godwho's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Part Duex I DID keep reading that book and hit on a very interesting paragraph later... The writer has just described the potential sacrificing of Isaac by his father Abraham. He's deconstructing it at the end, trying to decide what it says about this "new" God. Cahill: "At the outset of this harrowing episode, the narrator, knowing that poor human readers could never bear the suspense, tells us that this will be a 'test,' so we know that Yitzhak (Isaac) will not actually be sacrificed, however difficult it is to keep that in mind during the ensuing action. It is a test ofr us as well. Can we open ourselves to the God who cannot be understood, who is beyond all our amulets and scheming, the God who rains on picnics, the God who allows human beings to be in human, who has sentenced us all to death? All other gods are figments, sorry projections of human desires. Only this God is worth my life (and yours and Yitzhak's). For 'there is no other.'... Avraham (Abraham) passes the test. His faith -- his belief in God -- is stronger than his fear. But now he knows he is dealing with the Unthinkable, beyond expectation. The God who called him out into the wilderness and made impossible promises has begun to bring those promises to fulfillment. But this must not mean that, through this God, I can see the future and control what has not yet come to be. I control nothing. My task is to be as open to God as I am to my own child; to both I must say, 'Here I am!'" Wow. 4:57 p.m. - 2007-10-18 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- That's me in the spotlight losing my -- (oh, no it's not) I started reading �The Gift of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels� yesterday. It�s an awesome thesis, and I was looking forward to it, but not far into the text, I found myself skimming and very impatient to get to the meat of the story. The author, Thomas Cahill, seems to be trying to set the stage by going on ad nauseum about the Sumerian culture. I guess his point is to contrast how completely polar the Israelite culture was to the existing polytheistic, pagan society out of which the Jewish people came. But he�s hammering the point with so much wind, it�s making me tired. Digressions in writing which strongly inject the author�s personality into what I had expected to be a story about something else (in this case, the Israelites) bother me a great deal. Inflammatory digressions, especially when completely unnecessary and unrelated to the point, bother me even more! There�s one part where he�s talking about Ut-napishtim, the hero of the flood tale from the Epic of Gilgamesh. In it, there is a footnote: �The discovery of this earlier Sumerian �Noah� in the first attempts to translate cuneiform tablets toward the end of the nineteenth century raised as much anxiety as Darwin did among Victorians, who had assumed that everything in the Bible was without antecedent because it was the �Word of God.�� This irritates me on so many levels, I hardly know where to start. First of all, the vagary of �raised anxiety� begs the question, �Among whom?� Why raise a flag if you�re just going to wave it purposelessly and then run away? Secondly, to compare Darwin�s influence of thought to the physical discovery and translation of an ancient text inflates, in my opinion, Darwin�s thoughts on the origin of species. Granted, he was a bright man and an exceptional naturalist, but so many of his postulations have been proven, as scientific understanding has developed, simply untrue. So, I�m going to spank on both so-called Christians without the ability to apply logic (who might indeed find themselves anxiety-ridden at each new bit of archaeology or scientific discovery), and at people in general, because we�re a bunch of pompous idiots in our jumping to and drawing false conclusions. Because both groups are serving to make the non-existent rift between science and Biblical belief appear as vast as that between the Sumerian and Jewish cultures. Why do we assume that the Jewish Bible�s story of Noah is �borrowed� (as the book says later) from the Epic of Gilgamesh? Cahill himself notes that the Shemites were illiterate. The Sumerians developed the ability to write first, but who�s to say they didn�t �borrow� their story from what they�d heard the Shemites tell? Personally, I believe neither of those hypotheses to be correct. To me, it would make much more sense to believe the flood stories, which exist in some form in every ancient culture, are about the same thing. An actual event of global flooding would be remarkable enough to sear itself into the mental and oral and finally written histories of the people involved. That could be an acceptable alternative to anyone, I�d think. Where we may part the ways is that I happen to trust the Genesis account of the flood