Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption, by Stan Rice, story 4. The Book of Ruth

Author Stan Rice has just published another collection of short stories: Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption. Stan Rice is better known as a science writer, and scientific content and themes show up in most of his stories, including those in this collection.

Here is the author’s summary from Amazon: “You cannot see stars in the daytime, but they, like hidden reality, are always there. In these nine stories, Stan Rice asks, what if God appeared in the sky, with a message for Muslims? Can a theme park haunted castle help a young woman escape from genocide? What if an old greenhouse is the site of shifting timelines? What if a hotel burglar is actually a kindly man? What if a man discovers his girlfriend thinks of him as a teddy bear, then needs him? What happens if a demon from hell changes places with a human being on Earth? In one of the stories, Ruth meets Carmen.”

 

The stories in this collection are: When Pigs Fly; The Haunted Castle; Bleeding Earth (all reviewed earlier); The Book of Ruth (reviewed here); The Old Burrill House (reviewed in my science blog; The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith; The Gentleman; Ursa Minor; and You Little Demon (reviewed in later essays).

This is a story right out of the Bible, about which Rice, who has written extensively about religion, knows a great deal. Ruth is a Moabitess woman. Moab is one of the tribes neighboring Israel, which considers itself God’s chosen people. She is the friend of Naomi the Jewish woman. They live as gleaners, by gathering the grains dropped on the ground after the harvesters have passed through the grain fields. Ruth is extremely worldly, while Naomi is very religious. Actually, this story is not straight out of the Bible, but is what happens when Ruth intersects with Bizet’s operatic character Carmen. Ruth knows what she wants and how to get it.

A religious wanderer, Mahlon, sees Ruth and falls in love with her. Ruth wants Mahlon to fight for her; when he hesitates, she sings Carmen’s song from the opera. When a violent farm worker threatens Ruth, Mahlon quickly defends her. The rich land owner, Boaz, drives Mahlon away and decides to protect both women by giving them work within his house. He then marries both of them. Of course, as you could guess, this was not the end of Mahlon.

The Bible makes it very clear that Israel, not Moab, was God’s chosen people. As a reader of this blog, you probably have your doubts about this. This story will make you doubt it even more.

In case you think the Bible is full of boring theology and regulations, you are wrong—the Bible has some dramatic stories, including the book of Ruth the spicy details of which you never hear in church. Put it together with the equally spicy story of Carmen, and you are in for a wild ride.

When Kings Go Forth to War

The Bible is left over from an earlier era where war was just considered a normal part of leadership. The most recent portions of the Bible were written almost two millennia ago. And while the total weight of evil has increased in the world during that time, so also has the universal awareness that war, oppression, injustice, and slaughter are evil. Much of this new awareness has come from people who have been inspired by the Bible; but they chose this awareness because of their preferred interpretation of scripture, not because of the Bible itself, which has remained unchanged.

I recently visited a memorial to the war dead in Germany and France [photo]. Originally built in 1925 to call for the Great War to never be repeated, it was only a little more than a decade later that the whole story occurred again. The memorial is now to the war dead of two world wars. All the government of Germany had to do was to add a couple of new dates to the stone entablature. In the rising world awareness of the evils of war and oppression, religion followed rather than leading. The peaceful countries of Europe are largely secular. There are many Catholics in France where I now live, but their government is secular.

One passage of the Bible that we often read without noticing it was the beginning of the passage about David and Bathsheba in Second Samuel chapter 11. “And it came to pass, after the year was expired, at the time when kings go forth to battle, that David sent Joab…” It was just part of the mindset of people, even those who were supposedly God’s chosen (in particular, of King David), that spring was the time for war. War was just part of the circle of seasons of the year.

That is the point I wanted to make here. If you think that we can do something better than to make war in the spring, when the wildflowers emerge from the hills for some reason other than to drink the spilled blood of soldiers and civilians alike, you did not get this idea from the Bible.

The Danger from Christian Fundamentalists, part four.

