A couple months ago, the thing that I was hearing a lot on social media specifically from right wing religious folks is the idea that there\u2019s the sin of empathy. And on its surface I thought it was laughable, but I have you here now. So my question is is there anywhere in the Bible that talks about the sin of empathy?<\/strong><\/p>\nCertainly not. There are certainly times when in narratives God will say, \u201cShow no mercy,\u201d or something like that. And these are particularly problematic passages where God says, \u201cYou will go through the town and you will kill everything that breathes, men, women, children, the suckling baby. Show no mercy.\u201d And so I think you could interpret that to mean there are times when God does not want you to be empathetic, at least there are times when the narrative calls for that. But I think we can point out that\u2019s a bad narrative and that\u2019s a bad message. There\u2019s certainly no point where anyone says empathy is a sin just in general. And the notion of the sin of empathy is just an attempt to try to overturn the fact that we\u2019re social creatures and we are evolutionarily and experientially predisposed to feel what other people are feeling.<\/p>\n
That is what allows us to cooperate. That\u2019s what allows us to build larger and more complex social groups without things breaking down. Empathy is important to the survival of humanity, but it has a negative byproduct because we all understand ourselves according to specific sets of social identities. And if you have a social identity, you have an in-group and then you have an out-group. And so empathy can be problematic when we empathize with the in-group to the degree that we then become antagonistic toward the out-group. We call that parochial empathy. If you are empathetic toward the people you identify with to the degree that you then antagonize and harm the out-group, that can be harmful.<\/p>\n
But I don\u2019t think that\u2019s what people are talking about when they are talking about the sin of empathy because those are the people who are overwhelmingly trying to defend precisely parochial empathy because they\u2019re trying to convince others it\u2019s bad for us to empathize with undocumented immigrants. It\u2019s bad for us to empathize with people from other nations. It\u2019s bad for us to empathize with either conservatives or liberals. I think empathy that is outward looking is good. Empathy that is parochial, I mean, it serves a purpose. Smaller groups that are threatened, that are vulnerable, in order for those identities to survive, they have to kind of circle the wagons and you have to kind of be a little protective of your identity.<\/p>\n
This is what the Judeans and the Jewish folks throughout history have had to do. And that\u2019s necessary, I think, in certain contexts for the survival and the protection of vulnerable identities. But once you become the oppressor, once you become the empire, once you become the dominant group to then say the out-group is bad and to exercise that parochial empathy, I think that becomes phenomenally harmful. And so ironically, there can be a way that empathy is bad and the folks who talk about the sin of empathy are primarily defending the bad kind of empathy and criticizing the good kind of empathy. So I think they have it precisely backwards. And I think all they\u2019re trying to do is protect their own privilege and power.<\/p>\n
Yeah. I mean, I think they have it backwards, but I think they have it backwards purposefully so. I think that there are a lot of people who don\u2019t know any better and they say things based in their ignorance, but I also think there are a lot of people who interpret the text in a way that justifies the things that they already believe to be right. It\u2019s good for them to\u2026 I mean, sometimes when I\u2019m listening to some folks talk about the Bible and Jesus, the image of Jesus that comes in my mind is Jesus riding horseback on a Tyrannosaurus Rex with two sub-machine guns in his hand.<\/strong><\/p>\nWith an AK, yeah.<\/p>\n
Yeah, exactly. It\u2019s like that\u2019s not the Jesus that I see, but I understand how some people can twist their beliefs to fit that image.<\/strong><\/p>\nYeah. And you do, anytime you have these movements, you\u2019ve got a lot of people who are there along for the ride. They\u2019re convinced of things, but a lot of the thought leaders and a lot of the people who are driving the car are conscious of what they\u2019re doing, are very intentionally doing it.<\/p>\n
So tell me about your book. why\u2019d you write it? All the things.<\/strong><\/p>\nAll the things. It\u2019s called The Bible Says So: What We Get Right and Wrong About Scripture\u2019s Most Controversial Issues. The framing that I came up with is the Bible says so because one of the most common things that I\u2019m confronting in social media is the notion that the Bible says X, Y, and Z. And so that was the genesis of this manuscript that turned into this book, which has 18 different chapters, an intro, and then I give a little broad-level view of how we got the Bible. But then 18 different chapters, each one addresses a different claim about what the Bible says. So the Bible says homosexuality is an abomination. The Bible says God created the universe out of nothing. The Bible says you should beat your kids. A lot of different claims about what the Bible says.<\/p>\n
And in each chapter I try to go through and share what the data actually indicate about what the authors and earliest audiences of these biblical texts understood the text to be doing and to be saying, where normally when people say the Bible says X, Y or Z, they\u2019re sharing what makes the Bible meaningful and useful to them in their specific circumstances. And what I do is try to say, \u201cI\u2019m going to set that aside and I\u2019m going to try to understand what would\u2019ve made this text meaningful and useful to its authors and earliest audiences irrespective of how meaningful and useful that may make it to us.\u201d And so I try to share what we think the authors were trying to say when they wrote whatever they did right in the Bible.<\/p>\n
All of your studies that you\u2019ve\u2026 And you\u2019ve gone deep into all of this, is it fair to look at the Bible as a historical document or do you see the Bible more as a collection of stories that try to teach people, specifically people of that time how to live their lives, like how to be safe, how to create community, all of those things?<\/strong><\/p>\nI think there\u2019s a degree to which many parts of the Bible are historical, but I think that\u2019s incidental. The Bible was certainly not written as a history book. And I think overwhelmingly, the Bible is a collection of texts from that time period that were intended to try to do certain things with the audiences. It wasn\u2019t also always necessarily about how to live right. I think a lot of the times it\u2019s about trying to establish who\u2019s in control and what kind of understanding of our identity we should have and things like that. So there are a lot of different rhetorical goals going on, and sometimes one set of authors might be arguing against another set of authors. You see that particularly between Samuel and Kings and Chronicles.
