The Book of G

This is something I wrote a couple of years ago during a timed-writing exercise for my Bible Students. I'm just experimenting with posting directly to Blogger from Google Docs. Pretty cool.

The Book of G:
The Hebrew Bible's Jedi Training Manual

The Book of Genesis, on one level, is about the development of a nation, and that nation’s troubled and deeply conflicted relationship with the God who chose them. On another level, it can be viewed as an extended metaphor for the journey to maturity that every spiritual master must go through. If God, as Carl Jung suggests, is a name for the collective unconscious, then each of the characters can be seen as a name for the stage of development that the awakening soul travels through. From the naïve child eager to grow old too quickly to the fully developed Jedi Master, Genesis outlines a course of spiritual development that parallels that of the martial arts.

The stage of the young child – which Genesis calls Adam & Eve – is one of innocence and trusting. There were always snakes in the garden, but the child sees them as friends instead of enemies. For the child, the relationship between the conscious and unconscious is an easy one – the conflict doesn’t exist because there is no awareness of the duality. While ignorance is blissful, it is not the same happiness that accompanies spiritual mastery, because it needs only be tempted to realize how incomplete it is. The true spiritual master does not succumb to temptation (cf. Joseph and Potiphar’s wife), because he knows he is already complete and does not need anything else. The blissful child lacks this awareness, and so is simply waiting for the slightest provocation to slip into misery. If the snake hadn’t offered the apple, Eve would have found an equally appealing temptation to send her on the path to spiritual maturity. God in this case is not arbitrarily punishing them, since he obviously wanted them to eat the apple. Without the apple, there could be no Joseph. The meaning of the apple is revealed in Joseph, just as the meaning of Joseph’s slavery is revealed in the famine. God sends the serpent to help his consciousness start the journey, in the same way that we are sent nightmares to help heal us and deal with the more disturbing aspects of our lives. The logical extension of this – and one that most people don’t like making – is that evil (personified in the snake) is an agent of God’s purpose, without which God’s purpose cannot be fulfilled.

The unconscious then causes a crisis in the life of the individual which now must be dealt with. Because our hero (let’s call him G) is still spiritually immature, he looks on his punishment as a threat to his identity, and not as an opportunity for a grand adventure. Thus, G slips into the second stage: preservation of the individual ego by destroying any perceived threats. Genesis calls this stage Cain & Abel. This stage lasts a long time, both individually and globally (it’s the reason for all wars), and only perpetuates itself by bowing to the defense mechanisms and destroying perceived threats that are actually brothers. This cycle gets progressively worse until Lamech (seven times worse than Cain), and can only be solved by a complete cleansing of the psyche. The unconscious accomplishes this through the flood – a metaphor for the total spiritual cleansing that can happen after major tragedies, which Jung suggests are projections of the unconscious even if they seem to be external. The other people drowned in the story are not mentioned with much compassion, because they are simply vapors in the unconscious that continue the cycle, and therefore must be destroyed. Like in the Bhagavad Gita, we need not lament these losses – to do so would be to enable our addiction to violence and unhappiness.

But cleansing is not rebirth. Noah represents the stage when an addict enters rehab and abandons his enabling friends, but this is not spiritual maturity or healing. It is only the first step to recovery. Noah’s drunkenness shows that G still has a lot to learn, and the Tower of Babel represents how – in our desire to move quickly into maturity – we try to skip steps to get there. It will be a long, slow process, but at least the journey has begun.

Abraham represents the first conscious steps of this journey. His story is the most fully developed so far, and represents the first seeking for an explanation of the ways of the unconscious, and a means to develop a cohesive relationship with it. Abraham struggles valiantly but is still blocked by his need for self-preservation. He seeks to appease the unconscious through sacrifices that symbolize his own ego. He negotiates with the unconscious, seeking to find the line where the deity will finally be appeased. But sacrifice again is only a stage. It appeases God, because it shows the unconscious that it need not feel threatened. But legal arbitration is not the same as true communion.

