The Sultan of Brunei Has Played the Ace of Spades

I would guess that he still believes he is religious through massive indoctrination as a youth. It doesn't have to be logical or consistent, just like the southern slave owners.

"It doesn't have to be logical or consistent." ... That much is clear. Either it's all for show (my guess) or his capacity for self-deception is virtuosic. The level of mental gymnastics required to implement a law calling for the brutal whipping of anyone who drinks alcohol, while simultaneously selling millions of dollars worth of alcohol so you can fund your hedonism, is almost comical.

The majority of Christians believe that the Old Testament Mosiac laws were fulfilled when Christ died on the cross (Romans 10:4 For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.) Therefore eliminating the need to follow Old Testament laws. Your quote from the New Testament was the apostle Peter talking and encouraging Christians who were slaves!! The slavery in biblical times was a slavery based on economics and usually the inability to pay debts. This slavery was not based on skin color, as we have commonly come to know slavery in fact the apostle Peter himself was later imprisoned and murdered for his belief in Christ. To portray the Christian faith as one that commands slavery is entirely false, millions of Christians have died serving and saving others because of their belief in Genesis 1:27 which states that ALL men are created by God and made in His image!! Why else would thousands of Christians go to third world countries, the poor, the destitute and imprisoned with food, clothing and an encouraging word if the Bible was clear in its desire for slavery. I understand the desire to portray Bible as commanding slavery throughout its entirety in order to nullify what it says about sins that hit close to home. Isaiah 5:20 "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness"
cheers,
scott

Brother, please pick a book! First you're claiming that Jesus lets you go to Red Lobster because you don't need to follow the OT, then you quote the OT exclusively to defend actions taken in contradiction with the other parts of the OT.

Your "majority of Christians" are happily browsing a moral cafeteria, feeling comforted by plucking the pieces that agree with their politics. Seneca the Younger had it right, except each individual wears all three hats, depending on the situation.

Your statement - "I understand the desire to portray Bible as commanding slavery throughout its entirety in order to nullify what it says about sins that hit close to home" - contains a fallacy of composition error. It would only be true if I subscribed to a rare America-based strain of literalist fundamentalism which is fairly unique throughout history and much of the globe. Even here in the United States where it enjoys a stronghold, it's the minority position. I don't. Therefore, it's untrue.

In any event, I won't speak about my personal religious views. They aren't relevant. What I will say is that those who take the minority literalist position on a text - in this case, the Bible - believe that if [X] is proven to be false, it therefore follows that [A]-[Z] are also false. Those who take the non-literalist position don't suffer from this constraint.

For example, a lot of Catholics and Quakers are non-literalists as the education is so good they can't help but confront the many glaring errors, contradictions, and mistakes in the books considered canon. This doesn't stop them from believing in divine inspiration but they don't ignore the reality that the words themselves are often incorrect.

A few illustrations that will come as no surprise to any theology student: How many sons did Michal the daughter of Saul have? 2 Samuel 6:23 says she died childless, 2 Samuel 21:8 said she had five sons. How old was Jehoiachin when he began to reign? 2 Kings 24:8 says he was 18 but 2 Chronicles 36:9 says he was 8. What time was Christ crucified? Depends on whether you look at Mark 15:25 or John 19:14-16. Has anyone but Christ seen God and lived? John 1:18 says no but Genesis 32:30 says yes. The dimensions of the basin in the temple are mathematically impossible as they violate Pi, which tells us the person writing the book was lazy and approximated or didn't know what they were talking about (1 Kings 7:23).

What about Isaiah 34:4, Matthew 24:29, Mark 13:25 and Revelation 6:13, which are clearly written not by God but by iron-age men with no understanding of what is now elementary physics, chemistry, and astronomy? The complete lack of understanding of what those twinkling things in the sky are for a person to be able to write the word used in the original languages to describe "star" is embarrassing.

The list is long and one could probably make a decent amount of money writing a book detailing them, making freshman seminary accessible to the masses. To the minority of Christians who are literalist, this might induce a crisis of faith, yet to the majority of Christians both now and throughout history who are non-literalists, none of it is relevant to whether it is moral to accept usury, or steal from your neighbor, or covet his wife, or require marriage to be between a man and a woman, or forgive debts every seven years, or permit divorce. Proving or disproving the validity of one part of scripture doesn't influence another as they are each to be weighed by the spirit, individually.

If this is the Scott I'm thinking of (it may not be, if so, I apologize), I'm surprised you aren't more familiar with this. The Quaker non-literalist view played a substantial role in shaping the laws and culture of the United States in age of the founding fathers, especially in and around the state of Pennsylvania. It isn't an exaggeration to say that without it, the country might never have been born and / or slavery might never have been ended. It has almost nothing in common with modern day evangelicalism.

If this is the Scott I'm thinking of...

