Wholly Buy-Bull

As an undevoutly irreverent Christian, of course I revere the Bible as my traditional mythology. In fact, once when I was very small I even read it cover to cover, an exercise in monumental boredom for which I was highly praised by the Sunday school teacher. You see, I wanted to find out for myself the truth of that cute little ditty that we dutifully sang every Sunday morning. Unfortunately, the experience was so mind-numbing that I never really did grasp the proof of that wondrous truth. The Bible sounded like so much hogwash, but I was such an ignorant fool for thinking such a thing.

Then, several years later, I decided to try to understand the Bible. For this wondrous venture in utter futility, I turned to the preacher, a grandiose visage in his gorgeous vestments, claiming to have received Profound Knowledge by the magic of Apostolic Succession, standing in the pulpit and proclaiming all sorts of wonders. Even with all his patient help and support, the Bible still sounded like badly written mass confusion and this Apostolic Succession business was beginning to sound like a bunch of charlatanry, but I was such an ignorant fool for thinking such a thing.

Try to imagine reading the Bible without the background of a Christian upbringing but with knowledge of the mythological background of the societies in which the various parts of the Bible were first written. Basically, the Bible seems to describe a sort of development of the God idea from the initial concept of the primitive tribal war god. Ancient tribes used to carry large wooden or golden idols into battle as good-luck charms. Some ancient tribes (perhaps the Hebrews were first, I don't know) figured out that they could dispense with their idols by simply proclaiming to their enemies, "Our True God is more powerful than all your false gods because He is strong enough to carry Himself into battle and what's more, He is magically invisible to you. We are the only ones who can see him!" Of course, they won all the battles because they didn't need to use up half their soldiers lugging their stupid gods around.

The Bible appears to be just loaded with bad ideas. Let's begin at the beginning. (Where else?) In Genesis 1:26 man has been given dominion over everything in sight, justifying environmental destructiveness. In Genesis 2:21-23 woman is created as a mere accessory to man, justifying male domination. Throughout Genesis, God is consistently portrayed as a bungling ham-fist who just can't quite get his creation to run right and keeps needing to destroy portions of it and start over. The created beings are consistently rewarded for groveling in abject obedience and punished for exercising their powers of rational thought. For example, check out Genesis 22:1-12, where Abraham is getting ready to sacrifice Isaac. Anybody who thinks even for a moment that some sort of god is ordering him to slay his own son is certainly navigating with a bent rudder.

The highlight of Exodus is the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:2-17), that favorite document of the Righteous Reich. The first four of these commandments have nothing at all to do with moral values, they're nothing but expressions of primitive tribal superstition. Two of the other commandments have no meaning outside the bounds of one specific family heirarchical structure. The other four, worthy though they may be, are too small in scope to form any sort of general code of moral behavior. So this is the bit of drivel that's gonna keep guns out of schools? Yeah, right.

Moving on to Leviticus, we see in chapters 18-21 an example of primitive tribal hatred at its finest. The Egyptians and the Canaanites are being accused of all sorts of strange and uncouth misdeeds just so the Children of Israel can pride themselves on being ever so superior in giving themselves laws against these things. But some of these proscribed practices are, like who cares? Leviticus 20:13 demands that gay people be put to death. What sense does that make? Why should I even exclude gay people from my circle of friends, let alone hate them or commit acts of violence upon them?

Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Judges are a total crashing bore, filled with monotonous genealogies, more utterly senseless laws and commandments, and tribal battles in which the Children of Israel smite their neighbors and rape women and murder children, all with the blessing of their tribal god as long as they perform the correct rituals of cruelty to animals thinly disguised as sacrifices.

Ruth is sort of a cute little story except for its poor literary quality and maddeningly crummy readability.

