Bernard Bailyn

The little-remembered century—1600 to 1700—began with the founding (and floundering) of the first permanent English settlement in America, the one called Jamestown. The century that saw all the disease-ridden, barely civilized successors to Jamestown slaughtering and getting slaughtered by the Original Inhabitants, hanging on by their fingernails to some fetid coastal swampland until Pocahontas saved Thanksgiving. No, that's not right, is it? It was a blur.

Enter Bernard Bailyn, the greatest historian of early America alive today. Bailyn has recently published, The Barbarous Years, casting a light on the darkness, filling in the blank canvas with what he's gleaned from what seems like every last scrap of crumbling diary page, every surviving chattel slave receipt and ship's passenger manifest of the living and dead, every fearful sermon about the Antichrist that survived in the blackened embers of the burned-out churches.

Bailyn has not painted a pretty picture. Little wonder he calls it The Barbarous Years and spares us no details of the terror, desperation, degradation and widespread torture—do you really know what being "flayed alive" means? (The skin is torn from the face and head and the prisoner is disemboweled while still alive.) And yet somehow amid the merciless massacres were elements that gave birth to the rudiments of civilization—or in Bailyn's evocative phrase, the fragile "integument of civility"—that would evolve 100 years later into a virtual Renaissance culture, a bustling string of self-governing, self-sufficient, defiantly expansionist colonies alive with an increasingly sophisticated and literate political and intellectual culture that would coalesce into the rationale for the birth of American independence. All the while shaping, and sometimes misshaping, the American character. It's a grand drama in which the glimmers of enlightenment barely survive the savagery, what Yeats called "the blood-dimmed tide," the brutal establishment of slavery, the race wars with the original inhabitants that Bailyn is not afraid to call "genocidal," the full, horrifying details of which have virtually been erased.

 "Look at the 'peaceful' Pilgrims. Our William Bradford. He goes to see the Pequot War battlefield and he is appalled. He said, 'The stink' [of heaps of dead bodies] was too much."

Bailyn is speaking of one of the early and bloodiest encounters, between our peaceful pumpkin pie-eating Pilgrims and the original inhabitants of the land they wanted to seize, the Pequots. But for Bailyn, the mercenary motive is less salient than the theological.

"The ferocity of that little war is just unbelievable," Bailyn says. "The butchering that went on cannot be explained by trying to get hold of a piece of land. They were really struggling with this central issue for them, of the advent of the Antichrist."

Suddenly, I felt a chill from the wintry New England air outside enter into the warmth of his study.

The Antichrist. The haunting figure presaging the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation plays an important part in Bailyn's explanation of the European settlers' descent into unrestrained savagery. The key passage on this question comes late in his new book when Bailyn makes explicit a connection I had not seen before: between the physical savagery the radical dissenting Protestant settlers of America wreaked on the original inhabitants, and the intellectual savagery of their polemical attacks on the church and state authorities they fled from in Europe—and the savagery of vicious insult and vile denunciation they wreaked upon each other as well.

"The savagery of the [theological] struggle, the bitterness of the main contenders and the deep stain it left on the region's collective memory" were driven by "elemental fears peculiar to what was experienced as a barbarous environment—fears of what could happen to civilized people in an unimaginable wilderness...in which God's children [as they thought of themselves] were fated to struggle with pitiless agents of Satan, pagan Antichrists swarming in the world around them. The two [kinds of struggle, physical and metaphysical] were one: threats from within [to the soul] merged with threats from without to form a heated atmosphere of apocalyptic danger."

***

Bailyn could have coasted on that success, researching and publishing on the multitude of controversies still raging over the meaning of the Revolution and the Declaration and the Constitution. Going forward, the way most historians have done.

But instead, he did something unusual: He stepped backward, not just in time but in spatial perspective. He had what he would call his "cosmic eye" on a grand vision of the massive westward movement from Europe and Africa to North and South America that began before 1492, and he chronicled it in his subsequent book, Voyagers to the West. In examining the interactions of four continents bordering the Atlantic, and seeing them as a single, mutually interacting whole, he reshaped the modern history profession and helped create what is now known as "Atlantic history."

