PDF Version: AncientInjustice.pdf

Growing up, my Jewish education consisted of an after school program (‘cheider’ to the Yiddish inclined) while I attended public school by day.  On my walk to Hebrew School I would often try to marry the two bodies of knowledge from the two respective school systems.  A happy romance occurred around 1987 between the religious and secular bodies of knowledge.  As many may recall 1987 was the year of the big crash on the stock market.[1]  Debt and the economy were on the lips of many in those days.

In the secular world there was tremendous talk of personal and national debt, interest rates, unemployment and the like.  All the while, the Torah I was reading in Hebrew school was definitely running on about the sabbatical forgiveness of debt and the precept that “there should be no poor among you”. (Deut 15:1-4)  Now my mental image of the ancient Israelites was that of a pastoral, agrarian people.  With hindsight I can say that this image was only slightly misguided.  Despite the rumored grandeur of the Davidic kingdom, archaeologists hold that their society was more rural than urban.

But this left me with a theological problem:  I saw debt as a product of banks which were on city streets.  I failed to conjure an image of rolling agricultural fields dotted with banks and/or ATMs at the Temple gates. (Parenthetically, it turns out that if the Gospels have any historical veracity, there may have been just such an ancient equivalent of an ATM at the Temple gates.  More to follow shortly.)  Failing to imagine ancient banks, I was puzzled about what the ancient Israelites knew of debt and how then did this prescient warning against the accumulation of debt make it into the Torah?  I questioned my Hebrew school teacher along these lines and I was given the answer that ‘the Torah contained the writ word of God and all His wisdom.  It was written for all times and addressed all the problems that we would encounter until the end of days.’

Platitudes such as this are to young inquisitive men, such as I was, like drinking sea water when thirsty:  quenching only at first and then leaving you more thirsty than ever.  If my teacher’s answer was to hold water (pun intended) then there were conspicuous absences from the ‘writ word of God’.  Where were the foundations for democracy?  Where were the specific prohibitions against slavery (beyond the sabbatical release of Hebrew slaves)?  Where was the discussion about protecting the environment beyond the scant ordinances for burying excrement beyond the outskirts of camp (Deut 23:14)?  From those grandiose absences there were more mundane absences like: Where were the prohibitions against smoking and where were the prohibitions against high cholesterol foods?  My attempts to marry the religious and secular belief systems were thwarted by the absence of these secular guidelines which I had determined to be legitimate and necessary.  After a brief flirtation the attempted marriage failed in divorce with the judgment pronounced by my rationality decreeing that the Torah was not indeed the writ word of God.

Literalists may be tempted by the previous sentence to toss this work out of hand directly into the fire.  Indeed this may provide needed warmth to those suffering the effects of debt.  Just the same, with a bit of patience on both sides of the theist/atheist debate, I believe there is commonality to be found in the good intentions of the Torah.  While we may debate its authorship I will not debate that it was written with the best of intentions.  Further, I hold that it was written to describe an ideal rather than the actual practice of the day.  There is a common modern Israeli expression: “The synagogue I don’t go to is Orthodox.”  Similarly, I believe that the Torah describes an ideal set out for the people to follow which was likely, based on archaeological evidence, considerably different than religion actually practiced by the ancient Israelites.  Specifically, archaeology reveals the rampant practice of polytheism and idolatry up to the Babylonian exile.[2]  Biblical archaeology contends that the Torah was a compendium of tales written by a reformist movement railing against the practices of the day.  Setting aside the issue of biblical authorship, I will continue the discussion in the context of the good intentions of the author presently.

The now dubious authorship of the Torah made my original question even more pronounced.  If the Torah was not written by God, then who wrote it and how were the ancient Israelites aware of debt and its effects?  My research would lead me to the field of biblical archaeology.  I studied the works of William Dever and Israel Finklestein amongst others with the following results.  The ancient Israelites never conquered Canaan as told in the Torah canon.  They were instead Canaanites themselves who survived and replaced a decaying social order with a more egalitarian one.  For those interested in how I arrived at this conclusion there is a wonderful précis of biblical archaeology available on Public Broadcastings’ NOVA series: “The Bible’s Buried Secrets.”[3]  There you’ll find a terrific summary of all the archaeological and scientific findings to date.  I only wish this series had existed at the outset of my research for it would have saved me much trudging through many inaccessibly written academic works on the topic.  Researching biblical archaeology was much like archaeology itself: sifting through piles of academic detritus to yield occasional relics and then putting the pieces together.

So, accepting for the moment that the Israelite race emerged from the nadir of the Canaanite civilization, Zephaniah 1:11 becomes ever more clear:
“The dwellers of Machtesh [, a quarter of Jerusalem,] howl;/ For all the tradesmen [nation of Canaan] have perished, All who weigh silver are wiped out.”
Two things are critical in this passage.  First the time of Zephaniah, well past that of the Canaanite era, and second the reference to the weighing of silver.  Zephaniah was not admonishing the Canaanites but rather the Jewish merchants of Jerusalem who were acting like Canaanites.[4]  As to the reference to the weighing of silver, silver was then as it is now, a monetary metal.  All throughout history, every society has been plagued by the manipulation of their currency leading to their ultimate downfall.  Economists call the process seigniorage gain.

Seigniorage gain is the process by which the minter (usually the government) gains on the difference between the face value of the coin and the actual value of the metal used to make it.  I often think it is the job of economists to construct palatable names for what in the end turns out to be sheer larceny.  Those unfamiliar with the term may be more familiar with the contemporary synonyms such as ‘inflation’.  Whatever you choose to call it, ‘a lemon by any other name would taste as sour’ and inflation, currency manipulation, or seigniorage gain is quintessentially a tax on the middle class leading to widespread debt, poverty and wealth inequality.  It is a fundamental violation of the biblical injunction to have “fair weights and measures” (Deut 25:13-16).

It is my supposition that it was an economic collapse brought about by currency manipulation which spelled the end of the Canaanite civilization.  I will support this supposition by reviewing the log roll of history vis a vis currency manipulation and the subsequent unfolding of the relevant civilization.  Biblical archaeology tells us that the proto-Israelites literally fled for the hills in the face of the collapse of the Canaanites.[5]  There they regrouped and sought to set themselves apart from the evils of their past.  After the dust had settled they returned with a renewed spirit and purpose to set out a more equitable system.  To that end they developed laws against the accumulation of debt and the slavery that results.  Those laws were later canonized in the Pentateuch around the end of the Babylonian exile (4th to 6th centuries BCE).[6]

Some 600 years later we know that these laws were largely being ignored and that corruption again loomed large.  We have the historical testimony of the gospels of Luke and John which recount Jesus’ banishing of the money changers from the temple gates.  Around the time of the year 0 CE Roman currency was the common currency in the holy land.  These coins typically bore the images of pagan gods and were unacceptable for use in temple worship.  At the temple gates, benches of money changers would exchange these coins, at predatory exchange rates, to Levite coins for use in temple services.  These same money changers would charge the Levites unreasonable rates to change these coins back into Roman coins such that the Levite priests could make purchases in the markets.  Jesus found the entire process abominable and forcibly drove them from the temple.[7]  Whether you believe the historical veracity of the gospels is beside the point here.  What is known is that currency manipulation was clearly on the mind of the authors of the gospels and the gospels were known to be written around this time (admittedly within 400 years).  As a pertinent aside, the word ‘Bank’ comes from the Latin for ‘bench’ precisely referring to this historical antecedent.[8]  I believe it is social disarray caused by the financial ruin of Israel which led to its overthrow by the Romans.  There is textual evidence for this in the bible itself:  Jeremiah 7:11 reads “Is this house, whereupon My name is called, become a den of robbers in your eyes?”  Amos 5:7 reads “Ah you who trample the heads of the poor into the dust of the ground, and make the humble walk a twisted course.”

