ISRAEL AND HAMAS

             It is disheartening to hear of large crowds of people demonstrating in Washington against Israel on account of its incursion into Gaza in search of the rockets and tunnels of the Hamas terrorists. One also hears of much larger and more vociferous mobs demonstrating in European cities against Israel. While such demonstrations may have a humanitarian component—concern for the lost lives of Palestinians, particularly children--there is also a large element of anti-Semitism.  As various American writers have shown, the Israeli invasion was a justified response to multiple rocket attacks by Hamas and the building of tunnels by Hamas under the border between Israel and Gaza.

            Joe Klein, in Time Magazine, put his finger on the problem: “Hamas, which was in an existential jam this spring, needed a new strategy. It had lost its prime ally in the region when the Egyptian army overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood.  (Hamas is the official Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood.) It also alienated another of its supporters, Iran, when it sided with the Brotherhood against Bashar Assad in Syria. Opposition within Gaza to Hamas’ corruption and misrule was also on the rise. What to do? Provoke Israel. It had worked in the past.”

It is useful to understand that the war between Israel and Hamas is not simply a war between two competing religions or political ideologies. It is a war between civilization and darkness. There are many in the world who would paint Hamas as a group of devout Muslims who provide extensive social programs for their people. This portrait ignores the fact that Hamas represents the vanguard of a form of nasty fascism.

The recent hostilities were started by Hamas when it began raining rockets on Israel without provocation. What was Israel supposed to do? Sit by and complain without doing anything? Israel is not that kind of country. They did what the U.S. would do if Mexico started bombarding our cities with explosives. They retaliated.

Hamas is the extreme branch of Fatah. Unlike the Fatah movement on the West Bank, Hamas refuses to negotiate a permanent peace with Israel or to recognize the right of Israel to exist. The United States has designated Hamas as a terrorist organization.

Israel is not just another Middle Eastern country. It is the one true democracy in the Middle East and the one country that reflects the kind of freedom and culture embraced by America. This is why it is hated so much by the most radical and uncivilized Muslim people of the region. Although it is a haven for Jews the world over, Israel is an open society in which more than half of the population is non-religious. There are large numbers of Muslims and Christians living in Israel with complete freedom of religion. Many Americans have gone to live in Israel.

Some people believe that Israel has no right to exist because it has set itself up as a Jewish state and occupied what was formerly a Muslim land under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. I’m sorry, but I think that the case of Israel is special. It is not just that the Jews of Europe needed a place to live after the Holocaust, but that the vast history of pogroms, hatred, and discrimination of Jews left them with no option but to set-up a state where they could live in peace and defend themselves from their enemies. There may be some discrimination against Muslems in Israel, but Israel has created a democracy—yes, a messy and contentious democracy—in the middle of a land ruled by angry and violent people.

The Israelis, many of whom are descended from European, Russian, and Polish Jews who were almost completely exterminated in the Nazi holocaust, have created a powerful military with the vow “Never Again!” They have also created a thriving economy in the midst of the wasteland that Muslim nations have allowed to develop in the deserts of the Middle East despite the existence of oil. They have preserved and expanded the great European culture from which they are descended.

The strong culture of Israel should be contrasted with that of the Islamic world. As George Will once wrote, the Middle East “festers with forces that menace elevated societies everywhere.” I believe that the root cause of radical Muslims’ hatred of Israel is Muslims’ lack of self-confidence. Israel was able to take land in the desert and make it bloom. Many Middle Eastern Muslims see Israel as a Western colony in Arabia and look upon it as a thumb in their eyes.

Some Muslims turned to fanatic religion as an answer to their feelings of inferiority. This is a common historical fact. People of lower economic, social, and intellectual classes envy and resent the more fortunate people of the world. They need to believe that they are among the elect few who practice the correct religion and that however lucky other people may seem, those others are condemned to religious error on earth and to hell upon death. Fanatic forms of Islam, such as Khomeini’s Shi’a revolution, the Salafism of the Moslem Brotherhood, the worldwide jihad of Osama bin Laden, and the fanaticism of the Iraqi ISIS fighters, is the answer for such Muslims.