because I think God protected the oral history until Moses wrote it. After the flood, Noah, Mrs. Noah, and their three boys and daughters-in-law emerged from the ark. Several generations later, their descendents disobeyed God�s order to fill the earth, so He confused their languages so they�d be in a position to distrust and move away from those with whom they couldn�t communicate. It makes so much sense considering the similarity of languages, the archaeological evidence of the Middle East as the �cradle of civilization,� etc. So go ahead and find more stuff that was written down even earlier than the Bible that seems to agree with it. I�m not freaking out about its pre-dating the Bible�s written account. I�m going to be excited! As for Darwin, it�d be hard to overstate the effect his work has had on civilization. Though he wasn�t the first long-age inter-species change evolutionist, he did popularize it in a way unrivaled by anyone else. The ramifications continue, even though a chunk of his work has been debunked. The stuff that�s held up shouldn�t give anyone, including thinking �Victorians,� pause. Let�s take finches, for example. Darwin noted that finches on different parts of the Galapagos Islands had significantly differently-shaped beaks. If they had to break open crabs, their beaks were husky and short. If they fished between rocks, their beaks were elongated and thin. That�s an awesome testament to adaptability and natural selection. It does not, however, speak to the belief that finches used to be dinosaurs. That part is simply a flight of fancy that, regardless of the incessant insistence by many that it�s been proven, does not hold up to scientific scrutiny. Later, Cahill details the opening scenes of Abraham�s life from the Everett Fox translation of Genesis. He then goes on to detail how different it is from the Sumerian writings he�s reproduced (did I mention ad nauseum?). He says, Abraham�s father, �Terah, whoever he is, did not live for more than two centuries.� Really? That�s a pretty authoritative statement from someone who wasn�t there and didn�t know Mr. Terah. Why is it that we can read about the American colonists having an average life span of just over 40 years and believe that? Any problem thinking the ancient Egyptians barely made it past 30? It�s because we�re pompous and we assume that if we aren�t seeing it right now, it never ever could have happened. People can�t live 250 years because people DON�T live 250 years. Why is it any easier to believe they lived half as long as we did as it is to believe they lived twice as long? There wasn�t a hole in the ozone back then. They didn�t have all of the chemicals we do. And, for someone who believes in the Bible, they weren�t as far removed from the original creation as we are. Adam and Eve were originally supposed to be ETERNAL. 250 years might seem like a long time to those of us bound to the earth by an average of a century, but compared to eternity, it�s a tragic truncation of life. When Adam and Eve chose to disobey God, part of His curse was what He�d promised would happen if they did the ONE thing He told them not to. �You shall surely die.� But Adam and Eve represented perfection originally. It was only after the curse that genetic mutations were �turned on.� People gradually lived shorter and shorter until after the flood, when it really dropped off. I think environmental factors started coming into play after that time. We are so limited in what we can grasp. We assume that dinosaurs didn�t live alongside people because we don�t find their bones together, but we assume other creatures DID co-exist even though we don�t find their bones together. I�m convinced we can�t fathom the dinosaurs and humans living at the same time because they don�t NOW and we�re severely unimaginative. Then we go on about mythical �dragons,� which suspiciously resemble dragons, and, again, which every culture seems to record. It doesn�t make sense to me that the Chinese zodiac would include 11 �real� animals and one imaginary. Or that cave paintings would include the very real buffalo hunts alongside a fanciful �dragon.� Those wacky cave people. When I was growing up, I was very skeptical about everything, and this proved bad for my �religion� because there was no one in my immediate vicinity to mentor me in how to think about the world. But I was a kid. As far as I�m concerned now, there�s no excuse for adult believers to feel �anxiety� over anything new. It�s exciting! It�s an opportunity. And I don�t appreciate someone who doesn�t know me lumping me in with people whose faith is made nervous by enlightenment. That�s not true faith. That�s sort of a generic hoping that something is true. And that�s no kind of Christian to be. 4:15 p.m. - 2007-10-17 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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