"From 1500," he wrote in an earlier book, "it has involved the displacement and resettlement of over fifty million people and it has affected indirectly the lives of uncountable millions more."

But Bailyn's "cosmic eye" saw even deeper. He wanted to capture not just physical movements but also "the interior experiences, the quality of their culture, the capacity of their minds, the patterns of their emotions." He wanted to look inside heads and read minds. Bailyn's voyage was a monumentally ambitious project, a voyage through unmapped oceans of data analo­gous to the Columbus-era explorers setting out on a vast uncharted ocean.

The opening section of his new book stands out for his profoundly sensitive appreciation of the sensibility of the original inhabitants whom he introduces simply as "Americans" rather than "Native Americans."

He captures that sensibility as well as any attempt I've read: "Their world was multitudinous, densely populated by active, sentient and sensitive spirits, spirits with consciences, memories and purposes, that surround them, instructed them, impinged on their lives at every turn. No less real for being invisible...the whole of life was a spiritual enterprise...the universe in all its movements and animations and nature was suffused with spiritual potency."

In person, Bailyn expresses an almost poetic admiration for this sort of spirituality.

"All the world was alive!" he exclaims. "And the wind is alive! The mountains are alive!"

Then, he adds: "But it's not a terribly peaceful world. They were always involved in warfare, partly because life would become imbalanced in a way that needed justification and response and reprisal. And reprisals, within their lives, are very important. But partly the onus is on the threats that they're under."

"Would both civilizations have been better off had they not been forced into contact," I ask, "or if all the colonies on the verge of failing had, in fact, failed and the two civilizations continued separately, merely as trading partners?"

"Well, the Indians were not genocidal on the whole. Their effort, even the 1622 massacre [which he calls "genocidal" in his book], was not to wipe the Europeans off the face of the map. It's the English after the massacre who write these letters saying 'wipe them off the map.'

"But the Indians had the view they wanted to use them [the Europeans]. They wanted the English there on the fringe so they would have the benefit of their treasure, their goods, even their advanced weapons. They wanted that, but under their control." It didn't exactly work out that way.

Bailyn does not let either of the two adversary cultures off the hook. He recounts little vignettes of the original inhabitants' behavior such as this: Following the ambush of four Dutch traders, Bailyn quotes a report, one "had been eaten after having [been] well roasted. The [other two] they burnt. The Indians carried a leg and an arm home to be divided amongst their families."

And, on the other side, consider that fixture of grade school Thanksgiving pageants, Miles Standish, an upstanding, godly Pilgrim stalwart who does not at all seem the sort of man who would have cut off the head of a chief and "brought it back to Plymouth in triumph [where] it was displayed on the blockhouse together with a flag made of a cloth soaked in the victim's blood." (Happy Thanksgiving!)

"What happened," Bailyn continues, "is a legacy of brutality in intercultural relations developed through this period of which, of course, the overwhelming legacy was slavery." Bailyn points out that although there were only "a few thousand" slaves in the colonies toward the end of King Philip's War in the 1670s, when he concludes The Barbarous Years, "The rules for chattel slavery were set."

And so the legacy of the barbarous years continued beyond the white male liberation of the Revolution.

Bailyn is fascinating when he speaks of questions of value. The day we talked was the peak of the fevered notion that the American government should settle its national debt by minting a platinum coin arbitrarily given a "trillion dollar" valuation. And it made me think of wampum, the original inhabitants' currency. I'd always wondered how you could found an entire centuries-long economics on beads and shells as these "Americans" did. And yet, isn't that what we've done since, basing our economics on shiny metal objects that have a declared, consensus value unrelated to their worth as a metal?

So I asked Bailyn why wampum was accepted in exchange for an obviously more highly valuable commodity, such as furs.

Bailyn: "They're little shells."

Me: But why should people massacre each other over these little shells?

Bailyn: Because they had great value.

Me: Because of their beauty?

Bailyn: No, because they're hard to make and they don't exist everywhere. You ever see how this was done?

Me: No.

He picks up an imaginary shell from his desk and says:

"OK, they have a shell like this and then they have to bore a hole all the way down through the middle of the thing in order to hitch it to the next one and do it with certain color regularities. It's hard to do! And it becomes of value."

