... calling every Christian 'deluded' smacks of petulance and whining at the fact that his Outsider Test hasn't resulted in every Christian deconverting and thanking him for delivering them from obscurantist bondage.

I haven't looked deeply into his "outsider test," but it sounds like something Wittgenstein would have enjoyed: it presupposes some significant unknowns about how beliefs are formed--including atheistic beliefs. It's true that your parents believing something is the best predictor of your believing something, so if you equate "insider" with "raised in this belief," it clearly plays an important role.

But what exactly disposes a person to convert from anything to anything? Loftus is apparently presupposing that conversion to atheism always results from a coldly rational disposition to follow the evidence wherever it leads--but if that we the case, we wouldn't have phenomena like Bedson, who deconverts and then spends his life begging and pleading for his former associates to validate his deconversion by joining him. It wouldn't fully account for Dawkins, or Coyne, or their type, either: even if their atheism were purely rational, that wouldn't explain their evangelism. What prompts them (even assuming they're right) to take on the doomed cause of fighting ignorance and error? What makes them want to spread their views, instead of being content with their own rationality?

Without some sort of answer to those questions, it's unclear whether the "outsider test" has any validity. Does "thinking like an outsider" make you objective? Or is it yet another brainwashing technique: given our facility for post-hoc rationalization, does "thinking like an outsider" actually set up the right conditions for talking ourselves out of belief--not because the evidence is good or bad, but because "pretending not to believe" activates the mechanism we have for justifying prior decisions? The latter is actually more plausible to me.



As an aside, I've noted the phenomenon that movie actors who play lovers, sooner or later end up dating. The stars of Twilight are a recent example. It might be nothing more than sexual libertinism and a tendency to casually form shallow relationships. But I've suspected for decades that something else is at work. I suspect that pretending to be in love triggers the manufacture of justifications for being in love, which in turn convince them that they really are in love. As a teenager I would have said "actors are so stupid, they fall for their own acting!" My original explanation wasn't very precise or nuanced, but it's substantially the same as the explanation I'd give today.

As another aside, I read something 20-30 years ago about brain-washing in Japanese POW camps. The trick I remember was that they had essay contests, with cigarettes for prizes, and they freely awarded prizes to jingoist pro-American essays--but prisoners knew they could improve their chances if they found anything positive to say about the Japanese. So they waved the flag vigorously, but included things like, "That's not to say that the Japanese are evil plain and simple; many of them suffer the deluded belief that their cause is just." After the POWs were released, they were found to have noticeably less anti-Japanese ardor than their brethren who were never prisoners. Which IIRC, was the opposite of the expected outcome. POW camp is not fun; you'd expect them to come away more hate-filled than ever. But viewing the Japanese with "insider mind" changed their views.

The trouble is that all children are "indoctrinated," whether the parents like it or not.

So? You seem to be suggesting that because avoiding indoctrinating would be very difficult, it isn't a good approach.

I didn't say it's difficult. I said it's impossible. I didn't say most children are often; I said ALL children ARE. You can avoid blatant attempts at mind control, and I fully support that, but you're deluding yourself if you believe you're not indoctrinating. You are, merely by existing--the being they're genetically programmed to imitate, upon whom they are utterly dependent for mere survival, who establishes the routines that make up their lives. By what you say and don't say, read and don't read, do and don't do, where you go and don't go, you are indoctrinating them.

If you have kids and think you're not indoctrinating them, then you should maybe get that avatar you talked about, because you're engaging in nothing more than intellectual self-gratification.

Atheist's don't believe in anything, they LACK belief.

Lack of belief, skepticism, doubt, disinterest--the content of your indoctrination includes much more than a list of tenets. It includes attitudes, views held and not held, epistemology, esthetics, etc. Fort mentioned strong atheism, but indoctrination can also communicate mere doubt, uncertainty, or indifference as well. Deism or agnosticism are also communicated--including not merely the intellectual notion that God probably does or probably doesn't exist, but doubt whether we can know, or disinterest in knowing, or a firm belief that we can't know, etc.