In the Books of the Kings (called I&II Samuel and I&II Kings in most Protestant versions of the bible) we see the beginnings of anything that can be historically verified. This historical period begins about the middle of the 11th century BC, a time in which, elsewhere in the Near East, non-religious humanist philosophy is making its debut, with its moral standard based on Love Thy Neighbor As Thyself and its intellectual standard based on Seek And Ye Shall Find. (Betcha didn't know these ideas originated outside of any religion, didja?) Nowhere in the Books of the Kings do we see anything substantially resembling this level of enlightenment.

In I&II Chronicles we see little more than a stale and eminently unreadable rehash of earlier books. Skip them and you aren't missing anything.

Ezra and Nehemiah appear to be mere extensions of the Chronicles, just as badly written and just as historically inaccurate, although several passages in Nehemiah have been historically verified.

Esther is the Hebrew version of a widespread legend of passionate intrigue and assassination. The Persian and Babylonian versions are much more well-written and lots more fun to read.

Job is an incredible fantasy story that portrays God and Satan playing games with each other, apparently not with a full deck. Do you really want to believe in that sort of God? Oh by the way, when I was in college I did my Religion class term paper on the Book of Job. I got an A+ on it, not that anybody cares.

Now we come to the Psalms. They are, for the most part, rather nice poetry, and some of them sound pretty good set to music. Musical arrangements of many of the Psalms are published in Psalms Made Singable edited by Keith Shafer, available from Church Music Services. The ideas found in the Psalms, however, are vaporously devoid of substance.

Proverbs and Ecclesiastes contain a few bits of reasonably good advice here and there, but if you're a basically sensible person you're probably following that advice already. Besides, the good advice is so thoroughly interspersed with meaningless sequences of random words and Rah Rah God cheerleading that it's hardly worth wading through to find it.

The Song of Solomon would be pretty nice to sing while strumming upon your dulcimer outside your lover's window on some romantic moonlit night. Hey guys, try it sometime! You'll probably send the poor lady into gales of uproarious laughter.

Now we come to Isaiah, the most glorious aggregation of gobbledygook I've ever seen in a single setting! Isaiah appears to be a conglomeration of several ancient myths and legends, with all sorts of grandiose imagery of God and all the Celestial Attendants, gruesome scenes of the horrible things that happen to disobedient folks, wondrous visions of the delights that await the righteous, and vast quantities of incomprehensible nonsense. Much of this imagery is taken to be a prediction of the coming Messiah, although to me it looks like the typical fortune teller's ploy of predicting everything in sight, then whatever happens you'll have gotten something right. A rather interesting highlight is the phrase in Isaiah 7:14 where the English translation (King James version) reads "Behold, a virgin shall conceive". This accurately follows the Greek Septuagint version. The Hebrew version translates as "Behold, a young woman shall conceive", and a similar Persian myth says "Behold, an independent woman has conceived". Scholars more knowledgeable than I am disagree as to who mistranslated whom. I suppose the unreformably male-supremacist Children of Israel, speaketh they Hebrew or Greek, had no comprehension of what an independent woman could ever be. To Isaiah's credit, at least he slips in a few small pleas for social justice, the first mention in the Bible of this radical new idea that had already been a mainstay of most non-religious humanist philosophies for several centuries.

Jeremiah, Lamentations, and Ezekiel are more or less similar to Isaiah except the mystic imagery is a bit less gaudy and the social justice theme is a bit stronger. In the Episcopal Church we do many of our standard Bible readings from these books, primarily because of the social justice issue.

Daniel is a fantasy myth similar to many other Near Eastern myths of the period. Daniel 1:8-15 is sometimes used as a biblical justification for a vegetarian diet, but most of my vegetarian friends don't seem to depend on biblical justification.

Hosea, Joel, Amos, and Obadiah are short but rather dull little treatises about largely nothing. Well, I suppose there are a few pleas for social justice and fairness, but they're embedded in such monumental hogwash that they're easily overlooked.

Jonah is another fantasy myth with many parallels in Near Eastern mythology.

Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi could probably be accidentally left out of the Bible and hardly anybody would notice. This is rather sad, I think, because it is in these books that most of the Bible's calls for social justice and fairness are stated most eloquently.

Some versions of the Bible, including the one we officially use in the Episcopal Church, contain a group of several books called the Apocrypha. If your Bible does not have the Apocrypha, fret thee not, for thou doth be indeed not missing much.

Did Jesus Christ ever actually exist on earth as a living person? Well, I suppose he probably did, but you certainly can't tell it from the Gospels. They're nothing but rather sloppily written accounts of just another warmed-over version of the same stale old man-god myth that has been a recurring staple of eastern and central European and Near Eastern mythology since time immaterial.

Here's the story. One of the gods decides to come and live on earth in human form. He causes some poor unsuspecting virgin to conceive and bear him, typically under very humble circumstances such as perhaps in a stable, where a makeshift bed is fixed up for him, perhaps in a livestock feeding trough. The birth is announced by various celestial means, such as a magnificent star, or choirs of angels on high. Visitors come bearing such unlikely gifts as gold, frankincense, and myrrh, suitable for a god, I suppose, but of no conceivable use for a normal baby. The sacred birth catches the attention of the local king, who then, perceiving a threat to his dynasty, has all boy babies in the kingdom put to death. However, the newborn man-god escapes via a mystic warning delivered to his earthly parents. The typical man-god myth generally contains very little detail of his childhood and youth. Then, in adulthood, he rounds up several disciples, typically twelve, although the number varies in some versions. He then goes around performing the same old miracles that are the stock-in-trade of every myth-maker, preaches the same old stuff that is already a part of existing philosophy, and retells the same old parables that everyone already knows by heart. Then he gets arrested by the local ruler, often through the perfidy of a disloyal disciple, and is put to death by some gruesome means such as crucifixion, but then he is resurrected and spends a few days strolling around and chatting with his disciples, then zooms off to Heaven or Valhalla or the Land of Happy Hunting or wherever.

The writers of the Gospels certainly had no shortage of source material because several dozen of these man-god myths were already familiar to Greek-speaking people of central and eastern Europe and portions of the Near East, and they could always place the scene of the action in some unfamiliar place like Palestine. Read the Gospels sometime with an ancient map of Palestine in hand. It's good for a lot of laughs. For instance, in the fifth chapter of Mark Jesus steps off a boat directly into the Country of the Gadarenes, about thirty miles from the nearest body of water big enough to float a boat. Wow, man! Jesus Christ Superstar of the Olympic broad jump team! And then when he's in that country he encounters a guy who's infested with demons and he casts out the demons and causes them to enter some pigs, a species that has never existed in that country because they can't survive the climate.

And just look at all these references to the Pharisees but not a single mention of the Essenes. The Pharisees were very prominent among the Greek-speaking Jews of Asia Minor, Greece, and Egypt, but barely noticed in Palestine. The Essenes were just all over the place in Palestine but almost unknown elsewhere. And this lovely little town of Nazareth is not mentioned in Roman maps and tax records of the era. It's very unlikely that the greedy Romans would have overlooked the taxation opportunities of any town big enough to have a carpenter shop. Oh by the way, the present-day town of Nazareth was founded in 135 AD as an unnamed community and received the name Nazareth in 254 AD. That oughta be enough to tell you that the Gospels were written by Greeks who had very little knowledge of the geography of Palestine and the customs of the Jews. Well, so much for trying to find profound truth in the Gospels.

The Acts, almost certainly written by the same author who wrote the Gospel of Luke, is a creative new twist on the man-god legend. It contains more of the same standard miracles of classic mythology such as speaking in tongues (Acts 2:1-11), healing (Acts 3:2-8 and Acts 5:15-16) and conversion (Acts 9:1-9), but it attributes these miracles to the human followers of the man-god after the ascension, a relatively unusual twist on the usual myth. The author also gets in a few of his own political views, such as communal living (Acts 2:44-45 and Acts 4:34-35) in seeming oblivion to the universal failure of communal living arrangements whenever they've been tried throughout history, and the idea of assigning underlings to do the real work while the high and mighty keep their delicate little paws clean (Acts 6:2-4). Not only that, but he includes a few actual historical people in his narrative, possibly at the request of those people themselves, so that we can't be sure what's fantasy and what's history.