Me (thinking of home-beading kits my mother had): Doesn't it seem arbitrary?

Bailyn concedes he's not up on "wampum literature."

"There's wampum literature?" I asked. "You think I'm kidding. There are wampum experts and they don't fool around!"

Our wampum discussion leads to the fascinating "fair price" controversy in the Puritan communities, the argument over how much profit a pious person should make on a given transaction.

Free market theory dictates there should be only one motive in economic culture: getting the max. But early colonists integrated piety and humility into their economic lives. Spiritual considerations. One of his favorite stories is about the English merchant who couldn't stop confessing the sin of overcharging.

"Robert Keayne," he recalls, "was a very, very proper Puritan tradesman from London who made it big and set up trade here and then got caught for overpricing."

"The guy who made a big apology?" I ask, recalling the peculiar episode from his book.

"He wrote endlessly, compulsively," of his remorse, Bailyn replies.

"50,000 words or so, right?"

"Unbelievable!," he exclaims, "A 50,000-word will which explores the whole business of revaluing, of cheating and so forth. And I published his will, the whole thing, 158 pages in the original. And the question is whether you could be a proper Christian and make money. See, they were caught in a double bind. Max Weber started all this out [with The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism]."

Weber argued that Protestants were driven to make money and create urban centers of wealth to display it because these were an external sign that one had been saved, chosen by God to enter into his grace and be redeemed. But in fact most of the Protestant heretics who settled America believed that salvation was a matter between God and the individual, no matter what their bank balance—and that too much wealth could signify the exact opposite of sanctification: greed and spiritual degradation. Thus the "fair price" controversy and what British economic historian R. H. Tawney called the Puritan "double bind," a theory Bailyn has adopted. "They were against exhibitionism," Bailyn tells me. "There were moral prohibitions against making as much as you possibly could—that's not good! You have to do it within constraints. There's a big literature about this."

It makes you think of the con­trast with our hedge fund wealth-worshiping culture, our conflicted attitude toward the "1 percent"—envy and moral disapproval. Perhaps judges should sentence insider traders to write 50,000-word apologies while in prison.

Speaking of price made me think of the overarching question of early America: whether the barbarism, torture, murder, massacre—the ethnic cleansing—that Bailyn describes in The Barbarous Years was the inevitable price we had to pay for the civilization that followed.

When I ask the question of whether there could have been another way for the races to interact than mutual massacre, he brings up one of the few figures who emerges with honor from his chronicle of this savage period: Roger Williams.

"There were people who tried to have amicable race relations," he says, "but it broke down again and again."

I had always admired Roger Williams for his belief in religious toleration, which was realized in his Rhode Island colony, a place where all the dissenters and the dissenters from the dissenters could find a home to worship the way they wanted. And I'd admired him for standing as a reminder to certain contemporary zealots that America was a refuge for people who believed there should be a separation between church and state—and that both church and state were better off for it, sentiments that entered into the First Amendment.

But in Bailyn's account, Williams becomes a great American character as well. Not only was he close to the original inhabitants, he could speak some of their languages and had the humility to recognize he could learn from them.

I told Bailyn what an admirable character his Williams came across as.

"Well, the people at the time didn't think he was. He was a perfectionist. And no form of Christianity was good enough for him. He started out in the Church of England. He was a very strange man. He was a zealot.

More Than a Simple Commitment

If Christians would like to be able to influence others they must change their life so that they are exposed to those lost on a regular basis, become comfortable with them and familiar with the best of their culture, so that when they meet, hire, date, or talk with them they are not betrayed their hesitation and discomfort.

Youth are not Buying what We are Selling

The youth do not believe our stories.One-third of teens do not accept the statement, "The Bible is totally accurate in all of its teachings." 56 percent say their religious faith is "very important" to them and slightly more than 50 percent of all teens report believing that Jesus committed sins while he was on Earth. Approximately two-thirds of teens say that Satan is "symbolic, not real."

