Hector Avalos is professor of religious studies at Iowa State University and the author or editor of six books on Biblical studies and religion, including his recently published work, The End of Biblical Studies. Join us for a fascinating presentation detailing how the more we discover about the ancient world, the less reliable we find the Bible.
From the dust jacket of The End of Biblical Studies: Hector Avalos calls for an end to biblical studies as we know them. He outlines two main arguments for this surprising conclusion.
First, academic biblical scholarship has clearly succeeded in showing that the ancient civilization that produced the Bible held beliefs about the origin, nature, and purpose of the world and humanity that are fundamentally opposed to the views of modern society. The Bible is thus largely irrelevant to the needs and concerns of contemporary human beings.
Second, Avalos criticizes his colleagues for applying a variety of flawed and specious techniques aimed at maintaining the illusion that the Bible is still relevant in today’s world. In effect, he accuses his profession of being more concerned about its self-preservation than about giving an honest account of its own findings to the general public and faith communities.
My Dad and my Uncle were in World War One.
At least they were in it, but not in it:
Conscripted but never committed.
My Dad was called up in 1915,
And then run over by a field gun
In an army camp at Lydd marsh in Kent,
So he never actually made it
Across the Channel to fight.
His pelvis and both legs were crushed,
In his first week, in a training exercise,
By a Howitzer rolling downhill.
It weighed over thirty hundredweight.
While pushing and dragging the gun up a slope
My Dad and the other eighteen-year-olds carried shells,
Shells to be fed into the Howitzer’s six-foot-long barrel.
One of the group lost his footing
And they lost control of the gun carriage,
Then two were crushed by its cast-iron wheels;
Each wheel being the height of a man’s shoulder.
One of them died, but my Dad survived.
As a child I was ashamed of the story,
Naively wanting him to be a hero
But, of course, if he’d never been invalided out,
I might never have come into existence.
There were a thousand Howitzers on the Western Front,
Heavy, Swedish-made guns towed along
By boys, men and horses from battle to battle
Which, by the war’s end, had fired 25 million shells,
Stealing thousands of lives, and generations unborn,
Making the gun crews primary targets.
My Uncle Jack’s connection to the war
Was stronger than my Dad’s, as Jack “saw action”.
He made it across the Channel
In a Royal Artillery troopship,
And lost the use of a limb in 1916.
His arm was half severed by shrapnel:
He held it in place until it was patched up
And then he was returned to his unit,
With a flask of iodine to dab on it.
Jack was in one of that war’s most famous battles,
One of those whose very name makes you well up –
But Jack ran counter to the received wisdom
About the soldiers serving in the Great War
With its sentimental patina and its mythologized tales
Of Nurse Edith Cavell, and the Angel of Mons,
And lions led by donkeys and plucky Brits,
Because my Dad’s elder brother
Never really participated either,
And he certainly never gave it his all.
Jack had “reservations” was how my Dad put it.
More often than not Jack didn’t have “one up the spout”
Meaning he’d avoid putting a bullet in his gun,
Because, with a dodgy arm, it was a nuisance to load it
And when his hands were freezing he just thought ‘sod it’.
It was easy to escape their corporal’s attention,
And Jack said there were many others who did the same.
“Hundreds, if not thousands,” Jack always claimed,
Men whose instincts told them to do the minimum.
Jack won the Military Cross, but not for that.
He won it for dragging their Sergeant Major
Back into the trenches from No Man’s Land,
Where the Sergeant Major was lying wounded.
Jack’s commanding officer came to know of it
And Jack was “mentioned in dispatches” –
The Army’s understated way
Of saying that he’d shown courage
In undertaking his one-armed rescue,
Though, as far as his fellow soldiers were concerned,
Jack’s exploit had been a waste of time
For their Sergeant Major was unpopular,
And in any case he was dead on arrival.
Jack lived with the taunts and the ribbing
About his gesture having been pointless,
And was even accused of doing it to “show off”.
Cripplingly shy, this was a knife to the heart,
And it lasted long, long afterwards.
Jack never picked up his Military Cross
And whenever a family member mentioned it,
He dismissed it as “a putty medal with a wooden string.”
As a child I never quite knew what that meant,
But apparently it was a common expression,
Applied to the top brass when they visited the front,
When they strutted up and down –
Martinets with black gloves and swagger sticks
Fact-finding desk-jockeys from the War Office
Clanking away with their rows of flash medals
And drawing attention to themselves –
Those below in the dugouts would mutter,
“Putty medals with a wooden string.”
