Wishing You a Quiet New Year

This past year, as every previous year, I have written a lot about loud, bloviating fundamentalism. I have tried to avoid discrediting all religion when I criticize fundamentalists. But I want to take a moment to indicate that the purpose of this blog is not to attack religion as a whole but just doctrinal religions that make people think they have the final answers to every question.

Fundamentalist religions tend to be loud. Their preachers are loud and relentless. They give you no time to think for yourself and to consider possibilities other than the stark black-and-white choices they have set before you: to agree with they say (Heaven) or to doubt it (Hell). Even during times of supposedly silent prayer in a conservative church, the organ plays melodies of hymns that tell you what to think. At least that is the way it is in fundamentalist Christianity, and I suspect (without direct knowledge) the same is true in Islam.

In this sense, fundamentalist religions resemble entertainment. Many modern movies consist of nearly continuous action. If you stop for a moment to think, you might get attacked by orcs, so you have to keep slashing with your sword. That is, these movies are like video games. And, as in video games, all of the characters are unchangeably good or bad. Genre fiction also never takes time for reflection. There are movies and literary novels in which you have to think about which direction the characters will choose and in which good vs. bad is not always very clear. But these reflective movies and books make a lot less money than action movies and genre fiction.

The big churches that sell religion and the big corporations that sell entertainment do not want you to take time for reflection. Fundamentalist religious leaders worry that, if you think for yourself, you might become a Quaker (if Christian) or Sufi (if Muslim). You might be less useful of a follower, less likely to give money to a church, less likely to take up arms when called to do so. And the corporations are afraid that you might have a good time by doing something that does not require you to make a purchase.

I wish for you, in this coming year, freedom. And you can find freedom by taking time to think carefully for yourself. Walk in the woods and notice things. Shut up and listen. Read the Bible, and think about what Jesus and the prophets said rather than what the big preachers say. Do not be afraid to be alone with your own thoughts.

Christmas Message 2013

It is the Sunday before Christmas. Doctrinal churches call it the last Sunday of Advent. It’s been a while since I’ve been to church, but this does not mean I am without religious feelings and sensibilities. And I would like to share some with you.

We recently had an ice storm, which deposited about three-quarters of an inch of ice on every exposed surface except for the ground. Streets remain clear, but everything else is glazed with a layer of crystal. It is not always symmetrical; a branch may have a half an inch of ice on one side and a quarter on the other.

There is not much that we can do about the ice except, on a Sunday morning, go out and appreciate its beauty: to notice such things as the asymmetry of ice on branches. The ice transforms everything into an object of beauty. Buds, already half-swollen for spring, are encased in it. Spheres of sycamore seeds become bizarre tree-ornaments, hanging from the trees by their loose stalks. Best of all, the ice magnifies and distorts beautiful colors, such as crimson holly berries and blue cedar berries. When the sun briefly emerges from behind thick gray clouds, the world becomes a crystal palace, like the one that Lara and Yuri walked through in Dr. Zhivago. Inevitably, the music of Journey through Snow Country and Dance of the Snowflakes from The Nutcracker filled my mind. I wonder if Tchaikovsky, who was depressed and who particularly despised the Nutcracker music that he himself wrote, could have imagined that someone almost 140 years later would me walking around in Oklahoma (which did not even exist at the time) thinking of his music. I consciously invited the beauty of ice and music to fill my mind.

We could, I suppose, have gone to church to sing about and listen to sermons about doctrines. But I believe we made the better choice, to go walking in the ice with hearts open to the beauty of the thin layer of cosmos that clings to our little path of Earth.

Back at a “Bible church” of which I was a member long ago, a former missionary related a story to me. An African tribal chief had said that he knew there was a God because he could see God’s tracks, just as he knew that certain animals were present, though unseen, because of their tracks. We might say, instead of tracks, God’s phenomena—the appearance (Greek phainen, to manifest) of the unseen in the world of the seen. The missionary meant, by this, that you could recognize the presence of God because of the evidences of creationism. While I consider creation-science to be ridiculous, I have to admit that, if there is some kind of God of love, I saw God’s phenomena this morning.

Whatever beliefs you may have or lack, I wish you a time of looking for, and finding, beauty.

Atonement

It is the Christmas season, which for most people just means materialism and religious rituals and images. But for some people, religious or not, it is a time to think about “peace on Earth, goodwill toward men.” One of the main ideas in traditional Christian belief is that Jesus brought “atonement” between God and humankind. According to this view, human sin had caused a rift between God and humankind, and Jesus’ incarnation and later his crucifixion atoned for that rift.

