The Christmas Lyrics You Never Hear

O Holy Night was clearly the climax of Adolphe Adam’s (1803-1856) life. He wrote a ballet, Giselle, in which the heroine stabs herself then dances around for about forty minutes, as I recall. But I doubt there are very many people who have not heard O Holy Night.

But in nearly every case you will hear only the first verse. Maybe you didn’t even know there were three verses. The third verse is, in some ways, the most important. It clearly reveals that Adam intended his song not just for Christmas but as an abolitionist song.

Truly He taught us to love one another;

His law is love and His gospel is peace.

Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother;

And in His name all oppression shall cease.

Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,

Let all within us praise His holy name.

Conservative Christians today would fully agree with Adam and all the other abolitionists that slavery was an abomination. But they tend to ignore the ongoing message of liberation from oppression that inevitably accompanies Jesus’ story and message. Conservative Christians adamantly support all rules and systems that keep the poor people of the Earth in economic oppression, barely better than slaves. This time of year they focus on the immediate plot line of the Christmas story without thinking about its larger implications for the people of the Earth. They focus on proclaiming that we Americans are rich because God favors us. They are distinctly uncomfortable with the call for liberation of the people who produce cheap goods for us to consume and who cannot afford enough food because the best crop land is used to raise food for Americans to import, to eat and to feed to their livestock.

Dare we believe that “in His name all oppression shall cease”? Don’t expect God, or Christians, to make this happen. If it is going to happen, people who care (whether religious or not) will have to do it.

There Must Be Something?

The following is probably the closest I am going to come to a Christmas message.

As a Christian agnostic, I remain uncertain about the existence of God, primarily because God cannot be defined. If you think that God is a universal ruler who is in control of everything, then the senseless evil of the world disproves your image of God.

The argument is often made that if there is no God, then there is no universal good or evil. Morality is then defined by the species. There is no basis for saying that the fictitious Klingons, who glorify violence, are bad, and humans are good. One cannot say that spiders are evil simply because the only way they can survive is by sucking the life out of other creatures.

While I grant that this may be true of spiders, I do not believe it is true of intelligent creatures. If spiders evolved intelligence, then at some point they should realize the truth that they should love their fellow creatures. I cannot prove this, but that is how I feel. This may seem to be a wholly imaginary topic—after all, humans evolved as altruistic animals, so for us, love is good and hatred is evil. Why wonder about other potential intelligent beings in the universe?

I confess that I believe there is some universal goodness. Not necessarily a person to be called God, but a pervasive Goodness against which evil can be measured. Even if there is no God who does anything, says anything, or thinks anything, goodness is not merely an adaptation that some species have and others do not. If love is God, then I believe in a universal God.

This is not so different from something that is actually in the Bible. The first epistle of John says that God is love. It does not say that love is God, but for me to say it is not such a stretch from what the Bible actually does say.

The Little People

Like many cultures, my Cherokee culture has stories of (usually invisible) little people who make things happen. Ours are called nunnehi. This sounds like the kind of thing that modern people (including, of course, most modern Cherokees) scoff at. But when the belief originally began, it was, in a sense, logical. You see people and animals doing things. And you see things happening without apparent cause. Ergo, invisible people or animals must be doing them.

But ever since the time of Newton we have needed to give up the idea of supernatural causation. We now know that little people or angels are not necessary in order to move the sun across the sky (which does not actually happen) or the Earth around the sun or create new species or make spring return each year. The idea that the natural world operates by its own laws is not a new Darwinian idea, but goes back to the beginning of modern science. I believe that, regardless of whether there is a God or not, intercessory prayer is as unacceptable of an idea about how to make things happen as are voodoo dolls.

The idea of spiritual causation is not stupid; it was quite reasonable in the past. It is just time to let this idea go.

Untitled

Throughout history, emperors and dictatorial leaders have used violence and torture upon their foreign and domestic subjects. Homo sapiens has been the most violent and bloody species in the evolutionary history of the Earth. Far from limiting this tendency, religion has mostly made our human evil more potent. That is, religion evolved primarily as a means of suppression. For our species, it is evil, since we know the difference between altruism and oppression, between love and hatred. A wolf is just a wolf but a violent man is evil.

Many of us grew up with the belief that the United States of America was different, that America was a force for good in the world. Of course, we should have known that this is not true. I should have known this because of what the United States government did to my Cherokee ancestors and to members of every other tribe of Native Americans. And we all should have known that America was not a good country because of government approval of slavery and later of oppression against black people.

Some of us dared to hope that America is not like that anymore. Although much oppression and police brutality remain, the government no longer kills Natives or enslaves blacks. But the recent release of the Senate report on brutality against detainees after September 11, 2001 must cause us to reconsider whether our government is a force of good. Our government’s response was not just to track down terrorists and bring them to justice, but also to grab Muslim men at random and torture them. A detainee is simply someone who has been thrown in prison, without regard to evidence of guilt.

CIA operatives, in some cases, did their best to degrade detainees by “interrogation techniques” that had absolutely no chance of yielding useful information. Torture is not just evil but is scientifically worthless. CIA operatives:

• Used rectal injections on detainees as a method of torture, with no medical justification.
• Subjected detainees to up to 180 hours of sleep deprivation.
• Stripped detainees naked, hooded them, and dragged them down the prison hallways.
• Forced detainees with broken feet or legs to stand in stressful positions.

