I ran across the term Чермное море in my Russian reading; for a moment I was confused by its resemblance to Черное море ‘Black Sea,’ but it turns out чермный is an old (Church Slavic) word for ‘(dark) red’ which Vasmer derives from an IE word for ‘worm’ (cf. Lith. kirmìs, Skt. kŕ̥miṣ, Alb. krimb, OIr. cruim, Welsh рrуf). So far so good, but is this red sea the Red Sea? Who knows? The Russian Wikipedia article links to English Yam Suph, a term I was unfamiliar with (though I’d doubtless seen it before):
In the Exodus narrative, the Yam Suph (Hebrew: יַם-סוּף, romanized: Yam-Sup̄, lit. ’Reed Sea’), sometimes translated as Red Sea, is the body of water where the Crossing of the Red Sea happened in the story of the Exodus. This phrase appears in over twenty other places in the Hebrew Bible. This has traditionally been interpreted as referring to the Red Sea, following the Septuagint’s rendering of the phrase. However, an appropriate translation remains a matter of dispute, as is the exact location.
I’ll be interested to see what the Hattery has to say about all this.
I don’t have much to say, will just point out the Gorazd entry for the CS word.
It seems to be transparently “reed sea” in the Hebrew; the various alternative readings of סוּף seem pretty far-fetched to me. The question is not so much what it (literally) means, but where it was, and whether it’s actually the Red Sea – or not.
will just point out the Gorazd entry for the CS word.
Thanks!
The question is not so much what it (literally) means, but where it was, and whether it’s actually the Red Sea – or not.
And? I expect you to have an opinion on these things, or at least an Oti-Volta take!
The historical inundation that inspired the story would have been on the Mediterranean side. It could have been, perhaps, a stretch of marshland in the Nile delta.
I expect you to have an opinion on these things, or at least an Oti-Volta take!
Sadly, the Kusaal Bible opts for simply translating the translations: Atɛuk Zɛn’ug “Red Sea.” The Kusaasi are not very clued up on seas (atɛuk is a loanword.)
But the Mooré Bible has rudum ko-kãsengã, “the great water of rudumdi“, where rudumdi, the dictionary tells me, is Vetiveria nigritana
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysopogon_nigritanus
Not sure where they got that; the Mooré Bible strikes me as usually following French versions more literally than the Kusaal version follows English, but it’s “la mer Rouge” in Louis Second’s version. The parallel French text in the Mooré Bible Android app has “la mer Rouge” too. Good for the Mooré translators, though!
[I see that it’s a revision: my dead-tree 1983 Mooré Bible has (in modern orthography) mogr Miuugã “the Red Lake.”]
Here is my previous comment on what I think is by far the best theory explaining the signs and wonders of Exodus. The story is discussed a bunch here as well and this has another previous mention of “Yam Suph.”
There is no record in any Egyptian histories of a substantial part of its army being swallowed by a body of water pursuing some fleeing slaves. Given their meticulous record-keeping you’d expect there would be. There’s no record of any large number of slaves all fleeing at the same time. The whole biblical story is made up out of whole cloth IMO — and in the opinion of (say) Bart Ehrman.
About the only thing that’s clear is that ‘Red Sea’ is a terrible translation. (And I’ve a feeling there was a previous Hattery thread that touched on ‘Reed Sea’. Edit: ninja’d by Brett.)
Whereas the diaspora to and return from Babylon has archaeological support, the whole Israel-in-Egypt gig seems, as @V says, to be some sort of allegory. It’s not even clear Moses was a historical figure. This could all be just some ruse for the priests to assert the authority of the Commandments. I guess Cecil B DeMille could be blamed.
I must take to calling Afroasiatic “the Suphic languages.” Much better.
Lots of interesting stuff in Wikipedia, including Egyptian mentions of p3 ṯwfj.
Given their meticulous record-keeping you’d expect there would be.
It’s a good thing we can rely on the Son of the Sun, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Lord of the Two Lands (may he be given life and health) to speak publicly and frankly about his occasional losses (that is, if such things ever happened), and to make sure they are durably recorded for posterity.
this red sea
Wine dark?
Well, there’s a White Sea … no Rosé Sea, though.
(At one point there was much talk in the UK of the EU having a Wine Lake. Whether this appealing geographical feature still exists, I do not know.)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=JqowmHgxVJQ
I see from WP that the familiar version is just a tad sanitised: original last verse:
The punk rolled up his big blue eyes
And said to the jocker, “Sandy,
I’ve hiked and hiked and wandered too,
But I ain’t seen any candy.
I’ve hiked and hiked till my feet are sore
And I’ll be damned if I hike any more
To be buggered sore like a hobo’s whore
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Rock_Candy_Mountains
WP says:
Yam-Sup̄
Nitpicking: s/b Yam-Sūp̄; סוּף not סֻף.
יַם yam ‘sea.of’ is the construct case of יָם yām, ‘sea’. sūp̄ is a mass noun.
Note that in Exodus 10:19 God summmons a רוּחַ יָם rûaḥ yām, lit. ‘sea wind’, to drive the locusts it had been punishing Egypt with into yam sūp̄. If we literally interpret it as northern wind, coming from the sea in Egypt, then yam sūp̄ would reasonably fit in the Nile delta. However, yām is used elsewhere in the OT to mean ‘west’, a metaphor which comes from a vantage point in Palestine. If the passage was written in Palestine, the local metaphor would imply a western wind which would plausibly drive the locusts into the Red Sea, at least the more southern ones. The ones in the delta, where I believe most agriculture was, would not suffer that indignity. On balance, literal yām and hence a delta location of yam sūp̄ seems more straightforward to me.
That said, I don’t know Ancient Egyptian geography, and no doubt this verse has been closely inspected by people who do.
I happen to have read of an inscription in which one pharaoh recycled one of his father’s victories as two of his own. Apparently that kind of thing was standard practice.
Or consider this battle, recorded in quite some detail as a glorious overwhelming victory; in this case there’s external evidence, and the battle is considered more of a stalemate with high casualties.
Yes, I was going to adduce Kadesh as a prime example of the radiant veracity of the Son of the Sun, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Lord of the Two Lands (may he be given life and health).
The ancient Egyptians did not write history, which hadn’t been invented yet. We write it for them on the basis of administrative documents compiled for quite other purposes, highly tendentious (auto)biographies, royal boastings and similar stuff. And there are enough periods of chaos and disruption in Egyptian records to make the absence of an Egyptian account of anything like the Exodus one of the less convincing arguments against the historical reality of the Biblical account.
Things like the absence of archaeological evidence are more to the point. Even authors not hostile on principle to the Biblical story as such have pointed to difficulties with the sheer numbers claimed to have been involved in the population movement, for example. (I just happened to have been reading ibn Khaldun – no infidel he – making this very point. Though, of course, he was fine with the idea that the Hebrew scriptures might contain a lot of distortions and even fabrications.)
I just noticed that in my comment above I referred to the biblical God as “it”, which I find funny. Usually I follow standard conventions in these matters. Not that I think that should cause any consternation to any immortal or any mortal, religious or not.
Kusaal Wina’am “God” (in Christian and Muslim usage, and sometimes elsewhere) belongs to the same “abstracts/substances/liquids” noun-class/”gender” as “water”, “gold” or “freedom.” Even the normal “pagan” word for the Creator, Win, belongs to the default non-human-but-countable “gender.” (Which does contain some human-reference nouns, though most of them seem to have been transferred from the “human gender” for secondary phonological reasons. Doesn’t apply to Win.)
Swahili Mungu “God” belongs (morphologically) to the “tree” gender, not the “human” gender. (Cognate with the Oti-Volta “long thin things” gender. Go figure. Though, as both Bantu and Oti-Volta put “road, path” in this “gender”, I suppose you could adduce the dominical “I am the Way” in support.)
people who know more about hebrew palaeography than i do (a low bar): what if anything does the final-form pe (if we trust the masoretes) tell us? i’m not used to that character being anything but a langer fey, so it strikes my eye as either incongruous or exotic.
—
i’m inclined to agree with AntC that there’s no reason to search for putative historical anchors for any part of the Exodus story. better biblical scholars than me (or even i) have made the case that trying to read the Tanakh as history is to misread the text in fundamental ways.
but i’m also not entirely convinced that “yam sūp̄” needs to be taken as referring to something other than the body of saltwater east of the nile valley (as apparently RaShI interprets it). the question seems to me to often have the flavor of people expecting to find familiar place-names in texts that were written in a different language and much earlier period.
but to be less meta about it all: it seems like a lot rests on the vocalization! if we set aside the traditional identification with what we call the red sea (south for turks, west for slavs), and accept the (i assume) masoretes’ reading, a sea of reeds could be the nile, or some papyrus-heavy part of the delta, as easily as anything more brackish. but if we don’t take their word for it, the “yam sof” / final sea seems a perfectly reasonable way to talk about the red sea, at the extreme edge of either north africa or bilad ash-sham, depending on which way you’re headed.
though it might be an even better fit for the atlantic. which does tend to support joseph smith’s understanding of who the israelites were (though not moroni’s narrative of their arrival on these green and pleasant shores). or, if we weave in some platonic or theosophical mythmaking, for the peopling of atlantis. i’m just not sure in either scenario how to get them back via desert.
we could also take both at once, and end up with a crossing to elephantine – at the end of the kingdom and in the reedy nile – resonating with its historical role as a place of refuge for judeans.
The thing with sōp̄ is that it only appears in later books: Joel, Ecclesiastes, 2 Chronicles, and is plausibly a later Aramaic loanword. Earlier books use קֵץ qēṣ for spatial end or extremity.
Joel 2:20 is interesting. It’s a clear parallel to Exodus 10:19. Here God promises to cast away the invading locusts (‘the northerners’, imagined as an invading army): in the main to the southern deserts, the head of the swarm (פָּנָיו pānāyw ‘its face’) to the eastern sea (הַיָּם הַקַּדְמֹנִי hayyām haqqadmonî ‘the forward sea’, presumably the Dead Sea), and the rear of the swarm — its סוֹף sōp̄ — to the western sea (הַיָּם הָאַחֲרוֹן hayyām hāʾaḥărôn ‘the rear sea’, presumably the Mediterranean).
I would not be surprised if Joel utilizes sōp̄ to echo the sūp̄ of Exodus, but they are in different contexts.
there’s no reason to search for putative historical anchors for any part of the Exodus story.
Quite so. And I’d be happy to read the O.T. as mythology and allegory — if it weren’t for all the Christians standing on street corners telling me I must base my morality in the so-called literal text [**]/by implication Atheists are ipso facto immoral.
the radiant veracity of the Son of the Sun,
I’m not looking for veracity; merely any mention of such a momentous event, coloured by whatever propaganda they were casting it in. Never mind the ‘spin’, the bean-counters would fret about replacing so many chariots, weighty armour and weaponry — it all has to be audited, you know.
