(9,500 words)
THE
THIRD CULTURE WHY
THE GODS ARE NOT WINNING NEW
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Elaine
Pagels — THE GOSPEL OF JUDAS
But this dealer in Cleveland was telling me he had it there. Was he telling the truth? I called the Met, the Getty, and the Frist to ask about him, and they told me that he is a reputable dealer who has important material—but when I called back he suddenly stopped answering the phone. I realized then what already had seemed likely—that the book had been stolen from Egypt, and could not be legally sold. I located a man who often bought rare books from this dealer, and who also has given many of them to Princeton, hoping that he might buy the Gospel of Judas, give it to Princeton, and then return it formally to Egypt, which would legalize the arrangement. Then we could photograph and publish it—that was the plan. So I went to Madison Square Garden to meet the dealer, and confronted him: "I'm Elaine Pagels, why won't you talk to me?" Startled, he explained what we had suspected—that the owner of the text had told him not to talk about it, since it had been bought illegally. He then invited me out to Cleveland to see it, and I went, and looked at it. And there was the title—"The Gospel of Judas" in Coptic—and then he showed me the following five pages—which turned out to be five pages of rather uninteresting Coptic text. So I said, Okay, well, they've hyped it, they were hoping to get fifteen million dollars—it's not what they said. But when suddenly it resurfaced last year, and I was asked to be on the advisory committee presenting it publicly, I learned what had happened: the dealer didn't realize that when you have a Greek or Coptic text, the title is often placed at the end of the text. It turns out that the previous 26 pages were the actual Gospel of Judas—a fascinating dialogue between Jesus and Judas about what happened when Judas handed Jesus over for arrest—and why he did it. Startlingly, this gospel presents Judas Iscariot as Jesus' favorite disciple, the only one whom he trusts with his deepest mysteries. And all the other disciples appear as people who completely missed the message of Jesus, and entirely distorted it—and this is what has come down to us as "Christianity." Many people see the main message of Jesus as "Jesus died for your sins"—and see Jesus' death as a sacrifice God requires to forgive human sins. This gospel asks, What does that make of God? Is he a bloodthirsty pagan god who demands human sacrifice? The God of Abraham prevented Abraham from offering his son as a sacrifice—does the God of Jesus then require it? Second, we've all heard of Christian martyrs. This text sees Judas dying as a martyr—because here the other disciples hate him so much that they kill him! But the Gospel of Judas challenges the idea that God wants people to die as martyrs—just as it challenges the idea that God wanted Jesus to die. Whoever wrote this gospel—and the author is anonymous—is challenging church leaders who teach that. It's as if an imam were to challenge the radical imams who encourage "martyrdom operations" and accuse them of complicity in murder—the Gospel of Judas shows "the twelve disciples"—stand-ins for church leaders—offering human sacrifice on the altar—and doing this in the name of Jesus! Conservative Christians hate gospels like this—usually call them fakes and the people who publish them (like us) anti Christian. There was a great deal of censorship in the early Christian movement—especially after the emperor became a Christian, and made it the religion of the empire—and voices like those of this author were silenced and denounced as "heretics" and "liars." The story of Jesus was simplified and cleaned up—made "orthodox." But what really happened in the early movement is far messier, more intriguing, and more human. These recently discovered sources show us what was censored—and what those who didn't become "orthodox" were saying. For this is the only gospel we've ever seen that shows Jesus laughing at his disciples—because they have distorted his message and gotten it so wrong. What we have here is evidence of how some people in the early movement were struggling with the story of how Jesus died, betrayed by one of his own men. We don't have any stories of Jesus written down within 40 years of his death, but after that time many people wrote down accounts of what happened. One of the most puzzling parts of the story is that people knew that Judas Iscariot, one of his closest followers, had handed him over to the people who arrested him, and to the Roman authorities who killed him. The question was, Why? What was the motive? Why would Judas do that? The earliest account that we have, Mark's account in the New Testament, gives no answer at all: it simply says that this is what happened. Judas handed him over—no motive given. The second account was by Luke who read the first, and apparently found it inadequate. Feeling that he had to suggest a motive, Luke retold the story saying that Satan, the power of evil, entered into Judas Iscariot and made him do it. Satan embodied the evil power that opposed the divine spirit in Jesus—so Luke says—and that is why Jesus was overcome and