The U.S. should not presume to dictate to the Israelis what they should do in the face of rockets falling on Israeli cities. It is important that any truce and settlement of the dispute between Israel and Hamas include protection of Israel and restriction of Hamas’ ability to attack Israel.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POVERTY, IGNORANCE, AND RELIGION

        The Science Channel recently aired a controversial and surprising new television program entitled Through the Wormhole. It is a discussion of current scientific issues with the actor, Morgan Freeman, as its host. In one episode entitled “Did we invent God or did God invent us?” Freeman explores the question of whether the concept of God is purely a product of our brains. As part of the discussion, Freeman tells about the ideas of a University of Texas psychologist named Jennifer Whitson. Through experiment, Whitson illustrates how people who feel that they have no control over their lives and surroundings are more likely to look for explanations in something mystical. On the other hand, people who feel well in control of their lives are less likely to believe in mystical or  spiritual beings controlling their destinies.

            One of Whitson’s experiments involved having people try to solve random problems. There were no right or wrong answers to the problems, but Whitson designed the experiment so that some people would feel that they were solving all of the problems while others were made to feel that they were failing to solve any of the problems. As a final part of the experiment she gave each of the people a picture of random static noise such as appears on a television screen. There were no pictures in the static, but the people who had been made to feel that they had failed to solve any of the problems, and who were discouraged with the feeling that they had no control, regularly claimed that they saw a picture of something in the static. Those who thought they had done well with the problems and felt in control said that they did not see anything in the static.

            The conclusion drawn by Whitson was that people tend to look to mystical and spiritual things for help when they feel that they have no control. People who feel totally in control are far less likely to adopt spiritual and mystical explanations. Morgan Freeman said that this might explain why the most religious and superstitious people in the world are in the poor and ignorant populations.

            Poor and ignorant people seem to be far more religious and superstitious than rich and educated people. Religion is basically a form of encouragement, support, and reinforcement. It is a crutch for people who feel they have no control over the world and need something to back them up. Poor and ignorant people want to believe that this is not all there is to life. They want to believe that there is a life after death that is much better than this one and is the best of all possible worlds.

            According to Gallup polls, there is a direct relationship between poverty and the religiosity of countries around the world. In the world's poorest countries -- those with average per-capita incomes of $2,000 or lower -- the median percentage of people who say religion is important in their daily lives is 95%. In contrast, the median for the richest countries -- those with average per-capita incomes higher than $25,000 -- is 47%.

Highly educated people tend to be less religious than people with little education. A poll of those distinguished scientists who are members of The National Academy of Sciences disclosed that 93% are atheists or agnostics.

            The anthropologist Scott Atran says: “In Britain and the United States, the highest measures of religious commitment and the most radical forms of religious affiliation (Pentecostal, Baptist, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists etc.) are registered among the most marginal or underprivileged social groups, especially minorities and persons at the bottom of the socioeconomic totem pole.”

            When you look at it from the point of view of very poor people the world over, belief in God has a rational basis. We are all born with a natural inclination to assume that everything in the world should make sense. Very poor people cannot accept that their lives of want, hunger, crime, infirmity, discrimination, and disrespect, are all there is or will ever be for them. They believe that life should be fair, and that there must be something to balance their hardships.  If you wander in the worst ghettos of American cities, or the teeming, indigent barrios of Latin American cities, or the fetid warrens of India’s slums, you will find people with nothing in the way of material goods, but a great deal of hope for a better life after death.

They need to believe that somehow in the afterlife God will level the playing field and that they are not condemned for all eternity to being poor, backward, inferior, or ignorant. They need to believe that in eternal life there will be no aristocrats and peasants, no intellectuals and simple minds. The poor of America need to believe that in the afterlife they will have everything they want and will get as much respect as if they were millionaires. The poor of the arid deserts of Arabia need to believe that in the afterlife there will be cool rivers flowing through green pastures with plentiful flowers and fruit.