Things like the absence of archaeological evidence are more to the point.
Sure: no material remains to corroborate the Plagues story.
I take Commandment 9 (or is it 8?)’s “not bear false witness against thy neighbour” [KJV] as raising no scruple in telling whoppers against thine enemies, the Egyptians.
[**] As if their favourite/cherry-picked translation is in any sense ‘literal’. Since we’re in Exodus, I had a barney with a bunch of anti-abortion demonstrators, who a) claimed abortion is condemned in the Bible (but were unable to find any such verse); b) refused to open their Bibles to Exodus 21:22.
@AntC,
And I’d be happy to read the O.T. as mythology and allegory — if it weren’t for all the Christians standing on street corners telling me I must base my morality in the so-called literal text…
I am really curious: how are all these Christians standing on street corners preventing you from applying traditional exegetical methods? Are they forcing to you engage in their heresy/error?
Ah, look! There’s another one of them trolling.
[For @DM’s records, there was a lengthy riposte I just wrote then deleted.]
I should hasten to add I’m well aware most Christians don’t stand around on street corners proselytising; and indeed JWs despite standing on street corners would rather the ground opened up and swallowed them than actually engage in exegesis.
JW’s are not orthodox Christians at all. Essentially, they are Arians, and have a rather large number of other unmainlinish beliefs, one of which is that all orthodox Christianity is Satanic.
It is, however, worthy of consideration that it was JWs, not Christians, who ended up having their very own group category in the Nazi camps.
Nor are JWs involved in the MAGA paraChristian hate cult, as far as I know.
JWs are actually pretty keen on Bible exegesis, though not in a mode that would appeal much to your average theology professor in the street.
@AntC: anti-abortion demonstrators, who … refused to open their Bibles to Exodus 21:22.
Why Exodus ?
Yes, that verse doesn’t strike me as having much bearing on the issue at all.
But it’s true enough that concocting anti-abortionist arguments from the Bible is difficult, not to say, impossible. The book has nothing to say about it at all, and those who pretend otherwise have to overinterpret verses like Psalm 139:13 to imply things that plainly can never have crossed the Psalmist’s mind (in this case, that a fertilised ovum is already a human being.)
Historically, Protestant anti-abortionism is a fairly recent phenomenon. It was deliberately leveraged and encouraged by those Reagan-era Republicans who realised that they could corrupt American Evangelicalism (historically fairly apolitical) into a far-right movement useful for their purposes, and set about doing so, with the lamentable results so evident today.
The Hippocratic Oath, which everyone seems to imagine that all doctors take at some point, actually does forbid inducing abortions, or did in its original form. As it involves swearing by Apollo, it may not be a great source for Christian anti-abortionists, though. And the oath is really primarily about not blabbing trade secrets to muggles. (I think we can all get behind that.)
I’m not sure it’s fair to blame the LXX for an alleged mistranslation, since the Vulgate has “Mare Rubrum” and Jerome’s whole goal was to get behind the LXX to the authentic meaning of the Hebrew. Do we really think that those translators thought “suph” meant the color red, or simply thought the compound as a hydronym referred to the body of water known in other languages as the “Red Sea” and didn’t want to confuse their readers with an overliteral calque of the Hebrew name of that body of water? And if they thought that, that’s presumably because it was the standard interpretation (if that’s the right word for matching up potentially-mysterious place names in an old narrative with current spots on the current map) of the time.
The same Hebrew lexeme pops up in the second chapter of Exodus, where the baby Moses is being put in a basket (or “ark”) and left in the reeds (or “flags” or “sedges”) by the bank of the Nile. The Vulgate (as well as subsequent translators from Hebrew to English) figured that one out just fine, although the LXX has that as the ἕλος, meaning “marsh” or “marshy-patch-of-ground, which Brenton Englishes as “the ooze.”
“The Red Ooze” sounds like a 1950s SF B-movie.
FWIW, wikipedia asserts that the “Greeks themselves derived the name from an eponymous King Erythras [i.e. “Red”] and knew that the waters so described were deep blue.”
Exodus 21:22 and ff goes against the claim a fetus is deemed a life (and contrast the penalty if the mother is killed). Plenty of explanations at Google. I suggest the Data over Dogma podcast.
(It’s the pro-choicers’ standard counter to anti-abortionists claiming Biblical authority. I’m surprised yous don’t already know it.)
Perhaps not so much a B-movie, but “Yam Suph” sounds like the name of a villain in a pre-WW2 pulp adventure story of the Robert E. Howard / Edgar Rice Burroughs sort.
Combine the two: the dreaded (and physically loathsome) villain Yam Suph, feared throughout Barsoom/Cimmeria as “the Red Ooze.”
Hmm: that’s such an impressive combination that it may induce phantom childhood memories of having read it in a cheap paperback circa 1975.
This reminds me by free-association of a biblical-translation quirk I recently noticed and maybe it goes here better than in the Dostoevsky-translation thread. In Matthew 7:18, Jesus says (in some translations) “A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit,” which seems very straightforward. But instead of two repeated adjectives, the Greek has four separate ones. A ἀγαθὸν tree can’t bear πονηροὺς fruit; a σαπρὸν tree can’t bear καλοὺς fruit.* A handful of recent translations try to use four different English adjectives to match that structure, e.g. “A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit.” But oddly enough the KJV took a mixed approach, with two negative adjectives but only one positive one: “A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.” And some modern translations do the same unbalanced thing, with e.g. good/evil/rotten/good, or good/bad/poisonous/good. But what motivated that? How hard is it to think of two positive adjectives that would fit? To be fair, the simpler approach of treating the set of four lexemes in Greek as mere “elegant variation” and stripping it down to two adjectives each used twice goes back to the Vulgate, which goes (appropriately inflected) bona/malos/mala/bonos.
I have every expectation that this is handled better in Kusaal.
*The fruit-adjectives are plural because “fruit” isn’t a mass noun the way it is in English but a plural count noun.
I have every expectation that this is handled better in Kusaal.
Sadly, no. It just goes with good/bad, bad/good.
Tisʋŋ kʋ tun'e wal walbɛ’ɛdɛ. Ka tibɛ’ɛd mɛ kʋ tun’e wal walsʋmaa.
The Mooré version is more enterprising:
Tɩ-sõng ka tõe n wom bi-yood ye, la tɩ-wẽng me ka tõe n wom bi-sõama ye.
The dictionary doesn’t give any great help about how wẽnga “bad” differs from yoogo “bad”, though. Both seem to mean “morally bad” when applied to people.
The Bimoba version has two different “bad” adjectives too:
Tiŋaŋ kan lon lɔɔnbiiti; tikpeeuŋ mun kan lon lɔɔnŋana.
Under wẽnga, Niggli’s dictionary cites an interesting Mooré proverb, which seems to pun on wẽ́ndè “era, epoch” and wẽ́nde “bad”:
Biig pa yã a ma wẽndẽ n yet t’a ba kẽ ne pʋg-wẽnga.
“L’enfant n’a pas été témoin de la jeunesse de sa mère, soutient que son père a marié une méchante femme.”
This seems to be akin to the somewhat more physical Kusaal proverb:
Biig pʋ nyɛɛ o ma saa nɛ ka ye o ba’ sa’am niigi.
“The child did not see his mother as a young girl, and says his father wasted his cows [i.e. bride-price.]”
Ah, look! There’s another one of them trolling.
Will you stop doing that? Nobody’s trolling you; I had exactly the same question, and I’m as atheist as thou (though not as belligerent about it). How do street-corner yammerers keep you from doing anything?
street-corner yammerers
And what would the Manic Street Preachers have done for a name without them?
I actually used to know one (a manic street preacher) in St Andrews; she was quite a sweet lady when not, as it were, on duty. She was Plymouth Brethren (a group I have family connections to), from Norway, where the Brethren are (or perhaps were) quite a big thing. Their history is like the Scots Brethren, and rather different from the Darbyites who are occasionally exhibited for our entertainment by the media as exemplary religious nutters.
She used to picket wicked events like university discos and such, and was (I think) regarded with some affection by the students in general, which would perhaps not altogether have pleased her.
She was, unfortunately, also quite militantly anti-Catholic, and tended to picket Catholic events too, until the Catholic chaplain (a learned and humorous man) sprinkled her with holy water, which actually seems to have worked.
Not unnaturally, given her Weltanschauung, she also regarded the university Theology faculty as a source of sin and error, and on one famous occasion asked the professor as he was on his way in “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”, to which he instantly replied “Well, I’m damned if I’m not!”
in that theological realm, i much prefer the RaMBaM’s approach, which identifies the fetus as a רודף | rodef [pursuing enemy*], who may ethically be killed to protect the person being pursued. i think uncle moysh construes that narrowly, applying only to situations where the potential parent’s life is endangered, but the framework can be easily extended into a more ethically coherent “on demand and without apology” position by taking the term to apply to harms to the pregnant person’s wellbeing more generally (or simply by acknowledging that pregnancy is one of the more life-threatening activities people regularly engage in, and can prove so in any particular case on very short notice).
—
“Well, I’m damned if I’m not!”
brilliant!
.
* in yiddish, with the predictable [o]->[oj] vowel shift, also meaning “oppressor/persecutor” more generally.
Did he know the anecdote about Jeanne d’Arc: when the citizens of Troyes sent a Franciscan friar to meet her and he sprinkled her with holy water and continuously made the sign of the cross, she told him: “Approchez hardiment, je ne m’envolerai pas.”
Exodus 21:22: I’m not a Bible scholar, but this made me curious. On a first reading, this would not seem to be applicable to a still birth caused by a third party, since that would probably fall under the heading of “harm”. And that’s basically what an abortion is. So why are the anti-abortion people afraid to discuss it?
(I don’t have a pony in this race. I find the text of a 4000 year old collection of fables utterly irrelevant to the question of what rules should govern abortion in a modern society. There are hard questions of ethics and morals, but the Old Testament can be no help in answering them. If there was something in the Gospels, now; I’ll take Jesus as a teacher, but ask me if I care about the literal meaning of Exodus except as a linguistic puzzle).
@ulr:
I know not. But he struck me as hardi enough to be going on with. (The lady was evidently quite harmless, though irritating if you weren’t in the mood.)
@Lars:
Even within a universe of discourse that regards the Bible text as a good basis for deciding ethical questions, I’d have thought myself that, rather than scrabbling around for dubiously-relevant texts purporting to support a view favourable to inducing abortion, it would be more useful to point out that the Bible text never actually addresses the question at all, and that claims to the contrary are transparent special pleading (I have in fact seen Psalm 139:13 hijacked in this way.)
