the Bible, and is the most ignorant of all churches concerning it— even though we are the "original christianity" that wrote the New Testament in the first place. Like everyone else, despite our (again) much self-vaunted "creation theology", many of us especially in the Greek communion are waiting to "go to heaven" just like everyone else; we might individually care about rainforests, but we don't have a strong sense of creation as sacramental, even if we are the Church that above all others bears the biblical meaning of sacramentality into the world.

Also, those who came to Orthodoxy later in life often avoid the Bible because when they read it, they find themselves stuck in fundamentalist interpretations which they have by no means gotten completely free of, for lack of a really workable alternative paradigm. We are much more likely to work through Theophylact of Bulgaria's commentaries than the actual pathways of the Text itself— much less the abysmally conventional "Life Application Study Bible". Well, again, understandable, in a market where those are the only alternatives apart from the Left Behind Series, it's no surprise that St Theophylact sells.

But comes now one of the crowned heads of modern scholarship saying that on the basis of the exciting discovery of "canonical intertextuality", in which "the OT is re-read in light of the New and vice-versa", there is a need for "studying more deeply the way in which Christian tradition, especially early patristic interpreters, understood these intertextual relations". And he even claims that a New Testament scholar— that is, not a scholar of early Christian history or a scholar of of Christian dogma, but a New Testament scholar— is "impoverished" by ignorance of patristic readings of the Bible— so much impoverished, in fact, that he himself— even one of the best— must now say, "I’m now constantly involved in educating myself about these matters."

The Orthodox Church has forgotten the scriptures, and prefers to read only the fathers (if not popular 'lives of saints' etc, of very mixed quality). The churches that study the scriptures have preferred to read only modern commentaries (of mixed quality themselves), and have forgotten Orthodoxy and the fathers. But now that the scriptures are coming at last into view in terms of their own cultural location, narrative character, and even political-social dimension, people are starting to feel a need to trace their way up a path that will lead, inevitably, to the Seven Councils and the classic dogmas, and to Orthodoxy.

So hopefully, we Orthodox will now begin to develop a taste again for Scripture. Indeed, I have friends who have become Orthodox after reading NT Wright, and they continue to find him exciting. The Bible tells you why the dogmas say what they say.

And I myself find at last that i have something to talk about excitedly with evangelicals— and to talk collaboratively, not polemically. Haven't you noticed that educated people generally speak of Orthodoxy respectfully— although to be sure, still with a lot of misunderstanding and ignorance and fantasy. But none the less, there's a sense that important connections exist within Tradition, that need to be recovered.

I don't mean this as a triumphalist piece— particularly because i think we have a long, long way to go and a lot of work to do. But it was clear that a major sea-change was underway in the 60s, when ethnic food became popular in america. The Other. It's all about the Other. The Bible is Other, we are Other, Africa is Other. It's no longer all just about ourselves!

Yay!

Some Petroglyphs

Spent a night near Moab when i went on a fundraising trip last week, and on the way out of the canyon, I found this rock on which the ancient Native Americans had carved some of their symbols. I like to copy these symbols into my journal sometimes— drawing slows down your perceptions, and you come to a better sense of what you're looking at. So I realized while copying that there seem to be only a couple of male figures in the whole panel. Also, the big image to the left seems to be someone giving birth; and the other big image to the right of it is surely the Corn Mother. Note also the numerous footprints along the lower right register of the panel— I seem to recall reading somewhere that that's a recognizable clan sign, but I can't recall.

Enlarging the two main images of the panel: As I say, the large figure at the left is clearly in the process of giving birth; what's interesting is the small figure connected by its arm to her right leg (i.e., on the viewer's left). The bundle between the birthgiver's legs is clearly connected by an umbilical cord, though in this photo that isn't so clear. The large figure at the right just "has to be" the Corn Mother. The small figure below her is one of the two or three males i could identify (look between the legs); the other one is the figure somewhat to his left, who is carrying a shield and seems to have an erection connecting to another somewhat obscured figure, with nine little footprints leading up from there to the side of the birthgiver. So I'm guessing the footprints represent nine moons (months). The paired footprints to the right of them seem to be deer or sheep footprints. There are only five sets of those. How long is the gestation period for deer, antelope, or mountain sheep?

