Abnormal Interests

July 3, 2009

Evangelism As A Reality Show

Evangelism to what religion? In Turkey, like the United States, it doesn't seem to matter all that much as long as nonbelievers convert to some religion or other. Here's a couple of snippets from the Guardian.

"The project aims to turn disbelievers on to God," the station's deputy director, Ahmet Ozdemir, told the Hürriyet Daily News and Economic Review.

That mission is attested to in the programme's advertising slogans, which include "We give you the biggest prize ever: we represent the belief in God" and "You will find serenity in this competition".

Only true non-believers need apply. An eight-strong commission of theologians will assess the atheist credentials of would-be contestants before deciding who should take part.

Does it really take eight theologians to determine that someone is an atheist? I guess they don't want any lying theists to cheat their way onto the program.

Contestants will ponder whether to believe or not to believe when they pit their godless convictions against the possibilities of a new relationship with the almighty on Penitents Compete (Tovbekarlar Yarisiyor in Turkish), to be broadcast by the Kanal T station. Four spiritual guides from the different religions will seek to convert at least one of the 10 atheists in each programme to their faith.

Those persuaded will be rewarded with a pilgrimage to the spiritual home of their newly chosen creed – Mecca for Muslims, Jerusalem for Christians and Jews, and Tibet for Buddhists.

You see, anything is better than being an atheist. If I were to convert to Baal worship, would they send me to Ugarit for a week or so?

There are at least two ways to read this show that are not really mutually exclusive. One can read it as an example of the all too common prejudice against nonbelievers. But one can also read it as an indication of religious tolerance in Turkey. But, like Mark Twain and Brian Leiter, when it comes to religion, I prefer indifference to tolerance.

Then atheists may not be the only problematic folk. It seems that here in the United States, nuns may be inefficiently religious.

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Posted by Duane on Friday, July 3, 2009 at 1:44 PM (UTC-08:00)
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July 2, 2009

Four Stone Hearth 70 Is Up

It's that carnival time of month and now the seventieth edition of Four Stone Hearth is up at afarensis. That Australopithecus guy has done a wonderful job bringing together a host of things anthropological. It's amazing that someone over 2.9 million years old can still do such a great job. I wonder what the internet was like when he first started posting.

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Posted by Duane on Thursday, July 2, 2009 at 8:33 AM (UTC-08:00)
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July 1, 2009

Biblical Studies Carnival 43 Is Up

Biblical Studies Carnival 43 is up at kata ta biblia. Pat McCullough has done a great job bringing it all together this month. He has also had a little fun. Go unroll the recently discovered Apocalypse of Eve and you'll have fun too.

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Posted by Duane on Wednesday, July 1, 2009 at 3:27 PM (UTC-08:00)
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June 29, 2009

A Short Brutal Life

I normally don't post on medieval stuff. But this did catch my eye.

Bone regrowth around a dent in the front of the skull suggested the man had recovered from a severe blow, possibly from an axe.

The warrior had also lost a number of teeth - perhaps from a blow, or a fall from a horse.

The fatal wound, however, occurred when something, possibly a sword, sliced through his nose and jaw.

[snip]

A large, tanged arrowhead was found in skeleton and appears to have struck through the back or under the arm.

Crystalised matter attached to the arrowhead may have been from flies or other insect larvae and could have been from clothing the arrow forced into the wound.

Oh yeah. The guy, likely a knight, lived to the ripe old age of ~25. Checkout BBC News article and learn more.

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Posted by Duane on Monday, June 29, 2009 at 1:18 PM (UTC-08:00)
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June 28, 2009

A Slippery Soul

This post began life as a draft comment to a post by Chris Heard at Higgaion. But it outgrew what I think of as an optimum comment length. Chris' post is an opening salvo in review of S.T. Joshi's God’s Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong. Before you go further, you should run over to Higgaion and read Chris' remarks.