Elicka Peterson Sparks, in her book The Devil You Know, draws links between conservative Christianity and crime. As a criminologist, she knows what she is talking about. The first link was that violence is part of Who God is, according to a long, long list of Bible passages. A Bible-based society, therefore, is one in which violence is one of the possible options in social interactions. The second is that fundamentalists like to pretend that the Bible demands harsh punishment, usually death, for a long list of perceived offenses, something that results in high incarceration rates and higher crime rates.

The third link is through Biblical oppression of women. Most crimes are committed by men, many of them against women, as with rape and domestic violence. The relatively small number of domestic violence cases of women against men are often, as in the infamous Lorena Bobbitt case, women taking revenge for abuse by men.

All of ancient society, in which the Bible was written, was misogynistic. The question of whether the Bible is more, or less, misogynistic than its social context is irrelevant. Fundamentalists pick out the passages that oppress women and hold them up as the will of God. In the Bible, as in the world at large, a woman has to marry whomever her father orders her to marry. Women are property.

The general attitude, enhanced by fundamentalism, that women are lesser creatures contributes to an atmosphere that contains rape and domestic violence. In the Old Testament, rape is a property offense. If a man rapes a woman, the rapist has to pay the woman’s father, then she is required to marry the rapist. Happy ending! Deuteronomy 21:11 permits conquering Israelite men to take captive women as their wives, plural. They are spoils of war.

My old fundamentalist self, like many modern Christians, tried to deny this. We emphasized the passage in which the Apostle Paul told husbands to love their wives. Clearly, according to conservative Christianity, a man is not supposed to viciously harm his wife; he is supposed to treat her nicely even while treating her as property.

Even though the Bible does not say it, many fundamentalist Christians believe that women want to be molested. President Trump said that women enjoy having their pussies grabbed by rich men. Many Christians believe everything Trump says as if it were in the Bible. Maybe they think it is. Most of them haven’t read the Bible.

In the next essay, I will present some final thoughts that came to me as I ready Sparks’s book.

The Danger from Christian Fundamentalists, part two.

I continue to explain some of my responses to Elicka Sparks’s book The Devil You Know.

Sparks claims there is a link between fundamentalism and a violent, crime-ridden society. What, exactly, is that link? Sparks points out components of the link. I will describe one of them here, and others in later essays.

The first link is this. From a fundamentalist viewpoint, Violence is frequently the godly thing to do. This principle contributes to a violent society in which crime is common.

The Bible, revered by fundamentalists, contains many very violent passages. Especially in the Old Testament, but also in the New, God commands violence, sometimes extreme forms of it. Sparks has page after page of Biblical quotes. When God led the Israelites to the Promised Land, as fundamentalists would say, or when the Israelites conquered it, as history would say, the Bible indicates that God commanded the Israelites to kill every man, woman, and child in the Canaanite cities, with a special emphasis on stabbing pregnant women to kill their fetuses. Except when, once in a while, God told the Israelites to take the young women for themselves, that is, the virgins who cannot possibly have evil fetuses in them. But there are also violent passages in the New Testament.

Some of these passages can be deeply disturbing. The prophet Isaiah (that is, one of the prophets by that name) predicted that God’s Army would utterly extinguish the Babylonians. One of the ways this would happen, according to chapter 13, verse 16: “Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses will be looted and their wives violated.”

It is not just during war that the Bible claims God commanded violence. The Old Testament also commands violence as part of normal jurisprudence. In Numbers chapter 5, a jealous husband can, without evidence, demand that his wife be subjected to a trial by ordeal to establish her guilt or innocence. She has to consume water containing dust from before the sacrificial altar—dust that may contain lots of bacteria, though they did not know this. It is referred to as “bitter water,” which may or may not refer to water that contains an abortifacient herbal extract. If the woman’s abdomen swells, and she has a miscarriage, then she was guilty. The intention was not to kill the woman, but of course this was a very great possibility. The main point, though, is that the woman may get sick or even die regardless of whether she had committed adultery or not: there is no connection between the outcome of the ordeal and the truth of the charge.

It is, as no one reading this essay will find surprising, extremely hypocritical for modern conservatives to claim that every embryo and fetus is precious when their Old Testament God commands a trial by ordeal in which an unborn baby is killed for the supposed sins of the mother or of the pagan society into which it might otherwise have been born.

