Dreamer Easy

I cannot now remember where I first encountered the idea that two people of equal intelligence, given the same facts, can in complete good faith reach different conclusions. It's a simple truth about the enormously complex process of trying to make sense of an enormously complicated world. I'm not just talking about opinions shaped by experience, training, prejudice, or habit: even scientists, whose basic tools are facts and logic, often disagree, sometimes spectacularly, and it takes a great deal more fact-finding and logical thinking to show which of them was right.

Which is why it's infuriating when a scientists insists on telling people what their religious beliefs are. Quoth Dawkins, re Pat Robertson, re Haiti: "Loathsome as Robertson's views undoubtedly are, he is the Christian who stands squarely in the Christian tradition."

I actually share Dawkins' view that linking catastrophe to human behaviour is a dubious, hazardous theology. We behave messily because we live in a messy universe, and not the other way around. But how the heck we're supposed to get from "the Bible describes Jesus casting out demons" to "Haiti made a pact with the Devil" I have no idea. Presumably the idea is that having accepted one supernatural event, you then accept them all. And you wondered why there has never been any controversy over theological opinions! How is this illogic any different to insisting that accepting evolution must inevitably lead to, for example, eugenics?

"Just read your own Bible," chides Dawkins. The Southern Baptist he disparages uses the Bible as a direct riposte to Robertson: "Is the judgment of God something we can claim to understand in this sense... No... Jesus himself warned his disciples against this kind of presumption." (I assume he's referring to Matthew 7, but my theology's very slender. Help?)

This is what I'm referring to when I say that militant atheists and fundamentalists have, in a sense, the same beliefs. Or, to borrow from Alan Watts, nobody believes in God like an atheist. ;)

Nodding off while listening to an extremely interesting Podcast on Biblical Hebrew. Earlier was poking around in GB thread about the sex or gender of God, in which various people said God was a bodyless spirit, wouldn't be limited by gender, etc. And yet, God has all these other human characteristics - he's got a face, he breathes, he speaks, he experiences love, anger, jealousy, and so on. Now, in the Podcast they talk about the importance of language in the creation, that "Hebrew letters are the sounding block of creation itself" - creation and language are inseparable. Influenced by Zen, I suppose, I regard the Divine as ungraspable by the rational mind: gods and their personalities and stories are analogies, something humans can deal with, but no more to be confused with the actual Divine than a road sign should be confused with Yass. So my question is, in this theology, is language a property of creation, or a property of God? Do language and the universe come into existence at the same moment? Language is (almost but not quite) the defining characteristic of human beings, so does it result from our being made in God's image? Your answers on a postcard.

I've read so much stuff at such a speed over the last two days, trying to get books back to the library before the OS trip, that I think I burned something out. This morning on the bus I couldn't make head nor tail of the fairly straightforward nonfic I'd brought with me. Sometimes this happens when you write too much and you abruptly lose the ability to parse English, but I've never had it happen from reading before.

This possibly led to a dizzying moment of Zen when I realised that God, too, would be marked by emptiness. Oh my head.

Theologically, is the "word of God" as in the Scriptures identified with the Word of God as in the logos?

Found some Jehovah's Witness magazines on the train. IS GOD RESPONSIBLE FOR NATURAL DISASTERS? asks one. Alas, it doesn't answer the question, but it does reassure us that the world will end shortly in any case. Rather sweetly, an article on immigrants "who feel caught between two cultures" are reminded of Biblical figures in similar situations, such as Joseph and Timothy. I also found out who the five foolish virgins were (hint: not a pop band).

Same podcast, different speaker (Jonathan Sacks, the UK's Chief Rabbi):

'If you read the Bible, you will see for instance, towards the end of Deuteronomy where Moses warns the people that bad things will happen if they drift away from their faith and way of life, he says 'These bad things will happen because you didn't serve God with joy, and fullness of heart out of the abundance of all things'. Judaism if you read it carefully in the Bible, is very much about celebrating this life, down here on earth, the earth that God created and declared good. And the Psalm says 'Serve God with joy, come before him in exultation'. So it was really the persecutions of the Middle Ages that transposed Judaism in what I'd call the minor key. But actually deep down, it's a religion of celebration, and the Hassidim understood it, and my goodness me, they know how to do it.'

What a challenge - for a Jew, for anyone! *is floored by it*

Further to my last posting about that notable young man of Middle Eastern appearance: one of the many Christian groups on campus are having a lecture series called "If I were God I would..." . Tomorrow's lecture is titled "If I were God I would end all suffering". (This will of course be an explanation of why God doesn't, in fact, end all suffering.)

Now many concepts are readily translatable from one religion to another, but what this question actually means is, "If I were omnipotent I would..." Looked at one way, my own deities are not omnipotent; looked at another way, the question is meaningless, as my own gods aren't bureaucrats or generals organising the universe from outside. In fact, I agree with Thorkild Jacobsen's analysis in Treasures of Darkness: the idea of the chief god as a ruler whose word is law, with many ministers in the form of lesser gods, developed when human societies themselves became organised in this way.

Imagine the excitement, if you can - being the first scholar or scholars to translate the ancient Canaanite text, sometime early last century:

Behold, your enemy, Baal,
Behold, you will kill your enemy,
Behold, you will annihilate your foes.
You will take your eternal kingship,
Your dominion forever and ever.

These lines have just emerged from tablets dug up in the site of the ancient city of Ugarit - and yet, like any educated Westerner, you already know them. You take down a Bible from the shelf, and turn to the familiar Psalms:

Behold, your enemies, Yahweh,
Behold, your enemies have perished,
all evildoers have been scattered. (Psalm 92)

Your kingdom is an eternal kingdom,
your rule is forever and ever. (Psalm 145)

The lines aren't identical, in the spooky way that the Babylonian Flood story is almost word for word the same as the Genesis account, but you can't dismiss the similarities. They keep cropping up - the connections between the god of the Bible and the Canaanite chief deity El; Baal's conquest over the sea, his appearance on a mountaintop accompanied by storm and earthquake, the title he shares with the Hebrew god, "Rider on the Clouds".

So do these discoveries shake our scholars' faith? Of course not - why should it? "... the god of Israel may be unique, but the formulae with which Israel expressed her understanding of him were not," comments translator Michael David Coogan, who points to Ezekiel 16:3: "By origin and by birth you are of the land of the Canaanites". (It's Coogan's account in Stories from Ancient Canaan that I'm relying on here.)

The jolt the scholars must have experienced is the same shock of recognition I get when reading the story of the goddess Anat's lethal punishment of the hero Arqhat, who refuses to hand over his magic bow and arrows and even insults her. In the next paragraph, Coogan says exactly what I'm thinking: this is extremely similar to Ishtar's spurned proposal to Gilgamesh. I don't know which story came first, or whether they both arose from the same background, and I don't know much about Anat yet, but my brain still goes "boing"!!! Have I just encountered my own god, in a different form?

What strikes me personally is the astonishing fact that the very words used to praise the Canaanite gods as much as two thousand years ago, are still alive today, preserved in those Psalms. I don't think there's any Mesopotamian equivalent, not even those lines shared between Gilgamesh and Genesis.

Reading about embryos and such at the moment for Quiet Game. Some of the questions this stuff provokes is like messing around with the rules in a role-playing game: when two embryos fuse spontaneously fuse to form a single chimeric individual, as occasionally happens, how many souls does the resulting human being have?