Contempt

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 History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  "And as He went forth out of the temple, one of his disciples saith unto Him, Master, behold, what manner of stones and what manner of buildings! And Jesus said unto him, Seest thou these great buildings? There shall not be left here one stone upon another, which shall not be thrown down."—Mark 13:1,2. Sources. Josephus: Bell. Jud., in 7 books; and Vita, c. 4–74. The history of the Jewish war was written by him as eye-witness about A.D. 75. English translations by W. Whiston, in Works of Jos., and by Rob. Traill, ed. by Isaac Taylor, new ed., Lond., 1862. German translations by Gfrsörer and W. Hoffmann, Stuttgart, 1836; and Paret, Stuttg., 1855; French translations by Arnauld d’andilly, 1667, Joachim Gillet, 1756, and Abbé Glaire, 1846. Rabbinical traditions in Derenbourg: Histoire de la Palestine depuis Cyrus jusqu’à Adrien. Paris, 1867 (first part of his L’Histoire et la géographie de la Palestine d’après les Thalmuds et les autres sources rabbiniques), pp. 255–295. Tacitus: Hist., II. 4; V. 1–13. A mere fragment, full of errors and insults towards the vanquished Jews. The fifth book, except this fragment, is lost. While Josephus, the Jew, is filled with admiration for the power and greatness of Rome, Tacitus, the heathen, treats Jews and Christians with scorn and contempt, and prefers to derive his information from hostile Egyptians and popular prejudice rather than from the Scriptures, and Philo, and Josephus. Sulpicius Severus: Chronicon, II. 30 (p. 84, ed. Halm). Short. Literature. Milman: The History of the Jews, Books XIV.-XVII. (New York ed., vol. II., 219 sqq.). Ewald: Geschichte des Folkes Israel, VI. 705–753 (second ed.). Grätz: Geschichte der Juden, III. 336–414. Hitzig: Geschichte des Volkes Israel, II. 594–629. Lewin: The Siege of Jerusalem by Titus. With the Journal of a recent Visit in the Holy City, and a general Sketch of the Topography of Jerusalem from the Earliest Times down to the Siege. London, 1863. Count de Champagny: Rome et la Judie au temps de la chute de Néron (ans 66–72 après Jésus-Christ), 2. éd., Paris, 1865. T. I., pp. 195–254; T. II., pp. 55–200. Charles Merivale: History of the Romans under the Empire, ch. LIX. (vol. VI., 415 sqq., 4th ed., New York, 1866). De Saulcy: Les derniers jours de Jérusalem. Paris, 1866. E. Renan: L’Antechrist (ch. X.-XX., pp. 226–551). Paris, second ed., 1873. Emil Schürer: Lehrbuch der neutestamentlichen Zeitgeschichte (Leipzig, 1874), pp. 323–350. He also gives the literature. A. Hausrath: Neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte, Part III., second ed., Heidelberg, 1875, pp. 424 487. Alfred J. Church: The Story of the Last Days of Jerusalem, from Josephus. With illustrations. London, 1880.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  "That the eternal truth of God preached by the Prophets and Apostles, is on our side, we are prepared to show, and it is indeed easy for any man to perceive. But all that is done is to assail us with this battering-ram, ’Nothing can excuse withdrawal from the Church.’ We deny out and out that we do so. With what, then, do they urge us? With nothing more than this, that to them belongs the ordinary government of the Church. But how much better right had the enemies of Jeremiah to use this argument? To them, at all events, there still remained a legal priesthood, instituted by God; so that their vocation was unquestionable. Those who in the present day have the name of prelates, cannot prove their vocation by any laws, human or divine. Be it, however, that in this respect both are on a footing, still, unless they previously convict the holy Prophet of schism, they will prove nothing against us by that specious title of Church. "I have thus mentioned one Prophet as an example. But all the others declare that they had the same battle to fight—wicked priests endeavoring to overwhelm them by a perversion of this term Church. And how did the Apostles act? Was it not necessary for them, in professing themselves the servants of Christ, to declare war upon the synagogue ? And yet the office and dignity of the priesthood were not then lost. But it will be said that, though the Prophets and Apostles dissented from wicked priests in doctrine, they still cultivated communion with them in sacrifices and prayers. I admit they did, provided they were not forced into idolatry. But which of the Prophets do we read of as having ever sacrificed in Bethel? Which of the faithful, do we suppose, communicated in impure sacrifices, when the temple was polluted by Antiochus, and profane rites were introduced into it?