The first link between conservative Christianity and crime, then, is this. Christians may say that God is love, but the Bible depicts a God who is at least sometimes very bloodthirsty. To the extent that Christianity influences our culture, then, it opens the collective national mind to violence as an option. Criminals know that violence is part of a Christian society, and as a result they feel free to embrace the option of violence. Violence is quickly and easily thinkable as a mode of social interaction, because violence is part of Who God Is.

Today, Trump Christians want us to go back to a frontier mentality of solving conflict through guns. And they can cite book, chapter, and verse to support this.

In the next essay, I will explore another link that Sparks makes between conservative Christianity and crime.

Forty Years in the Wilderness

The Biblical books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy contain long lists of ritual laws that God supposedly communicated directly to Moses on the holy mountain while the Israelites were wandering for forty years in the wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula after escaping from slavery in Egypt.

Among these ritual laws, there are many that could not possibly apply to the nomadic Israelites. For example, they were supposed to put blood on their doorposts. Wandering, tent-dwelling nomads don’t have doorposts. They were also supposed to make ritual cakes out of wheat flour. Wandering nomads don’t raise wheat.

It is clear to most scholars of the Bible that these ritual commandments were projected backward from the period after Israel had become a settled country, when they had doorposts and wheat fields. Most likely, these rituals had become well established by the period of Greek occupation, just before Roman occupation. The priests then projected their rituals backward to the nomadic period of their history. By claiming that God Himself had thundered the commandments from the mountain, the priests could claim absolute authority (of God and of Moses) in matters of ritual and doctrine.

But fundamentalists believe that God actually commanded the Israelites to do all of these things, for example to use wheat flour (which they did not have) for making ritual tortillas during the lifetime of Moses. As far as I recall, the commandments in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy do not say, “Someday, you will be able to keep these commandments.” The commandments were given, period, some of them on pain of death.

The fundamentalists have set themselves up for this problem. Instead of reading the Old Testament books as ritual, they insist that they are history. The ridiculous situation of a poor wandering Israelite finding himself condemned to death for not having wheat flour is the result not of the ancient writings themselves, but of fundamentalist assumptions about them.

I Washed My Face in the Morning Dew

I vaguely remembered a song from my childhood in the 1960s. I recently looked it up. It is yet another expression of the frustration and sense of injustice that many people felt, and feel, about how the rich are oppressing the poor. The lyrics were written by Bobby Bare and performed by several singers including Johnny Cash and Tom T. Hall.

The first strange town I was ever in

The county was hanging a man
Nobody cared if he lived or died

And I just didn't understand.

So I washed my face in the morning dew, Bathed my soul in the sun,
Washed my face in the morning dew And kept on moving along.

The second strange town that I was in

They were laughin' at a poor crippled man
Begging for nickels and dimes on the street

And I just didn't understand.

So I washed my face in the morning dew, Bathed my soul in the sun,
Washed my face in the morning dew And kept on moving along.

The third strange town that I was in

Was settled peaceful and nice
The rich got richer and the poor got poorer

And to me it didn't seem right

So I washed my face in the morning dew, Bathed my soul in the sun,
Washed my face in the morning dew And kept on moving along.

Someday times are bound to change

It can't be very far
And each injustice I have seen

Will come before the bar.

So I washed my face in the morning dew, Bathed my soul in the sun,
Washed my face in the morning dew And kept on moving along.

These words seem to be a modern embodiment of the cries of the Old Testament prophets, from Amos to Isaiah to Jeremiah. When the Old Testament prophets saw the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, they did not say, “To me it just doesn’t seem right.” Instead they proclaimed that God hated this kind of oppression and that he would punish Israel and Judah for it by allowing military empires to conquer them. The prophets, like the singers, also believed that God would pass His judgment on the oppressors (the injustices would “come before the bar,” or judgment seat). And these “strange towns” are not so strange after all; they are the cities we all live in, and we see these injustices as being normal, not strange.

Are there any popular songs today that call for an end to oppression? I do not follow popular music. Feel free to post a comment about examples you may know about.

Emails from Hell, part nine.