You can elaborate anti-abortion arguments in the Catholic manner, based on church tradition, reason and other sources of doctrine: but to try to do it on the basis of sola scriptura, as most of these people imagine themselves to be doing, is a non-starter. But such people tend not to actually read their Bibles much, I think.
Where could these people have possibly gotten the notion that the Bible, if only read correctly, in fact provides reliable answers to all questions worth asking?
I suppose the Rev’d John Knox was pointing out that other modes of argumentation nicely complemented sola scriptura when he famously declaimed “To promote a woman to beare rule, superioritie, dominion or empire aboue any realme, nation, or citie, is repugnant to nature, contumelie to God, a thing most contrarious to his reueled will and approued ordinance, and finallie it is the subuersion of good order, of all equitie and iustice.” (This licensed him to quote Aristotle and other pagan writers only a few paragraphs later.)
if only read correctly
Aye, there’s the rub.
You can’t bring a completely empty head to the reading of the Bible (though some of my American coreligionists seem to have made a very good try.)
Sola scriptura is more of a slogan than a practical program, I think; in practice, it meant that it was permissible to go against church tradition if you could find plausible reasons for doing so in the Bible. It’s very much a child of the Renaissance mindset: we rediscover the pristine Wisdom of the Ancients, obscured for centuries by those intervening Dark Ages. There are similar naiveties and ahistorical assumptions involved, sometimes. And I don’t think the great Reformers quite saw the potential for abuse of the idea.
The problem with the mindset is that if it superficially seems that the Bible simply doesn’t speak to an important-seeming issue the natural conclusion is that one must simply try harder in order to decipher the true answer that is promised to be lurking in there somewhere.
Fortunately, a proper exegesis of Revelation is still useful to understand exactly what sort of mischief the EU is trying to perpetrate. https://www.thetrumpet.com/34389-the-first-of-the-10-kings-unite-against-america
Yay! Armstrongites!
(But boooooring …; surely we have known for decades that the EU is the Beast from the Sea …)
Those who (like me) are Amillennialist (the only correct position) actually do think that Revelation has some current relevance. Nice (if somewhat on-the-nose) allegorical descriptions of MAGA and Trump …)
[“Europe becoming a 10-nation superpower”, says the link below. From your mouth to God’s ears …]
Christian proselytizers are not the only ones guilty of scriptural ignorance. I recently saw a picture of some religious (maybe not haredi) Israeli Jew holding a sign with a nonexistent verse of the Torah, which conditions God’s favors upon the Israelites on their studying the Torah.
Haredis have the reputation (at least in the heathen commie sources I’m exposed to) of being as learned in the Talmud as they are ignorant of the Old Testament.
The current problem is that without an authoritative Church to authoritatively teach exactly what the doctrine of sola scriptura does and doesn’t mean, individual Protestants will try to figure out for themselves what sola scriptura means and predictably Get It Wrong. Or at least I think that’s the position espoused by the reactionary Calvinist fellow who wrote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shape_of_Sola_Scriptura.
Doesn’t look like my ideal beach read …
I think it is true that a distinct theological weakness of many Protestant movements is downgrading or outright ignoring the concept of saved communities. It’s the “my personal Saviour” (perhaps better, “my personal Savior”) thing.
It is doubly unfortunate that this unbiblical worship of individualism chimes so readily with the secular outlook of … some countries one can think of.
I have a vaguely Anglican perspective that the Truth is out there vaguely somewhere in the vague middle, myself. (I am not now, and have never been, an Anglican, but I admire the Anglican insistence on having it both ways on all contentious issues. It can work, given enough good will … and the odd civil war now and again …)
“The Biblical view that’s younger than the Happy Meal” (actual headline)
I’ll just let that stand uncommented in all its glory. It is beyond words. 😀
That makes sense immediately.
Lies, all lies, most damnable. While Emmanuel “Jupiter” Macron is most definitely the King of France until the next scheduled Revolution, Donald Tusk is not the King of Poland. Jesus is. It appears that the Armstrongites don’t know Polish law!
10, 27, whatever.
the Renaissance mindset
I don’t disagree, but such purism has occurred elsewhere under different circumstances: the Karaites rejected all post-biblical Jewish teachings, in Babylonia, maybe as early as a full millennium before the European Renaissance.
I had exactly the same question, and I’m as atheist as thou (though not as belligerent about it). How do street-corner yammerers keep you from doing anything?
Part of why I deleted my initial response was the thought it was a long way off-topic, off-Language, too overly Political and would incur the displeasure of the Host.
The liberal-democrat-agnostic-secular-eceumenical majority in the US has ducked and weaved away from the Religious Right yammerers at least since Reagan. How is that going for you? Now (for example) abortion is illegal in a large number of States — keeping women in desperate plights from being able to make decisions about their own bodies. Redistricting is in effect keeping many from having a democratic voice.
The yammerers have suborned the First Amendment to shout over any opposition, on specious grounds any attempt to bring evidence and reason into politics is infringing on their freedom of speech. (They’re consequently so ignorant as to the lessons of history as to sign a 14-point Treaty **at Versailles**. Even the tech-bro fascists’ AI could not make this up.)
In NZ the Religious Right are on the same long march to turn back Māori hard-won rights/assert ‘English’ culture/turn back immigration from Asia.
True that I don’t have an unwanted pregnancy, am not a black voter, am not Māori, am an immigrant but not from Asia … I’m not yet being kept “from doing anything”, am free to research biblical scholars who’ll inform me the exegetical reasons why Biblical Literalism is bunkum.
So I should just let the yammerers continue yammering until they’ve drowned out reason and humanitarian values? Pastor Niemöller’s words seem appropriate.
@Y:
There have been Muslim sola scriptura groups too
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quranism
some of which apparently antedate the Renaissance in Europe, e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kharijites
though the information on premodern Qur’anists seems to be very incomplete, and (like information on Christian heresies) to tend to come from victorious opponents.
As an outsider, it strikes me as a difficult postition to hold: the Qur’an is pretty short compared to other Abrahamic scriptures, and some pretty basic Muslim practices aren’t in it.
The founder of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nichiren_Buddhism
also seems to have regarded his mission as leading a return to the pristine wisdom of the Lotus Sutra, over against the debased modern Buddhism of his day. Mind you, Nichiren rather comes over as one of those people who could start an argument in an empty room all by himself.
You can elaborate anti-abortion arguments in the Catholic manner, based on church tradition, reason and other sources of doctrine: but to try to do it on the basis of sola scriptura, as most of these people imagine themselves to be doing, is a non-starter. But such people tend not to actually read their Bibles much, I think.
“These people” are more hotly opposed to the Church of Rome and all its pomps than to Atheists. (Per your St Andrews example.) I think what they read is some ‘translation’ of the Bible that leaves out all the inconvenient bits.
Exodus 21:22: … On a first reading, this would not seem to be applicable to a still birth caused by a third party, …
The two violent gents are the third party in this case. What’s applicable is that the still birth is treated as a chattel, _not_ a life, whose loss is to be compensated by payment to the _husband_ as owner of the wife and anything to do with her.
(I fully take your point about the irrelevance of 4000 year old collections of fables. That argument gets nowhere with street corner yammerers. OTOH to merely not engage with them does nothing to counter their claims to speak for some sort of ‘silent majority’. NZ Parliament debated (and mildly revised) our Abortion Legislation only a few years ago. There were some conscientious objectors, but a large majority of MPs supported the law as is. Our Supreme Court does not consider it a matter on which it should just make stuff up.
Citing the Bible against the yammerers might at least get them to stop and think. )
@Y: the Karaites rejected all post-biblical Jewish teachings, in Babylonia, maybe as early as a full millennium before the European Renaissance.
According to this page, the Karaites have their own post-Biblical teachings. For instance, they don’t lay tefillin; they interpret that passage allegorically (ten fingers, Decalogue).
On another subject,
I recently saw a picture of some religious (maybe not haredi) Israeli Jew holding a sign with a nonexistent verse of the Torah, which conditions God’s favors upon the Israelites on their studying the Torah.
How could you tell it was a nonexistent Torah verse as opposed to something in Biblical style? Did it say “The Torah says” or some such?
I think what they read is some ‘translation’ of the Bible that leaves out all the inconvenient bits.
Eh, we all have those. There are a lot of inconvenient bits.
The late (for quite some time now) F F Bruce, an old acquaintance of my wife’s family,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._F._Bruce
brought out a book called The Hard Sayings of Jesus. My impression was that said sayings divide fairly evenly into “hard” in the sense “what does that even mean?” and “hard” in the sense “I really don’t want to do that.” (The temptation is to pretend that the latter type fall into the former category.)
The linguistic angle to the “hard sayings” of Jesus is the now-archaic-looking “n” in “This is aN hard saying; who can hear it?” Thus John 6:60, immediately following various statements of Jesus that quite a lot of Protestants (not all, by any means) have spent the last five centuries squirming to evade.
I see that F. F. Bruce died as recently as 1990, although DE is asserting that was “quite some time” ago.
@JF: I can’t find that photo (it was pretty recent). I think it was accompanied by a real fragment of a verse, and it was with niqqud, which is rare in general use. I think he misremembered that verse, conveniently in a way that would bolster his argument, without pausing to realize it was absurd, or maybe not caring.
Citing the Bible against the yammerers might at least get them to stop and think
not in my experience. but then, i do share a neighborhood with an impressive number of people who believe themselves to be normatively pious jews while believing in a presently living (if occulted) messiah.
i think that with these segments of the far right – as with the rest of it – the task is to never engage on their terms or accept their framings, very much including on the question of valid sources of factual, evidentiary, or ethical* authority.
the collapse of the thin liberalism that has passed itself off as a left in the electoral sphere in the u.s., and in much of europe (most timely-ly the u.k.), has followed closely on the heels of their fervent embrace of the terms of debate and framings of the far right. that’s true in damn near every sphere of politics, touching everything from “crime” to “economic growth” to specific understandings of “efficiency” and the line defining “externalities” to the place of religion in policy-making. by contrast, the remarkable mass movements of the past 15 years in the u.s. have been so large, so broad, and so effective while in motion**, precisely because they’ve been based on rejecting those basic premises. they haven’t recruited a ton of street preachers, true, but that’s the highest-hanging fruit to ever have hung high.
.
* the “moral” of course being their framing, or, better, their term designed to replace the notion of the ethical, and take precedence over much that should be decided on the basis of evidence.
** i’m speaking about the tactical level: the destruction of the 3rd Precinct in minneapolis; the establishment of bail funds and courthouse door welcoming committees; the many dozens of land occupations of various kinds that could not be countered except with physical force that the participants chose not to meet in kind, etc. at the strategic level, the electoralists and NGOs have so far been able to derail and dissipate the momentum that builds up autonomously, with no victories in any sphere to show for it.
