Half of the 62-page codex, written in Coptic script, is devoted to an account of the final days of Jesus Christ written from the viewpoint of the man who has for two millennia been excoriated as Christ’s deadly betrayer. The text begins: “The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot three days before he celebrated Passover…”
…And though the manuscript has been carbon-dated to around 300AD, it is likely to be a copy of an earlier Greek manuscript written around the year 150AD, in the same period when the gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John were also written down. So, the new discovery is serious competition, the National Geographic people implied, for the official version.
What The Gospel of Judas says is that, far from being Jesus’s enemy, Judas was his chief apostle – who “betrayed” him to the authorities at the actual request of his master in order to fulfil a divine ordinance for the salvation of the world. Judas, alone of the disciples, understood the true significance of Jesus’ teachings – because Jesus told him. “You will exceed all of them,” Jesus tells the main man in the key passage in the text, “for you will sacrifice the man that clothed me”.
Thus the individual whose name has entered the language as a synonym for traitor – selling his master for 30 pieces of silver, the amount for which the law of Moses specified an Israelite could buy or sell a slave – was, instead of being the big villain, the secret hero.
…There was no doubt that a Gospel of Judas had once existed. That much was clear from the writings of a second-century bishop, St Irenaeus of Lyons, who condemned it in his work Adversus Haereses (Against the Heresies) written around 180AD. He even set out what it said. Its authors “believe that Judas the Betrayer was fully informed of these things and that he alone, knowing the truth as no others did, fulfilled the secret of betrayal that confused all things, both in heaven and on earth”. The text was the work of a sect called the Cainites who were so determined to accentuate the positive that they saw Cain (the Old Testament’s first murderer) as a hero too. Some academics suggest that Irenaeus took as his source Justin Martyr which would date the Gospel of Judas 120AD.
[L]et’s turn to the Christian record. What do the Gospel writers say about Jesus? When it comes to his birth, as a group, they say nothing. The Gospels of Mark and John never mention the Nativity. Only Matthew and Luke describe it.
But it’s misleading to say “Matthew and Luke.” One might better say “Matthew vs. Luke,” for the Gospels bearing their names contradict each other on almost every detail. The popular image of shepherds and wise men side by side before the cradle? Matthew says wise men. Luke says shepherds. Neither says both.
The star in the East? Only in Matthew.
“Hark, the herald angels sing” . . . but only in Luke. Matthew never heard of them.
But then, only Matthew heard of Herod’s slaughter of the innocents []. That’s right, the indiscriminate killing of every male baby in Judea—with one significant exception—did not merit Luke’s attention. On the other hand, no Roman historian chronicles this atrocity either, not even Flavius Josephus. Josephus reviled Herod and took care to lay at his feet every crime for which even a shred of evidence existed. Had Herod really slaughtered those innocents, it is almost unimaginable that Josephus would have failed to chronicle it.
Matthew says Joseph and Mary lived in Bethlehem, moving to Nazareth after their flight into Egypt []. But Luke says Joseph and Mary lived in Nazareth all along; Jesus was born in Bethlehem only because Joseph and Mary had traveled there to enroll in the census []. Roman records mention no such census; in fact, Roman history records no census ever in which each man was required to return to the city where his ancestral line originated. That’s not how the Romans did things.
Our litany of errors continues. Matthew and Luke both claim to catalogue the male ancestors of Jesus —through Joseph—back to King David. Matthew lists twenty-eight generations between David and Jesus. Luke lists forty-one. Matthew and Luke propose different names for Joseph’s father and grandfather. They propose different names for each ancestor separating Joseph from Zerub’babel, a late Old Testament figure. Incredibly, over the five-hundred-year span preceding the birth of Jesus, Matthew and Luke, whom many Christians consider divinely inspired, cannot agree on the name of a single one of Joseph’s ancestors!
This disparity is less troublesome if one views Christianity in historical rather than metaphysical terms. Scholars tell us the Gospels of Matthew and Luke developed independently in discrete Christian communities. Neither evangelist could know that the other had guessed differently about story details or had made different choices about which pagan traditions to borrow. But why should either evangelist include a genealogy through Joseph if Jesus were born of a virgin—in which case Joseph would not be his father?
