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Religion ruins the study of history
Qingu
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I just watched The Ten Commandments for the first time in a long-ass time.
The very last line of the movie is spoken by Charlton Heston as Moses, standing majestically astride the boundary to the holy land (which he would not enter). He hands off the Torah to Joshua and then declares,
Go, proclaim liberty through all the lands! To all the inhabitants thereof!
(SO IT IS WRITTEN. SO LET IT BE DONE.)
I was struck by two things.
1. How much this movie warps the original story's moral message into its own. In the Bible, Joshua and the Israelites do not spread freedom through the holy land. They literally go on a genocide. They are commanded to kill all of the inhabitants thereof—every man, woman, and child—and then occupy the remains of their destroyed cities. The movie also imposes an incredibly overt abolitionist/antislavery moral message that is simply not there in the original story (the Israelites could own slaves and were legally obligated to enslave non-holy land cities they conquered.)
2. How much the Bible's stories, themselves, pervert the stories of what actually happened in history. It's interesting to think about how The Ten Commandments movie would have been made if its producers took the approach that the makers of Troy took—remove all the supernatural elements from the story, and try to establish a reasonably approximate tale of what could have really happened at that point in history.
Obviously, I am an atheist, so I'm a bit biased in my outlook on Biblical history. But I think most people on D&D, even the Christians, do not interpret the story of Exodus literally. I think most thinking people would doubt that Yahweh actually turned the Nile river to blood, that he made fire and brimstone rain down and Egypt, and sent a destroyer angel to kill all the firstborns, or sent pillars of fire to hold off the Egyptians.
It is fascinating to consider the kernel of truth in Moses' story. Moses is an Egyptian name, and I don't think it's a coincidence that we see the first records of a monotheistic religion arise in Mesopotamia shortly after the demise of the monotheistic Amarna cult in Egypt. It's an entirely possible that Moses, or his followers, were adherents of the Amarna cult. The Hebrew religion is really an amalgam of a number of religious beliefs floating around in ancient Mesopotamia around 1400-800 B.C.: the Babylonian cult of Sin (the moon god) believed in Sabbath days—called shabatu days, they were considered astrologically unlucky and nobody was allowed to work. Mt. Sinai is probably derivative of Sin. The Babylonian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, has many similarities to Yahweh's creation story in Genesis, and there are two Babylonian flood stories (Atrahasis and a flashback story in the Epic of Gilgamesh) that predate the Genesis flood story and share many of its details. A monotheistic cult leader from Egypt, or his later followers, could well have used syncretism to unify all these Mesopotamian tribal and cultish beliefs into a single, guiding ideology.
It's a fascinating historical story. But it pisses me off because we can't really tell this story in our culture, because people take the Bible so seriously. And the same applies to history in other areas: many Hindus believe that epic myths like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are accurate tellings of history, so it's difficult to explore what could have really happened in ancient India. Chinese and Japanese history are likewise obscured by their psuedo-religious histories, describing magical emperors and moral prophets. Imagine if we could study these areas of ancient history with the same skeptical clarity that we study ancient Greece and Rome with—how much more would we know, and how many more lessons could we learn?
The very last line of the movie is spoken by Charlton Heston as Moses, standing majestically astride the boundary to the holy land (which he would not enter). He hands off the Torah to Joshua and then declares,
Go, proclaim liberty through all the lands! To all the inhabitants thereof!
(SO IT IS WRITTEN. SO LET IT BE DONE.)
I was struck by two things.
1. How much this movie warps the original story's moral message into its own. In the Bible, Joshua and the Israelites do not spread freedom through the holy land. They literally go on a genocide. They are commanded to kill all of the inhabitants thereof—every man, woman, and child—and then occupy the remains of their destroyed cities. The movie also imposes an incredibly overt abolitionist/antislavery moral message that is simply not there in the original story (the Israelites could own slaves and were legally obligated to enslave non-holy land cities they conquered.)
2. How much the Bible's stories, themselves, pervert the stories of what actually happened in history. It's interesting to think about how The Ten Commandments movie would have been made if its producers took the approach that the makers of Troy took—remove all the supernatural elements from the story, and try to establish a reasonably approximate tale of what could have really happened at that point in history.
Obviously, I am an atheist, so I'm a bit biased in my outlook on Biblical history. But I think most people on D&D, even the Christians, do not interpret the story of Exodus literally. I think most thinking people would doubt that Yahweh actually turned the Nile river to blood, that he made fire and brimstone rain down and Egypt, and sent a destroyer angel to kill all the firstborns, or sent pillars of fire to hold off the Egyptians.
