Confusion

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  The simplest explanation of these discrepancies is that the cultic calendar had not yet taken its final shape when the books of Ezra and Nehemiah were edited. There are several other minor discrepancies, such as the variation in the amount of the temple tax (one-third of a shekel in Neh 10:32 but one half in P, Exod 30:11-16). Since taxation tends to increase rather than decrease, this is probably another indication that the Priestly legislation had not reached its final form in the time of Ezra. Nonetheless, it remains true that the law of Ezra corresponds substantially to the Torah as we know it, including both Deuteronomy and some form of the Priestly code. According to the account of Ezra-Nehemiah, the people of Jerusalem had no knowledge of the book of the law before Ezra’s arrival. In fact, the prophetic oracles of Haggai, Zechariah, and Third Isaiah, which date to the period before Ezra, never appeal to such a book. Yet at some point, the book of the Torah was recognized as the law of Judah. Ezra is the person credited with this momentous innovation in the biblical tradition. The Problem of Intermarriage The dominant issue in Ezra’s time in Jerusalem, however, is not the cultic calendar but intermarriage. According to Ezra 9:1-2, after Ezra had arrived in Jerusalem and presented his credentials, “the officials approached me and said, ‘The people of Israel, the priests, and the Levites have not separated themselves from the peoples of the lands with their abominations, from the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites. For they have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and for their sons. Thus the holy seed has mixed itself with the peoples of the lands, and in this faithlessness the officials and leaders have led the way.’ ” We do not know exactly who the officials were who made the complaint. They were evidently not identical with the officials who led the way “in this faithlessness.” The practice of intermarriage was evidently a cause of some division within the community even before Ezra arrived. The “peoples of the lands” are identified in traditional biblical terms (cf. the lists in Gen 15:19-21; Exod 3:8, 17; Deut 7:1; et al.). Some of the names on this list were of immediate relevance (Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites), while others were obsolete, as the peoples no longer existed (Jebusites, Hittites). We must assume, however, that the primary temptation to intermarriage came from the descendants of the Judeans who had never gone into exile and from the Samaritans. These people were not regarded as members of the Jewish community, at least by purists such as Ezra. The attraction of intermarriage, apart from the normal development of human relations, was compounded by the economic situation. The returning exiles presumably hoped to recover their ancestral property in Judah.

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  Finally, if the future appearance of the antichrist actually was a central component of Paul's teaching, as intimated in 2 Thess 2:5, it is very strange that he never says a word about it in any of his other letters. These difficulties make it hard to see how Paul could have written both of the letters to the Thessalonians. One of the most interesting things about the second one is how it ends: "I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand. This is the mark in every letter of mine; it is the way I write" (3:17). This means that "Paul" dictated the letter to a scribe but then added his own signature to it, as he did, for example, in Galatians (see Gal 6:11). What is peculiar is that he claims this to be his invariable practice, even though he does not appear to have ended most of his other letters this way, including, 1 Thessalonians! The words are hard to account for as Paul's, but they make perfect sense as the words of an imitator of Paul who wants his readers to be assured that despite the fact that they have received at least one letter that was forged in Paul's name (2:2), this is not another one. We obviously don't know who actually wrote this letter if it wasn't Paul and can only speculate about when he was living. We can assume that he wrote sometime after Paul had died, possibly near CHAPTER ,, IN THE WAKE OF THE APOSTLE 325 the end of the first century, when writing letters in Paul's name became both more feasible and, from what we can tell, more popular. Moreover, we know that during the period some Christian groups were beginning to face increased hostilities within their social contexts and that some of them were turning to a renewed hope in the return of Christ in light of these conflicts. Thus the author must have been a Christian from one of the churches that Paul established, who evidently had read 1 Thessalonians (hence, for example, the similar prescript). He wrote to help resolve the problems that Christians of his day were facing, choosing to do so in the name of Paul, the founder and hero of his church, one whose words would be heard and heeded.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Poking around online, I find a paper by Daniel Dennett, a philosopher, called “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity.” That puzzling thing, the self, Dennett posits, is analogous to the center of gravity of an object. A center of gravity is an accepted concept in Newtonian physics, but it is not an atom or other physical item in the world. It has no mass or color or physical properties, except for its location in time and space. It is a purely abstract object, Dennett explains, a “theorist’s fiction.” So too is the self. When we read fiction, Dennett says, contradictions don’t feel like a big deal.63 We’re used to this in stories; we’ve gotten good at suspending disbelief. It’s just a fictional character. We find contradictory properties less tolerable, however, when we are trying to interpret real people and things. But contradictory properties are quite normal, something we can all locate in ourselves. Walt Whitman famously exalted in his multitudes. In the fiction of the self, the self is both author and character. We are constantly writing the novel of ourselves, inventing more and more of it on demand, in response to what the world asks of us. In this way, parts of us that are not exactly known or defined at one time become better defined as we go on creating. We can’t undo anything, but we can clarify and