‘Comics guy’ sets his sights on scholarly translation of the Bible

by Jeff Diamant, The Star-Ledger

To millions of Americans fascinated by comic-book superheroes, Bill Jemas of Princeton is an industry legend who helped breathe life into Marvel Enterprises by pushing the wildly successful “Ultimate Spider-Man” series that rejuvenated the company.

These days, however, Jemas, a high-energy 51-year-old whose controversial four years as Marvel’s president remain fodder for comic-book blogs, finds himself engrossed in a task far removed from dialogue balloons.

Photos by Matt Rainey/The Star-LedgerMeeting in the Princeton office of Bill Jemas’ 360 Intellectual Equity, are, from left, Jemas; Sarah Miller, business manager; Farrah Gross, creative director; and Michael Martucci, web developer. Jemas, below, is writing a new translation of the Book of Genesis.

Cause for Concern for Minority Christians in Russia

from ChristrianFreedom.org

Written by CFI Field Staff
Monday, 08 June 2009 01:46

SAULT STE. MARIE, MI (Christian Freedom International) — Christian leaders are concerned that Russia is returning to a “Soviet era” persecution of Christians.

After the Soviet communist regime crumbled in 1991, Russia adopted a constitution that, in theory, allowed for freedom of religion. However, in reality “old guard,” draconian regulations are reappearing.

The most recent incident involves the Soviet-style, reconstituted Ministry of Justice’s (MOJ) “Council for Conducting State Religious Expert Analysis.”

As reported by the Norway based Forum 18 News Service, the MOJ’s choice of members to the Council includes “anti-cultists” and controversial scholars of Islam. The Council is chaired by Alexander Dvorkin, Russia’s most prominent “anti-cult” activist, who has described the faith of some Protestants as “a crude, magical-occult system with elements of psychological manipulation.”

The powers of the Council were recently widened allowing it to investigate the activity, doctrines, leadership decisions, literature, and worship of any registered religious organization and recommend action to the MOJ.

There is a recently formed Internet movement, “No to Inquisitors,” which hundreds of Russians have managed to join. The protesters have called on the MOJ to either dissolve the Council or ask Dvorkin to submit his resignation. Neither is likely.

If the Council is given free rein, it is likely to recommend harsh measures against certain religious organizations, especially Christian groups.

For example, at the Council’s first meeting, Dvorkin named the Russian Bible Society as a possible target for investigation.

The Russian Bible Society
The Russian Bible Society is a non-denominational organization for translating and distributing the Bible in Russia. The stated mission of the Bible Society “… is to confess Christian faith and propagation of the Word of God.”

The main goal of the Bible Society in Russia is to make the Bible available to every person in a language and format each can understand and afford. The Bible Society works with Christians of all denominations.

The Bible Society in Russia is currently the largest publishing house of Biblical literature in Eastern Europe and cooperates with all Christian churches, religious organizations, and even secular agencies in the mission of printing and distributing the Holy Scriptures.

The full-scale Bible translation into the Russian language began in 1813 after the establishment of the Russian Bible Society. The first full edition of the Bible including both Old and New Testaments was published in 1876.

The Russian Bible Society, since its establishment in 1813 and up to 1826, distributed more than 500,000 Bibles and related Christian books in some 41 languages throughout Russia. Several times in the 19th and 20th centuries, activities of the Society were stopped by the harsh policies of the Soviet government.

The Society was restored in 1990-1991 after a long pause connected with the “Soviet era” restrictions.

The Law “On Freedom of Conscience and Associations”
In 1997 the Russian government enacted a controversial, draconian law “On Freedom of Conscience and Associations.” The 1997 Law is complicated and place many restrictions on religious minorities considered “non-traditional.” As a result, many new Christian churches have either shut their doors or gone underground.

The 1997 Law created three categories of religious communities (groups, local organizations, and centralized organizations) with different levels of legal status and privileges.

The most basic unit is a “religious group,” which has the right to conduct worship services and rituals and to teach religion to its members. A group is not registered with the Russian government and consequently does not have the legal status to open a bank account, own property, issue invitations to foreign guests, publish literature, enjoy tax benefits, or conduct worship services in prisons, state owned hospitals, and the armed forces.

A “local religious organization” can be registered if it has at least 10 citizen members and is either a branch of a centralized organization or has existed in the locality as a religious group for at least 15 years. Local religious organizations have legal status and may open bank accounts, own property, issue invitation letters to foreign guests, publish literature, enjoy tax benefits, and conduct worship services in prisons, state-owned hospitals, and the armed forces.

“Centralized religious organizations” can be registered by combining at least three local organizations of the same denomination. In addition to all the legal rights enjoyed by local organizations, centralized organizations also have the right to open new local organizations without any waiting period. Centralized organizations that have existed in the country for more than fifty years have the right to use the words “Russia” or “Russian” in their official names.

However, the 1997 Law also gives officials the authority to ban “religious groups” — for any or no reason — and thereby prohibit all of the activities of such religious communities. As a result, many Christian groups meet in unregistered, underground house churches. This onerous provision has been used to close down Christian churches.

Ancient Primate Could Be Distant Ancestor of Humans

In what could prove to be a landmark discovery, a leading paleontologist said scientists have dug up the 47 million-year-old fossil of an ancient primate whose features suggest it could be the common ancestor of all later monkeys, apes and humans.

Anthropologists have long believed that humans evolved from ancient ape-like ancestors.

Some 50 million years ago, two ape-like groups walked the Earth. One is known as the tarsidae, a precursor of the tarsier, a tiny, large-eyed creature that lives in Asia.

Another group is known as the adapidae, a precursor of today’s lemurs in Madagascar.

Based on previously limited fossil evidence, one big debate had been whether the tarsidae or adapidae group gave rise to monkeys, apes and humans.

The latest discovery bolsters the less common position that our ancient ape-like ancestor was an adapid, the believed precursor of lemurs.

Philip Gingerich, president-elect of the Paleontological Society in the U.S., has co-written a paper that will detail next week the latest fossil discovery in the Public Library of Science, a peer-reviewed, online journal.

“This discovery brings a forgotten group into focus as a possible ancestor of higher primates,” Gingerich, a professor of paleontology at the University of Michigan, said in an interview.

