The Fear of the Lord

Most conservative Christians believe the Biblical statement, which I am in too much of a hurry to look up right now, that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Most agnostics and humanists would vigorously reject this statement. But maybe it is, in a way, true. If so, how?

Conservative Christians really do mean “fear.” And by fear of the Lord, they mean that we should be afraid, very afraid, that if we question so much as the tiniest point of doctrine that they assert about the Lord we will go to Hell. The fear of disagreeing with any of the self-appointed spokespeople of God is supposed to be the basis of all wisdom. In particular, they seem to believe that we should be afraid to question anything that the great God Donald Trump asserts.

But they have it wrong in two ways. First, I think they misunderstand “fear,” giving it a modern English interpretation. They think it means that we should be very, very afraid of asking questions such as “How do you know that thing that you assert?” But instead I believe that “fear” means awe and wonder. One can have a great deal of technical knowledge about the natural world, but unless one feels awe and wonder then the natural world is not God’s creation but is just a pile of resources for rich Republicans to make money off of. Most scientists I know—and I know a lot of them—feel awe and wonder at the cosmos that we are privileged to investigate. It is we, the scientists and anyone else who feels awe and wonder, are the ones who truly fear the Lord.

Second, the Biblical statement says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, not the entirety of it or the end of it. Conservative Christians think that your unthinking acceptance of their assertions about the Lord is the entirety and the end of wisdom. If you worship Donald Trump, then you’re all set for the world today and for the hereafter.

I do not accept traditional Christian doctrines, not because I don’t like them, but because I do not know what they mean. Son of God? Define son, and define God. I don’t know what those terms mean in Christian doctrine. But I do have the fear of the Lord as the beginning of my wisdom: I feel awe at the universe, and I use that as my starting point for learning more about it, from my own research and investigations by others.

Comrade Trump

Donald Trump won the electoral college vote. You would think this would be enough for Him. Hillary Clinton got about two million more popular votes than He did. But Trump wants to rewrite history. He claims that He actually won the popular vote, because those votes for Clinton were illegal. See the USA Today article here. He wants not only the presidency but wants history to remember Him as the recipient of the huge and virtually uncontested adoration of Americans.

And He can do it.

Will Trump, by his endless repetition of his claims, alter the records of history in the United States? Will future generations of American students learn that Trump led an immense popular revolution? This sort of thing has happened before, though not in America.

Joseph Stalin was one of the Bolshevik leaders of the Russian Revolution in 1917. There were others who worked beside him and were just as important. But when Stalin grabbed power in the Soviet Union, he proceeded to literally rewrite the history of the Revolution. As one by one his former comrades-in-arms began to fall from his favor, Stalin literally had them purged out of the photographs of the period. Consider this set of four images. The original photograph shows four men—Stalin and three comrades who fought with him. One by one, the images of the others were erased until Stalin is left alone, implying that he single-handedly led the Revolution. The others were literally erased from history.

Here is another example. Nikolai Yezhov was the water commissar in Moscow. The original photo of him with Stalin appears at the top of this post (Blogger will not allow me to imbed it in this post). But Yezhov later fell from favor with Stalin, who had him erased from the photo:

Trump is arrogant enough, and has enough popular support, that He could conceivably rewrite American history to fit his views, particularly with regard to himself.

You can find more information, and the images I have used, here.

In a similar fashion, Adolf Hitler got everyone in Germany and outside Germany to think that all Germans supported, indeed worshiped, Him. This was to the advantage of Hitler, who pretended that there never had been any serious opposition to Him, and to the Allies, who wanted to maintain the fiction that all Germans were Nazis. History does not even remember that there were Gentile white Germans in 1940 who were not Nazis. There were many thousands of them, as explained here; 77,000 of them were executed by the Nazis.

One would think that only God could create truth. But Donald Trump considers Himself to be in the same league as God. As a Christian agnostic, I do not have a problem with the man Jesus, but the oppression that churches have carried out in Jesus’ name over the last two millennia. And now conservative churches urge their followers to consider Trump to be God’s choice. American Christianity is, by and large, little more than the comrades of Donald Trump who wish to rewrite the history of the world with American Republicans of 2016 as the climax of history. This is a deed worthy of Comrade Stalin, or of Adolf Hitler. Will American opponents of Donald Trump be as forgotten by history as the anti-Nazi Germans? American Christianity, by and large, appears to hope that this will happen, even though one of the most prominent German anti-Nazis was the famous Christian writer Dietrich Boenhoeffer, whose books (especially The Cost of Discipleship) are still read by thousands of Christians. Or, at least, they used to be.

An Unlikely Place to Find a Nature Worshiper

I discovered a surprising book in my vast library recently: My Wilderness, East to Katahdin, by a certain William O. Douglas. Many of us think of the modern era of environmental awareness as having begun with the 1962 publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. But My Wilderness, published in 1961, has some of the same ideas, though in a less organized form. Rachel Carson organized the concepts into a powerful argument and provided all of the scientific references, but William O. Douglas and probably many others had thought of them earlier. To read more about these specific concepts, see the essay for this same date on my science blog.

Douglas was a man who hiked all over the continent. He writes of backpacking in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming; Zion National Park in Utah; Maroon Bells in Colorado; Baboquivari along the Arizona-Sonora border; Quetico Provincial Park in Canada; The Smoky Mountains; the Everglades; the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal near Washington, D. C.; and the White Mountains, Allagash, and Mt. Katahdin in the northeast United States. He was no stranger to the challenges of survival in the wild. The descriptions in this book are sometimes evocative and help you to feel like you are actually present in a place you will probably never visit. But, although I have no doubt that he saw all of these organisms, his descriptions were usually lists of plants and animals that sound like he copied them out of a guidebook. There were quite a few books of this sort published about the same time, such as The Singing Wilderness by Sigurd Olson, The Near Woods by Millard Davis, and One Day at Teton Marsh by Sally Carrighar. Douglas’s book is highly disorganized, except for each chapter being about his experience in one particular place.

What makes this book unique is the person who wrote it. Who was he? Do the black robes in this portrait give you a hint?