In order to develop a relationship with the unconscious that goes beyond a mere standoff in which both parties agree to an uneasy truce, the awakening soul must learn to listen on a deeper level to the callings of the unconscious. This stage could be represented by Isaac, whose life is left fairly blank in Genesis. We hear about Isaac’s love for Ishmael, and his silent submission to be sacrificed, but then hear nothing from him until he is an old man. The whole middle part of his life is a blank. Later in his life, he is duped by Rebekkah and Jacob, but seems fairly distant from the affairs of the world. Looked at from a certain angle, this is the behavior of a hermit or a monk. And who can blame him? His mother banished his best friend and brother, and his father seemed ready to sacrifice him. After such traumatic childhood events, it’s only natural that he withdraw into himself. It’s this withdrawal that creates the space necessary in meditation, the whole purpose of which is to be able to listen and respond to the voice of the unconscious. Only in a focused stillness, away from the noise of the world, can we hear the “still small voice” that speaks to Elijah. We have very little information about Isaac, and so these are conjectures, but they are certainly consistent with the evidence.

And so now we arrive at a very interesting stage of spiritual awakening. Most monks spend years in this stage, and lay people look on this as the arrival of spiritual maturity. But what happens in meditation is like planting a garden. It’s the waiting for what happens in the spring. What happens in the spring is Jacob.

Jacob bursts forth as the first charming, truly likeable character who takes his destiny in his own hands. Granted, his actions are often amoral or immoral, but that’s part of his charm. Like Brer Rabbit or Tom Sawyer, he survives by his wits and bends social convention to his own purposes. His life reads like an adventure story. He is the arrival of the butterfly after a long sleep in a cocoon. Now spiritually awake, he is excited by the supernatural power that comes with deeper levels of awareness. He single-handedly lifts an enormous stone from Rachel’s well, he manipulates the breeding patterns of sheep to become rich, he does the work of many men and fathers thirteen children in one chapter. Jacob is life caught on fire – awake to his own spiritual powers and in love with life. He is the epicurean bodhisattva warrior, an unstoppable, charming and thrilling presence unencumbered by dusty morality. We won’t see his likes again until the arrival of David. No wonder God loves him.

But the journey is far from over. In the stage of Jacob, G is a sort of shaman, able to manipulate nature to his own advantage, and the unconscious now – instead of fearing him – is charmed by him. A personal relationship now becomes possible, because both sides are intrigued by the other. God even reverses the Tower of Babel by building Jacob’s Ladder. And instead of destroying Jacob from fear, as he did mankind in both the flood and Sodom & Gomorrah, he engages in that most boyish of pastimes – wrestling. What boy didn’t wrestle with his father at some point after dinner? Wrestling does not imply antagonism. It’s a splendid game.

But Jacob is spiritually awake enough now that God has to cheat to win! The conscious has developed to the point where it is a worthy opponent for the unconscious. G’s Jedi training is now complete.

And thus we come to the stage called Joseph. Joseph is the fully awakened, spiritually mature being. His early days with his brothers – which some may interpret as petulant – are actually simply the utterings of a precocious child. His statements about his dreams are not pretentious – he merely relates them, and his brothers and father draw the conclusions. He is a child prodigy – misunderstood as Mozart was – who can only come into his own by pursuing the hero’s adventure. He ends up in all the right places – prison, tempted by a seductive woman, tested for patience and forgiveness – and because he is spiritually mature, he meets all of these tests and passes them all. The genius of the Book of Genesis lies in its use of parallels, so that the temptation which destroys Adam & Eve has no effect on Joseph. The hardships that torment Job give Joseph no pause. The crimes committed by Cain, and perpetuated in Isaac & Ishmael and Jacob & Esau are finally resolved in Joseph, who finds the way out of the cycle of violence by practicing the art of forgiveness. Abraham and Sarah doubt the word of the Lord (with good reason!) and take matters into their own hands (Hagar  Ishmael), but Joseph has transcended time, so that he can step back and see the entire tapestry. He is the only character in the Bible so far who has a full understanding of God’s purpose, as he says to his brothers – God enslaved me so I could save you. God tempted Eve so I could become a Jedi Master. People suffer so that they may reach spiritual maturity, which often takes many generations, and with that maturity comes great powers and abilities, and also great responsibility.

So Joseph completes the spiritual training and solves the complex problems that Genesis raises. Of course, his maturity is an individual one, so he is not a good leader for the hundreds of thousands of Egyptians and Israelites who eventually become enslaved as a result of his public policy. His maturity is complete on an individual level, but not yet on a collective one.

God obviously still has work to do.

Ancient Rumblings

Here is an intriguing article about sin and salvation by the author of The Evolution of God, a book I would really like to read. It posits that our evolitionarily useful sense of guilt was developed by religion into the concept of sin. The need for salvation is a consequence of this, and the author implies what I have always believed - that whether or not God exists in the way that perceive or believe her or him to, the drive for salvation is a useful human urge. Therefore the belief in God is more practically useful on a general plane than not believing in God. Of course there are drastic exceptions on both sides - deeply moral atheists and unabashedly hypocritical believers.