If you're thinking it's me, it wasn't.
🙂

That's a really great response, and thought-provoking. Thanks for taking the time to articulate your views. I do think, however, that there are some fundamental problems (from a theological perspective) with regard to the degree of literalism that is required. It's true that the view that the Bible cannot simply be interpreted literally enjoys a long history. Aquinas observed that there were at least four senses of scripture - the literal, the allegorical, the moral and the anagogical. And the most sophisticated of Christian exegeses have always been willing to consider that the most intuitive or seemingly obvious moral of a verse was not necessarily the correct interpretation.

But how far can we go? We might replace the doctrine of transubstantiation with symbolic presence, a move that was partly responsible for the Reformation. We might try to explain away the tendency of the Bible to subscribe to gender norms about marriage and male leadership because they offend our modern sensibilities. We might even, as some have tried to do, try to say that in spite of the Bible's injunctions against same-sex intimacy that its spirit and fundamental spiritual message is love. Surely all of that is right to some degree.

But it seems to me that this is not the best and even possibly a rather lazy way of dealing with the problems the Bible throws in the way of a believer. Some things don't seem amenable to non-literal interpretations. The resurrection, surely, must have been an actual miracle, not a symbolic story of the soul's ascent into heaven. Right? Or that the world was created in several days ... well that must be symbolic since it doesn't agree with what we understand about evolution, right? But the problem about consistency cuts both ways: Why should Christians believe in a God that has the power to raise them from the dead if they are unwilling to believe in a God who can create the world ex nihilo? Why is it that the kinds of verses that 21st-century Christians choose not to interpret literally are not the same verses that earlier theologians had a problem with?

I think there is a tendency on the part of modern-day Christians (not you, I mean this point generally) to pick and choose the parts of the Bible that dovetails with an existing ethical philosophy, rather than to approach the Bible, as the scholastics of medieval times did, with the idea that its inconsistencies and contradictions were/are sites of struggles and of mysteries. All of this is understandable, of course. How do 21st-century Christians who are offended by ideas about slavery, discrimination against gay people, or women, and so on, reconcile their deeply-held convictions with biblical injunctions that tell them - both in letter and spirit - otherwise? What would it mean for a Christian to come to the troubling conclusion - after reading the context of the Bible, studying the words in their original Greek and Hebrew iterations, and the exegeses of the patristic fathers - that, yes, the Christian God of both the Old and New Testament does not think about women the same way a 21st-century man would, that the Christian God does not view marriage simply as a union between two people in love, but as a sacrament between man and woman, or that this same Christian God is as dark, vengeful and awe-ful as he is the sacrificial Lamb of the cross?

The literal meaning of a verse isn't just a stepping stone. It means something. It says something. And if it's disturbing, well, maybe Christianity - or all religions - has something that's disturbing about it. I suppose what I'm advocating is that the power of the Bible comes from its paradoxes and that a hermeneutics capable of a paradoxical reading is required. It's not enough to "explain away" uncomfortable positions, and to eschew the literal for the allegorical every time some odious or perplexing biblical injunction surfaces.

So, I am not a particularly religious/spiritual person myself. But I think I would respect someone whose faith was a daily form of struggle and mystery rather than simply a religious re-rendering of already-held moral beliefs. Maybe that means being gay and wondering why God won't literally let you have sex with another man or woman, or perhaps as the Dominican friars during the conquest of the New World wondered, why God literally allows slavery and what might be an appropriate ethical response that could be culled from within the pages of the Bible itself.

I suppose I think the literal matters. (P.S. I don't think it's necessary to go into my politics/background. I am guessing no one can guess based on what I just said anyway - you'd be surprised.) 🙂

From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, the Sultan of Brunei's behavior is completely expected and rational. He's maximizing his own offspring by monopolizing sex. I find it more fascinating that this isn't the behavior of all rich and powerful men. In other words, I find the countervailing forces even more interesting and weird. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett could easily afford to have harems of thousands of women, but they don't. Obviously the answer to why they don't is law and moral norms, but the compliance of the wealthy with these norms, in rejection of the biological urge to produce offspring with as many women as possible, is very interesting to me.

Given that monogamy occurs in roughly 1 out of 11 mammals as an evolutionary adaption, those countervailing forces clearly confer some advantage, perhaps in the concentration of assets on offspring and the greater chance of survival due to lower sexually transmitted disease? It would be an interesting research project.

There was an article in The New York Times last year ruminating on the topic. One theory is that monogamy helped humans "push through a ceiling in terms of brain size" as it made it easier for an individual to have a steady supply of energy-rich meat given the smaller group with which it had to be shared.

Did not know about all those facts that you just had off the top of your head. I'm sure that they (along with countless others that you didn't list and that I'm sure I'm not aware of yet) weave together a mosaic supporting evolutionary reasons for monogamy.

It's still interesting to contrast the difference between how society seems to accept people having casual sex with thousands or more of women (men less so - both for men and women), but if these acts of intercourse resulted in children or even more shockingly children that were supported, it would be far less so. I can think of a few basketball players with a few less than a dozen children, all with different women, but that seems to be the end of the bell curve as it goes in modern society. Yet the disparity is far higher if simply looking at either casual sex or the wealth distribution (ability to physically support that amount of children).