And the list goes on. Now, suppose I were captured in a random sweep of white American men by a Muslim government and subjected to these tortures. I would confess to anything to get the pain to stop, since it would be clear that this would be the only way to stop the pain. I would confess to being a secret agent from Mars.

As if this news was not bad enough, Dick Cheney has gone on record as saying that he had no regrets about having the CIA do any of these things, and that he would do them again in a minute. He is proud that we torture people to force them to say what we want them to say. This is what the former Vice President wants the world to think about the United States.

Cheney proclaimed that we should not have been nice to the people who attacked us. But the people who actually attacked us on 9-11 were dead. And some of the detainees were guilty, and some were not; torture did not yield any useful information regarding which was which. It would be like terrorists grabbing random Americans and torturing them—which is, in fact, what they do, and something that, until now, we have pretended we did not do.

Okay, so we were not as bad as many other countries, such as Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. And today we are not as bad as, let me think, North Korea. But that is not the point. We claim moral superiority, that we are a good nation fighting against bad ones. The fact that our government differs from evil governments in degree rather than quality is of little comfort to those of us who wish we could be proud to be Americans.

Not all Americans are bad, of course. Barack Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize, after all. At least he has some respect in the world. But the world also knows the utter and pure hostility with which Republicans confront Mr. Obama. And there are millions of other good Americans, some of whom are reading these words. But what difference does it make? They hear what Mr. Obama says, and they hear what the CIA has done, and they believe the actions rather than the words. And for every Barack Obama saying peaceful things, there is a Dick Cheney proclaiming that America will do whatever it wants to whomever it wants whenever it wants.

Having Dick Cheney be the face of America in the world right now proclaims one thing and one thing only: America is strong only because of its force and wealth. The moment that we falter, economically or militarily, we deserve no cooperation or mercy from the rest of the world, which we have disdained. Because of this, I am ashamed to be an American. I am not ashamed of good Americans, including some who are very rich but who spend their wealth to try to eradicate diseases such as malaria that afflict millions of poor people in the world. But the actions of my government cause me to hang my head in shame.

Islamic extremists claim, You call us barbaric? You call us evil? While this does not justify their continued acts of terrorism, it is perfectly clear why they hate us. And I can make no defense for the official actions of the United States of America. Of course we are not as evil as they are (e.g. shooting Malala Yousafzai in the head; she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize the same day that the report was released). But they are terrorists, and we are supposedly the nation of goodness and peace, so the mere fact that we are not as bad as they are means nothing for our image.

We are strong in the world because of our military power and our wealth. That is all. We cannot expect any respect from other countries, but only fear. They will be nice to us because they don’t want us doing something evil to them. We spend more money on military activities than all other countries combined, so it is clear that we can wipe the floor with anybody’s asses if they stand against us. We are the Babylon, the Roman Empire, of the modern world. And that is pretty much all there is to it.

Can you see why I cannot think of a title for this essay? What word or phrase could encompass the profound stain that permeates America’s image now?

Religion is Like a Prescription Drug

I read recently about a young Pakistani man who believed that his spiritual hero had the ability to raise people from the dead. So he volunteered to be killed and resurrected. You can guess how this turned out (see article here).

Let me try this simile: Religion is like a prescription drug. Like a prescription pain killer or antidepressant, it can have its beneficial uses in making people more altruistic or happier. But, if overused or misused, it can have devastating effects, making otherwise good people into destructive zealots and completely disrupting their ability to reason about or even see the reality right in front of them. Also, like many prescription drugs, religion may not be the best medicine for what ails you. And religion is clearly addictive, like many prescription drugs. I know this from personal experience with prolonged withdrawal from fundamentalist religion.

Also, like a prescription drug, religion should only be administered by people who know what they are doing. Many drugs can only be prescribed by a certified physician and dispensed by a certified pharmacist, and only after the drug has passed through much expensive research.

In some cases, religion is similar: it is dispensed by people who have carefully studied it and who know its strengths and weaknesses. Scholarly theologians, and clergymen trained by them, are examples of this. But such cases are very rare. Anybody can preach and get people to follow him or her. They can use psychological means of advertising that are illegal for every other product on the market, especially drugs. They can lie and make stuff up, even while waving a Bible that does not say what they say it says. The Pakistani religious leader who slit the throat of a volunteer is an extreme example, but there are millions of less extreme examples. Religion today is at the same point that drugs were back in the days of snake oil and “patent medicine” salesmen.

Maybe we need to have some kind of Board certification for dispensers of religion—to have it dispensed by the equivalent of doctors and pharmacists. However, I think many of you would agree that we do not want the government deciding how religion should be dispensed. Republican lawmakers or administrators would validate only those forms of religion that confirm them as God’s chosen leaders. Maybe instead we should have an independent scholarly Review Board that will investigate religious claims and either proclaim them to be safe (not necessarily true, just safe) or dangerous. Maybe we could call it RATS (Religion and Theological Safety)? I would nominate John Shelby Spong and Bart Ehrman to its board of directors. As a non-governmental organization, it could keep out the people who wrap oppressive politics in a sheepskin of religion. Maybe some churches would actually like to have the RATS seal of approval?

Not So Inerrant After All

Fundamentalist Christians believe themselves to be personally inerrant when it comes to interpreting the Bible. The Bible is capable of many different interpretations, but a fundamentalist believes that whatever interpretation s/he chooses is inevitably the correct one. For example, they believe that “day” in Genesis 1 means 24 hours; but this cannot be the meaning of “day” in Genesis 2. So they claim that the word has two different meanings in the two chapters. And they believe that this rule of interpretation cannot be wrong, and you are headed straight for hell if you think they are wrong.