I wondered recently what “atonement” means to conservatives. They claim to believe in the atonement brought by Jesus Christ. But what do they mean by this? They think that they obtain atonement from God every day when they pray and every week when they go to church. But then they continue doing the same evil things as they did before, the same things that the Old Testament prophets denounced, such as grinding the poor into the dust. Apparently, to them, atonement means that God forgives them in advance for whatever they might do, sort of like the pope conferring indulgences in advance for whatever rape and pillage the Crusaders might do once they reach the Holy Land.

The conservative viewpoint is very male. Males seem to be like medieval knights: they enjoy jousting with one another, pennants and draperies waving in the air, while the people around them are sick and starving. Congress (which is mostly male) recently created an artificial budget crisis, not all that different from medieval jousting matches, so that they could joust while ignoring the real problems that bring suffering to the masses. And they fantasize that females drool over their jousting sticks. Male thinking, like male reproduction, is an ugly ramming, unlike the nourishing roundness of the female body and female thinking. Conservatives, whether Christian or Muslim, generally believe in the right of males to dominate females, which includes the primacy of male ramming over female nurture. Atonement, then, to their way of thinking, must mean to wash away female niceness and replace it with male ruthlessness.

This view of atonement is completely different from the original Christian meaning, back when Christians were a little socialistic altruistic band and before Christianity became a political force.

The Real Creation Model

Most people, including most readers of this blog, think that creationism is the belief that God made all the components of the universe in perfect form just a few thousand years ago.

But that is only part of the creationist creed. There is another part, which they do not openly proclaim, but which they believe.

We all know there is a political correlation between rejection of evolution and rejection of environmentalism. I merely maintain that is correlation is real, not accidental. There is a reason for it.

The full statement of the creation model is that God made all the components of the universe in perfect form just a few thousand years ago for us to use up now.

Creationists believe that the Earth will come to an end soon, so we might as well go ahead and use up all the natural resources, like coal and fish and trees, as fast as we can. Why preserve them, only to have them burned up in Armageddon? Why preserve them, only to leave them behind in the Rapture and let damned sinners have them? Why have a livable Earth in 2100, if the end of the world will already have occurred?

A creationist said to me, several decades ago, that the basis of his belief was time. (That’s funny; I would have expected it to be God.) We know that Jesus is coming soon, he said, therefore just as the future is short so must the past be short. I thought this was rather strange, but now it makes perfect sense.

So when you look at the full statement of creationism, their opposition to both evolution and environmentalism makes perfect sense.

If you are, or know, an environmentalist creationist, all I can say is, glad to hear it. And I could have a respectful conversation with such a person. But this is clearly the exception to the rule. If anything, conservative creationists probably hate environmentalist creationists even worse than they hate evolutionists. An environmentalist creationist is embracing a burden of frustration.

The political correlation between anti-evolutionism and anti-environmentalism is real, not accidental. I believe the reason is that creationists think God made the Earth for us to use up right now. If you have a different explanation, please feel free to post a comment. If your argument makes sense, I would be glad to acknowledge it.

How Far Can You Trust Religious People?

Pretty far, but not far enough.

I now present a second reason why orthodox religion (as opposed to religious sensibility or mysticism) is really bad for the human species.

The religious conservatives believe that God has given them absolute truth; they are God’s chosen, and the rest of us are God’s enemies; they are saved, we are damned.

In the past, religious conservatives took this belief to mean that they have the right to torture and kill anyone who disagreed with them, whether brown-skinned pagans or white-skinned heretics. Today, of course, they do not do this. They will lie about us in order to get their followers to hate us, but they will not torture or kill us.

But why not? If in fact they are God’s chosen, why shouldn’t they kill us? After all, Joshua killed the Canaanites, putting entire cities to the sword. Religious conservatives say this was right. But they will not put us to the sword, because…why? Perhaps, that’s just not done anymore. Or perhaps it is because they recognize the authority of human governments, which declare murder to be illegal, even if it is done in the name of God. But if God is the same for all time, then if he commanded genocide in the past, he could do so again.

So they will not kill us. But the basis for their refusal to kill us is operational, not fundamental. Read that again. They have operational, not fundamental, reasons to not kill us. They believe God gives them the right to, but has indicated that this is not the right time or place to do so.

But even recent history shows how quickly an operational restraint can change. Just a few years after the fall of Yugoslavian communism, genocide was raging across the Balkan states.

