Slapping Down Intolerance (Again)

(This is my rebuttal of an incredibly intolerant and narrow-minded article by Matt Barber of the WND):

“Today’s Baal worshipers“
By Matt Barber

Modern-day liberals – or “progressives” as they more discreetly prefer – labor under an awkward misconception; namely, that there is anything remotely “progressive” about the fundamental canons of their blind, secular-humanist faith. In fact, today’s liberalism is largely a sanitized retread of an antiquated mythology – one that significantly predates the only truly progressive movement: biblical Christianity.

*A judgmental, value-laden, not to say unsubstantiated claim if there ever was one. The essential claim being made here seems to be that biblical Christianity is a progressive movement, one by which all other movements and religions are to be judged.

While visiting the Rivermont Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Lynchburg, Va., a few weeks back, I heard a troubling, albeit thought-provoking, sermon

Pastor John Mabray addressed the ancient Canaanite practice of Baal worship and, though he didn’t reveal it by name, connected the dots to its present-day progeny: liberalism. Baal, the half-bull, half-man god of fertility, was the focal point of pagan idolatry in Semitic Israel until God revealed His monotheistic nature to Judaism’s forebears.

* Baal. Let’s talk about Baal because this is an old piece of monotheistic nonsense that has been disproven by scholars. Mr. Barber is simply repeating ancient propaganda, as was Pastor Mabray, peddling cheap anti-Paganism cloaked in the guise of piety. Albright, among many other scholars (and needless to say, most Christians and Jews), hold a very low regard for Canaanite religion. Delbert Hillers points to the problem of the study of Canaanite religion being the domain largely of Christian and Jewish scholars in that “our picture of this alien ancient faith is drawn by those who are committed to finding it inferior, puerile, barbarous, retarded, or shocking.” In short, these scholars “may have been patiently and elaborately analyzing an ancient belief-system in order to reach the inevitable and foregone conclusion that it is an abomination.” His fears certainly seem well-founded: The Old Testament, as Hillers notes, casts the Canaanites in the role of villains, a portrayal Christian and Jewish scholars seem eager to perpetuate. [1] Albright, for instance, called it a “low level” religion and claimed that it “inherited some of the most demoralizing cultic practices then existing in the near east.” But that was not the end of his condemnation, for in his view “the brutality of Canaanite mythology…passes belief.”[2] For Albright, the Canaanite rites are “orgiastic” and “savage” and he contrasts this negatively with the shining example of Israelite morality.[3] This is perhaps no surprise when we consider the privileging of the Bible as a source over literary and archaeological evidence, especially when they do not agree. After all, everyone knows that the worship of YHWH is the legitimate religion and that Canaanite polytheism is its wicked counterpart; any evidence to the contrary must be dismissed as mistaken because it has already been determined what the truth is. But when considerations of dogma are laid aside, this dismissal of Canaanite religion is of no small matter, since it is proven to be the religion of the Israelites themselves. El, Baal, Asherah, Mot, Shapsu, these were the Gods of pre-exilic Israel. As Smith points out, recent scholarship (from the 1970s on) has resulted in an understanding of “‘Canaanite practices’ as eminently Israelite.”[4] Halpern points to the fact that “scholars sometimes speak of the ‘introduction’ of the cult of Baal ‘into Israel’ in the 9th century B.C.E., of Canaanite influence of Israel’s religion – much as their 19th century forerunners spoke of Babylonian influence on the Second Commonwealth. But Israelite religion did not import Canaanite. Israel’s religion was a Canaanite religion.”[5]

In his sermon, Pastor Mabray illustrated that, although they’ve now assumed a more contemporary flair, the fundamentals of Baal worship remain alive and well today. The principal pillars of Baalism were child sacrifice, sexual immorality (both heterosexual and homosexual) and pantheism (reverence of creation over the Creator).

Ritualistic Baal worship, in sum, looked a little like this: Adults would gather around the altar of Baal. Infants would then be burned alive as a sacrificial offering to the deity. Amid horrific screams and the stench of charred human flesh, congregants – men and women alike – would engage in bisexual orgies. The ritual of convenience was intended to produce economic prosperity by prompting Baal to bring rain for the fertility of “mother earth.”

