The book looks interesting to me. The meme, however, is dumb because it is written by one species of fundamentalist to attack another species of fundamentalist:
There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that homo sapiens (including that special people called Israel) evolved in their understanding of God under the influence of His Spirit. So the suggestion of scholars like Stavrakopoulou that Israel evolved from a henotheistic (there are lots of gods but ours is greater than all of them) to a purely monotheistic (there’s just one God) view of God neither intimidates nor embarrasses me. Scripture certainly seems to suggest that process, which is why the God of Israel humilates the gods of Egypt rather than giving a theology lesson on their non-existence. God, as usual, meets his people where they are and brings them along to further understanding of him. It is not till later that Israel starts talking about there simply *being* no other gods. And even in the New Testament period that does not mean a belief in mysterious powers and principalities at work in the world is not rejected. Rather, they are now understood to be created by the One God and in various states of relationship with him from rebellious demons to angels serving him in various capacities.
But for the species of Fundamentalist one finds in reddit.atheist circles, all this evolution of understanding by humans is clearly imagined to be a body blow to faith because, just like the Christian Fundamentalists they mirror, evolution of any kind is imagined to somehow be a mortal threat to faith.
“She knows vastly more about your god and your religion than you do” absolutely drips with contempt and intellectual pride. The funny thing is, I doubt seriously Stavrakopoulou shares this contempt. But the reddit.atheist culture warrior who made the meme? He imagines every member of every Abrahamic faith in the world just sustained a death blow from which he can never recover, because, like so many of these atheists, he is just as much a fundamentalist as any religious fundamentalist.
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4 Responses
Scratch an atheist, find a fundamentalist
While I’m not intimidated about the idea of God slowly making Himself known to us, trickling the truth to us, building upon previous knowledge, I wonder about one thing:
How do we know that “One thousand years BC, people in the Middle East worshipped a pantheon of deities led by El, who had seventy children, one of them called Yahweh”?
1000 years BCE is about the time of King Solomon, who built the temple to Yahweh in Jerusalem. It’s hard to imagine it would be possible to have one monotheistic temple dedicated to but one child of El, while erasing 69 siblings of Yahweh and El himself.
I mean, it reeks of revisionist history similar to apocryphal gospels conceived by agnostics.
What is the source for this revelation? Is there contemporary record that would prove this, or is it just archaeology trying to piece together wholecloth out of single threads and scraps of material and arriving at Däniken-esque conclusions that sound as sensational as possible because the most obvious and realistic conclusions are way too boring to sell?
It’s like when a dig uncovers a grave of two people of same sex in one layer. While the real explanation could be as mundane as opportunity: one person was a local, but the other was a perfect stranger, an outsider, who happened to die and would be buried in the grave that was already dug out. Historically, archaeologists would conclude that those were siblings, or parent and child, who both died in the same accident… More recently, historians take such graves as evidence of same-sex unions in the past and claim that it was a couple of lovers or spouses.
The ancient Israelites weren’t monotheists (“There is only one God”), they were henotheists (“Only *worship* one God). The 10 commandments often refer to Yahweh as “your God.” The non-existence of other gods was not asserted, just the ccommandments not to worship them. The concept of other gods simply not existing doesn’t come into play until later.
I agree with you that what is sophistic about the meme (I hate memes in general), is that there were many different tribes living in what is now Israel/Palestine. It was a constant challenge in Old Testament times to keep the Israelites focusing on worshiping Yahweh, and Yahweh only.
You’re right, I didn’t make my comment clear, I guess.
What Mark said is relevant: “God of Israel humilates the gods of Egypt rather than giving a theology lesson on their non-existence.”
It’s clear that Israelites consider there is no greater God than Yahweh and that even if there are lesser gods or idols, they are a different category. As in, Yahweh is the God proper, and lesser gods are created beings, some of who had flesh, some of who had ascended, but were not the transcendent God that Yahweh is. In a way, all those lesser gods are insofar human inventions as they fit within categories that we, as humans, can imagine.
God, Yahweh, eludes them and cannot be neatly pigeonholed.
So regardless of whether those lesser gods exist, Israel is commanded to not seek them out, let alone worship them. The commandment of “no other gods before Me” is clear on that, regardless of how its interpreted (do not worship ideas, objects, do not pursue anything that takes away time from God, up to do not worship actual gods/supernatural beings that are creations, not the Creator).
Come to think of it, there’s a wonderful duality of “If you ignore them, they will go away” when it comes to the commandment and when it comes to the quoted meme.
Israel ignored the other gods and a great deal of them was eventually erased from the collective memory and we’re only aware of those who are mentioned in the Bible because they were given as examples of objects of idolatrous worship.
I think there’s some expectation that if people ignore God long enough, He will cease to exist in our minds/He will go away and stop bothering us.
It always reveals more about the person thinking this way than about God simply because it’s usually associated with “I don’t like this commandment, I’d rather it didn’t exist, so if I get enough people on board with the idea that God and commandments are a human invention, there’s a chance we will all stop following that commandment”.
On a related note, this is why any attempts of seriously worshiping pagan gods are doomed. It’s because they resided within domains that were previously incomprehensible. Once these domains were explained by science, it’s no longer necessary to invent a god to govern that domain.
Yet a monotheistic God escapes all those categories. He does not exist to explain the world, He just exists.
Of course, one could argue that God is just an invention, the Creator that explains the creation and any moment now, science will have a theory of everything explaining all of creation, and we can do away with the need for a Creator, and yet, it will never answer one crucial question: How existence arises from nonexistence.
Because physics observes that something can degrade into nothing, but nothing has never been demonstrated to cause something into existence.