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Love Thy Neighbor
The Evolution of In-Group Morality
- John Hartung
Men never do evil so completely and
cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Blaise Pascal, Pensees, 1670
Abstract:
The world's major religions espouse a moral code that includes
injunctions against murder, theft, and lying or so conventional 19th- and
20th-century Western wisdom would have it.
Evidence put forth here argues that this convention is a conceit which
does not apply to the West's own religious foundations. In particular, rules against murder, theft,
and lying codified by the Ten Commandments were intended to apply only within a
cooperating group for the purpose of enabling that group to compete
successfully against other groups. In
addition, this in-group morality has functioned, both historically and by
express intent, to create adverse circumstances between groups by actively
promoting murder, theft, and lying as tools of competition. Contemporary efforts to present Judeo-Christian
in-group morality as universal morality defy the plain meaning of the texts
upon which Judaism and Christianity are based.
Accordingly, that effort is ultimately hopeless.
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Author's note:
I thank Noam Chomsky for nine years of insightful correspondence about
issues raised in this essay, Richard Alexander, Napoleon Chagnon, Lalla
Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, William Irons, Kevin MacDonald, Frank Miele, Robert
Trivers, William Zimmerman, and Matt Ridley for steadfast encouragement and
sage advice. Any errors of fact or
interpretation are mine, and all criticisms, accusations, and assignations of
bad karma that might be inspired by this work should be directed exclusively at
me.
A Look in the Mirror
Southern
Baptists counted the number of people expected to go to hell from Alabama a
whopping 46.1% or 1.86 million souls.
The New York Times (1993)
explained how: "The study took each county's population and subtracted
from it the membership of all churches.
After that, Baptist researchers used a secret formula to estimate how
many people from different denominations and faiths were probably going to
heaven." Newsday (1993) reported that based on this calculation "a
higher percentage of Methodists are saved than are Roman Catholics" and
that "virtually everyone not belonging to a church congregation was
counted among the lost."
And according to the New
York Times, when thousands of the world's clerical leaders gathered at the
second World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago one hundred years after
the first such gathering in 1893, "Evangelical and fundamentalist
Christian churches that are embraced by many Americans shunned the gathering on
theological grounds, and the established centrist and liberal denominations,
like the Episcopalians and Methodists that have usually supported interfaith
talks, were scarcely visible.
Eastern Orthodox Christians came but
left en masse when they found
themselves in the company of "neopagans," and Jewish groups withdrew
when the Nation of Islam showed up.
Sikhs and Hindus stayed but tried to push each other out of the
convention center (physically), and the
Dalai Lama astutely concluded "Nonsense!" in response to his own
question: "If we have conflicts in
the name of religion, can we help
resolve other problems?" (Steinfels, 1993, p. 93).
Nonsense indeed, but finger pointing
can be useful if one is facing a mirror.
If each of the world's families tends to its own backyard before the
neighborhood inspection begins, we may all be able to live together. To that
end, we in the West should inspect Judaism and its demographically dominant
offshoot, Christianity, before criticizing other religions.
Who Is Thy Neighbor?
When grade school twins help each other put a puzzle
together, same-sex fraternal twins use the word 'I' a lot, pull the puzzle away
from each other, tussle over pieces that look like they will fit, take a long
time to get the job done, and are not particularly pleased with the
result. In distinction, identical twins
use 'we' a lot, keep the puzzle between themselves, hand each other fitting
pieces, get the job done quickly, and seem pleased with their accomplishment
(Segal, 1984).
Evolutionary theorists argue that identical twins will
naturally treat each other according to the gold standard of morality:
"Love thy neighbor as thyself." In kin selection terms, such twins have no room for conflict because
their "degree of relatedness," or "r" is 100% (r = l)
(Hamilton, 1964). Their self-interests
are identical with their concern for each other because each twin is as
genetically related to their twin's offspring as they are to their own
offspring. For identical twins, to
help thy other is to help thyself.
The phrase Love thy
neighbor as thyself comes from the Torah.1 The word Torah
means law and the Torah is the
Law. If Moses had been transmitting the
word of his god to modern biologists he might have said "Love your
neighbor as if r = 1 as if all of your genes are identical." According to the ancient Israelites'
autobiographical ethnography, this was the general principle from which
prohibitions against murder, theft, and lying were derived. But who qualifies for this apex of
morality? Who is thy neighbor?
Most contemporary Jews and Christians, who both have the
highest regard for the god of the Torah, answer that the law applies to
everybody, as spelled out in the following excerpt from a Christian-authored
promotion for the Committee for Judaism
and Social Justice (Walz, 1992; for a more elaborate but ideologically
identical interpretation, see Hefner, 1991):
"It is upon the Biblical command to 'love your neighbor
as yourself' starting in the family and extending to the community, the
business world and ultimately international affairs that the Committee for
Judaism and Social Justice is depending for its growth."
But when the Israelites received the love law, they were
isolated in a desert.2 According to the account, they lived in tents clustered by
extended families, they had no non-Israelite neighbors, and dissention was
rife. Internecine fighting became
rather vicious, with about 3,000 killed in a single episode (Exodus 32:26-28).3 Most of the troops wanted to "choose a
[new] captain and go back to Egypt" (Numbers 14:4). But their old captain, Moses, preferred group
cohesion.
If we want to know who Moses thought his god meant by neighbor, the law must be put into
context, and the minimum context that makes sense is the biblical verse from
which the love law is so frequently extracted.
Here are four translations of Leviticus 19:18:
·
Thou
shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but
thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. First Jewish Publication Society
translation (JPS '17) and the King James Version (KJV).
·
You
shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own
people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Revised Standard
Version (RSV).
·
You
shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your countrymen. Love your fellow as yourself. TANAKH (JPS
'85).
Thou Shalt Not Kill Who?
In
context, neighbor meant "the
children of thy people," "the sons of your own people,"
"your countrymen" in other words, fellow in-group members. Specific
laws which follow from the love law can be better understood by keeping the
in-group definition of neighbor in
mind. Consider the proto-legal portion
of The Ten Commandments (Deuteronomy 5:17-21; JPS '17 & KJV):
Thou shalt not kill.
Neither shalt thou commit adultery.
Neither shalt thou steal.
Neither shalt thou bear false witness against thy neighbour
Neither shall you covet your neighbor's wife and you shall not desire your neighbor's house, his field, or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his
ass, or anything that is your neighbor's.
And
add the realization that the scrolls from which these words were translated
have no periods, no commas, and no first-word capitalization. Decisions about where sentences and
paragraphs begin and end are courtesy of the translator. Accordingly, instead of being written as
five separate paragraphs of one sentence each, without changing any of the
words, Deuteronomy 5:17-21 could be translated:
Thou shalt not kill, neither shalt thou commit adultery,
neither shalt thou steal, neither shalt thou bear false witness against thy
neighbour. Neither shall you covet your
neighbor's wife, and you shall not desire your neighbor's house, his field, or
his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or anything that is
your neighbor's.