On the other side of the rock were these five very simple figures, again the imagery seems very female. The snake probably represents the river or the canyon that this rock is in, because it has many twists and turns; the footprint motif to the right of the right-hand triangular figure is rather different from the footprints on the other side of the rock, although a number of them are banded. I'm guessing this rock was some kind of temple or initiation spot for women. As a male, i probably shouldn't even see it!
But those people are long gone... except, I gather, for the Hopi. I also understand (though maybe incorrectly) that these simple, geometric types of petroglyphs were carved over 1,000 years ago. (I welcome correction or further comment.)

Along the road there were also a number of places where modern people have cut caves into the rock and built houses. This one doesn't seem to have been completed; in fact it's not really clear what it was for, since it really doesn't seem big enough for a house. But it was interesting anyway.

What the Bible Says

So I'm here in Salt Lake City, where I met some of my nephew Christopher's friends over this past weekend. Tattooed, somewhat punked out kids (to my eyes), twenty- or thirtysomethings doing beer bongs on the front porch of a spectacular old house on 8th South. You wouldn't think they were the types that thought much about religion, and they probably aren't all that much so, although later Gordon mentioned that the people who lived there had a vision for the house to be a real community. And the subject of religion did come up (without my prompting), as it often does in SLC— Mormonism etc, of course. They're all still separating from it. It takes a while, even if you grew up Catholic here, as many of them had.

But Gordon surprised me by saying he was completely pacifist, a strong believer in reincarnation, and I guessed rightly that he got a lot of his ideas from psychedelics, and he volunteered also Graham Hancock. We chatted a bit about the earth as a seed; humankind will go to the stars. Interesting eschatology, but I didn't get what the ultimate need or purpose for the journey was. And then Justin said at first he was an atheist, but then took it back, he didn't know what he believed, but the ultimate value seemed to be love. But then he mentioned something about being excluding someone for some reason I forget, and I pointed out that there was then some higher value for him, that trumped and limited love in some way. I wasn't clear how much he understood my point as I pressed it, but later he said he had heard me and had really been thinking about it ever since.

Lot of idealism in these kids, and I love talking with them because of it, but as usual it has very little form or structure, and really not much opportunity to express itself in bold, swashbuckling, imaginative moves, and only such community as can be developed among seven housemates. And God knows how poorly my own idealism works, even with all the form and structure and swashbuckling I have subscribed to and done. So I sense a lot of yearning, which may, alas, not get to be altogether fulfilled.

Justin, it turns out, is the boyfriend of Christopher's half-sister Barb, and Chris invited them over to Mom's for a barbecue more or less on my account on sunday night. So we had a good chance to talk and he said he was getting really interested in religion, actually; he suspects there's something there because so many key people in history have been into it, but he just doesn't know where to start, and most of what he encounters just seems like bullshit. But he'd really like to know what the Bible is about, for example— he has some notion that it's all rules or something, based on some kind of "spiritual truths". I said no, it tells a story and if you want to know, I can tell it.

He did, so I talked about God's plan to create a beautiful world and to fill it with his own life and energy and love, and how he made Adam (man) to be the center of the whole program— the priest offering the world to God, and the mediator bringing God into the world. But Adam turned away, and to turn away from the source of life is already death, so man lies in corruption and death; the priest has become just dead bones. This was not pleasing to God, and God set out to fix it.

I spoke of Abraham's call as the beginning of the solution— a solution he would bring about through Abraham's descendants, Israel. But Israel turned away also, by trying to make their own kingdom into the center of God's plan. Nonetheless, God was serious about his plan, and what he wanted was a faithful Israelite, a Messiah. That was who Jesus was. Nonetheless, the powers of death— particularly the high priests of his own religion and the rulers of the gentiles— put him to death. And so it looked like death had triumphed after all. But God vindicated Jesus by raising him from the dead, and through him poured out the Spirit of the resurrection on all, to heal, empower, renew, and recreate the world. Adam was restored when Adam's son got up from death; and Adam's restoration, in Jesus the Messiah, is the key, finally, to the originally intended union of heaven and earth.