interpret. “The past and present wilt,” Whitman wrote in “Song of Myself.” “I have fill’d them, emptied them. / And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.” I’d wanted so much to have a story that behaved, but instead I have a self. 35It’s easier to say what I am not than what I am. I’m not straight. I’m in-between. In a certain sense, maybe I’m not so different from Ash. I find desire where gender crimps to reveal the person underneath it, because that’s where I myself want to be found. I’m in-between other identities too: a mother, but only half-time, and a divorced woman who co-parents with her ex. It doesn’t surprise me anymore that Diamond found, among her sample of non-heterosexual women, that “unlabeled” was the sexual identity most frequently used. These women explained that they were increasingly skeptical of the rigid nature of any sexual categorization. Feeling “unlabelable” isn’t new, or unusual. “Fluidity conveys the capacity of women’s sexuality to fill an available space the way a body of water takes the form of its immediate boundaries,” writes Diamond. “Sometimes the available space is created by a particular environment, opportunity, or relationship, but sometimes it is created by the process of self-reflection. Either way, when the attractions develop, they may be experienced as an expansion and a blossoming rather than as a discovery of something that was always there but just repressed.”64

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  At the end there were about thirty seated people who had come to hear the talk and another thirty standing people who had arrived during it. I thought that some of the standers, drawn to the talk more by volume than interest, might be annoyed, and the first question seemed to confirm my expectations. It was clearly inimical in tone, but it was also absolutely fair and, in the long run, extremely helpful for my own understanding. It went something like this. Questioner: “You said that the Barabbas story was created by Mark because, as he saw it, the Jerusalem crowd had picked the wrong saviors, namely the brigand-rebels, in the war against Rome that started in 66 C.E. ?” Myself: “Yes.” Questioner: “Mark himself made it up? The choice of Barabbas over Jesus never happened? It’s not true?” Myself: “Yes.” Questioner: “Then why can’t you just call it what it is: a lie?” I cannot remember what I said in response, but it was probably defensive because I had never thought of the problem that way before. Why did I not call that incident or the many others created, in my view, by the traditions or the evangelists, lies? They were not true, so were they not lies? The question stuck with me over the following weeks, and it was in thinking about the Cross Gospel and not about any of the canonical accounts that I first saw the answer. I knew I was not afraid to call things, even gospel things, by their proper names. If I had thought lie was the proper term, I would have used it. So why not use it? What had always prevented me from doing so? I had called the claim that the Jews killed Jesus “the longest lie.” But did not the gospels say just that? Recall the number of times in this book that I have emphasized gospel as updated good news, rewriting the Jesus of the late 20s as the Jesus of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. I knew, of course, that words and deeds of Jesus were updated to speak to new situations and problems, new communities and crises. They were adopted, they were adapted, they were invented, they were created. But then so, of course, were the friends and enemies of Jesus. That I had ignored. The community and author behind the Cross Gospel described the friends and enemies of Jesus at his execution as their own friends and enemies in the early 40s. The Romans were completely innocent then because that was how they appeared now . The house of Herod and the Jewish authorities were completely guilty then because that was how they appeared now . The “people of the Jews” were ready to convert then because that was how they appeared now . We may not like it, but that is what gospels do in Catholic Christianity. That is their generic destiny and compositional function. They are not straight history, straight biography, straight journalism.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  —How nice to see you, how really nice. The gin blossoms that traversed his nose wrinkled in his smile. And then Neil got right into it. Because there was no delaying where spiritual issues were concerned. Because this was a time of great spiritual questing. The center of the conversation was again est , on which Myers had an inside track, as he seemed to have on a variety of nontraditional avenues of worship, including the Church of Scientology, Parhamansa Yogananda, the Peoples’ Temple, Gestalt therapy, and transcendental meditation. The main issue, the way Myers put it, was the Fleece . You had a right, as a struggling human machine, to the fleece, to get all the fleece in your daily life. —But having a right, well, and I’m paraphrasing here, paraphasing Werner and one of his students, having a right is different from being right. Being right and being happy are on opposite ends of this dance that is the life of human machines. That’s all that’s going on here. Being right is the last refuge of scoundrels. Abdicate totally and completely. Right? Instead, as est accounts for it, you’re going to have to search for your flow and negotiate … its currents and its white water. That’s right. Once you have found the center-that-is-not-a-true-center, as a human machine you can partake of it at any time. Werner says pretty clearly that when you begin to communicate about your flow, it will take the shape of this globe, this world. That’s the big secret that isn’t really a secret. Once you’ve constructed this raft for this voyage along your flow, once you have copped to the twists and bends of this journey, you can think about becoming a spiritual adept yourself. That’s the secret. That’s about all there is to it. —Now, good relationships in the dance, well, the problem there is simply adjustment to the other person’s flow, Myers went on. You have to work toward an avenue of play and love that feeds on the dance. Your avenue of play and love becomes shelter for the object, the other human machine. These are your options. Your flow has tributaries, see, and these are called options, the way Werner talks about it. The field of tributaries just goes on and on. And the end point here is that everything in heaven … everything in heaven is fashioned from the mutability of these options constructed in your flow, whether with consciousness or unconsciousness. And that means that your feet rest in heaven. As Werner says, you are the higher power, the supreme being. You are. Myers broke into an unashamed grin. —Well, honestly, I’m glad somebody is, Elena said. —I’ll bet you are, Myers said, as cheerful as Buddy Hackett. Because that’s getting it. That’s getting It. —Well, tell me, Elena said. How did you two meet? —Well, he’s my minister, Neil said. And then it struck Elena.