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.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Social Darwinist Preachers
Nearly all of the most conservative preachers today are staunch and vocal supporters of free enterprise, by which they mean that big corporations have a right to crush ordinary people. In doing so, they are directly contradicting Jesus and the prophets. What, for example, would the prophet Amos have said about this? You can read it for yourself.
Evolutionary scientists, however, are not supporters of this doctrine, which is called Social Darwinism. It is the application of an incorrect and disproven version of evolution to the social and political world. It is Herbert Spencer’s, not Charles Darwin’s, version of evolution. Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary writings are, according to Ernst Mayr, of no consequence to modern evolutionary science.
Modern “free enterprise” preachers are not the first to have espoused this oppressive doctrine. In 1877, Henry Ward Beecher, fresh out of a scandal about the open secret of his extramarital affair, gave sermons that said essentially the same thing as modern conservative preachers. Workers’ riots were erupting all over the eastern United States, with deadly conflicts between workers and the National Guard in several cities. Workers earned only enough money (a dollar a day), it was said, for bread and water. Beecher, while overseeing the construction of his Hudson River waterfront mansion in Peekskill, New York, announced that workers should be satisfied with this. “The man who cannot live on bread and water is not fit to live.” The poor, said Beecher, will “reap the misfortunes of inferiority.” He added, melding God and evolution together, “God had intended the great to be great and the little to be little.” He ignored Amos, who said that God had not intended the great to crush the little.
In so claiming, Beecher apparently did not notice his inconsistency. His sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, was the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin which has been considered the most famous denunciation of American slavery. He did not recognize that big corporations can economically enslave the working poor. This was particularly true in 1877, and still almost as true today.
The difference is that Beecher openly admitted his doctrine was a spiritual adaptation of Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary ideas. Modern preachers, in contrast, denounce evolution and claim to get their ideas straight from Jesus. In so doing, these preachers are not only just as wrong as Beecher was, but are insulting Jesus on top of it. Beecher at least claimed to take a figurative interpretation of scripture.
I obtain my historical information from Berry Werth’s excellent book, Banquet at Delmonico’s: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America (Random House, 2009).
Evolutionary scientists, however, are not supporters of this doctrine, which is called Social Darwinism. It is the application of an incorrect and disproven version of evolution to the social and political world. It is Herbert Spencer’s, not Charles Darwin’s, version of evolution. Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary writings are, according to Ernst Mayr, of no consequence to modern evolutionary science.
Modern “free enterprise” preachers are not the first to have espoused this oppressive doctrine. In 1877, Henry Ward Beecher, fresh out of a scandal about the open secret of his extramarital affair, gave sermons that said essentially the same thing as modern conservative preachers. Workers’ riots were erupting all over the eastern United States, with deadly conflicts between workers and the National Guard in several cities. Workers earned only enough money (a dollar a day), it was said, for bread and water. Beecher, while overseeing the construction of his Hudson River waterfront mansion in Peekskill, New York, announced that workers should be satisfied with this. “The man who cannot live on bread and water is not fit to live.” The poor, said Beecher, will “reap the misfortunes of inferiority.” He added, melding God and evolution together, “God had intended the great to be great and the little to be little.” He ignored Amos, who said that God had not intended the great to crush the little.
In so claiming, Beecher apparently did not notice his inconsistency. His sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, was the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin which has been considered the most famous denunciation of American slavery. He did not recognize that big corporations can economically enslave the working poor. This was particularly true in 1877, and still almost as true today.
The difference is that Beecher openly admitted his doctrine was a spiritual adaptation of Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary ideas. Modern preachers, in contrast, denounce evolution and claim to get their ideas straight from Jesus. In so doing, these preachers are not only just as wrong as Beecher was, but are insulting Jesus on top of it. Beecher at least claimed to take a figurative interpretation of scripture.
I obtain my historical information from Berry Werth’s excellent book, Banquet at Delmonico’s: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America (Random House, 2009).
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Fixation on the Afterlife
At the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa there is an exhibit of ancient Egyptian sarcophagi and artifacts. I remember that it was in Tulsa, long before I lived here, that I saw my first ancient Egyptian items. I had grown up in a California town where even the historical museums had nothing from before 1800 (CE, that is) and was amazed to see something that was actually from the time of the Old Testament stories. I was in awe. But this time, as I looked at item after item, some of them over 5000 years old, I felt burdened. Here is why.
