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.

I've casually assumed that misogyny is at work, based on generally-remembered material I've read in the 1980's remarking that the Qumran community (1) were Essenes, (2) were a male-only ascetic community, and (3) did have writings that, e.g., made heavy use of the "sinful woman" imagery from Proverbs.

And combination of those might have been debunked by now, but assuming that all three are true, I'd still vote for misogyny. It's hard to imagine folks joining an ascetic all-male community while having good healthy attitudes toward women.

In that case I'd revise my estimate of the likelihood of misogyny downward, more or less in proportion as the gender mix approaches 50:50.

In the US, for example, the Shakers were a celibate community with a fairly equal gender mix, in which men and women shared leadership roles, and regarded "Mother Ann" as a prophetess, was as you'd expect full of bias against sex but relatively free of bias against women.

Since I can't find any source willing to commit to a guess about the gender mix, I'm stuck assuming they were about even. The graveyard studies, which aren't necessarily statistically significant, suggest 46% women, after excluding the graves that are thought to have been later burials by bedouins (i.e., shallow, east-west facing graves). So now I'd rate Ken's #! and #2 about equally likely.

The biggest takeaway I see in this report is that even 2,000 years ago, people had an irresistible compulsion to throw coins in pools.

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.

Before I relinquished it, my version of the "gap theory" was like the Stephen Wright joke: "One day I came home and realized that someone had stolen everything, and replaced it with an exact duplicate."

what forced me to drop even that, almost unfalsifiable theory, was Russell and his tree-rings. I was prepared to ignore completely the global flood implied by "the face of the waters," but the least I would expect is a discontinuity at about the time of the six-day recreation. Evidence of trees happily living before and after the creation week was more than I could accept.

The argument about verb tenses is a bit of a sideshow--too easily dismissed. So the earth "was" formless and void... at the time. It's easy enough to conclude that scripture is silent about how it might have been in prior ages.

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...

Mercia, you are the necromancer of threads. You make them rise from the dead, years later, and shamble about. Please try not to do that--necrothreading is actually considered bad manners.

Sense or not, people find it very disconcerting to find themselves replied to four years after they said something, and other people find it very disconcerting to be sucked accidentally into conversations with ghosts of four years ago. Most people like conversing with actual humans.

Bumping the thread up in Google doesn't have anything to do with it; nobody asked anybody to go around bumping threads up in Google.

I realize that people are often criticized for posting FAQs without ever using the search function--but if a person has a habit of resurrecting necrothreads, I'd recommend that person find some other hobby than reading necrotic threads.

The book is extremely light on knowledge of Christianity (Carrier only evinces a very rudimentary knowledge of C.S. Lewis’ brand of “mere Christianity”), and doesn’t even really attempt to touch the surface of theology and philosophy...

Slightly tangential, but Dawkins and Myers have taken to directly mocking the notion that a knowledge of these subjects is necessary to debunk theism. Their meta-argument is roughly that arguing the details of textile technology is nothing but a distraction from noticing that the emperor is stark naked. It dovetails nicely with their generally angry outlook, since it allows them to make various cracks about "discussing the merits of imported versus domestic newt tongues for making love potions," and such like.

I'd like to see a cogent meta-counter-argument explaining where "sophisticated theology" comes into play. As a non-theologian, I'm ill equipped to make it myself: I can see Myers and Dawkins et al veering off the beam, but can't necessarily articulate where they went wrong exactly. Unfortunately I can see that their mockery is partly on target: a sizable chunk of apology appears in my view also to rely fatally on the assumption of what they're trying to prove; they really do take the form of "discussing textiles" instead of confronting the question whether the emperor's posterior is or is not showing.

In "The God Delusion," which in all honesty I haven't read, I understand it to focus mainly on origins. God's reason for being is to explain the unexplainable concerning origins; we now have explanations for those previously unexplainable mysteries; therefore, there's no need for God. And since beings only exist if they're needed, God doesn't exist. QED. On that score my first reply is, "Jessica Simpson!" Clearly useless beings have an annoying habit of existing. So putting God out of a job does nothing to attack the question whether He exists or not.

Dawkins of course thinks he's addressing a deeper epistemological problem; he believes that the only reason people believe in God today is their need to fill the gaps. His error is clear: practically nobody believes in God for that reason. It's as good a theory as any other, I suppose, for how primeval people went about inventing their myths and superstitions, but subsequent generations don't repeat that process anew. They believe in God (or their parents' gods) for the simple reason that their parents did. It's now communicated to them, along with other cultural elements, as part of their upbringing. If asked why they believe, most will say they "Just do." So attacking "God of the gaps" doesn't lay a glove on them.

American fundamentalists (and their overseas brethren) make Dawkins overconfident, because they do retroactively pin their belief on such things. I.e., they didn't start believing in God to fill gaps, but after the fact they did start hanging their faith on the idea that these gaps are proofs of God. It makes their faith easy to destroy, because the foundations are so shaky: instead of attacking what might even be an impregnable structure, you undermine the foundations and watch it fall like Jericho. It has the opposite effect on those of us who aren't fundamentalists, because he's not touching our building nor its foundations, but he is strutting around proclaiming himself conqueror of all he surveys. It makes one want to snicker and call, "Jettez la vache!"

But to my regret, it's not a complete response to Dawkins. If I personally pointed this out to him, he would turn the tables and reply, "So tell me, Mr. Jeenyus, why do you believe in God?" Any reply I make will get me skewered, since my main reason is... I just do. I have only indirect evidence to point to, such as the power and meaning of scripture in my life, and mumble mumble prophecy. I'm not the David to send out to slay him with a well-chosen apologetic sling stone. So while I see that his theological unsophistication causes him to miss the mark, I'd be interested myself in a more complete, cogent explanation of what this mark is that he's missing.

Yep, that's my grandpap!












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

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

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.

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.)

I'd like to be encouraging about your project, and I hope it's very successful. As far as looking up, and commenting on, every use of the word "one" in scripture, I think it's good to remember that the Hebrews were ordinary humans, and "one" was an ordinary word to them. If you imagine what it would be like to look up every occurrence of "one" in Moby Dick, say, or War and Peace, I think you would conclude that it was a huge effort likely to bear only a very little fruit.

On your question, I know that Malachi never heard of the "Holy Trinity," had no conception of the Holy Spirit as a person, and had never in his life heard of "God the Son." So he couldn't possibly be arguing for or against any of those ideas. Just like the verse says, Malachi was saying, "We all have the same God, so we should all be true to each other and our religion."

Via Diglotting:

While I claim ignorance regarding what happens when we die, I must say that I definitely don’t ascribe to the idea of hell. Even though I did believe in it during my teenage years, I now find the idea of eternal conscious retributive punishment to be an abhorrent thing to believe in. I do believe in some sort of existence after death, but I am somewhat skeptical of the idea of an incorporeal soul part of us that survives death and flies through a tunnel of light to heaven. I find the idea of a future resurrection of the body to be a much more holistic and meaningful concept in this modern scientific age regarding the question of life-after-death.

I do. I ascribe several things to the idea of hell. Barbarity, injustice, sadism, sociopathy, and unspeakable horror, to name a few. I do not, however, subscribe to the idea of hell.









Sorry, couldn't resist. My hobby is spotting when smart people use the wrong fancy word. My Dad got me started, with his awful habit of saying "prodigious" when he meant "propitious."

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.

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.

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.

... 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.