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  Your whole life has been true. It happened to you. All that time that you felt straight, when you dated men, when you married Brandon—all of what you felt was real. But this story you’re trying to tell, it’s not your story. I think you want your story to be a straight line, but it may not be. Then what is my story? Tell me. So what if you don’t “cohere,” or not all the time? Imagine the perspective of someone who meets you at a party. They see you dancing. It seems like you’re outgoing and fun. But a different person, let’s say someone who meets you at a coffee shop, might describe you as reserved or shy. You’re focused on your work; you don’t make eye contact. Both people can be right. Sometimes you’re this; sometimes you’re that. But that’s just mood, I said. That’s not my self. I know you want to think there’s a firm thing that’s “Molly.” Some core that you can understand and count on. But if there is a core to you, what exactly is it? This is more uncomfortable to think about. What part of you is stable, if you’re actually changing all the time? You didn’t used to be a mother, or a wife, or a restaurant owner. Now you are. That’s a lot of change. What if the one constant thing about you is that you’re changeable? [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Problem: Even I do not believe that my experience is possible. Unless. Theory A: I was born gay, or bi, but I did not understand it until now. Or, Theory B: I changed, almost beyond my own recognition. Theory A fits the common understanding of sexual orientation. I saw a glimpse when I was twenty, with Laura, but I have been closeted for most of my life. I have deceived even myself. I clothed myself in layers of self-deception. (How on earth did I do it?) Even while telling myself that I loved Brandon to the exclusion of all others, loved him enough to marry him, somewhere deep within me lived this person who would give anything to fuck a woman. She’d stowed away inside my psyche for years, hiding belowdecks without making a sound. Theory B is of course simpler. I changed. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I read in Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts that Nelson’s mother once sent her a card to celebrate a poetry publication, and on the card was that famous Joan Didion line: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Nelson was unsettled by it. “I became a poet in part because I didn’t want to tell stories,” she writes. “As far as I could tell, stories may enable us to live, but they also trap us, bring us spectacular pain. In their scramble to make sense of nonsensical things, they distort, codify, blame, aggrandize, restrict, omit, betray, mythologize, you name it. This has always struck me as cause for lament, not celebration.”19

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  It is not apparent that Samuel’s command, either here or in chapter 13, is for the greater good of the people, unless one assumes, as the Deuteronomist does, that it is always better to obey the prophet who claims to speak for God. Saul might have been forgiven for doubting the authenticity of that claim. But in fact he never questions Samuel’s authority in the story. After all, Saul’s own authority derived in large part from the word of the prophet. Samuel’s rebuke to Saul has a prophetic ring to it: “Has the L ord as great delight in burnt offerings and in sacrifices as in obedience to the voice of the L ord ? Surely, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed than the fat of rams” (1 Sam 15:22). There is a close parallel to this in the prophet Hosea: “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings” (Hos 6:6). Hosea and Samuel agree that sacrifice is no substitute for right conduct, but they have rather different ideas about what constitutes right conduct. For Hosea, it is steadfast love and the knowledge of God. In the context of the prophet’s oracles, it is clear that the practice of justice is required, as well as fidelity to YHWH. For Samuel, in contrast, everything comes down to obedience, even if what is commanded is the slaughter of other human beings. The two stories of conflict between Samuel and Saul in 1 Samuel 13 and 15, frame another engrossing story that illustrates a similar conflict in values. In the battle against the Philistines after the incident at Gilgal, Saul, we are told, laid an oath on the troops, cursing any man who tasted food before the enemy was defeated. (Recall the oath of Jephthah in Judges 11.) His son Jonathan, the hero of the battle up to this point, was unaware of the oath and ate some honey. When he is told of the oath, Jonathan shrugs it off: the men would fight better if they had food. Here again we see a clash between a moderate pragmatism on the one hand and an ethic that attaches great importance to oaths and vows on the other. Jonathan questions the efficacy of oaths as a means to success in battle. It would be better to see that the troops were well fed. In this case, Saul is cast as the defender of the ethic of obedience. He declares that if Jonathan is guilty he must die. This story, however, ends very differently from either that of Abraham and Isaac or that of Jephthah and his daughter. Jonathan is not executed, and the reprieve does not come from divine intervention. Instead, the troops intervene to rescue Jonathan from his father’s oath. In this case, pragmatism wins out.