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.

President Trump's Columbus Day Proclamation

President Trump has proclaimed that on Columbus Day, 2025, Americans should honor Christopher Columbus as “the original American hero, a giant of Western civilization, and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the earth.”

What followed Columbus’s encounter with America in 1492 was a legacy, not of “faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue” but of conquest, disease, and slavery. While I will admit that Columbus probably did not intend the entire Native population of two continents to be slaughtered and enslaved, and all their resources grabbed by force, he certainly began the process. While we may not necessarily condemn Columbus, neither should we revere him. He was NOT the original American hero, as if the indigenous people who were already in America did not even exist—there is no mention of them in Trump’s proclamation.

To listen to Trump, you would get the impression that the white domination over Native America was a completely good thing. This is false, as I explained in my recent book Forgotten Landscapes: How Native Americans Created Pre-Columbian North America and What We Can Learn from It.. My book is not a vicious liberal attack on Columbus, but a scientific evaluation of what America was like before Columbus and what happened after him.

Native American history has, in the popular mind, largely been erased. Most Americans know nothing about Native Americans, other than as dark inconvenient people who stood in the way of white progress, and continue to do so today, as explained in detail in Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America.

We had been making progress so that even in many red states the Monday nearest to October 12 was recognized either as Columbus Day or Indigenous People’s Day. Under Trump, we have gone back to exclusively the white version. In this as in many other ways, Trump is leading us fearlessly into the twentieth century.

If you agree with Trump that Columbus was inspired completely by the desire to “spread the gospel of Jesus Christ to distant lands”; that evangelism consists of killing some of the people who had not yet heard about Jesus, enslaving others, and taking their land, then you are welcome to join President Trump in celebrating Columbus. And you should get out your guns and go on an evangelistic expedition into whatever hotspots of anti-Christianity you might choose.

Instant Gratification, Consumer Debt, and Jesus

Americans owe $1.2 trillion in credit card debt, according to the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Once you are sunk into credit card debt, it is very difficult to get out of it, as almost everyone knows. The more you owe, the higher the interest rate you get charged, which makes it even harder to pay off your debt.

Credit card debt results mostly from instant gratification. Americans want to buy whatever they want right away, and use their credit lines to do so. I carried credit card debt most of my life. I lived frugally. In my case, it was not instant gratification that I was after, so just living frugally, as I tried to do, is not a guarantee of freedom from credit card debt. I finally paid it off, which saved me a lot of money in interest payments.

American banks want to make it easy for you to get a line of credit. They send out pre-approved credit offers to just about everyone. My daughter received one when she was eight years old. We filled out the application just to see what would happen. It was rejected, of course, but why was it pre-approved in the first place? One advertisement showed the family dog getting a pre-approved credit offer, and then said, who but a dog would put up with 18 percent interest? Banks cast a wide net, irrespective of age or even species.

Then I moved to France and found a very different situation. I wanted to live debt-free, and found that I was practically required to live debt-free. My bank debit card is tied only to my checking account. If I were to overspend my checking account, the payment would not necessarily be refused, but I would get a call from my personal banker (Thomas) telling me to get my rear in gear and live within my means. For such reasons, credit card debt is practically unknown in France. A writer for Slate online [https://slate.com/business/2025/01/credit-card-spending-france-debit-payments-budgeting-finances.html] had a similar experience.

Instant gratification is nearly the opposite of the kind of life Jesus taught. I don’t think I need to explain this. America is considered a Christian country, France a secular country, but it is in France that people live closer to the manner of which Jesus would approve, in this way as in many others.

Bible Literacy

I recently finished reading a book in French called Zapping de la Bible. Published by Larousse, better known for dictionaries, this book was neither promoting nor degrading the Bible. It had about three thousand little boxes of facts about the Bible. “Zapping” means that no single piece of information was explained at length. It is a sort of summary of the things that people should know about the Bible. Everything from Cain and Abel to Noah to Abraham to David to the prophets to Jesus to Paul. I knew most of them, from decades of Bible study. But there were some overall surprises.

The first was that most people know few, if any, of these things. There seems to be two groups of people. First, the ones who claim to believe the Bible, but know almost nothing about it. I did surveys of my students back when I was teaching in Oklahoma, and found that most students claimed to believe the Bible but knew almost nothing about it (e.g. who King David was). These people just believe what their leaders tell them to believe about the Bible. Most recently this means to believe that Donald Trump is bringing about the Will of God on this planet (a belief strengthened by the release of the Trump Bible). Any difficult questions simply do not occur to them.

The second group is people who reject the Bible as nothing more than white males trying to control, even enslave, the rest of the world. These people, also, seldom know anything about what the Bible actually says.

The fundamentalist mindset that controlled me for many decades of my life blinded me to the true purposes of much of the Bible. Take, for example, the apocalypse (Revelation). My fellow fundamentalists all believed that the details of the Apocalypse would all occur in the future—not the author’s future, but ours. Point by point. One radio preacher even organized a tour group to go see the valley of Megiddo in Israel, which, she said, would be filled with blood as deep as horses’ legs (which would require billions of people to be killed). But in reality Revelation was a message to the churches which were just beginning to experience Roman persecution: keep the faith. It was coded in a mysterious way so that, if the manuscript got uncovered by Roman authorities, they could not understand it. It was all a retelling of concepts from the Old Testament. The four beasts came from Daniel; the four horses from Zechariah; the lion from Amos; the sky rolled up like a scroll from Isaiah; the locusts from Joel. The whole symbolism was lifted from the marginally-crazy visions of Ezekiel. No one in Jewish-Christian society of about 100 C.E. could have missed this. But us fundamentalists did.

