August 6, 2005
Digging Up David
This New York Times story about some archaeological discoveries in East Jerusalem is interesting for a few reasons: A political agenda masquerading as a religious agenda masquerading as science being funded by a private benefactor, the weirdly literal and fetishistic way that all the believers of the main monotheistic religions insist on physical evidence for their texts, the complete disregard of the scientific value of the discoveries in light of their (current) political context. It's like these people have so little faith that they're willing to put their money into producing evidence to justify their beliefs. If you don't want to just believe, why be religious at all?
But the reason I'd link to it is the last line of the story. One great piece of evidence that the New York Times is still the best newspaper in existence is Steven Erlanger's last sentence, and the way it sums up the article's unstated subtext so elegantly.
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I'd suggest to you, Mr. Dash, that the followers "of the main monotheistic religions", of which I am one, seek the evidence for non-believers who demand evidence, not for our own selves. I don't need evidence to know what my spirit already knows. That's faith. For those who struggle to believe something without evidenciary reason for doing so, need things like archaeological discovery to validate belief. I'd be less hesitant to criticize if I were you. Because frankly, you are also the person that looks for the proof before you believe. That evidence is for you. Not me.
Amen, brother!
Hi Anil,
Have you read Margaret Wertheim's "Pearly Gates of Cyberspace"? It was much touted at SXSW 2003. The best part of the book is how Wertheim documents the physical, cultural and spiritual conception of space from 1200 to 2000, of which the most relevetory is how in the modern world we have a flat conception of space: only physical space.
Given the need in the last 100 years that everything most be seen, touched and smelled to be believed, the "great monothestic" religions have resorted to physical proof to convince the modernist.
I taught this book in my Critical Theory class this last spring to seniors and juniors at a very conservative Evangelical university this spring. For many of them it was the first time that they had studied the idea of space and its repercussions for modern thought. It is a very "modernist" approach to only examine the physical. While much of the arts, technology and critical theories have moved beyond modernism and post-modernism into the Digital Age, religious apologists are still trying to prove the fallacies of 50 years ago.
This is the true shame. I challenged my students to join 2005 and to engage culture now.