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] So what was it? Was I gay all along, or bi, and I’d just looked the other way? After nothing happened with Laura, hadn’t I been a little glad? Of course: that must have been when I went into the closet. People don’t just become gay. I must have repressed it, buried it so deep that even I couldn’t find it. As a child, I’d never believed what I heard other kids say about gay people going to hell. But the fact that people said it left a mark. It raised a fear, a prickly, painful thing, a splinter for other fears to snag on. I didn’t want to be gay. I thought, Who on earth would want to be gay? Though I knew that other people’s hatred was wrong, the splinter must have dug in fast, so deep I couldn’t see it. I felt a low humming relief, when I understood what it was to be gay, that I was not that. Early on in dating Brandon, when we swapped dating histories and have-you-evers, I’d told him about Laura, about how confusing and exciting it was, how sad and strange. It was no big deal for either of us: People are complicated, ha-ha! Now we’d been married for nearly a decade. Now I wanted Nora. All that time, had this been under the surface, waiting to surge up like magma, frothy and fast, solidifying where it met the air? If sexual orientation is something you’re born with, I must have always been gay, or bi, or whatever I was. But I’d thought being closeted meant, at the very least, that you knew what you were. That made sense to me: you hid because you had something to hide. I’d never felt I had anything to hide. I had felt straight, with one strange exception that never went anywhere. Laura had confused me because she was an anomaly. But once the confusion and the wanting subsided, I didn’t feel not-straight. I felt like there was simply something about her, an isolated case. Even after Laura, I knew my story. My story made sense. Is there another universe where the story could have gone otherwise? How good is my imagination?

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  The Vulgate translates the words thus: “Ego sum qui sum”—”I Am Who Am.” It is in no sense an original concept; in fact, every ancient race had its equivalent. All the temples of Egypt had carved on their walls the words, “Nuk Pu Nuk”—”I Am That I Am.” The Hindus had their “Tat Twam Asi”—”I Am That,” and the Persians their “Ahmi Yat Ahmi.” Thus salvation may be of the Jews, but not originality. Now as soon as Being exists, “I Am That I Am” becomes “I Am What I Will Be,” and this is the meaning of the word Yahveh. This is made up of four Hebrew letters: Yod, He, Vah, He, or YHVH. As the Y and I are identical, these four are the same as those of the Tetragrammaton. They all mean Being , and their transpositions, change . The priestly scribe, aware of this changing process, presents it in another way; he has Yahveh change his name. 3. And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of God Almighty (in Hebrew, El Shaddai), but by my name Jehovah was I not known to them (Chap. 6). Historically, the word Jehovah is a semantic accident. As the Hebrews considered the name Yahveh too sacred to be uttered, they used the words Adonai and Elohim instead, and in writing, added the vowel signs of these words to the consonants YHVH. In due time these were mistaken for parts of the word itself and so YHVH became Jehovah. Elsewhere we are told that God is “the same, yesterday, today, and forever,” but according to the Torah he is constantly changing, as he should. This change in his name is the same as that of Abram, Jacob, and others, but now on a lower plane. It represents that change from Involution to Evolution, an isomerism—same in substance, but different in quality. In other words, Jehovah, the God of Moses, is the creative power in Evolution. There is, however, a woeful confusion here also. According to this text the name Jehovah was not known in Abraham’s day, yet, according to Genesis, Abraham called the place of Isaac’s sacrifice Jehovah-jireh. And even in Seth’s day (Gen. 4:26), “Then began men to call upon the name of the Lord,” originally Jehovah. These earlier statements are, like circumcision, priestly interpolations long subsequent and for a priestly purpose. The word El Shaddai means “terrible power,” namely, a sun. In our Premise we said it was this “terrible power” that created this earth. Here we find it so terrible that it even tried to kill Moses, the life force in it. “And it came to pass by the way in the inn that the Lord met him (Moses) and sought to kill him.” Can any professor of “Biblical Literature and Religion” explain this statement? He cannot on his hypothesis, but we can on ours.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  Are the sequences equally likely? The intuitive answer—“of course not!”—is false. Because the events are independent and because the outcomes B and G are (approximately) equally likely, then any possible sequence of six births is as likely as any other. Even now that you know this conclusion is true, it remains counterintuitive, because only the third sequence appears random. As expected, BGBBGB is judged much more likely than the other two sequences. We are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world, in which regularities (such as a sequence of six girls) appear not by accident but as a result of mechanical causality or of someone’s intention. We do not expect to see regularity produced by a random process, and when we detect what appears to be a rule, we quickly reject the idea that the process is truly random. Random processes produce many sequences that convince people that the process is not random after all. You can see why assuming causality could have had evolutionary advantages. It is part of the general vigilance that we have inherited from ancestors. We are automatically on the lookout for the possibility that the environment has changed. Lions may appear on the plain at random times, but it would be safer to notice and respond to an apparent increase in the rate of appearance of prides of lions, even if it is actually due to the fluctuations of a random process. The widespread misunderstanding of randomness sometimes has significant consequences. In our article on representativeness, Amos and I cited the statistician William Feller, who illustrated the ease with which people see patterns where none exists. During the intensive rocket bombing of London in World War II, it was generally believed that the bombing could not be random because a map of the hits revealed conspicuous gaps. Some suspected that German spies were located in the unharmed areas. A careful statistical analysis revealed that the distribution of hits was typical of a random process—and typical as well in evoking a strong impression that it was not random. “To the untrained eye,” Feller remarks, “randomness appears as regularity or tendency to cluster.”

