Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Monday, June 18, 2007
Tammuz
A common tactic employed by Jewish educators to help ensure that their young charges are not tempted to leave the faith by Christian missionaries is to point some of the similarities between Jesus and earlier pagan gods that were also worshiped as divine incarnations who were killed but later resurrected in order to provide salvation for their respective followers. This type of deity was so common in the ancient world that it has its own category - the "dying-and-rising" gods. Some notable examples are Mithras, the Egyptian Osiris, and the Greek Attis. The back-story of each is pretty much the same. There is some fight or betrayal that leads to the tragic demise of the deity, followed by a great deal of mourning before the god makes his/her triumphant, supernatural return. The death and rebirth of each deity was supposed to mirror the annual cycle of the earth in which the summer vegetation withers each winter, but is rejuvenated again each spring. On a deeper level, the stories also reflects a very universal human response to our own life-cycle of birth and inevitable mortality, as well as a reaction to loss in general. Followers of these gods usually had elaborate mourning rituals, often at the end of summer, to commemorate the annual "death" of their deity, along with the rest of nature.
The educators could argue that one should identify Christianity as just another adaptation of these earlier pagan belief systems and therefore could not possibly be "true." However, what they didn't tell us is that Judaism may also have some vestiges of this concept.
The very idea of Judaism acquiring religious concepts from outside influences is so beyond the pale for most traditional practitioners that is never even considered. However, some of the tenets of faith considered to be most intrinsic to Judaism are completely absent from its early forms. For example, ask most religious Jews today what their "goal" is in observing the commandments and the most common response will likely be that s/he is working towards earning a premium spot in Olam Haba ("the world to come"), even though this post-life paradise is mentioned exactly zero times in the Old Testiment. The concept of an afterlife where goodness and obedience to the Divine commandments on Earth is rewarded - or in fact, a post life existence more elaborate than the generic Sheol, a state of dreary oblivion that awaits both the righteous and the wicked - is a later transplant picked up during the Babylonian exile.
From the Babylonians we also got - and even your Rabbi will admit to this - the familiar names for the months in the Jewish calendar. In the Pentateuch, the months are referred to simply by number, the first month, the second month, etc. After the start of the first exile, they suddenly have the Babylonian names attached, for example, in the book of Ester:
"In the first month, that is, the month Nisan, in the twelfth year of king Ahasuerus, they cast Pur, that is, the lot, before Haman from day to day, and from month to month, to the twelfth month, that is, the month Adar." (Ester 3:7)
As sacrilegious as it may sound to use pagan names for our scared calendar, it get worse. Tammuz, the month that started this past Sunday according to the Jewish calendar, is named for a Babylonian deity, one of the dying-and-rising kind. For them, the month named for Tammuz began at the summer solstice, when the daylight hours begin to decline. Each year the Babylonian tradition dictated that there be severe mourning, some of which is even recorded in the Bible:
"Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the Lord's house which was toward the north; and, behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz. Then said he unto to me, 'Hast thou seen this, O son of man? turn thee yet again, and thou shalt see greater abominations than these." (Ezekiel 8:14-15)
This much is not disputed. However, while I realize that what comes next is a bold assertion, I don't think that it is a coincidence that the month of Tammuz, along with the following month of Av, is considered to be a time of mourning in the Jewish annual cycle. Traditionally, Moses broke the Tablets on the 17th day of Tammuz, and Holy Temple was destroyed (twice, by the Babylonians and then the Romans) on the 9th of Av, which becomes the most sober day of the year. Both of these are observed as fast days and the period in between, the "three weeks," are considered to be time of mourning when restrictions on weddings, live music, and haircuts are kept. Jews pray all year for the Temple to be rebuilt, but these prayers take on extra fervor during this time. It may be that, directly or indirectly, this morning process is the Jewish take on "dying and rebirth," but with reference to the Temple instead of a deity. The fact that the destruction of the Temple is said to have occurred at the end of the summer may just be a historical quirk (that's when wars are fought, after all) but I think that the timing, along with the naming of "Tammuz", indicates that there is quite possibly a connection to an ancient mourning for a deceased god.
The educators could argue that one should identify Christianity as just another adaptation of these earlier pagan belief systems and therefore could not possibly be "true." However, what they didn't tell us is that Judaism may also have some vestiges of this concept.
The very idea of Judaism acquiring religious concepts from outside influences is so beyond the pale for most traditional practitioners that is never even considered. However, some of the tenets of faith considered to be most intrinsic to Judaism are completely absent from its early forms. For example, ask most religious Jews today what their "goal" is in observing the commandments and the most common response will likely be that s/he is working towards earning a premium spot in Olam Haba ("the world to come"), even though this post-life paradise is mentioned exactly zero times in the Old Testiment. The concept of an afterlife where goodness and obedience to the Divine commandments on Earth is rewarded - or in fact, a post life existence more elaborate than the generic Sheol, a state of dreary oblivion that awaits both the righteous and the wicked - is a later transplant picked up during the Babylonian exile.