It is an irony of history, if not a recurring leitmotif, that the very same financial snare which destroyed Israel also destroyed its captors.  In Hebrew school we all learned of the famous (infamous) “Judea Capta” coin.[9]  This coin depicts the pride of the Romans in defeating ancient Israel.  It is in the silver or precious metal content of roman coinage with which we can track the decline of the Roman Empire.  The backbone coin of the Roman economy was the Denarius which started out with a silver weight of approximately 4.5 grams.  Have you ever noticed the ridges on the edge of a quarter?  These same ridges were present on the Denarius and there intention is to make any shaving of the coin obvious.  This made it harder for individuals to debase the currency but the government was free to mint coins with less and less silver content.  By the year 274 CE under Aurelian’s reign the coins had almost no silver content at all.[10]  The causes of the fall of Rome are admittedly complex, including the outsourcing of their military defense to barbarian mercenaries.  Just the same, the economic decline of Rome is certainly one of the principle causes and is yet another exemplar of the debasement of currency leading to the debasement of the underlying civilization.

The collapse of the Roman Empire led the world into the dark ages.  The Christian religion took hold championing the cause of the poor all through these long dark ages.  Eventually a fair monetary system was developed called the tally stick system.[11]  Very strict Christian based laws against usury (interest) prevented any monetary abuse.  However, in the 1500’s Henry VIII, obviously unaware of the peril, deregulated the economy and allowed for certain forms of usury.[12]  The economic maelstrom unleashed destroyed the English economy.  In the wake of the upheaval and in the aftermath of the English revolution of 1642, the Bank of London was established.  Oddly enough, the initial shares were bought with no other currency than talley sticks.  The bank of England replaced this monetary system with their own manipulated (or ‘fiat’) currency.  Currency manipulation was now institutionalized in the form of this ‘Central Bank’ put in place to ‘protect and regulate’ the money supply.

Just around this time, gold was being used as a currency.  Carrying ones gold on their person could be cumbersome and moreover, dangerous.  A robbery could erase ones savings.  The goldsmiths of the day agreed to hold gold for consumers at a nominal fee and issued them a certificate which they could then use to redeem their deposits.  These little slips of paper were much easier to work with and in a very short time, the slips of paper would be used in transactions instead of gold.  The goldsmiths made an astute observation.  Not all of their clients came to collect their gold at one instant.  As such they could lend out some of the deposited gold at interest making money on money they did not really have.  While this seems relatively harmless provided customers do not all come for their gold at once, it is in fact at the core of everything wrong in the world today.  The fraud is subtle yet essential to understand.  By using gold that say a farmer had deposited to make loans, you are using the hard labour of the farmer to make money with very little labour.  In a nutshell, this practice siphons up the value of labour and puts it in the hands of the advantaged few who are in a position to leverage it.  This is the practice of fractional reserve banking with is with us to this very day.[13]  When a middle class family takes out a loan to get an SUV, the bank does not lend you their money.  They lend you the savings of an auto worker who drives a compact sedan.  The banker turns interest on money s/he never owned and drives a luxury sports car on the profits.  Such is the food chain of fractional reserve banking.  Bankers love the practice for obvious reasons.  Politicians love it because they can finance their projects without reaching for tax dollars.  Projects can now be financed with thusly conjured money with only a nodding concern for inflation and the ever growing national debt. The average person neither loves it nor hates it because they do not understand it.  Hopefully, that is, until now.

The Bank of England was aware of the practice of the goldsmiths but instead of outlawing it, embraced it.  As such they succeeded in protecting and regulating the money supply insofar as her citizens of wealth were concerned but all to the detriment of the English parliament and the general public.  The bank so bankrupted England that England was forced to place a heavy tax burden on its colonies.  The American colonies revolted to the cry against ‘taxation without representation’ in the war of independence of 1762.  By the end of this revolution, with the effects of the Bank of England in mind the Americans set out to “form a more perfect union”.  Into their new constitution section 10 forbids “…emit[ing] Bills of Credit; mak[ing] any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts…”.[14]  It was pursuant to this section that the United States was on the Gold Standard for most of its existence up until 1933.  The Gold Standard ensured that every bill was backed by gold.  Bills printed prior to 1933 were marked “redeemable in gold”.  After 1933 they were marked as only “legal tender”.  The founding fathers knew of the threat of a manipulated currency but that memory and warning was, as we now see, historically fleeting.

The Americans had the first and second Banks of America which again started to manipulate the currency.  Andrew Jackson famously put a temporary stop to the banking cartels saying: “You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the grace of the Eternal God, will rout you out.”[16]  For a short while he succeeded.  From 1836 to 1913 the United States was free of a central bank and the currency manipulation they bring with them.

During this hiatus in central banking while financial crises persisted, inflation was flat.  That is to say that one dollar was worth one dollar for this interim period.[17]  This allowed for the accumulations of savings which is the true practice of capitalism.  Indeed by the early 1900’s bankers were concerned with the prevalence of self-financing of business development.  So concerned were the bankers that they sought to reassert themselves and in 1913, taking advantage of a recent (some say engineered) financial crisis, the Federal Reserve was born and central banking was reborn in America.[18]  Again too, the promise of the Federal Reserve was to regulate the money supply and again, so it did, to the advantage of the wealthy few.  As it has always been throughout history, currency manipulation manufactures debt and poverty.  Since the inception of the Federal Reserve, the purchasing power of the dollar has decreased by 95%.  Inflation has increased by 1929% (that’s 19 hundred and twenty nine percent!).[19]  The effect of this is that wealth inequality is now staggering.  As of 2001, in the U.S., the top 20% held 84% of all the wealth.[20]  For those who have trouble dealing with math, what this means is that if you are in the class of the remaining 80% (most of us are) then in a more fairly distributed economy – which would necessarily feature a fair currency – you would have approximately 5 times your current assets.

As common as monetary manipulation is throughout history, so too are the attempted fixes when the system gets out of whack.  A fiat currency (recall a ‘fiat’ currency is an ‘on faith’ currency) is a sort of monetary Golem: this time made of minted coins instead of clay.  Generally it functions impeccably as designed, siphoning wealth upwards but occasionally and often dramatically, it causes large financial upset.  When this Golem takes a swat at its banker creators the solution is to placate it with, yes, ever more printed or minted money.  This maneuver results in one of two results: 1) a temporary stabilization of the monster or 2) a hyperinflationary death when the monster collapses under its own weight.  Note that in either outcome, the best that can be accomplished is a temporary shoring up of the system.  Inevitably, the Golem collapses back into the imaginary ore it came from, only after raping the value of the land and passing it into the hands of the elite few.  Revisiting the economic death of Rome, Nero and other Emperors debased the currency via inflation fiddling and minting as it were while Rome burned.

