Wednesday, May 28, 2008

McClellan: Bush Misled U.S. on War

Scott McClellan, Bush's former White House Press Secretary confirms what critics of the Bush administration have been saying since 2002.

"What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary," he wrote in the preface.


Bush's real motivation for war





Via Andrew Sullivan.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Repost: Ancient Judaism was Polytheistic

Today, I received a comment from my 2006 post originally titled Ancient Judaism and Canaanite Religions. Since I haven't recently blogged about this subject, I thought it would be a good time for a repost:

There are many names of God or Gods used in tanakh. Orthodox Jews maintain that every name refers to the same God, except those names which are clearly used to refer to idols of other religions. Some of the names, however, are strikingly similar to the names of gods from the polytheistic religions surrounding ancient Israel.

Ugarit was an ancient city in what is now northern Syria, which existed from before 6000 B.C.E. (or approximately 2000 years before the creation of the Universe, if you're a young-Earth creationist) to around 1200 B.C.E. It was rediscovered in 1928:


On excavation of the site, several deposits of cuneiform clay tablets were found, constituting a palace library, a temple library and -- apparently unique in the world at the time -- two private libraries; all dating from the last phase of Ugarit, around 1200 BC




Ugaritic religion centered on the chief god, Ilu or El, the "father of mankind", "the creator of the creation". The Court of El or Ilu was referred to as the 'lhm. The most important of the great gods was Hadad, the king of Heaven, Athirat or Asherah (familiar to readers of the Bible), Yam (Sea, the god of the primordial chaos, tempests, and mass-destruction) and Mot (Death). Other gods worshipped at Ugarit were Dagon (Grain), Tirosch, Horon, Resheph (Healing), the craftsman Kothar-and-Khasis (Skilled and Clever), Shahar (Dawn), and Shalim (Dusk). Ugaritic texts have provided biblical scholars with a wealth of material on the religion of the Canaanites and its connections with that of the Israelites.

There are some obvious parallels here. The God of tanakh is often referred to as El, recalling the chief God of Canaanite religion. Furthermore, the term Elohim, which is now thought of as merely another name of God, was in Canaanite religion a term for the whole court of El. (Hebrew not having vowels, Elohim in Hebrew is basically the same as 'lhm.) Some of the other Gods mentioned in the Ugaritic texts are also mentioned in the Bible, not as synonymous with the Jewish God, but rather as "other gods," which are now (by Orthodox Jews) thought to mean "idols" or false gods. Asherah is mentioned in 2 Kings 18.8:

He removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the grove, and brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it: and he called it Nehushtan.

Where's Asherah in that verse, you ask? Well, the hebrew word that's translated as "grove" is... Asherah. Which frankly makes a lot more sense when you notice that its parallel to "the high places," "the images," and "the brasen serpent," all sources of idolatry. Some English translations retain "Asherah," such as the New Living Translation. The New King James Version translates it as "sacred pillars."

Asherah is interesting because of her status in Canaanite religion. She is the "consort" of El, and the mother of his 70 sons.

Scholars believe that Asherah was worshipped by many in ancient Israel and Judah, referred to by Jeremiah as "the Queen of Heaven."

Jeremiah 7.18:


Another interesting Canaanite God is Ba'al, who is mentioned in tanakh. Orthodox Jews understand Ba'al to be a false god -- or several false gods -- quite popular in Jeremiah's time.

Now in tanakh, YWHW is the same God as El. But YHWH may have started out in Canaanite religion as one of the 70 sons of El. The Dead Sea Scrolls fragment of Deutoronomy 32.8-9, which agrees with the Septuagint, reads as follows:

When He divided up the sons of man,
He fixed the boundaries for peoples,
According to the number of the sons of El
But Yahweh’s portion is his people,
Jacob His own inheritance.

Now the Jewish version reads "sons of Israel" in place of "sons of El," but the first time we see that version is from a manuscript dating 700 years later than the above. "The older reading implicates an original polytheist context at the birth of Judaism. Within this framework, humanity was divided into seventy peoples, each with its own patron god. Yahweh takes Jacob as his, shedding additional light on the textual meaning of the chosen people."

The argument for the original polytheistic context at Judaism's birth is bolstered by the name "Elohim."

"Elohim" has the shape of a plural noun, and indeed is often used that way in tanakh when it's used to refer to "other gods." However, it's often used as a singular noun, as in Genesis 1.1. Many scholars argue that the plural form of "Elohim"

reflects early Judaic polytheism. They argue it originally meant 'the gods', or the 'sons of El,' the supreme being. They claim the word may have been singularized by later monotheist priests who sought to replace worship of the many gods of the Judean pantheon with their own singular patron god YHWH alone.


The alternative polytheist theory would seem to explain why there are three words built on the same stem: El, Elohim, and eloah. El, the father god, has many divine sons, who are known by the plural of his name, Elohim, or Els. Eloah, might then be used to differentiate each of the lesser gods from El himself.

