Jeffrey Tayler continues his series of anti-theist pieces in Salon with an analysis of sexuality in the Bible (in particular, the King James version): “The Bible should be X-rated: The Good Book is loaded with sexy sin—someone tell Mike Huckabee.” The piece is an analysis of both the salacious and the unwholesome sexual acts detailed in the Bible: stuff that most of us, being well up on the Old and New Testaments, know about. We hear, for instance, about how Adam may well have copulated with his mother (since there were no other women around), how Lot slept with his daughters, about the sexytimes in the Song of Solomon, and about all the prohibition of sexual activities in the Bible, including that of homosexuality.
Tayler’s point is that perhaps conservatives shouldn’t hold up the Bible as a guide to sexual behavior, or sexual morality. So, for example, while conservatives often quote scripture as a reason to deny gay marriage, Tayler argues that the Bible could be construed to favor homosexuality:
But what of gay sex? The Bible, of course, forbids it, warning (in Leviticus 22) that ”thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: [it] is abomination.” Later in the same chapter, it is declared that those who do so “shall surely be put to death.” How many preachers and pastors have cited these lines to rail against gays, no one can say. Yet possibly, a few Biblical personalities chose to ignore such strictures. In 1 Samuel 18:1, we read that “the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.” Then, in 2 Samuel 1:26, David informs Jonathan that “very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.” Just a bromance or an instance of gayness? We don’t really know.
Women, too, may have gotten it on with each other. In the Book of Ruth, Ruth and Naomi may have been lovers.
This, I submit, is a bit of a stretch; Tayler is cherry-picking verses here (of course, so do Republicans), but it’s not at all clear that this refers to homosexuality. More important, the point about the Bible not being a good source of morality holds for far more things than sexuality. It promotes slavery, second-class status for women, genocide, death penalties for working on the Sabbath and cursing your parents, and so on. One could devote an article to every such issue, but of course Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris have already done that.
Although Tayler may be telling people unsavory things they don’t know about the Bible, the piece is not as useful as his previous critiques of theism, for the points have been made often, and recently, by the New Atheists. The best thing about his piece is Tayler’s reacquainting us with the Original Strident Old Atheist, Thomas Paine. He quotes some surprisingly vicious criticism of the Bible, and then reveals that it came from Paine:
Who indited [JAC: not a typo; look it up] such flagrant blasphemy against the Holy Scriptures? Not, as one might expect, the late Christopher Hitchens or some other “New” atheist, but the revolutionary deist and enemy of organized religion, Thomas Paine – the everlasting human font from which many anti-religionists, including myself, draw inspiration. The above quotations come from his fiery treatise against Christianity, “The Age of Reason,” which he wrote more than two centuries ago. “The Age of Reason” is a book to read and treasure and reread. Paine was in places unjustly dismissive of the Bible (as I’ll explain below), but if nothing else, “The Age of Reason” gives lie to the notion, advanced by quasi-literate modern-day commentators with faith-dulled axes to grind, that “stridency” characterizes the New Atheists alone. Paine was relentlessly “strident,” and his brilliant Biblical exegesis shows how right he was to be so.
This has prompted me to make plans to reread The Age of Reason, and also to remind readers of the other strident Old Atheists, including Bertrand Russell, H. L. Mencken (Dawkins never even came close to his invective), Nietzsche, and Bertrand Russell. What’s “new’ about New Atheism is, I always maintain, the view that the existence of God, and other tenets of faith, can be seen as “scientific” hypotheses, and not afforded respect merely because many people accept them. And even that isn’t really new, for the Old Atheist Percy Bysshe Shelley said similar things in the early 19th century, to wit:
“God is an hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof: the onus probandi [burden of proof] rests on the theist.”
But maybe there’s still some value in reminding the faithful (who, after all, know less about the Bible than do atheists) of what’s really in the damned book. As Tayler argues:
Some may object that if those as far back as Thomas Paine were pointing out such things, why is it worth our time now to examine what the Bible actually says? Well, even as nonbelief is spreading, three out of four Americans view the Bible as the Word of God. The “Good Book” continues to poison our politics and give succor to all who would halt our tentative progress and hurl us back into the Dark Ages, threatening women and their rights, our science-based education and our future in a technology-dominated world, and the flickering, almost extinguished (rationalist) spirit of the Age of Enlightenment – the Golden Era of atheism and renewal, humanism and promise. We need a re-Enlightenment, and fast. A first step in the right direction would involve scrutinizing the religious canon that still enjoys far more respect than it deserves.
I’m not sure that 3/4 of American take the Bible as the Word of God, rather than as “inspired by God” and therefore fallacious in places, but I can’t check because Tayler’s link doesn’t work. Nevertheless, I applaud his continuing emphasis on Enlightenment values.