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  As far as I know, my father never had any serious difference with any other human being during the whole course of his existence. And Turgenieff, in a letter to my father in 1865, wrote, "You are the only man with whom I have ever had misunderstandings." Whenever my father related his quarrel with Ivan Sergeyevitch, he took all the blame on himself. Turgenieff, immediately after the quarrel, wrote a letter apologizing to my father, and never sought to justify his own part in it. Why was it that, as Turgenieff himself put it, his "constellation" and my father's "moved in the ether with unquestioned enmity"? This is what my sister Tatyana wrote on the subject in her article "Turgenieff," published in the supplement to the "Novoye Vremya," February 2, 1908: All question of literary rivalry, it seems to me, is utterly beside the mark. Turgenieff, from the very outset of my father's literary career, acknowledged his enormous talents, and never thought of rivalry with him. From the moment when, as early as 1854, he wrote to Kolbasina, "If Heaven only grant Tolstoy life, I confidently hope that he will surprise us all," he never ceased to follow my father's work with interest, and always expressed his unbounded admiration of it. "When this young wine has done fermenting," he wrote to Druzhenin in 1856, "the result will be a liquor worthy of the gods." In 1857 he wrote to Polonsky, "This man will go far, and leave deep traces behind him." Nevertheless, somehow these two men never could "hit it off" together. When one reads Turgenieff's letters to my father, one sees that from the very beginning of their acquaintance misunderstandings were always arising, which they perpetually endeavored to smooth down or to forget, but which arose again after a time, sometimes in another form, necessitating new explanations and reconciliations. In 1856 Turgenieff wrote to my father: Your letter took some time reaching me, dear Lyoff Nikolaievich. Let me begin by saying that I am very grateful to you for sending it to me. I shall never cease to love you and to value your friendship, although, probably through my fault, each of us will long feel considerable awkwardness in the presence of the other.... I think that you yourself understand the reason of this awkwardness of which I speak. You are the only man with whom I have ever had misunderstandings. This arises from the very fact that I have never been willing to confine myself to merely friendly relations with you. I have always wanted to go further and deeper than that; but I set about it clumsily. I irritated and upset you, and when I saw my mistake, I drew back too hastily, perhaps; and it was this which caused this "gulf" between us.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  I stayed in Lyon for about two weeks. My friends worked during the day and I spent my afternoons with the student I had met in London. When his parents were out, I lay down on his cabin bed and he would lie down on top of me, and I had to be careful not to knock my head against the shelves. I was still inexperienced but I regarded him as still more of a novice than myself from the way he furtively slid his still slightly limp cock into my vagina, and the way he so quickly slumped his face down onto my neck. He must have been sufficiently preoccupied with what a woman’s reaction might and should be to ask me whether the sperm projecting onto the walls of the vagina produced a specific sensation of pleasure. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t feel his penetration that distinctly, whereas I certainly can distinguish a viscous little puddle spreading inside me! ‘Really, that’s strange, no special feeling?’ ‘No, nothing at all.’ He worried more than I did.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  As the years went by, counting husbands was substituted for counting children. I imagine that, finding myself under the seductive spell of some identified man (in turns, a film star, a first cousin, etc.) and focusing my wandering thoughts on his features, I perhaps felt less uncertainty about the future. I could envisage in more concrete terms my life as a married young woman, and therefore the presence of children. More or less the same questions were raised again: was six the most ‘acceptable’ number or could you have more? What sort of age gap should there be between them? And then there was the ratio of girls to boys. I cannot think back to these ideas without connecting them to other obsessions which preoccupied me at the same time. I had established a relationship with God which meant that every evening I had to think about what he was going to eat, so that the enumeration of the various dishes and glasses of water which I offered him mentally – fussing over the size of the helpings, the rate at which they were served, etc. – alternated with the interrogations into the extent to which my future life would be filled with husbands and children. I was very religious, and it could well be that my confused perception of the identities of God and his son favoured my inclination to counting. God was the thundering voice which brought men back into line without revealing himself to them. But I had been taught that he was also, and simultaneously, the naked baby made of pink plaster which I put into the Christmas crib every year, the suffering man nailed to the crucifix before which we prayed – even though both of them were actually his son – as well as a sort of ghost called the Holy Spirit. Of course, I knew perfectly well that Joseph was Mary’s husband, and that Jesus, even though he was both God and the son of God, called him ‘Father’. The Virgin was indeed the mother of the Christ child, but there were times when she was referred to as his daughter. When I was old enough to go to Sunday school, I asked to speak to the priest one day. The problem I laid before him was this: I wanted to become a nun, to be a ‘bride of Christ’, and to become a missionary in an Africa seething with destitute peoples, but I also wanted to have husbands and children. The priest was a laconic man, and he cut short the conversation, believing that my concerns were premature.