They seemed impressed, in the sense that it made sense and they wanted to know more.

And that's the problem: where can they go to get this 'more'? They won't get i directly from any of the Orthodox churches around here, or anywhere else. They're not really likely to get it from any other church either, although Julianne's friend Gwen, also at the party, mentioned that her pastor talks a lot about NT Wright in his sermons so I know this is what he's on to; and in those places, the rest of the story— the wisdom tradition and the spiritual practice that's part of it— is altogether missing.

That narrative is there in our churches, and certainly the wisdom tradition as well, but none the less, Israel is buried and forgotten, and we don't talk much about Abraham as the key and initial turning point of the whole story. So we don't actually tell the story of the Bible all that effectively. And frankly, I'm pretty sceptical about the value of passive listening to foreign sounding music sung by a few more (or less) proficient specialists— often inaudibly and incomprehensibly— that we consider to be "liturgy". Maybe it will catch him; maybe not. But I can't really suggest anywhere else for them to go, so I said, Well, you could try this out. But be patient if it doesn't seize you.

Justin says he doesn't read. He's not so unusual in that; few people will enjoy the books I push myself to read... sometimes. And this is America. No African is that literate, at all. So here is the challenge of the 'good news' everywhere in the world: how to tell the basic story so that people will get it? And how will enough people get it, so that we're all telling the story (once again). Because this is, after all, the One Story!

I could definitely hone my presentation— I think this is the first time I've really tried telling the story of the Bible as the main thing people need to know, but I'm convinced that it's the only way to talk about religion and christianity. What needed to be said is what the Bible is about, and I think it got across.

I think it was also clear enough in telling the story that way that it's not about rules and it's not about a belief structure which everyone who doesn't accept it is supposedly going to hell. I said the Bible doesn't talk about going to heaven or hell. It talks about how God achieved his plan— his original plan and his plan to fix the world, which both come down to the same thing— and about how an opportunity is offered to us to join God's program, no matter where we are at any given moment, no matter what our beliefs are already. That's all.

And the rest is not about rules you have to follow, but just about coming to terms with what it takes to really be effective and alive in that program, or not. The same as you might decide you need to do or not do things in order to develop in a relationship with a woman or a friend or some work you valued.

Just for fun, I was even able to talk a bit about the Eighth Day. That's always a little hard to grasp because people are not really used to thinking of the week as a deeply meaningful structure that even has an eschatology, but it's clear enough once they get the distinction between Sabbath / Lord's Day as that between creation and redemption. This basic liturgical insight, again, depends on understanding the sweep of the scriptures as a whole.

Religious Bigotry in Egypt Swine Cull?— Ya Think??

An item from here:

Egyptian authorities have ordered a mass cull of that nation's swine as an anti-swine flu protection measure.

Trouble is, all the pigs are farmed (understandably) by the nation's Coptic Christian minority. Unlike the Muslim majority, Copts do not see the animals as unclean.

And there is no public health reason for Egypt to kill these 400,000 animals!

Excerpt:

"Our pigs are healthy. They are our capital and they have no diseases," said Adel Ishak, who feeds his pigs from the rubbish he collects in Manshiet Nasser, northeast of Cairo.
"We remind Hosni Mubarak that we are all Egyptians. Where does he want us to go?" added 46-year-old Gergis Faris, another pig farmer. "We are uneducated people, just living day by day and trying to make a living, and now if our pigs are taken from us without compensation, how are we supposed to live?"

How indeed? Or does that matter to the government and the Muslim majority of Egypt?

A Religulous Zeitgeist

Find a trailer for Bill Maher's movie Religulous here, as long as it lasts. Otherwise, find it in the used bin at the video store in a few months.