My beef is with the use of the perjorative 'indoctrination' to describe a process which is not, in fact, indoctrination.

Sounds like a piffling quibble. When someone says, "You're indoctrinating your kid," you reply that you're not, because you aren't strapping 'em down; I reply that I certainly am, and so is every parent who ever lived since our rodent-like ancestor in the age of the dinosaurs.

My answer is a bit more accurate than yours. I freely acknowledge that I am raising my child with the overwhelming likelihood of belonging to the Christadelphian church, and liking science fiction, enjoying country music, Asian food, and the shooting sports, and rather disliking cops. And yet I am unusually scrupulous about giving him choices and not imposing my will on him. And yet... he recently told me that after meeting he'd like to go to the shooting range, then to a hibachi restaurant, and finally come home and watch Buck Rogers. It's quite obvious that I'm indoctrinating the living daylights out of him, despite the utter absence of any cult-like mind-control techniques, nor even the slightest desire to instill my personal likes and dislikes in him.

I have no doubt that it occurs in our community, but using this word as a blanket generalisation simply not accurate.

On the contrary, it's not nearly blanket enough. If you aren't profoundly influencing your child's views in almost all areas of life, then you are either a non-custodial parent, or dead.

There's nothing arrogant about saying you're not indoctrinating your kids when you're not. It's only arrogant (and false) when you are.

Please read again from the top, with comprehension. When we say we're "not indoctrinating our kids," we are claiming that "we aren't profoundly influencing their views on practically every subject." Which is false, because we are. If we aren't, it's because we don't have custody, or are dead.

If instead we interpret that statement to mean, "we aren't systematically using cult brainwashing techniques, but have instead decided to go about profoundly shaping our kids views on practically every subject using the more mundane technique of raising them in our household as dependents," then the question arises what the hell we're so proud of. But I suppose we deserve a cookie for not doing this:

Yes the stats show you are more likely to do what you perceive as normal according to the environment in which you grew up. BUT there are lots of exceptions. That's the wonder of human free will.

Agreed. However, it puts the lie to arrogant claims that one isn't indoctrinating one's kids. The best you can claim is that you aren't actively trying to brainwash them.

Religious Indoctrination is the process of continually subjecting children to complex religious rituals, ceremonies, laws and doctrines before they have the ability to critically assess and consent to what they are doing.

So that would include most mainstream Christians, Jews, Hindus and Muslims etc. Pretty much most of the world really.

But withholding such things powerfully biases against ever adopting them; sleeping in on Sundays powerfully biases the kids to sleep in on Sundays as well. For that matter, going to church on Sundays but missing midweek class powerfully biases the kids to do the same. Of the full range of Christadelphian ritual (which is fairly narrow), the best predictor is the parents. My own non scientific inter generational observations support this as well. The kids raised going on Sunday infrequently keep doing so, skipping Bible classes and daily readings; the ones raised faithfully going to meeting only keep doing so; the ones raised going to meeting and Bible class keep doing that but not the readings, and the ones raised doing the readings keep doing them. Likewise for praying before meals or not.

Where of course "the ones raised... Keep doing..." is a shorthand for, "doing... In childhood is the best predictor of doing... In adulthood." I even know examples of people raised reading but not going to meeting--devout "isolation" families, who grew up and kept reading and praying before meals, but living in isolation. And I know families where the kids were sent to Sunday school while the parents stayed home, and you'll never guess what!

Indoctrination by immersion is incredibly pervasive. It even includes ridiculously small details about mannerisms, ways of conducting relationships, etc. it contributes to statistical patterns like children of divorce being more likely to divorce, and daughters of single mothers being more likely to become single mothers themselves.

A believer raising their kids to "make up their own mind" will end up producing a believer

I come from a family of 4 children. Our parents raised us to make up our own minds. Two of my siblings became unbelievers.

I believe you. The plural of "anecdote" is not "data," though. The fact remains that the best predictor of present views is the parents' views.