I do not intend to defend Joshi for two reasons. First, I haven't read him. Second, based on what Chris says, I doubt that I will. I'm likely far too stupid myself. But I do want to react to one point that Chris makes in his opening salvo. Referring to several dichotomies propounded by Joshi, he says,

In a certain way, Joshi’s sentences are correct—but for each of the sentences above, assessing the truth or falsity of the claim depends radically on the definitions of key terms. What I mean when I say “soul” may not be what Joshi means when he says “soul,” and neither may be what the apostle Paul meant by ψυχη or what any given psalmist meant by נפש.

How true!

In what follows, I will use "soul" as a placeholder for a rather large number of concepts including the concept of God or gods. Chris' remarks illustrate one of the several recurring issues one faces when dealing with many topics like "soul." Definitions do not stand still. When thinkers modify definitions, they generally do not crisply discard the older definitions. On the assumption that Chris means something different by "soul" than what Paul meant by ψυχη, does that mean that Chris rejects Paul's meaning? If so, exactly how. Here I'm not calling for a discussion of the meaning of "soul." I'll do that later. I'm trying to illustrate a problem. There is a kind of piling on that raises the bar for successful rejection of any idea in this neighborhood. It seems, for lack of a consistent definition, one must disqualify every individual idea in the neighborhood one at a time. A common complaint generally meets any attempt to show that the idea of "soul" is fatally flawed. "You didn't take Tillich into consideration. You didn't take Niebuhr into consideration or Barth or Augustine or Aquinas or Calvin or Zwingli or Luther or Rashi or Maimonides or Averroës or 1 Corinthians 15:45-46 . . . . . or Heard."

I also think those who would want to debunk "soul" generally fail to be clear about what it is that they are debunking. And yes, they often do a bad job in addressing the theologians they do discuss. In this regard, I am in complete agreement with Chris.

I have a modest suggestion that would greatly help in the furtherance of the discussion of "soul." I would like all those who think "soul" denotes or even connotes something to get together and agree on what it denotes or connotes. Since I foresee a rather large schism developing between those who see "soul" as some kind of an entity or set of entities and those who see "soul" as a metaphor for something or some things, I'd be happy with two reports. One would clearly indicate that "soul" is an entity and describe exactly what kind of entity it is including important descriptive details. The other report would indicate and discuss the target of the metaphorical source "soul" along an explanation of why, when and how the source is more useful than the target. If those who work on this second report want to use tenor and vehicle instead of target and source, it's okay with me. If these two reports reference each other, I do ask that they not indicate that I should see the other report in some circular fashion. If it turns out that there are those who think "soul" is neither an entity nor a metaphor, then I'd be happy with a third report as long as it is clear, consistent and complete. Heck, I'd be happy with ten reports as long as each was otherwise unanimously adopted in its own right and independent of the others and, of course, no one felts a need for additional reports. I guess there could still be outliers who reject all reports but they should be few number and considered outliers by all who signoff on the official reports. But dealing with independent, sometimes multiple, reports from everyone who has ever thought hard on the subject of "soul" is just too much work for us lazy, stupid, skeptics.

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Posted by Duane on Sunday, June 28, 2009 at 10:16 AM (UTC-08:00)
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June 27, 2009

4th Millennium Camel Cart From Turkmenistan

Back in the day, one could get up a lively debate on camel nomads vs. ass nomads in the Levant and various supposed implications for patriarchal history. Happily, I think this kind of discussion has mostly gone away in these more cynical critical days. In his history of Israel, Bright said this about the origins of camel domestication.

Although the camel was of course known from very early times, and isolated instances of its taming may, therefore, have occurred at any period (it is probable that nomads had kept herds of camels in half-wild state in order to secure their milk, hair and skins), it appears that the effective domestication of that animal as a beast of transport took place between the fifteenth and thirteenth centuries deep in Arabia.