 

Is it possible Augustine was right when he wrote in his book “The Literal Meaning of Genesis” that the first two chapters of Genesis were written to suit the understanding of the people at that time? “Perhaps Sacred Scripture in its customary style is speaking with the limitations of human language in addressing men of limited understanding… The narrative of the inspired writer brings the matter down to the capacity of children.”

 

In order to communicate in a way that all people could understand, Augustine suggests that the creation story was told in a simpler, allegorical fashion and was not meant to be understood scientifically.

 

If a builder is describing how his company built a hospital, he will probably describe the process chronologically: “We dug a hole, laid foundations, and then put up the superstructure floor by floor: basement, parking; ground floor, administration; first floor, wards; second, operating theaters; third, more wards.” But ask a surgeon, to describe the construction of the hospital and he might say, “We put the operating theater on the second floor and located wards, above and below it on the first and third floors.” The surgeon describes the hospital logically from his perspective, not chronologically. We are so used to this kind of thing that we take account of it automatically. We would not insist on understanding the surgeon as implying that the operating theatre suddenly appeared in mid-air and wards were then constructed above and below it. And yet we would know that the surgeon was describing a very real and literal hospital.  

When Darwin wrote Origin of Species it was widely accepted---even among conservative Christians---that the world was much older than previously thought.

 

When someone questions Christians’ perfect understanding of the Bible they act quite similarly as our Congress. No matter. The youth are not buying what we are selling.

Does God Make Bad Things Happen So He Can Rescue Us?

Christians live in a fantasy world of their own imagination.

 

Recorded in chapter 9 John tells the story of a blind man. The disciples asked Jesus “who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?” If John is correct the disciples thought we can sin before we are born. Can we? Were the disciples that naïve? Was that a common belief at the time?

John then tells us that Jesus said “this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.” Did God make this man be born blind so he could give him sight or did Satan make this man be born blind providing Jesus the opportunity to be praised for giving the man sight?

 

Does God make bad things happen to us so he can be praised for helping us? When people make bad things happen to others so they can be given credit for coming to the rescue don’t we call that Munchausen’s by proxy?

 

 

 

Stories of the Church of Christ

In the Stories of the Church of Christ I noticed none of the restorers referred to immersion as the initial way to receive forgiveness of sins. I see no biblical evidence that immersion indicates salvation, or to join anything or to confirm anything.  

Luke writes that God added to the church those who were being saved. That does not necessarily mean everyone being immersed was being saved. At the end of the day there was a group of people who had had their sins forgiven which put them on the path to eventually living with God for eternity. Saved they were not.

What is your attitude?

On the Sunday following Pentecost why did people assemble? To listen to a preacher I doubt it. How about remembering what Jesus did I doubt it? Feeling alone and wanting to associate with people who believed as they believed, probably.

 

Why do we assemble, habit, nothing else to do, yes? Years ago I knew a man who came to work every Saturday, although his job did not require it. He would come in, eat a doughnut, drink coffee, visit with those trying to work and leave after noon. Why did he come in? He had worked on Saturdays for so long he did not know what to do until he “went to work and came home.” Most Christians habitually “come to church” because they do not know what to do on Sundays until after church. Think before you answer: if it was possible to have everything that Heaven offers with the exception that God was not there would it matter? Personally, I do not care if God is there or not I would take it.

Different Attitudes

We need to be careful. The individual books and letters in the Bible were written by men who had held low opinions of women. Those were then translated by men who held low opinions of women. Jesus held high opinions of women. Who are we to believe? When we pray Jesus said to go into a closet but we put a microphone in front of them and stand them in front of the assembly. Who should we follow?

Different Attitudes

David said “No, but I will buy them for the full price. I will not take for the LORD what is yours, nor offer burnt offerings that cost me nothing.” We at Great Smoky Mountains Church of Christ serve stale bread in the communion all to save money. Different attitude, don’t you think?

Refuting Darwin

 

In your class you mentioned something about Darwin not having one degree or another as if the lack of the degree is supposed to take away from his observations and conclusions. Brad Harrub made a similar comment. Do we have Darwin concluding one thing you and Brad thinking another none of whom being educated in the specific areas of science.

