The anti-Christian left cares nothing about truth, or freedom of dialogue, or thought. It cares only that you agree and follow. Today’s example. This one hits home with me, as my daughter faced similar anti-Christian cowardly bigotry in her community college.

That link takes you to an article about a 15-year-old high school student who was “threatened with suspension and called ignorant by the superintendent of the Shawano School District,” according to the student’s attorney. Basically, the student was invited to write an editorial taking the “con” side of a pro/con piece about allowing homosexual partners to adopt. As a result of the editorial, he was summoned to the superintendent’s office and apparently berated for “hours,” with the super ultimately threatening suspension and calling the student “one of the most ignorant kids.” Read through the article for a more detailed account of the events. This struck me as a bit of an overreaction, since the paper came up with the topic and invited the submission. However, the article links to the editorial itself (here), and it is remarkably disturbing. Besides the fact that it appeals exclusively to religious fundamentalism and misrepresentations of the science and sociology of homosexuality, it states the following:

In a Christian society, allowing homosexual couples to adopt is an abomination. Leviticus 18:22 clearly states “You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination.” God made man and woman with the intention of them getting married to each other and having children. As Christians, same-sex partnership is against many Christian beliefs so why would it be okay for them to adopt children? Through Moses, God says in Leviticus 20:13 “If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.” God also says homosexuality is a perversion not a life choice. In today’s world, many Christian people generally base their values and beliefs on the Bible, and using that guideline, homosexuality is wrong, which leads us to the conclusion that homosexuals adopting is wrong because a child should not be raised in a sinful environment.

I’m going to ignore the fallacy and the ignorance of the majority of this paragraph and focus on the bolded portion. This paragraph is about how Christian base their ideas about proper society on the Bible, and in it this student quotes a scripture that advocates for the execution of homosexuals! He didn’t have to include the entire verse (there’s a sentence break), but he did. For some reason, he thought that it was necessary to specify that God himself, through Moses, calls for the execution of homosexuals. This is just horrific, and the superintendent’s reaction is much more understandable to me now.

The article fails to highlight this portion of the editorial, but I wonder how James White would feel if his daughter came home from her community college and said their paper ran an editorial in which a Muslim student wrote that a Muslim society follows the Quran, quoting a verse they understood to mean infidels should be executed. Would he say anyone who got upset “cares nothing about truth, or freedom of dialogue, or thought,” or would he be incensed? Would he call it “anti-Muslim cowardly bigotry” for the administration to threaten suspension, or would he demand it? I think the answers to these questions are obvious, and I think the student’s appeal to a biblical text legislating the execution of homosexuals is far more bigoted than the response of the superintendent. White has absolutely no room to complain.

Some initial thoughts:

- The edges of the pages are remarkably crisp for two thousand year-old leather
- The pages and the plates were together when the holes were punched
- The plate under page I has the star iconography found on several demonstrably forged plates, and the leather is clearly cut to fit that plate.
- Page II seems to have two layers of material underneath it. This plate is likely the middle layer, given the correspondance with the holes and the menorah image. I don’t know what kind of chemical interactions create that kind of image. Notice the rather intentional border on the right side of the plate
- Page III seems to me to be a lead plate, not a leather page. The script is the same as on the plate that underlies the other page, although it appears engraved rather than cast. The hole on the left is punched right through the text, as it is on the other plate, undermining the notion that the text itself was of any actual value to whoever punched the holes. The erratic arrangement of the text and iconography appears intentional, which is indicative in my mind of a naive attempt at archaizing.
- The crude iconography is the same as on many of the demonstrably forged plates

As part of the Final Exam in World Religions I have all the students answer two short essay questions at the very end. 1. What did you enjoy most about the class? 2. What lesson did you learn that made, or will make, the greatest impact on your life?

One of my student wrote in answer to the second question:

Going to visit the Mormons taught me that there are many counterfeits out there to beware of and they all sound very good to try and draw you in or change your own philosophy. Trust in your faith and don’t be trusting of that in the world that has been derived from man alone.

Please note that all my students are required to visit two religions outside their comfort zone, and it is purely up to them where they go. They write a five-page paper on the experiences, and then get up in class and briefly discuss their findings. It is one aspect of the class that the students repeatedly tell me how much they appreciate and enjoy.