Yes and no… the redistricting, in Texas especially, was done under the assumption that everyone would vote for the same people as in 2024. If that fails, the “gerrymander” turns into a “dummymander”, and numerous districts could flip. A few lines of evidence are suggesting that’s going to happen.
the task is to never engage on their terms or accept their framings,
Which is exactly what they’re doing. (My preferred framing would be that a foetus at 12 weeks is not viable/not yet life. Not yet capable of “the breath of life” Genesis 2 — as we discussed elsewhere.)
So they stay in their silo on Twitter/wherever, and get no engagement when they demonstrate on street corners. I stay in my silo at the Hattery. Having no contact, they can be persuaded their opponents are Radical left Lunatics who go round vandalising national monuments; and murdering babies [**].
The only ‘connection’ is via the ballot box, where they can dismiss the voters against them as being duped by the ‘lying, failing media’ — which would be my framing of Fox so-called News and Breitbart.
Then consensus politics has broken down; democracy is dismissed as not working; they’ll be happy for Trump to suspend the 2028 election (if not the mid-terms).
NZ is suffering the same non-consensus framing of Hindu, Sikh and Muslim people, [self-styled ‘Bishop’ Brian Tamaki] and of LGBTQ and women [‘Pastor’ Logan Robertson]. Too marginal? Comments from an MP in Government (minor party member of the coalition); the same party that wants to legislate to strengthen English as an official language. A different minor party in the coalition tried to remove minority rights for Māori. (The same in Britain, I think: by Tommy Robinson and then Restore making racist comments, Farage can take them as legitimised and obliquely echo them.)
Then I want to show that their opposition does exist, does have a face; is aware of the Bible; doesn’t have horns and cloven hooves.
Our legislators completely flubbed bringing in Hate Speech laws (as now enacted in most of Europe), even after a gunman who’d been radicalised online went on a rampage and killed 50+ Muslims at prayer on a Friday afternoon.
[**] Actually a specialism of _their_ God: ordering the sacrifice of Isaac; killing the first-born of Egypt.
the collapse of the thin liberalism that has passed itself off as a left in the electoral sphere in the u.s., and in much of europe (most timely-ly the u.k.), has followed closely on the heels of their fervent embrace of the terms of debate and framings of the far right.
Too bloody right. I think it’s actually worse in the case of the UK Labour party, where the leadership has been taken over by the Blue Labour faction, which actually shares the fash outlook on such things. They’d rather see the far right in power than the genuine left (and are the same people who actively undermined the party from within during the brief period in opposition when it espoused recognisably progressive objectives.)
I see that F. F. Bruce died as recently as 1990, although DE is asserting that was “quite some time” ago
Recency in such things is subjectively different when it involves people you actually know personally (I didn’t, but my wife did.)
Last week, last ice age…
I certainly think of 1990 as quite some time ago.
If ones interest in religion is largely confined to how it either enhances or impedes ones own political agenda, one should want all the Bible-curious people whose politics one doesn’t approve of to become Jehovah’s Witnesses so that they may follow the strict JW discipline of declining to vote.
The liberal-democrat-agnostic-secular-eceumenical majority in the US
??????????????????
I was just recently revising my treatment of the Kusaal tense markers da “far past” and daa “not so far past.”
Daa refers to “before yesterday” (“yesterday” has its own marker) and, broadly speaking, anything up to about a year ago; but the dividing line from da is very slippery.
I found a partly comparable case in Shambala (a Bantu language of Tanzania); Ruth Mfumbwa Besha’s A Study of Tense and Aspect in Shambala features a younger interviewer and an older narrator discussing the foundation of the royal clan, centuries earlier; here, while the interviewer uses the distant past, the narrator uses the near past. Besha suggests that this difference is due to the fact the older speaker was a chief, and a direct descendant of the founder, and thus felt that although the events took place long ago, they were still of direct relevance to him; but to the younger speaker, who grew up at a time when tribal tutorship had almost come to an end, the events were merely an interesting piece of history.
A similar effect in Kusaal may underlie the very frequent appearance of daa in the Bible versions up 1996 to narrate events in the life of Jesus in the Gospels, while da is used for remoter events, such as the ancient history of Israel, and in parables and background remarks. In the 2016 version ‟remote past” cases of daa are systematically replaced by da. I don’t think the language itself has changed; what’s different is a changed editorial stance regarding the current relevance of New Testament era events versus Old Testament era events. (Probably relevant that the previous versions were only of the New Testament.)
[Mostly autoplagiarised from my Kusaal grammar.]
The liberal-democrat-agnostic-secular-eceumenical majority in the US
??????????????????
I grew up in West Virginia, went to grad school in Indiana, spent some time in San Diego, and now live in Indiana again. I’ve never lived in a place where secular liberals were the majority, and when in grad school I had a couple of housemates from enclaves where their liberalism was the majority view, they struck me as smug bigots.
…, had my teaching career in Kentucky, …
AntC’s picture of the US (as of religion) is, shall we say, more ideological than reality-based.
On a not-related issue, can one refer to the study of Shambala grammar (de, 10.31) or its practitioners as Shambala-ics?
I read the statement as “all these overlapping groups taken together are a majority compared to those who would prefer a theocracy”, which they very much are – but then the (in)actions of the Democratic Party get ascribed to that majority, and that’s a stretch. It’s not how parties work in the US, to the extent that they work in the first place. They’re primarily a fundraising apparatus for the campaigns of (many!) individual candidates, not a forum for discussing what policies to collectively adopt, let alone how to collectively get them implemented. They can’t even expel members.
can one refer to the study of Shambala grammar (de, 10.31) or its practitioners as Shambala-ics?
Shambalists.
Searching for the name “Shambala” has a disturbing tendency to turn up references to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shambhala
and to Those Wacky Nazis, too. Also (WP):
To be fair, who hasn’t attempted to create the perfect communist human being using esoteric Tantric practices?
OK: so it’s just me, then? (And Bokii and Barchenko. At least, that’s what they told people they were doing. “I know what this looks like, Comrade, but it’s a Tantric practice meant to create the perfect communist human being.”)
@AntC, I think I get the argument about Exodus 21:22 being a problem for the murder-from-conception view of abortion. But since a miscarriage is not necessarily a still birth, my logic said that “no harm” must mean that the child lived, which would make the law inapplicable to abortion. The translations that use the phrasing “she miscarries, but no harm follows” can be read either way, it seems to me, but when it says “she gives birth prematurely, but there is no further injury,” I’d assume the child lived.
But that may be ignoring the reproductive health options that would have been available, and would in any case depend on how near to term the mother was. The Catholic versions seem to license the dead baby reading more explicitly: “If […] she miscarry, but live herself.”
That may be what the LXX says as well, my latinity begged off sick so I didn’t check, but something called the Brenton Septuagint Translation has “and her child be born imperfectly formed.” That is of course irrelevant if you think God inspired the KJV directly.
Lars: King James’ translators had excellent Greek but they Weren’t Even Trying to translate the God-inspired Greek of the LXX for the book in question. Brenton’s “imperfectly formed” is FWIW Englishing μὴ ἐξεικονισμένον.
ETA: the more recent NETS version of the LXX has “and her child comes forth not fully formed.” You need to look at the next verse for guidance on the consequences “if it is fully formed.”
the (in)actions of the Democratic Party get ascribed to that majority, and that’s a stretch
My go-to example of what it was like to live with those two liberals is when we were arguing about something and one of them said, “But Rodger, normal people don’t think in moral terms!” Besides the structural matters David M describes (which apply to both parties), I think the impotence of the Democrats is largely ascribable to this mentality. Using moral language has, to them, the stink of religion about it.
Rodger C’s anecdote sounds like it involves refugees from a 1974 Star Trek convention. We are now 40+ years into the cliche of stereotypical college-town progressive/activist types rubbing boringly-normal/median Americans the wrong way by being moralistic about their own set of pet issues. So great is the anthropological tendency to religiosity and ritual and purity taboos that they will tend to reemerge in ersatz form among the self-consciously irreligious after a certain passage of time.
But is there more to be said about the R*?d Sea? https://www.discogs.com/release/368468-The-Adverts-Crossing-The-Red-Sea-With-The-Adverts
I hope we can all agree that “One Chord Wonders” is a great song.
@hat: I prefer “Bored Teenagers” myself. But as we used to say back in the old punk-rock days, “[i]n the realm of religious faith, and in that of political belief, sharp differences arise. In both fields the tenets of one man may seem the rankest error to his neighbor. To persuade others to his own point of view, the pleader, as we know, at times, resorts to exaggeration, to vilification of men who have been, or are, prominent in church or state, and even to false statement. But the people of this nation have ordained in the light of history, that, in spite of the probability of excesses and abuses, these liberties are, in the long view, essential to enlightened opinion and right conduct on the part of the citizens of a democracy.”
In Europe, the conservatives have been successful enough in equating “values” with “conservative values” in their campaign slogans that Social Democratic parties don’t use that word. But moral language, especially “justice”, “fairness” and the like, is everywhere to some extent, and in the US is very much associated with the Bernie/AOC wing, I gather.
There may also be a generational “traumatized by Reagan” thing going on.
Oops, when I said latinity I was thinking of the Vulgata, weren’t I, not the LXX? I have no Greek, sadly. But the next verse is important, I agree, since it enforces the “miscarriage = dead baby” reading, and implies that there is a point before which a fetus is not “really” a living person. (Interestingly, the English versions I find have verse 23 talking about the potential death of the mother, which is why I missed the “fully formed” bit).
traumatized by Reagan
A whole generation of Brits imagine that when Margaret Thatcher said “there is no alternative”, she was courageously stating an unwelcome truth, rather than trying (pretty successfully) to shut down the discussion.
I think I still have the original Stiff Records 7″ somewhere (although no working record player); I don’t remember how I got hold of it at the time; it was almost impossible in Germany (Cologne) in 1977 to acquire indie label singles (you might have more luck with LPs).
YT has interesting interviews with Tim Smith and Gaye Black.
J.W. Brewer says: We are now 40+ years into the cliche of stereotypical college-town progressive/activist types rubbing boringly-normal/median Americans the wrong way by being moralistic about their own set of pet issues.
Well, I don’t know about 40+, but people associate the beginning of upsurge of wokescolds with the latter half of the second Obama term, and (hopefully?) suggest we are now past peak woke.
J. W. Brewer: It was, in fact, 1974. Ergo silebo.
@Lars: the ancient set of rules and regulations is saying here’s two different-but-related sorts of bad acts, one of which attracts a more severe penalty than the other. Trying to figure out what valid-for-all-times-and-places rationale that would seem logical to modern minds would justify that difference in penalty may be a serious conceptual mistake. Only extremely fringe elements within Christian discourse (theonomists and so-called reconstructionists) think that all of the details of the Mosaic law must be adopted as the comprehensive civil and criminal legal system of any society other than the ancient Israelite one on whose behalf Moses received it. Another society may choose not to impose criminal penalties on something the Torah treats as a capital offense, and may likewise choose to treat more severely something the Torah treats more leniently. (Thus, e.g., Mark 10:5, in which Jesus deprecates reliance on the laxity of a particular aspect of Mosaic law.)
