Tim Kimberley over at the Parchment and Pen blog, is featuring a series based on the top ten Biblical discoveries in archaeology.
As promised, I intend to link to them from here, and so here is the third offering, at number eight on the list:
Top Ten Biblical Discoveries in Archaeology – #8 Caiaphas Ossuary
I disovered the below article courtesy of Francis Sedgemore who introduces us to the piece thusly:
Forget the enlightenment and rationality, what turns on the captains of high-tech industry are not wealth, political power and cultural hegemony, but rather age-old myths such as the Fountain of Youth, and the quasi-religious concept of ‘human transcendence’.
And concludes:
Bestselling futurologist Ray Kurzweil believes that by the 2030s, the world’s smartest, most resourceful people – aka the new Master Race – will achieve virtual immortality by “backing up their brains”. Immortality, eh? Kurzweil has obviously never had a hard drive or flash disk fail on him. In the real world there is no shortage of bad sectors.
The selfish, narcissistic über-humans of Silicon Valley can shove their technological dystopia where the sun never shines. This example of biological wetware is entirely comfortable with his own mortality.
If this is not enough to pique your interest, then I’m not entirely sure what would. As for me, I found the article morbidly fascinating with a strong sideline in positively disturbing….
ON a Tuesday evening this spring, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, became part man and part machine. About 40 people, all gathered here at a NASA campus for a nine-day, $15,000 course at Singularity University, saw it happen.
While the flesh-and-blood version of Mr. Brin sat miles away at a computer capable of remotely steering a robot, the gizmo rolling around here consisted of a printer-size base with wheels attached to a boxy, head-height screen glowing with an image of Mr. Brin’s face. The BrinBot obeyed its human commander and sputtered around from group to group, talking to attendees about Google and other topics via a videoconferencing system.
The BrinBot was hardly something out of “Star Trek.” It had a rudimentary, no-frills design and was a hodgepodge of loosely integrated technologies. Yet it also smacked of a future that the Singularity University founders hold dear and often discuss with a techno-utopian bravado: the arrival of the Singularity — a time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state.
At that point, the Singularity holds, human beings and machines will so effortlessly and elegantly merge that poor health, the ravages of old age and even death itself will all be things of the past.
Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity. They believe that technology may be the only way to solve the world’s ills, while also allowing people to seize control of the evolutionary process. For those who haven’t noticed, the Valley’s most-celebrated company — Google — works daily on building a giant brain that harnesses the thinking power of humans in order to surpass the thinking power of humans.
Larry Page, Google’s other co-founder, helped set up Singularity University in 2008, and the company has supported it with more than $250,000 in donations. Some of Google’s earliest employees are, thanks to personal donations of $100,000 each, among the university’s “founding circle.” (Mr. Page did not respond to interview requests.)
The university represents the more concrete side of the Singularity, and focuses on introducing entrepreneurs to promising technologies. Hundreds of students worldwide apply to snare one of 80 available spots in a separate 10-week “graduate” course that costs $25,000. Chief executives, inventors, doctors and investors jockey for admission to the more intimate, nine-day courses called executive programs.
Both courses include face time with leading thinkers in the areas of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, energy, biotech, robotics and computing.
On a more millennialist and provocative note, the Singularity also offers a modern-day, quasi-religious answer to the Fountain of Youth by affirming the notion that, yes indeed, humans — or at least something derived from them — can have it all.
“We will transcend all of the limitations of our biology,” says Raymond Kurzweil, the inventor and businessman who is the Singularity’s most ubiquitous spokesman and boasts that he intends to live for hundreds of years and resurrect the dead, including his own father. “That is what it means to be human — to extend who we are.”
But, of course, one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia.
Cross-post by Joseph Weissman
[Quick Note: For those who don't know, Joseph is a Messianic Jew]
As many readers will appreciate, I have long been concerned for the welfare of my fellow believers in Israel and indeed around the world. I am always saddened to read stories of violent anti-missionaries persecuting Jesus’ followers and causing them personal harm.