            Religion is not nearly as important to middle and upper class Americans as it is for the poor. For many of the comfortable and educated, there is considerable doubt and lax adherence to required church-going expectations. I have known many middle class people who say that they believe in God but who go to church only once or twice a year. I have found that of those middle and upper class people who are deeply religious, many tend to be less educated or intelligent than others. The more educated and intelligent one is, the more such a person has a curious mind. People with great curiosity tend to be more skeptical. People with great skepticism are more likely to be atheists.

PUTIN AND UKRAINE

      It was distressing and scary to see Russian military forces move into and take-over the Crimea in southern Ukraine. It is even more distressing and depressing to see American conservatives blaming our president for these dangerous events and showing admiration for Vladimir Putin, the man behind this aggression.

            Anyone who has read history will be aware that World War I was started with the same kind of occurrences as are happening now in Ukraine. Back then, the assassination of a Grand Duke, followed by a series of demands, confrontations, and clashes, led to greatest bloodletting the world had ever known. World War II was preceded by Hitler’s claims that he needed to invade neighboring countries in order to protect the German populations therein. Putin has made similar claims about the Crimea, and has hinted that he feels the same about other areas in nations surrounding Russia.

I believe that what happened before World Wars I and II could happen in Ukraine. If the Russian army were to move into eastern Ukraine, and the Ukrainian Army were to confront the Russian invaders, and if European nations were to come to the aid of Ukraine, and the United States was to fulfill its treaty obligations with NATO, we could be in a bloody world of trouble—all caused by the insecurities of Vladimir Putin. Contrary to the image he likes to project, I believe that Putin is a terribly insecure man.

            Let’s not forget that Putin is a former KGB officer. After the fall of the Soviet Union he was in charge of the Federal Security Service which was the successor to the KGB and which retained many of the old KGB thugs. He has said that the fall of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Putin has never denounced the police state that existed under Communism. The Soviet Union may have been powerful, but it existed on the basis of a harsh, ruthless, violent tyranny that denied its people most of the freedoms we experience in the United States and confronted the United States and Europe with brutal hostility. Putin may not want a return of Soviet Communism, but he would surely like to reestablish Russian homogeny over the states that were formerly part of the USSR.

Under Putin’s dictatorial rule the democratic freedoms that arose in Russia after the fall of Communism have gradually eroded, and opposition groups have come in for serious attacks. In 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, a reporter who was critical of the Putin regime, was murdered outside her Moscow apartment. In the U.K., Alexander Litvinenko, a noted Putin critic, was poisoned with a lethal dose of polonium 210. The chess master, Gary Kasparov, was thrown into jail for campaigning for justice and civil rights. Other opponents of Putin have incurred similar attacks.  The Russian media has seen its freedoms of speech and the press eliminated.

            Putin has made it clear that he desires to restore the influence and power of the Soviet Union. In 2008, when the President of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, sent troops into the rebellious Georgian republic of South Ossetia , Putin sent tank units of the Russian Army into Georgia and crushed the Georgian forces. Putin has succeeded in intimidating Russia’s former republics, and dissuaded them from becoming members of NATO.

            In July 2007, Putin suspended Russian observance of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE). This treaty established limits on key categories of conventional military equipment in Europe and mandated the destruction of excess weaponry. It restricted Russian freedom to expand its military might.

            Perhaps those conservatives who seem to admire Putin so much should consider whether they want a return of the Soviet Union. The Russian Federation has a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons. Putin has enlarged the Russian armed forces. We could easily return to a Cold War status.

            It used to be a rule between the major political parties in America that whatever domestic disagreements we had, we came together as a nation on foreign policy. The reason for this was obvious. Internal disputes over foreign policy make a nation appear confused and weak. When dealing with other nations, especially potential enemies, we should speak with one voice. For some reason, conservatives have depicted President Obama’s efforts to bring-about peace in the world as weakness. They show admiration for a macho thug like Putin. They ignore the likelihood that the reason for Putin’s tough-guy stand, and for his international defiance and aggression, are insecurities about himself and his country.