Here
the question, "Thou shalt not kill who?" is answered "Thou shalt
not kill thy neighbor the children of thy people, your countrymen
your
fellow in-group member.
How unconventional is this interpretation? Not very. The rabbis of the Talmud determined that an
Israelite was not liable for murder unless he intentionally killed a fellow
Israelite. Indeed, if an Israelite
intended to kill a non-Israelite, but killed an Israelite by mistake, he was
not guilty of murder. The law (Mishna)
is explicit in this regard (Sanhedrin 79a):
If he intended killing an animal but slew a man, or a
heathen and he killed an Israelite
he is not liable.
And
the discussion (Gemara) of this law gives a clear example:
This excludes [from liability] the case of one who threw a
stone into the midst of a company of Israelites and heathens. How is this? Shall we say that the company consisted of nine heathens and one
Israelite? Then his non-liability can
be inferred from the fact that the majority were heathens.
So if a defendant admits to having killed a fellow in-group
member by throwing a stone, his plea of innocence should be accepted if there
is reason to believe that he was aiming at an out-group member. In this regard, the rabbis of the Talmud, who
are traditionally designated the Sages, took an extraordinarily lenient view of
what would constitute evidence of intent, extending credibility to a
perpetrator even if there was only one out-group member in the company of nine
in-group members (Sanhedrin 79a, Baba Kamma 44b):
And even if half and half, when there is doubt in a capital
charge, a lenient attitude must be taken! ... if there were nine Jews and one
heathen ... still, since there was among them one heathen, he was an essential
part of the group, and essential part is reckoned as equivalent to half, and
where there is doubt in a criminal charge the accused has the benefit.
As one might expect, the law for inadvertent killing was not
symmetrical. If an out-group member
accidentally killed an in-group member, he was guilty of Murder One.
Maimonides, whose summarizations and condensations of the Torah and the Talmud
are generally accepted as authoritative, put the point succinctly (Book of
Torts 5:5:4):
If a resident alien slays an Israelite inadvertently, he
must be put to death in spite of his inadvertence.
The
Book of Judges (Maimonides, 5:9:4) confirms this:
A Noahide [non-Jew] who kills a person, even if he kills an
embryo in the mother's womb, is put to death.
So too, if he kills one suffering from a fatal disease ... he is put to
death. In none of these cases is an
Israelite put to death.
Who Is Human?
The
Sages perceived their god as having given his people a special fierceness. As explained by Rabbi Simeon, "There
are three distinguished in fierceness: Israel among the nations, the dog among
animals, and the cock among birds" (Bezah 25b). The Yanomamo Indians, who inhabit the headwaters of the Amazon,
traditionally believe that they are fierce, and that they are the only fully
qualified people on earth. The word Yanomamo,
in fact, means man, and non-Yanomamo
are viewed as a form of degenerated Yanomamo (Chagnon, 1992). A similar theme runs throughout
Judeo-Christianity. Although many Jews
have been killed by Christians who perceived their god to have changed his
choice, the original theme of God's
chosen people was developed in the Torah and promoted a not-fully-human
perception of out-group members.
Maimonides had a penchant for omitting rulings and opinions
that were not politically correct by 12th-century standards, yet he was often
more explicit than the Talmud, especially when stating rules that the Sages
assumed would be taken for granted.
Consider his exegesis of the intent of the commandment against murder
(Torts 5:1:1, 5:2:11):
If one slays a single Israelite, he transgresses a negative
commandment, for Scripture says, Thou shalt not murder. If one murders willfully in the presence of
witnesses, he is put to death by the sword ... Needless to say, one is not put
to death if he kills a heathen.
In most recent translations of Maimonides' Codes, the words
"single Israelite" are replaced by "human being" in the
above passage (e.g., translation by Klein, 1954, p. 195 and note 1, p. 273),
and the clarification regarding heathens is relegated to the editing room floor
(e.g., Chavel, 1990). This suggests an
effort to convert in-group morality into general morality by strategically
mistranslating and editing original documents.
However, in Maimonides' hand-written manuscript referred to as The Oxford Codex, the text reads
"single Israelite" as distinct from "human being" and
cannot be translated otherwise unless a translator accepts the Talmudic
argument that only in-group members qualify as human beings. Even then, such an ideological translation
requires taking the liberty of inserting this understanding without putting
readers on notice that the translation is not literal.
The Sages were quite explicit about their view that non-Jews
were not to be considered fully human.
Whether referring to "gentiles," "idolaters," or
"heathens," the biblical passage which reads "And ye my flock,
the flock of my pasture, are men, and I am your God," (Ezekiel 34:31; KJV)
is augmented to read (italics in original): "And ye my flock, the flock of my pastures, are men; only ye are
designated 'men'" (Baba Mezia 114b).
Or: "And ye My sheep the sheep of My pasture, are men; you are
called men* but the idolaters are not called men." [Footnote in original: *. . . only an Israelite, who as a
worshipper of the true God, can be said to have been like Adam, created in the
image of God. Idol worshippers, having
marred the Divine image, forfeit all claim to this appellation (Yebamoth
61a).] Or, again with explanation from
a footnote (parentheses and italics in original):
...in the case of heathens; are they not in the category of
adam? - No, it is written: And ye my
sheep, the sheep of my pasture, are adam (man).* Ye are called adam but heathens are not called adam.
[Footnote reads:] *... The term adam does not denote 'man' but Israelite. The term adam
is used to denote man made in the image of God and heathens by their idolatry
and idolatrous conduct mar this divine image and forfeit the designation adam (Kerithoth 6b).
Indeed, the Hebrew word adam
appears 106 times in the Torah, referring to the character Adam only 14
times. The other 92 occurrences of the
word adam translate as man or men, usually referring to Israelites generally, as distinct from
designating gender.
East of Eden
According
to the distinction made in the Talmud between adam and other terms for humans, the original conceptualization
appears to have been that the god of the Israelites created them in his own
image. This explains how it could be the case that their god created man (adam) in his own image while other
people (non-adam) were simultaneously
alive east of Eden in the land of Nod - where Cain went after killing Abel,
found a wife, and founded a city (Genesis 4:16-24). The word adam is not
used for man when referring to
persons in Nod (Genesis 4:23).
