Thirst for Conquest

May 28, 2015, was the 175^th anniversary of the Indian Removal Act. On that day in 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the bill that required the U. S. Army to evict southeastern Native tribes, including my Cherokee tribe, from their native lands and send them to Oklahoma. Many people think of this as a land grab; that is, the federal government wanted Native land and whatever resources (such as the Dahlonega gold mines) it might possess. That is, the motivation was primarily economic. However, as I will explain, this does not seem to be the case. I believe that the primary, if unrecognized, motivation was the thirst for conquest.

My first piece of evidence for this comes from the Indian Removal of the 1830s. The federal government had to spend a lot more money to send the Cherokees and other tribes on forced marches than they could possibly have recovered, especially since most of the land and its wealth went to the states, such as Georgia, rather than into federal coffers. The federal government had to expend army resources to drive the tribes westward, and had to provide Natives with food and shelter (both barely adequate, but still costly on the whole) during the journey. Then, when the Native tribes got to Indian Territory, the government had to maintain forts to protect the Cherokees and other relocated tribes from attacks by the tribes who originally lived in the region. Ft.Gibson, in northeastern Oklahoma, was built in 1824 but primarily served to protect the Cherokees after the Trail of Tears after 1839. Ft. Washita, Oklahoma, was built in 1842 for the express purpose of protecting Chickasaws and Choctaws from the indigenous tribes in southern Oklahoma.

So the federal government spent a lot of resources to move and then protect the southeastern tribes. It seems unlikely that the federal government came out economically ahead by this. Therefore the Indian Removal was not merely, to use a term from Steve Inskeep’snew book, a land grab.

My second piece of evidence to demonstrate that the federal government wanted to conquer Native tribes rather than to just get their land comes from the story of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe. The army had already taken his tribe’s land, and he and the remnant of his tribe was fleeing to Canada. When they were only forty miles from Canada, the federal army caught them in 1877 and sent them as prisoners to various reservation localities. If the only motive was to get their land, then the federal government would have let them flee U.S. territory. All the rest was unnecessary expense intended only to crush the Nez Perce.

In prehistoric times, the thirst for conquest may have been a profitable adaptation. When one tribe fought another, they did not merely desire the other tribe’s land or resources, but experienced a bloodlust, fully experiencing the other tribe as evil, feeling a desire to make the other tribe suffer before being slaughtered. That is, natural selection may have favored both the behaviors and the feelings of conquest and annihilation. The white American government did not just want Native American land, but wanted to drive Native Americans to extinction or at least to put them somewhere where they could be forgotten.

Another set of behaviors and feelings that may have been profitable to prehistoric humans is to depict the enemy tribe as not merely evil but powerfully evil—that is, to believe and feel that the enemy has supernatural force. A tribe that believes its enemies to be supernaturally evil will fight harder than a tribe that considers its enemies to be merely humans worthy of annihilation. Unfortunately, while the thirst for enemy annihilation is pretty much a thing of the past in America, the belief that one’s enemies are supernaturally powerful is not.

There are two recent examples of this.

• In 2012, according to the Houston Chronicle, Lubbock County (Texas) judge Tom Head said regarding President Barack Obama, “He’s going to try to hand over the sovereignty of the United States to the (United Nations), and what is going to happen when that happens? I’m thinking the worst. Civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war maybe. And we’re not just talking a few riots here and demonstrations, we’re talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms and get rid of the guy…Now what’s going to happen if we do that, if the public decides to do that? He’s going to send in U.N. troops. I don’t want ‘em in Lubbock County. OK. So I’m going to stand in front of their armored personnel carrier and say ‘you’re not coming in here’.”
• In 2015, Texas governor Greg Abbott feared that President Obama was planning a military takeover of Texas. Not satisfied with words, Abbott ordered the Texas State Guard to monitor a U.S. Navy Seal training operation.

