110522 Sodom and Gomorrah

To begin, some givens…

·         The Bible wasn’t dictated by God.  Inspired, sure.  But dictated means that every single word was from God’s mouth, even the stuff that’s not accurate.  There are some who want to make a big deal about the Bible being inerrant – without error in its original state – but this is a meaningless statement since we don’t have that document.  In addition, one needs to wonder why Judaism has never taken this position, even though the entire Old Testament was from the Jewish tradition, and most, if not all of the New Testament writers would have shared the same Jewish perspective.  Why would we adopt a position they would have rejected?

·         The Bible as inspired means that God worked with people as they sought to remember and record their personal and national relationship with God.  This means that the writers’ worldview is laden within the text, adding really helpful color and context if we’ll allow it.

·         Because the Bible includes the worldview of the writers’ when we study a text, we must do our best to understand their perspective.  If we do not, we may end up believing something they didn’t, and didn’t intend for us to believe.  Or, we may believe something that we shouldn’t because we see the world differently than they did because we have more information.

·         Working with a biblical text becomes very engaging as we try to come alongside our ancestors, hear from them, consider their conclusions, and ultimately deciding how we need to apply ancient passages to our contemporary lives.

On to Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19)…

First, some backstory.  If you read the chapters preceding the one we’re looking at here, you’ll discover that there’s more going on than simply God getting ticked off at a small town.  Lot chose to live in the region where Sodom was located with his family and flocks because it was so lush when Abraham gave him first dibs on which land to graze.  That’s how Lot got there in the first place.  Maybe the grass isn’t always greener.  Or maybe it is, but only because the fertilizer is knee high.  Wear boots.

                Like the Noah story, Abraham gets a visit from God and along with it an announcement that God has heard of the wickedness in Sodom, and has come to see it for himself before he destroys it.  Abraham, showing great hospitality and respect, dialogues with God and negotiates some hopeful terms for the doomed village: if just ten righteous people can be found in the community, God will spare them all.  This is reminiscent of God telling Noah that he is the only righteous man in the whole world worth saving.  The story is going to come back to this beginning encounter after all hell breaks loose on Sodom.  This is a helpful thing to keep in mind because it’s how early communities preserved their history in the oral tradition.  It’s called a chiastic structure, or a palistrophe, where the story ends from where it began, making it easy to remember and pass along.

A personal visit from the King.  We learn that the two men who enter Sodom were angels. A couple of strange things happen as they enter the town.  In our present day, if we are on a trip and enter a town we knew nothing about, we would get a bite to eat, pay the tab, and then find a motel and stay the night.  The next morning we would pay our bill, and within two miles down the road we would have forgotten every person we encountered – the restaurant hostess, the wait staff, the motel manager, the housekeeping staff – all deleted from our RAM.

            But the ancient world was not so impersonal.  If two visitors came to the city gate – where the community leaders gathered to discuss the day’s business – it would be a black mark against the city if nobody offered hospitality to them.  Interestingly, the only one who did, according to the story, was Lot, himself an immigrant.  When our ancestors heard that detail, they would have gasped – they have been given an early clue that Sodom was inhospitable.

            When Lot offers hospitality, however, the men refuse.  If no hospitality is offered, people gasp.  If hospitality is offered and rejected, people gasp again.  You don’t do that in that part of the world, especially at that time.  My wife and I have accidently “stepped in it” along these lines.  The culture in which we were raised never wanted to impose on anybody.  If somebody offered hospitality, it wasn’t to be taken seriously – they were simply being polite, wanting to let us know the gesture was there.  When acquaintances have offered a form of hospitality, we deemed it as a non-literal gesture, thanked them and politely refused.  If the people were raised like us, all was well.  But there have been a few times where the cultures clashed, and we realized that we may have unintentionally offended the one offering a meal.  I think more of the world is like these friends who really, genuinely offer the invitation – not just a gesture – and are a little put out when they get rejected.  If Lot was like most people, he could have walked away greatly offended.  But two things were true of Lot.  He was a genuinely kind person (even if he had faults that led to problems down the road), and he knew how awful the streets of Sodom were at night, and insisted that they stay in the safety of his house.

Rough town.  Lot was right.  The story tells us that all the men of the town – young and old – came to Lot’s house, banged on the door, demanded that the two visitors be released to them so that they might have sex with them.  Worst pick up line in history. 

