h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Do y'all know what a parable is?

The online dictionary calls a parable 'a simple story used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson.'

The Gheorgheni dictionary calls a parable 'a simple story you tell somewhere up the timeline, so that far down the timeline, the message hasn't got turned into a game of whisper-down-the-lane.'

If I remember correctly, this is the first-ever parable in the Bible, a book that is full of them. I woke up this morning and had the thought that this parable is particularly apt in the early 21st Century. Read the parable, and then I'll explain the context.

'The trees went forth on a time to anoint a king over them; and they said unto the olive tree, Reign thou over us. But the olive tree said unto them, Should I leave my fatness, wherewith by me they honour God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees? And the trees said to the fig tree, Come thou, and reign over us. But the fig tree said unto them, Should I forsake my sweetness, and my good fruit, and go to be promoted over the trees? Then said the trees unto the vine, Come thou, and reign over us. And the vine said unto them, Should I leave my wine, which cheereth God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees? Then said all the trees unto the bramble, Come thou, and reign over us. And the bramble said unto the trees, If in truth ye anoint me king over you, then come and put your trust in my shadow: and if not, let fire come out of the bramble, and devour the cedars of Lebanon.'
Judges 7: 8-15 Authorised Version

The context of the parable was that Gideon, aka Jerubaal, lived in a wild time of what the CIA Factsheet would probably call 'warlords'. Think Afghanistan or Somalia. Anyway, the story is that Gideon, initially a nervous type, was given preternatural military acumen and leadership ability by God - also an angel as military advisor. With all this help, he drove the marauding Midianites out of the area - think ISIS - and made peace. This was a success story, big-time. Gideon became so prosperous he had 70 legitimate sons. He had at least one illegitimate son, which seems kind of weird, I mean, why didn't he just marry the mother, what was one more wife, more or less? I guess you had to have been there.

Gideon made a big mistake, besides not marrying Abimelech's mom. He constructed an ephod.

What's an ephod when it's at home, I hear you ask? An ephod is a 'magic garment'. (Do not at this point think about Mormons.) It can also have jewels on it. Which can be used as a sort of ancient ouija board. This, apparently, was what Gideon did with it. God sent the angel to tell him to lay off. He ignored them, '...and all Israel went thither a whoring after it...' Judges 8:27. Probably looking for lottery winners. God warned Gideon that after he died, it would all go south. Gideon didn't care.

After Gideon's death, the illegitimate son, Abimelech, gathered the locals together under his leadership. They killed all of Gideon's other sons, except for Jotham. Jotham told the parable quoted above, predicting doom. Doom came in the form of civil war. You can read all about it in Judges 9. It's real 'Game of Thrones' stuff. During some heavy fighting around a tower, a woman threw a millstone down and hit Abimelech on the head. End of bad guy.

MORAL: There always is one, but I'm sort of betting that nobody's found it in, oh, 3000 years. Because it's aimed at exactly the sort of people who usually read the book - who, of course, think it applies to everyone but themselves.

Gideon=very religious person. Through his initial response to the truth, he achieves great things. But then he messes up. He decides that HE is the arbiter of all things good. He starts blathering about 'family values' while keeping girls on the side and hiding his tax returns, etc, etc. Doom is predicted. He puts his fingers in his ears and sings, 'la, la, la.' No angels need apply.

Abimelech=the kind of rotten leader you get when everybody else has lost the thread. Which they lost because the original leaders were too weak, or cowardly, or greedy, or self-important to stay the course and keep to the original plan. They build their own inferior standards, like that stupid ephod. And then they get Abimelech. Abimelech is an evil, no-talent blowhard who comes to power by appealing to the crowd. 'I have words. I have the best words! Make Canaan great again!' The crowd laughs, and eggs him on, and seals its fate.

Jotham warns them, but it's already too late. They'll end up tearing each other apart. Abimelech won't get the message until somebody hits him on the head with it. Literally.

I wish more people read the Bible, and worried about something other than the dimensions of that floating zoo. These messages might manage to get through.

In case you want to read the whole story, here it is in antique English:

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges+8&version=KJV

Oh, if you insist, here's a version without 'thees' and 'thous':

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges+8&version=NIV

But, if it's the sort of people who read it that are the ones who don't think the moral of the parable applies to them I don't see that as being particularly useful.
It seems to me that the Bible, consisting of books having been written over such a long period by so many people from different cultures and contexts, tells you whatever you want to hear.

