The Religion Report - ABC Radio

I've included links to ABC Radio's Religion Report before, but this week there was an interesting program that dealt with a new age group.

"In the United States this week a case is before the Supreme Court that could have important implications for the free expression of religion in public life. At the centre of the legal storm is a new age group from Utah, the Church of Summum, which is fighting for the right to erect a monument to its beliefs. But as we'll hear, the dispute raises broader questions about the constitutional right to freedom of speech."

Just follow the link - Religion Report November 19, 2008

You'll need to fast forward 18 minutes and 56 seconds into the podcast to get to the section on the Church of Summum.

God Trumps

The New Humanist calls itself the magazine for free thinkers. They have an amusing section on a game called God Trumps. Here's what it's about.

"No doubt you are visiting the New Humanist website because your religion is looking a bit threadbare and worn out so you are a shopping for a new one but you just can't figure out which is the best. Well, mate, your worries are over. We have devised a new game that will solve this time-honoured riddle once and for all. Yes, play God Trumps and find out if Buddhism beats Scentology, Catholicism crushes Hinduism or Zororastrianism zilches Islam.

Its good clean fun and of course not to be taken seriously at all. Just like religion really."

Year 12 - New Age Spiritualities

The following is a reprint of a post from a Blog titled "The Constructive Curmudgeon". It is written by a Christian who is a Professor of Philosophy but is a concise summary of the New Age phenomenon.

"New Age Spiritualities" published in Dictionary of Contemporary Religion in the Western World (InterVarsity, 2002)

NEW AGE SPIRITUALITIES

The term “New Age,” as in New Age spiritualities or the New Age movement, has a variety of meanings. Christians have sometimes spoken of the new age inaugurated through Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. In the past few decades, however, “New Age” has been used to describe a social movement (or network), as well as a family of spiritual approaches to life involving both doctrine and religious activities that are taken by most analysts to lie outside the bounds of orthodox Christianity. The popularity of the term “New Age” reached its height in the 1980s. Many now opt for “new spirituality” or merely “spirituality.” However, “New Age” is still used, and not merely pejoratively.

New Age ideas and practices came to the fore through the countercultural revolt in Western nations in the 1960s, but their roots go further back to the nineteenth century movements of Transcendentalism, the Mind Science churches, and the Theosophical Society. Those associated with the New Age often controversially claim to continue an ancient esoteric tradition frequently suppressed by traditional religiosity and secular philosophy.

As a social movement, the New Age has no one leader, organization, or official creed, although celebrity enthusiasts abound. In the 1980s, actress Shirley MacLaine chronicled her conversion to New Age thought in several best-selling autobiographies and multiple media appearances, which helped bring the New Age perspective into the limelight. Some New Age oriented writers, such as Marilyn Fergusan, refer to the New Age as a network of like-minded organizations and individuals who share a concern for human and planetary transformation through spiritual experiences focused on the potential of the untrammeled self. The New Age will dawn when people turn away from both atheism and the restrictive dogmas of traditional Western religions, and instead embrace ideas and practices that free the self to realize its divine possibilities. This is sometimes correlated with the astrological claim that we are moving into the Age of Aquarius. In this sense, New Age spirituality can be loosely described as millenarian and messianic, with different people expressing different eschatologies. Although the New Age as a movement is composed of many different groups, New Age partisans may congregate at psychic and metaphysical fairs, for special spiritual events (such as the much-hyped Harmonic Convergence of 1987), or at sacred natural sites such as Sedona, Arizona (thought to be a center of mystical energy vortexes), or Stonehenge in England.

COMMON THEMES

Although New Age spiritualities are eclectic, syncretistic, and somewhat flexible with respect to beliefs, some common themes consistently emerge. Paul Heelas rightly claims that “the most pervasive and significant aspect of the lingua franca of the New Age is the that person is, in essence, spiritual.” Although a Christian would agree with this, Heelas goes on to specify what the New Age view takes the spiritual self to be. “To experience the ‘Self’ itself is to experience ‘God,” the “Goddess’, the ‘Source’, ‘Christ Consciousness’, the ‘inner child’, the ‘way of the heart’ or most simply and, I think, most frequently, ‘inner spirituality’.” In other words, the self is the spiritual center of the universe. Ted Peters captures this notion in the title of his critique of the New Age: The Cosmic Self. This view of self challenges the claim of monotheism that a transcendent, personal, and moral Creator stands above and beyond the created self, which should submit the Creator’s authority.

Like Christianity, the New Age world view repudiates materialistic secularism, deeming it reductionistic and unfit to accommodate our spiritual natures and possibilities. Unlike Christianity, it deems monotheism as overly authoritarian because it shackles the self to the concepts of finitude and sin and fails to see Christ as uniquely God incarnate. The world view of recent influential New Age thinkers (although they may not like the designation), such as best-selling author and medical doctor Deepak Chopra and mystic-scholar Ken Wilber, is generally pantheistic and monistic. This is representative of much, but not all, of New Age spirituality. In pantheistic monism, the Deep Self or True Self or Higher Self is one with the divine essence, however infrequently experienced. Chopra, much influenced by the nondualistic Hinduism of Transcendental Meditation, holds that this awareness of divine oneness is the source of spiritual and physical health. Wilber, influenced by Zen Buddhism, works on a more theoretical level, claiming that he has synthesized both Eastern and Western traditions across a broad range of disciplines. The emphasis on monism leads many New Age teachers to erase any ultimate ontological separation between God and creation or between good and evil. New Age teachers also affirm belief in reincarnation and an openness to paranormal experiences such as past-life regression, ESP, telepathy, telekinesis, spirit contact (or channeling), UFO encounters, and so on.