I'm not sure how this view has held up over the years. But now we have an abnormally interesting find from Altyndepe in Western Central Asia near Ashgabat, Turkmenistan: a stylized clay model of a cart pulled by a camel. The dating seems a little imprecise. The DiscoverNews report describes Altyndepe as a Chalcolithic and Bronze Age settlement and dates the find between 4,000-3,000 BCE. And Lyubov Kircho, the researcher, refers to the 4th millennium. Other cart models from the same location have bulls as their means of locomotion. Take a look at the DiscoverNews article and accompanying picture. But if you really have an abnormal interest in this, you'd better start polishing up your Russian.

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Posted by Duane on Saturday, June 27, 2009 at 10:44 AM (UTC-08:00)
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June 26, 2009

My Impactful Five

John Hobbins thinks I should fess up to the books and scholars that have had the most impact on how I read the Bible.

For me this is a lot harder than some might think. One approach would be to list the relevant works of Noth, von Rad, Cassuto, Gottwald, Van Seters and the like and let it go at that. For reasons I will address below, this seems wrong-headed. Another approach, driven by the more narrow philological interests that I often display here on my blog, would be to list two dictionaries, two grammars and one of several influential linguistic works. As they sit on my bookshelf, these works are monuments to human learning, but when I take them down, they generally become monuments to my own ignorance. To be sure, ignorance has influenced my thinking and, therefore, should be given its due. But I'm not all that happy with highlighting the impact of ignorance on my reading. In addition, I often display a narrow philological interest here as a cover for a much broader thought process.

There is a still larger concern. The Bible is just one set of literary works that interests me. Any literature I read impacts my understanding of the other literature I read. In addition, my life's experiences influence how I read and understand literature (and everything else). So to fulfill my social obligation I will list below a snapshot of thinkers whose works have had a disproportional influence on my life and the way I approach all literature including the Bible.

I'll start with the first impactful book I ever read, Plato's Republic. I own several versions of the Republic. I acquired my old Jowett translation in 1953. I was eleven years old when I first tried to read it. I didn't fully understand it then and, even with numerous rereading over the years, I still don't. But I have learned two things that impact how I read all other literature and how I understand life itself. First, I learned that fiction could sometimes communicate extremely complex but imprecise ideas better than non-fiction. Second, I learned that for any well-formed question there is a fact of the matter. In other words, since reading Plato, I have always been a realist, certainly a physical realist but even a moral and aesthetic realist. I also learned that the fact matter that answers many well-formed questions might be extremely illusive. I must add that while I am a realist and have toyed from time to time with Platonism, I now think his metaphysics and epistemology are fatally flawed and even rather silly. I'm not so sure he believed all of it himself but that is another story. These days, I while am far from being a Platonist, neo or otherwise, I still often find myself asking, "What would Plato have thought of this?" You see, for me all thinking is a footnote to Plato.

Second, I would point to Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Most of Twain's fiction reinforces the notion that fiction is an important vehicle for communication. But more, in Huckleberry Finn I learned that conventional expectations often mask serious errors in thinking. Personal norms and conventional thinking are not the best standards for judging people or literature.

Third, I continue to reflect on what I learned from Taylor's Calculus with Analytic Geometry. From the mid forties to the early seventies this was the most commonly used calculus textbook. At least it was in United States. Taylor was neither my first exposure to mathematics nor my last; it is just the one I remember most fondly. How does this affect my reading of literature? It is a simple if often ignored fact that a math textbook is a very specific and easily identified literary genre with an unambiguous Sitz im Leben. I wish all literary genres were so easily identifiable. Mathematics demonstrates a pristine beauty that often stands in stark opposition to the equally wonderful messiness of the rest of the world. I gave up any quest for that pristine beauty in literature when I gave up Platonism but much of my thinking is still driven by a quest for informal but fairly rigorous models that may (or may not) inform my reading. Mathematics imposes an extreme standard for critical thinking on its practitioners that practitioners of other disciplines can never match. As an amateur working in the humanities, do I have math envy? I sure do.

Fourth, Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, which I read for the first time in high school, lunched my life long interest in natural explanations for just about everything including literature and particularly the Bible. Humanists often forget that we too are products of the natural world and therefore our works are also products of that world. As such, they are deserving of our best efforts at natural explanation.

