Bible Literacy

I recently finished reading a book in French called Zapping de la Bible. Published by Larousse, better known for dictionaries, this book was neither promoting nor degrading the Bible. It had about three thousand little boxes of facts about the Bible. “Zapping” means that no single piece of information was explained at length. It is a sort of summary of the things that people should know about the Bible. Everything from Cain and Abel to Noah to Abraham to David to the prophets to Jesus to Paul. I knew most of them, from decades of Bible study. But there were some overall surprises.

The first was that most people know few, if any, of these things. There seems to be two groups of people. First, the ones who claim to believe the Bible, but know almost nothing about it. I did surveys of my students back when I was teaching in Oklahoma, and found that most students claimed to believe the Bible but knew almost nothing about it (e.g. who King David was). These people just believe what their leaders tell them to believe about the Bible. Most recently this means to believe that Donald Trump is bringing about the Will of God on this planet (a belief strengthened by the release of the Trump Bible). Any difficult questions simply do not occur to them.

The second group is people who reject the Bible as nothing more than white males trying to control, even enslave, the rest of the world. These people, also, seldom know anything about what the Bible actually says.

The fundamentalist mindset that controlled me for many decades of my life blinded me to the true purposes of much of the Bible. Take, for example, the apocalypse (Revelation). My fellow fundamentalists all believed that the details of the Apocalypse would all occur in the future—not the author’s future, but ours. Point by point. One radio preacher even organized a tour group to go see the valley of Megiddo in Israel, which, she said, would be filled with blood as deep as horses’ legs (which would require billions of people to be killed). But in reality Revelation was a message to the churches which were just beginning to experience Roman persecution: keep the faith. It was coded in a mysterious way so that, if the manuscript got uncovered by Roman authorities, they could not understand it. It was all a retelling of concepts from the Old Testament. The four beasts came from Daniel; the four horses from Zechariah; the lion from Amos; the sky rolled up like a scroll from Isaiah; the locusts from Joel. The whole symbolism was lifted from the marginally-crazy visions of Ezekiel. No one in Jewish-Christian society of about 100 C.E. could have missed this. But us fundamentalists did.

The Bible, in reality, raises many interesting questions about the purpose (if any) of humankind and the world, and about how we should live. Often, the Bible itself offers no clear answers or, if it does, these answers are contradictory. But I believe that, in our culture, to deal with these questions, it is important to know how the authors of the Bible dealt with them, in order to selectively agree or disagree with them, neither swallowing nor rejecting the whole.

The first and most obvious fact about the Bible is that it is not a book. It is 66 books, written by at least 40 different people (we assume, men, but we cannot be sure about some of them) over the course of at least 1500 years. Not surprisingly, the authors all believed different things. The final list of which books to include in the Bible was not made until the Council of Carthage in the year 397 of the current era. The Bible presents these different viewpoints then leaves it up to us to figure out what it all means.

Whatever you believe, you can probably find it in the Bible. If you believe that God has chosen a people (originally, the Israelites, and today America) to rule the world, you can find a lot of this in the Bible. If you are agnostic, or even think that God is inexplicably unjust, you can find that too, especially in Ecclesiastes and Job.

I strongly believe that my grandchildren should have access to this information so that they, as I eventually did, can make up their own minds about what to believe. This is how we raised our daughter who, like me, had a journey from faith into skepticism. And our daughter and son-in-law believe the same thing: they do not hate the Bible. They are willing to let our grandchildren explore it.

Meanwhile, we are all fiercely dedicated to the general religious principles of how to live: to love your family and your neighbors, for example. No destructive behavior, toward self or others, is tolerated. This is no different from those humanists who accept altruism as one of the main components of evolution. Love is a product of evolution, not a miracle from God.

The only problem is, explore it when and how? I struggled with the idea of how to bring the subject up with my grandchildren, who are still too young to understand much about life. Not to indoctrinate them, but just to get them interested. If there is a Spirit, the Spirit can take it from there.

It turns out that nature can take its course. When I finished the Zapping book, I left it on the return-to-library shelf. My granddaughter saw it and asked about it. Before long my wife and I were explaining the Exodus and how the modern Christian Passover is Easter, a holiday we had just celebrated by seeing the resurrection of the green foliage of the trees.