What is happening here?  Were their wives at Women of Faith for the weekend or something?  Some have stopped here, knowing what’s coming, and have concluded that this is the ultimate proof-text for God’s hatred of all things homosexual.  That would make sense if we didn’t do some research.  Why research, though?  Isn’t the truth obvious?  How can you mistake it – the men of the town wanted to have sex with the visiting men within Lot’s home – how much more black and white can you get?  But what if it’s not that clear?  What if our presupposition is wrong?  What are we potentially wrongly attributing to the character of God?  What hatred are we allowing ourselves to perpetuate if this is where we stop?

            The issue in Sodom had nothing to do with sexual orientation.  It had everything to do with violence.

            If a woman is raped, nobody calls it making love or even sex, because we know that even though what took place may have been forcible intercourse, we see it first and foremost as violence.

            This is why Lot acts so passionately – what they were demanding was unthinkable in every culture in the Ancient Near East (ANE).  He even offers his virgin daughters to them instead – horrific choice in our estimation – a sign of how wretched the situation must have been.  He placed himself outside and shut his front door – willing to die to save the men inside.  What the townsmen were doing warranted the death penalty universally in the ANE.  The rape they were intending was a form of torture used on prisoners of war.  Absolutely inhumane.  The outcries heard by God were correct.

Lot leaves, finally.  Lot didn’t like change, even when there was nothing worth staying for in Sodom.  But he and the fam only left when the angelic men literally took them by the hand and escorted him, his wife and daughters out of town.  His daughters’ fiancés, by the way, didn’t heed the warning – they were true-to-form Sodomites, I guess.

Fire from heaven.  After some negotiating with the angels (interesting and odd), Sodom and the neighboring city of Gomorrah were destroyed.  Lot’s wife, looking back (apparently) longingly turned into a pillar of salt.  Stephen Spielberg may have written that part in…

            An important thing to keep in mind is that the people of the ANE assumed that bad stuff was due to the wrath of the gods – the gods are angry.  Even though our faith heritage made a unique advance with monotheism, they still engaged God from their polytheistic, mythologically-based perspective.  All weather disasters, birth defects, military defeats, skin diseases, poor crop harvest, drought, infertility – all the bad stuff – came as judgment from their angry God.  Because we have access to information they did not, we appropriately need to ask ourselves if we need to see the world and God through the same lens as our ancient ancestors.  There are parts we definitely need to respectfully sequester because of what we know, and there are parts to which we hold fast.  That's not easy, is it?

So, if it’s not a story about the wrath of God, what were our ancestors trying to communicate?

Back to Abraham.  Once safe, the word came down that the reason God spared Lot and his daughters was because of Abraham’s righteous request more than Lot’s so-so faith.  Like the story of Noah, and like many additional stories throughout Genesis, the intended take-away for the ancients as well as us is one word: redemption.

            Sending an angelic delegation to Sodom is an act of redemption.  Blinding the mob at Lot’s front door – maybe that will get them thinking, since blindness was seen as an act of God's judgment – is an act of redemption.  Telling Lot about the forthcoming fate of Sodom, insisting on his leaving town, personally escorting him out of town, negotiating where he stays – all are acts of redemption.

My take away.  To spend a lot of time wondering about the literalness of certain aspects of this incredible story is to miss the much greater lesson our ancestors were trying to communicate.  In a time when it seemed people were just pawns being moved around by local, geographically-based deities, ancient Jews were experiencing something profoundly different.  God was not impersonal, but rather showed up on our respective doorsteps.  He was not callous and indifferent to the desires of humanity, but responded to their pleas.  And even though bad stuff happened, God paved a way of redemption for any who would take it.

            This has not changed.  God still shows up personally.  God still hears our prayers.  God still offers redemption as we move through our journey.  Life is not a waste of time.  God is not indifferent.  God is with us on the journey – even the tough parts – always offering a hand in the direction of our complete wholeness and peace – shalom and salvation in a nutshell.

            In light of this then, may you treat with great respect the story we’ve been given by letting it be what it was for its first audience.  And may you treat the story and our ancestors with great respect by seeking the primary message of the story they were trying to convey and apply it to your life, that you might truly live and help others do the same.