            President Obama is obviously not a weak man. He is a decent man who has no need to prove his masculinity. He shows his deep strength and humanity by working for peace and understanding. I wish that his conservative critics had the courage to do the same.

THE HOLOCAUST

 Today is the last day of Shavuot, the Festival of Weeks. Lately, I have been reading spy novels about World War II Germany and I have been thinking a lot about the mammoth slaughter of the Jews during the Holocaust. Thinking about the Holocaust always makes me very emotional. I do not know why. I am not Jewish, but the very thought of this atrocity moves me deeply. As a gentile, the Holocaust has always presented a serious problem for me. How could a modern, culturally rich, Christian nation, carry-out such a monstrous act of evil? With all of the crimes of man, including the genocides committed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and other places, and the atrocities committed in every war, I still see the Holocaust as a horror unmatched in the history of human evil. It should never be compared to other acts of evil.

Emil L. Fackenheim, in his book, To Mend the World, said: “To link Auschwitz with Hiroshima is not to deepen or widen one’s concern with humanity and its future. It is to evade the import of Auschwitz and Hiroshima alike.” The same can be said of all of the other cataclysms suffered by humanity. Each is a separate occurrence of evil.

The history of the Jews, beginning with the conquest of Israel and banishment of Jews by the Romans, is one long sorrowful testament to man’s inhumanity. The Nazis did not invent the genocide of the Jews. They merely took it to new depths of horrendous magnitude. Over the centuries before the Holocaust the Jews experienced many genocides and pogroms. Around the time when Columbus was sailing to America, the rulers of Spain were expelling all of the Jews from their realm. Many reasons are given for this massive persecution, but no explanation can begin to justify such evil.

One frequently hears people compare things to the Holocaust. The right-wing anti-abortionists like to say that abortion is the same as the Holocaust. Such unthinking speech is morally abhorrent. How can any person compare the elimination of a microscopic, not-yet-conscious, not-yet-thinking, not-yet-feeling unborn embryo to the deliberate murder of grown, thinking, feeling human beings? At Auschwitz and other camps, the Nazis starved millions of Jews. They raped the women, shot families in front of huge ditches, tortured millions, and, ultimately, gassed the remainder. They used to save time and trouble by throwing live babies and small children into the ovens without gassing them first. If you cannot identify the distinction between that and abortion, you are morally numb.

The excuse given by the Christian Nazis and Fascists for persecution of the Jews was usually that they were: “Christ Killers.” It is a revoltingly stupid claim. Jesus of Nazareth was killed by the Romans, yet nobody has ever wanted to exterminate the Italians. Even if it had been the Jews who killed Jesus (himself a Jew), why blame it on Jewish descendants living thousands of years later?

According to the Bible, Jesus had brothers and sisters. We must assume that many of the descendants of these brothers and sisters were Jews, and that millions of Twentieth Century Jews in Europe had the blood of Jesus’ family in them. The Christians who marched Jews into the gas chambers of Auschwitz and other camps were actually murdering the descendants of Joseph, Mary, and the family of Jesus.

As a gentile, I am able to find something valuable in the teaching of the great Jewish philosopher, Emile Fackenheim. He said “To grasp the Holocaust whole-of-horror is not to comprehend or transcend it, but rather, to say no to it, or resist it.” Fackenheim said that 613 commandments were given on Mt. Sinai. He offered a 614^th commandment. In effect, he said that if we forget, or minimize, or diminish the importance of the Holocaust, if gentiles engage in anti-Semitism, if Jews give-up their beliefs and culture because of the Holocaust, they will be letting Hitler gain a form of victory. He said that we must not let Hitler win.

I may not share the beliefs of religious Jews, but by dedicating my life to tolerance and brotherhood, I can join in the crusade to defeat Hitler and his progeny.