However, I am even more saddened when these activists try to justify their violence in the name of God. I do not think that God wants one sect to aggressively persecute another in order to establish a theological truth. Not by power, nor by might, but by my Spirit says the Lord (Zech 4:6).
And so when reading the New Testament, I have gained great comfort from reading the words of the great rabbi Gamaliel to the Sanhedrin as recorded in Acts 5.
Gamaliel I is one of the greatest teachers within Judaism, gaining the title of rabban to denote the depths of his wisdom and Torah study. Gamaliel’s teachings are celebrated in the Talmud and acknowledged in modern-day yeshivas across the world. The Mishnah starkly states that piety and purity died with Gamaliel. Yet Gamaliel is also greatly celebrated within the Christian world for his advice to the Sanhedrin.
To set the scene, the Sadduccean members of the Sanhedrin are particularly upset with Peter and John, who insist on blabbing to all of Jerusalem that the crucified Jesus is also the salvation of the world. According to the Sadducean high priest and his associate, Peter and John are determined to call the Sanhedrin guilty of Jesus’ blood.
Peter retorts assertively, declaring the resurrected Jesus as Israel’s prince and saving redeemer, and the tension is ratcheted up further. With the Sadduccean-controlled Sanhedrin determined to make Peter and John suffer and potentially be put to death, the Pharisee named Gamaliel steps in, advising:
”Men of Israel, consider carefully what you intend to do to these men. Some time ago Theudas appeared, claiming to be somebody, and about four hundred men rallied to him. He was killed, all his followers were dispersed, and it all came to nothing. After him, Judas the Galilean appeared in the days of the census and led a band of people in revolt. He too was killed, and all his followers were scattered. Therefore, in the present case I advise you: Leave these men alone! Let them go! For if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail.But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God.”
At first glance, one might say that Gamaliel was using the apostles as a pawn in his contentions with the Sadducees. Others would say that Gamaliel was anxious to avoid any kind of messianic rumblings, be they expressed as a positive belief for a particular claimant or as a negative belief against a messianic claimant – in this case Jesus.
Gamaliel was perhaps a more sensitive teacher and more politically astute than other members of the Sanhedrin, and would see these messianic uprisings as a distraction from Torah study.
Still others argue that Gamaliel was a secret believer in Jesus who, although belonging to the Sanhedrin, did not agree with its rulings on Jesus. This will no doubt come as a surprise to many Jews. Yet within the New Testament, there is evidence of Sanhedrin members taking a radically different position on Jesus to the majority of ruling clerics.
Consider Joseph of Arimathea – a prominent member of the Sanhedrin who disagreed with their decision to condemn Jesus, and counted himself as a disciple of Jesus. Perhaps Gamaliel too was in a similar situation, remaining within the Sanhedrin so as to use his position of influence to assist fellow believers.
Of course, there are further options than believing in Jesus as Messiah and wishing Jesus and his followers to come to harm. There is a good case that Gamaliel simply abhorred violence. This is perhaps the most logical position to take on Gamaliel.
Even so, the idea of Gamaliel as a secret believer is hugely popular within Catholicism, a view initially advanced by St. Photius of Constantinople.
Leaving aside what Gamaliel may or may not have actually believed, there is a simple wisdom in Gamaliel’s words here – if this movement is the same as the other failed messianic movements of his time, it should come to nothing. Whatever you think of the Jesus movement, it has indeed stood the test of time. To this day, many people believe after Jesus’ death that he is the Messiah and that he is risen from the dead.
And whichever way you look at it, Gamaliel had a huge influence on the early church, particularly on St. Paul. In Acts 22 when Paul is in Jerusalem accused of stirring up trouble by the crowds and mistaken by the Roman army for an Egyptian terrorist leader, this is his opening gambit:
I am a Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia, but brought up in this city. Under Gamaliel I was thoroughly trained in the law of our fathers and was just as zealous for God as any of you are today.
