Will Reason Triumph?

The new year is coming up. Are you ready for it? Neither is anybody else. The big problems continue to get worse, particularly the strain of human consumption and pollution upon the ecosystem of the Earth, and hardly anything is being done about it except by a minority of humanitarians. The Paris climate talks earlier this month produced a set of reasonable recommendations that will at least help make the impact of global climate change a little more manageable. But the political machine of America responded with a collective snort; Congress has declared that America will not cooperate at all with other nations to limit global warming. Most Republicans declare that (in words I heard one of them use) nothing will ever convince them of global warming. Nothing. Ever. This is a statement, pure and simple, that Republicans consider themselves to be totally incapable of error. They have carved out for themselves a niche that properly belongs to God, if there is One.

And a lot of the power behind the conservative declaration of infallibility is religion. They believe that God has made them incapable of error. God approves of everything they do. (Some of them might admit that, once in a while, they make a few tiny mistakes.) To win any argument, a conservative need do no more than hold his God Finger Puppet up in the air and wiggle it.

There is practically no hope that this will change. And that is because the human brain did not evolve to reason. It evolved to rationalize. That is, the human brain evolved to use information from the world to control other human beings. Sometimes they used reason to do this. But just as often they used fantasy. We are the evolutionary descendants of people whose brains allowed them to understand the world just enough to manipulate it and to dominate other human beings. Therefore, the coming year, and all years to come, will be just as unreasonable and dangerous as the previous year, as all previous years.

However much I admire the character of Perry Mason, as played by Raymond Burr, I must regretfully disagree with one of his statements. In a 1961 episode, a client named Fallon (one of thousands of wrongfully-accused defendants) thanked Perry Mason for not losing faith in him, to which Mason responded, “Oh, I always have faith, Mr. Fallon—faith in what Judge Learned Hand called ‘the eventual supremacy of reason.’” One of the reasons I have always enjoyed Perry Mason reruns is that I can fantasize, for a few moments, that truth will eventually triumph in the world, a fantasy that I know is not true.

Skin-Deep Savages

I’m tired of writing about racism, but it just keeps coming up! I wish it would just go away. But it won’t, so I keep writing about it. During this Christmas season, we are supposed to be thinking about good news of peace on Earth. But so long as we are still racist savages on the inside, we will never have peace on Earth. In fact, our technological interconnectedness can amplify, rather than dampen, our evil tendencies.

Author Derrick Jensen, in the preface to his book The Culture of Make Believe, describes one of the most disturbing incidents in the history of white/black relations in America. (It is very similar to many incidents in the history of white/Native relations.)

“In 1918, the husband of Mary Turner, a black woman from Valdosta, Georgia, was killed by a mob of white men, not for any offense he had committed, but rather because another black man had killed a white farmer. I do not know precisely how Turner’s husband died. I do not even know his name. I know only that in retaliation for the killing of the white farmer, many white citizens of Valdosta lynched eleven black men—who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong color skin—before they shot and killed the man they were after.

“In the wake of her husband’s murder, Mary, who was eight months pregnant, vowed to avenge those who killed her husband. An Associated Press article later commented on her ‘unwise remarks, as well as her attitude.’ If you dig beneath the delicate language, it is easy to see what was coming. A mob of several hundred white men and women determined they would ‘teach her a lesson,’ or, perhaps more precisely, they would teach a lesson to those others who might be tempted to act as she did. They tied her ankles together and hung her upside down from a tree. Then they doused her clothes with gasoline and burned them off of her. They used a hog-splitting knife to open her belly. Her infant fell to the ground, and cried briefly, until someone crushed the head with his heel. The mob then shot her, not once or twice, but hundreds of times.”

Surely, we think, we would not do something like that today. But underneath our thin skins, we still carry the emotions that, under the right conditions, could ignite into similar or greater levels of violence. Most of us have grown up learning not to think, feel, or act in this manner which is perhaps the worst imaginable offense to God, should God happen to exist. But the people of Valdosta, not quite a hundred years ago, were not very different from us. Human nature has not changed. This kind of behavior could happen again if sparked by the right circumstances.

In case you still think it is impossible, let me report what a colleague told me about a student in her class. He wrote his English composition term paper about how black people are inferior and should return to slavery. Did this person reach this conclusion by getting to know black people and, perhaps regretfully, concluding that they were not just slightly but so extremely inferior that they deserved subhuman status? No. He spewed out beliefs that had been implanted in a religious fashion and that he held with religious zeal. He refused to think for himself. We know this because his paper was plagiarized from a white supremacist website.

A Creation Story from the Yoruba People

When I teach evolution, I have a brief section about evolution and creation. It is a science course and I do not spend a lot of time on this. One of the things I do in this course is to introduce the students to versions of creation from outside Christianity, such as the new Native American creationism espoused by Vine Deloria Jr. and the Muslim creationism of Harun Yahya. But this semester, I had two students from Africa. One of them told me about the creation stories of her people, the Yoruba. I would like to present the account that she gave to us, the ÌTÀN ÌSÈDÁ ÃYÉ.

“In the beginning of the world, there was nothing except a ball of water. And Olódùmãrè (the Almighty) sent Õdùduwà to Òbìrí Ãyé (the round Earth) to plant the earth. Õdùduwà left heaven with a horn full of sand and a chicken. He poured (planted) the sand on the surface of water, so that he can step on a ground. He then placed the chicken on the ground. The chicken helped spread the sand all over. The areas where the chicken was able to reach are the land we have today. Õdùduwà saw to it that the surface of the earth was covered part land and water so that there is a form. And several years passed by………………..

“Meanwhile, Sokoti (the blacksmith of heaven) has been assigned to mold every form of creature he could imagine to fill the formed earth. Sokoti used his artistic ability to mold different kinds of creatures with different colors and skins. Unfortunately, Sokoti was a drunkard. This made it hard for him to get his job done right. One day in his drunken state, he molded different forms of creatures and sent them to earth without a quality test of assurance. These creatures were the monkeys, baboons, chimps, and gorillas.