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  He also wrote at Worms, for his private solace, not for publication, an epic poem in sixty-one distichs (one hundred and twenty-two lines), which celebrates the triumph of Christ and the defeat of his enemies (Eck, Cochlaeus, Nausea, Pelargus) after their apparent and temporary victory.532 He was not a poetic genius, but by study he made up the defects of nature.533 The Colloquy of Worms, after having hardly begun, was broken off in January, 1541, to be resumed at the approaching Diet of Regensburg (Ratisbon) in presence of the emperor on his return. The Diet at Regensburg was opened April 5, 1541. Calvin appeared again as a delegate of Strassburg and at the special request of Melanchthon, but reluctantly and with little hope of success. He felt that he was ill suited for such work, and would only waste time.534 After long and vexatious delays in the arrival of the deputies, the theological Colloquy was opened and conducted on the Roman Catholic side by Dr. John Eck, professor at Ingolstadt (who had disputed with Luther at Leipzig and promulgated the papal bull of excommunication), Julius Pflug, canon of Mainz (afterwards bishop of Naumburg), and John Gropper, canon and professor of canon law at Cologne; on the Protestant side by Melanchthon of Wittenberg, Bucer of Strassburg, and Pistorius of Nidda in Hesse. Granvella presided in the name of the emperor; Cardinal Contarini, an enlightened and well-disposed prelate, who was inclined to evangelical views and favored a moderate reformation, acted as legate of Pope Paul III., who sent, however, at the same time the intolerant Bishop Morone as a special nuncio. Calvin could see no difference between the two legates, except that Morone would like to subdue the Protestants with bloodshed, Contarini without bloodshed. He was urged to seek an interview with Contarini, but refused. He speaks favorably of Pflug and Gropper, but contemptuously of Eck, the stentorian mouthpiece of the papal party, whom he regarded as an impudent babbler and vain sophist.535 The French king was represented by Du Veil, whom Calvin calls a "busy blockhead." There were present also a good many bishops, the princes of the German States, and delegates of the imperial cities. The emperor, in an earnest speech, exhorted the divines, through an interpreter, to lay aside private feelings and to study only the truth, the glory of God, the good of the Church, and the peace of the empire.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Solomon is not to be compared with Theognis, Socrates, and other Greek sages; moreover he is said to have been overcome by women, and therefore does not deserve to be ranked among wise men. Paul was an arch-traitor; calling God now the God of the Jews, now the God of the Gentiles, now both at once; not seldom contradicting the Old Testament, Christ, and himself, and generally accommodating his doctrine to circumstances. The heathen emperor thinks it absurd that Christian baptism should be able to cleanse from gross sins, while it cannot remove a wart, or gout, or any bodily evil. He puts the Bible far below the Hellenic literature, and asserts, that it made men slaves, while the study of the classics educated great heroes and philosophers. The first Christians he styles most contemptible men, and the Christians of his day he charges with ignorance, intolerance, and worshipping dead persons, bones, and the wood of the cross.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  through a bloody battle of parties, that for such a price he would at once turn Christian himself.485 Such an example could not but shed its evil influence on the lower clergy of the great cities. Jerome sketches a sarcastic description of the Roman priests, who squandered all their care on dress and perfumery, curled their hair with crisping pins, wore sparkling rings, paid far too great attention to women, and looked more like bridegrooms than like clergymen.486 And in the Greek church it was little better. Gregory Nazianzen, himself a bishop, and for a long time patriarch of Constantinople, frequently mourns the ambition, the official jealousies, and the luxury of the hierarchy, and utters the wish that the bishops might be distinguished only by a higher grade of virtue. § 54. Organization of the Hierarchy: Country Bishop, City Bishops, and Metropolitans. The episcopate, notwithstanding the unity of the office and its rights, admitted the different grades of country bishop, ordinary city bishop, metropolitan, and patriarch. Such a distinction had already established itself on the basis of free religious sentiment in the church; so that the incumbents of the apostolic sees, like Jerusalem, Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, and Rome, stood at the head of the hierarchy. But this gradation now assumed a political character, and became both modified and confirmed by attachment to the municipal division of the Roman empire. Constantine the Great divided the whole empire into four praefectures (the Oriental, the Illyrian, the Italian, and the Gallic); the praefectures into vicariates, dioceses, or proconsulates, fourteen or fifteen in all;487 and each diocese again into several provinces.488 The praefectures were governed by Praefecti Praetorio, the dioceses by Vicarii, the provinces by Rectores, with various titles—commonly Praesides. It was natural, that after the union of church and state the ecclesiastical organization and the political should, so far as seemed proper, and hence of course with manifold exceptions, accommodate themselves to one another. In the East this principle of conformity was more palpably and rigidly carried out than in the West. The council of Nice in the fourth century proceeds upon it, and the second and fourth ecumenical councils confirm it. The political influence made itself most distinctly felt in the elevation of Constantinople to a patriarchal see. The Roman bishop Leo, however, protested against the reference of his own power to political considerations, and planted it exclusively upon the primacy of Peter; though evidently the Roman see owed its importance to the favorable cooperation of both these influences. The power of the patriarchs extended over one or more municipal dioceses; while the metropolitans presided over single provinces. The word diocese (dioivkhsi") passed from the political into the ecclesiastical terminology, and denoted at first a patriarchal district, comprising several provinces (thus the expression occurs continually in the Greek acts of councils), but afterward came to be applied in the West to each episcopal district. The circuit of a metropolitan was called in the East an eparchy (ejparciva), in the West provincia.