William O. Douglas was, throughout nearly all of the time during which he took the hikes he describes, a Supreme Court justice. He still holds the record of serving the longest on the Supreme Court, almost 37 years, from 1939 to 1975. Aside from Teddy Roosevelt shooting big animals and mistaking it for a love of nature, we have never had—and almost certainly will never again have—a prominent politician who had or will have such a passionate and thorough knowledge of the natural world. Today, with the new “conservative” (vs. conservationist) takeover, it seems that the less you know about science and nature, the more qualified you are for any office, particularly positions in which you are supervising government conservation and scientific activities. But even the few remaining liberals in government seem to think that the Earth is just a stage on which the human drama takes place. Douglas was most famous for writing the “Rights of Rocks” statement. In the Sierra Club v. Morton suit regarding the commercial development of Mineral King, just south of Sequoia National Park in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, Douglas wrote, “Contemporary public concern for protecting nature's ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation.” That is, trees should be able to sue for their own preservation. Can you imagine any Supreme Court justice, or any other prominent politician, saying anything like this today?

But the main point for this essay in this blog is that Douglas considered Nature to be a holy place. No wonder the right-wing fundamentalists hated and still hate him. Bob Dole and Gerald Ford both wanted to see him removed from office. Thousands of books are published with the theme that nature is holy, and millions of people believe it, but none of them in such a prominent position as the one Douglas held. Just read these words: “If we make conservation a national cause we can raise generations who will learn that the earth itself is sacred. Once a person breaks through to the level where love of beauty is the ideal, he will worship the rocks and plains that are America. Then he will look on a tuft of grass with awe. For it has the secret of chlorophyll that man hardly comprehends” (page 32). Nearly every modern conventional Christian would consider Douglas to be a pagan for saying such things. Yet his view is the only one that can allow us to survive into the future.

How Religion "Advances"

Today it is relatively rare to find racist Christianity. As indicated in the previous essay, there is still plenty of it. But nowadays, fundamentalist megachurches proclaim that members of any race are equally invited to donate money to their coffers. But it wasn’t so long ago that many white fundamentalist Christian groups did not want to associate with members of other races.

It is even rarer to find Christians who insist that the Earth is the center of the universe. The only example of which I know is the Fixed Earth website. But it was not very far in the past that churches all insisted on geocentrism as a fundamental belief.

In these and in many other cases, the advances in belief—advances toward racial harmony and a scientific understanding of the universe—were the result of forces and processes that were not inherently religious. After slavery was abolished, people began to gradually realize that people of other races were fully human and deserved the same rights as one’s own race. Partly this was due to the utter failure of supremacists to find scientific verification for their beliefs, but mainly, I believe, because more and more people became acquainted with members of other races and discovered, usually pleasantly, that people they might once have disdained were actually nice, ordinary people. In many cases it was devout people who led the push toward racial harmony—and there is hardly a better example than Martin Luther King Jr.—but it was not religion itself that led these advances. None of the leaders, or followers, of racial integration re-read their Bibles and discovered, “Holy Moley! Right there is a verse that we’ve been overlooking for two thousand years.” The Bible did not change. There were, or so the fundamentalists claim, no new revelations from God. The advances in racial harmony, inside and outside of churches, came from accumulated experience which most religious groups have now acknowledged. Reason and experience led the way; religion followed.

It is clear that the conversion of religious people to heliocentrism occurred because science advanced, and religion followed.

Science, experience, and reason are the head of the animal of society; religion is the tail, sometimes wagging, sometimes dragging.

Bad News about Your Constitutional Rights

You probably thought that the Constitution guarantees your rights to free speech and religion, even if the new federal administration tries to restrict its critics or the dissenters to its version of Christianity. But this is not true. The First Amendment only guarantees that Congress shall not restrict free speech or religion. It does not say that the Executive Branch cannot do so. This is not good news.

I tried to post an essay about this, but Blogger would not allow me to do so. Not sure why. But here is a link to the essay on my science blog. Please go there to read it.

Was What Happened on November 8 Stupidity? Unfortunately Not.

Many progressive thinkers such as myself were stunned at what seemed like the utter stupidity that led to the election of Donald Trump. But then I realized it was not stupidity at all. It was typical human intelligence. The key word is human.

Intelligence did not evolve so that animals in the hominin lineage could understand the world better or keep facts straight in their minds. Those are two of the functions of intelligence but not the most important. The most important benefit of intelligence, during human evolution, was so that some individuals could bend the facts, warp reality, and create delusions that would trick other individuals into following, supporting, or helping them. That is, the major function of human intelligence has always been to gain individual advantages, whether by using the truth or by using lies. (A good liar has to be very intelligent.) Not what is best for a country or the world, but the individual. Trump acted in a supremely effective fashion to gain advantages for himself.

Though it makes me sick to think about it, I must admit that Donald Trump seems to have the genius of knowing how to manipulate people. He knew exactly how to evoke a resonant sympathy with what is in the hearts of most people: racism, sexism, and general hatred. All of his words were in the service of these purposes. He knows that human intelligence does not primarily care about facts, but rather beliefs and impressions. When he mocked disabled people, he was evoking the old childhood memories of bullies on the playground.  He played our brains like the keys of an organ. In this way he was able to completely deflect attention away from the evil things he has done. He did not appeal to our love of humankind or our logical understanding of the equality of races; instead he stirred up hatred of anyone who is different from him. He got his followers chanting “Make America Hate Again” (oops, sorry for the slip) without ever specifying which Yesteryear America he was talking about. The Great Depression? The Confederacy? The wars of extermination against Native Americans? Trump disabled, in his followers, the very ability to ask or even recognize the existence of such questions.

Democrats just don’t get this. Every time, over and over, Democrats cite facts as if they matter. Well, apparently they don’t.

For me, the problem is that Trump has used the rest of us as raw material for his own individual expansion of power. But maybe the solution is also individual. What do I do now? Maybe all I can do is pay attention to and enjoy the direct responsibilities that I have, rather than to try to fix the world or to even nudge it a little away from catastrophe. And who knows? Maybe in my writing and teaching I will end up changing the minds of some people—not to get them to share my political opinions (which I cannot do at a public university) but to start using their brains in a more empathetic and logical fashion. I got up this morning and taught two classes. I was really depressed but I managed to make those two classes some of the best I have ever taught. I even invented, on the spot, a new activity for student involvement in learning about how nerve transmissions work. Maybe some of my readers and students will start noticing that there is more to the world than just their deep visceral hatreds and prejudices. And I can do this no matter who is president.

There might be a kind of truthful and pure intelligence that evolved somewhere in the universe in some species; but that place is not Earth and that species is not Homo sapiens.

