Chris Lang's Web Log
2011-05-22: On my facebook page last week, I posted a small comment about the failed rapture prediction: "Harold Camping claimed that gay pride is one of the signs that we are in the end times, but he was wrong about that too."
But before I comment further on the rapture, some background might be in order.
The rapture eschatology is based on a theological framework known as Dispensationalism, said to have been introduced by a 19th century Scottish evangelist named John Nelson Darby. This is a theory that cuts the history of the world into several distinct periods, or "dispensations," where God interacts with humankind in different ways. For example (according to one version of the theory), one dispensation is the law of Moses, which covers the interval from Exodus to the appearance of Jesus Christ; this dispensation was followed by the church age, which will be followed by another dispensation, the Millennial Kingdom described in Revelation (when Jesus will rule the world for 1000 years). Dispensationalism was popularized by the Scofield Reference Bible, widely used by evangelicals in the early to mid 20th century. Now the business of the rapture pertains to the end of the church age (our age), and the beginning of the Millennial Kingdom. The Millennial Kingdom will begin with the dramatic (visible and public) return of Jesus. But before the return of Jesus, it is believed that there will be a period known as the Tribulation, when humankind will suffer terrible punishments under the rule of the Antichrist; it is commonly said that this period will be seven years long. The traditional Christian expectation has been that Jesus will return, and when he returns, he will call all Christian souls to him. The innovation of Darby is to separate the calling of all Christian souls from the final, visible return of Jesus. That is, there will be a separate, secret return of Jesus for all Christian souls (the rapture) prior to the public return of Jesus, when he begins his 1000-year rule. Opinions differ as to the timing of these two events; one version (the "pre-tribulation" position) is that the rapture will happen at the beginning of the Tribulation, seven years before the public return of Jesus. (Harold Camping taught the Tribulation would last 5 months.)
This theory of the rapture, that it happens years before the return of Jesus (contrary to traditional Christian belief), was popularized in contemporary times by Hal Lindsey, in his book The Late Great Planet Earth (which was the best-selling book except the Bible in the 1970s); the enormously popular Left Behind novels by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye are based on the same scenario. Actually, while this "pre-trib" position is highly popular in evangelical circles, there is a wide divergence of opinion about these matters. Some Christians are "post-trib"; they believe the rapture accompanies the visible, public return of Jesus. Some are "post-mill," believing that the Millennial Kingdom comes before these events, not after. (This would be the position closest to that held by conservative mainline Christians and Roman Catholics.) "Pretarists" believe the end-times prophecies have already been fulfilled by the violent destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, and the establishment of the church age. "Partial pretarists" share that belief, but they also expect something similar to the end-times scenarios of the "pre-trib" folks; they believe the prophecies apply to our times as well as the early church.
Now the basic theological framework of the rapture and the tribulation is usually presented with detailed scenarios identifying modern nations with the lands or peoples mentioned in Biblical prophecies. In the version described by Hal Lindsey in The Late Great Planet Earth, the modern nations identified include Russia and China, and a European Union functioning as a rebuilt Roman Empire ruled by the Antichrist. But the critical element in the scenario is the rebirth of the nation Israel; Lindsey and many others believe that this event, which happened in 1948, makes possible the fulfillment of the end times prophecies. (Of course, the Bible describes terrible events, such as the final battle known as Armageddon, that were to occur in Israel. So naturally, there must be an Israel for these events to be possible.) However, it is well-known that Lindsey's interpretations are simply wrong on key points. For example, he misreads the Hebrew word "Rosh" (in Ezekiel) as a reference to Russia; it actually is the word for "head" or "prince" (as in "Rosh Hashanah," the head of the year; the first day of the Jewish calendar). Another egregious error of Lindsey resulted from his speculative intepretation of Luke 21, when Jesus tells his followers what to expect in the end times. In verse 29, Jesus gives the parable of the fig tree: when its leaves appear, you know summer is near; in verse 32, Jesus promises that "this generation" will not pass away until all these things (the end times) have occurred. Now it is clear that the early Christians, including the apostles, expected the return of Jesus in their lifetime; this verse in Luke appears to reflect this expectation. But Lindsey interprets the fig tree to refer to Israel (claiming the fig tree is an ancient symbol of Israel), and he links verse 29 with verse 32 to say that the phrase "this generation" refers to the generation that sees the rebirth of Israel. That is, the generation that sees the rebirth of Israel will see the return of Jesus. Lindsey said that one generation in the Bible is 40 years. Thus Lindsey arrived at the conclusion that the rapture will happen within 40 years of 1948. Of course, no such thing occurred; Lindsey later decided that the Israeli capture of Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967 marked the beginning of that generation. But that was 44 years ago. (It should be noted that many, if not most, evangelicals shy away from attempts to predict when the rapture will occur; they quote Jesus, who said even he did not know when these things would happen.)