In fact, the most frequently used biblical Hebrew words for
man/men are 'iysh and 'enowsh, occurring 428 times in the
Torah. All occurrences of man being created in the image of god
occur as adam, but people who were
conquered by the Israelites are not referred to as adam, with the exception of two passages which also involve
cattle. These exceptions are
rhetorically questioned in the Talmud, where the Sages explain that "This
is used in opposition to cattle," by which they meant, "In contrast
to cattle, idolaters also may be described as adam (men)" (parentheses in original, Kerithoth 6b, Yebamoth
61a).
A strained and self-serving defense of these passages is
presented by the 20th-century editors/translators of the Soncino Press edition
of the Talmud, asserting that the restricted use of adam only applies within the context of ritual defilement, and that
distinguishing "gentiles," "heathens," and
"idolaters" as not in the category of adam, "loses all harshness when it is remembered that it is
simply a Talmudic idiom denoting 'inhuman,' and that its author was Rabbi
Simeon, who had been so bitterly persecuted by the Romans" (Baba Mezia
114b, p. 651, n. 7).
There are a number of difficulties with this
explanation. Among them is the fact
that Rabbi Simeon, son of Yohai, was among the most authoritative, most cited
(over 700 times just within the Talmud), and most respected Sages of Judaism;
rabbis at large accepted and promulgated his view on this point; non-Jews are
referred to as not fully human in contexts other than ritual defilement; and
designating one's victims as "inhuman" is not "simply an
idiom" on the contrary, such designation has been a critically important
propaganda accomplishment for most of the world's most immoral military enterprises
and by in-groups of all stripes.3a
Aldous Huxley said it succinctly on the eve of World War II (1937, p.
101): "The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that
the other set is human. By robbing them
of their personality, he puts them outside the pale of moral obligation."3b
The Evolution of Cooperation
Have
you ever watched a flock of birds dart across the sky like an animated cloud,
turning on a dime, in unison, through three-dimensional space? Before the mid-1960s we knew what flocking
birds were up to they were surveying their breeding territory in order to
assess its nutritional abundance. That
way each female could adjust the number of eggs that she would lay, her
objective being to prevent over-exploitation of the environment. How could natural selection produce such a
morally sound arrangement? Simple, by
group selection birds that overcrop their territory would eat themselves into
oblivion, leaving only environmentally conscientious groups to perpetuate their
kind. Domestic sheep are a counter
example. If not herded along, sheep
will crop all edible plants beyond recovery.
That's the main reason that shepherds have jobs because left to their
own devices, or lack thereof, sheep would decimate otherwise renewable
resources.
In 1966 George Williams published a book that initiated the
demise of the notion that organisms evolve by group selection. Williams perceived three main problems:
First, what would happen if a mutation caused an individual female in an environmentally-conscientious
group to have as many offspring as she was able? Answer: that mutation would spread. Second, what would happen if there were any appreciable amount of
migration between less conscientious groups and more conscientious groups? Answer: conscientious groups would lose their
conscience. And third, if the mutation
and migration problems could be solved, how long would it take for a gene to go
from a low frequency to a substantial frequency by group selection? This depends upon the rate at which whole
groups fission and become extinct.
Proper models show that both rates need to approach the rate at which
individuals are born and die. For whole
groups, such rates are orders of magnitude beyond realistic.
Nevertheless, people like the idea of group selection. It could, if it worked, create natural
harmony, and even imply that humans in a natural state will naturally cooperate
sacrificing self-interest for the good of the group. Accordingly, wishful thinkers have been
jerrybuilding group selection models ever since Williams found the idea to be
theoretically untenable (e.g., Wilson and Sober 1994). But skeptics continue to dash
group-selection hopes with clearer logic and empirical evidence of individual
selection (cf Alroy & Levine, 1994; Cronk, 1994; Dawkins, 1976, 1994;
Nesse, 1994; Smith, 1994; Williams, 1992).
The cleanest tests have come from ornithologists. Birds, having birdbrains, are not good at
knowing which eggs are their own and which came from somewhere else (that's why
mockingbirds and cowbirds can make a living as brood parasites laying eggs in
other birds' nests). This means you can
put a fifth egg in a nest of four eggs and see what happens. The birds will hatch and try to feed all
five chicks, but more often than not, they will only fledge three, while nests
left with four eggs fledge four chicks.
Flocking aside, individual birds lay the number of eggs that will
maximize their reproductive success (for a review see Trivers, 1985).
So why do individuals cooperate if there is no group
selection? Two answers helped filled
the gap and form the foundation of contemporary evolutionary theory: inclusive fitness (Hamilton, 1964) and reciprocal altruism (Trivers,
1971). For the purpose of calculating
how fast a gene can spread, inclusive fitness is the realization that an
individual's total reproductive success should include his or her effects on
the success of individuals who also carry the gene in question i.e.,
relatives. So we expect relatives to
cooperate. In humans, this covers
everything from mothers nursing infants to nepotism in politics and
industry.
Reciprocal altruism is "you scratch my back, I'll
scratch yours." In humans this
covers everything from two individuals sharing a load to groups of individuals
hunting Woolly Mammoths, to groups of people hunting other groups of
people. The key ingredient here is
payoff reciprocal altruism works if each individual's share of benefits is
more than could have been obtained by not cooperating. A great hue and cry has gone up that
inclusive fitness and reciprocal altruism are not real altruism not really
moral behavior. That is absolutely
correct. As put by Trivers (1971, p. 1): "Models that attempt to explain
altruistic behavior in terms of natural selection are models designed to take
the altruism out of altruism."
Unfortunately, cooperation based on kin selection and
reciprocal altruism can be difficult to distinguish from cooperation based on
group selection but there are telltale signs. Large-scale reciprocal altruism usually entails hierarchies
(pecking orders, dominance ranks), markedly unfair distribution of
group-derived benefits (according to rank), and in humans, rules and laws that
compel cooperation. Indeed, human
systems of reciprocal altruism often include individuals, like slaves, who
would do better on their own but who do not have that option.
Like most ancient peoples, the Israelites had stringent
hierarchies, vastly disproportionate distribution of wealth, many slaves, and
many laws that compelled cooperation.
Some of those laws were simply tests of loyalty, as distinct from
enforcing cooperation per se, but they were taken very seriously. Consider the punishment for working on a
Saturday (Numbers 15:32-36):
While the people of Israel were in the wilderness, they
found a man gathering sticks on the sabbath day. And those who found him
gathering sticks brought him to Moses and Aaron, and to all the
congregation. They put him in custody
because it had not been made plain what should be done to him. And the LORD said to Moses, "The man
shall be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him with stones outside
the camp." And all the congregation brought him outside the camp and
stoned him to death with stones, as the LORD commanded Moses.