@Rodger: I have nothing against anecdotes from 1974! It was a great year! Everybody was kung fu fighting, etc. It’s just that such anecdotes do not always illuminate our current circumstances without appropriate adjustments being made. But understanding via such anecdotes the mores and quaint customs of other times and places can also perhaps lead to a better understanding of our own.
So true …
Only extremely fringe elements within Christian discourse (theonomists and so-called reconstructionists) think that all of the details of the Mosaic law must be adopted as the comprehensive civil and criminal legal system of any society other than the ancient Israelite one on whose behalf Moses received it.
Quite. Trying to justify one’s attitude to induced abortion by reference to the details of Mosaic law is a conceptual mistake for Bible-believing Christians (let alone anyone else.) It’s also a mistake to try to argue on their own terms with anybody who is unable (or unwilling) to see this: you’ll just confirm them in their basic mistake if you do that. It’s their terms of reference that are the real problem.
To be fair, my own most 1974-specific anecdote does not involve kung fu fighting as such, but rather running around my maternal grandparents’ house making some sort of ruckus with my brother and/or cousins and being shushed by rather grim and solemn-faced grownups who were watching Nixon resign on the tv. I guess it seemed like a big deal to them. At age 9 I just sort of took it in stride as the sort of thing that apparently happened in the world, much the same way I’d taken the first moon landing in stride five summers previously.
The JPS Torah Commentary offers a good elucidation of the problems in Exodus 21:22.
In short, the miscarriage itself matters little. The main issue is the injury or death of the mother, resulting from the miscarriage, resulting from her being accidentally hit (ngp̄), in a way which by itself would not kill her. It’s this indirect injury which warrants this separate elaboration.
Hammurabi’s provide for vicarious punishment
H’s code mandates (I gather) that if a surgeon operates on an eye and the eye is lost, the surgeon’s own eye should be gouged out.
I believe I have previously mentioned a dispute I participated in among some ophthalmologists about whether, if you were a Babylonian with a cataract, you should go to a one-eyed surgeon or a two-eyed surgeon. The correct answer, of course, is “one-eyed”: such a surgeon will be (a) experienced and (b) extremely careful.
@Y:
Thanks for that. Very helpful. I was just looking at the Hebrew and concluding that it’s woefully ambiguous and unclear. Not just me, then …
The Kusaal version opts definitively for the idea that the whole issue is whether the mother suffers harm:
Ka dapa ayi’ ya’a zabid ka nwɛ’ɛnɛ taab ka di gaadi gban’e pu’apʋʋg ka o kpa’ae, amaa ka pu’a la mɛŋ pʋ pu’alim, onɛ maal ala la na yɔ pu’a la sidi gban’e si’em ka sariakatib la siak la.
“And if two men are fighting and it spreads to affect a woman’s pregnancy, and that flows out, but the woman herself is not harmed, the one who did this will pay the woman’s husband as the husband decides and the judges agree.”
I must say that involuntarily losing one’s pregnancy strikes me as pretty harmful in itself. I doubt if any woman would disagree.
About that One Weird Trick of using your political foe’s framing against them: when the Right talks about Men’s Rights, or about Anti-White discrimination, or about TERF, or calls for academic programs in Euopean-American Studies, that does not get them any sympathy on the Left, either.
In both directions, there is a good reason to suspect dishonesty. The leftists know that the rightists aren’t really concerned with protecting minorities, just as the religionists know that the anti-religionists aren’t really interested in a logical and consistent application of biblical law to their lives.
how parties work in the US, to the extent that they work in the first place. They’re primarily a fundraising apparatus for the campaigns of (many!) individual candidates, not a forum for discussing what policies to collectively adopt, let alone how to collectively get them implemented. They can’t even expel members.
this is true to some extent, but in fairly limited ways. over the past year or two it’s also become a major talking point for people who want everyone to vote for Democratic Party candidates regardless of their stated political positions, and also not to hold the party to account for its leadership’s statements, votes on legislation, and public positions on policy questions. as that juxtaposition hints, the promoters of the idea have a lot riding on the idea that parties are infinitely malleable empty vessels (or, really, that the Democratic Party is – they don’t ever apply the argument to Republicans, because it would be pretty unsustainable to even try). and, as usual with that set, it’s a lie.
yes, candidates are selected by a dizzying variety of primary processes, and parties cannot expel candidates who win the right to run on their ballot lines. but the parties’ leadership have the ability – which they constantly use – to withhold party funds from any candidate they choose, undermining their chance of winning. the Democratic Party almost exclusively does this to candidates who win large primary victories while running to the left of the party’s preferred candidate. and, especially at the local level, the parties’ machines (“clubs”; “district leaders”; etc) have many tools at their disposal to prevent such challenges from occurring – which is why they rarely do outside of districts with active counter-machine structures (the New Kings Democrats are my local example, and a fine specimen of the breed).
and, perhaps more to the point, parties have official platforms, generally updated at their presidential nomination conventions. these are more rhetorical than programmatic in many ways, but do match their legislative agendas – and certainly constitute the results of discussions of what policies to adopt and how to frame them. who is involved in those discussions is certainly a valid question – and for at least the past half-century, the answer has been the parties’ leadership and the donors who put them in place. the complete irrelevance of enrolled party members is especially visible when, as with the Democrats in 2024, the platform changes significantly in ways that directly oppose the positions of the most popular candidates running on the party’s ballot line (e.g. dropping opposition to the death penalty; endorsing wars of aggression; supporting and funding genocide; etc). but these are, nonetheless, clear and accurate reflections of a party’s official positions, beliefs, and intentions.
finally, while parties cannot bar candidates from running for, or on, their ballot line, there is no similar absence of disciplining structures once a politician is in office. each party’s caucus in the House and Senate (per wikipedia) “approves committee assignments, and serves as the primary forum for development of party policy and legislative priorities.” it also “writes and enforces rules of conduct and discipline for its members” – and can refuse to recognize a member of congress as a caucus member, in its concrete processes if not by formal expulsion (i can’t find a good answer to whether they can expel people). they can – and do – also invite members who are not elected on their party’s line to join: sanders (VT) and king (ME) are current examples, elected as “independent” but caucusing with the Democrats.
@Y:
True.
@rozele:
Enlightening (and depressing.)
One of the first actions of the Starmerite/Labour Together/Blue Labour faction currently infesting our UK Labour party was to curtail internal party democracy significantly. Can’t have the door-knockers and the envelope-stuffers getting above themselves and thinking that the party leadership should pay them any attention at all …
On the supposed secular majority in the U.S., 62% of adults in the Pew Institute’s latest poll (2023-24) identified as Christian, 7% as affiliated with other religions, 11% as atheist or agnostic, and 19% as “nothing in particular”. (Some rounding discrepancies.) 33% of those surveyed said humanity had evolved from other species and God had no role in the process, 47% said God or another higher power had guided human evolution, and 17% said humanity had always existed in its present form.
https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2025/02/PR_2025.02.26_religious-landscape-study_report.pdf
https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-political-independents.aspx
On the supposed liberal majority, the latest Gallup poll found
Of course, what respondents mean by “liberal” and “conservative” may not be what you, dear reader, or I mean.
@Y: In both directions, there is a good reason to suspect dishonesty. The leftists know that the rightists aren’t really concerned with protecting minorities, just as the religionists know that the anti-religionists aren’t really interested in a logical and consistent application of biblical law to their lives.
I agree as far as “suspect”. You can start that kind of argument honestly with “Even from your point of view” or the like. Of course some here think that’s still a bad idea.
David M. In Europe, the conservatives have been successful enough in equating “values” with “conservative values” in their campaign slogans that Social Democratic parties don’t use that word. But moral language, especially “justice”, “fairness” and the like, is everywhere to some extent, and in the US is very much associated with the Bernie/AOC wing, I gather.
Over here, I think “values” is still fine for liberals, and there are many others under your “the like”, but “virtue” probably sounds too religious.
AntC’s picture of the USA is conditioned by a few observations:
* In most post-war Presidential elections, the Democrat candidate gets more votes, but the exigencies of the Electoral College mean the Republican gets elected.
(This is confounded by the turnout being abysmally low, so how do we know how they would have voted?/What’s the point in voting when the Electoral College is in effect going to disenfranchise you?)
* The Senate has two members from each State, irrespective of the number of electors in that State. (Both South Dakota and North Dakota.) This gives unbalanced power to the rural States that tend Republican.
(Although again confounded by low turnout.)
* Leading to throughout Trump’s Presidencies — and even in most of Obama’s and Biden’s, many Democrat motions being carried in the House but blocked in the Senate. (And the Democrats have been quite explicit as to how often they’ve held back because they know a motion would get nowhere.)
* Leading to the Republican Senate (Mitch McConnell with the smug grin) blocking nominations for the Supreme Court; leading to that now being dominated by conservatives. IOW unrepresentative of the nation.
a) I already on another thread declaimed I’ll never understand America.
b) As an ‘experiment in democracy’, it’s a failure.
c) The tenor of recent remarks here is that I have an over-idealised opinion of the rationalist/humanist common decency of most Americans despite their politicians. I should stop fooling myself America’s politics is unrepresentative of its people. The place really is Religiously intolerant.
d) Most Americans I’ve met — that is the one’s who’ve travelled outside America — seem decent enough. (Are often apologetic about their country.) I take it an American with a passport is a relative rarity(?)
I still want to prevent my country descending into that sort of a confrontational, disengaged, socially incohesive shithole. The biggest threat I see to that is the money (and dogma) pouring in from the US Religious Right.
@J.W.B.: If ones interest in religion is largely confined to how it either enhances or impedes ones own political agenda, one should want all the Bible-curious people whose politics one doesn’t approve of to become Jehovah’s Witnesses so that they may follow the strict JW discipline of declining to vote.
Or religiously conservative Amish or other Mennonites.
@AntC: You might check how many U.S. presidential elections were won in the Electoral College by a candidate who didn’t win the popular vote. Your other asterisked comments are OK.
I know politically conservative evangelical Christians who are decent people who would help you get your car out of a ditch, despite my opinion and yours that their political views are not decent. Please don’t stereotype with expressions such as “rationalist/humanist common decency”.
@Jerry F.:
1. As I understand it most Amish do not vote most of the time, but they do not have the same strict per se taboo about it as the JW’s do, and sometimes there are elections where more Amish than usual do choose to vote.