EASTER AND THE HOLY EUCHARIST

It is Christian doctrine that Jesus died as a sacrifice for man. The idea is that “Original Sin” was committed by Adam and Eve, and that the stain of that sin was upon every human being born thereafter. Thus, even though subsequent humans did not commit the original sin, they were guilty of it as well as other sins. Christ came to save man from original sin and all other sin, and to provide a means for man to achieve everlasting life in heaven. In order to save man, Christ had to perform a sacrifice. Jesus was God, so he performed a sacrifice to himself. The sacrifice was a human sacrifice of the most bestial and agonizing kind, a painfully slow death by suffocation on a cross. 

One has to wonder why this omnipotent, all-loving, almighty God couldn’t have simply forgiven all men of sin without this orgy of torment? Why did he have to be the scapegoat for all human beings and go through this horrendous nightmare of torture in order to provide salvation? The answer is that the writers of the Bible lived in a benighted and barbaric time when this was thought to be the right way for the gods to behave.

The resurrection of Jesus from the dead has been called the basis for all Christianity. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:13-14: “But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.” The celebration of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is the most important date on the Catholics’ liturgical calendar. It is also the concoction of Paul and other writers who came long after Jesus died.

Scholars use various methods of textual criticism, including language and style, to determine if text is authentic or was added to the original gospel at a later time. There are many things on which they agree. Scholars agree that Jesus did not predict his own resurrection from the dead or his second coming. The quotations in the Bible in which he makes such a prediction (e.g. Mark 8:31) are considered to be later additions.

Moreover, the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection are so contradictory and improbable that the whole story has to be dismissed as fiction. Matthew says that the day following Jesus crucifixion Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to the tomb (Matt 28:2), but Mark says that the two Marys and Salome went (Mark 16:1). Luke writes that Mary Magdalene went with Mary the mother of James, Joanna, and other women (Luke 24:10). Matthew says that the stone was removed by an angel at the time the women arrived at Jesus’ tomb (Matt. 28:2), but Mark and Luke say it had already been removed (Mark 16:2-4, Luke 24:1-2). Matthew says that when the women arrived, the angel was outside the tomb (Matt 28:2), but Mark says the angel was inside the tomb (Mark 16:5) and Luke says there were two men inside the tomb (Luke 24:4).

In Matthew the two women rush from the tomb to tell the disciples (Matt 28:8-9), but Mark says that they said nothing to anyone (Mark 16:8). Luke says that they reported the story to the disciples (Luke 24:9-11). John tells a very different story from the others (John 20:1-18). Later post-resurrection stories are also in conflict (compare Matt 28:16-20 with Luke 24:13-53, and John 20:19).

The first Gospel written was the Gospel of Mark. Scholars can tell that the whole story of the resurrection of Jesus in Mark was added to the Gospel by somebody else long after the original version was written. Originally, the Gospel of Mark ended at Chapter 16:8. That is the part where the women find the empty tomb and are told by a “young man” that Jesus has risen. The part of the Gospel after that, in which Jesus appears to various people, was added by later writers who wanted to supply authenticity to the myth of Jesus’ resurrection. As Professor Bart D. Ehrman of the University of North Carolina says: “These verses [Mark 16:9-20] are absent from our two oldest and best manuscripts of Mark’s Gospel, along with other important witnesses; the transition between this passage and the one preceding it is hard to understand….and there are a large number of words and phrases in the passage that are not found elsewhere in Mark.”

If you consider the fact that the Gospels of Mathew and Luke were based on the gospel of Mark, then it becomes clear that the Gospels’ story of Jesus’ resurrection is pure myth that was made-up long after the Gospels were written. The earliest Christian scriptures were the Epistles of Paul, yet Paul does not give any details about Jesus’ resurrection other than referring to it (See Rom. 6:5, 1 Cor. 15:13).

The idea of resurrection by a god did not begin with Jesus. Lots of gods arose from the dead in ancient times. Among them are Mithra, Attis, Dionysus, Osiris, Tammuz, Ishtar, Adonis, Persephone, Semele, Heracles (or Herakles), and Melqart. Some claim Buddah was resurrected from the dead.

