"Losers rule" helps explain both the Old and NewTestaments

Being an atheist, it's difficult for me to decide which is the weirdest and most unbelievable religion, because they're all weird and unbelievable.

Since I don't know a lot about Judaism, I was drawn to a piece by Adam Gopnik in the August 28, 2023 issue of The New Yorker, How the Authors of the Bible Spun Triumph from Defeat. Based on a review of a book by Jacob Wright, "Why the Bible Began," the article aided my understanding of what makes Judaism so strange.

Gopnik says that the Jews were notable losers.

The Jews were the great sufferers of the ancient world—persecuted, exiled, catastrophically defeated—and yet the tale of their special selection, and of the demiurge who, from an unbeliever’s point of view, reneged on every promise and failed them at every turn, is the most admired, influential, and permanent of all written texts. Wright’s purpose is to explain, in a new way, how and why this happened.

The easiest explanation is that it happened this way because that’s the way God wanted it to happen. But this does not lessen the need to say how it happened.

If the primary cause of the Old Testament's triumph -- which I obviously don't believe -- is viewed as the will of God, Wright argues that the secondary cause is our love of losers.

The “secondary cause” for the Bible’s triumph, in Wright’s view, can be put simply: losers rule. More people remember the record-losing ’62 Mets than the pennant-winning ’62 Yankees. Division and defeat, Wright explains, made the Bible memorable.

Successive expulsions and exiles forced the Jewish poets and prophets, like Red Sox fans of yore, to imagine defeat as a virtue, dispossession as a gift, failure today as a promise of victory tomorrow. Defeat usually compelled other ancient peoples, as it does us, to invent rationalizations for what happened. (Yes, we failed to pacify Afghanistan, but nobody could have done so.)

In the face of regular defeat, however, the Jewish scribes had to ask whether defeat wasn’t God’s will in the first place, and so opened mankind unto a new contemplative possibility: that spiritual success and failure were not to be judged on worldly terms. Nice guys, or, anyway, pious guys, finish last and should be proud of their position.

Since Jesus was a Jew, we can see this principle continuing on into the New Testament. 

How much losing is there, really, in Christianity? At first glance, the Christian story appears to reverse the polarities and make a tale of universal triumph out of the old Jewish stories of particular defeat. But is this really so?

Debates still rage over whether the Jewish figure of the “suffering servant” presaged the Christian example. Whatever scholars conclude, though, the force of the Christian example surely lies in the extremity of the deity’s abasement, tortured to death in the most humiliatingly imaginable way and left to be buried as a criminal.

The Christian fable potently compresses the Jewish stories of suffering into a single story, unfolding over a single year. Indeed, doesn’t the emotional appeal of Christianity rest on its very Jewish ritualization of extreme suffering and humiliating defeat as a prelude to divine favor?

Consider the number of images of Crucifixion (Jesus dying) in Italian churches as opposed to those of the ascension (Christ rising). Christian art centers on a moment of anguish and defeat, and this is in essence a Jewish idea.

Donald Trump isn't at all religious. He just uses religion for his own selfish and authoritarian ends. One way he does this is by appropriating the Judeo-Christian notion of noble suffering. The more political and legal trouble he gets into, the more he hopes fundamentalists will view him as a martyr.

Before and after Donald Trump’s historic indictment and arraignment, countless MAGA Republican provocateurs have been noting the Holy Week timing and blasphemously comparing Trump to Jesus.

“As Christ was crucified, and then rose again on the 3rd day, so too will Donald Trump,” tweeted one right-wing lawyer known for representing Jan. 6 insurrectionists. Other influencers making the comparison include Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, TPUSA Faith founder Charlie Kirk, and even Trump’s own attorney. Trump, himself, framed his arrest as an attack on Christians in an “emergency prayer call” on Tuesday, April 4, with televangelist and longtime aide Paula White-Cain, attorney Rudy Giuliani, and MAGA worship leader Sean Feucht.

Well, you've got to give Judaism, Christianity, and yes, Donald Trump, credit for turning weakness into strength, defeat into victory, humiliation into triumph. I don't consider that either of these religions, and certainly not Trump, deserve to be embraced for those reasons.

But as a marketing ploy, hey, it does seem that "losers rule" is effective. Most of us like a comeback story of someone who overcame difficult obstacles more than a tale of a person whose path to success had no detours or roadblocks.

Comments

[SantMat64]

With 2.4 billion followers, the world's largest religion is Christianity.
The next largest would be Islam, with 1.9 billion and growing. Along with Judaism, these are all Abrahamic religions.

If the Old Testament hasn't triumphed, how to explain these numbers? Moreover, where are the Romans and their domination of the Western world?

As for Donald Trump and those who are forever obsessed with him, take note that all the great things his successor ran on have largely been rejected by the public.

[um]

@ Santmat

The old testament and the new testament as well have offered their believers a free pass ...TO KILL ...in the bame of God, and wash their hands in inocence.

If that free pass was not there there would be no abrahamic religions and believers.

It is a human trick of the mind.
Sentient beings can only kill for food, the maintenance of the body.
To kill for other reasons, they need a "divine free pass"

It works until today.

[um]

@ Santmat

The old testament and the new testament as well have offered their believers a free pass ...TO KILL ...in the bame of God, and wash their hands in inocence.

If that free pass was not there there would be no abrahamic religions and believers.

It is a human trick of the mind.
Sentient beings can only kill for food, the maintenance of the body.
To kill for other reasons, they need a "divine free pass"

It works until today.

[um]

Imagine what would be the fate of the afghan [rural] culture in general and that of men in particular if the Taliban would not have the koran at their hand ... they would completely been crushed by women under the influences of globalization.

They have no Industry, no IT, they have nothing that resembles a western society. .. what is theirs is their medieval society based upon clans, farming, weaving and some mining.

Men would lose everything they have and are without getting anything in return, they would be worse of then beggars.

As long as that is not understood and dealt with their will be no solution and peace.

[Jack]

God is either retarded or the most evil thing that ever existed. He makes this stupid plan to create two humans only to make sure they eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and then throws them out into a desolate land and tells them to forgive their enemies after they beat the shit out of them and torture them continuously!
He kills babies, children, and mostly good poor people and anyone else he feels like murdering just to hurt good people who have fallen in love and then laughs his ass off when they suffer. He helps Evil people to rule over the world while they kill millions of people just to gain control of the Disgusting piece of shit he created. The moron does all this just so when he ends this piece of shit those he finds worthy can spend all eternity worshiping him! This guy is totally fucked up!

[Jack]

Let’s see, all you have to do is look into the past, the present, and the horror that is yet to come! Stalin, Poe, Mao, Kim Jung Un, all God’s emissaries on this earth, and many others that have tortured hundreds of millions of people especially Idi Amin one of the most brutal of god’s representatives on this putrid planet all have existed with his blessings.
God chooses a people to be his people and then makes them suffer immense pain and agony above others using his loved ones, the Nazis, who, using his people’s skin for lampshades, baking them in ovens, ..... it’s too horrible to even describe, and then claims to to be an all loving and merciful god! It makes me sick to hear such hypocrisy!
Couple all this EVIL history with what is written in the Bible and the complete and utter nonsense that plagues the world today
and the TRUTH THAT REVEALS ITSELF CANNOT BE DENIED! GOD IS FULL OF SHIT!