But they have quietly allowed their inerrant interpretations to change. A few decades ago, conservative white Christians were absolutely certain that some people were black because of the Curse of Cain, or maybe it was the Curse of Ham, or something, and that they had literal Biblical justification for hating black people and undertaking acts of violence against them. There are still white Biblical fundamentalists who believe this, but it is a comparatively rare belief today. Somehow, in the last few decades, many fundamentalist Christians have changed their beliefs. This has not happened because of federal government force. Maybe it started that way; they were furious about the government enforcing school busing and integration. But today you will find very few fundamentalist Christians who say “I get along with black people only because the federal government forces me to.” Most white fundamentalists genuinely like people of other races. Now.

Why the change? The Bible has not changed. Nor did God appear in the sky and announce, “Hey, uh, listen up; I just decided, uh, that it’s okay to like black people now.” It is the fundamentalists themselves who have changed their beliefs. If fundamentalists are inerrant in their Bible interpretations, then why have their beliefs changed? It is because they learned some things. They learned from experience that black people are just people, with good and bad individuals just like any other race. This means that somebody was wrong sometime. Either modern fundamentalists are insulting the Bible by liking black people, or else their recent predecessors were insulting the Bible by hating black people. Somewhere along the line, somebody interpreted the Bible incorrectly.

When a modern fundamentalist claims that they and they alone know what the correct interpretation of the Bible is, they should remember that earlier fundamentalists made the same claim about beliefs that are now widely rejected.

Two Gods

Do the major monotheistic religions all worship the same God? Both Christianity and Islam claim to worship the Jewish Old Testament God. But if you go by the actions of religious people, there are actually two different Gods that they worship.

The first God is the one who created the universe recently, who created it and all of humankind to be the property of angry men with guns, and who plans for angry men with guns to bring it to a violent end in the near future. This is the God whom right-wing Christians and jihadist Muslims worship. They hate each other, but they worship the same God who has the same commandments.

The second God is the God of love who pervades the universe and wants us to take care of the world. This is the God whom moderate Christians and Muslims worship.

Moderate Christians have more in common with moderate Muslims than they do with right-wing Christians. And, though neither of them wants to hear this, right-wing Christians have more in common with jihadist Muslims than with moderate Christians. The fact that right wing and moderate Christians both claim to worship the same Jesus appears to mean nothing.

Post-Election Demise of Reason

For those of us who wish to use evidence and reason to inform our beliefs and decisions, yesterday’s elections confirm our worst fears. The entire legislative process at the national level, and in most states, will now consist of attempts to implement conservative beliefs. And this has left me with a sense that nothing I do next is going to matter very much.

Now, if conservative beliefs—any of them—were the product of evidence and reason, even if the evidence is imperfect and the reason well-intentioned, then I would not feel this way quite as much. I would respectfully disagree with them. But conservative beliefs—as nearly as I can tell, all of them—are the result of assertions based solely upon their own opinions and held even when the evidence is against them. Evidence and reason simply do not matter to the new Republican majority.

One example of conservative substitution of wild assertions in place of evidence is the Christian preacher Rick Wiles, who posted recently about the ebola epidemic. His first claim was that God sent ebola as a way of punishing atheists, gays, and sluts. His second claim was that President Obama has intentionally spread the ebola virus in order to cause a crisis so that he can impose martial law. His words are nothing but insane hatred. Most conservatives do not agree with him. But have you heard any conservative preachers or politicians denouncing Wiles or other preachers who proclaim similar lies? I am not aware of any. Please post a comment if you are. Preachers such as Rick Wiles use religion to get people to, without the least bit of thought or evidence, embrace far right-wing politics. The right-wing politicians, even those who know that Wiles is wacko, are happy enough to let him lure people into their political sphere. Conservatives seem to not be bothered at all by having such people as Rick Wiles represent them.

All that remains for me to do is to try to do the right thing for my family, friends, colleagues, students, and readers. Scientific evidence and reason may not matter at all to the new majority, but they matter to a lot of people who are actually in contact with me. Though I have no hope of effecting any political change, I will continue to serve all of you.

In a way, those of us who understand and love science must continue working the same way the first-century Christians worked. They told others about what they thought was the Gospel (even though this Gospel evolved over time), they continued to meet (even when in secret), and they did so even though they knew they would have no immediate impact on a government run by clinically crazy Caesars in Rome.

Religion: Starting Over

If I could change human nature, one of the things I would do is to hit the reset button on religion. Religion is the powerhouse behind some of the worst things in the world. It is at least part of the inspiration for the Israeli strikes this summer against Palestinians (and so far Palestinians have been almost the only casualties in the conflict), as well as the inspiration behind Palestinian rockets fired into Israel as well as the way the Palestinian militias have put civilians directly in the line of fire. The only thing that Palestinian militias and the Israelis agree on is that Palestinian civilians should get killed in the name of religion. And here in America, there are a lot of people who at least act as if the gospel is where Jesus said you should accumulate assault weapons and be ready to use them. And as the previous blog essay indicated, a lot of religion is just a scam. I wish I could hit the reset button.