Bill Maher tours the underbelly of American religiosity with the intent of showing how stupid and vulgar and insane religious belief of any kind is. "We. just. don't. know.", he keeps saying, over and over: "so how can we keep killing people over what we don't really know?" Of course, the american religiousness he shows us is for the most part completely absurd and insane (I did like the Vatican astronomer, though— one had the impression that Maher couldn't handle him, he didn't fit in to what he'd already decided). And that kind of american religion is very sobering, even if Maher's peroration against all religion at the end— delivered against a backdrop of atomic bombs— seems a bit preachy. (And am i mistaken in thinking we may know just a little more than he lets on?) But there is indeed a kind of Christianity that's a deluded fantasy, and he flushes it out. After the past 30 years, no thinking person can fail to see how it's manipulated by the Ronald Reagans and Lee Atwaters and Karl Roves and Sarah Palins who give us all these wars.

But like I say, the one guy who stood out positively amid the nonsense was the Vatican astronomer Jesuit, who emphatically said that the Bible is not science and never was intended as such, that it was written long before modern science as such was ever practiced, and that it has its own integrity, which has to be respected. Maher did his best, I think, to frame the guy's discourse as yet another example of double-talk & craziness— and the sad thing is, in true Catholic style, he pointed to the pope's athority for his view that "evolution is not just a theory"— like we needed a pope to tell us this— but he was actually quite lucid— more so than the one or two other "believer" scientists he interviewed, who obviously hadn't thought as deeply about the nature of the Bible as such.

But it's the task of a good reporter to identify good interviewees, and by picking only those he did interview, Maher showed that he's either too ignorant or too timid to ask— and be asked— good questions.

I'm not sure what Maher would make of the fact that this month, a Vatican-backed conference on evolution rejected the Discovery Institute, the main organization supporting intelligent design research, saying, "We think that it's not a scientific perspective, nor a theological or philosophical one." (Poor Discovery Institute!— that had to hurt!)

The problem-religion Maher was investigating actually appeared most clearly when he was talking to his believing scientists, even if, as I say, Maher himself couldn't recognize it. He acts the smart-aleck by asking (for instance) whether manuscripts written within a century of Jesus' death are "historically reliable"— but he's not bright enough or deep enough to ask the much more interesting question of whether "historicity", in the sense that he and most of his interlocutors require it, is even the right frame in which even to view the gospels (or the rest of the Bible, for that matter). If we could get a clear discussion of that, then the whole discourse of "belief" might come crashing to the ground, or at least take a turn for the better. Of course, that's a discussion, alas, that we won't ever have on american tv, which is why i don't waste time with it.

Both Maher and his interviewees assume that the gospels were "biographies of Jesus". They are not "biographies"— not, at least, if we take their writers' own aims seriously— they are kerygma— a "proclamation" of "good news" (euangelion)— four distinct writers' four distinct proclamations of what we might call an 'event of spirit'— a movement of spirit that passed through Jesus into his disciples (I am taking this language from Erich Voegelin, who is worth reading in this vein). Each of the four gospel writers shows this movement— shows it, in the senses both of describing and of demonstrating it— each in his own unique way, by telling his own unique story of Jesus. Thus their four books are themselves part of that movement of spirit, means by which it extends into the space and time of subsequent humanity. They aren't interested in relating a "biography of Jesus", but in communicating the movement of spirit that they had experienced, which took its beginning in Jesus. They want us to feel its transforming force. They want to communicate not that there was once a powerful dude named Jesus who lived in the past and worked miracles so you'd better do what he says or he'll send you to hell where you'll burn forever— but the very power itself of this Jesus, whose career so transformed them, and whose 'spirit' continues to transform men and women of truth in the present. About the specifics of his "biography", they're relatively unconcerned and say almost nothing.

Oh, to be sure, there's a very narrow base of recoverable historical fact that scholars have been interested for a couple centuries now in teasing out from the "proclamation" as such— as far as they can do so, from documents that do not easily lend themselves to such procedures, since they weren't ever intended for them. This is called historical-critical work. But we can't glimpse much of the historical biographical information, because providing it was simply never the purpose or the interest of the gospels, nor in fact their force, to begin with.