Now my own involvement with these things began when I read The Late Great Planet Earth, when I was about 13 years old. The vivid scenarios grabbed a hold of me, but I was too young to be equipped to think critically about these things. (It never occurred to me to find a book that would give a contrary point-of-view.) So I became an evangelical believer. I avidly read my copy of The Way (the popular 1972 edition of a breezy paraphrase of the Bible known as The Living Bible), and I read with excitement other books by Hal Lindsey (his second book: Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth) as well as other evangelical writers. I attended an Assemblies of God church that a friend attended, and later with my Mom, I belonged to a nearby Baptist church.
But all of this eventually lead to intense cognitive dissonance—I always had been extremely interested in science, and I knew that much of what these evangelicals taught (creationism and a literal interpretation of Genesis) was entirely incompatible with science. I finally reached a point where I could no longer believe any of this; by the time I entered college, I had abandoned my evangelical faith. I was left with a great deal of regret at what I had been through; I wondered what would have happened if I had spent more of my time learning about real, worthwhile things instead of these evangelical fantasies. I remember how glad I felt, in my first year in college, when I saw a debate between a leading young-Earth creationist and a Reed College biology professor; when I saw how poorly the creationists handled science, I knew that the evangelical religion held no more power over me.
2011-05-28: I've just read a very interesting book: Forged: Writing in the Name of God—Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are, by Bart Ehrman. This concerns books in the New Testament which amount to forgeries: written in the name of one or another apostle by someone who was not that apostle. Ehrman argues this was done with the intent to deceive the reader by writers who pretended to be an apostle to gain the upper hand in one theological dispute or another. He distinguishes between false attribution, forgery, plagiarism, and fabrication; he offers many remarkable examples of each of these. He gives good evidence that deliberate misconduct of these kinds was common in ancient times and that ancient writers condemned it in no uncertain terms. The implications for modern Christians are often uncomfortable, particularly Christians who believe doctrines such as "plenary verbal inspiration" (every word of the Bible is inspired by God). But what Ehrman describes is uniformly accepted by modern scholars (except for those scholars who approach the scriptures with the presupposition that the Bible is without error).
Here are some of the books that Erhman discusses, and the type of misconduct they represent:
In addition to these canonical books, Ehrman discusses a variety of non-canonical ancient books that exhibit these same kinds of misconduct. These include various spurious letters and gospels, which were written to further political or theological agendas. For example, fraudulent letters supposedly written by Pilate were intended to exonerate the Romans and blame the Jews for the death of Jesus. Some of the forgeries were in the service of what became regarded as heresies, but still other forgeries were intended to attack these same heresies.
Erhman finishes by exhibiting four examples of modern forgeries or fabrications claiming lost knowledge of Jesus or ancient manuscripts, etc. One such forgery, which appeared in 1894, was an account of an ancient biography of Jesus (claiming he traveled to India and studied with Brahmins and Buddhists), found in a Tibetan monstery by the author, who claimed he befriended the abbot there while recuperating from a broken leg. Every point of his story was convincingly refuted, but not before his book achieved international fame.