BONUS!  I recently got a link to this essay from a CrossWalker who  has discovered great dialogue in this particular site.  If you'd like to get great, documented understanding of the Ancient Near East - the landscape and worldview of much of our Old Testament - grab a cup of coffee and dig into the essay.  You won't be sorry!


http://biologos.org/uploads/projects/godawa_scholarly_paper_2.pdf

110515 The Flood

Everybody remembers floods.  I remember a few years ago when we had so much rain that I-80 was flooded out, and the park next to my kids’ school was a lake.  The little creek next to our development got jammed up downstream, and we patiently held our breath as we watched the water rise closer and closer to our house’s foundation.  When we lived near the Mississippi river, flood levels were always leading stories when spring storms came in.  Napa experienced a terrible flood in 1986, and now has flood control to minimize the chance of it happening again.  Many Australians and Americans alike will remember 2011as a year of devastation.  But no flood comes close to the magnitude of the story of the one told to children that ends with a rainbow.

Noah or…  Because we live in the Western world which is mostly Judeo-Christian, when we think of the big flood we naturally find ourselves thinking about Noah’s Ark as told in Genesis chapters 6-9.  But if you walked around with Abraham and his contemporaries, there’s a good chance they might think of a related story that is very different.  In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Utnapishtim gets a tip that a massive, life-ending flood is coming from the unwarranted wrath of the god Enlil.  Utnapishtim survives by building a massive cube, filling it with animals, his family, and some handy workers.  He saves humanity (to the chagrin of Enlil), but is also rewarded with divinity.

            Partly in light of the Gilgamesh Epic’s story, there has been and still is today much discussion regarding the historical reliability of the account of Noah.  Did he really build an ark with over 100,000 square feet of cargo space in incredibly primitive times?  Did two of every kind of animal really come to him (except when there were seven of a few other kinds)?  Was there really room enough for all those critters?  How about for their food for almost ten months?  And what about such unpleasantries as excrement – were there RV dumping stations floating around, or did they carefully throw it out through the 18” windows at the top of the boat?

            Some have tried hard to make the case for taking this story completely literally, while others have noted that the earliest Jewish communities may not have placed so much value on that kind of truth as much as another kind.  When we read a history book, we assume the author intended to give us a reliable historical account.  That’s how we think.  But that may not have been how our early ancestors in the faith thought. 

What we can all agree on…  Rather than focusing on the historicity of some of the most controversial stories for the last 2000 years (Genesis 1-11), we may be better served considering the Good News our brothers and sisters gleaned from the telling and retelling of this story.  Most of the general population around them thought that they were pawns in games played by the gods who ruled the sky, rain, thunder, crops, everything…  The Jewish people had discovered that God is One.  That’s a very big deal.  Their One God was the only deity in the story, and the cause of wrath was not unwarranted, but because all the people on earth were running amok.  The gods aren’t, any more.  There’s just one.

            Another really cool thing that our ancestors dialed into in a much fuller way than others was that God showed mercy in two ways.  First, God told Noah what was coming, and, so the legend goes, Noah spent 100 years letting everybody know the flood was coming, and proved his belief by building the ark (or his sons built it, or the Llamas).  Some think the world is going to be judged on May 21, 2011.  The billboards have only been up a few months.  But God gave lots of time for people to get the message.  That’s very nice.  Secondly, when the flood was over, God’s desire was to restore everything to its potential beauty.  He made a covenant with Noah (and humanity), and sealed it with a rainbow.  That’s a gracious thing to do.  We really cannot appreciate the contrast to the Sumerian story, because we haven’t lived in Sumeria generations before Abraham lived there.

            Noah, of course, became a poster child for faithfulness.  People named their sons after him.  Even a daughter was named Noah.  The great prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel refer to him.  Jesus refers to Noah when he speaks of the time when Christ returns – unexpectedly even though it’s obvious.  The writer of Hebrews put Noah in the Hall of Fame (which is located in Weed, CA) for faithful characters in Jewish history.  Peter refers to him in his letters as well.  Noah built an ark that took a ton of money and time.  Because he did, however, he lived, along with his family members, and all the animals, which eventually meant the world lived on, too.  Not just his own skin, but everyone and everything lived because of his faithfulness.  The big reward wasn’t that he became a God, which would be a very selfish end, but that relationship with God had been restored for all.