However, New Age spiritualities are not uniformly pantheistic and monistic, and even these perspectives come in different varieties. Some New Age adherents may adopt panentheism, a world view that affirms that while God is in everything and everything is in God, God in some sense transcends the cosmos. This is the view of New Age celebrity Matthew Fox, a former Catholic priest who became an Episcopalian to escape the censure of the church. Furthermore, while pantheism classically affirms an impersonal and amoral deity, many New Agers influenced by the monotheism of Judaism and Christianity inconsistently attribute personal qualities (such as love and purpose) to the impersonal/amoral divine force, principle, or consciousness. This tendency is found, for example, in the writings of Marianne Williamson, a popular New Age writer and speaker in the US. Others involved in New Age spirituality may be almost polytheistic in their insistence that we “create our own reality,” yet invoke the notion of universal deity and cosmic oneness in other contexts. Some traces of dualism can be found in New Age thought as well, especially those schools of thought influenced by Gnosticism, which rejects matter as illusory, evil, or less real than spirit.

The experience of New Age spirituality is often deemed more important than mere beliefs. This experientialism is found in the use of such consciousness-expanding therapies, as yoga, visualization, chanting, meditation, and the group experiences offered through seminars such as Werner Erhard’s est (later called the Forum). These “psychotechnologies” (Marilyn Ferguson) claim to empower people to cut through their sense of limitation and finitude in order to reach the “God within.”

Heelas has noted that New Age practitioners of many stripes employ religious traditions in a “detraditionalized” way. That is, they select elements from various Eastern mystical and Western occult and pagan traditions that suit their individual, interior needs. The ultimate authority on spiritual matters is the self, not some external source, whether church, society, or holy writ. Christopher Partridge refers to this orientation as “epistemological individualism,” which is often (paradoxically, some might say) wedded to a metaphysical monism.

PREMODERN, MODERN, OR POSTMODERN?

In its cobbled-together eclecticism, New Age spirituality is akin to postmodernism--an approach that rejects fixed boundaries, foundations, and established definitions in favor of alternative, fungible, and rather ad hoc social and personal arrangements. However, the religious traditions to which the New Age typically appeal are premodern, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and ancient paganism. To further complicate matters, New Age adherents may be considered modernists in at least three senses: (1) Despite monistic claims, they retain a focus on the individual and autonomous self’s sense of meaning and purpose, thus opposing the postmodernist notion of the decentered self wherein the self dissolves into contingent social structures. (2) New Age spiritualities maintain a commitment to the idea of cosmic progress by claiming that we are moving into a superior New Age, which is often understood as the result of “spiritual evolution.” The idea of social progress is anathema to postmodernist sensibilities, since it smacks of a positive modernist metanarrative or totalizing ideology. (3) Some New Age theorists, such as physicist Fritjof Capra in The Tao of Physics and subsequent writings, claim that the discoveries of modern physics substantiate the metaphysical claims made by ancient eastern mystics. Whether successfully or not, this strategy seeks rational support for mystical views from modern scientific knowledge, which it takes to be reliable and objective. Therefore, it seeks legitimization from a source of knowledge taken to be authoritative by modernist thinking.

CRITICISMS

Many of the first critiques of New Age spirituality came from conservative Protestant writers who saw the perspective as unbiblical and even demonic in some of its aspects. These polemical approaches ranged from the sensational and apocalyptic accounts that tied the movement into end-times prophecy, to the more apologetic and theological treatments that assessed the New Age world view logically and biblically. Similar treatments by conservative Roman Catholics followed, sans apocalypticism. More liberal writers of both traditions often hailed the New Age as reinvigorating spirituality, albeit in heterodox ways. Skeptical, modernist critics condemned the New Age as superstitious and retrograde, since they took it as dismissing critical rationality and the advances of secular, modernist society. Since the early 1990s, a growing number of nonreligious, scholarly books and journal articles have appeared which describe the phenomenon historically, sociologically, and psychologically.

Bibliography
1. Robert Basil, ed., Not Necessarily the New Age: Critical Essays. New York: Prometheus Press, 1988.

2. Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy. Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1980.

3. Douglas Groothuis, Unmasking the New Age: Is There a New Religious Movement Trying to Transform Society? Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1986.

4. Paul Heelas, The New Age Movement. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.

5. Christopher H. Partridge, “Truth, Authority and Epistemological Individualism in New Age Thought,” Journal of Contemporary Religion, Vol. 14, No. 1, 1999:77-95.

6. Ted Peters, The Cosmic Self: A Penetrating Look at Today’s New Age Movements. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

7. Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything. Boulder, Colorado: Shambhala Press, 1996.

Year 12 - Religion in Australia in the 21st Century

NCLS Research is a world leader in research focused on connecting churches and their communities. Decades of rigorous and thoughtful research has been based on millions of participants. Co-operating denominations, including Catholics, Anglicans and Protestants, are a network for sharing practical resources to help churches.

The following link will take you to the findings of some of their recent research.
http://www.ncls.org.au/default.aspx?sitemapid=4528

An article focusing on the current religious landscape in Australia by Fr. Frank Brennan can be found here: http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=8111

One of the growing religious movements in the developed world is Paganism. Here's an article discussing Paganism in Australia.
http://www.australianreview.net/digest/2003/08/cusack.html

There's a wiki page, obviously from an Australian school, here that has some summaries for the HSC unit Religion in Australia Post 1945. Just follow this link and it will take you there.
https://cm12sor.wikispaces.com/Religion+and+Belief+Systems+in+Australia+Post-1945

Aboriginal Land Rights

The following website has some clear and simple information on the Aboriginal Land Rights Movement. The site is Northern Territory specific but is a very useful resource.

http://www.nlc.org.au/articles/cat/land-rights/

Santeria

St. Lazarus (Babalu Aye)

I was in Cuba recently and was interested to learn about the religion of Santeria. It is an example of syncretism, the melding of two religious traditions. Santeria is a religion of the West African slaves who were brought to Cuba to work on the sugar plantations. These slaves brought their spiritual traditions with them and, when forced by the slave owners to convert to Catholicism, they hid their religious secrets inside the imagery of their masters’ Saints. Santeria, or “the way of the Saints,” is the term the slave owners applied to what they perceived as their slaves’ primitive worship of the Catholic Saints in preference to the more traditional Catholic focus on Jesus Christ. The slaves themselves referred to their beliefs as Lucumi, “La Regla de Ocha” (the Rule of Ocha), or simply, “la religión.”

