"Ghost Hunters"

[QUOTE] The member list included some prominent... spiritualist followers. These members professed to agree with the plan for skeptical research. But it now appeared that they hadn’t meant for the word ‘skepticism’ to be taken quite so literally. Many spiritualists remained angry over the perceived negative findings in Nora’s analysis of ghost stories. Some quit in outrage over the exposé of Madame Blavatsky. The mediums in the organization were infuriated [...] It wasn’t just Nora who was antagonizing the membership. Richard Hodgson was back in England, cheerfully adding fuel to this already smoldering sense of resentment [...] There were no spirits in these séances, merely fast hands, hidden devices, distraction— and a wish by those participating to believe in magic. Following hard after the SPR’s earlier exposé, this struck the spiritualists as a gratuitous attack. [...] Even Alfred Russel Wallace was drawn into the fight, taking the side of the spiritualists and making it obvious how far he had fallen from the Darwinian mainstream for the moment. [...] Across that intractable Atlantic, the psychical researchers suffered through no such dramas, but then, their best work was being done in careful secrecy. [– End of quotation. See “Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death” (Blum, 2006)]

I absolutely adore Deborah Blum’s 2006 book “GhostHunters”, which chronicles the events surrounding the 1882 formation of the British Society for Psychical research (SPR) (as well as its American branch in 1885), a non-profit organization dedicated to conducting impartial research into claims of the paranormal. Members included Sigmund Freud, William James, Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, F.W.H. Myers (who coined the word “telepathy”), several Nobel Laureates, a Prime Minister, and many other note-worthy people. In my judgment (without going into much detail now) “Ghost Hunters” has some flaws in it, but it’s still a great introduction for anyone interested in the history of parapsychology, which is the scientific study of allegedly “psychic” abilities (to the extent that such abilities can be studied empirically). In the tradition of the SPR, identifying as a parapsychologist (or a “psychical researcher”) does not imply either acceptance or denial of the existence of psychic abilities. Instead, it merely signifies that one conducts experiments to test whether these abilities ever occur, regardless of whether the results are positive or negative.

There’s actually a rich history of psychical research carried out during the Victorian Era by otherwise respected scientists and scholars with differing opinions and varying degrees of confidence (or lack thereof). Some were mega skeptics, some were fence sitters, and some were “believers” – although even many of the believers were cynical; in a letter to William James, Edmund Gurney complained that 95% of cases were obvious fraud and that only 5% of cases were “worth” looking into.

Diehard “skeptics” and “believers” alike will enjoy Blum’s book.

gays and tattoos

(Above image taken from this site)

To be fair, it’s possible that Leviticus 19:28 is referring to a nearby idolatrous “pagan” practice of tattooing oneself at funerals to obtain postmortem favors, in which case the man in the picture is not being an ironic hypocrite. Some try to argue that Leviticus 18:22 is similarly culturally limited with (in my judgment) varying degrees of success.

But, for now, let’s forget about all of that. My interest in the picture goes much further than the verses in question. What I find more disturbing (and also more interesting) is that many people sincerely believe that Leviticus and the rest of the “Old Testament” books truly and unequivocally dictate the will of God without exception and that is what I will focus on here. Many people sincerely believe that God -- the Ground of Being/ that which all of reality (apart from that Ground of Being itself) is completely reducible to and dependent upon-- actually uttered the words that are attributed to “him” by the authors of Leviticus, Deuteronomy, etc.

I assume the man in the picture holds that view, or at least something close to it. (If not, no worries. He inspired me to reflect on the issues I raise below, but one needn't apply the issues to that man.) If so, I wonder if he would be willing to get a tattoo of one or more of the following:

    (1) Leviticus 20:18, which forbids men from having sex with women who are on their periods. It may seem gross, but I know many Christian men who oppose same-sex eroticism but have nevertheless had sex with a woman during menstruation and intend to do it again.

   (2) 1 Samuel 15:2-3, which quotes God as telling the Israelites to 

attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, CHILDREN AND INFANTS, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys[!]

This text could not be any more barbaric than it already is. To make sure we get the picture, God (through the author) tells them to kill the “infants” too. And, for some reason, God didn’t like their camels or donkeys either. Please note that this vicious military order (according to the text itself) came from God himself. Either the author was right or he was wrong; there’s no middle ground here. If the author was wrong – if God did not tell the Israelites to murder innocent infants – then this text does not reflect the will of God. Which is it? 

    (3) 2 Kings 2:23-24, in which Elisha curses 42 children “in the name of the Lord”, which results in two bears appearing and tearing the children “to pieces”. Why did the two bears butcher those children “in the name of the lord”? According to the text, it’s because the children were mocking Elisha for being bald...   


   (4) 2 Samuel 12:11-14, which quotes God as threatening to take David’s wives and hand them over to his “neighbor”, who will then “lie with” David’s wives “in broad daylight.” Please note that the text quotes God himself.

    (5) Exodus 31:14, which demands the death penalty for anybody who “worked on the Sabbath” (“Keep the Sabbath holy. You have six days to do your work, but the Sabbath is mine, and it must remain a day of rest. If you work on the Sabbath, you will no longer be part of my people, and you will be put to death.”) In other words, relax and take a break or else I will kill you...

    (6) Deut 21:18-21, which commands parents to have their consistently disobedient sons murdered out in the open by “all the men of the city”. Here’s the passage:

 If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear, and fear.

Forget Rescue Nanny 911. If your bratty son won’t listen to you, eh, just have your neighbors murder him by smashing him with rocks. That way you can “purge evil from your midst”.

    (7) Deut 22:13-21, which commanded the Israelites to murder women who weren’t virgins when they got married. Even worse, it was supposed to take place right in front of “the door of her father’s house”! On the other hand, if husband’s accusation is false – if the woman really was a virgin when they got married— then the husband must pay the woman’s father “a hundred shekels of silver”.

    (8) etc.

I don’t get any pleasure out of flaunting these darker passages. Instead, my point is that many people who mindlessly use the OT as a weapon against gay human beings seem unaware of what else the OT says.

 Many people really believe that the creator and source of time itself and the cosmic engineer who “finely tuned” the “constants” of physics and sparked inflation --and perhaps also the creator of countless other space-time manifolds-- actually inspired all of the aforementioned passages. The anti-gay verse of Leviticus 20:13 is bad enough, but people should also be talking about all of the many other nasty passages and commandments in the Hebrew scriptures.

To be fair, there is no logical inconsistency between the proposition “God exists” (if we go by a minimal definition of “God”), on the one hand, and the idea that the OT texts unequivocally dictate the will of God without exception, on the other hand. I just want people to be aware of what that actually entails. It would make God petty and every bit as nasty as some of the war criminals and tyrants many Christians so love to despise. I’ll end by quoting a passage from the 2006 book “The God Delusion” by the zoologist Richard Dawkins:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.*

 (* For the record, I give “The God Delusion” 5 out of 10 stars and feel that it’s overrated in terms of its contributions to the philosophy of religion. I just get some guilty pleasure out of this passage from the book because it’s so eloquent and neatly-worded. It’s even fun to read aloud)