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  For d’Holbach, religion was born of weakness, fear, and superstition; people had created gods to fill the gaps in their knowledge, so religious belief was an act of intellectual cowardice and despair. First, men and women had personified the forces of nature, creating divinities in their own image, but eventually they had merged all these godlings into a massive deity that was simply a projection of their own fears and desires. Their God was “nothing but a gigantic, exaggerated man,” rendered incredible and unintelligible “by dint of keeping together incompatible qualities.”52 God was an incomprehensible chimera, a mere negation of human limitations.53 His infinity, for example, simply meant that he had no spatial boundaries, but such a being was utterly inconceivable. How could you reconcile the goodness of an omnipotent God with human suffering? This incoherent theology was bound to disintegrate in the Age of Reason. Descartes, Newton, Malebranche, and Clarke, who had all tried to save God, were simply atheists in disguise. Clarke, for example, had assumed that matter could not have brought itself into existence, but recent research had proved that he was mistaken. Even the great Newton had succumbed to the prejudices of his infancy. His Dominion was nothing but a deified despot, created in the image of a powerful man.54 If only these philosophers had realized that they need look no higher than Nature, their philosophy would have come out correctly. The System of Nature has been called the bible of the “scientific naturalism” or “scientism” that has continued to fuel the assault on faith. Its central belief is that the natural, material world is the only reality; it needs no external Cause because it is self-originating. There is no God, no soul, and no afterlife, and, although human beings can live useful and creative lives, the world itself has neither point nor purpose of its own. It just is. Science alone can give us a reliable understanding of all reality, including human intelligence and behavior. Because there can be no evidence for God’s existence, all rational, educated individuals must repudiate religion altogether.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  Just six years prior, in 1965, sociologist (and later senator) Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in his now infamous Moynihan Report, illustrated the "erotic life of racism."" In his report, Moynihan posited that the crux of the degeneration of the black family and black community was the black "matriarchal" family structure, which, in turn, implicates not only (a false sense of) black dysfunction and pathology, but also contrived notions of black female promiscuity and hypersexuality. The illegitimacy rate among blacks, comparatively higher than that of whites, putatively functioned as material evidence, though was skewed and illusory, as the disproportionately higher abortion rate among whites was conspicuously neglected from the discourse or his report. Thus, it reinscribed and reified racist/ racialized stereotypes of an always already aberrant, "anormative" black sexuality, resulting in a castigation of blacks-rather than systematic American racism, racist oppression, and a long history of U.S. state and legally sanctioned sexual crimes against black bodies-for cumulative black familial and communal "dysfunction." As literary and sexuality studies scholar Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman cogently notes, historical "sexual aberrance incorporated a logic of racial and corporeal identity by which to make it visible" with "transgressive sexuality" being constituted by conventions predicated on aesthetics and phenotypes, notably "appearance" in the "arena of race, by which to make it known."51 What this brings into stark transparency are the contradictions of American life, deeply paradoxical, of the indeed racially sexualized constructions of American sociosexual character. For, as the individual and aggregate findings of Kinsey and Poussaint had shown, while black people's sexual lives were varied, they were neither as exaggerated nor pathologically anomalous as the stereotypes or The Moynihan Report otherwise suggested. Contrastingly, white sexuality lacked the puritanical character that had historically been attributed to it, as the studies exposed that whites engaged more frequently in clandestine taboo sexual acts and a sexual culture that belied their presumably "normative" sexual character. Three years later, in a 1974 issue of Ebony with a cover featuring the then sex symbol Billy Dee Williams, sociologist Robert Staples, in "Has the Sexual Revolution Bypassed Blacks?," argued that although blacks, unlike their white counterparts, were far less involved in certain sexual behavior, such as pornography, "swinging," and open marriages, college-age blacks were more likely to engage in premarital sex than their white counterparts during the sexual revolution.

