Heaven is and has always been an extension of our deepest desires for peace and security. Heaven has never been a place of intense pleasures, sexual or otherwise, but of tranquility, based primarily on biophilia, which is the love of nature, that is, its peaceful aspects.

I thought about this when I remembered a hymn we used to sing in our little fundamentalist church long ago:

 

There’s a city of light where there cometh no night

For the sun never sets in the sky

In the Bible we’re told that the streets are pure gold

And a cool gentle river runs by.

 

Little children will play and our hearts will be gay

As we stroll through that city of gold

No more dying up there, no more sorrows to bear

And nobody will be feeble and old.

 

This is based on symbolism from the end of Revelation, which itself is based on Ezekiel. It was not meant to be taken literally. But being fundamentalists, we had to argue over it. Revelation does not indicate that Heaven has streets, plural, but just one street. I wonder if the streets-faction split away from the street-faction.

This song sounds a lot like the place I live now, a suburb outside of Strasbourg, France. There is very little crime, and my wife and I can walk anywhere without fear. Most people are polite, and the socialist society takes care of all of our needs. A situation such as this has been extremely rare in human history, including French history. The European Union has come closer to being heaven on Earth than any group of humans has ever been; and it won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012. Right near our house, our favorite place to walk is along the Ill River, which is gentle and cool, just as in the song. Its flow is almost constant, varying by about 15 cm between rains and droughts, at least during the two years we have been here. The river we lived near in Tulsa varied from dry sand to flood stage within weeks. Partly the gentle flow of water in the Ill is natural, but is also because there is a canal system that regulates water flow in the rivers Ill, Muhlwasser, and Aar.

 

France is politically more like Heaven than anywhere else I know about. Racial strife occurs, but it is very quiet. France absorbs immigrants but requires them to become French. All of the hijab-wearing and African women around here speak French (not surprising, since they come from former French colonies). A recent advertising campaign showed Muslim and African women, and indicated that people frequently asked them, even politely, Where are you from? The correct answer, said the advertisement, was, I’m from here. As in our idea of Heaven, people from everywhere blend together.

The song makes Heaven sound like such a wonderful place that one can overlook some obvious problems. If little children are playing, does that mean they were children when they died? And will they remain children forever and never grow up? This is a question without a logical answer and lends itself only to humor, such as what Mark Twain used in Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.

Anyway, I thought I would send you greetings from Heaven.

Elon Musk's Carbon Footprint

 

Or, maybe, butt-print.

Try putting “Elon Musk carbon footprint” into a search engine. You will find plenty. This is, you realize, the world’s richest man, who just managed to talk his company into giving Him a trillion-dollar pay package. This is all money that Tesla is not going to spend on making their products innovative and safe (hint to investors).

You will get an answer right away. According to PC Magazine, “Elon Musk's two private jets alone—not including his emissions from other sources—generate 5,497 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, or an average of 15 tonnes per day. This is equal to 11 average people's emissions in their entire lifetimes.” A tonne is a metric ton, that is, a thousand kilograms. Then you can click on a Guardian article that explains, worldwide, “Twelve billionaires’ climate emissions outpollute 2.1 million homes.” And that article is even out of date; it has gotten worse.

As if you did not already have enough reasons to hate Elon Musk. Imagine him trying to tell a government how to be more efficient.

But we will get nowhere complaining about how the richest people not only waste money while millions of people suffer, or complaining about how the rich do not deserve to be millions of times richer than the average person. Maybe a little, but not a million times. There is a serious point here.

The fault for global warming, caused by carbon emissions, is primarily due to rich nations (like America) and rich people in those rich nations. China emits more carbon than America, but it has over a billion people. The average Chinese person does not emit, directly or indirectly, as much carbon as an average American. I drove a small car when I was living in America, and my “guilt” was much less than an average American, certainly a rich American.

It is clear that one major contributor to global warming is that so many Americans are so rich and wasteful. You knew that. I just want to give you a couple of numbers to consider.