The Epistles of Paul the Apostle are primarily flights of fantasy with all sorts of talk about salvation and redemption and all those other esoteric concepts of Christian dogma, but the one thing that really stands out is that this guy has got a rather serious circumcision fetish (Romans 2:25-29, Romans 3:30, Romans 4:9-12, I Corinthians 7:18-19, Galatians 2:7-9, Galatians 5:2-3, Colossians 2:11,13, and many many others). In addition, he seems to be some sort of sex-hating pervert (I Corinthians 7:7-9,32-34) like maybe he was some sort of nerd that women didn't like and he was jealous of the fun everyone else was having. He also expresses a negative view of the created world (I Corinthians 2:12) and bodily existence (Romans 8:1-3, Romans 13:14, and Galatians 5:16-21). He is a gay-basher (Romans 1:27 and I Corinthians 6:9), a male supremacist (I Corinthians 11:3,8-12, I Corinthians 14:34-35, Ephesians 5:22-24, and Colossians 3:18), a hair length fetishist (I Corinthians 11:14-15), and a hat fetishist (I Corinthians 11:4-7). To Paul's credit, he recognizes the legitimacy of human differences (Romans 12:6-8, Romans 14:2-6, and I Corinthians 12:8-11), and he recommends loving thy neighbor (Romans 13:8).

The other Epistles (including I&II Timothy and Titus, often erroneously attributed to Paul) are more flights of fantasy but with much less of Paul's weird hangups, although male domination rears its ugly head (I Timothy 2:11-12 and I Peter 3:1) with the interesting new twists that women should not wear jewelry and nice clothes (I Timothy 2:9 and I Peter 3:3) and widows shouldn't be allowed to have any fun (I Timothy 5:5-6). James is to be commended for recognizing that action rather than faith is what gets things done (James 2:14-26).

When Revelation was first published, it was uniformly denounced by the Christian community as the rantings of a madman. Emperor Theodosius insisted that it be included in the Bible so that he could use its freakish imagery to fabricate frightening boogeymen to spook the superstitious population into meekly accepting his tyranny. Hey folks, it's still the rantings of a madman.

I suppose I am misinterpreting the Bible. If that's the case, then maybe we ought to think about rewriting the Bible so people like me can understand it. If the Bible, as it stands now, is the inerrant Word of God, then God must be a miserable muddle-head. But I am such an ignorant fool for thinking such a thing.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas, everyone! Celebrate as you please! Newton's birthday (by the old Julian calendar)! Hanukkah (or however you spell it)! It's the Winter Solstice, a time when celebration is needed to ease the gloom of winter.

There are two classes of people I do not tolerate very well, sorry.

One is the anti-religion nerd-grinch who refuses to celebrate Christmas because it's the mythical birthday of an imaginary man-god that no sane and rational person could ever believe in.

The other is the religion spastic who bleats, "Put Christ back into Christmas," which is really double-speak code for, "Shove everything else out of Christmas."

Our winter solstice holiday season, complete with the make-believe man-god's mythical birthday, is believed to have dated to the 23-rd century BC if not indeed earlier, if certain ancient Sumerian and Elamite writings eventually prove to be genuine. With a tradition like that, no person in their right mind would refuse to celebrate.

Bailing Out the Auto Industry

Cars, the most hopelessly inefficient form of transportation ever invented, have done wonderful things for us.

Car ownership has enabled people to live in the outer suburbs, far from their jobs, stores, schools, and places of social life. This makes outer suburban land more potentially useful and therefore more expensive, thus feeding the forces of land speculation.

