Every Jot and Tittle: Nobody Obeys Everything in the Bible, and that's a Good Thing

I'm going to try to make this a short one, because it's a sunny day in Colorado, and I want to get into the mountains, and nobody wants to read long blog posts anyway. So here's today's topic: people who claim they follow everything in the Bible without picking and choosing. I hear people say this all the time, and it is clearly, obviously, and abundantly false. Everybody picks and chooses, and as I'll argue here, that's a very good thing. It's not that people who say this are consciously lying--I don't think they are. They just seem to be ignoring vast swaths of the Bible that they no longer follow.

Folks who claim not to pick and choose often quote the King James translation of Jesus in Matthew 5:18: "For verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." Now, I find the words "jot" and "tittle" rather pleasing, and I wouldn't mind seeing them brought back into use. But I would hate to see people really follow every jot and tittle, and I'm glad they don't, whether they say they do or not.

First, very few Christians really follow all the dietary and ritual laws in Leviticus, Deuteronomy, etc. (very few Jews do either, except the ultra-orthodox.) Most Christians I know happily eat shrimp and pork, trim the hair on the sides of their heads, wear mixed fabrics, and generally violate Torah in a hundred different ways. That's fine--I don't expect Christians to start living like Orthodox Jews. But I do expect them not to say they follow rules when they clearly don't. Is that really too much to ask?

Of course, not all Christians claim to follow every rule in the Bible, and there's a long history of debate within Christianity about the extent to which Christians should follow Old Testament Jewish law. This goes all the way back to the beginning, to arguments between Paul and the more orthodox former associates of Jesus. It even goes back to the words of Jesus himself. While Jesus did say that not one jot or tittle would be changed, he also cast doubt on whether dietary laws should be followed, when he said in Matthew 15.11, "What goes into someone's mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them." The tension between this verse and the "jot and tittle" verse has, understandably, led to a lot of tension within Christianity over the centuries.

It seems that many conservative Christians today still haven't decided for sure where they stand on the issue. Whenever I hear someone quoting Leviticus to denounce homosexuality, I ask them why the hair on the side of their head is trimmed, and whether they eat shrimp. Then, generally, they'll say that's part of the Old Covenant, and Christians follow the New Covenant. To which I reply, "Fine, but stop quoting Leviticus if you no longer follow it. And stop saying you don't pick and choose what parts of the Bible to follow. Because you do."

Another episode in the New Testament that suggests Jesus was more a "spirit of the law" than "letter of the law" kind of guy is the beautiful story of the woman caught in adultery (though the story isn't actually in the oldest manuscripts, and may have been written long after Jesus' death). The Mosaic law in this case was clear--she was to be put to death (actually, so was the guy she slept with, but for some reason, he doesn't appear.) The Jewish authorities tried to trap Jesus by asking him what should be done, but he outsmarted them. He didn't contradict the law, as they hoped. He just said that whoever is without sin should cast the first stone. After a while, the crowd dispersed and the woman lived.

You don't have to be a Christian to be appreciate the wisdom and mercy shown here (wherever the story really comes from). Thankfully, the story helped form a basis for Christians to move away from the brutality of the Old Testament laws (Jews also moved away from the harsher laws, of course). But here again, the fact is that Christians have stopped doing some of the things the Bible clearly prescribes. Even Jesus, if the story in John really happened, was picking and choosing--choosing not to see the law carried out. He was choosing mercy over the law.

Anybody today who really did stone adulterers* and disobedient children, kill homosexuals, burn promiscuous preacher's daughters, or slay entire villages of unbelievers--men, women, children, and livestock--would justly be regarded as a psychopathic barbarian and locked up. Sadly, there are people in the world who do put similarly harsh and archaic laws into practice; people like ISIS and the Taliban. They really do beat people to death with rocks for suspected adultery and for not believing what they believe. And they are rightly denounced around the world as atavistic barbarians.