killed. A third account, that of the New Testament gospel of Matthew, offers a different motive: he did it for money. The way Matthew tells the story is that Judas went to the chief priest and said, what will you give me if I hand him over to you? And having gotten a certain price he agreed to do it—so, according to Matthew, the motive was obviously greed. This new account, the Gospel of Judas, says that Jesus not only anticipated that he would die and went into it with his eyes open, so to speak, aware that this somehow had to happen because there was a deep mystery in it, asked Judas to perform this act as a friend, and that Judas was the only one who could and would do it, and the others completely misunderstood it and took it as betrayal. Matthew's gospel says Judas was so remorseful he went out and hung himself. But this gospel says the others stoned him to death, out of rage. So it's a very different kind of account. When the National Geographic first heard that there was such a Gospel of Judas, several experts interpreted it the way we have basically always have interpreted Gnostic text. When we first heard about Gnostic texts, we were told that they were "weird"—"Gnostic", that meant they were the wrong kind of gospel, not like the "real" gospels. But when (Harvard Professor) Karen King and I approach these texts, we treat each as another Christian gospel—another way that this powerful and strange and tangled story of betrayal was told by Jesus' followers in the decades after his death. We can't assume it tells us much about what happened between Jesus and Judas—it's probably guesswork, like all the other gospels—but it also offers a lot more than that: it places us right in the heart of the historical situation in the generations after his death. Anyone who joined this movement was aware that he or she could be killed for it, as many had been—Jesus' closet disciple Peter was crucified by the Romans, Paul was beheaded, while other followers of Jesus, like his brother James and his follower Stephen, were lynched by public mobs and riots. It was very dangerous to be a part of this movement. And one of the most troubling problems with anybody associated with it was, what do you do if you're arrested? What do you do, knowing that this could happen? Do you run? Do you accept persecution as if this were something God wanted? There is a Jewish tradition about persecution and about martyrdom which sees dying for God, as they called it, as a way of witnessing God's power. The followers of Jesus argued intensely about that question. And the Gospel of Judas is one of the writings that comes out of these intense, painful arguments involving the threat of violence—arrest, threat of torture and public execution. This shows us what DIDN'T become Christianity—and casts very new light on what did. For when Jesus' followers tried to make sense of how their messiah died, some suggested that Jesus died as a sacrifice—"he died for our sins." The idea that Jesus' death is an atonement for the sins of the world becomes the heart of the Christian message, for many. It's certainly the heart of the New Testament gospels. There Jesus, before he dies, tells his disciples, when you eat this bread you're eating my body, which I'm giving for you; you're drinking my blood when you drink this wine. Because I'm giving my body and my blood as a voluntary sacrifice for you. So the worship of Jesus' followers became a sacred meal in which people drank wine and ate bread, ceremonially reenacting the death of Jesus. We call it the Eucharist, the Mass. We're so used to it we hardly see that it's a cannibalistic feast. But whoever wrote the Gospel of Judas has Jesus laughing at the disciples, to say, what you're doing is ludicrous. Turning the death of Jesus into something like an animal sacrifice. Eating flesh and drinking blood ritually, even, is a kind of obscene gesture. This author, this follower of Jesus, sees the idea of Jesus dying for our sins as a complete misunderstanding of the whole message of Jesus. So, although the Gospel of Judas is an authentic early Christian document, it was early condemned as "blasphemy". We don't know whether this actually IS what Jesus taught—for although New Testament Gospels say that Jesus did teach secret teaching, they don't tell us what it was. But we do have many new texts that show us secret teaching, like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Phillip. And probably Jesus, like other first-century rabbis, taught one kind of message in public, with thousands of people listening, and other kinds of teaching in private. We don't think the Gospel of Judas belongs in the canon—but we also don't think it belongs in the trash: instead it belongs in the history of Christianity—a history that now, in light of all these recent discoveries, we now have to rewrite completely. |
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WHY THE GODS ARE NOT WINNING A myth
is gaining ground. The myth seems plausible enough. The proposition
is that after God died in the secular 20th century, He is back in a
big way as people around the world again find faith. In 2006 Foreign
Policy ran two articles that made similar, yet distinctive claims.