The student’s comments above are priceless. Why? Because she made the visit to the local Mormon meeting house on her own, long before we ever discussed Mormonism as a religion in class. In her words the Mormon church is (1) a counterfeit, and (2) a worldly religion derived from man alone. I couldn’t agree more.

The neat thing about teaching World Religions is not the pay, the long hours of preparation and study, but the lives that are changed for the better when I read comments like those above. They “get it” in a postmodern world of relativism, narcissism, and nihilism, all of which Mormonism espouses at different levels of thought. And because they “get it,” they won’t end up in a cult like Mormonism. Thank God for that!!

Btw, the jury came back with a unanimous decision that Mormonism was not an accurate representation of Christianity, and that after I placed the only Mormon in the class on the side attempting to prove that it was. Unfortunately, after the trial was over, the Mormon quit coming to class (not that she had a stellar attendance record anyway), and she’ll end up failing, sorry to say.

Several people in the field commented that this was entirely and completely inappropriate. I  shared in the comments section some responses from the teacher and a year later shared another post related to his bigotry.

It  has now come to my attention that Paul Derengowski recently resigned from his position at Tarrant County Community College as a direct result of his bigoted approach to teaching. Apparently two Muslim students who had had enough (one of whom commented on my blog) repeatedly interrupted his class during a lecture and one made threatening remarks that made Paul and several students quite uncomfortable. Both students left the class a couple minutes early. Paul filed a report with campus police, and several students also filed grievances. In the end, however, the students don’t appear to have suffered any disciplinary actions. One of them sent an email around linking to a bunch of Paul’s comments about Islam, Mormonism, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses elsewhere on the internet, and the admin didn’t appreciate what they found there. You will find many different versions of the story from many different angles if you google the keywords of the story (often describing Paul as a victim of “Sharia Law”). A news report is here. Another report is here. Paul has posted a long letter on his own blog explaining his side of the story and his resignation. Read through it if you have the stomach, but note he suggests in one place that all mosques should be under 24-hour government surveillance and all Muslims should be profiled and immediately deported or executed for any crimes whatsoever, including spitting on the sidewalk (what if they were born in the US?). This is the tone that accompanies Paul wherever he goes. It simply defies logic that he does not consider himself bigoted in the least (although he defines a bigot only as someone who has dogmatically made up their mind without looking at the data).

Now, as far as I’m concerned, the actions of the students were completely and totally inappropriate, and the one who made the threat, if it did happen, should have been disciplined. There’s simply no call or excuse for continued interruptions or threats toward teachers or students. I disapprove of those actions unilaterally. They should have gone to an administrator. Having said that, Paul says they should have come to him with Quran in hand to prove to him he’s wrong. That illustrates how useless it would be to try to approach him directly about his teaching style or to at all reason with him. An outburst of some kind from students was inevitable. It appears the school did not take the action Paul wanted because it was made aware of Paul’s phenomenally bigoted approach to teaching about religions. They cancelled a class he was going to teach while they were investigating the matter and he felt they didn’t want him around anymore, so he resigned. He’s still angry and feels having his syllabus and approach left alone for three years indicates his syllabus and approach were perfectly legitimate, but that’s obviously because they just didn’t vet him very well or look at his syllabus. That’s the school’s fault, although they’ll probably shuffle the blame around.

I leave you with Paul’s parting words to the school administration:

To the TCC administration—Barbara Coan, Josue Munoz, and Rusty Fox—who mishandled this case terribly, what a disappointment you have been.  You all were given the opportunity to serve God, but chose to serve mammon instead.  And by choosing to protect your bellies, you jeopardized, and will continue to jeopardize, every other student and employee associated with TCC.  In fact, the precedent you set by failing to act appropriately in quashing this terroristic act of jihad by these two Muslim students may cost someone his/her life someday.  God forbid if that happens.  Nevertheless, if it does, you won’t have to look far to see the bloodletting, because it will already be on your hands.  But, then again, maybe it will be your head they will want next, so it won’t matter then, just like it doesn’t matter to you now.  You will have your reward and so will they.