There is nothing fundamental in the refusal of religious conservatives to kill the rest of us. It is purely operational. And if, by some means, they should become convinced that the situation has changed and that God does, after all, want them to kill us, then they will do so, though perhaps with some hesitation. This can happen almost overnight. I prophesy that it will, and I fervently hope I am wrong.

In contrast, science provides a fundamental reason to not kill people who disagree with you. And that fundamental reason is that all of our conclusions, about what to believe and how to live, are tentative. Scientists cannot (without no longer being scientists) kill heretics because there are no heretics in science; there are only people who are wrong. We never say “God has proclaimed that…” but can only say “The evidence clearly indicates that…” In science, there always remains a slight margin of possibility that we are wrong, even about the most obvious things. Maybe the Sun really does go around the Earth, and God just makes it look like it’s the other way around. Therefore scientists cannot pass summary, lethal judgment on anybody on account of their beliefs. But religious conservatives believe that there is no slight margin of possibility of error.

Murderous religious zeal, so common in the past and still so pervasive in large parts of the world, remains within American religious conservatives like a tiny population of bacteria, so tiny that most conservatives refuse to believe it is there, just waiting to emerge when the conditions are right.

Whose Fault is the Human Condition?

In this essay, I present a very basic reason why I am convinced that orthodox religion (as opposed to religious sensibility or mysticism) is really bad for the human species. In addition, I have another reason, which I will post as a later entry.

There is a famous story about an essay contest in England. The topic was, “What is wrong with the world?” The British writer G. K. Chesterton wrote the winning entry. It consisted of two words: “I am.”

In addressing the question of “Whose fault is the human condition,” I am not going to focus on individuals, as Chesterton did. Instead I am asking about larger human institutions or frames of thought. In particular, I want to consider science and religion: which of these two institutions or frames of thought has had more of an impact on the sad, bloody human condition? The answer is religion. I refer herein to conventional, orthodox religion.

Preachers such as the late D. James Kennedy have been relentless in blaming all human evils on evolution and on science. Of course, this makes no sense. Humans have been killing and oppressing one another as long as there has been evidence of human existence. Humans have always had religion, but have only recently had science. In fact the decline in atrocities has been coincident in time with the spread of science.

But there is another reason that I blame religion as a major cause of human suffering. Either God created human nature, or else God allowed Satan to create human nature. Either way, our nature is God’s will. That’s what makes it human nature; we cannot change it. We can “be saved,” they say. But most of the people I know who “have the Holy Spirit living inside of them” live in just as worldly a fashion as those whom they despise as hell-bound sinners. At the very least, even “saved” people still have human nature, Holy Ghost or no.

Therefore, from a religious perspective, “is” and “ought” are the same in human nature. Consider this example. Men are more violent than women. According to religion, this is the way things ought to be; God made us that way. As a matter of fact, it is bad for men to not be violent. I vividly remember a radio broadcast in which James Dobson, a major voice of the religious right, condemned the Berenstain Bears cartoons because they depicted a father bear who was not sufficiently assertive and masculine. It is always men who start wars and who do most of the fighting. And this is the way God made us, religious people claim. Women are supposed to stay home, stay quiet, and stay pregnant with fetuses of future warriors.

Evolutionary science, on the other hand, separates “is” from “ought” in human nature. Darwin proposed sexual selection as the reason that male animals are more “pugnacious.” Males fight more because they evolved that way. Maybe it made sense in the Stone Age. But today it is an evolutionary mismatch—what conferred fitness benefits in the Stone Age is now maladaptive except for a few lucky dictators. Evolutionists do not obtain morals from Stone Age biological and cultural adaptations. Religious people, in contrast, have to obtain their morals from the way God made us. Was God correct in ordering the Israelites to kill all the Canaanites, even the kids? If God is unchanging, then either he is wrong or else all of the Old Testament killing was right. If God said it was right in the past, then it is still right. But if an adaptation evolved in the past, it is not necessarily adaptive today.

I believe I am justified in attributing a great deal of modern human suffering to the idea, strongly held by most Christians, Jews, and Muslims, that God made men to be fighters and that is the way it is supposed to be now and forever. For religious people, Homo bellicosus was intelligently designed. But to evolutionists, Homo sapiens is an ape struggling to subdue its old ape behavior with modern cultural evolution.