*Ritualistic YHWH worship looked something like this: We are constantly told that one of the great evils of polytheism and Paganism is human sacrifice, particularly child sacrifice, in particular that of the Phoenicians to Moloch and of the Assyrians to Adad and Ishtar. The Canaanites significantly, from what we have learned of Israelite origins, also stand accused.[6] Eusebius used human sacrifice to prove the inherent inhumanity of Paganism:

“For what can be a greater proof of madness, than to offer human sacrifice, to pollute every city, and even their own houses, with kindred blood? Do not the Greeks themselves attest this, and is not all history filled with records of the same impiety? The Phoenicians devoted their best beloved and only children as an annual sacrifice to Saturn. The Rhodians, on the sixth day of the month Metageitnion, offered human victims to the same god. At Salamis, a man was pursued in the temple of Minerva Agraulis and Diomede, compelled to run thrice round the altar, afterwards pierced with a lance by the priest, and consumed as a burnt offering on the blazing pile. In Egypt, human sacrifice was most abundant. At Heliopolis three victims were daily offered to Juno, for whom king Amoses, impressed with the atrocity of the practice, commanded the substitution of an equal number of waxen figures. In Chios, and again in Tenedos, a man was slain and offered up to Omadian Bacchus. At Sparta they immolated human beings to Mars. In Crete they did likewise, offering human sacrifices to Saturn. In Laodicea of Syria a virgin was yearly slain in honor of Minerva, for whom a hart is now the substitute. The Libyans and Carthaginians appeased their gods with human victims. The Dumateni of Arabia buried a boy annually beneath the altar. History informs us that the Greeks without exception, the Thracians also, and Scythians, were accustomed to human sacrifice before they marched forth to battle. The Athenians record the immolation of the virgin children of Leus, and the daughter of Erechtheus. Who knows not that at this day a human victim is offered in Rome itself at the festival of Jupiter Latiaris ? And these facts are confirmed by the testimony of the most approved philosophers. Diodorus, the epitomizer of libraries, affirms that two hundred of the noblest youths were sacrificed to Saturn by the Libyan people, and that three hundred more were voluntarily offered by their own parents. Dionysius, the compiler of Roman history, expressly says that Jupiter and Apollo demanded human sacrifices of the so-called Aborigines, in Italy. He relates that on this demand they offered a proportion of all their produce to the gods; but that, because of their refusal to slay human victims, they became involved in manifold calamities, from which they could obtain no release until they had decimated themselves, a sacrifice of life which proved the desolation of their country. Such and so great were the evils which of old afflicted the whole human race.”[7]

This is quite the list (Those nasty Pagans!) And nowhere, of course, does Eusebius mention his own God, who is allegedly the same as the Jewish God, or his own demands for the sacrifice of infants. But if we take Exodus 22.29 literally, YHWH demanded human sacrifice as well: that of the first-born son:

Do not hold back offerings from your granaries or your vats. You must give me the firstborn of your sons. Do the same with your cattle and your sheep. Let them stay with their mothers for seven days, but give them to me on the eighth day.

Ezekiel (20.26) certainly takes God’s command in this way, in a literal sense: “I let them become defiled through their gifts – the sacrifice of every firstborn – that I might fill them with horrors so they would know that I am the LORD.” The ever-reviled Baal and Moloch have nothing on this guy. YHWH was demanding the first-born as a sacrifice to him, just as he was demanding the sacrifice of the first born of cattle and sheep. There is no mistaking the context. Robin Lane Fox rather hopefully suggests that “probably, the order meant consecration only” but admits that 2 Kings 21.6 shows how King Manasseh “sacrificed his own son to the fire.”[8] How then are we to know that Fox is right? It is difficult to mistake the meaning of that passage in Exodus, after all. It is quite clear what YHWH wanted. We can’t put the reviled behavior of Manasseh in 2 Kings down to devotion to idols, since he was only doing what YHWH himself had commanded much earlier in Israel’s history.

Another example of YHWH accepting human sacrifice is found in the story of Jephthah, one of the Judges of Israel who lived in the time before the first king. When the Ammonites invaded, Jephthah vowed to YHWH, “If you give the Ammonites into my hands, whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me when I return in triumph from the Ammonites will be the Lord’s, and I will sacrifice it as a burnt offering (Judges 11.29-31).” Of course, Jephthah won and when he returned home from his campaign, the first to come out of his house was his daughter, who “was only a child.” Her father, we are told “did to her as he had vowed. And she was a virgin” (11.32-39). This event was not decried afterwards. Rather, it was celebrated, since “From this comes the Israelite custom that each year the young women of Israel go out for four days to commemorate the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite” (11.40). The whole history of human sacrifice in Israel then is not just a matter of Jews behaving badly, falling prey to the wicked foreign mores of their neighbors. This is easily seen when we consider the testimony of Levicitus (27.28-29) where we find the following, a command that seems to argue against the idea of simple consecration:

But nothing that a man owns and devotes to the LORD – whether man or animal or family land – may be sold or redeemed; everything so devoted is most holy to the LORD. No person devoted to destruction may be ransomed; he must be put to death.