In the spring Phillip Longman's "The Return of the Patriarchy" contended
that secular folk are reproducing themselves, or failing to reproduce
themselves, out of existence as the believers swiftly reproduce via
a "process similar to survival of the fittest." In the
summer FP followed up with "Why God is Winning" by
Samuel Shah and Monica Duffy Toft, who pronounced that the Big Three—
Christianity, Islam and Hinduism—are back on the global march
as secularism fades into irrelevance. In the fall Foreign
Affairs joined the chorus when Walter Russell Mead's God's
Country? gave the impression that conservative theism continues
to rise in a United States jolted back to the spiritual by 9/11. In American Fascists Chris
Hedges warns that hard-core Dominionists are accumulating the power
to convert the nation into a fundamentalist theocracy.
Since 1900 Christians have made up about
a third of the global population, and are edging downwards. No growth
there. Hindus are coasting at a seventh the total, no significant increase
there either even though India adds more people each year than any
other nation. The WCE predicts no proportional increase for
these faiths by 2050. The flourishing revival of two megareligions
whether by democracy, edification, or fecundity is therefore a mirage.
Having shrunk by a quarter in the 20th century, Buddhism is predicted
to shrink almost as much over the next half century. Once rivaling
Christianity, paganism – whether it be ancient or modern as per
New Ageism and Scientology — has over all contracted by well over
half and is expected to continue to dwindle.
Those who feel the opposite about religion doubled between the 1960s and 1970s, have been fairly stable since then, but have been edging up in recent years. American opinion on the issue of human evolution from animals has been rock steady, about half agreeing, about half disagreeing, for a quarter century. What has changed is how people view the Bible. In the 1970s nearly four in ten took the testaments literally, just a little over one in ten thought it was a mixture of history, fables, and legends, a three to one ratio in favor of the Biblical view. Since then a persistent trend has seen literalism decline to between a quarter and a third of the population, and skeptics have doubled to nearly one in five. If the trend continues the fableists will equal and then surpass the literalists in a couple of decades.
From
a high of three quarters of the population in the 1930s to 1960s,
a gradual, persistent decline has set in, leaving some clerics distressed
at the growing abandonment of small churches as the big ones gobble
up what is left of the rest. Weekly religious service attendance
rose only briefly in the months after 9/11—evidence that the event failed to stem national
secularization – and then lost ground as the Catholic sex scandal
damaged church credibility. As few as one in four or five Americans
are actually in church on a typical Sunday, only a few percent of them
in megachurches. America's disbelievers atheists now number 30 million, most well educated and higher income, and they far outnumber American Jews, Muslims and Mormons combined. There are many more disbelievers than Southern Baptists, and the god skeptics are getting more recruits than the evangelicals. The rise
of American rationalism is based on adult choice—secularists
certainly not growing via rapid reproduction. The results can be seen
on the bookshelves, as aggressively atheistic books such as Sam Harris' The
End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, Richard
Dawkins' The God Delusion, and Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking
the Spell, break the
mainstream publishing barrier onto the best-sellers lists. Long disparaged
as neither moral or American, the growing community is beginning to
assert itself as a socio-political force. As a
result the great majority enjoy long, safe, comfortable, middle class
lives that they can be confident will not be lost due to factors beyond
their control. It is hard to lose one's middle class status in
Europe, Canada and so forth, and modern medicine is always accessible
regardless of income. Nor do these egalitarians culture emphasize the
attainment of immense wealth and luxury, so most folks are reasonably
satisfied with what they have got. Such circumstances dramatically
reduces peoples' need to believe in supernatural forces that
protect them from life's calamities, help them get what they
