Guest essay by Fred F. Mueller
While many people will agree that some of the stories recorded in the Old Testament might not be taken too literally, this book nevertheless deserves a lot of respect for the fact that is represents the collective wisdom and historical records of a nomad populace that roamed vast swathes of Egypt, Mesopotamia and adjacent regions before finally settling in what is now known as Israel.
These tribes were highly intelligent and had a remarkably good understanding of many basic rules governing their daily life. Given the hygienic knowledge and standards of these times, rules determining how to prepare kosher food certainly had the beneficial additional effect of preventing the spread of diseases such as trichinosis or salmonella infections.
The old Jews had a basic but efficient set of laws called the Ten Commandments and, by observing the Shabbat, also practiced a very early form of work hour limitation. And, over a time period probably spanning back thousands of years into the fogs of unrecorded early human history, they kept the collective memory of key weather events and natural disasters such as Noah’s flood or the (probably volcanic) annihilation of Gomorrah. A very remarkable exploit of the Old Testament is the description of the Ten Plagues affecting Egypt. One can view them as a line-up of the worst natural incidents these people ever had lived and recorded over a period of probably several thousand years. Which now brings me to the decisive point: the list does not include freezing temperatures and deep snow.
Hail, but neither snow nor subzero temperatures
While the Ten Plagues included hail storms, the records clearly limit their impact to the destruction of crops and the battering to death of cattle and humans alike. Such events are extremely violent but also very ephemeral. The Bible makes no mention of bitter cold or of lasting snowfall. Given the high intelligence and excellent observation skills of the ancient Jews, one might feel enticed to suggest that during hundreds if not thousands of years, weather events of this type simply did not occur in their habitat.
Which now brings me to the decisive point: while the proponents of the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) insist that the temperatures of the planet are set to rise in an accelerating mode that we won’t be able to control least we adopt drastic climate protecting measures a.s.a.p., we just learn that in the Sinai desert, a region to the south-west of Israel, four hikers have died in a blizzard. They lost their way and sadly froze to death in deep snow at temperatures well below the freezing point. Pictures in the internet show camels knee-deep in snowdrifts.
If one pieces together this information and biblical records, one might feel entitled to draw the conclusion that such a weather event hasn’t been observed in the region for several thousand years. Not exactly an indication of runaway temperatures, at least not a rush to the northern regions of the mercury scale. And this wasn’t a singular event. Over a prolonged time period and a wide area, the Middle East might have been experiencing its worst cold snap in several hundred if not thousand years.
This certainly does not harmonize with stories about runaway temperatures sizzling our planet. If the Bible is right, the CAGW theory seems to have hit some serious snag. Maybe it would be a good suggestion to tell these people to go back to the drawing boards and proceed to an in-depth makeover of their simulation software…
[Note: some commenters questioned why this essay was posted, I simply saw it as an interesting discussion of recorded historical events, something that scholars worldwide look to document. The Roman Warm Period is well known and also much studied, and it coincides with many writings in the Bible. Wikipedia says:
Theophrastus (371 – c. 287 BC) wrote that date trees could grow in Greece if planted, but could not set fruit there. This is the same situation as today, and suggests that southern Aegean mean summer temperatures in the fourth and fifth centuries BC were within a degree of modern temperatures. This and other literary fragments from the time confirm that the Greek climate during that period was basically the same as it was around 2000 AD. Dendrochronological evidence from wood found at the Parthenon shows variability of climate in the fifth century BC resembling the modern pattern of variation.[3] Tree rings from Italy in the late third century BC indicate a period of mild conditions in the area at the time that Hannibal crossed the Alps with elephants.[4]
The phrase “Roman Warm Period” appears in a 1995 doctoral thesis.[5] It was popularized by an article published in Nature in 1999.
Anyone reading anything more into this posting, or thinking that I’m endorsing the idea that the bible “disproves global warming” should think again. – Anthony]
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Zaphod,
Christopher Hitchens was a Neo-Conservative slave, and a lying warmonger in the end. Like the piper in the old saying, he played only the tunes he was paid for.
He was always drunk on his celebrity TV appearances, slurring his propaganda of hatred against Muslims. He was a just a drunken, lying tool masquerading as an academic — one of my least favorite and most resented celebrities in the new atheist cult.
I am an atheist as you may have realized – but Dawkins spawned a viscous cult of “Organized Atheism,” and it is no different to a religion.
Let me show you where it started, and who it emulates…
Sounds like common sense.
(I think you mean to infer “a vicious cult” rather than “a viscous cult”)
Better a non-superstitious basis for foreign policy than one controlled by a cult which requires the ritual mutilation of babies as a pre-condition of membership.