The Bible, in reality, raises many interesting questions about the purpose (if any) of humankind and the world, and about how we should live. Often, the Bible itself offers no clear answers or, if it does, these answers are contradictory. But I believe that, in our culture, to deal with these questions, it is important to know how the authors of the Bible dealt with them, in order to selectively agree or disagree with them, neither swallowing nor rejecting the whole.

The first and most obvious fact about the Bible is that it is not a book. It is 66 books, written by at least 40 different people (we assume, men, but we cannot be sure about some of them) over the course of at least 1500 years. Not surprisingly, the authors all believed different things. The final list of which books to include in the Bible was not made until the Council of Carthage in the year 397 of the current era. The Bible presents these different viewpoints then leaves it up to us to figure out what it all means.

Whatever you believe, you can probably find it in the Bible. If you believe that God has chosen a people (originally, the Israelites, and today America) to rule the world, you can find a lot of this in the Bible. If you are agnostic, or even think that God is inexplicably unjust, you can find that too, especially in Ecclesiastes and Job.

I strongly believe that my grandchildren should have access to this information so that they, as I eventually did, can make up their own minds about what to believe. This is how we raised our daughter who, like me, had a journey from faith into skepticism. And our daughter and son-in-law believe the same thing: they do not hate the Bible. They are willing to let our grandchildren explore it.

Meanwhile, we are all fiercely dedicated to the general religious principles of how to live: to love your family and your neighbors, for example. No destructive behavior, toward self or others, is tolerated. This is no different from those humanists who accept altruism as one of the main components of evolution. Love is a product of evolution, not a miracle from God.

The only problem is, explore it when and how? I struggled with the idea of how to bring the subject up with my grandchildren, who are still too young to understand much about life. Not to indoctrinate them, but just to get them interested. If there is a Spirit, the Spirit can take it from there.

It turns out that nature can take its course. When I finished the Zapping book, I left it on the return-to-library shelf. My granddaughter saw it and asked about it. Before long my wife and I were explaining the Exodus and how the modern Christian Passover is Easter, a holiday we had just celebrated by seeing the resurrection of the green foliage of the trees.

And there is no turning back now. The subject of the Bible is open for the next generation. I did not need to artificially open it. France is a secular society, but it has many holidays based on the Christian calendar. Everything closes down not only for Easter Sunday but for Good Friday and Easter Monday as well. You won’t find that in Christian America.

Another Year of Being Grateful for Abundance All Around Us

 

This essay follows up on the previous one about the French Revolutionary Calendar.

In the original calendar, as explained in this wikipedia entry, each day was named after something to be found in the world of an ordinary person. These days were named after ordinary things, not after kings or saints or presidents. It may have seemed difficult to find 360 things after which to name the dates of the calendar, but the world is so full of things about which we can be grateful that it was not difficult at all. In my daily journals from that time in my life, I named each day after a tree or other plant one year; in another, after people who had been important in my life.

In the original calendar, the first day of Vendémiaire was named after the grape (raisin), as you would expect in France. Many of the later dates were named after trees and other plants, many of which would escape the attention of all but the closest observers. These included the érable à sucre (sugar maple), colchique (autumn crocus), and belle de nuit (beauty of the night, otherwise known as the four-o’clock flower). One day was named for hemp (chanvre), which is the same species but not the same breed as marijuana. The French make distinctions that we often ignore in America, such as potiron (winter squash) and citrouille (pumpkin) for the purposes of making soup. The list was made after the Europeans had incorporated food plants from North America, such as pomme de terre (potato), piment (hot pepper), and tomate. Of course, they also included domesticated animals, including those one might not expect a day to be named after, such as âne (donkey), bouc (billy goat), and grillon (cricket). They had days named after fuels and other materials such as tourbe (peat), houille (coal), argile (clay), and even fumie (manure). Of great importance to ordinary people were the tools such as herse (harrow), hoyau (fork hoe), pelle (shovel), and of course the pressoir (wine press). One might not expect an environmentalist like me to be thankful for coal, but when used in moderation coal can be an essential part of a sustainable and healthy economy.

Salvatore Fresca made a series of engravings, one for each of the French Revolutionary months, each of them of voluptuous women scarcely clad. But only in the three summer months were the women bare-breasted.

By naming each day after something, I had my eyes opened not only to biodiversity but also to the diversity of little blessings that we all have but about which we, concentrating on our own problems and stresses, do not think about. I seem to remember in my journal (which now has over 13,000 entries) I had a day named after the pencil. How often have you thought about and been grateful for pencils? Today’s list could be so much longer than the 1792 French list, and would include telephones and computers and vaccines and antibiotics and…

Few have said it better than Robert Louis Stevenson: “The world is so full of a number of things/That I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” Not to mention the fact that few kings have been or are as happy as most of us ordinary people! Today, and this year, look around you and be grateful.