How I Learned to Stop Worrying about the Bible

In my journey from Christian fundamentalism to Christian evangelicalism to Christian agnosticism, I had to relinquish many doctrinal beliefs. These doctrinal beliefs had strangled me. But I now realize that doctrinal beliefs had also strangled the Bible. With these doctrines laid aside, the Bible has also been liberated from the preachers’ strangle-hold.

It was quite simple, actually. I just had to give up the assumption, which is as basic to orthodox Christianity as it is absent from the Bible, that the Bible is an internally-consistent book written by God. I can now see how absurd this assumption is. The Bible is not a book; it is 66 books, written over the course of centuries and by people with very, very different viewpoints. In most cases, the writers claimed that God was speaking through them; but no writer claimed this about all of the other writers by name, and at the time that they were writing the canon of scripture had not been defined. It is the theologians and preachers who claim that the entire Bible is a thread of argument that God is making. All I had to do was to listen to what each writer, individually, had to say.

Once the assumption that the Bible is God’s Coherent Book is dropped, many things become clear. It becomes obvious why the J and P documents contradict each other (e.g. Genesis 1 vs. 2); they represent two different traditions. It becomes obvious why the Chronicles differ from Samuel and Kings; the former was a reinterpretation from the viewpoint of the Southern Kingdom (Judah). It becomes clear why the prophets denounce the religious establishment who were the keepers of the law and the official histories. This is why the Gospels differ from one another; each writer had a different point to make that did not blend entirely with what the others said. What can one make of John, who wrote, “Love one another, for love is of God; he who loves is born of God and knows God; he who does not love does not know God”? This passage makes it clear that the “saved” are those who love, regardless of whether they believe in a particular doctrine or any doctrine at all. Of course, other parts of the Bible say something quite different. The religious leaders who put the Bible together had respect for all these viewpoints and included them in a “bible,” which is a library, not a book. They made no attempt (except for the redactors of the Old Testament J and P documents) to homogenize these books.

And, by dropping the God-Book assumption, I was also able to toss aside those Biblical writings that are obviously deviant from the God-is-love message. I am referring, of course, to the book of Revelation, which shows Jesus making the Earth flow thick with blood and gore. The Apocalyptic image of Jesus does not in the least resemble Jesus of Nazareth. Well guess what. You should not expect it to. I wonder if the writer of Revelation had even read any of the gospels. Revelation is a terrible book and it is time for it to be buried in the Great Recycling Bin in the Sky. Every time I look at the book of Revelation, I have the irrepressible feeling that its author had gotten some really bad hash from Damascus. It has not escaped my notice that Revelation is the favorite book of the political right, since it gives them permission to bring holocaust upon any social or political entity that they consider to be ungodly. The fact that those people, in whose lives hatred plays such a prominent role, like the book of Revelation so much is one reason that I hate it so much.

The book of Ecclesiastes is an expression of religious agnosticism and does not fit in with the rest of the Bible. But why should it? I can love Ecclesiastes, hate Revelation, and admire the other books, with the same freedom that I have when browsing at a library.

Announcing a new YouTube channel

I have started a new YouTube channel, The Darwin Channel, which you can search for under my YouTube name, StanEvolve. I have posted three video clips, and more are on the way.

Charles Darwin meets a monkey
Charles Darwin eats a banana
Charles Darwin and natural law

Weedy Religions

The religions of fury and hatred are here to stay. They include the radical right wing of Christianity and of Islam. They are certainly the most sensationalistic and obvious ones. The stunt pulled by Terry Jones, the Florida pastor who threatened to burn Korans on September 11, 2010, made the news much more than the interfaith outreach of peaceful Christian groups. Islamist terrorists always make more news than the peaceful Muslim Sufis, so much so that most people do not even realize that there is a philosophical meditative branch of the Muslim religion. (Incidentally, the group that plans to build a mosque in lower Manhattan consists of Sufis.)

At first this seems strange, because the peaceful, constructive branches of Christianity and Islam seem so much more beneficial and reasonable. Why do the religions that want to build a better world fail to predominate over those that wish to destroy as much of the world that they can?

Religions consist of sets of ideas that spread through a process similar to natural selection in nature. In this sense, religions evolve. The religions that get themselves propagated most successfully from one human mind to another are the ones that predominate. As with the evolution of plants and animals, success depends not on long term quality but on immediate success. Plants and animals will do whatever they can, destructive or constructive, that allows them to have as many surviving offspring as possible: they can harm their fellow creatures, or benefit them, depending on the circumstances.

It is unfortunate that the religions of hatred are thriving at the expense of the religions of peace. The reasons are obvious. All that a religion of hatred has to do is to press a single button in the human psyche, releasing primal fury, fury that is powerful enough that the spouter of hatred contradicts him or herself and does not even notice it. (Example: the same people may claim that Obama is godless, and also a Muslim. What, pray tell, is a godless Muslim? Of course, he is neither.) In contrast, the religions of peace require people to stop and think. While some people are thinking, the spouters of hatred have already contaminated a dozen other people. Fundamentalist religions are simplistic: just give money to the preacher, go to church, vote Republican, and hate gays. Peaceful religions, in contrast, require a more thoughtful attitude about literally everything in the world.

But the spread of the religions of hatred is not automatic. It occurs mostly in disrupted social and political circumstances. People are already thinking only brief thoughts in the short term, since the economy and world events are in such turmoil. How do you think ahead when everything may change in a few weeks or years?

I study plant ecology. I could not help but notice that the religions of hatred resemble weeds. Weeds are plants that grow rapidly, produce a lot of seeds, then die. Before you know it, you have thousands of weeds. The religions of peace are more like trees, which grow slowly for many years. Weeds grow best in an open space that has been recently disturbed, often by human activity such as bulldozing. Eventually the trees will take over, unless the disturbance continues. In places where disturbances occur frequently, weeds can spread but trees never get a chance to grow big enough to produce their seeds.

The religions of hatred are weedy religions. They grow and spread rapidly. The tree-like religions of peace never get a chance to grow because disruptions and crises keep happening. This will only get worse in the “long emergency” of climate disruption, as described by David Orr (Down to the Wire) and Bill McKibben (Eaarth).

A peaceful religion is like a complex symphony, or at least a piano sonata, with themes and structure. A religion of hatred is more like a trumpet blast, like the blasts in the book of Revelation so beloved of fundamentalist Christians.

For a weed, there is no future. A weed is going to die soon anyway, and there is no point in preparing for the future. For a tree, the future is the environment in which it will spend centuries of its life. The parallel with religion is unmistakable. To a fundamentalist, there is no future; God is going to come right away and destroy everything. But to a peaceful religious person, the future is what is most important.

Unfortunately, it appears that the immediate future of the Earth is going to look like a continually ravaged and re-ravaged weed patch, both in terms of its physical appearance, the plants and animals and the places that people live, and in terms of its religious and social environment.

This essay appeared on my website on September 19.

The Agriculture of Religion

Here follows a brief analogy that might help us to understand the role of religion in human history and society a little better. The list of evil things that have been done in the name of religion is very long; but, it seems, for every evil thing, there is something good that a religious person has done. This does not, of course, prove that religion itself is the source of those good things; as Sam Harris says, religion often gives people bad reasons to do good things. But what we are left with is a long list of good and bad things, to be considered on a case by case basis, and are thus unable to determine whether religion is, on the whole, good or bad for the human species. (It is, of course, a moot point, for it is nearly inconceivable for humans to not have religion.)

The human mind, with its capacity for reason, creativity, and social interactions, is like a wild prairie thick with rhizomes and roots of the grasses and wildflowers. It flourishes, and holds down the soil. This is what the human mind is capable of: great thoughts and great works, based upon our earthly, altruistic, non-religious brains.

But religion is like a modern agricultural field. Organized religions demand that we clear away all of the grass stems and roots, and leave a completely empty, flat field of soil. It was the grass stems and roots that had created the soil in the first place, but we are not supposed to acknowledge this. We are supposed to empty our minds of reason and of our previous understandings of the world, leaving nothing but fertile soil in which ìthe Word of Godî can be planted.

Sometimes, the result can be a lush garden or a productive agricultural field. This depends entirely on the kind of seed that is planted. Some people, whose minds have been cleared out by religion, grow thought-gardens that have many and very different species in them; these are the philosophical, scholarly religious people, particularly in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Some people plant an agricultural field that stretches as far as the eye can see with just one kind of crop, a monoculture consisting of just a simple religious idea. These are the unthinking religious people. But in either case, the resulting crops could be good. This is good religion.

But a cleared field of fertile soil is also the perfect place for weeds to grow. They grow rapidly, produce a lot of seeds, and choke out any garden or crop plants that might be starting to grow. (This is beginning to sound like one of Jesusí brilliant parables.) These weeds are religious ideas about how we are Godís chosen people who have a right to dominate, suppress, even destroy anyone who does not recognize our special divine status; about how we become holy by giving our money and devotion to charismatic religious leaders and the correct political party; and so forth. In Jesusí parable, the weeds are worldly thoughts; in the parable I am now developing, the weeds are religious thoughts (the bad kind).

So the cleared field of religion can grow both good and bad religious thoughts and actions. But the bad ones will predominate in your mind unless you constantly guard against the bad ones. Most people just let the weeds grow, and since the weeds are religious, they assume that they are good people who are going to heaven. We admire religious people whose thought-gardens are full of peace and of making the world a better place; but we see that most religious people have minds in which destructive thoughts can grow.

But there is no reason why it is necessary to clear away the prairie and create an open, barren field. A new kind of agriculture, natural systems agriculture, is being developed in which, once the crops are planted, they produce deep and abundant roots, filling the soil and making it impossible for weeds to thrive. It is a kind of agriculture, based on long-lived rather than short-lived crops, that imitates nature. Not only is natural systems agriculture more resistant to invasion by weeds, but also suffers less from pests and diseases.

