Internet Spam, Telemarketers, etc.

Telemarketers are annoying. It was a major reason I got rid of the landline at my last house (along with realising that it was cheaper just using a mobile). They are one of the reasons I only usually give out a number which leads to an expensive-to-call electronic voicemail box, which then e-mails me the voicemails as MP3s. But there is a way to deal with them.

Theoretically, the best way, as with spam and with annoying TV adverts, is not to abuse them (though that can be funny). After all, the telemarketers are just doing a job. It's not a great job, but it's slightly better than nothing. We don't blame people who work in factories which print porn for the consequent problems.

Theoretically, the best way is to stop people buying from telemarketers, or from internet spam, or products that have been advertised with annoying TV adverts. If telemarketing was not financially viable, people wouldn't do it. Ditto with spam. Ditto with annoying TV adverts. Ditto with door-to-door salespeople. Blame the idiots who buy from them.

Japanese Biker Fails to Notice Missing Leg

Well, I've heard of people going into shock and failing to notice injuries. I even know a guy who only noticed his thumb had been ripped off after looking down at his hands. But this story really kicks it into a different league.

A Japanese biker failed to notice his leg had been severed below the knee when he hit a safety barrier, and rode on for 2 km (1.2 miles), leaving a friend to pick up the missing limb.

Purple Peppers

I bought a purple pepper from Sainsbury's the other day, because I wanted to know what it would taste like.

The cashier also said she wondered what it would taste like.

It was incredibly bland.

There seems to be this dumb idea that has got into the heads of food-selling people that people care primarily what food looks like rather than what it tastes like. Just try apples from a supermarket! And it's rubbish. I don't know where the idea comes from. I'd far rather have something that looked dodgy but was really tasty than something that looked all purple and shiny, but didn't taste of anything. And I think I'm in the majority for once on this.

Deprecatory Psalms

Several of the Psalms contain what are often described as "deprecatory" sections - bits where the Psalmist is praying for God to break the teeth of / hurt / defeat enemies. And yes, I know Psalm 137:8-9 is worse than that.

Anyhow, Dale Ralph Davis has an interesting insight on this, while reflecting on how David treated Saul. David, of course, is credited as having written many of the Psalms, some even before he came king. Saul was David's predecessor as king, and spent several years trying to kill him because he was worried that David would take over. David had quite a few opportunities to kill Saul (e.g. 1 Samuel 24), but made a point of not taking them.

Davis points out two important features of deprecatory Psalms:

1. The Psalmist wanted nasty things to happen to people
2. The Psalmist didn't do them, but left vengeance to God

Should our attitude be different to 1? Maybe. In some cases, it is quite understandable to feel that way though. On a trivial level, I know I have briefly wanted nasty things to happen to people who (for example) turn left across the path I was trying to ride on a bike, in at least one case forcing me to skid off the road to avoid being hit. On a more serious level, the author of Psalm 137 had almost certainly seen the brutal destruction of his home city at the hands of the Babylonians, who had in all probability killed infants he knew by throwing them against rocks. In such situations, being angry and wanting nasty things to happen to people is understandable.

But given that anger, what should we do with it? Well, the message of the deprecatory Psalms is that we should pray about it and we should leave it to God to sort out. Revenge is not our job.

Preaching

Does it take the message of the cross and the resurrection of Jesus to achieve the ends for which you are aiming in your preaching? If not, then you are not preaching the gospel, but offering self-improvement with a Christian veneer.
Philip Greenslade in Preach the Word (ed Greg Haslam)

Stephen Bates has another shot

Yesterday, the Church Times printed this article about the Oxford PPH review, which raises some interesting questions. Stephen Bates (notorious Guardian columnist) respun it here.

Nastinesses Mr Bates committed in doing so:

• He repeats the "allegations of misogyny and homophobia". Those were made in an anonymous (and libelous) document which only seems to have appeared when the Guardian published an article based on it. It wasn't true then, and isn't true now either. Nor is it news.
• Mr Bates says the report was about Wycliffe Hall. As I understand it, it doesn't single out Wycliffe for criticism at all. It is a report about the PPHs at Oxford, of which Wycliffe is one.
• It suggests that the report was a response to the issues at Wycliffe. Actually, the report was underway long before that and was (I think) actually a response to an application from Oxford Islamic Centre to be allowed to be a PPH
• "doubts about whether it is offering students full intellectual development" - what the report actually doesn't like is the PPHs offering non-Oxford university courses. That's partly because Oxford University doesn't offer the range of courses required to train students for Anglican ordained ministry.

