News Intelligence Analysis
Why Secularists Get the Bible and the Religious Left Wrong
A Response to Barry Seidman's article: "A Critique of the New Religious Left"
By Katherine Yurica
June 1, 2006
Barry Seidman, citing Hector Avalos in his book: Fighting Words: The Origin of Religious Violence, makes the argument that the Abrahamic religious texts can never be reconciled with democracy because when read in a certain light, those texts are violent to the core and ultimately spawn hatred, war and violence. From such scriptures neither love nor democracy can emerge. I disagree—Avalos and Seidman have got it all wrong!
Even if we limit ourselves to the Hebrew literature and omit the New Testament, Seidman’s argument runs into two problems: First, the Abrahamic texts are above all things, literature, and not just ordinary literature. Beginning with Genesis and ending with Malachi, the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament reign as the greatest literature ever written. They are poetry. They are drama. They are history. And a large and important part of the literature is law with judicial edicts. In short, our modern civilization was built upon the precepts of the Abrahamic texts. For example, as I wrote in Bloodguilty Churches, the Health and Safety Code of Leviticus was the forerunner of all modern sanitation laws and the judicial code is the forerunner of our judicial system.
That the Hebrew texts contain violence is a fact, but Seidman and Avalos make the mistake of arguing that because historians describe wars in their books—they are in fact encouraging wars! This is sheer nonsense. It’s the kind of argument made most often by men who are not widely read in literature and history. However, Seidman and Avalos (whom he quotes), are forced to hold readers of the Bible to the most literalistic meaning of every word in the scriptures. Again, this is sheer nonsense because poetry (which makes up the greater part of the Hebrew texts) is not meant to be literal. Metaphors are used by poets to compare unlike things. When the Psalmist writes that the man who delights in the law and meditates in it day and night, “…shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth its fruit in its season; its leaf also shall not wither…” he is not saying that a man who studies the law will become a tree! (Psalm 1)
In fact Seidman calls the act of reading with discernment, “cherry-picking the words of God.” In this way he equates God as well as the men who read the biblical literature as fools.
Turning to the New Testament and citing John 2:14-17, Avalos argues that when Jesus whipped the moneychangers out of the temple, his act of violence “came to influence some of the violence linked to sacred places,” and Seidman says Avalos meant “the Crusades among other historical Christian atrocities.” I find it extremely difficult to take the money-changers incident as the source or even the inspiration for future historical Christian atrocities. It just seems like a huge stretch with no logical basis.
Again, Seidman quotes Jesus in Luke 14:26-27 and asserts that Jesus inspired “recruiting suicide terrorists” with these words:
“If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” (KJV)
Seidman and Avalos hold the reader once again to the literal meaning, when most intelligent readers of the literature impute a comparative metaphorical sense to the words. They do so because the words contradict other passages spoken by Jesus. See for example Matthew 10:37 where Matthew records Jesus’ words on the same topic differently: Jesus asks his followers to love him more than they love members of their own family.
In a court of law, if one of two witnesses testified that a deceased man said, “Hate your family,” and the other witness testified he said, “Love me more than your family,” the testimony would be inconclusive. The attorneys would have to gather more evidence, perhaps seek testimony on how the deceased lived and what he taught. It appears Seidman and Avalos want others to call Jesus violent on the sketchiest of evidence—they do so, however, out of prejudice—not understanding. At the very least, Seidman and Avalos ought to concede that the evidence against Jesus is inconclusive.
Seidman writes, “Avalos understands Christian ‘love’ this way:” (At this point Avalos’ understanding of anything is sorely in question!)
“Love was…primarily meant for other Christians.”
What an assumption to leap to! It is contradicted by the words of Jesus. Jesus said all of the law can be said in this one sentence: “Love the Lord our God with all our hearts, mind, and soul and our neighbor as ourselves.” (Matthew 19:19) But he did not stop with loving our neighbors. He went on to say:
“Love your enemies, do good to them who hate you, bless them that curse you, and pray for them who despitefully use you…and as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them. For if ye love them who love you, what thanks have ye? …But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again…” (Matthew 5:44; Luke 6:27-35). KJV
As I said in an interview with Terri Murray, the instruction to love our neighbor as ourselves is the foundation of democracy. Loving one’s neighbor as ourselves necessarily implies the concept of “equality.” And Jesus also made it clear that one’s neighbor is the very person the church leaders of his day—the hypocrites despised: one’s neighbor is a Samaritan, a prostitute, a homosexual, a tax collector. All of these were despised in Jesus’ day, but Jesus loved them as Himself and bid his followers to do the same! That is the heart and soul of democracy. If I have the right to vote, my neighbor should have that right. If I have a right to get married, then my neighbor must have that right. If I have the right to speak in the public forum, then my neighbor must also have that right. That’s Christianity and that’s democracy!
Seidman and Avalos want readers to play “Bible Roulette.” I wrote about this in my essay “The Ship of State is Sinking, Who is on the Lord’s Side?” Here’s the quote:
When I was a youngster in a Pentecostal church, we all wanted to “hear from God” on a daily basis. The only way we could be sure we were “hearing from God” was to read the Bible. But that’s a pretty big book! So we played what came to be known as Bible Roulette. We would take our Bibles, close our eyes and turn the book every which way, open it at random and point at something on a page—then open our eyes to see what God was telling us. This worked pretty well until one day one kid read his word from God for the day: “And Judas went out and hung himself.” We all decided that was not an inspiring word from God so we told him to do it again. This time, he went through the process with great intensity. When he opened his eyes, his finger was pointing to these words, “Go and do thou likewise!” That’s how we learned that not every word in the Bible has equal gravity.
I suggest that Seidman and Avalos take this to heart. Particularly because Seidman wrote the following:
"But members of both the religious right and left subscribe to the same ethics of hegemony and domination as did their ancestors who wrote their unscientific understanding of ethics on papyrus thousands of years ago."
It is patently untrue that the religious right and left share the same ethics and as for the unscientific quality of the Hebrew scriptures, I refer my readers to my discussion of the scientific method found in Deuteronomy that coincides with Karl Popper's modern day definition. The Christian Left consciously seeks to eliminate errors. The Christian Right tries to save their theories from refutation at any cost. There is a vast gulf between the two.
Barry Seidman concludes his essay by saying, “Liberal religionists have not been able to mature past the need for a ‘parent figure’ lest they find themselves alone in the universe.” M. Scott Peck wrote in his book, The People of the Lie, an answer that is psychologically sound:
“All adults who are mentally healthy submit themselves one way or another to something higher than themselves, be it God or truth or love or some other ideal…In summary, to a greater or lesser degree, all mentally healthy individuals submit themselves to the demands of their own conscience.” (At page 78)
Katherine Yurica is a news intelligence analyst. She was educated at East Los Angeles College, the University of Southern California and the USC school of law. She worked as a consultant for Los Angeles County and as a news correspondent for Christianity Today plus as a freelance investigative reporter. She is the author of three books. She is also the publisher of the Yurica Report.
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