“On one of his sober days, Sokoti framed out a fine creature and made different forms it in various colors and diversity with sand, clay, and mud. Some he fashioned them with large breasts, and left some bare. He created them such that they were like a puzzle that could fit into each other. These creatures were the most perfect of all he had made. He sent them into the world and they were called Eniyan (humans).

“After few years, there was conflict between the apes and humans. They couldn’t live together in harmony. The apes were rejected and ignored by humans. They decided to end this conflict by consulting with each other. They chose a representative who will go to Olódùmãrè on their behalf. Olódùmãrè gave instructions that they should congregate at the mountain in three days time, where he would prepare a potion of oil in a giant basin. They are to rub their skin with this oil to become human. The apes were so excited that they drank, danced and forgot what day it was. By the time they remembered, the oil had almost dried up. They managed to rub their faces, hands, and feet with the remaining oil but it wasn’t enough. Some rub their butts and chests against the basin, but still not enough. This is why apes have faces, hands, butts, and feet that are almost bare.”

This story illustrates two things. First, it shows that there are many creation accounts. Christian creationists assume that disproving evolution would prove their version of Christianity. Second, it shows how a supposed harmony between creation and evolution can be forced, no matter what kind of creationism it is. It can be Christian creationism, as when generations of religious scientists have tried to harmonize Genesis and geology. But it can also be done with the Yoruba account. As my student explained, the primordial Earth was mostly water (the continents arose later); this is the Òbìrí Ãyé of the legend. The adiye chicken could have been a tyrannosaur or an archaeopteryx. It took time for Sokoti to perfect the design of the human, just as it took evolution a long time to produce us. Sokoti used different materials, such as sand or clay, of different textures and colors to produce different species, and different human races, just as evolution has produced diversity. And Sokoti, like sexual selection, produced genders of humans who fit together like puzzle pieces. See? The Yoruba legend fits together with modern science!

Attempts to reconcile religion and science, from Augustine to Francis Collins in the western world, and all over the world, is an exercise in creativity rather than a discovery of truth.

I appreciate the contribution that my student made to our class, and I think no one in the class (except the other Yoruba student) had experienced anything like it.

Bible Faith and Bible Understanding

This fall, I administered a questionnaire (as per guidelines of our Institutional Research Board) to my classes. I have tabulated the results from my evolution class. I work at a small regional university in the jewel at the middle of the buckle of the Bible belt. This year, I kept two groups of questionnaires separate: those who accept the Bible as a, or the, holy book, and those who do not.

You probably expect that the class had a lot of creationists. But, when you think about it, you realize that this is unlikely to be the case, since the class is an elective and creationists tend to stay away from it. Even within this class, I have noticed that one student who expressed a distaste for the subject (maybe he thought it would be an easy A) signs his name on the attendance sheet and leaves (and seems to think I don’t notice). Not only does this suggest that he does not want to deal with the evidence, but he is being dishonest by taking credit for attending a class when he was not there after the first minute. On the other hand, I have had some very smart and honest creationists in the class over the years. Still, one should not be surprised at the makeup of the class. Of those who accept the Bible as holy, about 75 percent are theistic evolutionists (who believe God created the world through the process of evolution). Only one respondent identified him or herself as a young-earth creationist. Of the non-believers, three of five said evolution was responsible for the world being the way it is. My class is hardly polarized at the extremes; most people are somewhere in the middle.

First, those who consider the Bible to be a, or the, holy text. Eighty-two percent said that they know a lot about the Bible, and 45 percent said they had read the entire Bible at least once. Sounds like these people should know their religion, at least. However, they did not do so well on the general questions about Biblical knowledge. These questions included:

• Who David was, or who Abram was
• How many tribes of Israel there were, or how many plagues of Egypt there were
• About how many books are in the Bible
• That the prophets of the Old Testament called for the rich to stop oppressing the poor
• That the Old Testament prohibits eating shellfish

I also included, in the general Bible questions, a couple that should have been very easy to answer: about whether the Catholic and Protestant Bibles have the same books, and whether the Bible was originally written in English. This last questions sounds really strange, and in fact all respondents knew the Bible was not originally written in English, but there is a church right outside of town that considers the King James Bible to be the inspired Bible—not the earlier versions.

I also asked some specific questions that are very interesting and relevant to modern issues.

• The Old Testament commands agricultural land be left fallow every seven years, a practice known as the “Sabbath of the fields.” That is, the Old Testament commands sustainable agriculture.
• The Old Testament commands that all debts be forgiven and all land returned to its original owners every fifty years (a practice known as Jubilee). If this command were really carried out, it would mean the collapse of the capitalist system. Can you imagine Bank of America doing this? Not only will they not forgive debts, but they make sneaky policy changes to trick customers into having even more debt. Thanks, Moses.
• The Old Testament permitted slavery and it actually says, regarding the slave-owner, “The slave is his money.” Guess what: the Confederates (who still fly their flags proudly in Oklahoma) believed that black slaves were not people, but property. Thanks, Abraham Lincoln.
• Most religious people consider abortion to be murder. Inconveniently, the Old Testament says that if a man injures a woman such that it causes a miscarriage, this is not treated as a murder but as what we would call a misdemeanor, requiring monetary restitution.
• The Old Testament specifies certain rights that foreigners residing within Israel have; it does not prohibit foreigners from living in Israel.

Second, the students who do not consider the Bible to be a holy text. Two-thirds of them said they know a lot about the Bible. And 38 percent of them said they had read the Bible at least once. Some of these, at least, were raised in a religious tradition and then left it.

This chart summarizes the differences between the Bible-believers and the non-believers, first in terms of general knowledge then knowledge of the specific questions.

Percent correct responses
Topic	Believers	Non-believers
General knowledge: mean	60%	61%
General knowledge: range	31-87%	40-88%
Sabbath of the fields	83%	100%
Jubilee	27%	56%
OT permits slavery	58%	67%
Killing a fetus is not murder	36%	57%
OT does not prohibit aliens	36%	28%

These results indicate that (if these students represent the general population) the non-believers know just as much about the Bible as the believers do. In fact, when it comes to Bible passages that are relevant to modern issues such as agriculture, economics, slavery, abortion, and refugees, the non-believers know more about the Bible than the believers do, sometimes by a wide margin.