It has been this way for a long time. An historian who gave a series of lectures about the Paleolithic claimed that, until the start of agriculture, humanity progressed by “extensification,” that is, by moving into new territory and doing the same things as before. But when the territory was all gone, by about ten thousand years ago, humans had to turn to “intensification.” For example, humans could get more food from the same amount of earth by intensive agriculture than by extensive hunting and gathering. But I believe this historian had his dates wrong. With the exception of North and South America (and, of course, Antarctica), the entire world has been filled with humans for a long time. No extensification (aside from the people who migrated over the Bering Strait over 14,000 years ago) has been possible for at least the last 50,000 years. Modern humans, moving into Siberia, encountered Denisovans; and moving into Europe, they encountered Neanderthals. Modern humans had to practice intensification to take resources away from other human species and, later, from one another. Before agriculture, intensification took the form of conflict, much of it inspired by religion. There were religion-spewing conquistadores 30,000 years ago in Europe, just as there were 500 years ago in America.

I will take one further step. Orthodox religion is part of the Stone Age adaptation that conferred success at the time but which now needs to be transcended. Not necessarily by atheism; perhaps orthodoxy should be transcended by a different kind of religion. I think the Earth has had about all of the Moses-and-Joshua style conquest that it can handle; maybe it needs some more of the prophetic voice of people like Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. And, wouldn’t you know it, in the Old Testament there were no female priests; but there were a few women prophets.

Goodbye, Legal Rights of Consumers and Citizens

May 17 was the anniversary of Brown v. the Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court. This decision allowed a little black girl to attend a previously all-white elementary school. She had had to walk 21 blocks to get to the black school, while the white school was only seven blocks away. The only reason the case ever got to court was because of legal representation.

But all that is about to change. In many states, small claims courts are being shut down due to a shortage of funds (that is, legislatures decide to use the money for themselves rather than for small claims courts). I heard this news report on May 17, the Brown v. Board anniversary. So you cannot expect to ever receive your legal rights unless it is such a big case that you can get the funds to hire a lawyer, which Mr. Brown was able to do with a lot of help. But if you are just a citizen being screwed by the IRS or by a corporation, there is no legal recourse. The rich and the powerful can now use the law to get what they want, and the middle class people without influence simply have to accept whatever happens, no matter what the law or a signed contract says. Technically, you can file a case in a small claims court, but it may literally sit there forever.

An Offer You Can't Refuse

Dear Federal Government,

If you need someone to screw up the government and the national economy and the world economy, which is what Congress appears to be bent on doing, I wish to offer my services. I believe I can screw up the government, the country, and the world just as well as Congress does, but a lot cheaper.

Congressional pay averages $174,000 per person per year, and the House and Senate collectively cost the American taxpayers about $258,000 per day, which is over $94 million per year. And all they are capable of doing is to create artificial crises, without addressing any long-term problems. For example, the long-term debt needs to be addressed, but instead their entire attention is focused on making the debt problem into a short-term crisis. As I write, the budget standoff has not been resolved, but it probably will be, say members of Congress. They will, I hear, agree to suspend the debt ceiling crisis until a few months from now. That is, they will fight this battle over and over again into the foreseeable future, thus getting no other work done.

Heck, I can do that. And a lot cheaper. Instead of spending $94 million a year, you could pay me a one-time fee of just a quarter million dollars (plus expenses) and I promise you that I can come in and make a mess of the government, the country, and the world. Maybe not as much of a mess, since the House and Senate have 535 members working full time to create new crises, but I can create enough of a mess to make our government and economy collapse, and if it collapses, does it matter how much of a mess is made? That is, I can do their job for one-376th the cost.

You can even close the Congressional gym. I wouldn’t use it. I just put pillows on the floor and do pushups and situps; I don’t need any fancy equipment or a heated pool. As a matter of fact, you could close down all the other Congressional perks. I have heard, but cannot confirm, that there is a congressional movie theatre, massage parlor, casino, and gentleman’s club. Well, maybe leave them open for a week or so, so I can use them, then shut them down.

I would require the health care plan that members of Congress enjoy but which many of them passionately desire to deny to the rest of America. But you could suspend Congressional health care while the members are locked out of their offices and chambers. Oh, you might need to keep the staff proctologist on call for them.

I would require health care only for the duration of the contract, at which time I would return to my day job. I don’t want to spend too much time away from my day job, since I am actually doing useful work and wish to continue it.

We have the best Congress that money can buy, both at public expense and (even more) as a result of payments by large corporate donors. While normally this is an expense we can barely support, there is a bright side to it: look how much money you could save by hiring me to screw up the world.