As we are told in the very final passage of Leviticus: “These are the commands the LORD gave Moses on Mount Sinai for the Israelites” (27.34). In any event, as Morton Smith points out, even if leha’lavir ba’esh means “to sanctify” as in a “temple servant or priest or something of the sort…what became of all these sanctified first born?” In the end, Smith finds that “the arguments advanced for figurative interpretation are indefensible; we may plausibly presume the texts mean what they say.”[9] R.H. Sales concludes that

Sacrifice was an integral part of Hebrew ritual and worship. Important to the philosophy of the practice was the idea that blood was necessary to effect atonement or for achieving the desired relationship between man and God; also the more valuable the sacrifice the more effect it would have, and hence the highest sacrifice a man could offer was his first-born son.[10]

This is a bit of a problem, to say the least. After all, those Christians who defend the literal truth of the Bible are put in the rather uncomfortable position of accepting that one of the demands their God made on His people was the sacrifice of infants, the very evil they decry in Paganism. In fact, it is human sacrifice that alongside sexual promiscuity are always held forth as the very essence of Paganism.[11] This author well remembers Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses coming to his home and engaging him in discussion. When told I was a Pagan, they launched immediately into the evils of human sacrifice, with nary a word about how their own God demanded it. In this we could argue that Pagans are superior. Pagans have learned that there are other suitable ways to show devotion to our Gods that do not require the death of an infant. But Christianity, following later Judaism, seems to have rejected the command of their God in this respect. He demands infant sacrifice. Given Leviticus 27.34, what is their excuse for not rendering it? After all, Jesus said he had come not to destroy the Law but to uphold it.

One might argue that Ex. 13.12-13 contradicts these findings, where the Israelites are told to “Redeem every firstborn among your sons”. But as Morton Smith observes “this is a modification of the old law that still stands in the Convenant Code…The provision for a substitutionary sacrifice had to be justified by a legend, the story that (the angel of) Yahweh intervened to prevent the sacrifice of Isaac and to provide as a substitute a ram, which Abraham sacrificed ‘instead of his son’ (Gen 22:13).”[12] But this modification to the Law creates its own problems. A perfect God cannot change his mind. That would negate his perfection as it would demonstrate that he had been wrong in a previous judgment and had to correct his earlier mistake. Nor does acceptance of this as a revision of the law negate the fact of Jewish infant sacrifice to their God, YHWH.

The claim of bisexual orgies is simply prurient (and probably wishful) propaganda on the part of the Jewish scribes. The Jewish monotheists were obsessed with sex. Jewish attraction to other gods was referred to as whoring and sexual infidelity.

The natural consequences of such behavior – pregnancy and childbirth – and the associated financial burdens of “unplanned parenthood” were easily offset. One could either choose to engage in homosexual conduct or – with child sacrifice available on demand – could simply take part in another fertility ceremony to “terminate” the unwanted child.

*Now Mr. Barber is simply making things up out of whole cloth, and given that his own god demanded human sacrifice, he might well be speaking of his own religion.

Modern liberalism deviates little from its ancient predecessor. While its macabre rituals have been sanitized with flowery and euphemistic terms of art, its core tenets and practices remain eerily similar. The worship of “fertility” has been replaced with worship of “reproductive freedom” or “choice.” Child sacrifice via burnt offering has been updated, ever so slightly, to become child sacrifice by way of abortion. The ritualistic promotion, practice and celebration of both heterosexual and homosexual immorality and promiscuity have been carefully whitewashed – yet wholeheartedly embraced – by the cults of radical feminism, militant “gay rights” and “comprehensive sex education.” And, the pantheistic worship of “mother earth” has been substituted – in name only – for radical environmentalism.

·Fertility Worship: First of all, Mr. Barber is rejecting what was well respected by millions for many centuries before anyone heard of YHWH or introduced his worship into the highlands of Canaan.