 

In his book “The Origin of the Species, By Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life” he mentions that upon his return from his time on the H.M.S. Beagle as naturalist it occurred to him, in 1837, that something might perhaps be made out on the question on origin of species by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it. By the way he was recommended for the position on the Beagle by Cambridge University professor of botany J.S. Henslow which should suggest something about his confidence in Darwin.

 

Fully aware of the resistance from the orthodox scientific and religious communities he published his book in 1859 only after another naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, independently reached almost exactly the same general conclusions. He admits his book is imperfect; he could not give references and authorities for his statements; and that no doubt errors will have crept in.

 

Christians who are also scientists accept his conclusions. A couple of Popes have written that Evolution does not contradict the Bible. I have read that before the early 60s when The Genesis Flood was published, many Christians considered evolution insight into the way God did things.

 

While the Bible may not change our understanding of it does. At one time Christians believed angels moved the planets. Later Christians believed the Bible was very clear on the sun moving around the earth.

 

If the youth are to be convinced reasons beyond discounting Darwin must be employed.

 

 

John Jenkins
865-803-8179  cell
Gatlinburg, TN



Email: jrjenki@gmail.com
Blogs: http://littlepigeon.blogspot.com/
         http://alumcave.blogspot.com/

 

“All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.  For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens … “

"George Washington on religious toleration

Christians Want This Taught in our Schools?

Did dinosaurs live two by two upon Noah’s ark? Was light from distant galaxies created en route to the earth? Were the first members of our species fashioned out of dirt and divine breath, in a garden with a talking snake, by the hand of an invisible God?

George Washington on religious toleration

“All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.  For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens … “

 

 

Which to take Literally

We are told that there is one correct way to participate in the Lord’s Supper i.e. Luke 22:17-20: “After taking the cup, he gave thanks and said, “Take this and divide it among you. For I tell you I will not drink again from the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.” And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.”

 

Luke says Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it. Isn’t that part of the pattern? Does the pattern include multiple cups or just one? Luke says Jesus took the cup. There is no end to controversies whether we ought to take one detail or another literally and ignore the obvious.  The early church---from all appearances---observed the Lord’s Supper in conjunction with a normal ordinary make with the usual variety of food. Jude referenced “love feast.”  

Why 10,000 years

The youth of the church do not accept what they are being taught.

 

If I make something look like an antique so that you believe it is an antique am I being honest and ethical? Was God pretending when he asked Adam and Eve where they were? We are told God knows the number of hairs on our head but he did not know where Adam and Eve were hiding?

 

I know what I believe and why I believe it. My guess is no one knows why they believe the earth is 10,000 years old.

 

Groupthink

 

Jerry Harvey wrote an article “Abilene Paradox: The Management of Agreement.” His point is a group of people collectively decide on a course of action that is counter to the preferences of many of the individuals in the group. It involves a common breakdown of group communication in which each member mistakenly believes that their own preferences are counter to the group's and, therefore, does not raise objections. A common phrase relating to the Abilene paradox is a desire to not "rock the boat". I believe the GSMCOC men are an example. The men of GSMCOC, have shown we cannot discuss sensitive personnel issues. Until we are able, groupthink will rule.

I have included Harvey’s paradox below.

 

On a hot afternoon in Coleman, Texas, the story goes; a family is comfortably playing dominoes on a porch, until the father-in-law suggests they take a trip to Abilene, fifty-three miles north, for dinner. The wife says, "Sounds like a great idea." The husband, despite having reservations because the drive is long and hot, thinks that his preferences must be out of step with the group and says, "Sounds good to me. I just hope your mother wants to go." The mother-in-law then says, of course I want to go. I haven't been to Abilene in a long time." The drive is hot, dusty and long. When they arrive at the cafeteria, the food is bad. They arrive back home four hours later, exhausted. One of them dishonestly says, "It was a great trip, wasn't it?"

 

The mother-in-law says that, actually, she would rather have stayed home, but went along since the other three were so enthusiastic." The husband says, "I didn't want to go. I only went to satisfy the rest of you." The wife says, "I just went along to keep you happy. I would have to be crazy to want to go out in the heat like that." The father-in-law says that he only suggested it because he thought the others might be bored.