In France, where I now live, the richest ten percent are responsible for 31.2 percent of carbon emissions. But in America, the richest ten percent are responsible for 84.5 percent of carbon emissions. What this means is that rich Americans are really, really rich and wasteful. America needs to become more like France, in which the rich people (at least, the ones who live around Strasbourg) have only moderately showy wealth and are only moderately wasteful.

As long as rich Americans continue to be joyously wasteful, then there will be no solution to the problem of global warming.

American wasteful wealth and inefficiency cannot possibly be in accordance with any serious religious ethics, Christian or otherwise.

Washing Dishes in Heaven?

Especially after reading what Mark Twain wrote about Captain Stormfield’s visit to Heaven, I used to think (even when I was conventionally religious) that the Christian version of Heaven sounded pretty boring, certainly not someplace that a spirit with a conscious mind would want to spend eternity. Strumming harps and singing hymns nonstop for eternity? Remember that spirits do not need to sleep and, according to Revelation, there is no sunrise or sunset in Heaven. How could anyone think up such a version of eternity, much less desire it?

But experience can teach us differently. At least it did in my case. May Day is a serious national holiday in France; even the trams do not run in Strasbourg. Everybody stays home and eats with their families and friends. You cannot have barbecues on apartment balconies, but there are thousands of garden plots (jardins familiaux), rented long-term by families, that allow barbecues, and they were all smoking away on May Day this year. My extended French family was no exception. Instead of a rented garden area, one of the elder uncles has a house and yard in a little town near Strasbourg, where he and his wife used to spend the summers. They now live in the city but their house is available for family gatherings. The whole family pitches in to keep the the fruit trees trimmed. They maintain electricity and water there, though the house is usually empty.

And didn’t we have a fine lunch there on May Day. Whenever my son-in-law’s father is there, we have wonderful barbecue. He was elsewhere on this day, so we just had soup. But it was the finest split-pea soup I’ve ever had, made by my son-in-law’s aunt. Even without the fine beer and wine, I would have been drowsy afterwards. Drowsy, but unlike the uncle, I did not sleep through the early afternoon. I was just awake enough to watch the kids playing. I felt an amniotic fluid of goodwill washing over me which I could not have put into words even if I had tried to do so. The breeze was just slight enough, and just the right temperature, to make me feel as good as I have ever felt in my life. It occurred to me that this state of mindless pleasure might be what Heaven is like, if there is one.

And then the women, and a few men (not us elderly ones) washed dishes. The kitchen and its sink were cold and dark, so they moved the operation out into the yard under the shade. Washing, rinsing, drying all occurred on folding tables. They were having a good time. Of course this seemed heavenly to me, sitting as I was in perfect comfort and being served by them. But I realized even at the time that, maybe the next time, I would enjoy helping out with the dishes. It was not the experience of being served that was pleasurable to me, but the experience of being in a family where everyone enjoyed serving everyone else.

In theological Heaven, no one has to eat. If there are endless banquets, the serving ware either magically vanishes or cleans itself, I suppose. No one has ever written a theological treatise on heavenly dishwashing. But the indolence of letting other people, or letting magic, take care of all our needs is not what I was enjoying. Maybe instead of Heaven being a place of perfect rest, as the hymns say (“There is a place of quiet rest near to the heart of God…”) (“…while the peaceful, happy moments roll…”), it is a place of endless cyclical mutual service.

And there must be some exercise in Heaven, as well. I like to imagine long hikes in wooded vales and over mountaintops, all without muscle pain. Dream on, you say? Thank you, I believe I will.

Yet Another Reason for Conservatives to Hate Global Warming Science

Most scientists, particularly those whose research has established the science of global warming, tend to be on the political left. They have been disproportionately targeted for the termination of federal government positions and funding, under the anti-global-warming leadership of Donald Trump. The outspoken advocacy of global warming science by former Vice President Al Gore particularly motivated conservatives to hate global warming science.

Well, I just ran across a new reason for conservatives to hate global warming science. The possibility of global warming was first discovered by a woman scientist.

And no ordinary woman scientist. She was a vocal advocate of women’s rights, and signed the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. She trespassed into the male territory of science and invention, and then she wanted to vote, too.

