Now it’s not as if Hector Avalos really needs any defense, least of all from me. Longtime readers may remember that I disagreed pretty strongly with some things that Hector wrote in the SBL Forum last summer. Hector himself graciously sent a long reply, and to my shame I have not kept up my end of the dialogue. But despite the fact that have disagreed with Hector in the past, and despite the fact that my comments are, well, nothing more than my comments, I just cannot sit by without responding to the Discovery Institute’s scurrilous attacks on Hector.

Hector was recently awarded tenure promoted to full professor (thanks to Pim van Meurs for the correction in the comments below) at Iowa State University (for which congratulations are in order, but are not the main point of this post). During the same round of promotion-and-tenure considerations, however, one Guillermo Gonzalez was denied tenure. Gonzalez is a Senior Fellow of the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture—an arm of the Discovery Institute—so naturally the “Intelligent Design” crowd has mounted an all-out attempt to paint Gonzalez’s failure to receive tenure as an ideological move against Gonzalez because of his support for “Intelligent Design.” Plenty has been written in the blogosphere in defense of Iowa State’s denial of tenure to Gonzalez, and that’s not what I’m going to write about here. However, as part of their case (in the court of public opinion) against Iowa State, the Discovery Institute have decided to attack Hector Avalos, and that’s just not right.

On the Discovery Institute’s “Evolution News and Views” web site, the headline screams, “Iowa State Promotes Atheist Professor Who Equates Bible with Mein Kampf While Denying Tenure to ID Astronomer.” Now this is really curious, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s rank hypocrisy: the DI wants to claim that Gonzalez has been persecuted for his ideology, and so their tactic is—you guessed it—to attempt to persecute Hector for his ideology. Second, it’s rank hypocrisy: the DI constantly claims that ID is about science, not about religion, so why should they care one whit about Hector’s view of the Bible?

I suppose that Hector would be a natural target for the ID crowd, since he was apparently instrumental in drafting and promoting an anti-ID petition at Iowa State a couple of years ago. Well, good for Hector! I’ve disagreed with him on other topics, but had I been on Iowa State’s faculty, I would have been his ally in opposition to ID.

The DI web “report” makes much of Hector’s comparisons, in his 2005 book Fighting Words, between the Bible and Mein Kampf (though I think the DI presents the case too simplistically). I’ll go ahead and quote the DI web page at length:

Just how extreme Avalos’s view of the Bible is can be seen in his previous book, Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence (2005), in which he repeatedly equates the Bible with Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Indeed, in a section of the book titled “Scripture: A Zero-Tolerance Argument,” Avalos actually suggests that the Bible is worse than Mein Kampf:

In fact, Mein Kampf does not contain a single explicit command for genocide equivalent to those found in the Hebrew Bible… Thus, if all of Mein Kampf is to be rejected simply for its implied genocidal policies, we should certainly reject all of the Bible for some of its explicit and blatant genocidal policies. [p. 363]

At other points, Avalos appears to blame Jewish people for Hitler’s attempt to exterminate them, locating the origins of the Holocaust in what he calls “Hebrew racism.” Consider the following passages:

“The purpose here is to show that the Nazi policy of genocide was based on premises quite similar to those in the Hebrew Bible.” [p. 316]

“the Nazi Holocaust represents the synthesis of attitudes found in both the New Testament and the Hebrew scriptures.” [p. 318]

“[Scholars Katz and Wolpoff] fail to see the parallels between certain practices promulgated in the Hebrew Bible itself. Indeed, the supreme irony of the Holocaust is that the genocidal policies first systematically enunciated in the Hebrew scriptures were reversed by the Nazis. Nazi ideology simply had better technology to do what biblical authors had said they would do to their enemies.” [pp. 318-319]

“Hitler saw himself as trying to counteract Hebrew racism, which he saw as the main counterpart and enemy of the German race.” [p. 319]

As if these statements were not enough …

What’s telling here is that, despite their outrage, the best critique the DI can muster is a half-hearted attempt at something resembling post-Holocaust sensitivity. They do not, and indeed could not argue with intellectual integrity (not usually high on the list for the DI when it goes into attack mode), that Hector is wrong—because, simply put, he’s not. The Tanakh—the focus of my professional activities and a significant factor in my own religious convictions—offers up some positively genocidal texts, and not just as narratives, but as divine law. As a Christian believer, I wish that weren’t the case, but I’m not going to whitewash matters and pretend that those texts aren’t there. I have even written about this myself (but unfortunately that article sits right in the gap between the SBL’s online Semeia archive and Rosetta’s archive of older Semeia volumes). Yes, of course Hector’s comparison is provocative, but it’s also accurate.

The DI post goes on to grab a few other quotations from Fighting Words, and to present them without any analysis whatsoever. They are presented, out of context, simply for shock value. The DI is counting on readers to respond emotionally, out of offense—and is counting on readers not to bother to ask whether Hector’s statements are accurate or inaccurate. Now it just so happens that I disagree with some of Hector’s value judgments, but those value judgments are not self-evidently wrong (any more than mine are self-evidently right), and therefore tossing them up on a web page as part of a smear campaign is completely inappropriate. And William Dembski’s atrocious attempt to try to make Hector look like a dishonest CV-padder is beneath contempt.

Have I mentioned that I disagree with Hector on a number of points? He’s an atheist and I’m a believer; that alone will tell you that we don’t see eye to eye. But I am outraged by the DI’s attempts to slander a reputable and ethical scholar just because they’re upset that he got tenure when their pal didn’t.