Rodney Stark's Discovering God - Part 8 - Send In The Christians

After addressing the arguments over the historical reliability of the Gospels in the first half of Chapter 7, Rodney Stark examines the spread of Christianity as a religion. Personally, I would have to say that this is the part of the book where Stark is at his best and strongest.

Stark begins with the apostle Paul. He lists "five major components to Paul's identity." First, Paul was raised as a highly commited Jew, to the point that he persecuted early Christians. Second, Paul spoke Greek and was immersed in Hellenic culture. Third, he likely came from a privileged background. Fourth, he was a Roman citizen. Lastly, he became a Christian.

While Paul is traditionally portrayed as focusing his missionary efforts on the Gentiles, Stark puts forth a convincing case that Paul's missionizing was really directed towards Diasporan Jews. As Stark puts it, "it is worthwhile to look more closely at where he went and with whom he associated with when he got there."

Stark proceeds to explain in a very convincing manner how Paul would have gone about trying to spread the Christian faith. "You have decided to lead a band of missionaries west from Jerusalem to spread the word. But where in the West? Who will receive you? The answer would have seemed obvious: you should go to your relatives, friends...in the Diasporan Jewish communities, for these are people to whom you can gain introductions and who are accustomed to visits by religious teachers from Jerusalem."

Furthermore, contrary to the stereotype of the lone street corner preacher bearing a sign reading "Repent! The End of the World is Near!", "Paul did not travel alone, but often took a retinue of as many as forty or fifty followers with him, sufficient to constitute an initial 'congregation' which made it possible to hold credible worship services immediately and to welcome and form bonds with newcomers." It was indeed a very clever strategy, which likely served to make the number of early Christians seem larger than they actually were. I am reminded of a tale from the Civil War about the Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest, who obtained the surrender of a Union commander who had a numerically superior force. While Forrest was parlaying with the Union commander, Forrest's smaller force was partially obscured by some trees. Forrest had instructed his men, who had with them only one artillery piece, to march in a circle behind the trees, which created the illusion that he commanded a much larger force.

As discussed previously in Part 6, the Diasporan Jews "were ripe for conversion to a faith that allowed them to retain most of their religious capital...The only major innovation was to cease strict observance of the Law. It has often been noted how that eased conversion for Gentiles who could enter the new faith without being subject to such things as adult circumcision or encountering barriers against dining with their friends and relatives. But much too little has been made of the immense appeal this would have had for Hellenized Jews who were chafing under the Law's social limitations."

Even more interesting, Stark's analyses of quantitative data "found that [Paul's] missionizing had no independent effect on whether or not a city had a Christian congregation by the year 100." He continues, "Thus, it appears that Paul's missionizing role may have been considerably overplayed." Stark concludes that "Paul may have been far more important as a trainer, organizer, and motivator of missionaries than as an actual founder of congregations." Below is an example of what Paul's motivational speeches must have been like:





And remember, ABC, "Always Be Converting!"

Having established how early Christians went about spreading their faith, Stark next examines the growth of the new religion within the Roman Empire.

Again in revisionist mode, Stark challenges the assumption that Christianity grew rapidly. Popular convention has it that crowds of people would convert en masse after hearing a stirring sermon. But Stark makes the astute observation that "one sermon, no matter how dynamic, does not prompt the fundamental shift of identity essential to a religious conversion; even after being baptized there would have been a great deal of educating and socializing still to be done before any...could have been claimed as a Christian." He goes on to add "that sociological studies have found that doctrine plays a very secondary role in conversion, that people convert when their social ties to members of a religious group outweigh their ties to nonmembers."

Having made his case that religious founders spread their faith by first converting friends and family members, Stark presents a scenario in which the number of Christians in the year 40 CE numbers 1,000 people. With a growth rate of 3.4% each year, Stark shows that as late as the year 200 CE, the number of Christians would total not much more than 210,000 people, still less than 1% of the population of the Roman Empire. However, as someone once said, the most powerful force in the universe is the power of compound interest. Assuming the number of Christians continues to steadily increase by 3.4% per year, a mere 50 years later there would have been over 1,120,000 Christians in the empire. By the year 300 CE, the Christian population of the empire would have shot up to 6 million people, or approximately 10% of the imperial population. Following the official recognition of Christianity by Constantine, the Christian population grew to over 31 million people, over half of the population of the empire.

While these figures are approximations, Stark points to a number of findings to support his argument. Among them are studies showing the number of Christian names appearing in Egyptian documents and the increasing frequency of Christian epigraphs found on Roman gravestones. Inevitably, Stark notes, the growth rate "must have decelerated as the number of potential converts declined. Furthermore, not only is it impossible to convert more than 100 percent of a population, in this instance significant numbers of residents of the Empire never converted to Christianity. Many Jews did not; organized paganism lingered for centuries; and many people in rural areas never seem to have gone beyond merely adding Jesus to their pantheon of Gods."

And this leads to Stark's next interesting argument. In the present-day United States, fervent Christianity is generally seen as a phenomenon of the South or rural areas, whereas American cities tend to be more pluralistic and secular. However, in the Roman Empire, Christianity was an urban religion, and as time went on, paganism became equated with the rural hicks of the era. Indeed, the word pagan meant someone who was a peasant or rustic fellow.

It is a sensible argument, because when you think about it, if you want to grow a new religion, you have to seek converts in the cities. To paraphrase the famous remark of Willie Sutton, cities are where the people are. Stark estimates that by the year 250 CE, of the 450,000 residents of Rome, some 84,000 of them were Christians. Furthermore, writes Stark, "unlike pagans, Christians were well organized. They belonged to relatively small, intense congregations, and they may have had their own neighborhoods. They could easily be mobilized vis-a-vis local affairs, which greatly amplified their numbers. Thus the size and effectiveness of the Christian communities may well have been a factor in the persecution that fell upon them in the year 250 at the hands of Emperor Decius."

