I'm following the news regularly these days (sometimes I get exhausted from it and quit for a while), and it is, apparently, election time already. I am supposed to have an opinion regarding whom I will vote for in 2008, despite the fact that the candidates have not yet been nominated. I have decided to refuse to think about it yet. However, I am once again feeling pretty good about the differences between us. A few entries ago, I was talking about the biography of Benjamin Franklin I was reading and about the way the earliest Americans were dealing with the same dichotomy that we're still wrestling with today, which is basically the conflict between the Puritans (who believe that faith is the key to salvation as opposed to deeds or good works, that hierarchies should be respected, and that harsh judgment should be brought upon those who violate the Christian moral code) and the children of the Enlightenment (that rational, observable science should be the foundation of public policy, that morality should be based in actions and deeds rather than in religious dogma, and that all men are created equal). It made me feel better to think that our forefathers had been wrestling with all these questions that seem so irreconcilable at this moment in time and that, somehow, our American government and society have continued to function. Well, the book I've just finished is called The Jesus Dynasty by Jeffrey Tabor, and I see now that this conflict existed long before Europeans ever thought of colonizing America. His book is an exploration of early Christianity, and it's fascinating. The study of the historical Jesus - who he was and how he lived in his own cultural context - is necessarily complicated because our best historical source is the Bible, which is hardly an objective piece of scholarship. Sometimes, reading the book, I felt that Dr. Tabor had really covered all his bases; other times, I felt like he was reaching a bit towards conclusions that his evidence didn't necessarily support all that strongly. Still, even when he was guessing, it was educated guessing, with well documented sources. In the last chapter, he concludes by noting that Paul's preaching to the gentiles really turned the movement Jesus (and, before him, John the Baptist) started into two separate movements: the evangelical movement (that faith is the key to salvation as opposed to deeds or good works, that Jesus himself, God made flesh, is God's message to us as opposed to the laws and commandments of the Torah, and that Christianity was a religion with its own rules and hierarchies) and what Tabor calls "the Jesus movement" (that actions and deeds matter more than religious dogma, that Jesus' teachings, based largely on the laws and commandments given to the Jews in the Torah, are more important than Jesus himself, and that wealth and rank are meaningless compared with the kingdom of God). So what is it about humans, then? Is there a gene or something in our brains, a switch that flips one way or the other? Did the early hominids (not the Neanderthals; I can't remember the name of the ones we actually evolved from) have two schools of thought, with one adamant about making sure the tribe's hierarchy was clear and making sure the people who broke the rules got punished and the other pushing for independent thought and science? In any case, once again... we're all still here.