Tuesday, 02 August 2011
The folks at Prometheus Books sent me the book The End of Christianity, edited by John Loftus. They sent it to me for free, on the condition that I write a review of it.
It’s a decent book. Certainly not great. Not even good, in fact. But it’s not horrible and I intend to finish it. I’m currently about 2/3 of the way through, and I wanted to write about a curious analogy I read on pages 207-217. Those pages are from chapter 8, and the author of that chapter, Dr. Matt McCormick, argues that if anyone accepts Jesus’ resurrection based on the evidence provided in the gospels, then they should also accept that there really were witches in Salem during the late 17th century.
The doctor points out that 150 people were accused of witchcraft in Salem. Using several passive sentences, he notes that the folks in Salem set up a court, conducted investigations, and gathered evidence. People confessed. Community members transcribed the proceedings and accompanied their texts with affidavits, original court documents, and interviews.
Unlike the gospels, this was all documented in real-time (not decades later) by eyewitnesses (not people like Mark, Luke, and Paul who – even if they were the real authors – weren’t present). Community members recorded their sworn statements of witnessing acts of sorcery. Of course, we might claim that everyone was lying, but they had so much to lose. Some of these people provided statements against their spouses, children, parents, and neighbors. “Accusing a friend or wife of being a witch would very likely have the horrible outcome of getting them executed,” the doctor says on page 208.
He claims that if all the documentation from Salem’s witchcraft trials were gathered into one place, it would fill a truck.
The surviving evidence we have that Salem was full of witches far outweighs the evidence we have that Jesus was resurrected.
The doctor notes that if this line of reasoning is pointed out to a Christian, they’re likely to just respond that both the resurrection and the witchcraft in Salem were real events. I wonder if this is true. I can’t recall ever discussing the Salem event with my fellow Witnesses (when I was a Witness), but I wonder if they think their really were acts of sorcery back then. They might. They believe in demons, and they think things like Ouija boards, Ozzy Osbourne records, and the Smurfs have mystical Satanic powers.
The problem with accepting the Salem accounts at face-value, Dr. McCormick notes, is that there are many other tales of the supernatural that are also better documented than the resurrection. So, if people are willing to accept the Salem event as true, then they also need to accept the miracles of Judaism (such as the Hanukkah miracles), Hinduism, Mormonism, and Catholicism (these last two involve much more recent miraculous claims).
As I said, the book is not remarkable, but these few pages were the most intriguing of the bunch. Am I missing something, or is this a pretty damn good argument?
Wednesday, 03 August 2011
Today at work, I walked to the cafeteria to get some ice. While there, I found a dime sitting on the floor. Yes!
As I mentioned back on January 4th, I am keeping track of the money I find this year. One thing I was interested in determining was if I would be able to find enough money to equal minimum wage. Currently, minimum wage is set at $7.25. Well, as you’ve probably guessed by now, today I passed that milestone.
My total was one cent short since Monday. On that day, I also found a dime and my yearly total rang up to $7.24. Today’s dime, therefore, allows me to comfortably surpass that mark. In just over seven months, I found – just lying there for anyone to see – enough money to equal one hour of minimum wage work.
And my pay wasn’t even taxed.
Yes, assuming that this holy text isn’t holy, I will now convince you of its unholiness. Thanks McCormick, but I can draw circles all by myself.
I’m not sure what you’re saying here. It sounds like you’re not impressed with the book (I’m not either) and that you think McCormick is just belaboring a point that’s already been made.
Perhaps I should have pointed out that McCormick begins by assuming the resurrection is true based on the available evidence. Of course, he doesn’t believe it – he’s just saying it’s true for the sake of argument.
The intended audience for the book are Christians. I’m not sure if the Salem-to-Resurrection analogy would be convincing to them. Obviously people like you and me feel it’s just reinforcing an already-held position (assuming it’s a good argument). I’m just wondering if it would be effective ‘on’ Christians.
Yeah, sorry for being so glib. As I was reading your post, I thought you were going to state some reason for not thinking his Salem-to-Resurrection analogy was very good. You started out by saying that you didn’t think the book was good. Then you introduced the argument as “curious”. I was so exited to read what you didn’t like about it, that I wasn’t even scrutinizing the points he was making. See, I have sort of a thing for when people agree with an argument’s conclusions, but disagree with the content of the argument. But you didn’t really say that the argument was bad at the outset and the argument is (mostly) fine — probably more so in the context of the rest of the book. Oh well.
My thoughts on his argument go in two directions. On the one hand you can have a Christian who accepts the resurrection and that there were witches in Salem. On the other, you could have one who accepts the resurrection, but rejects the witchiness of the witches.