…Next question: When was Jesus born? No one knows. Estimates that the Nativity occurred a few years B.C.E. arose from scholarly efforts to reconcile Luke’s census and Matthew’s slaughter of the innocents with known history. Modern scholarship tells us that neither event occurred, leaving us without evidence for the year of Jesus’ birth.
…Did Jesus exist? Possibly not—and if he did, surely he bore scant resemblance to the legendary figure of the Christian Gospels. Regarding his birth, we can be less equivocal. So steeped in pagan lore are the dueling accounts of Matthew and Luke, so reflective of the politics of the early Church rather than of any possible history, and so wholly contradictory in their details, that when it comes to the Nativity, Christianity’s foremost sources tell us quite literally nothing at all.
“The word Easter came from the Saxon Mother Goddess Eostre, in her fertile springtime aspect. Her name had many other forms throughout the ancient world: Ostara, Astraea, Astarte, Ashtoreth, Ishtar, Esther. At the pagan festivals of Eostre, people gave gifts of eggs, symbolizing new life, and worshiped the Moon Hare, a symbol of animal fertility. Despite the church’s later condemnations of these pagan devilments, they remained to be passed down to us as the Easter egg and the Easter bunny. Without admitting it, the church took over not only the holiday’s pagan name, but also the pagan way of determining its date, according to the first full moon after the spring equinox.
Associated with the springtime Goddess was the Green Man, a dying-and-resurrected figure representing the rebirth of vegetation. People honored him by ‘the wearing of the green,’ putting on green garments and wreaths of leaves, to encourage springtime burgeonings by sympathetic magic. The Green Man is still seen in many old church carvings, usually as a face surrounded by leaves. Also known as Green George, he was later adopted by the church and falsely canonized as Saint George, whose feast day became Easter Monday. He was also the Green Knight of Arthurian romance, who was annually killed (or reaped) by Sir Gawain, the Celtic sun hero. George’s leafy headdress may be compared to Jesus’ crown of thorns, usually interpreted as the thorny twigs of the myrrh tree, a common middle-eastern symbol of rebirth, and another name for the virgin mother of the Greco-Syrian sacrificial savior god under the name of Adonis (Hebrew Adonai, ‘Lord’).
At least 20 dying-and-resurrected saviors are known, each one god-begotten and virgin-born (usually at the winter solstice), and given the Greek title of Christ (Christos), which means ‘Anointed One.’
…One of Rome’s most popular saviors was Mithra, whose Persian titles ‘Son of Man,’ ‘Sun of Righteousness,’ ‘Light of the World,’ and ‘Messiah’ were all assimilated to Jesus. Mithraic dualism taught of the war in heaven between heavenly angels and the rebellious underworld angels, or daevas (a word meaning both ‘devils’ and ‘divine spirits’). The final battle between these forces, Armageddon, would bring on the end of the world and the Last Judgment, according to Persian eschatology. Mithra was born on December 25, of the usual mortal virgin. He healed the sick, raised the dead, cast out demons, made the blind see and the lame walk. Before he ascended into heaven around the time of the spring equinox (celebrating the sun’s annual ascension), Mithra had a Last Supper with his 12 disciples, who represented the 12 houses of the zodiac. His worshipers practiced baptism, and ate his holy body in the form of bread marked with a cross. This was one of his seven sacraments, called mizd, Latin missa, English mass. In 307 C.E. the emperor officially declared Mithra ‘Protector of the Roman Empire.’ But in 376, his temple on Vatican Hill was seized by Christians. The title of the Mithraic high priest, Pater Patrum, ‘Father of Fathers,’ was taken over by Christian bishops and shortened to Pa-Pa, or ‘pope.’ Similar elements of the salvation cult are found in many other tales of the dying and resurrected god-men, such as Dionysus, Marsyas, Heracles, Aleyin, and the Babylonian savior Tammuz, whose sacrificial death was enacted in the temple of Jerusalem (Ezekiel 8:14). Jesus’ title of Adonai, ‘Lord,’ was plagiarized from the cult of Adonis, another savior popular in the middle east. Adonis was born of the virgin Myrrha and died in the spring, to be resurrected as the deity of new vegetation. Early Christians claimed that Adonis was laid to rest in the same grotto in Bethlehem where Mary nursed Jesus. Adonis was also called the Good Shepherd, and adored by shepherds at his birth. As a sacred king, he was welcomed in procession with waving palm fronds. He, too, received the titles of Lamb of God and Christos.