I also published this in my science blog. The two blogs are actually different most of the time.

t I have, rather than to try to fix the world or to even nudge it a little away from catastrophe. And who knows? Maybe in my writing and teaching I will end up changing the minds of some people—not to get them to share my political opinions (which I cannot do at a public university) but to start using their brains in a more empathetic and logical fashion. I got up this morning and taught two classes. I was really depressed but I managed to make those two classes some of the best I have ever taught. I even invented, on the spot, a new activity for student involvement in learning about how nerve transmissions work. Maybe some of my readers and students will start noticing that there is more to the world than just their deep visceral hatreds and prejudices. And I can do this no matter who is president.

There might be a kind of truthful and pure intelligence that evolved somewhere in the universe in some species; but that place is not Earth and that species is not Homo sapiens.

The Dark Ages, Coming to a Campus near You

On Halloween, a preacher came to our campus (Southeastern Oklahoma State University) and started yelling about how much God hated women (he said that all women on our campus were sluts), how much God hated Muslims (his shirt read “Allah is Satan,” even though Allah is the translation of the same word the Old Testament uses for God), and how black people should just accept their inferior lot and let white people rule them, all in the name of God.

I borrowed these photos from the Facebook posting by Amy Elizabeth Kennedy.

He had permission to come and speak outdoors by the clock tower (well, what passes for one on our campus; a clock on a pole) but he got that permission by lying to the university staff about what he was going to do. He said he was coming to share the Gospel, but of course there was no Gospel whatsoever in anything that he said.

He accomplished his purposes. He wanted to make people angry. He succeeded in making all of the students who heard him upset (not one student took his side, not even our redneck Trump-supporting students). Some of these upset students simply went away. But when the preacher started verbally attacking black students, one black student started to get physically rowdy (wouldn’t you?) while several other black students held him back. The situation got so tense that police had to escort the preacher off campus. His visit was, to him, successful. He wanted to show us how much, according to him, God hates us, and he succeeded in doing that. He wanted an angry response, and he got it. Now he can go back to his donors and say, “See, what did I tell you? I told you Satan would attack me.” (I have heard fundamentalist Christians say that the hostility of the world is proof that you are doing God’s will. By that definition, Hitler was doing God’s will.)

And he left behind him an impotent and confused discussion about how to prevent such incidents in the future. Everyone seems to be saying that we cannot restrict any form of free speech on campus. This is ridiculous. We already restrict speech that would, for example, recruit terrorists or encourage murder. Speech is not unlimited and never has been. I believe that anyone speaking on campus should be sponsored by a class or by a recognized student organization. If we let just anybody come and speak, no matter how hateful their words, how can we be sure they don’t have guns also? And maybe, for all we know, this preacher did.

The story had a different ending on All Saints Day at East Central University. East Central knew this preacher was coming. When he arrived, he proceeded to exercise his first amendment rights, only to discover that the marching band, at exactly the same time and place, was exercising theirs. Guess who won!

I do not know the name of this preacher’s “ministry,” but whatever it is, he should rename it “Make Jesus Look like an Asshole Ministry.” Because this is what he succeeded in doing. Say all you will about how most Christians are not like him. But such a large number of self-identified Christians are hate-filled racists, though few of them are so vocal about it, that I wonder whether this preacher might represent the norm of American conservative Christianity. I suspect that, in fact, this man reflects what American Christianity is like. Good Christians who preach peace and love may, in fact, be a minority in this country, at least among fundamentalists. All you have to do is see the breathtakingly large number of fundamentalist Christian organizations that endorse Donald Trump, whose entire message is how much he hates anyone who fails to revere him; Donald Trump, whose slogan should be, Make America Hate Again.

The impression I took away from this incident is not that Jesus is an asshole—this incident had nothing to do with Jesus—but that on the whole, at least in America, religion is a negative force and I hope we get rid of it as much and as soon as possible. When you consider what America is like, and the Bible Belt states more than the others, you can get an idea of the fruits of religion. Poverty, drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, and violent crime are rampant in the most Christian parts of America. In order to find a society in which people are, by and large, nice to one another, you have to look at countries such as France. When I visited, as a family member not just a tourist, I was astonished at how well people treated their neighbors and fellow citizens and visitors. The sooner we can become more like France, and leave Christianity behind, we will be a better society. A society that, in fact, more closely resembles Jesus. We need a secular society if we are to survive as a free country.

I am sure it has not escaped the attention of anyone that fundamentalist religion is pushing—perhaps significantly—toward the establishment of a religious dictatorship. Remember, they have guns and they believe God has given them permission to use them however they want.

I am particularly angry that I spent so much of my life suckered into religion. I lost decades of my life to having my brain warped by creationism and fundamentalism. Though I left doctrinal Christianity behind over a decade ago, it took an incident such as this to allow me to see how ugly and despicable my erstwhile religious views were.

Creationism is not about science. It has one purpose only: to support a hatred version of religion and get it established in a powerful position so that they can control the thoughts and lives of the rest of us. Arguing science with a creationist? Don’t bother. They don’t even know what’s in the Bible, much less about science.

I also published this essay on my science blog.

Just When You Thought You’d Seen Everything…

Nazi websites have had a makeover. They’re still here, but they have recast themselves as positive and creative, rather than negative and destructive. Consider one such site: The Creativity Movement. You have to see this to believe it. Their banner looks A LOT like the Nazi flag. This group claims that it does not openly hate non-white races; instead, they celebrate whiteness. They are still unable, however, to restrict their hatred of Jews, laying the blame for all of society’s evils upon them. They are a church, similar to fundamentalist Christianity but not, as far as I can tell, actually associated with them. Their own website explains the difference between Christianity and the Creativity Movement:

“Christianity teaches love your enemies and hate your own kind, we teach exactly the opposite, namely hate and destroy your enemies and love your own kind…Christianity teaches such destructive advice as ‘love your enemies,’ ‘sell all thou hast and give it to the poor,”…’turn the other cheek.’ Anybody that followed such suicidal advice would soon destroy themselves, their family, their race and their country.” They also make a most interesting observation. They point out that Christianity is hypocritical; it preaches love, but then practices savagery and genocide.

They were founded by Ben Klassen, who was their first (I am not making this up) Pontifex Maximus. (Their current Pontifex Maximus is in prison.) They still sell Klassen’s book, Building a Whiter and Brighter World. I’m not making that one up either.

