In the above video, aired by the BBC this week, Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of Britain, discusses science and religion with three scientists, including Richard Dawkins.
The two entered into a dispute at a related BBC-sponsored debate this week over whether or not Dawkins’ attacks on the God of the Old Testament are anti-semitic. The Telegraph reports:
Lord Sacks complained about a passage in Prof Dawkins’s book in which he said that the God of the Old Testament was the “most unpleasant character in all fiction”.
Prof Dawkins said that his remark that the stories of the Old Testament suggested God was “jealous”, “petty”, “pestilential”, a “megalomaniac” and a “bully” was a joke. But Lord Sacks replied: “There are Christian atheists and Jewish atheists, you read the Bible in a Christian way. Christianity has an adversarial way of reading what it calls the Old Testament – it has to because it says ‘we’ve gone one better, we have a New Testament’.
“So you come prejudiced against what you call the Old Testament and that’s why I did not read the opening to chapter two in your book as a joke, I read it as a profoundly anti-Semitic passage”
Prof Dawkins expressed incredulity. “How you can call that anti-Semitic?” he said. “It’s anti-God.”
Lord Sacks insisted: “It is anti the Jewish God, Richard.”
Sacks clarified that, he was only describing Dawkins’ rhetoric, not his personal views: “I was not concerned that Richard was anti-Semitic at all. I was concerned that he was using an anti-Semitic stereotype, which has run through a certain strand of the Christian reading of what is called the ‘Old Testament’ as a result of which thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Jews, died in the Middle Ages.”
Dawkins has run into trouble recently with feminists over his comments. A rocky road for the New Atheist.
September 14th, 2012 | 10:20 am
. . . you read the Bible in a Christian way. Christianity has an adversarial way of reading what it calls the Old Testament – it has to because it says ‘we’ve gone one better, we have a New Testament’.
Matthew Schmitz,
It seems to me Rabbi Sacks “plays the anti-Semitism card” against Dawkins and then turns right around and basically invalidates Christianity! I am wondering why you don’t object to Rabbi Sacks’s “anti-Christianity.” He is, after all, in a way sneering at the idea of a “New Testament,” and of course from a Jewish point of view it’s a perfectly reasonable point to make. Christians view the whole of Hebrew Scripture as a preparation for the coming of Christ. Consequently, with the coming of Christianity, Jews who continue to read Hebrew Scripture differently from Christians are—according to Christians—missing the whole point.
September 14th, 2012 | 10:21 am
I think Dawkins’ writings on religion are embarrassingly stupid, but in this case I have to come to his defense. Even if the rabbi’s charges are accurate, how is it “anti-semitic” to read the Old Testament from a Christian point of view?
September 14th, 2012 | 11:37 am
I think Dawkin’s rhetoric ” is anti-Jewish. But, contra Rabbi Sacks, it has nothing to do with Christianity. For main stream Christianity the God of the “Old Testament” IS the father of Jesus. Only Gnostics, like Marcion, whom the Church declared to be a heretic, took an anti-”Old Testament God” view.Ths is really abc. I am surprised at Rabbi Sacks. Note how Rabbi Sacksa in his “clarification” tries to back off and speaks of “a certain strand of the Christian reading.”
September 14th, 2012 | 12:16 pm
Is being “anti the Jewish God” (even if it were true that Dawkins was that specific) actually equivalent to being anti-Semitic, though?
How many people here are negatively disposed toward Islam? Show of hands?
Is anyone who’s anti-Islam necessarily prejudiced against Muslims?
September 14th, 2012 | 12:31 pm
Chief Rabbi Sacks should note that his understanding about the Christian attitude to the Old Testament (and its relationship to the New Testament) was rejected by the Church in the heresy of Marcionism in the second century. That Dawkins is ignorant of this (and many other teachings of the Church) is no surprise to anyone. But the good rabbi should be aware that orthodox Christianity has no such “adversarial way of reading what it calls the Old Testament.” Orthodox Christians encounter the God of love, mercy, compassion, and justice in our reading of the Hebrew Scriptures no less than our Jewish brothers and sisters.
September 14th, 2012 | 12:33 pm
The criticism is Dawkins is directed against the religion of Judaism, not against the Jewish ethnicity. Ipso facto, it cannot be anti-Semitic. The chief rabbi ought to start fighting actual prejudice against the Jewish ethnicity, not demean it by trying to use it as a get out of jail free card against religious criticism.