I found this video on YouTube about Santeria in Cuba. Take a look!

Biblical Insights From Archaeology

The Jordan River

Because the Bible was written in Hebrew and Greek it is necessary that someone translate it into English and other languages so that it can be read by those with little or no knowledge of the original languages. Most of us realize this. Perhaps we do not see as readily that the customs and culture of the Bible must also be "translated" for the modern reader. History and archaeology provide the Bible student with much help in this effort.

Archaeology is a systematic study of ancient people as their life can be learned by what they left behind. In addition to the remains of palaces, temples, monuments, and great buildings, the archaeologists find immense libraries, weapons, pottery, tablets, murals, coins, jewelry, utensils, and even clothing. The "Biblical world" includes the areas of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), Persia (modern Iran), Egypt, Palestine (modern Lebanon, Israel, the West Bank), Jordan, Syria, Asia Minor (modern Turkey), Greece, Italy and a few other areas.

What Archaeology Can and Can Not Do

The Bible claims to be the inspired word of God (2 Tim. 3:16-17). We do not believe that the purpose of archaeology is to "prove" the Bible is true. It is better to speak of archaeology illustrating, illuminating, or supplementing the Biblical record. Sometimes even the word confirm may be appropriate. Generally speaking, the finds of archaeology have been friendly to the Bible, but some problem areas do exist and several widely held views have been reversed as a result of subsequent studies.

Some Values of Archaeology

(1) General Cultural Background. Archaeology, along with other historical records, provides the general cultural background of the history of the Bible. The Bible furnishes us with a character and archaeology furnishes the cultural background in which he lived. It says that these persons were not figments of overzealous imaginations, but real people. The sketchy lives of characters described in the Bible are seen to fit into the general historical period in which the Bible places them.

Excavations of the City of David (Zion) in Jerusalem have revealed much about life at the time of the fall of the city to the Babylonians. The excavations at Lachish have provided a better understanding into both the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests of Israel and Judah. This information provides much help in a study of the Old Testament historical books and the prophets.

(2) Resurrection of Forgotten People. Forgotten people have been brought to life by the archaeological spade. The Hittites, even though mentioned more than 40 times in the Old Testament (Josh. 1:4, et al.), were unknown outside the Bible at the beginning of the twentieth century. Some critics had denied the existence of such a people. By 1906 the Hittite capital at Boghazkoy (near Ankara, the capital of modern Turkey) was being excavated by Hugo Winckler. I have visited the site as well as the Anatolian Civilizations Museum in Ankara where the Hittite treasures are housed. Courses in Hittite civilization are now offered in major universities.

The names of numerous individuals who are mentioned in the Scriptures have been found on inscriptions, seals, and bullae from the period in which they lived. Ahab, Jehu, Mesha, Jehoiachin, Gemariah, Baruch, and Sargon are just a few of those named in the Bible who are also now known from historical records outside the Bible.

(3) Chronology. The Israelites never developed a consecutive chronology. Who has not wished for more information as he tried to make sense of the books of Kings and Chronicles? Fortunately, the nations about Israel (Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon) did use consecutive dating. By the Israelite contact with these peoples we are able to develop dates for Old Testament events and persons. The Babylonian Chronicle, read by D. J. Wiseman of the British Museum in 1955, provides the date of the capture of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and the taking away of Jehoiachin (2 Kings 24:10 17). In our calendar the date would be March 16, 597 B.C. Other tablets, now in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, list rations provided daily to king Jehoiachin and his servants while they were in Babylon (2 Kings 25:27 30).

(4) Identify Biblical Sites. Several Biblical sites have been identified as a result of inscriptions that have been discovered. Gezer was identified when an inscription with the Hebrew words "the boundary of Gezer" was found at the site (1 Kings 9:15 17). Other examples of this include Gibeon, Ekron, Derbe, Lystra, and Thyatira.

(5) Help in Translating the Bible. Many ancient documents and inscriptions have been discovered which provide a better insight into the meaning of words used in the Hebrew and Greek originals which make up our Bible. Actual Biblical manuscripts have also been found.

(6) Demonstrates Accuracy of Bible. Archaeology has done a great deal to correct the impression that the Bible and Biblical history was of doubtful trustworthiness. Many of the illustrations used above show that the Bible is to be trusted in what it says.

The Case of Sargon

The case of Sargon provides a good illustration of the value of archaeology in Bible study. He is one of the forgotten persons who has been brought to life by the archaeological pick, and he provides a great illustration of the historical trustworthiness of the Bible. Because the story has unfolded over a period of a century and a half it shows the need for patience on the part of students. In a day of instant communication and the quick fix, this is not easy for most of us.

Sargon II was king of Assyria from 721 to 705 B.C., but records which survived into the 19th century made no mention of him. In the only reference to Sargon in the Bible the prophet Isaiah says, "In the year that the commander came to Ashdod, when Sargon the king of Assyria sent him and he fought against Ashdod and captured it" (Isa. 20:1). In the earlier English versions, including the King James and the American Standard, the Hebrew term for commander was transliterated as a personal name, Tartan. Since the time of those versions scholars have learned more about the Assyrian language. The New King James continues to use the term Tartan but adds a note, "Or the Commander in Chief." The NASB simply uses the term commander. The RSV and the NRSV use the phrase commander in chief. The NIV uses the phrase supreme commander. Grogan, in The Expositor's Bible Commentary, says the term tharetan (tartan) "really means 'second' and is indirect testimony to the great value the Assyrians attached to military prowess. Their supreme commander was second in status only to the king himself."