Also in Salon: My atheist search for God: We’re debating science and religion all wrong
It seems to be about how we can still believe in God if we just redefine it. Never gets to the punchline because it’s a book excerpt.
Instead of redefining god as the ground of being as Hart wants us to do, here she is asking us to define god as we want him to be.
My definition of God then: nonexistent.
Diane, this too, is my definition
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Hemant ran a different excerpt today for the same book. It is just as much a cliff-hanger though.
You must have meant Cane copulated with his mother. Not Adam.
Cane. “Sugar” Cane.
Cain was able to copulate with his mother; Adam wasn’t.
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& Tayler not Taylor (in the title), PCC.
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and Bertrand Russell (x2).
You mean Cane sodomised Russell? Twice?
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If you haven’t already, read Common Sense as well. Paine was wonderful.
Although the bad bits of the Bible have been pointed out many times before by many others, just as you say, I still find that most Christians are shocked by some of its contents. They’ve never seen the bad bits before. They just hear the cherry-picked sections read to them on Sunday at church.
My personal favorite is to get them to read Genesis 19: 4-8. The look on their faces is priceless.
As a child I remember being told how it showed what a good guy Lot was. I didn’t realize what actually happened to his daughters – I thought they got beaten up – but I was still horrified. I remember my grandmother getting very embarrassed as I questioned her, and leapt on the solution of the daughters getting beaten up with relief. We went back to Winnie the Pooh after that.
The story makes no sense. Howcome the men of Sodom were so desperate to shag the angels (they must have been pretty boys, but you’d think the wings would give them away…)
Obviously the Sodomites weren’t into paedophilia, the Bibble implies that would have been quite acceptable.
Weird story.
Wow – the lolcat version is pretty racy, too.
I read it at KJ Version on-line and came away thinking two things.: 1) any woman who has any truck, whatsoever, with any religion that holds that scripture “holy” needs to rethink her position and 2) those babble writers sure couldn’t get enough of them thar prepositions!
Adam may well have copulated with his mother
What’s all this then? Typo? Is it Seth or Cain you mean here? Because of course Adam’s mother was spoonful of dirt, apparently. Even so, three’s nothing to suggest that Seth and his mother got it on. Presumably, Adam and Eve had daughters, and all the incest was likely brother-sister for a while. There aren’t many daughters mentioned in the bible at all, and after Eve I don’t recall that any woman is given a name until the time of Sarah and Hagar.
Just Seth and Cain? Poor Abel was always the black sheep in the family.
If you look at the Taylor article, you will see that Jerry meant to type Cain.
Tayler. Sigh.
I think that perhaps what’s new about the New Atheists is that modern media means they reach a far wider audience. People notice when they stand up.
The great thing about this is that all those who think they’re alone in their doubt realize they’re not, and with modern methods get the chance to reach out and speak out, if only anonymously.
I agree that what is new is not the ideas but the size of the audience reached.
The internet is one factor, but there are others. There is a tipping point of public receptiveness, an audience big enough for “God is Not Great” or “The God Delusion” to be profitable to print. Growing up I never saw such books in the bookstores. Even the rise of big box book stores probably played a role by bringing in to even small towns a larger and more homogenized selection, including books like these. And with that increased visibility comes more visibility through TV interviews and so on.
I think what is “New” about the “New Atheists” is simply that they can no longer be ignored. The religious no longer feel safe in the knowledge that they will never encounter atheists or their arguments save in straw man form in sermons. Now, even the most cloistered believer can’t avoid hearing at least scraps of what the atheists are saying. This bothers them greatly.
This has prompted me to make plans to reread The Age of Reason,…
It is my understanding that many editions leave out Part Three – Examination of the Prophecies, so that American Atheists published a separate volume with just that.
Part Three is also available for free online.
In part three, Paine examines all of the alleged OT prophecies cited in the NT. He finds them wanting.
PCC, Russell appears twice here
Bertrand Russell on religion is well worth a second read.
A book not worth reading twice is not worth reading once. —C. S. Lewis
That’s pretty bold coming from C.S. Lewis, who had a lot to lose by that rule!
I agree
The link he intended to give is http://www.gallup.com/poll/170834/three-four-bible-word-god.aspx (one character different).
47% – The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word
28% – The Bible is the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally.
21% – The Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by man
I think these numbers definitely back the contention that the “Good Book” “continues to poison our politics and give succor to all who would halt our tentative progress and hurl us back into the Dark Ages”.
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Common Sense by Paine in 1776 probably had as much impact on the revolution as anything. The guy just had a way with words and some even though Adams wrote it.
