Zealot, 2013

I’ve just finished a lovely book, currently #4 on the NYT Nonfiction Bestseller list, that I recommend highly for those seeking to improve their personal spirituality and understanding of religion, Reza Aslan’s Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, 2013. First a personal disclosure: My parents were raised, and they raised their children in the Lutheran branch of Christianity. But like many a learning-oriented youth I had increasing difficulty reconciling the logic and aspirations of modern texts (primarily, the lovely World Book) with the illogic and wrath of large parts of the Bible. I started taking notes in the margins to document my disagreements, and began dropping whole sections from my mind, beginning with most of the Old Testament. By my young adulthood I ended up focusing on the parts of Jesus message I really admired, and I came to understand him as a courageous spiritual leader, a champion of the downtrodden, and a failed revolutionary who was very much a product of his time and culture.

Life of Brian, 1979

Do you remember Monty Python’s Life of Brian, 1979? In particular, that scene with all the messiahs in the marketplace, competing for followers? It turns out the truth isn’t that far from that famous skit. First Century Palestine was a highly competitive breeding ground for would-be messiahs, with rationality in short supply and populism, passion, rhetoric, and tricks like exorcism and miraculous healings as standard tools of the trade for a large class of itinerant preachers. Will and Ariel Durant covered this well in their amazing and epic Story of Civilization, 1935-75, parts of which I read in college.

One of Azlan’s gifts is that he resurrects that easily-forgotten world in the first twelve chapters of Zealot, in a well-crafted, suspenseful story. He begins by introducing us to the Maccabees, zealous guerilla-fighting Jews who recapture Judea and Jerusalem from the Seleucids in 164 BCE, after four centuries of non-Jewish rule. Then we see the Jews sadly lose control of their beloved homeland again in 63 BCE, when Rome conquers Jerusalem under Pompey Magnus, putting Judea under tithe and hated centurions in control of the holy Temple. He retells the hopeful prophecies in Judaism for a coming messiah (a new king, revolutionary, savior, prophet) who will smite the enemy and usher in a new “Kingdom of God” on Earth. We are introduced to scores of failed messiahs from this era (at least a dozen self-proclaimed messiahs are known, even with the poor records of the time) who each gain followers, even for years, yet most are eventually captured and crucified, the classic punishment for revolutionaries.

We next see the rise of Jewish Sicarii, stealthy assassins who use small daggers, hidden in cloaks, to secretly and effectively kill Romans and Roman sympathizers in crowds in public, and we see them eventually even murder the Temple’s head priest Jonathan of Ananus, a hated stooge of Rome, in 56CE. By 66CE, these passionate revolutionary Jews have risen up and expelled the far more powerful Romans from Jerusalem, and they are kept out for four entire years. At the end of the Jewish Revolt, in 74CE, almost a thousand Sicarii, men, women, and children, kill themselves en masse at Masada, rather than give the Romans the pleasure of doing so. That’s a level of zealotry, of fervent, extreme, and revolutionary belief and action in support of one’s religion, that we can scarcely understand today.

Jesus in the Temple

This history gets us ready to understand Jesus the revolutionary, Jesus the zealot, Jesus of Nazareth, who lived for some 30 years and who built the foundation for perhaps the most successful movement of religious believers the world has yet seen. The study of the real Jesus, and the attempt to uncover his true life and beliefs is called Jesuism (Jesuology might be more accurate, but it doesn’t seem to exist). As the wikipedia page on this topic reminds us, Jesus was a revolutionary, a communalist, and a transcendentalist, as well as being thoroughly a Jew. Even in the heavily redacted New Testament, pieces of the revolutionary Jesus remain.

We see a Jesus who had his disciples sell their cloaks for swords in Gethsemane (Luke 22:36-38). We see him “Cleanse the Temple” in Jerusalem using physical force (Mark 11:15-33). And he says things like:  “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth. I have come not to bring peace, but the sword.” (Matthew 10:34).  Of course, all of this is heresay, written mostly by followers who didn’t know him personally, many decades after his death. What Jesus said and did in his life is largely a mystery. Yet Azlan takes us one step closer to uncovering that mystery, and presenting it as an epic story, and we must thank him for it.

Paul the Narcissist

But I think it is Part III, the last three chapters and epilogue, where Zealot really shines. Here we are introduced to Paul of Tarsus, an urbanized Roman Jew who was a serious narcissist, power-lover, and yet another would-be messiah, born a few years after Jesus’s death. After at first unsuccessfully persecuting the early believers in Jesus, and no doubt impressed with how both stubborn and kind they were to him in return, in a flash of inspiration he realized this new religion’s weak spot – by fashioning himself into a “new apostle”, alleging divine communication with the dead Jesus, and preaching an even easier and broadly palatable version of Jesus’ teachings than the others on offer, he could take control of this new movement himself. In his fights with the other versions of Christianity on offer Paul says things like (“If anyone else preaches a gospel contrary to the gospel you received [from me] let him be damned” (Galatians 1:9) even if it comes “from an angel in heaven” (Galatians 1:8), instead, “be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.” (1 Corinthians 11:1). Most importantly, Paul’s version of the gospel requires only a simple and easy faith in the divinity of Jesus as the sole means to salvation for the believer.