However, one need not look as far afield to find a terrific example of the hyperinflationary death of an empire.  Just recently, the Weimar republic died just such a death.[21]  In the 1920’s Germany forced under the WWI reparations act to make payments to the victor nations.  The victor nations, most notably France and England who were in their own financial distress due to – you may have guessed by now – their own currency manipulation, pressured the Germans to make good on their obligations.  The German coffers were largely empty and as a result they decided to print money to meet their obligations.  The German citizens were wary of the stability of their currency and began to hoard cash fearing a crisis.  Simultaneously the German creditors began to fear default on their loans and closed the taps of credit.  The German economy stalled and went into a brief bout of deflation.  The Germans did what every other economy has tried all throughout history to solve the problem:  they threw more money into the market to try and jumpstart it.  The German citizens feared for their nest eggs which caused them to attempt to convert any cash they had on hand to real assets.  This unleashed a torrent of cash on the market which immediately lead to hyperinflation.[22]  Hyperinflation is runaway inflation fueled by panic and distrust of the underlying currency.  A corollary to the loss of trust in currency is an inevitable loss of trust in the government that promotes it.  It was thus that the Weimar republic fell leaving a political vacuum in its wake which would soon be filled by the Nazis.  Malcolm Muggeridge once wrote that: “It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.”[23]  History will record that this is equally applicable to the cessation of belief in government.

Historians and economists alike may be quick to point out that there would appear to be a historic precedent for economic spending or stimulus as an escape to recession.  They undoubtedly would point to the Roosevelt era and the “New Deal”.  So hope filled were the citizens of the day that the New Deal was rhapsodized into the Great Depression era musical: ‘Annie’.  Daddy Warbucks swooned “I know the depression is depressing… But we’ll get a new deal for Christmas this year.”[24]  The character Daddy Warbucks was modeled after Paul Warburg.[25]  It was common knowledge at the time that this was so.  Warburg was one of the chief architects of the Federal Reserve which is the United States arm of the Bank of England.  The bitter irony here is that it was the Federal Reserve System which caused and exacerbated the Great Depression.  They were anything but the cure.  The famed economist Milton Friedman spent a lifetime promoting this interpretation of events.  On the occasion of his 90th birthday Ben Bernanke, the current chairman of the Fed said: “I would like to say to Milton… Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”[26]  While I believe that Roosevelt was well intentioned, he was fatally naïve.  His New Deal served only to confiscate all public monetary gold and transfer yet more power to the Federal Reserve to manipulate currency.  The hidden tragedy of the musical Annie is that while she shares a stage with the theatric Roosevelt and Warbucks (Warburg) singing their accolades as her saviour, she is actually praising the instrument of her orphan plight.  (Annie was orphaned due to the financial insolvency of her parents.)

While unwittingly kissing the hand that starves you may be tragic when it occurs on stage, it is far more tragic when it occurs in the real world.  It is still a mainstream notion that Roosevelt’s New Deal was what rescued the Americans from the Great Depression.[27]  Even though all through history, government salvation through spending has led to financial ruin at every attempt some still espouse the idea that it is possible to spend our way out of the damage wrought by currency manipulation.  Currency manipulation is good for bankers and bankers fund business schools which produce bankers.  It is no wonder then that currency manipulation which goes hand in hand with government spending ‘has’ to be a good thing.  If you want to be at the top of this pyramid scheme you have to support the bricks that build it.  In this light, when the financial meltdown of 2008 hit, how did the pyramid builders propose to deal with the ‘Gre08er Depression’?  You guessed it, with more government spending.

Journalists are already pointing out the similarities in circumstances between Barack Obama and Roosevelt.[28]  I believe the comparisons are justified and that Obama is, like Roosevelt, well intentioned but critically misguided.  Mind you, not only is Obama misguided but most people are ill aware of monetary policy and its implications.  Obama promises trillion dollar deficits running for the next many years.[29]  It is his hope that this massive spending will shock the economy back to life.  The only shock it can reasonably hope to achieve though is shocking the Frankenstein of currency manipulation to life to turn on its creator.  The only reason Roosevelt’s New Deal appeared to work was that by the end of WWII, the US had developed tremendous manufacturing capabilities and the US was a burgeoning economy; the US emerged from the Great Depression despite Roosevelt’s New Deal, not because of it.  The situation in this Gre08er Depression is different.  There is no new manufacturing potential, indeed it is declining.  The US is not a burgeoning nation but is instead a declining one.  Thus the only shock government spending is capable of producing on the US economy is an electrocution.

Growing up I had trouble relating to the ancient Israelites I was reading about.  I could relate only to their enslavement in Egypt which I read as an allegory for my forced attendance at school.  Beyond that, they were a people very far from me both spatially and temporally.  My time was dominated by discussions and anxious anticipation of new technologies and new scientific discoveries.  While I could ‘upconvert’ an ordinance to help a neighbour right a fallen cattle to a more modern equivalent of assisting ones neighbour with a crashed computer in general the setting for torah morality written in terms of cattle, oxen and sheep failed to connect with me.  I was always amazed then as to how these seemingly simple people understood concepts such as debt.  Most debt in modern times comes from securing shelter.  In ancient Israel this could be accomplished by erecting four poles and securing canvas.  So where did these biblical injunctions come from, what wrong were they trying to right?

In trying to answer that question I would have to journey through studies of biblical archaeology and general history.  After so doing, I have found a new connection with the ancient Israelites.  They were trying to solve a very old and fundamental problem:  how to govern a large group of people equitably while preventing corruption.  Currency is one of the fundamental cornerstones of any civilization.  It is fundamental to most of our interactions and if it is corrupt, so too will inevitably be anything built on top of it.  Disappointment then comes in reading the scroll of history with each entry echoing the previous:  “Empire rises with high ideals.  The high ideals erode under complacency.  Corruption then leads to inequality and fiscal malaise.  Empire manipulates the currency to buy time.  Empire runs out of time.”

The tenet of monotheism according to the bible started with Abraham.  What the Torah describes as a moment of epiphany is revealed by biblical archaeologists to in fact be a long arduous process which took several hundreds of years.  Key here is that a stated ideal can become a practiced ideal with exertion of effort over time.  It is thus to the commandment that we “should have no poor among [us]” that we must redirect our time and efforts.  I have recently come to a conclusion that the reformed Canaanite predecessors of the world’s ‘big 3’ monotheistic religions likely came to long ago; poverty is not the result of a lack of wealth but instead a lack of justice.