2. The Amish generally do not seek converts with any particular zeal and it might be unkind and destabilizing to their particular cultural ecosystem to dump a bunch of newcomers on them selected for having bad political opinions. The JW’s at least in principle are very desirous of converts and I imagine they have evolved various practical ways to smooth off the rough edges of some of the quirkier folks they succeed in converting and integrate those newcomers into their community.
Also maybe 3. Only suckers and naifs think they know who won the so-called popular vote in 1960.
@J.W.B.: 1. I think my sister feels that voting is a strict per se taboo in her congregation.
2. I didn’t realize your dead-serious idea was to “dump” one’s political opponents into non-voting religions.
3. I thought of 1960 after I posted and was glad I hadn’t stated a number.
Looking for tidbits of purely linguistic interest in our sprawling and varied U.S. political system … it is primary day here in N.Y. state and while celebrity incumbent Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is cruising to victory with >85% of the vote in the 14th district Democratic primary I was pleased to learn that her doomed sacrificial-lamb Republican opponent for the general election has already been selected and is a fellow with the ethnolinguistically-interesting name of Diamant Hysenaj. Born in a non-Slavic corner of Titoist Yugoslavia, then “That life changed dramatically in 1991 when, at just nine years old, I fled Kosovo with my family as a communist dictatorship tightened its grip and instability spread across the region. We arrived in the Bronx carrying little more than a suitcase and hope.” Based on the recent past, it should be relatively easy for him to get 30% of the vote in November, but much harder to get 35%.
Interesting that a Republican candidate in 2026 would blame a „Communist dictatorship“ for tightening its grip on Kosovo, when of course it was the weakness of the post-Tito Communists and general disillusionment in Communist ideals in Yugoslavia that led to the country falling apart. But a personal history of fleeing a virulent nationalist government that was trying to reverse „ethnic replacement“ and violently deport „immigrants“ (as the Serbs viewed it) is probably not a popular story in today’s GOP.
As long as “secular” means “preferring to keep government and religion apart”, there’s no contradiction.
While it’s bad enough that this can happen, it’s only happened in 2016, in 2000* and in… 1876 or something.
* Well, that’s what was certified. The certified numbers are wrong by any possibly legal standard for how to count ballots in Florida (partisan source, foreign source), but there’s no way to undo a certification.
I mean, that’s a completely different phenomenon. Some of the Texans who voted for JFK & LBJ may have been dead, but they did vote, if you know what I mean, so the certified majorities of voters (34,220,984* = 49.72%) and of electors (303 of 537) do line up.
* Footnote in Wikipedia: “Official tallies for the popular vote are complicated by unpledged electors in Alabama. The voters of Alabama were faced with voting [electing?] each of the 11 presidential electors in individual races; while each of the 11 races featured a Republican elector pledged to Nixon, only five races featured a Democratic elector pledged to Kennedy, and the remaining six races featured a Democratic elector that was unpledged. Kennedy is commonly provided the popular votes of the highest-voted Kennedy-pledged elector in Alabama, while the remainder of the Democratic vote is given to the unpledged electors.” Unpledged or individually elected electors are a thing of the past.
Yes. The country is simply so big that few people ever need to step outside. And those who’d like to go on holidays elsewhere can’t necessarily afford it because, again, the distances are huge.
It is. Indiana in 2008 was a sobering lesson that low turnout can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In particular, 1) various mostly older voters may feel they fit their definition of “liberal”, but prefer not to use the word because the whole right wing used it as a slur for a few decades, while 2) to many on the left, “liberal” means “Clintonite”, and they’re to the left of that.
Passionate defenses of “liberalism” in what must the narrowest American sense can be found under “Editorials” on zompist.com.
David M. Yes. The country is simply so big that few people ever need to step outside. And those who’d like to go on holidays elsewhere can’t necessarily afford it because, again, the distances are huge.
The number of valid U.S. passports in fiscal year 2025 was a bit more than half the U.S. population. However, since it’s possible to have two valid passport documents (one book and one card, for instance), a reasonable estimate is that about half of Americans have valid passports. That may count as a relative rarity depending on what it’s relative to. It’s probably true that a small fraction of Americans need to go outside the country, but what fraction of people in other countries need to? And I’d bet that a very large fraction of Americans who can afford to travel for pleasure can afford to travel to foreign countries. Most of the biggest cities are within a reasonable day’s drive (say eight hours) of Canada or Mexico—though with the price of gas where it is now…
Americans who travel to New Zealand are probably not at all a representative sample, though.
The percentage of the U.S. population with a currently-valid passport has grown quite dramatically over the last 30 years or so, prior to which it was below 10%. But part of that is that in those good old days it was simply not necessary for a U.S. citizen to have a passport to travel to/from Canada, Mexico, and a variety of Caribbean locales.* So some of the increase is driven by the need to comply with increased bureaucratic rigor rather than greater cosmopolitanism.
ETA: and come to think of it a passport is now of practical non-travel use in a way that was not anciently the case: when you start any new job in the U.S. you are technically supposed to provide your employer with documentation that you are either: a) a U.S. citizen; or b) a non-citizen who has appropriate current valid immigration status that includes the right to work. If you in category a) there are a variety of acceptable combinations of documents you can show to establish that, but if you have a valid passport that’s a one-step solution. I doubt too many people get a passport in the first instance just to simplify Form I-9 compliance, but if you change jobs a lot that might well be a sufficient motivation to renew/replace an expiring passport even if you don’t have a trip to Europe planned in the near future.
*At present it is still possible in principle for a U.S. citizen to reenter the country from Canada and maybe Mexico w/o a passport if driving in a car but not if flying by commercial plane. But the list of acceptable alternative forms of documentation has changed or shrunk and those alternatives now generally also involve similar-to-passport levels of bureaucratic hassle to obtain in the first place.
I’ll just drop a Pound quote in here: “Authar, marvelous reign, no violence and no passports.”
Apparently the monarch whose name is given an extra vowel by wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authari
That seems to be the accepted spelling; I thought maybe Pound got it from Migne, his source for this medieval stuff, but when I finally found the requisite Vol. 95 of the Patrologica Latina I discovered he too has Authari. But Regensburg’s Geschichte, Sagen und Merkwürdigkeiten von den ältesten bis auf die neuesten Zeiten, in einem Abriss aus den besten Chroniken, etc, by the historian/archivist who rejoiced in the name Christian Gottlieb Gumpelzhaimer, uses Authar, so either Ez got it from him or he just decided to shorten it up and make it ’Murican.
He’s given a lot of wars, too…
A bit of a silly tangent, but I’ve never understood the statement that “Americans don’t have passports because America is so big, they don’t need to leave it.”
What?
Yeah, America is big, but it’s all just more America. Would you meet a Russian from central Siberia who has a passport, and think “Why would you ever need one of those?”
Sorry, I’m just ranting because I’m a religious studies teacher, and I’m mad that I showed up too late to participate in the knock-down-drag-out about the authorship of Exodus.
I’m mad that I showed up too late to participate in the knock-down-drag-out about the authorship of Exodus
Well, we did leave it with one or two issues still not completely resolved to the satisfaction of all parties …
It’s a question of what you’re comparing it to. If you’re European you can cross a dozen national frontiers without too much effort, yet it’s all just more Europe. If I were to drive within the U.S. from my home in New York to Jerry F.’s home in New Mexico, it would put more miles (or km, whatever) on the odometer than would a continent-crossing drive from Calais to Istanbul. Although to be fair these days I guess you can drive almost that whole way (from Calais to the Bulgarian-Turkish border) without a passport if you detour around the fragments of the former Yugoslavia that are pariah nations not yet assimilated into the Schengen Area. Maybe “international” travel internal to the Schengen Area shouldn’t count as evidence of cosmopolitanism?
Would you meet a Russian from central Siberia who has a passport, and think “Why would you ever need one of those?”
The odds of you meeting a random Russian in central Siberia with a valid passport for foreign travel are likely even worse than finding a random American in Nebraska with a valid passport. Only 30% of Russians had valid passports in 2023 and I suspect the number is dropping.
I must say that Americans whom I have met personally (and sometimes worked with) were on the whole distinctly Above Average on the Global Niceness Scale.
They did all (presumably) have passports, though, as I have never been to the US (and am not likely to do so at present.)
Some of them did have distinctly odd opinions (and they tended to be notably more right-wing politically than a comparable Eurosample); this generally did not impair the niceness, however.
@Vanya: this chart of state-by-state variation in passport possession has Nebraska at about 44%. Note that the highest-ranking non-coastal state (60.2%) is Utah, perhaps because of factors correlated with the LDS propensity to go on foreign missions. https://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/SAVEact-tables.pdf
I must say that Europe always strikes me as rather homogeneous after Africa.
I suppose it depends what kind of variety you’re looking for: geographic, demographic, linguistic, cultural …
Those who talk about Americans not travelling abroad so much because of the variety they can find at home usually seem to mean the first type (which seems fair enough.) I daresay you can find the others easily enough too without leaving the US, though perhaps not so much on a package tour. And they’re probably not high on the list of priorities of typical tourists from any country.
Sheer cost is not something I’d thought of in this connection, but it certainly seems likely to be relevant.
The news has recently been full of tales of foreign soccer fans wandering off the usual Euro-tourist beaten paths in the U.S. and discovering the hitherto-unknown wonders of American vernacular cuisine. Perhaps package tours will adjust their offerings accordingly in the future? E.g. https://fortune.com/2026/06/22/kraft-ranch-dressing-tsa-approved-travel-world-cup-visitors-chugging/
It reminds me via very loose free association of how there are certain dishes you can commonly find at ordinary restaurants in Japan that you rarely find at Japanese restaurants in the U.S. because the guardians of the brand-image-for-export of “Japanese cuisine” find them rather vulgar and off-message even though they are quite enjoyed by actual Japanese people.
JWB: Why Calais to the Turkish border? From Sagres in Portugal to Narva in Estonia the shortest drive is about 2890 miles, all within Schengen. That’s about the driving distance from NYC to SF (of course Key West to Neah Bay is longer.)
@DE: Is non-Sahel Western Africa, say Benin to Senegal, about as culturally homogeneous as Europe?
@Y: I think I was thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Leigh_Fermor ‘s famous 1933-34 walk across Europe from the North Sea to the Bosporus, although Fermor got off the ferry from England in Hook of Holland rather than Calais.
But if driving from Portugal to Estonia why would you skip the chance to make a stop at (non-Schengen) Kaliningrad?
@Y:
I’d say no; though such an assessment is perhaps just a bit subjective … (and my mental concept of “Europe” is really “Western Europe”, which is surely cheating.)
Strictly speaking the savanna is not Sahel, but I suppose you mean “the Guinea zone” by “non-Sahel”? Even so, a great deal of cultural diversity. The matrilineal Akan culture is very different from traditional Senegalese cultures, for example.
As far as linguistic diversity is concerned, of course, it’s a kerb-stomping no-contest, but that’s cheating too.
