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Today’s Special Comment begins with the short yet forceful opinion of Mr. Stewart about the following disclaimer accompanying founding documents of America:
“This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today. Parents might wish to discuss with their children how views on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and interpersonal relations have changed since this book was written before allowing them to read this classic work.”
Predictably, the response from Wingnut-land on this has been “The Constitution is perfect in every way and all of it still applies to our modern times! The Founders were visionaries who could see a Republic many years in the future! This is like the ‘living document’ bullshit we don’t believe in unless it benefits us!”.
This should sound familiar to anyone with an inkling of experience in how fundamentalist religion works. Here, let me substitute for you.
“The Bible is the perfect and inerrant Word of God! All of it applies to our modern times (excepting the parts we don’t believe in) and the writers were visionaries who could see our most wonderful country that should forever and always be completely only Christians!”
Easy, killer. Clearly, we don’t really believe in the inerrant nature of the Constitution, or we wouldn’t have provided a mechanism by which it can be amended in case something turns out not to work properly, and we wouldn’t have passed the document with ten amendments already attached. A significant amount of the founders didn’t think the original had it right on key issues of the times. It seems pretty logical to infer that peoples of our temporally advanced times might have changed their positions on key issues over time, as well. The original document believed that rule by the men of a patrician class was the most effective way of making sure all the candidates were of the highest quality. In our times, we believe that rule by a person who has the most mob appeal, the biggest amount of funds raised, and who looks the best on television (and occasionally we care about what he actually thinks) is best suited to lead us. Most of us modern peoples believe that the statement “all men are created equal” applies equally to nonwhite men (Civil rights Acts of 1864, and 1964, + Amendment 14) and, at least in some degree, to women (Amendment 19 + several nondiscrimination statutes), neither of which was part of the original document (nonwhite men counted as less than a whole person, and women of any color were nonpeople). Times change, and so do attitudes. It makes sense.
The disclaimer may be overkill for some people who can follow this train of thought, but for younger children who are being taught about the text of the founding documents and the values of modern American society, it makes sense. Most kids can see the disconnection, and it does them a disservice to gloss over it or to say that the Founders intended things they did not. That’s trying too hard to paint a perfect America, instead of one that’s strong enough to recognize their difficulties, their faults, and to overcome and work through them.
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For part two, I’m blinking at the jaw-dropping, head-desk inducing...something engaged in by Mr. Kilpatrick's insistence that the prevalence of real places and details about Jesus in the Christian Foundational Writings / New Testament versus the more aphoristic nature of the Qu'ran means that Jesus is real and the True Son of God and that Muslims follow a false prophet. First, he starts with the question of “Did the major prophet of Islam actually receive a revelation from God?” but abandons that line of thinking early On. I suspect he realized how easily that argument can be run against him - if all you have are the writings of the followers, then you have to take it as an article of faith that your prophet really did get his stuff from God/YHWH.
Thus, he turns toward the details in the narrative to prove that his account is real. We’re guessing Mr. Kilpatrick has not heard of the historical fiction genre, where the entire point is to plant a narrative that did not happen into a setting that did, complete with details, places, names, and other items to lend the weight of history to the fiction. As did, say, the epics and the sagas and the mythologies of other religions and philosophies. Claiming the One True Way based solely on that you used places and people that existed is laughable. Just for kicks, though, let’s continue on his line of thinking.
To Mr. Kilpatrick, “applying the same tests of critical reason and historical evidence” means to focus solely on the treatment of Jesus, comparing a work in which Jesus is the principal figure and focus to a work where he is not. the Jesus of Islam is there, he says, to refute the claims of the Christians, to claim that he never said he was a God in addition to God, and then to make way for the prophet of Islam. There’s no details of his life, his upbrining, or the things that he did. No supporting cast, no Herod, no miracles. Mr. Kilpatrick believs that a book that’s not about Jesus should nonetheless devote time and energy to his life and upbringing, instead of treating Jesus the same way the Christian Foundational Writings treat John the Baptist - important for certain points of the narrative, but definitively a secondary character, even though he could probably have a whole story of his own work. (I forget about what is contained in the non-canonical literature of Christianity. Perhaps that book has already been written.) This lack of details apparently makes the Islamic version of Jesus unconvincing and the Christian version of Jesus compelling.