And therein lay the irony. By the time that Diocletian got around to vigorously persecuting Christians in the late 3rd century, the Christian population of the empire had achieved a critical mass that made it an exercise in futility to stamp the faith out. And for Stark, "what is perhaps more surprising is that it is not until Constantine that anyone recognized what powerful political support the Christians could supply." But the hour is late and that will be a topic for another post.

Rodney Stark's Discovering God - Part 7 - Desperately Seeking Jesus

Following Chapter 4, titled The "Rebirth" of Monotheism, Stark devotes the next two chapters to Indian and Chinese religious thoughts. I am going to skip those chapters and jump right into Chapter 7, The Rise of Christianity.

When last we left off at the end of Part 6 of my commentary on Discovering God, the Jews of the Diaspora were assimilating to Hellenism even as they were converting pagans to Judaism. Meanwhile, back in Judaea, the Jews who remained there were anticipating the coming of a Messiah who would send the Romans packing.

Having refrained from addressing the historicity of Jesus in his prior writings on Christianity, Stark makes what he derisively refers to as "the controversial and often bizarre search" for the historical Jesus his opening salvo in Chapter 7.

The quest to find the historic Jesus, complains Stark, "has been carried to obsessive and absurd lengths as soaring scholarly imaginations." He is dismissive of the Jesus Seminar, "whose members...have been meeting annually to winnow the Gospels", and believes that the search for the historic Jesus "is in many ways a fool's errand." I can only imagine that Rodney Stark is not a particularly big fan of this site.

I have to confess that I am personally agnostic as to whether there was a real Jesus, though I lean towards giving the benefit of the doubt that the Jesus of the Gospels is based at least in part on a real person. Since, as Stark points out, the Scriptures tell us very little about the life of Jesus, "it is his death and resurrection that dominate Christian thought."

Stark goes on to criticize the assumption that "no intelligent modern person could credit tales involving healing, exorcism, or changing water into wine, let alonge such an absolute impossibility as the claim that Jesus rose from the dead!" He considers it narrow minded and ignorant to use the miracles reported in the Bible to discredit the Bible. He vehemently objects to both "militant atheists" who dismiss the miracles described in the Bible as fairy tales and "those seeking to defend their faith by trying to show how miracles could have had natural causes." As Stark sees it, "to make miracles plausible, all that is needed is to postulate the existence of a God who created the universe, nothing more."

And here is where Stark goes off the rails. The parting of the Red Sea. Joshua making the sun stand still. The Virgin Birth. Raising Lazarus from the dead. Stark writes "Some believe these things happened, some believe they didn't-and both positions are based on faith!" (Bold text mine). All that is needed is for someone to believe that these things could have happened. There are some people who believe that the United States government recovered a crashed alien space craft. Most people don't believe in such a bizarre story. But, using Stark's reasoning, both positions are equally based on faith, when in fact they are not. Rather than boiling such controversial claims down to an "either it happened or it didn't", the question that needs to be asked is "How plausible is this story?"

Take the story in Joshua 10 where the sun is alleged to have stood still in the sky. That means the Earth stopped spinning on its axis, unless anyone reading this still subscribes to the geocentric model of the solar system. According to Rodney Stark, if a god exists that created the universe and intervenes in human history, then it is perfectly reasonable to believe that this god can cause the Earth to stop spinning, which would cause the sun to appear to stand still in the sky, so that the Israelites would have extra daylight to slaughter a retreating enemy army. To disbelieve this story requires just as much faith as it does to believe it. Oh really? Consider the context of the story in Joshua. A coalition of kings attacked the Gibeonites, who had allied themselves to the Israelites. The Gibeonites called on the Israelites for help, and Joshua answered their pleas. Not only did the Israelites defeat the coalition, God Himself saw fit to hurl "large hailstones down on them from the sky." If the story is to be believed, more of the enemy died from the hailstones than from Joshua's warriors.

When one considers the vast extent of the universe, and how our planet is an infinitesimal speck within all of it, how plausible is it that a deity that created all of that is going to take such an active interest in the affairs of a particular group of humans in a small sliver of land in the Middle East? Joshua 10 makes it clear that the battle was already won and was a rout, and yet on this day only, we are expected to believe that the creator of the universe stopped the sun in the sky for almost a full day so that a confederation of Hebrew tribesmen could have more daylight in order to slay more of their enemies in a battle that was already won. One wonders why it would be even necessary, since god supposedly killed the majority of them with hailstones. And why hailstones? Why not cause the Canaanites to spontaneously combust on the battlefield? That would have been really damaging to their morale! Considering all this, it is perfectly reasonable to dismiss this story from Joshua as being fictional while it requires a tremendous leap of faith to believe that it is literally true.

Stark then proceeds to concentrate on what we can know about Jesus, if indeed he was an actual historical figure. He makes an interesting argument against the belief that Jesus and his disciples were a bunch of homeless vagabonds. In the Gospels, Jesus spends most of his ministry in Galilee. This region "is so tiny that it is an easy two-day walk from north to south and only a day's walk from east to west at the widest point." Therefore, Stark considers it to be perfectly reasonable that Jesus and his apostles had homes in Galilee and that therefore his journeys were rarely more than a day's travel from where he lived. In this I can find no disagreement with Stark.