{beginning of email}

            As we sat there with General McArthur, we saw a man in a robe coming along. His robe was all the colors of the rainbow. And with him was a flock of the cutest animals you ever saw. Kitty cats with big eyes, puppies with big eyes, hamsters with big eyes. Animals that would have torn each other to pieces in the wild but as a result of human domestication and the influence of Heaven, they played with one another in peace. The lion and the lamb, as described in two places in the Old Testament, followed. Then along came lobsters and octupuses and levitating fishes. I was puzzled, because this was supposed to be Hell.

            The man drew closer and wished us an effusively good day.

            “Good sir!” I called out. “I think I know why your robe is all the colors of the rainbow.”

            “You do?” he said in a piping voice. “What do you think the reason is?”

            “You are or were a member of the GLBT community.”

            “The what? Never heard of it,” he said.

            “Okay, let me guess again,” I said. “You are Joseph with the Amazing Dreamcolor Coat right out of Genesis 37.”

            “Wrong again,” he said. “I am Noah, and the rainbow was associated with me a long time before Joseph or the BLTs.”

            “You should have guessed it, with the animals,” Joe whispered to me.

            “Please explain, Mr. Noah, why you are in hell.”

            “I built an Ark—actually, I contracted the work out—and saved two of every kind of animal from dying in the Great Flood.”

            “So how did you get them to all come into the Ark?”

            “It was a miracle,” said Noah.

            “Two of each species of insect?”

            “It was a miracle.”

            “Two of each species of spider?”

            “It will always be the same answer. It was a miracle. I still don’t know how it happened, or how we found places to stash all of them.”

            “Very well. But how did that get you sent to Hell? Oh, wait, I know. It’s when you got drunk afterwards.”

            “No, that wasn’t it. As I said, I saved two of every species of animal.”

            “Am I missing something?” I asked.

            “You most certainly are,” Noah said. “Every species. Not just the ones that humans found useful, but even the rattlesnakes and the mosquitoes and the spiders. They each had their place in nature, regardless of their utility to humans. Why, you may ask.”

            “Why?”

            “Partly because no one could know which species might be useful later,” said Noah. “We had to look all over the place to find the flatworm Caenorhabditis elegans, and we never knew why. But nowadays it is one of the favorite animals that scientists use in genetic research. Same thing with that fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. But also, it is just because God had this idea that if He made it it was good.”

            “I still don’t see what was so bad about that,” I said.

            “Do I have to explain everything to you?” asked Noah.

            “Yes,” said Joe.

            “Well, it’s like this. The fundamentalists who decide who goes to hell believe that most species are useless, and that it is not worth the trouble or the cost to save them. You saw how much the conservatives despised the Endangered Species Act in the United States! God did not ask me if I could afford to save all of them, or even if I wanted to. But you just let an American environmentalist say that we need to save the Lesser Prairie Chicken, for example, and the conservatives start howling like extinct dire wolves—Canis dirus—and calling them godless communist atheists. See, they believe that God wanted me to save all the species so that American conservatives can let them go extinct in the twenty-first century. I, sir, was the original bleeding-heart environmentalist. And so, here I am.”

            “Well,” said Joe, “being as you know all the different kinds of animals, can you recommend what kind of meat we can have for lunch?”

{end of email}

Wisdom from Wes Craven

I’ve never watched a Wes Craven movie. From the descriptions I have heard of them, I probably never will. The only reason I listened to a Terry Gross interview of Craven, who died August 30, was because it was on the radio as I drove into Tulsa recently. I was certainly not expecting to learn anything from him.

If you watch any of his movies, I understand, you might think that he exults in torture and blood. But actually, one of his formative experiences as a child was when he killed a rat. He shot it with an arrow, pinning it to the ground. Its scream was much louder than one would ever expect such a small animal to make. He said it was a long and difficult process to finish the rat off.  He was astonished at the desperation of the rat to stay alive. Humans are like this too, he realized. This experience stayed with him for life.

Most movies before the 1960s showed stylized murders and death. Viewers were never really confronted with the horror of seeing another person killed. For example, in many movies, a single stab will kill someone, or a single blow to the head. (I saw this sort of murder at least a hundred times on Perry Mason reruns.) But in real life it usually takes multiple stabs or blows and gets gruesome very quickly. Wes Craven wanted his viewers to know how horrifying death really was.