September 14th, 2012 | 12:34 pm
I think the rabbi’s point is a valid one.. One has to parse the term anti-semetic a split it away from the more virulent sense and accepted as simply anti-judiasm..
Under such a understanding then Dawkins passage is anti-jewish theologically.. Small but apt point.
September 14th, 2012 | 12:46 pm
The Rabbi is wrong, simple as that. His views are an attempt to censure criticism of a book that should now be regarded as profoundly racist and supremacist about others. This was not exceptional at the time, but just look at how the Hebrew Bible portrays ’Cannanites’ and Samaritans. The Yahwists who wrote the book accused others of practices such as child sacrifice when this was part of some branches of the cult of Yahweh. It refers gleefully to the slaughter of women and children all in God’s name. This was standard for the time in which it was written. It is not standard now. That progress is due to the development of our moral understanding, and that growth has little to do with religion. The parts of the book that Richard Dawkins was referring to were written long before Rabbinic Judaism started anyway. Thousands of years of human effort, (mostly male effort) has gone into ‘explaining away’ all the nasty bits of the Hebrew Bible. Why not accept like Humanistic Jews do that this is just a book that reflects its time, the events in it are not always true, and they are not morally correct. The Rabbi needs to accept that if he wants the kudos of hanging with his new science chums he will be expected to bring evidence to the table to back up what he says, and the mis treatment of minorities including, but not restricted to Jews, (Gays, Atheists, other Christians) by Christians is not explained by what he says. A last thought, the writers of most of the Hebrew Bible did not call themselves Jews, they were Hebrews, or Israelites. RD is discussing their concept of God, not the God that modern branches of Judaism beleve in. Therefore RD can in no way be accused of anti-semitism. The Rabbi should rethink and apologise.
September 14th, 2012 | 1:24 pm
The article didn’t quote the whole passage in question… but from what I’m looking at, I don’t see anything “profoundly anti-Semitic.” I don’t even see him tapping into any sort of stereotypes, but maybe there are stereotypes I’m unaware of.
Dawkins is a fool, but this doesn’t seem like a good way to go after his ideas.
September 14th, 2012 | 2:24 pm
Yesspam, how noble of you to explain to “modern” Jewish people what it is that they believe about God and their holy texts! What would those ignorant and unenlightened Hebrews do without you to explain and account for the difficult parts of their scripture? How dare they bring their own theological hermeneutic to a text that so clearly speaks about a petty, megalomaniacal, and murderous tyrant of a deity!
(Perhaps this is exactly the sort of anti-Semitic attitude that Rabbi Sacks objects to in comments like yours and Dawkins’s.)
September 14th, 2012 | 2:36 pm
Yesspam writes: “His views are an attempt to censure criticism of a book that should now be regarded as profoundly racist and supremacist about others.”
I know a lot of people who disagree with you. Why should your reading of the minds of the original writers be better than that of those who find worth in these words. Yes, understanding has increased, but
Yesspam writes: “That progress is due to the development of our moral understanding, and that growth has little to do with religion.”
Would you please fill us in as to what, other than religion, was the source of that progress?
You make quite a few claims. To take a page from Dawkins, would you mind providing evidence for them?
September 14th, 2012 | 2:48 pm
I am not sure what the rabbi means by anti-Semitic stereotypes. Normally one would expect that to mean stereotypes of Jewish people as in this brief excerpt from Wikipedia:
But the rabbi seems to mean that Dawkins depicts the God of the Old Testament as he has been interpreted by Christians, and he finds that “anti-Semitic.”
I think Steve S is incorrect in bringing Marcionism into the discussion. Marcion did not impose any particular Christian reading on the Old Testament. He believed that the god of the Old Testament was a god—a lesser god—and not the God, the Father of Jesus. Marcion did not accept the Old Testament as part of Christian scripture. He wanted to put it aside.
I think Yesspam is basically correct. And one certainly doesn’t have to be a Christian to find all kinds of fault with God as depicted in the Old Testament. I think is someone who was literate and intelligent but who knew nothing about Judaism or Christianity were asked to read the Old Testament and form an opinion of God, he or she would come up with quite a different portrait than Jews or Christians claim to find in Hebrew Scripture today.
It seems clear to me that Rabbi Sacks is taking a swipe not just at Dawkins here, but at Christianity and the New Testament. I am a little surprised that Matthew Schmitz is willing to overlook the anti-Christian angle, perhaps on the theory that anything that seems to reflect poorly on Richard Dawkins is worthy of posting no matter what.