Gamaliel was a teacher from the House of Hillel and was a direct descendant from Hillel. Paul trained under Gamaliel learning the Torah. Gamaliel’s teachings would have so saturated Paul’s life that – even years after Paul’s conversion to Christ - Paul was able to declare before the Sanhedrin in Acts 23:
“My brothers, I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee. I stand on trial because of my hope in the resurrection of the dead.”
Paul has initially encountered the reality of resurrection, not on the road to Damascus in an encounter with the risen Christ when he was a grown man, but under the feet of Gamaliel in Jerusalem, having learned about the future resurrection of the dead as a young lad.
Paul here rests on the authority of Gamaliel, leading to Pharisees standing up and declaring there was nothing wrong with Paul in Acts 23:9.
Paul’s words inevitably lead to a conflict between the ruling Sanhedrin comprised of Pharisees and the Sadducees: a coalition government far more strained than anything the British Parliament has countenanced.
Imagine a Labour MP being attacked by Conservatives and Lib Dems over the 2010 budget, only for backbench Lib Dem MPs to stand up and side with the Labour MP as good socialists. Paul here is the Labour MP, appealing to the grassroot beliefs of the Pharisees, lamenting their compromises with the Sadducees.
Just as Gamaliel directly saved Peter and John from certain death before the Sanhedrin in Acts 5, his teachings have indirectly saved Paul from an almost identical predicament in Acts 23.
So what then may we learn from Gamaliel’s interaction with the early church?
Firstly, that in one way or another, Gamaliel’s words came to be a physical protection for the apostles. Christians should remember this and be wary of teaching that Judaism is essentially anti-Christian, or that rabbis are uniformly represented by anti-missionary thugs: they are clearly not.
Theologically, Christian clerics and laymen should reconsider any belief that the leading Jews of first century Israel were uniformly antagonistic towards the Jesus movement. Gamaliel is the clearest proof against this, as is Joseph of Aramathea and indeed many other Pharisees within the Sanhedrin – some of whom warned Jesus that Herod was out to kill him.
Meanwhile, haredi clerics may similarly allow Gamaliel’s wisdom to hit home. If the Jesus movement were based on falsehoods, it should disappear in its own time. Of course, the Jesus movement has expanded globally, and has sadly allowed itself to be corrupted by power and empire, to the point of being distorted beyond all recognition. Still, the essence of the belief that Jesus is the Messiah has been preserved for many centuries.
Yet for those arguing that Jesus was not the Messiah, violence and hysteria against his followers will not contribute anything constructive anyway. Instead, we should all hope for a world of peace and love, not agitation and fear against neighbouring communities.
Previous posts; here, here, here, here and here.
On a quick aside, and quite coincidentally, Dr Jim West today comments on the DVD collection based on this marvelous book, in these terms:
But I just can’t commend Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years highly enough. The 5th episode especially is brilliant as MacCulloch discusses the ‘prosperity gospel’ with a Korean theologian. Brilliant. Really, if you have $70 laying around or a kind relative or a birthday near or for any reason whatever, get it.
Agreed!
Another snippet from Diarmaid MacCulloch’s book: A History of Christianity – The First Three Thousand Years.
Pages: 305-306
…..Only halfway through the work, at the end of the fourteen books, does Augustine explicitly begin to take up the theme of the two cities: ‘the earthly city glories in itself, the Heavenly City glories in the Lord’. All the institutions which we know form part of the struggle between these two cities, a struggle which runs through all world history. If this is so, the idea of a Christian empire such as Eusebius of Caesarea had envisaged can never be a perfect reality on earth. No structure in this world, not even the Church itself, can without qualification be identified as the City of God, as biblical history itself demonstrated from the time of the first murder: ‘Cain founded a city, whereas Abel, as a pilgrim, did not found one. For the City of the saints is up above, although it produces citizens here below, and in their persons the City is on pilgrimage until the time of its kingdom comes.’ Though this remains his principle, Augustine is occasionally incautious in expression, and does indeed identify the visible Church in the world as the Heavenly City. Ironically, much of the influence of The City of God over the next thousand years came from the eagerness of medieval churchmen to expand on this identification in their efforts to make the Church supreme on earth, equating the earthly city with opponents of ecclesiastical power like some of the Holy Roman Emperors.