I believe that Congress creates these artificial crises in order to avoid dealing with issues. Last year, in the wake of the Connecticut school shooting, there was the very real possibility that, backed by massive public opinion, Congress might pass at least some slight gun regulation. Some Congressional leaders sweat bullets over that, but they won’t have to ever again, because the topic of gun regulation will never come up. As of the beginning of June, the date of an article that addresses this point, the House and Senate had passed 13 laws, none of which addressed any major long-term questions. See that article for the complete list. My personal favorites are H.R.1071 (“To specify the size of the precious-metal blanks that will be used in the production of the National Baseball Hall of Fame commemorative coins”) and S.982: Lamar Alexander’s Freedom to Fish Act. This is not worth $94 million, is it?

In the event that the artificial crisis is resolved, we all know it is a temporary resolution. But my offer remains good for the next time Congress wants to engineer a world crisis.

This blog is about religion. Many of these members of Congress actually believe that God is guiding them in their acts of destruction. This is yet one more example of religious delusion that affects the entire world. While individually the members of Congress are less violent than jihadists, their net effect on the world economy will be much greater. Praise God?

New video!

The next video in the series about Darwin and the Bible has been posted here.

Have We Evolved Beyond Racism?

No.

First, consider the biological reason. The brain physiology underlying our minds has not evolved appreciably since the stone age. Not only every race but every tribe considered itself chosen by God to kill the others. There has not been enough time for our brains to have undergone significant biological evolution. We have their stone age brains.

Second, the cultural reason. Surely we have evolved beyond ancient mindsets by cultural evolution? I am afraid that the answer here, also, is no. Certainly, we have made progress in the past 150 years. But we have not left racism behind. Instead we have just pushed it into our subconscious minds. It still calls the shots in many cases, and often determines what we do, but we may not be aware of it.

The major example of which we Americans, and observers from around the world, are aware is the utter determination of the Republican Party (which is disproportionately white compared to the American population) to destroy Barack Obama. They were confident that Mitt Romney would win the 2012 election. When Obama won re-election, the Republicans went to Plan B: destroy Obama. I consider their subconscious motivation to be racism. Here’s why.

Obama is a lame duck. There is no political need to destroy Obama; if Republicans succeed, they will have President Joe Biden. (Similarly, Democrats held back from impeaching George W. Bush, not wishing to have President Dick Cheney.) If there is no political reason to destroy him, then there must be a personal reason.

How do we know that the Republican attacks on Obama are not merely politically motivated? We know this because we can scientifically test this hypothesis: If the Republican hatred of Barack Obama were politically motivated, then they would hate him less than they hated Bill Clinton. But, as it turns out, they hate him much much more.

And the evidence for this? There are, as I see it, three differences between Bill Clinton (while he was president) and Barack Obama. They are as follows.

First, Barack Obama has high ethical standards than Bill Clinton did as president. Instead of having a Monica Lewinsky hanging around him, Obama is a morally upright husband and father. The Obama family is the picture-perfect American family. (In this way Obama also compares favorably to John F. Kennedy.) This should be a reason that Republicans, who claim to be God’s representatives of purity and morality upon the face of this sordid planet, would like Obama better than Clinton. Therefore the ethical difference between Clinton and Obama cannot be the reason for Republican hatred of Obama.

Second, Barack Obama is more politically and fiscally conservative than Clinton. Republicans decry Obamacare as socialist, but it is much, much less socialist, and incorporates more market forces, than did the ill-fated 1993 health care plan proposed by Bill Clinton. Republicans reacted strongly against the Clinton plan, but not with the ferocity of their attack on Obama. Obama’s comparative fiscal conservativeness should be a reason that Republicans would like Obama better than they liked Clinton. Therefore the political difference between Clinton and Obama cannot be the reason for Republican hatred of Obama.

A third difference is race. Clinton is white and Obama is black (actually, biracial, but he identifies with his black heritage). This is the only reason that I can think of that would make Republicans hate Obama worse than they hated Clinton. And it is clearly a personal, intense hatred.

Of course, Republicans forced a government shutdown during the first Clinton Administration also. The federal government shut down all but emergency services twice: from November 14 through November 19, 1995 and from December 16, 1995 to January 6, 1996, a total of 28 days. As of tomorrow, the 2013 government shutdown will have reached the same number of days as the first shutdown, in November of 1995. Republicans appear resolved to continue the shutdown even if it means defaulting on contractual funds on October 17. And this time, we have all seen evidence of the extreme antipathy that Republicans have showed toward Obama. They have shown him the kind of disdain that slavery advocates—from the Union states, the confederate states having seceded—showed Abraham Lincoln in 1865.