James Orr commented in 1906, "Ancient writers knew nothing of him [Sargon]. He was a mystery: some did not hesitate to deny that he ever existed" (The Problem of the Old Testament, 399). Sargon's palace was found by Paul Emile Botta at Khorsabad in 1843. In various inscriptions and annalistic reports Sargon II claims to have taken Samaria (Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 284 87). A nonagonal prism, chronicling the expedition of Sargon II against Babylon, Medians, Syria, and Palestine mentions the conquest of Samaria, "the land of the house of Omri," in 721 B.C. (British Museum artifact 22505 from Khorsabad, 8th century B.C.).

In one annal Sargon says: "I besieged and conquered Samaria, led away as booty 27,290 inhabitants of it. I formed from among them a contingent of 50 chariots and made remaining (inhabitants) assume their (social) positions. I installed over them an officer of mine and imposed upon them the tribute of the former king" (ANET, 284 85). In another annal he claims to have rebuilt the town "better than (it was) before and settled therein people from countries which I myself had conquered" (ANET, 284). Samaria actually fell to Shalmaneser in 722 B.C. (Assyrian records and the Bible agree). Sargon began his reign in 721 B.C. and claims some of the credit.

My only opportunity to visit Iraq (area of ancient Mesopotamia) was in 1970. I recall a room in the newly opened Iraq Museum in Baghdad devoted to items from the palace of Sargon at Khorsabad. The British Museum has numerous artifacts depicting Sargon or containing inscriptions about his work (BM118822; BM118828; BM135206; BM118808, et al.). Recently the Louvre has opened a remodeled exhibit of reliefs from the palace of Sargon II.

Fragments of a basalt victory stele of Sargon II were found at Ashdod in 1963. This artifact is now on display in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Ashdod is mentioned in Isaiah 20:1 as the town captured by Sargon!

In 1989 archaeologists unearthed fabulous treasures at Nimrud (Biblical Calah) including more than 125 pounds of gold jewelry. According to a report in Time, "Much of that gold [found in April] turned out to be priceless jewelry draped around the skeleton of a young princess named Yabahya, tentatively identified as the daughter of one of Assyria's most renowned and feared kings, Sargon II." In July, a few yards from the original find, the excavators found more than 440 pieces of gold jewelry believed to "represent the private collection of an Assyrian queen, perhaps the wife of Ashurnasirpal himself." See "The Golden Treasures of Nimrud," Time, 30 Oct., 1989: 80 81.

Isaiah had it right all along. One needs to hesitate a long time (maybe a couple of centuries!) before questioning the accuracy of the Bible.

Conclusion

If the Bible student uses maps, Bible dictionaries, commentaries, and other up to date helps which reflect the current knowledge in archaeology he will be greatly repaid for his effort. This information can serve him well when he talks with those who doubt the historical character of the Bible.

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This article was published in Biblical Insights, Jan., 2001. It may be reproduced freely in its entirety.
© Ferrell Jenkins 2002. Bookmark our new domain: BiblicalStudies.Info. (http://biblicalstudies.info/)

Top Ten Archaeological Discoveries of the Twentieth Century Relating to the Biblical World

If you are interested in archaeology and the Bible and have difficulty figuring out what's real and what 's fundamentalist rubbish (take a bow Noah's Ark) you might enjoy this article.

http://biblicalstudies.info/top10/schoville.htm

Ten major archeological discoveries of the past century that are significant for understanding the world of the Bible are identified. For each find, a narrative of its discovery and the crucial information it unlocks is relayed, plus its connection to key biblical events or references. These ten discoveries illustrate the point that new facts about the Bible, its world and personalities, come through diligence in archeological research.

The Top Ten is:

1 THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS

2 THE HOUSE OF DAVID INSCRIPTION

3 AMULET SCROLL

4 GALILEE BOAT

5 BARUCH BULLA

6 OSSUARY OF CAIAPHAS

7 PONTIUS PILATE INSCRIPTION

8 EKRON INSCRIPTION

9 MOUNT EBAL ALTAR

10 UGARIT

Overview of Christian History

The following link will take you to the webpage of Rev. Felix Just S.J.

http://catholic-resources.org/index.html

Introducing the site he states, "This website contains a variety of materials, mostly related to biblical and liturgical studies, intended for scholars, teachers, students, pastors, believers, seekers, and others. Many pages contain my own writings and photographs, some were created by my students, and some are collections of links to other websites. Although I am a Roman Catholic priest and have taught mostly at Catholic universities, I hope that these materials are academically reliable and pastorally adaptable enough to be useful for many other Christians and non-Christians as well."

Want a quick overview of Christian history? If you do, be thankful. Felix Just has compiled one for you. Take a look.

http://catholic-resources.org/Courses/Christianity-Gilles.htm#Summary

Christian Creeds

When early Christian Church leaders were trying to come up with a statement of faith, or creed, they looked first to sacred texts and then to tradition. The purpose of a creed was to formalise what was considered correct belief and oppose those errors that these church leaders saw popping up around the Mediterranean world. You can trace schisms in Christianity through respective creeds and their interpretations such as the filioque controversy. By the time of the Reformation protestant churches throughout Europe were developing their own creeds and in doing so, looking back to the origins of Christianity.

The following link will take you to site called Creeds of Christendom. It lists a lot of creeds and some have a commentary.

http://www.creeds.net/#rcc

Gilgamesh and the Flood

We were talking the other day about creation stories in the book of Genesis and I happened to mention the story of the flood. I asked the students to look up the epic of Gilgamesh and discover how it could have been a source for Genesis. The following links tell the story and analyse its impact on the story of the biblical flood.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh

http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/MESO/GILG.HTM

The following table has been copied from the Institute for Creation Research. You need to be careful when researching biblical origins and influences as fundamentalists, who have a very widespread web presence, use stories such as Gilgamesh to prove the historical veracity of biblical texts. However, this gives a quick summary of the similarities and differences in the two stories.