More severe decrements to inclusive fitness were reserved
for low-ranking individuals who took a larger slice of the pie than they had
been allotted, especially if that slice had been allotted to a dominant
male. When Achan, one of Joshua's
soldiers, put a captured 50-shekel bar of gold into his tent instead of putting
it in the collection plate (Joshua 7:24-25, italics added): "Joshua and
all Israel with him took Achan ... and
his sons and daughters ... and all Israel stoned him with stones; they
burned them with fire, and stoned them with stones." These are not
the hallmarks of a group that evolved its ability to cooperate through group
selection.
Evolutionary Ethics
Moral
behavior can be active or passive. If
you refrain from stealing when you could get away with it, you have been
passively moral. When you help someone
at a cost to yourself, you have been actively moral. If natural selection proceeded by differential reproduction of
groups, as opposed to differential reproduction of individuals, individuals
within replicating groups might treat each other as if r = 1 were their default
program. But unfortunately, genes that
cause self-sacrifice are sacrificed by natural selection.
That is not to say that groups have no effect. Imagine a gene for the ability to shoot
straight whether a sling shot or a gun shot.
A gene like that could spread within a breeding group by individual
selection and give that group a serious advantage in competition against other
groups. So it is that gene frequencies
can change in consequence of group-group competition, but only because the
winning group already had more of the genes which caused more of its individual
members to compete successfully within that group, and they engaged in
sufficient reciprocal altruism to generate cooperation. That is, natural selection can generate
individuals who behave against their short term self-interest in consideration
of other group members if the cost to such in-group moralists is more than
compensated by their share of benefits obtained from successful competition
with other groups. For example,
in-group morality can evolve if cooperation enables a group to wage war against
other groups at a net profit. This is
not a consequence of group selection as the term has been properly understood,
nor is it a foundation for morality as that term is properly understood.
In addition to requiring laws that compel group members to
cooperate, the viability of in-group morality is functionally completed when
the converse of those laws is applied, implicitly or explicitly, to out-groups
when "within-group amity" serves "between-group enmity"
(Alexander, 1987, p. 95) i.e., when "Thou shalt not kill or steal from
in-group members" is balanced by "Thou shalt kill and steal from
out-group members."
Such evolutionary ethics apply to races and nations as well
as religions. In 1942, Keith perceived
this complementary relationship to be implicit in Hitler's term National Socialism (1947, pp. 10, 14,
parentheses not added):
Hitler uses a double designation for his tribal doctrine
National Socialism: Socialism standing for the good side of the tribal spirit
(that which works within the Reich) and Nationalism for the ethically vicious
part, which dominates policy at and outside the German frontiers ... Hitler is
an uncompromising evolutionist, and we must seek for an evolutionary
explanation if we are to understand his action.
Genocide
Moses
may not have known about natural selection but he transmitted his god's
explicit commandment to kill and steal from out-group members as a recurrent
major theme.4 Two distinct
policies were put into effect. First,
all members of nations located in the land that was to become Israel were to be
killed outright. Subsequently, people
in surrounding nations were to be killed unless they agreed to become
subservient to Israel. Both policies
are given in one passage of Deuteronomy (20:10-18; RSV), with instructions
regarding people outside of Israel given first:
When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer
terms of peace to it. And if its answer to you is peace and it opens to you,
then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall
serve you. But if it makes no peace
with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the
LORD your God gives it into your hand you shall put all its males to the sword,
but the women and the little ones, the cattle, and everything else in the city,
all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourselves; and you shall enjoy the
spoil of your enemies, which the LORD your God has given you. Thus you shall do
to all the cities which are very far from you, which are not cities of the
nations here.
But in the cities of these peoples
that the LORD your God gives you for an inheritance you shall save alive
nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the
Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as
the LORD your God has commanded; that they may not teach you to do according to
all their abominable practices which they have done in the service of their
Gods, and so to sin against the LORD your God.
For prior occupants of the promised land, there can be no
doubt that this meant genocide according to the word's modern definition
(RSV):
They should be utterly destroyed,5 and should
receive no mercy but be exterminated as the LORD commanded Moses" (Joshua
11:20).
Utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but
kill both man and woman, infant and suckling" (I Samuel 15:3).
And,
as if they had a sense of Hamilton's (1964) inclusive fitness:
You will make them as a blazing oven when you appear. The LORD will swallow them up in his wrath
and fire will consume them. You will destroy their offspring from the earth and
their children from among the sons of men (Psalms 21:9-10).
There can be no doubt that this commandment was mandatory,
as Maimonides explained (Judges 5:4, cf Elba 1995; Lior 1994):
It is a positive commandment to destroy the seven nations,
as it is said: Thou shalt utterly destroy
them. If one does not put to death
any of them that falls into one's power, one transgresses a negative
commandment, as it is said: Thou shalt
save alive nothing that breatheth.
Moral Fallout
The
Israelites' campaign to carry out their god's commandment to commit genocide
against the native inhabitants of Canaan-cum-Palestine took several
generations. It began with Joshua's
massacre at Jericho. Contrary to the
Christian song "Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho," according to
scripture there was no battle at all.
It was a siege, at the end of which all of the city's inhabitants were
killed except Rahab the prostitute (she and her family were spared in exchange
for helping Joshua plan his strategy, Joshua 6:16-17, 19, 21, 24, RSV):
Joshua said to the people, "Shout; for the LORD has
given you the city. And the city and all that is within it shall be devoted to
the LORD for destruction ... But all silver and gold, and vessels of bronze and
iron are sacred to the LORD; they shall go into the treasury of the LORD."
... Then they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and
old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword ... And they burned the
city with fire, and all within it; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of
bronze and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD.
The half-life and penetrance of such cultural legacies are
often under-appreciated. Some 3,000
years after the fall of Jericho, Israeli psychologist George Tamarin (1966,
1973) measured the strength of residual in-group morality. He presented Joshua 6:20-21 to 1,066 school
children, ages 8-14, in order to test "the effect of uncritical teaching
of the Bible on the propensity for forming prejudices (particularly the notion
of the 'chosen people,' the superiority of the monotheistic religion, and the
study of acts of genocide by biblical heroes)." The children's answers to the question "Do you think Joshua
and the Israelites acted rightly or not?" were categorized as follows:
" 'A' means total approval, 'B' means partial approval or disapproval, and
'C' means total disapproval."
Across a broad spectrum of Israeli social and economic classes, 66% of
responses were "A," 8% "B," and 26% "C." The "A" answers tended to be as
straightforward as they were numerous (Tamarin, 1966):
·
In my
opinion Joshua and the Sons of Israel acted well and here are the reasons: God
promised them this land and gave them permission to conquer. If they would not have acted in this manner
or killed anyone, then there would be the danger that the Sons of Israel would
have assimilated among the "Goyim."6
·
In my
opinion Joshua was right when he did it, one reason being that God commanded
him to exterminate the people so that the tribes of Israel will not be able to
assimilate amongst them and learn their bad ways.