That is, Craven wanted us to know how horrifying violent death was so that we would hate it. Watch enough stylized deaths and pretty soon death seems abstract. Craven wanted to blow us away from this delusion. In particular, he grew up watching graphic footage of death in the Vietnam War. To Craven, it made no sense that Americans would support such a war, and also support economic enslavement of the poor people of the world, while being afraid to watch a graphic scene of murder in a movie.

Craven talked about his fundamentalist upbringing, but he did not recognize much connection between it and his inability to resist showing us graphic violence. But I saw a connection. If you read enough Sunday school stories about the Israelites conquering the native peoples of Palestine, if you kept reading about how the Israelites “smote” the inhabitants and killed all of them, men, women, and children, then pretty soon genocide and slaughter seem normal. Generations of Sunday school kids have grown up thinking that the Israelite slaughter of whole cities of people was somehow antiseptic and that God did not give a crap about their screams. So much for the book of Joshua. As for the book of Judges, it is so gruesomely violent that there is no way to make it tame enough to teach in Sunday school; most churches skip the part about the Israelite man who cut his murdered concubine into twelve pieces and sent them to the tribes of Israel. Or the Israelite who sacrificed his own daughter on an altar.

Maybe if Wes Craven had made The Ten Commandments, following the Bible account faithfully, then complacent American Christians would have been shocked enough to quit supporting government and economic policies that, even today, lead to the degradation of millions of poor people around the world.

Maybe it’s time for a new movie called The Book of Judges: The Real Story. Damn, that would make one hell of a movie! Don’t believe me? Dig out your Bible and read the book of Judges. I’ll write the screenplay if anyone wants to put up the money for the movie. Not for a Hollywood movie, just an Indy movie for Sundance or Cannes or something. Or maybe it will play on the Sunday evening church circuit.

What Happens When a Bunch of Freethinkers Have a Convention?

Report from the 2015 Oklahoma Freethought Convention, June 20. I also posted this report on my science blog.

Let me guess what some very extreme religious people might think that humanists do when they get together. They might think that freethinkers—such as atheists and agnostics—start jumping on each other for a wild sex orgy. Such a person would be very, very wrong. Just looking around at the small crowd, one might think that (except for the occasional tattoos and green hair) that it was a church convention. This is because, of course, humanists have morals just like anyone else. They just have different reasons for their morals. Let me give you some reasons that freethinkers do not have. First, they will not say, “I have morals because God will send me to hell otherwise.” Second, they will not say, “I have morals because the Apostle Paul writes in the books of Contusions, Abrasions, and Concussions that God gets mad if you don’t have morals.” Third, they will not say, “I have morals because God wants me to love people.” When a Christian claims that “We love because He first loved us,” this may imply (though not necessarily) that love is a miracle and therefore cannot occur unless God makes it happen. Humanists know that love is part of instinctual human nature. And morals emerge from love: morals are how you treat other people right. God may indeed love us, but this is not a necessary precondition to human love and morality.

I can assure you, from this meeting, that humanists are quite capable of selfless love. One of the presentations was by Rebecca Vitsmun, who was herself a victim of the 2013 Moore (Oklahoma) tornado and who is now the development director for Foundation Beyond Belief, a humanist disaster relief organization. Her passion is helping people who suffer emergencies, and doing so without proselytizing them (for or against religion). I would put Rebecca up against any of the religious humanitarians, and compare her favorably with many.

What, you may ask, is a freethinker? I will venture my own discussion, although famous historical freethinkers like Ben Franklin and other founding fathers probably said it better. A freethinker examines Big Questions about God, nature, and the meaning of life. That is, freethinkers are first and foremost thinkers. If you don’t give a crap about the meaning of life and just want to have fun, or if you think “God is the meaning of life and I don’t care to think about it further,” then you are not a freethinker. You have to be a thinker first. Furthermore, freethinkers do not decide the conclusion in advance. Freethinkers do not use thinking as a tool either for or against religion. If I had suspected that the Freethinker’s Conference would just be a lineup of angry atheists, I would not have attended (I have other things to do). But there was no assumption that the attendees would be atheists or even agnostics. There was no altar call.