COMPARISON OF GENESIS AND GILGAMESH
	GENESIS	GILGAMESH
Extent of flood	Global	Global
Cause	Man's wickedness	Man's sins
Intended for whom?	All mankind	One city & all mankind
Sender	Yahweh	Assembly of "gods"
Name of hero	Noah	Utnapishtim
Hero's character	Righteous	Righteous
Means of announcement	Direct from God	In a dream
Ordered to build boat?	Yes	Yes
Did hero complain?	Yes	Yes
Height of boat	Several stories (3)	Several stories (6)
Compartments inside?	Many	Many
Doors	One	One
Windows	At least one	At least one
Outside coating	Pitch	Pitch
Shape of boat	Rectangular	Square
Human passengers	Family members only	Family & few others
Other passengers	All species of animals	All species of animals
Means of flood	Ground water & heavy rain	Heavy rain
Duration of flood	Long (40 days & nights plus)	Short (6 days & nights)
Test to find land	Release of birds	Release of birds
Types of birds	Raven & three doves	Dove, swallow, raven
Ark landing spot	Mountain -- Mt. Ararat	Mountain -- Mt. Nisir
Sacrificed after flood?	Yes, by Noah	Yes, by Utnapishtim
Blessed after flood?	Yes	Yes

Jim Jones and The People's Temple

Today one of my students asked if I had seen a documentary on a religious cult that had aired on television earlier in the week. I hadn't, but we started discussing Cults and I mentioned that when I was at school one of the big stories was Jim Jones and The People's Temple. I briefly outlined what I remembered and after a little more discussion we got back to work. So here is a couple of pages that tell the story and a picture of the aftermath.

http://www.gbs.sha.bw.schule.de/jim_jones_history.htm

http://www.cnn.com/US/9811/18/jonestown.anniv.01/

There is a PBS documentary about Jim Jones and here's a link to the site that contains information about it.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/jonestown/

Jewish Bioethics on ABC Radio National's Religion Report

Posted below is a link to the recent ABC Radio National Religion Report Podcast that looks at Jewish Bioethics. It also contains a report on the recent Lambeth Conference and the danger of a split in the Anglican Church.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/religionreport/default.htm

Listen to this episode

If you just want to read a transcript of the show go to the following link.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/religionreport/stories/2008/2333504.htm#transcript

The Myth of the Flat Earth

Jeffrey Burton Russell is a historian I have enjoyed reading for some time. His four volume work on the Devil and mankind's perception of evil is very illuminating, as is his work on witchcraft in the middle ages. The following is a speech he gave summarising the ideas behind his latest work. I think it is very valuable in helping us to understand the conflict that seems to brew whenever religion and science are in the same room together. Of course the evidence he proposes will be used by creationists who will argue that this helps prove their point. It doesn't, but it does show that people need to be very careful when using/reading history.

A paper by Jeffrey Burton Russell for the American Scientific Affiliation Annual Meeting August 4, 1997 at Westmont College summarizing his book Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (1997)

How does investigating the myth of the flat earth help teachers of the history of science?

First as a historian, I have to admit that it tells us something about the precariousness of history. History is precarious for three reasons: the good reason that it is extraordinarily difficult to determine "what really happened" in any series of events; the bad reason that historical scholarship is often sloppy; and the appalling reason that far too much historical scholarship consists of contorting the evidence to fit ideological models. The worst examples of such contortions are the Nazi and Communist histories of the early- and mid-twentieth century.

Contortions that are common today, if not widely recognized, are produced by the incessant attacks on Christianity and religion in general by secular writers during the past century and a half, attacks that are largely responsible for the academic and journalistic sneers at Christianity today.

A curious example of this mistreatment of the past for the purpose of slandering Christians is a widespread historical error, an error that the Historical Society of Britain some years back listed as number one in its short compendium of the ten most common historical illusions. It is the notion that people used to believe that the earth was flat--especially medieval Christians.

It must first be reiterated that with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat. A round earth appears at least as early as the sixth century BC with Pythagoras, who was followed by Aristotle, Euclid, and Aristarchus, among others in observing that the earth was a sphere. Although there were a few dissenters--Leukippos and Demokritos for example--by the time of Eratosthenes (3 c. BC), followed by Crates(2 c. BC), Strabo (3 c. BC), and Ptolemy (first c. AD), the sphericity of the earth was accepted by all educated Greeks and Romans.

Nor did this situation change with the advent of Christianity. A few—at least two and at most five--early Christian fathers denied the spherically of earth by mistakenly taking passages such as Ps. 104:2-3 as geographical rather than metaphorical statements. On the other side tens of thousands of Christian theologians, poets, artists, and scientists took the spherical view throughout the early, medieval, and modern church. The point is that no educated person believed otherwise.

Historians of science have been proving this point for at least 70 years (most recently Edward Grant, David Lindberg, Daniel Woodward, and Robert S. Westman), without making notable headway against the error. Schoolchildren in the US, Europe, and Japan are for the most part being taught the same old nonsense. How and why did this nonsense emerge?

In my research, I looked to see how old the idea was that medieval Christians believed the earth was flat. I obviously did not find it among medieval Christians. Nor among anti-Catholic Protestant reformers. Nor in Copernicus or Galileo or their followers, who had to demonstrate the superiority of a heliocentric system, but not of a spherical earth. I was sure I would find it among the eighteenth-century philosophers, among all their vitriolic sneers at Christianity, but not a word.

I am still amazed at where it first appears. No one before the 1830s believed that medieval people thought that the earth was flat. The idea was established, almost contemporaneously, by a Frenchman and an American, between whom I have not been able to establish a connection, though they were both in Paris at the same time. One was Antoine-Jean Letronne (1787-1848), an academic of strong antireligious prejudices who had studied both geography and patristics and who cleverly drew upon both to misrepresent the church fathers and their medieval successors as believing in a flat earth, in his On the Cosmographical Ideas of the Church Fathers (1834).