…Modern scholarship has shown that Easter is not a Christian institution. Every detail is of pagan origin. The divinely fathered savior, born of a virgin at the winter solstice, followed by 12 zodiacal disciples, sacrificed at the spring equinox, buried in a new tomb, resurrected amid general rejoicing, bringing salvation and eternal life to those who worship him and/or sacramentally consume his flesh and blood: all these are purely pagan concepts. When early Christian fathers were told that their Jesus was just one more copy of many sacrificial saviors going the rounds in the Roman Empire, they could hardly deny it. They could think of no better rebuttal than to say that the devil knew in advance about the coming of Jesus, and so invented all these other religions many centuries earlier, in imitation of the true religion, in order to confuse people. This improbability was much used, before the church succeeded in wiping out the memory of such earlier faiths, in opposition to the obvious probability of the imitation having gone in the other direction.
Underlying the idea of original sin, and atonement by a savior or a scapegoat, is the irrational promise of guilt transference. God, being man writ large, can imitate man’s propensity to take out his anger on someone other than its cause, and to be appeased by blaming the victim. Easter is founded, even today, on the notion that all human sins can be transferred to one victim, who lived 2000 years ago.
…Even though many scholars now doubt that such a person as Jesus actually lived, the legend of the atoning scapegoat persists…Through the centuries, scholars have searched in vain for the so-called historical Jesus. There is no credible information about him except the gospels, which are notoriously untrustworthy, since they were not written in Jesus’ time nor by any of the apostles whose names the writers used. Every incident of Jesus’ life and every phrase attributed to him have been found–often word for word–in earlier writings elsewhere, or they have been shown to be interpolations introduced as much as four to six centuries later, to uphold some political doctrine of the church.
…If the vengeance of a punitive God remains without proof, and the sacrifice of a savior perhaps unnecessary, yet we may find reassurance in the dependably recurring cycles of nature, and the advent of spring, which has always brought joy and hope. Rather than the old syncretisms, we might better return Easter to a simple celebration of spring’s annual return, the greening of the earth, and the promise of new life, the renewal symbolized by the Easter egg. This is a happier symbol than a bleeding, dying god. The Moon Hare–or any animal–seems a more vital emblem than a cross, the instrument of agony and death so unpleasantly presented in my long-ago Sunday-school classroom.”
“Like the works of Homer, the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) was set in the late 2nd millennium BCE but written more than five hundred years later. But unlike the works of Homer, the Bible is revered today by billions of people who call it the source of their moral values. The world’s bestselling publication, the Good Book has been translated into three thousand languages and has been placed in the nightstands of hotels all over the world. Orthodox Jews kiss it with their prayer shawls; witnesses in American courts bind their oaths by placing a hand on it. Even the president touches it when taking the oath of office. Yet for all this reverence, the Bible is one long celebration of violence.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. And the Lord God took one of Adam’s ribs, and made he a woman. And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living. And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain. And she again bare his brother Abel. And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him. With a world population of exactly four, that works out to a homicide rate of 25 percent, which is about a thousand times higher than the equivalent rates in Western countries today.
No sooner do men and women begin to multiply than God decides they are sinful and that the suitable punishment is genocide. (In Bill Cosby’s comedy sketch, a neighbor begs Noah for a hint as to why he is building an ark. Noah replies, ‘How long can you tread water?’) When the flood recedes, God instructs Noah in its moral lesson, namely the code of vendetta: ‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.’
The next major figure in the Bible is Abraham, the spiritual ancestor of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Abraham has a nephew, Lot, who settles in Sodom. Because the residents engage in anal sex and comparable sins, God immolates every man, woman, and child in a divine napalm attack. Lot’s wife, for the crime of turning around to look at the inferno, is put to death as well.
Abraham undergoes a test of his moral values when God orders him to take his son Isaac to a mountaintop, tie him up, cut his throat, and burn his body as a gift to the Lord. Isaac is spared only because at the last moment an angel stays his father’s hand. For millennia readers have puzzled over why God insisted on this horrifying trial. One interpretation is that God intervened not because Abraham had passed the test but because he had failed it, but that is anachronistic: obedience to divine authority, not reverence for human life, was the cardinal virtue.
