Untitled

The following is the first draft of an untitled short story that I started writing yesterday.

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        We were told that Moses commanded it, and since Moses is the one who talks to God, Moses' words are taken as God's.  And so we all have to line up and walk out of the camp and take turns throwing rocks at a convicted Sabbath breaker until he dies.  All you heard was he was gathering sticks for his mother.

        "Thank God he was caught before he got home," says a man in front of you.  "If she was caught lighting a fire, we would be stoning her too."

        People are singing hymns.  A lot of people are crying, especially women and girls.  A lot of people are shouting Amen or Hallelujah, especially men.

        A boy who looks eight, nine, or ten hands you a rock and says "May the Lord strengthen thy hand," and you quietly laugh because he used the archaic second person singular.

        Your hope is that the man will be dead by the time it's your turn to throw your rock.  There are so many people here, that so many people must already have thrown their rock.  The man must already be dead.

        The man in front of you throws his rock onto a large pile of rocks, turns around and whispers "Lord have mercy" and walks away.

        Now it's your turn, but all you see is a big pile of rocks.  The man must certainly be dead now.  No action from you could have been the cause of death or any harm to him.

        You pause and try to think of something good to say, like something a man in the crowd would say whenever Moses or Aaron talks -- "Praise the Lord," or "Bless God," or, like the man in front of you, "Lord have mercy" -- but none of those seem to be the right thing to say.

        You toss your rock underhanded.  It falls a cubit short of the pile.  You look around and everyone except for a woman sitting on the ground is looking at you.  You walk forward, stoop, and flick your rock with your hand.  This time it falls less than a pinky's width in front of the pile.

        You're pretty sure everyone is still looking at you.  You just don't want to turn around.

        "What do you say, Miss, should my last throw count?"  You turn to face the seated woman but she's still staring forward and completely silent.  She hasn't said a word since you got to the front, and now you're thinking she's the very last woman you should have asked that question.

        You pick your rock up again, hold it out over the pile, and drop it.  It claps when it hits the pile.

        You turn to see the boy who was handing out rocks try to give a rock to the lady sitting on the ground.  She wouldn't take it, so he sets it in her lap.  She shrieks, then wails, then falls over and lies motionless.

        It's strangely quiet back at camp this evening.  You'll grow used to the weird silence, just like you'll grow used to the heat, and to stoning other Hebrews to death.  You nibble on your ration of sweetcake and you sip your ration of water, and you look out at the red mountains around you, and you see that there is bread and water in the camp and none outside it, and you decide that, at least for now, life is less cruel with your people than without them.  And over the next forty years you will make that assessment again, and again, and again.

Corpus Hermeticum

I wanted to see what, if any, systematic theology there might be behind tarot reading. And I was struck that almost as soon as Europeans started using tarot decks for cartomancy, they attributed the practice to Egypt and the Hermetic tradition - and this was before they started putting Hebrew letters and Egyptian themes on the cards. Our scholarship of ancient and medieval religious texts has greatly developed since the 1700's, and now I am peering down into a deep, dusty rabbit hole.

Two kinds of eudaimonia

Just a quick update - I'm a eudaimonist now. And a damn statist to boot. My moral views are less Kantian than they have been in the past, and I now see "acting in accordance with our nature" as a big part of morality.

But what's "natural" for us? I agree with Mencius that the beginning of morality is the primordial compassionate urges you feel towards others. But as Steven Pinker mentions, it's more natural for us to sacrifice our self interest for family members than for a larger group - we have to socially train ourselves to include non-family into our circle.

I like the eudaimonia that's broader than merely the primordial. I generally see morality as a way to act that contributes to human enrichment, and a big part of that is an increase in human life expectancy and quality of life.

So the socialization that occurs to get people to include non-family into their circle, though not immediately natural, is "natural" enough for the purposes of my eudaimonism because it's necessary for states, which helps keep people from dying young.

When and in what order was the New Testament written?

It seems only seven books of the New Testament were written during the lives of the apostles, according to a consensus of Biblical scholars. These books are the "undisputed" letters of Paul - 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, Philemon, Philippians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Romans. All or almost all of Jesus' contemporaries were dead by the time the other New Testament books, including the gospels, were penned.

This is a relatively new perspective for Christians; but as Christians come around to this view, should they give more weight to Paul's seven letters than to the other New Testament books? If they were to, then maybe the Free Grace theology of my fundamental Baptist upbringing wouldn't seem so overstated. There would still be funny phrases to wrestle with, like "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12), but at least James wouldn't be as big a problem.

But there could be other problems. Though these seven epistles go at length about salvation by grace through faith in the crucified and risen Christ, and though they call Jesus Lord, they don't call him God, they say nothing about a virgin birth, and they say nothing about an empty tomb (though that last one might not be such a problem for the orthodox when the risen Christ is mentioned). And they don't forbid women from speaking in church, or require them to ask doctrinal questions to their husbands rather than their pastors; but to the fundamentalists' comfort, Romans does start out sounding sufficiently homophobic.

The view that Paul's seven epistles are the only parts of the New Testament written during the lives of the apostles poses a serious challenge to what I call the "Ebionite myth" - the idea popular among modern Ebionites, Black Hebrew Israelites, some liberal Protestants, and Muslims, that there originally was a purely Jewish (if subversive) Christianity that centered around Jesus' teachings rather than his death, and then Paul came and messed it up. Given that the oldest records of Christian doctrine we have are written by Paul, it gets pretty hard to say that Paul's writings about salvation by grace and atonement through Jesus' death and resurrection are a perversion of Christianity.