·Child Sacrifice: As we have seen, this was engaged in by more than one ancient culture, including the Jewish, whose god demanded of parents their first-born son.

·Sexual immorality: Mr. Barber, like his intolerant ancestors, believes that any form of sex which falls outside his narrow window of tolerance (man and woman, missionary position, no pleasure, just for making babies) is immoral. While he is entitled to feel that way, to peddle his intolerant views as some sort of universal truth is without merit.

·Radical Environmentalism: I shall cite Celsus here, since he said it best: “I shall have to show that their stupidity really hinges on their doctrine of creation, since they hold that God made all things for the sake of men, whereas our philosophy maintains that the world was made as much for the benefit of the irrational animals as for men – I mean, why should thing have been created more for man’s nourishment than for the benefit of the planets and trees, the grass and the thorns? I suppose they ignore the fact that things do not grow without human endeavor – we struggle to make things fertile, whatever God may have to do with the case – whereas they attribute everything to God as though everything grew without sowing and tillage. As Euripides says, “Sun and light serve mortals”but they serve the ants and flies as well. For in their case, too, the night is for sleeping and the day for doing.[13]

The Christians, like the Jews, boast that we are the rulers and Lords of creation – because we hunt and feast on animals. I might reply by asking why rather they are not our masters, and why it cannot be said that we were made for their sake, since they also hunt and feed on us. And while they go to hunt alone, we tend to need dogs, weapons, and other men to help us against the prey! And so to those who say that man is superior to the irrational animals, I reply that God indeed gave us the ability to catch the wild beasts and to make use of them; yet it is also true that before there were cities, arts, culture, weapons, and nets – men were captured and eaten by the wild beasts, and it was rarely the other way around.”

But it’s not just self-styled “progressives” or secular humanists who have adopted the fundamental pillars of Baalism. In these postmodern times, we’ve also been graced, regrettably, by the advent of counter-biblical “emergent Christianity” or “quasi-Christianity,” as I prefer to call it.

* Quasi Christianity. Mr. Barber falls into the trap of claiming that his own narrow definition of Christianity is the only one and that all other forms are false, or to use an old term, “heresies.” But history does not prove this. In fact, Orthodox Christianity was in fact a late-comer. Many forms of Christianity existed in the ancient world. In fact, the original followers of Jesus were Jews and remained Jews. The Jerusalem Community opposed Paul and ended up bringing to an end his disgraceful apostasy. Only the unhappy chance of the revolt against Rome in 66 CE, which led to the destruction of the community led by James the Just, allowed Mr. Barber’s type of Christianity to claim to be normative. In fact, Gentile Christianity is hardly original but rather a syncretic and derivative mixture of Judaism and Pagan ritual and liturgy.

This is merely liberalism all dolled up and gratuitously stamped “Christian.” It’s a way for left-wing ideologues to have their “religion” cake and eat it too. Under the guise of “social justice,” its adherents often support – or at least rationalize – the same pro-homosexual, pro-abortion and radical environmental policies pushed by the modern-day Baal worshiper.

* Here we go with the name calling again. Nobody who fails to support Mr. Barber’s narrow view of religion and his utter intolerance for views not his own, can be considered either a Christian or a moral person. Ideas of morality outside his own are foreign to him.

Though the “Christian left” represent what is arguably a negligible minority within larger Christianity, the liberal media have, nonetheless, embraced their cause and seized upon their popularity among elites as evidence that the so-called “Christian right” (read: biblical Christianity) is losing influence – that Christianity is, somehow, “catching up with the times.”

* In fact it is the Fundamentalist and Evangelical Christians who are a minority, making false claims to both numbers and influence.[14] In fact, Christianity is “somehow catching up with the times” as more and more Christians understand that social causes and not moral crusades are where their efforts should be focused. Fundamentalist Christianity is a reactionary force, a reaction against the Enlightenment of several centuries ago, of its continued success and against loss of control over the hearts and minds of humankind.

Because emergent Christianity fails the authenticity test whenever subjected to even the most perfunctory biblical scrutiny, I suspect it will eventually go – for the most part – the way of the pet rock or the Macarena. But this does not absolve leaders within the evangelical community from a duty to call leaders of this counter-biblical revolution on their heresy. It’s not a matter of right versus left; it’s a matter of right versus wrong – of biblical versus non-biblical.

