An ancient Biblical tradition, a midrash, relates that the Canaanites wrote marriage contracts between man and man and woman and woman, and that this was one reason the land "vomited" them up in favor of the Israelites who took their place. The historicity of this isn't the point. It's the moral that matters, having to do with the social impact of being libertarian about marriage combinations
Today
Rod Dreher,
Andrew Sullivan, and
John Derbyshire are contemplating the question of whether there is a secular case against same-sex marriage. Is there?
Well, there would have to be. God doesn't rule arbitrarily. He has in mind the aim to encourage human flourishing, and He knows better even than Andrew Sullivan does. That doesn't mean His reasons are always entirely scrutable. That may be why the exact nature of a religion-free case against state-sanctioned gay marriage sometimes seems a bit hazy. Nevertheless, I'll give you my three thoughts about how human interest is served by resisting attempts to remake matrimony.
First, the institution of marriage is very ancient, and that by itself tells us something. A profound wisdom accumulates over the millennia, as generations discover the kind of institutions best suited for human beings. For thousands of years and across a multitude of cultures, people have agreed that marriage means the union of man with woman. This consensus is enshrined in religious beliefs, revered by Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus alike. You can think of these beliefs as God-given, but you don't have to. You also can think of them as human discoveries.
When the
New York Times derided
this book for
children -- as possibly giving comfort to religion! -- I wanted to buy it right away but of course it was already out of print. So the King County public library system was my best alternative. It's a very clever yet simple allegory by William Steig, the author of
Shrek, contrasting a Darwinian and an intelligent design perspective. A yellow wooden doll and a pink wooden doll debate where they came from, with the yellow doll voicing fatuous opinions straight out of Darwin about how it all came to pass by accident. In the end, a man, their designer, comes along and scoops them both up.
Finally, my turn in the library queue came. After I got home from work with the book, our 7-year-old, Ezra, read it in a few minutes. "Pink seems smarter than Yellow," he commented. After I had read the brief and charming little book aloud to him, Naomi (age 6) and Hannah (age 3), Naomi said "Again!"
It was a bit over Hannah's head but then again, the subject also seems to exceed the grasp of the New York Times science reporting staff.
An outfit called the Presidential Prayer Team is praying that President Obama should effectively lead the fight to
combat swine flu.
Meanwhile, my father went into the hospital this morning for relatively minor surgery -- though at his age, no surgery is truly minor. I prayed that it should go smoothly and successfully.
The other evening after prayer services at our synagogue, the rabbi announced that the brother of a former synagogue president had been involved in a serious bicycling accident and was paralyzed. The rabbi led us in a prayer,
Psalm 20, for his healing. "That's what a congregation does," the rabbi commented.
In situations like these, can prayer really help heal? Assuming, of course, that the person who's ill doesn't know he is being prayed for -- which, otherwise, could contribute to a placebo effect. Interestingly, research in recent years has given contradictory answers about the power of prayer.
How fascinating -- the underreported revelation of
modern evolutionary, genetic, and DNA science -- that physical, material causes are not enough to explain the history of life's evolution and development -- was understood by the rabbis more than a millennium ago. Rabbi Bahya ibn Paquda in
Duties of the Heart:
Which is the country's local culture most beset by moral confusion, New England or the Pacific Northwest? Seattle icon Knute Berger at Crosscut notes a fascinating contrast between these two regions that are America's top strongholds of secularism:In New England...same-sex...
Tomorrow is Israel's 61st birthday, Yom Ha'atzmaut. I love the country and only wish I could go more often. I can't wait to bring my children there for their first visit. The culture of Judaism in Israel is healthier than here in...
Let's talk about some rules I'm now initiating in this space, which will become more relevant as the blog, so I hope, grows. According to the Talmud, God allowed the first Temple in Jerusalem to be destroyed by the Babylonians because...
My mother-in-law is flying in from New York City on Thursday for a visit. We live in Seattle but the New York metro area has 28 confirmed swine-flu cases, Washington State so far none. I've actually found myself wondering if...
A.N. Wilson goes into more fascinating detail about his return to religious faith from atheism in an essay in the New Statesman. Now isn't this interesting: the literary critic, biographer and historian credits his gradual re-conversion in no small part...
So you still think Judaism doesn't seek to influence the spiritual path that non-Jews are on? That Jews have no plan of "conversion" in mind for the rest of the world? That Judaism has no "mission" to humanity? This week's...
I may have been harsh on David Plotz and his book, The Good Book, about reading the Bible, in which case I apologize. Plotz himself fights back spiritedly in the comment box. When I've read his writing in the past,...
Can you control your own evil impulses? Can you decide when to feel happy, angry, afraid? It sure doesn't feel that way to me. Yet the premise of cognitive therapy, which a lot of people swear by, is that by...