In both of these instances, the Texas officials accused President Obama of planning to do things that are very nearly physically impossible. By what possible set of causal factors could President Obama order United Nations troops into Texas? By what possible set of causal factors could President Obama bring about a military takeover of Texas? In both cases, the Texas officials seemed to be giving Obama a kind of infernal, supernatural power. To them, he is not merely a political opponent but the manifestation of spiritual evil. (Strangely enough, a little over a week later, Governor Abbott begged this same President Obama for federal assistance to recover from Texas flash floods.)

The tribes who had a desire to annihilate enemy tribes, and the desire to depict one’s enemies as supernaturally evil, prevailed in the prehistoric struggle for existence. We are their descendants. And their behaviors and feelings live on in us, as manifested in recent history and in current events.

Broken “Promises” in Proverbs

The Book of Proverbs contains lots of tidbits of wisdom. Some of them are very insightful, although most of them seem rather shallow to me. I once summarized this book as, “It’s good to be good, and it’s bad to be bad.”

Proverbs has some things to say about wealth and poverty, and, more generally, about why bad things happen to people. Some of the proverbs are true if you consider spiritual, rather than physical, blessings. For example, when Proverbs 3:33 says that God blesses the righteous, and Proverbs 28:20 says that the righteous will abound with blessings, they are true if you believe that the blessings consist of the satisfaction of knowing that you are living in the right way. And many of the proverbs can be considered true if you think of eternal life, rather than life here and now; for example, Proverbs 11:19 says evil people will die. But many of these passages are wrong, if taken literally. Some of them say that if you are lazy, a drunkard, or both, you cannot expect anything except poverty. But we all know or know of very rich people who are lazy drunkards. But even more than this, many of the proverbs can be interpreted to mean that poor people have only themselves to blame for their poverty. Here are some examples, with summaries:

• God does not let the righteous go hungry (10:3).
• God’s blessings will make you rich (10:22).
• Respect for God will make you live longer (10:27).
• God keeps righteous people from trouble (11:8).
• The wicked will not go unpunished (11:21).
• The house of the righteous will stand (12:7).
• No harm occurs to righteous people (12:21).
• Good people reap the good reward that they deserve (14:14).
• Righteous people are rich (15:6).
• Your plans will work out if you are godly (16:3).
• Good planning and hard work lead to prosperity (21:5).
• The reward for righteousness is riches, honor, and life (22:4).
• Those who work their land will have abundant food (28:19).

One can argue that these passages are true in the sense that, on the average, living a good life will make you richer and less troubled than living a bad life. But, if you take them at face value, these promises to you as an individual are false. These proverbs are as false as the common American belief that if you work hard you will succeed. This belief is true only as a generalization, not an individual promise. Taking the generalized interpretation instead of the literal one does not bother me, but Biblical literalists should be bothered by this.

Especially since all of these promises are directly disputed by two other books in the Bible: Ecclesiastes, and Job. Job is a righteous man who experiences the worst indignities and sufferings that can be imagined.

I see the Bible as the best attempt of intelligent and thoughtful people to make sense out of their world in ancient times. But conservatives force an interpretation on it that is clearly wrong. Among other things, the wisdom books of the Hebrew Bible (such as Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job) do not themselves claim to be the word or words of God.

Biblical Contortionism

Fundamentalists like to claim that they believe the plain and simple literal statements of the Bible. But this is not true. I know this from my own painful experience.

It happened in high school. I had joined (by my own choice) a little Church of Christ cult. To them, belief in Jesus was not enough; even Biblical literalism was not enough. They believed that you could not do anything during a worship service that the Bible did not authorize. For example, the Bible did not authorize the use of instrumental music in church, therefore you cannot use it. (Incidentally, the Bible says nothing about this.) In particular, this little cult said that, since the Bible did not authorize the use of multiple little cups during communion, then you could not use them; you had to use a single large cup for everyone in the whole congregation. This was how they identified “saved” congregations: any congregation that uses multiple cups (individual cups) during communion was damned. This cult was hyper-über-literalist.