* The interesting thing is that Mr. Barber’s Christianity also fails the authenticity test when subjected to “the most perfunctory biblical scrutiny.” And in fact, Fundamentalism’s failing membership proves that the opposite of Mr. Barber’s claims are true.

Nonetheless, the aforementioned pillars of postmodern Baalism – abortion, sexual relativism and radical environmentalism – will almost certainly make rapid headway over the next four to eight years, with or without help from the Christian left. The gods of liberalism have a new high priest in Barack Obama, and enjoy many devout followers in the Democratic-controlled Congress, liberal media and halls of academia.

* Mr. Barber toes the company line by blaming a tolerant and diverse society. He sounds more than a little bitter that his bid for theocracy fell short of the mark. He is showing signs of denial all through this piece; a refusal to face the fact that his message of intolerance did not appeal to the majority of the American voters; an unwillingness to accept the fact that his type of Christianity is very much in a minority in this country and failing fast.

Both Obama’s social agenda and that of the 111th Congress are rife with unfettered pro-abortion, freedom-chilling, pro-homosexual and power-grabbing environmentalist objectives. The same kind of “hope, action and change,” I suppose, that was swallowed up by the Baalist Canaanites of old.

* Pro-homosexual should be substituted with pro-equality and Constitutional. Mr. Barber is accusing the ancient Baalists of being tolerant of diversity and friendly to the environment, and I cannot imagine a higher compliment being paid.

So, today’s liberalism is really just a very old book with a shiny new cover. A philosophy rooted in ancient pagan traditions, of which there is naught to be proud.

* And we should be thankful for a return to Paganism, which celebrated tolerance and diversity. We could (and have) done much worse than a return to Paganism.

NOTES:

[1] Delbert Hillers, “Analyzing the Abominable: Our Understanding of Canaanite Religion,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 75 (1985), 254. As Hillers points out (p. 260), the “characterization of the Canaanite religion as primitive turns out on examination to be vague, possibly inaccurate, inconsistent in application, and finally a rather dubious way of justifying the course of our religious history.”

[2] F.M. Albright, “The Role of Canaanites in the History of Civilization,” Pp. 438-487 in The Bible and the Ancient Near East: Essays in Honor of W.F. Albright, edited by G.E. Wright (NY: Doubleday, 1961). See also idem, “The Biblical Period,” Pp. 3-69 in The Jews: Their History, Culture and Religion, edited by Louis Finkelstein, second edition. Volume 1. (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1949).

[3] F.M. Albright, The Biblical Period from Abraham to Ezra (New York and Evanston, 1963), 35.

[4] Smith (2002), 21. Baal, the storm god whose name means “Lord” and whose worshippers saw him as both generous and a champion of his people, became demonized as Beelzebub by the later monotheists. His worshippers would not have recognized this negative image of Baal created by the monotheistic spin machine.

[5] Baruch Halpern, The Emergence of Israel in Canaan (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983), 246.

[6] For a study of Canaanite human sacrifice see Delbert R. Hillers, “Analyzing the Abominable: Our Undersatnding of Canaannite Religion,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 75 (1985), 253-269. Hillers concludes that “In sum, we confront references to human sacrifices in the Bible, and apparently illuminating evidence from North Africa, but no literary or archaeological evidence for such a thing from Phoenicia or Syria.”

[7] Eusebius, Panegyric of Constantine 13.

[8] Robin Lane Fox, The Unauthorized Version, 57.

[9] Morton Smith, “A Note on Burning Babies,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 95 (1975), 479.

[10] R.H. Sales, “Human Sacrifice in Biblical Thought,” Journal of Bible and Religion 25 (1957), 113.

[11] As do some Jews as well. For instance, David Klinghoffer, Why the Jews Rejected Jesus (NY: Doubleday, 2006), 15 identifies the hallmarks of Paganism as “relativism, nature worship, sexual corruption, and a willingness to sacrifice children to the cause.”

[12] Morton Smith, “A Note on Burning Babies,” 478.

[13] Celsus, On the True Doctrine. A Discourse Against the Christians. Tr. by R. Joseph Hoffmann (Oxford, 1987, 82-83).

[14] Debra Dickerson, “The Myth of the Moral Majority,” Mother Jones (May/June 2008), http://www.motherjones.com/arts/feature/2008/05/the-myth-of-the-moral-majority.html?welcome=true