·
Joshua
did good because the people who inhabited the land were of a different
religion, and when Joshua killed them he wiped their religion from the earth.
Tamarin (1973) noted that:
"C" classification [total disapproval] was
accorded to all answers formally rejecting genocide, either on ethical or
utilitarian grounds. This does not mean
that all "C" responses reveal non-discriminatory attitudes. For example, one girl criticized Joshua's
act, stating that "the Sons of Israel learned many bad things from the
Goyim." ... Another extremely racist response is that of a 10-year-old
girl disapproving the act, stating, "I think it is not good, since the
Arabs are impure and if one enters an impure land one will also become impure
and share their curse."
Other C misgivings included (1966):
·
I
think Joshua did not act well as they could have spared the animals for
themselves.
·
I
think Joshua did not act well as he should have left the property of Jericho;
if he had not destroyed the property it would have belonged to the
Israelites.
In contrast to the established difference between boys and
girls in propensity toward violence and approval of violence in general, with
regard to biblically commanded genocide Tamarin found that "Contrary to
our expectation, there was no difference concerning this most cruel form of
prejudice, between male and female examinees" (1973). Less surprising, but more alarming, nearly
half of the children who gave "total approval" to Joshua's behavior
also gave "A" responses to the hypothetical question: "Suppose
that the Israeli Army conquers an Arab village in battle. Do you think it would
be good or bad to act towards the inhabitants as Joshua did towards the people
of Jericho?" Tamarin (1966)
received such responses as these:
·
In my
opinion this behavior was necessary, as the Arabs are our enemies always, and
the Jews did not have a country, and it was necessary to behave like that
towards the Arabs.
·
It
would have been good to treat the Arabs as Joshua and his soldiers did, as they
are Arabs; they hate and retaliate against us all the time, and if we
exterminate them as Joshua did, they won't be able to show themselves as
greater heroes than we.
·
I
think it was good because we want our enemies to be conquered, and to widen our
frontiers, and we would kill the Arabs as Joshua and the Israelites did.
Some respondents disapproved of Joshua's campaign (answer "C"),
but approved of similar acts if committed by Israeli soldiers. One girl disapproved of Joshua "because
it is written in the Bible, 'don't kill'," but she approved of the
conjectured Israeli Army action, stating "I think it would be good, as we
want our enemies to fall into our hands, enlarge our frontiers, and kill the
Arabs as Joshua did."
As a control group,
Tamarin tested 168 children who were read Joshua 6:20-21 with "General
Lin" substituted for Joshua and a "Chinese Kingdom 3000 years
ago" substituted for Israel.
General Lin got a 7% approval rating, with 18% giving partial approval
or disapproval, and 75% disapproving totally.
We withhold judgment
on the moral blindness of children because they are in a formative stage, but
we should not withhold judgment of adults, especially influential adults, for
the moral blindness that they inflict upon others. In that regard, consider Ellie Wiesels portrait of Joshua (1981), which ends, Poor Joshua, glorious
Joshua. He was forced to win so many battles
-- with no one around to say thank you.
Except God.
The Evolutionary Point
Over
400 cities are detailed by name as having been "utterly destroyed" by
the Israelites. The campaign lasted some 170 years and ended with David's
victory at Jerusalem, where the Jebusites had managed to defend their city
against every Israelite leader from Joshua to Saul. The account of the second city to fall, Ai, poignantly juxtaposes
the distinction between in-group sanction against, and the out-group sanction
of, homicide. According to scripture,
after a moderately heavy day of killing 12,000 people, Joshua carved the Ten
Commandments in stone, including "Thou shalt not kill," while his
troops were gathered around a campfire (Joshua 8:24-25, 30-32; RSV):
When Israel had finished slaughtering all the inhabitants of
Ai ... and all of them to the very last had fallen by the edge of the sword ...
all who fell that day, both men and women, were twelve thousand, all the people
of Ai ... then Joshua built an altar and they offered on it burnt offerings to
the Lord ... And there, in the presence of the people of Israel, he wrote upon
the stones a copy of the law of Moses.
These verses are not generally focused upon in Bible Study
classes, but when inquiries are made about Jericho, Ai, or Jerusalem, Jewish
and Christian theologians stress the view that their heroes were far from
perfect, but their ideals were close to perfect (or perfect, having come from
their god), and it is those ideals that constitute the take-home message. This is plain wrong. Joshua was not even
guilty of contradiction, much less hypocrisy, because the law that applied to
out-group members was the antithesis of the law that applied to in-group
members.7
The point, however, is not that such phenomena were unique
to the ancient Israelites. Far from
it. Indeed, given the ubiquity of
in-group/out-group double standards around the globe and throughout history,
the propensity for in-group morality appears to be an attribute of human
nature.
A Light Unto The Nations
Israel's
glory-days reached their apex during the reign of Solomon, David's son, who
inherited "all the kingdoms from the Euphrates to the land of the
Philistines and to the border of Egypt" (I Kings 4:21). Solomon spent most of his time enjoying the
spoil of his enemies (Deuteronomy 20:14), including "seven hundred wives,
princesses, and three hundred concubines" (I Kings 11:3, RSV) ... and
massive protection payments (I Kings 10:14-15):
Now the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was
six hundred and sixty-six talents of gold, besides that which came from the
traders and from the traffic of the merchants, and from all the kings of Arabia
and from the governors of the land.
Since 666 talents is about 60,000 pounds of gold, this is
almost certainly an exaggeration, but is still three times the amount that
Attila the Hun was able to extort from Rome per annum prior to sacking it for
late payment.
After Solomon's reign the Kingdom of Israel split in
two. Civil war between the Northern and
the Southern Kingdoms so weakened Jerusalem that nations which had been sending
tribute began to send troops instead.
During a siege of the city by Syria, in-group morality fell to its
nadir. Everyone is familiar with the
story of Solomon's wisdom how he threatened to chop a baby in half in order
to discover which of two claimants was its real mother (I Kings 3:16-28) but
like the story of Ai, Bible Study classes seldom focus on a similar dispute
that was brought to one of Solomon's successors (II Kings 6:26-30):
Now as the king of Israel was passing by upon the wall, a
woman cried out to him, saying, "Help, my lord, O king!"...And the
king asked her, "What is your trouble?" She answered, "This woman said to me, 'Give your son, that we
may eat him today, and we will eat my son tomorrow.' So we boiled my son and ate him.
And on the next day I said to her, 'Give your son, that we may eat him';
but she has hidden her son." When
the king heard the words of the woman he rent his clothes.
The picture became so bleak for so long that a most
desperate hope grew among the faithful.
Israel's god would send a messiah.