Their website has a number of images that celebrate white supremacist women. I noted first that all of the images were sketches of young, sexy women with long hair, usually blonde or red. I sort of doubt that any of the women in the movement actually look like that. The backgrounds of the drawings were usually snowy peaks and blue skies. In one case, a woman was standing in front of a marble building with columns that was supposed to be their headquarters. I very much doubt that they have a marble building for their HQ. I’ll bet that their headquarters is an office above a liquor store or something. The drawing that best expresses what white supremacists think about women is one that shows a young blonde in white, sitting by a window, with a view of a white supremacist flag and a mowed lawn. The woman is pregnant. Apparently part of their plan to take over the world is to pop out as many white supremacist babies as possible. See, women do have an important role in the new world order.

This was what I found in my exploration of the weird world of the modern white supremacist movement and its religious underpinnings.

Religion and Vulnerable People

When I was a child, I attended a Presbyterian church in Strathmore, California. The pastor was A. Luke Fritz (for Alfonso), who was one of the most amazing human beings I have ever met. He was a thoughtful preacher. Somehow he managed to keep his congregation at peace during the Vietnam War. He was a Boy Scout leader and led a backpack trip to the top of Mt. Whitney every summer for many years. I went on this trip in 1978. Not only did he lead a Boy Scout troop, but he took time to talk individually with each of us. He would ask us questions and make us think. The question for which he was most famous was, “What is courage?” He knew all of us boys would answer, “Not being afraid.” To which he would respond, “Only a fool is never afraid. A courageous person acts despite fear.” See, I still remember this. He was a giant of empathy.

One day in church, a middle-aged mother and her two young daughters came to church after the service had started. And they were weeping very loudly the whole time—during the songs, during the sermon. I never found out what the problem was. It was easy to guess that it must have been something to do with the husband/father, and it was something bad enough to make all three of them weep uncontrollably.

My point is that the woman and two girls were extremely vulnerable right then. A single word could have lifted them or crushed them, especially from a respected clergyman. They were incredibly lucky to have come to Rev. Fritz’s church.

But suppose they had gone to one of those big fundamentalist churches. Oh, I’m sure one of the army of assistant pastors would have helped them. But the big, money-hungry churches would also have used the opportunity to slip in a word to let the three vulnerable females know that God wanted them to give their money and their devotion to that particular church. Big-time preachers prey upon people during their times of vulnerability in order to build up wealth and power. That’s how they get to be big-time preachers. They do things that would get any licensed counselor out of business. There ought to be some way to shut down preachers who offer sham counseling. Rev. Fritz did not do this to anyone. His help was the real thing. Predictably, his church was not rolling in dough.

I sent him a letter after he retired. I let him know of my success in life, and my appreciation for his help. He wrote back saying that he had had so much surgery and replacement parts that he was no longer Cool Hand Luke but Second Hand Luke. Same sense of humor! Soon thereafter his widow sent me a copy of the funeral brochure.

One additional point: don’t wait to tell someone you appreciate them, or it might be too late. I almost missed my chance to thank Rev. Fritz.

A Random World?

One of the most powerful components of the scientific method is to test hypotheses against a null hypothesis. Nearly everyone is capable of rational thought; but scientific thought is a discipline. Nearly everyone can reason from evidence to reach a conclusion; but in science, what we do is to contrast the evidence that we see for the hypothesis against the things that we would expect to see if the hypothesis is wrong. That is, against what we would expect to see at random.

And it is here that the scientific and the religious ways of thinking can perhaps most clearly be contrasted. For example, Herbert Benson and collaborators tested the hypothesis that God answers prayer. Actually, they tested the hypothesis that supplemental intercessory prayer would decrease the rate of relapsing back into heart disease.

In a scientific view of the world, you expect things to happen more or less randomly unless something is causing them to happen non-randomly. That is, absent some physical process, good and bad things will happen more or less equally. One of the things that this could mean in our everyday lives is that we should expect good and bad things to happen to us more or less randomly. As for the other humans with whom we interact every day, some are better and some are worse; and each person is a mixture of good and bad motivations. Therefore, in Benson’s study, one might expect patients suffering from heart disease to sometimes relapse and sometimes not. This does not necessarily mean that heart disease patients would relapse exactly 50 percent of the time; the actual rate will depend on the availability of good medical treatment as well as many other factors. But a scientific null hypothesis would state, in this case, that heart disease patients would relapse to the same extent whether they were being prayed for or not.

This is extremely different from the fundamentalist religious view. To a fundamentalist, the entire world is pervaded by evil, by the works of Satan, and that bad things will always happen all the time to everyone unless God specifically and miraculously prevents it. The fundamentalist null hypothesis is therefore 100 percent relapse.

Therefore, if you pray for someone to be healed from an injury or illness, and they recover, this constitutes evidence, or even proof, that God has intervened and blessed them miraculously, according to religious people.

Actually, there is no direct way to prove which null hypothesis—the approximately 50 percent relapse that scientists expect, or the 100 percent relapse that religious people expect—is correct. The only way to get around this problem is to have a control group. In Benson’s case, the experimental group of patients received intercessory prayer, and did not know it; and the control group of patients did not receive intercessory prayer, and did not know it. The percent relapse of the control group patients represents a measurement of the null hypothesis. It was in this manner that Benson and collaborators demonstrated that intercessory prayer had no measurable effect: one group had 52 percent relapse, the other had 51 percent, a statistically indistinguishable effect.

Fundamentalists have ignored this result and continue to insist that, unless you join their church and give them money, bad things will probably happen to you. God might allow them, or might prevent them. They insist that there is no such thing as God not doing anything; God either prevents bad things, or else bad things happen.

This is perhaps the most basic difference between a scientific and a fundamentalist view of the world: the scientific view that things happen at random unless they are caused, and the fundamentalist view that only bad things happen unless God prevents them. To a scientist, the world has a random background; to a fundamentalist, the world has a background permeated with evil.

I also posted this on my science blog.

I Washed My Face in the Morning Dew

I vaguely remembered a song from my childhood in the 1960s. I recently looked it up. It is yet another expression of the frustration and sense of injustice that many people felt, and feel, about how the rich are oppressing the poor. The lyrics were written by Bobby Bare and performed by several singers including Johnny Cash and Tom T. Hall.

The first strange town I was ever in

The county was hanging a man
Nobody cared if he lived or died

And I just didn't understand.

So I washed my face in the morning dew, Bathed my soul in the sun,
Washed my face in the morning dew And kept on moving along.

The second strange town that I was in

They were laughin' at a poor crippled man
Begging for nickels and dimes on the street

And I just didn't understand.

So I washed my face in the morning dew, Bathed my soul in the sun,
Washed my face in the morning dew And kept on moving along.