As further evidence that Republican antipathy is not merely political, consider that the Republicans could achieve their aims in a constitutional manner. They could pass a bill repealing Obamacare in both the house and senate, and have the president sign it. He won’t, because he won re-election in 2012 largely on the issue of Obamacare. The constitutional way for Republicans to have their way would have been to win the 2012 election. Instead, they pass laws creating programs then refuse to fund those same programs.

I believe that in the long run American history will evaluate Obama the same way as it depicts Lincoln. At the time, many strong voices attacked Lincoln as a dictator who wanted to ruin the United States by giving black people the rights of citizenship. Today, those voices are buried in the dustbin of history under a patina of disgust. Similarly, I believe, the Republican voices of our day will be derided in the same way as are the 1865 voices in support of slavery. The party of angry old white men, and a few angry young white men, and a very very small number of angry Latinos and blacks, will dwindle into an insignificance from which their stockpiles of guns cannot resurrect them.

There are other ways in which Republican positions have racist effects. Global warming is caused by carbon emissions from human activity, for which white industrial nations are largely responsible. But most of the burden of famine and disease will be borne by nations dominated by people of color, especially in Africa. Republicans, I assume, do not hold their global warming denialism with racist intent. But subconsciously they might be thinking, who cares about a bunch of Africans?

Of course, Republicans will claim they are not racists. And they may honestly believe they are not. But I conclude for the above reasons that racism is operating in their subconscious minds. We are all cavemen in modern clothes, some of us more than others.

How to Get Lost with a Bible

It has been said that if the Bible is your roadmap, you will get lost.

The main reason for this is that the Bible was written at a very different time in history and under very different circumstances than we find ourselves today. In an ancient world, where the mindset was to conquer your neighbors and expand into their territory, it made sense (albeit in a cruel way) to have laws that encouraged as much reproduction as possible and the extermination of other tribes. But today, just let a nation try obeying all the laws that Jehovah supposedly gave to the Israelites after the Exodus, and it will be immediately branded a terrorist state. Just let us produce as many kids as we possibly can, and we have a recipe for economic and ecological disaster. This is because our world can no longer remain in an expansionist mode. We have to begin the transition into an equilibrium mode of sustainability. “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth” no longer works because we have already filled the Earth.

However, I do not believe that we should accept the Bible as a roadmap or an instruction manual. Instead we should accept it as a record—partly historical, partly legendary—of the attempts of ancient people to make sense of the world. We can learn a thing or two from their at least partly unsuccessful attempts to figure out the right way to live in the world. This means we have to apply some judgment values to the Bible. The better part of wisdom is, today, to reject the Genesis 1 approach—that we should be conquerors of the Earth—and embrace instead the Genesis 2 approach—that we should be stewards and caretakers of the Earth.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, everybody. At least, according to the French Revolutionary calendar that was adopted in France right after the Revolution. It was used from 1793 until 1805. Read more here. One purpose of the calendar was to produce a scientifically-based calendar system.

Part of the scientific basis is that it was modeled after nature, after the seasons and the phenomena associated with them, rather than arbitrary months invented by human governments. For example, March used to be the first month, but Roman emperors added January and February, apparently for purposes of tax revenue. Because the Romans stuck two months onto the beginning of the year, the names of the months now make no sense. “September” means seventh, “October” means eighth, “November” means ninth, and “December” means tenth. But the French Revolutionary Calendar begins very close to the Autumnal Equinox, which was actually yesterday. The seasons, and the movements of the Earth relative to the sun, dictate this calendar.

The French Revolutionary Calendar is also based on the moon. Each of the twelve months has thirty days, consistent with the phases of the moon. Twelve months therefore have 360 days; the remaining five days were special days added to the end of the year. Today is the first day of Vendémiaire, that is, the month of grape harvest.

The traditional religious calendar had feast days of the saints. The French Revolution swept religion aside and established non-theistic science as its basis. This is one of the reasons I like it so much: it takes its framework from nature, rather than foisting a religious framework upon nature. Their calendar named each day after (in most cases) plants, although many were named after animals or farm implements. For example, today is raisin, or grape. I guess the revolutionaries had their priorities straight, didn’t they: naming the first month after the grape harvest, and the first day after the grape.