Personally, I love the legend of King Arthur and yesterday came across this article in the Telegraph.
Researchers exploring the legend of Britain’s most famous Knight believe his stronghold of Camelot was built on the site of a recently discovered Roman amphitheatre in Chester.
Legend has it that his Knights would gather before battle at a round table where they would receive instructions from their King.
But rather than it being a piece of furniture, historians believe it would have been a vast wood and stone structure which would have allowed more than 1,000 of his followers to gather.
Historians believe regional noblemen would have sat in the front row of a circular meeting place, with lower ranked subjects on stone benches grouped around the outside.
I have to blog this today, as courtesy of the MailOnline, the story now comes complete with a cool artist’s impression:
His is among the most enduring legends in our island’s history.
King Arthur, the gallant warrior who gathered his knights around the Round Table at Camelot and rallied Christian Britons against the invading pagan Saxons, has always been an enigma.
But now historians believe they have uncovered the precise location of Arthur’s stronghold, finally solving the riddle of whether the Round Table really existed.
And far from pinpointing a piece of furniture, they claim the ‘table’ was in fact the circular space inside a former Roman amphitheatre.
The experts believe that Camelot could in fact have been Chester Amphitheatre, a huge stone-and-wood structure capable of holding up to 10,000 people.
They say that Arthur would have reinforced the building’s 40ft walls to create an imposing and well fortified base.
The king’s regional noblemen would have sat in the central arena’s front row, with lower-ranked subjects in the outer stone benches.
Arthur has been the subject of much historical debate, but many scholars believe him to have been a 5th or 6th Century leader.
The legend links him to 12 major battles fought over 40 years from the Scottish Borders to the West Country. One of the principal victories was said to have been at Chester.
Source book: Why go to church? The drama of the Eucharist by Timothy Radcliffe – Introduction, page 1:
One Sunday a mother shook her son awake, telling him it was time to go to church. No effect. Ten minutes later she was back: ‘Get out of bed immediately and go to church.’ ‘Mother, i don’t want to. It’s so boring! Why should I bother?’ ‘For two reasons: You know you must go to church on Sunday, and secondly, you are the bishop of the diocese’.
Just a bit of fun for bloggers:
And the results for this blog:
The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.
They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.
Yeah right!
I can’t even think of anything appropriate to say….
Kabul 1970:
Kabul 2010:
Hat-tip: Biblicus Semitae
Our weekly dose of psychobabble.
It seems to me rather intuitive that folk should turn to spirituality in times of increased stress, and now we have some research by Ian McGregor (Associate Professor in York’s Department of Psychology, Faculty of Health), which appears to confirm this assumption.
Now, much has been made of this research, especially by atheists, however, regular readers will know that I have a particular weakness and penchant for such studies, so here is the write-up from Science Daily:
Anxiety and uncertainty can cause us to become more idealistic and more radical in our religious beliefs, according to new findings by York University researchers, published in this month’s issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
In a series of studies, more than 600 participants were placed in anxiety-provoking or neutral situations and then asked to describe their personal goals and rate their degree of conviction for their religious ideals. This included asking participants whether they would give their lives for their faith or support a war in its defence.
Across all studies, anxious conditions caused participants to become more eagerly engaged in their ideals and extreme in their religious convictions. In one study, mulling over a personal dilemma caused a general surge toward more idealistic personal goals. In another, struggling with a confusing mathematical passage caused a spike in radical religious extremes. In yet another, reflecting on relationship uncertainties caused the same religious zeal reaction.
Researchers found that religious zeal reactions were most pronounced among participants with bold personalities (defined as having high self-esteem and being action-oriented, eager and tenacious), who were already vulnerable to anxiety, and felt most hopeless about their daily goals in life.
A basic motivational process called Reactive Approach Motivation (RAM) is responsible, according to lead researcher Ian McGregor, Associate Professor in York’s Department of Psychology, Faculty of Health. “Approach motivation is a tenacious state in which people become ‘locked and loaded’ on whatever goal or ideal they are promoting. They feel powerful, and thoughts and feelings related to other issues recede,” he says.