And there is no turning back now. The subject of the Bible is open for the next generation. I did not need to artificially open it. France is a secular society, but it has many holidays based on the Christian calendar. Everything closes down not only for Easter Sunday but for Good Friday and Easter Monday as well. You won’t find that in Christian America.

Another Year of Being Grateful for Abundance All Around Us

 

This essay follows up on the previous one about the French Revolutionary Calendar.

In the original calendar, as explained in this wikipedia entry, each day was named after something to be found in the world of an ordinary person. These days were named after ordinary things, not after kings or saints or presidents. It may have seemed difficult to find 360 things after which to name the dates of the calendar, but the world is so full of things about which we can be grateful that it was not difficult at all. In my daily journals from that time in my life, I named each day after a tree or other plant one year; in another, after people who had been important in my life.

In the original calendar, the first day of Vendémiaire was named after the grape (raisin), as you would expect in France. Many of the later dates were named after trees and other plants, many of which would escape the attention of all but the closest observers. These included the érable à sucre (sugar maple), colchique (autumn crocus), and belle de nuit (beauty of the night, otherwise known as the four-o’clock flower). One day was named for hemp (chanvre), which is the same species but not the same breed as marijuana. The French make distinctions that we often ignore in America, such as potiron (winter squash) and citrouille (pumpkin) for the purposes of making soup. The list was made after the Europeans had incorporated food plants from North America, such as pomme de terre (potato), piment (hot pepper), and tomate. Of course, they also included domesticated animals, including those one might not expect a day to be named after, such as âne (donkey), bouc (billy goat), and grillon (cricket). They had days named after fuels and other materials such as tourbe (peat), houille (coal), argile (clay), and even fumie (manure). Of great importance to ordinary people were the tools such as herse (harrow), hoyau (fork hoe), pelle (shovel), and of course the pressoir (wine press). One might not expect an environmentalist like me to be thankful for coal, but when used in moderation coal can be an essential part of a sustainable and healthy economy.

Salvatore Fresca made a series of engravings, one for each of the French Revolutionary months, each of them of voluptuous women scarcely clad. But only in the three summer months were the women bare-breasted.

By naming each day after something, I had my eyes opened not only to biodiversity but also to the diversity of little blessings that we all have but about which we, concentrating on our own problems and stresses, do not think about. I seem to remember in my journal (which now has over 13,000 entries) I had a day named after the pencil. How often have you thought about and been grateful for pencils? Today’s list could be so much longer than the 1792 French list, and would include telephones and computers and vaccines and antibiotics and…

Few have said it better than Robert Louis Stevenson: “The world is so full of a number of things/That I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” Not to mention the fact that few kings have been or are as happy as most of us ordinary people! Today, and this year, look around you and be grateful.

Happy New Year!

This is mostly a repeat of what I posted on my blogs on September 23, 2013, which I’ll bet few if any of you have read. I myself had forgotten it (Moi-même je l'avais oublié). I have written a new follow-up essay which I will post next time.

Happy New Year, everybody. At least, according to the French Revolutionary calendar that was adopted in France right after the Revolution. It was used from 1793 until 1805. Read more here. One purpose of the calendar was to produce a scientifically-based calendar system.

Part of the scientific basis is that it was modeled after nature, after the seasons and the phenomena associated with them, rather than arbitrary months invented by human governments. For example, March used to be the first month, but Roman emperors added January and February, apparently for purposes of tax revenue. Because the Romans stuck two months onto the beginning of the year, the names of the months now make no sense. “September” means seventh, “October” means eighth, “November” means ninth, and “December” means tenth. But the French Revolutionary Calendar begins very close to the Autumnal Equinox, which was actually yesterday. The seasons, and the movements of the Earth relative to the sun, dictate this calendar.

The French Revolutionary Calendar is also based on the moon. Each of the twelve months has thirty days, consistent with the phases of the moon. Twelve months therefore have 360 days; the remaining five days were special days added to the end of the year. Today is the first day of Vendémiaire, that is, the month of grape harvest.