It always breaks my heart to see how simplemindedly the Hebrew Bible is discussed in the media. David Plotz, editor of Slate, has a new book out about the experience of trying to read the Bible straight through -- apparently...
A reader challenges me on my criticism of Christopher Buckley and his uncharitable published memories of his father and mother: "You wrote a memoir, and if memory serves painted a portrait of your adopted parents' religiosity that some readers might have...
Andrew Sullivan now seeks to invest his hyperventilating stance on torture with the dignity of a papal encyclical. He complains: "The point of torture is to violate the integrity of the human person and to coerce the will itself." As I've...
My post from Monday "Slouching Toward Columbine: Darwin's Tree of Death" continues to get comments, many poignantly indignant expressions of faith in "science":What matters is the evidence for evolution and that evidence is massive and extremely powerful. The facts of...
Today and tomorrow are Rosh Chodesh, inaugurating a new month in the Hebrew calendar -- the lunar month of Iyar. In Jewish liturgy, there are various additions special to the day but my favorite is the conclusion of the morning prayer...
As I mentioned in my post on Christopher Buckley's unkind portrait of his parents, Bill and Pat Buckley, great fathers have a way of producing sons who go off the track. Maybe they don't give them enough attention. That's not...
Christopher Buckley has an excerpt from his memoir about the loss of his parents, Mr. & Mrs. William F. Buckley, in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine. It's affecting but uncomfortable in what I'd regard as the inappropriate detail he...
The great psychologist writes wonderfully in "The Will to Believe" (1897):We feel, too, as if the appeal of religion to us were made to our own active good-will, as if evidence might be forever withheld from us unless we met...
A commenter on my previous entry about God's "tinkering" with nature asks: If God interferes (making miracles, making species) to show us that he and we are free, then why doesn't he make that more transparent? Why is it so hard...
Scot McKnight's Jesus Creed asks, "Why would God design a world where he needed to tinker constantly to make things work?" OK, JC, I'll take you up on that. The same blog post suggests that the idea of intelligent design hasn't stood...
Sigh. Our son Ezra, age 7, fears the Jackal god. That would be Ezra who attends an Orthodox Jewish (actually, Chabad) elementary school and studies the weekly Torah portion. I gave him a copy of a book I liked when...
A couple of times I've come across the Rev. Billy Graham's syndicated newspaper columns -- yes, they are still being published -- and on both occasions he was answering a letter from a reader who was perplexed upon trying to...
Responding to my post on the Columbine shooting and the social consequences of Darwinism, some objecting readers argued that the Bible, after all, has also inspired evil acts. Which is true, of course, but misses the point. Biblical faith has...
The Da Vinci Code author is finally coming out on September 15 with his new title, expected to go to press with an initial run of 5 million copies. I can't wait, and I'm entirely serious about that. He's a...
Jews read the Torah in a yearly cycle, one portion per Sabbath. Now that Passover is past, we're back to the regular schedule. This week's reading is Tazria-Metzora (Leviticus 12:1-15:33), and it's not an easy read. Not only because the...
It's always a hoot to be fired upon by Little Green Footballs. A friend emails, "He proved himself a demagogue by what he didn't quote" from my earlier post. Last time this happened, I wrote a series at Evolution News &...
Stephen Hawking, theoretical physicist and sometimes hailed as the world's smartest man, is reported "very ill" and as having been rushed to the hospital. Newspaper writers are working on obituaries.An interesting sidelight, that one hopes will not prove poignant too,...
I received an email from a Jewish historian and journalist I respect very much, including this thought:I envy your finding [spiritual life] "at home" so to speak in Judaism, but alas the worship of a Jewish God who found the...
I've learned to temper both my thoughts and how I express them -- a little bit! -- since I wrote a 1998 piece for First Things about the Holocaust in light of the Hebrew Bible that was subsequently denounced in...
I've long been fascinated by the image of the Tree of Death, parallel to the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden and cryptically referred to in mystical texts explaining the Hebrew Bible:And out of the ground made the...
I promised you that over Shabbat I would read Spengler's essay from First Things, "Christian, Muslim, Jew," and I did on Friday night after dinner. It is a very interesting and characteristically learned discourse on the religious philosophy of Franz...
I've belatedly discovered a soul brother in the person of "Spengler," the incredibly widely read and formerly masked columnist for the Asia Times Online. He reveals his true identity now as David P. Goldman, in the act of taking up...
The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; Lilith also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest (Isaiah 34:14).Somehow it...
Just in time for Passover (which is just past), Princeton University Press brings out a book that seeks to debunk the parting of the Red Sea -- whose anniversary we Jews just observed two days ago on the seventh day...