There was no question, however, that Freethinkers overwhelmingly consider organized and conventional religion to be negative and even dangerous. Here are examples from the lineup of speakers:

• According to Jason Heap, who hopes to be the first humanist chaplain in the history of the U.S. armed forces, conservative religion perpetuates the belief that America was settled by Europeans who wanted religious liberty. Rather, history is very clear (and Jason announced some new documentary evidence from the Bodleian Library at Oxford) that the European settlers wanted a chance to establish their own theocracies. The Pilgrims already had religious liberty in the Netherlands; they came to America to establish a society without religious liberty for anyone who disagreed with them.
• According to Vyckie Garrison, who has emerged from the Quiverfull movement of Christians, conservative religion can trap a woman into being nothing but a baby-making machine. In this movement, there is no limit whatsoever to how many children a father can sire or a mother can bear. They think that “be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth” means to have so many kids that the Earth is overfilled; if they stopped to think, they would realize that we have already filled the Earth and it’s time to do something else now already. They also seem to think that the psalm that said a man is happy if his quiver is full of sons must have meant an infinitely large quiver that the man has to drag along the ground or mount on a semi-truck. Vyckie expressed no bitterness, but rather gratitude that her freethinker uncle encouraged her simply to think about what she was saying and doing.
• Dr. Darrel Ray, a psychologist, explained that some conservative religious “counselors” (many with certification from Brigham Young University or Pat Robertson’s Regent University) have invented a false disorder called sex addiction, from which they are happy to (for a fee) release the purported addicts. Some even use what I would consider fraud. The Mormon-associated Oxbow Academy in Utah, according to Ray, encourages parents to send their boys as young as twelve to them for treatment for “sex addiction.” But the DSM-V (the psychologists’ Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) does not recognize sex addiction, therefore insurance companies will not pay for its treatment. But, says Ray, the Academy tells the insurance companies that the treatments are for disorders such as depression. Sure, says Ray, sexual behaviors can cause big problems, and need to be dealt with, but the industry of “treating sex addiction” is a fraud. I had a little problem with this concept. My understanding is that addiction is not qualitatively different from habit; both can be enhanced by the dopamine pathway in the brain. According to this article in Science, dopamine deficiency can lead to a craving for high-fat and high-sugar diets. Interference with dopamine processing is the basis of nicotine and cocaine addiction. If hamburgers can be literally addictive, why can’t sex? But religion offers the perfect opportunity for fraud, in this particular case.
• The most astonishing presentation was by independent “autodidact” Aron Ra, who presented abundant Biblical references to show how barbaric the Old Testament is. I most remember Numbers 5, which prescribes an ordeal to which a wife, if her husband merely suspects her of having sex with another man but has not gotten pregnant or has not yet shown signs of pregnancy, must undergo. Note: many parts of the Old Testament are very grim, but not prescriptive. The book of Judges is overwhelmingly gruesome, something you do not want to use in Sunday school, but the last sentence in the book indicates that these acts were evil. But Numbers 5 is prescriptive. The accused wife is supposed to have a curse laid upon her by a priest, then ingest a concoction of dust and bitter water. If the woman is guilty, her belly will swell and her thighs will wither. Otherwise, she will be declared innocent. This is clearly a barbaric practice on a par with dunking witches. Oh, incidentally, Numbers indicates that the man will be free of guilt. If modern conservative Christians knew as much about the Bible as Aron Ra does, and his knowledge is formidable, they would not be so quick to call for Old Testament standards for modern jurisprudence.

The main part of the meeting ended with a magic show by Matt Dillahunty, who seemed able to know which word or number someone was thinking, or which card they had chosen, but who was actually using perfectly materialistic means of figuring these things out. Of course, he did not tell us what these were. He did a great job, especially considering that he got sick right before his performance.

I left the meeting feeling very enlightened and excited. I’m not sure if freethinkers are completely free in their thinking—they would not have looked kindly on a speaker who said the Bible was at least true in a figurative sense—but their thoughts were freer than any religious convention you have probably ever encountered.