As a byproduct, this car dependence has required large parking lots in inner cities, thus requiring stores, industries, schools, etc. to acquire more land for these parking lots. This feeds the forces of speculation in inner city land.

So now that we've become so totally dependent on cars for all our transportation needs, our dependence appears to justify propping up the car industry when they begin falling victim to the very same land speculation that they, themselves, encouraged.

Perhaps we might change our perspective a bit. Maybe we could go ahead and let the car companies fail. Then many people will become unemployed and many dwellers of outer suburbia will be stranded in their remote luxury mansions without cars.

That would be horrible! But look! There's an obvious solution! Modify our tax structure to increase the location component of property taxes and decrease taxes on buildings, incomes, sales, and everything else.

This would cause land usage patterns to become more dynamic, enabling people to move closer to their work, stores, schools, etc. so that walking and bicycling would become practical for more of their transportation, thus decreasing their need for cars. The more dynamic land usage patterns would also permit the establishment of business forms that are more relevant to people's actual needs, thus re-employing the workers displaced by the failure of the car companies.

This tax shift, described in the nineteenth-century book Progress and Poverty by Henry George, looks like it would be very easily implementable within almost any reasonable governmental form. When I receive my property tax bill every September, the location value and building value are already separated out and re-added back together again, so implementing the tax shift looks like it would involve leaving a step out rather than adding a step. And if the income tax could be eliminated, yet another burdensome administration could be eliminated.

Hey, don't tell me it can't be done!

Seeds of Destruction

Back when world communism was alive and well, the communists taunted us and warned us that capitalism sows the seeds of its own destruction. Their observation is true, of course, but they failed to notice that communism also sows the seeds of its own destruction, the very same seeds, in fact, and by pure chance their seeds germinated first.

So what are these seeds of destruction?

Every elementary economics textbook begins by explaining that all wealth is made from land, labor, and capital. When an entrepreneur first establishes a business, he spends his initial investment on land and capital, then hires employees to perform the labor.

This initial investment lumps land and capital together and refers to the composite as the Means of Production. Capitalism places the Means of Production under corporate control and communism places the Means of Production under government control. Is one inherently better than the other? Should we care?

The need for the entrepreneur to lump land and capital together for investment purposes leads to the error of failing to see the fundamental difference between land and capital. Land is part of the universe. No human being, alive or dead, made it. It's a Gift of God (if you're a believer) or a Fact of Nature (if you're a non-believer). Capital is made by living people, and the quantity of it is a product of human decisions, thus capital bears a much closer kinship to labor than to land.

And therein lies the Seeds of Destruction. Whenever land and capital are treated identically for taxation and administrative purposes, land becomes subject to uncontrollable price inflation that eventually renders land such a large percentage of the corporate assets that it becomes more profitable to cut back production instead of increasing production. Downsizing happens. People lose their jobs. Newly unemployed homeowners default on their mortgages and banks are left holding the bag with properties that can't be sold for the amount of the outstanding balance.

In short, we have a depression.

Is the current economic downturn a mere recession that will soon turn back up again? Are we headed for a depression that will take years to pull back out of? Is this the depression that will cause total collapse of the entire world order as we know it? I'm not going to make a prediction, and I'm not going to believe any prediction anybody else makes, either.

Whatever the next presidential administration tries to do to fix our economy, it's doomed to fail unless something is done to rein in land speculation. The land value tax suggested in the nineteenth-century book Progress and Poverty by Henry George would be a very good place to start.

Now, if we do finally get wise and find a way to stop uncontrollable land-price bubbles, should the government own and administer major capital investments, as recommended by communists and socialists? In some cases, perhaps yes, but in other cases it won't make any difference.

The Uncaused First Cause

Everything must have a cause, therefore there must be an uncaused first cause, which must be God. Right?

First flaw: Many alternatives are possible, which the promoters of this proof commonly either handwavingly dismiss without an adequate explanation or leave entirely unexplored.