Tonight (i.e., Thursday) Jews counted the 8th day of the Omer, a commandment touched upon in Leviticus 23:15-16:And ye shall count unto you from the morrow after the day of rest, from the day that ye brought the omer of...
As the Torah commands, Jews power down for the first and last two days of Passover. So Wednesday and Thursday I will have to miss blogging. I'll miss you but will be back on Friday. This post is being published...
Tomorrow, according to Biblical tradition, is the anniversary of the splitting of the Red Sea in 1313 BCE, when Pharaoh's army pursuing the escaped Israelite slaves was hurled into the sea by God and drowned. Jews read the relevant passages...
My Beliefnet colleague and friend Rod Dreher notes the return to Christianity of A.N. Wilson, a writer I've long admired greatly. He's a novelist, biographer, and literary editor. Rod is glad and I am too but I'm more interested in...
"And God said, Let there be light: and there was light" (Genesis 1:3).I was just haggling with my wise editor at the Forward over my use in an op-ed piece -- about the Biblical commandment of counting the Omer --...
As I prepare resignedly to download and mail off my usual application for an IRS tax extension, I won't hide from you that in this period of recession money is a worry with our family. Thank God I have a...
Rabbi Gil Student, who writes the always fascinating and learned Hirhurim blog, drops by to comment on my assertion that Christians invented Zionism. He points to a book that attributes early proto-Zionist thoughts and deeds to the students of the...
Happy Easter to my Christian friends! American Jews have lots to be grateful for to you. For one, there's a historical argument to be made that American Christians invented modern Zionism.That thesis relates to Passover. Yesterday in synagogues around the...
Sorry if the question sounds tactless, and no I don't in fact want to know the answer. I ask, instead, to point out the well intentioned but nevertheless inappropriate gesture of the President's hosting the first ever Seder at the...
As the Torah commands, Jews power down for the first and last two days of Passover. So Thursday and Friday I will have to miss blogging, as well as on Saturday, which is Shabbat, the Sabbath. I'll miss you but...
The Jewish web has been awash with excitement about the Blessing of the Sun, or Birkat Hachama, that happens only once in 28 years, on the Eve of Passover, and occurred this morning. Being the contrarian I am, I couldn't quite...
National Review Online thoughtfully offers a nice little roundup of a recommended Passover reading. Marshall Breger recommends:Aaron Wildavsky's Moses as a Political Leader assists one in understanding the Bible generally and the Passover story specifically in political terms. The political...
In the new issue of The American Scholar, Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd tries to explain how a universe unguided by divine purpose can still have meaning. Most of the essay, "Purpose-Driven Life," is pure blather, largely unreadable. But his simple point seems to...
In the New York Times this morning, the day before Passover, the usually thoughtful and humane columnist David Brooks invites us to re-enslave ourselves to Pharaoh, king of Egypt. Not just Jews, either, but everybody. That's the unstated message of his...
Today, a couple of days before Passover, a friend told me something that pained me.When he was a kid, his father, who was a lawyer, would inform him of how much in billable hours his time was worth, and remind...
A reader, Joyce, comments poignantly on my post about Newsweek's rabbis list, which is topped by liberal activist Rabbi David Saperstein. I had noted that the organization Saperstein heads up, the Religious Action Center, takes a firm stance against tobacco....
Is Judaism a race or a mission? Last week when I began writing this blog, my Beliefnet editor advised me about some recent trends in Jewish-related web searches. After all, we're trying to keep things relevant here. It turns out that there's...
Thanks and congratulations to the editors of Mishpacha, a popular Orthodox Jewish magazine, for marking this year of Darwin anniversaries with a frank look at Darwinism's cultural consequences. The author is also the author of this blog. I note the...
Newsweek published its list of the 50 most influential rabbis, and the usually entertainingly acerbic Failed Messiah comments blandly, "Star power trumps community influence." There's much more that we can say than that. This list, which will be the talk of the...
Have you seen the new Nicolas Cage movie Knowing? It's actually pretty effective as science fiction entertainment, but what fascinates me about it is the weird way it raises questions about destiny or predestination that have been bugging me all...
Philo-Semitic Christians often cite God's words to Abraham in Genesis 12:13 -- "I will bless those who bless you" -- as a big part of the reason for their passionate defense and activism on behalf of the state of Israel....
To my surprise tonight, I returned home from work about 8 pm to discover my two oldest children speaking Yiddish. They are Ezra and Naomi, ages 7 and 6, hereafter to be designated by their accustomed nicknames Ezzie and Noma....
There was a line of ants running up and down the face of the aboveground crypts of the huge necropolis, a city of the dead with story upon story of stacked crypts rising over the 405 freeway south of...
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Add to Facebook
Add to StumbleUpon
Subscribe