The discovery has little bearing on a separate paleontological debate centering on the identity of a common ancestor of chimps and humans, which could have lived about six million years ago and still hasn’t been found.

That gap in the evolution story is colloquially referred to as the “missing link” controversy.

In reality, though, all gaps in the fossil record are technically “missing links” until filled in, and many scientists say the term is meaningless.

UNC’s Prof. Ehrman: “19 of 27 New Testament Books are Forgeries”, “There Was no Resurrection”

By John Blake
CNN

CNN — Just so you know, Bart Ehrman says he’s not the anti-Christ.

He says he’s not trying to destroy your faith. He’s not trying to bash the Bible. And, though his mother no longer talks to him about religion, Ehrman says some of his best friends are Christian.

Ehrman, a best-selling author and a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is a biblical sleuth whose investigations make some people very angry. Like the fictional Robert Langdon character played by actor Tom Hanks in the movie “Angels & Demons,” he delves into the past to challenge some of Christianity’s central claims.

In Ehrman’s latest book, “Jesus, Interrupted,” he concludes:

Doctrines such as the divinity of Jesus and heaven and hell are not based on anything Jesus or his earlier followers said.

At least 19 of the 27 books in the New Testament are forgeries.

Believing the Bible is infallible is not a condition for being a Christian.

“Christianity has never been about the Bible being the inerrant word of God,” Ehrman says. “Christianity is about the belief in Christ.”

Critic: ‘There’s a touch of arrogance’ about him

Ehrman’s claims have found an audience, and controversy. He’s a fixture on History Channel and Discovery Channel documentaries on Christianity. He’s appeared on National Public Radio, CNN and the BBC and talked about scribes misquoting Jesus on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”

Yet Ehrman’s popularity also may be due to a larger trend. The books of people like Elaine Pagels, author of “The Gnostic Gospels,” and Dan Brown, author of “The Da Vinci Code” and “Angels and Demons,” resonate with people who believe there are parts of the Bible that the church left on history’s editing floor.

Some scholarly critics say Ehrman is saying nothing new.

Bishop William H. Willimon, an author and United Methodist Church bishop based in Alabama, says he doesn’t like the “breathless tone” of Ehrman’s work.

“He keeps presenting this stuff as if this is wonderful new knowledge that has been kept from you backward lay people and this is the stuff your preachers don’t have the guts to tell, and I have,” Willimon says. “There’s a touch of arrogance in it.”

Yet even many of Ehrman’s critics say he has a knack for making arcane New Testament scholarship accessible to the public.

“He has a gift for clear thinking and an ability to present some complicated things in simple, direct ways,” Willimon says.

Some pastors also say that Ehrman forces them to confront tough questions about the Bible in front of their congregations.

“His take on the scriptures is a gift to the church because of his ability to articulate questions and challenges,” says Rev. Guy Williams, a blogger who also happens to be a Methodist minister in Houston, Texas. “It gives us an opportunity to wrestle with the [Bible's] claims and questions.”

Ehrman: There was no resurrection

Ehrman says that no one accepts everything in the Bible. Everyone picks and chooses . He cites some New Testament’s references to the role of women in church as an example.

In the first book of Corinthians, Ehrman says, the Apostle Paul insists that women should remain silent in church (1 Corinthians 14:35-36).

In the 16th chapter of the book of Romans, Paul’s attitude is that women could and should be church leaders — and he cites women who were serving as deacons and apostles in the early church, Ehrman says.

Ehrman backs his arguments with a deep knowledge of the culture and history of the New Testament world. He’s written 20 books on early Christianity and is an authority on ancient manuscripts used to translate the Bible.

His claims, though, take on some of Christianity’s most sacred tenets, like the resurrection of Jesus. Ehrman says he doesn’t think the resurrection took place. There’s no proof Jesus physically rose from the dead, and the resurrection stories contradict one another, he says.

He says he doesn’t believe the followers of Jesus saw their master bodily rise from the dead, but something else.

“My best guess is that what happened is what commonly happens today when someone has a loved one die — they sometimes think they see them in a vision,” Ehrman says. “I think some of the disciples had visions.”

Ehrman says he immerses himself in the Bible, though he doesn’t believe in its infallibility, because it’s the most important book in Western civilization.

“I have friends who teach medieval English,” he says. “They don’t believe in Chaucer, but they think Chaucer is important,” he writes in the conclusion of “Jesus, Interrupted.”

The fundamentalist turns agnostic

Ehrman once had a different attitude toward the Bible.

He was raised in the Episcopal Church in Lawrence, Kansas, and became a fundamentalist Christian at age 15 when he met a charismatic Christian youth group leader who reached out to him. Ehrman says he later persuaded his parents to embrace a more conservative brand of Christianity.

He says he became so devoted to the Bible that he memorized entire sections. He was convinced the Bible was “God’s words.”

But Ehrman says he began to develop doubts about the infallibility of the Bible after attending Princeton Theological Seminary to become a college Bible professor.

He even began to change his opinion of the Christian youth group leader who helped convert him. The youth leader visited Ehrman’s father when he was dying of cancer in a hospital.

The youth leader used a bottle of hotel shampoo to “anoint” his father, and tried to persuade his father to confess specific sins, Ehrman says. Ehrman says he was angry at the minister for acting “self-righteous” and “hypocritical.”

“For a vulnerable high-schooler who is trying to figure out the world, a personality like that is very attractive,” Ehrman says. “They’re like cult leaders. They have all the answers.”

Ehrman says he later became an agnostic because he couldn’t find the answer to another question: How could there be a God when there is so much suffering in the world? An agnostic is one who disclaims any knowledge of God, but does not deny the possibility of God’s existence.

Today, Ehrman describes himself as a “happy agnostic.”

But some people can’t believe an agnostic can be happy, he says. They tell him that they’re praying for him. Others say worse. They say he’s being fooled by Satan and he’s headed to hell. Some say he’s the anti-Christ.

“I’m not that powerful,” he says, laughing.

His family, however, feels no obligation to talk to Ehrman about his ideas on the Bible, Ehrman says. His mother, brother and sister remain conservative Christians.

He once tried to talk to his mother about his new beliefs, but the discussion proved fruitless.

“My mom is a strong evangelical,” Ehrman says. “We talk basketball. We don’t talk religion.”

Still, Ehrman says he still sends his mother and siblings copies of his latest books. They’ve never responded, he says.