That man would restore the Kingdom and Israel would reign over all the
nations on earth. Perhaps the best
disguised theme in the Bible, the most spun by both Christian and Jewish
exegetical spindoctors, is the Light Unto
the Nations. The light was to be
Israel and nations outside of the genocide zone were to be caused to see the
light in consequence of being conquered by Israel. Those nations would then realize that the god of Israel is
stronger than their gods, and, most important, they would then worship Israel's
god through Israel that is, once again, by paying tribute to Israel.
This ultimate in-group fantasy is explicated throughout the
Bible, but is put most pointedly in Psalms and Isaiah (RSV):
Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and
the ends of the earth your possession.
You shall break them with a rod of iron, and dash them in pieces like a
potter's vessel (Psalms 2:8-9). And the
[diaspora Jewish] peoples will take them and bring them to their place, and the
house of Israel will possess them in the LORD's land as male and female slaves
(Isaiah 14:2). Thus says the LORD:
"The wealth of Egypt and the merchandise of Ethiopia, and the Sabeans, men
of stature, shall come over to you and be yours, they shall follow you; they
shall come over in chains and bow down to you. They will make supplication to
you, saying: 'God is with you only, and there is no other, no god besides him
(Isaiah 45:14). I will give you as a
light unto the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth
(Isaiah 49:6). And nations shall come
to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising ... Foreigners shall
build up your walls, and their kings shall minister to you ... your gates shall
be open continually; day and night they shall not be shut; that men may bring
to you the wealth of the nations, with their kings led in procession. For the nation and kingdom that will not
serve you shall perish; those nations shall be utterly laid waste (Isaiah
60:1-12).8
And when was this to happen? As soon as Israel could stop internecine fighting as soon as it
could get its in-group morality back on course. Then the Messiah would come and bring The Kingdom of God to
earth. The objective was not to leave
earth for heaven, it was to have heaven on earth - to restore the kingdom of
David.
Onward Christian Soldiers
There
is a tendency for Judaism's recusant evangelical sect, Christianity, to
perceive its renegotiated contract with its god the New Testament or New
Covenant as morally superior to the original covenant. Two thousand years of history suggest that
this delusion has served military and colonial ambitions well. Thomas Paine perceived a "wretched
contrivance" (1794, pp. 12, 180, 183):
Some Christians pretend that Christianity was not
established by the sword; but of what period of time do they speak? It was impossible that twelve men could
begin with the sword; they had not the power; but no sooner were the professors
of Christianity sufficiently powerful to employ the sword, than they did so,
and the stake and fagot, too ... Those who preach this doctrine of loving their
enemies are in general the greatest persecutors, and they act consistently by
so doing; for the doctrine is hypocritical, and it is natural that hypocrisy
should act the reverse of what it preaches.
Indeed, for a religion that prides itself on its
contradictions and imponderables like a Holy Ghost who is indefinable by
definition and simultaneously one and the same entity as the god of the
Israelites and that god's son Christianity might have done a better job at
disguising its own savior's antipathy toward out-group members, especially
since the vast majority of Christians would have qualified as out-group members
by Jesus' reckoning. Consider the
attitude displayed in the following account of an encounter with a left-over
Canaanite (Matthew 15:21-28; RSV):
And Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district
of Tyre and Sidon. And behold, a
Canaanite woman from that region came out and cried, "Have mercy on me, O
Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely possessed by a demon." But he did not answer her a word. And his disciples came and begged him,
saying, "Send her away, for she is crying after us." He answered, "I was sent only to the
lost sheep of the house of Israel."
But she came and knelt before him, saying, "Lord, help
me." And he answered, "It is
not fair to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs." She said, "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs
eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table." Then Jesus answered her, "O woman,
great is your faith! Be it done for you
as you desire." And her daughter
was healed instantly.
The assumptions that lie behind the miracle are
revealing. They suggest that native
inhabitants were tolerated if they perceived themselves as dogs compared to
in-group members.9 This made sense because Jesus wanted to restore
the Kingdom of David, and it would not do to have thousands of pounds of gold
flowing in from foreign nations if in-group members had to sweep their own
streets and empty their own bed pans.
Day labor would be needed and the option of importing Romanians, Thais,
and Filipinos was not yet available (Goell, 1994). Local domestics, satisfied with crumbs that fall from their
masters' tables, would be perfect.
Essentially the same story is told in Mark (7:24-30), with
the Canaanite changed to a Greek, suggesting that Jesus discriminated against
out-group members on an equal opportunity basis.
The New In-Group Judaism
According
to the Gospels, Jesus' declared mission was to reform Judaism, to bring back
the spirit of in-group morality that seemed to have given way to sanctimony,
observance of rituals, and rigid class distinctions in the face of Roman
domination. He stated this repeatedly,
even instructing his disciples to avoid out-group members when taking his
message to in-group members (e.g., Matthew 10:5-6; RSV): "Go nowhere among
the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost
sheep of the house of Israel."
Jesus often used the words neighbor and brother without
explicitly indicating that he meant fellow Jews whom he sought to unify. (For a sympathetic and particularly
well-informed perspective on Jesus and his mission within the context of 1st
century Israel, see Vermes, 1973). Ironically, gentile Christians generally
infer themselves to be included by these terms, even though many passages make
it clear that they were not. For
example, consider Matthew 18:15-18, in which Jesus explained to his disciples
that Jews who sin against fellow Jews and cannot be made to see the error of
their ways should be considered as gentiles because, like gentiles and tax
collectors (Jews who collected taxes for the gentile government), they were
going to be rejected from heaven (RSV, see also Matthew 5:47; 6:7; 6:32;
10:16-21):
If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault,
between you and him alone. If he
listens to you, you have gained your brother.
But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that
every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to
the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you
as a Gentile and a tax collector.
Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in
heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
The purpose of re-forming Judaism was stated over and over
by Jesus. It was to bring his god's
kingdom to earth to either be the Messiah himself or to usher him in (see
Vermes, 1973, regarding both the strength of the former conviction and the
ambivalence of the latter. Jesus
self-image as the Messiah waxed and waned, but it is clear that he would have
been outraged by the suggestion that he was the god to whom he prayed per
Christianity). After so many centuries
of foreign domination, Jesus wanted to bring his group back together, to forge
them into a unit even more cohesive than that formed by Moses, primarily by
emphasizing the need for active morality between in-group members, as distinct
from the earlier emphasis on passive morality. This active in-group morality extended to nine repetitions of
"love thy neighbor," to the Golden Rule (Jesus' twice-used paraphrase
of "love thy neighbor" "Whatever you wish that men would do to
you, do so to them"),1 and even to "turning the other cheek"
to fellow Jews who might thereby be persuaded to join the cause (Matthew
5:39).
The cause was the plan, or the word, and the word was
holy. Jesus was very concerned that the
holy plan not become apparent to out-group members, so again he instructed his
disciples (Matthew 7:6; RSV): "Do not give dogs what is holy; and do not
throw your pearls before swine."