Next, Stark addresses the purpose of the crucifixion of Christ. He notes that the "objection to the entire Christ story has been that it seems so fundamentally pagan." But, as before, Stark trots out the divine accomodation argument. "God's revelations are always geared to the current capacity of humans to comprehend," Stark reminds us, "Hence, the message to Greco-Roman pagans: Christ died for your sins! Forget offerings of a hundred or even a thousand cattle! The Christian God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. That message spoke powerfully and eloquently to a culture that took sacrifice, especially blood sacrifice, as fundamental to pleasing the Gods." So there you have it, Christianity paved the way for the animal rights movement.

Therefore, rather than discrediting Christianity, its similarities to pagan beliefs were seen as a verification of its truth. Consequently, what are considered to be the pagan elements of the Christ story, "maximized the cultural continuity between Greco-Roman paganism and Christianity." On the other hand, it is also possible that the Christian message was deliberately tailored by early Christian missionaries to appeal to pagans.

Stark proceeds to make a revisionist case not only for the historical reliability of the New Testmant, but also for the early authorship of the Gospels. He derides Biblical scholars such as those affiliated with the Jesus Seminar as being "motivated by angry atheism." Stark disagrees with the Biblical critics who "take the position that unless something reported in scripture can be completely verified by nonbiblical sources, it must be rejected as mythical."

The veracity of the New Testament is sound, argues Stark, because it "provides a very accurate geography, not only of Israel, but of the Roman Empire. Places are where they are supposed to be. Reported travel times are consistent with the distances involved. The topography is accurately described and extends to tiny details such as the location of wells, streams, springs, gorges, cliffs, city gates, and the like."

Contrary to the consensus that the Gospel of John was written much later than the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), Stark is impressed by the argument of the late Biblical scholar John A. T. Robinson that John actually predates them. Among the pieces of evidence in support of Robinson's contention is that John "is infused with fear and antagonism toward the Jews at a time when the Roman authorities had long since become the primary persecutors." Perhaps it is ignorance on my part, but I would have thought that the antagonism towards the Jews would be evidence for a later authorship of John, as well as Matthew, precisely because of the references to "the Jews" as some other entity, considering that Christianity started out as a reform movement within Judaism. Would not early Christians, who believed that Jesus was a fulfillment of Jewish prophecies, still see themselves as Jews?

Among other factors Stark gives for the historical reliability of John is that the author "displays far more detailed and accurate information about the city of Jerusalem than do the other Gospels, which suggests he lived there (and before 70 CE)." There is also an "apparent lack of knowledge that Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Romans in the year 70 CE-John seems to assume that many places were currently existing that were razed by the Romans."

Stark also argues in favor of earlier dates for the Synoptic Gospels. Stark cites Gerd Theissen and Richard Bauckham, who note the frequent use of "protective anonymity" in many passages of the Gospels, including John. There are the references to "the disciple that Jesus loved" for example, which Theissen and Bauckham believe were necessary to shield them from prosecution should their identities be exposed. Writes Stark, "This frequent resort to anonymity suggests that the Gospels were written at a sufficiently early date that these people were alive and still at risk."

Well, if the Gospels were written so close to the events depicted in them and the environment was still so fraught with risk, the authors seem to have been privy to information that they should not have in such dangerous times. For example, Matthew 28:11-13, where the tomb guards and the priests are discussing amongs themselves what to say about the disappearance of Jesus. Where would the author of Matthew have gotten this information? In fact, one thing that struck me upon reading the Gospels again last year was that they read like novels with an omniscient third person narrator. Conversations and events are portrayed to which none of the authors of the Gospels could have been witness to. And to have actually located these people, again in a time supposedly close to the events reported in the Gospels, and in a climate that was dangerous for early Christians, does not strike me as plausible. However, what cannot be denied is that the authors of the Gospels clearly do set the story of Jesus in a real time and place.

Stark concludes that "at the very least, the New Testament provides a truthful and reliable account of what the first generation of Christians believed to have taken place." Or, I would add, at the very least, the Gospels provide an account of what early Christian missionaries wanted potential converts among the Jews of the Diaspora to believe to have taken place.

Rodney Stark's "Discovering God" - Part 6 - From Jews to Christians

I have long believed that the best thing to ever happen to the Jews in ancient times was the Persian Empire. As I discussed in my post The Chosen People of the Supreme Being Test - Chapter 1 - You Call This A Promised Land?, the Israelites were hard pressed to maintain their kingdom due to the geographic misfortune of finding themselves sandwiched between their more powerful neighbors. But now, being allowed to resettle in the land of Israel, the Jews no longer had to worry about foreign invasion because the Persian Empire also encompassed all of the lands of their former enemies. The Jews now had something vital that their ancestors had always lacked, security. One must look at a map showing the extent of the Persian Empire to truly appreciate how vast it was.

The Jewish exiles who returned to Israel, writes Stark, "were primarily those deeply committed to the Yahweh-Only Sect," and "they launched vigorous efforts to impose true monotheism on the entire society." And their vision of god had changed as well. No longer was Yahweh simply their national god, he was the god of all.

What happened next was that Judaism became centered on the Temple in Jerusalem. "The Judaism put in place by the Yahweh-Only Sect... required strict observance of the Law and absolute intolerance of polytheism. But authority over this new orthodoxy was centered in Jerusalem amd placed in the hands of a professional, hereditary priesthood." With the imposition of a mandatory tithe on the Jewish people, the Temple and its subsidized priesthood became "the dominant financial institution, acting as the state treasury as well as an investment bank."