Mr. Kilpatrick then turns to the possibility of Jesus-as-historical figure, citing as his evidence the body of work written by Christians claiming that Jesus existed. It’s like saying the presence of the Talmud and the Mishnah means that the Torah are the true words of God. Sure, there’s no Jesus proclaiming the way for Mohammed, but then again, we have to take on faith that there was a John the Baptist proclaiming the way for Jesus.
So, based on his own reasoning, there’s no reason to believe Mr. Kilpartick’s claims that Jesus is more likely to exist in the Christian version than the Muslim version. the appropriate comparison would have been to compare the amount of details in the Writings about Jesus to the amount of details in the Qu’ran about Mohammed. From this venue, we get to a more metatopical complaint about Mr. Kilpatrick’s reasoning, namely that the two accounts are written in entirely different styles to achieve different ends. The Foundational Writings are intended to be a narrative, an account (for you, Theophilous, Lover of God) of a person, his life as a prophet and as an avatar or emenation or part of the divine, through his death and the resurrection that proved his status as a God-being, and then of the following that started from the time of that proof. The Qu’ran follows more in the style of the Analects, the Daodejing, or some of the sutras of the Buddha, a collection of the things the prophet said to his followers and the lessons imparted to them. It doesn’t need historical setting or narrative detail past the amount necessary for the story to make sense.
Actually, the better comparison might be the needling done between the Daoists and the Confucianists as they poke holes in each other’s masterworks and chide each other for their “errant” philosophies. They create strawpeople intended to say things they probably wouldn’t have said, in the service of illustrating a point or in making fun of them. The Qu’ran Jesus is more like this figure, put to the task of illustrating the error of his followers’ ways. The Jesus of the Foundational Writings does it himself, whenever there’s a Levite, or a Pharisee, or just about anyone who’s too bound up in the Mosaic Law to act as a child of God. Do those people need detailed historical backgrounds, or will they suffice as “the Levite who passed the man beaten on the road” and “the Samaritan, the outcast, who stopped to help the man, and in doing so, was more of a Godly man than any of the people who are supposed to be his priests”?
Mr. Kilpatrick is trying too hard to justify his religion and demonize someone else’s, and it only makes him look foolish. I recommend a course of rereading the writings for their content, and then a strict diet of the classical and canonical apologists and commentaries for all the Abrahamic religions until comprehension of the depth and complexity of our ability to think about God and any ideas he has for Humans dawns. With time, perhaps he can gather the faith of a child or his beginner’s mind.
“This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today. Parents might wish to discuss with their children how views on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and interpersonal relations have changed since this book was written before allowing them to read this classic work.”
Predictably, the response from Wingnut-land on this has been “The Constitution is perfect in every way and all of it still applies to our modern times! The Founders were visionaries who could see a Republic many years in the future! This is like the ‘living document’ bullshit we don’t believe in unless it benefits us!”.
This should sound familiar to anyone with an inkling of experience in how fundamentalist religion works. Here, let me substitute for you.
“The Bible is the perfect and inerrant Word of God! All of it applies to our modern times (excepting the parts we don’t believe in) and the writers were visionaries who could see our most wonderful country that should forever and always be completely only Christians!”
Easy, killer. Clearly, we don’t really believe in the inerrant nature of the Constitution, or we wouldn’t have provided a mechanism by which it can be amended in case something turns out not to work properly, and we wouldn’t have passed the document with ten amendments already attached. A significant amount of the founders didn’t think the original had it right on key issues of the times. It seems pretty logical to infer that peoples of our temporally advanced times might have changed their positions on key issues over time, as well. The original document believed that rule by the men of a patrician class was the most effective way of making sure all the candidates were of the highest quality. In our times, we believe that rule by a person who has the most mob appeal, the biggest amount of funds raised, and who looks the best on television (and occasionally we care about what he actually thinks) is best suited to lead us. Most of us modern peoples believe that the statement “all men are created equal” applies equally to nonwhite men (Civil rights Acts of 1864, and 1964, + Amendment 14) and, at least in some degree, to women (Amendment 19 + several nondiscrimination statutes), neither of which was part of the original document (nonwhite men counted as less than a whole person, and women of any color were nonpeople). Times change, and so do attitudes. It makes sense.
The disclaimer may be overkill for some people who can follow this train of thought, but for younger children who are being taught about the text of the founding documents and the values of modern American society, it makes sense. Most kids can see the disconnection, and it does them a disservice to gloss over it or to say that the Founders intended things they did not. That’s trying too hard to paint a perfect America, instead of one that’s strong enough to recognize their difficulties, their faults, and to overcome and work through them.