If Hitchens was a neocon, why on earth would he advocate the trial for war crimes from South East Asia to the Mid East, of that arch-Neocon, a certain Henry Kissinger?
I remember Hitchens thirty years ago as a rabid Marxist when he lived in Britain, it always makes me smile when he refered to as a Neocon.
Yes Hitchens allowed himself to be swept along by the Neocon’s rhetoric over Saddam’s mythical WMDs, as many were including me (I wont be fooled again and we should have listened to The Who more carefully) but on religion he was spot on.
Zeke says:
February 27, 2014 at 11:17 am
“… the Old Testament… is coherent with the New Testament.”
For the sake of intelligible discussion, I’ll assume you meant “consistent” when you typed “coherent”, since otherwise, there is no intelligible content to critique.
And my (admittedly rhetorical) question is, how can the Old Testament possibly be consistent with the New Testament, when the New Testament is grossly inconsistent within itself, contradicting itself repeatedly on important factual details about the life of Jesus of Nazareth?
And these contradictions are all the more remarkable, since the various authors of the New Testament are claimed to have been near-constant companions of Jesus, and to have largely witnessed the same events and would certainly have had first hand accounts from their fellow-disciples of those at which they were not personally present.
Khwarizmi says:
February 27, 2014 at 1:27 pm
Zaphod,
“….I am an atheist as you may have realized – but Dawkins spawned a viscous cult of “Organized Atheism,” and it is no different to a religion….”
I don’t feel qualified to comment on your critiques of Hitchens and Dawkins, as I’ve found their writings too unpalatible to peruse at any lenght. Similarly, I cannot fairly evaluate your assessment of the origin of organized atheism, but do feel rather that it is a manifistation of the same psychopathology that maintains organized religion – a state of constant fearfulness that seeks to rigidly order and limit the personal perspective.
What I can empathize with fully is your despair at being slotted into a narrow social niche as an “atheist” by the writings of popular authors and demagogues propounding a narrow, anti-mystical, rigidly “materialistic” definition of atheism.
To me, the issue in English, my working language since childhood, has always been how to answer inquiries into my religiosity. There are only two choices that don’t require a lengthy footnote: “agnostic” and “atheist”.
“agnostic” is the more misleading, as it suggests to most people a mere indecisiveness, a suspension of judment, perhaps even just uncertainty as to which organized religion or even sect, is the most preferable. This certainly doesn’t fit my beliefs.
When, after being “confirmed” as a Catholic in my early teens, I decided, without consultation with any other person, that Catholic dogma was illogical nonsense, I proceeded to immerse myself in the study of the more philosophical religions, Hinduism, Bhuddism, Taoism, and their derivatives, such as Theosophy.
In the end, I decided that all of these mainline religions had rapidly degenerated into dogma (such as Karma) which was nothing more than self-serving propaganda to shore up highly stratified social orders. And that the more radical religions, such as Bhuddism and Islam, were nothing more than tools for a redistribution of power in such rigid and stratified societies, which ended up creating theocracies just as rigid and stratified.
So labeling myself “agnostic” would have been a gross deception. I could never consider adopting or endorsing any of these religions.
That left only the label of “atheist”, which by that time, has already been universally associated in the public mind with disbelief in the possibility of more advanced beings (angels, devils, gods), or even belief in the possibility of intuition (ESP), predictive visions (clairvoyance), persistence of consciousness post-mortem (life after death), etc., etc..
It is difficult in our society to find platforms from which to campaign vigorously for critical yet scientific open-mindedness, and so the fiercest demagogues for a simplistic world view dominate the stage, in the religious sphere as in other areas of intellectual life.
I call my self an “atheist” because:
1. superior beings who demand grovelling adulation of their inferiors should be called “devils”, not “gods”
2. superior beings who are not “devils” would find it repugnant to be worshiped, but would encourage and appreciate the struggle of their inferiors to see and think more clearly and otherwise develop their intellectual and moral faculties
3. there are undoubtedly beings in our universe who are superior to human beings in their intellectual, social, and/or technical development, and
4. I don’t know what happens to one’s persona (mind, soul,etc.) after death, but cannot rule out, after decades of reading and thinking about this transition, that some sort of conscious continuity might persist, or even that re-incarnation (the mechanism of which I have so far been unable to comprehend) is impossible.
It’s unfortunate that there is no English word, at least none understood by the vast majority of educated speakers of English, for someone who holds such beliefs.
The German word “Freidenker” (freethinker), would be much preferable, although my mother used to say of this group simply that “they all end up killing themselves”. Of course, she was quite mistaken, many have been executed or otherwise destroyed by the “slavethinkers” who police our society.
Why didn’t the bible mention blizzards? They didn’t or rarely get snow in the middle east and the Lavant. Only in the Alps and high terrain, where few people lived anyway.