And this is the way religion can be also. Instead of starting your religious devotion by clearing away all your previous experiences and your capacity for critical thinking, you can plant a religious mind-field with a philosophy based on science and critical thinking. This is the way science grows its field of thoughts; religion can do it also. In such a church, the minister would admonish the congregation to think carefully about what is happening in the world and what we should do to make the world a better place. The minister would not say, Clear out your minds, banish all thought, and let ìthe Spiritî or its weedy impostors take root in your minds. Such a religious mind-field could still produce a good harvest, and at the same time would be less vulnerable to evil religious thoughts.

You can easily tell the difference between the two kinds of religious thinkers. Those who leave their minds barren and let bad religious ideas grow in them are those who say, ìIf you disagree with what I say, you are an enemy of God.î Those who carefully construct their gardens of religious thought are those who say, as the first Isaiah said in the first chapter of the book named after him, Come, let us reason together, saith the Lord.

Christianity and the Environment: Guest Essay, Part Two

This is the remainder of Chris Baroody’s essay, the first portion of which I posted previously, used with permission.

“And God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth (Genesis 1:28).

Many Christians denigrate environmentalism, citing the above scripture as justification, yet they ignore the second command give: we have indeed dominated, yet we have been exceedingly loath to replenish. Furthermore, many Christians claim as something of a self-evident truth that God will not allow nature to fail us. And yet the Bible clearly states that wicked men bring desolation to the land:

“How long will the land lie parched and the grass in every field be withered? Because those who live in it are wicked, the animals and birds have perished. Moreover, the people are saying, 'He will not see what happens to us'”( Jeremiah 12:4).

How much more so then now in the wake of technology and Global Warming?

Many Christians hold that environmentalists, in claiming that nature holds spiritual value, merely perpetrate a new form of paganism; however, many of these same Christians have adopted a doctrine that holds the free market and pursuit of wealth as sacred and vigorously attacking environmental regulations that in anyway impede the pursuit of wealth. However, in the time of Christ, the spirit of wealth went by the name of Mammon, and Christ warned that one could not serve both God and Mammon. John Milton, author of the epic Christian poem Paradise Lost, wrote the following of Mammon: “Men...by his suggestion taught, Ransack'd the Center, and with impious hands, Rifled the bowels of their mother Earth for Treasure better hid.

To shrug off one’s responsibility to the world which provides all natural resources, from lumber and coal to complex pharmaceuticals, epitomizes the most dangerous form of arrogance, neglect, and greed. Yet service to Mammon demands the dereliction of responsibility. Just As the Pharisees once fooled themselves into believing that they served God when they served themselves and their own selfish pursuits, a great many Christians today have been led into sanctifying the speciously alluring doctrine of the unrestrained pursuit of wealth. John Milton also wrote: “Hypocrisy [is] the only evil that walks invisible, except to God alone.” Often the sin of hypocrisy is invisible to one’s own eyes. When Christians justify environmental irresponsibility as a God given right, the specter of hypocrisy thrives.

My thanks again to Chris Baroody, author of the above essay (in two entries).

Christianity and the Environment: Guest Essay, Part One

The following essay was written by Chris Baroody, a student in my Honors course on global warming, and is used with his permission. I hope he publishes and/or posts his own writing someday. He would label himself as a Christian, rather than a Christian agnostic.

“The time has come for judging the dead, and for rewarding your servants the prophets and your saints and those who reverence your name, both small and great-- and for destroying those who destroy the earth." (Revelation 11:18)

Early European Christians saw the wild as a place where dangerous beasts roamed and witches held black masses; likewise, if nature did not yield resources it was considered “waste.” This antipathy towards nature has persisted for so long that even today it has permeated through the American psyche. Now, in America, a movement of Christian anti-environmentalists lays complicit in the face of surging ecological decay and threatens to prevent any significant measures to counteract it. Yet these anti-environmental Christians ignore key scripture in the Bible that warns against the reckless abuse of nature and contradicts the popular notion that nature belongs to man to ruin and disregard as his whim may dictate.

In the past 200 years our species has felled over half of the world’s tropical rain forests. Between 1960 and 1990, 1.7 million square miles of rain forest, an area approximately the size of the United States, have been clear cut. Each year a further 2 percent falls, extinguishing all life therein. Roughly half of the world's biodiversity exists in the tropical rain-forests, with many species endemic to only a few isolated acres. We will never know how many miracle cures or unique and intricate life forms have been lost to clear cutting. To a believer, such disregard for the sanctity of creation should be akin to blasphemy, and yet, for many professing Christians, it is not.

In all areas of life wastefulness and myopia are condemned as wickedness; yet when applied to treatment of the environment, many Christians see them as just and natural attitudes to take, attitudes even mandated by scripture; to these Christians, men alone possess nature and it is for them to exert whatever will they may upon, no matter how rapacious the will or how savage the exertion.

Yet far from being ordained by God, the Bible specifically warns against such attitudes. As Psalm 50:7-12 explains, “Every animal of the forest is mine, and the cattle on a thousand hills. I know every bird in the mountains, and the creatures of the field are mine. If I were hungry I would not tell you, for the world is mine, and all that is in it." Not only does nature belong to God rather than man, God knows nature intimately and cares for it; even creatures maligned for their predatory natures : “The lions roar for their prey and seek their food from God. In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures,” (Psalm 104-10-28). It is ironic that only 50 years ago nearly a half a million lions lived in Africa. Now there are as few as 16,000, a decline of more than 95 percent wrought solely by the hands of men.

Close to 800 species have gone extinct in only the last 400 years, and almost 16,000 are threatened with extinction. This is well beyond the background rate of extinction, and is comparable to the "great extinction" events of the fossil record, although at a faster rate, and for no natural cause. By 2100, one half of the species on Earth will likely have gone extinct and we alone hold the blame.

Thanks, Chris. The rest of Chris’s essay will appear in the next entry of this blog.

The Evolution of Delusion (a Thanksgiving Day Message)

Today is Thanksgiving. But it is also the fortieth anniversary of Yukio Mishima’s seppuku.

Yukio Mishima was a Japanese writer who sometimes wrote feel-good novels (e.g. The Sound of the Waves) and very rarely even humor (e.g. the short story Tamago, or Eggs). But he was most famous for writing fiction with angst, much of which was focused on the loss of the spirit of Japan (Yamato damashii). As I understand it, his mind was in the grip of a delusion that Japan had a glorious samurai past, where warriors had total honor and would rather commit ritual suicide than to submit to any loss of face. The ritual suicide was, of course, seppuku, which is the same as harakiri—the former is the fancy, the latter the ordinary, way of saying it in Japanese. He had a small cult of young men who followed him, like a band of samurai, or perhaps like ronin, the wandering samurai who had no home after Japan entered the modern world in the nineteenth century. But this was post-World-War-II Japan, with no room for either samurai or seppuku.

To Mishima, Japan’s defeat in World War II was an intolerable loss of face. And quite possibly he was influenced by his own cowardice during World War II: when he was drafted, he told the doctors at his physical exam that he had tuberculosis, and he was relieved from Army duty. It was not until 1967 that he joined the postwar version of the Japanese army (the Self Defense force; Japan’s constitution, written by the United States, forbade an army capable of international expansion). He considered this army to not be patriotic enough, so he formed the Tatenokai (Shield Society) in 1968, which upheld bushido (the way of the warrior) and swore to uphold the Emperor. However, he did not think that even Emperor Hirohito was patriotic enough, because Hirohito had renounced his own divinity at the end of World War II.

Mishima was one of the last holdouts of the delusions that were widespread in Japan before and during World War II. Such delusions can, as the Hakko Ichiu principle (Japanese world dominion) did, grip an entire nation. But even this was not enough for Mishima and his followers. On November 25, 1970, Mishima and four members of his Tatanokai visited the commandant of the Tokyo headquarters of the Self-Defense Force. Once inside, they barricaded the office and tied the commandant to his hair. Then Mishima stood on a balcony and delivered a prepared speech, about returning Japan to its glory, to the soliders who had gathered below. He asked the soldiers to join him in a coup d’etat, but they just jeered him. He finished his speech, went into the commandant’s office, and committed harakiri. After he had partially disemboweled himself, one of his assistants was supposed to behead him, in the traditional manner; but this assistant was unable to do so, and another assistant had to finish the job for him. It is now generally believed that Mishima had not intended the coup to be successful, but had planned his ritual suicide for years, and he had made sure his legal affairs, including money for the legal defense of the remaining Tatenokai members, were in order before his final battle.

Delusions can completely determine what a person considers to be reality. Every piece of sensory information is interpreted as a reinforcement of the delusion. This might seem to be an imperfection of the brain that evolution would have gotten rid of. But delusions can sometimes provide evolutionary advantages to the people who have them and to the societies in which these people live. If you have two tribes, one of which has delusions of being God’s chosen conquerors of the world and the other of which values reason over emotion, guess which one will win the war. If a delusional tribe wins territory and resources, its individual members, to varying degrees, will have greater evolutionary fitness. The human mind is capable of intense delusion, and this is the product of natural selection.

Well, I have tied this story in with evolution and religion. Let me finally tie it in with Thanksgiving. Americans have a delusion, even if only mildly held, that the Pilgrims were heroic pioneers who came to the New World from England for religious freedom. But after leaving England, they mad moved to the Netherlands, where they had religious freedom—but so did everyone else. The Pilgrims wanted the “freedom” to enforce their religion, so they had to form their own colony, in Massachusetts. When they got there, they nearly starved, but were rescued by the welfare provided to them by a socialistic Native American tribe. Later, they showed their gratitude by carrying out genocide against this tribe. Pilgrim leader William Bradford describes the way the colonists surrounded a Pequot village at sunrise. They set it ablaze and killed anyone who fled. Bradford wrote, “It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they [the colonists] gave praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully.” They were able to ignore the suffering that they inflicted on their fellow humans because their brains were deluded with the idea that they were God’s chosen people upon the face of the Earth and had the right, even the responsibility, to slaughter anyone (at least any Indian) who questioned their delusion.

But let me end with something to be thankful for on this day. Evolution has given our species the ability to create, in our minds, a beautiful world based upon the sensory information that those minds receive—brilliant color, wonderful scents of food, beautiful music. They are illusory creations of our minds, but let us enjoy them anyway. They are more beauty than we, the products of natural selection, have any right to have expected.

This essay also appears on my evolution blog.

