The Fall of Jericho: biblical genocide?

The guest preacher, Terry Boyle, at the Church I attend this morning (Sunday 17/11/2024) preached on this reading:

Joshua 5: 13–15  The Fall of Jericho

Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, “Are you for us or for our enemies?”

‘Neither,’ he replied, ‘but as commander of the army of the LORD I have now come.’ Then Joshua fell facedown to the ground in reverence, and asked him, ‘What message does my Lord have for his servant?” 

The commander of the LORD’s army replied, ‘Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy.’ And Joshua did so.

Boyle's key message from the reading was that Joshua achieved success because he was obedient to God. And, he said: 'We all know what happened next'. 

Indeed we do, and I remember as a child joyfully singing "and the walls came tumbling down". 

It was a great triumph for Joshua because he followed the will of God, and Boyle took it for granted that we would all rejoice at this story of victory in the history of the Israelites. That is indeed always how I remember the story in my Christian upbringing.

But here's what the bible tells us happened after the walls came tumbling down:

"They devoted* the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys." Joshua 6:21

*A footnote to the NIV translation on Bible Gateway explains that the Hebrew term translated as 'devoted' refers to "the irrevocable giving over of things or persons to the Lord, often by totally destroying them".

And:

"Then they burned the whole city and everything in it...." Joshua 6:24

Sound familiar? 

How did we deal with these passages when I read the story in the past? When singing the song you go no further in the narrative beyond the walls coming tumbling down, and you don't need to think about what happened next. From bible classes I have vague memories of worrying about killing so many people, but I think we read it as a story and which was no more real than, say, the Lord of the Rings. If it is 'just' a story it is an exciting tale! (The business with Rahab the prostitute sheltering Joshua's spies, Joshua 2, and Joshua in turn saving her and her household from the killing, Joshua 6:22, is weird but a memorable story.)

But now Israel is acting-out a modern-day slaughter of Palestinians and it is very, very real. Israel is destroying "men and women, young and old' and 'burn[ing] the whole city and everything in it' - but not just Gaza City, the whole of the Gaza strip. And people in Israel, and even more so Zionist Christians in America, are justifying it based on the authority of the bible.

As I said about Psalm 124, it is not good enough that churches use these stories without joining the dots. We can no longer stop at 'the walls came tumbling down'. We've got to ask about the slaughter.

What to do about Psalm 124?

Yesterday (29th September 2024) I was on the rota for reading at Church, and found myself reading Psalm 124, one of the lectionary readings for the day:

1 If the Lord had not been on our side –
  let Israel say –
2 if the Lord had not been on our side
  when people attacked us,
3 they would have swallowed us alive
  when their anger flared against us;
4 the flood would have engulfed us,
  the torrent would have swept over us,
5 the raging waters
  would have swept us away.
6 Praise be to the Lord,
  who has not let us be torn by their teeth.
7 We have escaped like a bird
  from the fowler’s snare;
the snare has been broken,
  and we have escaped.
8 Our help is in the name of the Lord,
  the Maker of heaven and earth.

I don't need to spell out the problems with this, in the light of the activities of the state of Israel over the past year, do I? 

In the past I wouldn't have worried. or not much anyway. The psalms are notorious for 'difficult' content ("happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks", psalm 137 v. 9) and need lots of interpretation. For example, I heard someone suggest that the infants being dashed against the rocks should be thought of as evil thoughts starting to grow in your mind: smash them before they become too big. For myself, I see the bible as a human creation and, like any book, open to criticism. We can contexualise all we like, we can interpret it in the light of modern understanding, but at some point we just have to say: no, I think that is wrong.

At the end of the reading, as is the custom, I said 'this is the word of the Lord', and the congregation responded 'thanks be to God'. I toyed with instead saying 'this is what it says in the bible' or something like that, but in the end I didn't have the courage to break with what we are 'supposed' to say.

But if this psalm is being read in churches across the world, at the very least we have talk about it surely? To put it crudely, is it saying that God is on the side of modern-day Israel? That the slaughter of 40,000 people in Gaza, and the bombing of Lebanon and the Yemen will succeed (is succeeding) because the Lord is with them?  

And, before you shout 'anti-semitism', I'm talking about the state of Israel, and about Christian churches. And, let's be clear, the most ardent Zionists, the most dangerous Zionists, are right-wing Christians in the USA. I don't know what goes on in most Synagogues, but I do know that large numbers of Jews would have no sympathy whatsoever with Zionism, certainly not Zionism which leads to the slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians.

In my church, the minister's sermon was based on the New Testament reading* and made no mention of the psalm. I suggest that's not really good enough: we can't just have a reading which some people might read as giving religious cover to genocide, without at least saying something about it.