 

The group sits back, perplexed that they together decided to take a trip which none of them wanted. They each would have preferred to sit comfortably, but did not admit to it when they still had time to enjoy the afternoon.

 

This is a benign but dramatic illustration of the consequences of groupthink. Every member of the group agreed to do something they didn't want to do because they thought the others were committed to doing it. The result was that no one came away happy.

Does the Bible teach the earth is immovably fixed in space?

In the sixteenth century Nicholas Copernicus suggested that the earth moves, when Scripture seems to teach the earth is immovably fixed in space. I can provide verses if you like.

This may not seem to be a huge deal nowadays, but at the time it was a very hot topic. The reason? In the fourth century BC the Greek philosopher Aristotle taught that the earth was fixed in the center of the universe and that the sun, stars, and planets revolved around it.  This fixed-earth view held sway for centuries even though, as early as 250 BC. a sun-centered system was suggested. After all, it made a lot of sense to ordinary people; the sun appears to go round the earth; and, if the earth moves, why aren't we all flung off into space? Why does a stone, thrown straight up into the air, come straight down if the earth is rotating rapidly? Why don's we feel a strong win blowing in our faces in the opposite direction to our motion? The idea that the earth moved was absurd.

But now we need to face an important question: why do Christians accept this "new" interpretation, and not still insist on a "literal" understanding of the "pillars of the earth?"  Why we are not still split up into fixed-earthers and moving-earthers? Is it really because we have all compromised, and made Scripture subservient to science?

In the January 2010 issue of Smithsonian magazine there is an article about the Dead Sea scrolls. The article says the thousands of tourists who flock to Qumran each year, where the scrolls were discovered, are told the site was once home to a Jewish sect called the Essenes, who devoted their lives to writing and preserving sacred texts. An Israeli archaeologist disagrees, and says the settlement was originally a small fort that was later converted into a pottery factory to serve nearby towns. Which story sounds better to the tourists? Do they want to know the truth or do they want to continue to believe what they want to believe even if it might be false?

Free Will?

When an animal kills we do not bother to ask the question of blame. We simply deal with the offending animal in the most straightforward manner to maintain public safety.

 

When it comes to humans the legal system rests on the assumption of free will and we are judged based on this perceived freedom.

 

The rabies virus is a microscopically small organism which takes over the behavior of a host. After a bite from one mammal to another, this tiny virus climbs its way up the nerves into the brain. There it changes the local patterns of activity inducing host to aggression, rage, and a propensity to bite. By steering the behavior of the host, the tiny virus survives by commandeering the massive body of the host millions of times larger than it. The lesson is that invisibly small changes inside the brain can cause massive changes to behavior. Should we punish the individual for failing to exercise his free-will not to bite?

 

In 1966 Charles Whitman killed thirteen and wounded thirty-three beginning with his mother and wife the previous day. Whitman had thought something was different about himself and he was correct and asked that his brain be examined to possibly understand what. At his own request following his death his brain was examined and a tumor abut the diameter of a nickel was discovered. It is thought the tumor was the cause of his actions. Should he have been punished for his failure to use his free will to make better choices?

 

In 2002, a 40-year old male school teacher began to view child pornography websites, and solicit prostitutes at massage parlors, activities which there are no accounts of him having done in the past. The man's wife turned him into the police when he was found making subtle sexual advances towards young children.

 

The evening before his prison sentencing, he took himself to a hospital, complaining that he had a massive headache and would "rape his landlady." An MRI revealed an egg-sized brain tumor located in the area of the brain which is tied to judgment, impulse control and social behavior. 

 

Once the tumor was removed, his sex-obsession disappeared.

 

After he was remanded to psychiatric care, he complained of balance problems and a MRI scan revealed an egg-sized brain tumor. Further tests found the man was also unable to write or copy drawings and was unconcerned when he urinated on himself.

 

But seven months after the tumor was removed he complained of headaches and secretly collected pornography once more. After an MRI scan revealed tumor regrowth and it was removed, the behavior again disappeared.

 

Should he be punished for failing to use his free will to make better choices?