The third strange town that I was in

Was settled peaceful and nice
The rich got richer and the poor got poorer

And to me it didn't seem right

So I washed my face in the morning dew, Bathed my soul in the sun,
Washed my face in the morning dew And kept on moving along.

Someday times are bound to change

It can't be very far
And each injustice I have seen

Will come before the bar.

So I washed my face in the morning dew, Bathed my soul in the sun,
Washed my face in the morning dew And kept on moving along.

These words seem to be a modern embodiment of the cries of the Old Testament prophets, from Amos to Isaiah to Jeremiah. When the Old Testament prophets saw the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, they did not say, “To me it just doesn’t seem right.” Instead they proclaimed that God hated this kind of oppression and that he would punish Israel and Judah for it by allowing military empires to conquer them. The prophets, like the singers, also believed that God would pass His judgment on the oppressors (the injustices would “come before the bar,” or judgment seat). And these “strange towns” are not so strange after all; they are the cities we all live in, and we see these injustices as being normal, not strange.

Are there any popular songs today that call for an end to oppression? I do not follow popular music. Feel free to post a comment about examples you may know about.

A Brief Insight from George Carlin

The late comedian George Carlin had this to say in his book, Napalm and Silly Putty.

[God] has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to remain and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry, forever and ever, till the end of time. But he loves you! He loves you, and he needs money! He’s all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, but somehow…he just can’t handle money. Religion takes in billions of dollars, pays no taxes, and somehow always needs a little more.

White Pride

I think white people have a lot to be proud of. They can drive loud fuming pickup trucks around like nobody’s business. And they are pretty straight shooters, especially when they have dark targets. All of this takes nerves of steel and muscles of meat.

But here’s what I don’t understand. Why is it that so many white people feel inadequate in their own self-image unless they can degrade people of other races? Can’t whites just be proud of being white without shooting blacks or releasing dogs to attack Native American children? Why can’t white people just thank their white God that they are white, without having to carry out acts of degradation against other races?

There’s nothing wrong with white pride, or black pride, or Native pride, so long as people do not degrade members of other ethnicities.

Do Police Killings Show a Racial Bias?

It seems like at least once a week, if not more often, we get news of an unarmed black man being killed by white police officers. When it happened in the city where I live, I started thinking more about what is happening.

I have not seen evidence that any of the white officers were motivated by overt racial hatred. But it appears that there is an underlying racial bias, of which most police officers may not even be aware: a bias that makes them pull the trigger on black men more than on white men. The number of police shootings of black men is way out of proportion to the percentage of black people in the population. It looks as if the idea—conscious or not—of “shoot first and ask questions later” motivates police more against blacks than whites.

White pride groups usually respond to this by saying that blacks commit more crimes, per capita, than whites. This, however, is no justification for having a quicker trigger finger for blacks than for whites. It may explain the higher conviction and incarceration rates for blacks than whites, but not the disparity in police shootings.

And we all understand that mistakes will happen. When a police officer has to make a quick decision, and when he or she thinks his or her life is in danger, there is no time for logical thought. But these are exactly the circumstances under which unconscious bias can have the greatest impact.

It becomes even clearer when you consider how many white men have been shot by black police officers. An online search suggests that this happens about once or twice a year. Here are the examples I found, in reverse chronological order:

• November 2015: A black cop killed Jeremy Mardis, a white boy with autism in Louisiana.
• November 2014: A black officer shot Gilbert Collar, a white student at the University of Southern Alabama, after he banged on the police station window.
• October 2014: A black cop killed Dillon Taylor, a white man, in Salt Lake City.

This takes us back almost two years. In two other cases I could not determine the race of the police officer who shot the white victim: Castaic, California, and Fresno, California, both in 2016. The killing of Dylan Noble in Fresno made it all over the internet. It looks like a lot of cases until you see how many of them are about the same man, Dylan Noble. There has also been a lot of rage over the police killing of a white youth, Zachary Hammond, in South Carolina in 2015, even though the police officer was also white.

White officers kill black men: dozens of times a year. Black officers kill white men: about twice a year.

As indicated in the above graphic, Native Americans are even more likely than blacks to be shot by police. As a member of the Cherokee tribe, I took notice of this, although no police officer in a hurry would think I was Native American. If the police killings have an underlying racial motivation, it is not surprising that Native Americans should also be the victims of lots of police shootings.

A version of this essay, in an evolutionary context, will soon appear on my evolution blog.

New blog essay by Amy Kennedy

Amy Kennedy has posted a new essay on her blog: "How could anyone ever make it in life without God? I'll tell you." She describes herself as self-disciplined, moral, respectful, caring, genuine, hard-working, honest, empathetic, and kind. I can affirm that this is correct. 

An open letter to Governor Bevin

Dear Governor Bevin:

I wish to applaud you on your statement earlier this week that Republicans should be ready for blood to be shed in the defense of their Party. In saying this, you have echoed the words of your Supreme Leader, who said that if he lost the election there might be violence.

You are far from alone in your sentiments. The man who hung an effigy of Hillary Clinton along an Oregon highway this week has made it clear that Democrats will soon suffer the fate that lynched blacks suffered in earlier decades.

I realize that you have left open the possibility of bloodshed in either direction: Democrat blood by Republicans, or Republican blood by Democrats. But Republicans have a lot more guns. Therefore it is very unlikely that Democrats would shoot Republicans.

Opposition to the Republican Party has gone on far too long. Anyone who hesitates to give complete devotion to your Party should be swept away as quickly as possible. And you can start with me. While I am not indicating whether I support Clinton or not, I unhesitatingly affirm that I do not worship Trump. He is a mere human being who does not deserve the religious reverence that his followers give Him.

So I invite you to begin your bloodshed with me. I teach classes in the Biological Sciences building at Southeastern Oklahoma State University in Durant. You can find me there almost every weekday. You can send somebody to shoot me, assuming you do not have time to do it yourself. Other than a few hundred students who might be in the way, it should be a pretty clear shot. There might be some difficulty in crossing state lines to do this, but you can probably hire someone in Oklahoma to do it.

I am a member of the Cherokee tribe. You used to have Cherokees in Kentucky (though most were in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia), but you got rid of us in 1838. I provide this information just in case it makes it easier for you or someone else to shoot me. Proportional to population, far more Native Americans have been shot by whites than the other way around, so my assassination would not be too unusual in American history.

Think of the prestige you would get if you back up your words with actions. You should get started. When can I expect you or your surrogate to arrive?