The broader question of what place confessionalism has in academia is an interesting one. In a secular university, there shouldn't be confessional requirements on posts. In a college training people for Anglican ordained ministry, there should. The obvious solution then seems to be to have two separate recruitment policies, but if staff at either are qualified to teach in both (i.e. academically respectable enough and confessionally in the right place), then there needn't be a problem with that.

Commentaries and Scholarship on Psalms

I'm doing quite a bit of work on the Psalms at the moment - partly because I'm down to preach on one of them in a few weeks, and partly because I'm meant to know some of them especially well for my exams next year, so am getting a bit of study in early.

The commentaries on Psalms really are quite an odd bunch. Academic study of the Psalms for ages has centred on the idea of form criticism - when coming to look at any given Psalm, many commentators see their top priority as putting it into one of a dozen or so artificially-constructed categories, which don't always fit that well. Their second priority is then to try to back-engineer the Psalm to work out how it was written, preferably on at least three separate occasions by different people, who were taking earlier material and modifying it. Yes, sometimes there is a good but not conclusive case that that may well have happened (e.g. Psalm 89). Alternatively, they might try to work out what liturgical purpose this Psalm might have fulfilled. If that means inventing new major festivals which there is no evidence for, that seems to be ok as well.

One mind-numbingly obvious problem with all of that is that the Psalms are written as songs to be sung rather than texts to be classified or analysed for redaction layers, but many commentaries don't seem to go much further than that unless they see hints of pagan creation mythology (Psalms 74 and 89), at which point they get all excited.

Given that, four commentators seems to stand out as being worth reading, and two of them weren't in a position to take any notice of modern scholarship, some of which is actually worthwhile. Those four are:

• John Calvin's Commentary on the Psalms (16th century)
• C.H. Spurgeon's Treasury of David (19th century) is well worth a look, especially for the "Quaint Sayings", where Spurgeon has put the best quotes he read on the Psalms.
• Willem vanGemeren in the Expositor's Bible Commentary Series is the best modern commentary I can find on all the Psalms
• Gerald Wilson in the NIV Application Commentary series (Psalms 1-72 only) is remarkable. Wilson spent most of his life studying the Psalms, and in some areas (e.g. Psalm ordering) was a long way ahead of anyone else in the world. It seems that when he was asked to do the NIVAC on Psalms, he threw everything at it. Volume 1 is longer than vanGemeren or Calvin's whole commentaries. Although the NIVAC usually doesn't bother much with scholarship, Wilson throws all kinds of interesting and useful bits in, then applies it, and manages to keep the emphasis devotional. And when I say he threw everything at it, I mean that. He died partway through writing volume 2. This is probably the best commentary on Psalms 1-72, and it is fairly easily accessible to laypeople.

It is quite possible that the multi-volume Baker commentary on the Psalms will be very good, but I haven't seen it yet.

The Days of Abiathar the High Priest

One of the reasons I find it difficult to take militant atheists seriously is the quality of their arguments. I used to spend a lot of time discussing alleged inconsistencies in the Bible, and was used to all the examples they cited being rubbish. However, in academic circles, probably the most commonly cited "error" in the Bible is in Mark 2:26.

Jesus answered, "Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? In the days of Abiathar the high priest, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions."
Mark 2:25-26, NIV

The incident referred to is in 1 Samuel 21, where the high priest is Ahimelech. This is often cited as evidence that Mark got it wrong, and so when Luke and Matthew wrote their gospels later, they copied Mark but corrected his mistake by removing the reference to Abiathar. It is then used as evidence that Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source (which is quite possible - there is reasonable but not conclusive evidence that Mark was the first gospel to be written, and that it was based on the recollections of Peter, which would explain why it came to be the template for Matthew and Luke). It's also used as evidence that Mark is not a completely reliable source.

I'm studying 1 Samuel at the moment, so thought it would be a good opportunity to confront this alleged inconsistency and see if it actually stands up. It doesn't, of course.

The story continues in 1 Samuel 22. Saul finds out that Ahimelech helped David, and has that group of priests massacred. Well, all of them, except one, who escapes to tell David. Abiathar, son of Ahimelech (who then becomes high priest by virtue of being the only survivor). In fact, the conservation between David and Abiathar suggests that Abiathar had been there when his father had helped David (1 Samuel 22:22). Abiathar, being priest to David, ends up much better known than his father ever was. He gets 27 mentions by name in the Old Testament; his dad Ahimelech gets 11.