I am reading another book right now called The Alphabet Versus The Goddess, by Leonard Shlain, which covers similar ground for different reasons. The section on human evolution is particularly fascinating. The hunter/gatherer stage lasted around 2,990,000 years (!), and so many if not all of what feel like natural human instincts were developed during this time. The right and left sides of the brain developed different tasks during this time, and this in turn was caused by the development of an opposable thumb to climb trees, a heel when the trees in the jungle parted, and then the consequent mastery of throwing things, which led to the particularly hominid means of hunting from a distance. But as hominid brains got bigger, the size of the brain was limited by the circumference of the female pelvis, which led to babies born without being fully developed, as other animals are. You then have a baby who cannot walk or even lift its head at birth and thus requires a type of nurturing that is unique among the species. Human brains continue to develop for twenty years, which necessitates a division of labor as females care for babies who cannot care for themselves or even cling properly to their mothers.

So, Shlain argues, this accounts for the division of labor in primitive societies, and the differences in the brain, which cause a huge psychological rift between men and women. Hunters survive by being analytical, thinking in a linear way, concentrating with a single-minded focus. Mothers, on the other hand, need more peripheral vision (which they have, since they have more rods in their eyes than men), to be able to care for children while simultaneously gathering subsistence food. The other duality that comes into play here is between relationship to others (gathering) and survival (hunting), which in many ways contradict each other. Survival necessitates an us vs. them mentality, leading eventually to the particularly human act of murder, even of the family. The resultant dualities in the brain (since men and women all contain all of these elements) is the split that has caused much confusion and anxiety, as well much of the ability to recognize the beauty and fragility of the world.

Shlain's thesis is that these hunter/gatherer societies were the most egalitarian in history, as well as the best balance in the brain hemispheres. But with the domestication of crops and animals, hunting was no longer necessary, and so the outlet for male aggression, previously so vital for survival, was diminished to almost nothing. This is when the era of human sacrifice began, as well as sports, battles, and wars. But where he's headed with the book is how the development of the alphabet made the left brain dominant, though it was the younger twin. Like Jacob to Esau, the younger twin supplanted the elder, which is a theme throughout the bible and all the religions and philosophies of the Axial Age. In the Hebrew Bible, true human nature begins with the murder of Abel by Cain, and Genesis is not complete until the younger brother (Joseph) not only supplants but finally learns to forgive his brothers. But that imbalance, between the twin hemispheres struggling for dominance, is what we are left struggling with today.

Of course, we have moved beyond the agrarian society (almost none of us have any real idea how out food makes it to our plates), but we are left with 10,000 years of patriarchal instincts, on top of and often in conflict with 2,990,000 years of hunter/gatherer ones. No wonder we feel alienated and confused!

I am just beginning to process a lot of this (I am familiar with most of the theories from Joseph Campbell's Primitive Mythology, a true masterwork on the topic), but I hope to write more about it, since it fascinates me so deeply and has for so many years. We have shifted so much to the left brain, with its surgical spotlight focus, but you can tell by the insistence of religion in spite of scientific evidence, by the persistence of art despite the dominance of cheap commercialism, and by the hunger for mythology as evidenced by the Harry Potter and Twilight phenomena, that the older twin is beginning to demand her birthright once again. Deep in the recesses of the psyche, the goddess is beginning to stir once again.

Our Very Own Mahabharata

I'm teaching the Mahabharata in my mythology class now, and am amazed at how often it reads like the newspaper. Here's a review of a new book by Reza Aslan about a Cosmic War. Aslan differentiates between a global war, like the two world wars we have had, and a Cosmic War, which is described like this:

"A cosmic war," Reza Aslan writes, "is like a ritual drama in which participants act out on Earth a battle they believe is actually taking place in the heavens." Earthly wars are fought with weapons. Cosmic wars are won or lost with jihads, occupations, and forcible conversions. "There can be no compromise in a cosmic war. There can be no negotiation, no settlement, no surrender."

Sound familiar?

Apparently, the book doesn't offer a way to win a cosmic war, but does offer ways to make it more manageable. Its focus is primarily on Islam and Christianity. But with North Korea testing its missile range by shooting into the Pacific, it's obviously not limited just to those two religions.