And starting over might allow the good aspects of religion to grow back. If there is a God of love, then this power might be able to find greater expression. There are many loving Christians (and Jews, and Muslims, and Buddhists, etc.) but the people who use religion as a justification for hatred crowd them out like tender seedlings among gigantic weeds.

I suspect that religion is inherently illogical and cannot have a reasonable basis. But suppose I am wrong. If there is a true God of love, then our minds ought to be able to reasonably choose that God and that religion. One of the main reasons this cannot happen now is the religious part of most people’s minds is filled with religious junk that we have inherited from previous millennia. If we could just hit the reset button and make a reasonable choice about what form our religious instinct should take…maybe Christianity would more closely resemble what Jesus said than what violent conservative Christians believe we should say using His Name as a justification.

Dream over. Time to get back to real life.

The Holy Spirit: An Experiment

Back when I converted to Christian fundamentalism when I was in high school, I was told in no uncertain terms that the Holy Spirit was absent from me before I was baptized, and that it would enter into me at the moment of baptism. The details were unclear; would the Holy Spirit merge with my own spirit, or would they remain separate like two battling Zoroastrian entities? (Modern Zoroastrians seem to be the only cultural group that every major religion wants to slaughter.) It was also unclear whether the Holy Spirit would ever leave. But at least if I should stop adhering to fundamentalist beliefs, the Holy Spirit would become inactive.

Therefore my conversion experience, and my subsequent rejection of organized religion, followed the classic ABA experimental design. Situation A, my previous unconverted self; B, my converted self; then back to A, my post-fundamentalist self. My spiritual experiences during B should be significantly different from those during A.

It is true that, during B, I had deeply and soaringly religious experiences. My feeling of inspiration was sometimes so strong that I could hardly breathe. The whole world radiated colorful beauty. The problem is that I also had these experiences before, during the first A. Somewhere around age nine I started feeling unspeakable inspiration when I was surrounded by beautiful natural scenes. Once at a Presbyterian church camp (which clearly did not meet fundamentalist standards) up in the Sierra Nevada we wrote little skits. I was Paul Bunyan going to heaven, and I said that if heaven didn’t have trees I didn’t want to go. The feeling was so strong that I experienced it even when riding my bicycle through endless acres of pesticide-drenched monocultures of orange or olive trees. I can still remember the scent of Malathion. I identified this feeling with God. And I believed the basic Christian doctrines. But I had not yet been baptized.

Many years later, when I left theology behind, I continued to have these experiences. Just this past summer I felt inspiration over and over as I beheld the wonders of nature (see my evolution blog). I am not an atheist like Sir Richard Dawkins, but even he likes to quote someone who described him as “a deeply religious nonbeliever.” If I am indeed still experiencing the Holy Spirit, which really does make me love everybody and the Earth, then why is it still a palpable presence in my post-doctrinal life? Why did I have these feelings before and after my time as a fundamentalist? A statistician would say that my experiences (the dependent variable) during A vs. B (the independent variable) were not significantly different.

I experience the mental state that many (most?) other people experience, and I experience it more often than nearly everyone I know: I feel breathlessly inspired by nature, and I love altruism. (I also hate those times when people defy altruism. Those are the only times I get really, really angry.) But those experiences are not associated with the presence or absence of belief in fundamentalist doctrines.

We’ve been sold a big lie. Fundamentalists insist that everyone who has not joined their ranks is an abject sinner who lives only for pleasure and is constrained from harming other people only by the fear of Hell, and that when you join them you become a new person who is filled with the spirit of love. Both of these assertions are wrong, and are lies. There are perhaps billions of non-fundamentalists who behave in the way the Bible says we can recognize as Christian, except for the doctrines and rituals; and there are at least thousands of Christians in America who are constrained from acting aggressively toward you only because they fear the secular law of the land.

Behold the Lamb

Back in my formally religious days, one of my favorite Biblical passages was what John the Baptist said when Jesus showed up to be baptized. He said, “Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world.”

To me, the most important word was the first one, behold. What was there, about a young Jesus, that might suggest that he was the Lamb of God, which you could see just by looking at him? Jesus had not yet begun his public ministry. It is very likely that John knew Jesus, knew about his character and his beliefs, but it is very unlikely that John knew about what would later be considered the essential theology of Jesus as Son of God and as King in the lineage of David. Based on evidence that Bart Ehrman has outlined very clearly in How Jesus Became God, it is not likely that Jesus even made these claims about himself. At the very least, Jesus almost certainly had not yet made such claims back when John baptized him.

So what could John see, and bid others to see, by looking at Jesus? They could see a man who really cared about his fellow humans, who noticed and championed those who are oppressed and poor, who turned away from the path of violent opposition to the Romans, who took time to notice the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. When you beheld Jesus doing things like this, you could conclude that he was the Lamb of God. As a scientist, I consider this to be a good, if primitive, application of the scientific method.

But when you behold a modern conservative Christian, you see almost the exact opposite of these things. Modern conservatives glance at the poor and oppressed and blame them for not being rich. To modern conservatives, laziness is the only reason that anyone is poor. Furthermore, to these modern Christians, armed opposition is the first choice against any power of which they do not approve. Jesus told Peter to put away his sword, but modern conservatives say that we should all have as many guns as we can afford, and be ready to use them. And to modern conservatives, the birds of the air and lilies of the field are invisible parts of a countryside that is just asking to be driven over by ORVs or developed into resorts. To listen to modern conservatives, you would think that Jesus got rich by ruthless business practices, shunned the poor, had as many weapons as he could carry, and aspired to live in a big house on the hill built by underpaid and uninsured laborers.