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[1]   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Monday_(1987)
[2]   William G. Dever: “Did God Have a Wife?”
[3]   http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bible/program.html
[4]   http://books.google.ca/books?id=sIWn6lYS-MQC&pg=PA171
[5]   Smith, Mark “The Early History of God: Yahweh and Other Deities of Ancient Israel” (pp 6-7)
[6]   McDonald & Sanders, editors of The Canon Debate, 2002, The Notion and Definition of Canon by Eugene Ulrich, pg 4
[7]   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_and_the_money_changers
[8]   http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=bank
[9]   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaea_Capta_coinage
[10]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_Roman_Empire#Michael_Rostovtzeff.2C_Ludwig_von_Mises.2C_and_Bruce_Bartlett [11]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talley_stick
[12]  http://books.google.ca/books?id=pnszAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA8
[13]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking#History
[14]  http://www.usconstitution.net/xconst_A1Sec10.html
[15]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard
[16]  http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quotes_by/andrew+jackson
[17]  http://www.economics-charts.com/cpi/cpi-1800-2005.ht ml
[18]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve
[19]  http://postworthy.com/Worthy/ex/US_Dollar_Purchasing_Power_Decline/205.aspx[20]  http://mwiner.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/wealthdistribution.gif
[21]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1920s_German_inflation
[22] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation
[23]  http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/malcolm_muggeridge.html[24]  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2vGeaqM33g
[25]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Warburg#Legacy
[26]  http://www.federalreserve.gov/BOARDDOCS/SPEECHES/2002/20021108/default.htm[27]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal
[28]  http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20081124,00.html
[29]  http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-01-06-obama-economy_N.htm

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I’ve long held a theory about homosexuality that a recent article lends credence to. I’ve examined homosexuality through a political-societal lens in this posting:

http://mwiner.wordpress.com/2008/01/22/the-war-of-the-words-are-heterosexual-monogamists-the-patent-holders-on-marriage/

In this posting, I’d like to examine homosexuality through the lens of evolutionary biology. You see, those who condemn homosexuality do so by thumping on two texts, the bible and National Geographic. Bible thumpers thump and then leaf to Leviticus 18:22 which reads: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind; it is abomination.” I invite such individuals to glance at Numbers 15:32-36 which states that those who profane the sabbath ought to be publicly stoned. However, at least in the case of bible thumpers I can concede that the text does condemn homosexuality.

In the case of those who open up their National Geographic and point to pictures of rutting and mating animals and say, “it’s not nature’s way”, they’ve just got it wrong. It is Nature’s way; they just lack an understanding of nature and specifically evolution. Homosexuality has existed in nature for eons, but the question, from an evolutionary standpoint is: “How?” Standard evolution deals with selective pressures which make certain individuals more successful than others in reproduction. As a result the genes that contributed to this success are passed on preferentially over less ‘fit’ genes.

Homosexuality poses a conundrum then to anyone who lacks another piece in the evolution puzzle: Kin Selection. It is possible to pass your genes on to the next generation without directly reproducing. You can accomplish this by helping your kin as much as possible. By helping your kin, who carry part of your genetic code, you can preferentially increase the survivability and reproductive success of your kin. This mechanism was proposed by W. D. Hamilton in the 1960’s when explaining the evolution of altruism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._D._Hamilton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._D._Hamilton#Hamilton.27s_rule

Since I am Canadian, I learned about the evolution of altruism using the example of our good old Canadian Beaver. When a beaver detects danger, such as a wolf, it slaps its tail loudly against the water to warn its peers of the impending danger. This behaviour attracts attention to itself, making it a target for predation. Thus, how did this behaviour evolve, considering that it lowers the reproductive success of the warning beaver? The answer is that the beaver’s peers are relatives. Thus even if the beaver becomes the wolf’s lunch, the beaver’s genes can live on via the reproductive success of its relatives.

Arriving back at our original topic of consideration, how then can homosexuality have been allowed to survive the process of natural selection? I’ve long suspected that the notion of kin selection might be at work here too. I’ve long thought that if perhaps homosexual individuals helped in child rearing and caring, then their genes may have been passed indirectly through the offspring of the kin they assisted. Recently I chanced upon a study which proposes exactly this explanation:

http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/080208_gaygene

This study of a Samoan homosexuals suggests that homosexuals do indeed assist in child rearing. It’s important to note that similar studies have been conducted in the West but have failed to find such a correlation. It is proposed that the Samoan culture more closely replicates our ancient lifestyle and that the modern (western) biases and condemnation of homosexuality may be to blame for the failures of the western studies.

In conclusion, what is most striking, yet perhaps not blaringly obvious from this study is that opposition to homosexuality comes from those appealing to old sources such as the bible or appeals to nature’s longstanding order. However, this study shows that, at least in evolutionary time scales, the bias against homosexuality is a modern invention.

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There is much debate of late as to who is the patent holder on the term ‘Marriage’. Conservative heterosexual monogamists have put their moral stake in the ground claiming that ‘Marriage’ is their intellectual property. The proponents of a traditional definition can be subdivided into the religious, who claim divine rights to the word, and traditionalists that appeal to the naturalistic fallacy that the definition is as it ought to be, proven and tested by time.

First, let us set things straight. What is the traditional definition of marriage? The short answer is: one woman, one man, for life. Yet, is this the definition that both proponents of the traditional definition truly espouse?

Those religiously minded who claim a divine definition for marriage point you conveniently to the Bible. Yet, weren’t many of the biblical greats polygamists?! Clearly some historical modification of this divine lexicon has occurred.

The traditionalists have also modified matrimonial definitions over time. As recently as 1997, Ireland legalized divorce, reducing the certainty of the ‘for life’ part of the definition. Throughout most of recorded history, divorce was simply, ‘not an option’ yet it seems that societal needs have forced us to alter that definition.

So what the proponents of a traditional definition of marriage present as an immutable and timeless definition, turns out, upon closer inspection to be a shifting definition which is a product of the defining times.

Having knocked the moral ascendancy of the conservatives down a peg, we move on to possible solutions to this problem. Most people believe in homosexual marriage-style rights, leaving the word used to describe this solution as the only sticking point to be debated. They turn to homosexuals and say: what’s in a name? Wouldn’t ‘a marriage by any other name be as sweet?’ They give them the rights but just wish that they’d stay out of their lexical backyard.

Same sex marriage proponents contend this would be tantamount to the tenets ‘different but equal’ and point back to the inequalities such thinking created in civil rights history. While they have a point on this issue, I believe that the semantic battle for the word ‘marriage’ is a bid to gain popular acceptance and I believe that their opponents see it as such. I would like to see advocates for the broadened definitions of marriage speak to why homosexuality should be accepted in general. In dealing with the issues at the core of the debate they have the best chances of evoking understanding, hence change.

The main points at the core of the debate as to whether to accept homosexuality are: 1) is it natural 2) is it evil and 3) is it a choice or endemic? We’ll examine each point in turn.

First what is natural? There are two aspects to natural, first the examples taken from nature around us and next the notion that the way things are, even in the human (not natural) world are the ‘natural’ way they should be. Looking to nature we see some examples of heterosexual monogamy in say, the Bald Eagle. However, more often we see examples of harems (polygamy) and loose monogamy (infidelity, or pair bonding for only a few mating seasons). While the traditional definition of marriage does exist in the animal kingdom, it is a minority player amongst many other definitions of bonding. Further, in nature we see examples of homosexuality amongst, say, male mice who often make female sexual displays in high population densities. Thus to say that heterosexual monogamy is nature’s way is tunnel sighted and uninformed.