The book also has a battle between Arjuna and Aswatthaman that sounds exactly like the last days of the cold war. Arjuna and Aswatthaman have both released weapons into the air - weapons which have the power to destroy the entire universe, but which counteract each other through their intentions - and Krishna and Vyasa try to talk them down from it. Here's the passage at length:

[Krishna said,] "Arjuna, withdraw it."

"I will," said Arjuna. Majesty, it is harder by ten million times to call back that weapon once released, and at the slightest error Arjuna and all there would have died, and Earth become a desert with no life for seven thousand years. But he did it; then weak and sick he collapsed to his knees gasping for breath.

Vyasa sat before Aswatthaman and said, "Bring it down. You will not be harmed. I protect you."

Slowly Aswatthaman's fireball turned yellow, then orange. The flames flickered and smoked. Aswatthaman perspired and said, "I cannot."

"Your heart must be at peace and not burning," said Vyasa. "You are afraid of Bhima. He lied to your father. But he cannot move. You have my protection and Arjuna's weapon is gone."

"Alright." The fire was only half as large, and dim. "Because I trust Arjuna," said Aswatthaman," I kill my fear. Because I trust you, I am not sad. Because Arjuna did not wish for my death, I let my anger go."

Like a torch in the daylight the pale flames were still there. "But I must have revenge."

Vyasa sighed. "Stop your sadness, kill revenge himself. Find that cunning ugly man who holds you tight as iron chains, aim true at him where he is hidden."

"I have no other purpose," said Aswatthaman. The fireball burst into bits in midair and was gone.

Vyasa is certainly speaking now (through Aslan, as well as others), but we will need to sharpen our hearing. As Vyasa says in another context, "Understand me; do not only agree."

Atheists in Heaven?

Here is follow up on a study I posted about earlier that said that the majority of Christians believe you don't have to be Christian to attain eternal life. They have now done a repeat study with more specific questions, and found that most Christians even believe Atheists can go to heaven.

This is intriguing, especially in light of Carlton Pearson, an evangelical preacher who stopped believing in hell because of a conversation he had with God, and now preaches the Gospel of Inclusion. His story was broadcast on This American Life and can be heard on their website.

Jesus and the Buddha

Here's a really interesting article from the Boston Globe about Asian Christians during the Dark Ages.  There's a lot in there I never knew about, and it's worth reading all the way to the end.  I am surprised again and again at how what we take for the true Christian message has been distorted and re-interpreted and re-packaged and forgotten so many times.  That shouldn't surprise me, but it really does.  And it reminds me again how incredibly solipsistic we are to think that our interpretation of the holy scriptures is the "right" one.  I am not a relativist when it comes to religion.  I do not believe all interpretations are equal, and there are some that are downright silly, and others that are evil (Jim Jones comes to mind).  But it is equally wrong to assume that we have a corner on God.  

Here is an image of the lotus-cross mentioned in the article.

Jon Stewart & Mike Huckabee on Gay Marriage

I appreciate how respectful Jon Stewart is - he provides a good model for how intelligent discussion of tense issues can be achieved.  The questions he raises here about gay marriage are precisely the ones I would like answered.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Mike Huckabee Pt. 1

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Mike Huckabee Pt. 2

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Angulimal & the Buddha

I have been following this blog for a while now, and have enjoyed its unique perspective. This entry in particular is worth passing along not only for the insights given in the post, but for the wonderful telling of the story of Angulimal and the Buddha.

The Biblical Definition of Marriage

In the debate the other night, both VP candidates agreed that they do not support gay marriage in terms of legal definitions, but both agreed (or seemed to) that the government should not limit any civil rights of gay couples. This is a step forward, since our government (in theory, at least) is based on the separation of church and state. I was really surprised and encouraged to hear Sarah Palin say that she does not advocate limiting any civil rights for gay couples, particularly considering how she supported a bill to deny hospital visitations (which she later was advised was unconstitutional). Palin said clearly at the debate that she would not prevent visitation rights to gay couples, but of course, she also did not say she would do anything to guarantee them, which is the government's most important job.

However, both candidates said they believe (not as a matter of public policy, but personally) that marriage should be between one man and one woman. Biden said that it was a matter for each individual religion to decide and did not identify where his personal convictions come from. We can deduce from the activities of her church, however, that Palin bases her belief on the Bible.

Since I am currently teaching the Bible, I can't help but bring up what is meant by a biblical definition of marriage. This article offers some important points that anyone seeking a biblical definition of marriage would need to address. (Numbers 3, 5 and 6 are particularly instructive.)