What about the rest of the verse? Lamb of God referred to the idea that Jesus was to be the sacrifice that would take away the sins of the world. The Apostle John said that “God sent not his son into the world to condemn the world but that through him they might be saved.” But according to conservative Christians nearly everyone who has ever lived is going to suffer unspeakable torture in Hell forever. In most cases, it will be because these people never even heard of Jesus. In many other cases, it is because these people beheld the actions of Christians and concluded that, if Christians imitate Christ, then Jesus must be evil. And in most other cases, it will be because these people did not accept the interpretation of the Bible that conservative Christians insist is the only correct one. For example, the Book of Revelation depicts 144,000 people being saved. To most of us, this is clearly a figurative number, based on holy numerology and the number seven. But conservative Christians believe that if you do not believe this number to be literally exact, then you will not be among that number. Or if you do not believe that this or that or some other specific political event is in fact the beginning of the End Times and Armageddon, then you are damned. If about 100 billion people have lived in the history of the world, and only about 100 thousand will be saved, this is a one-in-a-million success rate—or, a 99.999999 percent failure rate, for God’s announced purpose of saving the world.

No wonder conservative Christians hate us. When one of them looks at you, he or she knows that there is only a one in a million chance that you will be with them in heaven. This being the case, why should they care to treat you with any respect? Why should they hesitate to throw garbage in your yard? I wrote about this earlier, in which my former neighbor (who wears a God-and-guns-and-American-flag T shirt) trespassed into my yard to use my trashcan (or did, before I locked up my trashcan on an enclosed porch). Why not? I am just hell-fodder anyway, and so, probably, are you.

In the famous parable of the Good Samaritan, a student of religious law asked Jesus to define the term neighbor. A neighbor, Jesus indicated, is whoever you give assistance to when they need it, even if you find them out on the road. But to modern conservative Christians, even the person who lives in a house next door is not a neighbor, but is merely some biomass headed for Hell.

When I behold modern Christians, I cannot see at all the figure of Jesus as depicted in the gospels. The Jesus I love is someone I must wholly construct out of fantasy.

Poems

First, a brief poem that I wrote. I have written thousands of little four-line quatrains (more so in the past than now) and I would like to briefly share one now.

They build a lofty church

And imagine

That it encloses God

And that He is theirs.

Then, here is a fabulous poem by Rupert Brooke, called “Heaven.” This is how fish might imagine—and rationalize—heaven.

…This life cannot be All, they swear,

For how unpleasant, if it were!

One may not doubt that, somehow, Good

Shall come of Water and of Mud;

And, sure, the reverent eye must see

A Purpose in Liquidity.

We darkly know, by Faith we cry,

The future is not Wholly Dry.

Mud unto mud!—Death eddies near—

Not here the appointed End, not here!

But, somewhere, beyond space and Time

Is wetter water, slimier slime!

And there (they trust) there swimmeth One

Who swam ere rivers were begun,

Immense, of fish form and mind,

Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;

And under that Almighty Fin,

The littlest fish may enter in.

Oh! Never fly conceals a hook,

Fish say, in the Eternal Brook,

But more than mundane weeds are there,

And mud, celestially fair;

Fat caterpillars drift around,

And Paradisal grubs are found;

Unfading moths, immortal flies,

And the worm that never dies.

And in that Heaven of all their wish,

There shall be no more land, say fish.

A Letter I Plan to Send

To Gregory Alan Thornbury

President, The King’s College

56 Broadway

New York, NY 10004

Dear President Thornbury,

My name is Stanley Rice. I am a professor of Biological Sciences at Southeastern Oklahoma State University in Durant. I am also the president of the Oklahoma Academy of Science. I was a faculty member at The King’s College from 1987-1990, at which time I chose to leave for other employment (I was not asked to leave). I was a sabbatical replacement, then a temporary instructor, then an assistant professor of biological sciences.

I wish to express my disappointment with the way King’s, a supposedly Christian college, prostituted itself to the Republican Party, as well as some relief that, with your appointment as president, a more theological and less political direction seems to have been restored. From what has been in the news, it appears that the only thing that was important, from the viewpoint of the administration and governing board of King’s, was that a faculty or staff member adhere zealously to the Republican Party. This was particularly evident in the case of your former president, Dinesh D’Souza, who apparently considered himself exempt from the laws of both man and God as he broke the civil law regarding campaign contributions and God’s moral law regarding faithfulness. While King’s could not have known about his utter disregard for personal morality when D’Souza was hired, it was clear even long before he became the president of King’s that he believed he could say anything he wanted, regardless of fact or evidence, against Democrats, especially President Obama, and that God would approve of it. While this may not be what you intended, the message that the outside world gets from this is that D’Souza was acceptable as your leader merely because he is a zealous Republican, and that, for King’s, Christianity is merely a disguise for rabid political conservatism. Previous presidents of King’s (I was there during the administration of Friedhelm Radandt) were not famous conservative zealots but were more interested in education as, it appears, you are. At the time I worked at King’s, I felt uncomfortable with this switching of Republicanism with Christianity, and now I am completely ashamed of it. Just be assured that the outside world does not deride The King’s College for being Christian, but for being unchristian.

During my time at King’s, I knew some truly outstandingly good individuals, most notable of whom was Dr. Wayne Frair. But even these fine individuals got caught up in the continual warring factions that eventually led to the 1994 temporary closure of the college.