• From City of Night (1963)

  “After a while,” another man told me, “Glen will be out of the hustling ranks. Hell quit going around with the teenage girls he still tries to impress us with—and he’ll have a steady young boyfriend. Watch and see.” “After all,” another man added, “pretending that you never, never, never do this or that is fine—or if you dont now, that you never will. But really never, never, never doing this or that—well, it’s slightly insane. It’s a perversion in itself.” And so, that summer, it was an insistent refrain: the premium on Youth. Often, it was brought up bitchily by scores after the sexscene—but other times it was said from an acute awareness of the life they—we!—lived.... Mr. King had brought it up, but that had been at the beginning of the journey, and its meaning had been remote then. It wasnt how I would live that terrified me. It was, instead, the horror that the youthful cravings would extend into a time when what made them possible of gratification might no longer be. And one of that summer-wave of people who would emphasize that refrain was an evil old auntie—whom I will remember as an impeccably clean dirty old man—whose name is Hubert, but who says self-affectionately: “Call me Hughie, dear—everyone does”—a rabbity-looking, mincing, effeminate, beady-eyed little old man of about 60. As he tried to flash brilliantly before me, confusing T. E. with D. H. Lawrence, I couldnt help—and what the hell?—coming on intellectually, and I corrected him. “Oh, dear me,” he said, “how frightful—an Intellectual! You should have kept your mouth closed, youngman. My oh my—oh!—the mind of an old man and the body of a young boy. Dear, dear me!” And I struck back at him: “Better than the mind of a young boy and the body of an old man!” “Ouch!” he winced, “dear me, dear dear me,” as with rabbity gestures, he cuddled himself on a chair.... Although I had dinner with him several times after that, he indicated no sexual interest in me then. And it was with him, soon after, that I went to the mansion of that famous director whom Skipper had known. Derisively, the old auntie announced to the director: “This youngman is an Intellectual—watch out,” and the director had immediately sneered: “The last time I even talked to one—a writer,” he said, “I ended up in Confidential magazine.” “Oh, dear, oh, my—listen to that, will you?” the little auntie fluttered: “Oh, the wages of Fame—tsk-tsk!” The director commanded the youngman living with him at that time: “Go tell Mattie we’ll have lunch outside”—with a coldness and an undisguised contempt—a paid owningness—that made me cringe. The youngman moved away obediently—after having fixed our drinks. That whole evening turned into progressively less veiled hostility between myself and the director, as—throughout his brutal imitation of a star then involved in a frontpage sex scandal—the face of Skipper—somewhere drunk in downtown Los Angeles—scorched my thoughts.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  Christians were also thought, sometimes, to be morally reprehensible, in that they were thought to perform acts of incest, infanticide, and cannibalism during their worship services on a weekly basis. Remember, they would meet early before the sun came up, they would call one another “brother” and “sister,” and they would greet one another with a kiss, so that outsiders who didn’t understand the ritual would assume that there were some acts of incest going on. Moreover, they were known to “eat the flesh” and “drink the blood” of the Son of God, and so people assumed that they were performing acts of infanticide and cannibalism. Christians were thought, then, to be socially dangerous. Christians, of course, denied that they were dangerous, and many of them refused to recant their beliefs, even in the face of violent opposition, and concerted official efforts. In this lecture, we will shift from considering persecution from the pagan perspective; that is, we won't now be asking: Why did pagans act this way? We will now look at the Christian perspective: How did Christians react to their Opposition by pagans? How did they react to the persecutions and threats? First, as you might expect, we do have record of some Christians recanting of their faith in Christ in the face of violent opposition. This can be seen in some of the literature that we’ve looked at already. In the previous lecture, we considered the case of the Christians of Vienne and Lyons, in a letter written by the survivors of the persecution that happened around the year 177. Christians in Vienne and Lyons were persecuted first by the mobs, then by officials, and underwent horrible torments and tortures, with some of them actually martyred. We find in this 198 letter written by the survivors, though, recorded for us by the church historian Eusebius, that not everybody who was a Christian decided to go through with persecution. Some, in fact, apparently recanting of their belief SO as to avoid persecution. Thus, the authors tell us: The rest of the Christians fell into two groups. It was clear [says the author] that some were ready to be the first Gaelic martyrs [In other words, the first martyrs in Gaul, ancient France]. These people, these Christians, made a full confession of the testimony with the greatest eagerness, but it was equally clear that others were not ready, that they had not been trained, and were still flabby [This is a reference to the Christians who were willing to be persecuted as great warriors, and were in good shape, and trained, but that these others who were not willing to be martyrs were not trained, and were still flabby.]; in no fit condition to face the strain of a struggle to the death. Of these, some ten proved stillborn, causing us great distress, and inexpressible grief, and dampening the enthusiasm of those who were not yet arrested.

• From Memoirs of Fanny Hill (1749)