The trouble is that all children are "indoctrinated," whether the parents like it or not. The single best predictor of a person's views, is their parents' views. And children are clever beggars: they aren't fooled by our pretenses of neutrality. They're very good at figuring out what we REALLY think, and then they go with that.

A believer raising their kids to "make up their own mind" will end up producing a believer; an atheist doing the same thing will end up producing an atheist. A hypocritical churchgoer will raise an unbeliever; and a superstitious person who attends no church will nevertheless raise a believer (in whatever). Perhaps not always, but usually.

Yep, that's my grandpap!












Just kidding; I dunno if he's any relation. But wow.

I wish someone would convince my son Dawkins is a......errrr.....dawk! He thinks he's the best thing since sliced bread right now lol.

His writing on evolution and related subjects is top notch. It's just that he seems to suffer from the delusion that brilliance in one area makes one competent, or at least not utterly incompetent, in others. The same reason doctors are notorious for losing their shirts investing--they think being smart makes them competent investors.

Edit: If everyone had a personal relationship with their ministering angel/God then their would be no more need to preserve free will and hide from us. Although this is characterised as Adam hiding from God. You would have personal proof like me. You have to voluntarily surrender your free will in this life or you were never sincere. How can you be sincere if you only surrender your free will when you have no other choice, at physical death?

This is the way it will be in the future and that is EXACTLY why it says their will be no more death, no more suffering, because their will be no more free will. You cannot have both.

duh.

You just replied to yourself and said, "Duh."

How could that be when Israel didn't come along until a long time after and from Adam came all sorts of other nations?

You need to read the book to get the background, but the basic idea is that Genesis was finalized after the exile--perhaps by Ezra, say. The post-exilic writings such as Chronicles recast Israelite history in order to address the burning question of the day: what does it mean to be a Jew in light of the diaspora? How are they God's people, if they've lost their land and temple? What of God's promises of an eternal kingdom, since their kingdom was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, and the throne has never been reestablished since? How can they worship God while living in Babylon without any access to the temple, nor any temple to access? Etc., etc.

The critical development in Jewish theology after the exile was the concept that God scatters but also regathers; punishes but also relents. Genesis 1-3, in its final form, tells the same story that plays out over and over in the OT, and it's precisely the story of Israel: God picks out His people, puts them in a good land of His choosing, gives them commandments and access to His presence, and then they disobey and are punished but also redeemed. Adam's biography is a reenactment of Israel's history. Apart from serving as an allegory of Israel, Adam is also specifically identified as Israel's ancestor via the genealogies in Genesis, so his special creation by God and his covenant relationship to God is another thing that makes Israel special. Genesis is ambiguous about the existence of other people at the same time, such as Cain's wife, or the people Cain was afraid of, etc., but that wasn't the primary concern of the Jews; although they seem to have believed that he was the ancestor of everyone in the world, Adam's relationship with other nations was of no interest to them. Adam was the special son of God, Seth was the special son of Adam, Shem was the special son of Noah, and so on, making the Jews the "firstborn" among the nations--so they specifically were the heirs of Adam's specialness in a way that no other nation was. Thus Adam both literally and figuratively marks the Jews as special to God despite Adam's exile from the garden and Israel's exile from the promised land.

Great piece. It dovetails with some other recent posts on BTDF. The nutshell summary is that "fellowship" is about having a relationship with each other, carried out as a partnership.

By itself, that wouldn't seem very impressive; we talk about that all the time. We routinely exhort about how we're "family." The key bit is to truly appreciate the implications of a "relationship." We have a distorted view of them, because we're born with all these family relationships, and often treat them as fetters to be strained against. They just are; they don't take work; and the best we can hope for is for them not to inconvenience us too greatly.

If we think in terms of a friendship, or a marital relationship, we get a different picture entirely. If we don't nurture those relationships, then our friends turn into strangers and our spouses turn into enemies. They require regular care and feeding. And there is a burdensome aspect, since that means putting up with their quirks or accommodating their bizarre sensitivities--but unlike our family, our friends and spouses are not stuck with us. If we neglect them, they are free to go elsewhere for what they're needing. (If we regard our spouse as "stuck with us," and treat her accordingly, we'll either discover her gone some day, or discover that our lives have become hell on earth.)