The Egyptian fixation upon death and the afterlife was total and stifling. Egypt is famous as an archaeological treasure trove, because of its long civilization and the dry conditions that allowed exquisite preservation even of things that had not been mummified. It should be a tremendous source of information about the everyday lives of ancient people. But in reality, besides the records of kingly conquests, most of the hieroglyphics are incantations that will guide the departed person through the afterlife. So, for instance, you have a sarcophagus covered with hundreds of hieroglyphics. They tell you that it is so-and-so-and-so son of so-and-so-and-so, that he was a scribe or the keeper of the granaries, and the rest of it is please-Osiris-don’t-hurt-me-please-Ra-don’t-feed-me-to-the-alligators-please-Horus-I-wrote-down-the-right-words-so-I-deserve-to-live-in-the-underworld-forever-along-with-my-mummified-cat-no-longer-Fluffy. No biography, just religious hocus-pocus.
The extravagances expended upon preparation for the afterlife of Egyptian kings and nobles are infamous. But so imbued was Egyptian culture with this fixation that middle-class people were expected to make these preparations also. I saw the sarcophagi and other items of artisans. Preparation for death could cost the artisan a year’s wages. They had various cost-cutting measures. The middle-class sarcophagi had red and yellow paint to imitate the gold sheet they could not afford, and painted patterns to make limestone look like granite. Even the lowest professionals had to have something, so they made mummy-covers out of terra cotta (pretty amateur work, resulting in faces that looked almost Neanderthal). If they found a tomb that had been abandoned, they recycled the contents by erasing the names of the previous owner-inhabitant. Some of these items could have been a chance to preserve a record of, for example, how the pyramids were built—did the artisans (who were not slaves, but contractors) push the blocks up inclined planes? Or did outer space creatures use anti-gravity devices, as Erich Von Däniken claimed? Just how were the contractors chosen and how much were they paid? There is a little information, but not much. The Egyptians wrote a lot, but mostly incantations for the afterlife.
So powerful was the cult of the afterlife that conquerors got sucked into it. One of the sarcophagi was of a Greek ruler just before the Common Era. Everything looked just like it was Egyptian, even with hieroglyphics (which were used only for religion; commerce used a primitive alphabet)—but the face plate was a Pompeii-style painting.
The Egyptians were not the only ones to focus all their attention on religion and leave little record of their ordinary lives. In another part of the museum there are medieval paintings. They are all of religious themes. Occasionally a little bit of ordinary life and landscape would slip in as background. Only later did ordinary life and lives make it into paintings. At the end of one hallway is a permanent exhibit at the Philbrook: Bouguereau’s painting of the little sherpherdess, more lifelike than life, and whose eyes, everyone agrees, seem to follow you wherever you are.
Some of my own writings have suffered from religious limitations in the past. I have kept a daily journal (today’s entry was number 7548) for 21 years. The recent entries contain many things that I have learned from my experiences, observations, and from the news. Whoever reads them someday, should they happen to survive, will learn much about our times and how at least one thoughtful person reacted to them. But when I started the journal, it was a devotional book, in which I wrote only about the Bible, and wrote prayers of adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication (the ACTS system). A little bit about me, hardly anything about the world. My journal, at its inception, was very much like an Egyptian sarcophagus, covered with writing that would tell a person of the future very, very little, and which did not even help me very much. I felt an obligation to be pious rather than wrestling with difficult spiritual issues honestly. I am thankful that enough life remains to me that I can finally begin examining it.
The Egyptian fixation upon death and the afterlife was total and stifling. Egypt is famous as an archaeological treasure trove, because of its long civilization and the dry conditions that allowed exquisite preservation even of things that had not been mummified. It should be a tremendous source of information about the everyday lives of ancient people. But in reality, besides the records of kingly conquests, most of the hieroglyphics are incantations that will guide the departed person through the afterlife. So, for instance, you have a sarcophagus covered with hundreds of hieroglyphics. They tell you that it is so-and-so-and-so son of so-and-so-and-so, that he was a scribe or the keeper of the granaries, and the rest of it is please-Osiris-don’t-hurt-me-please-Ra-don’t-feed-me-to-the-alligators-please-Horus-I-wrote-down-the-right-words-so-I-deserve-to-live-in-the-underworld-forever-along-with-my-mummified-cat-no-longer-Fluffy. No biography, just religious hocus-pocus.