The Revolutionary Calendar was just one way of rethinking the world. The scientists of the French Revolution also produced the metric system, which is not only still used but has been expanded. The metric system is based on nature. For example, they said the meter was one-ten-millionth the distance from the equator to the North Pole. (They were pretty close.) It was also based on powers of ten. Instead of 16 ounces in a pound and 2000 pounds in a ton, or 5280 feet in a mile, there were 10 millimeters in a centimeter, 100 centimeters in a meter, and 1000 meters in a kilometer. And it is based on water, also. A milliliter is one cubic centimeter (cc). A milliliter of water weighs one gram. A calorie is the amount of heat that can raise the temperature of 1 cc of water 1 degree Celsius. How nicely it all fits together. No wonder scientists have used the metric system for a long time. And every major country other than the United States uses the metric system. As scientists continue to explore the very large and very distant and very small and very brief, they have expanded the metric system to 24 orders of magnitude both ways from the base. There are a million million million million yoctoseconds in a second, and a million million million million meters in a yottameter. The French revolutionaries did not imagine this possibility. Now the metric system has spread around the world, while the Revolutionary Calendar has been largely forgotten.

The Revolutionary Calendar is certainly not the only one based on nature. The Jewish calendar begins with the Month of Nisan in spring.

The reason I like to observe the Revolutionary Calendar, in addition to the regular calendar, is that it helps to fit my thinking into the cycles of nature. It helps me realize that we are part of nature, rather than being masters over it. Just as we cannot force the sea to not rise (see my earlier blog entry), we cannot force January 1 to be the first day of the year in anything other than an artificial sense. We have to start thinking of ourselves as part of the mesh of nature, of evolution, of ecology.

So happy 1 Vendémiaire, everybody!

New videos

Two new videos you might enjoy:

Darwin speculates on the origin of music by means of sexual selection: http://youtu.be/X-Mz3Mupsmw. 

Darwin interprets the Genesis story of Jacob and the heterozy-goats in terms of genetics: http://youtu.be/_pROlv9_g_A. 

Republican Religion

I have posted a video on the Darwinandthebible YouTube channel about how the story of Noah's ark cannot be literally true, and also that a literal interpretation ruins the meaning of the story. Hope you enjoy it. Now for the new essay.

Republicans like to associate themselves with the Christian religion. But this is not really their religion. Their religion is the Republican Party. The dividing line between the saved and the damned is membership in the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Of course, they will not actually say this. But consider what they do, and whom they choose to represent them.

For awhile, many “Christian” Republicans were strong supporters of Newt Gingrich. When he pulled out of the race, Rick Perry endorsed Gingrich. Gingrich has been an unabashed womanizer, going against all the ethics and morals that Republicans claim to believe in. Yet his conservative Republican beliefs are enough to release him from the consequences of what would be, for a Democrat, sinful behavior.

And now former governor Mark Sanford has been elected to the House of Representatives. Not that it makes any difference; the House Republicans do nothing except proclaim the holiness of the Republican Party, which they would do whether Sanford is a member or not. But while governor Mark Sanford not only committed a very extreme act of adultery, but he lied about it publicly, and he is also guilty of dereliction of duty: he told nobody in the state government where he was (in case of emergency) while he was off hiking the Appalachian Trail along his mistress’s geography. Not only adultery but also lying and dereliction of duty do not matter, so long as he follows the Republican Party line.

Although I do not proclaim any particular doctrine, I have always been an admirer of Jesus. It really bothers me when someone, or even an entire political party, insults Jesus by claiming themselves to represent Him while they openly and brazenly commit what would be, for a Democrat, immoral behavior, and behavior that would disqualify any Democrat from public service. Had I only the self-proclaimed Republican Christians as evidence, I would be forced to consider that Jesus was evil, a thought that fills me with revulsion.

Republicans worship their own party. That’s pretty much a summary of the whole situation. They wave their Bibles in the air but I doubt that they ever read them. To the Republican climate of hypocrisy one can add blasphemy as well.

A New Video

I have just posted a video on the Darwin and the Bible channel about what Charles Darwin (standing out in a heavy rain) (link here) might think of the environmentalist message of the story of Noah's Ark--a message almost wholly ignored by Bible believers today.

Subtle Misinformation from Christian Radio

When I was driving through Texas recently, my radio choices were between Christian radio and Christian Christian radio. I thought I would listen awhile.

On at least two radio preacher programs, the message was the same: in relationships, it is most important to cultivate a close relationship with one person than to be promiscuous with lots of partners; and that a lasting relationship begins with a strong bond of shared values, and grows out into physical intimacy from there.