So what?  One major stumbling block is the clear statement that God was angry with how humanity was wrecking each other and abusing their physical world.  So upset, in fact, that he was willing to wipe out everyone and everything except a very small percentage of very righteous people and presumably faithful animals.  That’s how people of antiquity thought about the world.  Way back then.  It was reasonable for them to come to such conclusions, and so they deserve no disrespect.

            But we live in a time of Doppler radar.  We see storms coming hundreds of miles away caused by high and low pressure thousands of miles away, not by gods playing games.  We know what conditions make hurricanes and tornadoes more likely, and can warn people of the impending doom.  We don’t think about weather and calamity the same way our earliest predecessors did because we have more information than they did.  All of this is to say that just because the early interpretation of the reason for the flood was stated as God’s wrath does not mean it was correct.  The Bible was inspired by God, but not dictated.  This means we get the flavor and worldview of the people who provided us the stories – which is a wonderful gift to us as we wrestle with the same questions they did.  Because of this, we have the right and responsibility to engage a story apart from a mindset that lacked our information.  People will do the same with our ideas generations from now, because they will understand that our perspective was uninformed compared to theirs.  And that’s good.  Don’t we want our children to rise above and beyond us?

            The point of the story at least for me, therefore, is about God’s desire to redeem and our role in redemption.

            God’s heart from the beginning of the Story is that God’s good and very good creation would become as beautiful and wonderful as it was intended to become.  As with Noah, God gives us a “head’s up” all the time regarding big and small concerns.  We hear God’s whisper as our conscience informs our behavior.  We learn the ethos of faith from Bible study, prayer, meditation and community dialogue – all whispers.  We feel the conviction of the Spirit when we’ve blown it – another whisper (sometimes a shout).  And even when it hits the fan, God comes back to proclaim God’s continuing desire to redeem.  We experience this, too, when we find ourselves in humble places, knowing and owning our inadequacy, and discovering the cross of Christ to be enough to cover the sins of the world past, present and future.  I don’t follow a God who has lost control of his people and then seeks to wipe us out.  That’s incongruent with everything I’ve learned to be true about the heartbeat of God.

            Noah’s role was hardly inconsequential.  What if Noah blew off God’s invitation as too incredible, too inconvenient, too costly, just too much?  Redemption wouldn’t have taken place.  Not for himself.  Not for his wife and kids.  Not for the animals.  Not for the planet.  God’s invitation is to be part of the redemptive process, not simply passive recipients of redemption as is sometimes communicated (just say “yes” and get yourself saved).  Saying yes to God’s invitation is to be a player in the game that seeks to restore everyone and everything to its best.  Working toward becoming more and more like Christ.  Serving as Christ those we love and those we don’t and everyone in between so they might experience the very good that they are, progressively, as they discover Christ.  Treating our home (our world) with great respect and wisdom so that it is able to be the grand creation it was created to be.

            Of course, we have luxuries our early ancestors could not even imagine.  We have their history and everyone else’s who lived since, teaching us so much about the heart of God.  We have all the advancements that time has allowed.  And most importantly, we have Jesus, the face of God, the Word made flesh, who proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that God’s love is infinite and complete.  Wood formed into a boat redeemed everything.  Wood formed into a cross redeemed everything forever.  Wood formed into crosses for us to now bear await, that we might help rescue people from their respective floods, and in the process find ourselves saved as well.

110508 The Womb

Just a reminder.  We haven’t always defined truth the way we tend to now.  In fact, our current approach is fairly modern.  When the Age of Reason or Enlightenment dawned, the Church was excited to discover a wonderful ally in science and its methods.  The Church even went so far as to embrace the scientific method as the primary approach to understanding truth as what can be validated or proven.  Unfortunately, science is indiscriminate, and began to question the existence of God and the credibility of the Bible.  The Church reacted.  Fundamentalism was born to protect the Church and her Bible.  Inerrancy and Infallibility began to be used to describe the Holy Bible.  All the while, truth was still “provable” if it was true at all.  Unfortunately, this extremely narrow definition has hurt the credibility of the Church, and has called faith into question.  As we continue, we must decide whether or not we are open to a broader embrace of truth than simply that which can be scientifically proven.  Otherwise, our heads just might explode along with our faith…

Before we take a look at a text that will no doubt be very familiar to you, let’s first read of its significance in the first century.  Take five minutes and read from Paul’s letter to the Romans beginning in chapter five, verse twelve, through the end of the chapter.  See you in a few minutes…

Clearly, something so significant happened in the beginning that God needed to deal with it much later, personally, in the work of Jesus Christ.  But to refresh your memory, flip to the beginning of the Bible and read the third chapter of the book of Genesis.  It will take you about three minutes.