*Mark 9: 38–41. "Whoever is not against us is for us", and he spoke of the need for diversity and a range of perspectives in the church. This was fine, but could have been preached at any time. And, TBH, I've heard it plenty of times before.

Why create God? Thoughts at a funeral

I recently attended a funeral at the local crematorium with about 17 mourners. I didn't really know the deceased, though he was someone known to my wife, and I had developed an indirect liking for the man.

Two months ago a friend only had a couple of people at his cremation, but invited friends to think about him on the day, which my wife and I did.

Earlier this year I attended a funeral at my church of a member of the congregation. The church was packed with family and friends.

When Queen Elizabeth died two years ago, millions of people across the world mourned her death and watch the funeral on television.

Meanwhile, people all across the world die with no-one to mourn them. 

Are some of these people of more 'value' than others? Is the life of one more meaningful than that of another? Humanly, it is difficult not to draw that conclusion. We may say 'all human life is worth the same', but it is difficult, really, to believe it. 

So, we invent a God for whom it is true.

Information, narrative, and history. Thoughts prompted by reviews of a book by Richard Holloway

I am conscious that my arguments for the primacy of narrative over facts/information might appear to licence 'anything goes', but it doesn't.

1) You can't just make up information. There has to be something underneath the trapezium and the process in the trapezium is not arbitrary.

2) Narratives are not all equal.

At some point I want to illustrate with the 'narrative' as a mathematical formula or a computer programme, but for now I want record some thoughts arising from a couple recent book reviews in the Guardian.

A review of “A Little History of Religion” by Richard Holloway in the Guardian by Tim Whitmarsh on 21st September 2016 included this:

A Little History of Religion by Richard Holloway review – God versus oppression

The former bishop is excellent on the crisis we face today, but has too narrow a concept of religion and too obvious an agenda about true believers fighting state power

As a history of religion this book is ill‑conceived. As an informed reflection on the state of faith in the western world in the 21st century … it is insightful and intelligent. But it is as a history that it announces itself, and that is how it will be judged.
 […]
Those with a little postmodern learning often opine that history can never be objective; it always tells a story. That may be true enough in a crude sense, but the writing of history remains a subtle art. Bad history is transparently ideological: it uses a crude narrative to make an obvious point. Good history, on the other hand, is based on deep learning. It surprises the reader, using the past to disrupt our expectations, or showing how what seems to be one thing in fact may be something very different. On these criteria, I am afraid to say, Holloway is a bad historian. It is not just the distortion of fact and the absence of any critical handling of sources (though it is disturbing, to me at least, to see chronological dates attached to the Biblical Abraham and Moses). The main problem is that his accounts always serve the same black-and-white agenda, painting the same picture of pious types battling monstrous state power. [My emphasis]

Now I like Richard Holloway. I like what he has to say and he also comes across as honest and kind, so I like him as a person, too.  So this negativity caught my attention and set me thinking more deeply than I might otherwise have done.

"Those with a little postmodern learning": that's me!  Well, *very* little postmodern learning.

This has led me to spend a few minutes looking further at facts and history, or historiography, I suppose I mean.  I'll report more on that in separate post.  For the moment I'll focus on this review, but also on another one. Someone else had also, earlier, reviewed this book in Observer, which is really the Guardian-on-Sunday.

Peter Stanford on 14 August 2016:

A Little History of Religion by Richard Holloway – review

An agnostic ex-bishop’s account of our enduring love affair with deities is even-handed, elegant and compelling

[...] Most writers who attempt such a sweep end up giving the religions they know best – by upbringing, culture or preference – too great a prominence. Not Holloway, though: he shows no favouritism to the various branches of the Christian family and is just as authoritative on Islam as he is on Anglicanism.

I've chosen that paragraph to quote by Stanford because it is, superficially at least, completely at odds with Witmarsh, who says:

It is a “little history” because it is written from a comfortable armchair. Holloway’s is an unashamedly, but apparently unselfconsciously, Protestant account. He takes it for granted that the only religious experience that matters is divine revelation, when God talks directly to human beings: none of that ritual mumbo-jumbo that bothers the anthropologists. So we race past entire areas of human experience. He explicitly states that Shinto, ancient Greek polytheist and native American beliefs aren’t proper religion; presumably he would say the same about the indigenous cultures of Africa or South America, since he never mentions them.

Perhaps there is no problem. Perhaps it is just that Witmarsh is reviewing it, as he says, as history, which Stanford has made no mention of. Still, it is interesting that the two accounts should be so different. In particular, that Witmarsh is critical because it is so parochial (if I may use the term), while Stanford is complimentary because it is not parochial. Alternative narratives about the same book.

So, there are two levels.

Witmarsh is arguing that Holloway's narrative is not legitimate history, because it is transparently ideological ("painting the same picture of pious types battling monstrous state power") and because of his distortion of fact and the absence of any critical handling of sources.