Oh, and I teach evolution too.

Love and Writing

People who, like me, grow up to be writers have put in hundreds or in my case thousands of hours writing (in sheer bliss) by middle age. Daniel Levitin said that a genius is simply someone who has practiced something for ten thousand hours, I am quite certain that this is an incomplete picture. But there is probably no genius who has not practiced for ten thousand hours.

I have a natural talent for writing. It manifested itself more strongly when I was young than did my talent for music. I believe I will yet become a great writer. But I do not believe that I would ever have become a great musician even if I had practiced ten thousand hours. I might have been the modern equivalent of the baroque composer Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf, competent and forgotten. (Wikipedia says he was also a silvologist, or forestry expert. Perhaps he did better work with trees than with music, like me.)

But to get to the level of skill that I have today, I had to go through my juvenile experimental period. I worked at it very hard when I was in elementary school, using an old Undersood open-sided sturdy typewriter. I also did a lot of composing.

One of the novels I worked on was about Russian spies building a rocket out in the desert of Arizona. The hero of the story was pretty sure that this is what they were up to; they drove panel trucks with a hammer and sickle on it, after all. Every chapter of plot was separated by a chapter in which the hero described all of the plants in his parents’ garden. Future botanist here. I do not remember what the climax was; maybe that was because I might not have finished it.

Another novel was about three kids getting lost in the woods: two boys and a girl. I was right on the cusp of puberty, and I wanted to have one of the boys get together with the girl inside a blanket to stay warm during the cold forest night. The other boy wouldn’t have minded; all he did was recite Shakespeare. But I did not have the courage or foolhardiness to pursue that path. The climax was when the kids, who had dug trenches and buried themselves to stay warm, were sniffed out by a bear, which inexplicably left them alone. I don’t remember much about it other than that I described the mountain as if it had loving parental arms that embraced the hikers; I had read a story in which O. Henry used the word philoprogenitiveness, and I wanted to use it too. My idea of good writing back then was to use as many big words as I could.

When I was in college and old enough to know better, I started writing a romance novel set in medieval England, about which I knew nothing. (About either romance or medieval England, as it turned out. I was too meek to have a romantic life at that time.) It had so many plot bloopers in it that when I wrote a (good) novel decades later I used my earlier novel as an example of one that was hilariously inept.

I spent hours and hours on this stuff. I did not realize it was bad. But had I known how bad it was, I might have stopped writing it and never developed my talent. I remain thankful to my teachers, such as Mr. Jim Kliegl, who put up with some of this stuff and even encouraged me. I think he knew I would become a good writer, based not on what I wrote but on the fact that I was writing it.

Okay, so I finally learned how to write. But I still had a few things to learn, things that I still have to carefully avoid. Here’s an example. As I have written previously, we have patriotic Confederates down here in Oklahoma, whose only purpose in life is to sell confederate flags and drive around with confederate flags waving from poles in their truck beds. Based on my conversations with them, I consider them to be among the most hateful people I have met. They are really scary. When I recently started a new novel, I had a female Cherokee heroine and a male Confederate villain. I won’t give away the plot other than to say I based it on the apocryphal book of Judith.

As I wrote, I made the villain as hateful as possible. Every little detail was disgusting. I was ranting. But then I started running an experiment in my mind. If he was really that disgusting, the heroine would have stayed away from him and there would be no plot. This was when I realized that I did not have a character, but a foil. In order to make him a real character, I had to get inside his mind. I had to empathize with him.

I discovered that, to write a good novel, or even a good story, I had to love even the characters that I hated.

I believe that, with this discovery, I have finally reached the plateau of professional competence. I am beginning a new round of queries to fiction agents in an attempt to market another novel, one which I have thoroughly rewritten twice. How many times, hundreds perhaps, I have been turned down by fiction agents. But maybe it has been for the best. (This can’t go on forever, of course, or I’ll be dead.) One agent told me that an earlier version of this novel was episodic rather than having a strong plot. It only took me a year to realize she was right. I will send the new one back to her as soon as tomorrow. I am now glad the earlier version was not published. I have published science books, but am ready now for fiction.

I feel like a plant with dozens of unopened flower buds (the novels). The plant keeps developing those buds to be better and better so that when they open, perhaps one after another in quick succession, the result will be spectacular and pollinators will come buzzing and whirring from miles around. In the event that this happens, that the playfulness of my youth and continued playfulness of my middle years pays off in my maturity, I will let you know.

I posted a version of this essay, in an evolutionary context, on my evolution blog.

A Story about Leaving Adventism

Amy Kennedy has written a blog entry about her experiences with leaving Adventism. It is a thoughtful essay and I recommend it. The link is here.

Some Religious Insights from Literature: W. H. Hudson

Green Mansions by W. H. Hudson is a classic. It is considered to be one of those works you have to read at some point. And I admit that it gripped me when I read it, and it was beautifully written.

As I writer, I could recognize numerous problems with the structure of the story, which other writers even contemporaneous with W. H. Hudson would have avoided. The main problem was that it had no closure. It reached a climax, and the climax was extremely vivid. Then after the climax, the narrator just fell apart into depression, stumbled about, and the story ended. This went on for 25 very long pages after the climax. Some of it was very good—especially the image of the white moth doing the same thing that the young woman Rima did—but for the most part it was just heavy depression.

The structure of the story was that the original narrator got a Venezuelan, Mr. Abel, to tell the story he had kept secret all his life. Most of the novel is Abel’s first person account. This makes Green Mansions a double-first-person structure. Briefly, Abel recounted the old man’s story, making it a triple-first-person for a brief period. This would be fine except that, at the end, as I said, there was no closure: there was nothing about any conversation or parting between the author and Abel.

Having such a closure would have solved at least two problems. First, the events in the story were so much like a fantasy—the young woman Rima (flitting around in a skirt of spider silk) seemed too ethereal to be a real person, too good, too naïve, too nimble, which made me think that maybe Abel had imagined her. Abel claimed to have brought Rima’s bones with him in a jar (sorry I had to spoil that). He could have shown the jar to the narrator who, looking inside, would have found it empty. Or not. Anyway, Hudson could have done something with that for a really good ending.

Second, during the long depressing end, Abel told the author about how he had concluded that God either did not exist or was evil. I, like many readers of this blog, found this interesting; but it was just a long rant. How much more interesting it would have been if Abel had told the author what he thought, and the author might have probed and questioned him on it. I believe this is what H. G. Wells would have done.