September 14th, 2012 | 2:55 pm
Yesspam, how noble of you to explain to “modern” Jewish people what it is that they believe about God and their holy texts!
Steve S,
But if you are a Christian, which I take it you are, the whole basis of your religion is that contemporary Jews are reading Hebrew Scripture incorrectly. They don’t believe in the Fall or Original Sin. They don’t believe in all of the “prophecies” that look forward to the coming of the Messiah. From the Christian point of view, contemporary believing Jews are missing the very purpose of the Old Testament, and they are continuing to live by the Law, which has been made irrelevant by the “New Testament.”
September 14th, 2012 | 3:51 pm
Yesspam writes: “His views are an attempt to censure criticism of a book that should now be regarded as profoundly racist and supremacist about others.”
@David, I think this is Yesspam’s claim that raises Steve S ire. “should now be regarded” is a very strong claim. Yesspam’s thinks his viewpoint should the “moral” one for us all. The claim lacks a certain humility, one that even Dawkins displayed in the video when challenged by Sacks. That is, he owned up to limitations on his claim that to raise children in the religion of their parents should be a crime. I’m hoping that Yesspam will own up to similar limitations, but that is up to him.
September 14th, 2012 | 5:02 pm
This post and the video raise many interesting questions. One of the things that struck me watching Rabbi Sacks and Richard Dawkins talk was that they both seemed to be comfortable talking about the hugely abstract concept of religion without making the least effort to define it or put any boundaries around it. Rabbi Sacks has a very simple message that boils down to asserting that both science and religion are good and do not conflict with one another.
It seems to me that one might say that science and religion, properly understood, should not conflict with one another. But of course if we look at the history of science and religion, we tend to see religion retreating and science advancing. For example, in the battle between the Church and Galileo, it may have taken centuries, but the Church has now embraced Galileo. In the battle between Christianity and Darwin, Darwin has largely won, but we still have debates even here about young earth creationists.
Meanwhile, if religion is a good thing, what do we make of the fact that a Coptic Christian made a scurrilous anti-Muslim film, and there are now largely as a result protests against the US and its allies in twenty countries, many of them violent. How does “good religion” fit into that picture?
What is religion, and how can you tell “authentic” (good) religion from “misused” (bad) religion? I may be mistaken, but it seems to me fairly easy to define science purely in the abstract, but very difficult to define religion without pointing to a particular religion or a particular group practicing that religion.
September 14th, 2012 | 5:02 pm
I think the “Angry God of the Old Testament” vs. the “God of Love” of the New Testament figures in Christian thinking and theology. Of course since there are so many flavors of Christian theology, a given Christian can claim that this does not represent “his” theology.
None the less it is a perceived dichotomy amongst many Christians, and it represents a way of characterizing the Old Testament God, and this view is not of traditional Jewish origin.
That some segments of Christianity have had a history of antisemitism does not directly derive from this conception of the Old Testament God, and so I think Rabbi Sacks was overreaching with this criticism.
September 14th, 2012 | 5:38 pm
Again, I believe commnetors are making to much of the term “anti-semetic”.
The Rabbi apparently is prepared to defend the old testement God on terms he finds to be authetically Jewish.
In such a defense he finds charachterizations like Dawkins to be anti-semetic. I read that to mean that Dawkins makes the same mistake many anti-semtic Christians make when they oversimplify the God presented in the old testment and present this scripture outside historical context and theological charity.
September 15th, 2012 | 10:28 am
An interesting proposal in a column in the Catholic Herald:
” . . . it is a great pity that the Chief Rabbi can’t, for obvious reasons, apply for the job of being the next Archbishop of Canterbury . . .”
http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2012/09/10/its-a-shame-the-chief-rabbi-cant-be-the-next-archbishop-of-canterbury/
September 15th, 2012 | 12:05 pm
Yesspam, how noble of you to explain to “modern” Jewish people what it is that they believe about God and their holy texts! What would those ignorant and unenlightened Hebrews do without you to explain and account for the difficult parts of their scripture? How dare they bring their own theological hermeneutic to a text that so clearly speaks about a petty, megalomaniacal, and murderous tyrant of a deity!
(Perhaps this is exactly the sort of anti-Semitic attitude that Rabbi Sacks objects to in comments like yours and Dawkins’s.)
What makes you think I am not a “modern” Jewish person? Many of them agree that the Torah is not true and morally correct. That may be the reason why world wide non religious Jews are in the majority. You clearly think you can tell them what to believe. Perhaps that is real anti Semitism.