Mark records Jesus as saying that the incident was in the days of "Abiathar the high priest". Abiathar was not high priest at the time. On the other hand, he was alive at the time; he quite possibly witnessed the incident; he was the best known person there (apart from David) from the perspective of Mark's readers (and Jesus' listeners) 1000 years later; he became high priest as a result of that incident. I think that makes Mark's statement perfectly legitimate. After all, we'd be happy saying that William the Conqueror built up a large army in Normandy and then then invaded England in 1066, even though he wasn't called "the conqueror" until later. People don't seem to have a problem with saying that President GW Bush avoided fighting in Vietnam, even though he wasn't president at the time.

Once again, it looks as if whoever first came up with this as an objection to the reliability of the gospels was seriously desperate.

Abortion Legislation

The rationale behind current abortion legislation is interesting. Indeed, it seems completely to ignore what seems quite obvious about the nature of the fetus.

Instead it seems to focus on the issue of viability - how capable the fetus is of survival without the mother.

Of course, on one level, this seems to be a ludicrous idea - a baby is not capable of independent survival at least until it can crawl, and in almost every case, for a long time afterwards. But it seems to me that the specific issue here is the dependence on the mother rather than on other human beings. After 24 weeks, the baby would need help to survive, but that help does not have to come from the mother.

Abortion legislation then seems to rest on the idea that no-one has an obligation to help another. If someone is lying bleeding by the side of the road, we do not have to call an ambulance. If we do not want to support our children, we can put them into the care of social services. If we do not want to support elderly relatives, ditto. If we do not want to support non-viable fetuses, we do not have to. But since there is no-one else who can support them other than the mother, the fetus is killed.

And to an extent, that is a logical point of view, though harsh, and I have stated it harshly to make a point. It is the idea that we have a right not to be responsible for others if we don't want to, which we place more highly than the right to continued life.

I don't agree with that, of course. I think the act of bringing the child into existence confers a responsibility on those who did so to support it until it becomes independent, just as I think that that support confers the responsibility on the child to look after the parents when they can no longer look after themselves.

And neither does that point of view provide any justification for taking action to end the life of the fetus, which is what abortion is. Even if it was a valid point of view, it would only confer the right to mistreat the child by eating unsuitable or inadequate food, using drugs, etc. It would not give the ability to remove life, any more than society deciding it no longer wanted to look after Jews would give society the right to kill them.

Abortion - The Nature of the Fetus

(I am using the word "fetus" to denote the whole stage from fertilisation to birth. I am using the American spelling because the English only added the "o" to be pretentious, and the Americans then rightly removed it again.)

There are several important questions which ought to be asked about the fetus. Is it alive? Is it human? Is it individuated (i.e. a distinct human from its mother)?

"Alive" seems to be a binary state. Things are either alive or they are not. We do not see examples of things in everyday life which are "partially alive". We sometimes speak like that when things are in danger of dying, but that is not the issue here. The question is not alive/dead but living/non-living. There are also examples in nature of systems which are partially living, such as soil, but that is because they are composed of a large number of small living things, with other bits of dead and non-living material. That description does not apply to a fetus.

So is the fetus living? It is certainly living at the moment of birth. If it was non-living at any moment before then, there must have been a sudden point where it made the transition from non-living to living. We do not observe such a point in pregnancy. Therefore the fetus is living from the time of fertilisation to the time of birth.

Is the fetus human? This, of course, depends on the definition of "human". Our definition needs to include all instances of humanity, including babies and people who are asleep or in comas, which means that the definition would either have to be in terms of potential, e.g. "A human is a physical being which, at some stage in the past or future, might be able to tell a joke / relate to God / whatever." or in terms of genetics. All of these definitions apply to fetuses throughout pregnancy, unless fetuses are specifically and directly excluded from them. Hence it seems logical to conclude that fetuses are human.

Are fetuses individuated or are they "just part of the mother"? The same argument seems to hold as for living. Things are not partially individuated. Indeed, the use of the word "mother" above tells you that there are two distinct individuals - the mother and the fetus. If they were one individual, she would not be a "mother", and there would be no "father" either. And so, because they are individuated at birth, and there is no one moment of individuation, they must also be individuated at conception.

This does not of course mean that they are physically distinct. Indeed, the situation is in many ways comparable to the situation of conjoined twins, where there are two individuals in one composite body. Except in this case, of course, the body is mostly that of the mother.

So then, it seems most logical to me to conclude that the fetus is an individuated, but not physically distinct, living human.