The tentative conclusions I draw are the following:

• Believers believe the Bible but are no more likely to know what it says than non-believers, in terms of general Biblical knowledge that is not directly relevant to modern issues.
• Believers know less than non-believers about those parts of the Bible that address modern issues. This may be because their preachers actually feed them misinformation, proclaiming that the Bible champions capitalism and prohibits aliens from living in God’s land (which many of them consider to be the United States). That is, I suspect that preachers have actively led their followers to believe more wrong things about the Bible than do non-believers. Conversely, non-believers are more likely to know things about the Bible that are embarrassing to modern believers.

My main recommendation, from these responses, is this. If you base your political and scientific opinions upon the Bible, you should read it first.

I also posted this essay on my evolution blog.

National Buy-Nothing Day

The human species would not have survived without the instinct of acquisition. We are all descendants of people who got what they needed—alas, often at the expense of other people. But we also have an instinct of contentment, of being able to be satisfied with what we have, to be happy even if we do not have everything that we might want. Imagine Paiute Natives in the Mojave Desert in pre-Columbian times, living in a manner that was beyond frugal, just barely surviving. But the most successful Paiutes, with greatest evolutionary fitness, were those who felt that the land was beautiful and who loved their lives. They were the ones who did not give up, they were the survivors. It may not have occurred to them to spend time thinking about a Big Rock Candy Mountain with all of the things they could not have.

Modern civilization has given us conditions in which the ability to be satisfied with what we have has nearly been strangled. We want everything not just because we want everything but because other people will look down on us if we don’t have everything. Gone is the “Desiderata” of “Go placidly amidst the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence,” to be replaced with “Buy things you don’t want with money you don’t have to impress people you don’t like.” We all know this.

A writer named Colin Beavan decided to live for a year in a way that would produce no net impact upon carbon emissions. He describes his experience in his book No Impact Man. He found it was very difficult to have no impact, but quite easy to have less impact, on Earth’s resources. And he discovered, as have thousands of people who have sought a simpler and more spiritual life, that he was perfectly happy without many of the things that he had previously considered essential. He discovered that part of the reason we think that we need mountains of stuff is that advertisers, through every medium and all day, tell us that we need the stuff. In Beavan’s words, a summary of every advertisement would read, “You suck, but if you buy our product you won’t. Then everybody will love you.”

Today is Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, and the traditional beginning of the Christmas season, which has for modern society become a time of unrelenting advertisement. As Dave Barry said, “Once again, we come to the holiday season: a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.”

Black Friday is a time when, just one day after giving thanks for what we already have, we are willing to claw over the bodies of other people in order to buy what we do not have.

Please join me in National Buy-Nothing Day. Consuming less (and on some days buying nothing) is the only thing that will free us from the overuse of energy which is bringing on global warming. No amount of energy efficiency can compensate for the simple fact that we use too much of everything.

What is Faith?

Okay, so this doesn’t sound like a science essay. But I assure you it does fit in with science. I want to share a story that I heard on Krista Tippett’s On Being, an NPR show, on September 24 of this year. I retell this story from memory, since I do not have time to listen to the whole podcast over again, but you can hear it atthis link.

Dr. Guy Consolmagno is the current Vatican Astronomer, at the Vatican Observatory, and Dr. George Coyne is the recently retired astronomer. Now, whoa. You may not have known there even was a Vatican Observatory. Wasn’t this the church that condemned Galileo for believing the Earth was not the center of the universe, and burned Giordano Bruno at the stake? Well, it took a while for the Vatican to catch up with science, but in 1891 Pope Leo XIII founded the Catholic church decided to pursue it.

Dr. Coyne told a story of speaking at a convention of astronomers one time. He was wearing his priestly vestments. Then someone in the audience asked him, “Father,” not Dr. Coyne or George, “What does it feel like to go to work each day with the realization that you already know all of the answers?” Coyne’s response was swift and sure. He tore off his robe (I assume he was clothed underneath, and not in Mormon magical undergarments) and let everyone know that faith is not about knowing the answers, but about the assurance that the universe can be, as each day and year passes, better and better understood: our efforts at research will be rewarded. Even if we never understand it fully.

That is a way of describing the fundamental faith that all scientists have. And it is a leap of faith: there is no logical reason to believe that our brains, which evolved to maximize the fitness of genes and individuals, should have any way of understanding the universe. We evolved intelligence because it gave us a better ability to survive and to form associations with or to dominate other human beings. It evolved as a tool for evolutionary success, in the pursuit of which rationalization was just as good as reason. What our minds tell us need not be true, except in the matter of telling us where the edge of the cliff, or the next meal, is; it can be total fantasy, and natural selection favors it, so long as it allows us to form associations and to dominate others. I consider it an astonishing thing that our brains just happen to be suited for understanding the universe also. Even though very few people can actually understand dark energy or superstrings, at least we can understand the reasoning.

Keep the faith, brethren. We can understand the world, despite the political and religious and economic forces of hatred and unreason that try to keep us from doing so.

I also posed this essay on my evolution blog.

Intelligent Design, as Explained by Sock Puppets

The 104th  Annual Technical Meeting of the Oklahoma Academy of Sciences has just concluded, and with it my term as president. I am now the Immediate Past President. The president for 2016-2017 will be Terry Conley, a dean at Cameron University. The new president elect, who will become president in 2018, is Adam Ryburn of Oklahoma City University. During Adam’s term I will devolve from being Immediate Past President to being Le Président Ancienne, and then after that I will be Le Président Vieux.

The OAS Technical meetings are an excellent venue to connect with our fellow scientists from around the state. It is also an excellent place for students to present their first research results in a non-threatening environment. Our passion at OAS is to nurture an ongoing culture of science in Oklahoma.

But I need to comment on a student presentation in the Science Communication and Education section. The two students, from Oral Roberts University, gave a presentation that was clearly not research. It was a scripted presentation that was very similar to one given by the science dean at ORU (who was a co-author on this presentation) back in 2012, only this time it was incomprehensible. Perhaps this was because it was redacted from a longer version. But unlike the dean’s presentation back in 2012, this presentation had sock puppets. Well, a PowerPoint slide of sock puppets.