But then, beyond that, there is the legitimacy of the narrative of the reviews themselves. Could it be that the reviews themselves are "transparently ideological"? Could they be distorting facts to fit their own narrative?  Or, picking up on my previous post, choosing different 'facts' from the sources to support different narratives?  Of course the reviews are not objective: there's surely no such thing. But at what point might they cross some boundary and become "transparently ideological" reviews?  Among all the dross of the below-the-line comments on the reviews, someone had pointed out that Quakers are not an American development, so Witmarsh's statement that

Modernity is represented in this history primarily by America’s Christian and para-Christian developments: Quakers, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientologists and so forth.

is wrong about Quakers. That doesn't really matter or significantly change the argument, but it is a reminder to careful of the narrative sweeping the information along without care for the facts.

Difference

From day to day I keep seeing things in terms of "difference that makes a difference". Since I've not posted anything on here for a while, here's a couple from the last few hours.

a)

"God created suffering so that joy might appear through its opposites. ... Things become manifest through opposites. Since God has no opposite, He remains hidden."

Words of Rumi^* in Elif Shafak's "The Forty Rules of Love". (Penguin Books 2015 ed., p121)

* Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī was a 13th century "poet, jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic" (from Wikipedia, version as of 16:38, 12 October 2015)‎. I've no idea whether these really are his words of the words of Shafak.

 b)      A colour chart showing how Crayola have expanded the range of colours in their crayons since they started with eight in 1903.

From Somewhere Over The Crayon-Bow.

Information about, for and as religion

The upcoming Difference That Makes a Difference conference, DTMD 2015 at IS4IS in Vienna, has the theme of Information and values: ethics, spirituality and religion. 

I've been thinking about information and religion on and off for some time, and last year presented a paper on the theme at ISSEI 2014 in Porto. The abstract of that presentation is below, and I hope a full paper will be appearing in the proceedings in due course.

The Porto presentation was really just framing the problem, suggesting that 'information and religion' should be addressed in terms of information about, for and as religion.

I hope that other people will be presenting papers within this framework at Vienna. So, if you are reading this and have thoughts about information about, for and/or as religion, please submit an abstract to DTMD 2015 before the deadline of 27th February.

• See the Call for Papers.
• Submissions (extended abstracts) are now open and can be made through the International Society for Information Studies submissions page.
• Submissions close on 27 February 2015

Information and Religion

Increasing numbers of workers in an ever-widening range of disciplines have been discovering that a theory of information provides new insights into their field. Hans Christian von Baeyer, for example, argued in his 2003 book that information is the new language of science. Wolfgang Hofkirchner argues that our understanding of information is undergoing a paradigm shift with far-reaching consequences, and the philosopher of Information Luciano Floridi has put forward the thesis that information underpins a fourth revolution (following the three due to Copernicus, Darwin and Freud) which repositions our sense of identity. After the fourth revolution (which actually started the moment our ancestors painted on the walls of their caves) we are informational agents – inforgs – dispersed in an infosphere.

Albert Borgmann identified three roles for information: information about reality; information for reality and information as reality. This presentation explores information about, for and as religion.

Information about religion concerns the use of information-thinking to describe and understand religion. Gregory Bateson’s widely-cited definition of information as ‘a difference which makes a difference’ might itself be a description of religion. To be a Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jew… is to be different from people who are not that: and it makes a difference to your life. To an extent this is just saying that religion is about identity and identity is an informational concept, but understanding religious identity in terms of information brings with it new insights which potentially provide different ways of thinking about religion. I have argued elsewhere, for example, that information is inherently provisional: that it cannot ever be anything else but provisional. So religious identity, too, from an informational perspective, cannot be anything other than provisional.

Information for religion concerns information as a tool of religion. Borgmann discusses information for reality as specification: defining and shaping reality, and so, similarly, information defines and shapes religion. Religious texts might be interpreted as the specification manuals of religions, but the unwritten traditions are information as well, and by understanding the nature of information we can look for insights into how religions are maintained and passed on from generation to generation.

Information is core to many religious formulations. Creations stories, for example, recognise the role of the informational concepts of difference and identity, as in the Genesis description of God separating night from day and land from sea, and the first man, Adam, naming the animals.

More recently some writers have been exploring how ideas which subvert materialism/physicalism and emphasise the primacy of information might open doors to a world-view that aligns with religious formulations.

Information as religion, is information replacing religion or delivering a religion itself. For some writers information thinking provides the basis for something close to a grand narrative. Hofkirchner, for example, seeks from an information science paradigm a new Weltanschauung: a new world-view; a new philosophy; a new way of thinking, and sees in this a route to addressing the global problems that arise from technological development, enabling a global, sustainable, information society. Information has been proposed as an alternative to religion as the basis of ethics, too. Floridi has spoken of an information ethics which “holds that every entity, as an expression of being, has a dignity, constituted by its mode of existence and essence” and that “there is something even more elemental than life, namely being [...] and something even more fundamental than suffering, namely entropy”.