 

Frontotemporal dementia is a disease which causes parts of the brain to degenerate. Patients lose the ability to control the hidden impulses. They patients find a variety ways to violate social norms: shoplifting in front of store managers, removing their clothes in public, running stop signs, breaking out in song at inappropriate times, eating food scraps found in public trash cans, or being physically aggressive or sexually transgressive. Currently there is no medication to stop it. Over fifty percent of frontotemporal dementia patients display socially violating behavior compared with less than ten percent of Alzheimer’s patient. Should these people be punished for failing to use their free will to make better decisions?

 

When Parkinson’s patients were given a drug called pramipexole some of them turned into pathological gamblers. These patients had never before displayed gambling behavior. For some, the new addiction reached beyond gambling to compulsive eating, alcohol consumption and hypersexuality.

 

The treatment for Parkinson’s is to increase the patient’s dopamine levels. It turns out along with dopamine’s role in motor commands it also guiding a person toward food, drink, mates, and all things useful for survival. Because of its role in the reward system, imbalances in dopamine can trigger gambling, overeating, and drug addiction.

 

Should these people be punished for failing to use their free will to make better decisions?

 

A slight change in the balance of brain chemistry can cause large changes in behavior. Should these people be punished or treated in ways to protect society.

 

There is no consensus of the causes of homosexuality do they really have free will? Do you have control over the gender you find sexually attractive?   

Is Satan as all powerful as we claim?

Have you considered that the folks who translated the bible let their personal prejudices and biases unduly influence their work? While Jesus did not choose a woman as an apostle he appeared to not hold the biases towards women we know existed in the world at the time as it does today. It appears to me the New Testament is similar to CNN in that on CNN the president says something and then “experts” tell us what he meant. In the bible we have Matthew Mark, Luke, and John telling us what Jesus said and we have Paul’s and Peter’s letters telling us what he meant.

 

I have to wonder if our understanding of what Jesus said is correct.

 

Did God create Satan as evil or is he a fellow-sinner like the rest of us? If he dropped dead would sin continue to exist? James says “each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.” He does not say Satan tempts or causes us to sin.

 

Genesis says “the serpent was craftier than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman…” but we say Satan tempted Eve.

 

The author of Genesis tells us “the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life.”

 

The author fails to differentiate that God is next speaking to Satan: “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”

He then speaks to Eve.

If God is speaking only to Satan, Satan is cursed above all livestock and wild animals and is crawling on his belly eating dust. If he is speaking only to the Serpent we have God putting enmity between the Serpent and Eve and between the Serpent’s offspring and Eve’s offspring and Eve’s offspring will crush the Serpents head and the serpent will strike Eve’s offspring’s heel.

If he is first speaking to the Serpent and then speaks to Satan we have something that makes sense.

Folks are not comfortable considering ideas other than those they have heard their entire lives isn’t it more important to know truth. Youth are not accepting our explanations. As one fellow wrote the youth are spiritual but it not the spiritual of their fathers.

    

Does Christianity make people prejudiced?

     

Working at Dollywood has exposed me to people with whom I would not otherwise have associated. 

 

It’s no secret that the evangelical church is divided along racial/ethnic lines; evangelicals rarely engage in meaningful interactions outside of our mostly homogenous church groups. Sociologists report that over 90 percent of all American churches are composed of congregations that are at least 90 percent racially homogenous and even though American society is increasing in diversity, American churches are decreasing in diversity.  Social psychologists have found a significant correlation between Christian religiosity and racial prejudice. The more people identify with Christianity, the more they display racial prejudice.

 

 

We naturally create group categories that distinguish us versus them. This distinction is good for group formation; we have a stronger group identity and greater group solidarity when we can easily distinguish ourselves from other groups. However, when it comes to the way we categorize Christians, our fellow church members are mostly, if not entirely, composed of ethnically-similar others. The people who belong to our homogenous church group with whom we interact on a regular basis are the people with whom we most closely associate the term “Christian.”  We automatically and nonconsciously apply the term “Christian” exclusively to our church group and not to the broader, diverse body of Christ. As a result, ethnically-dissimilar Christians are treated like the outsiders they are perceived to be.