@Y: and of course separately “driving distance from where I live to where Jerry Friedman lives” arose naturally in the context of this thread as a distance that was *not* being devised to be as long as theoretically possible while staying within the borders of the U.S. Jerry’s about 800 road miles closer to me than the southwesternmost corner of California; I’m about 600 miles closer to him than the northeasternmost corner of Maine.
there are certain dishes you can commonly find at ordinary restaurants in Japan that you rarely find at Japanese restaurants in the U.S. because the guardians of the brand-image-for-export of “Japanese cuisine” find them rather vulgar and off-message even though they are quite enjoyed by actual Japanese people
I don’t know Japan well enough to judge whether there are guardians. It may be just that people have strong opinions on what kind of food you can serve under which circumstances. I know that there are Lebanese dishes that you will only get to eat when you’re almost family or when you go to specific places that serve lunch break menus or to canteens, , i. e. , where you go to fill your stomach and not primarily to meet people. You wouldn’t find them in the restaurants where Lebanese go to socialize and you won’t get them if you attend a dinner invitation at a Lebanese home or big event like a wedding, because they are considered home cooking not fit for guests. These dishes aren’t necessarily simple; it takes more effort to prepare some of them than the standard kebabs you normally get at banquets and restaurants after you stuff your belly with mezze. They’re just not considered sufficiently prestigious.
Some of them [Americans] did have distinctly odd opinions (and they tended to be notably more right-wing politically than a comparable Eurosample); this generally did not impair the niceness, however.
With all due consideration, you and I are white and speak English as a first language. Would JF’s hypothetical evangelical Christians/good Samaritans be as decent to a black or hispanic? Or a pregnant woman rushing to an appointment at an abortion clinic?
There’s been a series of Youtube vids from an American who’s relocated to London, in the form of postcards home. Pointing out aspects of living in the UK that seemingly aren’t reported in the U.S.:
* The NHS is wonderful, and much more comprehensive and cheaper than US healthcare.
* There are no guns. People do not feel ‘oppressed’ by being banned from carrying them in public.
* Neither do the police carry guns as a matter of course. People do not feel unsafe in public.
* Freedom of speech and movement is every bit as relaxed as the U.S.
(The anti-‘Hate Speech’ laws are very narrow in what they limit.)
* You can walk in most cities; you can bike in most cities; cars are smaller; petrol is eye-wateringly expensive.
* …
I guess a reverse experiment would show Brits/Euros having “odd opinions” about the US.
(So contrariwise, the prevalence of/risks from guns in the U.S. can’t be as bad as our media paint it: in a straw poll at least no contributors here have been shot. In my one transit through the US, I was very much put off by even ordinary passport-stamping agents carrying guns.)
My favorite genre of food that you will never find outside of its country of origin is localized Chinese food. Every major country it seems has its own version of Chinese food, made by generations of Chinese immigrants and non-Chinese. But it is almost entirely unheard of outside of that country, because it’s not really indigenous food and it’s not “real” Chinese food either.
The one exception is that vaguely American-style “Chinese” food, like General Tso’s Chicken, seems to have recently become a trendy export to some major cities outside the US. We’ll see if that trend continues.
EDIT: well, OK. I guess technically “ramen” is a major exception, because what 90% of the world thinks of when they think of ramen is a Japanese version of a Chinese dish. But to me ramen is so thoroughly globalized that it hardly has any national identity at all.
@AntC: With all due consideration, you and I are white and speak English as a first language. Would JF’s hypothetical evangelical Christians/good Samaritans be as decent to a black or hispanic? Or a pregnant woman rushing to an appointment at an abortion clinic?
Two of the first people who came to my mind are hispanic (and actually, I’m now thinking they might be Catholic, though maybe with a lot in common with right-wing evangelical Christians). Beyond that, I can only speculate. I think someone who would stop to help someone in trouble would probably not do so if the person looked dangerous—a young man with gang tattoos on his shaved scalp, for example—and a lot of Americans of different religious and political views would think a black or hispanic person would look more dangerous than a similar-looking white person.
You don’t actually know if someone’s rushing to an abortion clinic. Abortion is certainly a topic that a lot of Americans have very strong feelings about, and still speculating, I suspect there are people who might not help someone if their car had a sticker expressing the “wrong” view, depending on the urgency of the need for help and such.
By the way, in the U.S., “speak English as a first language” is completely compatible with “hispanic”. According to this 2024 survey, 31% of Americans who identify as hispanic speak only English, and another 37% report that they speak English “very well”.
Madeline Kalvis : I hated Polish ramen (in Kraków). Way too greasy. The establishment was great, otherwise.
Jerry : I met one MAGA-hat wearing person, prior to Trump’s first election, here in Bulgaria, and he seemed nice (at least to me! and I guess in the old sense) but not very smart. (but I am repeating myself).
America is big, but it’s all just more America
in terms of rulership, yes (though what that means in practice varies pretty widely, both geographically and according to who a given state employee thinks you should be categorized as). in terms of lects, mostly yes: u.s. englishes and (varied varieties of) western-hemisphere castellano predominate.
but in terms of bioregion and topography, not at all. even within a few hours’ drive from the fairly short strip of littoral i’ve lived in, there’s quite a wide range despite the ravages of colonization; utah, kansas, or louisiana are entirely different worlds. and that’s not even getting into the cultural side of things: even within the christian(ish) zone, UUs, mormons, anabaptists (by any other name), southern baptists, and anti-V2 catholics – to name only varieties with a clear core of northwestern european descendents of original settlers – all have different geographies, not to mention ways of life.
“Japanese cuisine” “Lebanese dishes” “localized Chinese food”
one of the joys of the immigrant cities of the u.s. is that a lot of these things are possible to find! though if you’re not from the specific community, it may not be at all easy unless you both speak the home lect and are pretty persuasive. i think that’s most true of food cultures like shamsi cuisine (lebanon/palestine/syria) where there’s a particularly strong division between the home cooking and commercial cooking repertoires (The Gaza Kitchen cookbook does a lovely home-cooking-centered job of talking about the differences). but i don’t know enough to know how much of what places like Tanoreen and Ayat serve is draw from the home-cooking side of the line, though i do know that some of it is quite locally specific.
but in nyc and l.a. (and i assume some other places), an array of local chinese foods is now fairly accessible! here in nyc, xi’an/shaanxi commercial cooking is easiest to find (several local restaurant chains! plus a scattering of uyghur/xinjiang places!), but in the four(!) chinatowns there are all kinds of restaurants catering to recent waves of immigrants. and to some degree that’s true of other communities: the wonderful yemeni lunch spot in boerum hill has recently been joined by a whole ton of specifically yemeni coffee shops around town (i assume opened by the kids of yemeni bodega-owners) as a different strain of arabic food business than the shamsi falafel places and the nyc-specific “halal cart” food that can now be bought indoors as well as from street vendors.
i can’t speak for the japanese end here, but i’ll try to remember to ask my japanese-canadian brother-in-law what the landscape looks like to him next time he’s in town!
@rozele: I was thinking in particular of the alas-now-permanently-closed Tonkatsu Matsunoya on E. 45th St. in Manhattan, which was aiming more at a Japanese-expat-businessmen customer base than an American crowd and thus offered a few things that are pretty normal in Japan but well outside the usual American scope of “Japanese food.” In particular things that had originated from the post-1945 US occupation where the locals saw the GI’s enjoying e.g. chicken parm and thus decided to experiment with putting tomato sauce and melted cheese on top of their own dishes.
but i don’t know enough to know how much of what places like Tanoreen and Ayat serve is draw from the home-cooking side of the line, though i do know that some of it is quite locally specific.
In Lebanon or places with lots of Lebanese like here in Dubai, it’s relatively easy to determine – if it looks fancy, or does business mostly in the evenings, or offers shisha, it’s a place you go to to socialize / meet people over a meal, and won’t have home cooking. If not, and especially if it mostly operates during office hours, it’s a place where you mainly go to get your daily food intake and very likely offers home cooking. But I don’t know how well that rule applies in New York.
In NYC a good rule is (or at least used to be) to go where the cab drivers go.
In NYC a good rule is (or at least used to be) to go where the cab drivers go.
Yet another downside to the inevitable replacement of cab drivers by self-driving vehicles.
I just read a review (with a link to the pdf) to Kirk McGregor’s “The Pro-Choice Biblical Ethic of American Evangelical Scholars before the Religious Right”, published in 2025 in the Journal of Biblical Literature, which looks at how evangelists interpreted the Bible for guidance on the abortion issue in 1968. The revolting history of how anti-abortion was adopted as a rallying issue is here.
“Revolting” is correct. The article doesn’t really do justice to the fact that this was part of the deliberate corruption of American Evangelical Christianity by the Republican Party for political gain, though they wouldn’t have succeeded so thoroughly if the seeds of corruption hadn’t been there already, of course.
Our UK fascists are trying the same trick here, but I think that their adulation of MAGA has rather blinded them to the great cultural differences which make this a less hopeful strategy for them in the UK.
Thank you @Y — which raises only more questions. I see the Review is explicitly citing Exodus 21:22-25, as we discussed.
If the issue didn’t have ‘traction’ among evangelicals ’til then (partly because it was seen as a Catholics-only matter), why did the promotion manage to stir it up, where Weyrich et al’s ‘real’ target (tax exemption) hadn’t?
Evangelists were too embarrassed to campaign on an explicitly racial segregation basis for the tax?? Really??
(BTW I see not much evidence Billy Graham was neutral wrt abortion. So much as that he didn’t think it was a motivating issue — until it was.)
Billy Graham was politically naive, to a probably culpable degree, but largely confined himself to attempting to convert people. (I heard him once in the flesh: he was very good at what he did.)
His son Franklin is a full-on Trumpite, weaponising his religion against basic humanity and compassion. Whatever your opinion of Graham père (low, presumably), the contrast is great, and emblematic of the deep shit American Evangelical Christianity is now in.
I needed a passport (or as a minor to be listed as my parents’ child in _their_ passport, during the Soviet occupation of Bulgaria) to visit my grandparents’ village house, 33 kilometers away.
EDIT: I meant as a child registered as my parents’.
I chanced to be reading St. Paul grousing about his life and hard times and was struck by the octuple repetition in 2 Cor. 11:26:
κινδύνοις ποταμῶν,
κινδύνοις λῃστῶν,
κινδύνοις ἐκ γένους,
κινδύνοις ἐξ ἐθνῶν,
κινδύνοις ἐν πόλει,
κινδύνοις ἐν ἐρημίᾳ,
κινδύνοις ἐν θαλάσσῃ,
κινδύνοις ἐν ψευδαδέλφοις·
This is IMHO especially nicely-Englished by HCSB as “dangers from rivers, dangers from robbers, dangers from my own people, dangers from the Gentiles, dangers in the city, dangers in the open country, dangers on the sea, and dangers among false brothers.” I was naturally curious about the danger-word and was amused to be told sternly by wiktionary that “Attempts at an Indo-European etymology should be given up.” https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BA%CE%AF%CE%BD%CE%B4%CF%85%CE%BD%CE%BF%CF%82#Ancient_Greek
Kids of today are always attempting Indo-European etymologies. I think it’s a TikTok thing.