Ecclesial relationships are like friendships or marriages. If we do the Sunday-morning-handshake routine, they're not brothers and sisters; they're strangers. If we ignore them, except when we feel motivated to rebuke them, they will feel free to ignore us, or hate us, or go elsewhere--they certainly won't be influenced in any useful way, unless they happen to be masochists. And so on.

So when it says they "devoted themselves to fellowship," it's saying that in the context of preaching the word, exhorting, reading, praying, and all that, they consciously and effortfully nurtured their relationships with each other and with God.

Yes it's what we would now call history with literature. But to Herodotus and Josephus, it was just history.

^^ This.

We can call history a modern concept if we like. But there's no getting out of the fact that the ancients had their own version of history, and just like ours it was seen as a record of literal facts about literal persons and events. I honestly don't see a huge difference between the two.

I don't know to what extent it's really so, but it appears that Greeks regarded their myths as history. My limited experience with modern-day polytheists suggests that they would have had varying degrees of awareness that as their history passed back into mythic time, it ceased to be strictly literal. Even the ones who considered it mythic, however, would treat it as history.

I don't know to what extent it's really so, but it appears that Greeks regarded their myths as history.

It may be more accurate to say that they saw their myths as pre-history. They certainly believed the persons in these myths did exist and the events recorded did occur but this doesn't prove their conception of history was significantly different to our own.

Fair enough. "Pre-history" is a nice way to put it. The fantastical elements were relegated to an unverifiable past. They weren't disbelieved per se, but they were compartmentalized differently than recent history, which relatively lacked fantastical elements and could be verified.

I'd say, though, that I have a certain amount of doubt whether "our own" conception of history is so different from theirs. We believe (in this country) that Washington "could not tell a lie," as shown by the mythical incident of the cherry tree; we believe that Lincoln "freed the slaves," which only happened after his death; we believe that Puritans came to this country seeking religious freedom, when in fact they came seeking a place where they could impose their (purer) vision for the Church of England; we believe that the colonists (apart from a handful of loyalists) unitedly sought independence, when historians agree that only 10-15% were in favor of secession in 1776; we believe that Roosevelt ended the depression by joining WWII, when in fact our prosperity in no way increased until some time after the war (we just failed to notice, because our rationing books were part of the "war effort," and our young men were dying in Europe, rather than idling on street corners). Our "knowledge" of US history is a complete hodgepodge of myth, propaganda, and selective ignorance. Less outlandish than Greek myths, perhaps, but different only in degree, not in kind.

Far more people believe the folk version of US history than the historians' version, and they persist in believing it even after they've been told the truth. My sixth-grade teacher told us as eleven-year-olds that the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to confederate territories, where of course it had no force; that slaves in Union territories like West Virginia were not freed; and that the intent of the Proclamation was to prevent England aiding the South, with which it appeared likely to do, having strong sympathies in every area except the issue of slavery. Of those forty kids, how many still believe that "Lincoln freed the slaves"? Most of them.

The line between myth, folk tale, and propaganda seems blurry to me. All are types of falsehood that are sort of believed, but somehow compartmentalized in a way that avoids empirical verification. It is of course true that we have changed our attitude to "history" somewhat, and we now insist that our "myths" be packaged in a much more believable form. And Americans, perforce, have no interesting "pre-history," because in prehistorical times we lived in England and Holland, and that was only about 300 years ago.

It may be more accurate to say that they saw their myths as pre-history. They certainly believed the persons in these myths did exist and the events recorded did occur but this doesn't prove their conception of history was significantly different to our own.

I suspect something similar applies to Gen 1-11. It's likely that the ancient Hebrews saw the events and people as real, but the stylised nature of the accounts suggests we're dealing with "mythologised" history, where actual events involving historical people were related using the tropes and motifs of the ANE with which they were familiar, but which are alien to us...