Having read this book, I cannot help but wonder how Christianity would have developed if these various forgeries or fabrications did not make it into the canon. For example, many evangelical churches do not allow women to have leadership roles or to preach from the pulpit because of the falsified verse inserted into 1 Corinthians, or similar verses found in forged letters of Paul. Another example to contemplate: Revelation, incorrectly attributed to the Apostle John; Revelation nearly didn't make it into the canon because many in the early church doubted its authorship by the apostle. How many end-times speculations and theories have been based on that book and its murky symbology? Another book that shouldn't be in the canon: the Old Testament book Daniel. Evangelicals argue this is a supernatural book of prophecy written in the sixth century BCE, but it was a second century BCE book of apocalyptic fiction. (The arguments for this are convincing. For example, a third century BCE Jewish writer lists great men of the Jewish faith, but Daniel is not included in the list.) This book is another favorite of end-times prophecy enthusiasts.
But it is also interesting to see what would be retained if known forgeries or fabrications were removed from the New Testament. We would certainly still have Jesus as a preacher and a healer who taught that the Kingdom of God is near, and we would certainly still have that Jesus rose from the dead. This is testified by Paul in his (genuine) letters, such as 1 Corinthians, where he lists people who saw the risen Jesus. This was written less than three decades after the death of Jesus, by a writer who describes his conversion to Christianity only several years after the death of Jesus. (This doesn't prove the reality of the resurrection, of course. But it does prove that the original followers of Jesus did believe he rose from the dead.) In the genuine letters of Paul we also find such important passages as the hymn to love (1 Corinthians 13), and his affirimation in Galatians that "[t]here is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."
2011-05-08: Today (the Third Sunday of Easter) was the day in the Episcopal Lectionary for the story of the Road To Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35). This is the story of the two disciples who didn't recognize the risen Jesus when he appeared to them, until Jesus was made known to them in the breaking of the bread. This story always brings to mind a wonderful memory: my Mother's 60th birthday surprise party. The set-up for the party was simple: as it happens, my Mom and one of my brothers share the same birthday. Usually, we celebrated the birthdays on the same day, but because it was my Mom's 60th birthday, we told her we would celebrate her birthday that weekend on Sunday and my brother's birthday on Saturday. Of course, it was the other way around. I flew in from out of town, as did her parents and one of her two brothers. At the party, we hid in a back bedroom, and we decided that I would come out into the party first. I did, and I found my Mom in the kitchen; she was talking to two or three other people. But it was clear to me that I hadn't registered on her. After a little while, I put my arm across her shoulder. She still didn't realize it was me. Then my uncle, her brother, came into the room. She recognized him immediately, and only then did she know it was really her birthday party. Then finally she realized it was me with my arm around her shoulders. By that time, she was trembling with excitement and joy. Apparently, I didn't register on her because I am the same height and build as my sister's husband; she wouldn't have expected to see me because it was mid-semester, and I never visited Portland at that time of year. I can't say that this experience makes me believe more in the story of the Road to Emmaus, although it does resonate with me as I remember my Mom's joy in recognizing me. But I thought it would be a good story to share on a Third Sunday of Easter that was also Mother's Day.
2011-03-08 2200: I've been watching the old Carl Sagan series Cosmos on Netflix. It's 30 years old, so the visual effects as well as the scientific content were dated, but I was impressed with how well the series has held up. The very beginning of the series has Sagan standing on a bluff above a shore with waves pounding on the rocks, with his long black hair blowing in the wind. I was struck at how young he seemed, and how attractive; he was charismatic, and I have friends who revere him and his series. Certainly, it impressed me when I saw it, in 1980 when I was in college.
One episode, "The Backbone of Night," has Sagan visiting the neighborhood in Brooklyn where he lived when he was a kid; he reminisces about his childhood fascination with astronomy (he asked a librarian for a book about the stars, and she handed him a book about celebreties). Later, he visits Greece to tell the story of Thales and other ancient Greeks, who discovered the scientific method (answering questions through observation and experimentation)—and how the Greeks later abandoned science for the mysticism of the Pythagoreans and their followers. Sagan says that the Greeks who discovered the scientific method referred to the universe as the Cosmos, a place of order, reflecting their belief that the universe followed natural laws that could be understood by humans. Sagan returned to Brooklyn to visit his old grade school classroom, and showed the children how astronomers were going to look for planets around other stars. He promised them that such planets would be found in their lifetime. This took my breath away, because exoplanets have been confirmed only in the last several years.
