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.