Darwin, Science, and Bias

Scientists take great precautions against bias. Scientists, like all humans, have a tendency to see what they expect to see rather than what is really there. But scientists are very careful to design research and experiments in such a way as to exclude bias. For example, in testing drugs, the patients who receive the placebo (“sugarpill”), which does not contain the drug, are not told that the pill is a placebo, otherwise they would assume it will not work and they will report themselves as still being sick. But scientists go further and make sure the assistants who actually administer the placebo do not know that it is a placebo, lest the attitude of the assistant influence the patient’s attitude as well. The placebo usually has a bitter chemical in it, or even a mild sedative, so that the patient will believe that it is the real drug. A large amount of the design and expense of scientific research is to avoid bias.

Charles Darwin had to deal with bias also. His evolutionary theory gave nature, rather than God, the creative role. It is the ideal theory for someone who wants God out of the picture. Was Darwin such a person? Well, not at first; his wife Emma was a moderate creationist, and Charles was sensitive to her opinions, as you might guess. But after their daughter Annie died at a tragically young age, both Charles and Emma were devastated. This deepened Emma’s dependence upon Christianity but pushed Charles into agnosticism. This was years before Charles wrote the Origin of Species.

So Charles must have been biased against creationism and in favor of a theory that would make God irrelevant. But he worked very, very hard to make sure that his bias did not influence his scientific judgment. He spent years gathering information about the variability of traits in populations, and about natural selection, as well as about fossils, biogeography, and other evidences of evolution. The Origin of Species is full of numerous lines of reasoning, each with its own evidences, which lead to an undeniable conclusion. That is, he spent years amassing evidence that would prevent his bias from influencing his results. This is the mark of a true scientist.

Creationists are just the opposite. They hate evolution, and will grab at any shred of information that they can twist into evidence to support their view. They even bring together so-called evidences that contradict one another. For example, they present information that they claim proves the Flood of Noah, then they present information that they claim shows gaps in the fossil record. But if there was a flood, there could be no order in the fossil record in which gaps might appear!

Charles Darwin is an exemplar of the heroic scientist who disciplines him or herself to pursue the truth even when bias presses upon the scientist from his or her personal experience.

This essay also appeared in my evolution blog.

A Christian View of Creation

There are many Christians today who view the natural world as God’s glorious creation, worthy of protection from human plundering. Unfortunately, this view seems rare in Oklahoma. I want to tell you a story about a much more common view in my home state.

I recently got a water heater installed, and I had to listen to the two plumbers preaching at me during the installation. It was a lecture, not a discussion; they frequently prefaced their statements with “I don’t know what other people think, but here’s what I think.” Then they would tell me Biblical things that may or may not actually be in the Bible.

Somehow we got to talking about trees, particularly the largest ones such as the giant sequoia trees in California. One of them told me exactly what would go through his mind as he stood at the base of a giant sequoia. He said that his mind would be calculating the number of board feet of timber in the tree and how much he could sell it for. That, to him, was the major inspiration stirred in his heart by the tree. Many other Christians have thought that large trees were wonderful expressions of God’s greatness. But not so for Oklahoma fundamentalists.

I could have told him something of practical value: not just how awe-inspiring sequoia trees are, but how much financial benefit that living trees provide for us. As I have often said in my blog and website entries, trees put oxygen in the air, remove carbon from the air, prevent floods and mudslides, build up the soil and allow water to percolate into the soil. That’s just a start. I’ve written a whole book, Green Planet, about it. Of course I did not say this to him, because he had proceeded on with a story about how fast he could cut down a big sycamore tree like the one in my back yard, and then went on to tell me how much God hated Obama’s health care plan.

And then he was done. At least he did not charge me extra for the time he spent preaching at me.

Walking in the Woods with Mahler

Thoughtful agnostics continually experience intense emotion about the beautiful things, and the tragic things, in the world. It is with this thought that I introduce the following essay, which will appear soon on my website. It is about Gustav Mahler, an agnostic Jewish/Czech/Austrian composer who lived at the turn of the previous century. I used to say that I believed in God because Mahler, with his intense insight into the world, believed in God (he joined the Catholic Church). Then I found out that he did not, or at least was not sure. (His conversion to Catholicism was to deflect anti-Jewish prejudice.)

The autumn colors in Oklahoma are not as amazing as those in New England, but they are still beautiful—yellow hickory leaves, red red-oak leaves, and bronze post-oak leaves. On a sunny warm autumn day, it seems like a time of rejoicing. And, in part, it is.

But it is also a time of death. For the trees, it is senescence, not death; the leaves die as part of an orderly breakdown, and the buds already contain next spring’s growth. Many smaller plants die, as well as small animals such as insects. Death is part of the cycle of nature. Many of the red oak leaves on the Oklahoma hillsides are covered with parasitic galls and powdery fungi, but since the leaves are going to die anyway, it doesn’t matter. Autumn is a time to accept death as part of life.

It is also a time to rage against death, to feel intensely that it is a tragedy that all of the beauty, constructed so carefully during an organism’s life, should come to an end and simply be decomposed. This is especially true in humans, where a human brain has built up a lifelong structure of knowledge and wisdom and emotions, and then simply stops working and rots. Autumn, therefore, is a time to come to grips with death, to accept it but also to despise it.

The perfect companion during a walk in the autumn woods is the music of Gustav Mahler. Perhaps no other composer has written music with such an intensity of sensation, as intense as the reddest leaf of autumn. His emotions were nearly always intense. Before going to his cabin each morning in summer to write his symphonies, he would swim across the lake and back; writing music was an athletic exercise for him. His music embodied the joy of nature (e.g. his Third Symphony) but also rage against death (e.g. his Second Symphony).

Even in the first movement of the Third Symphony, when Mahler depicted the coming of spring, the conflicts were unresolved. A bright and cheerful march (which he called “Summer Comes Marching In”) alternates with the tragic chill of winter. Spring is a time when winter keeps coming back, at least in northern Europe, until summer has fully arrived.

Mahler never came to grips with life and death—the conflict always renewed itself in his mind and music. This is the way of the world: rebirth every spring, senescence every autumn, eternally unresolved.

If you want to know more, I suggest the new book by Norman Lebrecht, entitled Why Mahler?

Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (13). The End.

Today’s Bible reading. Ecclesiastes 4: 9-12, 11:1-5.

After all of this—raging against injustice, and mourning the death that awaits all animals, human or nonhuman—both Solomon and Schubert’s Winterreise wanderer found something. It is companionship.

“Two are better than one, because they can appreciate one another’s work. If one of them falls, the other can lift him or her up, but woe to him who falls alone! If two lie together, they are warm, but how can one be warm alone? A man might prevail against one who is alone, but cannot overcome two men who work together, even if they are not strong. A threefold cord is not quickly broken.” There has hardly ever been better poetry of friendship than this.

Solomon also makes another, and more surprising, discovery. It is opportunity.

Whatever happens, happens. “The tree falls to the south, or maybe to the north, but wherever it falls, there it is.” So what should we do? Solomon says, take a chance! Do something enjoyable and good! If the fate of good people is no better than that of evil people, neither is it worse! “Cast your bread upon the waters! Have a feast for seven people—why not eight? For if you are always worrying about the wind, you will never sow, and if you are always worrying about the clouds you will never reap.”

At the end of Die Winterreise, Schubert’s traveler notices a poor organ-grinder standing in the street, his feet bare in the snow. He waits for someone to put money in his tray, but nobody does. Even the dogs snarl around him. But he does not notice; he is at peace. Perhaps the traveler went crazy at this moment, as crazy as the organ-grinder already was. But for once—for once!—the wanderer thinks about someone other than himself, and sees through another’s eyes. He tells the old man he wants to stay with him, and sing while he grinds his organ. It’s too bad that the wanderer has to stand out in the cold in order to appreciate companionship; he could have saved himself the trip. But he found some meaning in life.

And many of us find plenty of meaning in life, despite Luck being the Empress of the World, and despite God not doing anything in the world. To affirm the good things that we can find to do, even if in the long run the forces of evil erase all of our good work—that is what most of the entries in this blog will be about!

Thus ends, for now, my series of 13 essays in which I explore Ecclesiastes, Die Winterreise, and Carmina Burana, in search of a meaning for life.

Some More Thoughts About Altruism

Today is election day, and I am posting this entry before the results are in. The election forms the backdrop for yet more comments I will make about one of the best human adaptations, the capacity for altruism. Across the country, observers have noticed the overwhelming flood of negative campaign ads. While surveys have shown that the candidates themselves favor positive ads, the “independent” groups that support them funnel a seemingly unlimited amount of money into negative ads. These groups have such names as “Fund for Freedom, Love, Goodwill, and a Bright Future,” or something like that. I might note that, since I do not have television, my own estimate relies on the large amount of campaign mail that I receive in Oklahoma. In this reddest of red states, I am surprised that the campaign mail seems mostly positive. Republican Tom Coburn is running for Senate again, and I have seen none of his ads; but in 2004 his negative ads were really vicious. In general, even if not in Oklahoma in 2010, altruism seems buried by negativity.

Midterm elections usually favor the minority party, and this one will almost certainly be no exception. This means that, at least on the national level, altruistic cooperation will be more important than ever. If Congress goes Republican, it will have to participate in a give-and-take with the Democratic president (direct reciprocity), if anything is to be done; and the reputation of both parties will depend on their display of goodwill (indirect reciprocity). At least, this is my hope. But I remember the government shutdown in 1995, because Newt Gingrich’s Republicans demanded that President Clinton do everything they wanted, and I suspect that something at least this bad will happen again.

Altruism is an instinct, and like most instincts it operates at an almost subconscious level that would be nearly impossible to codify into rules. Imagine programming a computer to be altruistic. Altruism cannot be legislated. Let me give an example. When I sit in my backyard, I can hear the bleating of a goat down the alley. Remember, this is in the city limits of Durant, Oklahoma. I imagine that one goat is no problem: not much noise, not much waste. But how many goats are too many? You could make a law about this but it would be complex: how many goats per unit area could be allowed, relative to waste disposal processes. I can imagine city officials spending hours on a goat ordinance. But altruism makes it simple: don’t have so many goats that it bothers your neighbors. You can probably think of a nearly unlimited number of examples of legal complexity that could be avoided by altruism. No matter how complex the laws may be, a non-altruist can find a technicality around them.