In this case "dogs" referred to left-over Canaanites and
Samaritans (e.g., Matthew 15:2128 above) and "swine" referred to
people who eat pork that is, gentiles.
Pearls were the pearls of wisdom about how to treat in-group
members. As such, Matthew 7:6 was the
1st century equivalent of saying in America today "Go tell the plan to the
White people, but what ever you do, don't tell the niggers and the
spics." Ugly language indeed, but
it is commonly sold and bought among Christians as some kind of poetry, not
least of all by those who are upset about the coarseness of lyrics in rap
music.
Jesus' prospects for accomplishing the plan were buoyed by the
claim that he was the direct descendant of King David "according to the
flesh" (Romans 1:3), the underdog who extended the borders of Israel
throughout the Middle East (Luke 1:31-33; RSV):
And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son,
and you shall call his name Jesus. He
will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God
will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the
house of Jacob [Israel] for ever; and of his kingdom there will be no end.
Jesus' appeal was effective among the hopeless because he
held out their greatest hope the ultimate in-group aspiration (Acts 1:6-8;
RSV; see also Luke 2:32; 24:21; 24:44; 24:49; and Revelations 1:5-7; 11:17-18):
They asked him, "Lord, will you at this time restore
the kingdom to Israel?" He said to them, "It is not for you to know
times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy
Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all
Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth."
He wanted to make Isaiah's dream come true (see Matthew 3:3;
4:4; 8:17; 12:17; 13:14; Mark 1:2; Luke 3:4-6; John 1:23; 12:38-41) to bring
the Kingdom of God to earth, to fulfill his god's promise to Abraham
a less
innocent promise than it is generally interpreted to be because the word
"bless" in Genesis 26:4 is euphemistically translated. The transliterated Hebrew word is "barak"
which is a primary word meaning to kneel
(for barak translated kneel down or kneel, see Genesis 24:11;
II Chronicles 6:13; Psalms 95:6; for barak translated as curse or cursed, see Job
1:5; 1: 11; 2:5; 2:9). A person, or
nation, is blessed consequent to acknowledging subordination, by kneeling
before the god, person, or nation that confers the blessing (italics and
brackets added, RSV; see also Genesis 12:2-3; 18:18; 22:18; 28:14 and 26:4):
"I will multiply your descendants as the stars of
heaven, and will give to your descendants all these lands; and by your
descendants all the nations of the earth shall bless [kneel] themselves."
But under the requirement of having to kneel before Rome,
Kingdom Come was not a practical idea for 1st century Jews. Nor was it, in any moral sense, a good
idea. Indeed, it was a dangerous idea
for Jesus' own in-group. It especially
threatened those who had made an accommodation with the Romans those who had
knelt before Rome and were receiving the bulk of the blessings and they had
Jesus crucified for promoting it.
Rewriting the Script
So
where did Christian universalism come from?
It came from the Israelite Saul, who changed his name to Paul, and
pronounced himself to be his Messiah's apostle to the gentiles. Like Paul's name change, his
universalization of Jesus' message was more than a little convenient, since
Paul had been kicked out of Israel and found himself irretrievably among
gentiles. In addition to being an
exigent personal accommodation, Paul's offer of honorary in-group status to
out-group members was inextricably linked to the message that Israel's Messiah
would be back very soon certainly within a couple of years, probably within a
few months, and quite possibly within a few weeks. In other words, the offer was good for a limited time only.
Paul's message, and that of his colleague Peter, included:
don't get married; if you are married, don't have children ... maintain the
status quo even if you are an oppressed slave or an oppressed woman, even if
you suffer beatings, behave submissively, because Jesus will be back any day
and everything will change ... withstand your suffering, no matter how unjust,
be good, and he will take care of you when he gets here ... etc. For example (I Peter 2:18-21; see also I
Corinthians 7:24-40; Timothy 6:1-2; Titus 2:9-10; and I Peter 3:1-6):
Servants, be submissive to your masters with all respect,
not only to the kind and gentle but also to the overbearing. For one is approved if, mindful of God, he
endures pain while suffering unjustly.
For what credit is it, if when you do wrong and are beaten for it you
take it patiently? But if when you do
right and suffer for it you take it patiently, you have God's approval. For to this you have been called, because
Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in
his steps.
That is, if your master beats you for an offense that you
did not commit, this is your opportunity to be Christ-like. Just take it, have faith, and you will soon
be rewarded.
Peter and Paul were the characters who appear in modern
cartoons as bedraggled nay-sayers holding signs that warn Repent! The End Is Near.
Reading these injunctions in the context of the perceived immediacy of
the pending apocalypse suggests that if one could go back in time to tell gentile
converts that the returning Messiah would be late by at least 2,000 years, they
would have put these prototype Christian missionaries on the first boat back to
Israel.
It All Comes Out In The End
Paul's
historical revisionism aside, Jesus' plan, his message, and his prophecy are
reissued in the Revelation to John (RSV):
He who conquers and who keeps my works until the end, I
[Jesus] will give him power over the nations and he shall rule them with a rod
of iron, as when earthen pots are broken in pieces, even as I myself have
received power from my Father (2:26-27) ... And I [John] heard the number of
the sealed, a hundred and forty-four thousand sealed, out of every tribe of the
sons of Israel (7:4) ... they were told not to harm the grass of the earth or
any green growth or any tree, but only those of mankind who have not the seal
of God upon their foreheads; they were allowed to torture them for five months,
but not to kill them (9:4-5).
Jesus' angels could not kill the goyim because they were needed
to occupy the countries that would pay tribute to Israel when the Kingdom of
David was restored. But apparently, in contrast to the Canaanite woman who was
on her knees to save her daughter, the goyim would need a bit of softening up.
Jesus was to have his own rod of iron, and because his hands
would be occupied with that, a sort of stiletto sword would come out of his
mouth (19:14-16):
From his mouth issues a sharp sword with which to smite the
nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron; he will tread the wine press
of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty.
On his robe and on his thigh he has a name inscribed, King of kings and
Lord of lords.
It is the miracle of the holy trinity Jesus' ability to be
both a god and a man that enabled him to be simultaneously David's heir on
earth (King of kings) and the ascendant god in heaven (Lord of lords). The difficulty of where this would leave him
vis-a-vis his father is resolved by the article of faith that they were one and
the same.
More than a few men of the cloth have been bothered by
parishioners who take it upon themselves to engage in unsupervised reading of
the Book of Revelation. The
forward-looking concern is this: 144,000 may have looked like a hefty number
2000 years ago, but haven't all of those slots been filled by now? Is there still room in Kingdom Come? Unfortunately, this question completely
misconstrues Jesus' message. The
Kingdom is not taking reservation from gentile Christians or even from Jewish
Jews. All slots are reserved for a
small subset of original in-group members Israeli Jews for Jesus. The Good News is that many seats are still
available, probably about 143,000.