• From How the Bible Actually Works (2019)

  good” (5:36–39). This sounds backwards. Luke seems to be prioritizing Jewish tradition over Jesus—yes, the new wine belongs in new wineskins, but the old wine is better. Luke’s twist also has a purpose, though to be honest, I’m not really sure what that is. Since this lesson comes in the middle of a section in which Jesus is challenged by religious leaders (about fasting and keeping the sabbath), this twist may be a dig against them. Though the religious leaders claim to be the traditionalists and Jesus the dangerous innovator, Jesus is delivering a punchy retort that he is more aligned with the old ways than they are. They are the blundering innovators who actually cloud God’s ways. I could be wrong, of course, but that makes most sense to me at the moment. I’d rather stop now than go on for five hundred more pages talking about how the Gospel stories differ. My point here is simply this: each Gospel is a deliberate shaping of the life of Jesus to address the needs of the community. According to the reigning theory, Mark was written first and was used as the basis for Matthew and Luke—and they adjusted Mark’s Gospel as they saw fit , either by changing Mark to suit themselves or including scenes that Mark doesn’t. We might call that dishonest, bad writing, plagiarism, or the like, but let’s not impose our own rules onto ancient writers. The Gospel writers, rather, were adapting and shaping the relatively recent history of Jesus of Nazareth, even freely editing the work of others, in order to present Jesus meaningfully to their communities of faith. But beyond the four Gospels, the New Testament as a whole is one big act of wisdom—its writers reimagine God in light of the present moment, in light of their faith in Jesus as God’s Messiah. Their work ties Jesus to the past, but also takes the faith of old far beyond the pages of their sacred text, in more surprising —even startling—ways than we’ve seen thus far. Chapter 11 Reimagining God the Jesus Way

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  I’d seen movies, read magazines and novels and Cathy cartoons. I’d heard groups of women talk shit about men—men always this, men always that—as though men were a unified, homogeneous category, and I’d heard groups of men do the same. It made me queasy. Even people who seemed to be happily partnered talked shit about their significant other in private. How much annoyance with one’s partner is normal? A lot of people seem to barely tolerate the person they love. Is that normal? If it is normal, is it okay with me, in my life? Which compromises could I live with and which would fester, rise up between us like a wall? How could I know—and know right now—which attributes were important? What could I live with, for the sake of us? How does anyone know? I was happy with Brandon. Was that enough? [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] The following spring, on a sunny late-March day in Brooklyn, we sat down on a bench beside the East River and he slid suddenly to his knees and pulled out a ring. I said yes and quietly panicked, bewildered and ecstatic, a collision of feelings that felt very sane. We were twenty-four and twenty-seven. We’d been together for eleven months and four days, though we’d lived on opposite coasts for every day of it. We held hands and walked on the waterfront, stopping in a chocolate shop we’d read about. We tossed back and forth dates and locations and daydreams and the question of where we would live. There was another question I remember not saying aloud: How will we handle our money? I couldn’t make my mouth form the phrase. It was too unsexy, unromantic, anxious. I didn’t believe that getting married was supposed to be some blissful state of suspended animation, but I wanted to be elated, swept up, careless. I wanted to be transformed. I wanted to be able to be someone else, even just for a day, maybe a week or two. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Both before and after we were married, I hated the thought of needing someone to “complete” me. Of course I wanted a boyfriend. I wanted to love someone and be loved. But surely I was not lacking on my own, not incomplete. I grew up an only child, so I’d always been on my own, and I liked it. As I envisioned it, my husband and I would be separate people. We would be as important individually as we were together, as a couple. We’d be discrete entities with our own histories, energy, and motion, but we’d be bound to each other like stars in a constellation: a union born by the force of imagination and emotion, by the curious work of the human mind.