Isaac’s son Jacob has a daughter, Dinah. Dinah is kidnapped and raped — apparently a customary form of courtship at the time, since the rapist’s family then offers to purchase her from her own family as a wife for the rapist. Dinah’s brothers explain that an important moral principle stands in the way of this transaction: the rapist is uncircumcised. So they make a counteroffer: if all the men in the rapist’s hometown cut off their foreskins, Dinah will be theirs. While the men are incapacitated with bleeding penises, the brothers invade the city, plunder and destroy it, massacre the men, and carry off the women and children. When Jacob worries that neighboring tribes may attack them in revenge, his sons explain that it was worth the risk: Should our sister be treated like a whore?” Soon afterward they reiterate their commitment to family values by selling their brother Joseph into slavery.
Jacob’s descendants, the Israelites, find their way to Egypt and become too numerous for the Pharaoh’s liking, so he enslaves them and orders that all the boys be killed at birth. Moses escapes the mass infanticide and grows up to challenge the Pharaoh to let his people go. God, who is omnipotent, could have softened Pharaoh’s heart, but he hardens it instead, which gives him a reason to afflict every Egyptian with painful boils and other miseries before killing every one of their firstborn sons. (The word Passover alludes to the executioner angel’s passing over the households with Israelite firstborns.) God follows this massacre with another one when he drowns the Egyptian army as they pursue the Israelites across the Red Sea.
The Israelites assemble at Mount Sinai and hear the Ten Commandments, the great moral code that outlaws engraved images and the coveting of livestock but gives a pass to slavery, rape, torture, mutilation, and genocide of neighboring tribes. The Israelites become impatient while waiting for Moses to return with an expanded set of laws, which will prescribe the death penalty for blasphemy, homosexuality, adultery, talking back to parents, and working on the Sabbath. To pass the time, they worship a statue of a calf, for which the punishment turns out to be, you guessed it, death. Following orders from God, Moses and his brother Aaron kill three thousand of their companions.
God then spends seven chapters of Leviticus instructing the Israelites on how to slaughter the steady stream of animals he demands of them. Aaron and his two sons prepare the tabernacle for the first service, but the sons slip up and use the wrong incense. So God burns them to death.
As the Israelites proceed toward the promised land, they meet up with the Midianites. Following orders from God, they slay the males, burn their city, plunder the livestock, and take the women and children captive. When they return to Moses, he is enraged because they spared the women, some of whom had led the Israelites to worship rival gods. So he tells his soldiers to complete the genocide and to reward themselves with nubile sex slaves they may rape at their pleasure: ‘Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.’
In Deuteronomy 20 and 21, God gives the Israelites a blanket policy for dealing with cities that don’t accept them as overlords: smite the males with the edge of the sword and abduct the cattle, women, and children. Of course, a man with a beautiful new captive faces a problem: since he has just murdered her parents and brothers, she may not be in the mood for love. God anticipates this nuisance and offers the following solution: the captor should shave her head, pare her nails, and imprison her in his house for a month while she cries her eyes out. Then he may go in and rape her.
With a designated list of other enemies (Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites), the genocide has to be total: ‘Thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them…as the Lord thy God has commanded thee.’
Joshua puts this directive into practice when he invades Canaan and sacks the city of Jericho. After the walls come tumbling down, his soldiers ‘utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.’ More earth is scorched as Joshua ‘smote all the country of the hills, and of the south, and of the vale, and of the springs, and all their kings: he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded.’
The next stage in Israelite history is the era of the judges, or tribal chiefs. The most famous of them, Samson, establishes his reputation by killing thirty men during his wedding feast because he needs their clothing to pay off a bet. Then, to avenge the killing of his wife and her father, he slaughters a thousand Philistines and sets fire to their crops; after escaping capture, he kills another thousand with the jawbone of an ass. When he is finally captured and his eyes are burned out, God gives him the strength for a 9/11-like suicide attack in which he implodes a large building, crushing three thousand men and women who are worshipping inside it.
Israel’s first king, Saul, establishes a small empire, which gives him the opportunity to settle an old score. Centuries earlier, during the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, the Amalekites had harassed them, and God commanded the Israelites to ‘wipe out the name of Amalek.’ So when the judge Samuel anoints Saul as king, he reminds Saul of the divine decree: ‘Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.’ Saul carries out the order, but Samuel is furious to learn that he has spared their king, Agag. So Samuel ‘hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord.’