“Your Uncle Jack lost all his friends in the trenches,”
My Dad would say, “And he’s never made any, ever again.”
And it was true, I never saw Jack with a friend.
I saw him throughout my life, but he was always alone
Except for his sister, Mabel, who looked after him.
He never made another friend in over fifty years.
Neither he nor my father ever explained the war to me.
It was just something that had happened to them.
Something irrational that hung over them;
A grisly cloud of spectral blood;
A tumour that fogged the psyche;
Something in their history that had spoiled both their lives.
Stoically they never admitted to the pain
But, looking back, my Dad was always in pain
And Jack could be painfully silent
To the point of catatonia.
Even though they were little more than children,
They’d been forced to endure a random, excruciating pain
That had confiscated parts of their bodies,
Bodies that had been their birthright.
But afterwards each was able to exact
A small but significant revenge
By their both giving the war some fifty years
Of unremitting negative spin.
They’d scoff at those who tried to romanticize it;
They’d never buy poppies for their buttonholes;
And on Remembrance Day they’d say
That there was nothing worth remembering.
To my father the cenotaph was “a monument to Jack’s hell.”
“A traffic hazard”, he’d say when we drove past it.
And he’d curse it, that dreary Lutyens plinth
With its floral lifebelts laid beneath it,
Lifebelts that save no one’s lives,
Propped up against a memorial
That’s used to fetishize war after war.
“They should have a picture on it,” my Dad said
“Of your Uncle Jack living beside rotting corpses –
“Pictures of doomed youth with froth-corrupted lungs.”
(He had a first edition of Wilfred Owen.)
As a child I naively wanted to boast about Jack
And to tell other boys that he’d won the MC
As if that would make me seem brave too.
When my father overheard me once
I got a dressing-down that I remember to this day:
He accused me of “throwing Jack’s weight about.
“You never ask yourself do you, why Jack never picked it up?
His medal? Well, he wasn’t proud of it. He was ashamed,
When his friends are there, six foot deep in Belgian mud.
If he doesn’t swank about it, why should you?”
When my father died, Jack invited me to go out for a meal
On the first Friday of the month, every year till he died.
The meals were largely silent. His bad dream was still there,
Even in the nineteen-seventies.
His mind was still numbed by something whose origins
Were inexplicable and which he’d never decoded.
A war that had caused another war, like a cancer
That people still seem unable to cauterize.
Over the years, I’d winkle out his memories
As tactfully as I could.
As a boy I seem to have been set the uninvited task
Of probing a world that they wished never existed,
And which left them wishing it would go away.
Jack didn’t mind talking about actual events
Allowing himself only to recount the facts,
But never touching upon his emotions.
A waiter would bring the cheese trolley and most months
Jack would tell the same story about a mule cart
That had arrived behind the lines ferrying an enormous cheese,
A Dutch cheese which they’d all salivated at the sight of.
Jack’s best friend from the same street in Chester
Impulsively ran towards it, his mouth watering
Only to be picked off by a German sniper.
“Fell down against the cheese”, Jack said,
“I won’t eat the stuff now.”
And I’d nod and say, “No,”
As understandingly as I could manage.
The story was unchanging, several times a year.
A hapless waiter wheeled off the cheese trolley untouched.
“I ever tell you about that?” Jack would ask at the end.
I was sure that he half knew he had, but why not?
If the fact of it never went away.
My Dad and my Uncle were in the First World War
Though it’s not quite the whole story,
Because neither of them were exactly in it,
Not in the way that most people might think,
But from their experiences I was able to learn
What callous folly had killed thirty million.
They were forced to serve King and Country for no reason,
They both had lifelong scars, and got nothing in return –
Nothing from the King, and nothing from the Country,
But both ended up certain there must be another way
And for that I’ve been grateful to them, ever since.
They may or may not be in some other world now
But something is certain, if only to me.