Roman Catholics around the world celebrate Easter by partaking of the Holy Eucharist. It is a wafer of unleavened bread and liturgical wine. The wafer is placed in the recipient’s hand or mouth, and the wine is usually sipped out of a common chalice ( a somewhat unsanitary practice). According to Church dogma, the bread and wine are not just symbolic commemoration of the body and blood of Jesus. They are the actual body and blood of Jesus. It is believed that by consuming the body and blood of Jesus you take into your body part of his divine grace.

It seems that for thousands of years nobody has ever stepped back and examined this holy practice. A little thinking about it should, however, make us wonder where it came from and why we do it. Why eat a human body and drink human blood. Isn’t that a little cannibalistic? How did the Catholic Church ever decide to ordain this as the most profound way of worshipping Jesus. Obviously, it is taken from an ancient time when men performed human sacrifice. It is well known that following a human sacrifice, ancient men frequently ate the body and drank the blood of the sacrificial victim. The sacrificial victim was often an enemy defeated in battle. It was believed that by doing so the eater took into himself the courage and strength of the victim. Even in more modern times headhunters would eat the bodies of their victims in the belief that the valor and fighting ability of the victim would come into the victor. Thus, as the practice of human sacrifice and cannibalism decreased, religions continued the practice by substituting bread, wine, and other food for the bodies of sacrificial victims.

The rite of the Last Supper, which the early Christian Church adopted as its Holy Eucharist, clearly was borrowed from the ritual meal practiced by more ancient religions. In The Roman Cult of Mithras, Manfred Clauss says: “The offering of bread and wine is known in virtually all ancient cultures, and the meal as a means of binding the faithful together and uniting them to the deity was a feature common to many religions. It represented one of the oldest means of manifesting unification with the spiritual, and the appropriation of spiritual qualities.” Claus describes how the worshippers of the god Mithra engaged in a ritual meal similar to the Christian Eucharist.

In the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), the Last Supper is a Passover meal. In the Gospel of John, it takes place the day before Passover. It is possible that Jesus asked his followers to eat bread and drink wine in his memory. It is highly unlikely that he horrified his disciples by recommending anything so cannibalistic as having bread and wine represent his body and blood. Such ideas were abhorrent to the Jews. Even the blood of an animal was forbidden at a Jewish meal by biblical law (Leviticus 7:26). Geza Vermes, Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies at Oxford University, in The Religion of Jesus the Jew, says, “...the imagery of eating a man’s body, and especially drinking his blood...even after allowance is made for metaphorical language, strikes a totally foreign note in a Palestinian Jewish cultural setting...With their profoundly rooted blood taboo, Jesus’ listeners would have been overcome with nausea at hearing such words.” The idea that the eating of bread and wine was a consumption of the body and blood of Jesus is a later Greek development, taken from the Mystery Religions such as the cult of Mithra. The biblical version of the Last Supper was obviously added long after the original gospels were written.

In the Mystery Religions, the cult “agapes” were “love feasts” in which the communicants achieved “mystical identification with the divinity.” The cults of Mithra and Attis had sacramental use of bread and wine as a means of communing with the gods. The early Eucharistic feasts of the Christians came to be called “agapes” by the Greeks. It was the Greeks who substituted bread and wine for the body and blood of sacrificial victims. If one goes back far enough, one can see the history of human sacrifice in Greece and how it affected the liturgy of the modern Church.

NOAH’S ARK AND HUMAN STUPIDITY

           Today, March 28, 2014, Hollywood will release a film called “Noah” starring Russell Crowe. While Christian groups will nit-pick the biblical accuracy of the film, I want to discuss the total absurdity of the biblical story and the stupidity of the people who believe in it. My point was made very well by Bill Maher in a recent television show where he said:

“No one can blame me when I say this is a stupid country when 60 percent of the adults in it think the Noah's Ark story is literally true--which is why I'm already sick of the ads for this floating piece of giraffe crap. You believe a man, Noah, lived to be 900 years old, that's what the Bible said, and when he was 500, he decided to have three kids just like Clint Eastwood. And when he was 600, he and his three 100-year-old sons built a boat unto which, in one day, they loaded over 3 million animals, all of which were apparently indigenous to within five miles of the boat.