  She was about forty six years old, tall, meagre, red-haired, with one of those trivial ordinary faces you meet with every where, and go about unheeded and un-mentioned. In her youth she had been kept by a gentleman, who, dying, left her forty pounds a year during her life, in consideration of a daughter he had by her: which daughter, at the age of seventeen, she sold, for not a very considerable sum neither, to a gentleman who was going on envoy abroad, and took his purchase with him, where he used her with the utmost tenderness, and it is thought, was secretly married to her: but had constantly made a point of her not keeping up the least correspondence with a mother base enough to make a market of her own flesh and blood. However, as she had not nature, nor, indeed, any passion but that of money, this gave her no further uneasiness, then, as she thereby lost a handle of squeezing presents, or other after advantages, out of the bargain. Indifferent then, by nature of constitution, to every other pleasure but that of increasing the lump, by any means whatever, she commenced a kind of private procuress, for which she was not amiss fitted, by her grave decent appearance, and sometimes did a job in the match-making way; in short, there was, nothing that appeared to her under the shape of gain, that she would not have undertaken. She knew most of the ways of the town, having not only herself been upon, but kept up constant intelligences in promoting a harmony between the two sexes, in private pawn-broking, and other profitable secrets. She rented the house she lived in, and made the most of it, by letting it out in lodgings; though she was worth, at least, near three or four thousand pounds, she would not allow herself even the necessaries, of life, and pinned her subsistence entirely on what she could squeeze out of her lodgers. When she saw such a young pair come under her roof, her immediate notions, doubtless, were how she should make the most money of us, by every means that money might be made, and which, she rightly judged, our situations and inexperience would soon beget her occasions of. In this hopeful sanctuary, and under the clutches of this harpy, did we pitch our residence. It will not be might material to you, or very pleasant to me, to enter into a detail of all the petty cut-throat ways and means with which she used to fleece us; all which Charles indolently chose to bear with, rather than take the trouble of removing, the difference of expense being scarce attended to by a young gentleman who had no ideas of stint, or even economy, and a raw country girl who knew nothing of the matter.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  God was the author of both the Book of Nature and the Bible, and “two truths cannot contradict one another.” 72 If scientists made statements about religion and if the devout claimed that scripture gave infallible information about the hidden structures of nature, there could only be the worst kind of confusion. 73 Copernicus had understood this perfectly: he had always limited his remarks to “physical conclusions based above all on sensory experience and very accurate observations.” 74 But in cases where there was no conclusive proof, Galileo argued that we should bow to the authority of the Bible: “I have no doubt at all that, where human reason cannot reach, and where consequently one cannot have a science, but only opinion and faith, it is appropriate piously to conform absolutely to the literal meaning of scripture.” 75 What Galileo did not seem to have realized was that the political climate had changed. The Vatican no longer regarded theology as a speculative science but was systematically reducing the teachings of Aristotle and Aquinas to an inflexible set of propositions formulated in such a way as to end all discussion and maximize certainty. 76 In 1605, the Jesuit cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621), who epitomized this new attitude, had become papal theologian. For Bellarmine, the task of theology was simply to organize doctrines into neat systems that could be marshaled effectively against the enemies of the Church. The execution of Bruno had made it horribly clear that papal officials were ready to enforce the new orthodoxy using the same coercive methods as any early modern monarchy. Galileo was not a lone voice; he belonged to a “family” of Catholic progressives who supported his Copernican ideas but constantly advised him not to tangle with the Vatican authorities. 77 And yet despite his conviction that theology and science were entirely separate disciplines, he seemed perversely intent on reconciling his discoveries with scripture. In his Letters on Sunspots (1612), he produced biblical quotations proving that his theory was “most agreeable to the truths of holy writ” 78 and was furious when the papal censors insisted that he delete them. When opposed, Galileo could be just as scornful and impatiently self-righteous as any cardinal. But why, given his clearly stated views, had he included the quotations in the first place? Hypothetical thinking had been acceptable to Copernicus and would continue to be essential to scientific procedure. Was Galileo’s insistence on absolute certainty another sign of the dogmatism of the age?

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  What’s that? Well, there was a law adopted in some circles that 40 lashes were excessive as a punishment, and therefore, if you wanted to get the full extent, you had 39 lashes. Paul said that he received this from the hands of the Jews, which must indicate that within the synagogues Paul preached in, he was sometimes taken out and fogged for his blasphemous views, views considered blasphemous. The point is, that is a synagogue form of punishment, according to Paul, so that Jews are actively trying to stamp out these people, these Jews who were saying that Jesus was the Messiah. This is an internal Jewish conflict at this point. It’s Jews who believe in Jesus, and Jews who don’t believe in Jesus. Those who do believe in Jesus are the small minority, being persecuted by the majority, who find the claims of these Christian Jews to be ludicrous. In any event, this statement of Paul’s in 2 Corinthians coincides well with the view found throughout the Book of Acts about early Christian persecution. The earliest persecutions always happened at the hands of Jews. It’s not difficult to understand why this happened. Christianity started off as a Jewish sect, with Judaism, which saw Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, sent from the Jewish God, to the Jewish people, in fulfillment of the Jewish Law. These Christians remained within the Jewish synagogues for their worship, because they considered themselves still to be... They were, as they would call themselves, the “true” Jews, and they would try to convince others that they, too, should accept Jesus as the Messiah. But these views about Jesus were rejected by the vast majority of Jews. Those who were propounding these views of the Messiahship of Jesus were often seen as a troublesome and rabble-rousing group, an outspoken minority with completely unacceptable views. Up until about the middle of the first century, before the books of the New Testament themselves had been written, Christianity was still viewed as a 123 Jewish sect, not just by Jews. This is something many people don’t understand. They tend to think that once Christianity started, it was immediately separate from Judaism. In fact, it started out as Jewish, and continued as a Jewish sect up through a good part of the first century.