They won’t be commemorating World War One
On the Saturday Sept. 28th, disgraced Gen. Odlanier Mena shot himself in the head in a stairwell outside his home in Santiago, Chile. Convicted in 2007 and sentenced to six years for ordering the murder of Oscar Codoceo, Manuel Donoso, and Julio Valenzuela in 1973, a media firestorm over the conditions of his military prison, replete with nutritionist and tennis court, had forced conservative Pres. Piñera to approve his transfer to general population. Rather than face prison life, Gen. Mena made a choice he never offered the thousands whose torture he oversaw as head of the CNI (Chile’s secret police), years of suffering or a painless death. He chose the latter.
Such a sensational story rightly found traction in media outlets across the Hemisphere, but most, like the New York Times, failed to mention Mena’s training at the School of the Americas (SOA), a U.S. Army training facility for Latin American soldiers, as well the broader involvement of the Nixon Administration in fomenting the 1973 coup. That Gen. Mena was able to commit suicide on weekend leave to his comfortable home while technically a prisoner of the state is indication enough of Chile’s agonizing struggle for justice; that mainstream media outlets across the Hemisphere failed to link Mena to the policies of Kissinger and Nixon– policies that continue to the present even as the SOA has been rebranded WHINSEC (Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation)– lays plain that Chilean generals are not the only ones who walk among us, blood on their hands, with impunity.
The New York Times, of course, is not the only publication to focus on the drama of Mena’s death without probing the accomplices who trained, funded, and protected him along the way. The Times, like others, stuck to descriptions of his death, limited the scope of his crimes, and devoted one of eight paragraphs to a sympathy plea from Mena’s lawyer while offering no voice to the family members of his countless thousands of victims. In order to understand this carnal mess, we must expand the timeline beyond that offered by the Times, which in their article begins in 1973, when Gen. Mena had recently transferred from the “Caravan of Death” unit of the Chilean Army to commander of the Rancagua Regiment in Arica Province. Without forgetting his eventual conviction for the murders of the civilians he ordered that year, it’s necessary to turn back the clock three years to 1970, when Mena attended a 9 month Command and General Staff Officer Course at Ft. Benning, GA, home of the School of the Americas. In doing so, the precise type of officers produced at the SOA will come into focus, and allow us a contemporary, domestic point of reference for both the 9/11/73 coup that bore Gen. Pinochet’s dictatorship and the implementation of “Operations Other Than War (OOTW)” that Mena became familiar with at Ft. Benning.
The SOA/WHINSEC has a long and gruesome history. Originally opened in the Panama Canal Zone in 1946, it relocated to Georgia in 1984 after the Panamanians finally achieved sovereignty over their Canal. Notorious graduates include Guatemalan Pres. Gen. Rios Montt (convicted this year, and subsequently released, of genocide), Argentine Pres. Gen. Roberto Viola (convicted in 1985 of murder, kidnapping, and torture) and Honduran Police Chief Juan Carlos “the Tiger” Bonilla (whose police force has murdered and repressed Hondurans so successfully since the 2009 coup that the U.S. State Department has rerouted military aide to his subordinates, an Orwellian maneuver necessitated by Congress’s disapproval of human rights abuses in Honduras). That is to say that the impact of SOA grads across the Hemisphere continues not only in the historical memories of Latin Americans and the nightmares of disgraced generals, but in the mundane standard operating procedures of lethal military bureaucracies from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego.
Chile alone has sent more than 5,200 soldiers to be trained at the SOA in counterinsurgency, sniper fire, and interrogation techniques. Gen. Mena, high enough in rank in 1970 to forgo those courses, instead enrolled in Command and General Staff Officer Course (O-3), reserved for majors and above. According to the 1996 U.S. Army Course Catalog from the SOA, the stated purpose of the course was to train Latin American officers to “be able to command battalions, brigades and equivalent-sized units in peace or war…” and “efficiently manage manpower, equipment, money and time.” Certainly, his U.S. Army instructors would have been pleased with how efficiently Mena ran the Center for National Intelligence from 1977-80, renamed, like the SOA, after its previous moniker, DINA, had become too toxic.
During a time when the Chilean state faced no credible external threats, of all the course objectives listed in the SOA catalog, it must have been the Operations Other Than War (OOTW) training that Gen. Mena drew upon most frequently. The seemingly vague description, “To develop awareness of U.S. OOTW doctrine and of specific Latin American problems in a (sic) OOTW environment,” tells all when we trace the trajectories of SOA stars like Mena to the craters where they are currently crashing and burning all across Latin America. Among the “specific Latin American problems” Mena developed an awareness of during his time at the SOA most surely was the ascendance of the political left, a process now more than a half century old that manifested itself in Chile by the election of the Popular Unity coalition’s Salvador Allende Gossens to the presidency on Sept. 4th, 1970, six months after Mena’s enrollment at Ft. Benning. We can only imagine what must have been discussed by Mena and his Chilean colleagues in the portion of their course devoted to the objective of “Officer Preparation”, designed to familiarize them “with basic organization and doctrinal concepts”, but the outcome was tattooed in red across Chile during the 17-year Pinochet dictatorship.