At one point Maher attacks the existence of Jesus. Why? Because his loony fundamentalist interviewee is using some notion that "it's been proven that Jesus did exist" as a reason for believing the crap they believe. That is (the assumption goes), if someone can "prove" that a guy named Jesus lived in the past and did miracles etc, then this means I have to believe in the Vatican, or some creationist Disneyland theme park, or Mormonism. Sheer crackpottery, dredged from the murky bottom that religious discourse in our country scrapes along and feeds on. But arguing whether Jesus "existed" or not won't help with that!

But let's even pretend Jesus didn't exist— we'd still have to explain, from that very place it began, the whole experience of the saints. You'd have to posit a "Jesus" or somebody exactly like him, in whom and through whom the movement of spirit first happened. His significance is not his mere existence, as if an external proof of that would somehow validate my "belief" in miracles, face-of-jesus tacos, UFOs, etc. How bizarre.

A related sample of (anti)religious bottom-feeding can be found in Peter Joseph's Zeitgeist, another movie here.

i looked at it, for a few minutes anyway— at least, i clicked on one of the links at that page and got a google movie called "Zeitgeist, the movie - remastered / final edition", and looked at that.

You know, there was a lot of speculation about a century ago that christianity was an outgrowth of "Gnosticism" and/or of Hellenistic mystery religion. It all seemed very plausible at the time and, except for a few loose ends, lots of scholars took as somewhat proven that we could safely explain away the christian religion as an amnesiac exercise in a charming, although outmoded, kind of mythology. However, the loose ends proved fatal, and the whole story unraveled and was laid to rest after a few years of further research. See Louis Bouyer, Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Maurice Blondel, etc— this is stuff i read in Catholic high school for pete's sake! Indeed, "Gnosticism" (the very term is problematic) now seems to owe more to Christianity than vice versa— but of course the theory looked plausible at the time, and scholars were obligated to try it out, until it failed. But while scholars were reining in their chastened speculations, the meme escaped somewhat from the debates of learned journals into popular culture— especially into the kinds of popular religious culture championed by Madame Blavatsky or "Linda Goodman's Sun Signs" or "National Enquirer" or "Starhawk" or some coffee-table book on "Wicca" &c.— and in one form or another, it still gets recycled from time to time even now as "the truth behind the jesus myth". I count both Religulous and Zeitgeist" as current reincarnations of the same.

But i've got some terrible news: if students want to know more about religion— any religion, including christianity— they're going to have to dig a little deeper than "Zeitgeist" or Bill Maher, Peter Joseph (or even Joseph Campbell, for that matter)— and in particular they're going to have to get over George Carlin's picture of God an "invisible man living in the sky" with a "special list of things you have to do or not do" lest you "go to a place of fire where you burn and suffer till the end of time", and who "needs money". What silliness! Such a god is manufactured only to ignore— and serious persons have been doing just that, long before the Old Testament came to an end. However, I'll even grant that some people may have had to suffer such ideas as kids, but (here's where knowledge of the actual Christian tradition is helpful) even if everyone were being taught that way today (which they manifestly are not)— such stupid ideas simply never were part of the Christianity of the gospels or of the church. Seriously, they're just going to have to get over it! Movies like Zeitgeist may provide some encouragement for lazy persons to throw off the yoke of bad, half-understood 3rd grade sunday school teachings, but they can't do much for mature and serious persons who want to know the depths of anything, much less of the Gospels.

Zeitgeist and Religulous (despite Mr Joseph's pretentions of igniting a "Zeitgeist Movement", both articles of trivia are almost forgotten already, like that other piece of sadistic trash by Mel Gibson a couple years ago) seem to share a number of ideas, of which one is an equation of Christ with Osiris. Maher doesn't say much, but Zeitgeist goes into a little more detail and lots of "parallels" which are, um, "factually incorrect" (at best). In fact i ought just to say the guy is lying, knowing that most people are not equipped to question or debate what he says, and building with lies his real agenda. I take it that real agenda has something to do with 911 government conspiracy theories, but i didn't watch the whole movie. So I guess what i missed is why the notion that 911 was a government plot requires disproving Jesus in order to work!