I want to include here some of the vivid passages that the new atheist Abel spoke. I will repeat them here largely without judgment. They are just vivid, that’s all.

Abel imagined speaking with Rima before she perished in the fire (sorry I had to spoil that): “To me was your cry; but your poor, frail fellow-creature was not there to save, or, failing that, to cast himself into the flames with you, hating God.”

Then he continued (in these fragments from the next twenty pages). “Thus, in my insufferable pain, I spoke aloud; alone in that solitary place, a bleeding fugitive in the dark night, looking up at the stars I cursed the Author of my being and called on Him to take back the abhorred gift of life.

“Yet, according to my philosophy, how vain it was! All my bitterness and hatred and defiance were as empty, as ineffectual, as utterly futile, as are the supplications of the meek worshiper, and no more than the whisper of a leaf, the light whir of an insect’s wing…when I thanked Him on my knees for guiding me to where I had heard so sweet and mysterious a melody, or hated and defied Him as now, it all came from Him—love and hate, good and evil…though my cries did not touch nor come near Him they would yet hurt me; and, just as a prisoner maddened at his unjust fate beats against the stone walls of his cell until he falls back bruised and bleeding on the floor, so did I wilfully bruise my own soul, and knew that those wounds I gave myself would not heal.

“For no reaction, or submission, had followed on that furious revolt against the unknown being, personal or not, that is behind nature, in whose existence I believed. I was still in revolt: I would hate Him, and show my hatred by being like Him, as He appears to us reflected in that mirror of Nature. Had he given me good gifts—the sense of right and wrong and sweet humanity? The beautiful sacred flower He had caused to grow in me I would crush ruthlessly; its beauty and fragrance and grace would be dead forever; there was nothing evil, nothing cruel and contrary to my nature, that I would not be guilty of, glorying in my guilt.

“For they were all dead at last, old and young, all who had lighted the fire round that great green tree in which Rima had taken refuge, who had danced round the blaze, shouting, ‘Burn! Burn!’

“That is my philosophy still: prayers, austerities, good works—they avail nothing, and there is no intercession, and outside of the soul there is no forgiveness in heaven or earth for sin.”

Green Mansions is one of those novels that is so gripping and flawed that I fantasize that someday I will write my own version of it. Or not. 

Some Political Insights from Literature: Carson McCullers

I recently read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. It contained some passages that help us understand the political frustration that progressives feel today. I merely quote these passages for your appreciation.

One of the passages was spoken by Jake Blount the communist. His feelings reflect the frustration of millions of low-wage workers today who dare not speak out against their oppression:

‘And look what has happened to our freedom. The men who fought the American Revolution were no more like these D. A. R. dames than I’m a pot-bellied, perfumed Pekingese dog. They meant what they said about freedom. They fought a real revolution. They fought so that this could be a country where every man could be free and equal. Huh! And that meant every man was equal in the sight of Nature—with an equal chance. That didn’t mean that twenty per cent of the people were free to rob the other eighty per cent of the means to live. This didn’t mean for one rich man to sweat the piss out of ten thousand poor men so that he can get richer. This didn’t mean the tyrants were free to get this country in such a fix that millions of people are ready to do anything—cheat, lie, or whack off their right arm—just to work for three squares and a flop. They have made the word freedom a blasphemy. You hear me? They have made the word freedom stink like a skunk to all who know.’

Another passage was spoken by the black doctor Benedict Copeland, who was giving a sermon to poor blacks gathered at his house for a funeral:

‘Land, clay, timber—those things are called natural resources. Man does not make these natural resources—man only develops them and uses them for work. Therefore should any one person or group of persons own these things? Can a man own ground and space and sunlight and rain for crops? How can a man say “this is mine” about those things and refuse to let others share them? Therefore Marx says that these natural resources should belong to everyone, not divided into little pieces but used by all the people according to their ability to work…Say a man died and left his mule to his four sons. The sons would not wish to cut up the mule into four parts and each take his share. They would own and work the mule together. This is the way Marx says all of the natural resources should be owned—not by one group of rich people but by all the workers in the world as a whole.

‘We in this room have no private properties…All that we own is our bodies. And we sell our bodies every day we live. We sell them when we go out in the morning to our jobs and when we labor all the day. We are forced to sell at any price, at any time, for any purpose. We are forced to sell our bodies so that we can eat and live. And the price which is given us for this is only enough so that we will have the strength to labor longer for the profits of others. Today we are not put up on the platforms and sold at the courthouse square, but we are forced to sell our strength, our time, our souls during almost every hour that we live. We have been freed from one kind of slavery only to be delivered into another. Is this freedom? Are we yet free men?...

‘And we are not alone in this slavery. There are millions of others throughout the world, of all colors and races and creeds. This we must remember. There are many of our people who hate the poor of the white race, and they hate us. The people in this town living by the river who work in the mills. People who are almost as much in need as we are ourselves. This hatred is a great evil, and no good can ever come from it. We must remember the words of Karl Marx and see the truth according to his teachings. The injustice of need must bring us all together and not separate us. We must remember that we all make the things on this earth of value because of our labor.’

Race as Shorthand, Not as Reality

It has always been impossible to define race. Most humans who have ever lived have had characteristics that were recognizable for their race, although nobody could ever figure out how many races there were. For example, are subsaharan Africans all one race? Bantu people (e.g. Nigeria) look very different from Ethiopians and San (e.g. from Namibia).

But in many societies the dominant people found it extremely important to define race with an exactitude that the concept will not allow. This was particularly true for people of mixed ancestry, as many of us are. This resulted in such absurdities as the one-drop rule in pre-Civil-War America, in which “one drop of black blood” made you black, and if your mother was a slave, you were a slave, even if you were only (like the children of Sally Hemings) one-eighth black. The former Apartheid leaders of South Africa struggled with this concept so much that, in their pitiful final days of rulership, they had to define people from India as honorary whites. No more needs to be added to this, other than that if you have not read Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (a slave and a master, who were both one-eighth black, were switched in the nursery), you should.

Still, look around you, and you will find that race is a useful shorthand for identifying people. Even the bluest of liberals cannot avoid it. And, for me, seeing all the different races helps me to rejoice in human diversity, more so than I would if I (perhaps more accurately) saw each person as unique. On the trams of Strasbourg, I enjoyed seeing Muslims and Jews, each in distinctive garb, mixing with saffron-robed Buddhist priests.