It can get even worse. Yugoslavia, during the Soviet era, was at peace not because of altruism but because of Tito’s dictatorship. As soon as the dictatorship was gone, all hell broke loose. The nearly total absence of altruism virtually ruined that part of the world. An unstable altruistic truce exists in Rwanda, one which totally broke down in 1994. My point is simply that nothing can take the place of altruism.

And in upcoming years, our politicians will need to remember this, especially the Republicans who are clearly less altruistic than Democrats, and who have promised that, if they take power, they will offer no compromise. John Baynor has declared the number one priority of a new Republican majority to be the destruction of Barack Obama’s presidency. I fear that altruism will not just be ignored but be shunned by the hyperventilating Republicans.

This entry also appears on my evolution blog.

Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (12). Fragile Beauty

Life is such a fragile thing, which is why it can so easily be lost. The candle beside my desk is a perfect balance of wax and oxygen at high energy, from which carbon atoms release painful light. A puff of breath disrupts the flame. The wick, instead of spreading the wax thin to the embrace of the oxygen, now smolders. How slight is the difference between a burning candle and a candle that has just gone out; how slight is the difference between a person moments before, and moments after, a gradual death.

Yet the network of life on Earth is very strong, and will outlast not just each human but all humans. The network of human relationships is also very strong, and outlasts the shifting winds of fortune. This is what we will learn from the final entry in this series, which is coming soon.

Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (11). Luck and the Future

Both the medieval minstrels and the writer of Ecclesiastes, then, are in agreement that what happens in life, whether an individual’s life or the life of the world, has nothing to do with whatever people may deserve. But it is time to ask the question: Does the randomness of luck, with regard to individual people, mean that we cannot predict the future?

We are constantly trying to predict the future. And we are not very good about it. There are two reasons. First, our minds work in a linear fashion, while many of the important processes of the world are nonlinear. Some of these nonlinear processes are exponential. Populations are an example: they grow by doubling, not by accumulating. Human population has increased as a curve, not as a line. Debt is exponential also, because the more debt you have, the more interest you pay. The federal government will figure this out sometime, when (even if other nations keep loaning us money at current interest rates) in a few decades the government will be paying more money in interest to other countries than on anything else. Some of these nonlinear processes involve a tipping point. Adding just a little more carbon dioxide to the air does not necessarily mean that we will have just a little more global warming. If enough ice melts, reducing the amount of sunlight that is reflected back into outer space, we may begin a process by which more ice melt leads to more warming, regardless of what we do about carbon emissions. James Lovelock (in his book Gaia’s Revenge) criticizes the scientists who merely extrapolate climate change from the present into the future without considering how life itself, the plants and the bacteria, may alter climate processes.

We cannot predict the future but we can calculate overall average risks. The person who does this best is Vaclav Smil, who is a genius (speaking many languages) and who can grasp the concepts of many different fields such as science, economics, and sociology. He has calculated (in his book Global Catastrophes and Trends) the risks that humankind will face over the next few decades. For example, he calculated that the risk (from 1995 through the 9-11 attacks of 2001) of an American dying from a terrorist attack was one in ten billion per person per hour. This is a much lower risk than being killed in a car accident, which is about four in a million per person per hour. He calculated the risks of hang gliding, being killed by an asteroid collision (which is about the same as being a victim of a terrorist), etc. His point is that cumulative risks do not change rapidly; despite sensational headlines, the risks have remained about the same over recent years. Therefore, we may ask, is luck really the empress of the world?

Yes, because, as Ecclesiastes and Carmina Burana both point out, from any individual’s standpoint, fate is almost entirely unpredictable. You can reduce certain risks—by driving safely, by not smoking, by exercising—but beyond these few things, you are really not in control of your fate, and there does not appear to be any heavenly help for you. Modern science allows us to calculate risks, and the error ranges associated with them, but not to predict individual fate.

Religious Malpractice

Counselors are professionals. Before anyone can open up shop as a counselor, they must meet state-mandated standards of professional training, including supervised practice sessions. This is important because an unprofessional or sloppy counselor can put a client in danger. I heard of a case recently in which a student, practicing to be a counselor, advised her client to quit taking her meds. This brought about immediate reprimand. In fact, this student might have to look for another line of work.

But anyone can be a religious counselor. All they have to do is to be associated with a church. If it is a little rural independent church, the counselor (usually the pastor) may have no professional training whatever. The pastor can give amateur advice to people, advice that is often wrong and dangerous. Of course, they do not consider their advice to be amateur; they think they have a direct line of inerrant wisdom flowing directly from God. The most dangerous counselor in the world is one who considers himself or herself personally inerrant in dispensing “God’s” advice. Such action is respected by law enforcement and government and society as the free practice of religion.

One such pastor advised a young adult woman that because she was not what he considered to be a Christian, her life was worthless and she should kill herself. She tried to do so. Fortunately, she was as much an amateur at suicide as the pastor was at counseling, and she failed.
The pastor was apparently a shitty, abominable, satanic pastor. His statements were not even remotely Christian. But it is obvious that, were he a counselor, he would be liable for a whopping malpractice lawsuit.

But pastors of little independent churches can get away with anything. As a society, we let them dispense deadly advice and to stir up hatred. If anybody else—a teacher, a doctor, a counselor, a business executive, a writer like myself, a television personality—gave such advice, they would be thrown out on their butts (except, of course, for conservative talk show hosts). Pastors of church denominations have to meet professional standards and can be terminated by the denomination, but not so the little churches out in the sticks, where the Christians are much more dangerous than the wild hogs.

Freedom of religion does not mean that a pastor of an independent church can say whatever he or she wants, regardless of its effects. Pastors should be constrained by the same laws that the rest of us have to observe. Of course, the victim (were she not totally devastated by the incident) could sue the pastor, but this is unlikely to occur. In most aspects of life, we are protected by laws, and sometimes we have to sue; but in many churches, we have no protection at all unless we sue.

If only God would wring that pastor’s neck. But that won’t happen. God never brings any punishment on the evil. They take on God’s name as an adornment and sin boldly, while good people are struck with disease and disaster. God makes no visible difference in the world. This is what the writer of Ecclesiastes complained about, and the complaint is still valid.

Also, please remember to vote Democratic in the upcoming elections. The Republicans seek the support of dangerous religious people such as the ones described here. Also, remember to share this blog with your associates.

Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (10). Yet Even More Agnosticism from Ecclesiastes. The Ultimate Truth

Today’s Bible reading: Ecclesiastes 3:18-22, 12:2-7.

The truth to which Solomon keeps coming back is this. It is mentioned over and over, so I have chosen just one passage. A person is not a lump of clay animated by a spirit, a spirit that is liberated from the lump of clay upon death. No. Man is an animal, and dies just like an animal. Is there a spirit that goes to heaven? Solomon openly declares not just that he does not know, but “Who can know?” This is agnosticism in its most elegant form, straight from the Bible.

“I said in my heart with regard to the sons of men that God is testing them, to show them that they are merely beasts. For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of the beasts is the same; as dies one, so dies the other. All have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts…All go to one place, all are from the dust and return to the dust. Who knows whether the spirit of man flies upward and the spirit of the beast descends into the Earth?”

And this, he says, is the end of history: not a majestic conclusion, but the last whimper of extinction. “…in the day when the keepers of the house tremble, and strong men are bent over, sad people look through windows, the doors are shut, there is little sound of work being done, a man jumps in fright at the sound of a bird, grasshoppers drag their bellies along on the ground, people are mourning in the streets, the silver cord is snapped, the golden bowl broken, the pitcher is broken at the fountain, the wheel is broken at the cistern, and the dust returns to the earth, and breath back to God.”

Is there anything after death? Solomon hints at judgment, although he may be referring to the judgment of history. But he certainly describes no Heaven.

Reminder: Remember to vote Democratic, which is the milder and less dangerous choice.

Reminder: Send a link to this blog to your friends and professional associates.

At War with the Cosmos

The fundamental assumption of science is that the cosmos can be understood, and that it operates by consistent laws and principles. While this is an assumption that may be embraced by religion as well, I am not convinced that evangelical Christianity does so. Mainline denominations, and liberal groups such as the Quakers, appear to do so, but not the big, powerful, and loud fundamentalist groups that dominate the religious scene in America today.

Jesus told his disciples, “The world will hate you.” I always assumed, back in my fundamentalist days, that this meant that people who love to sin will hate those who tell them not to, or even imply by their moral lives that sinning is wrong. But this is not what the Biblical statement says. The “world” in that statement is kosmos. That is, the physical world that science studies. The implication (or so it was suggested by A. N. Wilson in his biography of Jesus) is that it is wrong, from the Christian viewpoint, to want to make sense of what happens in the world. The world, including the planets and plants, is the kosmos that is hostile to Christians. Jesus also said, to Doubting Thomas, blessed is he who does not see yet still believes. As Richard Dawkins points out, to evangelical Christians, the dissonance between facts and faith is itself accepted as confirmation of the faith.

I suppose this also means that truly religious people should reject Occam’s Razor. A complex creationist explanation full of invented stories (e.g., God moved the fossils around during the Flood to make them get buried in an evolutionary order, and God stuck thousands of pseudogenes into noncoding DNA to make it look like organisms had evolutionary ancestors) are just as good as the simplest and most straightforward explanations: that the fossils have an evolutionary order because they evolved over time, and that pseudogenes were genes used by real, living, evolutionary ancestors.

Christian scientific organizations such as the American Scientific Affiliation and the John Templeton Foundation will strongly object to this interpretation. Good for them, and they deserve our admiration for it. But this observation might make it easier to understand why so many religious people seem to live in a world devoid of reality when it comes to scientific, political, and cultural ideas. Get rid of that kosmos; the truth consists of whatever ideas pop up in my brain, because God must have planted them there.

Reminder: Remember to vote Democratic, which is the milder and less dangerous choice. Democrats, however imperfect, are more likely to get their facts from the kosmos.