This theory makes the Elohim saying "Let US make Man in OUR image, in OUR likeness" make more sense, as well as YHWH's commandment to Israel, "worship no other gods [Hebrew:Elohim] before me."

Dan Brown may have been wrong about Jesus and Mary Magdalene, but a pretty strong case can be made not only for El/YHWH and Asherah, but for an even bigger cover-up than the one in The Da Vinci Code -- that the earliest Jews were polytheistic!

Monday, May 26, 2008

Quote of the Day: Archaeology and the Bible



Memorial Day 2008





Friday, May 23, 2008

McCain vs. Ellen on Gay Marriage

There's nothing he can say to her face to justify his position. I bet his children and grandchildren are going to be ashamed of this in the future, if they aren't already.

And yeah, Obama isn't a whole lot better on this issue, although he at least has the good sense to be humble when he's wrong.

Related: How Orthodoxy Causes Good Men to do Evil

Monday, May 19, 2008

Israel is an Anti-Israeli Appeaser least if you go by the American right's logic, which often uses two ridiculous assertions:

1) That positions held by a majority or plurality of Israelis themselves or even by the Israeli government can be "anti-Israel."
2) That talking to terrorist organizations is "appeasement."

It turns out that Israel is talking to Hamas (without preconditions) in what the head of Shin Bet calls "negotiations."

Obama, has of course, been pilloried by the American right and the minority Jewish right who claim to speak for the Jews and Israel for saying he would talk to various nations and/or terrorist organizations without preconditions.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

On a related note, you can watch Chris Matthews call out right-wing blowhard Kevin James for not having a clue what he's talking about regarding "appeasement."

Friday, May 16, 2008

Repost: Who Wrote the Bible?


Reprinted in full:





The Clues











The Jewish Tradition


In the Talmud, it says:


Other Sources of Evidence



19: Then answered I before thee, and said,
28: Hear these words, O Israel.

48: And I did so.





Nehemia 8
Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Friedman
4 Ezra or 2 Edras
Torah Redactor, wikipedia.

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Common Causes of Deconversion

Kieran Bennett analyzed 117 Deconversion Stories at Positive Atheism and classified the reasons people claim they left Christianity. Note that these are not disproofs of religion or even necessarily good reasons, just individuals' reasons for leaving. The following words are mine but the numbers are his:
14.89% Stupid or incoherent answers by religious leaders to simple questions.
14.89% Science contradicted their religious dogma.
12.76% Contradictory dogma.
?% Exposure to atheism. [Kieran seems to have omitted the number here.]
10.63% Reading the Bible.
8.51% Hypocrisy of the Church.
8.51% Prayers went unanswered or person came to believe he was talking to self.
8.5% The existence of other religions.

My deconversion was a process and not an event, but I would probably point to stupid answers by religious leaders and to the conflict between science and the Torah as the primary causes of my leaving Orthodoxy.

The first major pang of doubt that I remember is when I asked the smartest rabbi I knew -- and one with substantial secular education at that -- what the firmament is. His answer? The stratosphere. But well before that, I had learned that rabbis could say things far stupider than that, and sometimes things that were racist or just plain offensive.

Then I started to notice a pattern. The "more Orthodox" the Rabbi, the less likely he was to, for example, believe in evolution or an ancient universe and the more likely he was to say things that are clueless and/or downright offensive. Clearly, "less Orthodox" was the right direction. But for all their efforts, the "less Orthodox" rabbis I knew and knew of coudn't come up with a coherent world view, just an uncomfortable compromise between Orthodoxy and reality, with a little fudging here and a little looking-the-other-way there. Every time I could tell they wanted to be factually correct or morally progressive but couldn't quite do it, it was because they were trying to stay within the bounds of Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy itself was the barrier.

(Via Friendly Atheist.)

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Albert Einstein: Bible a Collection of Childish Stories

Maybe this will clear some things up for those confused by Einstein's unfortunate use of religious metaphor.







Tip o' the hat to JP Perry.

Monday, May 12, 2008

Obama Does Not Have a Jewish Problem

The idea that Jews won't vote for Obama is one of those lies told over and over again by the media. Here is Gallup:
PRINCETON, NJ -- Barack Obama is faring better than might be expected [By who?? --JA] among Jewish voters, beating John McCain in Gallup Poll Daily general-election matchups and trailing Hillary Clinton only slightly in Jewish Democrats' preferences for the Democratic nomination.

This is according to an aggregate of Gallup Poll Daily tracking from April 1-30, including interviews with close to 800 Jewish voters, and nearly 600 Jewish Democratic voters.

Furthermore, Gallup Poll Daily tracking finds no recent decline in the percentage of Jewish Democrats favoring Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination. Jewish Democrats continue to favor Clinton, but by only a slim margin over Obama -- 50% to 43% in April, compared with 51% to 41% in March.


Both the 61% and the 66% numbers seem low to me, considering the percentage of Jews who voted for Gore (79%) and Kerry (74%).