From the Babylonians we also got - and even your Rabbi will admit to this - the familiar names for the months in the Jewish calendar. In the Pentateuch, the months are referred to simply by number, the first month, the second month, etc. After the start of the first exile, they suddenly have the Babylonian names attached, for example, in the book of Ester:
"In the first month, that is, the month Nisan, in the twelfth year of king Ahasuerus, they cast Pur, that is, the lot, before Haman from day to day, and from month to month, to the twelfth month, that is, the month Adar." (Ester 3:7)
As sacrilegious as it may sound to use pagan names for our scared calendar, it get worse. Tammuz, the month that started this past Sunday according to the Jewish calendar, is named for a Babylonian deity, one of the dying-and-rising kind. For them, the month named for Tammuz began at the summer solstice, when the daylight hours begin to decline. Each year the Babylonian tradition dictated that there be severe mourning, some of which is even recorded in the Bible:
"Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the Lord's house which was toward the north; and, behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz. Then said he unto to me, 'Hast thou seen this, O son of man? turn thee yet again, and thou shalt see greater abominations than these." (Ezekiel 8:14-15)
This much is not disputed. However, while I realize that what comes next is a bold assertion, I don't think that it is a coincidence that the month of Tammuz, along with the following month of Av, is considered to be a time of mourning in the Jewish annual cycle. Traditionally, Moses broke the Tablets on the 17th day of Tammuz, and Holy Temple was destroyed (twice, by the Babylonians and then the Romans) on the 9th of Av, which becomes the most sober day of the year. Both of these are observed as fast days and the period in between, the "three weeks," are considered to be time of mourning when restrictions on weddings, live music, and haircuts are kept. Jews pray all year for the Temple to be rebuilt, but these prayers take on extra fervor during this time. It may be that, directly or indirectly, this morning process is the Jewish take on "dying and rebirth," but with reference to the Temple instead of a deity. The fact that the destruction of the Temple is said to have occurred at the end of the summer may just be a historical quirk (that's when wars are fought, after all) but I think that the timing, along with the naming of "Tammuz", indicates that there is quite possibly a connection to an ancient mourning for a deceased god.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Evolutionary Psychology
Physics is great for explaining the natural world, but offers little help when it comes to explaining human nature. Since one is likely to run into other humans in the course of any given day, it is usually advantageous to have some idea about why people act the why they do. An extremely powerful tool for doing this is evolutionary psychology, which extends the concepts of natural selection to the workings of the human brain. By thinking about specific emotions and cognitive strategies as being beneficial or detrimental adaptations no less than organs or limbs, human predilections that seemed incomprehensible before can be made sense of. Even the popular media invokes EP as the prevailing scientific theory. Time magazine periodically does so; recently, it devoted an entire cover story to the science of hunger, in which it details humans have evolved a strong desire for fat and calorie rich foods, which were rare prizes for our ancestors but now are all too readily available.
Although evolutionary psychology is sometimes criticized as consisting of contrived, post-hoc explanations, it does make testable, falsifiable predictions that have been tested and confirmed by experiment. Almost as important, it has great explanatory value regarding human behavior that is mystifying otherwise. Why do we crave unhealthy foods? Why do teams sports come so naturally to us? Why are we generous to our relatives and distrustful of outsiders? Why do we find certain people to be attractive potential sexual partners more than others? Why do we feel compelled to enforce fairness and punish cheaters, even if it is not in our immediate self-interest? Consider the alternative religious explanation: "Humans act that way because that's just how God made us." In addition to the fact that this has zero explanatory value, it also doesn't make sense on it's own. Why would a deity create us a propensity to selfishness, a desire to mate with forbidden partners, or a mind that come up with rival gods and religions? To say that "the creator (or the devil or whatever) is just testing us" is to engage in real post-hoc storytelling.
Although evolutionary psychology is sometimes criticized as consisting of contrived, post-hoc explanations, it does make testable, falsifiable predictions that have been tested and confirmed by experiment. Almost as important, it has great explanatory value regarding human behavior that is mystifying otherwise. Why do we crave unhealthy foods? Why do teams sports come so naturally to us? Why are we generous to our relatives and distrustful of outsiders? Why do we find certain people to be attractive potential sexual partners more than others? Why do we feel compelled to enforce fairness and punish cheaters, even if it is not in our immediate self-interest? Consider the alternative religious explanation: "Humans act that way because that's just how God made us." In addition to the fact that this has zero explanatory value, it also doesn't make sense on it's own. Why would a deity create us a propensity to selfishness, a desire to mate with forbidden partners, or a mind that come up with rival gods and religions? To say that "the creator (or the devil or whatever) is just testing us" is to engage in real post-hoc storytelling.
Friday, June 1, 2007
The Onion
I liked this Onion piece because it satirizes some of the unusual ways some believers try to reconcile what they have been taught to believe with scientific evidence. Often this results in a strange hybrid in which "God directed evolution to create life" or "The six days of creation really took billions of years." These syncretist solutions usually end up mangling both science and religion in the attempt to get them to mesh. The article also takes the "God of the Gaps" approach to logical extreme - as science continually improves its naturalistic explanation of the world, there is less and less room to invoke the supernatural.
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