Except when they weren’t.  The Bible talks about God creating new heavens and a new earth, both in the Hebrew Bible (Isaiah 65:17) and the New Testament (Revelation 21:1). The old heavens and old earth will pass away. After all the blood-soaked apocalypsing, God was going to make all things new. I loved this idea, because I was then as now a great lover of the natural world, the clean and green forest, and at that time I thought it was God’s pure creation. I did not understand why God would create something so beautiful as the Earth and then destroy it forever. And so, one Sunday, when I was invited to give a sermon at a small congregation, I preached on this subject: we can look forward to not just heaven but a new earth as well.

Brother Bob was following every word. And the next Sunday, he went for the kill. Remember, I was a high school kid and he was in his upper middle age years. He said that the very idea that there was going to be a new Earth was a damnable heresy that would lead anyone who believed it to hell. Of course, that meant that I was going to hell.

But how could he say this, against the clear and plain teaching of the Bible? Here is where the contortionism comes in. A skillful Fundamentalist can take sentences of scripture and weave them into pretzellations (I just made that word up right now) and tie them into knots that make them mean the exact opposite of what they say. What Bro. Bob said was this. The old earth, he said, referred to the Old Testament, which is where the ancient Israelites lived: they lived in or on the Old Testament. Therefore the new earth was the New Testament. The old heaven and old earth had already passed away, and we were already living on the new earth. Therefore, when John wrote Revelation 21, he was wrong; he referred to the new earth in the future tense, and he should have referred to it in the present tense. Or even the past tense: the “new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven” in Revelation 21 had, from Bro. Bob’s viewpoint, already happened. So, this is where we ended up: when the Bible says there will be a new heaven and a new earth, what it means is that there will not be.

There I was, wilting in a front pew as I heard myself denounced as a heretic in front of the congregation that I thought was uniquely saved. This borders on abusive behavior on the part of a man who was supposed to be the spiritual leader of our congregation. It took me weeks before I got out from under the cloud of depression from this. Couldn’t there have been a private discussion with me first? But no; the first I heard about it was in this public forum.

So you can see why I sneer at the idea of Biblical literalism. The “literalists” aren’t really literalists. They certainly ignore the parts of the Bible that are inconvenient for Republicans. For them, the Bible is only a source of rope to hang people with. They have no more respect for scripture than does any atheist.

In the American Religious Scene, the Bible Doesn’t Really Matter

In recent weeks I have reconnected with a lot of old high school friends on Facebook. And some of them are extreme political conservatives. I guess I just have to put up with that and not lash out against their views the way they do against the views of everyone who is not an extreme right wing Republican. I mean, they believe things that would make a moderate Republican feel ashamed.

And, alas, the news bears this out as well. As described in this news report, Texas governor Greg Abbott claimed that President Obama was planning on putting Texas under martial law. What was his evidence? His evidence was that several Wal-Marts have been closed down for remodeling. Abbott drew what was to him the obvious conclusion: Obama planned on using these buildings to retrofit train cars with shackles to treat Republicans as political prisoners. Then Abbott decided to take action. He ordered the Texas State Guard to watch over federal military activities.

The fundamental religious doctrine of Texas Republicans is very clear. It is this: Obama and all Democrats are devils, and only the Republican Party can bring us salvation. Their religious doctrine has nothing at all to do with the empathetic, bleeding-heart Jesus described in the Bible. Does it matter whether I am a doctrinal Christian vs. a Christian Agnostic? No, because none of that matters. Only the zealous affirmation of right wing conspiracy theories matters. Therefore, no matter how much I might ever have affirmed, or ever again affirm, belief in Jesus as the son of God, Texas Republicans will not permit Jesus to save me. And Jesus had better do what the Republicans tell Him, or else they are going to kick His ass.

Some Texas Republicans were horrified at the blasphemous stupidity of the current Republican leadership. Former state representative Todd Smith told the governor, “Your letter pandering to idiots…has left me livid.” But opinions of Republicans like him carry no weight in Texas. God has directly infused inerrant wisdom into the brains of right-wing Republicans, and that settles it.