The sock puppets told us that there is an “invisible hand” behind everything in the universe. Evidence? None was presented. Perhaps the sock puppets, and their friend the Pastafarian Flying Spaghetti Monster, are all the evidence you need.

Next, without visible connection to what had come before, the presenters claimed that engineering can come to the rescue to help solve the alienation between social sciences and natural sciences (and they showed a cartoon to this effect). Once again, they did not explain how engineering was supposed to do this.

Then they claimed that the cosmos was obviously designed. Evidence? The evidence was that water says “drink me” and woman says “love me.” (No, really. You can’t make something like this up.) So it was obvious to the presenters, and they assumed it should also be to us, that the purpose of water is to be drunk by humans and maybe other animals. Presumably evaporative cooling of animals and leaves, and erosion of sediments, are not part of water’s purpose. And, of course, the purpose of a woman is to be loved. Does this refer to carnal love by a man? If they were referring to spiritual love, they would have said people say “love me.” But the statement (which they were quoting from a book I had never heard of) gave it a specific gender. Maybe this is not what they meant, but they (and whoever wrote the script) were incredibly naïve to think that their listeners would not make the inference of carnal love (presumably within holy matrimony).

Then they explained the part of the presentation that, in the interest of time, they had to omit. In their presentations to audiences, they present the evidence for evolution and the evidence against evolution and allow the listeners to choose. As anyone who has read this blog or any legitimate books about “creation vs. evolution” must know, it is dishonest to polarize all viewpoints into these two extremes.

But it gets worse. If the presenters were deeply convinced that evolution is utterly evil and creationism utterly true, as appeared to be the case, then they could not possibly present an unbiased assessment of evolution, any more than an atheist can present an unbiased assessment of religion. I could only imagine that they presented something such as “Evolution says that you get ahead by using and subduing other people, survival of the fittest, red in tooth and claw, while creation says you should love other people.” What is a person to think when offered such a choice? If that really is what evolution is about, even I would reject it. (Interestingly, this was merely hours before the Paris terrorist attacks, for which ISIS took credit, and carried out in the name of religion.) I brought this point up during the brief question/answer period afterward. (There was no time for questions, but I was the next presenter and gave up some of my own time for it.) All the students said was that they really tried to present a fair version of evolution.

The presenters also indicated, as nearly as I could understand, that the funding they had received required some kind of assessment at how effective their presentation had been. They presented the results of audience feedback from previous presentations. The audiences had overwhelmingly liked their presentation.

Now, suppose that they had, at this time, conducted a survey of their presentation with our group. They did not, but had they done so, they might have gotten a more positive response than they might otherwise have simply because they told us that previous audiences had liked it. This is almost a textbook definition of bias. That would be like me telling my students, before semester evaluations, “All my other classes for the last 17 years have loved me,” implying, “so if you don’t there’s something wrong with you.” (I don’t do this.)

I asked the presenters who the audiences were who gave them their positive evaluations. They claimed they had given presentations at two previous scientific meetings, and that the other presentations had been to church groups and Bible studies. To me this indicated that the vast majority of their sample was from carefully-selected religious groups. I very much doubt they gave their presentation to any Unitarians, or to mainline denominations (including the twenty-first century Catholic Church) which have, for the most part, made their peace with evolutionary science. If they separated out their presentations to science meetings from the others, would the results have been so positive? Well, I can tell you that if I were them and the feedback from scientists had been positive, I would certainly have said so, and with pride. I doubt that they held this information back due to modesty.

This project was sponsored by Biologos, which claims to defend an evolutionary interpretation of God’s creation. Unlike organizations such as the Discovery Institute, Biologos does not appear to be simply a front for Intelligent Design, which is by no stretch of the imagination evolutionary. ID (as it is known) is top-down, in which a Great Engineer in the Sky designed the world, while evolution is bottom-up. However, Oral Roberts University apparently convinced Biologos to give them a grant in order to promote ID. I very much doubt that Biologos likes the creation/evolution polarization that ORU appears to promote. This presentation would have been better if it were merely old-fashioned ID. As it was, it was merely confusing.

My presentation, following theirs, was about Lee Smolin’s idea of fecund universes, that is, the natural selection of universes. I have written about this previously. I think it offers a truly clever example of natural selection at work on things other than organisms. Ideas, music, technologies (in general, memes) evolve, and do so by natural selection. Computer programmers often use evolutionary computing to design things from the bottom up rather than the top down. Why not universes? The difference between my presentation and the one preceding it was that I admitted there was no evidence, since this universe (sample size = 1) is the only one we know about. The ID proponents never admit that there is no evidence for their beliefs.

OAS encourages student research. But the ORU presentation sounded very much like student indoctrination, the recital of a script that sounded suspiciously like what the ORU science dean had presented before, than research.

I posted this essay also on my evolution blog.

New video

See my new Darwin video, A Tale of Two Gavels. One is from a scientific organization, and one is from the KKK. Science can help us to overcome racism.

Nanyehi: The Continued Evolution

It has been two years since I first saw the musical Nanyehi, written by Becky Hobbs and Nick Sweet. The musical is based on the story of the last Cherokee ghigau, Nanyehi (also known as Nancy Ward). She lived from about 1738 to about 1822. I have a particular interest in this woman because she was my sixth great grandmother. Nanyehi was caught between the worlds of Europeans and Cherokees, and between peace and war. She was a war heroine who, all of her life, led the way to peace. Of course, for the Cherokees, neither the path of war nor of peace ultimately worked; both paths led to the United States conquering the Cherokee. We remain a conquered nation today.

The first set of performances was supported by the Eastern Band of the Cherokees in Hartwell, Georgia in 2012. The second set was sponsored by the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma in Tahlequah in 2013. This was where I first saw it. There were other performances in 2014: in Tulsa, Oklahoma (I saw this one), and Kingsport, Tennessee. The fifth set of performances has just ended in Tulsa, where I saw it last night.

