Month: January 2022

2022-01-03

The Fairy Tale Ideal World of the Gospel Story as a Living Hell

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Studies, New Testament
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From livingconcord.com

I was once met with frozen silence in a forum set up for Bible scholars when I expressed the view that the Gospel of Mark has a fairy-tale type introduction: “John the Baptist came preaching and all (πᾶσα) the region of Judea and of Jerusalem went out to hear him and were all (πάντες) baptized confessing their sins…” No one reads that introduction in Mark 1:5 literally. “Obviously” not “everybody” went to hear John and be baptized. No? But that is the opening scene of the gospel. To read it as history we have to interpret “all” as an exaggeration. But what if the story is about an ideal scenario?

In struggling through my machine translations of Bruno Bauer’s chapters on gospel criticism I was pleasantly surprised to find the same thought expressed in relation to other passages in the gospels. Recall Jesus telling the would-be disciple who wanted to go and bury his father before setting out to follow him. BB points out that such a scenario can only happen in an ideal story world: no teacher could maintain widespread admiration if he forbade a person from fulfilling obviously meaningful family responsibilities. Readers accept the story at face value because it is an ideal scenario, not a real-life depiction. We know the point is to teach readers the moral of putting Jesus before family ties; but no one seriously expects a teacher to command a man to walk away from his father’s funeral in order to follow him right then and there.

Jesus’ message is to leave behind the world of the “spiritually dead”. The entire exchange is a kind of parable. It is not real life.

Yet, as per the previous post, sometimes very smart people can read the account as a literal life-and-death message that applies in the here-and-now. And that’s when the hell starts. I recall years ago walking away from a religious belief system in the stunned realization that I had been living in a fairy tale world. As children, we may fantasize about living in a fairy tale world but as adults, that game can literally be hell for loved ones, even deadly.

Hector Avalos wrote a book, Bad Jesus, illustrating exactly how a literal reading of the gospels makes good characters — and readers who are devoted to those characters — bad.

2022-01-02

The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Ethics & Human Nature
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From ABC website

We need to discard the widely held belief that a high IQ and rationality go hand-in-hand, argues David Robson, author of The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes.

He says while intelligence quotient (IQ) tests have become the benchmark for smarts, they’re highly selective and only measure one’s ability for certain kinds of abstract reasoning.

Worst of all, they say nothing about a person’s common sense.

“When it comes to things like analysing evidence and thinking about it in a fair, even-handed way, or looking at the news and being able to work out what’s true and what’s false, actually IQ is really bad at predicting whether people can do that kind of thing,” Mr Robson tells ABC RN’s Future Tense.

And individuals with a high IQ score are just as vulnerable to cognitive biases as anyone else.

“The most important one for me is this idea of motivated reasoning,” he says.

“If you have a hunch or an intuition that something is right and it fits with your overall worldview, then you will only look for the information that supports that point of view.”

And, according to Mr Robson, when it comes to motivated reasoning, the crucial difference between highly intelligent people and the rest of us is that so-called smart people are simply better at it.

“They have that mental agility that lets them rationalise their points of view in a more convincing way.

“So, what you find is that on certain polarised issues, more intelligent people become even more polarised.”

Extracted from Are some of us destined to be dumb and is there anything we can do about it? by Antony Funnell for Future Tense on ABC Radio National.

2022-01-01

A Common Origin – One Wonders

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Ancient Literature, Biblical Studies, New Testament, Poetry and epics (Greco-Roman)
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An interesting observation in an ancient history publication:

In Babylonia demons hostile to the cult became subject to exorcism, a rite which from the earliest times was regarded as something communal. Some exorcisms were directed against storm demons, and one wonders whether behind the ‘Odyssey’ incident of the bag of winds given by Aiolos and Jesus’ command on the sea of Galilee ordering the winds to cease, there is not a common origin, the belief that winds were demons, capable of obeying human commands or being bound by magic. (The sea also as associated with evil is a characteristic Old Testament and even New Testament theme.) The Mycenaean Linear B tablets give evidence that the Mycenaeans worshipped the winds. A cult to Boreas existed in classical times at Athens. But winds would be gods in much the sense that streams, mountains, woods, etc. had gods, with less of a link between demons and winds than existed in the Orient. Another remnant among the Greeks might be the Siren passage of the ‘Odyssey’, where a daimon quells the winds just as Odysseus and his men are to pass the Sirens (12.169).

That’s from

  • Brenk, Frederick C. “In the Light of the Moon: Demonology in the Early Imperial Period.” Aufstieg Und Niedergang Der Römischen Welt 16, no. 3 (1986): 2068–2145.
Aeolus Giving the Winds to Odysseus by Isaac Moillon