The extravagances expended upon preparation for the afterlife of Egyptian kings and nobles are infamous. But so imbued was Egyptian culture with this fixation that middle-class people were expected to make these preparations also. I saw the sarcophagi and other items of artisans. Preparation for death could cost the artisan a year’s wages. They had various cost-cutting measures. The middle-class sarcophagi had red and yellow paint to imitate the gold sheet they could not afford, and painted patterns to make limestone look like granite. Even the lowest professionals had to have something, so they made mummy-covers out of terra cotta (pretty amateur work, resulting in faces that looked almost Neanderthal). If they found a tomb that had been abandoned, they recycled the contents by erasing the names of the previous owner-inhabitant. Some of these items could have been a chance to preserve a record of, for example, how the pyramids were built—did the artisans (who were not slaves, but contractors) push the blocks up inclined planes? Or did outer space creatures use anti-gravity devices, as Erich Von Däniken claimed? Just how were the contractors chosen and how much were they paid? There is a little information, but not much. The Egyptians wrote a lot, but mostly incantations for the afterlife.
So powerful was the cult of the afterlife that conquerors got sucked into it. One of the sarcophagi was of a Greek ruler just before the Common Era. Everything looked just like it was Egyptian, even with hieroglyphics (which were used only for religion; commerce used a primitive alphabet)—but the face plate was a Pompeii-style painting.
The Egyptians were not the only ones to focus all their attention on religion and leave little record of their ordinary lives. In another part of the museum there are medieval paintings. They are all of religious themes. Occasionally a little bit of ordinary life and landscape would slip in as background. Only later did ordinary life and lives make it into paintings. At the end of one hallway is a permanent exhibit at the Philbrook: Bouguereau’s painting of the little sherpherdess, more lifelike than life, and whose eyes, everyone agrees, seem to follow you wherever you are.
Some of my own writings have suffered from religious limitations in the past. I have kept a daily journal (today’s entry was number 7548) for 21 years. The recent entries contain many things that I have learned from my experiences, observations, and from the news. Whoever reads them someday, should they happen to survive, will learn much about our times and how at least one thoughtful person reacted to them. But when I started the journal, it was a devotional book, in which I wrote only about the Bible, and wrote prayers of adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication (the ACTS system). A little bit about me, hardly anything about the world. My journal, at its inception, was very much like an Egyptian sarcophagus, covered with writing that would tell a person of the future very, very little, and which did not even help me very much. I felt an obligation to be pious rather than wrestling with difficult spiritual issues honestly. I am thankful that enough life remains to me that I can finally begin examining it.
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
The Dark Side of Altruism
I have written extensively about altruism, in my Encyclopedia of Evolution, as well as in my book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, to be released this fall by Prometheus books. When animals are nice to other members of their species, they enjoy lots of benefits; nature is not simply “red in tooth and claw,” to use Tennyson’s oft-quoted phrase. Humans are, it appears, the animal species with the most complicated forms of altruism.
But clearly the positive benefits of altruism are not, by themselves, enough to have influenced the evolution of altruism. There is also a dark side to altruism. Animals also exercise violent actions against those who are cheaters in the altruism game. This confers a penalty upon those individuals who do not practice altruism. “Sweet revenge” appears to be as hard-wired in our brains as is friendship and love. And it is not just an instinct; it is a pleasure. It is a pleasure that can more suddenly and completely take over our brains than almost any other passion.
One example of this sudden, mindless zeal against cheaters took place in the aftermath of the European theater of World War II. In an earlier entry, I told about meeting with my cousins in a rural cemetery on Memorial Day weekend, and exchanging some of our uncle’s war stories. Here is one of them.