In 2013, I wrote rapturously about this musical in my blogs. After seeing it three times my opinion remains unchanged. Each time it is performed (with Michelle Honaker as Nanyehi and Travis Fite as Tsiyu Gansini) it gets better and better in every way. Becky and Nick have added a couple of new musical pieces, which are among the best: “Love Doesn’t Come in Colors” and “War or Peace.” These pieces focus on some of the most important themes: the warrior Tsiyu Gansini is displeased with his peaceful cousin Nanyehi marrying a white man (Bryant Ward, my sixth great grandfather) or with her championing of the way of peace. You can find all information about this musical, including the stories and lyrics of all the pieces, at the website.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the evolution of this musical is that it has already become a classic.  There are already famous lines from it, such as when peace chief Attakullakulla says that “Cherokee women have always done and will always do whatever they want.” But most of all it has become a new tribal tradition. In its first performances, it needed support from the tribe; the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma paid for every Cherokee citizen who wanted to attend the 2013 Tahlequah performance. But last night the performance hall at the Cherokee Casino was totally filled. And what was the most common thing that I heard people talking about after the performance? The most common words were “Aren’t you glad you came?” and “Wasn’t that good?” and “See you again next year right here.”

The story of Nanyehi is only sparsely documented in books. Search for “Nancy Ward” on Amazon and you find only old books or children’s books or chapters within other books. I believe it is time that someone write a really good popular book about this astonishing woman who was important not only in Cherokee but in American history. Actually, I have a manuscript that I hope to market very soon. The words at the end of the theme song of the musical are “You will be heard!” but most people have never heard of Nancy Ward. I hope that my future writing, and the continued success of Becky and Nick’s musical, will fix this problem.

The issues faced by Nancy Ward and her warrior cousin are still with us today. Does war lead to peace, as Tsiyu Gansini said, or must we pursue peace as our primary goal, as Nanyehi said? This exact same story is going on in the Middle East today.

Another important aspect of the story of Nancy Ward is what some writers have called the sacred feminine. Civilization and organized religion have enforced male domination and crushed women into a subservient role. For example…well, look at all of recorded history. And look at the world today. But in many tribal societies, including the Cherokees, women often had important positions of leadership. As ghigau, Nanyehi could decide the fates of war captives. Primitive Christianity, when the church first started, was dismissed by outsiders as a religion for women and slaves. But eventually women lost their power: the church became entirely patriarchal, and in the early nineteenth century the Cherokee Nation reorganized itself to imitate American governance. Once the Cherokee Nation had a constitution, beginning in New Echota in 1827 (now in Georgia), only men could vote or hold office. The sacred feminine of nurture and peace was lost in the Cherokees just as in almost all other tribes, nations, and institutions. In a world that is still largely patriarchal, Nanyehi (Nancy Ward) remains a heroine worthy of our admiration. She was not perfect, but who was?

You don’t have to be Cherokee to be totally swept away by the story of Nancy Ward. If any of you ever get the chance to see the musical, don’t miss it! Hey you people in California, get on a plane and come back here next year to see it! Watch for information on the website. It just might restore a little faith that humanity has some goodness left in it.

This essay also appeared on my evolution blog.

Creationists Take Genesis, but not Jesus, Literally

Most creationists are protestants and fundamentalists. Some are Catholics, but the last few decades and the last few popes have not been very good for the remaining Catholic creationists. Creationists, as most of you understand, are (primarily) Christians who insist on a “literal” reading of the entire Bible.

Well, not quite. When it comes to The Last Supper that Jesus shared with his disciples before his crucifixion, protestant creationists hastily abandon their literalism. According to the Bible, Jesus broke the (unleavened Passover) bread and said, “This is my body.” You will find this in Luke 22 and in Matthew 26 as direct gospel accounts and it is repeated by the Apostle Paul in First Corinthians 11. Later, he took “the fruit of the vine” which everyone except teetotalers recognize as wine and said, “This is my blood.” (I suppose it could be juice from some other vine. In one novel manuscript, I describe a desert church that used gourd juice.)

Jesus does not say “This represents my body” or his blood. It says that it is. He then says, do this in remembrance of me. But nevertheless the bread is his body and the wine is his blood. Only Catholics, during the communion service they call the Eucharist, take this statement literally. According to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, the wafer actually becomes the same “substance” as Christ’s body, and the wine the same substance as Christ’s blood. The bread is still gluten and starch, and the wine is still resveratrol and ethanol and anthocyanin and sucrose, but the inner “substance” is transformed into Christ’s body and blood. (I wonder what Catholic physicists have to say about transubstantiation.) Protestant and fundy creationists, during what they usually call the Lord’s Supper, alter the plain meaning of scripture and twist it to mean that the bread and grape juice are just meant to make us think about Jesus’ body and blood. They throw literalism out the window where, one would think, it matters most.

“Well, of course,” they could say, “Jesus didn’t actually mean his actual body, because He was sitting right there holding the bread which was molecularly distinct from his body. And He couldn’t have actually meant his actual blood which was still inside of his arteries and veins.” But if this is so, it makes Jesus seem pretty stupid. If it was so blinking obvious that the bread was not actually his body, why would he say that it was? Was he lying, or was he stupid? (Or was he speaking symbolically? No, creationists will not permit Jesus to do this.)

I first encountered this contradiction when I read a book about 25 years ago (which I might not have read were I not asked to review it) of letters exchanged between a literalist creationist and a scientist who was also a Catholic. Personally, I have no interest in this argument, but it does show that creationists are no more faithful to the Bible than other religious people.

And yet creationists present themselves to the rest of us as practically the owners of the Bible. They imply that if you don’t agree with them that the Earth is young, then you need not bother believing in Jesus. But, they think, it is just fine to believe in Jesus without believing that the communion bread is his body and the communion wine is his blood.

Wisdom from Wes Craven

I’ve never watched a Wes Craven movie. From the descriptions I have heard of them, I probably never will. The only reason I listened to a Terry Gross interview of Craven, who died August 30, was because it was on the radio as I drove into Tulsa recently. I was certainly not expecting to learn anything from him.