“I imagine they’re hidden in a back room,” he says.

Whether it’s his family, critics or students, Ehrman says he has a better handle on why he is so threatening to so many people — some Christians worry they will make the same decision he has.

“I changed my mind,” he says. “My students find me more dangerous that way. I really do know what they’re talking about when they stake out an evangelical position.”

Scientists May Have Found How Life Began

from Fox News

British scientists said on Wednesday that they had figured out key steps in the process by which life on Earth may have emerged from a seething soup of simple chemicals, according to Agence France-Presse.

Genetic information in living organisms today is held in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the famous “double helix” molecule of sugar, phosphate and a base.

But DNA is too sophisticated to have popped up in an instant, and one avenue of thought says its single-stranded cousin, ribonucleic acid, or RNA, came first.

RNA plays a key role in making proteins and, in viruses, is used to store genetic code.

It is chemically similar to DNA but is simpler and tougher in structure, and thus looks like a good candidate for Earth’s first information-coding nucleic acid.

But for all its allure, the “RNA first” theory has run into practical problems.

Now a paper published in the British journal Nature by University of Manchester chemists, led by Professor John Sutherland, ventures that an RNA-like synthesis took place through a series of chemical reactions and an important intermediate substance.

Moral Lessons from a Misinterpreted, Mistranslated Scripture

by Michael Kranitz
from Examiner.com

People often equate the Old and New Testaments with morality and goodness. That is why one of my esteemed Examiner colleagues wrote about being “biblically correct” in a recent article about a beauty contestant who spoke her mind about gay marriage. I read the article waiting for him to discuss what it truly means to use the bible as one’s moral yardstick. Since that discussion was missing, I felt compelled to fill in the blanks.

There are certainly places in the bible that provide useful moral guidance. The bible in that respect is no different from Greek, Egyptian, Hindu, Buddist and other religious and philosophical texts that preceded by hundreds and thousands of years with similar guidance. On the other hand, the bible is replete with nasty moral lessons and standards that make prison rules look fair, just and desirable. I want to talk about those.

Slavery

Perhaps the most embarrassing set of moral directives contained in the bible are those dealing with slavery. The bible and its god unmistakably and enthusiastically promote slavery. God even provides handy rules for how to treat and beat your slave throughout your ownership cycle. From Leviticus to Titus, slavery is openly condoned and regulated by Jesus and whomever wrote the Old Testament.

Titus 2:9:

Bid slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect; they are not to be refractory, nor to pilfer, but to show entire and true fidelity.

Here’s the law boys and girls. Pretty clear.

Leviticus 25:44:

Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can will them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.

I really like this rule because it’s much easier to grab foreigners and make them work for you than it is to enslave cousins that live in your village.

Exodus 21:20:

If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property.

This one is crystal clear. I’ll bet Stanley Kaplan would have made tons of Shekels teaching masters how to beat the snot out of their slaves but not so much that they could not get up in two days.

Exodus 21:1:

Now these are the ordinances which you shall set before them. When you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years, and in the seventh he shall go out free, for nothing. If he comes in single, he shall go out single; if he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with him. If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master’s and he shall go out alone. But if the slave plainly says, ‘I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free,’ then his master shall bring him to God, and he shall bring him to the door or the doorpost; and his master shall bore his ear through with an awl; and he shall serve him for life.

In this case, the bible is starting to read like a software developer’s contract. If the master provides a wife to one of his man-slaves, whatever she produces is the master’s to keep. Makes perfect sense. Now, if the slave wants to keep his wife and kids, he gets an awl in the ear and no freedom for life. Have you ever had an awl in your ear?

There are plenty more passages, all of which present Chistians with a huge problem. Most “good Christians” know that slavery is wrong and indefensible by any rationale. Yet, they also know that their bible was either divinely inspired or written by god himself. (If it wasn’t, it means ordinary men could have made up the stuff about Jesus, the Ten Commandments and other elements that make up the foundation of their religion). How do you reject “god’s word” on slavery and then choose the other parts of the bible that fit into your sense of morality and make up the foundation of your religion? These are tough questions that no Christian can answer credibly. You simply can’t reject the teachings of slavery because their are immoral and accept the other aspects of the bible you like. If you do, you MUST admit that the bible was written by bronze-age men with bronze-aged morality and not by a god. If you admit that the bible was written by ordinary men, you call into question the entire foundation for Christianity because it would almost certainly have been made up by these same men. If, on the other hand, you insist that the bible was devinely inspired or written by god, himself, you are praying to an entity that endorses a barbaric practice that most humans intuitively know is wrong.

Misogynist Lord

A misogynist is someone who hates women. God of the Old and New Testaments, it turns out, is one of those women-haters. It could not be more plainly stated in Ephesians 5:22-24, which gives the pecking order:

“Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.”

I’m pretty sure Hillary Clinton did not read this passage.

Corinthians 14:1, summons all of the wisdom of the creator of the universe to instruct women to shut up in church:

As in all the congregations of the saints, women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.

Just in case you thought god viewed women as intelligent, there’s Timothy 2:1

Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent.

For men inclined to rape, Deuteronomy 22:28-29 provides the proper etiquette and transactional information:

“If a man meets a virgin who is not engaged, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are caught in the act, the man who lay with her shall give fifty shekels of silver to the young woman’s father, and she shall become his wife. Because he violated her he shall not be permitted to divorce her as long as he lives.”

This one apparently means that if a man rapes a woman and gets caught, he can buy her for 50 shekels like an item at the bazaar. His punishment is apparently eternal marriage to her. That is also her punishment for being a woman.

In Numbers 31:14-18 Moses asks of his soldiers:

“Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and were the means of turning the Israelites away from the LORD in what happened at Peor, so that a plague struck the LORD’s people. Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”

Seriously, what is the point of pillaging if you can’t have your sex slaves? I’ll get to the “kill all the boys” part in a minute.

When we read Peter 3:7 we men learn that our wives are weaker:

“Husbands, in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect as the weaker partner and as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life, so that nothing will hinder your prayers.”

This passage was obviously written before god saw a women’s softball game.

