standing and valiant humanist, Edd Doerr, founder of Americans for Reli-gious Liberty, thinks that, in the struggle for the separation of church and state, humanists need all the allies they can find, and that it is unwise to offend Orthodox Jews, devout Catholics, or mainline Protestants who might other-wise share their liberal sentiments. The better part of prudence, these critics insist, is not to criticize the ontological foundations of one's religious liberal bedfellows, but to work with them on joint issues, seeking to find common ground.

I can appreciate the desire to find allies. Many wish to be polite, to avoid the social ostracism that atheists and freethinkers of the past have suffered from the Establishment. Unfortunately, in America, and the rest of the world, there is almost never any skeptical criticism of the sacred cows, though humanism, secularism, irreligion, and skepticism are constantly attacked by "true believers" from pulpit and media platforms. The claim is made over and over again that morality must rest on theological grounds, that it is not possible to be moral without belief in God, that modern science proves God's existence, that the Bible is divinely inspired.

Religious humanists, like secularists, reject these premises, but they do not wish to ruffle feathers. Are humanists to abdicate responsibility by treading softly and muting vigorous criticism of such preposterous claims? There is almost no dissent today about religious doctrines. I fail to see why it is "strident" or "raucous" to challenge them. On the contrary, I submit that today's abandon-ment of the radical criticism of religion by religious humanists is a major betrayal of humanism's commitment to free inquiry.

The tragedy of the humanist move-ment, in my view, is that it has not been willing to break away from its ethnic foundations (the Society of Secular Humanistic Judaism) or its religious foundations (UUA, Ethical Culture, FRF, and AHA). It should not be held hostage to Unitarian, Judaistic, or Adlerian institutional forms, but needs to develop its own identity and integrity. If God is dead, our major concern must

be to assert that humans are alive. This does not mean that we should exalt Reason, forget Passion, and not appeal to the whole person.

I have introduced the term euprax-ophy, which has been criticized by religious humanists precisely because it gets across the point that humanism is not a religion. It is more than philos-ophy, ethics, or science, for it provides a cosmic outlook and wisdom (sophia) and it offers good, practical wisdom and guidance in life (eupraxia). Isn't it time that we finally cut the umbilical cord of religion and religiosity and attempt to take genuinely new directions for humanism?

Incidentally, most Enlightenment figures never abandoned Deism: They maintained their commitment to a belief in God. The development of a thor-oughly secular, atheist, or agnostic humanism is relatively new in human history, going back to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But as hu-manists enter the twenty-first century, we need to be, in my view, honest and truthful about who we are and what we stand for.

For a long time I followed a path similar to Radest's. I held that human-ism could become the religion of the

Gerald Larue

The Mask of Nostradamus, by James Randi (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1990). 256 pp. $19.95, cloth.

For those of us who have pondered the sayings of Nostradamus and

read the efforts by so-called experts to force what he wrote into their particular interpretations, James Randi's no-nonsense, commonsense book, The

Gerald Larue is chairman of the Com-mittee for the Scientific Examination of Religion.

future, and that, as such, it could inspire a "religious commitment." I was pro-foundly mistaken in that view. I think that it is time that humanism strike out anew and resist obfuscation with reli-gious language. This is the task of CODESH and FREE INQUIRY.

I do not mean by my above remarks not to show any appreciation for the subtle richness of Radest's analysis. I think that all humanists will profit from reading this book. I appreciate his view that we need to relate humanist values to the personal lives of individuals. Humanism is more than social protest, more than an intellectual, political, or ethical agenda. It must speak to the private soliloquies of each and every person—and we need biographies of what it has meant in the lives of individual humanists.

Radest's final plea in his book I find both eloquent and meaningful:

It is the radical claim of humanism that we can live rich and full lives while denying eternity. It is the even more radical claim that such lives are more satisfying precisely because they come closer to truthfulness and do not rely on illusions. (p. 159)

To which, I say, "Amen." •

Mask of Nostradamus, comes as a breath of fresh air.

Randi prepares the stage for his investigation by establishing Nostrada-mus's place in the historical setting of the sixteenth century. Then he discloses "the rules of the prophecy game," including: "Make lots of predictions, and hope that some come true. If they do, point to them with pride. Ignore the others." He also advises would-be prophets: "Be vague and ambiguous"; "Use lots of symbolism"; and "Predict catastrophes." By employing these guidelines at the right time and in the

Unmasking Nostradamus

Fall 1991 51

right place, predictors are bound to attract a following. Nostradamus did just that.