If you watch any of his movies, I understand, you might think that he exults in torture and blood. But actually, one of his formative experiences as a child was when he killed a rat. He shot it with an arrow, pinning it to the ground. Its scream was much louder than one would ever expect such a small animal to make. He said it was a long and difficult process to finish the rat off.  He was astonished at the desperation of the rat to stay alive. Humans are like this too, he realized. This experience stayed with him for life.

Most movies before the 1960s showed stylized murders and death. Viewers were never really confronted with the horror of seeing another person killed. For example, in many movies, a single stab will kill someone, or a single blow to the head. (I saw this sort of murder at least a hundred times on Perry Mason reruns.) But in real life it usually takes multiple stabs or blows and gets gruesome very quickly. Wes Craven wanted his viewers to know how horrifying death really was.

That is, Craven wanted us to know how horrifying violent death was so that we would hate it. Watch enough stylized deaths and pretty soon death seems abstract. Craven wanted to blow us away from this delusion. In particular, he grew up watching graphic footage of death in the Vietnam War. To Craven, it made no sense that Americans would support such a war, and also support economic enslavement of the poor people of the world, while being afraid to watch a graphic scene of murder in a movie.

Craven talked about his fundamentalist upbringing, but he did not recognize much connection between it and his inability to resist showing us graphic violence. But I saw a connection. If you read enough Sunday school stories about the Israelites conquering the native peoples of Palestine, if you kept reading about how the Israelites “smote” the inhabitants and killed all of them, men, women, and children, then pretty soon genocide and slaughter seem normal. Generations of Sunday school kids have grown up thinking that the Israelite slaughter of whole cities of people was somehow antiseptic and that God did not give a crap about their screams. So much for the book of Joshua. As for the book of Judges, it is so gruesomely violent that there is no way to make it tame enough to teach in Sunday school; most churches skip the part about the Israelite man who cut his murdered concubine into twelve pieces and sent them to the tribes of Israel. Or the Israelite who sacrificed his own daughter on an altar.

Maybe if Wes Craven had made The Ten Commandments, following the Bible account faithfully, then complacent American Christians would have been shocked enough to quit supporting government and economic policies that, even today, lead to the degradation of millions of poor people around the world.

Maybe it’s time for a new movie called The Book of Judges: The Real Story. Damn, that would make one hell of a movie! Don’t believe me? Dig out your Bible and read the book of Judges. I’ll write the screenplay if anyone wants to put up the money for the movie. Not for a Hollywood movie, just an Indy movie for Sundance or Cannes or something. Or maybe it will play on the Sunday evening church circuit.

Whence Goodness?

Ever since Plato (or even before; cavemen and cavewomen could have discussed this also) people have recognized two possible fundamental sources for the standards of what is good and what is evil.

One of these standards is God. God defines what is good. God does whatever he likes, and so goodness is whatever God does and likes. God says love is good, therefore it is. He could just as easily and arbitrarily have said that hatred, genocide, and slavery are good, but he didn’t. This is the doctrinal position of most monotheists today.

The problem with this argument is that the only way we can know what God thinks is good is to have somebody tell us. The heavens themselves are silent. Most monotheists tell us that scripture (Torah, Bible, Koran) tell us what God thinks is good. But we find, in these sources, no consistent statement about what is good. God tells Joshua to commit genocide against the indigenous people of Palestine, even killing all of the children. The Old Testament also approves of slavery. It places limits on slavery, but makes it very clear that, to the slave owner, “the slave is his money.” But the Bible also exalts love as the ultimate good (God is love). So how would we, today, decide what is good in any given circumstance? Well, you have to believe what the self-appointed preachers tell you to believe. They tell you that genocide is bad when the people of whom they do not approve do it (Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, etc.) but is good when the people of whom they approve do it (Columbus, etc.). So the standard of what is good and what is evil ultimately rests on what the preachers—many of whom are not well educated, even in Biblical scholarship—tell us.

The second argument is to say that the standards of good and evil are fundamental to the universe, to all possible universes, and that God is good because he is the embodiment and force of these standards. This means, of course, that there is something higher than God, to which God must conform. Therefore, argue atheists, God is not a necessary hypothesis.

We are no closer to a resolution of this problem than were thinkers in the days of Plato. Moreover, maybe these two arguments are the same. If God is not an independent person with whims and emotions, then God and the universal standards may be one and the same thing. Many religious people, though not fundamentalists, accept this solution, which isn’t really a solution but it, at least, gives us something to live by.

Actually, evolutionary science gives us an explanation. Love (as expressed through the emotion of empathy and the behavior of altruism) is the ultimate good in our species, though of course there are countless exceptions. Love is our instinct (except in psychopaths), though often not our behavior. But maybe in the Klingon universe the opposite is true? Evolutionary science indicates that this is impossible. Any sentient species that loves hatred will drive itself into extinction. They would all fight each other until the last one died alone. Simple as that. That’s why there are no animal species on Earth that do not at least have rudimentary altruism. Heck, even bacteria have a little bit of it.

This would mean that God is unnecessary as the ground of goodness. Of course, how can I know? I am trapped inside my theistic brain. When I look at the beautiful world this morning, as my wife and I take a walk, I see God. Illusion? Reality? It’s not like I can, with my animal brain, tell the difference.

Happy Columbus Day, Part 2

Despite all of the things I wrote about in the previous entry, conservatives insist that we honor Christopher Columbus.

I started to go to the Conservapedia website to learn their view about Columbus, but Web of Trust (WOT) displayed a red circle and announced that this website was untrustworthy and dangerous for child safety. I had to specifically give my browser permission to continue going there. I felt a tingling of danger, as if I was sneaking a peek at pornography.

I can see why Conservapedia (the right-wing twisted-logic imitation of Wikipedia) would be considered untrustworthy. But why would Conservapedia be considered a dangerous website for children?

One of the things that conservatives hate the most is what they call revisionist history. They hate it when modern scholars tell us to rethink our assumptions about Christopher Columbus being a great hero of Christianity; or the same assumption about the Pilgrims; or to reject our cherished myth about How the West Was Won by heroic whites shooting dirty Native Americans.