So, if today's Christians really did follow every jot and tittle of the Old Testament law, they would eat and dress like Orthodox Jews, but carry out violent death sentences reminiscent of ISIS. They don't. In the case of the violent punishments, that's a very good thing. In either case, it's simply false to claim they follow everything in the Bible without picking and choosing. They DO pick and choose, and that is ALSO a good thing, because lots of what's in the Bible was written by people who lived in a violent, superstitious time; a time when people thought the sky was a solid dome and demons caused disease. Let's finally go ahead and face it--some of what the Bible prescribes (especially the Old Testament) is simply archaic barbarism. It's not a matter of how it should be interpreted; it's just wrong, plain and simple. Modern, decent Christians do pick and choose, and they choose not to follow the old, violent laws. That's a wonderful thing, and it shows that this rough old world actually has grown a little more humane, at least in some places.

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* Actually, the verse in Deuteronomy classifies female rape victims in the city as adulterers. Also barbaric.

What Accent Snobs Don't Git

I have a nephew and a father named Ben. But that's not what I call either of them. I'm from Arkansas, so I say "Bin". Once my sister-in-law (nephew Ben's mom), said, "You know, his name's "Ben", not "Bin." I told her it couldn't be helped--I simply can't make myself say it that way, because it feels weird and phony when I do. Besides, I like my accent. It marks me as being from somewhere that's a little different. I don't sound like I'm from Anywheresville, USA.

Of course, there are people who hear me say things like "Git Bin an ink pin" and conclude that it means I'm dumb, or that I'm speaking a sort of degraded, simplified version of English. That's OK, because the joke's on them, not me. I know of two Rhodes Scholars (Bill Clinton being one) who talk a lot like I do, so it's clearly a mistake to conclude that anybody who speaks this way is dumb. As for the "degraded English" notion, that idea in itself is what's dumb. It shows an ignorance about how languages change and evolve. They do change, of course, but as they get simpler in some ways, they get more complex in others.

Take the way I say "Ben", "pen", and "them." Anybody who speaks this way is unconsciously applying an extremely complicated grammatical rule. I first realized this when I thought, "If I say 'Ben' like 'Bin', and 'ten' like 'tin', why don't I say 'peg' like 'pig, or 'let' like 'lit'? When I looked up the answer, I was amazed at the complexity of the rule I had been applying without knowing it. Linguists call this way of talking the "Pin-Pen Merger". It shows up in most parts of the south and in the area around Bakersfield, California, which was settled in large part by hillbillies like me. The reason somebody who asks for an ink "pin" doesn't also say "lit the dog out" is that the "e" sound only becomes an "i" in words that end in a "nasal stop", like an "m" or "n".* Try saying "Ben" and then "sit", and pay attention to what's going on in your mouth (seriously, try this--it's kind of amazing). When you say the "n" in Ben, your soft palate connects with your tongue, forcing air through your nose. Your nasal cavity resonates, giving the "n" part of its distinctive sound. When you say "sit", your soft palate never descends, and your nose doesn't resonate.

Of course, before I read all this I had no idea what a nasal stop was, or that my nose resonated like an elephant seal's. Yet I still apply this complicated linguistic rule without even knowing it, and so does the most backwoods hillbilly. We may be speaking a socially-maligned form of English, but we aren't speaking a simplified form. Yes, we've ditched the distinction between the sounds in "pin" and "pen", but we've added a complex (albeit unconscious) rule about when to do so.

That "dumb" version of English turns out to have pretty sophisticated rules. I git a pretty big kick out of that.

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Actually, as I wrote this, I realized I do say "get" as "git", and that word doesn't end with a nasal stop. So the rules are actually even more complicated that I'm discussing here, but I don't know what the extra rules are (even though I "know" how to use them--the human mind is weird, isn't it?) Wonder if the linguists have worked out that one, too?

Fellow Liberals: Please Ditch the Pseudoscience

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We liberals* like to think of ourselves as the pro-science side of the political spectrum. And we aren't totally wrong about that. After all, we don't scoff at the vast majority of climate scientists; telling them they're making it all up and we know better. We don't push to have creationism taught in public schools. We don't have bumper stickers that say, "The Big Bang Theory: God Said It, and BANG! It Happened." We don't build creation museums with taxpayer money; we don't say "God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve"; and we never say women were created from man's rib. We also don't have blind faith in the power of free markets to cure all societal ills.