I find very little theology—in the formal sense of this word—in Hebrew Bible. Such a claim requires explanation. Theologies are first and foremost language games, in the same sense that philosophies are language games. This is how Wittgenstein approached it. He recognized that philosophies set up meanings for words in manners that are not natural to ordinary language usages. “Asked whether philosophers have hitherto spoken nonsense, you could reply: no, they have only failed to notice that they are using a word in quite different senses.” The Tanakh, with few exceptions, is fundamentally devoid of such “different senses,” and hence we can assert that there is no theology that is biblical. Put differently, there are only biblical theologies when a religious community or scholar insists upon their fabrication. Of course, the Bible is replete with beliefs and ideologies about God, politics, social order, ritual, etc., but these beliefs and ideologies are not conveyed in language games. The lack of systematic theology in Tanakh—in this sense of a language game—has been recognized by most, but this has not stopped scholars from imposing constructed theologies upon Tanakh. Scholarly attempts to describe such a theology are essentially irrelevant to the furtherance of our understanding of Israelite ideas. Ideologically speaking, it makes little sense to speak of a theology of the canon; and the canon’s redactors were much more focused on the political expediencies of their documents than on God-related ideology.

I’ve long contended that Biblical Theology attempts to impose a univocal framework on the biblical text without first bothering to consider whether or not it’s merited. I don’t think it is. Such an approach levels the diachronic and synchronic disparities in the text to about the time of the corpus’ completion in the Greco-Roman period, effectively eradicating any meaning found in the text before then and elevating the authority of editing and redacting over that of composition. It also imposes modern theological lenses on it in such a way that interpreting the text becomes an exercise in creative exegesis.

Thanks to certain critics of this page, we would like to highlight a correction to a small portion of text found within a transcription of the Oxford (OMCS) metallurgical report. Whilst typing from the original copy (the scanned original is also posted on this site ) a sentence was unintentionally omitted, which has since been corrected. Please note that this has no bearing on the final conclusions of the report.

First, that error was first pointed out about six months ago. It shouldn’t have taken six months for Elkington to acknowledge the error and correct it. Second, it strains credulity to think that the one portion of the report that directly conflicted with Elkington’s broad claims would be conveniently, and accidentally, omitted, especially in light of his repeated appeal to the report’s corroboration of those claims. I discussed the possibility of haplography in the post linked to above (note my assumption was shown to be correct), but if you consider Elkington’s reticence for the last six months and the claim he made on his recent appearance on Coast to Coast that he simply doesn’t have the skills to forge a different report (which was never the charge), it seems highly unlikely this was an accident.

For discussion of the video shot months ago and recently added to Elkington’s Facebook page, see Steve Caruso’s The Aramaic Blog.

Prototype theory is a mode of graded categorization in cognitive science, where some members of a category are more central than others. For example, when asked to give an example of the concept furniture, chair is more frequently cited than, say, stool. Prototype theory also plays a central role in linguistics, as part of the mapping from phonological structure to semantics.

As formulated in the 1970s by Eleanor Rosch and others, prototype theory was a radical departure from traditional necessary and sufficient conditions as in Aristotelian logic, which led to set-theoretic approaches of extensional or intensional semantics. Thus instead of a definition based model – e.g. a bird may be defined as elements with the features [+feathers], [+beak] and [+ability to fly], prototype theory would consider a category like bird as consisting of different elements which have unequal status – e.g. a robin is more prototypical of a bird than, say a penguin. This leads to a graded notion of categories, which is a central notion in many models of cognitive science and cognitive semantics.

This theory is intriguing to me because it makes better sense of the existence of quite fuzzy boundaries in most definitions of ancient religious categories. It also, in my mind, seems to accord better with the way modern religionists conceptualize of theological boundaries, especially in terms of monotheism (the subject of my thesis). For instance, most Christians and Jews these days acknowledge the existence of multiple divine beings in the worldviews of ancient (and modern) Judaism and Christianity. Their view of those worldviews as thoroughly monotheistic is defended by many on the grounds that no other divine beings are divine in the same way, or to the same degree, that God is divine. In such a conceptualization of divinity, Yhwh functions as a divine prototype, and other divine beings are divine (or “gods”) only insofar as they approximate God’s prototypical divine nature. There are other ways to define monotheism today, of course, but this is not an uncommon one. Thoughts?

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 76,000 times in 2011. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 3 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.