This Pauline Christianity is geared toward gentiles, not just Jews, and toward the urban Romans. It ignored Jesus’s unpopular revolutionary ambitions, and did away with the need for good works and law abidance for salvation that we find in Judaism. Paul’s is a modern, sanitized faith for a New Wealthier and Lazier Age, and it eventually won the battle over the more popular form of Christianity taught in Jerusalem at the time by James, Jesus’s younger brother, which bitterly condemned wealth and was much more devoted to the Torah, both unpopular with Roman audiences. Pauline Christianity keeps growing with gentiles in Rome, and eventually becomes adopted as his own religion by the Roman Emperor Constantine in the 300’s. He convenes the First Nicene Council to settle conflicting Christian beliefs in 325CE, and it becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380CE. When the official New Testament is finally assembled at Hippo Regius in 398CE, more than half of the twenty-seven books that make the cut are either by or about Paul.

His message has won, and Christianity has become a largely Roman invention, as well as a lasting gift the world. At the same time, beginning with barbarian invasions in 376CE and concluding with the murder of the last emperor, Julius Nepos, in 480CE, the Roman Empire itself entered a long and tragic collapse, from which its new religion could not save it.

It is all such an amazing story, and our historical records get better every year at piecing together the key details. Aslan, @rezaaslan, is a co-founder of BoomGen Studios in NY. They do “Transmedia Storytelling”, blending history, education, and entertainment, in different media formats, like graphic novels (think of Persepolis, 2000), textbooks, video games, and films, in a way where people and institutions will pay for their own edification. Mahyad Tousi, @MahyadT, is BoomGen’s co-founder. I recommend Tousi’s inspiring TEDx talk, The Future of History, for more on transmedia uses of history to edify-educate.

First Century Palestine

I don’t know if Aslan and Tousi are thinking about doing a graphic novel of Zealot next, but I bet they could crowdfund one on Kickstarter if they choose. Eventually we can expect to see a film. A great film would immerse you in the incredibly messianic and violent world of First Century Palestine. It would show you how the idealistic, communalist, revolutionary Jew, Jesus of Nazareth lived and what he likely said and thought. And it would show how Jesus of Nazareth was turned into Jesus the Christ in the decades and centuries after his death, by a lot of motivated people, for many compelling reasons.

A good film series on the evolution and development of the Christianity story could be particularly helpful for lapsed Christians who are moving toward the evidence-based destinations of scientific naturalism and agnosticism. It would also show how all successful religions continue to reform themselves, and that the only real moral problem with the major monotheistic religions is that they all stopped editing their scriptures about 1,000 years ago, while science continues to edit its morality story faster and more usefully every year.

Socrates, Champion of the Questioning Mind

A great prequel to the Christianity story might begin with the birth of the modern secular naturalist mind in Greece, beginning with Thales, 624-546 BCE, perhaps the first great Western secular humanist, philosopher and mathematician. We could also meet Cleisthenes, who brought democracy to Athens circa 550 BCE, which would lead us to Pericles, the great secular leader of Athens in its Golden Age, 480-404 BCE, and next to Socrates, 469-399 BCE, who championed:

1. Questioning as a method of continual self- and world-improvement,
2. Agnosticism (knowing of nothing with certainty, including God),
3. Dualism (humanity’s body/behaviors and soul/mind are equally important),
4. Asceticism (earthly things are less important than one’s soul/mind/morals) and
5. Never retaliating to those who do you wrong.

We can imagine that if Socrates had been not only nonretaliatory but more empathic and humble, prizing people’s feelings as high as their thoughts, he likely wouldn’t have been sentenced to death for impiety and “corrupting” the minds of youth. He was not a revolutionary (Jesus was, and so his path was fated once he allowed himself to be called messiah), but a patriot. We can also imagine that if Socrates had also promoted careful observation, measurement, and physical experimentation, closely watching and building things in the physical world, not just in the mind, we would have had a clear statement of the scientific method in our philosophy of knowledge about 1600 years earlier than we did. So close, yet so far!

Aslan, who also wrote the acclaimed No God But God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, 2011, considers himself a reform Muslim. I know many reform religious members who are also openly or secretly naturalists and agnostics. That’s the main trend for the future of religion, I think: increasing numbers of us being members of some religious or spiritual community, but no longer sanctioning woo-woo language, scriptural falsehoods and hypocrisies. Protesting those parts of the story we don’t like, because our gut, or science, tell us they are wrong. That road has led to a 2013 Pope who has finally caved to homosexuality, for example. All we needed were enough Catholics speaking out, and enough empathy for gay Catholics. We could have also looked to all the nonhuman species, in order to see how natural a sexual variation homosexuality actually is. Who are we to judge indeed.