Last night, I watched some more of the series, part of the episode "Encyclopedia Galactica." He told another remarkable story: an eleven-year-old boy named Jean-François Champollion who was visiting the scientist Joseph Fourier and was fascinated by the ancient Egyptian artifacts Fourier had on display. Champollion wanted to learn how to read the ancient hieroglyphics; after many years of study of linguistics, he was able to use the Rosetta Stone to learn how to decipher hieroglyphics. He thus opened up to comprehension a culture alien in its great antiquity. Sagan used this as a springboard to talk about the search for extraterrestrial sentience and how we might communicate with extraterrestrials; he also speculated about an Encyclopedia Galactica which would list the current status or fates of millions of inhabited worlds. He hoped that the humans would survive their technological adolescence without destroying themselves, and someday join the galactic civilization.
2011-03-08 0845: Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of the composer Alan Hovhaness (who died in 2000). Hovhaness is one of my favorite composers. His music is warm and consonant, inspired by Orthodox sacred music and Asian music. He is best known for his Symphony No. 2, "Mysterious Mountain," written in the early 1950s. But the first piece I heard by him was a recording my father bought: the Mount St. Helens symphony, written in the early 1980s to commerate the eruption that turned a lush and beautiful wilderness into 200-square mile zone of utter devastation. I have have other interesting pieces by him on my CD shelf: "And God Created Great Whales," a dramatic piece written in 1970 which combines orchestra, organ and recorded humpback whale songs; and a playful piano sonata with the charming title "Fred the Cat" (written on commission for a patron who mourned the loss of his cat).
2011-02-01 2300: A couple of weeks, I posted something about tigers. Since then, I've read or heard about some other interesting animals.
I read a long article in Science magazine, "Killer Whales Earn Their Name," by Virginia Morell (21 January 2011, vol. 331, p. 274). These animals (Orcinus orca) are nothing less than terrifying, having a dramatic impact on other species. In particular, they prey upon large whales, even upon sperm whales (themselves large and powerful predators); the article gives gruesome details of various incidents of predation witnessed by scientists.
Another article, "Snow Phantom," by Abigail Tucker, appears in the February 2011 issue of the Smithsonian magazine. She describes the elusive lynx (Lynx canadensis), and efforts to study this cat in Montana. It is a 30 pound animal with tufted ears and oversized legs and feet adapted for running on the snow in winter. One interesting trait of the animal is its curiosity: fur-trappers would catch lynx by hanging mirrors from trees, whose sparkles would attract the cats. The primary prey of lynx is rabbits; the writer quotes the naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton (writing in 1911): the lynx "lives on Rabbits, follows the Rabbits, thinks Rabbits, tastes like Rabbits, increases with them, and on their failure dies of starvation in the unrabbited woods."
An animal that is apparently more elusive than the lynx is Sasquatch or Bigfoot. A colleague of mine read a book about Bigfoot written by a Idaho State University biologist named Jeff Meldrum, and was impressed enough to cold-call him to invite him to speak at our university. So last week, I saw his presentation. It turns out that Meldrum is an expert in particular on Bigfoot tracks. Skeptics regard these as a variety of hoaxes and mis-identifications of tracks by other animals such as bears, but Meldrum has proposed a name for the tracks (for the putative animal that makes them): Anthropoidipes ameriborealis ("North American ape foot"). What's interesting here is that while in paleontology, it is not unusual for an animal to be named based only on fossil tracks (in the absence of bones or other fossil remains), Meldrum proposed this name based only on the tracks of an animal he believes to be extant. The alleged tracks themselves tend to be 16 inches in length and similar to human tracks ("plantigrade, pentadactyl and elongate"). However, I found the evidence, as presented by Meldrum, to be less than convincing. (By the way, much of what he presented is on the web; for example, Evaluation of alleged Sasquatch prints and their inferred functional morphology.)