"The thing that's really disturbing about Noah isn't that it’s silly, it's that it's immoral. It's about a psychotic mass murderer who gets away with it--and his name is God. Genesis says God was so angry with Himself for screwing up when he made mankind so flawed, that he sent the flood to kill everyone--men, women, children, babies. What kind of tyrant punishes everyone just to get back at the few he's mad at? I mean besides Chris Christie.

"You know conservatives are always going on about how Americans are losing their values and their morality. Well maybe it's because you worship a guy who drowns babies. And then God's genius plan after he kills everyone is to repopulate the world with a new crop of the same ass-holes who pissed him off the first time with predictable results. He kills millions more. If we were a dog and God owned us, the cops would come and take us away. Why are we getting our morals out of this book? Why are people following any of it?"

I can cite many reasons why the Noah story in the Bible is simply a fairy tale, but that should be obvious to ordinarily rational people. Nevertheless, for some reason, many people believe this garbage, so I must point-out several things:

In the first place, there are two flood stories in Genesis.  In one, God tells Noah that he is going to destroy sinful mankind with a flood and that Noah is to take his family and two of every kind of animal on board the Ark (Genesis 6:19).  In the other, God directs Noah to take seven pairs of clean animals, of every type, and one pair of the unclean (Genesis 7:2). The reason that there are two stories is because there were different people who wrote different stories at different times which were later stitched together into what we now call Genesis. It was not written by Moses as is claimed in the Bible.

According to the Bible, the Ark was 300 cubits (about 450 feet) long. Try to imagine fitting all those millions of animals onto the Ark. There are currently 5,488 species of mammals on earth. There would be two (or seven) of every kind of elephant, rhinoceros, hippo, gorilla, ox, bull, cow, horse, pony, lion, tiger, Komodo Dragon, zebra, bear, giraffe, wildabeeste, elk, moose, pandas, buffalo, Llama, panther, pigs, dogs, racoons, etc. Because of the extinction of species in the past few thousand years, there no doubt were thousands more species at the time that Noah was supposed to have lived. However, the Bible says that Noah took two (or seven) of every kind of “animal” on board the ark, so this includes all species in addition to mammals, including amphibians, birds, reptiles, and insects, which in today’s world would account for over 2.4 million animals. It would have been impossible for many of the animals to come from distant parts of the world. How could kangaroos and koalas get from Australia to the Middle East? How did Noah keep lions, tigers, bears, panthers, and hyenas from attacking deer, elk, antelope, sheep and other kinds of natural prey? How did Noah feed all those animals? Many of these animals constituted the primary source of food for other animals. How did he and his family clean-up after the animals?

Some time ago ABC News did a story about some Christian archeologists from Texas who claimed to have found the remnants of Noah’s Ark. They apparently found something that looked to them like the Ark on Mount Suleiman in Iran's Elburz mountain range rather than on Mount Ararat in Turkey, the site identified in Genesis 8:4. Nevertheless, they believed it was the Ark. "I can't imagine what it could be if it is not the Ark," said Arch Bonnema of the Bible Archaeology Search and Exploration Institute--a Christian archeology organization dedicated to looking for biblical artifacts.

We have to wonder at the pathetic spectacle of “scientific” teams of grown people going out and climbing mountains to find the remains of Noah’s Ark. It is a little sad. Serious archeologists, geologists, historians, and theologians know that the story of Noah’s Ark is an ancient myth, a fairy tale, not history. It never happened. Fundamentalist Christians and Jews might argue that the building of the Ark was a miracle and that the whole story must be taken as miraculous. Why then do they go out on safaris trying to find the actual Ark? Surely if it was a miraculous vessel that God created only for that one period of time, it would not still survive today.

