Clay Burell's Library tagged literature →  View Popular

In the case of resurrecting the mammoth, Dr. Church said, the process would begin by taking a skin cell from an elephant and converting it to the embryonic state with a method developed last year by Dr. Shinya Yamanaka for reprogramming cells.

Asked if the mammoth project might indeed happen, Dr. Church said that “there is some enthusiasm for it,” although making zoos better did not outrank fixing the energy crisis on his priority list.

Dr. Schuster believes that museums could prove goldmines of ancient DNA because any animal remains containing keratin, from hooves to feathers, could hold enough DNA for the full genome to be recovered by the new sequencing machines.

Tom: What do you do, then, if the experience is not to be found
in religion?

Joseph: You find it in mysticism and get in touch with mystics
who read these symbolic forms symbolically. Mystics are people who are not
theologians; theologians are people who interpret the vocabulary of scripture
as if it were referring to supernatural facts.

There are plenty of mystics in the Christian tradition, only we don't
hear much about them. But now and again you run into it. Meister Eckhart
is such a person. Thomas Merton had it. Dante had it. Dionysus the Areopagyte
had it. John of the Cross breaks through every now and again and then comes
slopping back again. He flashes back and forth.

I think Joyce is full of it. And Thomas Mann had it in his writing, though
it isn't as far out as Joyce. It's strange how after Mann's death it disappears
and you don't get it any more.

Tom: I gather you're not terribly fond of the Bible.

Joseph: Not at all! It's the most over-advertised book
in the world. It's very pretentious to claim it to be the word of God, or
accept it as such and perpetuate this tribal mythology, justifying all kinds
of violence to people who are not members of the tribe.

The thing I see about the Bible that's unfortunate is that it's a tribally
circumscribed mythology. It deals with a certain people at a certain time.
The Christians magnified it to include them. It then turns this society
against all others, whereas the condition of the world today is that this
particular society that's presented in the Bible isn't even the most important.
This thing is like a dead weight. It's pulling us back because it belongs
to an earlier period. We can't break loose and move into a modern theology.

One of the great promises of mythology is, with what social group do
you identify? How about the planet? To say that the members of this particular
social group are the elite of God's world is a good way to keep that group
together, but look at the consequences! I think that what might be called
the sanctified chauvinism of the Bible is one of the curses of the planet
today.

Tom: There's a lot of interesting material in the Old Testament,
isn't there? For instance, it says that God created everything except the
water.

Joseph: You've put your finger on it. The water I is the
goddess. You see, what happens in the Old Testament is that the masculine
principle remains personified and the female principle is reduced to an
element. The first verse says when God created, the breath of God brooded
over the waters. And the water is the goddess.

Tom: I assume you don't believe in an actual, literal seven
days of creation.

Joseph: Of course not. That has nothing to do with the actual
evolutionary story as we now get it.

Tom: How do you reconcile these two accounts?

Joseph: Why should one bother to, any more than you would try
to reconcile the Navajo story?

Tom: I remember hearing a wonderful lecture by the late Louis
Leakey in which he insisted that there was no conflict between the Genesis
account of creation and what he had discovered.

Joseph: Well, it is in conflict because he didn't read it carefully
enough. There are two Biblical accounts, one in the first chapter and one
in the second, and they're quite contrary to each other.

It's about time we stopped feeling that we have to believe in the Bible.
I'd just as soon try to work out the Navajo thing, where they come up through
four worlds. One is red, one yellow . . .

Tom: But if you throw out the Bible as history, don't you also
throw it out as a moral imperative?

Joseph: Yes. I don't think the Bible is anybody's moral imperative,
unless you want to be a traditional Jew. That's what the Bible tells you.

Tom: Doesn't it tell you how to be a good person?

Joseph: No.

Tom: Lots of people think so.

Joseph: Just read the thing. Maybe it gives you a few hints, but
the Bible also tells you to kill everyone in Canaan, right down to the mice.

Tom: What was the passage you quoted to justify their exclusivity
ideas?

Joseph: "There is no God in all the world but in Israel."
That leaves everybody out except the Jews. This is one of the most chauvinistic
views of morality.

One of the great texts is in Exodus, when the Jews are told to kill the
lambs and put the blood on their doorsteps so the angel of death won't kill
any of their children, but will kill the first children of the Egyptians.
And the night before they leave, they're to invite their Egyptian friends
to lend them their jewels and so on. Then the next night, they run off with
the jewels, and the text says, so they fleeced the Egyptians. No, so they
despoiled the Egyptians. You call this good ethics?

Tom: What's the background of something like Cain and Abel?

Joseph: There's a very amusing Sumerian dialogue that appeared
about 1500 years earlier than the Cain and Abel story. It's about a herder
and an agriculturalist competing for the favor of the goddess. The goddess
chooses to prefer the agriculturalist and his offering. Well, the Jews come
into this area, and they're not agriculturalists, they're herders. And they
don't have a goddess, they have a god. So they turn the whole thing upside
down, and make God favor the herder against the agriculturalist.

The interesting thing is that throughout the Old Testament, it's the
younger brother who overturns the older brother in God's favor. It happens
time and time again. This is simply a function of the fact that the Jews
come in as younger brothers. They come in as barbaric Bedouins from the
desert, into highly sophisticated agricultural areas, and they're declaring
that although the others are the elders - as Cain was, the founder of cities
and all that - they are God's favorite. It's just another form of sanctified
chauvinism. You understand the view of exclusive religion, don't you - "You
worship God in your way, I'll worship God in his."

Tom: I gather there were a number of East-West conflicts in
the early church. I find Pellagius a fascinating figure, for example.

Joseph: Pellagius in the fourth century was either a Welshman
or an Irishman, I think. He upheld the individualistic Western tradition
against what I would call the tribalism of the East, and was considered
a heretic. He stated the main points against the doctrines of which St.
Augustine, his contemporary, was the champion. One was the doctrine of original
sin. Pellagius said, you cannot inherit another's sin. Therefore, Adam's
sin is not inherited by anybody.

Tom: The sins of the father are not visited upon the
son?

Joseph: That is all Eastern philosophy, not European. Another
thing Pellagius said is that you cannot be saved by another's act. That
takes care of Jesus on the cross and knocks the whole thing out. Of course
that was rejected. Pellagius was defending a doctrine of individual responsibility.
I don't know where it comes from, but certainly it was typical, I would
say, of European as opposed to Eastern points of view. You were an individual,
not merely the member of a group.

Tom: That sounds like the line in the King Arthur legend .
. .

Joseph: "Each knight entered the forest at a point he had
chosen, where it was darkest and there was no way or path." That's
from The Quest of the Sangral, 1215 or so in France.

Tom: How do they expect to find their way then?

Joseph: By questing.

Tom: And that's what we all do in life?

Joseph: Yes. Otherwise, you'd follow someone else's path, follow
the well-tried ways. No one in the world was ever you before, with your
particular gifts and abilities and possibilities. It's a shame to waste
those by doing what someone else has done.