When King’s should prove ready to heed the call of the prophets, ancient and modern, to care more about the poor than the rich, and to care about the earth, as commanded in Exodus, and to behold the lilies of the field, as Jesus did, then let me know. I would be happy to circulate your response to those who read my writings.

Sincerely,

Dr. Stanley Rice

I’m So Glad to be So Out of There

From 1987 to 1990, I was a faculty member at The King’s College, which at the time was in Briarcliff Manor, New York. I voluntarily left in 1990. I was a moderate Christian at this very conservative religious college. Some of my colleagues had inquisitive minds, but many were simply closed-minded to anything outside of conservatism. Many of them spent their time fighting one another in power struggles and doctrinal disputes. The students got really tired of it and eventually there were so few students that the college closed in 1994. Then it reopened in New York City.

I am so glad to be out of there. You see, I called it a conservative religious college, not a conservative Christian college, because the only things they really affirmed with any enthusiasm were the tenets of the Republican Party.

I had stopped paying attention to The King’s College until I heard a news report about the hyper-conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza. It turns out he was president of the college from 2010 to 2012. D’Souza is the perfect example of the belief that all you have to do to be saved is to worship the Republican Party—that is, the extreme right wing of the Party. Moderate Republicans do not count.

D’Souza expresses this opinion most vividly in his absolute hatred of Barack Obama. In a Forbes magazine article in 2010, D’Souza said that Obama was “...trapped in his father’s time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father’s dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.” D’Souza stops just short of saying that President Obama is demon-possessed.

Even those aspects of history and current affairs that most conservatives find disturbing seem to be pretty damn acceptable to D’Souza. For example, he thinks that the European conquest of Africa was just fine. According to Wikipedia, “In the second chapter of What's So Great About America, D'Souza defends colonialism, arguing that the problem with Africa is not that it was colonized, but rather that it was not colonized long enough.”

D’Souza also claims that the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib was the fault of liberals, not of certain members of the American military or the Bush Administration. He said the tortures and degradations (which the whole world saw on video) were caused by “the sexual immodesty of liberal America”.

In May, 2014, D’Souza pleaded guilty to making illegal campaign contributions in a senatorial race. He and his wife each made contributions to the full legal limit, but then he made further contributions through “straw donors,” one of whom was the woman with whom he was having an affair. On September 23, he was sentenced to eight months in a halfway-house rather than prison; five years of probation; and a fine of $30,000.

As I read the Bible, God considers it wrong to have affairs and to break national laws and to lie about people (as D’Souza has lied about Barack Obama). But D’Souza apparently thinks, or at least thought, that he was exempted from God’s laws because of his worship of the Republican Party. I wonder if his sexual immodesty will cause a new rash of tortures of detainees.

Although The King’s College had the integrity to pressure D’Souza to resign his presidency once the sexual scandals emerged, I very much doubt that the College has opened itself up to reasonable thinking any more now than it ever did in the past. I thank whatever God there may be that I got out of there.

What is Hell Like? Come to Church and Find Out, or Not

I think this is the third time I have posted photos on this blog from the marquee of the church down the street from where I live. In the first photo, the marquee indicated, “Big Bang Theory: You’ve Got to be Kidding—God.” Interesting that God should actually provide a direct quotation to this particular church without providing it to other churches. I kind of thought they believed the Bible was God’s word, but apparently God sends them direct quotes. I used this photo in my 2012 book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged,Stressed-Out World. At first I thought God was ridiculing cosmology, but I have gradually come to realize that what really disturbed God was the television series by that name. Apparently God really hates TV shows with geeks in them. In the second photo, the marquee announced, “Evolution: The Science of Calling God a Liar.” I made a YouTube video of this sign, and it got copied around the FaceBookosphere.

Note of caution: There is a website that makes fake church marquee images. They are funny but don’t take them seriously. For example, the church sign that said, “God to President Bush: Those little voices are not from me. Check your meds,” was funny but not genuine. And that joke about the church marquee that said, “What is Hell? Come to church and find out” is likewise apocryphal.

But in this third example the marquee looks, at first, not too different from other church marquees. It is not outrageous, but subtly misleading in a way that I think is interesting enough to discuss at this point. There is a website called “ExploreGod.” In their videos, being shown at this church, they ask important questions, such as Does God exist? or (as in this photo) Why does God allow pain and suffering? These are good questions. But how a church approaches them and how scientists might approach them reveal a fundamental difference between religion and science.

First note that science itself cannot answer either question. But scientists as people frequently wonder about such questions and come up with personal answers to them.

When a church asks, Does God exist?, there is only one possible answer. And everything that leads up to their conclusion is forced into lockstep march toward that conclusion: the answer of Yes. But when scientists ask, Does God exist?, you get a whole range of answers. Science does not force its arguments into a lockstep march toward the answer of No. Many scientists answer Yes, many answer No. But many scientists, myself included, cannot answer this question. Instead we ask, what do you mean by God? If you mean a supreme being who controls all the details of the universe, the answer is clearly No. But if you mean a spiritual essence of love, the presence whereof can never be tested but which many of us would really, really like to believe in, the answer is a resounding I hope so for those of us in the middle. Scientists are always questioning our assumptions and biases. The churches answer the question like an army; scientists answer it like a herd of cats.

