Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [40]
If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son, who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they chastise him, will not give heed to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, “This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.” Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones; so you shall purge the evil from your midst; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.
Within an hour my webmeister, Nick Gerlich, had the passage up on our Web page, and early that evening I found myself back on the air with Graf and my challenger. I fully expected that either he would not appear on the show or he would waffle and not pay up. I was wrong on both counts. Not only was he on the air, he spoiled Graf’s hope for a good talk-radio on-air confrontation when he confessed: “There is nothing to dispute. I was wrong. I will pay the Skeptics Society one hundred dollars.” And he did. I was blown away. This almost never happens. It takes considerable intellectual courage and honesty to admit you are wrong, and this gentleman did so with grace. He did wish to make a couple of other points, which included the fact that Jesus’ new philosophy of ethics overrode much of Old Testament morality by calling for ecumenical acceptance of those outside of our group and more humane responses to sinners and wrongdoers. (I even received a call the next morning from a woman making the same point, who also kindly offered to pray for me to accept Jesus as my savior.)
I agreed with the radio caller, but pointed out that Christians typically pick and choose biblical passages without consistency, including and especially from the Old Testament, and that there are many more Old Testament rules that make one blanch and feel embarrassed for believers. For example, for emancipated women thinking of adorning themselves in business attire that may resemble men’s business ware (or for guys who dig cross-dressing), Deuteronomy 22:5 admonishes: “A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God.”
Even worse than stoning disobedient children (for it also encompasses a wide range of misogynistic attitudes) is how to deal with virginal and nonvirginal women. According to Deuteronomy 22:13-21, for all you men who married a nonvirgin, you’ve got to turn in your wife immediately for a proper stoning. In the following passage, for those not accustomed to reading between the biblical lines, the phrase “goes in to her” should be taken literally, and “the tokens of virginity” means the hymen and the blood on the sheet from a virgin’s first sexual experience; the key passage about stoning her to death is at the end.
If any man takes a wife, and goes in to her, and then spurns her, and charges her with shameful conduct, and brings an evil name upon her, saying, “I took this woman, and when I came near her, I did not find in her the tokens of virginity,” then the father of the young woman and her mother shall take and bring out the tokens of her virginity to the elders of the city in the gate; and the father of the young woman shall say to the elders, “I gave my daughter to this man to wife, and he spurns her; and lo, he has made shameful charges against her, saying, ‘I did not find in your daughter the tokens of virginity,’ And yet these are the tokens of my daughter’s virginity,” And they shall spread the garment before the elders of the city. Then the elders of that city shall take the man and whip him; and they