Fri, 4 September 2009
Margaret Kittson
0:00:00 Introduction - Richard Saunders 0:03:30 Eran Segev interviews Margaret Kittson 0:34:32 A Grain of Salt - With Eran Segev Comments[2]
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- My thoughts on Margaret's remarks:
She talks about how a critical stage in the abandonment of religion was when she asked herself what evidence there was for thinking that one particular religion is true, or in other words, what makes one religion stand out against all the others.
That was the same question that I asked when I was younger, but in my case I received an answer that satisfied me at the time and lead to my embracement of Christianity for many years. It was only in my twenties that I abandoned the Christian faith, after too many disappointments when things I'd previously taken as evidence in favour of its uniqueness and truth turned out not to be as I learned more and thought more.
I spent several years living in the residential wing of a Christian theological college, wherein I would often argue against six-day creationists. This takes me to the second of Margaret's comments that I wish to comment on, namely the connection between the Biblical creation and flood stories and the Epic of Gilgamesh, etc.
The six-day creationists that I argued with at the Bible College were, as you'd expect, perfectly aware that the Biblical stories borrowed from the legends of surrounding cultures. They just didn't see a conflict between that and a literal interpretation.
Those that expressed a view on Gilgamesh at all favoured the polemic theory, which was taught at the College. This is the theory that the reason why the Biblical stories copied from earlier legends was to highlight all the more clearly where those earlier legends are wrong, and that it's the points at which the Biblical version contrasts most sharply with its contemporaries that are the points it was written to convey. For example, it is often said that one of the most striking ways in which Noah contradicts Gilgamesh is in its teaching that God cares whether humans act morally or not.
Now, it seems to me (and it seemed to me then) that there's a problem in simultaneously believing that a story was written as a teaching tool to show why other religions of the day were wrong, AND believing that the same story was written in order to describe true events from the beginning of the world. Of course a story can have more than one purpose, but if so there must be some compromise between them.
My point is that it's easy for skeptics to convey creationists as denying the connection between Noah and Gilgamesh, etc, but the more educated among them don't so much deny the connection, as deny that it has any bearing on whether the Biblical versions are historically true. I'm curious about whether Margaret's experience concurs with mine on this point.
Great piece from Eran, as usual.
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