Randi's examination of the ways in which the seer's quatrains have been interpreted over the centuries makes it clear that devotees have not hesitated to mistranslate words or transpose letters to create results to fit their views. As part of Randi's research, he went to St. Remy, where Nostradamus was born and lived until he was sixteen. There he discovered natural and architectural features that form the basis for a reasonable and sensible interpretation of quatrains 4-27 and 5-57. Now, it becomes clear, there is nothing myste-rious or hard to decipher in these verses. As Randi writes:

The highly fanciful, detailed and precise interpretations, naming spe-cific dates, places, personalities and events, that Ionescu and other inter-preters have given this quatrain, were arrived at only after diligently search-ing through history for something—anything—that would fit the very wrong, altered, misspelled and mis-construed poetry of Nostradamus.

He asks, "Is it not more reasonable to accept the simple, likely relationship of fact and poetry that I have described above than the tortuously oblique and inventive process offered by the Nostra-damians?" (p. 189). The answer must be "Yes!"

What of Nostradamus's end-of-the-age prophecies? One need only read the labyrinthine explanation of quatrain 10-72 by Stewart Robb, who is modestly described on the cover of his book Prophecies on World Events by Nostra-damus as "the world's leading scholar on Nostradamus," to discover how far interpreters will go in mingling confused interpretations of biblical mythology with Scandinavian folklore and selected modern events to give sixteenth-century utterances meaning and rele-vance for our time. Randi's comment on the same quatrain is on target: "Ho hum" (p. 244).

This book belongs in the library of every thinking person who would like to have a ready source of delightful reading to respond to the persistent claims of the Nostradamians. •

The Book of J, translated from the Hebrew by David Rosenberg, inter-preted by Harold Bloom (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990). 340 pp. $21.95, cloth.

Traditionally, devout Jews and Christians have believed that Moses

was the author of the first five books of the Bible, known as the Torah or Pentateuch. However, numerous anach-ronisms, discrepancies, and duplications as well as differences in style and vocabulary within the Pentateuch have led virtually all modern biblical scholars to agree that it is a composite work. Most of these scholars support the theory that the Pentateuch was formed by weaving together four distinct documents, or sources, that were written down in stages from the time of the monarchy (c. 1020-587 B.C.E.) through that of the Babylonian Exile and the Restoration (c. 587-400 B.c.E.). One of these sources—in fact, the one generally thought to be the oldest—is customarily called "J" (for the "Yahwist" or "Jahwist').

The Book of J contains a new recon-struction, translation, and interpreta-tion of the Yahwist's work (the ancient "Book of J") separated from the surrounding material added to it by later redactors. Contrary to Grove Weiden-feld's claims, this effort does not represent the first time J has been lifted from its context and studied in isolation. Peter F. Ellis's The Yahwist: The Bible's First Theologian (1968) contained The Jerusalem Bible translation of J and a commentary upon it. The Bible's First

William H. Stiebing, Jr., is a professor of history at the University of New Orleans. He is the author of Out of the Desert? Archaeology and the Exodus Conquest Narratives (Prometheus Books, 1989).

History (1989) by Robert Coote and David Ord also examined J. However, Harold Bloom does not mention either of these works.

David Rosenberg's idiosyncratic translation of the J material not only departs from the wording of previous translations, but also deliberately uses shifting tenses and peculiar word order for effect. He sometimes succeeds in giving the English reader a sense of the original word plays in the Hebrew—for example, when he has Yahweh "baffle" human language at Bavel (the Hebrew pronounciation of Babel or Babylon), where people were building a tower to reach the sky (Genesis 11:1-9). But occasionally he introduces word plays in English that are not present in the Hebrew (for example, his repetition of the word broken in the first few verses of the story of the rape of Dinah, p. 116). In general, Rosenberg's translation does little justice to the flow of J's prose and to this ancient writer's generally acknowledged ability as a storyteller. Worse, his version is often more a paraphrase than a translation. Rosen-berg claims that he "wanted to avoid the false simplicity that modern trans-lations deliver with smooth clichés, awkward idioms, and undistinguished sound" (p. 329). Yet much of the irony and complexity in his English version seems to have been read into the original rather than translated from it. Any of the recent English translations of the Bible provides a more accurate and more readable version of the original than does Rosenberg's translation.

However, it is Bloom's analysis of J—rather than Rosenberg's translation—that has raised the most controversy and made the book a best seller. Bloom contends that J was a female member of the royal court, perhaps a grand-daughter of David, writing during the reign of Solomon's son, Rehoboam (c. 922-915 B.c.E.). The possibility that J was a woman was first broached by

The Origins of the Pentateuch William H. Stiebing, Jr.

52 FREE INQUIRY