You have a lot of things being changed because the editors of Chronicles were like, \u201cI don\u2019t like the way you do it. I\u2019m going to do it this other way.\u201d And they\u2019re trying to make different points. But yeah, they\u2019re definitely rhetorical texts.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re definitely to some degree propagandistic texts, and particularly a lot of the historical texts having to do with the Kings and things like that in the Hebrew Bible. Once we get into the New Testament, I think it\u2019s probably a little more in line with texts intended to help people understand how to live according to the opinion of the authors.<\/p>\n
Tell me if this categorization is fair. The God of the Old Testament is, my dad would kill me if he heard me say this, but the God of the Old Testament feels very much a God of get off my lawn, kids and very much like an angry wrathful God, like, \u201cYou step in line with me or I will smite you. I will burn whole cities down. And if you turn around and look at those cities, I will turn you into pillars of salt. I don\u2019t mess around. There\u2019s no mercy.\u201d Then after Jesus is born and Jesus lives his life, the God we meet there is a much more generous and loving God, the God who hung out with tax collectors, who hung out with prostitutes, who told you to love your neighbor as you would love yourself, all of these things that are a much more softer and loving deity than what we see in the Old Testament. Would you agree that that\u2019s true?<\/strong><\/p>\nI would agree that that\u2019s a very common interpretation. And I would agree that on the surface, if we\u2019re not looking incredibly closely, it can seem like that. But I think there\u2019s a problem with that perspective, and there are a few things going on here. Because you have an angry vindictive God in the New Testament as well, but it\u2019s isolated to only a couple places and primarily like the Book of Revelation represents a deity that will bathe its sword in the blood of victims, and you also find a phenomenally merciful and long-suffering God in different parts of the Hebrew Bible.<\/p>\n
And this is one of the reasons that I\u2019ve tried to point out there\u2019s no one God of the Bible. You have numerous different divine profiles being represented throughout both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Different authors are going to represent God in whatever ways serve their own rhetorical interests and goals, but there is a chronological trajectory as well. As things are changing in the world in societies, you go from far more warfare, far more conflict between societies to a time period when there\u2019s still war and conflict, but there\u2019s a lot more advocacy for peace. And it\u2019s not the division between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament where that pivots, it\u2019s actually before the end of the Hebrew Bible.<\/p>\n
I think that that dichotomy of the vindictive and violent God of the Hebrew Bible and the loving merciful God of the New Testament also is problematic from an antisemitism point of view because that has taken up frequently to frame the God of the Jewish people as evil and the God of Christianity as good. And that facilitates, or it historically has facilitated a lot of problems. So I try to help people understand that you\u2019ve got a mix of both in both sets of texts, and it\u2019s really your choice what you choose to emphasize, give priority to and center.<\/p>\n
This is exactly why I love your videos because I have a long-held belief that I\u2019ve thought about over years. And then you come along and you blow it all up. You blow it all. Not only do you blow it up, you point out the places where that belief is problematic because until you said it, I never would\u2019ve thought of it in the frame of like antisemitic. It\u2019s the blind spot, I don\u2019t see it like that, but when you frame it in that way, I get it. I get why that thinking is totally problematic, and I think that\u2019s the power of what you do on social media.<\/strong><\/p>\nAnd that\u2019s something that it\u2019s a lesson I had to learn myself as well. Because I saw somebody posted on Twitter many years ago a picture of Santa Claus in somebody\u2019s living room, but he was angry and had an ax or something, and there\u2019s a little kid on the stairs looking around the corner and says, \u201cOh, no, it\u2019s Old Testament Santa.\u201d And I was like, \u201cAha.\u201d And I shared this and some of my Jewish scholar friends immediately were like, \u201cBad form. Here\u2019s why this is bad.\u201d And it had never occurred to me either, and then I couldn\u2019t unsee it. Once I accepted that people with very different experiences are going to feel very differently about the joke and what\u2019s being expressed there, I couldn\u2019t unsee that.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s interesting to me growing up in the Baptist church that when I was in church and in the church that I went to, the Bible verse that I heard more than anything was that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than a rich man to enter the gates of heaven. And that was kind of a thing in the church that I was in, and most of the churches that I went to, that wealth did not equate that you were a pious and good person. It was more the opposite, that wealth meant that your actions had to be more because it was going to be hard for you to get through the gates of heaven. And it seems that that Bible verse is completely forgotten by, well, A, like a lot of these Christian nationalists or preachers who engage in the prosperity gospel.<\/strong><\/p>\nYeah, it\u2019s a big issue. And I mean, there are ways that people try to get around that verse. They say that, \u201cOh, eye have the needle doesn\u2019t mean an actual sewing needle. It refers to what\u2019s called a wicked gate, a little door that is inside of the main door of the city gate.\u201d And so it just means that you have to open the little door and the pack has to be taken off the camel and they have to shimmy through on their knees. And I don\u2019t think these people have ever seen a camel in real life who are saying this because camels are not going to do that. But there were no such gates anywhere in, around or near Jerusalem, anywhere near the time of the composition of the New Testament.<\/p>\n