Second flaw: In order for something to be uncaused, it must be part of the primordial realm of the uncaused, consisting of only things that exist only because their nonexistence does not exist. I've never seen any description of what sort of God might be plausibly included in this realm.

Third flaw: In order for something to be a cause, it must have causative powers. I've never seen anything in our theology that explicitly credits God with any specific causative powers beyond the hand-waving statement that God is omnipotent, which is meaningless.

The primordial realm of the uncaused might plausibly include such things as the validity of logic, the truth of the axioms, the workability of mathematical patterns, the feasibility of certain dimensionalities, and many other things which, if true, would have precisely the sorts of causative powers needed to cause at least some of the features of our universe, but theologians have unexplainably omitted these attributes from their various concepts of God.

Theologians, you've got a lot of work yet to do!

An Open Letter to Our Next President

Dear Next President, whoever may win this election:
 
Prepare ye this day for the monumental challenge of the century, our economy.  For this, I have two suggestions.
 
First, converse with a few real estate salespeople.  Take note of the many times they recite the ever-popular real estate mantra, "The three most important things about a location are location, location, and location."
 
Next, read the nineteenth-century book Progress and Poverty by Henry George, which explains what all this location business is all about.
 
You see, all human activities, without exception, have one thing in common, that is they require a location.  At a minimum, in order to do anything you have to be someplace while you are doing it.  Some locations are better than others for certain activities.
 
It should come as no surprise, therefore, that all meaningful investments contain a major component consisting of the market value of their location.  The influence of land speculation artificially jacks up this location value component, making the entire investment appear more valuable than it really is, thus we end up with investment "bubbles" of various sorts.
 
When the location value component reaches a certain point, land usage patterns become less dynamic because of the greater amount of money that needs to be borrowed for a land sale, thus decreasing the efficiency of industry and leading to economic stagnation.
 
Mr. McCain, your party has traditionally believed that the Invisible Hand envisioned by Adam Smith will, if government simply butts out, magically cause more wealth to be created.  How do you expect this to happen if the Invisible Hand is chained to the dungeon wall of land speculation?
 
Mr. Obama, your party has traditionally believed that there's plenty of wealth and all that's needed is equitable distribution.  If you redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, how do you propose to prevent the forces of land speculation from re-redistributing it back to the rich?

Mr. Next President, whichever of you should win, you've got your work cut out for you!

Same-sex Marriage

It's time for me to present my opinion of same-sex marriage, a topic of which I know nothing, so I'll freely admit that my own opinion is total hogwash.
 
I know nothing about gay people, so I have no idea whether the institution of marriage is right for them.  That's for them to decide.  I'm not qualified to deny them something that might or might not work for them.
 
All arguments I've ever seen against same-sex marriage appear to fall into three categories: first, it's not the way we imagine marriage was done a thousand years ago therefore we can't do it now; second, somebody's religion says homosexuality is an Abomination Unto The Lord (or some such theological jibberish); and third, extending marriage to a new category of people will destroy it in some vaporously unfathomable way.  I consider all these arguments utterly spurious.
 
Now I'll admit that same-sex marriage is quite a jolt to my concept of what's usual, but I see no material harm in it.  Now I realize that the institution of marriage has been custome-fine-tuned for the benefit of opposite-sex couples, but whether or not it would be workable for same-sex couples is something only gay people can decide.  If we let them try it, and if they try it, and if they find it doesn't work for them, then fine, they'll at least have the opportunity to find out for themselves whether they can make it work.
 
I suspect it'll be quite a few years before Maryland considers legalizing same-sex marriage, but if it ever does come up for a vote during my lifetime I'll vote for it.  I'm not qualified to vote against it.
 
Now, whether same-sex couples should have children either by adoption or by donor insemination depends on how the children will be raised.  That's a topic for sociologists to examine scientifically, and that's outside of my field of expertise.  I'll abstain from presenting any opinion.