 

 

When we get beyond the comfort of our racially-homogenous churches, we will begin to associate the term “Christian” with those who do not necessarily look, think, talk, or act like us. Only then will we begin to embody the unity and diversity for which the Church was intended.

 

No King But King Jesus

 

George Washington and Martha did not have children of their own. George did take in Martha’s children from an earlier marriage, John Parke Custis and Martha Parke Custis. Later George and Martha raised John's two children when John died in 1781. George had no direct descendants.

 

Studies have shown we are more likely to believe that a statement is true if we have heard it before---whether or not it is actually true: “illusion-of-truth effect.” Subjects rated the validity of plausible sentences every two weeks. Without letting on, the experimenters snuck in some repeat sentences (both true and false ones) across the testing sessions. And they found a clear result: if subjects had heard a sentence in previous weeks, they were more likely to now rate it as true, even if they swore they had never heard it before. This is the case even when the experimenter tells the subjects that the sentences they are about to hear are false: despite this, mere exposure to an idea is enough to boost its believability upon later contact. The illusion-of-truth effect highlights the potential danger for people who are repeatedly exposed to the same religious edicts or political slogans.

 

How many untruths do Christians believe only because they have heard it all of their lives? What the fellow said about knowing George’s direct descendant is blatantly untrue but since they have heard it once when they hear it again people will believe it to be true.

 

From what I have found “No king but King Jesus” was the slogan of the Fifth Monarchists during the Interregnum in England, but there is little evidence for its use during the American Revolution.

 

At a 1999 commencement speech at Bob Jones University, Attorney General-designate John Ashcroft is quoted as saying this phrase was a slogan of the founding fathers. He also said this sentiment is found in the Declaration of Independence in the phrase, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." Was this the motivating cry of the Revolution, and was Thomas Jefferson alluding to it in the Declaration? Ashcroft was wrong on both counts.

 

While people in the colonies may have used the expression, I have not found anything to suggest that it was a central rallying cry, nor that it was implied in the Declaration of Independence. Members of radical sects first used the phrase in a revolutionary context in England in the mid-17th century during the British Civil War. Groups such as the Diggers and the Levellers believed that after the execution of Charles I, a biblical monarchy was near and that Jesus would be the king. (The Diggers advocated the abolition of private property, and the Levellers were for the separation of church and state.) The phrase was particularly incendiary because it attacked the authority of both king of England as well as the clergy. In the American colonies, there are some historical references to it being said by Presbyterians who were agitating against the authority of the British king and harkening back to the earlier revolution.

 

The Enlightenment, not Revelation, was the underlying philosophy of the founders. While Jefferson was a member of the Anglican Church, he, like Washington, Adams, Madison, and Franklin, was a Deist. He believed in a rational God who created the world but that it was up to men, through reason and science, to shape it. Jefferson believed Jesus was a historical figure and moral philosopher, but like his fellow founders, was skeptical about the divinity of Jesus.

 

    I suggest quotes without credit be looked upon as suspect. If you are still reading this I am surprised.

 

KJV Words Not in Other Versions

I have heard sermons on the word individual words in the KJV which is not found in other versions so I looked at this email skeptically.

 

Recently I received an email on the meaning of the “folded napkin” in Jesus’ tomb. I’ve heard sermons on the same topic. It appears to from a sermon Jerry Shirley, a Baptist preacher, preached in 2006. Shirley presumed the Hebrew folks had a tradition regarding the folded napkin. Is it true? He provides no credits. I have been unable to find any information about Hebrew tradition that every Jewish knew concerning folding a napkin.

 

The King James Version:  "...and the napkin that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself."

KJV, AS, and RSV translate the cloth as a "napkin;" NIV a "burial cloth;" NKJV a "handkerchief;" and NASB, ESV a "face-cloth."   I understand the Greek word comes from a Latin word for "sweat."  An example might be a towel for wiping sweat and could be Greek for a towel or cloth, not specifically a table napkin.

NIV and NKJV translates the word "folded;" NASB, SAV, RSV "rolled up;" KJV "wrapped together." Again I understand the Greek word is from words that may mean to twist or to entwine.