Unlearning War

The vision of the Peaceable Kingdom was a popular one among the Old Testament prophets. They probably all knew it, and two of them (or their followers) incorporated it into their writings: the first Isaiah (chapter 2) and Micah (chapter 4). The prophets envisioned a time when armies would stop fighting wars and instead raise food for their people: “Beat your swords into plowshares.” This image is just as powerful today as it was thousands of years ago, as depicted in a statue at the United Nations.

But this vision is not something that we can all of a sudden decide to do. We cannot go directly from a war mindset to an attitude of peace. We have to learn to think in a new way. Both Isaiah and Micah say, “Nation will not lift up sword against nation, neither will they learn war anymore.” Soldiers cannot create an effective agricultural economy by poking holes in the ground with their swords to plant seeds. It takes a wholesale economic restructuring, in which industry produces plowshares instead of swords, or better yet, recycles the now-useless implements of war into the equipment of peace.

Unfortunately, we can go the other way also. Because of our violent human nature, bequeathed to us by evolution, we can easily slip back into a mindset of war, without having to retrain our brains. The Old Testament prophet Joel did this (chapter 3), when he envisioned a time when people would beat their plowshares into swords.

The Biblical Solution to the Palestinian Crisis

As of today, about 1800 Palestinians, mostly civilians including children, have been killed by Israel, while Palestinians have killed only about 70 Israelis, mostly soldiers. It is clear that both sides are committing horrible acts, but the about 25-to-1 disparity shows that the main result of this conflict is the death of Palestinian civilians. The Israeli prime minister has made it clear that he has no interest in what the rest of the world may think about his response to this crisis.

The reason that this matters to many Americans is that American conservatives consider Israel to be (second only to the USA) God’s nation on the face of the Earth. Israel, in their view, can do whatever they want to do, because God has approved of them in advance. And conservative American Christians base their views on the Old Testament. This raises the question about what the Biblical response to the Palestinian crisis might be—a response that American conservative Christians should clearly champion.

The Old Testament makes it clear that God led the tribes of Israel into the region that some of their descendants now possess, told them the land was theirs, and not only authorized but commanded them to slaughter every Canaanite man, woman, and child. In fact, in some instances, when they left a few Canaanites alive, God took retribution against Israel for disobedience. Genocide was, according to the Bible, God’s clear command. And if, as Christians believe, God is unchanging forever, then genocide must still be God’s command. In order to be consistent with their Biblical literalism, American conservative Christians should demand that Israel carry out a campaign of genocide against the Palestinians (who are Arabs, not Canaanites, but are still residents of the land the Bible says God gave to Israel). And the Republican Party, based solidly on whatever the Christian Right wants them to do, should demand that the United States support this genocide. As it is, Israel is just playing around; just 1800 Palestinian deaths? This can only mean that, despite his protestations, the Israeli prime minister does in fact have some fear of world opinion.

Of course I do not believe genocide would be the right solution. The very idea makes me personally sick, especially since one of the best students I ever had was a Palestinian American woman and whom I very much respect. But I also do not believe the Bible is a set of commands for what we must do. I believe the Old Testament is a record of the primitive and often evil actions of people who used God’s name to justify whatever they wanted to do. I believe the incomplete genocide carried out by ancient Israel is exactly the wrong, not exactly the right, thing to do. What I do not understand is why American conservative Christians do not wave their Bibles in the air and demand a campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people.

American conservative Christians today seem to consider physical force to be the preferable option in nearly every case. They were happy to have the Bush II Administration use torture against detainees (which they now blame on Obama). I vividly remember Pat Robertson calling for air strikes on Iran years ago. This is very different from the fundamentalist experience I had back when I was in high school. The Church of Christ sect of which I was a member was pacifist. Back when the draft was still in effect, nearly every young man in our sect published a prepared statement, “My position on carnal warfare,” in our nationwide newsletter, Old Paths Advocate, stating that the Bible clearly forbade us to kill our enemies. I think we were right, but virtually NO conservative Christian leaders today reflect this idea. Today, the Christian church seems to be primarily an arm of the military-industrial complex. Just think of all of the weapons we could sell to Israel if they took their Old Testament duty seriously and began a campaign of genocide that they have so far resisted.