don't have, or at least make up for them with the ultimate Club
Med of heaven. One of us (Zuckerman) interviewed secular Europeans
and verified that the process of secularization is casual; most hardly
think about the issue of God, not finding the concept relevant to their
contented lives. In part to try to accumulate the wealth needed to try to prevent financial catastrophe, in part to compete in a culture of growing economic disparity with the super rich, the typical American is engaged in a Darwinian, keeping up with the Jones competition in which failure to perform to expectations further raises levels of psychological stress. It is not, therefore, surprising that most look to friendly forces from the beyond to protect them from the pitfalls of a risky American life, and if that fails compensate with a blissful eternal existence. The effect
can be more direct. For instance, the absence of universal health care
encourages the utilization of faith-based medical charities. The latter,
as well intentioned as they are, cannot provide the comprehensive health
services that best suppress mortality at all ages. But charities extend
the reach of the churches into the secular community, enhancing their
ability to influence society and politics, and retain and recruit members. So much
for the common belief that supernatural-based religiosity is the
default mode inherent to the human condition. What about the hypothesis
that has gained wide currency, that competition between the plethora
of churches spawned by the separation of church and state is responsible
for America's highly religious population? Australia and New Zealand
copied the American separation between church and state in their
constitutions, yet they are much more irreligious. Meanwhile the
most religious advanced democracies in Europe are those where the
Catholic church is, or was, dominant. We can
also explain why America is has become increasingly at odds with
itself. On one hand the growing level of socio-economic disparity
that is leaving an increasing portion of the population behind in
the socially Darwinian rat-race is boosting levels of hard-line religiosity
in the lower classes. On the other hand freedom from belief in the
supernatural is rising among the growing segment that enjoys higher
incomes and sophisticated education. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Ted
Turner, Richard Branson and Rupert Murdoch are typical upper crust
disbelievers.
Disbelief now rivals the great faiths in numbers and influence. Never before has religion faced such enormous levels of disbelief, or faced a hazard as powerful as that posed by modernity. How is organized religion going to regain the true, choice-based initiative when only one of them is growing, and it is doing so with reproductive activity rather than by convincing the masses to join in, when no major faith is proving able to grow as they break out of their ancestral lands via mass conversion, and when securely prosperous democracies appear immune to mass devotion? The religious industry simply lacks a reliable stratagem for defeating disbelief in the 21st century. Even though
liberal, pro-evolution religions are not at fault for unacceptable
social policies, organized faith cannot reform itself by supporting
successful secular social arrangements because these actions inadvertently
suppress popular religiosity. They are caught in a classic Catch-22.
And liberal churches are even less able to thrive in advanced democracies
than are their more conservative counterparts, so if churches, temples
and mosques become matriarchal by socio-politically liberalizing
they risk secularizing themselves into further insignificance. Aside from the above nontheists never having promoted Darwin's personal world-view as the sole fountain of societal goodness, Quinn is making the even bigger mistake—the same mistake nearly everyone is making—of believing that the contest between popular faith and secularism is an epic struggle of ideas that then determines the quality of societies. But the level and nature of popular faith is really set by economic conditions, and only secular egalitarian prosperous democracies that reject extreme social Darwinism can produce the best practical conditions. Assuming
America continues to secularize towards the 1st world norm then what
can we expect? The decline in faith-based conservative ideology is
predicted to allow the country to adopt the progressive policies
that have been proven to work in the rest of the west, and vice-versa.