It is fascinating to consider the kernel of truth in Moses' story. Moses is an Egyptian name, and I don't think it's a coincidence that we see the first records of a monotheistic religion arise in Mesopotamia shortly after the demise of the monotheistic Amarna cult in Egypt. It's an entirely possible that Moses, or his followers, were adherents of the Amarna cult. The Hebrew religion is really an amalgam of a number of religious beliefs floating around in ancient Mesopotamia around 1400-800 B.C.: the Babylonian cult of Sin (the moon god) believed in Sabbath days—called shabatu days, they were considered astrologically unlucky and nobody was allowed to work. Mt. Sinai is probably derivative of Sin. The Babylonian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, has many similarities to Yahweh's creation story in Genesis, and there are two Babylonian flood stories (Atrahasis and a flashback story in the Epic of Gilgamesh) that predate the Genesis flood story and share many of its details. A monotheistic cult leader from Egypt, or his later followers, could well have used syncretism to unify all these Mesopotamian tribal and cultish beliefs into a single, guiding ideology.
It's a fascinating historical story. But it pisses me off because we can't really tell this story in our culture, because people take the Bible so seriously. And the same applies to history in other areas: many Hindus believe that epic myths like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are accurate tellings of history, so it's difficult to explore what could have really happened in ancient India. Chinese and Japanese history are likewise obscured by their psuedo-religious histories, describing magical emperors and moral prophets. Imagine if we could study these areas of ancient history with the same skeptical clarity that we study ancient Greece and Rome with—how much more would we know, and how many more lessons could we learn?
Qingu on
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I'm not even sure if Moses actually existed.
EDIT: I could be wrong of course, but to come up with that story during that time period and to have nobody call you out on it is more than a little suspicious.
Dude, they have documentaries on what really happened during Biblical times on all the time. I distinctly remember one where they were trying to track down the original Garden of Eden. Most people aren't particularly interested, but the number of people actively hostile towards such investigation is - in the US, anyway - minute.
Unexciting idea the second: History is written by the victor.
Unexciting idea the third: People are sometimes resistant to hearing their heroes criticized, whether those heroes are religious or not.
Unexciting idea the fourth: When religious people pull the same shit as non-religious people (like portraying a murderer as a hero), anti-religious people trot out the "lolfundies" banners.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
And then we could make movies, like we do now, where we portray Spartans as the slavers they were and not some freedom loving heroes. But about Christian history.
Arch,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_goGR39m2k
It's not just television- check out the academic journals and books on this subject, too.
On a scale of "how likely did someone sort of like them actually exist," here's my spectrum:
• Alexander the Great
• Jesus
• Sargon of Akkad
• Moses
• Gilgamesh
• King Rama
• Adam
I think you are vastly underestimating the integrity of "historical texts" during that period. Babylonian kings lists are ridiculous, claiming that some kings lived thousands of years and were descended from gods. Gilgamesh was considered to be a real, historical king, who traveled to the edge of the world and threw a bull's thigh in the face of a goddess. Even Greek and Roman histories were frought with miracle stories (try reading Josephus, for example, who says an army appeared in the clouds with chariots and armor before the destruction of the Judean temple). So, it's not like there were many skeptical historical critics following around the authors of Exodus going "that didn't happen!"
Secondly, the Bible was not written down during the time of Moses. Most scholars believe it was written from around 900 to 400 B.C., with earlier oral versions of the stories getting passed down and modified into written form (which was also modified). Exodus is not an "eyewitness perspective" anymore than the Ramayana is (neither are the gospels, for that matter, though they were written closer to the events they described.)
So yes, a cult around a real Egyptian exile figure named Moses could have easily arose in ancient Egypt, and its story would have mutated through 5-10 centuries before getting written down in Exodus.
I guess I should have been clearer: I realize there's research on this stuff, but it's not communicated to the public in the same way that, say, ancient Greek or Roman or Egyptian research is. For example, you don't learn about "ancient Mesopotamian and Israelite history" in middle school. Nobody makes historical epics based on actual, historical research on what ancient Israel would have been like—they make movies like The Ten Commandments (which themselves freely twist the story as much as the story probably twists the real history—a twist of a twist).
Maybe not as the superpowered, lame-healing and water-walking guru he's known as today, but he was around.
