Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters

Notes

411 Notes Chapter 1 1 David Suzuki, The Legacy: An Elder’s Vision for Our Sustainable Future (Vancouver , B.C.: Greystone, 2010), 86. 2 Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1988), 123–24. 3 Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (London: Pan Books, 1979). 4 This section of chapter 1 and much of what immediately follows draws to a significant extent on Iain Provan and Loren Wilkinson, “‘Unscripted, Anxious Stutterers ’: Why We Need Old Testament (Hi)story,” Sapientia Logos 1 (2008): 12–36. That essay in turn depends heavily for its opening paragraphs on a lecture originally written by Loren Wilkinson, whom I gladly acknowledge, therefore, as the source of much of my text to this point and as the inspiration for my thinking. 5 J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (London: HarperCollins, 1991), 738–39. 6 The phrase “inextricably middled” was coined by David L. Jeffrey, “The Self and the Book: Reference and Recognition in Medieval Thought,” in By Things Seen: Reference and Recognition in Medieval Thought, ed. David L. Jeffrey (Ottawa, Ont.: University of Ottawa Press, 1979), 1–17 (2) (throughout the notes, page numbers in parentheses refer to the specific pages cited). 7 Dante Alighieri, The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, the Florentine, Cantica I, Hell, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1949), 71. 8 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 216. 9 Karl Jaspers, The Origin and the Goal of History, trans. M. Bullock (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953). 10 John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); and Karen Armstrong, The 412 Notes to pp. 7–12 Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (New York: Knopf, 2006). 11 Bron Taylor, Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 12 Berry, Dream; Suzuki, Legacy; and Derrick Jensen, Endgame, vol. 1, The Problem of Civilization (New York: Seven Stories, 2006). 13 Note the following books, for example: Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006); Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking, 2006); Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: Norton, 2004); and Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve Books, 2007). 14 This quotation greets one immediately on the home page of the new atheists website: “The New Atheists,” accessed October 26, 2012, http://newatheists .org/. 15 See “Atheist Bus Campaign,” accessed October 11, 2013, https://humanism.org .uk/about/atheist-bus-campaign/. 16 I have given substantial attention of this kind to the stories of the axial age and the dark green golden age in my book Convenient Myths: The Axial Age, Dark Green Religion, and the World That Never Was (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2013). For responses to “new atheism,” see, e.g., David Berlinski, The Devil ’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Crown Forum, 2008); Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); and William Lane Craig, ed., God Is Great, God Is Good: Why Believing in God Is Reasonable and Responsible (Grand Rapids: InterVarsity, 2009). 17 Berry, Dream, 123. 18 See Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, “U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey ,” Pew Research Center, accessed October 26, 2012, http://www.pewforum .org/U-S-Religious-Knowledge-Survey.aspx. E.g., respondents were asked to identify which prohibition on a list of four is not found in the Ten Commandments and which biblical figure is associated with the Exodus. 19 Two Bible questions set in a recent Canadian survey were of a level similar to the ones in the Pew study. Teenagers were asked whether they knew the names of the founding father of Judaism and of the person who denied Jesus three times; 10 percent knew that the first was Abraham, and 22 percent that the second was Peter. Even among adults the latter figure only rose to 42 percent. See Reginald W. Bibby, The Emerging Millennials: How Canada’s Newest Generation Is Responding to Change and Choice (Lethbridge, AB: Project Canada Books, 2009), 93. 20 Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (New York: Free Press, 2003). I was pleased to come across this book after...