Saul is eventually overthrown by his son-in-law David, who absorbs the southern tribes of Judah, conquers Jerusalem, and makes it the capital of a kingdom that will last four centuries. David would come to be celebrated in story, song, and sculpture, and his six-pointed star would symbolize his people for three thousand years. Christians too would revere him as the forerunner of Jesus.
But in Hebrew scripture David is not just the ‘sweet singer of Israel,’ the chiseled poet who plays a harp and composes the Psalms. After he makes his name by killing Goliath, David recruits a gang of guerrillas, extorts wealth from his fellow citizens at swordpoint, and fights as a mercenary for the Philistines. These achievements make Saul jealous: the women in his court are singing, ‘Saul has killed by the thousands, but David by the tens of thousands.’ So Saul plots to have him assassinated. David narrowly escapes before staging a successful coup.
When David becomes king, he keeps his hard-earned reputation for killing by the tens of thousands. After his general Joab ‘wasted the country of the children of Ammon,’ David ‘brought out the people that were in it, and cut them with saws, and with harrows of iron, and with axes.’ Finally he manages to do something that God considers immoral: he orders a census. To punish David for this lapse, God kills seventy thousand of his citizens.
Within the royal family, sex and violence go hand in hand. While taking a walk on the palace roof one day, David peeping-toms a naked woman, Bathsheba, and likes what he sees, so he sends her husband to be killed in battle and adds her to his seraglio. Later one of David’s children rapes another one and is killed in revenge by a third. The avenger, Absalom, rounds up an army and tries to usurp David’s throne by having sex with ten of his concubines. (As usual, we are not told how the concubines felt about all this.) While fleeing David’s army, Absalom’s hair gets caught in a tree, and David’s general thrusts three spears into his heart. This does not put the family squabbles to an end. Bathsheba tricks a senile David into anointing their son Solomon as his successor. When the legitimate heir, David’s older son Adonijah, protests, Solomon has him killed.
King Solomon is credited with fewer homicides than his predecessors and is remembered instead for building the Temple in Jerusalem and for writing the books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs (though with a harem of seven hundred princesses and three hundred concubines, he clearly didn’t spend all his time writing). Most of all he is remembered for his eponymous virtue, ‘the wisdom of Solomon.’ Two prostitutes sharing a room give birth a few days apart. One of the babies dies, and each woman claims that the surviving boy is hers. The wise king adjudicates the dispute by pulling out a sword and threatening to butcher the baby and hand each woman a piece of the bloody corpse. One woman withdraws her claim, and Solomon awards the baby to her. ‘When all Israel heard of the verdict that the king had rendered, they stood in awe of the king, because they saw that he had divine wisdom in carrying out justice.’
The distancing effect of a good story can make us forget the brutality of the world in which it was set. Just imagine a judge in family court today adjudicating a maternity dispute by pulling out a chain saw and threatening to butcher the baby before the disputants’ eyes. Solomon was confident that the more humane woman (we are never told that she was the mother) would reveal herself, and that the other woman was so spiteful that she would allow a baby to be slaughtered in front of her — and he was right! And he must have been prepared, in the event he was wrong, to carry out the butchery or else forfeit all credibility. The women, for their part, must have believed that their wise king was capable of carrying out this grisly murder.
The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery. People enslave, rape, and murder members of their immediate families. Warlords slaughter civilians indiscriminately, including the children. Women are bought, sold, and plundered like sex toys. And Yahweh tortures and massacres people by the hundreds of thousands for trivial disobedience or for no reason at all. These atrocities are neither isolated nor obscure. They implicate all the major characters of the Old Testament, the ones that Sunday-school children draw with crayons. And they fall into a continuous plotline that stretches for millennia, from Adam and Eve through Noah, the patriarchs, Moses, Joshua, the judges, Saul, David, Solomon, and beyond. According to the biblical scholar Raymund Schwager, the Hebrew Bible ‘contains over six hundred passages that explicitly talk about nations, kings, or individuals attacking, destroying, and killing others…Aside from the approximately one thousand verses in which Yahweh himself appears as the direct executioner of violent punishments, and the many texts in which the Lord delivers the criminal to the punisher’s sword, in over one hundred other passages Yahweh expressly gives the command to kill people.’ Matthew White, a self-described atrocitologist who keeps a database with the estimated death tolls of history’s major wars, massacres, and genocides, counts about 1.2 million deaths from mass killing that are specifically enumerated in the Bible. (He excludes the half million casualties in the war between Judah and Israel described in 2 Chronicles 13 because he considers the body count historically implausible.) The victims of the Noachian flood would add another 20 million or so to the total.