Even Wal-Mart has come out in favor of universal medical coverage as
bottom-line busting health care expenditures compel the corporations
to turn towards the system that has done so much harm to the churches
of Europe. If and when religion declines in the states Darwin's
science will automatically benefit enormously as it has in ungodly
Europe, but Darwinistic social policies will not fare as well as they
have in Christian America. |
 Re:
"Who Says We Know: On The New Politics of Knowledge" By
Larry Sanger
Gloria Origgi, Charles Leadbeater |
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If social networking and Wiki media is the new religion, we need dissenters and atheists to challenge the new faith. Larry Sanger is making a macro argument about how society establishes "background knowledge" and a much more detailed critique of how Wikipedia works. I am not convinced by either argument but I am grateful to Sanger for making the challenge. Take Sanger's macro argument first. Society has "background" knowledge which is well established and provides the framework for how we understand the world. In the past background knowledge was established by an elite, from priests to publishers. We are entering a new era in which background knowledge will be created through a more open, egalitarian and democratic process enabled by Web 2.0 and its successors. One risk Sanger raises in passing—echoing Cass Sunstein in Infotopia is that Web 2.0 might fragment common platform of background knowledge. But his main focus is on the current best example of "democratic" background knowledge creation—Wikipedia—which he says is deeply flawed because it treats all contributors as equals and fails to accord a proper role to experts. So the risk is that as a society we may become dependent on a way of establishing background knowledge that is more egalitarian but less accurate. I am not convinced by this argument. Leave aside whether this claim is true for all societies—India, China, Iran—or just the developed liberal democracies. And leave aside whether the account of history is correct: many would argue that elite control over society's background knowledge has been subject to growing contest for at least the last two centuries. That contest is now taking on new forms thanks to the Web. For Sanger's apocalyptic scenario to be correct there would have to be a new way of establishing society's background knowledge that will displace competing methods, leaving us in the grip of a new, flawed, monopoly provider of background knowledge—Wikipedia—writ large. But that is not what's happening. Instead of displacing other sources, Web 2.0 seems to be adding to them, complementing them. As readers and researchers we now have a wider array of sources to choose from and compare. And by comparing them we may become more discerning, critical and engaged readers, learning to distinguish what can be trusted from which source. Wider information sources could make us more critically engaged citizens, more used to thinking for ourselves, a point Yochai Benkler makes powerfully in The Wealth of Networks. Let me give you a very trivial example. Every morning I scavenge for news about Arsenal football club (soccer to American readers) which has its home round the corner from mine in north London. Ten years ago my sources were confined to the two newspapers I got delivered at home which carried about one report on Arsenal every two days, written by an "expert" football reporter. When the web came along the official Arsenal.com site started to provide lots of useful additional information about upcoming fixtures accompanied by bland match reports and player interviews. Then five years ago a slightly crazed, sometime drunk, often witty and very passionate Dublin based Arsenal fan started Arseblog which each day provides a daily round up of the news in all the newspapers, on and offline editions, including papers in France and Spain where many Arsenal players come from, as well as linking to all the other—fifteen plus—decent blogs about Arsenal. In Sanger's nightmare scenario Arseblog would became a monopoly, displacing all other sources of news and comment about the club. That would clearly not be ideal. Sometimes the blogger in chief goes awol. Arseblog works only by drawing on and aggregating other sources from the expert to the amateur. But Arseblog is not going to become a monopoly provider of news a bout Arsenal. Instead what we have is a much richer information ecology, in which there is a good deal of collaboration—Arseblog feeds on experts in the newspapers but also directs readers to them—as well as competition. As Sanger puts it: "I think most us want mainstream expert opinion stated clearly and accurately; but we don't want to ignore minority and popular views, either, precisely because we know that experts are sometimes wrong, even systematically wrong. We want well-agree factors to be stated as