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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.

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.

The Onion

I Believe In Evolution, Except For The Whole Triassic Period

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.

Willful Ignorance?

Recently, I was at someone's apartment and the conversation turned to Sam Harris, the noted atheist author who had written Letter to A Christian Nation, which addresses, among other things, the dangers of mixing religion and politics. The host owned a copy of one of Harris's earlier books, The End of Faith, which also argues in favor of reason over belief. As the book was taken off the shelf and handed to a guest, someone else present said (in effect) "You probably shouldn't read the book. It makes some good arguments - not as good as the author thinks they are, but still pretty persuasive." Silently, I was taken aback. Clearly there was a lot of cognitive dissonance in the room. The speaker obviously had a great deal of questions about his faith, or at least, enough to read a book that completely demolishes what he has been taught to believe. His response after reading the book, for which, he admits, he has no satisfactory arguments in defense of his faith, was not to revise his beliefs but to advise others not to read the book in the first place. To me, this borders on an attempt to help others remain willfully ignorant. In contrast, if someone handed me a book and was able to persuade me that there was a strong likelihood that that, after reading it, I would be convinced that God exists, or that Unicorns control the UN, et cetera, I would be edger to read it because I'm really interested in finding the truth (or at least, I hope I am). However, it is human nature in many instances to prefer confirmation of one's beliefs, even when mistaken, above being faced with facts that may lead to having to change one's opinion. This is especially true when the person has made a large investment in a particular course of action, and a lifetime of religious belief and practice certainly qualifies. Nevertheless, I'm still encouraged by the fact that there are religious young people who possess the open mindedness to question what they have been taught, even if they are not quite ready to take the next step in the process of moving beyond faith.

Slate.com book excerpt

Previously, Slate has run several interesting features on religion, such as a very engaging "Blogging the Bible" recurring column in which a modern reader offers his impressions after actually reading the book so many claim as indisputable cannon. Recently, the website posted a excerpt from Christopher Hitchens's new book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Hitchens makes some very powerful points, and I'm sure that even many believers will agree with him, provided they are talking about all the other religions, not the specific one they personally maintain to be absolute truth.

Demystifying Love

Empiricists often hear objections to the effect that "science provides a reasonably good description of most phenomena, but there are just some things, such as god, or love, or human consciousness, that simply transcend any attempt to be explained by any purely materialistic theory. These critiques can usually be recognized as simple reformulations of the "god of the gaps" philosophy ("since I can't explain it right now, it must be the work of a god or gods or some other unexplainable source"). By simply giving up it , the objector is ignoring the track record empiricism has had against the god of the gaps (eg. lighting is not really a projectile from Zeus). Science is constantly making headway on questions formerly considered to be completely intractable. This is not to say that scientists will ever have all the answers - it may turn out that some things are really beyond human comprehension, but don't count on it. Therefore, upon being called a "materialist," one can rejoin, "you say it like it's a bad thing!"

One area in particular that has long been thought to be the Provence of the transcendent is romantic love. Ironically, it is on this topic that evolutionary biologists and sociobiologists have made huge progress, showing how "love" can be explained as an vital evolutionary adaptation. In fact, The New York Times "themed" this Tuesday's Science Times with the science of "desire." Some traditionalists might be unhappy to hear that the "transcendent" romantic attraction between sweethearts is really nothing more than a matter of neurotransmitters acting in very down-to-earth biochemical reactions, however, reality is not always so accommodating to our wishes. Richard Dawkins likes to say, science and religion try to answer the same questions. Science has the added benefit of usually being right. Besides, explaining our world doesn't make it less interesting by "ruining the mystery." On the contrary, science has shown that the universe is so much more facinating than humans could ever had imagined. As Daniel Dennett points out in Consciousness Explained, knowing that the sun is a huge thermonuclear furnace teeming with atoms in ceaseless activity is a lot more interesting than thinking it to be pulled across the sky by a chariot.
So instead of taking all of the excitement out of life, empiricism helps inspire a sense of awe that a pile of molecules we call a human being could love and think and have a sense of awe in the first place.