The bible is filled with similar examples of exactly how poorly women are viewed by god and Jesus. Why would any woman worship a god that thinks this way? Women are treated just like slaves by the bible. Again, if god wrote the book or he devinely inspired it, something is wrong with god. Or, it is more likely that ordinary barbaric men wrote the bible. If that is the case you need to ask yourself whether ANYTHING written in the bible is actually true.

Oh and for those who would argue that the bible was written to reflect the moral standards at the time, I would ask why god didn’t teach the morons the proper way to act back then. It would have saved lots of suffering by women and slaves for the past few thousand years.

Child Killing

For all of the ranting that Christians do these days about killing unborn fetuses or pre-fetus cell clusters, I wonder how much reading they have done about all of the truly alive children that god had executed.

In Exodus 12:18, god gets busy with the Egyptian children:

So the people of Israel did just as the LORD had commanded through Moses and Aaron. And at midnight the LORD killed all the firstborn sons in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sat on the throne, to the firstborn son of the captive in the dungeon. Even the firstborn of their livestock were killed. Pharaoh and his officials and all the people of Egypt woke up during the night, and loud wailing was heard throughout the land of Egypt. There was not a single house where someone had not died.

This is exactly the type of behavior you want from your lord, right? These children did nothing other than happen to be born to Egyptians, who did nothing except be residents of a country led by a despotic leader. Good moral lesson? Sure, if you are studying to be the head of North Korea.

Not to be outdone by M. Night Shamalan, Isaiah Chapter 13 provides this narrative:

Anyone who is captured will be run through with a sword. Their little children will be dashed to death right before their eyes. Their homes will be sacked and their wives raped by the attacking hordes. For I will stir up the Medes against Babylon, and no amount of silver or gold will buy them off. The attacking armies will shoot down the young people with arrows. They will have no mercy on helpless babies and will show no compassion for the children.

There’s god in all his baby-killing glory. How does one even defend this?

In Hosea 13 it continues:

Samaria shall bear her guilt, because she has rebelled against her God; they shall fall by the sword, their little ones shall be dashed in pieces, and their pregnant women ripped open.

Apparently, if you live in the wrong country, you get the punishment. Even in Matthew, where the bible describes the birth of Jesus, God is aware of Herod’s order to kill all the children and he saves HIS kid, but no others. I know, it was considered appropriate at the time to kill children. It was customary so we can’t fault them. God didn’t know any better.

Those who would cite the bible as either the actual word of their god or even just a model for morality have to ask themselves why there is so much immorality and criminal behavior in their perfect book. Why is it necessary for confessedly unworthy sheep to make excuses for what should be their lord’s perfect document or to pick and choose which portions of that book are right? If the bible is not perfect, one has to ask whether it was actually written by god or, almost certainly, by men with serious emotional issues and metal helmets. If the latter is true, the entire book is open to indictment. In either case, the bible is the LAST place I would look for moral guidance on almost any issue.

Is Christianity Simply About God Entering the Uterus of a Jewish Virgin?

ReligiousDispatches.org

By Eric Reitan
April 29, 2009

Just the other day a friend forwarded me a mass-mailed promotion for Free Inquiry magazine (a publication in which, incidentally, I had an article published a couple of years ago). The brochure was emblazoned with the following warning: “If you wish to avoid spending eternity roasting in HELL, do not open and read this brochure.”

Having no fear of hell, I opened it and fished for the note my friend said would be inside: a note from Richard Dawkins encouraging the recipient of the mailing to subscribe to Free Inquiry.

Dear Friend,

If you live in America, the chances are good that your next door neighbours believe the following: the Inventor of the laws of physics and Programmer of the DNA code decided to enter the uterus of a Jewish virgin, got himself born, then deliberately had himself tortured and executed because he couldn’t think of a better way to forgive the theft of an apple, committed at the instigation of a talking snake.

Since I live in Oklahoma—the purported Buckle of the Bible Belt—one might expect that Dawkins was envisioning a neighborhood like mine when he assessed the chances that my next-door neighbors believed this odd little story. As it happens, one of my next-door neighbors is a Marxist atheist, but the neighbors on the other side do attend the hip, youth-oriented Christian church in town. As such, what they believe may bear some family resemblance to Dawkins’ sketch. My guess, however, is that the resemblance is about as close as what the typical political-cartoon-rendition of President Obama bears to the real man. That is, it’s a caricature that exaggerates certain visible features but fails to capture the man’s soul.

Such caricatures are common in popular religious discourse, and Dawkins is good at them. In the same note, he caricatures Islam by noting that in other parts of the world, your neighbors are likely to believe “you should be beheaded if you draw a cartoon of a desert warlord who copulated with a child and flew into the sky on a winged horse.”

These are caricatures not because there aren’t people who believe things roughly along these lines, but because they tell us as much about the true substance of the faith as the shape and size of Obama’s ears tell us about the character of the man. While most of my Christian friends treat the Garden of Eden story as a myth whose religious significance lies not in its literal accuracy but in its allegorical meanings, there certainly are Christians who insist on the literal truth of this story. But even those who do would typically agree that it’s the meaning behind the story that matters most.

The great world religions aren’t mainly about literal belief in stories you might read in a book of fairy tales. Instead, they’re primarily about promulgating a holistic worldview and way of life infused with the sense that there’s something beyond the empirical skin of the world, something deeply important with which we can forge a relationship. They teach us that when we do so, our lives will be richer and our character better. At their root, the stories and teachings and injunctions of a religion aim to bring about a transformation in believers, one in which the believers’ lives are informed by a relational connection to an Ultimate Reality that transcends them.

That, put simply, is what religion is about. It’s not about believing that talking snakes or flying horses are real—even if, sometimes, the adherents to a religion insist they are. Even among those who believe that religious stories are historical facts and not just myths, there is also an affirmation that the story is more about theology than about history. The story is remembered because it means something.

If religious teachings are an attempt to transform believers by connecting them with a more fundamental reality, then we have to admit that many religions are failures, at least by any pragmatic measure of success I’d be prepared to endorse. But does it follow that every religion is a failure? Or, focusing on my own religious faith, does it follow that every way of being a Christian is doomed to failure?

The important question here isn’t whether some soulless, cartoonish version of religious faith can transform one’s life. The important question is whether there’s a way of being religious, a way of living one’s life as if there were a transcendent good beyond the empirical world, that actually bears rich fruits.