Similarly, when churches ask the question in the photo, you know that they will reach some kind of answer or other that leaves God both merciful and all-powerful. They might answer it (especially this church), “God allows suffering because there are Democrats in the world.” Others might answer it, “Because God is testing and strengthening us.” But both of these answers fail to match the evidence, because (in response to the first) even Republicans suffer now and again—there are some forms of pain from which even assault weapons cannot protect them—and (in response to the second) because pain and suffering is way, way, prodigiously, lugubriously, supercalifragalisticexpialadociously, abominably greater than is necessary for strengthening a person’s character. We all expect life to be challenging, to find thorns in a rose garden, but for many people (so far, not for me) suffering has been overwhelming. A little Palestinian kid getting killed by an Israeli mortar, or getting killed because she was used as a human shield by an Islamist terrorist, does not promote that kid’s spiritual development. (See, here is common ground between Israel and Hamas: they both believe that Palestinian civilians are expendable.)

The one answer a church will not permit is to say, “Shit happens and God doesn’t stop it.” There may be a God-essence that wants us to overcome struggles to the extent that we can, and this can be considered a potential Christian answer, but no church would say this, because then people would stop coming and bringing their money. That is, if you can’t get God to alleviate your suffering, then what is the point of prayer and church involvement?

But scientists as people are open to a range of responses to such a question.

As Bart Ehrman has pointed out in his book God’s Problem, the Bible offers about four different answers to the question of why God permits suffering, depending on which part of the Bible you read. The answers all contradict one another. Scientists, as people, would note this range of Biblical answers without trying to force everyone to believe just one of them, without screwing the scriptures that say otherwise into confirming the belief decided in advance.

And of course there are lots of religious answers outside of Christianity. Christian Scientists (who are not Christian scientists) claim that suffering is an illusion.

Conservative religion says, “We have the answer, and we will force all evidence, even scriptural evidence, into confirming it.” Scientists as people say, “There are different possible answers, and we may just have to accept the fact that we cannot know which if any are correct.”

In closing, I point out that this photo was taken on September 22, 2014. Notice that the sign is still advertising a God-loves-guns-and-wants-you-to-have-assault-weapons seminar they sponsored the previous May. The seminar is over enough already and you should take the sign down. But they don’t, because this sign—apparently a permanent fixture now—expresses that they think the Gospel is really about: not Jesus, not God, but guns.

A Survey of Religious Belief and Knowledge at a University in Oklahoma

I teach many general biology classes, for students in all different majors, as well as biology students in my botany and evolution classes, at Southeastern Oklahoma State University in Durant. For years, I have known that my students had religious beliefs that covered the whole range from agnosticism to fundamentalist Christianity, and scientific perceptions ranging from evolution-only to young-earth-creationism. Since we are in the middle of the Bible Belt, I assumed most of them were creationists. But I never asked them.

Until now.

A couple of weeks ago I administered a survey (with institutional approval) of religious knowledge and beliefs. The survey was voluntary and anonymous. The religion under consideration was Christianity, because it is the most common religion in rural Oklahoma. I wanted to know how many of the students accepted evolutionary science and how many believed the Bible to be a, or the, holy book. And if they did believe the Bible to be holy, just how much did they know about it? Most of the questions I asked had something to do with biology: the age of the Earth and Noah’s flood (evolution), Old Testament dietary laws (nutrition), the Sabbath of the Fields (ecology), slavery (the genetics of race relations), and violent miscarriage (relating to the question of when human life begins). I will now report the results from the 49 respondents in my general biology classes.

The first thing that I discovered is that student beliefs were more evenly spread than I had anticipated; they were not overwhelmingly young-earth creationist.

Belief General Biology Fall 2014	Number	Percent	Belief in literal six-day creation	Belief that Noah’s Flood covered the whole Earth
Evolution produced the diversity of life.	6	12%	0%	0%
God allowed or used evolution to produce the diversity of life.	14	29%	44%	67%
God supernaturally created diversity over a long period of time.	13	27%	60%	100%
God supernaturally created diversity over a short and recent period of time.	10	20%	100%	89%
Declined to state	6	12%	50%	100%

There were 20 students of 49 who accepted some form of evolution, and 23 who did not. As it turns out, the “declined to state” category answered most questions in a creationist fashion, so it might be safest to assume 20 students of 49 (41%) being open to evolution in some form, and 29 students of 49 (59%) rejecting evolution. Belief in a literal six days of creation and a Flood that covered the whole Earth were higher in the creationist categories, but, perhaps surprisingly, not completely pegged to 100%; Noah’s Flood seemed more popular than the six-day creation.

Seventy-nine percent of the respondents who said that God allowed evolution to occur believed that the Bible was a or the holy book; in the creationist and declined-to-state categories it was 100%. The following information is based only on the students who identified the Bible as holy.

Of these students, only 15 percent had actually read the Bible. The others had read parts of it, or relied on their preachers to quote passages to them. That is, 85 percent of the people of faith relied on their preachers to edit the Bible for them: to either conveniently ignore certain passages, or to actually give them misinformation about what the Bible said.