The American was no other than our beloved storyteller Washington Irving (1783-1859), who loved to write historical fiction under the guise of history. His misrepresentations of the history of early New York City and of the life of Washington were topped by his history of Christopher Columbus (1828). It was he who invented the indelible picture of the young Columbus, a "simple mariner," appearing before a dark crowd of benighted inquisitors and hooded theologians at a council of Salamanca, all of whom believed, according to Irving, that the earth was flat like a plate. Well, yes, there was a meeting at Salamanca in 1491, but Irving's version of it, to quote a distinguished modern historian of Columbus, was "pure moonshine.

Washington Irving, scenting his opportunity for a picturesque and moving scene," created a fictitious account of this "nonexistent university council" and "let his imagination go completely...the whole story is misleading and mischievous nonsense."
But now, why did the false accounts of Letronne and Irving become melded and then, as early as the 1860s, begin to be served up in schools and in schoolbooks as the solemn truth? The answer is that the falsehood about the spherical earth became a colorful and unforgettable part of a larger falsehood: the falsehood of the eternal war between science (good) and religion (bad) throughout Western history.

This vast web of falsehood was invented and propagated by the influential historian John Draper (1811-1882) and many prestigious followers, such as Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918), the president of Cornell University, who made sure that the false account was perpetrated in texts, encyclopedias, and even allegedly serious scholarship, down to the present day. A lively current version of the lie can be found in Daniel Boorstin's The Discoverers, found in any bookshop or library.

The reason for promoting both the specific lie about the sphericity of the earth and the general lie that religion and science are in natural and eternal conflict in Western society, is to defend Darwinism. The answer is really only slightly more complicated than that bald statement. The flat-earth lie was ammunition against the creationists. The argument was simple and powerful, if not elegant: "Look how stupid these Christians are. They are always getting in the way of science and progress. These people who deny evolution today are exactly the same sort of people as those idiots who for at least a thousand years denied that the earth was round. How stupid can you get?"

But that is not the truth.

Jeffrey Burton Russell is Professor of History, Emeritus, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. (http://www.asa3.org/ASA/topics/history/1997Russell.html)

Shabbat

Here's a good site that may help you with your current assignment.

http://www.shabat.co.il/

And here's a video made by some school children in Chicago explaining Shabbat using a hip hop performance. I can't vouch for the music but the message is okay.

Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Judaism

I found this posting at the Chabad website in the section on questions and answers. Remember that Chabad are Hassidic Jews and are therefore very Orthodox in their approach.

The picture above is by Marc Chagall and was painted in 1912. During the Nazi era in Germany this painting, "The Pinch of Snuff", was pulled on a hand-cart through the streets and publicly jeered at. Chagall's family were Hassidic Jews and much of his art reflects his upbringing.

What is the difference between Orthodox Judaism, Conservative Judaism and Reform Judaism?

Answered by Rabbi Tzvi Freeman

I may be the wrong person to answer this question. Because, personally, I don't believe there are any "isms" in being Jewish. There are just Jews, our Torah, and our willingness to do it.

However, I'll try to give an objective description of what these "isms" mean in practical terms:

All the way up until the 19th century, there were just Jews. We kept the halachah -- which means the rabbinical interpretation of the rules and guidelines of the Torah -- and kept a steady tradition for 3,000 years since Sinai. If some individual or group went astray from halachah, they were generally estranged from the Jewish people.

Then came Reform. They said, "Things are changing. We are smarter now. We know there is no need to keep kosher, Shabbat, circumcision or believe in a return to Zion." In Germany, they said, "Berlin is our Jerusalem." In America, it was Washington.

Then came Conservative. They said, "These Reform rabbis have gone too far. We need to conserve some of the basic traditions of Judaism." So they revived a form of kosher eating, Shabbat and circumcision. And they weren't so convinced about the Washington thing.

The Jews who did not go along with any of this were labeled "Orthodox." They never asked for it, but that's what they got called. Personally, I cannot see myself as orthodox, since I think of my Jewishness as something very radical and, well, unorthodox.

I also don't see the point in reforming my Jewishness. I would much rather my Jewishness reform me. After all, all these things that the fathers of reform saw as obsolete back then have now come back into fashion and are rising in popularity every day. The number of kosher foods on the market, for example, rose by about 2000% in the last ten years. As for Jerusalem, well that's pretty obvious. The Reform movement had to make a sharp about-turn in 1948.

Now, I'll bet I've provoked more questions than I've answered. But that's okay. Because that's part of what being Jewish is about -- thinking out of the box and asking questions.

Rabbi Tzvi Freeman heads Chabad.org's Ask The Rabbi team, and is a senior member of the Chabad.org editorial team. He is the author of a number of highly original renditions of Kabbalah and Chassidic teaching, including the universally acclaimed "Bringing Heaven Down to Earth."

Basic Judaism

The following website has some very good, and brief, articles on Judaism. It's probably a good first stop when researching anything to do with Judaism. Use it in tandem with the Judaism 101 site.

http://www.rossel.net/basic01.htm

Moses and the BBC

Here's a link to a very interesting article on Moses from the BBC Religion & Ethics site. By the way, the picture above is of Charlton Heston in the movie "The Ten Commandments".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/judaism/history/moses_1.shtml

Creation Magazine

I was over at my friend Kate's house last Saturday night and I was browsing through some magazines that she had stacked next to her lounge. Now Kate was brought up a Catholic but recently she has been reading Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion" and Christopher Hitchens' "God Is Not Great". I know this because I saw them in her lounge room. In amongst the fashion, home decorating and music magazines was what I thought was a science magazine. I didn't really register the name but there was a lizard on the cover and it looked like a science magazine. I started flicking through it and began scanning some of the articles.

Then it dawned on me. This was a creationist magazine masquerading as a science magazine. One of the articles discussed a recent discovery in extracting DNA from dinosaur fossils. Apparently this discovery proved that dinosaurs existed in the last 10,000 years and that they became extinct due to the Noahide Flood (that's the biblical flood of Noah and the Ark fame). For the most part it sounded scientific and looked scientific. Kate told me that she saw the magazine in a newsagent among the science magazines and thought it might be fun to read.