Eunice Newton Foote’s experimental demonstration of the possibility of global warming was very simple, and would today be considered simplistic, but it was valid. She took glass cylinders, used an air pump to remove the air, then put air into one cylinder, hydrogen gas into another, and carbon dioxide gas into a third. She had thermometers in the cylinders. (The actual experiment was a little more complicated.) When they had reached temperature equilibrium, she placed them in bright sunlight. The glass trapped the heat of the sun inside the cylinders—that is why it is called the greenhouse effect. The cylinder with carbon dioxide got much hotter than the others, reaching 125 degrees F. This cylinder also took longer than the others to cool off after being removed from the sun. She concluded not only that carbon dioxide held solar heat very well (actually, the infra-red radiation from objects that had warmed in the sun, and, further, that at times when the Earth’s atmosphere had more carbon dioxide—whether in the past or the future—the climate would have been or would be warmer. Years before John Tyndall, and a half century before Svante Arrhenius, who usually get the credit for the discovery of global warming, Eunice Newton Foote had it figured out. Her research, though it remained obscure, did get published. It was presented to the major American scientific society in 1856, though she avoided notoriety by having a man present it for her.

 

 This graphic shows Foote, two of her glass jars, and the sun.

It was difficult, in the nineteenth century, for a woman to publish her own scientific findings, but some, including Eunice Newton Foote, managed to do so. It was legally impossible for a woman inventor to patent her own inventions, because she did not have the legal right to defend her patents from infringement in court. This is why Eunice Newton Foote, like other woman inventors, patented her inventions under her husband’s name. Fortunately Eunice had a supportive husband who was happy to promote her work.

Science, and the world, are better when women are given creative freedom. Most modern conservatives believe this, but they disapprove strongly of modern women who take Foote’s role in modern society.

Darwin Climbs a Cathedral

When I started making a video on the platform halfway up the cathedral in Strasbourg (which is the highest point that is open to the public and which can be reached on foot), I wondered how I could possibly tie it in with science. My YouTube channel, after all, is about science. I cannot simply post nice tourist videos showing the cathedral spire and the roofs of new and old Strasbourg.

But it didn’t take me long to come up with a science angle for the video. When they started building the cathedral in 1015, no one knew how old or big the world, or certainly the universe, was. People, especially the laborers who built the cathedral, lived in a cloak of darkness. Any question that could not be answered by the church was not worth asking. Scholars knew the world was not flat, but it might as well have been.

The builders kept adding to the height of the cathedral, and it reached its current height in 1439. This was before Copernicus was born. For over a century afterwards, people believed the sun, moon, and stars orbited around the Earth which was the center of God’s attention. From 1647 to 1874, the cathedral in Strasbourg was the tallest structure in the world. It is still the tallest building that was constructed entirely in the Middle Ages.

When Copernicus died, the idea that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the solar system was still heresy. But within a century, all of that changed. By the time the current Horlogue Astronomique (astronomical clock) was installed on the ground floor of the cathedral in 1843, everyone knew the planets orbited around the sun and that Copernicus was right. The giant clock even had the planets that were known at the time moving around the sun, and even had a portrait of Copernicus, the man the church would have killed in 1543 except that he was already dead. Today the Catholic Church celebrates the Copernican view of the universe. The Vatican even has an observatory and an official astronomer.

 

But by the time the cathedral had already reached its full height, the church and world were still in scientific darkness.

Another thing you can tell by looking at the roofs of Strasbourg from the cathedral is that Strasbourg has existed for a long time, at least since Roman times, when it was called Argentoratum (city of silver). Everyone is aware of the ancient legacy of Europe, Asia, and even Africa and Central and South America. But North America also had an ancient legacy of civilization. As I explain in my recent book Forgotten Landscapes, the big cities of North America (such as Cahokia and Spiro) have been forgotten by nearly everyone. Cahokia is now just some mounds of dirt, and Spiro not even that. The historical legacy of my Native American ancestors has been effaced from the surface of the planet.