I bet you could learn a lot about the development of very early Christianity by studying a chronological New Testament. The most famous one right now is by Marcus Borg. He dates various books differently than does Raymond Brown, who is one of Jericho Brisance's other sources. Borg sets James earlier in the sequence than Brown does, mostly because James looks like it might be closer to earlier Christianity. (Maybe it's the egalitarianism and the "faith without works is dead." I personally think "the Father of lights" makes the book sound a bit neo-Platonic or Gnostic, but anyway Jews had been in contact with Greek and Persian religion for centuries before the author of James was born.) Also, Borg sets John earlier than Luke, which I find strange because to me John looks like the biggest weirdo of the canonized gospels. I personally prefer Brown's dates over Borg's, but Borg's book looks worth the read.

Is Disbelief in Free Will Bad for Society?

The June issue of Scientific American contains an article by Azim Shariff and Kathleen Vohs about the social impact of skepticism about free will (if you can't pay $5.99 for the issue, you can read the full article for free at Learned Citizen). Based on some surveys and studies that have been done, it seems two things could happen to people when they doubt free will - they could want less prison time for criminals, but they could also put too much hot sauce in the food of people they don't like. In other words, they could get less vengeful in theory but more vengeful in action.

The authors write that as more people loose belief in free will, one of three social effects could result from this: we could get a more merciful justice system that emphasizes crime prevention over retribution; we could descend into anarchy; or, as Voltaire said about God, we might feel we have to re-invent belief in free will.

The third possibility sounds a little fascinating and reminds me of Kant's philosophy of religion during his critical period; but I question whether it's best to promote belief in an idea that the scientific community supports less and less.

I grant that ideas can rightly be weighed in part by their social effect. But I wonder if there are long-term costs, including opportunity costs, to keeping foundational beliefs that science increasingly puts into question. The social benefit of having lots of free will believers who are individual responsibility, law and order types might be outweighed by the social cost of not basing our justice system on an accurate view of human nature. These social costs could include higher rates of recidivism, the costs born by the victims of that recidivism, and the public costs of pursuing, trying, and imprisoning re-offenders.

Not-so-new News About the Northridge Mosque

There was a very bitter dispute in the Sunni Muslim community in Granada Hills recently. The dispute was mainly over how the mosque's finances should be handled, and who should be in charge of the mosque. Theology wasn't part of it. But the parties to the dispute were likening each other to the Taliban, protesters started demonstrating outside the mosque during services and called the imam a devil, the mosque leaders hired private security, allegations of battery were made, a death threat was allegedly made on the phone, lawsuits were filed, fun things like that. Sometimes it's harder to tell what's worse - fights about money or fights about God.

The judge ordered the mosque to hold an election for the board, and that election happened July 15 of this year. Since the imam, the incumbent board members, and almost all of their supporters boycotted the election, the challengers won by a landslide. Incumbents got between 2 and 5 votes each, while the challengers got between 992 and more than a thousand votes each.

One of the reasons many of the incumbents' supporters abstained was that they did not believe that a ruling from a secular court was valid in disputes between Muslims. So though this dispute was more about finance than religion, it was someone's religion that made their loss blatant.

Making San Jose the Capital of Silicon Valley

     "I'm convinced that we would have been better off rebuilding this city from a million small decisions made by tens of thousands of individual citizens and business owners than by a gang of bureaucrats with no stake in our success beyond their own resume padding.

     "We may have gained a couple of extra high rises and a few more public buildings...but the cost was too great. We sucked the soul and culture out of old downtown San Jose and replaced it with a comparatively sterile and empty metropolitan center that constantly has to dangle expensive bait to lure in young people and wealthy suburbanites.

     "It will take at least another generation to bring back the random juxtapositions of shops and businesses, the welcome and well-worn seediness and the population of hungry young urbanites that make up a healthy city center - and that were so thoughtlessly torn down or driven away back in the '80s and '90s...

     "Where was all of that Redevelopment money coming from?

     "The typical answer I got at the time was either a shrug or that it was a kind of magical 'free' money that would have absolutely no effect upon the overall finances of the city.

     "Well, we now know that was utter bullshit. A city is an ecosystem. You can't segment off one corner of it, rewrite its financial underpinnings and expect it to operate in a vacuum. No matter how you try to firewall it off, inevitably everyone is affected. And now we can see what that means - a shiny and empty downtown, the loss of numerous small downtown businesses (many of them a century old) that gave San Jose its character and culture - an aging infrastructure in the other, outlying districts, public buildings that have become financial sinkholes, a city budget too strained to pursue major new initiatives, a rising crime rate and a declining quality of life...

     "[I]f you are going to build a prosperous future, a city that will come roaring out of this recession into a new era of prosperity, then you don't try to pick winners - especially [in some] industry like clean tech - and you don't help mature, and likely doomed, tech companies build nice high-rise headquarters, and you don't burden struggling start-ups with endless regulations, taxes and fees, and the latest social engineering boondoggle.

     "And most of all, you don't leave it up to a committee of bureaucrats to guess which companies will succeed and which won't.

     "Instead, you give the start-ups cheap office space, tax breaks and the fastest broadband you can deliver. Then you get the hell out of way and trust them to do the rest. Ninety percent of them will fail, but the last 10 percent will change the world - and the fortunes of the city of San Jose...."

     - Malone, Michael S. "Dreams of Instant City/The Blue Sky Days." *Metro Silicon Valley* [San Jose] 5 September 2012: 16+ (http://issuu.com/metrosiliconvalley/docs/1236_mt).