Anthropoligists and paleoanthropoligists have used fossils and DNA to trace the history of man. They know that our species originated in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago. They recognize that man evolved from lower animals over a period of millions of years. There has been no worldwide flood interfering with human history. Moreover, geologists are unable to find any physical evidence of the kind of worldwide flood spoken about in the Bible.

The story of Noah and the Flood did not originate with the writers of the Hebrew Bible. It was borrowed from ancient Mesopotamian myths that precede the writing of the Bible by thousands of years. The Mesopotamian myths were written about different gods and different people.

I agree with Bill Maher that in order to believe in the story of Noah’s Ark one has to be stupid. Not just uninformed, not just religious or reverant, but downright stupid. There is no basis in history, science, or even theology to believe in this silly story. Some people think that Americans are smarter than people in other parts of the world. The fact that so many Americans believe in the Noah’s Ark myth indicates to me that we are really no smarter than most of the other people in the world.

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CHRISTIANS, THE TEA PARTY, AND THE POOR

            The Tea Party movement arose out of anger at the use of taxpayer money to help the poor during the recession. In February 2009, the day after President Obama announced his Making Homes Affordable plan to help people facing mortgage foreclosures, a reporter for CNBC named Rick Santelli went on a rant at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange against the proposal and announced that: “We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All of you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m going to start organizing.”

            The Chicago rant went viral and immediately attracted millions of right-wingers who were enraged that the government was going to spend billions of dollars to help poor people, particularly African Americans, whom they deemed to be lazy, shiftless, and undeserving. Said Santelli: “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills.” There was not a word of sympathy for the families undergoing the agonizing trial of losing their homes, often because they had lost their jobs. While President Obama showed deep empathy for the misery and distress of these people, Tea Partiers all over the country organized and struck out against those suffering terrible hardship from the effects of the great recession.

            Naturally, the mass of adherents to this newly named right-wing movement were people who call themselves “Christians.” Those ultra-conservatives use their religion not only as a comfort and consolation, but also as a weapon to bludgeon those with different theologies and values. Their so-called Christian pastors can drive their congregations into frenzies of hatred merely by attacking abortionists, gays, liberals, Hollywood types, the ACLU, atheists, Moslems and Jews.

            It is the belief of these “Christians” that Almighty God came down to earth in the form of a wandering Jewish preacher named Jesus of Nazareth. They assert that unless you believe that Jesus was the eternal creator of the universe and the “Son” of God, you are doomed to spend eternity in Hell or in the outer darkness.

            Nevertheless, they do not seem to pay any attention to the teachings or example of Jesus. They are wildly antagonistic to the idea of government helping the poor even though helping the poor was the cornerstone of the life of Jesus. Surely Jesus did not mean that although we should all help the poor, government should do no such thing. I doubt that Jesus would have agreed with the anti-poor fury of today’s right-wingers. It is surprising that so many of these Christians can quote the Bible, yet seem indifferent to the message that Jesus left with us.

            One of the finest modern books about Jesus is Thomas Cahill’s Desire Of The Everlasting Hills. In his book, Cahill zeroes-in on the great moral teachings of Jesus, and movingly describes that part of the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus tells of the second coming and tells the story of the King who says, “...for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was naked and you clothed me…I was sick and you visited me ...as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:35-40). Says Cahill:

It is ironic that some Christians …

have never bothered to heed

these solemn words about the presence of

Christ in every individual who is in need.

Jesus told us only once (at the Last Supper)

that he would be present in the Bread and

Wine, but he tells us repeatedly in the

gospels that he is always present in the

Poor and Afflicted---to whom we should

all bow and kneel.

            It is plain from reading the many passages of the Bible where Jesus spoke about the poor that he did not believe that they were worthless and undeserving leeches on society. He favored the poor. He even counseled some to sell everything they had and give to the poor (Matt. 19.21). He wanted his followers to see him in the faces of the poor and afflicted. How would he have felt to be spit upon and despised by the Tea Party people of today.