Jefferson’s Bible, 1820

In college, I discovered that one of my heroes, Thomas Jefferson, had done his own Jesuism as well. Verse by verse, with scissors and glue, he compiled eighty-two pages of New Testament writings about Jesus life and teachings that he found worth studying, verses he called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (aka the “Jefferson Bible“). He characterized this effort as picking out “diamonds in a dunghill”, and encouraged each of us to do the same, with everything that is held up to us as scripture, by anyone.

As for me, beyond religious naturalism, which was called deism in Jefferson’s day, and agnosticism, I haven’t yet found my ideal religious community. But I have found a community, the Unitarian Universalists (UU), that am willing to join and do my small part to reform. I’m looking for a community that primarily promotes scientific and philosophical understanding of the universe and our relation to it (“universal thinking”), unconditional love of the universe and all its creatures (“love and empathy”), and higher moral behavior, activism against moral deviance and deviants, who may need “tough love” (“moral activism”). It should have a large, cognitively- and skills-diverse community, doing good social works and activism, to maximize friendships and social support. Importantly, since neither the Left or Right have a monopoly on truth, the community should support a great diversity of political views, ideally all lightly held.

Unitarian Universalism (UU) – A Good (Not Yet Great) Secular Humanist and Reform Religious Community

Fortunately, the UU’s have built a big tent that welcomes lapsed believers from all the world’s religious communities, as well as nontraditional spiritual communities like us secular humanists. Most admirably, UU Sunday Schools (“Spiritual Growth and Development”) aim to give children a basic fluency in and empathy with all the world’s religious beliefs, while primarily promoting humanism, democracy, civics, and (to some degree) truth-seeking. There are still quite a few Liberal Christians, other scripture-believers, antiscience New Age thinkers, postmodernists, and woke activists in UU congregations, and thus not enough emphasis yet on science, evidence, and rationality in their spiritual practice. But all UU congregations champion gender, racial, social, economic, religious and intellectual diversity and equity, and all have a growing secular humanist core.

Predictably, the largest UU churches have formed in cities that have old and large universities. A lot of worldly and educated people choose these churches as their spiritual communities. I still cringe at the way UU churches use old Christian terms, like “worship” instead of more accurate terms like “fellowship”, and I find some UU congregations growing too politically liberal in recent years, with some ministers advocating utopian ideas like open borders, defunding our military and police, and other forms of woke thinking. But I am confident that as evidence accumulates, and AI advances, these exceptions will die away, and we’ll see a more balanced set of liberal and conservative values and language in their leaders.

Jefferson dabbled in Unitarianism before deciding it was too faith-based. But since the merger of Unitarians with Universalists in the 1960s, when it actively embraced the secular humanists too, it has undergone a lot of reform. UUs also continue to revisit their main beliefs in a democratic way. Science and evidence-seeking is just one strand in their presently beliefs, and sadly, in recent years, this strand has become less important and explicit. Many UUs don’t even believe that there are universal values, common to all cultures, or that a developing a better science of values and ethics should be one of our primary goals, as humans. But as AI continues its accelerating advances, and as we all get personal AIs in coming years, I predict that in thirty years, the UU community will be much more rational and scientifically centered than it is today. It will be the a lot closer to ideal that Jefferson was (and I am) still searching for.

Other good-sized groups seeking to advance spirituality in a secular age are the Humanist, Ethical Culture, Society of Friends (Quaker) and various Freethought communities. I’d recommend checking any of these out now and attending any that are helpful to your own spiritual path. But while Freethought, and to a lesser extent, the other spiritual communities above recognize the primacy of science as way of knowing, all of these still miss the importance of the phenomenon of accelerating change to the human condition. Few today are going to talk about the coming of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and about what kind of AI we want to create in the world.

The continual acceleration of certain resource-minimizing processes is the most interesting and civilization-advancing phenomenon in the history of life on Earth, and presumably on all other Earth-like planets. Yet we don’t study its physical basis, or know what function it serves.

One of the greatest conceptual oversights of all of these communities, in my view, is that none of them are discussing, writing about, or contributing to research on apparently innate developmental trends toward increasing universal complexity, morality, and consciousness, what the Jesuit priest and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin was discussing eloquently in the early and mid twentieth century.

Given these apparently natural developmental processes, it is obvious to me at least, that we will see a far faster, smarter, more capable, and more resource-independent (catastrophe-immune) postbiological intelligence very soon on Earth. So for me, what intelligent technology wants, and how we can best guide its its emergent goals and morality, are among the most interesting practical and spiritual questions of our age.

I am doing my small part to help our local UU’s think, talk, and do their own research on such questions. I hope you can do the same in your spiritual community, and if you don’t have one, I welcome you to try out UUs. You can bring your whole self to the UU community, expose your kids to big moral topics and questions, and struggle with others as well all strive to live with greater truth, beauty, and goodness. Walking a spiritual path with others who are science-oriented and evidence-based, and serious about living higher values, is far more effective and rewarding than doing it alone.