2011-01-18 2300: More housekeeping: I've revamped my website a bit. In particular, I've reorganized my little art gallery, adding the ray-traced images described below.
2011-01-18 2200: I saw an indelible story on a public television show on the "Pioneers of Television" this evening. This episode was about certain path-breaking 1960s science fiction shows, including Star Trek. The story concerned Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura on Star Trek. This role was unprecedented: a black woman fourth in command, in an era when African-Americans usually played servants on television. But as it happened, the character Lt. Uhura faded to a minor role as the characters Kirk and Spock became the central characters in the show. Nichols became frustrated in her role, and decided to leave the show. But a meeting was arranged between her and an influential fan of the series, to convince her to continue on the series. She was astonished to be introduced to her fan: the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. He was a devoted Trekker, and he told her that many people looked up to her character as a role model. So she stayed on board.
2011-01-17 1000: Today, I did some badly-needed housekeeping for my blog, archiving all of my 2010 posts. I've been meaning to do this for some time, but I was prompted to do this today because a dear reader complained that I had not posted anything since November, and I wanted to clear things out for me to resume posting.
There isn't any particular reason I have been neglecting my blog. I've been busy traveling the last couple of months. Another reason I haven't tended to my blog is that I recently bought an Apple iPad. It's an absolutely lovely toy, ideal for browsing the web and reading email, but I cannot write or edit my blog using it, so to the extent I use the iPad instead of my other machines, I'm not likely to post things on my blog. In the last two months, I've also sunk a lot of time into another side project: writing computer programs to generate "ray-traced" three-dimensional graphic images. (See below.)
But a third reason I haven't posted on my blog is that I there were certain things I meant to say but decided not to; I have composed and abandoned little essays on several subjects. One essay was going to be a detailed summary of what I learned last year in reading about HIV epidemiology and safer sex; this was going to frame a small manifesto in favor of committed monogamy for gay people. I might post that yet, but for now, all I'll say is that in my readings, I learned that anal sex in the context of multiple sexual partners is dangerous even when condoms are used consistently and correctly. Another essay I began writing but never finished was to be a personal account of my efforts to understand and reconcile religion and science, particularly regarding biology and evolution. These essays absorbed quite a bit of time but with nothing to show for my efforts, at least on this blog.
Now hopefully, I will keep up with my blog. First, I will get caught up on books I've been reading.
Last year, I mentioned beginning the Diarmaid McCulloch book, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. I'm still reading it—I'm about 350 pages into this 1000-page tome. At one point, I stopped reading it because I found out McCulloch has a public television series based on the book, but the first episode (provided by Netflix) was unimpressive. But the book is quite good, and I eventually got back to reading it. I noticed last month that is was one of the New York Times notable books for 2010.
A book that proved to be a much faster read is The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, by John Vaillant. This isn't the sort of book I tend to read, but a friend gave it to me; I'm glad he gave it to me, because it turned out to be very interesting. (It was perfect for my flight out west last month.) Now the story itself—the hunt in December of 1997 for a Siberian tiger that had killed three men—is perhaps rather thin, but the author gives fascinating detail and back-stories about the men involved, the illegal trade in poached tigers (in demand for Chinese medicinals), the political and economic circumstances of post-Soviet Siberia, and the magnificent and endangered animals themselves.
As mentioned above, I've been working on a side project: writing a computer program to produce three-dimensional "ray-traced" computer graphic images. There are several reasons why I wanted to do this—to be able to produce highly-realistic images of mathematical objects, perhaps for use in my teaching; or to eventually produce striking and original art. But the primary reason is that I wanted to re-create software I wrote more than 15 years ago, but lost. (I lost the source code when I moved from Mississippi to Indiana in 1994.) But whatever the reason, here are a couple of images I have produced in the last month or so. These were produced using programs of about 1000 lines of C++ code (from scratch: the program computes the images pixel-by-pixel). The images include shadows and three levels of reflections within reflections. The second image shows a torus (donut) with blue stripes on it.
Earlier postings: 2010, 2009, 2008 .
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