McCormick’s argument for the first group is that they would then have to accept the miracles of competing religions. This is supposed to show a point of inconsistency, right? But I don’t think this would be a problem for Christians of this type. They probably do accept the miracles of the Mormans and Catholics and Muslims and Jews… they just spin them to fit in with their own ideas — “The demons made the statue cry blood.”
And I don’t think it is limited to just demons doing demonic things. I’m not up on my Bible anymore, but I think there is something in there about people performing “powerful works” in Jesus’ name that were to be rejected. I take there “powerful works” to mean miracles — perhaps even positive miracles.
So I think for the Christian who is more liberal with their acceptance of the supernatural, this argument is not very compelling.
When I was a JW, I was more like the second group — the ones who could somehow draw a line between miraculous miracles and dubious ones. I think that, in some respects, it was baked into the teaching.
Witnesses seem to try to remove or downplay the supernatural elements of things. It may not be immediately obvious when you consider the things you mentioned like belief in demons and the danger of certain games made by Hasbro Inc. But when you look at how they treat the miracles that they do believe, you see they water down the supernatural elements quite a bit.
They are always trying to explain the miracles of the Bible in the context of modern science and understanding. Remember the time you tried to stump them about the details of Noah and his ark? Only JW’s could be so confounded.
You asked where the water come from? For them it had to be a massive canopy. Why? Why couldn’t it have been that the guy who pulled the entire universe out of his backside found a little extra water in there one day while he was digging around? (That was offensive. I’m sorry.)
When asked how all those animals fit in the ark, they point to rapid evolution (Don’t they deny evolution?). Why not just say that God bought his ark from the same store the Weasley’s bought their camping tent?
(Personnaly, you might argue that these make for weak plot elements [a la Tolkien], but I think when you are dealing with what you really truly believe happened in real life, what is is. You can’t weigh out reality the same way you would review a movie. “Sorry God, but that’s just a little too convenient.”)
For these people who are very conservative in dubbing things supernatural, I think the understanding is that there were no real witches in Salem. McCormick’s implied argument here is that they are being inconsistent in accepting the gospel account and not these other records.
I don’t think this is particularly compelling in that the it doesn’t address why people believe the gospels. To compare the two records, you have to first put them on even footing and then apply your own criteria — criteria that you and I may accept, but Christians wouldn’t.
So this is where my circular logic comment comes in. I think McComick’s goal is to prove the written account to not be “inspired by God” by, first, removing the inspired status.
I understand that he may start by accepting the account in the Bible as true, but he’s not accepting it for the same reasons any Christian does. He’s not saying, “Now that we’ve established the divinity of this record, let us consider the inspired nature of the account of Salem.” Rather, he’s saying, “Let’s accept this based on the accuracy of its human authors and their ability to accurately record events.”
It’s begging the question. The whole point of why a Christian would accept the accounts in the gospels is that they have reason (outside of the gospels) to believe it. You can’t undermine those reasons by, first, removing them.
Also, what’s the premise? Who accepts the resurrection SOLELY on the gospels? I think his point would be like if I were to say that I accept Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” as reason to accept evolution, but then I must also now accept Behe’s Intelligent Design because more people worked on his book, the Science is more up-to-date, and the author is still alive to be challenged… (whatever, I’m just making stuff up). It’s like, “Great criteria, but I accept evolution for reasons outside of this one book and I reject ID for reasons outside Behe’s.”
That being said, from my point of view, he makes a good argument. Why is this older, less reliable chronicling accepted while this more modern and better substantiated one not? It removes any arguments for the authentic telling of historical events that come solely from the text — its candor or self consistency or whatever.
So yeah, I agree — good argument for me, (maybe) bad for a Christian.
Thanks for clearing that up.
Yes, I see that I never really stated my opinion on his argument. The thing is, I thought it was a novel, intriguing argument. I’d never heard this argument before and, in an otherwise mediocre book, I was please to come upon something so compelling. As I was reading it, though, I couldn’t stop thinking that there must be some reason why this wouldn’t work on a Christian (JW in particular), but I just couldn’t put my finger on it.
You make some good points here – first, that JWs just accept the bible, regardless of its historical accuracy. And, second, that many people do accept all of those miracles. JWs do try to find naturalistic explanations for all their beliefs (such as the Flood) but, at the end of the day, they don’t need any reasonable explanations for any of it. They’ve already accepted it at face-value.
As I said, I am reading the book with the idea of eventually writing a review of it. When I came upon McCormick’s analogy, I considered mentioning it in the review as a bright spot in a dull book. But now I think I might mention it merely as one more so-so chapter.
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