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  However, it is not our intention to deny that the individual intellect has of itself the power of perceiving resemblances between the different objects of which it is conscious. Quite on the contrary, it is clear that even the most primitive and simple classifications presuppose this faculty. The Australian does not place things in the same clan or in different clans at random. For him as for us, similar images attract one another, while opposed ones repel one another, and it is on the basis of these feelings of affinity or of repulsion that he classifies the corresponding things in one place or another. There are also cases where we are able to perceive the reasons which inspired this. The two phratries were very probably the original and fundamental bases for these classifications, which were consequently bifurcate at first. Now, when a classification is reduced to two classes, these are almost necessarily conceived as antitheses; they are used primarily as a means of clearly separating things between which there is a very marked contrast. Some are set at the right, the others at the left. As a matter of fact this is the character of the Australian classifications. If the white cockatoo is in one phratry, the black one is in the other; if the sun is on one side, the moon and the stars of night are on the opposite side. [444] Very frequently the beings which serve as the totems of the two phratries have contrary colours. [445] These oppositions are even met with outside of Australia. Where one of the phratries is disposed to peace, the other is disposed to war; [446] if one has water as its totem, the other has earth. [447] This is undoubtedly the explanation of why the two phratries have frequently been thought of as naturally antagonistic to one another. They say that there is a sort of rivalry or even a constitutional hostility between them. [448] This opposition of things has extended itself to persons; the logical contrast has begotten a sort of social conflict. [449] It is also to be observed that within each phratry, those things have been placed in a single clan which seem to have the greatest affinity with that serving as totem.

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  But if before all else they are collective representations, they add to that which we can learn by our own personal experience all that wisdom and science which the group has accumulated in the course of centuries. Thinking by concepts, is not merely seeing reality on its most general side, but it is projecting a light upon the sensation which illuminates it, penetrates it and transforms it. Conceiving something is both learning its essential elements better and also locating it in its place; for each civilization has its organized system of concepts which characterizes it. Before this scheme of ideas, the individual is in the same situation as the νοῦς of Plato before the world of Ideas. He must assimilate them to himself, for he must have them to hold intercourse with others; but the assimilation is always imperfect. Each of us sees them after his own fashion. There are some which escape us completely and remain outside of our circle of vision; there are others of which we perceive certain aspects only. There are even a great many which we pervert in holding, for as they are collective by nature, they cannot become individualized without being retouched, modified, and consequently falsified. Hence comes the great trouble we have in understanding each other, and the fact that we even lie to each other without wishing to: it is because we all use the same words without giving them the same meaning. We are now able to see what the part of society in the genesis of logical thought is. This is possible only from the moment when, above the fugitive conceptions which they owe to sensuous experience, men have succeeded in conceiving a whole world of stable ideas, the common ground of all intelligences. In fact, logical thinking is always impersonal thinking, and is also thought sub species ætrnitatis —as though for all time. Impersonality and stability are the two characteristics of truth. Now logical life evidently presupposes that men know, at least confusedly, that there is such a thing as truth, distinct from sensuous appearances. But how have they been able to arrive at this conception? We generally talk as though it should have spontaneously presented itself to them from the moment they opened their eyes upon the world. However, there is nothing in immediate experience which could suggest it; everything even contradicts it. Thus the child and the animal have no suspicion of it. History shows that it has taken centuries for it to disengage and establish itself. In our Western world, it was with the great thinkers of Greece that it first became clearly conscious of itself and of the consequences which it implies; when the discovery was made, it caused an amazement which Plato has translated into magnificent language.