For example, we have a relatively accurate picture of what happened during Alexander the Great's reign and conquest—he was politically deified. We know a lot about ancient Roman emperors, and medieval kings, despite the political machinations of these places' rulers. The distortion around these figures and their stories was potent, but whatever religious cults they formed didn't last, and so we can look at them somewhat objectively today.
I'd still do Ramses' wife even today all withered and old.
Not dead though, that's icky.
But I give it leeway because it was based on a comic book.
I mean, shit, I wish someone made a comic book where Jesus is this badass demonhunter wizard who goes Super Sayan and fights Satan with magical Avatar-style martial arts in a supernatural plane while he's getting his ass crucified, and I'd watch a movie based on that comic book 20 times a day.
e.g. Braveheart.
It reminded me of Lord of the Rings more than anything. I guess that says something about my view of its portrayal of actual history.
I think we just need to give it time.
A lot of this is taking place already, by reasonable people on both sides of the fence.
Troy, for example, did not feature gods going into the battlefield and pulling Achilles away from combat by his hair. A Knight's Tale did not portray knights or saints as having magical powers derived from their faith in Christianity and use of ancient relics. Gladiator did not show Roman emperors healing cripples and blind men with godlike powers (as historical texts from the period show them capable of).
In other words: these movies play fast and loose with historical facts, but they don't play fast and loose with the physics of the time period.
Now I think this will be a problem, if I'm interpreting you correctly. If it's something like divorcing history completely from religion, where we're saying that religious people think God did it, but we don 't believe in that stuff, so here's what really happened, then I don't this what you're hoping for will ever happen unless people in general stop being religious.
Also, a movie about Troy without gods involved? And you were complaining about Ten Commandments twisting the original material?
Somebody option this; now.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
Also, for a religious movie, Ten Commandments sure did violence to the "original book." I mean, the last line of the movie is literally the exact opposite of what Moses actually said to Joshua...
"Go free those people!"
"Go kill every man, woman, and child of those people!"
Hm. I think I just figured out why so many religious people support the Iraq War.
Until later review, I'll tentatively agree with the thread title on the grounds that it is "Religion ruins _____" and that is statistically accurate.
It's no different than a movie about the Founding Fathers which omits the whole slavery issue.
Also Troy itself is the exception to the rule, look at movies like Jason and the Argonauts or Clash of the Titans.
My guess as to why they left Greek Gods out of Troy is because they wanted more of an action film instead.
Not like Pirates of the Caribbean's grim and totally accurate portrayal of 18th century piracy, right?
Jewish scholars can't really agree whether the Torah says it was itself given to Moses or just the commandments. Similarly, the movie you're sighting seems to have deviated from what's actually said in the Torah, so it's clearly their conception from popular culture that shaped the movie. At the same time, you seem to be conflating traditional slavery, which was probably a mix of POW, chain gang, and indentured servant, with American slavery.
Pirates are like the GOOD GUYS and the East India Company are the Bad Guys because the EIC wants to stop piracy.....
WHAT????
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
I actually thought Troy was an interesting interpretation of the Iliad because it managed to communicate many of the same moral positions of the ancient Greeks and Trojans. In the Iliad, neither side was "good," and the war was both glorious and tragic. Achilles' major flaw was his hubris in both movie and book, and the filmmakers didn't add any sweeping, unrelated, transparent moral pronouncements like "ABORTION IS OKAY!" to the story.
The Ten Commandments, on the other hand, added "SLAVERY IS BAD" and "SPREAD FREEDOM!" to a story about a group of people who went on to enslave and commit genocide based on the commandments of their god. That bothered me. It "sanitized" the Biblical story, making it morally palatable in a way that Troy didn't do with the Iliad.
Four words.
Gone with the Wind.
No offense to any Jewish scholars.
Is true—that's really a separate point I was making in the OP.
I hear this a lot from Christians attempting to defend Biblical slavery.
Apart from the racial element, I fail to see what meaningfully distinguishes American slavery from ancient Hebrew slavery. While Hebrew slaves were set free after a period of 7 years, foreign slaves were not. Hebrews were legally allowed to beat their slaves as much as the Romans beat Jesus before they crucified him. Killing one's slave was wrong, but was not considered "murder" (murder is a capital punishment, killing a slave is not). Also, there was a racial element to some extent, or at least a tribal element, since most slaves were probably acquired in war or bought from foreigners.