The good news, of course, is that most of it never happened. Not only is there no evidence that Yahweh inundated the planet and incinerated its cities, but the patriarchs, exodus, conquest, and Jewish empire are almost certainly fictions. Historians have found no mention in Egyptian writings of the departure of a million slaves (which could hardly have escaped the Egyptians’ notice); nor have archaeologists found evidence in the ruins of Jericho or neighboring cities of a sacking around 1200 BCE. And if there was a Davidic empire stretching from the Euphrates to the Red Sea around the turn of the 1st millennium BCE, no one else at the time seemed to have noticed it.
Modern biblical scholars have established that the Bible is a wiki. It was compiled over half a millennium from writers with different styles, dialects, character names, and conceptions of God, and it was subjected to haphazard editing that left it with many contradictions, duplications, and non sequiturs.
The oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible probably originated in the 10th century BCE. They included origin myths for the local tribes and ruins, and legal codes adapted from neighboring civilizations in the Near East. The texts probably served as a code of frontier justice for the Iron Age tribes that herded livestock and farmed hillsides in the southern periphery of Canaan. The tribes began to encroach on the valleys and cities, engaged in some marauding every now and again, and may even have destroyed a city or two. Eventually their myths were adopted by the entire population of Canaan, unifying them with a shared genealogy, a glorious history, a set of taboos to keep them from defecting to foreigners, and an invisible enforcer to keep them from each other’s throats. A first draft was rounded out with a continuous historical narrative around the late 7th to mid-6th century BCE, when the Babylonians conquered the Kingdom of Judah and forced its inhabitants into exile. The final edit was completed after their return to Judah in the 5th century BCE.
Though the historical accounts in the Old Testament are fictitious (or at best artistic reconstructions, like Shakespeare’s historical dramas), they offer a window into the lives and values of Near Eastern civilizations in the mid-1st millennium BCE. Whether or not the Israelites actually engaged in genocide, they certainly thought it was a good idea. The possibility that a woman had a legitimate interest in not being raped or acquired as sexual property did not seem to register in anyone’s mind. The writers of the Bible saw nothing wrong with slavery or with cruel punishments like blinding, stoning, and hacking someone to pieces. Human life held no value in comparison with unthinking obedience to custom and authority.
If you think that by reviewing the literal content of the Hebrew Bible I am trying to impugn the billions of people who revere it today, then you are missing the point. The overwhelming majority of observant Jews and Christians are, needless to say, thoroughly decent people who do not sanction genocide, rape, slavery, or stoning people for frivolous infractions. Their reverence for the Bible is purely talismanic. In recent millennia and centuries the Bible has been spin-doctored, allegorized, superseded by less violent texts (the Talmud among Jews and the New Testament among Christians), or discreetly ignored. And that is the point. Sensibilities toward violence have changed so much that religious people today compartmentalize their attitude to the Bible. They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality, while getting their actual morality from more modern principles.”
“Jean Piaget was the first developmental psychologist to propose that children see physical objects as designed for a purpose, and subsequent research has borne him out. Psychologist Deborah Keleman of Boston University has argued that young children exhibit ‘promiscuous teleology’ (a phrase only an academic could love), meaning they find goals and purposes in almost everything. For example, although older children and adults understand that only living things have goals, young children are less exclusive. A seven- or eight-year-old might say that a mountain is shaped the way it is so that animals have something to climb on. Keleman suggests that children start out with this promiscuous teleology as a kind of cognitive building block and that, as they age, they learn to narrow the identification of goals and purposes to biological things.
In addition to finding purpose in the design of objects, children also see meaning in events. In a 2015 study, Konika Banerjee and Paul Bloom of Yale University tested children’s preferences for natural and purposeful explanations for life events…
For each of these life events, children were given the choice between only one explanation—a natural one (e.g., “because she left the door open”)—and two explanations—one natural and the other teleological (e.g., ‘because she left the door open and to teach her responsibility’). Banerjee and Bloom found that the majority of younger children chose explanations that included an underlying intention, but the preference for intentional explanations decreased with age.”
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