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  53). [387] See Bk. III, ch. ii, § 2. [388] Perhaps there is no religion which makes man an exclusively profane being. For the Christian, the soul which each of us has within him and which constitutes the very essence of our being, has something sacred about it. We shall see that this conception of the soul is as old as religious thought itself. The place of man in the hierarchy of sacred things is more or less elevated. [389] Nat. Tr. , p. 202. [390] Taplin, The Narrinyeri , pp. 59-61. [391] Among certain clans of the Warramunga, for example ( Nor. Tr. , p. 162). [392] Among the Urabunna ( Nor. Tr. , p. 147). Even when they tell us that the first beings were men, these are really only semi-human, and have an animal nature at the same time. This is the case with certain Unmatjera ( ibid. , pp. 153-154). Here we find ways of thought whose confusion disconcerts us, but which must be accepted as they are. We would denature them if we tried to introduce a clarity that is foreign to them (cf. Nat. Tr. , p. 119). [393] Among the Arunta ( Nat. Tr. , pp. 388 ff.); and among certain Unmatjera ( Nor. Tr. , p. 153). [394] Nat. Tr. , p. 389. Cf. Strehlow, I, pp. 2-7. [395] Nat. Tr. , p. 389; Strehlow, I, pp. 2 ff. Undoubtedly there is an echo of the initiation rites in this mythical theme. The initiation also has the object of making the young man into a complete man, and on the other hand, it also implies actual surgical operations (circumcision, sub-incision, the extraction of teeth, etc.). The processes which served to form the first men would naturally be conceived on the same model. [396] This the case with the nine clans of the Moqui (Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes , IV, p. 86), the Crain clan among the Ojibway (Morgan, Ancient Society , p. 180), and the Nootka clans (Boas, VIth Rep. on the N.W. Tribes of Canada , p. 43), etc. [397] It is thus that the Turtle clan of the Iroquois took form. A group of turtles had been forced to leave the lake where they dwelt and seek another home. One of them, which was larger than the others, stood this exercise very badly owing to the heat. It made such violent efforts that it got out of its shell. The process of transformation, being once commenced, went on by itself and the turtle finally became a man who was the ancestor of the clan (Erminnie A. Smith, The Myths of the Iroquois, IInd Report , p.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  They have a blind spot. I do believe that it is possible for cissexuals to catch a glimpse of their subconscious sex. When I do presentations on trans issues, I try to accomplish this by asking the audience a question: “If I offered you ten million dollars under the condition that you live as the other sex for the rest of your life, would you take me up on the offer?” While there is often some wiseass in the audience who will say “Yes,” the vast majority of people shake their heads to indicate “No.” Their responses clearly have nothing to do with gender privileges, because both women and men, queers and straights insist that they wouldn’t be willing to make that change. When I ask individuals why they answered no, they usually get a bit flustered at first, as if they are at a loss for words. Eventually, they end up saying something like, “Because I just am a woman (or man),” or, “It just wouldn’t be right.” Let’s face it: If cissexuals didn’t have a subconscious sex, then sex reassignment would be far more common than it is. Women who wanted to succeed in the male-dominated business world would simply transition to male. Lesbians and gay men who were ashamed of their queerness would simply transition to the other sex. Gender studies grad students would transition for a few years to gather data for their theses. Actors playing transsexuals would go on hormones for a few months in order to make their portrayals more authentic. Criminals and spies would physically transition as a way of going undercover. And contestants on reality shows would be willing to change their sex in the hope of achieving fifteen minutes of fame. Of course, such scenarios seem absolutely ridiculous to us. They are unfathomable because, on a profound, subconscious level, we all understand that our physical sex is far more than a superficial shell we inhabit. For me, this is the most frustrating part about cissexuals who express confusion or disbelief as to why transsexuals choose to transition. They are unable to see that their disbelief stems directly from their own experience of feeling at home in the sex they were born into, their own gender concordance. In other words, it is their own subconscious sex—and their inability to recognize it—that makes it difficult for them to understand why anyone would want to change their sex. All of this reminds me of when I was growing up in the ’70s and early ’80s, when most straight people had a similar blind spot regarding sexual orientation.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  While I have found my subconscious sex to be impervious to conscious thought or social influence, my gender identity (i.e., the way I consciously relate to my gender) has been very much shaped by cultural norms and my own personal beliefs and experiences. For example, even though my initial realization of wanting to be female occurred prior to me experiencing sexual attraction and independent of any desire to take part in stereotypically girlish activities and interests, that realization led me to question (and eventually experiment with) my sexuality and gender expression. After all, like most children, I was raised to believe that men were supposed to be masculine and attracted to women, and that women were supposed to be feminine and attracted to men. The fact that I wanted to be female necessarily threw these other gender-related facets into flux. In fact, the first thought that crossed my mind when I discovered that I wanted to be female was that I must be gay, an idea no doubt inspired by flamboyantly feminine gay male stereotypes that regularly appeared on TV in the ’70s. However, once I hit puberty and my sexual desire kicked in, I found myself attracted to women and not men, which only served to confuse me more, since at the time I hadn’t even heard the word “lesbian.” As time went on, I latched onto all sorts of other gender identities and theories that seemed to hold potential explanations for my subconscious feelings. For quite a while, I thought of myself as a crossdresser and viewed my female subconscious sex as a “feminine side” that was trying to get out. But after years of crossdressing, I eventually lost interest in it, realizing that my desire to be female had nothing to do with clothing or femininity per se. There was also a period of time when I embraced the word “pervert” and viewed my desire to be female as some sort of sexual kink. But after exploring that path, it became obvious that explanation could not account for the vast majority of instances when I thought about being female in a nonsexual context. And after reading Kate Bornstein’s and Leslie Feinberg’s writings for the first time, I embraced the words “transgender” and “queer.”