Next we look to the idea that homosexual marriage is not natural since the heterosexual definition has been the prevailing one across the centuries. This is a classic example of the naturalistic fallacy which says that the way things are, is the way things ought to be. If we subscribe to the belief that the way things are is the way things they ought to be then we are forced to conclude that the world we currently live in cannot, and/or should not, be improved upon or changed in any way. Imagine if we all had subscribed to this belief, as many did, when it came time to review our ways in the face of slavery. Imagine again telling many suffering couples that they were stuck together for life because the definition of marriage was the way it was meant to be. Yet today we tell homosexuals that marriage is as it ought to be and if you want your rights, well then fine, but go do it on another page of the dictionary please. If we want the rights of deep, fulfilling, long term relationships to be extended to all humanity, heterosexuals must not drink the stupefying elixir of a ‘natural’ definition of marriage, because no such definition exists.

Is homosexuality evil? Well first, what is evil. To the religiously minded, they say evil is what God says is evil as given in the book of absolute truth. I’ve found that people who believe in absolute truths usually do so only because they are absolutely wrong. I admit that I have little respect or patience for those who derive their definitions of evil from a book and thus outsource their thinking. I dismiss them quickly for the same reason I scrape cold peas of my dinner plate, because they are cold and uninteresting. For those who are prepared to think about what good and evil really are, we come to the notion of utility. Good things serve a purpose and bad things do harm. This categorization is relative to a certain frame of consideration.

The ‘packages’ your dog delivers on the neighbourhood park are not good for you to eat, yet are gourmet meals to the community of flies. Thus the truth to the statement: “doggy packages make good eating” is relative to whom is speaking. In a thinking world, to show that homosexuality is evil, we must demonstrate that it is evil in one of two frames. We must prove harm to either homosexual individuals or to society as a whole.

To homosexual individuals, the main harm done to them by being homosexual is the lack of acceptance they receive. Many heterosexuals quickly point to the often ’sad’ lives some homosexuals end up living. However, to borrow from the poet Andrew Lang, they do this “… like a drunk leans on a lightpost, for support instead of illumination”. The truth is that heterosexual intolerance of homosexuality is the cause of the ’sadness’ they observe. Still, as acceptance slowly increases, we see many more homosexuals today live productive and successful lives. They do not necessarily live reproductive lives, but either do all heterosexuals.

To our society at large, homosexuality may have a reproductive impact, but on a planet of 6 billion, is this really an issue? If we really would like to have a discussion about harm, let’s talk about the harm of subverting this ‘evil’ impulse to be homosexual, only to have men live in a traditional marriage unhappily, hurting both himself, and his wife and perhaps children. Thus aside from the heterosexual discomfort it causes, there is no harm caused by homosexuality and hence it is not evil.

Finally, is homosexuality a choice? Why ask the question? We ask because if it is a choice, we can ask them to make a different choice. Well, homosexuality is a choice but only in the same way heterosexuality is a choice. Heterosexuals could choose to be homosexual if they really wanted to. What we refer to in common speak as a choice actually has two components, first a pressure and second a pure choice. When faced with an oncoming freight train, we have a tremendous survival pressure to move. Still we have a pure choice as to whether to move or not. Most of us would move. In the case of our sexuality there are pressures given to us by our environment, genetics and evolution and in the case of heterosexuals there are no other pressures which would cause us to use our pure choice to override this strong evolutionary pressure. In the case of homosexuals, societal pressures can cause individuals to use their pure choice to over-rule their evolutionary pressures. The fact that the natural pressure can be overruled does not suggest or imply that it should because most such individuals live lives with the constant stress of juggling conflicting priorities and are never truly at peace.

In order to determine the existence and severity of this pressure to be homosexual, being unable to jump into the minds of others, we need to empirically observe the effects. The empirical proof comes from asking: Why would any person willingly join a historically persecuted group if the pressure wasn’t strong to do so? Throughout history homosexuals have been shunned and forced to lead marginalized lives. This fact is common knowledge, thus it is impossible to state that homosexuals became or become homosexual on a flight of fancy.

So are heterosexual monogamists the patent holders on marriage after all? Why do homosexuals want the word so badly, even if they’ve already got the equivalent rights? Homosexuals want the word for the same reason that heterosexuals want the word, because of its meaning. It represents a deep, long-term, and socially recognized relationship between two people. Heterosexual monogamists claim to be the patent holders on marriage because tradition, the bible and nature have provided immutable and clear definitions of marriage that conveniently agree with them. None of that is true.

advocate · aig · ale · Andrew Lang · bible · Case · cent · cold · Coming · Environment · evolution · gay rights · God · homosexuality · http · Ireland · king · life · marriage · minority player · MIT · monogamy · nature · player · poet · RAM · Red · sex · slavery · utility

I’m currently reading: “Did God Have a Wife?” by William Dever. In it he mentions the literacy rate of the ancient Israelites.
From page 28:
“… Writing does not become widespread before the 8th century B.C., and then the coprus indicates only what I would call “functional literacy.” That is, a number of people could write their names, numbers and the names of a few commodities. But that is a far cry from being truly literate, able to read literary material such as we have in the books of the Hebrew Bible. It has been estimated that even in the Roman period, no more than 5 percent of the population was literate by the above definition. In ancient Israel the figure was certainly lower. That has important implications for the question I have raised here concerning how early the Hebrew Bible could in fact have been written, and whether ordinary people could have read it if they had had it.”

ancient israel · bible · British Columbia · cent · God · Israel · Israel I'm · israelites · literacy · William Dever · writing

The State of The Union – As Seen on TV
Martin C. Winer

But first a word about how this article was written:  This article was the result of a ‘cluster’ or a free-word association.  This is an exercise which is meant to use the ‘right brain’ to spur creativity and generate writing topics.  You can create your own clusters or bubbles here: http://www.bubbl.us/ but it’s best to do them with pen and paper since one tends to self edit when typing.  Each word you see italicized below is from the cluster.  Usually, the idea is to take one theme from the cluster and write about it.  I thought it would be a challenge to include ALL the words and still have the article tell a cohesive story.   Read the article, taking note of the italicized words.  Then see the cluster below.

I have been worried about the state of the world as of late.  Being recently unemployed with no meaningful job on the horizon, I was wondering when I’d be returning to the 9-5 lifestyle.  It’s not that I ravish 9-5, as Dolly Parton’s famous song correctly puts it, 9-5 is all “takin and no giving” but it beats aimlessly strolling on sidewalks waiting for a direction to unfold.  Up until recently I was a member of the over 30 and unmarried class.  Fortune changes quickly and I now find myself suddenly being married with children.  The responsibilities are understandably far different.  Curious as to what direction my life would take over the next months and years, I turned on the familiar glowing oracle fitted in every living room, the television.

While I waited for my big screen TV, a vestige of my former employed self, to come to life, I recalled that a comic had mentioned that Dolly Parton had insured her breasts.  I wondered if the comic was putting us on, as he was apt to do.  Would an insurance company take premiums for such a ridiculous item?  What was the counterparty risk?  Were her breasts in good hands with Allstate (TM)?  The TV came to life with the evening news reporting of another hemorrhage on Wall Street of 213 ethereal points, with AIG requesting more bailout money.  Evidently, indeed, insurance companies would take premiums on just about anything and the only boobs in the interaction were the policy holders who actually thought the policy was worth something.  Bored with the evening news I changed the channel.