The traditional religious calendar had feast days of the saints. The French Revolution swept religion aside and established non-theistic science as its basis. This is one of the reasons I like it so much: it takes its framework from nature, rather than foisting a religious framework upon nature. Their calendar named each day after (in most cases) plants, although many were named after animals or farm implements. For example, today is raisin, or grape. I guess the revolutionaries had their priorities straight, didn’t they: naming the first month after the grape harvest, and the first day after the grape.

The Revolutionary Calendar was just one way of rethinking the world. The scientists of the French Revolution also produced the metric system, which is not only still used but has been expanded. The metric system is based on nature. For example, they said the meter was one-ten-millionth the distance from the equator to the North Pole. (They were pretty close.) It was also based on powers of ten. Instead of 16 ounces in a pound and 2000 pounds in a ton, or 5280 feet in a mile, there were 10 millimeters in a centimeter, 100 centimeters in a meter, and 1000 meters in a kilometer. And it is based on water, also. A milliliter is one cubic centimeter (cc). A milliliter of water weighs one gram. A calorie is the amount of heat that can raise the temperature of 1 cc of water 1 degree Celsius. How nicely it all fits together. No wonder scientists have used the metric system for a long time. And every major country other than the United States uses the metric system. As scientists continue to explore the very large and very distant and very small and very brief, they have expanded the metric system to 24 orders of magnitude both ways from the base. There are a million million million million yoctoseconds in a second, and a million million million million meters in a yottameter. The French revolutionaries did not imagine this possibility. Now the metric system has spread around the world, while the Revolutionary Calendar has been largely forgotten.

The Revolutionary Calendar is certainly not the only one based on nature. The Jewish calendar begins with the Month of Nisan in spring.

The reason I like to observe the Revolutionary Calendar, in addition to the regular calendar, is that it helps to fit my thinking into the cycles of nature. It helps me realize that we are part of nature, rather than being masters over it. Just as we cannot force the sea to not rise (see my earlier blog entry), we cannot force January 1 to be the first day of the year in anything other than an artificial sense. We have to start thinking of ourselves as part of the mesh of nature, of evolution, of ecology.

So happy 1 Vendémiaire, everybody!

Darwin Meets Albert Schweitzer

It is likely that few of you in the newer generation have heard of Albert Schweitzer. He was famous in the middle of the twentieth century. He lived a long time in the city I now call home, Strasbourg, France. I just posted a video about him.

Schweitzer was most famous for doing what almost nobody does anymore. He was a polymath, that is, a genius expert in what seems to most of us like unrelated fields. His fields were:

• Music: He was an expert at playing and building organs.
• Philosophy.
• Theology: He wrote about the historical Jesus and the mystical Paul.
• Medicine.

Unlike many of us, who are certified in one field (mine is plant ecology) but who know a lot about other fields because we have read a lot about them, Schweitzer actually had degrees in music, philosophy, theology, and medicine. Some examples of people who have thought broadly about more than one area of inquiry are:

• Isaac Asimov, the biochemist who wrote about science in general and even about theology; he even had a joke book;
• René Dubos, the microbiologist who wrote about human nature;
• Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist who wrote about everything, even baseball;
• John Polkinghorne, the physicist turned priest.

Schweitzer felt called to be a medical missionary in Africa. He was criticized because his field hospital in what is now Gabon was not up to the medical standards even of the time. But in its first nine months the clinic had 2000 patients; some of them traveled for days and hundreds of kilometers to go there. Could somebody else have done a better job? Probably, but there was no one else.

He won the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize not just for these things but also for his activism against colonialism and nuclear proliferation.

Was there a theme that tied all of these things together? I think it was reverence for life. The aspects of music, philosophy, theology, and medicine that he emphasized were those that made life better for humanity, which he loved.

Today it is difficult or even impossible for a scientist to be an expert in more than one major field of human thought, because every field of thought has grown exponentially; at least, science has. He was not trying to get people to know more scientific facts, but to celebrate how science (in this case medicine) can improve people’s lives (this is my message to the science blog readers). Nor was he trying to get people to believe certain doctrinal points. He was an evangelist, but not of doctrine; rather, of a reverence for life—this is my message to the religion blog readers.