*swéḱs *septḿ̥, bro!
Tee hee!
The whole etymology paragraph in Wiktionary is a blatant, word for word plagiarism of Beekes; they just left out half of what Beekes wrote (including why Beekes thinks attempts at an IE etymology are hopeless).
To V’s comment, it should be said that the catalog of wicked deeds to which the then-governments of the U.S. and U.K. acquiesced during World War II for reasons of realpolitik and expediency is a very extensive one, and probably relatively few Westerners put the decision in August/September 1944 to let Stalin have his way with Bulgaria very close to the top of the list. But it belongs on the list. (This of course was still at the time when Stalin’s continuing coy refusal to make war on Japan gave him leverage in favor of his own unsavory agenda because the Western powers were not yet confident they could defeat Japan without Soviet troops.)
Whatever your opinion of Graham père (low, presumably), …
I didn’t really become aware of Evangelism as a genre until it was already being parodied. (Starting even, I guess, with Alan Bennett’s “Esau was an hairy man”.) I can’t in my mind distinguish the South Park preacher from Falwell/Graham/etc. Are they even parodying themselves? It seems such transparent flim-flam. And/or a cover for being child molesters (sorry notmuch — but they just look repellent with their make-up and ‘perfect’ coiffeur; Miscavige is another one).
(We have a prominent one in NZ who goes more for the muscled hunk look, but also the rich coiffe. Yeugh.)
What leverage did US and UK goverments have over SU in autumn 1944? End the lend-lease? Make a separate peace with Germany? It’s true that the fate of Eastern Europe wasn’t one of their main concernes, but there was little they could do anyway. See Poland.
they just look repellent with their make-up and ‘perfect’ coiffeur
American coiffure tends to strike me, too, as sometimes a bit odd; however, I am not convinced that this, in itself, is a sound argument against the opinions of the thus-coiffured.
Conceivably, Brits in the public eye (and possibly Antipodeans too) strike Americans as looking a bit scruffy. Alas, we shall never know.
The not-anointed but very oily Robert Tilton is a classic of the genre. It didn’t take much technological wherewithal to give him secondary fame as the farting preacher.
@D.O.: there were undoubtedly challenges, perhaps insoluble ones, in timing and logistics. Bulgaria had despite being allied with Hitler’s regime managed to stay out of Hitler’s war with and invasion of the USSR, had not contributed even token “volunteer” forces to that effort, and in fact never formally broke diplomatic relations with the USSR.* So the move (which one of the interim prime ministers had been groping toward without much success) would have been for Bulgaria to surrender to the U.S./U.K. and invite a “friendly” occupation by British troops as a way of signaling that no Soviet troops would be needed. But that unresisted British invasion/occupation would have been challenging to accomplish as long as there were still substantial German troops in Greece, and the Germans didn’t make the decision to withdraw their troops from Greece because needed elsewhere until Romanian resistance to the Soviets collapsed, which of course eliminated the geographical obstacle to the Red Army invading their previous non-enemy Bulgaria before the British could get there.
“Eastern Europe” was not a lump whose postwar fate needed to be uniform, as indeed the eventual foiling of Soviet designs in Greece (where British troops had in fact gotten their boots on the ground before the Soviets could get there) showed. Poland was perhaps doomed because located right in between Moscow and Berlin, but Bulgaria wasn’t really on the way to anywhere else and the Soviet troops that went into Bulgaria were in fact advancing in very much the wrong direction if the ultimate goal was Berlin. But by the time of the 1945 negotiations about the details of the post-war settlement, Soviet control of Bulgaria was a fait accompli, most of the child Tsar’s former regents and prime ministers had been executed, etc.
*Some sources claim that the Soviets were particularly happy to have a Bulgarian ambassador still in Moscow because that Hitler-ally ambassador (Stamenov) had been recuited as an agent by the NKVD prior to the war, but I don’t know if everyone accepts that theory.
@Y:
Tilton seems even worse than the deplorable average.
I (despite being myself what used to be called an Evangelical before our US brethren so comprehensively skunked the term) shared the perfectly justifiable horror of US teleevangelists shared by all right-thinking people.
However, I was (very peripherally) actually involved in a visit by Billy Graham to Edinburgh; I had supposed, prior to this, that he was the same sort of creature, but I was quite wrong. (AntC would of course have disapproved of him anyway, but he was in no way like Jerry Falwell. Still less like Miscavige, who as far as I know is not known for teleevangelism, however regrettable his other activities may be.)
The WP picture of Miscavige immediately reminded me of Sam Altman, demonstrating that dodgy coiffure and complete untrustworthiness may (perhaps) be correlated, but are not diagnostic of Evangelical Christianity.
the eventual foiling of Soviet designs in Greece
an interesting way to describe the british and greek nationalists’ violation of the plan for a post-war national unity government and alliance with the nazi-collaborationist paramilitaries, which they followed up with a two-year mass murder campaign and then a two-year civil war to exterminate the greek left.
“soviet designs”, of course, being an interesting way to describe stalin’s betrayal of the greek communist partisans who defeated the nazi occupation, in favor of a national unity government, in hopes that the “concession” would help his negotiations with the UK and US about post-war spheres of influence.
AntC would of course have disapproved of him [Graham] anyway, …
I think you’re over-rating how much attention I was paying at the time to teleEvangelism (US or otherwise). Gullible Christians [which excludes DE] can spend their time and money how they like, providing they keep out of Politics and out of other peoples’ lives.
I saw the threat (too late!) only with the rise of Trump. (I used to be agnostic; now I’m not so sure …; I’m a born-again Atheist.)
Graham seems to have been socially conservative (misogynistic, anti-diversity) in just the way I disapprove of. He does get marks for opposing racism, and including MLK.
@rozele:
Quite.
I saw the threat (too late!) only with the rise of Trump. (I used to be agnostic; now I’m not so sure …; I’m a born-again Atheist.)
I have to say that a reaction against Christianity as a whole (though illogical, Captain, strictly speaking) is an entirely natural and wholly understandable reaction to the blasphemous activities of MAGA, and I don’t blame people for it in the least. The blame lies with the blasphemers.
The close association of US Evangelical Christianity with the far right actually goes back to the Reagan era (it was the result of a deliberate political strategy, not a natural spontaneous development), but I agree that the full horror of it is a lot easier to see now.
Let’s talk about Language instead.
rozele, DE, right. Communist support for a coalition government in Czechoslovakia played out so well that “Soviet designs” can never be suspected. Keep dissing American Evangelicals, but don’t replace them with the communists, they are even worse.
This is not about communists being the good guys (they were much the most important part of the Greek resistance to the Axis, but were far from being moral paragons), or whether Stalin was a highly unscrupulous person (he was), or whether Stalin wished ill to Western Europe (he did); rozele’s comments are simply factual:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_resistance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Greece)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Civil_War
Well, I guess contrary to a common saying everyone is entitled to their own (selected) facts. Stalin, as far as I understand, didn’t like Greek communists because they were under Tito’s influence. It doesn’t mean that he had no “designs” on Greece. Why wouldn’t he?
No doubt he did; he eventually decided it was more expedient to throw his (wannabe) allies* under the bus. From his point of view, it was a pretty sound decision. Indeed, it may very well have been better for Greece, in the end: what happened was bad, but what would have happened given active Soviet support would probably have been much worse.
everyone is entitled to their own (selected) facts
Yeah, that nice Elon Musk has complained about the communist bias in Wikipedia quite a bit. Which articles should I have selected? They seemed relevant to the issue to me …
You may like this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror_(Greece)
* In fact, their fatal mistake was picking the Soviet Union over Tito.
I am in no position to evaluate the quality of wiki articles. My remark was about a strange position that because Stalin decided not to support Greek communists and left them to their fate, there was no reason to be concerned in the first place.
So the counterfactual speculative question would be under what if any circumstances would Stalin have decided to stay out of Bulgaria as well and thereby likewise abandon the local communists to an unsuccessful outcome in their local struggle. But presumably those circumstances would need to involve Soviet troops not having occupied Bulgaria to start with, because, once that had happened, supporting whichever faction of local Communists was on his good side (and not showing signs of Titoism) was a sufficiently low-cost strategy as to be the default. Various temporary Bulgarian administrations during 1944 were extremely interested in how to disentangle themselves from alliance with Germany, make peace with the Western powers, and avoid Soviet occupation. None of them succeeded in their objectives.
Perhaps those objective were impossible, but my broader suggestion is that even if something resembling in general terms the general post-war settlement in Eastern Europe was close to inevitable by the second half of 1944, there was still a lot of contingency in the exact details and how the exact details did or didn’t end up falling out was of considerable relevance to local people even if not a very high priority for those in London or Washington whose primary concerns were elsewhere.
I would say there was zero chance of a happy ending (in even the provisional sense that is all we can expect in this sublunary world) for any of the Balkan states after a century of war and general brutality; we can argue about the Greek civil war or Stalin’s plans till the cows come home, but I’m not sure what would be achieved. I recommend reading Trotsky’s excellent book of reportage from the Balkan front of 1912-13 for useful background.
hat’s the sort of gloomy gus who if handed a copy of the classic 1941* anthology _An American Symposium on the Macedonian Problem_ would immediately skip past the upbeat-sounding “Macedonia – Switzerland of the Balkans” to wallow in the more sobering “Macedonia – The Volcano of the Balkans.”
*Looks like it went to press fairly early in the year before the Wehrmacht invaded Yugoslavia, which rather changed the context for how a lot of the items might be read.
at a series of used book stores in sofia (and maybe plovdiv) i was tempted repeatedly by semi-bound* books in french on the “macedonian problem”, but never succumbed. that same trip gave me an earworm that still afflicts me whenever the subject comes up: VMRO amen.
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* stitched together, but without boards (perhaps full bookblocks)
Heh. For the non-Hebraic-adjacent, that’s a play on v’imru Amen (ואמרוּ אָמֵן) ‘and say Amen.’
they just look repellent with their make-up and ‘perfect’ coiff[ure]
They’re trying to convey, “I am a smooth man!”
rozele : “semi-bound” I have a few of the those, notably “a most recent history of Bulgaria 1878-1922” (not sure about the years and can’t check now, it’s in Sofia, but I’m pretty sure it was published in 1926). I got it from the used bookstore next to Slaveikov square, in one of the inner yards. The parts I found most interesting were the diplomatic relations, mostly with the Ottoman Empire and also Britain.