At the very least, I am glad we live in a monogamous society. As what you said above hints at, I have a feeling that a society with open polygamy would be a far nastier place on the whole.

It's important to emphasize that monogamy is not mutually exclusive with mating outside of the pair-bond. They call these dalliances "extra-pair copulations." Tiger Woods was one example of this: marry a Swedish model (and have kids with her) while having numerous short-term affairs with other women. This reproductive strategy allows him to contribute most of his time and resources to the offspring he values most, while spreading his seeds far and wide - the best of both worlds from a genetic standpoint, not a moral one. The socially-monogamous, sexually-promiscuous type of behavior even exists in swans, which are traditionally known to pair-bond for life. In the cited study, 27-40% of black swans per brood were products from outside the pair-bond.

Even in monogamous animals (humans included), there's a propensity toward both strategies because pair-bonding for life is the genetic equivalent of putting your eggs into one basket. What if your offspring inherits a genetic disorder or maladaption that's currently not expressed in the phenotype? What if a regional disaster (war, drought, hurricane) wipes out you and your entire family? If you had an affair with someone other than your bondmate, then the union might produce a kid with different disease resistances or advantageous adaptations. And if you're a man who habitually cheats when you're traveling, then your genes will live on in other locations even if a tornado wipes out you and your entire family at home.

Evolutionarily speaking, monogamy is the rifle and promiscuity is the shotgun. Alternatively: monogamy is the buy-and-hold investment strategy where the parents pool their resources and time on offspring; promiscuity is the "SIPC insurance policy" or the hedging.

Diversification in investing is division, not multiplication.

100 children per man would collapse humanity.

These instincts evolved long, LONG before we had modern medicine. Back then, people had short lives; child mortality rates were 30% or higher as late as the Middle Ages. Presumably, it was just as bad, or worse before the adoption of agriculture and humans lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers.

My point is, monogamy and promiscuity co-evolved because both had advantages and drawbacks in an uncertain world.

This is one of those posts where it's interesting for me to recognize how my upbringing colors my response to these types of dilemmas. Regarding the protest of the Hotel in California, I was raised to be extremely reluctant to boycott anything because it is always the innocent working-class people that get hurt.

E.g. After the BP oil spill, people boycotted the local franchisor that sold gas under the BP umbrella. The community businessmen grinding it out got hurt, while the executives that were negligent aren't exactly hurting financially.

Here, if 0 people attended the hotel over the next year and it shut down, the Sultan is going to be completely fine and unaffected. And the working-class people at the protested operations have their lives turned upside down, making me see the business wisdom in Bob Dylan's lyrics about only being a pawn in their game. Sure, some will get other jobs, but for some people, this Hollywood protest could lead to family evictions, foreclosures, and at the very least, financial stress.

In other words, the protest harms the Sultan not even 0.00000000000000000001%, and his financial life will be wholly unaffected by the boycott. Hundreds of working-class folks get caught up in the crosshairs. That makes it difficult for me to participate in the righteous indignation often associated with boycotts, because the people you are intending to harm as justice for their actions live on unaffacted, and innocent parties get hurt.

That said, in the final conclusion, I probably do ultimately agree with you: There's nothing fun shipping my money to a religious zealot bent on torture. If you can choose between "random business" and "religious zealot bent on torture", and are only going to support one, well, the decision is apparent.

I guess I ultimately reach the same conclusion as you do, but I have to climb up more of a mountain to get there, and I'm still not happy about where rationality leads me.

I love your last paragraph because it's a pain I know all too well. It mirrors the same conversation I've had too many times to count since adopting rationality roughly a decade ago. Last week, I was talking with a friend about one of the areas I keep running into it given the overwhelming scientific evidence on a certain topic and, yet, I don't like the philosophical, moral, or practical conclusions of the only intelligent way to behave because it makes me very unhappy.

You probably won't answer this, and that's probably wise, but is the area you're referencing eugenics?

It's directly related.

Idiocracy (2006) explores the topic irreverently. It probably wouldn't cheer you up, but a little levity always softens the blow.

Every year that movie slides ever so slightly from fiction to non-fiction. Not to get political, or to even say I understand our welfare system, but when low income families are financially rewarded for having more children, its no wonder they can't keep popping them out fast enough and producing more and more of the same types of leaches. If you don't know what I am talking about, start here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRRwZDSmTVI

What if these same low income families all belonged to the same political party? What if that same political party kept telling them to have more children and they'll receive more money? Do you the party would have more voters? For a second there, I had to check and make sure I wasn't talking about the Catholic church. (drum sound after a joke)

Could we have a post about Hobby Lobby? The discussions about religion are always among the most fascinating ... and unlike on other forums, people don't become hostile here 🙂