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  One of these protagonists was beneficial to humanity; the other, evil and dangerous. Ever since Augustine had insisted on the “absolute authority of scripture,” all theologians “without exception, have forced mankind away from the truth, and have caused Christendom to stumble for centuries into abysses of error and sorrow.” 70 In reality, the relations between science and faith had been more complex and nuanced. But this overblown polemic has remained the stock-in-trade of the atheist critique of religion and is widely accepted as a matter of fact. White’s misrepresentation of Augustine’s view of scripture is just one example of his bias. One of the most persistent of the apocryphal tales that developed at this time is the story of Huxley’s encounter with Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford (1805–73). In June 1860, shortly after the publication of Origin , they took part in a debate at a meeting of the British Association. Wilberforce is said to have played to the gallery and, having shown that he had absolutely no understanding of evolution, concluded by facetiously asking Huxley whether he claimed descent from a monkey through his grandmother or grandfather. Huxley retorted that he would rather be descended from an ape than a man like Wilberforce, who used his great talents to obscure the truth. It is a story that brilliantly encapsulates the “warfare” myth in its depiction of intrepid science victoriously triumphing over complacent, ignorant religion. But, as scholars have repeatedly demonstrated, there is no record of this exchange until the 1890s. It is not mentioned in contemporary accounts of the meeting. In fact, Wilberforce was entirely conversant with Darwinian theory; his speech at the British Institution summarized the recent review that he had written of Origin , which Darwin himself, acknowledging that Wilberforce had pointed out serious omissions in his argument that he would have to address, had considered “uncommonly clever.” 71 Closely allied to the “warfare” myth in atheistic polemic was the view that belief in itself was immoral, which has also become an essential ingredient of atheist ideology. It dates from the publication of Ethics of Belief (1871) by William Kingdon Clifford (1845–79), professor of mathematics at University College, London, who argued that it was not only intellectually but morally perverse to accept any opinion—religious, scientific, or ethical—without sufficient evidence. He illustrated his thesis with the story of a shipowner who knew that his ship needed extensive repairs but decided to spare himself the expense, reflecting that it had survived many voyages and that God would not allow it to sink with so many passengers on board.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  The next verse: “Then Herod the king ordered the Lord to be taken away. He said, ‘What I ordered you to do to him, do it.’”” Here, it is not Pontius Pilate who ordered Jesus’s crucifixion; it is the Jewish king, Herod, once again heightening Jewish culpability for the death of Jesus. This is how the story begins. As it goes on through, it contains many of the accounts that we are familiar with from the New Testament Gospels. Joseph of Arimathea wants the body, and is going to perform the burial. They take Jesus off to be crucified. They mock him, they beat him, and then they crucify him. Even though these are the same stories we know from the Gospels, they are told, in most instances, in a somewhat different way. Sometimes these differences are significant. For example, in verse 10 (modern editors have given verse numbers to these passages): “They brought forward two criminals, and they crucified the Lord between them. He was silent, as if he had no pain.” “Silent as if he had no pain.” Remember that Serapion thought that some of these passages in the Gospel of Peter could be read docetically. Maybe this is one of those passages. It was “as if he had no pain.” Maybe he didn’t have any pain. They put an inscription over his head: “This is the king of Israel.” They divided his garments among them. “It was noon, and darkness gripped all Judea. The Jews were all worried and anguished.” It goes on to say, “Indeed, the Jews fulfilled everything. They brought their sins to full fruition on their own heads.” It’s making the Jews culpable for the death of Jesus. Jesus is on the cross, and he cries out on the cross. It’s like you find in Mark, but somewhat different: “‘My power, oh power, you have left me.’ He said this, and was taken up.” Is this is the divine Christ leaving the man, Jesus, before his death? It says, “and he was taken up.” Jesus, though, is still on the cross there. What was taken up? Maybe the divine element was taken up. “They pulled the spikes out of the Lord’s hand. They lay him in the ground,” and an earthquake happens, as, again, happened in Matthew’s Gospel. We’re told the Jews rejoiced, but then later, they became nervous, because they realized they had done something bad. “Then the Jews, the elders and the Jewish priests, knowing what evil they did to themselves, began to beat their breasts, saying, ‘Woe to us, for the judgment and the end of Jerusalem are at hand.’” Jews acknowledge their guilt in killing Jesus. 266

• From City of Night (1963)

  “I saw you talking to Randy the other night at the Pirate’s Den,” says Chick to me. I ran into him at the Green bar. “Babe, let me warn you about Randy, hes one of the most dangerous people to know in Hollywood. The cops watch him all the time. Everyone knows he pushes—and takes the stuff himself. Hes always high—and he was probably trying to get you to push with him. Well! Hes trash! He uses marijuana—and worse!—to make his tricks—hes that low—at least I buy them Food.... And by the way, have you eaten yet?...” He was maneuvering me toward the corner. On our way there, he catches sight of Jamey standing by the bar. This time Jamey is dressed like a motorcyclist, and this time he looks like a slightly masculine female motorcyclist, but not as rough. “Oh, my God!” says Chick, covering his face in pretended horror. “Isnt she a sick girl?