Tom Rees of Epiphenom has covered this one also and concludes:
Now, this research is pretty preliminary. Other research has found that anxiety and uncertainly increases belief in a controlling God – but this study found no such effect. Of course, it’s possible that both effects (handing over control to a powerful God, or displacing the frustrated goal with an achievable, nontangible one) could both occur in different in people with personalities and in different situations. Then too, there is another theory (Terror Management), which claims that people cling to their ‘in-group’ cultural traditions when threatened.
But this research is encouraging because, although we’ve long known intuitively that people turn to religion when they feel stressed and unhappy. The question is how and why. Now, at least, we have three good theories about what is going on here. Only further research is going to tease them apart!
As I travelled to cathedral this morn, I was fresh off the back of watching BBC News24 (all very spiritual I know), in which they were bleating on about Raoul Moat.
I was particularly struck by the fact that their main preoccupation seemed to focus upon the police activities during the period of the six hour stand-off, with a special glee over the use of the taser gun.
I was heartily sickened to hear them majoring on the enquiries (Independent Police Complaints Commission) that will now be conducted, analysing police behaviour in relation to this incident.
Let’s just remember for a second that this chap had already murdered one, shot another, and then perpetrated a vicious attack on a lone policeman.
Moat was avowedly targeting the police and yet they attempted to negotiate with him for some SIX hours, gun in hand, and all the media want to do is focus on the police use of a taser gun.
Anyway, afore I get too hot under the collar, I was relieved to see Neil D over at Harry’s Place, pick up on this exact point:
The UK media have abruptly turned tack, after following the Raoul Moat saga as entertainment for the past few days. The Guardian ran a live blog. Nice. The BBC ran countless interviews with psychologists giving pisspoor insight into the mind of Raoul Moat, and spent lots of time trying to provoke Rothbury residents to emote on the phone. Thankfully, they didn’t in general.
Now Moat is dead, attention has shifted to how the blame can be put on the Police. Let’s be clear, Moat is dead. No other member of the public was harmed. No Policeman died in the operation. This is a successful outcome, with the regrettable loss of Moat’s life. Moat, it should be remembered, was the one who had killed a man, and injured others. He was holding a gun to his own head, and continued to be a threat to others. The Police spent hours trying to defuse the situation.
At the end, the Police used tasers, before Moat took his own life. We do not know what happened. Perhaps Moat was on the verge of taking his life and the Police fired the tasers in a desperate last chance to avoid Moat’s death? We don’t know though yet, and such speculation is just that ill-informed speculation. Not that that is stopping the media from making it clear something fishy has happened. The Sunday Mirror says it was “Death by Taser“, The Guardian tells us that the focus of the Raoul Moat investigation turns on police. The Guardian article while focusing on the Police, does remind us of another area that needs looking at:
Bishop Nick Baines has commented:
……I was in the BBC Radio 4 studio yesterday for the Today programme. We (Ben Summerskill and I) were in the studio with Professor David Wilson, the criminologist. He was talking about the Raoul Moat saga and rejected the sympathy that some people were expressing because of Moat’s cry that he didn’t have a dad. Professor Wilson said that Moat’s behaviour was typical of a ‘paranoid narcissist’ (I wrote it down) who saw everything in terms of power and control. Violent to his girlfriend and child, he was now trying to push the police to kill him in order to compound his own denial of responsibility and push the guilt onto other people. Sounded clear enough to me.
Do go on and read Nick’s whole blog post, as he rather intriguingly weaves this into a reflection on the church and current Synod:
…..Then he used a phrase which I thought might get picked up in the ensuing conversation about the Church of England: ‘future foreshortening’. I assume this is a term used in forensic psychology or criminology. It describes someone like Moat blaming other people for taking away the future, making death inevitable, ending the possibility of a new/different future.
Important note: I am NOT equating church responses with paranoid narcissistic criminological psychology – just using the language as a jumping off point!