Dick Cheney was on “State of the Union” with John King on CNN.  Cheney, a bastion of the old guard was set to be ‘grilled’ by King as to the sins of his administration.  I flipped right past the interview because I knew it could not yield the satisfaction I was seeking.  Waterboarding and assassination squads would be second nature to a man like Cheney who shot his hunting partner in the face.  Waterboarding I imagined was just his technique for cleaning his felled game, human or otherwise.  I wasn’t interested in the past, I was curious to know what my future held.

There was an infomercial on with 90 year old Jack Lalanne sporting his leisure suit and his juicer.  I am a late night TV watcher and infomercials plague the airwaves from dusk ‘til dawn.  Jack Lalanne was born in 1914 and looked to be in better health than myself all thanks to his 1/2 horsepower juicer.  In went an orange, apple, and every other healthy fruit your mother tried to get you to eat as a child.  Out poured a fountain of youth which had purportedly kept Lalanne in such great shape over these many years, yet somehow, it hadn’t managed to save his fashion sense.  The leisure suit was last popular when the juice on everyone’s lips was Juice Newton, “Grease” was the new movie and disco was still in style.  I was intrigued with the notion of extended life and wondered if indeed Lalanne’s juicer could provide it.  Even if it could, what would my life be like, aged 90+ years drinking fruit and vegetables all day?  Would my life be fulfilling?  I changed the channel seeking an answer from the glowing oracle of TV.

The next infomercial was for Extenz tablets; an all natural ‘Male Enhancement’.  Well this held some promise now didn’t it?  At least my latter years could be herbally augmented with extra length and girth.  But just what were these pills I thought to myself?  “An all natural male enhancement?” I wondered to myself.  Didn’t we already have such a thing in Dolly Parton?  What were these herbs and how were they discovered?  Did someone eat a salad with wild herbs one night with shocking results in the bedroom?  How did they then suspect the salad and not anything else?  My mind was awash with questions and I wasn’t much in the thinking mood.  I wanted answers, not questions.  Come on oracle of television, what would my life be like?  The only effort I was willing to exert was in flipping channels.

Yet as I flipped there were a plethora of Viagra and its new copy Cialis ads.  Was the television intimating that my future would need these?  A Viagra ad promised that at age 50 I could trade in my sedan for a Harley Davidson and with one pill have the vigor of a 20 year old.  A Cialis ad promised 36 hour or daily dosing options to make sure I would be able to respond when the mood was right.  If I was as old as Jack Lalanne, would my wife still be ready for me?  I’d be worried about breaking bones at that age.  Another flip would quell that fear.

Once a month Boniva would rebuild my wife’s bones without the need to remember a weekly pill.  There would be no need to take those chalky calcium pills once a day.  Of course memory at that age will be compromised so the once a month dosing is ideal.  Side effects could include liver and kidney disease but at least you would only have to endure them once a month.  God bless Big Pharma.  I could have a once a day boner and my wife could have healthy bones all month.  I was comforted that the future would be bright.  My comfort was not long lasting, at least not as long lasting as 36 hour Cialis promised to be, when it occurred to me that Big Pharma was suffering from a horrible case of misplaced priorities.  With all of their attention focused on bones and boners, they had dropped the two big balls of cancer and heart disease.  I curiously imagined a big Pharma strategizing kick off meeting with people brainstorming on new drug targets and somehow bones and boners getting to the top of the list over cancer and heart disease.  I only hoped that Jack Lalanne’s fountain of youth Juice could get my wife and I past those two roadblocks.

I calmed myself thinking that my 90th year was well off, I being only 35 now.  Big Pharma had time to readjust their priorities.  I continued my flipping to discover yet another Big Pharma commercial for Requip, a medication for Restless Leg Syndrome (RLS).  My legs were perfectly atrophied into their TV watching position.  I didn’t believe that such a condition could occur.  “My doctor said ‘Requip’” said the announcer as a television doctor mouthed “Requip”.  I imagined that the doctor mouthed “bullsh*t” in response to the patients complaint.  [0u92R90U R ‘ jixz-]0039;ffaS980059-09ATRE MT3.  Oops, I’m ever so sorry about that previous mess, you see my arms tend to spontaneously move uncontrollably every so often…  Oh my, could it be I have Restless Arms Syndrome (RAS)?  Well at least I know that Big Pharma is on the case.  Perhaps if I ingest Requip while standing on my head, the medication will settle in the appropriate appendages?  Parenthetically I wonder if all Requip contains is a bottle of gel caps filled with Brandy?  All it seemed Big Pharma could do for me in my latter years was give calm legs and arms and a rock hard erection.  The Viagra commercial warned that any erection lasting over 4 hours constituted a medical risk and thus I knew my fulfillment from Big Pharma would leave me with 20 remaining hours in the day to fill with what?  What would I do?  I looked to the financial stations to see if I had any prospect of finding a job.

CNBC was heralding the success of the latest Apple Computer quarterly results.  The IPhone and the IPod were unrelenting successes.  The host discussed the failing health of Steve Jobs as a concern for the future of the company and since we now know all that Big Pharma is good for, the concern is justified.  I myself am not a gadget freak.  I often mockingly eye people walking down the street sweaty palmed typing at lunatic speeds on their Palm, Blackberry or blueberry or whatever the latest berry is.  I have no need to be so totally connected, but evidently there is a huge market for these devices.  Just the same I was delighted to see the success of Apple whose Macintosh computer was, in my mind, the superior computer in 1985.  Bill Gates was the smarter CEO, not the better innovator.  Steve Jobs didn’t allow clones of Macintosh’s while Gates allowed clones of the PC.  As a result Apple’s market share fell like Newton’s apple under newly discovered gravity.  With all the discussion of executive compensation these days, I think Steve Jobs deserves the lion’s share of the reward when it comes to innovation.  The IPod is simple to use media device which takes advantage of the recent wave of music piracy and MP3’s that puts the tale of the Maersk Alabama to shame.  Now don’t get me wrong, copyright infringement was not created by Jobs, he only capitalized on it.  The IPhone is the next logical extension of a handheld computing device incorporating maps, navigation and a whole host of other useful features we come to expect from Apple.  The Macintosh, the IMac as it’s now called, is gaining market share in leaps and bounds.  I guessed that I had attained some inspiration from the glowing oracle;  perseverance, like that of Steve Jobs in the face of constant opposition and I too could one day go on to innovate a pile of handheld devices – or something like that.  Of course this special was being aired on CNBC the so called financial news network that managed to complete miss any predictions of the financial collapse which had claimed my job.  I wasn’t about to take any advice from them.  No, the Corruption National Broadcasting System as I had renamed them would have to find another mark. I dismissed them with a flip of the channel.

The Cheney Interview was over on CNN and now Anderson Cooper on A.C. 360 was sporting a pie chart showing the distributions of the American reinvestment Plan.  There were huge allotments for infrastructure building projects.  A clip revealed workers building bridges all over the country.  Wasn’t it another Democratic president who wanted to build a bridge to the 21st century?  Now are we building bridges out of Chapter 11?  There was discussion of incentives to homeowners to renovate and rejuvenate their properties.  I thought of stopping in at Home Depot but immediately balked because the 27 minute hand waving discussion with 17 year old ‘Skippy’ who works there never seems to get me the results I want.  For all the talk of hope and economic plans CNN was pushing out, I knew that the recession was receding faster than Dick Cheney’s hairline.