That's also a good way to put it. Americans are again a poor example, because we have no pre-history to speak of. Our conception of the Wild West is probably the closest thing we have to a mythical past--we do pretty generally believe our own cowboy stories. I know that Davy Crockett was a real historical figure, and I'm pretty sure he did not in fact "kilt a bar when he was only three," but I accept the unverified claim that he was indeed "king of the wild frontier." The shootout at the OK corral really happened, but I'm sure is mythologized in ways I couldn't even tell you. Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, etc., are the sort of tropes that Americans believe.

(Which is unfortunate, in some ways. We believe that the West was uncivilized, when in fact Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City, and Caldwell, for the years from 1870 to 1885, had only 45 homicides--a rate of approximately 1 murder per 100,000 residents per year, and much lower than the homicide rate of any major US city today except Lincoln, Nebraska, and El Paso, Texas, both of which had 0.8 homicides per 100,000 in 2010. The belief that "gun-slinging" was accompanied by high murder rates, shootouts at high noon, and all the rest, has a significant impact on public policy today. Politicians surprisingly often say, "This isn't the Wild West anymore!" with no conception that the Wild West wasn't wild in the first place--they're appealing to American myths, perpetuated by movies.)

In any case, I don't think any of the three of us disagree materially here. History and myth are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps Romulus and Remus even existed, for that matter. So none of this discussion should be taken as dismissing anything in scripture as pure fiction. Instead, the much more modest heresy is being considered, that elements of exaggeration, or tropes that were the ancient equivalent of "gun-slinging cowboys," might have been employed in relating some of these stories, and that interpreting them as strictly journalistic accounts would have similar results to watching a John Wayne movie as if it were a documentary.

I noticed in the original writeup that they contradict their claim to have found no images.

Given my want--to listen to what people mean, rather than what they say, as far as possible--I quickly deduced that they are expressing the claim that these "guardian lions," etc., were not objects of veneration, and that no objects of veneration were found. In other words, no idols. Solomon's temple was decorated with pomegranates and cherubim, the latter of which I casually equate with similar images of winged, human-headed lions in Babylon, but contained no idols. It would be distinctive (I confidently assume) from foreign temples which had (I confidently assume) decorative images along the lines of the cherubim, but also (we know for certain) idols to be worshiped.

I'm unqualified to pronounce judgment. Tentatively, however, I come away with the sense that they found cultic storage boxes with more-or-less bog standard decorations, but no idols inside, and no idols on the site that might have originally been placed inside.

If that's true, and you can easily see the largish number of assumptions I'm using to fill in the gaps in my actual knowledge, then I'd say this is a pretty exciting find: that while the other Canaanites were opening the doors on their shrine boxes and offering incense and prayer to the figurine within, the Israelites were opening the doors of their shrine boxes (or leaving them closed) and directing their prayers and incense at the empty space (or space occupied by flowers or some such "offering"). That would be highly distinctive, and while not at all proof of "monotheism," as Ritmeyer seems confusedly to imagine is claimed, but rather proof of a ban on veneration of images, which suggests familiarity with Moses' law, or some earlier prototype thereof.

It would also seem suggestive that the concept of an invisible, or at least unrepresentable, God, is a very early element of Israelite religion--even if they were merely monolatrous at the time. It does strongly suggest monolatry, since there are (assumedly) no images of lesser deities. If a polytheistic people believed that the chiefest god was invisible, it would seem unlikely to me that they also believed that lesser gods, demigods, etc., were all invisible, so I would expect to see an empty shrine-box for the chief god, but statues of lesser gods around it as well, if they were polytheistic.

ETA: Indeed, to add folly to folly, or rather speculation to speculation... regardless of the significance of this find, I'm about half convinced that non-polytheists (including monotheists and monolaters) would structure their devotional life exactly as described above: by setting up the same type of shrine as they knew from the larger cultural environment, but removing the idol from the place setting.

It's my general feeling that we Christadelphians avoid talking about that particular passage. I'm not sure exactly what would happen if brethren argued a similar position about it within the ecclesia.