Repeating an earlier observation, Stark argues that "pluralism is the natural state of any religious economy... It follows that religious monopolies can exist only to the extent that coercion is able to keep dissenting groups tiny and circumspect, and that whenever coercion falters, competing religious groups will arise. Because erstwhile monopoly religions inevitably are relatively lax, lazy, and worldly, most of their opposition will come from groups promoting a far more intense faith - from sects." While the present-day United States does not have nor ever did have a monopoly religious faith, Stark's theory seems validated by shifting religious demographics in the United States today, with the more liberal mainline Protestant denominations in decline while more hardline and conservative denominations like the Southern Baptists have increased in strength.

As for the Jews in post-Exile Israel, though the Temple priesthood was initially founded by those Jews from the Yahweh-Only Sect who had an intense commitment to their faith, "that religious intensity is never transmitted very efficiently from one generation to the next." Consequently, "Israel soon abounded in disputatious sects." Stark provides an overview of the three main Jewish religious groups that coalesced in the years leading up to the Roman era: the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and the Essenes.

In brief, the Sadducees were the Temple priests. The Pharisees were more numerous than the Sadducees. Stark writes that "[p]erhaps the most significant single contribution of the Pharisees was the establishment of synagogues in Israel." Synagogues were buildings used for local worship and the Pharisees held that a synagogue could be set up wherever there were at least ten Jewish men. Though the Sadducees were opposed to the practice of synagogues, the synagogues "became the primary institution of Jewish religious life" following the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E. The Essenes were an extremely ascetic group who are believed to have had a community at Qumran where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found.

From there, Stark expounds upon a little-known fact, that contrary to popular belief, that ancient Judaism was a proselytizing faith. This is contrary to the present day, where orthodox Jews tend to be rather insular. I once had an Orthodox Jewish co-worker who told me that his sect, the Lubavitchers, discouraged converts because of the strict requirements of the faith. However, Isaiah 49:6 has God telling the Israelites "I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the Earth." Given that the Earth is a sphere, one might be tempted to ask exactly where the end of the Earth is located.

During the Roman Era, it is estimated that anywhere from 10 to 15% of the population of the Empire was Jewish. Stark quotes an Adolf von Harnack's claim that "It is utterly impossible to explain the large total of Jews in the Diaspora by the mere fact of the fertility of Jewish families. We must assume... that a very large number of pagans... trooped over to Yahweh." From a practical standpoint, given the frequent conquests and occupations of the land of Israel since the time of the Assyrians, expanding a national religion by acquiring foreign converts could have the potential of providing a greater supply of manpower for an army of liberation.

But as Stark notes, there was in fact a two-way process going on. Just as Diasporan Jews were seeking converts among their Gentile neighbors, so were they too assimilating to the Gentile, particularly Hellenistic, culture of their neighbors. "All but a very few had so entirely lost their Hebrew that they worshipped in Greek and their scriptures had to be translated into Greek. Many Diasporan Jews, probably the majority of them, had abandoned some provisions of the Law. For example, the rules that made it very difficult to eat with non-Jews probably were widely ignored."

The Diasporan Jews then were ripe for a reform movement in their religion that would jettison the strict requirements of Torah law while retaining their belief in what they believed was the one true god. And as luck or fate would have it, such a reform movement was just over the horizon.

Stark Lunacy - Part 5 - Monotheism

After surveying the religious marketplace that was Rome, Stark devotes chapter 5 to an overview of monotheism in history.

The first known monotheist in recorded history was the 14th century B.C.E. Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep IV. For reasons not entirely clear, Amenhotep decided to proclaim that the sun god Aten was the one true god and changed his name to Akhenaten. A number of changes resulted from Akhenaten's pursuit of monotheism. One interesting development was in how Akhenaten allowed himself to be portrayed in bas-reliefs. Whereas his predecessors were depicted as remote and idealized figures, Akhenaten insisted that he be shown as an actual human being. A number of reliefs depict Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiri at play with their children. Why Akhenaten's monotheism went hand in hand with more naturalistic artistic representations and changes in architectural styles is a matter of speculation.

Alas, Akhenaten's new religion did not outlast his reign. Stark notes the reasons why. Akhenaten did not attempt to proselytize the common people of Egypt. His religion, in practice, was restricted to his inner circle, and even their level of commitment was highly in doubt. As Stark points out, "archaeologists have found many figurines in ruins of private homes at Amarna [Akhenaten's capital], revealing that during the time when all the old Gods and their images were banned, many of Akhenaten's officals continued to worship them in secret." Added to that, Akhenaten does not seem to have been a particularly effective ruler, and his neglect of foreign affairs resulted in the waning of Egyptian influence in Palestine.

There are some who have speculated that the Israelites got the idea for their monotheistic religion from Akhenaten, but Stark discounts that possibility. While not a Biblical literalist, Stark appears to believe that the Exodus did happen, but that "for many centuries after the Exodus... the religion that prevailed among the Israelites involved a number of Gods, and it is silly to compare the Jewish faith that took many centuries slowly to develop into a brilliant monotheism with the monotheism that had appeared so many centuries before and so briefly in Egypt, and then vanished." Or to borrow from one of the parables of Jesus, the monotheism of Akhenaten was like a seed that fell on stony ground and failed to take root.

Next, Stark looks at Zoroastrianism. Here, Stark introduces the reader to an important term that will reappear at various times later on in Discovering God, and that term is what he calls "religious capital", which he defines as "the degree of mastery and attachment to a particular body of religious culture." One's religious capital is a crucial factor in determining whether a person will convert from one religion to another. For example, Stark writes, "consider Christians deciding whether to become Mormons or Hindus. To become Mormons, Christians retain all (or nearly all) of their religious capital, needing merely to add to it: they already possess two of the three scriptures, needing only to add the Book of Mormon... [b]ut to become Hindus, Christians must discard their Bible and all their religious capital...buy a copy of the Bhagavad-gita, and invest the time and energy needed to build a whole new cultural stake."