—the bitch. I dont even talk to her any more. Shes evil.... Anyway, I was telling you to keep away from that Randy—For Your Own Good—no matter what he promises you; hes a liar. I know this cute kid he told he was going to take to Las Vegas and spend all kinds of fabulous sums on him (which he hasnt got)—and thats how he made the kid—and then he gives him a phony phone number, after he’d already made him.... Do you have my phone number babe?... Now listen to me, baby; listen to your mother—shes older and wiser, shes been around much longer than you have, and she knows what shes saying: That Randy’ll get you to push for him; hes ruined more fine trade that way, and then all theyre interested in is that dirty marijuana and everything, which makes it very difficult on we girls who havent got any—I mean, not that I’d ever resort to such vulgar tricks—because, like I always say, whatever I do in Bed doesnt harm anyone, but those narcotics—well!... Besides, hes been spreading all kinds of stories about Lance, since that time at Laguna Beach, and you know, whatever thev say about Lance, I love the guy—always have, always will. Hes done some pretty horrible things in his life, Im the first to admit that. Still, theres something about Lance that makes him Special.... Anyhow, it was Randy who started that story about how these marines tried to roll Lance at Laguna Beach (actually, when it happened, they were out toward Malibu)—and how they threw him over the cliff, and lemme tell you thats a beachy—I mean, bitchy—lie. No one ever even tried to roll Lance—no one could even think of it! He had too much Dignity, baby—he was like a King, and you knew it. But Randy goes around talking all kinds of dirt—like that those marines were straight. Babe, let your mother tell you: They were as queer as I am.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  ©2004 The Teaching Company. 32 IV. The anonymous author of the Gospel of Matthew has an ambivalent relationship to historical Judaism. A. On the one hand, he stresses more than our other Gospel writers that Jesus himself was Jewish, the Jewish Messiah sent from the Jewish God to the Jewish people to fulfill the Jewish Law. 1. This can be seen in the opening passages of his Gospel (the birth narratives). 2. And it is a theme that recurs throughout, for example, at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:17–20). B. On the other hand, he blames the Jews who refused to acknowledge Jesus for his death and portrays them as blind, hypocritical, and opposed to the will of God. 1. The Jewish leaders are condemned in vitriolic terms in this Gospel (chapter 23). 2. The Jewish people are portrayed as complicit in their blind rejection of Jesus (for example, 27:25). C. Even so, this understanding of the Jewishness of Jesus was significant for some later groups of Christians, who saw themselves as the “true” Jews and who kept the Jewish Law and customs on the understanding that Jesus himself was thoroughly Jewish. V. The apostle Paul took a different tack and maintained a different perspective, one that became yet more important historically for the development of Christianity A. Paul, too, accepted Jesus’s Jewishness and saw himself as thoroughly Jewish, a worshiper of the Jewish God and a believer in his promises. B. As we saw in the previous lecture, however, Paul came to believe that Jesus’s death and Resurrection were the only way of salvation and concluded that the Law of the Jews, although itself embodying God’s righteous demands, had no role to play in salvation. 1. As a result, he insisted that Christians are made right with God apart from the Law. 2. For him, this meant that Gentiles, who were quickly becoming the majority in the church by the middle to late first century, did not need to keep the provisions of the Law (such as circumcision, Sabbath observance, and kosher food laws).

• From The Case for God (2009)

  So too were the “proofs” of Descartes and Newton. Matter did not require a God to set it in motion; it was dynamic and moved by its own momentum, and its existence depended on nothing other than itself. Voltaire circulated the manuscript privately, though he doctored it in order to make Meslier a respectable Deist. But in the Memoire we find the germ of much of the atheistic critique of the future. It shows that the new fashion for proving the existence of God could easily backfire; it also shows a connection between the desire for social change and the theory of dynamic matter. In France as in England, people outside the establishment were becoming critical of the orthodox Enlightenment belief in the inertia of matter. In 1706, Jean Pigeon (1654–1739), a self-educated military man with a flair for mechanical physics, had presented Louis XIV with a model of the Copernican system that he had made himself . 42 But he found that the experience of constructing his own universe, as it were, took all the wonder out of creation; God suddenly seemed little more than a craftsman like himself. He also came to believe that matter was not passive after all. Pigeon’s son-in-law Andre-Pierre Le Guay de Prémontval (1716–64) continued to preach the gospel of dynamic matter and a downsized God to large audiences until he was forced to flee to Holland. Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–51) had also taken refuge in the Netherlands, where he published Man, a Machine (1747) which ridiculed Cartesian physics and argued that intelligence was inherent in the material structure of organisms. For La Mettrie, God was simply an irrelevance. 43 He included the record of a conversation with a fellow skeptic, who yearned for the destruction of religion. No more theological wars, no more soldiers of religion— such terrible soldiers! Nature infected with sacred poison would repair its rights and purity. Deaf to all other voices, tranquil mortals will follow only the spontaneous dictates of their own being, the only commands which can never be despised with impunity, and which alone can lead us to happiness through the pleasant paths of virtue. 44 People were sick of the intolerant behavior of the churches. But few were prepared to break with religion entirely. La Mettrie himself was careful to distance himself from the opinions of the “wretch” he quoted. But in 1749, the novelist Denis Diderot (1713–84) was imprisoned in Vincennes for writing an atheistic tract.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  ©2004 The Teaching Company. 31 judgment, that they might enter into God’s Kingdom when it arrived. 1. This message is comparable to that of prophets of the Hebrew Bible, and it stood completely within the confines of Judaism in Jesus’s day. 2. His disciples followed him precisely because they, as faithful Jews, adhered to this message. E. How is it, then, that Christianity, the religion founded on Jesus, became so virulently anti-Jewish? III. The key to answering that question involves what happened after Jesus’s death. A. As we saw in the last lecture, some of Jesus’s followers came to think that Jesus was raised from the dead. This changed everything for them. 1. His followers began to understand that the Resurrection of Jesus demonstrated that he was the Messiah. 