But many people want to make each race a category of blame. The most obvious modern example of this is that millions of conservatives consider all Muslims to deserve blame for the terrorist actions of a small number of them. The solution to terrorism, they believe, is to keep all Muslims out of America. By which they mean, all people Arabic ethnicity. (I’m not sure what they would do with red-headed white Muslims from Turkey or the former Yugoslavia.)

But I’m here to tell you, from personal experience, how evil this is. I am of partial Cherokee ancestry. My sixth great grandmother was Nancy Ward, the famous peace activist of the Cherokee Nation prior to the Trail of Tears. Her cousin, Tsiyu Gansini, was the last holdout of Cherokee warriors, whose Chickamauga warriors did not surrender until 1794 on Lookout Mountain, Tennessee. Tsiyu Gansini and his warriors committed numerous atrocities, and Nancy Ward could not stop them. Nancy Ward said “My cry is all for peace,” while Tsiyu Gansini said, “We are not yet conquered.” Today we would call the Chickamauga warriors terrorists.

And yet the United States considered all Cherokees to be guilty of the Chickamauga terrorism. In 1830, Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, and all Cherokees, not just terrorists (of whom none remained by that time) were forced out of their homeland by the United States Army in 1838. Even though the Cherokees by that time had their own written language, newspaper, constitution, Supreme Court, and they lived in white-man houses and had white-man agriculture,

the United States still considered them savages and took their land. It was the category of “Cherokee” that allowed the government to hold all members of the category responsible for the terrorist acts of a few.

When I think about the really nice Muslims I have known, including the couple who struck up a really friendly conversation with us on the tram in Strasbourg, I know none of them approved of Islamist terrorism, any more than my ancestor Nancy Ward approved of the terrorist acts of her cousin, Tsiyu Gansini.

I posted the foregoing on my science blog.

Homage to Abélard

At the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on July 23, the lines were very long just to get through security inspections and enter inside. This was only to be expected, since it was a Saturday during tourist season, and was also a response to the nearly daily terrorist attacks, such as a few days earlier (July 14) in Nice, and more recent ones in Germany. But I had already seen enough ornate cathedral decorations (see an earlier essay about the Strasbourg cathedral, also called Notre Dame). What I wanted to see and experience inside was something that was probably either off limits at the best of times, or maybe locations now lost to the historical record.

I wanted to see the chamber in which Peter Abélard lived in the twelfth century, and the classroom in which he taught.

Abélard was most famous for being the 35-year-old monk who had a torrid love affair with the 19-year-old nun Heloïse, in revenge for which her Uncle Fulbert arranged to have Abélard castrated. But Abélard was also one of the planet’s major scholars of his time, and Heloïse was an accomplished scholar herself.

And the thing that made Abélard different from all the other scholars was that his primary rule, first, last, and always, was to question what we think we know and what the authorities have told us. His famous quote, preserved in various forms, was this:  “The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth.” This was the closest that any scholar had yet come to the scientific method.

Abélard’s world was extremely limited compared to ours today. He could not have imagined the vastness of the universe, or even that Earth was just a planet like the others that revolved around the sun. He could not have imagined Copernicus, much less Darwin. To him, the universe was as orderly as an astrolabe, the little device that calculated the time and the phases of the moon and the positions of the planets based upon a geocentric model. He and Heloïse even named their love child Astrolabius! But he stretched his mind as far as anyone could at the time.

So I satisfied myself with seeing Notre Dame de Paris from the outside. It was splendid, as the photos show, but not as significant as the contribution that Abélard made to the history of scientific thought.

An Incredibly Beautiful Peace

I ended the last essay by describing my beautiful experience in Strasbourg at seeing to what extent the horrors of past war and oppression have been swept away from Europe since the end of World War 2. I grew up hearing horror stories of the German war from my uncle. To people of his generation, the peace that has lasted in Europe since 1945 was unthinkable. But my generation has seen it. A large part of the credit belongs to the European Union, which richly deserved the Nobel Peace Prize it received in 2012. And while some countries such as England have questioned the workability of complete economic integration, nobody wants to go back to the days of antagonism, certainly not of war.

I thought about these things in Strasbourg, France, on July 18 and 19. On July 18, I walked from the Wacken tram stop over to the European Union Parliament building. The main building is in Bruxelles (Brussels), but this secondary building is still very big and busy. The flags of the Union and of France were still at half staff in memory of the July 14 terrorist attack in Nice.

Nearby was the Court of Human Rights. In America, we are used to thinking of human rights as something that we choose and impose on the rest of the world. Many other nations, such as Russia and China, believe the same thing about their right to impose their values on the world. But in the European Union, the member countries deliberate together about what is right and wrong. I felt humble as I stood before the court, which also had the French and European flags at half staff, realizing that I represented a country which would never let any other country tell us, or even suggest to us, what to do.

The next day, July 20, we went with our French family across the Rhine River bridge into Germany. No checkpoint for passports. The European authorities have restricted traffic flow, presumably to monitor vehicles that might carry out terrorist attacks like those not a week earlier in Nice. But they have no plans to block the free flow of humans across the Rhine; in fact, they are constructing a new tram line over the river.

We walked through the beautiful German city of Kehl to a park along the Rhine. Of course, France was visible just a short distance away, across the river. This was the frontier of war for a millennium. But today it is just a peaceful park. Best of all, there is a pedestrian footbridge, away from the traffic of the vehicle bridge, which spans the river. We walked across and back. There wasn’t much to see or do; it was the significance of the act itself that will stay forever in my memory. In the middle of the bridge, right on the border, French-German couples have placed padlocks in the chain link, indicating that for them the new peace between France and Germany is not merely an international agreement but the most intense form of love.

The new stage of altruism that awaits the social evolution of our species is international trust and, where possible, love. I felt no hostility as I entered France, or walked between France and Germany. The only hostility I felt was in returning to the United States, where federal officials grilled me with trick questions to make sure that I, an American citizen, was not posing a threat to my own country. In Europe, there is a lot of altruism between nations; in America, especially in this political season, we have very little altruism within our country.

Our species evolved to be altruistic within our group and ferocious to everyone outside of our group. The European Union represents perhaps the best example of large-scale outside-the-group altruism that the world has ever seen, and its greatest success is the lasting peace, and the unthinkability of war, between France and Germany.

And you will notice also that this lasting peace was achieved totally in the absence of religious doctrine. While some peacemakers have religious motivation, there was utterly no theological foundation that enabled this peace to take shape. Today, the major denominations no longer scream for war. But they did not figure out international peace by reading the Bible; they had it forced upon them.