A much milder passage is John 5:4. It reads differently than the rest of the Bible generally. Do angels really amuse themselves by splashing in a pool, healing the first sick person to struggle into the water, and presumably having a bit of a laugh at the poor disappointed losers who didn't make it? We Christadelphians believe that Lourdes is a fraud--it's one of our distinctives. In this case I've casually accepted the theory that verse 4 is a scribal gloss that leaked from the margin into the text, and not felt motivated to argue about it. I think most brethren read it without anything like the dissonance that Matthew's passage causes--and so without avoiding it, but without particularly questioning it either.

(On a hermeneutical note, I can point to other places where the writers of scripture report others' beliefs without comment. Did the scribe believe that the witch at Endor really did raise Samuel? I don't think it's clear-cut; the scribe reports the scene as Saul perceived it, without affirming or denying its veracity. It's a prime example why we should really hesitate to make an inferential case for a doctrine. That incident supplies plenty of ammunition to argue by inference that ghosts and mediums are real.)

What Fort said. Some evidence suggests that Goliath's kit was much more deluxe than the average Philistine's, and Samuel supports this: if he were dressed like any other Philistine, they wouldn't describe his armor in such detail. (A later writer would probably not have described the Greek kit in detail, BTW, since he would assume all Philistines dressed like that.)

But my remarks about the "Judean Lourdes" aren't about historical debates like that. My point is that those bits read like superstition in an otherwise not superstitious book. They don't fit. Even references like demons are not done superstitiously. No girls levitating over their beds and rotating their heads 360 degrees like the Exorcist. No description of horned beasties running away from the scene after being expelled. The parable of "seven other demons" hints at a popular superstition, but in a restrained way. And this idea of an angel offering periodic healings as a lark would, apart from that one verse, read like another popular superstition. It's plausible that a marginal note explaining the superstition crept into the text, where it suddenly reads like an endorsement and not just an explanation.

His science is incredibly garbled, but I give him full marks for not trying to blame tornadoes on teh gayz.

I think the missing ingredient is that the ANE reader would have a function-oriented cosmology that played a similar role for him as our scientific cosmologies do us. In other words, they thought it was factual just as we do ours.

There's a danger in creating a false dichotomy between "functional" and "factual" cosmologies. Among other things, that leads to the erroneous notion that they were self-aware about the fact that their model was ahistorical. They weren't; that's what made it a "cosmology" as opposed to a "mythos." I think the key is the fact that they had no means of verifying their hypotheses anyway, so verification simply wasn't important. A sufficient test of a good theory was that it was consistent and useful. A recent miraculous creation was perfectly self-consistent, so no problems on that score. And a functional creation was quite useful to a pastoral civilization: it laid the groundwork for a discussion of seasons, the planting cycle, weeding, husbandry, etc. It was the shortest possible path from A to B, where A is "where did everything come from?" and B is "how do we go about surviving in this world?"

To them a bad cosmology would be bad because it was not self-consistent, or because it was inconsistent with the realities of their lives. One which taught them to plant in winter, for example, or condemned farming, or encouraged them to eat toxic plants, or undermined civic virtues like cooperation at harvest time.

At that superficial level, the 'new perspective' folk sound like Christadelphians. Except that we know from other sources that they're trinitarian. I'm wondering whether the Trinity isn't the only obstacle to making common cause with them?

I say that with trepidation, since I don't even know their stance on resurrectional responsibility, or clean flesh, or, or, or...

See, I wondered whether he was complaining that too many parishioners are modalists and tritheists. He's not getting any sympathy from me on that front.

Most adults in our Christian churches are not Christian in a biblical sense. A majority of the people who attend Christian churches are not Christian and have been attending the same church for nearly a decade.

I'd like to know more about this. We would say that none of 'em are Christian, of course, but that's obviously not what the author meant by that statement. What defines a "biblical" Christian in their eyes, and why are most adults not ones?

Depending on the answer, I might end up agreeing that half of Christadelphians are not "Christian in the biblical sense," which would be a powerful takeaway.