If your Christian faith is nothing more than belief that “the Inventor of the laws of physics…got himself born, then deliberately had himself tortured and executed because he couldn’t think of a better way to forgive the theft of an apple,” it’s hard for me even to imagine what it would look like to live as if this were true, let alone discern any good fruits that might result.

And so, if this hollow and disjointed story were the best that Christianity had to offer, I suppose we could conclude that Christianity is pretty pointless. But this hollow and disjointed story isn’t the best that Christianity can do. It’s a caricature.

And to see just how caricatured Dawkins’ version of the Christian story is, it may help to sketch out an alterative one. There isn’t just one, of course, and some may have more transformative potential than others. What I want to share here, as briefly as I can while doing it justice, a version that has been transformative in my life.

The story begins with the idea that the fundamental reality is personal, an eternal and infinite Person who created the world we know as an act of love. According to this story, love isn’t love if it doesn’t embrace that which is not the self. And God, whose nature is love, was therefore inspired by His very nature not only to create, but to create and embrace something truly Other than Himself—a universe bound by finitude and mechanistic laws of cause and effect. But love finds its fullest expression in mutuality, in relationship. An inanimate universe governed by mechanistic laws and randomness cannot respond to divine love. For that, there needs to be a personal Other. And to be another person, something fundamental is required: a person must have a will of their own.

And so God didn’t just create a world that ran by rules suited to its material nature. He also created a world which, operating in terms of those rules, gave rise to persons who had a will of their own.

And the gift of Otherness that He gave to us, the potential to chart our own course rather than blindly follow His, was a gift that necessitated distance. We could not exist in the full glory of God’s presence from the start and still be able to develop into independent selves. God had to create a space between Himself and us, in which we were free to chart our own path, to mature in our own way, to tell our own stories. Hopefully, these stories would be love stories that would eventually bring God’s creatures back to Him: fully formed selves who were Other than Him, but united with Him and each other in love.

But our freedom carried with it the capacity to do otherwise. It carried with it the capacity to reject God. It carried with it the capacity to reject one another, to hate each other, to despise Otherness rather than embrace it. And, of course, because we were limited, we chose far too often to do these very things.

But the story does not end there. This infinite God, when faced with the brokenness and alienation of His creation—with the reality of sin—didn’t abandon us. Instead, He became one of us, and suffered finitude, and experienced the worst kind of cruelty that human freedom can inflict. And somehow, in the process, He redeemed the world.

The somehow is important. Dawkins’ caricature offers no sense of how this act of divine self-sacrifice might be redemptive. There are many competing accounts, of course, so let me offer just one.

It’s an account that I first came to really appreciate after stumbling across a little-known and out-of-print book from the 1950’s, psychotherapist Don Browning’s Atonement and Psychotherapy. The account isn’t one that Browning invented—it’s far older than that. What Browning did was use the metaphor of psychotherapy to elucidate this old and profound understanding of how the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus could have a truly redemptive power in the world.

Browning begins by noting that all of us desire to be judged as valuable by some standard of achievement—something that earlier theologians called “works righteousness.” We get the idea, very early on, that our worth as individuals is tied to doing the right things. And we not only internalize this idea, but we grow to like it. We want to be responsible for our own worth. If we’re valuable, we want it to be because we’ve earned it.

This idea is inimical to the concept of unconditional love. Unconditional love isn’t earned. It’s bestowed as a gift. But for those who’ve grown to measure their worth in terms of their accomplishments, unconditional love may be an unwanted gift. It’s this fact, for Browning, that ultimately perpetuates our alienation from God. Where God offers unconditional love, and invites participation in a community defined by such love, we want the world to be ruled by a law of “tit-for-tat,” a law according to which love is earned by achievement, and being loved is a sign that one deserves it.

And so we find God’s unconditional love to be an affront, and we respond with hostility. In the face of such hostility, how is God to establish a loving relationship with us? Browning’s answer is drawn from his own experience as a psychotherapist.

The job of a psychotherapist is to listen empathetically, and to offer unconditional concern and care no matter what the patient might share. The point is to create a space in which it’s safe to share anything at all without fear of rejection. But many patients become hostile precisely because of this unconditional empathetic responsiveness. They want their therapist to approve of them for their accomplishments, but the therapist treats them as valuable no matter what.

And so the patients become hostile. They lash out: “I hate you because of your empathy and understanding!” And how does the good therapist respond? By empathizing with and understanding the hostility itself. Hostility to love is defeated by loving even more.

Browning uses this psychotherapeutic practice as a metaphor for our relationship with God. God’s love for us is an unqualified acceptance and empathy. We reject it because we are in bondage to the idea that acceptance must be earned. God responds by accepting us even in the face of our rejection of Him, by empathizing even with our hostility.

But God has to go further than any therapist. The therapist is merely human, and so can be hurt by hostility. The therapist’s continued love in the face of rejection and hostility means something for that very reason. Were the therapist a transcendent being who could not be touched by the blows the patient might strike, the acceptance of those blows would mean nothing.

And so God must make Himself vulnerable to the blows we strike. He must become one of us, at our mercy. And it’s not enough that His love be unconditional in theory. To really defeat our rejection of Him, He must love us through the worst that we can and do throw at Him. His love must really persist, even as we spit on Him in fact, even as we torture Him in fact, even as we nail Him to a cross.

Therapists do not break through their patients’ hostility by having a capacity for acceptance and empathy that would persist even if tested. They break through their patients’ hostility by actually accepting and empathizing with their patients even in the face of real hostility. But the empathy of therapists has limits. They’re human, after all. If their patients begin to stalk them, even the best therapists call the police.

Ordinary hostility may be overcome by a therapist’s work, but not sin itself. Sin admits of extremes that only God’s love can endure. And it is by truly accepting these extremes, and loving us in the face of them, that God defeats the power of sin. Sin is nothing but the rejection of God and His unconditional love. And the only way for God to overcome such rejection is through the relentlessness of vulnerable love, persisting even in the face of the most hostile conceivable rejection.

Vicariously if not in fact, we all crucify God for the crime of loving us unconditionally. And when we do, we come face to face with the fact that we have failed to kill what we intended to destroy. We confront the empty tomb. And when we truly come to understand that it’s empty, when we realize that even the cross is not enough to shatter God’s unconditional love, we are transformed. We cease striving to overcome our finitude on our own, and put ourselves at last into the hands of infinite love.