General Topic General Biology Fall 2014	Specific belief	Percentage answering “yes”
Evolution, Earth history	Genesis 1 contains the account of Adam and Eve.	65%
	God raised up new mountains after the Flood.	80%
	God created new life forms after the Flood.	24%
	God put the fossils in order during the Flood.	21%
Health and diet	The Law of Moses says eating shellfish is an abomination.	34%
Ecology	The world will end soon.	62%
	The Law of Moses says that agricultural land should lie fallow (uncultivated) every seventh year.	79%
Social and racial	The Law of Moses says debts should be forgiven every fifty years and land should go back to its original owners.	26%
	Children born into slavery remained slaves even if their parents were freed.	25%
	Israelites could own other Israelites as slaves.	40%
	The Law of Moses says, “The slave is his money.”	27%
	Injuring a slave, who dies later, is not a punishable offense.	50%
	The Law of Moses says that there should be no resident aliens in Israel.	42%
Life before birth	The Law of Moses considers that injuring a woman so as to cause a miscarriage is manslaughter or murder.	59%

First, consider the beliefs about evolution and Earth history. Among the difficulties of creationist explanations are: first, there are two creation accounts in Genesis, not just one; second, why do you have fossil deposits high up in mountains; third, how could animal genetic diversity come from just two of each kind in the ark; fourth, why do the fossils show an evolutionary order. These are things that creationist pastors may wish that people would not ask. How convenient it would be if churchgoers would ignore the differences between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, or to think that God solved these problems by putting the fossils in order, raising up mountains, and creating new genetic diversity. Large percentages of believers the respondents did in fact believe these things, even though they are not in the Bible. They just made these things up. No wonder so few religious students notice that the facts of science contradict a literalistic view of the Bible; they do not know what a literalistic view of the Bible is.

Next, consider beliefs about Old Testament dietary laws. Only 34 percent knew that Leviticus 11 condemns eating shellfish as an abomination. It is very common for conservative preachers to quote the Old Testament to say that homosexuality is an abomination. But they almost never say that the Old Testament uses the same word to refer to eating shrimp.

Perhaps the most disturbing finding is that 62 percent of the respondents believed that the world is going to end soon. This one result is enough to make me almost stop worrying about evolution education and focus on environmental education. If you believe that the world is going to end soon, then at least subconsciously you are going to be unconvinced that it is important to prevent global warming or to protect endangered species or to recycle or to conserve energy or anything else. Go ahead and make a mess of the world, since God is going to destroy it very soon anyway. Of course, politicians who say to not worry about the Earth will NOT say to not worry about terrorists or deficit spending. It’s just the Earth you can ignore.

Most of the respondents (79 percent) knew about what is popularly called the Sabbath of the Fields, which is a primitive form of soil conservation commanded in the Book of Exodus. Most of them know that the Law of Moses addresses stewardship and conservation of the land. But only 26 percent knew about the year of jubilee, in which debts are forgiven and land goes back to its original owners every fifty years. Such a law would be the death-knell of capitalism. It sounds like socialism, and that is probably why preachers almost never talk about it.

Most respondents had a very unclear idea about what the Old Testament said about slavery. They thought that Biblical slavery was benign and more closely resembled an employer-employee relationship than actual ownership of a person. But the Old Testament clearly indicates that a child slave remains a slave even if the parent is given freedom and that it says “the slave is his money” (Exodus 21:21). If an owner kills a slave outright, it is manslaughter, but if the owner injures a slave and he or she dies a few days later, it is not a punishable offense, according to the Law of Moses. Most Bible believers appear to be unaware of this.

The Law of Moses says that resident aliens in the land of Israel should receive the same rights as the Israelites; one law for both. Almost half of the respondents were unaware of this. When conservative preachers rail against “illegal aliens,” they conveniently ignore this part of the Bible.

Finally, you hear conservative preachers all the time saying that, according to the Bible, abortion is murder. Therefore, if someone injures a woman so that she has a miscarriage, then the death of the fetus constitutes at least manslaughter. But the Law of Moses does not say this. Exodus 21 says, "And if men strive together, and hurt a pregnant woman, so that her child comes out, and yet no harm follows; the one who hit her shall surely be fined, according as the woman's husband shall impose on him; and he shall pay a fine as the judges determine. But if any harm follows, then you shall pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth." It is unclear whether “harm” refers to the fetus or to the mother. While his passage does not actually sanction abortion, it does possibly indicate that the death of the fetus is not manslaughter. Over half of the respondents are unaware of this.

The conclusion I take away from this is that people who are most strongly convinced that the Bible has religious authority over science and daily life are unaware of what the bible actually says about these matters. This undoubtedly comes from people getting their Bible knowledge from preachers who twist what the Bible actually says and then assume (correctly) that their followers will not bother to look at the Bible themselves.

I also gave this survey to my evolution class (consisting mostly of upper division biological science majors). I only had fourteen respondents, which is not enough of a sample size to justify closer analysis except for these overall results. First, the most common belief in this class was theistic evolution (43 percent of respondents). The next most common belief was that evolution produced diversity (29 percent). Only three of the students (21 percent) were young-earth creationists, and only one was an old-earth creationist. This course is an elective, which most creationist students avoid. Second, acceptance of evolutionary science does not require rejection of the Bible. Of these respondents, 71 percent accepted some form of evolution, and 79 percent believed the Bible was a, or the, holy book. To them, these views are not mutually exclusive.

For me, there were three conclusions from this survey, of which the first two were surprising:

First, young-earth creationism was not the most common belief even in the Bible belt of Oklahoma.
Second, over half of the respondents thought the world was going to end soon.
Third, most Bible believers do not realize that the Bible does not support their beliefs.

I will continue administering this survey and eventually I hope that I will have a large sample size. In my approximately ten remaining professional years, I might get close to a thousand respondents.