A Youthful Take on the Bible…
The New Testament According to Rook Hawkins From Philly's Notorious Rational Responders,
A Young Truth-Seeker Who Translated the Bible from Greek
You may know them as the notorious Rational Response Squad, famous for the Blasphemy Challenge, outrageous statements, the Channel 7 Nightline Debate, and public tussles with rap singers. They are our bad boys, the Hell's Angels of the Atheist movement. But, surprise, they are also self-made intellectuals, experts on the bible, quite rational about what they believe in—and courageous enough to put it on the air. They are Howard Stern turned into Sam Harris; they are the blue-collar Dawkinses, the leather Dennetts and, man…they are good.
Rook Hawkins comes to us from this milieu. Rook, 25, wanted to become a priest when he was attending a catholic high school in Pennsylvania near the Jersey border. But a friendly, disenchanted priest quietly gave him St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas to read. "I was getting different perspectives from them about the bible and it wasn't matching what I was reading in the bible," he says. It opened the young, would-be seminarian's eyes. And one day, Rook, becoming disenchanted with christianity itself, refused to stand for prayer in his high school theology class.
Well, you know the drill: First he was exiled to the library during the theology class for the whole semester. ("I learned a lot more there than I did in class"), then he was "kicked out" of the catholic school. But his library habit persisted. "I had a deep-rooted interest in the bible. I wanted to learn why it exists, how it was formed, what was the process of canonization, who wrote the books of the bible, what was their intention." He studied the bible intensively, perusing outside sources, ancient texts, monographs, teaching himself Greek so he could translate the New Testament from the Greek. "I spent a few years translating the new testament from the Greek," he notes, a bit modestly. Wait a minute. That's like a Hell's Angel taking up crochet.
Atheism's First Online Radio Show
When he was 20, Rook met Brian Sapient and the rest is history. Their once-a week online Atheist radio program attracts some 600 to 1,000 listeners from 39 states and several foreign countries every Wednesday. Their Blasphemy Challenge, in which young people renounce god publicly onscreen, has gotten wide publicity, some of it good. Today the two young men live together in the same house with their girlfriends, communal style, with their workplace on the main floor.
Rook has never ceased his deep-rooted study of the New Testament, particularly the Gospels. On Sunday, he will tell New York City Atheists why the authors of the gospels wrote them as entertaining Jewish fiction, and why he defends the position that Jesus never existed. This young, vibrant theorist and bible specialist, with an authority born of in-depth immersion in the bible, will share with us what he, an autodidact, has spent years uncovering about the bible's origins.
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New York City Atheists is a not-for-profit education and activist association dedicated to separation of church and state and the right to be non-religious.
It is open to all—freethinkers, humanists, skeptics and doubters as well as those who are questioning and searching. NYCA is an affiliate of American Atheists, Atheist Alliance International and the Center for Atheism.
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Book Club / Library
After brunch, we move to the NYCA Library located on East 79th Street.
We continue discussing Christopher Hitchens' god is not Great, Chapter 10: "The Tawdriness of the Miraculous and the Decline of Hell."
Need not have read the assignment to participate
“ The speaker's thesis is not highly original, but I think he has contributed to the scholarship on the subject. We'll just have to see what the peer reviewers say. ”
Jane Everhart (+4 guests)“ Big crowd, nice people. The talk by Rook Hawkins of Philly's Rational Response Squad was informative & deeply researched. It was surprising to see that this young man, one of Atheism's "Bad Boys," turned out to be a nice, respectable, well-informed, gracious young man who was accompanied by his Dad. Viva the Nice Bad Boys! ”
KENNETH BRONSTEIN (+10 guests)“ ROOK WAS TERRIFIC VERY KNOWLEDGEABLE ”
“ The young speaker seemed to know his topic but could not limit the scope of his presentation and tried to present too much with the limited time at his diposal. As a result what could have been a more focussed and pointed attack on the Bible became verbose, diffuse, and redundant. Having said that, I must admit that his presentation was scholarly. Too much perhaps for the time available. Having to pack too much information in a limited time, he also was forced to talk too fast ( which did not help clarity ). ”
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