The Power of the Bible

After the predictable failure of Biblical predictor Harold Camping, we are now witnessing the ability of the human mind to rationalise its own credulity.

Here is a remarkable example: Peter Lombardi is a 44-year-old from Jersey City, N.J. who had had taken an "indefinite break" from his job in April to preach about May 21, and John Ramsey is a N.J. resident who had rearranged his life in recent months to devote himself to spreading the news of the Rapture.

Followers like Ramsey and Lombardi said they had few hard feelings toward Camping and still agreed with some of the self-taught preacher's views, such as one that says all churches and denominations have been corrupted.
"I have learned to study the Bible really well. This guy has opened my eyes to a lot of truths," said Lombardi.
"If he makes another prediction, I can't tell you what I am going to do," said Ramsey. "But I've really taken an interest in the Bible. I know it's the word of God. And I've been reading into more parts today."
He quoted Mark 13:22: "For false Christs and false prophets shall rise, and shall [show] signs and wonders, to seduce, if [it were] possible, even the elect."

Despite the apparent stupidity of thinking some nut with a radio station can predict an event that is, in any case, a fiction, these guys still think the Bible's worth reading. One of the master-strokes of early Christianity was its forging of a range of old stories and texts into a whole that makes no sense but can be utilised in the service of any agenda that one wants to push. I've spent my life listening to sermons and preachers, Thoughts for the Day and miracle stories, and they've all found something in that hotchpotch of platitudes to support the view they're pushing.

With a text as full of contraries as the Bible, it's easy to make it fit any narrative that arises, and Ramsey manages it here. Oh yeah, shit, that Rapture prediction culled from the Bible was wrong, and here's the Bible telling me why. Here's the Bible telling me the Bible's wrong. But there really aren't any contradictions in the Bible, in the philosophical sense of jointly exhaustive but mutually exclusive stories and morals; it's too complex and incoherent for that. If the book wasn't 'Holy', everyone who used it would be slapped into prison for deception. For nefarious politicians with an agenda, or just for mad old millionaire radio evangelists, it's the Book that keeps on giving, and keeps those who believe in it giving.

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Our stupidity may kill us, warns Archbishop

The Archbishop of Canterbury has warned us that we may ruin our 'material world' through our own stupidity. He says:

In the doomsday scenarios we are so often invited to contemplate, the ultimate tragedy is that a material world capable of being a manifestation in human hands of divine love is left to itself, as humanity is gradually choked, drowned or starved by its own stupidity.

This raises a couple of issues:

Firstly, if we are made in god's image why are we so stupid? If this scenario is played out it seems that he hasn't equipped us with the necessary tools to ensure our survival. It's a bit like the argument for belief in god; he has given insufficient reason (when that reason is applied *properly*) for us to believe in him, and yet we are to be punished for eternity for this demonstrable application of the reason *he* supposedly gave us. Doesn't seem fair to me.

Secondly, surely this scenario *fits* the very thing that his belief predicts; the end of time, the rapture. He is presumably welcoming it, so that all humanity can ascend to, er, heaven, or whatever? I think we should be told.

He goes on...

The disappearance of humanity from a globe no longer able to support it would be a terrible negation of God's purpose for a world in which created intelligence draws out the most transformative and rich possibilities in its material home.

Er, but, again, I thought that's what you believe is going to happen? See the Last Judgment.

As is true in various ways throughout the whole created order, humanity and its material context are made so that they may find fulfilment in their relationship. Without each other they are not themselves. And the deliberate human refusal of this shared vocation with and within the material order of things is thus an act of rebellion against the creator.

I really don't see how this ties in with the concept of heaven. He clearly says that humanity and the material context are not themselves without each other. So we aren't 'ourselves' in heaven, presumably?

Technology, Yannaras argues, is toxic when it forgets this artistic and transformational dimension – that is (in the terms I've been using here) when it loses its proper human intelligence. But it is a particular image used by Yannaras that perhaps expresses most simply what a Christian account of responsibility in our environment comes down to. In his book of meditations, Variations on the Song of Songs, he speaks of how love compels you to see things differently – to love 'the landscapes we have looked at together.'

I've seen a sort of new-worldy, hippyish tendency creeping into some apologist arguments recently, and this seems to be along the same lines. It's tapping into the vague distrust many members of the public have for science, because of a number of well publicised failures in science. They would like to think that intuition and feelings are automatically as valid as reason and evidence, so they appeal to an 'artistic', 'transcendent' truth.

This is wrong *because* of this wrong-headed notion that the truth is available to us. We may gain valuable insights about the world around us in any number of ways (reason, evidence, and, yes, artistic) , but we will not find the truth, just a working model. Once *everyone* finally understands that we will surely be closer to wiping out such sloppy thinking.

Another baffling speech from the Anglican main man.

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