The Germans had been defeated, and Allied troops, including my uncle Bill when he was a very young adult, fresh off an Oklahoma farm, were escorting German prisoners of war to prisons. All of them were on foot—the Allied guards, and the prisoners. This was, from the viewpoint of the Allied soldiers as well as most of the defeated Germans, a fair thing: once the war ended, there was no more need for killing, and now it was time for justice, which meant the execution, after judgment, of only the men who were most responsible for causing the war. But Bill recognized that one of the prisoners was an SS soldier. The SS soldiers had been trained as Nazi killing machines. For them, the war would not be over until death. They had all just finished eating lunch, and Bill wanted to light up a cigarette as he was, by himself, guarding the prisoners. It was windy. For just a moment—and he knew as soon as he did this that it was unwise—he leaned his rifle against the wall of a building to shelter the match from the wind. That was all of the time it took for the SS soldier to jump up and grab the rifle, with the intention of killing Bill. He grabbed the rifle also. The SS soldier, who was quite large, pushed against Bill, who was quite small, and Bill pushed back; they pushed each other a second time. Bill knew that he could not withstand the strong enemy. So when the SS soldier pushed a third time, Bill moved aside and tripped him. As the SS soldier fell, Bill took another gun out of its holster and shot the SS soldier in the back. He went into a trance, and just kept shooting. It took him awhile to notice that he had used all eight of his bullets, and the gun was going click-click-click. His comrades were now at his side.
Uncle Bill had slipped into a state that the Vikings called “berserk,” which is a term that specifically describes an alternate state of mind, almost dreamlike in quality, which encompasses a warrior in the midst of battle. We use the term loosely today to describe people who are out of control due to anger, but it is a mental state that anyone can slip into, and it clearly provided evolutionary benefits to our ancestors. It is an extreme form of the dark side of altruism. While I do not believe that it is good for us to go berserk, except in extreme situations such as Bill’s, it is clearly beneficial for us to not just promote good and altruistic policies and actions, but also to connect evil and selfish policies and actions with swift and sure punishment, of the appropriate variety. For example, Wall Street executives should not simply be scolded for causing the financial meltdown of 2008; they need the appropriate form of punishment, which is financial.
In extreme situations, such as Bill’s in 1945, there is no time for a trial. But those who execute sweet revenge need to explain their actions. Bill had to explain himself before a military panel. It was clear that he was defending himself and his comrades against an obviously evil enemy. But Bill also had a sense of humor. When a commanding officer asked him why he had used eight bullets, he said, “I didn’t have nine, and seven wasn’t quite enough.”
This essay also appeared in my evolution blog.
But clearly the positive benefits of altruism are not, by themselves, enough to have influenced the evolution of altruism. There is also a dark side to altruism. Animals also exercise violent actions against those who are cheaters in the altruism game. This confers a penalty upon those individuals who do not practice altruism. “Sweet revenge” appears to be as hard-wired in our brains as is friendship and love. And it is not just an instinct; it is a pleasure. It is a pleasure that can more suddenly and completely take over our brains than almost any other passion.
One example of this sudden, mindless zeal against cheaters took place in the aftermath of the European theater of World War II. In an earlier entry, I told about meeting with my cousins in a rural cemetery on Memorial Day weekend, and exchanging some of our uncle’s war stories. Here is one of them.
The Germans had been defeated, and Allied troops, including my uncle Bill when he was a very young adult, fresh off an Oklahoma farm, were escorting German prisoners of war to prisons. All of them were on foot—the Allied guards, and the prisoners. This was, from the viewpoint of the Allied soldiers as well as most of the defeated Germans, a fair thing: once the war ended, there was no more need for killing, and now it was time for justice, which meant the execution, after judgment, of only the men who were most responsible for causing the war. But Bill recognized that one of the prisoners was an SS soldier. The SS soldiers had been trained as Nazi killing machines. For them, the war would not be over until death. They had all just finished eating lunch, and Bill wanted to light up a cigarette as he was, by himself, guarding the prisoners. It was windy. For just a moment—and he knew as soon as he did this that it was unwise—he leaned his rifle against the wall of a building to shelter the match from the wind. That was all of the time it took for the SS soldier to jump up and grab the rifle, with the intention of killing Bill. He grabbed the rifle also. The SS soldier, who was quite large, pushed against Bill, who was quite small, and Bill pushed back; they pushed each other a second time. Bill knew that he could not withstand the strong enemy. So when the SS soldier pushed a third time, Bill moved aside and tripped him. As the SS soldier fell, Bill took another gun out of its holster and shot the SS soldier in the back. He went into a trance, and just kept shooting. It took him awhile to notice that he had used all eight of his bullets, and the gun was going click-click-click. His comrades were now at his side.