Conservatives want to cling to the 1950’s-western-movie version of history, and to the assumption that God established the United States of America as his holy white land. It is easy to understand that it is dangerous to raise kids to think these things. If cowboys who shot Indians were heroes, then maybe, the kids might think, it is just fine to do the same thing today. For why else do their conservative parents keep caches of arms and ammo? Perhaps, then, Conservapedia, which enables (even though it does not expressly promote) a white supremacist version of history, is dangerous to kids for the same reason that jihadist sites are. I don’t know; jihadist sites appear to be blocked on my browser, so I don’t know whether they would show up with red circles or not. I can find only news sites and anti-jihad (including moderate Muslim anti-jihad) sites.

And now, continuing with Columbus. I was googling to find out what conservatives actually say about Columbus. I expected all of them to praise Columbus as the man who brought the light of Christianity to heathen Natives who deserved to be enslaved. And some conservative writers come pretty close to this (see below). However, most of the conservative sites I found openly admit the evil things that Columbus did. This included the Conservapedia entry, which provided a harrowing list of the evil things that Columbus did. As a matter of fact, this entry mentioned some things that the progressive historians sometimes do not, such as how Columbus’ men would skewer the Natives on pikes. The author conveniently omitted the part about cutting off hands, but was otherwise quite honest about Columbus’ brutality. I am glad that I checked up on what conservatives actually say rather than just lashing out at what I thought they said. I wish they would be so careful in criticizing progressives.

However, by means of mental contortion, conservatives have figured out a way to ignore the evil things that Columbus did, right after admitting them. Here is how Conservapedia and another conservative website (The American Conservative) did it.

• First, Conservapedia claims that the main person to accuse Columbus of crimes against humanity was Ward Churchill, a professor who lost his job because of “academic dishonesty.” By claiming that Churchill was a bad man, they imply, though they do not say, that all accusations against Columbus are unreliable. We progressives do not base our opposition to Columbus upon Ward Churchill.
• Second, right after they admit that the 500 Taino captives that Columbus sent back to the slave markets of Seville were the first instance of an American slave trade, Conservapedia hastens to point out that more Natives died of European diseases than died of slavery. I guess that, since slavery was not the number one cause of death, then it can be safely ignored. Imagine applying this argument to current events today. “Diabetes kills more people than ISIS, therefore ISIS isn’t so bad” is a 21^st-century equivalent to “diseases killed more Natives than did slavery, therefore slavery wasn’t so bad.” I must note that Conservapedia did not say that slavery wasn’t so bad, but they clearly used disease as a way of minimizing the horror of slavery.
• Third, Conservapedia claimed that since the critics of Columbus had not adequately defined genocide, then this word cannot be used to describe the actions of Columbus. However, this contradicts what is written earlier in the entry, which says that within a space of 60 years a Native population of over a million on Hispaniola was totally wiped out. (I don’t know where they got these figures, but notice that they are even worse than the table of numbers I reported previously.) Only a rabid conservative would question whether or not this constituted genocide.
• Fourth, a writer for The American Conservative noted that all groups of people have had a brutal history. He proceeded to mention other acts of brutality in human history. Of course, this does not mean that we should admire Columbus. If conservatives revered a day to celebrate the Wounded Knee massacre, I would oppose it just as I do Columbus Day. I don’t think Cambodians should celebrate Pol Pot Day, if there is one. And so on. This conservative argument is only a diversion.

It is by such mental contortions that many conservatives deflect attention away from the evil things Columbus did, evils they will admit, and get their readers and admirers to turn against scholars and teachers who want to teach the truth about Columbus. I can only wonder how many home school conservatives teach their kids that Columbus was God’s humble servant.

Some conservatives, however, go much further in trying to sanitize and sanctify Columbus. Kenyn Cureton, vice president of the Family Research Council, says of Columbus, “He did do some things that weren’t right but his motives overall were, number one, to get gold to free Jerusalem but secondly to share the Gospel.” Think about that for a moment. That makes Columbus, overall, a force for good in history, right? Columbus didn’t want the gold for himself but to finance another crusade. And, Cureton continues, Columbus “was very much motivated by his Christian faith, and I think that is what is behind this effort to wipe his name out from history.” So you see, everybody, the only reason I would ever criticize Columbus, according to this particular conservative group, is because I hate Jesus. If I really really really loved Jesus, I would rejoice in what Columbus did. Please oh please somebody confirm that you don’t have to love Columbus in order to be a Christian.

The conclusion I reach is that nobody, anywhere, should celebrate Columbus Day. It should not, of course, be forgotten. October 12, 1492 should not be forgotten any more than September 1, 1939, the beginning of the Nazi blitzkrieg.

I posted this essay on my evolution blog.

Happy Columbus Day, Part 1

In this set of two essays I explain why we should hate Christopher Columbus rather than revere him, and why the celebration of Columbus Day is an insult to all human decency.

First, about Columbus. I have used William Least Heat-Moon’s book Columbus in the Americas as the immediate source of this information, but have confirmed much of it elsewhere. Christopher Columbus made the first European contact with Native Americans on October 12, 1492. It was, from the very start, genocide. Here are the reasons.

Columbus’ deep motives. Christopher Columbus seemed fascinated by his first encounter with what he insisted all his life was India. It seemed like a Garden of Eden to him, and he wrote glowingly about the sweetness of the flowers, which is something that single-minded conquistadors do not generally do. He also admired the Tainos, the Natives who lived in the vicinity of his first landfall. He marveled at their friendliness and their willingness to give him gifts, which further enhanced the image of a Garden of Eden. This does not sound like the writings of a man whose immediate thought was to kill them. He also admired some of their technology, most notably hammocks and canoes (the latter word coming from the Taino language). Perhaps most significantly, the Tainos showed great empathy and energy when they helped Columbus and his men gather up the wreckage of the Santa Maria to use for constructing the first European city in the New World, La Navidad.

But, right from the start, Columbus did have the subjugation of the Tainos in mind. From his very first encounter with them, he wrote that they would make good servants for the Spaniards, and he speculated that fifty armed Spaniards could easily conquer them. Therefore he immediately began thinking of them as resources, not persons. And it was not merely the gold and servitude that they could provide to the Spaniards that fascinated Columbus. He noted glowingly that most of the women were entirely naked. Historians concede that, were it not for Tainos sharing their food, all the Spaniards would have starved. Columbus noted, “They love their neighbors as themselves,” but rather than reflecting on how much more Christian the Taino behavior was than the behavior of the Spaniards, he seems to have considered this evidence that they were ripe for easy enslavement.