September 15th, 2012 | 12:09 pm
Yesspam writes: “His views are an attempt to censure criticism of a book that should now be regarded as profoundly racist and supremacist about others.”
I know a lot of people who disagree with you. Why should your reading of the minds of the original writers be better than that of those who find worth in these words. Yes, understanding has increased, but
But what? Did you miss the bit that said that nowadays these thoughts would be regarded as racist, and supremacist? I said nothing about the original intentions of the writers.
Yesspam writes: “That progress is due to the development of our moral understanding, and that growth has little to do with religion.”
Would you please fill us in as to what, other than religion, was the source of that progress?
Try googling the end of Slavery, anti Racism, gay rights campaigns, the right to vote campaigns, Civil Rights in the U.S. chock full of non believers.
September 15th, 2012 | 12:12 pm
Michael.
I think the “Angry God of the Old Testament” vs. the “God of Love” of the New Testament figures in Christian thinking and theology.
It certainly did not figure in what RD said.
September 15th, 2012 | 12:13 pm
Steve S
That Dawkins is ignorant of this (and many other teachings of the Church) is no surprise to anyone.
Dawkins made no reference to Christian beliefs about the God of the Hebrew Bible.
September 15th, 2012 | 12:20 pm
MM
Yesspam writes: “His views are an attempt to censure criticism of a book that should now be regarded as profoundly racist and supremacist about others.”
@David, I think this is Yesspam’s claim that raises Steve S ire. “should now be regarded” is a very strong claim. Yesspam’s thinks his viewpoint should the “moral” one for us all.
Y thinks someone should answer his evidence about how portions of the Hebrew Bible talk about others. Does anyone deny that there is bigotry towards Amalekites, Cannanites, etc? Again this has nothing to do with Judaism, or monotheism, since most of the HB was written long before the Babylonian exile, where the Judean elite picked up the idea of monotheism.
September 15th, 2012 | 12:24 pm
Steve S
difficult parts of their scripture?
In your opinion what percentage would that represent? Do you believe in Torah from Moses? Do you accept the overwhelming evidence of multiple authorship and redaction of the written Torah?
September 15th, 2012 | 4:40 pm
Patrick Molloy,
I can’t understand how people can fail to see that Rabbi Sacks, in criticizing Dawkins, was taking a shot at Christianity itself:
Rabbi Sacks didn’t say that some Christians have an adversarial way of reading the “Old Testament.” He said Christianity has an adversarial way of reading the “Old Testament.” He says Christianity has to read the “Old Testament” that way. And it seems to me the conclusion is unavoidable that he considers the Christian way of reading the “Old Testament” to be “anti-Semitic.”
In any other context than criticizing Richard Dawkins, it seem to me Christians would take offense at what Rabbi Sacks is saying. But apparently the contempt of theists for Dawkins is so great that Christian theists are willing to overlook the charge by a Jewish theist that their reading the “Old Testament” is “anti-Semitic” because they share a common enemy.
How in the world someone ought to be Archbishop of Canterbury when he thinks the Christian reading of Hebrew Scripture is anti-Semitic is way beyond me.
Of course, there is a great deal of truth to what Rabbi Sacks says about the Christian approach to Hebrew Scripture, but I don’t think many Christians are ready to acknowledge that.
September 15th, 2012 | 6:44 pm
Patrick: ” . . . it is a great pity that the Chief Rabbi can’t, for obvious reasons, apply for the job of being the next Archbishop of Canterbury . . .”
Very much so, for they spend little time defending their own religion, and mostly condemning “offenses” to other religion. See the Salman Rushdie controversy.
September 16th, 2012 | 11:12 am
_Try googling the end of Slavery, anti Racism, gay rights campaigns, the right to vote campaigns, Civil Rights in the U.S. chock full of non believers._
I did, and guess what, religion, particularly Protestant Evangelicalism played an enormous role in the abolitionist movement both in Europe and in the United States. The most effective civil rights campaign in our history was founded by the _Reverend_ Martin Luther King, who often used religious arguments to support his cause (_you_ might Google “Letter from Birmingham Jail”). We would disagree about gay rights because we would disagree about the nature of “gayness” and it’s morality, so frankly I don’t see the “gay rights” movement as progress, nonetheless, greater tolerance toward and compassion for those with homosexual tendencies (though not necessarily homosexual behavior) is now a part of the Catholic Catechism, and the Episcopal Church now ordains gay ministers and bishops. So yes Yesspam, the moral progress you cite, to the degree that it is progress has been a progressive fulfillment of the morality inherent in Christianity, and to the degree that it has been aided by non-believers, they have been acting according to Christian morality whether they acknowledge it or not.