After providing the reader with the Cliff Notes version of the history of Zoroastrianism, Stark moves on to Judaism, which is described as a "religion of the book." The Jewish Bible, or Tanakh, is distinguished "from other scriptures of its time [in] that it includes a great deal of history." Having said that, Stark has set the stage for challenging those who would question the historical accuracy of the Old Testament. But rather than examining the findings of Biblical archaeologists such as Israel Finkelstein, Stark disparages "militant extremists from several minor universities [who] claim that none of it ever happened... that the whole Torah was made up sometime about 200 BCE as 'pious propaganda' by Hellenized Jews in the Diaspora wishing to impress their Greek and Roman neighbors." Stark goes on to lament that "these so-called minimalists are much quoted in the media." Personally, I do not recall being familiar with anyone claiming that the Jewish scriptures were all invented around 200 BCE, and I doubt hardly anyone believes such claims, including most atheists. This is an example that is characteristic of Stark throughout the book, in that he brings up and tears down the more absurd claims while completely dodging the more serious and realistic challenges to his viewpoint.

Though Stark does acknowledge some discrepancies in the Bible, he mostly chalks it up to, yep, you guessed it, divine accomodation. It is a theme he brings up repeatedly throughout the book. So, with respect to the Bible, Stark argues that any "discrepancies with earlier scriptures could reflect that by the sixth century, human recipients were better able to understand God's words. Keep in mind that all revelations are limited by the capacity of humans to comprehend... in order to penetrate the ignorance of Israel."

By the way Stark describes it, you would think that God's attempts to communicate his will to the Israelites must have went something like this:



Stark sets out what he believes happened regarding the story of Exodus and the Israelite settlement of Canaan. Again, not being a Biblical literalist, Stark concedes that the "best of the archaeologically informed historians now believe that the Jews did not conquer Israel...but settled peacefully. For example, Jericho... was destroyed in about 1500 BCE by the Egyptians and lay abandoned in ruins at the time Joshua was said to have brought down its walls."

Stark is inclined to believe that there was a real Moses. Among his reasons are that the name Moses is Egyptian rather than Semitic, and he quotes William Dever positing that it is possible that a charismatic Egyptian sheikh named Moses might have indeed guided the Israelites through the desert. Besides, Stark insists, "someone had revelations and founded the Israelite religion." Stark refers to his earlier description in the book about religious innovators and how quite often their families become their first converts and supporters. In Exodus, it "tells that the first to accept Moses's revelations were his immediate family, which has, from the standpoint of social science, the profound ring of truth."

In tracing the development of monotheism in Israel, Stark contrasts the relative weakness of Israelite kings with those of its neighbors which had god-king monarchs and state subsidized religious monopolies. This meant that "Israel enjoyed a relatively unregulated religious economy. There lay the key to unique contours of Jewish history: unregulated religious economies always abound in sect movements, and when they enjoy sufficient freedom, sects sometimes achieve dramatic religious changes." Stark defines sects in his book as religious groups that maintain high levels of religious commitment, which brings them into tension with their cultural environment. Stark notes that the Yahweh-Only or Deuteronomist sect existed throughout most of the history of the Israelite kingdom, and that contrary to what is generally assumed, this sect would have been drawn from the ranks of the privileged. This also clashes with the criticism that is popularly levelled at the authors of the Old Testament, particularly by many atheists, that they were ignorant goat herders.

The Deuteronomists seem to have had their first success during the reign of King Josiah of Judah, when the "Book of Law" was found hidden in the Temple. In addressing whether or not the Torah was a forgery whipped up by the Deuteronomists ("Hey guys! Guess what we found!"), Stark again errs on the side of religion. "Is is equally clear that [the Deuteronomists] began with far earlier documents. Where would such documents have been kept other than in the Temple? And in an age of oral culture, is it surprising that scrolls may have lain forgotten and unread for generations?" B-b-b-but Rodney! This is supposed to have been their religious law! By way of analogy, imagine after the United States Constitution was drafted, someone hid the only copy of it in Ben Franklin's attic. The drafters of the Constitution would tell people what they put into the document that formed the basis of the nation's government, but since no one could actually get their hands on the document itself, the framework of the government would not be established according to constitutional principles. That hardly seems likely.

Ironically, it appears that the Babylonian Conquest was the best thing to ever happen to the strict monotheist sect among the Israelites. For decades they had been warning the people of Israel what would happen if they did not obey the one true god, and now they were vindicated. Furthermore, Stark quotes one Morton Smith, who wrote that "Most of the leaders of the Yahweh-alone party were probably among the upper classes of Jerusalem whom Nebuchadnezzar carried off to Babylon." Stark believes that "the temptations to assimilate served as a very efficient selection mechanism that, over several generations, would have filtered out the less committed, with the result that the self-conscious Israelite exile community came to consist almost entirely of sect members with unwavering faith that Yahweh was the Only God."

Stark also examines what influence, if any, Zoroastrianism had on Judaism at this stage. He observes that "the Babylonian captivity provided a circumstance for long and very close contact between Israel and Zoroastrianism, during a very formative period of the former, and a very vigorous, early period in the history of the latter." The notions of heaven and hell in post-exilic Judaism bear a resemblance to that of Zoroastrianism. The Zorastrians did not bury their dead, but left them exposed in the air to become bare bones. The book of Ezekiel mentions a field of dry bones. Furthermore, Stark refers to an agreement among scholars that there are Zoroastrian influences in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

So, the next time you get upset over the latest escapades by the Religious Right, just remember that if you go back far enough, it is all Zoroaster's fault. Zoroaster, you're a goddamned Persian bastard!