------
For part two, I’m blinking at the jaw-dropping, head-desk inducing...something engaged in by Mr. Kilpatrick's insistence that the prevalence of real places and details about Jesus in the Christian Foundational Writings / New Testament versus the more aphoristic nature of the Qu'ran means that Jesus is real and the True Son of God and that Muslims follow a false prophet. First, he starts with the question of “Did the major prophet of Islam actually receive a revelation from God?” but abandons that line of thinking early On. I suspect he realized how easily that argument can be run against him - if all you have are the writings of the followers, then you have to take it as an article of faith that your prophet really did get his stuff from God/YHWH.
Thus, he turns toward the details in the narrative to prove that his account is real. We’re guessing Mr. Kilpatrick has not heard of the historical fiction genre, where the entire point is to plant a narrative that did not happen into a setting that did, complete with details, places, names, and other items to lend the weight of history to the fiction. As did, say, the epics and the sagas and the mythologies of other religions and philosophies. Claiming the One True Way based solely on that you used places and people that existed is laughable. Just for kicks, though, let’s continue on his line of thinking.
To Mr. Kilpatrick, “applying the same tests of critical reason and historical evidence” means to focus solely on the treatment of Jesus, comparing a work in which Jesus is the principal figure and focus to a work where he is not. the Jesus of Islam is there, he says, to refute the claims of the Christians, to claim that he never said he was a God in addition to God, and then to make way for the prophet of Islam. There’s no details of his life, his upbrining, or the things that he did. No supporting cast, no Herod, no miracles. Mr. Kilpatrick believs that a book that’s not about Jesus should nonetheless devote time and energy to his life and upbringing, instead of treating Jesus the same way the Christian Foundational Writings treat John the Baptist - important for certain points of the narrative, but definitively a secondary character, even though he could probably have a whole story of his own work. (I forget about what is contained in the non-canonical literature of Christianity. Perhaps that book has already been written.) This lack of details apparently makes the Islamic version of Jesus unconvincing and the Christian version of Jesus compelling.
Mr. Kilpatrick then turns to the possibility of Jesus-as-historical figure, citing as his evidence the body of work written by Christians claiming that Jesus existed. It’s like saying the presence of the Talmud and the Mishnah means that the Torah are the true words of God. Sure, there’s no Jesus proclaiming the way for Mohammed, but then again, we have to take on faith that there was a John the Baptist proclaiming the way for Jesus.
So, based on his own reasoning, there’s no reason to believe Mr. Kilpartick’s claims that Jesus is more likely to exist in the Christian version than the Muslim version. the appropriate comparison would have been to compare the amount of details in the Writings about Jesus to the amount of details in the Qu’ran about Mohammed. From this venue, we get to a more metatopical complaint about Mr. Kilpatrick’s reasoning, namely that the two accounts are written in entirely different styles to achieve different ends. The Foundational Writings are intended to be a narrative, an account (for you, Theophilous, Lover of God) of a person, his life as a prophet and as an avatar or emenation or part of the divine, through his death and the resurrection that proved his status as a God-being, and then of the following that started from the time of that proof. The Qu’ran follows more in the style of the Analects, the Daodejing, or some of the sutras of the Buddha, a collection of the things the prophet said to his followers and the lessons imparted to them. It doesn’t need historical setting or narrative detail past the amount necessary for the story to make sense.
Actually, the better comparison might be the needling done between the Daoists and the Confucianists as they poke holes in each other’s masterworks and chide each other for their “errant” philosophies. They create strawpeople intended to say things they probably wouldn’t have said, in the service of illustrating a point or in making fun of them. The Qu’ran Jesus is more like this figure, put to the task of illustrating the error of his followers’ ways. The Jesus of the Foundational Writings does it himself, whenever there’s a Levite, or a Pharisee, or just about anyone who’s too bound up in the Mosaic Law to act as a child of God. Do those people need detailed historical backgrounds, or will they suffice as “the Levite who passed the man beaten on the road” and “the Samaritan, the outcast, who stopped to help the man, and in doing so, was more of a Godly man than any of the people who are supposed to be his priests”?
Mr. Kilpatrick is trying too hard to justify his religion and demonize someone else’s, and it only makes him look foolish. I recommend a course of rereading the writings for their content, and then a strict diet of the classical and canonical apologists and commentaries for all the Abrahamic religions until comprehension of the depth and complexity of our ability to think about God and any ideas he has for Humans dawns. With time, perhaps he can gather the faith of a child or his beginner’s mind.