Here, then, is a version of the Christian story. Unlike Dawkins’ version, it’s not a caricature—even if, perhaps, there is much about it that theologians and philosophers (and psychotherapists) might debate. But my task here isn’t to develop a fully coherent theological account of the Christian narrative. Rather, it’s to tell a version of the story that isn’t soulless and absurd. With this version of the story, I can imagine what it might look like to live as if it were true. I know many people who do so, whether or not they’ve formulated the story in quite Browning’s terms.

And my judgment, at least, is that those who live a life informed by this story are transformed by it. They experience a connection to something deep and fundamental, a wellspring of integrity, compassion, and joy, even in the face of the cruelty and suffering that the world can inflict.

And so here is my challenge to Dawkins and other atheists who want to critique religion. Let’s set aside caricatures. If Dawkins wants to challenge religion, he should take on the soul-stirring versions of the Christian story rather than the mind-numbing ones, and show that these versions lack the transformative power that they promise.

Or he should explain why the transformative potential of a religious narrative is not a good reason to choose to live as if it were true, even if such pragmatic assessment may be the only tool we have for evaluating beliefs about what transcends the empirical world.

Caricatures can be useful in calling attention to things we might not otherwise notice. But caricatures cease to be useful when they’re confused with the real thing, when the critic invites his audience to deride the real thing based on the absurdity of the caricature.

This is what Dawkins does in his little “note” to potential Free Inquiry subscribers. And it isn’t helpful. There is such a thing as helpful satire, as comic lampooning that highlights the truth. And then there are caricatures offered up as if they were the truth. When intelligent people indulge in the latter, they’ve let the lampooning spirit carry them too far.

Muslim Calligrapher Writes Luke’s Gospel for Pope

BETHLEHEM, West Bank — Muslim calligrapher Yasser Abu Saymeh has dedicated the past two months to Christian art, writing the Gospel of Luke in ornate Arabic script to be presented to Pope Benedict XVI when the Roman Catholic leader visits the Holy Land next month.

Abu Saymeh never read a New Testament text before he was picked for the prestigious assignment by Bethlehem’s Christian mayor. He said he has since come to appreciate the shared strands of the two faiths.

“I found that many of the things emphasized in Christianity exist in our religion,” said the 51-year-old Abu Saymeh.

The artist has nearly completed the Gospel’s text, which will eventually cover 65 poster-sized pages. It will be accompanied by colored drawings depicting the life of Christ, from the Nativity to the crucifixion.

The pope will receive the gift on May 13, when he visits Bethlehem as part of a pilgrimage that also includes stops in Nazareth and Jerusalem, the other focal points in the life of Jesus.

During a May 11 reception at the residence of Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, the pope will receive another rare gift of Scripture — a 300,000-word Hebrew text of the Jewish Bible inscribed on a silicon particle the size of a grain of sand, using nanotechnology.

Calligraphy is prized in Islamic cultures because Islam frowns upon figurative art as idolatrous.

Abu Saymeh was trained in Baghdad and works in a small studio in Bethlehem, a few hundred yards (meters) from the Church of the Nativity, built over Jesus’ traditional birth grotto.

He opens his workshop early every day, right after dawn prayers at a mosque near his home. The walls are decorated with handwritten verses from the Quran and Arabic poetry. Writing tools are laid out on an old table, including two dozen calligraphy pens and black, green and red ink.

Every few days, a local priest checks completed pages for accuracy. The text and drawings will be bound in deer hide and presented in a mother-of-pearl box, a specialty of Bethlehem artisans.

When it came to choosing a calligrapher for the project, the choice quickly fell on Abu Saymeh. He had won distinction in 2007, when he presented a handwritten copy of the Quran to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

He also teaches calligraphy at a local university, and is sometimes asked to testify in court as a handwriting expert, usually in fraud cases. Raised in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan, he began his career by drawing signs for what he said were peaceful demonstrations against Israel’s military occupation.

Mayor Victor Batarseh said he chose Luke among the four Gospels because he felt his writing contains the most detail about Jesus’ time in the city. And he picked Abu Saymeh not just because of his talent, but to send a message of peaceful religious coexistence.

“It’s a message to the world that Bethlehem is the city where Christianity was born,” he said. “It’s also the place of brotherly relations between Muslims and Christians.”

Relations between Christians and Muslims in Bethlehem are generally good, though there is occasional friction, usually involving either land disputes or mixed couples breaking the taboo of marrying someone from another religion.

Muslims make up two-thirds of the population in the town of 30,000 and Christian influence has been receding steadily.

The issue of interfaith relations will be high on the pontiff’s agenda during his May 8-15 tour, which includes several meetings with Muslim leaders.

Among many Muslims here resentment is still festering from 2006, when Benedict linked Islam and violence. The pope quoted a Medieval text that characterized some of the teachings of Muhammad as “evil and inhuman,” particularly “his command to spread by the sword the faith.”

Benedict long ago expressed regret for any offense his words might have caused, but his comments on the upcoming trip will be watched closely by Muslims and Chrisians in the Palestinian territories. Any misstep could upset the delicate relations between the Muslim majority and a dwindling Christian minority.

The calligrapher said he took on the mission, in part, because he wanted to send a conciliatory message and distance himself from extremists.

“I would like this to be a message from a Muslim artist through this simple work that the Muslim artist is tolerant and not aggressive, despite abuses that may come from here and there from extremists who use our religion for their own interests,” he said.

Genesis 1 and Theologies of Creation in the Hebrew Bible

from BibbiaBlog.com

Opening words are important. Authors and editors both know that the first sentence of a book needs to be arresting and engaging. It should capture the imagination of the reader, inviting the reader into the larger story or, at the very least, the larger story of the first chapter. Consider the first line of the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garca Marquez: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” In this example, the first sentence (and thus the novel as a whole) begins in two different time frames: a much later period, long after the discovery of ice—indeed, at the end of life as the colonel faces the firing squad; and much earlier, when as a boy Aureliano learned about ice with his father. These two temporal frames create interest by juxtaposition: how will we get from the first to the second? The contrast in content, too, is striking: a firing squad and a military execution of a ranking soldier, on the one hand, and a young boy, his father, and ice on the other.