The potential scope of an exploration of the value of information ideas to religion is vast. This presentation suggests a framework for thinking about the field and points to a few specific examples.

Chapman, D. A. (2014) ‘Information and Religion’ Images of Europe: Past, Present, Future The 14th International Conference of The International Society for the Study of European Ideas (ISSEI 2014). Porto, Portugal, August 4 – 8

Information, creation and the Hindu text, the Vedanta-sutra

On the 'Information and Religion' theme:

The big issue, even for cosmologists today, is whether or not that primordial state contained some of the information needed for the appearance and development of the cosmos. And where did that information come from: From chaos? Or, from an infinite regression of information leaking from previous universes.

Vedanta argues that useful information most likely has a sentient source, and that Brahman, is conscious energy in its “purest” state. Physical matter is transformed by the passage of time. But Brahman exists before time and is therefore timeless, eternal.

Akhandadhi Das, BBC "Thought for the day" 14/01/2015

DTMD 2015. Information and values: ethics, spirituality and religion

Following the successful DTMD* 2011 and DTMD 2013, the DTMD Group (as we think we have now become!) are delighted to announce that DTMD 2015 will be run as part of the International Society for Information Studies 2015 conference in Vienna, 3 - 7 June 2015.

*DTMD: The Difference That Makes a Difference

DTMD 2015 has the theme of:

Information and values: ethics, spirituality and religion

See the full call for papers here.

Submissions (extended abstracts) are now open and can be made through the International Society for Information Studies submissions page. Submissions close on 27 February 2015.

The International Society for Information Studies (ISIS - yes, we know, but it was called that a long time ago!) 2015 conference is shaping up to be a great event.  The list of speakers is a who's who of workers in the field of information studies.

Vlatko Vedral: What does it mean to call information the basis of reality?

Vlatko Vedral, who is one the Keynote Speakers at next month's Difference that Makes a Difference, talks on "What does it mean to call information the basis of reality?"

A Conversation with Vlatko Vedral | Big Questions Online

Peter Singer

About Peter Singer in the Guardian today:

Singer's argument, as first laid out in an essay in 1971, isn't hard to follow. "If it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it ... If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing." As he added, however, the "uncontroversial appearance" of this argument is deceptive. Considerations of distance, or of how many potential rescuers there might be, are irrelevant to Singer: the child you see dying of malnutrition or a preventable disease on the foreign news has as much of a claim on you as the child in the pond. Spending your surplus income on consumer treats rather than efforts to end extreme poverty, he concludes, isn't greatly different morally from leaving the toddler to drown.

[...]

Needless to say, this is a challenging position - "almost impossible to argue with", as the political theorist David Runciman once wrote, "but also very difficult to accept."

[...]

Singer's own approach to ethics, a version of utilitarianism, has deep roots in the English-language tradition, but it's scarcely uncontroversial. One famous criticism, associated with Williams, is that it's implausibly demanding, making people as responsible for the things they fail to do as the things they bring about. Williams's ultimate point was highly technical; Singer, in discussing it, soon brings the argument back to practical outcomes. "I think we can set standards that limit our responsibilities to help people. But I wouldn't want to say, therefore we're only responsible for our acts and not for our omissions.

(As an aside "Things they fail to do" has strong echos for those of us brought up in the C of E:

We have left undone those things which we ought to have done,
And we have done those things which we ought not to have done,
And there is no health in us:
But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders
Book of Common Prayer

I don't know you'd find much support for that expression ('miserable offenders') nowadays - within the church or without - but, there you go, the money I spend on, say, going to watch football, could have saved lives. How can that make me anything other than a miserable offender?)

But, back to Singer in the Guardian, on why you have to include 'things undone':

If you draw a hard line there, you end up saying that really quite trivial things are wrong because they're violations of my positive responsibility not to cheat or whatever ..." He casts about for an example. "Well, we have it all over the tabloids, don't we: I charged the government £5 for watching porn movies, right? I had the opportunity to save a child's life, either by ruining my shoes in the pond or by giving some spare money I had to Oxfam, but somehow that's not as important to assessing whether I'm a decent person or not as whether I cheated the government out of £5 to watch a porn movie. And I think that's the wrong set of priorities, that sends the wrong sort of message."

This leads into issues of moral equivalence (I don't think that's quite the right term, but it'll do for the moment), and I'd like to explore, for example, fiddling expense against the death of hundreds of thousands. Shame Hazel Blears is implicated in both! But thats for another time.