But if we think we're immune to woolly, pseudoscientific thinking, we're fooling ourselves. How often do you see a liberal friend shaking their head at creationism, and then going off to check their horoscope? How often do you see liberals buying dubious alternative treatments, taking part in trendy "cleanses", or even talking about the magic powers of crystals and auras? Do you know liberal antivaxxers? Liberals with starry-eyed views of nature as a benevolent mother goddess, despite the fact that nature made arsenic, liver flukes, and polio? I know people who do all these things, and I really, really wish they would stop.

Why? First, as liberals, it absolutely kills our credibility. If you're scoffing at people who say the earth is 6,000 years old, and then turning around and fretting about Mercury being in retrograde, then you're throwing stones from a glass house. Conservatives think of liberals as soft-headed, and this gives them all the ammunition they could ask for. We might as well gift wrap it and say, "Merry Christmas!"

Second--and I know this is controversial--what's actually true really matters. Despite what the postmoderny types say (and don't get me started on them), there is a real world, and it's important that we try to match our beliefs to it as closely as possible. That's a very hard thing to do, because the human mind is incredibly error-prone. We sense only tiny slivers of the vast universe around us, and we tend to see patterns that aren't there. The list of logical fallacies and psychological biases we're prone to would take up many pages. Science and logic help us defeat these tendencies. They give us a way to test our biases and preconceptions, to see if they hold up. Oftentimes, they don't.

The earth turned out not to be flat, or at the center of the universe. Ancient myths of human origins turned out to be wrong. The constellations turned out to be random patterns among stars that only seem connected when viewed from earth. And the stars turned out to be so far away that their light can take many human lifetimes to reach us. And that's all OK, because the universe turned out to be grander and more surprising than we ever imagined.

However, science has never given us any reason to think the universe is about us. All these eons and light years probably weren't put in place for a bunch of egotistical apes on one tiny planet among trillions. That's what most subscribers to pseudoscience--creationism as well as astrology--can't seem to accept.

Lots of my fellow liberals disagree with me when I say it's bad to believe things that aren't true, or for which you have no evidence. "What's the harm?" they ask. It's a good question, and here's my answer: What was the harm when the Book of Genesis led generations of people to believe that women were created from men to be a "helper", and were responsible for original sin and the fall from grace? Did any bad things happen because of that false belief? If you tour the bathhouses in Hot Springs, Arkansas, you can see tubs where sick people were once immersed in mercury. They thought it was good for them. Did that belief do any harm? What's the harm when people refuse to vaccinate their children, and diseases like mumps and whooping cough threaten to make a comeback? Did it do any harm that people in this country once believed blacks were an inferior race, and best suited to slavery? Yes, it did terrible harm.

Beliefs matter, because people act on them. False beliefs have probably caused as much suffering as any force on earth. When it comes to senseless destruction, natural disasters have nothing on human delusion.

"But astrology/past lives/crystals/homepathy aren't like racism and sexism," people will say. "They aren't that harmful." Well, maybe, and maybe not. If someone dies because they try to treat cancer with homeopathic remedies, where the active ingredient has been diluted into non-existence, that is, in fact, harmful. And consider astrology; probably the most common pseudoscience among liberals. What if some powerful person makes bad decisions based on horoscopes that have no basis in fact? Nancy Reagan used to consult horoscopes all the time. What if Ronnie had gotten into it too (maybe he did, for all I know), and made bad decisions about nuclear strikes after consulting an astrologer? I think it's safe to say the results could have been rather harmful.

Of course, Reagan wasn't a liberal (he also believed in the literal truth of the Book of Revelation, apparently) but my point is that liberals can't exactly claim the high ground when it comes to science and critical thinking if they're subscribing to pseudoscience themselves. Many conservatives also get into pseudoscience, but things like astrology and other New Age ideas are much more common among liberals. And that really needs to stop. It's embarrassing. We liberals pride ourselves on having soft hearts, and that's a good thing. But having a soft heart doesn't mean you have to have a soft head, too.

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I actually don't like calling myself a liberal, because I don't want to lock myself into one way of thinking. I'm not a doctrinaire liberal, but I'm a whole lot more of a liberal than a conservative.