In addition to arresting readers attention and engaging them in the story, openings give important background for the rest of the plot. The opening words of the Bible also do so:

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (Gen 1:1)

Like One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Bible begins in two different time frames: a later period, the time of the anonymous narrator, sometime presumably long after the creation of the world; and much earlier, at the putative moment of creation itself. Here too the juxtaposition of temporal frames creates interest and raises questions. How did the later narrator know what took place in the beginning? How will we get from that first moment to when the narrator lived? These questions indicate from the very start—the very beginning of the beginning, as it were—that the Bible is literature.

There is more to say about Genesis 1:1, however. Not even the first word of the Bible can pass by without controversy. The translation of Genesis 1:1 above is a traditional one, from the King James Version [KJV] of 1611, but it is no longer the only option. Consider the following translations from the late twentieth century:

“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth,” [NRSV]

“When God began to create heaven and earth—” [NJPSV/TANAKH]

“In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, ” [NAB]

As both the grammar and punctuation demonstrate, these three translations treat the first verse not as a self-contained sentence introducing the first chapter of Genesis (and the Bible as a whole), but as a temporal clause that introduces the first few verses. This makes the first important verb, not “created” but the verb “was” in v. 2 or even “said” in v. 3.

Here is how the NRSV puts it:

“1In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. 3Then God said, Let there be light; and there was light.” (Gen 1:1-3).

This translation—which is, linguistically speaking, just as likely if not more so than other translations—also leads to a different interpretation than the standard one in the KJV. Among other things, the temporal translation found in the NRSV and elsewhere may have something to say (or not to say, as the case may be) to the doctrine that God created all that is out of nothing. The KJV translation In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth would seem to support creation out of nothing. The temporal translations, however, would seem not to support it, and may instead imply that, at least from the perspective of the ancient Israelite narrator, when God began to create there was already something around: the earth, evidently, in some sort of amorphous and dark state, as well as a mysterious watery deep.

The translation and interpretation of Genesis 1:1 has been controversial because, seen in this light, the very first word of the very first verse of the very first chapter of the very first book of the Bible has bearing on things people care about in this specific instance, the world and how it came to be. In our own day most people, whether religious or not, look to the realm of science for hard data about the environment and cosmology. Prior to the modern period and the rise of the natural sciences, people tended to be more simple or nave about such things and tended to think (if they thought about it much at all) about the origin of the world in religious and theological terms. In the United States of America, the difference between religious and scientific ways of thinking about creation came to a head in the early twentieth-century with the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy and the Scopes or Monkey trial in 1925, which saw a young high school teacher, John Scopes, tried for teaching evolution. While the prosecutor, the well-known politician William Jennings Bryan, won the legal case, it is widely held that he lost in the court of public opinion. Be that as it may, the debate between proponents of evolution and creationists or Creation Scientists continues to this day.

The religion-science debate is in many ways rooted in the Bible and especially in the first chapter of Genesis, which describes the creation of the world in an almost poetic fashion and employs a seven-day week framework. This seven-day chronology has sometimes been interpreted literally by religious persons opposed to scientific theories such as evolution and natural selection, so that the data from fossil records, geology, dinosaurs, and the like, must be somehow fit into the seven days of the creation account in Genesis 1.

Yet despite the importance of opening words, books include much more than just the first sentence or chapter. And so, as important as the first chapter typically is to a book, and as important as Genesis 1 is to the Bible, we can find much more about creation if we keep reading. In fact, the importance of Genesis 1 is not primarily or exclusively to be found in its seven-day framework but rather in its introduction from the beginning of the theme of creation and Gods creative activity. References to the seven-day chronology of creation are, in fact, rare elsewhere in the Bible, but the verb “create”1, bārā’ in Hebrew, with God as the subject occurs no less than 38 times. But here also is just the beginning of the discussion, since the Hebrew Bible discusses creation even where that particular verb does not occur.

What is noteworthy is that regardless of whether the verb bārā’ appears these other texts dealing with creation often discuss creation in ways that are different from Genesis 1. For example, Genesis 2 discusses the creation of humans and then animals in an order that reverses that of Genesis 1, which has animals created first and only then humans. While this does not mean the two chapters are completely irreconcilable, it certainly complicates any simplistic harmonization of the accounts. Said differently, if these two versions of creation are to be reconciled, it will not be at the level of logical order or sequencing. Instead, they will need to be reconciled by other means, historically, for example. Perhaps the accounts are different because the narrator of Genesis 2 is a different one than the narrator of Genesis 1—biblical scholars have long thought that these two accounts in Genesis 1-2 are from different authors writing in different time periods, centuries removed from one another. Or perhaps the versions can be reconciled literarily or theologically in some way. After all, despite the differences, the compilers of the Hebrew Bible saw fit to include both versions in the final form of Genesis, and even placed them next to each other in immediate succession. This would seem to indicate that those responsible for the final form of the Hebrew Bible thought that both of these accounts of creation, different though they are, are important. They may not be logically consistent, but both were deemed essential testimonies about creation in ancient Israelite belief.

This point is even clearer when other passages concerning creation are taken into consideration. One example is Proverbs 8:22-31, which describes the creation of personified Wisdom as the first of Gods acts; she then helps God with the rest of creation. Another is Psalm 74:12-17, which in a piece of highly mythological poetry portrays Gods creation by means of primeval combat with the sea monster—a motif found in other ancient Near Eastern creation accounts. How do these correlate with Genesis 1’s seven-day week of creation? Quite simply, they do not. Instead, one must reckon in the Hebrew Bible with multiple perspectives and theologies of creation.

Do these different texts and theologies of creation undermine the first chapter of the book that is Genesis, which is the first chapter, as it were, of the book that is the Bible? Some might think so, but one might instead see these other texts and theologies as simply the rest of the story. The first chapter of a book, after all, is not the entire book. It serves to capture the readers imagination and to open the story in important ways that may foreshadow or intimate what is to come. But it cannot do all the work of a book or the book itself would be unnecessary.