Reminder: Send a link to this blog to your friends and professional associates.

This essay also appeared on my evolution blog.

Please Spread the Word

This is just a brief message to ask you to share this blog with your friends and acquaintances, even (or perhaps especially) with those who may not agree with it. There are not very many visitors to my two blogs, and I truly believe that a lot of people would benefit from reading them. It is certainly healthier fare than much of the hate-filled bile that is found in many blogs devoted to religion or to evolution. (Interestingly, I have more visitors from the Netherlands, Russia, and Luxembourg than from the US.)

But for those of you from America, please remember also to vote in the elections. I urge you to vote Democratic, since the Republicans represent a real possibility of danger to science and to religious freedom. I find it difficult to get excited about Democrats, but they are at least less dangerous than Republicans.

I realize that it is unlikely that this gentle blog can compete with blogs that push the buttons of unthinking anger, any more than a little garden herb can compete with a weed, but you can help.

And please leave comments, to which I will try to respond. If you bring up an interesting point, I can post something about it so that it does not remain hidden in the comments section.

Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (9). Even More Agnosticism from Ecclesiastes. Justice!

Today’s Bible reading: Ecclesiastes 4:1-3; 4:13-16; 5:8; 9:13-15.

One of the things that makes life seem most meaningless is that it is unfair. The powerful oppress the weak, and God does nothing about it.

“Again I saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun. Behold, the tears of the oppressed, and there is no one to comfort them! And for this reason, the dead are better off than the living, and better yet are those who have not yet been born—for they do not have to see the injustice on the face of the Earth.” “If you travel somewhere and see justice violently taken away, do not be amazed. What do you expect? The administrator who does the injustice has an administrator over him, who has an administrator over him, and so on,” that is, injustice is built into the very fabric of every government. Then Solomon tells a sad story. “There was a little city, with a little population, and a great king came and surrounded it. But in the little city there was a little wise man who figured out how to save the city. But now nobody remembers who he was.”

Not everyone accepts this fate. Certainly one of the poets who wrote what we now know as Carmina Burana did not accept it:

Sors immanis
Et inanis,
Rota tu volubilis,
Satus malus,
Vana salus
Semper dissolubilis,
Odumbrata
Et velata
Michi quoque niteris;
Nunc per ludum
Dorsum nudum
Fero tui sceleris.

Here are some choice words against the fates, the gods, God, perhaps a defiance against the injustice of the world. The little phrase “dorsum nudum” should give you an idea. “Fate monstrous and empty, you are a whirling wheel; when you are in a bad place, health is of no use, it can be overshadowed and hidden…now in the game of fate, I bare my butt against your villainy.” Is this defiance (mooning fate) or is it giving up, baring his shoulders to the whips of fortune? We cannot know, can we?

All of the prophets of the Bible—the major ones like Isaiah, the minor ones like Amos, and Jesus of Nazareth—have refused to believe that injustice will not be set right. They all proclaimed a coming kingdom, which they all understood in different ways, in which injustice would be brought to an end. Not soon enough for those who have already died, but at least at some point in time. Ezekiel dreamed (even hallucinated) about the literal re-establishment of the earliest Law of Moses and the priests. Amos just saw justice rolling down from Heaven. Jesus said his kingdom was not of this world at all.

And it is true that we see evil people brought to ruin, sometimes—but no more often than we see good people brought to ruin. And everybody knows that rich people are well insulated against bad luck. If you fuck up the economy of a whole nation, that nation’s government will give you a handout. But the poor are one little crisis away from financial ruin. I see no evidence that the prophets were right. Indeed, their vision is becoming ever more unattainable.

I am filled with the prophet’s zeal, and salivate at the thought that there will someday be justice. But I fear that I am just imagining it, and that, after all, Solomon will turn out to have been right. I can bare my butt in the face of Luck, or allow it to lash my back, but it will make no difference, so to speak, in the end.

The Inevitable Conclusion?

Many conservative Christians believe that the United States is God’s nation—not for historical reasons, such as Israel, but because God has chosen America to conquer the forces of heathen liberalism in the world. But they only believe that this is the case if the Republican Party is ruling it. It is their hope—and for some of them, their goal—that America become a Christian nation ruled by Christian force.

Perhaps if these people would read their Bibles they might see a parallel from the ancient world that would frighten them. The ancient nation of Judah was ruled by kings and priests who used force to impose religion on their nation. This ancient religious dictatorship ran the nation of Judah into the ground. There was only one way out of the religious stranglehold: conquest. They were conquered by a pagan empire (Babylon).

If the religious conservatives attain the religious dictatorship that some of them seek, there will, once again, probably be only one way out. It is not hard to guess what will happen. Religious conservatives gleefully rack up more debt whenever they see a chance to start another war. They use “fiscal responsibility” as a campaign phrase but have never honored it. China has the largest reserves of cash, and America has the largest debt. This is the proverbial “handwriting on the wall,” which is another reference to an Old Testament story, in which a hand wrote Babylon’s fate on a wall, and immediately thereafter Persia conquered Babylon. This time, however, it is not words but numbers on the wall.

A New World Symphony

There are only about a dozen pieces of music—well, two or three dozen at most—that can bring tears to my eyes. One of them is Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony. It is considered by some to be the perfect expression of Americana. The composer, however, considered it to be Czech, just like himself, and he called it “From the New World” because he happened to be visiting America when he wrote it. It sounds like a little country village of the nineteenth century. Hannibal, Missouri, during Mark Twain’s boyhood. In fact, Dvořák was living in New York City when he wrote it.

It brings tears to my eyes not because it evokes scenes of America, and only partly because of its supernal melodies. I cry because this music creates, in the minds of many listeners, a vision of what a world could be like, how fair the world could be, if it only were not for our religiously-inspired and profit-fortified arrogance and hatred. It is the symphony of a new world, one that will be forever beyond our reach. It would not be heaven, filled with cotton-candy airy sweetness. There is dissonance, but it is meaningful dissonance. The New World Symphony has melodies of heartbreaking sadness. These sadnesses are, however, resolved and made meaningful by the roles they play in the glorious climax.

I have little faith that such a world—in which we still have challenges and pain, but in which we ultimately prevail against them, the kind of world the Biblical prophets promised—will ever exist. But, for brief moments, when I listen to such pieces of music as the New World Symphony, I can fantasize about such a world.

Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (8). Just Enjoy Life, Part Three.

Today’s Bible reading: Ecclesiastes 4:6; 5:12; 5:18-20; 6: 1-9; 9:7-10; 10:19.

Just enjoy life—This was one of the important conclusions of Ecclesiastes. Consider two of the passages above. One says, “Go eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has already approved what you do.” This has a second layer of meaning: If you know that you are doing evil, you cannot really enjoy your bread and your wine. “Keep your garments white and oil on your face…” Today we would say, keep body and clothes clean, so that you can feel good about yourself, in confident happiness. “Food is for laughter, and wine gladdens life; and money answers everything.”

But Solomon does not say just to enjoy empty pleasures. The Biblical Solomon is said to have had a thousand sexual partners, but he was miserable. The writer of Ecclesiastes, pretending to be Solomon, says that true sexual enjoyment is, “Enjoy life with the wife whom you love.”

But the kind of pleasure that is most fulfilling is the satisfaction of good work. Among the passages noted above: “Sweet is the sleep of a laborer, whether he eats little or much; but the surfeit of the rich will never let him sleep.” Note that a craftsman can sleep, contented with his good work; but a slave cannot feel satisfaction. “Behold, what I have seen to be good is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all your work at which you spend the few days of your life under the sun. Your gift is to enjoy what you have been given, little or much. If you are happy, you won’t have time to sit around and think about the days of your life.” You won’t be singing, as Roy Clark did in the 1960s, “Yesterday when I was young, the taste of life was sweet, like rain upon my tongue…”

According to Solomon, it is a great tragedy when you cannot enjoy whatever good you may have. “There is a great evil that I have seen under the sun, and it lies heavily upon men: God may give a man everything that one could desire, and yet does not give him the power to enjoy it. He could have a hundred children, and live to a ripe old age, but if he cannot enjoy them, a stillborn fetus is better off than he is, for the fetus comes from nothingness and goes into nothingness, and has never known anything; at least the dead fetus can rest. It is better to enjoy what you can see than to always be yearning for what you cannot have.”

Once again, we encounter Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi, Luck the Empress of the World. Enjoy your work and your pleasure right now, don’t wait until it is too late. “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might—for there is no work, no thought, no knowledge, no wisdom in Death to which you are going.”

Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (7). Just Enjoy Life, part two

Another pleasure, which takes up most of the Song of Solomon (another unjustly ignored book of the Bible) is romantic love. To save space, I will not quote the Song of Solomon. But here is part of a medieval poem that is in Carmina Burana:

Si puer cum puellula
Moraretur in cellula,
Felix coniunctio.
Amore suscrescente,
Pariter e medio
Avulso procul edio,
Fit ludus ineffabilis
Membris, lacertis, labilis.

The unknown minstrel wrote, if a young man and a young woman are in a little room, how happy their coupling; love grows, and from them weariness is driven away, and playfulness begins in their limbs, their arms, their lips.

I think most of us realize that no more long-term happiness can be found in loose sex than in excessive drinking. We can be truly happy only if we take care of our bodies and respect other people. But there is no denying that sex is one of the greatest pleasures of life, a fact regarding which the Biblical writer of Song of Solomon was not bashful.

Erotic love is actually three different things, as explained by Helen Fisher in Why We Love. One kind of erotic love is lust, caused by the hormone testosterone, which a person can feel for many others at the same time. Another kind is passion, the crazed fixation upon just one other person, caused by the brain chemical dopamine (it is interesting that this neurotransmitter sounds like “dope” and makes you act like a dope). The third kind is contentment, caused by the hormone oxytocin. Promiscuity makes use of only the first. Although being in love can make you miserable (sound familiar to any of you?), human experience is poorer without it. By the time you get older, love consists of little teacups of oxytocin. But it is mighty good.