Uncle Bill had slipped into a state that the Vikings called “berserk,” which is a term that specifically describes an alternate state of mind, almost dreamlike in quality, which encompasses a warrior in the midst of battle. We use the term loosely today to describe people who are out of control due to anger, but it is a mental state that anyone can slip into, and it clearly provided evolutionary benefits to our ancestors. It is an extreme form of the dark side of altruism. While I do not believe that it is good for us to go berserk, except in extreme situations such as Bill’s, it is clearly beneficial for us to not just promote good and altruistic policies and actions, but also to connect evil and selfish policies and actions with swift and sure punishment, of the appropriate variety. For example, Wall Street executives should not simply be scolded for causing the financial meltdown of 2008; they need the appropriate form of punishment, which is financial.
In extreme situations, such as Bill’s in 1945, there is no time for a trial. But those who execute sweet revenge need to explain their actions. Bill had to explain himself before a military panel. It was clear that he was defending himself and his comrades against an obviously evil enemy. But Bill also had a sense of humor. When a commanding officer asked him why he had used eight bullets, he said, “I didn’t have nine, and seven wasn’t quite enough.”
This essay also appeared in my evolution blog.
Sunday, June 6, 2010
The Evolution of Religion
The evolution of religion is too big of a topic to cover in one blog entry or, as I am discovering, in a single encyclopedia entry (as I begin to work on the revised edition of Encyclopedia of Evolution). Religion, as Richard Dawkins points out, is a set of memes that propagate themselves through genetically- and socially-based instincts. Nevertheless, we can speculate about the evolutionary functions of some components of religion. I will speculate on one of them here.
On Memorial Day weekend, I met with some of my family at a cemetery to place plastic flowers on graves. This is nothing if not a religious ceremony. Winganon Cemetery is out in the country, several miles into the hills from Chelsea, a very small town in Oklahoma, which is over twenty miles from Claremore, which is a small city, which is over twenty miles from Tulsa. This is where my parents are buried, as well as the parents of my two cousins, whom we joined there. Also buried there are the grandparents and the great-grandparents that we all shared. Had my daughter not been kept away by a medical emergency, there would have been five generations, living and dead, represented at that place.
Religion is all about connectedness—in fact, that is what the word means, from the Latin ligere, from which the word ligament comes. We were there because our identities are not just who we are at this moment, but as descendants. The human mind operates in four dimensions—we are always thinking about the past and the future. Most humans, except for atheists, include an unseen spiritual world as part of this connectedness; even agnostics leave open this possibility.
We did not look very religious. We were trampling all over our parents’ and ancestors’ graves as we forced plastic flowers into adobe-hard ground. Then we stood in the sun or sat in meager shade to talk about current situations or about the experiences of our predecessors. One cousin and I shared war stories told by our deceased uncle. We did not have sanctimonious ceremonies. But we were doing exactly what our ancestors would have wanted us to do, had they been able to see us: we remembered them, and then built more connections. Neither my cousin or I had heard the stories told by the other.
The human mind works in four dimensions all the time. I realized this later as I reclined on the bed, beside a fan, with one of our cats. I just let my mind wander, and I suppose the cat was doing the same. But the cat was presumably thinking only about its comfort at the present moment, which vague memories of territoriality and food, and vague anticipation of hunger. My mind, however, wandered exclusively in the fourth dimension, remembering past events (most of them trivial) and wondering about the almost infinite possibilities for the future (many of them disturbing). The human mind, even at rest, lives in a cosmos of connectedness, which is to say, religion, broadly defined.
This essay also appeared in my evolution blog.
On Memorial Day weekend, I met with some of my family at a cemetery to place plastic flowers on graves. This is nothing if not a religious ceremony. Winganon Cemetery is out in the country, several miles into the hills from Chelsea, a very small town in Oklahoma, which is over twenty miles from Claremore, which is a small city, which is over twenty miles from Tulsa. This is where my parents are buried, as well as the parents of my two cousins, whom we joined there. Also buried there are the grandparents and the great-grandparents that we all shared. Had my daughter not been kept away by a medical emergency, there would have been five generations, living and dead, represented at that place.
Religion is all about connectedness—in fact, that is what the word means, from the Latin ligere, from which the word ligament comes. We were there because our identities are not just who we are at this moment, but as descendants. The human mind operates in four dimensions—we are always thinking about the past and the future. Most humans, except for atheists, include an unseen spiritual world as part of this connectedness; even agnostics leave open this possibility.