Hm, I knew a rather goth student once who had some peculiar ideas about Zoroastrianism based on Nietzsche....

We don't on the whole tend to pulp books because people don't understand them. Well, some people might, but I thought they were the kind that lived in 'Fahrenheit 451'. I don't think there's a lot of ambiguity about a statement like:

'Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land.'

Although I've listened to a fair number of people try to wiggle out of that one. (It's in the Torah.)

I'm not suggesting 'pulping' the Bible or any other book whether we understand them or not. We can get all sorts of understanding from all sorts of books, some of them more ambiguous than others.

One of the Christian apologists I've been engaging with recently posted something on his blog a couple of weeks ago fairly viciously ripping in to one of the other Christian apologist bloggers who happens to belong to a different bit of Christianity (I get confused by all these Arminianists and Presuppositionalists and all the others) - one of the supporters explained it was alright to do this because, although it says in the Bible that no one should laugh at their brother, this man clearly wasn't a brother because he interpreted some of the Bible differently. So you may see that passage as unambiguous but some of your fellow Christians may have other ideas.

Good point! I saw a television episode the other night that I considered divinely inspired....and I'm very fond of the Mahabharata, for instance.

Mark Twain had a story once - I've tried, but I can't find it - about an experiment with a tiger and a lion in a cage. They came to an agreement. Then they put a Baptist and a Methodist in there, and the fur just flew....

As a medievalist, and somebody who has spent a lot of time reading very old texts, my thought is that the reason a lot of people do this is that they joined a group that says it believes in a text that frankly, most of them haven't read. Some of them, when they read it, get disturbed because it didn't say what they thought it did...they spend a lot of time arguing that it couldn't possibly mean that.

Instead of, say, considering the possibility that they might be *wrong*?

This isn't a new problem. 2000 years ago, Jesus of Nazareth yelled at a bunch of Torah scholars for doing exactly the same thing. Have you ever read rabbinical commentaries? I'll bet they had the same arguments in ancient Chaldea over something some sage wrote.

You raised another good point about how people interpret things. (I get sticker shock during sermons, can you tell?) Let's see if I can find an exegesis of Judges 9....

Aha. Matthew Henry, 1662-1714, Welsh nonconformist.

http://www.biblestudytools.com/commentaries/matthew-henry-complete/judges/9.html

He wisely avoids drawing any political conclusions...all things considered, that was probably smart....

Okay, I won't impose it on you. But I've found a sermon on Youtube by what George Fox would have called a 'ranter'. He preached it in 2016, and drew conclusions about the upcoming elections negative to both candidates. There are some really hair-raising sermons on Youtube. I recommend nobody go there....the child's drawing with the millstone was unnecessary, I felt....

'sticker shock'
Of course, being a postmodern relativist, I can't make any claims about texts that don't need interpreting but it seems to me a bit dubious to, for example, write a story about Donald Trump as a rogue bramble bush (Bush? US politics is as confusing as Christianity...) that derives some of its power from an invisible authority when we could just write a straightforward "the evidence suggests that populists who get hold of political power quite often misuse it and get away with it because etc etc..."

Partly, it's the 'speaking from authority' bit that troubles me. If it's a sensible thing to say, it shouldn't matter if it's the Son of God or the world's greatest philosopher or Edna Everage in the supermarket that's saying it.

Who says it's not? The Spirit is everywhere. The problem is with the listening.

As the Quaker lady said to me, 'It's not true because it's in the Bible. It's in the Bible because it's true.'

Or as Paul Simon put it, 'The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls....'

I have a lot of trouble seeing religions as anything other than industries, and separate factions as anything other than profit-making and competitive corporations.

Until someone points out to me a religion which isn’t run on that basis, I’ll have very little motivation to investigate any of the so-called moralities they communicate.

I recognise that some of these scriptures have woven their way into our popular culture, but I see value in them only in the historical or storytelling sense.


Is it me?

Depends on what you mean by religion, I guess. Organisations versus ways of thought? I don't disagree about the money-making. Come to think of it, neither did Jesus...

What I got to thinking about is how important the invention of printing and the proliferation of the Bible were in toppling entrenched power after the Middle Ages. I suppose hardly anyone remembers this now....