This is probably the best way the different theologies of creation in the Hebrew Bible ought to be viewed vis-à-vis Genesis 1. Cosmology, the origins of the world, and the role of God in all of that are, after all, rather large topics. They cannot be resolved simply or easily. Many voices are needed to make sure the important points all get said. There is considerable evidence that the Hebrew Bible often preserved multiple perspectives on topics that were of crucial import in Israelite religion. Such important topics often reflect dense editorial work in key passages in the Hebrew Bible. Analogically, one might see the theme of creation as a dense literary-theological idea or trope. Multiple perspectives are needed. If we find such a scenario troubling—especially in our contemporary context, with its valuation of scientific and technological rationality—we might do well to remember that even science is a discourse marked by debate. Scientific hypotheses, no less than others, are discussed with old ones refined or rejected and new ones offered. Whether in science or religion and theology the way humans proceed toward truth is through dialogue and discussion. Rarely does only one person or one perspective have the corner on the market of truth, especially when the truth in question is a particularly thick, dense, or important one. Theologies of creation in the Bible, in brief, may well work the same way. Somewhat ironically, then, the Apostles’ Creed, widely held by many Christians, even very conservative ones, while affirming belief in God as creator, may be quite shrewd in its silence about how specifically God created.

To come full circle, first chapters and even first lines of books are important. So also with Genesis 1:1 or, for that matter, Genesis 1 as a whole. It is the unfortunate case that oftentimes readers don’t read much beyond the first chapter of a book. Much is lost if one doesn’t keep reading. When one does, however, much is gained.

Genes Show Neanderthals Split Into Different Races

from FoxNews.com
By Clara Moskowitz

We tend to think of Neanderthals as one species of cavemen-like creatures, but now scientists say there were actually at least three different subgroups of Neanderthals.

Using computer simulations to analyze DNA sequence fragments from 12 Neanderthal fossils, researchers found that the species can be separated into three, or maybe four, distinct genetic groups.

The evidence points to a subgroup of Neanderthals in Western Europe, another in Southern Europe near the Mediterranean, a third in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and possibly a fourth in Western Asia.

These groups have been postulated before, but this is the first study analyzing DNA data to look for genetic variations differentiating the subgroups.

Neanderthals were a hominid species that lived between about 130,000 and 30,000 years ago. They coexisted with humans for a while, and may even have interbred with us.

“Because the Neanderthals lived in a very vast territory, and their evolution took place over a very long time, we wonder if there were sub-populations, or if it was a unique population,” said researcher Silvana Condemi, a paleoanthropologist at the Université de la Méditerranée-CNRS-EFS in Marseille, France. “Other studies show differences between Neanderthals and modern humans. For the first time we are working just within Neanderthals and taking into account the diversity within that group.”

Condemi and Virginie Fabre and Anna Degioanni, also of the Université de la Méditerranée, describe their findings in the April 13 issue of the journal PLoS ONE.

The researchers tested various hypotheses, including that all Neanderthals belonged to a single homogeneous population, or that Neanderthals could be divided into two, three, or more subgroups.

They found that the three- and four-group model best fit the data by accounting for the genetic discrepancies seen in the samples.

The authors admit that their categorization is based on limited data, since they only have fragments of mitochondrial DNA sequences from a small sample of individuals.

Princeton University paleoanthropologist Alan Mann agreed, and said it’s too early to draw bounds around sub-populations because we don’t have any data from individuals outside of the bounds, such as from Neanderthals in Africa or Southeast Asia.

“My view is this is very interesting research but it’s very premature in our study to be able to draw any but the most generalized and preliminary conclusions,” he said in a phone interview. “I like the data they present. But at the moment we have to be extremely careful about exactly what we make of this.”

In the future, the researchers would like to compare their genetic data to what is known about physical distinctions among Neanderthals from different regions, as well as cultural differences, such as unique tool use among various populations.

“What is nice is that there are some variations in the genetics, and we see also from the bones and teeth that there is some variation,” Condemi told LiveScience. “We give a confirmation that the Neanderthals are not one homogeneous group.”

It is not known for sure what eventually caused Neanderthals to die out, while we Homo sapiens have survived to this day. Likely reasons for their demise are competition with humans and climate change.

Million-Year-Old Microbe Colony Found Under Antarctic Ice

A living time capsule of sorts has been found buried under hundreds of feet of Antarctic ice — a colony of microbes that have been sealed off from the rest of the world for more than 1.5 million years.

The finding, detailed in the April 17 issue of the journal Science, could serve as a model for how life might survive on icy planets elsewhere in the galaxy.

The microbes, which live without light or oxygen, were detected in meltwater flowing out from Taylor Glacier, one of the outlet glaciers of the vast East Antarctic Ice Sheet in the otherwise ice-free McMurdo Dry Valleys.

The Dry Valleys are considered one of Earth’s most extreme deserts, devoid of animals and complex plants.

Scientists took water samples from Blood Falls, a curious blood-red waterfall-like feature that sporadically flows from the edge of Taylor Glacier.

Analyses revealed that the glacier water held microorganisms that use sulfur compounds to extract iron in the bedrock below the glacier (this iron also accounts for the rusty hue of the water).

“When I started running the chemical analysis on [the samples], there was no oxygen. That was when this got really interesting, it was a real ‘eureka’ moment,” said researcher Jill Mikucki, who conducted the research, which was supported by the National Science Foundation, while a graduate student at Montana State University and a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University.

She currently works at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

The researchers can’t drill down to the pool that is home to the microbes because the ice is too thick and too far back from the edge of the glacier, but they think the pool is less than 3 miles (5 kilometers) across and was formed about 1.5 million to 2 million years ago.

Genetic tests suggest that the microbes are similar to ones found in marine environments today, which the researchers think are a remnant of a larger population of microbes that once lived in a fjord or sea that was cut off when sea levels fell and left the pool behind. The pool was eventually capped off by the flowing glacier.

“It’s a bit like finding a forest that nobody has seen for 1.5 million years,” said study team member Ann Pearson of Harvard. “Intriguingly, the species living there are similar to contemporary organisms, and yet quite different — a result, no doubt, of having lived in such an inhospitable environment for so long.”

The water the microbes dwell in averages a temperature of 14 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 10 degrees Celsius), but doesn’t freeze because the water is three to four times saltier than the ocean.

This briny pond “is a unique sort of time capsule from a period in Earth’s history,” Mikucki said. “I don’t know of another environment quite like this on Earth.”

Learning more about this unique environment could shed light on how microorganisms might survive on icy planets in our solar system, such as below the Martian ice caps or in the ice-covered ocean of Jupiter’s moon Europa.