We did not look very religious. We were trampling all over our parents’ and ancestors’ graves as we forced plastic flowers into adobe-hard ground. Then we stood in the sun or sat in meager shade to talk about current situations or about the experiences of our predecessors. One cousin and I shared war stories told by our deceased uncle. We did not have sanctimonious ceremonies. But we were doing exactly what our ancestors would have wanted us to do, had they been able to see us: we remembered them, and then built more connections. Neither my cousin or I had heard the stories told by the other.
The human mind works in four dimensions all the time. I realized this later as I reclined on the bed, beside a fan, with one of our cats. I just let my mind wander, and I suppose the cat was doing the same. But the cat was presumably thinking only about its comfort at the present moment, which vague memories of territoriality and food, and vague anticipation of hunger. My mind, however, wandered exclusively in the fourth dimension, remembering past events (most of them trivial) and wondering about the almost infinite possibilities for the future (many of them disturbing). The human mind, even at rest, lives in a cosmos of connectedness, which is to say, religion, broadly defined.
This essay also appeared in my evolution blog.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
America and Israel, again
The big news this week is about the Israelis using deadly force to attack a ship that was delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza. We must grant that Israel did make some effort to prevent an armed confrontation. They offered to let the vessel unload its cargo in Israel, so that the Israelis could inspect it and then give the humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza, and the vessel refused. It seems apparent that the vessel was intended not just to deliver humanitarian aid but to provoke the Israelis and call world attention to the blockade of Gaza. But to most observers the Israeli commando raid was vastly disproportionate to the offense. One observer, quoted on radio, said that Israel has used military force as its main and sometimes exclusive venue of relations with its neighbors ever since the 1967 war, and quoted a Jewish proverb: To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
The Israeli government, though officially neutral on religion, clearly considers itself to be the continuation of God’s Kingdom as described in the Hebrew Bible, which we call the Old Testament. As I noted in an earlier entry, they seem to base their self-identity on the Biblical nation of Israel which conquered its neighbors by genocide. I suggest that they look at the rest of the Hebrew Bible—in particular, the prophets. I will use the prophet Amos as an example.
Amos’ prophecy is structured as a spiral of denunciations, starting with Damascus. “For three transgressions of Damascus, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment…” This wording implies the same thing as when a parent says to a child, “That’s enough!” which does not mean “That was exactly the right amount of disobedience,” but rather, “You have gone too far.” Next, Amos denounces Gaza, then Tyre, then Edom, then the Ammonites (the people, not the extinct mollusks), then Moab, making a circle around Judah, spiraling closer and closer. And then, with exactly the same literary construction, the prophet says, “For three transgressions of Judah, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment,” then says the same for Israel.
Even back during the days of ancient Israel and Judah, “Bible days,” as some would call them, “God’s kingdom” was called to the same standards and subjected to the same judgment as all other nations. This is clearly not American policy. America accepts Israeli acts that we would condemn if any other nation committed them. Israel listens too much to Joshua; they should listen more to Amos.
The Israeli government, though officially neutral on religion, clearly considers itself to be the continuation of God’s Kingdom as described in the Hebrew Bible, which we call the Old Testament. As I noted in an earlier entry, they seem to base their self-identity on the Biblical nation of Israel which conquered its neighbors by genocide. I suggest that they look at the rest of the Hebrew Bible—in particular, the prophets. I will use the prophet Amos as an example.
Amos’ prophecy is structured as a spiral of denunciations, starting with Damascus. “For three transgressions of Damascus, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment…” This wording implies the same thing as when a parent says to a child, “That’s enough!” which does not mean “That was exactly the right amount of disobedience,” but rather, “You have gone too far.” Next, Amos denounces Gaza, then Tyre, then Edom, then the Ammonites (the people, not the extinct mollusks), then Moab, making a circle around Judah, spiraling closer and closer. And then, with exactly the same literary construction, the prophet says, “For three transgressions of Judah, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment,” then says the same for Israel.
Even back during the days of ancient Israel and Judah, “Bible days,” as some would call them, “God’s kingdom” was called to the same standards and subjected to the same judgment as all other nations. This is clearly not American policy. America accepts Israeli acts that we would condemn if any other nation committed them. Israel listens too much to Joshua; they should listen more to Amos.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)