Finally, Danto's Narration and Knowledge has left its mark. Because of its rigor, his analytical approach to the philosophy of history, has taught me much. I find his emphasis on the ability of historians to make true statements about things in their past and his thoughts on methodological socialism and the social individual particularly stimulating. Do I agree with everything Danto says? No, but he does not let his critics get off all that easily.

Having compiled this list, I must now tell two unvarnished truths. First, this is today's list of the impactful five. Tomorrow's list might be significantly different. Whitehead, Salmon (just now I'm thinking of Merrilee but Wesley could make such a list also), Kuhn, Aristotle, Dawkins, Dennett and Diamond along with many others might be on some other day's list. Second, no writer or scholar has affected my thinking more than have my friend and teacher Loren Fisher and my friend and wife Shirley. I also continue to learn from both my children in the professional capacity as philosophers to be sure and even more in the role as my now adult children. That doesn't mean that I agree with all that these friends and family members have tried to teach me and it certainly doesn't mean that they agree with all my thoughts on my many abnormal interests.

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Posted by Duane on Friday, June 26, 2009 at 1:46 PM (UTC-08:00)
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June 24, 2009

On Why It Is So Important

Jay at mu-pad₃-da provides a nice gentle rant on his issues with what he calls "maths." He also provides a link to Eleanor Robson's faculty page where one can find some abnormally interesting material on ancient Mesopotamian mathematics. While Jay may not think so, it is good that his research is forcing him to learn statistics and other math related stuff. In addition to the use of statistics in linguistics, an understanding of statistics is a now absolutely necessity for getting along in our world. If one doesn't know statistics, one is condemned to making many bad decisions in ignorance. With a good working knowledge of statistics, one will be empowered to make the same bad decisions with a mathematically rigorous understanding of reason for one's mistakes.

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Posted by Duane on Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 1:09 PM (UTC-08:00)
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June 23, 2009

Library Adventures

Today I made one of my occasional pilgrimages to UCLA. And quite an adventure it was. I was looking for three titles,

• Ebeling, Erich, Quellen zur Kenntnis der babylonischen Religion I, Leipzig: Hinrich 1918
• Maul, Stefan M., Zukunftsbewältigung: eine Untersuchung altorientalischen Denkens anhand der babylonisch-assyrischen Löserituale (Namburbi), Mainz am Rhein: von Zabern, 1994
• Köcher, Franz, Die babylonische-assyrische Medizin in Texten and Untersuchungen, Berlin: Gruyter, 1963-

All three of these titles contain collections of Akkadian texts with or without transliteration and/or translation and little else. And a different on campus library houses each title. The Young Research Library houses the Ebeling's work. When I say I'm going to the library at UCLA, this is the library I generally mean. I know where it is, I know the best place to park and I know my way around the library. So I had little trouble finding this volume and extracting what I needed from it.

But after that, the trouble began. The Arts Library houses Mual's work. I have no idea why. I knew that this library was in the same general neighborhood as the Research Library. I asked the student helper at the Research Library for directions. He was kind enough to provide them, "Turn left at the walk and when to get to the sculpture garden the Arts Library will be on the opposite side in front of you." In its own way, this was accurate enough, particularly if you knew the whereabouts of the Arts Library. The entrance (and exit) to the Research Library is about 200 feet from one corner of the sculpture garden and at the closest point to that entrance in the sculpture garden the paths to "the opposite side" head in three different directions across the garden. I took the diagonal. When I reached the other side, I asked for further directions. Someone told me that he thought it was in the new Board Arts Building. That made sense to me both because of name of the building and the fact that it too was across the sculpture garden from the Research Library but in a somewhat different direction. So I headed in that direction. With a sample of only four people, two things became apparent. First, everyone in the Board Arts Building knew it was not in that building. Second, they had no idea where it was. So I wondered back in the general direction from which I came and asked someone else for directions. That person, correctly it turns out, sent me to the Public Affairs building. That would be in the third possible way to cross the sculptural garden from the Research Library. I hadn't gone that way in the first place because I could see the name on that building from the sculpture garden and was completely certain that the Arts Library could not in the Public Affairs building. It shows you how wrong one can be. After this adventure, I found both the library and the book with little further ado. I must say that wondering around the sculpture garden for half an hour or so was a good experience but I would have enjoyed it more if I were looking for sculpture rather than books.