Always kick myself for not knowing Thomas Paine was from Thetford, England, when I was in the area many years ago. Use to go to Thetford to catch the trains and had no idea.
You mentioned atheist anger in an earlier post I myself, and this could just be semantics, would say a large dolop would be frustration with the continuing belief in a hideous myth, it’s cost to progress and the wellbeing of all the inhabitants of this fragile blue planet, let alone the planet itself, the birth place of all life. What is it they don’t get about this befuddles me.
Science education is the only way forward and I welcome the continual dissing of all religousity whatever the flavour.
Hear, hear!
Please excuse this one time test:
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Strikethrough too, and text (iirc; it might be code).
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Um, you’ve got Jeffrey Taylor in the title and Jeffrey Tayler in the first sentence. Imthink the latter is correct.
Bertrand Russel definitely deserves to be listed twice! Please do not correct! ;0)
Bob Ingersoll should absolutely be on the list as well: his prose, most nobly his eulogy/tribute to Walt Whitman, is magnificent. And no doubt all true WEIT fans have read Susan Jacoby’s Freethinkers, which contains the most thorough love letter to RGI one could hope to read.
Another person you might put on your reading list is Jeremy Bentham, a very impressive philosopher of law and social reformer, on whose principles the Australian republic was founded.
Goddammit my hotlink didn’t work!
“Thy love to me was better than that of any woman,” said David of Jonathan. And just what kind of love does anyone think David was receiving from his 100 wives and 400 concubines…er, whatever?
Bromance, my foot!
Stuff like whole “David and Jonathan may have ben gay” is what I don’t like about what some atheists do. (Of course, there’s nothing wrong with people gay! I’m just referring to historical inference.) I got into atheism largely through the works of Bart Ehrman, and his popularizations led me to other works in the field of secular biblical research. I am, of course, an amateur, but having read those works, it saddens me when people try and come up with their own models on what the history of some biblical verses without at least taking a look at what’s already been done– and the work that’s been done is quite fascinating. The human past, after all, is just as much a part of the physical universe as stars and cells and should be approached rigorously. Unfortunately, many atheists just want to offend believers and don’t hold their polemics to the standards of freethought. And when people like Ehrman call them out on it, they get hate mail insinuating that they’re not “really” atheists (or agnostics in Ehrman’s case).
I should clarify a bit. I’ve never read anything about Jonathan and David being gay and for all I know it could be true. But I really doubt that the way to find that out is to use a text that’s been translated from a translation of a translation. I’m sure biblical scholars would know based on hundreds of other usages whether the word translated as “love” had a sexual implication or not. So a more concrete example– I remember reading in Jesus and Mo that some Israeli researcher found psychedelics in Sinai and published a paper that Moses was high during the revelation. But Moses didn’t exist. Looking at Egyptian records and Canaanite history, there’s really no reason to suggest that the Israelites were kept as slaves. So while it may get on religious peoples’ nerves to suggest that Moses “was just high,” there’s really no basis to say he had the prerequisite existence to get high in the first place.
I share your preference that atheists, freethinkers, etc., should meet a higher standard. But there is the case where a counter-interpretation is related to demonstrate how easy it is to rationalize that a given passage of the bible supports whatever suits your fancy, but that is not intended as a claim of historical accuracy.
The goal being to demonstrate that the interpretations that believers come up with are no more likely to be valid, that the bible is a mess of contradictions, and that the end result is that you can use the bible to support about anything you could dream of.
There are cases of what you are criticizing, but I think that sometimes people misinterpret a claim that is made to demonstrate that there is no way to determine which is more likely, that claim or the one favored by believers, for a claim of historical accuracy. In other words, demonstrating that using believers’ own methods it is just as easy to find support for exactly the opposite thing they claim is supported by the bible.
“Unfortunately, many atheists just want to offend believers and don’t hold their polemics to the standards of freethought.”
Well, I don’t think this is Tayler “just wanting to offend believers.”
The point is, I think, that if you take the accepted versions of scripture at face value, as at least some believers do to prop up, e.g., their homophobia, you can as easily find passages that have a contrary interpretation.
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Tom Paine is one of my heroes and he had, through ‘The Age of Reason,’ an intellectual influence on my greatest of American heroes, Abraham Lincoln. When Lincoln came out of New Salem to Springfield, Illinois, in 1837, he was an outspoken anti-theist. As he rose in politics, his ‘friends’ warned him to cool it or face political death. To a great extent he did–publicly. Privately, however, he held to his radical skepticism concerning anything like an interventionist god and to his intense dislike of Christian evangelism. True, he probably died as some stripe of theist, but much closer to a determinist/deist than anything acceptable to the Christian electorate. I think I’m right to say that he is the only U.S. president not to have been a member of any church.