If you’ve been living in a Christian tradition in the West that is rooted in Evangelicalism, this story reminds you of why we need Christ: sin.  In case we missed it while reading the Gospels, Paul pointed it out for us in his letter to the Roman church.  But to hold too firmly to this view as the way it has always been viewed would be a great mistake.  Our focus on Original Sin is thanks to St. Augustine of Hippo in the early fifth century.  Before that time, Original sin was not the primary take-home lesson for believers.

So what did the first 2,000 years of people think about it?

According to Karen Armstrong, an internationally renown scholar, this story of beginnings helped people come to grips with some of life’s most basic questions.  Why is child-bearing so painful?  Why do men and women struggle to relate more intimately with God?  Why is life itself full of toil?

They weren’t looking to construct a problem that only a Christ (what’s that?) could solve.  They were looking for identity and meaning.  In the characters of the story they saw themselves…

In the snake is the rebelliousness and incessant compulsion to question everything that is crucial to human progress; in Eve we see our hunger for knowledge, our desire to experiment, and our longing for a life free of inhibition.  Adam, a rather passive figure, displays our reluctance to take responsibility for our actions.  The story shows that good and evil are inextricably intertwined in human life.  Our prodigious knowledge can at one and the same time be a source of benefit and the cause of immense harm…  The rabbis of the Talmudic age did not see the “fall” of Adam as a catastrophe, because the “evil inclination” was an essential part of human life, and the aggression, competitive edge, and ambition that it generates are bound up with some of our greatest achievements…

Today, because the modern West is a society of logos, some people read the Bible literally, assuming that its intention is to give us the kind of accurate information that we expect from any other supposedly historical text and that this is the way these stories have always been understood.  In fact… until well into the modern period, Jews and Christians both insisted that is was neither possible nor desirable to read the Bible in this way, that it gives us no single, orthodox message and demands constant reinterpretation. - Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, 44

Paul was doing what had always been done with texts, and what should continue to be done – he was helping his readers understand what was happening by drawing on a narrative about which everybody was familiar.  It can be safely assumed that Paul was not trying to give us a primary lens with which to view the story of Adam and Eve.  He was simply using it appropriately as a reference to help people see Jesus as our hope for living with God – a new order of things.

We are still looking for identity and meaning, and many of us are looking to our faith as our primary source for such meaningful pursuits.  The Bible becomes a narrative to help us along the way.  But as I’ve had my eyes opened over the course of my journey to how narrow my gaze has been trained, I confess that I wonder how much of the Bible have I missed because I thought I already knew it?

As we think about how Adam and Eve, in the womb, learned to navigate their first steps with stumbling and denial and even bravado, maybe we should take new notes.  Perhaps we need to engage the scriptures wholly differently – and no less sacred – asking the Spirit of God to enter into our dialogue as we learn from those who have gone before us even as we learn from each other and the present Presence who promised to never abandon his children.  Maybe then we’ll experience depth and beauty that have eluded us in our literal comfort.

110501 When Matters

Paul wrote a note of encouragement and instruction to his protégé, Timothy, where he stated, All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right.   God uses it to prepare and equip his people to do every good work (2 Timothy 3:16-17).  One particular word has caused some serious debate over the centuries: true.

When my son was very little – maybe 3 years old – he wanted to make me a note.  Doing the best he could, he scribbled out a message which he proudly gave me later that day.  The message was nonsense, however, and completely untrue.  What he wrote would be unintelligible to any literate person who looked at it.  A single “word” is on the card: ILFU.  To dismiss his work as nonsense, however, would be a great mistake, would offend him (and me) and would miss the message he was trying to communicate.