The original covenant was an exclusive contract. Although he occasionally threatened to destroy
them for insufficient fealty, the god of the Israelites never wavered in his
insistence that they were his chosen people.
The new covenant was for Jews who would follow the messiah and recreate
the empire of the original chosen people.
Jesus would have turned over in his grave if he had known that Paul
would be taking his plan to the pigs.
If You Can't Enjoin' em, Beat' em
As it
happened, Paul's rendition of Jesus' message was like Elvis Presley's rendition
of Carl Perkins' "Blue Suede Shoes" it took over. Paul's new target audience, gentile
Christians, became an inordinately powerful in-group. Unlike Judaism, out-group
members were encouraged to join, or were compelled to join, but payback for
following the rules was to be reaped in heaven. Pie in the sky was Paul's hook.
Meanwhile, in this life, the proceeds of wars and tithes to the Church
were shared disproportionately by supportive government officials and Church
dignitaries, who were often one and the same persons. Keith put his finger on this modus operandi (1947, p. 65; cf
Alexander 1987:175): "[T]he area
of the world over which the Prince of Peace is alleged to preside is the most
nationally minded part of the world the part where fierce war is
endemic. Christianity has not conquered
nationalism; the opposite has been the case nationalism has made Christianity
its footstool."
Ironically, being a good Christian, Keith did not understand
that nationalism's footstool was built for just that purpose by its original
carpenter, albeit for a different in-group. Contemporary Christians tend to be
aware of this footstool effect in reference to the Crusades and the Spanish
Inquisition, but Americans tend to forget that their forefathers thought of the
United States as God's New Israel (Cherry 1971, p. vi, capitalization per
original):
It has been often remarked that the people of the United
States come nearer to a parallel with Ancient Israel than any other nation upon
the globe. Hence OUR AMERICAN ISRAEL is a term frequently used; and common
consent allows it apt and proper (Abiel Abbot, Thanksgiving sermon, 1799).10
Reverend Abbot's analogy was as functional as it was apt,
leading to a colonial high-water mark for in-group morality. Consider the following account of
Sagoyewatha's words ("Red Jacket," Chief of the Seneca) to the
Reverend Cram from the Boston Missionary Society, at a meeting between the
chiefs and warriors of the Six Nations and missionaries from the Great
Awakening, at Buffalo Creek, in 1805 (Stedman and Hutchinson 1889, pp.36-38):
You say that you are sent to
instruct us how to worship the Great Spirit agreeably to His mind, and, if we
do not take hold of the religion which you white people teach, we shall be
unhappy hereafter. You say that you are
right and we are lost. How do we know
this to be true? We understand that
your religion is written in a book. If
it was intended for us as well as you, why has not the Great Spirit given to
us, and not only to us, but why did He not give to our forefathers the knowledge
of that book, with the means of understanding it rightly? We only know what you tell us about it. How shall we know when to believe, being so
often deceived by the white people?
Brother, you say there is but one
way to worship and serve the Great Spirit.
If there is but one religion, why do you white people differ so much
about it? Why not all agreed, as you
can all read the book?
Brother, the Great Spirit has made
us all ... we do not wish to destroy your religion or take it from you. We only want to enjoy our own ... you say
you have not come to get our land or our wealth but to enlighten our minds ...
you have been preaching to the white people in this place. These people are our neighbors. We are acquainted with them. We will wait a little while and see what
effect your preaching has upon them. If
we find it does them good, makes them honest and less disposed to cheat
Indians, we will then consider again of what you have said.
Brother, you have now heard our
answer to your talk, and this is all we have to say at present. As we are going to part, we will come and
take you by the hand and hope the Great Spirit will protect you on your journey
and return you safe to your friends.
Stedman
and Hutchinson describe what happened next:
As the Indians began to approach the missionary, he rose
hastily from his seat and replied that he could not take them by the hand; that
there was no fellowship between the religion of God and the works of the devil.
This being interpreted to the
Indians, they smiled, and retired in a peaceable manner.
Deuteronomic Deja Vu
The
strategic practicality of killing locals and bringing slaves from afar was not
lost upon God's New Israelites. Because
they were already there, Indians could not be pulled out by their roots,
transported halfway around the world, and terrorized into servitude as
thoroughly as Africans. Once again,
in-group morality worked its magic.
African slaves were difficult to manage before they were converted, but
upon seeing the light, their spirit was chained to the bottom rung of an
in-group ladder (Maier, 1993):
American-born masters took greater interest in American-born
slaves than in Africans, who seemed to them wild, and controllable only by the
threat of harsh punishments. Gradually a "new paternalism developed among
owners that softened their relationships with slaves, increased their attention
to slaves' material welfare and helped undercut an older opposition to the
Christianization of slaves. It also led
masters to intervene in the lives of their slaves to an extent unknown in other
similar systems of servitude, and fostered an extreme hostility toward signs of
independence in their slave "children."
Although a perceptive critic of
modern Israel, Patrick Buchanan would have felt at home in OUR AMERICAN
ISRAEL. In Gods New Israel, Buchanans
forthrightness would have been appreciated by slavers and the Reverend Cram
alike: Our culture is superior because
our religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free (1993).
Freedom, Fidelity, and Evil
Discussing
religious freedom, comedian-cum-exegete Steve Allen (1990, p. xxix) quipped,
"my freedom to swing my arms about stops at the point of another's
nose." Allen was right, but naive advocates of religious freedom ignore
"the ethically vicious part" (Keith, 1947, p. 10), pretend that it
does not exist, and/or suggest that believers will pick out the good and leave
the bad. This too is plain wrong, and
it houses a Judeo-Christian self-deception that Thomas Paine warned us about
(1794, p. 8):
Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in
disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not
believe. It is impossible to calculate
the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in
society. When man has so far corrupted
and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional
belief [belief professed] to things he does not believe, he has prepared
himself for the commission of every other crime.
By "believing what they do not believe," or
professing "to believe it
deeply, even if they cannot describe the it
that they believe" (Williams, 1994), most contemporary Christians and Jews
unwittingly support in-group morality.
They do so by revering the Bible as a source of universal moral values,
even though few have actually read it as distinct from having actually read
it and in consequence lending it credence as a source of moral values. This is backwards, and for the few believers
who have read the Bible, it is not enough to simply assert that true Judaism
and Christianity are other than what is stated in their book.
There is a stark contradiction between abhorring genocide and paying homage to a god who commanded his followers to commit genocide. There is a deep structural discrepancy between outrage over persecution of people because of th