And this is very clearly hyperbole that is coming at the end of a story about a rich young ruler comes to Jesus and says, \u201cI\u2019ve kept all the commandments since my youth. What do I have to do to inherit the kingdom of God?\u201d And Jesus says, \u201cSell everything you own and give it to the poor.\u201d And then it says the man went away sad because he had a lot of possessions. And that\u2019s where Jesus goes, \u201cTsk, tsk. It\u2019s going to be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven,\u201d and then gives this hyperbolic notion of a camel passing through the eye of a needle. And for people who try to endorse a prosperity gospel interpretation of this, not only is it incredibly hard to do and it\u2019s never really convincing unless you are already there and just need to be made to feel like it\u2019s not impossible.<\/p>\n
But like everywhere else in the gospels, Jesus says, \u201cYou cannot serve God and mammon.\u201d And Jesus says, \u201cBlessed are the poor.\u201d And you can look in the sermon on the Mount and in Matthew 5, and it says, \u201cBlessed are the poor in spirit.\u201d And so people say, \u201cAha. It doesn\u2019t say\u2026 That\u2019s not about economic poverty, that\u2019s about humility.\u201d But you can then go to the sermon on the plain in the Gospel of Luke and it just says, \u201cBlessed are the poor.\u201d Which very clearly is referring to economic poverty. As I said before, the Bible is a text. It has no inherent meaning. We create meaning in negotiation with the text, which means we\u2019re bringing our experiences and our understanding to the text, and that\u2019s generating the meaning.<\/p>\n
And if you have experienced privilege and wealth your whole life, you\u2019re going to interpret the Bible in a way that makes that okay. It\u2019s very rare that we have someone in a position like that who comes to the text and can think critically enough to realize, \u201cThis is about me. This is saying that I am the problem. I better fix myself.\u201d That\u2019s phenomenally rare. What is far more common is for someone to bring their own experiences to the text and say, \u201cI was right all along. The problem is everybody else. The problem is not me. I can find endorsement or validation of my own worldviews and my own perspectives and my own hatred and my own bigotry in the text and that authorizes and validates it.\u201d And that\u2019s what we see going on overwhelmingly in public discourse about the Bible.<\/p>\n
Tough question that you\u2019ve probably been asked a million times before, but the fact that you are doing such deep research on the Bible, how does that affect your religious belief? And I think for a long time I assumed that you are an atheist, that you didn\u2019t believe in God, but then you did a video and you talked about being a Mormon, and I was like, \u201cWow, okay. That\u2019s a wrinkle. That\u2019s something there.\u201d So yeah, talk to me about that. How do you balance the two things?<\/strong><\/p>\nWell, and this is something I\u2019ve for a long time said, I don\u2019t talk about my personal beliefs on social media, so that\u2019s a boundary that I try to maintain. But what I will say is that I have always tried very, very hard ever since I started formally studying the Bible to ensure that I was compartmentalizing my academic approach to the Bible from my devotional approach to the Bible, keeping them firmly separate, which is not an easy thing to do because I was raised more or less without religion. And like I mentioned earlier, I joined the LDS church as an adult. I was 20 years old. I didn\u2019t really have much that I had to deconstruct when I started studying the Bible academically.<\/p>\n
So I would say that a lot of people reach out to me for help with deconstruction, for help with trying to understand these things through a prism of faith. And that\u2019s where I say, \u201cThat\u2019s above my pay grade.\u201d I don\u2019t take a pastoral approach to this. I\u2019m not here to hold anybody\u2019s hand through faith crises and things like that. There are content creators out there who do that kind of thing. I\u2019m just here to try to present the data and my own personal grappling with that is something that is private. So I do keep that separate.<\/p>\n
Find More To The Story<\/em> on <\/strong>Apple Podcasts<\/a>, Spotify<\/a>, iHeartRadio<\/a>, Pandora<\/a>, or your favorite podcast app, and don\u2019t forget to subscribe.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A parishioner prays during Mass at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago.Joshua Lott\/The Washington Post\/Getty Get your news from a source that\u2019s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. Dan McClellan has spent much of his life learning\u2014and relearning\u2014what the Bible and its authors were trying to tell us. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1993,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-usa-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1992"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1992\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}