But as we enjoy summer and autumn, let us remember the pleasures of drink and love, and other pleasures that restrictive religion tells us we should feel guilty about even in moderation. Let us not spend our lives denying ourselves moderate and safe pleasures, only to find ourselves old and unable to enjoy them. For far too soon, Luck the Empress of the World will draw our time to a close.

Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (6). Just enjoy life, part one.

With this entry, I resume a series that I began last spring, and which was interrupted by (in my opinion) more urgent postings. The most recent one was posted on March 6, 2010. In this series, I compare and contrast thoughts from Carmina Burana (Carl Orff) and the Bible, to reach some conclusions that are quite different from fundamentalist Christianity. Please look back at the earlier five entries if you missed them.

In the previous entry in the Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi series, we saw that the writer of Ecclesiastes, whom many assume to be Solomon, reached the conclusion, at least temporarily, that we should stop worrying about the ups and downs of life, and whether it makes sense, and just enjoy what we have. Earlier in this series we also examined pieces of music, especially Orff’s Carmina Burana, which expressed some of the same ideas as Ecclesiastes.

There is also a fair amount of medieval poetry, used in Carmina Burana, which celebrates the enjoyment of life.

One kind of enjoyment is drinking. While the Bible has little to say about the enjoyment of drinking, the Persian poet Omar Khayyam had a lot. I wanted to share with you some of the medieval poetry of Carmina Burana with you. An unknown minstrel wrote what appear to be the words to a drinking game. Read the Latin words aloud and appreciate their beauty:

Semet bibunt pro captivis
Post hec bibunt ter pro vivis,
Quater pro Christianis cunctis,
Quinquies pro fidelibus defunctis,
Sexies pro sororibus vanis,
Septies pro militibus silvanis,
Octies pro fratribus perversis,
Nonies pro monarchis dispersis,
Decies pro navigantibus,
Undecies pro discordantibus,
Duodecies pro penitentibus,
Tredecies pro iter agentibus.

It translates roughly:
Once they drink for those in jail;
After that, three times for the living,
Four times for all Christians,
Five times for those who died faithful,
Six times for the weak sisters,
Seven times for the forest rangers,
Eight times for erring brothers,
Nine times for wandering monks,
Ten times for the sailors,
Eleven times for those who quarrel,
Twelve times for those who repent,
Thirteen times for travelers.

Then the unknown musician wrote about how everybody drinks, so you might as well too:

Tam pro papa quam pro rege
Bibunt omnes sine lege.
Bibi hera, bibit herus,
Bibit miles, bibit cierus,
Bibit ille, bibit illa,
Bibit servus cum ancilla,
Bibit velox, bibit piger,
Bibit albus, bibit niger,
Bibit constans, bibit vagus,
Bibit rudis, bibit magus,
Bibit pauper et egrotus,
Bibit exul et ignotus,
Bibit puer, bibit canus,
Bibit presul et decanus,
Bibit soror, bibit frater,
Bibit anus, bibit mater,
Bibit iste, bibit ille,
Bibunt centum, bibunt mille.

It translates roughly:
The pope the same as a king,
Everyone drinks without restraint.
The mistress drinks, the master drinks,
The soldier drinks, the cleric drinks,
The man drinks, the woman drinks,
The servant drinks with the maid,
The quick man drinks, the lazy man drinks,
The white man drinks, the black man drinks,
The regular drinks, the wanderer drinks,
The beginner drinks, the wise man drinks,
The poor man drinks and the invalid,
The exile drinks and the stranger,
The boy drinks, the greybeard drinks,
The president drinks and the deacon,
The sister drinks, the brother drinks,
The old man drinks, the mother drinks,
That woman drinks, this man drinks,
A hundred drink, a thousand drink.

I am certainly not one to encourage drunkenness. It’s fun to joke about, of course; the 1960s singer Shep Woolley (this could not have been his real name; and he doubled as the drunk Ben Colder) sang, “And we danced, and we danced, at least I thought it was dancing until somebody stepped on my hand.” But actually getting drunk is dangerous and extremely unhealthy, and I don’t do it. And, as my wife, who also does not get drunk, says, it’s no fun: if you pass out under the table, you miss all the fun. Passed out drunk, the operatic character Hoffman slept through his dream-come-true. But hey, when St. Patty’s day comes around, or at the end of a thirsty summer—at such a time (and most any other time) remember that a little mild drinking is a universal and timeless pleasure. As Henry Purcell wrote centuries ago, “If all be true that I should think, there are five reasons we should drink: Good friends; good wine; being dry, or the threat of being so by and by; and any other reason.”

Not For Profit?

The other day when I was in the post office, I saw that someone had left lots of leaflets on all the tables, inviting the public to a religious service at a local mega-church (of which Tulsa has dozens). A certain Dr. Don (no last name) was going to be miraculously healing people. I considered this to be an example of soliciting for private profit on federal property, and as a patriotic citizen I helped the leaflets find their way into the recycling slot.

Environmental organizations have nonprofit (or not-for-profit) status, which relieves them from the tax burden that private businesses bear. And in most cases, this is beneficial to the whole country. NGOs (non-governmental organizations), often filled with motivated volunteers, can do a lot more good work than can a government agency and for a lot less money. By letting NGOs do some of the work, in return for tax breaks, the government comes out ahead.

Religious organizations such as churches also have nonprofit status. It is, however, not as clear what the social benefits are that churches confer upon the community as in the case of environmental organizations. It is true that many churches perform valuable services—counseling, food kitchens, literacy programs. But for the most part, churches proclaim very specific doctrines, collect money from people who have been convinced of those doctrines, and use the money to proclaim their doctrines to yet more people. If the doctrine so replicated is Jesus’ message of love, it clearly confers an advantage on society. But at least here in Tulsa, the doctrine is frequently this: Our church has the truth, and you should give us your money, because God wants you to, and you are going to hell if you don’t. The purpose of many churches is to enlarge themselves, not to help the community.

It becomes most troublesome when you hear about what some of the mega-churches do with their money. There appears to be no meaningful federal restrictions on compensation given directly to the preachers, nor to the perks that these churches provide to their leaders, who act as if they are little gods upon the face of the Earth. One of the most famous Tulsa evangelists ran a university which has a private jet that he and his family could use for almost any purpose (since wherever they go or whatever they do, they are evangelizing by their mere presence). Technically, such organizations are operating “not for profit,” but clearly these churches are just methods of scraping money up from gullible people and shoveling it into the coffers of rich evangelists. Just what good are they doing for society? Clearly they are doing a lot less good, tax-free, than do most corporations that pay taxes.

Corporations do not pay taxes on money they donate to the public good. But there are strict rules about how they can do this. Imagine what would happen if a corporate CEO decided to create a spin-off foundation to “help the environment,” appointed himself director, and gave himself a big salary or a tax-free house. This would be considered illegal. I think. But how is this different from what rich evangelists do?

I modestly propose that churches no longer receive tax-free status. If they are in the business of raising funds for their own expansion, let them pay taxes for it like the rest of us. This would also apply to all NGOs. But big churches abuse the privilege of freedom from taxes much more often than do environmental NGOs. The Botanical Society of America, for example, does as much good for the world as the big Tulsa ministries, with a thousandth the budget. And most NGOs are run by qualified people, not by some Dr. Don who is not required to prove where his title came from.

Churches claim to be concerned about, for example, the health of American citizens. If churches paid taxes, except on specific social programs, the federal government might be able to afford health care after all.

This essay was recycled from my website (November 9, 2009).

A Brief Note About Bleeding Hearts

You have probably heard the term “bleeding heart liberals.” It is one of the Republicans’ favorite attacks. Remember that Republicans are also the most vocal defenders of Christianity.

I remember a 60 Minutes interview of Studs Terkel back in the 1970s. Studs Terkel was a politically liberal activist who died in 2008 at the age of 96. He is someone the conservatives have long loved to hate. He said something to the effect that he did not mind being called a bleeding heart; this phrase refers to the bleeding heart of Jesus Christ, of which he was not ashamed.

I wonder what the Christian Republicans would have to say about that.

Do Conservatives Need Someone to Hate?

My last entry was August 5. The announcement that Russia would stop exporting grain was on that date, but so also was the announcement that a federal judge overturned the California law banning same-sex marriages.

I have very little personal interest in this topic. I like women. I really like women (and, if you didn’t check my bio, I am a man). On the one hand, what do I care if some men like men, or some women like women? I will not go as far as Thomas Jefferson and say that it does not matter so long as it “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my bones,” but almost.

On the other hand, I do not feel that gays and lesbians are being severely abused if they are denied the opportunity to call their civil unions marriages. Perhaps it would just make sense to allow privileged tax status to go to civil unions, without using the term marriage. There are many more important things to talk about, like how to stop global warming. So, until now, I have never written on this topic.

And I have little to say about it now except regarding what the issue tells us about conservatives. The federal judge was unable to find any reason why gay marriages would harm other people, or why the state of California would have any legal interest in the matter. Exactly what is the harm that a gay-marriage-ban law is designed to prevent? No answer from the conservative side except this. Legalizing gay marriage would prevent them from foisting their views on others. That is what they said, only they didn’t use the word foist.

I think conservatives either need to have someone to hate, or else want to use this issue to divert our attention away from global warming, and financial reform, and health care, all of them problems that have lots and lots and lots of victims. From what I have observed of the psychology of conservatives that I have known, I would tend to favor the first explanation, but the second is more likely to be true.

Conservatives and their Alternate Planet

Have you noticed that conservatives live on a different planet? This is nowhere more evident than in their response to global warming. They deny the reality of one of the best attested facts in human existence. And they bolster it with appeals to religion, making things up that are not even in their scriptures.

In fact, we are all living on a different planet. As Bill McKibben points out in his new book, Eaarth, we no longer live on the old, comfortable planet Earth, but on a planet (which he calls Eaarth) in which global warming and its consequences have already become the norm. Political and religious conservatives have not yet reconciled themselves with the reality of Earth, much less of Eaarth.

The events of this week illustrate the fact perfectly. Three events have occurred that, while ignored by many people, are hugely ominous for the future of our planet.

First, climate scientists have predicted that areas near the oceans would get more rainfall, and get it in the form of big storms. They intended this as a future prediction, but it is the major fact of reality right now in Pakistan, which is having the worst floods in its history.