Actually, most non-Christians that I know believe this also. With few exceptions, the people I know who are not conservative Christians also form long-term bonds (usually marriages) that are based on character and values, not just sex; and with few exceptions, these people are not promiscuous.

So I did not have a problem with what the preachers said about the best way of forming, and the value of forming, deep lasting relationships (for many of us, that means with a spouse). What I found objectionable was that these preachers were consistently portraying all non-Christians as being sex-driven promiscuous maniacs. They did not actually say this, but their implied advertising message was, “Are you a sex-driven promiscuous maniac? If not, then join us and send us your money.”

Conservative Christians routinely lie about liberal Christians and about non-Christians. This is particularly outrageous because many famous evangelical preachers have been promiscuous and sex-driven.

So the radio preachers may be right about what they say about long-term intimate relationships, but they are consistently wrong, and I believe deliberately wrong, about what they say about those people who are not allied with them.

Another Advantage of Frugal Living

Frugal living has always been a good idea. I know modern conservative Christians do not think so. For example, in a previous blog entry, I documented that one leading conservative group thinks that the way to show God that you love him is to waste as much fossil fuel as you can. I wonder what these Christians think about Jesus and His frugal way of living. God made gold and silver, but Jesus showed how much He hated God by never seeking any. Throughout the ages, many religious people (of diverse traditions) have seen frugality as a way of respecting the created world and its creator. Not so modern conservative Christians. Let them hate Jesus, and let them hate me, for our frugality.

But there is another advantage of frugality. It seems that neither the government nor corporations feel obligated to fulfill their contractual obligations unless you sue them. Here are the corporate examples. I signed a contract with Sears for siding on my house. They cashed my check then repeatedly put off the work, until I told them that I was ready to hire a lawyer; then they began the work. The computer on which I am writing came from Best Buy, back when we naively trusted it, and in less than a year it is crashing. I also bought a camera from them last year; twice in a row, they had to fix it, the second time to correct damage they had inflicted on it while repairing it the first time. I had to threaten legal action to get them to replace the camera. A camera and a computer are staples in my work. Anything that is not fundamental to my work I will simply not purchase from a corporation. Farmer’s markets? They are pretty good.

The government example is an agency everyone knows and despises: the IRS. We all know we have to pay taxes; but the IRS is a corrupt agency. They were recently in the news for targeting conservative groups for special scrutiny on tax-exempt status applications. But there is a bigger problem. We all know that they take months to send refunds back. But during those months, they provide no information about what is going on. You can check on their website, but if you do click on “Where’s my refund?” you will almost certainly get a message that says that no information is available. I had to write a letter to the White House (not quite a legal threat) before the IRS checked up on it. It turns out that they were working very very very had to give me a bigger refund than I had requested, which is great news, only for those months I was waiting, I had no idea if they had even processed my return. I had a delivery confirmation, so I knew they had received it; but I had no way of checking whether they had subsequently misplaced it. Recently, I received a letter from them explaining to me why my refund was delayed, but not explaining to me why they had kept the process a secret for so long. All we want is to know what is going on, and for IRS to not be a totally secret organization reminiscent of Soviet days.

A refund is not a privilege that we are requesting from the IRS; the refund amount is the amount of money by which we overpaid on our withholding. It is our money, not theirs. So now I have greatly reduced my withholding; I plan to pay taxes each March (I do not wait until April) rather than to expect a refund. I can be absolutely sure the IRS will cash my check the moment they receive it, and within a day or so it will show up on my bank website. The ousted IRS director loudly proclaimed, “We provided horrible customer service.” But the news reports focused on a minor aspect of this ineptitude. What about the millions of us who waited for our refunds, and kept in the dark while we were waiting?

None of us can do anything about the fact that the IRS is corrupt, other than to minimize our withholding. But there is something we can do about corrupt corporations. We can simply purchase as little as possible. Quite simply and obviously, the more we buy, the more opportunity there is for corporations to take our money without delivering acceptable goods and services. Anything that seems even remotely unnecessary or luxurious, I will reject it. I occasionally eat out, but only when traveling or for special occasions, such as my daughter’s birthday. Even on those rare occasions, I often get temporarily double-charged for the bill.

If rejecting most luxuries sounds like what Jesus said to do, that is more than just an interesting coincidence. Let the conservatives decry me as evil for my opposition to large corporations. Let them call me unpatriotic if they like. But if they call me unchristian, they should take a second look at the Bibles that they wave in the air without reading.