September 16th, 2012 | 8:36 pm
Fred..
You forgot to mention how Christian the suffragettes were, and how they used Christian arguments..
September 17th, 2012 | 9:33 am
Fitzgerald and Fred, you both present an awfully selective version of history. You want to take credit for all the good, but blame for none of the bad that people with “Christian arguments” did. certainly were not orthodox Christians – from Abraham Lincoln to Charles Sumner. Garrison and John Brown are probably your best examples, being devout Christians, but still very far removed from modern-day Biblical literalists. Garrison was a pacifist, for example.
On the contrary, Biblical literalists tended to point out that the Bible condoned slavery – while the people you claim as evangelicals said that it was inconsistent with loving your neighbor as yourself. And you’ll also notice that the Constitution of the Confederacy mentioned God, unlike one other prominent Constitution. Jerry Falwell, who spurred fundamentalists to become politically active, started out his political career by opposing integration and promoting racism – and for not allowing blacks to attend his church until, astonishingly, 1968. Neither moral nor a majority, as they said.
I give Christians credit for the good that they have done. Brown and Garrison are great men. But you shouldn’t only look at what you find praiseworthy. Nor fail to acknowledge that even Brown and Garrison weren’t exactly modern-day evangelicals.
September 17th, 2012 | 10:43 am
Yesspam, the moral progress you cite, to the degree that it is progress has been a progressive fulfillment of the morality inherent in Christianity, and to the degree that it has been aided by non-believers, they have been acting according to Christian morality whether they acknowledge it or not
You are cherry picking. The Torah permitted slavery. when the religious finally got around to arguing against they used humanist arguments in defiance of their ‘sacred’ texts whether they knew it or not.
September 18th, 2012 | 7:54 pm
Last time I checked, the Torah wasn’t Christian. And humanism has a contradiction at its heart. To the degree it is moral at all it “smuggles” in Christian morality and tries to divorce it from the Christian God, but as Nietzche (hardly a biblical literalist) proclaimed at the end of the 19th century, there is no Christian morality without the Christian god. If an atheist humanist proclaims that human beings have rights by virtue of being human, he admits to having faith that humans are the kind of being that for some unknown, empirically unverifiable, and presumably non-material reason have rights. Hardly a more rational or provable faith than Christianity. The view that human beings have inviolable rights is the residue of the Christian belief that having been created in the image of God, and God having become one, man has an inherent dignity, even sacredness. Take that away and you take away any justification for “humanist” morality.
September 19th, 2012 | 8:36 am
Fred – Consider chess. There are certain fundamental ‘rules of the game’ that define it. An 8×8 board, 8 pawns per side that move in certain ways, two rooks per side that move in other ways, castling, the initial configuration of the pieces, etc. Now, there is no rule that you can’t sacrifice your queen in the first few moves of the game. It’s illegal to move your king to a threatened square, but it’s perfectly acceptable by the rules to stick your queen in front of a pawn at the start of the game.
However, if you want to win the game, you shouldn’t do that. There are almost no situations (at least, assuming evenly-matched opponents) where giving up your queen at the start will lead to your victory. Similarly, it’s rarely a good idea to move your king out to the center of the board. It’s usually a bad move.
Note words like “shouldn’t” and “bad”. They are value judgments. They prescribe ‘oughts’. They are not part of the ‘rules’ of chess. From where do they come?
From the combination of two things – first, the rules and structure of chess, and second, from the player’s desire to win the game. They are strategic rules.
We have physical laws, and we have human desires. “Oughts” – strategic rules – morals – arise from those two things. Some basic game theory, and voila – cooperation, etc. I contend that I am ethical and moral, that people in general are ethical and moral, because the alternative is running naked in the woods fighting over scraps of food. That’s not ‘smuggling’ at all.
Click on my name above for an expansion of this idea. Or see here.
September 19th, 2012 | 1:03 pm
Fred: If an atheist humanist proclaims that human beings have rights by virtue of being human, he admits to having faith that humans are the kind of being that for some unknown, empirically unverifiable, and presumably non-material reason have rights.
Intelligence is the reason we have regard for human beings, and it is neither unknown, nor empirically unverifiable.
It is not because it is commanded by any sort of god. You claim that morality is dependent on the existence of a god. Very well. So if there were no god, you would feel free to murder innocents? Surely not. Hence, you acknowledge the existence of morals independent of the existence of any god.
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