Next up, here come the Christians!

Stark Lunacy - Part 4 - The Market Theory of Religion

Chapter 2 of Rodney Stark's Discovering God is an overview of ancient temple religions in ancient societies such as Sumer, Egypt as well as the more recent Mayan and Aztec temple religions. From an atheist perspective, there is not much of interest in this chapter. Stark correctly points out that civilizations with subsidized, monopoly religious organizations tended to become static societies where innovation was frowned upon as a challenge and threat to the state religion. Temple religions did not exist to serve the common people, but rather a very small elite. At most, the people might be passive spectators to a publicly performed sacrifice or other ritual. In states that have subsidized religious monopolies, "the overall level of public religious involvement will be low."

This sets the stage for Chapter 3, which looks at religion in the Roman Empire. In contrast to the state subsidized monopoly religions that Stark discusses in Chapter 2, "the most unusual aspect of Roman religion is that it was relatively unregulated and little subsidized. The Roman Republic did not impose a system of state temples and allowed the evolution of a remarkably free and crowded religious marketplace wherein an amazing array of faiths jostled for popular support." Stark calls this the "market theory of religion", which states that religious competition increases the overall religiousness of the population. So far, so good.

However, having made a number of valid observations, Stark proceeds to unleash a broadside against those who claim "that religion stems from ignorance or irrationality." According to Stark, "people are as rational in making religious choices as in making secular decisions." He spends a sizeable paragraph attacking the criticisms levelled against religion by intellectual figures such as Emile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud. That some of the claims by these religious critics are themselves absurd, such as one Michael P. Carroll, who Stark quotes as describing the Rosary as "a disguised gratification of repressed anal-erotic desires", does not make religious belief inherently rational.

Stark retorts that a "mountain of trustworthy studies reveal that religion is positively associated with good mental health - religious people are substantially less prone to neuroses, anxiety, depression, and other forms of psychological problems." (Bold text mine).

Andrea Yates, a fervent Christian who was not prone to psychological problems.

Yeah, I know, one crazy religious person does not disprove that, but I just couldn't help myself!

Stark goes on though, stating that "the more educated they are, the more likely people are to attend church, and among university faculty, those in the physical and natural sciences are more religious than are their colleagues in other fields." Yet in a recent Harris Poll, it was found that those "with no college education (82%) are more likely to believe in God than those with postgraduate education (73%)." And a Nature survey of the members of the National Academy of Scientists in 1998, found that only 7% believed in a personal god! Maybe the polls that Stark looked at were taken from the faculty of Liberty and Regent Universities!

His bitch session ended, Professor Stark recovers his moorings and gets on with his survey of religious pluralism in the Roman Empire. In examining why new faiths, including Christianity, succeeded in spreading within the empire, Stark offers five reasons for their success. First, these religions appealed to the senses because their ceremonies had a high emotional content. Second, the new religions appealed to the individual rather than the group. Third, "they satisfied the intellect" because they possessed written scriptures. The holy texts of Judaism and Christianity in particular contained descriptions of real places and were grounded, at least in part, in history. Fourth, many of the new faiths were more inclusive towards women. Fifth, the churches and temples of these religions were not just places where people went to worship at set times, they also provided their adherents with a sense of community. In contrast to Greco-Roman religions, "the new faiths stressed celebration, joy, ecstasy and passion. Music played a leading role in their services - not only flutes and horns, but an abundance of group singing and dancing."

And here is where Rodney Stark is right in a way that can be uncomfortable for atheists to admit, Christianity succeeded in the Roman Empire because its message was attractive! This will be examined more when I get to Chapter 7, which looks more in depth at the rise and spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire, resulting in the faith becoming the state religion of the empire in the 4th century C.E.

Ironically though, when Stark describes the shortcomings of the Greco-Roman gods, he points to their lack of morals and manners, and describes them as being "afflicted with jealousy, greed, pride, and lust." Evidently Stark forgets that in Exodus, the god of the Bible tells Moses that he is "a jealous god", and throughout the Old Testament, the god of the Bible at best is psychopathic, genocidal, and controlling. Of course, the story of the birth, ministry, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus is meant to humanize the god of the Bible and make him, well, less of a dick.

Stark Lunacy - Part 3 - Divine Revelations

Wrapping up chapter 1 of Rodney Stark's latest book, Discovering God, the next noteworthy part of this chapter deals with religious innovators who have revelations. Stark defines a revelation as "a communication believed to come from a supernatural source, usually from a God, or to be divinely inspired knowledge."

Contrary to the popular belief that people who claim to have received revelations from god are crazy or dishonest, Stark tells us that these assumptions are "incompatible with the biographies of many prominent cases: most showed no indications whatsoever of mental illness, and most made personal sacrifices utterly incompatible with fraud. This led me to formulate a model whereby entirely normal people can, through entirely normal means, believe that they communicate with the divine."

David Koresh, a normal man with no indications of mental illness whatsoever, who believed that he received revelations from God and whose personal sacrifice of his own life at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas was utterly incompatible with fraud.

An example that Stark provides is when "Spencer W. Kimball, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, announced the revelation that persons of African ancestry should be admitted to the Mormon priesthood, he described the process by which he gained this revelation as the result of many hours of prayer that ended in the sudden, absolute certainty that this was God's will."

