From: SL500000@brownvm.brown.edu (Robert Mathiesen)
Newsgroups: alt.pagan
Subject: Re: help from you guys
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1992 07:31:50 EDT
Organization: Brown University - Providence, Rhode Island  USA
NNTP-Posting-Host: brownvm.brown.edu
News-Software: BNN via BNN_POST v1.0 beta

I've been a professor for 25 years now, Janis, and this sort of thing comes
up all the time, in the most surprising contexts.  I deal with it on two
levels.  (1) I claim that I have authority to teach my own class as I see
fit, in accord with my own standards and beliefs; in religious matters I am
convinced that many paths lead to the top of the Mountain, and that the
Bible is no more authoritative than, say, the Vedas or Lao Tzu; and that
until such time as someone can convince me of the contrary [which cannot
possibly be done by anyone who isn't as well acquainted with, say, the Vedas
and Lao Tzu as with the Bible] I shall continue to do so.  Equal time be
damned.  Truth is not found by debate, or in a courtroom, but by honest and
responsible testing of evidence which may falsify one's previously held views;
and belief is not evidence.  (2) This usually shifts the discussion to evi-
dence for the authority and text of the Bible, a field where I can run rings
around many seminarians, let alone most missionizing preachers.  The weakest
point is generally their notion that the Bible existed as a single book from
time immemorial, rather than as a collection of writings.

Different branches of Christianity even to this day cannot agree on
which books belong in the Bible, let alone which versions of these
books.  The "Church of the East," as it calls itself -- they've been
around since the 4th century and use Syriac texts [Westerners call them
"Nestorians"] -- rejects II-III John and II Peter from the New
Testament, for example; and the Ethiopian Church has a New Testament
about twice as long as the Western one, for it includes at the end the
"Eight Books of Clement."  Since these Churches don't for the most part
even bother to publish complete Bibles, one must get into their codes of
Canon Law to find these details out; but once you have them, they're
extraordinarily useful.  Ask your fundamentalists if they ever have
heard of an Old Testament book called "The Prayer of Solomon."  They
will surely say that they haven't.  (It's not in either Catholic or
Protestant Bibles these days.)  Then ask whether they are aware that it
*is* in the Gutenberg Bible, and in almost all early editions of the
Latin Bible until the middle of the 16th century.  Etc. etc.  You get
the general idea.  It does take a lot of scholarly work to prepare oneself
to do this, and there's no good reference book in any of the common lan-
guages which you can go and study, unfortunately.

Or you can ask whether they have read Morton Smith's _Jesus the
Magician_, where a top-level Bible scholar makes a very strong argument
that Jesus himself was in fact a wandering ceremonial magician, and
attempted to found a continuing ceremonial magic group (initiations and
all) which might even have included the practice of sex magic.  They
will probably say that they haven't.  Tell them to go and read it; and
when they can discuss its arguments with you rationally, you'll talk
with them further, but not until then.  (This means, of course, that
you'll have to read it, too.  It's worth the effort.  Smith's
scholarship is very solid indeed.  I like him because he's another
scholar in this field who stands apart from both Christianity and
Judaism.)

If it's a science course you're teaching, you may wish to explain
how science doesn't offer truth, and isn't a belief system, but offers
instead current best approximations to truth, which any scientist may
challenge at will by finding evidence to falsify some point; whereupon
other scientists may attempt to serve the first scientist in the same
way, and so on.  Thus science never arrives at any ultimate truth (any
more than mathematical functions of the right sort ever arrive at their
limits); and indeed such ultimate, irrevisable truths are not to be had
anywhere in life by any intellectually respectable means.  *All*
knowledge is provisional, including any religious claims which happen to
be empirically testable.

Let me know how all this works out for you.  It's a real problem in the
classroom these days.  -Robert

Robert Mathiesen, Brown University, SL500000@BROWNVM
Newsgroups: alt.pagan