There is a war being fought at the moment. It is a war between faith and reason. Both faith and reason are able to exist quite comfortably, unfortunately there are fundamentalists on both sides of the debate who don't allow for any departure from their particular point of view. Often this war is hidden from people but the majority of us in education, whether teaching or being taught, are caught in the middle of it. There's not enough space here to delve too deeply into the issue but have a look at the articles in Creation Magazine and see how comfortably they sit with you.

This link will take you to the Creation Magazine site where you can browse some of the articles.

http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/23

Aztec Human Sacrifice

Here's an article that sheds some light on the Aztec ritual of human sacrifice.

Evidence May Back Human Sacrifice Claims

By Mark Stevenson, Associated Press

23 January 2005

MEXICO CITY (AP) -- It has long been a matter of contention: Was the Aztec and Mayan practice of human sacrifice as widespread and horrifying as the history books say? Or did the Spanish conquerors overstate it to make the Indians look primitive? In recent years archaeologists have been uncovering mounting physical evidence that corroborates the Spanish accounts in substance, if not number.

Using high-tech forensic tools, archaeologists are proving that pre-Hispanic sacrifices often involved children and a broad array of intentionally brutal killing methods.

For decades, many researchers believed Spanish accounts from the 16th and 17th centuries were biased to denigrate Indian cultures, others argued that sacrifices were largely confined to captured warriors, while still others conceded the Aztecs were bloody, but believed the Maya were less so.

"We now have the physical evidence to corroborate the written and pictorial record,'' said archaeologist Leonardo Lopez Lujan. He said, "some 'pro-Indian' currents had always denied this had happened. They said the texts must be lying.''

The Spaniards probably did exaggerate the sheer numbers of victims to justify a supposedly righteous war against idolatry, said David Carrasco, a Harvard Divinity School expert on Meso-American religion.

But there is no longer as much doubt about the nature of the killings. Indian pictorial texts known as "codices,'' as well as Spanish accounts from the time, quote Indians as describing multiple forms of human sacrifice.

Victims had their hearts cut out or were decapitated, shot full of arrows, clawed, sliced to death, stoned, crushed, skinned, buried alive or tossed from the tops of temples.

Children were said to be frequent victims, in part because they were considered pure and unspoiled.

"Many people said, 'We can't trust these codices because the Spaniards were describing all these horrible things,' which in the long run we are confirming,'' said Carmen Pijoan, a forensic anthropologist who found some of the first direct evidence of cannibalism in a pre-Aztec culture over a decade ago: bones with butcher-like cut marks.

In December, at an excavation in an Aztec-era community in Ecatepec, just north of Mexico City, archaeologist Nadia Velez Saldana described finding evidence of human sacrifice associated with the god of death.

"The sacrifice involved burning or partially burning victims,'' Velez Saldana said. "We found a burial pit with the skeletal remains of four children who were partially burned, and the remains of four other children that were completely carbonized.''

While the remains don't show whether the victims were burned alive, there are depictions of people -- apparently alive -- being held down as they were burned.

The dig turned up other clues to support descriptions of sacrifices in the Magliabecchi codex, a pictorial account painted between 1600 and 1650 that includes human body parts stuffed into cooking dishes, and people sitting around eating, as the god of death looks on.

"We have found cooking dishes just like that,'' said archaeologist Luis Manuel Gamboa. "And, next to some full skeletons, we found some incomplete, segmented human bones.'' However, researchers don't know whether those remains were cannibalized.

In 2002, government archaeologist Juan Alberto Roman Berrelleza announced the results of forensic testing on the bones of 42 children, mostly boys around age 6, sacrificed at Mexico City's Templo Mayor, the Aztec's main religious site, during a drought.

All shared one feature: serious cavities, abscesses or bone infections painful enough to make them cry.

"It was considered a good omen if they cried a lot at the time of sacrifice,'' which was probably done by slitting their throats, Roman Berrelleza said.

The Maya, whose culture peaked farther east about 400 years before the Aztecs founded Mexico City in 1325, had a similar taste for sacrifice, Harvard University anthropologist David Stuart wrote in a 2003 article.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, "The first researchers tried to make a distinction between the 'peaceful' Maya and the 'brutal' cultures of central Mexico,'' Stuart wrote. "They even tried to say human sacrifice was rare among the Maya.''

But in carvings and mural paintings, he said, "we have now found more and greater similarities between the Aztecs and Mayas,'' including a Maya ceremony in which a grotesquely costumed priest is shown pulling the entrails from a bound and apparently living sacrificial victim.

Some Spanish-era texts have yet to be corroborated with physical remains. They describe Aztec priests sacrificing children and adults by sealing them in caves or drowning them. But the assumption now is that the texts appear trustworthy, said Lopez Lujan, who also works at the Templo Mayor site.

For Lopez Lujan, confirmation has come in the form of advanced chemical tests on the stucco floors of Aztec temples, which were found to have been soaked with iron, albumen and genetic material consistent with human blood.

"It's now a question of quantity,'' said Lopez Lujan, who thinks the Spaniards -- and Indian picture-book scribes working under their control -- exaggerated the number of sacrifice victims, claiming in one case that 80,400 people were sacrificed at a temple inauguration in 1487.

"We're not finding anywhere near that ... even if we added some zeros,'' Lopez Lujan said.

Researchers have largely discarded the old theory that sacrifice and cannibalism were motivated by a protein shortage in the Aztec diet, though some still believe it may have been a method of population control.

Pre-Hispanic cultures believed the world would end if the sacrifices were not performed. Sacrificial victims, meanwhile, were often treated as gods themselves before being killed.

"It is really very difficult for us to conceive,'' Pijoan said of the sacrifices. "It was almost an honor for them.''

John Safran Versus God

At the risk of looking like I'm just posting videos, here is a YouTube video of episode one of the "John Safran Versus God" series. You can access other videos of the series at YouTube. Enjoy!