such, but beyond that, we want to be able to consider the whole dialectical enchilada, so that we can make up our own minds for ourselves." Well that seems to be exactly what the emerging, richer media ecology provides. So it Sanger's macro argument fails because Wikipedia is not displacing but diversifying our sources of information, that leave his much more detailed, micro critique of how Wikipedia functions. I am no expert on Wikipedia but I did not find this convincing either. Sanger does not clearly establish that Wikipedia regularly makes serious mistakes that experts would have avoided. He says Wikipedia would be better if experts had a special role but does not specify how this might work. At one point he seems to suggest the real problem with Wikipedia is not lack of expertise but a lack of independence and diversity among contributors. Even if Sanger is right that Wikipedia is flawed, reforming Wikipedia is not the only option. The richer information ecology created by Web 2.0 should allow a variety of alternatives to Wikipedia, such as Citizendium, to emerge which mix experts and amateurs in different ways on different topics. Wikipedia—and its current process—does not represent a new monopoly provider of society's background knowledge. Wikipedia part of the developing "dialectical enchilada" that Sanger says we all want. |
GLORIA
ORIGGI I
like the idea of epistemic egalitarianism that underlies
the Wikipedia project. But, as an epistemologist interested in
the impact of Internet on knowledge, I won't bet on epistemic
egalitarianism as a stable outcome of Web 2.0. So I share Larry
Sanger's scepticism about the equation between Equality=Truth.
The Web is not only a powerful reservoir of all sort of labelled
and unlabelled information, but it is also a powerful reputational tool
that introduces ranks, rating systems, weights and biases in
the landscape of knowledge. Systems as different as the PageRank
algorithm in Google-based on the idea that a link from page A
to page B is a vote from A to B and the weight of this vote depends
on who A is—and the reputational system that underlies
eBay, are powerful epistemic tools insofar as they not only provide
information and connect people, but sort people and information
according to scales of value. Even in this information-dense
world, knowledge without evaluation would be a sad desert landscape
in which people would be stunned in front of an enormous and
mute mass of information, as Bouvard et Pécuchet, the
two heroes of Flaubert's famous novel, who decided to retire
and to go through every known discipline without, in the end,
being able to learn anything. |
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Are
You There, God? It's Me, Hitchens.
So
what makes it different from recent atheist screeds by the likes
of Daniel Dennett and Richard
Dawkins? |
Mind
Reading Brain
Lessons |
In his 2004 book, The End of Faith, Sam Harris pointed out that alone of all human assertions, those qualifying as "religious," almost by definition, automatically demand and typically receive immense respect, even veneration. Claim that the earth is flat, or that the tooth fairy exists, and you will be deservedly laughed at. But maintain that according to your religion, a seventh-century desert tribal leader ascended to heaven on a winged horse, or that a predecessor had done so, without such a conveyance, roughly 600 years earlier, and you are immediately entitled to deference. It has long been, let us say, an article of faith that at least in polite company, religious faith — belief without evidence — should go unchallenged. |
In
the beginning ... In his July 2005 article the cardinal seemed to challenge what most scientists would see as axiomatic—the idea that natural selection is an adequate explanation for the diversity and complexity of life in all its forms. Within days, the pope and his advisers found they had new interlocutors. Lawrence Krauss, an American physicist in the front-line of courtroom battles over education, fired off a letter to the Vatican urging a clarification. An agnostic Jew who insists that evolution neither disproves nor affirms any particular faith, Mr Krauss recruited as co-signatories two American biologists who were also devout Catholics. Around the same time, another Catholic voice was raised in support of evolution, that of Father George Coyne, a Jesuit astronomer who until last year was head of the Vatican observatory in Rome. Mr Krauss reckons his missive helped to nudge the Catholic authorities into clarifying their view and insisting that they did still accept natural selection as a scientific theory. ... |
THE DISCOVER INTERVIEW: MARC HAUSER Interview by Josie Glausiusz His new theory says evolution hardwired us to know right from wrong. But here's the confusing part: It also gave us a lot of wiggle room |
John
Brockman, Editor and Publisher |
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