And while Columbus himself apparently did not go around raping and pillaging, he was certainly complicit in these actions. One of his men was a childhood friend, Michele de Cuneo, whom Columbus allowed to capture a Native woman. Apparently she was Carib, rather than a compliant Taino, and she screamed and scratched when de Cuneo tried to rape her in his room. De Cuneo beat her with ropes until she complied. Once she complied, she might have thought that she could get more resources from de Cuneo by pleasing him, and, in de Cuneo’s words from a letter he wrote home, “She seemed to have been brought up in a school of harlots.”

Was Columbus’ motivation to establish a colony for Spain? No, it could not have been. Even with his fourth and final voyage, there was no pre-planning for agriculture. A few colonists came, but the people were overwhelmingly men who wanted gold and slaves. The cities that Columbus and his men established were called “trading posts” precisely because of this objective. The entire motivation was rapine and plunder. Colonization came later, after the Natives were slaughtered and, for some tribes, sent into extinction.

Columbus’ actions. While Columbus seems to have made sincere efforts on his first voyage to create goodwill and cooperation with the Natives, his motivation seems to have entirely disappeared by his second voyage. He used war dogs to kill resistant Tainos, and captured as many Tainos as he could. He sent 500 Tainos to the Seville slave market under cramped fetid conditions that most people associate only with the African slave trade. He gave another 500 Tainos to his men for whatever use they desired to make of them. And he allowed about 500 to flee into the mountains.

And Columbus was extremely brutal in his punishments. A Native caught pilfering could have his ears cut off or be beheaded. But the most horrifying example of Columbus’ cruelty is the story I am about to relate. If you have a sensitive stomach, stop reading now. As a matter of fact, if you have a sensitive stomach, you have no business learning anything at all about the realities of history. You should just spend your time fantasizing about what a blessing the whites have been to the rest of the world.

Columbus required each Taino male over 13 years of age to bring in a hawk’s-bell volume of gold each three months. Those who failed to do so had one of their hands cut off.

Think about that. Columbus must have intended this as torture and terrorism. Cutting a man’s hand off will not make him better able to gather gold. You would have to be fucking stupid to believe that. Columbus was not stupid. He knew what he was doing. I can only conclude that Columbus, perhaps slightly less so than his men, got a sensual thrill out of torturing Natives.

The net result of Columbus’ direct and indirect actions was, according to his son Ferdinand, that a Spaniard could go anywhere on Hispaniola that he desired and take all the food and women he wanted, without fear of danger. And the effect on the population of Natives was predictable, not only because Spaniards killed them but because the natives killed themselves out of despair. The basic food of these Natives was cassava, which has to be processed to remove bitter poison. Many Natives drank the poison rather than to become slaves. Also, in one case on a later voyage, when Natives were locked into a slave hold on a ship, they found ropes and hung themselves, even though there was not enough headroom to do this: they had to hold up their knees while the ropes suffocated them. Here are the population figures for Natives on Hispaniola:

                        1492                300,000

                        1496                200,000

                        1508                60,000

                        1548                500

                        Before 1600    Extinct

Columbus’ binary classification. Columbus classified everyone into two categories: the Europeans, whom God was blessing, and the “Indians,” whom God was delivering into the hands of Europeans. He noted, but gave no importance to, the differences among tribes.

The main distinction Columbus saw right away was between Tainos and Caribs. The Caribs were cannibals who preyed upon the Tainos. The Caribs would capture Taino women and children. They would caponize the boys (cutting off their genitals) so that they would grow up tender. But they would impregnate the women in order to produce the ultimate Carib delicacy: roast baby. In at least one instance, Columbus rescued Tainos from Carib captivity. Once his men captured a naked Taino woman, but Columbus ordered her sent back (clothed) to her tribe as an act of goodwill. (The fact that the Caribs were evil people does not make their enslavement and eradication justified.) Native Americans had as much diversity as Europeans. But in the end Columbus, despite his initial admiration of the Tainos, treated all natives the same; it was Taino captives whom he sent to the Seville slave market.

Spain’s motives. Even though Columbus appeared to have a streak of decency, Spain did not. Ferdinand and Isabella barely gave Columbus enough resources to launch his first voyage, because they were skeptical of his prospects. But they richly endowed his second voyage with lots of ships and resources. The reason was that Columbus had proven to them that “India” was a promising source of gold and slaves. There appears to have been very few resources dedicated to starting up an agricultural economy and a self-sustaining Spanish colony. The Spanish cities, of which only Santo Domingo continues to exist, were meant as places for gathering slaves and gold. Had it been otherwise, the ships of the second voyage would have been provisioned differently. The main nonhuman animals on the ships were war dogs, which the Spaniards could unleash on Natives to kill them. Incidentally, the money to fund the second voyage came from resources taken from the recently-expelled Jews.

It didn’t take long for the Natives to resist. Before returning to Spain on his first voyage, Columbus established La Navidad. When he returned he found it had been destroyed. He discovered the reason for it: the Spaniards had raided Taino villages and stolen women as sexual slaves; each Spaniard had four or five sex slaves.

Another aspect of the Columbus story that is interesting to scientists is that Columbus used a method often called “cherry-picking” to prove that he had, indeed, reached Asia. He ignored all contrary evidence. And he grabbed at any shred of evidence that could be construed to prove he was in Asia. He assumed that one Taino place name was a variant of Mangi, a province in China. And when he heard of a tribe whose leader wore a white tunic, he assumed this man was a descendant of Prester John. But Columbus went beyond this. He forced all his men to sign a deposition stating that they were, in fact, in Asia; and the punishment for a man saying that they were not in Asia was that his tongue would be cut out. This was Columbus’ scientific method of determining truth.

This essay also appeared on my evolution blog. Next entry: how conservatives sanitize and sanctify Columbus.