On the question of 911, readers may be interested in two better treatments, which can be found at ironweedfilms. Scroll down and see the listings for September 2008:

HIJACKING CATASTROPHE: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire (Jeremy Earp & Sut Jhally, 64 minutes): This fast-paced, explosive film makes the compelling case that the catastrophe of 9/11 was skillfully hijacked to carry out a neo-conservative agenda planned decades in advance, awaiting only a catalyzing national event to come to fruition.

9/11 PRESS FOR TRUTH (Ray Nowosielski, 85 minutes): Based in part on The Terror Timeline by Paul Thompson, this riveting, emotional film tells the story of the Jersey Girls, four widowed mothers whose relentless search for answers eventually compelled a reluctant and ultimately uncooperative administration into launching an independent investigation.

I recommend them.

But on to Zeitgeist's "facts" (which it simply asserts, but never backs up, because it cannot). Some are pretty egregious. For instance, Sirius (the famous "dog star") is a fixed star, not a planet, and so does NOT move in the sky—- thus it NEVER aligns with the 3 stars in Orion's belt! Does this guy know *anything* about astronomy or even astrology??! The "Dog Star" is Orion's obedient hunting dog, ever at Orion's heel, always in the same spot.

Or again, the name 'Bethlehem' may *look* like 'house of bread' in Hebrew, but that's not actually what it means (scholars tell us it's Bit-Lahmi, Lahmi being either a Canaanite goddess, or the name of a person (now unknown) associated with its founding— e.g., one 'Lahmi' appears in 1Chr 20.5 as Goliath's brother).

The Southern Cross, upon which the movie claims the sun is crucified at the solstice, does not in fact appear in the northern hemisphere and would not have been known to the ancient Middle Easterners and

[A classicist friend has corrected me about the Southern Cross:]

I noticed the movie's total lack of astronomical understanding, and did a bit of brief checking on some things. Really brief - I mean wikipedia. Here is what that eminent source had to say about the Southern Cross:
"Crux was visible to the Ancient Greeks, who regarded it as part of the constellation Centaurus. At the latitude of Athens in 1000 BC, Crux was clearly visible, though low in the sky. However, the precession of the equinoxes gradually lowered its stars below the European horizon, and they were eventually forgotten by the inhabitants of northern latitudes. By AD 400, most of the constellation never rose above the horizon for Athenians."
But even if that's right, and even if the Cross was still visible to Mediterranean peoples in the first and second centuries AD, it doesn't make the film's theory tenable. The mistake about Sirius is embarrassing (assuming the guy who made the film would be capable of embarrassment).

—for in any case it is not zodiacal: it has nothing to do with the movement of the sun, or vice versa.

The assertion that half the mythical figures of the world have the identical structure (Dec 25 birth, virgin mother, death and 3d-day resurrection, etc) would certainly be a marvel if there were any truth to it. Did the movie's writers ever bother to do any fact-checking, though?

And finally— the whole attempt to give the birth of Christ a solstitial-zodiacal-Osirian meaning is nonsense from the git-go. To begin with, astrology itself is nowhere near as old as the Osiris myth, and the Osiris myth has no zodiacal connection. The birth of Christ is related in two 1st-century documents (Matthew and Luke), but its celebration as 'Christmas' did not develop until 300 years later— and is still not celebrated in the ancient 'Oriental Orthodox' churches of Armenia, Egypt, Ethiopia, East Syria, or India. In other words, the story of Christ long predated any solstice association that may have been connected (although this theme is actually largely absent from Christian hymnography); and the solstice was never part of the New Testament story.

