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.