Rembrant - Raising of Lazarus

Then they aired a clip of the master of hope: President Obama.  “America has been great and shall rise to be great again” he prophesized.  I thought this had a familiar tone.  I quickly switched to the Catholic Television Service and the pastor proudly boomed “and the phoenix shall rise out of the ashes just as Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead.”  The pastor went on to solicit donations for a new building project.  This also had familiar overtones and I flipped back quickly to CNN.  “It will take considerable investment from us all but we shall rebuild and come back stronger” proudly acclaimed Obama.  It then occurred to me that Obama was more than just a President, he was our primary minister.  He then intimated at his plan to remove toxic assets from the books of the banks without providing the necessary details I was looking for; undoubtedly he would turn water into wine.  The rhetoric of hope was overflowing my ears and I needed a counter position to ground myself again.  Luckily there was the FOX network who was lambasting Obama as the bane of humanity whose short stint in office had already thrown the economy into apocalypse from which only a miracle could now save us.

Putin and other former Soviet interviewees were quoted as saying that the end of capitalism has finally come.  A commentator remarked: “the American dream of picket fences has been replaced by picket lines” as the video showed protesting auto workers.  Am auto worker protested: “The companies are trying to divide and conquer us, taking advantage of this downturn to cut our benefits and pay.  I say enough taxing the middle class!”  Cheers and hurrahs followed.  My brain was like a pair of Levi’s jeans iconically being pulled by these two polarized stations in opposite directions, at the risk of ripping.  There had to be some truth on the glowing oracle of television.  PBS I thought to myself quickly.  That will save me.

Jim Lehrer

(Ed. Note: Actually it’s IOWA that is ok with Gay Rights, not Oklahoma.  In my cluster, I confused the two, but I went with it because the challenge was to write an article using all the clustered words.  I was only off by a 10 hour drive anyways.    )

Public Broadcasting, publicly funded and publicly ignored in favour of watching MTV to hear if Britney Spears of Lindsay Lohan were wearing underwear today.  Today Jim Lehrer was discussing the state of Gay Rights.  Evidently in Ahnold’s (sic) California the rights of gays have been ‘terminated’.   Ironically, Oklahoma seems “Ok” with gay marriage.  Is that what the song “Oklahoma, OK” is about from the musical Oklahoma?  The world seemed upside down.  Had I inverted myself such that Requip went to my arms and forgot about it?  Oklahoma was a place where I expected politicians to spout the bible about ‘being Fruitful and multiplying’ and how homosexuality was unnatural.  In liberal California, I expect them to say anything goes, from Gay Rights to cloning dolly the sheep.  After all doesn’t Hotel California by the Eagles promise “Plenty of room at the Hotel California / Any time of year, you can find it here”?  I couldn’t make sense of my world.  I was about as comfortable as a man swimming in itchy wool trunks.  I needed to flip the channel quickly.

Kim Kardashian

Chicks Who Love Guns

Up next was a documentary “American Justice” revisiting the O.J. Simpson trial.  It brought back names like Mezza Luna, Nicole Brown, Robert Kardashian, Kim Kardashian… whoops my mind wandered.  Robert Kardashian had helped set a murderer free but brought us Kim Kardashian.  Now they say justice should be blind, but have you seen Kim Kardashian?  He was off the hook in my books but the rest of the characters who let O.J. go were open to attack in my imagination.  I recast the events of that fateful night as a Quentin Tarantino movie.  I’d have my justice, if only in my imagination.  Nicole Brown would now be Jackie Brown.  She would seductively seduce O.J. by dancing for him like Salma Hayek in Tarantino’s “From Dusk ‘Til Dawn”.  She’d then immediately turn into a vampire and eat him alive.  Next, Travolta and Samuel Jackson from Pulp Fiction would show up and after quoting Ezekiel 25:17 would lace into the O.J. lawyers.  Finally the women from “Chicks who love Guns” as seen in Jackie Brown, armed with the AK-47 and they would deal with every “mother [t]ucker” in the jury room.  Returning from my daydream I realized that 10 years had passed and there was no justice to be spoken of.  The only thing I had learned from the episode was that justice is a function of wealth and that O.J. stood for Orenthall James, not Orange Juice.  I’m not admitting I was that stupid however, I’m about to write another article: “If I was that stupid, here’s how I’d admit it.”

I knew how the O.J. saga ended so I flipped again to see what else was on the glowing oracle.  John Sebastian crooned “Welcome Back, to the same old place where you started from…”  It was a rerun of Welcome Back Kotter.  Truly, I was basically back where I had started from, only an hour of flipping elapsed.  I knew nothing more of the future than when I started.  Sure I knew that my bones and boners would be safe, boobs could be insured, and that if I worked very hard, I might find a job.  But I was looking for important answers to important questions like, what would justice be like in the future?  What would the economy be like?  I was sure that Kotter’s Vinni Barbarino wasn’t going to be able to answer my questions.  With that, I turned off the glowing oracle for the night.

‘Apple’ cluster which generated the article.

This is the free word association (or cluster, or bubble) which generated the article.  Again, each italicized above came from the cluster below.

9 to 5 · 9/11 · AID · aig · AK-47 · ale · allstate · America · american justic · Announcer · apple · arnold schwarzenegger · auto workers · bailout · bank · bankruptcy · bible · bill gates · blog · boniva · bubble · california · cancer · capitalism · Case · cent · chapter 11 · chicks who love guns · cialis · cluster · dca · dick cheney · dolly parton · eagles · Economy · Executive · extenze · Ezekiel 25:17 · free word association · gay rights · God · grease · head · Health · heart disease · home depot · homosexuality · hotel california · http · ibm · ILS · insurance · Internet · iphone · ipod · jack lalanne · Jackie Brown · jim lehrer · John Sebastian · John Travolta · juice newton · kim kardashian · king · lawyer · lazarus · levis · life · logic · maersk · maersk alabama · marriage · Martin C. Winer · MIT · mp3 · Music · nature · O. J. Simpson · obama · OJ · oklahoma · palm blackberry · piracy · pirates · President · Pulp Fiction · quentin tarantino · quote · Red · requip · rls · Robert Kardashian · Rome · Salma Hayek · sex · steve jobs · Tarantino · viagra · video · Vinni Barbarino · waterboarding · wealth · Welcome Back Kotter · writing

The Kuzari Proof is a famous proof of the validity of Judaism and is commonly used in outreach programs to convince estranged Jews to return to the fold of observance. (1) It was developed originally by the 11th century poet Yehuda Halevi as a response to the loss of Judaism’s monopoly on monotheism. It was designed specifically to prove that the Jews had a unique theological gift: the direct and public revelation of God to all the ancient Israelites at Mt. Sinai. (2) In recent years, the ‘proof’ has been offered as a proof of many things. Most commonly it attempts to prove: the existence of God, His revelation to the ancient Israelites at Sinai, His authorship of the Torah, and the resulting inerrancy of the Torah. My purpose is not to argue for or against the veracity of any of the above claims, but instead to show why the Kuzari proof is not a proof of any of them. Part of the search for truth entails the culling out of implausible options. It is my hope that the de-legitimization of the Kuzari proof will lead the observant and the secular alike to come closer to the truth.