"Christmas" developed as an extension of the March 25th liturgical celebration of the good news of the incarnation. It was rather *accidentally* placed near the winter solstice, because Dec 25 is 9 months after Mar 25th. The latter was nothing special in apostolic times, but was eventually settled upon in the 4th century when the early church's annual all-in-one celebration of Christ's incarnation-birth-death-resurrection, which took place at the time of Passover every year, was unpacked into its several components as the Quartodecimian Controversy (over when to celebrate Easter) was settled. All of the solar-astral stuff in the movie is sheer hallucination— one that misplaced the focus and renders its subjects completely unable to understand any actual Biblical or Christian use of solar imagery, such as we find in the Christmas troparion:

Your birth, O Christ our God, has dawned on the world as the light of wisdom. For by it, those who worshipped the stars were taught by a star to adore you, the Sun of Justice [cf. Mal 4.2], and to acknowledge you as the Dawn from on high. O Lord, glory to you!

So vast are the errors of Zeitgeist that it's impossible to think the writer/narrator or somebody on the team didn't know at least something more than the narrator lets on— even if he's not yet uninformed about Talley's derivation of the date of Christmas from Annunciation, which is accepted by all liturgical scholars.

In fact, Zeitgeist's narrator more or less begins with a pun on the 'sun' of god and the 'son' of god. It's a cute pun and we've all noticed it. But from that very moment we can pretty much tell his whole story has already gone south. What follows generally has about as much truth to it as the claim— almost actually suggested— that 'sun' and 'son' are etymologically related.

Attacks of this sort on Christianity respond to the shallow, narrow Christianity of american Bible-belt, televangelistic culture. As such, they are understandable, and we might even even be sympathetic with the desire to cast off the shackles of nonsense which pass for Christianity in our culture. Indeed, insofar as George Carlin's picture is an accurate depiction of Christianity, may the effort to throw it off be blessed! But as we sit in the darkness of Maher's "not knowing", listening to Chögyam Trungpa Rimpoche (whose signature is on my BA certificate, by the way) talking about "theism" at the beginning of the movie, let's recall that he was not giving an "enlightened" description of Christianity, but a Buddhist teaching, part straw-man and part serious, that applied to the way his students were adopting Buddhism as much as it did to any other religion— as he himself makes abundantly clear in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism and other books. The actual faith— or rather, experience— of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, or James— and the actual Judaism of Moses and the Prophets for that matter— are a lot more challenging and profound than such trivial bêtes noires as Maher and Joseph manage to roust from the Bible Belt. I hope people will somehow be motivated to find out about what the Bible is actually about, but i'm not too sanguine they will, alas. Indeed, these movies are just two more excuses for laziness.

Maher begins his movie saying he gave up religion when he was 13 or 14. If God had given him approval for masturbation, he says, and for his fantasies about girls and so forth, he "would have believed", but since such approval was not forthcoming, he was just relieved when his Catholic dad stopped making him go to church. A believer can tsk tsk about the fact that, like many in our culture, he seems not to have been exposed to anything, or himself grown any deeper, than that. But underlying his shallowness is a serious issue, which Maher clearly recognizes: If a religion is going to deny something that seems perfectly natural and good, then it had better have a pretty compelling reason— and not just some abstract ethical nonsense addressed to a teenager's head, or emotional nonsense addressed to her heart. Offering that reason is, of course, the work not only of real thinkers, but also of saints.

So— see these movies if you like. If you're in any way impressed, you are either 13 years old or less, or you have my deep condolences on having gotten as far as you have without ever venturing any deeper. It would probably not help you to read some of the more serious articles available at the NT Wright page, so i won't even recommend them, but i'll leave that much of a pointer, in the outside chance you might find them interesting.

"What Kind of Christian Are You"— Quiz Results

So I stumbled across this Quiz Farm site and discovered that they have a couple of quizzes designed to show you where you fit in the spectrum of theologies that people have. Mind you, these are amateur quizzes, nothing professional, but fun to look at anyway. So I took the "What type of "Christian" theology do you hold?" Quiz. Here's what I learned about my theological position among the churches:

You Scored as A New Kind of Christian or Emergent Liberal Hippie
(aka dangerously close to not being a Christian at all)

Sigh...you are a liberal/emergent type. You tends to be suspicious of systematic theology. Why? Not because you don't read systematics, but because the diversity of theologies alarms you, and no genuine consensus has been achieved, God didn't reveal a systematic theology but a storied narrative, and no language is capable of capturing the Absolute Truth who alone is God. You tend to be very critical of traditional Christians and like to think or Christianity more like a "save the world" club then as a relationship w/God. Beware, you have found yourself in a dangerous place. Doctrine matters, truth matters, and when you leave those behind you may be very close to leaving Christianity behind with you.