For about a thousand years, religious establishments in Europe had laid down the law and claimed divine authority for what was usually just wholesale robbery and abuse of people. Then the printing press came along. Ordinary people read the book, and lo....it didn't say they could do anything of the sort. Heads rolled. Sometimes literally, when the iconoclasts got going...

Then, of course, there were new factions, and those factions had factions, and people kept fighting about what it all meant...basically human nature, whether you're talking religion or politics or philosophy.

I think there's a difference between talking about 'sensible things' and 'truth' here but it would need an over-long post to explore that.

PS Talking about things that are inspirational, I just stumbled across a TED talk by Chris Hadfield. Nothing to do with religion, politics, or ancient texts, but I really enjoyed it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo62S0ulqhA

That's interesting, apart from his rather unfortunate resemblance to a Chuckle Brother.
Actually, I think it does have some connection to what you were saying. All of what he achieved, in fact the whole history of humans' exploration of space, has been accomplished without any necessary reference to the Bible, God or any religion. It's the ultimate test of knowledge, isn't it? To shoot someone up in to space and see if they come back alive. And it works because humans figured out, not just how to do it, but also that they wanted to do it. The idea that, whenever a human speaks something that we all respond to with "Ain't that just the truth!", it must be some supernatural something or other speaking through them is really the ultimate 'argument from authority' fallacy. It doesn't help to say that something is in the Bible because it's true rather than being true because it's in the Bible - the result is the same.

I'll try and link to one of the bloggers:
http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2018/11/how-to-read-genesis.html

The debate over whether there is, or is not, a God, is not one I'm really up for here. I had a whole course on those debates in grad school. They were really tedious.

The point of my original post was that a document from a very long time ago in western history demonstrated a perception about politics that was relevant to today. Which, to me, is as human an observation as Chris Hadfield's. It's about making sense of experience. I think we can profit from reading these voices from the past even if we don't share their world view. Even if we have trouble figuring out what that was.

I'm afraid I don't know these Chuckle Brothers of whom you speak. I like Chris Hadfield - he keeps trying to share his experiences in space with all of us who just wish we could be there. And yes, I'm glad he doesn't get all 'needlessly messianic' about it.

PS I took a look at that blog. Ye gods. I guess people can argue about anything.

Yes, I definitely agree that debates about the existence of God are extremely tedious. And we should definitely keep reading texts of all ages and places - we should never forget or underestimate our history.. However, we have a particular problem at the moment if we allow the 'Bible as a more important truth than the rest' to slip in unexamined or unchallenged; with someone like Mike Pence in the White House those sort of people have a considerable political influence. "I guess some people can argue about anything." Yes, literally anything including things like whether women should be executed for having an abortion... seriously.

Absolutely. That man has problems I wouldn't even begin to speculate on. The first of which is a total lack of intellectual humility.

Context is important in any text, it seems to me. Taking random sentences out of a book and trying to apply them is a risky business....

This reminds me of an ancient joke I got from a preacher. Back in the 19th Century, there was a tradition in rural churches in this country of extreme suspicion regarding too much education in theology. As a result, some preachers strove for 'divine inspiration' by choosing their texts at random from the Bible. You can imagine the result....

One morning, a preacher stuck his finger in the book and came up with 'these eight did Milcah bear.'

He scratched his head and said, 'This proves the wisdom of the Bible. One person can milk a cow, but it takes eight to milk a bear.'

Well I still would like to see which eight volunteered for the job!

Anyways I have some thoughts around this. By all means let people read the Bible. But let them also understand the context in which it was written - time, place, likely authors. And the context in which those particular books got adopted as the authoritative scriptures for a society and an empire. The history of the Christian religion and what it meant in different times and places. And encourage people to think about it all - critically. Don't let it become a substitute for people's judgement. Let people read other 'scriptures' - the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhist and Hindu scriptures, whatever else can be found - and be critical of those, too. Tell them about the religions without such scriptures, also, such as shamanic and animist religions. Tell them the old stories from mythology, the wider the better - all those Greek and Norse gods, for instance. Let people philosophize about religion, the religious impulse in humanity, and the psychology of religion - also the abuse of religion for controlling and exploiting people. And teach people general philosophy. And science. In the end, the more knowledge, the better. And after everything teach them, now that they know a real lot of stuff, to be intellectually and spiritually humble.

I agree wholeheartedly with that!

That gets my vote, too.

Thanks Chris and Dmitri!