The Kuzari ‘proof’ has been proffered in several forms and incarnations but the gist is as follows:
1) 3 million Jews witnessed the revelation of God at Sinai. (3)
2) Starting with the witnessing generation, one generation has told the story to the next, leading us, in the current generation, to be inductive witnesses to this event.
3) It is impossible to fake a large public event and its subsequent intergenerational transmission (with inferred acceptance) as described in steps 1 and 2, thus the original event must have happened.
It would seem to be common sense that events with many witnesses cannot be faked. However, history has taught us that many who have invoked ‘common sense’ have been frustrated by how rare indeed a sense it is. Needless to say, I find many problems with this ‘proof’. I will take each in sequential order.

First, I address the ‘3 million Jews witnessed the revelation’ claim. In logical discourse, one cannot assume what one is trying to prove. You cannot assume that the Torah is inerrant in order to prove that it is inerrant. The 3 million figure (or 600,000 adult males to be more precise) comes from the Torah. (4) One cannot use this figure then, to prove that there were 3 million witnesses to an event which then makes the Torah inerrant. To do so is to construct a tautological proof, or in lay terms… a self-validating statement. The statement “if it rains, it will be raining” is syntactically valid, but is semantically meaningless, in that it is tautological. The proof of the inerrancy of the Torah cannot be made by using statements that require the Torah to be inerrant. In short, we do not know, independent of the Torah claim, that there were 3 million witnesses at Sinai, hence the proof falls apart right there.

Next we look at the ‘witnessed the revelation of God at Sinai’ part of the first statement. As I can recall from my Hebrew school days, the voice of God at Sinai was so powerful it could ‘tear the soul from your body’. I also remember descriptions of smoke and fire similar to the poor Technicolor animations of the DeMille classic depicting the same. (5) Now Joan Rivers has a voice that in my mind can tear the soul out of my body as she as she squawks and screeches about the stars’ fashions at the Oscars. I am in no particular hurry to worship Joan Rivers nor Cecil B. DeMille. What I mean to get across comedically is that special effects capable of being produced cheaply these days by Industrial Light and Magic and the good folks over at Lucasfilm hardly proves God for me. A simple retort might be “but no one believes the fantastic stories and special effects of today to be true”. Tell that to the people who suffered mass panic and hysteria at the radio transmission of Welles’ “The War of The Worlds” in the 1938. (6) In summation, as we build here, for statement 1, we have 3 million unproved witnesses witnessing something they say was fiery, scary and spoke with a loud voice. If one were to tell a Kuzari adherent of UFO sightings, they would likely start to ask questions as to what other explanations could explain this phenomenon: why not here too? (7)

Now we look at statement 2, specifically at the part which says: starting with the witnessing generation, we have an unbroken chain of transmission. The ’starting with the witnessing generation’ part is key. It says that it is impossible to get a generation (a large group of people) to accept anything as an accurate account of history which was not known to be an accurate account history. Yet when you poke a Kuzari adherent for proof of the Israelites’ slavery in Egypt you quickly get this response: “The Egyptians did not record their defeats.” (8) Well hang on a second here, does not that suggest that the Egyptians published a history and the greater than 3 million Egyptians that read it accepted it as true even though they knew it was untrue? (9) So can you cause multitudes to accept a false history or not? Which is it? The answer cannot be, if we are to have a sensible conversation, yes in the case of the Egyptians and no in the case of the Israelites. It also cannot be the answer that the Egyptians were embarrassed by defeat and thus motivated to accept the faked history because we cannot know if the Israelites also were not embarrassed by some historical event and thus were motivated to accept a revised history of unique divine revelation. Recall, we cannot assume the Torah as an accurate account of history to prove that the Torah is an accurate account of history. Keeping our eye on the ball, it is NOT the issue here whether or not there were slaves in Egypt, nor is it the issue as to what the actual history of the region was. The issue is that you cannot, at once, claim that you both can and cannot cause a large number of people to accept a false history. The Kuzari proof and discussions of the Kuzari proof are fraught with these sorts of asymmetric applications of explanatory logic. You cannot suck and blow from the same explanatory pipe at the same time.

Next we address statement 3, the inerrancy and incorruptibility of generational transmission of this revelation. Note: this statement is really just a summation of points 1 and 2 where the true Kuzari argument rests. Many people have accused the Torah of suffering from ‘broken telephone’ transmission. The orthodox authorities have correctly retorted that they have proof, archaeological no less, that the Torah has shifted perhaps 2 or 3 letters at most during all of its transmission. Parenthetically, for those keeping score and who just noted an asymmetrical application of explanatory logic, a gold star to you. You correctly noted that all of the sudden archaeology IS an acceptable proof that the Torah has not changed through the generations, yet archaeology IS NOT acceptable as proof that there were not Israelites in Egypt.

If the Torah did not significantly change over they centuries, which is a statement I will accept due to archaeological supporting evidence, the question becomes: why would any people accept the Torah as history, as the ancient Israelites seemed to, if its contents (the description of the revelation at Sinai) were not known to be true? In typical rabbinic style, let me answer a question with a question: Why would the multitudes that accepted the Gospels as gospel, accept them unless they knew somehow that Jesus had indeed miraculously fed the multitudes fish and loaves of bread as the gospels describe? (10) “After the people saw the miraculous sign that Jesus did, they began to say, ‘Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world.’ ” (John 6:14) (11) The problem here exists in yet another asymmetrical application of explanatory logic. If you cannot pervert a generational transmission of a miraculous event, then adherents to the Kuzari proof must by definition, accept that Jesus fed the multitudes by miracle. To be clear, I am not saying whether Jesus fed the multitudes or not, nor am I proving or disproving a revelation at Sinai, I am simply saying that the evidence of cultural widespread acceptance of an event as a miracle cannot be the proof of Judaism because it proves antithetical Jewish and Christian miracles at the same time.

In summation we see that the Kuzari proof is a failed proof because of fundamental flaws in logic. The two main fundamental flaws are assuming that which is trying to be proved and asymmetrical uses of explanatory logic at the convenience of the argument. The Kuzari proof is an attempt to prove the divine revelation at Sinai which, in turn, is a cornerstone of Jewish faith. (12) For the orthodox that appear vexed at the decline of Judaism, the message is clear: The rest of us will accept what you have to say when you provide cogent proof. The Kuzari proof is not cogent and the burden of proof is on you.

Further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuzari

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1 http://ohr.edu/special/books/truth-6.htm
2 http://www.talkreason.com/articles/kuzari.cfm
3 Numbers (1:46) There were 600,000 adult males generally leading us to conclude a total population of 3 million.
4 ibid
5 http://www.chabad.org/library/article.asp?AID=2047
6 http://radio.about.com/library/weekly/aa102302a.htm
7 http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9923316/
8 http://ohr.edu/yhiy/article.php/2053
9 The number of Egyptians must have been greater than 3 million if the biblical account is true because it would be impossible to subdue and enslave a population of 3 million Israelites with an equal or smaller number of Egyptians.
10 http://www.gardenofpraise.com/bibl43s.htm
11 http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%206:1-15
12 Aish.Com – Rediscovering The Revelation

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