Well, it was now off to the BioMedical Library for Köcher's six-volume work. By this time, I had acquired a campus library map which, as you will see, failed me at the most crucial point. Notice that the title of Köcher's work has the word Medizin in it. These six volumes contain a sizable collection of transcriptions of cuneiform tablets. Let's be clear, these volumes contain transcriptions of the cuneiform not transliterations and certainly not translations. This library is associated with the medical school and biology research facility and is of the order of a mile from the other two libraries having collections of Akkadian texts in transcription or transliteration. At first, I was surprised that medical students would want to read Akkadian medical texts in their original language and script. But it turns out that two things were wrong in my surprise. First, this library has a rather massive collection of works related to the history of medicine. Second, no one on the street in this part of campus knew where the library was and several had never heard of it. I stood at a point on the street that turned out to be directly in front of the library stacks and not a single person I asked has the slightest idea where the library was. At least some of those I asked will makeup the next generation of doctors and medical researchers. One person in a lab coat suggested that perhaps someone, anyone, in an adjacent, connected, building might know about the BioMedical Library. So I walked about 50 yards further down the street to the entrance of this adjacent building and wondered around the halls looking for as much as one living soul. I eventually found someone else wondering around who had, to my great surprise, 1) heard of this library and 2), even more surprising, knew where it was. She was also able to give me very good, detailed, directions that turned out to be correct. The library didn't seem well used. Finding the correct volume was something else but with the help of a reference assistant, I finally completed my day's work and my day's adventure.

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Posted by Duane on Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 8:51 PM (UTC-08:00)
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June 22, 2009

The Idiot's Guide To KAL DILI

Our word "idiot" derives from the Greek ἰδιώτης, meaning something in the range of private citizen, individual or someone with no professional training.

With that in mind, let me tell how I spent part of my morning and most of my afternoon. I was trying to clear up an issue that I had set aside a few weeks ago. And if you are willing, I am now going to burden you with my idiot problem. How does one make sense of the two consecutive signs KAL DILI in a (mostly) Akkadian text? What is so frustrating about these two signs is that I have no doubt concerning their approximate semantic range. If one just reads them as if the were Sumerian, they mean something like dear or valuable individual. They're not exactly symposiums with ἰδιώτης but perhaps in an overlapping semantic range. But try as I might, I can't convince myself of their Akkadian equivalents. Knowing the Akkadian equivalents would help narrow the semantic range in their Akkadian context. The rational choices for KAL, as a Sumerogram, are not so great. The most likely option is aqru, meaning "rare," "precious," "dear," "singular" or the like. But there are quite a few options for DILI. The most reasonable ones are, amīlu "man," zikaru "male," gitmalu "ideal", ēdu "single", even, ištēn "one" and perhaps not as likely aḫu (brother). Lexical texts are the only support for many of these choices. While I have my preferences from among this list, I can nonetheless tell myself a supportive story for every option. By the way, it's even possible that KAL DILI was pronounced kal dili as a loan phrase or word in Akkadian. The context, in partial translation, is "To (the) KAL DILI, you provide a companion." Translators tend to render the expression "lonely man." The "you" refers to the god Shamash. Oh yeah, one tablet with this text has only KAL and if the others didn't have KAL DILI, I'd have settled on aqru by noon and been on to something else that I still haven't resolved.

What really bothers me about this is that I will likely feel like an idiot when finally I figure it out or when one of you points me in the right direction.

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Posted by Duane on Monday, June 22, 2009 at 8:13 PM (UTC-08:00)
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