Here is a link to the John Safran Website. It's not actually about religion but you might be wondering who he is and what he's done.

http://www.johnsafran.com/

The Story of God - BBC Documentary

Here is an excerpt from the BBC documentary series "The Story of God". The "Story of God" is an epic journey across continents, cultures and eras exploring religious beliefs from their earliest incarnations, through the development of today's major world faiths and the status of religious faith in a scientific age. The series examines the roots of religious beliefs in prehistoric societies and the different ways in which humanity's sense of the divine developed. It looks at the divergence between religions that worship a range of deities and those that represent strict monotheism.

This excerpt examines the religion of the Aztecs and peoples of Central America. The documentary series in fascinating and worth watching. It's available on YouTube. You might also want to look at the videos on Buddhism from the same series.



The complete 176 minute video of "The Story of God" is on Google Video. If you find the origins of religions interesting you might want to take a look.

Religion Facts

The following site is an excellent starting point if you want to find some information about a religion. It doesn't have very detailed articles but does cover a lot of ground.

http://www.religionfacts.com/

Judaism 101

If it's the end of May, which it is, the 2 Unit classes should be about to start Judaism. I've found an excellent resource that you should download and keep on your computer. It's a pdf file of the Judaism 101 website. Just go to the following link and download the file. It's zipped so you'll need to unpack it. Then save the document and use it when you need to clarify some point about Judaism.

http://www.jewfaq.org/archive/index.htm

BSC - SOR Wiki

This is a link to the Studies of Religion Wiki for Year 11. I'll go through this with the classes next week so that we can all use it. In case you don't know, a wiki is a web page that can be viewed and modified by anybody with a computer and access to the internet. It is basically a place where everyone in the class can add comments, links, pictures etc. so that we can all use them. It will also be available to other teachers and parents. Only members of the site will be able to edit and post so you'll have to join up. We'll see how it goes. Here's a video explaining what Wikis are and how they can be used.

Shinto Shrines

I've been trying to load my virtual Shinto Shrine virtual tour powerpoint presentation here but the file is just too big for me to move around. I'll show it to the 2 Unit Year 11 students soon, but in the meantime here is a site that has some very good information on Shinto Shrines. If you go back to the contents page there's also some good stuff on Buddhism.

http://orias.berkeley.edu/visuals/japan_visuals/shinto.HTM

BBC - Religion & Ethics

The BBC site is a wonderful resource for the study of all religions. Have a look.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/

The First Christians

This link will take you to the page for the PBS documentary series "From Jesus to Christ". It has excellent resources on the early Christian church, the formation of the gospels and life in 1st century Palestine.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/

Alan Watts tells the story of Zen Master Suibi

Christian Bioethics Summary

Bioethical principles in Christianity are based on

1. Scripture (Old and New Testament)
2. The example of Jesus’ actions (as related in the New Testament)

All Christians accept these. Roman Catholics also believe that the Pope and the Church has teaching authority – but this is always in line with scriptural values and the example of Jesus’ life.

Scriptural Principles Regarding Issues Surrounding Human Life

1. Genesis 1:27-28 human beings are created by God and in His image so Christians believe they each have dignity and must be protected and respected.
2. Thou Shalt Not Kill – Exodus 20:13
3. The Beatitudes in Luke and Matthew – “blessed are those who suffer persecution for the sake of justice” – Christians must stand up for the rights and dignity of others

Catholic teachings about bioethics include:

1. The 1994 Catechism
2. Various Papal Encyclicals – especially Humanae Vitae (On Human Life) which attests the dignity of human life at all states.

Disputes arise amongst Christians, even within denominations, over when human life begins. In the Anglican Church the Primate Peter Carnley (Bishop of Perth) says human life does not begin until “implantation” (14 days after fertilization does human genetic material becomes a person). The Anglican Bishop of Sydney Peter Jensen says that human beings exist from the moment of fertilization. Catholics agree with Jensen, as this is the argument outlined in Humane Vitae.

Understanding when human life begins is crucial to beliefs / ethics about stem cell research on embryonic material because if you believe human life begins at “implantation” then spare IVF embryos can be used for stem cell extraction without causing offence

Embryonic Stem Cell Research

A maximum number of types of cells can develop from embryonic cells so that all human cells can be produced for therapeutic purposes. But the removal of embryonic cells results in the destruction of the embryo that some Christians see as human beings or potential human beings. Some people see a difference between using “spare” IVF embryos and creating embryos for “harvesting” stem cells.

Christians, as a general principle, find embryonic research unacceptable ethically because of the inevitable destruction of the embryo and they believe it cannot be justified even on the grounds that the embryos are unwanted or that the destruction of the embryo will result in benefit to sick people.

Adult Stem Cell Research

This involves the “harvesting” of stem cells from humans any time after birth, or from the umbilical cord of newborns. The major disadvantage of this is that not all human cells will develop from this procedure. Roman Catholics say that this will improve with further research. Using adult stem cells is acceptable for a broad spectrum of Christians because it does not result in damage to, or death of, the donor. Dignity is preserved because the donor can give consent to the procedure.

Cloning

This is the creation of an exact genetic copy of a cell or cells. In religious bioethical terms it relates to human cloning. The advantages are that stem cells can be created for therapeutic application to sick and disabled people and that it does not involve emotional issues like “is an embryo a real human”.

The Christian ethical viewpoint is that cloning is unacceptable because it assaults the dignity of a human being because the clone is not a unique individual, not in the image of God and because the clone is created for the benefit of someone else.

Therapeutic cloning is the production of cloned cells, or whole bodies, for use to improve the health of already sick or disabled people.

Reproductive cloning is the production of exact genetic copies of highly gifted / extraordinary people so that their gifts or talents can be spread further.

Cloning is ethically unacceptable to all Christian denominations because it denies the cloned human the dignity of being unique and not being conceived by a natural process. It is seen as offending the dignity of the clone also, because it is created for the benefit of other people.