Beyond the glaring omission of Mena’s training at the SOA, the New York Times and other mainstream outlets also ignored the larger story of U.S. direct involvement in the ’73 coup and complicity in all that followed. That story has been told by truth seeking independent journalists many times (for a great account of the mainstream media’s whitewashing of Latin American state violence, see Keane Bhatt’s article from July 29). Suffice it to say that Nixon’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has for many years been unable to travel freely abroad for fear that foreign courts will hold him accountable for his crimes against humanity. While the Times tries to relegate Mena’s suicide to the realms of history and pulp, we must remember that crimes like Mena’s are ongoing, and that the SOA/WHINSEC continues to export anti-democratic human rights abusers around the Hemisphere. Who says we don’t produce anything here anymore?
Okay, they don’t do so in as many words. But in addition to being more confident than ever (despite a 16-year pause in warming and the growing mismatch between model projections and observations) that man-made climate change is real, they are also more confident nothing really bad is going to happen during the 21st Century.
The scariest parts of the “planetary emergency” narrative popularized by Al Gore and other pundits are Atlantic Ocean circulation shutdown (implausibly plunging Europe into a mini-ice age), ice sheet disintegration raising sea levels 20 feet, and runaway warming from melting frozen methane deposits.
As BishopHill and Judith Curry report on their separate blogs, IPCC now believes that in the 21st Century, Atlantic Ocean circulation collapse is “very unlikely,” ice sheet collapse is “exceptionally unlikely,” and catastrophic release of methane hydrates from melting permafrost is “very unlikely.” You can read it for yourself in Chapter 12Table 12.4 of the IPCC’s forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report.
But these doomsday scenarios have always been way more fiction than science. For some time now, extreme weather has been the only card left in the climate alarm deck. Climate activists repeatedly assert that severe droughts, floods, and storms (Hurricane Sandy is their current poster child) are now the “new normal,” and they blame fossil fuels.
“Current datasets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century … No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin.”
“In summary, there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale.”
“In summary, there is low confidence in observed trends in small-scale severe weather phenomena such as hail and thunderstorms because of historical data inhomogeneities and inadequacies in monitoring systems.”
“Based on updated studies, AR4 [the IPCC 2007 report] conclusions regarding global increasing trends in drought since the 1970s were probably overstated.”
“In summary, confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extra-tropical cyclones since 1900 is low.”
Pielke Jr. concludes:
“There is really not much more to be said here — the data says what it says, and what it says is so unavoidably obvious that the IPCC has recognized it in its consensus. Of course, I have no doubts that claims will still be made associating floods, drought, hurricanes and tornadoes with human-caused climate change — Zombie science — but I am declaring victory in this debate. Climate campaigners would do their movement a favor by getting themselves on the right side of the evidence.”
For further discussion, see my post “Global Warming: Planet’s Most Hyped Problem” on this week’s National Journal Energy Insiders blog.
Baker: At the end of the day. if we do not get it done the way the administration is working on it now, which we totally agree with, we ought to take em out.
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
Think of your smart phone as being equal to or the same as, an ankle monitoring bracelet forced on an alleged criminal.
“An ankle monitor (also known as a tether, or ankle bracelet) is a device that individuals under house arrest or parole are often required to wear. At timed intervals, the ankle monitor sends a radio frequency signal containing location and other information to a receiver.”
That sounds exactly like your smart phone?
The one thing that makes it different is that a criminal is forced to wear such a device and you are choosing to use and pay for own tracking! You are wearing, carrying, accessorizing your own electronic monitoring device. What a gift to the powers that shouldn’t be!