If one were to construct an amendment to the Constitution based on a literal reading of the Bible it might well contain the following stipulations:

1. Marriage in the United States shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women. (Gen 29:17-28; II Sam 3:2-5)

2. Marriage shall not impede a man's right to take concubines, in addition to his wife or wives. (II Sam 5:13; I Kings 11:3; II Chron 11:21)

3. A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed. (Deut 22:13-21)

4. Marriage of a believer and a non-believer shall be forbidden. (Gen 24:3; Num 25:1-9; Ezra 9:12; Neh 10:30)

5. Since marriage is for life, neither this Constitution nor the constitution of any State, nor any state or federal law, shall be construed to permit divorce. (Deut 22:19; Mark 10:9)

6. If a married man dies without children, his brother shall marry the widow. If he refuses to marry his brother's widow or deliberately does not give her children, he shall pay a fine of one shoe, and be otherwise punished in a manner to be determined by law. (Gen. 38:6-10; Deut 25:5-10)

7. In lieu of marriage, if there are no acceptable men in your town, it is required that you get your dad drunk and have sex with him (even if he had previously offered you up as a sex toy to men young and old), tag-teaming with any sisters you may have. Of course, this rule applies only if you are female. (Gen 19:31-36)

Obviously, the question of marriage has changed drastically over the years, and the bible is no better at guiding us in this issue than in the issue of slavery, which it clearly condones. It is much better to look at the spirit of the bible here than take these laws literally. In replacing ten (and hundreds more) commandments with two, Jesus meant to offer not laws but guiding principles, which would help us to work out complex issues for ourselves rather than relying on laws that were written for people who needed them but which no longer apply. The prohibitions on shell fish and mixed fabrics, for instance, hold little sway for us today, and the word used for them (translated in KJV as 'abomination') is the same word used for homosexuality. The spirit of all the laws - Hebrew and Christian - is summed up in the two Jesus chooses: place your ego second in order to discover the ultimate reality, and let non-judgmental compassion be the guiding principle in all your dealings with other humans.

In this light, I have such a hard time denying any right or name or responsibility or legal status or religious blessing to any loving couple. It is so difficult to find love in this world. Why would we not celebrate that every time it happens? Granted, the text does say in Genesis 2:24 (and again quoted or paraphrased at Matthew 19:3-9 and Mark 10:2-12, for example) that "a man shall leave his father and mother and cling to his wife, and they will become one flesh." Ironically, each time Jesus referenced the Genesis passage, he was not talking about gay marriage. He was condemning divorce. If we really want to protect the biblical definition of marriage legally, we should demand that the Supreme Court outlaw divorce, not gay marriage.

Love is the great miracle, regardless of to whom it happens or how. Common sense and experience (though clearly not the Bible) dictate that monogamy is the most stable relationship in modern society because it is the only type that can last (unless you have been raised with a ploygamous consciousness, like certain sects of the Mormon or Islamic communities). But again, this is not a Biblical law, but a practical application of a spiritual principle - putting the ego second and actively caring for those around us. Surely Jesus, who hung out with thieves and prostitutes, would see that love is a miracle worth celebrating no matter where it may occur.

Church of England Apologizes to Darwin

Here's a great article in which the Church of England apologizes to Darwin, having written an essay called "Good Religion Needs Good Science." Amen to that. Of course, good science may need good religion too (in my opinion), but I doubt if that realization will come any time soon.

BBC NEWS | UK | Education | 'Creationism' biologist quits job

I find this whole debate so mind boggling. Here is a science teacher castigated for saying that teachers should address the issue of creationism if it is brought up by a student. Sure, creationism doesn't hold up as science (Jesus taught by parables - why do we insist on trying to apply scientific principles to a series of metaphors?), but not addressing a student's curiosity on a genuine and considerate level is just rotten teaching. I also don't understand the conflict. Metaphors and parables are not less true than science - they are just less factual. Metaphors and parables can actually point to much deeper truths than fact, and science really can't prove truth anyway. They are two different domains. But what surprises me is the vehemence with which scientists attack the creationism argument. What is there to be so afraid of when the facts are on your side?

A Cosmological Kick in the Head

Here is a link to an interview that Robert Krulwich did with Brian Greene, a professor of physics and author of The Elegant Universe, among other books on physics. If you listen to this and don't feel your head has been expanded 3-4 times by the rapidity of the neuron firing in order to keep up, I'll be honestly surprised. Greene talks about the different explanations of the cosmological data that has been collected, and the implications, which range everywhere from the idea of the "Multiverse" - a collection of universes all of which are infinite (!) to the place of determination and free will in modern-day physics. Honestly, since I'm gearing up to teach courses in the bible and world mythology, this seems like a conversation I've heard many times before, just with vastly different data. In some ways, it's the oldest conversation there is - where did we come from, are we alone, are we in control of what we do? - with just a different vocabulary, substituting words like scientific words for literary or religious ones.

