Blog-IT-o ergo sum

	4/25/2006

Should anyone trust Bill Moyers?

Couldn't be there last week for the Bill Moyers speech at Guilford College in Greensboro, but I did pick it up on the re-broadcast on WUNC .

After opening with several self-effacing anecdotes to make it appear that being famous is not really all that important to him, Mr. Moyers took up the first topic of his speech: religion.

Now I am not a Bible scholar, but I was shocked at how Moyers, who professes to be a Baptist and a legitimate journalist, could be so willing to present a totally distorted view of key events in the most read book in the history of civilization and not expect to be fact checked on his points.

As wars and schisms will attest to, certainly there are many "facts" open for debate even among the faithful, but Moyers did not go after these. Instead he had the audacity to suggest novel interpretations of three Biblical accounts that even kids in Bible school could take him apart on.

Per Moyers...

Why Cain slew Abel:

Because a fickle God played favorites by preferring Abel's offering over Cain's. The implication being that the death of Abel was partially God's fault for shunning Cain and creating jealousy in his heart.

The actual passage in the Bible says that God accepted Abel's offering but not Cain's. If the documentarian Moyer's had bothered to investigate the matter two lines further into the written account he would have noted the following address of God to Cain: "Why art thou wroth? And, why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted?

I could be wrong here, but I think God was trying to tell Cain there was a reason, other than a whim of favoritism, that Cain's offering was not accepted.

Noah the unmerciful:

Mr. Moyers thinks the matter should be discussed as to the social responsibility Noah neglected when he failed warn his fellow man of the fate that was to befall them. Moyers' point was that just because Noah was following orders from God, it did not mean he should be absolved of all responsibility for showing compassion and mercy to those about to be swept away in the Flood.

However, if Moyers spent some time setting up the actual scene based on the facts as documented, it becomes rather difficult to suggest Noah had an option here. The Arc was not built in a day. The Ark was built on dry land. If you had a neighbor engaged in such a project, how inclined would you be to listen to his advice? Would you be more inclined to listen to him after he spent several days marching pairs of beasts from all over creation into the Ark? Would you start listening as he brought his own family into the Arc...just before he closed and sealed the door shut behind him?

Now if you really started to have second thoughts on how things might play out, what would you have done during the seven days Noah and his family where shut up in the Ark before the first drop of rain fell? Apparently, if the Biblical record is accurate, no one thought to ask God for mercy, let alone Noah. Moyers has a lot of nerve on this one.

Noah the drunken bum:

I listened to Moyers in disbelief twice on this just to make sure I heard him right. Moyers finds it ironic that the one patriarch God deemed righteous enough to save in the Flood, and who upon his deliverance to dry land immediately builds an alter to make a sacrifice, turns right around and gets drunk on his naked ass.

Moyers' delivered his point on the basis that the alter sacrifice and the decision to get drunk were near simultaneous events. Indeed in the Bible these two events were separated by only a few short sentences. However, one of those sentences is this: "And Noah became a farmer and planted a vineyard."

Now perhaps Moyers believes this was one of the first miracles of the Bible in that a seed could be planted a vine grow, a crop harvested, grapes be crushed and a wine fermented all within short order of hitting dry land and building an alter to God.

Feel free to listen to Moyers as many times as you wish, but you will not find justification for his position that the righteous Noah turned to drink right after honoring God with a sacrifice at the alter. I am sure such short lived piety happens all the time in real life. But, that was not the way it went down in this Biblical case. Moyers is massaging the facts to reach the foregone conclusion he wishes to draw. (We don't even have to mention that Moyers must not have been paying attention during all his appearances in church when the preacher would have proclaimed that even the most righteous fall short of being worthy of God's grace.)

Am I being too unforgiving to suggest that a Bill Moyers documentary should not be trusted at face value?

3:05:47 PM

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