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
Where Should The Birds Fly is the first film about Gaza made by Palestinians living the reality of Israel’s siege and blockade of this tiny enclave. It is the story of two young women, survivors of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead. Mona Samouni, now 12 years old and the filmmaker, Fida Qishta, now 27, represent the spirit and future of Palestinians. The film is a visual documentation of the Goldstone Report. But it is so much more. It reveals the strength and hope, the humanity and humor that flourishes among the people of Gaza. Few films document so powerfully and personally the impact of modern warfare and sanctions on a civilian population.
The film itself breaks the blockade. Filmmakers in Gaza have never had the opportunity to make a full length, professional documentary of their reality. Fida Qishta, born and raised in Rafah, Gaza, began her filmmaking career as a wedding videographer, and soon moved on to working with international human rights observers in Gaza, documenting day to day life under siege. Her commentary on the siege was published in The International Herald Tribune. Her video reports of Operation Cast Lead were published widely including in the UK newspaper The Guardian and in their weekly news magazine, The Observer.
Fida founded The Life-Maker’s Centre, Rafah, Gaza. She was the manager and a teacher at this free facility for 300 children affected by war. The center continues to provide a safe place to play and offers counseling and English language tutoring.
The IPCC has released its latest assessment of the state of climate science, and this time it’s even more dire than their 2007 assessment. Global warming is “unequivocal” and humans are the “dominant cause” to a certainty of 95%. But how are these uncertainties calculated? And how does the IPCC process work anyway? Join us this week on The Corbett Report as we dissect the latest IPCC hype and examine the organizations processes and conclusions.
For those with limited bandwidth, CLICK HERE to download a smaller, lower file size version of this episode.
For those interested in audio quality, CLICK HERE for the highest-quality version of this episode (WARNING: very large download).
PRESS CONFERENCE 9/24/13 Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan
Gregory Jaczko, Former Chairman,US Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Torgen Johnson,Citizens’ Representative, San Diego Forum
Tetsuro Tsutsui,Member, Nuclear Regulation Sub-committee,
Citizens’ Commission on Nuclear Energy (CCNE) /
Nuclear Power Plant Technical Experts’ Group
A political analyst has warned of efforts by anti-Iran political figures and the Israeli lobby in the US to impede the positive process which has begun on the standoff over Tehran’s nuclear energy program.
In a Friday interview with Press TV, Danny Schechter pointed to Iran’s successful Thursday talks with the six world powers over the issues surrounding Tehran’s nuclear energy program and the positive change in Washington’s tone about the Islamic Republic, saying extremist groups in the US, including “the Tea Party people” as well as the Israeli lobby will launch a campaign to obstruct the new positive process regarding Tehran’s peaceful nuclear work.
“Iran has surprised and put the rest of the world off guard, so to speak … Iran was not only very sophisticated but it was also very, as they say, constructive in establishing some parameters to continued discussion,” he said.
“I think there is a desire on the part of a lot of the parties and the people of the world to see this conflict if not ended certainly adjudicated in some sort of fair way and the fact that that the process has begun is quite amazing. I do not think anybody a week ago whether believes that it was even possible,” Schechter pointed out.
On Friday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and his American counterpart Barack Obama held a telephone conversation as the Iranian president was wrapping up his visit to New York.
The phone conversation is the first direct communication between Iranian and US presidents since Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979.
The two heads of states stressed Tehran and Washington’s political will to swiftly resolve the West’s dispute over Iran’s nuclear energy program, and exchanged viewpoints on various topics, including cooperation on different regional issues.
During the telephone conversation, Rouhani and Obama also assigned Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and US Secretary of State John Kerry to quickly set the stage for cooperation between the two counties.
The United States, Israel and some of their allies have repeatedly accused Iran of pursuing non-civilian objectives in its nuclear energy program.
Iran has categorically rejected the allegation, stressing that as a committed member of the International Atomic Energy Agency and a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, it is entitled to develop nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.
Coca-Cola plans to run its very first ad defending aspartame and the safety of artificial sweeteners. This move comes as a result of a dramatic drop in diet cola sales within the past year. This is great news as it goes to show how much of an impact we can really make by raising awareness about the health effects of aspartame. More people around the world are making better choices and you can read more about that and the dangers associated with the Coke here.
I came across this video and thought it would be appropriate to share in light of Coca-Cola’s recent move to bring awareness to and “join together” in fighting obesity. This comes before their more recent ad campaign to defend artificial sweeteners like aspartame. It’s the brutally honest Coca-Cola commercial you’ll never see on television. This is a voiced over version of the original Coke commercial which you can see here.
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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