Second, climate scientists have predicted that areas in the middle of continents would experience droughts and heat waves. This is happening right now in Russia, at the same moment that Pakistan is flooded. Russia had not experienced temperatures of 100 F during the time that reliable records have been kept, but they have had temperatures over 100 F for almost two weeks now. The result has been a massive drought, with the biggest outbreak of forest fires in their history.

Third, climate scientists have predicted interruptions in agricultural productivity and international trade in agricultural products. This has just happened, today. On August 5, 2010, Russia announced that it was banning grain exports for the rest of the year. Add this to the near collapse of Australian grain production, and the price of grain on the international market will get even higher—which will, of course, affect poor people the most. Most Americans may not notice, because we can afford to pay almost any price for food, or so we think.

There are three stages of conservative response to global warming. The first stage is to deny that it is happening. The second stage is to claim that it is happening but is not being influenced by human activity. They are already beginning this second stage. The third stage is to just say that, oh well, we can’t do anything about it so we might as well go ahead and burn all the oil we want to.

These three viewpoints all contradict one another, but conservatives can comfortably accommodate them, because evolution has given us brains capable of maintaining mutually contradictory thoughts. Science has given us a way to transcend the limitations of our ape brains, but conservatives appear in this case to have no use for science.

This essay also appeared on my evolution blog.

Zeal

Religious zeal can lead people to do all kinds of crazy things. I cannot bear right now to write, nor can you bear to read, a summary of the history of religious zeal or a survey of religious zeal in the world today. I just want to give a personal example of how I was blinded by zeal back in my creationist days (and it is not the only example).

When I was an undergraduate, I was a fundamentalist, and creationism was my gospel. I had, a couple of years earlier, been to Japan as an exchange student. I had friends in Japan, with whom I have unfortunately lost contact. One of them was a young woman named Sumiyo. I did not notice her very much when I was in Japan, but in the weeks after my return to America I developed a close relationship with her through letters. We meant a lot to one another, a love constructed of words. I thought she was nearly a perfect human being, except for one thing. She was Buddhist and as such headed to Hell. I wanted to somehow convince her to be a Christian. We actually wrote to one another about it, in her imperfect English, my beautiful English, and an occasional clumsy Japanese sentence that I wrote.

I wanted to send her some evidence that would convince any intelligent person—and she certainly was one—of the truth of creationism. I do not remember if I actually sent her any of my creationist books. But I do remember one that I almost sent her. It was a little cheap paperback by a creationist who was saying that if it were not for God, atoms could not exist. The book, “The Atom Speaks,” had a photo of a nuclear explosion on the cover. I was about ready to send it when I suddenly realized what impression it would have on her. This was about 1976, scarcely thirty years since the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That is almost the same amount of time since I have last corresponded with her. Not that long. The atomic bombs were within living memory—not of her, born in 1957, but of her parents. I might have deeply offended her by sending her that book.

My zeal had corrupted my empathy. Only at the last minute did I think to put myself in her position and look back at myself. That is what empathy is. I believe that there are many larger and smaller examples happening all the time in which religious zeal makes us forget our good and loving behavior. Zeal blocked my ability to think about what someone really needed to hear, rather than just what I wanted to say.

The Evolution of Religion: What Is Next?

Religion is not a single thing. It is a complex set of things. What form it will take in the human future depends on which of its components come to dominate it.

Religion consists of a set of doctrines, as well as spiritual feelings and experiences. Spirituality, based directly on human experiences, will probably continue forever. Our brains have experiences such as the following, which I listed in Chapter 7 of my forthcoming book, Life of Earth: ecstasy; loss of awareness of having a defined body; altruism; need for an authority figure; awareness of death; and belief that phenomena are caused by invisible persons. It is likely that each of these is caused by a particular brain function. They will never go away, except perhaps over a longer period of time than human civilization has yet existed; and we will probably always interpret them as spiritual experiences.

But the doctrines are memes. They are culturally transmitted. However unlikely it seems at the moment, these memes can die away quickly, over a very few generations. I do not expect many of them to die away, but I can at least hope that the more oppressive and destructive of them will become extinct. For example, the idea that God will send most people who have ever lived to a hell in which they will experience conscious eternal torture. This doctrinal belief makes people comfortable with the idea that it is acceptable to torture or harm other people. Another example: the idea that God has given our religious group the unique truth, and has not given it to anyone else. This doctrinal belief makes people comfortable with the idea that they can sweep aside other religious groups by whatever means necessary. The time for belief in God as Supreme Torturer and Dispenser of Unique Truth to Fundamentalists Who Can Enforce It (whether in Christian or Muslim garb) must end as speedily as possible. We should oppose these ideas vigorously and without interruption for as long as it takes to ensure their memetic extinction. One of the best ways to do this is just to educate people—about evolution and about the brain chemistry basis of our thoughts, for example.

And when we do so, should we happen to succeed at some point long after my life is over, what will we have? Perhaps, primarily, we will have spirituality—people who worship God by feeling the inspiration of nature and by living by the Golden Rule. People who think and act the way Jesus did when he was out in the hills. The component of religion that makes people better, not worse. This may be impossible, but it is a future worth working for.

This essay will also appear on my evolution blog.

It's a Miracle!

I walked into a dark restroom and the lights suddenly came on. It must have been a miracle! Anyplace else and I would have assumed it was a motion detector. But I was in no ordinary place. I was at the Shrine of the Infant Jesus of Prague. This shrine is an example of how convoluted religious reasoning can become. I have to start at the beginning.

In the late middle ages, there was a wooden statue of a baby boy with royal garments, a crown, and holding a sceptre and globe of the world. To my knowledge, Jesus never did this, at least when he was a child. But this statue was reputed to have special powers if you made offerings to it. After various adventures, the statue ended up in Prague (now in the Czech Republic). Meanwhile, there was a Catholic priest from Prague, Oklahoma who somehow ended up with a replica (souvenir copy) of the original statue. He apparently thought that there was some significance in his town in Oklahoma having the same name as the European city, and before you knew it, the replica statue was reputed to have special powers if you made offerings to it.

So here is the line of causation that comes into play if you visit this Oklahoma shrine. 1. Stick some money in a hole at the shrine. 2. The souvenir copy statue projects spiritual energy across the Atlantic to the European statue. 3. The European statue has some influence on the Virgin Mary. 4. The Virgin Mary is obligated to tell her Son to answer your prayer. 5. Jesus is more likely to answer your prayer this way than if you just asked him directly.

Wow. All this was happening less than twenty miles from where I was born, and I knew nothing about it until I was 52.

I considered my options. Nobody was around except the woman in the office behind the gift shop. First, I considered telling her that I had walked all the way from California (on my knees? no; backward? no) just to venerate the statue. But it was obvious that I had not been outdoors that much. Second, I considered using my fake eastern European accent which I learned from Boris and Natasha and saying I was from the shrine of the original statue and wanted to inspect it. But I realized that I did not know the secret catatonic handshake (if I remember correctly, this is the Catholic version of the secret Masonic handshake that my Dad never taught me) and my imposture would be revealed. Third, I considered proposing a statistical study to determine whether offerings to the statue actually increased the chances of having a prayer answered, as in the Benson heart study. But I didn’t do any of these things. I just went home and wrote this.

A version of this essay will appear on my evolution web site.

Occam's Razor

“Occam’s razor” is a philosophical position, attributed to medieval theologian William of Occam (Ockham). It is that the simplest explanation that fits all of the facts is the one that should be accepted. He applied it to theology, but it works in all areas of study. It is one of the foundational assumptions of science.

Religious people have, for the past few centuries, abandoned William of Occam’s theological premise. The reason is that science has steadily put physical explanations of nature in place of spiritual ones. At first it was that the Earth goes around the Sun. Then it was the idea that gravity and momentum, not angels, propelled the planets in their orbits. A few simple Newtonian equations explained as much as a multitude of angels.

One of the biggest examples of a simple natural explanation replacing a complex theological story is, of course, evolution. At the time of William Paley, every species was seen as not only a special creation by God but as evidence that God was good. Even mosquitoes. Evolution replaced “natural theology” largely because one, single explanation—natural selection—replaced thousands of separate acts of design and creation. Why does each species exist? In Paley’s time, each species had its own reason. Ever since Darwin, there has been only one reason: evolution.

But evolution is far from being the only example. If I were a fundamentalist, I would be a lot more worried about psychology than about evolution. Scientists have now explained nearly everything that happens in our “minds” and “hearts” as a physical or chemical process that occurs within our brains. This applies even to the most intense religious experiences (see the earlier essay about the Near Death experience.) Now, we know that these processes, involving neurons, neurotransmitters, hormones, and genes occur. In order to believe that a person has a spirit that thinks and feels, you have to believe that this spirit exactly mirrors, in every detail, the functions of the brain. You have to create, without evidence, an imaginary shadow of the brain. Occam’s razor says that, if the brain explains everything, there is no need to invent a spirit that is just a duplicate of the brain.

Occam’s razor, a philosophical position invented by a theologian, has now turned against theology.

Treasure in Heaven

Jesus talked about laying up treasure in Heaven rather than on Earth. The treasure to which he referred, we may deduce from context (the Sermon on the Mount), was that of creating a better world for others around us.

It has been my experience that the most zealously conservative Christians have been the worst at laying up treasure in Heaven. It is liberal thinkers, people like me, who lay up the most treasure in a heaven that we are not even sure exists. We forego opportunities to pile up riches in our own bank accounts or to push other people away; instead, we encourage others and build them up, even at some expense to ourselves. We do it because we believe passionately in altruism and, quite simply, we enjoy being good.

I have a lifelong list of experiences with conservative Christians who devote themselves to creating hostility and destruction. I will briefly summarize my decades of experiences.