One of the easiest to miss but most critical influence on our worldview is our respective birth date.  When we are born massively biases the way we interpret reality.  We know this is true when we witness a conversation between a current teenager and a person in their 80’s or 90’s.  But there is greater significance to the period of time in which we have all been born, a time that is very unique against the rest of history.

Isaac Newton and Descartes are credited with beginning what is called the Age of Enlightenment, sometimes also called the Age of Reason.  During this period, which lasted from the late 1600’s through the early 1800’s, Western thought (Europe and the US) celebrated and elevated the scientific method as the primary means for discovering truth about everything.  The Church as a whole was excited to ride and perpetuate this wave, as many of the discoveries were clearly proving the truth about God’s existence.  The order and engineering of everything all pointed toward a Master Craftsman who made it just so…  The church was quite happy to speak about provable truth.  In fact, the only things that could be true in many people’s minds were those things which could be validated by the scientific method.

But then science kept moving forward.  Discoveries were made that began to challenge some things in the Bible.  The Bible was true, of course, and taking a shot at it was to suggest that God made a mistake, which is impossible, because God is perfect.  But because this period of history focused on literal interpretation of the scriptures, and assumed its infallibility, the wonderful marriage between Church and science came crashing down hard.  The Church was no longer thrilled about the scientific method, because it was challenging what it held to be true.

And so, Christian fundamentalism was born in defense of the Bible and faith itself.  She began to feel threatened by the world around her.  She was right to feel that way.  The Church and faith were both being seriously questioned (using the scientific method, of course) by the wider culture; some even wondered why they should exist at all.  God was hard to prove.  And if you can’t prove it, maybe that’s because it isn’t.  Note: Recall that we’re talking about the early 1800’s, not the 1960’s that reiterated these same arguments.

Out of a time when truth was defined as only that which can be proven scientifically came the foundation for what we call Evangelicalism today.  A reaction to a real threat.  But a threat the Church welcomed at first.

The scientific method and its counterparts began to question things like a literal, seven day creation;  Moses’ authorship of the first five books of the Bible (because the Bible says he wrote them); the Bible’s accuracy as a whole because it speaks of the sun revolving around the earth in the Psalms (how could God miss that?); miracles that cannot be replicated or proven; the list goes on and on.  The response of the church was (and still is in many areas) was to simply hold to the literal ways of thinking about God and faith, even if the scriptures don’t jibe at all with science.  The Bible is true.  The argument has been neatly captured on a bumper sticker I once saw: The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it.

The challenges have been many over the years on a range of different issues.  But the reason why we need to think about it today is because this foundation is still heavily influencing how we interpret the Bible and therefore how we come to believe certain things about God.  It would be very easy to come to the conclusion that God is very, very angry with humanity, and that it’s coming to a head when judgment day will wipe out all the evil doers.  Better get ready to meet your maker.  He’s ticked.  Or not?

It all boils down to how we define the meaning of true.  Maybe God’s not as ticked off as the scriptures indicate, because we have limited our view of scripture to a post-Enlightenment lens which leans too heavily on the scientific method, even if it doesn’t apply.

Every person in the Bible believed that the sun revolves around the earth, which we know to be false.  Were they all morons?  No, we let them off the hook because we realize there is no way they could see it any differently.  The truth is, however, that they saw everything very differently than we do today.  They understood the truth of scripture differently than we do today.  They considered stories differently than we do today.  They interpreted events differently than we do today.  All of this is obvious if we begin looking for it, which requires us to stop wanting our ancient ancestors to live and think and speak and write with our worldview in mind.

My son’s card, by the way, communicated a great truth even though it was literally untrue.  It spelled, phonetically, I love you.  What he wrote was true even though it wasn’t true by literal standards.  I see it every day on one of my office bookshelves – come take a look or yourself.

The people who gave us our stories of faith lived in a truth we struggle to understand today because of the arrogant blinders adopted three centuries ago by our predecessors.  Our grasp of God has been severely compromised, and therefore so also our message.  Let’s walk together and see what we can learn when we choose to let our ancestors speak for themselves, in their language and context and culture, and discover how we can live with God in ours.

Over the next few weeks we’ll look at some difficult stories: Noah’s Ark, Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham and Isaac, and God’s apparent willingness to endorse infanticide and genocide.  Should be quite a ride.

And for a great reference book, check out Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God.  She is an expert on historical religion and fundamentalism.  Awesome book.