I recently had two online exchanges with “True Believers.” In my case, both were Christian “literalists” whose “true belief” was in Biblical inerrancy, believing that the Christian Bible is literally the “Word of God” and therefore contains no errors. The belief in inerrancy is more complex than the phrase implies, as there are so many different versions of the ancient texts. My concern is with inerrancy in general rather than which particular form it takes.
Christians aren’t the only ones who have an inerrancy faction. Muslims have one, too. Sunnis and Shia are currently in the news for their differences. I don’t know much about internecine conflicts in Buddhism, but Buddhists are not necessarily a big, happy family. One of the twentieth-century’s better thinkers, Edward de Bono compares the solidified state of “rock logic” with the more fluid and evolved “water logic”. On a personal scale, rock logic leads to arguments (and sometimes fights), and on an international scale, rock logic leads to wars.
Sometimes the differences in beliefs are small. In Gulliver’s Travels Jonathan Swift comments on a war between two nation states over the proper way to open soft-boiled eggs, those who favor opening the big end and those who favor opening the little end. The metaphor was for the ongoing (for centuries) conflict between Protestants and Catholics. One of the conflicts between England (Protestant) and France (Catholic) was a war named the “Hundred Years’ War” because it lasted so long. One of the things about True Believers is that they tend to think that what’s right for them is right for everyone—and they are willing to use force to influence your beliefs and behaviors.
Israel and Hamas (political party in control of Gaza) are currently battling (in a serious way with twenty-first-century weapons) for control of territory in the Mideast. The history of who deserves what and how much territory in the Mideast is too complicated for a blog entry, but my concern is primarily with the True Believers who are willing to fight and die (or have others fight and die) for their beliefs. What brought this to mind was a Christian’s statement to the effect that God gave the land (Israel) to the Jews, and the Jews need to take it all back. And, of course, “this” would mean war…. The Crusades happened a long time ago, but we have some sense of what they were like, even if we no longer understand the dynamics of the time.
This belief about Israel and the Mideast is not unique. In the States we speak of Columbus having “discovered” the New World. This concept seems to ignore the fact that millions of Native Americans had been here for a couple thousand of years before the “Columbusing” event took place. And those we call Native Americans weren’t the first. Before the Native Americans, another indigenous group inhabited much of the Americas. Now, of course, Native Americans are assigned certain small areas of relatively undesirable land (called “reservations”) while “Real Americans” (those of European descent) enjoy everything else. The comparison with what’s currently going on in Israel is obvious but not much discussed. The Muslim population has been forced onto reservations.
Europeans and Native Americans fought a lot of battles before the Native Americans were beaten into submission. The history written by Europeans has tended to overlook the full extent of the conflicts. If you are of European descent, you may have never heard of The Battle of the Greasy Grass. History tends to be written by those who win the wars. As methods of recording events improve, that may be changing, and that’s doubtless a good thing. The more people know, the less they fear….
That brings me back to the True Believers and the need for basing beliefs on actual evidence. True Believers, for example, tend to believe that the Earth is only about five thousand years old. The actual evidence says otherwise. The Earth is about 5 billion (not thousand) years old. True Beliers argue against evolution, believing instead that God created all the life forms in their current versions at the same time. That belief may have made sense thousands of years ago, but it doesn’t make sense in view of currently available evidence. Richard Bandler likes to ask the question, “Are you sure enough to be unsure?” If you really are sure that your beliefs are true, what happens when you look at the evidence?
I don’t know about Muslims who are True Believers in the sense of interpreting the Koran as literal truth rather than metaphorical truth, but Christian True Believers ignore much of what we know about the Christian Bible, including the Old and New Testaments. As was true for Homer and the epic Greek poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, much of what is now the Christian Bible came out of an oral tradition. Stories were passed from generation to generation in oral form. The Books of the Bible we know of as The Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) weren’t written until about 100 years after Christ’s death. How many times were the stories told, and how often were they changed? Those are questions we may never be able to answer fully. We can, however, trace changes made the manuscripts that were copied by different scribes over a number of years, and close examination of the manuscripts shows many changes along the way. Some of the changes, especially those concerning the power and authority of the Church, seem deliberate. Others are probably simply the result of tired scribes not reading or writing accurately.
The main problem with True Believers is that they ignore a lot of evidence that casts doubt on what they believe. And, of course, the True Believers in alternative realities disagree, so we have an ongoing argument between the “Big Enders” and the “Little Enders.” Jesus would not approve, and I suspect that Mohammed would not approve, either. It would be wonderful if fewer of us used “rock logic” and more of us used “water logic.”