Very soon after I was baptized into a fundamentalist church in 1973, while I was in high school, I was recruited into being a lay preacher. This was a good way of building my confidence. I thought it would be a good way to cultivate religious wisdom and careful thinking, but in this I was wrong. In fundamentalist churches such as the one I was in, each speaker’s responsibility was to simply repeat what the church leaders say, and claim that it was straight from the Bible, even when it was not. So I gave a Sunday night sermon about the New Testament passages predicting “a new Heaven and a new Earth” after Jesus’ Second Coming. I looked forward to a Heavenly City but also to an Earth renewed from the ecological disasters we have inflicted upon it. About a week later, the official preacher in our congregation delivered an entire Sunday morning sermon about how evil my little sermon had been. He was pretty fierce. Remember, I was in high school. And his line of reasoning was pretty absurd. He said that what the passage about the New Heaven and New Earth literally meant was that the New Heaven was a new Heaven but the New Earth was the New Testament. He had to carefully explain his contorted reasoning to reach this interpretation. This was a really bruising experience for me.

When I was in graduate school in 1982, I was a member of a different fundamentalist church. I was invited to teach a class about evolution and Christianity. Some of the people in the church assumed that only the most literal form of creationism would be allowed. They were wrong. But they did not accept this. They insisted on putting me on trial before the church council, at which I was not allowed to defend myself from the lies they told about me, the same lies that they had spread throughout the church. The church council wanted me to continue teaching the class, but the life had been kicked out of it. These bitter people had decided that their belief in creationism gave them permission to make false accusations against me. Intimidation.

My first faculty position, in 1987, was at a fundamentalist Christian college. The faculty, all deeply conservative, were tearing each other apart in a civil war that eventually brought about the downfall of the college (the students got tired of it and stopped coming). I was largely unaffected; as a newcomer, I managed to stay neutral in the big war over an issue I do not even clearly remember.

I was kicked out of my second faculty position, at another fundamentalist Christian college, in 1992 by the decision of a secret committee to which I was not allowed to provide any information and whose information I was not allowed to question. More intimidation.

Then this year there was the hate mail I described earlier.

I am sure Jesus is very proud of all of these Christian warriors.

Not. If you survey the political scene, the conservative Christians either revile and lie about those who disagree with them (like Ann Coulter) or are openly hypocritical (like the thrice-married twice-philandering Newt Gingerich). On the religious scene, the most vociferous conservative Christians are those who attack others and who frequently use false information, both to sway voters and to get money. In my life I have seen an almost perfect pattern of bitter, lying conservative Christians and gentle, honest liberal Christians and agnostics. An outside observer (which I am not) would say, if there is a God in charge of things up there in heaven, why do the people who believe in him most do such terrible things? Conservative Christians are one of the best evidences against the existence of a God of Love who is actually in charge of the world.

Why Do Christians Praise Democracy?

Here are some thoughts as July 4 draws close.

Conservative Christian politicians like to praise democracy, and they treat the Constitution almost as if it were a sacred document. But why? Democracy is not in the Bible. Most of the Founding Fathers (lo, we capitalize their title) had no specific theology, so they did not bother trying to make a Biblical justification for starting the first true democracy in the world. Even the conventional Christian Founding Fathers did not attempt to do this.

Our very image of God is based on an ancient unquestioning acceptance of the kingdom system of government. Religious people claim that God is a King, not a President or Prime Minister.

In Bible days, nobody could conceive of democracy. Or so we think. Actually the first century Christians came pretty close to it. The second chapter of Acts says that they lived together in communities that resembled communes, in which they held all property in common. They were communists. (BTW, Stalin and his Soviet goons were not communists. They just used communist terminology to justify their oppression of the Russian people and plundering their wealth.) This did not last very long. By the fourth century, there was no longer a church but a Church with a hierarchy that made all the decisions and foisted them on people, a Church that the ruthless Roman Emperor Constantine used for political advantage. Christian theology was back to a God as Absolute King way of thinking.

Furthermore, it is no surprise that many conservative religious people claim that we should torture detainees to get them to confess to things they may or may not have done. Conservative religious people believe in a Hell in which God will torture, consciously and forever, anyone who does not give full assent to all details of Christian doctrine. If you believe in a God like that, it is a small matter to believe that a government dominated by your political party has the right to torture people. In doing so, you are simply reflecting the image of God.

It is time that we get rid of the image of God as King, and as Supreme Torturer. Neither do we need President God or Prime Minister God. What we need is (and this is far from an original thought) an idea of God as our fellow worker for good in the world. If we believe this, if we believe in Comrade God, then we will try to create a system of government whose purpose is to allow people to help one another, to coordinate altruism. We will have a nurturing democracy, rather than the de facto rulership of rich Republicans.

Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think

This is the title of a book just published (2010) by Oxford University Press USA, written by Elaine Howard Ecklund. The author had apparently received financial support to conduct an extensive survey of scientists (over 1600) at top American universities and to interview many of them (about 250) in order to find out how they viewed religion. The book based on the results is mostly the personal stories from the interviews. The book is therefore valuable for two main reasons. First, it demonstrates clearly something that many people, particularly in the conservative churches, do not seem to know: many scientists (roughly half) are spiritual or religious. Yet all of these scientists—even the most religious—agree that the major scientific theories (notably evolution) are completely confirmed by data from the natural world. The scientific community, therefore, does not reject creationism and ID as a result of a monolithic anti-spiritual bias. Second, this book lets us get to know these scientists (even though their identities are hidden unless they have published on the subject) as real people, many of whom think carefully about spirituality and religion. The readers will probably know these scientists better than do some of their own colleagues down the hall.

However, I found the title of the book misleading. It is not just about what scientists think. The author clearly has her own agenda—that scientists (apparently all of us) should actively involve ourselves in a creative interaction of religion and science. She presents the results of the interviews, honestly conveying what each scientist said; but the trajectory of the book clearly moves from anti-religious scientists whose view the author considers unhelpful, to the “boundary pioneers” who find a way to incorporate religion and spirituality into their work and whom the author considers to be the best scientists. She indicates that scientists who simply ignore religion, or who consider it to be a bad thing, are depriving science and science education of important elements. They follow what she calls the “suppression” model, a term that sounds negative even if it was intended to be neutral. For example, many students are religious, and we should not ignore this important part of their lives. She indicates that anti-religious scientists are depriving themselves of the benefits that spirituality and religion can provide to science itself, including an appreciation of the ethical dimensions of scientific research and even a source of hypotheses to investigate. For example, we should “foster [religious] dialogue on campus for the good of science.” I got the impression that the author wanted us to believe that scientists who ignore religion are just not as good at being scientists as those who embrace religion. There would be no problem with this, except that the title of the book should have been something like Why Scientists Should Embrace Spirituality and Religion. I say this even though it appears, from Ecklund’s definition, that I am one of those “boundary pioneers” who actively incorporate religious insights into my teaching and writing. In particular, I point out the Biblical prophetic tradition that defends the poor and the land that they live on against the oppression of the rich. I may personally share the author’s bias—but it is a bias.

Scientists who ignore religion in their research and teaching have good reasons for doing so, which Ecklund does not emphasize. It is just not our job. I do not teach Biblical doctrines in my classes, but I am pushing the limits of what I can do in the science classroom by quoting Bible passages that express the beauty of the natural world and the importance of protecting it. In some universities, many students would not want spiritual concepts mixed in with science. Where I teach, at a rural university in Oklahoma, many students do not want a science professor to mention spiritual concepts that fall short of a complete confirmation of fundamentalism. But my job, per contract, consists of teaching science, doing science-related scholarly activity, and service. My contract does not authorize (or forbid) me to do what Ecklund implies that all scientists should do. Scientists who are spiritual or religious, but who ignore religion in their work, are just doing the job that they are authorized to do.

Ecklund makes a useful distinction between religion and spirituality. Religion includes doctrine which is accepted by faith in the authority of religious traditions, documents, and leaders. Scientists, understandably, are uncomfortable with having dogma handed to them. Spirituality consists of an awareness of the connectedness of everything in the cosmos, and of its immensity, along with a firm belief in transcendental values. However, most or perhaps all of the scientists Ecklund interviewed believe in transcendental values. I doubt any of them would say that love and hatred are equally good, and our human preference for what we call good is merely an evolutionary accident. On what basis, then, does the author dismiss the spirituality of non-religious scientists as “thin” and the spirituality of religious scientists as substantial? She did have a point that some scientists, the ones with “thin” spirituality, have not given as much thought to spirituality as have others. The author suggested that spiritual scientists are more likely to look outside of themselves, to the larger society and universe, than scientists who are not spiritual. But I suspect she has switched cause and effect here: perhaps those scientists who have a psychological tendency to look outside of their own work are more likely to be spiritual.

At one point in the book, the author presented the same data set twice, making it look as though there were more data than there actually were. Figure 3.1 has the same numbers as Table 2.1. She also focuses preferentially on small bits of data. She admitted that fewer than eight percent of religiously-inclined scientists reported that they had experienced prejudice from their peers, but she then begins to discuss it as if it were a major problem to be solved.

Many of the non-spiritual scientists in Ecklund’s survey did not appear to have a problem with spirituality or even some forms of religion, but were reacting strongly against the attacks on science by creationists. This is what bothered many of them. This is not the scientists’ fault, however.

Ecklund’s data confronts us with an uncomfortable truth, the implications might have been beyond the scope of this book. According to Table 2.2, 34 percent of the scientists surveyed indicated that they did not believe in God—in contrast to just two percent of the general American population. Can this entire difference be attributed simply to scientific prejudice? Or could it be that scientists know that science can fully explain the universe, and most people do not know this? I refer not only to the cosmological and evolutionary history of the universe but to the way the brain works, and that the soul, if there is one, appears to just be a duplicate—a probably unnecessary one—of the brain. Scientists study things more closely than does the general population. The fact that so many scientists are atheists makes me think that they may be on to something, despite my own persistent spirituality.

There is clearly a problem here to be solved: fundamentalist attacks on science not only damage science but also damage religious credibility. But it is not scientific prejudice that keeps the problem from being solved. Most scientists are not hostile toward religion, according to Ecklund’s data. The AAAS has a DoSER (Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion) program. Scientists can help solve the problem, but we did not cause it. The chapter titled “What scientists are doing wrong that they could be doing right” therefore misattributes the blame.

I appreciate Ecklund’s work and, for what it is worth, I agree with it. But it is not the objective overview of “what scientists really think” that the title implies.

This essay also appears on my evolution blog.