My YouTube Videos on the Bible

Many sincere Christians read the Bible with the conviction that the world’s most popular book is God’s Word revealed to mankind for the eternal salvation of the human race. Those of the Jewish tradition consider the Torah (the first five books of the Bible), along with other pre-Christian writings, as divinely inspired by Yahweh. 

Even the Koran, the sacred book of Islam, admits of divine intervention by Allah in the history of mankind, using names and stories, found in the Bible, familiar to Jews and Christians alike, as an historical basis for the early covenant with mankind by Allah.

Yet in our modern world, there are those who find the Bible a work filled with historical improbabilities. Others question the works included in the Bible as an incomplete list, referring to writings that were left out of the canon, or list, of both the Old and New Testaments.

Recent sensational stories about Jesus, taken from the Gospel of Thomas, or the hypothesis that Jesus was married and sired children, as suggested in Brown’s DaVinci Code and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene — even discoveries that purport to be ossuaries with the bones of Jesus and his family — have all made the New Testament story of the Christ’s bodily resurrection from the dead and ascension into heaven appear to be an incredible tale that cannot stand up to archeological discoveries and scientific analysis.

Confronted with these non-traditional views about biblical works, many Christians retreat into a sort of shell, comforted by their faith in the inerrancy of the Bible, and dismiss any questioning of the Bible’s accuracy  as the poison of the age in which we live. Christian fundamentalism is on the rise, and many Christians prefer to view the Bible as what they have been taught to believe about it — the Bible is God’s Word, and that’s that.

Yet is there a scholarly method of understanding the Bible that makes sense of some of the improbabilities, historical contradictions, and imperfect morality found especially in the Old Testament? Yes, there is. Mainline Christian scholars call it the “Historical-Critical Method.”

Definitions draw limits around concepts. No definition is able to be all-inclusive in its few words, no matter how skillfully composed. However, without definitions, there would be indeterminate communication, and misunderstandings would be the rule.

To define the historical-critical method as it applies to understanding the Bible, one might say it is the analytical method biblical scholars use to shed light on the historical processes which resulted in biblical works. The method studies the biblical texts much the same as scholars who study ancient texts from pagan cultures. Without denying the divine revelation attributed to the Bible, scholars using the historical-critical method seek to go back in time and become familiar with the way in which biblical texts were written.

Obviously, God did not use high definition television with Dolby sound to reveal his word to mankind, but rather, by today’s standards of communication, a crude, often imperfect, system of revelation which relied on human beings in various times and places to translate that revelation to the written record of their times.
So, when confronted with the similarities of the birth of Moses, for example, with that of the Babylonian King Sargon thousands of years before, the scholar using the historical-critical method asks the question, “Did the human author, or authors, of Exodus draw upon a well-known story from pagan sources to fabricate an historical event which his readers would recognize?”

Was there anything known about Moses’ birth, or did the author of Exodus have a purpose in describing an event which no one can forget — a cleverly written story of the rescue of an infant who was about to be killed by a ruler, fearful of losing control?

I recently completed a six-part series on “Understanding the Bible Using the Historical-Critical Method.” It’s free and viewable on YouTube, with each session running under half an hour.

1) The Canons, or lists, of Biblical books
2) The Apochrypha
3) Literal vs. Historical-Critical Interpretation
4) The Abrahamic and Mosaic Stories
5) The “Writings” – Historical and Didactic
6) The Gospels, Revelation, and Numeric Symbolism

Ipadology

We Americans are proud of our innovative nature. After all, what country has sent men to the moon? American inventions include the teleprompter, the airbag, the barcode, the atomic bomb, the laser, the Internet, the CD and CCD, the PC, WiFi, the mobile phone, and Post-it note pads, among countless other innovations.

I own an iPad 2 and I think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.

However, in doing the research on my own word invention…“iPadology,”…or the study of the iPad, I found some disconcerting information on how and where the stellar iPad is made.

Do you think that the iPad is made in the USA? Yes and no. The technology comes from California at Apple headquarters. However, the assembly of most iPads is done in China, as is that of iPhones and iPods.
In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world.

However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77.

Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chinese Chengdu plant.

“If Apple was warned, and didn’t act, that’s reprehensible,” said Nicholas Ashford, a former chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a group that advises the United States Labor Department. “But what’s morally repugnant in one country is accepted business practices in another, and companies take advantage of that.”

“Apple never cared about anything other than increasing product quality and decreasing production cost,” said Li Mingqi, who until April worked in management at Foxconn Technology, one of Apple’s most important manufacturing partners. Mr. Li, who is suing Foxconn over his dismissal, helped manage the Chengdu factory where the explosion occurred.

“Workers’ welfare has nothing to do with their interests,” he said.

According to a New York Times report, Apple has said it requires every discovered labor violation to be remedied, and suppliers that refuse are terminated. Privately, however, some former executives concede that finding new suppliers is time-consuming and costly. Foxconn is one of the few manufacturers in the world with the scale to build sufficient numbers of iPhones and iPads. So Apple is “not going to leave Foxconn and they’re not going to leave China,” said Heather White, a research fellow at Harvard and a former member of the Monitoring International Labor Standards committee at the National Academy of Sciences. “There’s a lot of rationalization.”

In a prior blog, I virtually canonized Steve Jobs. However, as the CEO of Apple he had to know that worker conditions in China were abysmal.

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

When asked how the more than 700,000 Apple jobs overseas could come back to the US, Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said. The questioner was the President.

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option.

A former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves.  Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.



A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation, and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

The Apple outsourcing story is the reason jobs are lost in the US. When I taught Global Issues a decade ago, I could see what globalization was already doing. Wages in the US, with decades of influence by unions, were way out of balance with wages in countries like China, Mexico, and India.

The other day I listened to Donald Trump claim that the US is rebuilding China. He’s right. That’s because nothing like Foxconn City exists in the United States.

The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day.

How can US companies afford to manufacture anything in the US?

I love my iPad. How it got into my hands stinks.