Gee, ya think so Professor Stark? Or was it more of a case of "Holy shit, we better come up with a face saving way of allowing blacks to become Mormon priests because in a post-Civil Rights America, we're starting to look awfully raycist!" Why Stark does not consider this possibility is beyond me. I wonder if Stark believes it is plausible that God really told President McKinley that he should "Christianize" the mostly Catholic Filipinos after the end of the Spanish-American War.

Stark compares the religious innovator's receipt of divine revelations to composers such as Gershwin or Mozart, who claimed that they did not compose tunes, they simply played the complete melodies that came to them in their heads from "out there." Stark suggests that while it is possible these allegedly divine revelations "are purely human creations", we should also be "free to assume that the revelation was sent... that God does reveal himself to humans - even if it is only within the limits of their capacity to understand."

In discussing the credibility of religious innovators, Professor Stark does get one thing right. He points out that in many cases, converts are family members, close friends, and members of the community, or to put it in his words, "It follows that successful religious innovators will tend to be well-respected members of an intense primary group." He points to examples such as Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, as well as Jesus, Muhammed and a host of other religious founders.

For a Stone Age religious innovator, converting ones family and neighbors was tantamount to converting the world, and the religion would eventually spread to other tribes through cultural diffusion. And the reason why religion tended to be everywhere is "because the needs it fulfills are everywhere... Alternatively, many religions come from God according to the ability of humans at a particular time and place to understand, and, of course, all revelations are subject to misunderstanding, exaggeration, and faulty transmission." (bold emphasis mine)

Then again, a God could solve that problem by revealing the same message to a number of people in a particular group simultaneously. After all, if two people approach you within the same time period, both claiming to have received different revelations from God, how are you to know which one to believe?

Coming soon, Rodney Stark looks at ancient state-sponsored temple religions, followed by an examination of that great religious marketplace called the Roman Empire, where Christianity would end up becoming the Walmart of the 4th century C.E.

Stark Lunacy - Part 2

Okay, time to continue on with my running commentary of Rodney Stark's new book Discovering God.

In tracing the evolution of religious beliefs, Stark tackles the task of trying to determine the religious beliefs of primitive peoples. Most of this chapter is of little interest to me until Stark examines the various explanations given for why belief in god or gods seems universal throughout all human cultures worldwide. Stark breaks the possible explanations down into three categories: biological, cultural, and theological.

In the area of biology, Stark mentions and critiques a number of well-known works. Among them are:

Julian Jaynes The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I had heard of this book but was not familiar with its subject matter. Jaynes theorized that until fairly recently in human history, the left and right sides of the human brain were not synthesized, so that "voices" from one side of the brain were believed to be external communications. Humans had no sense of an "I" and their natural state was not unlike that of a schizophrenic. Stark dismisses the evidence that Jaynes offered in support of his argument, which rested on his interpretation of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Jaynes noted that in the Iliad, many of the characters engage in a dialogue with the gods, whereas in the Odyssey, which was written about a century or so later, the gods are absent. Stark chalks this up to a literary convention and by way of analogy retorts that one could claim that early humans were only two dimensional beings because they appear two dimensional in the earliest depictions by human artists. With the caveat of not having read Jaynes book, I am inclined to agree with Rodney Stark on this one.

Next up is Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. Again, as with Jaynes book above, I have not read this work, so I am largely at the mercy of viewing it through Rodney Stark's subjective interpretation. As explained by Stark, Boyer's argument proposes that for purposes of survival, human brains evolved to detect purpose or agency in our environment. For example, seeing the potential for danger in a deadly predator animal that happens to be sitting motionless. According to Boyer, this detection system is biased to overdetection, which causes humans to perceive what they interpret as purpose in the their environment, and that the source of this purpose is some supernatural entity or god.

Stark serves up Boyer's definition of religion, which reads "Religion is about the existence and causal powers of nonobservable entities and agencies." Stark then responds to this by arguing that "real science embraces many unobservables - no one has ever seen gravity. Of course, Boyer would respond that gravity's effects are observable. But proponents of Intelligent Design would answer, so are the effects of a Creator!" I can't help but feel that Stark is acting like a smart ass with such a quip. Not only are gravity's effects observable, they are also measurable. To give an example, astronomers expected to find the planet we know as Neptune because of perturbations detected in the orbit of Uranus. On the other hand, an Intelligent Design proponent can argue that the complexity of life on Earth is valid evidence in support of the existence of a Creator, but the ID proponent cannot offer any measurable evidence for the existence of such a Creator. Where does it live? What does it look like? How does it create matter?

On the heels of Pascal Boyer, Stark proceeds to the eminence grise of the present day atheist movement, Richard Dawkins. In particular, Stark focuses on Dawkins popularizing the concept of memes. Stark's condescension towards Dawkins seeps through like baby's piss coming through a urine soaked diaper. As with Boyer above, the gist of Stark's criticism of Dawkins is that if religion can be reduced to memes, so to can scientific ideas. Stark concludes his brief discussion of Dawkins by noting that one of the positive blurbs that appear on the back cover of The God Delusion (which I have read btw!) are from the magicians Penn and Teller. Stark also devotes a mere paragraph to Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, which I also have not read, though I have seen Dennett speak on C-Span. Stark dismisses Dennett's book as just a rehash of Boyers and Dawkins.

In discussing the cultural origins of religion, Stark gives a favorable cite to a man named Paul Radin, who wrote Primitive Man as Philosopher. Stark sets forth, rightfully I would argue, that early humans should be viewed as rational and intelligent creatures, and not as dumb brutes as they are popularly depicted.