It's fascinating, but will require your attention. Download it and play it in your car or while you run. I love the way these two talk about science. Pretty awe-inspiring stuff.

Anonymous

Maybe you have heard about this - I didn't know anything about it until I saw it tonight. Anonymous is a group that is organizing a series of protests against Scientology. Their PR is pretty intense - a computerized voice with pictures of clouds and cities. Here's one of the videos they released.



They have been called domestic terrorists, most notably by a KTTV Fox 11 News report, and were accused of quite a few things, from the serious (bomb threats) to the fairly serious (hacking into MySpace pages and posting gay porn) to the ludicrous (trying to spoil the ending of Harry Potter before it was published). You can see where the fear would come from in the video above, as well as the fact that many of the protesters for their mass demonstration on Feburary 10th wore the masks used in V for Vendetta. But they also released this video with the rules for their protest, which seems like a pretty excellent list, including respect for police and private property and acting sensibly so as not to taint or distort the message by doing dumb things.



That video is also done in a sort of scary way, but it did make me more interested in researching their particular grievances. I had not known anything about Lisa McPherson, or James Hester. Lisa McPherson was a Scientologist who died under unusual circumstances, though the court findings were inconclusive. Certainly, any large organization is going to have suicides or unusual deaths, and from an outside perspective, there's no way to verify whether the church had anything to do with it, or whether those who died would have died anyway. So I'm not at all sure how I feel about either group, but I do find it all pretty fascinating.

The group also made headlines for outing a sexual predator - Chris Forcand - before he was able to do any damage. They got him to proposition them, and then reported him to the police, who then arrested him. The police reported that it was the first time an "Internet vigilant group" had ever helped with the arrest of an internet predator.

Virginia rape law

I saw this on TV tonight, and was floored. It reminds me of the rape of Dinah in Genesis - where Dinah (one of Jacob's daughters) is raped, and the assailant offers to marry her, which was an acceptable solution at that time. Well apparently, that is currently also an acceptable solution in Virginia! - at least until tomorrow, when it will finally be removed from the books. Under the current law, if a girl aged 14-16 is raped, the man is not allowed to face criminal charges if he offers to marry her.

The law goes off the books tomorrow - nearly 4000 years after Dinah. Of course, the rapist in Dinah's day was not really protected. Dinah's brothers tricked him by saying that he could marry her as long as he and all of his extended family and servants were circumcised. On the day of circumcision, when they were still weak, they were slaughtered by Simeon and Levi - every last one of them. Jacob (God's favorite), who had been quiet about the rape, was upset with his sons because he thought it would cause trouble for them, and later, on his deathbed, he cursed the two who had done it. The curse was that their tribes would eventually be scattered, which of course did happen, though the Levites would become the tribe of the high priests, with Moses as their most distinguished member.

There are many outdated laws on the books, but this one caught me particularly off guard.

Atheists who believe in God

Now this is amazing. It's a set of statistics published by beliefnet, including these:

21% of atheists say they believe in God.

The group that answered the questions in the most similar way to Evangelicals was Muslims.

57% of Evangelicals believe that many different religions can lead to eternal life.

Check out the rest of the stats here.

Religion in the classroom

Here's an example of rather extreme religion in the classroom - a middle school science teacher who burned a cross into a students arm. Yikes.

Phil Jackson's Zen Christianity

I often have talks with our school's basketball coach about the spiritual nature of basketball. His hero is John Wooden, and one of my favorite memories is hearing him talk about his lunch with Wooden and the seven spiritual principles that guide his life and guided his coaching.

I don't know a lot about Phil Jackson, but this article definitely makes me more interested in learning about him.

Karen Armstrong

I am currently reading two books by Karen Armstong - A History of God and In the Beginning: a New Interpretation of Genesis. Armstrong's command of her subject is extraordinary. The Genesis book is more personal but still excellent scholarship, and expresses a great deal of what I have often believed about that book, particularly the idea that the contradictions in the text are not unskillful writing, but instead are intentional complexities that show us how inadequate our current axioms about God are. I am sure I will write more about this, but suffice to say that her books are the equivalent of a graduate course in Western religion.