82% New Kind of Christian or Emergent Liberal Hippie (aka dangerously close to not being a Christian at all)

80% Fundamentalist

72% Classic American Evangelical

70% Reformed Protestant

62% Roman Catholic

Those who know me might find that very, very funny. But I do think it shows, albeit in garbled fashion, the effect of all the NT Wright I've been reading, and the intensive study of Mark that i've been engaged in over the past year. Of course, the preachments at the end of the narrative assessment— 'Beware, you have found yourself in a dangerous place. Doctrine matters, truth matters, and when you leave those behind you may be very close to leaving Christianity behind with you'— pretty much tell you where the quiz author is coming from.

So then I thought, well, just for balance i should take the other "Theology" quiz. Here are the results of that one:

You Scored as Calvinism

You are a Calvinist. You hate eveyone that does not believe like you, you are hateful and proud. You do not witness. God can save the world without you.

80% Calvinism
75% Atheist
20% Arminian

Again, the Buddhist in me thinks this is very, very funny. Again though— it's interesting that I would score both times fairly high on the "fundamentalist" or "calvinist" index. i think the NT Wright influence shows up, and the Gospel of Mark. Only problem is, i strongly believe the bible is more literary than historical, and I don't believe in creationism or in penal substitutionary atonement. So I guess i'm not a very good fundie or calvinist. "Hateful and proud" though? "75% Atheist"? Well, perhaps in the same sense that the early Christians were persecuted for being "atheists"— didn't believe in the state/cultural gods.

So there was one more quiz on offer, the "Eucharistic Theology" Quiz. Almost to my surprise (after the other two):

You Scored as Orthodox

You are Orthodox, worshiping the mystery of the Holy Trinity in the great liturgy whereby Jesus is present through the Spirit in a real yet mysterious way, a meal that is also a sacrifice.

Orthodox— 100%
Calvin— 63%
Catholic— 50%
Zwingli— 31%
Luther— 25%
Unitarian— 0%

So there ya go! Certified "100%" Orthodox when it comes to "eucharistic theology". Interesting that a quiz about eucharistic theology would get it right— and I guess the question is, Is there really any other kind? Of theology, i mean.

Anyway, you answer most questions on a scale of 1 to 7 or some such. In almost every instance, my responses were instantaneous and were either 1, or 7— almost no "in between". Since i know the theory, history, etc behind the phrasing of many of the questions, and can't always agree with either side (Protestant or Catholic)— or do agree to some extent with both— i occasionally backed off from a full 'yes' or 'no', possibly leaning towards one side or another, but often just choosing the middle as a kind of both/and or neither/nor. For instance, "The priest transforms bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ": As we say in the prayer, 'I believe, O Lord, and I confess that this bread is truly thine own most pure body and that which is in this cup is truly thy most precious blood'— but I don't believe the priest does any "transforming" of bread and wine into anything else. More like, "I am only a witness", as he says in confession: "Send down thy holy Spirit upon us and upon these gifts and make this bread to be the precious body..." etc: God does it, not the priest. So i marked the middle option: yes and no, but also neither/nor. But on the other hand, I flatly denied that 'The "accidents" remain, but the "substance" is changed.' It's not that i don't believe that the eucharist is really the body of Christ; I just totally don't buy such metaphysical constructs to "explain" anything.

Interestingly, the "What is your true religion" quiz tells me i'm 83% buddhist and only 72% christian— and at the same time, 72% atheist/agnostic!

Well, you could waste a lot of time on these things. There are 155 different religion quizzes, not counting the theology ones, I think. And though i am pretty strictly Orthodox, i'm sure at the same time i do escape most people's easy categorizations, for better or worse.