Stark posits, again correctly in my opinion, that religion originates with "unusual individuals" whom Radin calls "religious formulators" but whom Stark prefers to call "religious innovators." Stark defines them as "very gifted individuals who appear from time to time and introduce new religious culture." He goes on to observe that "even though innovators are scattered across time and space, their new formulations are remarkably similar." To this, Stark offers two possible conclusions, either these innovators were responding to universal human predicaments, or "perhaps they are similar because each is responding to a revelation from the same divine source." Of course, we already have a pretty good idea by this point which explanation Stark is leaning towards.

While correct in his statement that primitive peoples had very practical fears, he adds that by calling on the supernatural, "they acknowledge the fundamental principle that the supernatural is the only plausible source of many things that human beings greatly desire." (Bold mine). On what does Stark base his claim that the supernatural, or god, represents the only plausible source for the things that we desire? He does not say.

Due to the late hour I am going to pick this up again, wrapping up the rest of chapter 2 and all of chapter 3.

Stark Lunacy - Part 1

A couple of nights ago I happened upon Rodney Stark's book Discovering God while in the Borders book store near Penn Station. I first became familiar with him earlier this year when I noticed a couple of his books at my local library. Just from reading the jacket covers alone, I knew that Rodney Stark was someone with whom I would find much to disagree, but at the same time I relished the challenge of reading an academic apologia for Christianity instead of plowing through another pro-atheist book. I apologize for the flippant title of this post, but I just could not resist it! :-)

I had planned to do a review of one of the Stark books I read, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, but I had to return the book to the library and was not able to finish my review. I do plan to revisit it in the near future. This post will be the first of a series of running commentary posts I plan to do as I read Discovering God.

For those unfamiliar with Rodney Stark, he is a professor of Social Sciences at Baylor University who writes frequently on the history and sociology of religion. You can visit his website at rodneystark.com.

In his latest book, Discovering God, Stark comes across as a sort of anti-Dawkins. However, while Stark does devote several paragraphs to criticism of Richard Dawkins, Discovering God was not written specifically as a rebuke to The God Delusion. Rather, I suspect that due to the release and subsequent popularity of The God Delusion, Stark incorporated his criticism of Dawkins into Discovering God as he was writing it.

The introductory chapter opens on a personal note for the author, with Stark revealing to the reader that since he was very young, he "often wondered about God. Does he really exist? If so, where was he before he revealed himself to Abraham? Were many generations of humans condemned to live and die in ignorance, followed by many generations during which only the Chosen Few knew God? Or could it be that from earliest times God has revealed himself often and in various places so that many different religions possess at least fragmentary knowledge of divine will? If so, why do even some very major religions seem to lack any trace of divine inspiration?"

Only a few sentences later, Stark reveals his distate for what he calls the "militant atheism" of scholars of religion who openly presume "that Gods exist only in the human imagination, that religion arises mainly from fear, and that faith is sustained only by ignorance and credulity", followed by a jibe at Dawkins.

It is the thesis of Stark's book that God does exist and that the history of the evolution of religion is the story of how humans perceive God's revelations in bits and pieces. Stark suggests that at one point he might have been an atheist or agnostic. In describing the scholarly perspective, Stark writes "that the answer to where God was prior to Abraham's generation is that Yahweh hadn't been invented yet. That certainly was my view early in the 1980's... Today my answer is quite different..."

It is Stark's contention that God was always there, "revealing himself within the very limited capacities of humans to understand." This line of argument is what Stark calls Divine Accomodation. An analogy to this would be how we teach our children. We don't teach algebra and calculus to five year old children. First, they need to be taught numbers, followed by basic addition and subtraction, and then multiplication and division, fractions and onward. Stark goes on to cite references to this line of reasoning in the Bible, Origen's On First Principles, and Thomas Aquinas to support his argument and goes on to write "The principle of divine accomodation provides a truly remarkable key for completely reappraising the origins and history of religions."

In noting that many important religious founders throughout Eurasia were contemporaneous, such as Buddha, Confucius, Zoroaster, some of the Biblical prophets, among others, in what has been called the Axial or Axis Age, Stark asks rhetorically "Was this pure coincidence? An example of diffusion? Evidence of repeated revelations? Or what? On this, the social-scientific literature has had very little to say, and most of what has been said uniformly ignores or specifically denies any spiritual aspects."

Being someone who Stark would likely consider to be a "militant atheist" (though personally I consider myself to be a rather moderate atheist), I of course find myself in complete disagreement with Stark. If one posits the possibility of a god that is so powerful and intelligent that it can create this vast universe in which we live, then it should not be a substantial leap to posit a god that can create humans with a far greater capacity to comprehend it. (As an aside, unlike Stark, I refuse to refer to god as a male. Unless one is going to argue that god has a penis, how can a being with no shape or form have a gender?)

In other words, if there is a god that can do just about anything, then it should be possible that god could create humans with the capacity to achieve 21st century technology within the first generation, especially if that first generation really did have a 900 year lifespan!

Stark lays out the case that over time, "human images of God will tend to progress from those having smaller to those having greater scope." A god who creates and controls the universe is much more worthy of veneration than a god who controls the weather. In this, I find myself in agreement with Stark.

Furthermore, writes Stark, "humans will prefer an image of God[s] as rational and loving." Again, this is likely true. However, in debates I have had online with theists where I argued that the god of the Bible, if it really did exist, was not a being worthy of love and veneration because of its cruel behavior in the Bible, those theists would retort that I wanted a god that suited my preferences. Well, according to Rodney Stark, religions grow in popularity precisely because the god or gods worshipped by those religions are preferred by the people who convert to those religions.

It is getting late, so I will end this first part here for now and pick up on other parts of the book later this weekend.