2. Most Jews, of course, did not expect anything like Jesus as a Messiah, because he was a relatively unknown itinerant preacher from Galilee who was arrested, tried, and executed as a common criminal for crimes against the state. How could he be the powerful Messiah? He appeared to most Jews to be anything but the Messiah. 3. Jews who believed in Jesus, though, insisted that that’s precisely what he was. This naturally led to serious conflict between traditional Jews and those who re-understood Judaism in light of their belief in Jesus. B. Jews who believed in Jesus were opposed by the vast majority of Jews, who found their message absurd and even blasphemous. C. In response, the Jewish believers in Jesus argued that those who did not accept him were blind to the truth and, because they had rejected the Messiah sent by their own God, they had rejected God himself. Further, because they rejected God, he rejected them. D. Thus began a long history of antagonism between Christians and non-Christian Jews. E. As we will see in this and the following lectures, different Christian authors reacted to this situation and dealt with it in a variety of ways.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  To my knowledge, this is this is the first time that any Christian charges Jews not just with the death of Jesus, but with the death of God. Jews here are accused of committing deicide, the murder of God. At this point in Jewish-Christian relations, polemic such as this has to be seen, I think, as little more than defensive posturing by a tiny minority splinter group with no power. Melito had no power. He was an unknown bishop of a tiny little church in a remote part of the empire with no power to do anything about his ranting about Jews killing Christ. Christians, at his time, were scattered, and they were politically innocuous. They were being persecuted, and they had this kind of rhetoric as a way of defending themselves. That was to change over time as numbers of pagans began to join Christians, and eventually, Christians began to assume positions of authority. | am going to give an account of how that all happened in a later lecture. For now, let me just give you a couple of figures. Probably about the time Melito is writing, at the end of the second century, Christianity comprised 2 or maybe 3 percent of the Roman Empire’s population, by the end of the fourth century, maybe 5 to 7 percent. Later, though the Emperor Constantine converted, as we have seen already, and I will talk more about that later. Once Constantine converted, massive conversions followed, including conversions of the elite, authoritative classes in the empire, so that by the end of the fourth century, nearly half of the empire was Christian. In the fourth century, there were huge conversions, until half the empire was Christian. Constantine made Christianity a legal religion, even a favorite religion. One of his successors, the Emperor Theodosius, at the end of the fourth century, made Christianity the official state religion. When Christianity took over the empire, the Christians who were in charge then were people who had power and authority, and they started taking this rhetoric, of people like Barnabas, Justin, and Melito quite seriously. At first, they didn’t pass any legislation against Jews. Constantine passed some laws, but not very many. His successors started passing laws, but they did start turning an eye when Christians who were inflamed by this kind of rhetoric started taking it out on Jewish neighbors. The logic was, “If these Jews have rejected God, God has rejected them. What we do to people who have rejected God? God is going to punish them, and therefore, we should Start punishing them.” 130 That couldn’t happen when Christians were a small, persecuted minority, but when they became powerful, and acquired authority—legal, military, and economic—then, they started to use the rhetoric of their predecessors and take it seriously, and began to persecute Jews.

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

  This highly dichotomous approach to treating trans people reflected the fact that most other sexologists who became involved in transsexuality—such as John Money, who pioneered the use of nonconsensual genital surgeries on intersex infants, and Richard Green, who is renowned for his use of behavioral modification to eliminate femininity in young boys—seemed to be primarily interested in “curing” (i.e., eliminating) sex-, gender-, and sexuality-related ambiguities. By the late 1960s—with the establishment of several U.S. gender identity clinics and the publication of Green and Money’s medical anthology Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment—a standard protocol for dealing with people who requested sex reassignment had started to emerge. 9 These guidelines for treatment were later codified with the release of the original HBIGDA Standards of Care in 1979, and while they have evolved somewhat over time—especially since the mid-1990s, when HBIGDA finally began to incorporate changes suggested by the transgender community—they follow the same basic outline today. 10 While this chapter is largely written in past tense (to maintain grammatical consistency), it should be said that most gatekeepers today still follow this same basic protocol, and many still evaluate their trans clients based on the oppositional and traditional sexist criteria that I discuss throughout this chapter. The first step in this process was a period of psychotherapy (lasting at least three months, often more), during which time a mental health professional would evaluate the client. If the trans person received a recommendation from that therapist (which today comes in the form of a diagnosis of gender identity disorder, or GID), they would then be allowed to begin their “real-life test”—a one- or two-year period during which they were required to live full-time in their identified sex. If the real-life test was deemed successful by both the transsexual and the therapist, the trans person would be eligible for hormone replacement therapy (in those cases where hormones were not prescribed before or concurrent with the real-life test) and sex reassignment surgery (which usually required a recommendation from a second mental health professional). While the gatekeepers consistently argued that these methods were designed to protect the transsexual, the way they were executed (especially prior to the mid-1990s) reveals an underlying agenda.