Faith and Doubt: The Novels of Graham Greene

The kinds of religion to which I am agnostic are those that have easy and clear answers to every question. I admire people who, whether religious or not, seriously engage the questions of ultimate meaning. Characters who take steps of faith despite doubt, even though they cannot explain their faith, and do so without condemning those who disagree with them—these characters are common in the novels of Graham Greene, a twentieth-century British novelist. He converted to Catholicism, not because of being convinced by evidence or of doctrine, but because of an emotional attraction to it, a need he felt in his soul. This being the case, Greene never makes his readers, or his characters, feel as if there is something wrong or evil about them for not agreeing with his religious sentiments. Greene’s novels are not widely popular today, probably because his attention to the meaning of life is considered tedious by religious fundamentalists and atheistic seekers of pleasure alike. But it is precisely this that has made me love every novel of Greene’s that I have read: four and counting.

I just finished reading Monsignor Quixote. It is about a friendship between, and aimless adventures of, a Catholic priest and a communist ex-mayor. As you might guess, the priest is Quixote, the ex-mayor goes by Sancho Panza, the priest’s old car is Rozinante, and they hail from the little Spanish town of El Toboso. Neither of the men, though officially expected to do so, considers the other man to be outrageous or stupid even if he considers the beliefs to be so. The priest realizes that there are questions he cannot answer. Just as the priest does not have to personally answer for the atrocities of Torquemada and the Inquisition, the communist does not have to defend the atrocities of Stalin.

Just as did the original Quixote and Sancho, these two men had a common enemy, the windmills, represented in this novel by the Guardia, the police who supported Generalissimo Franco before his death, and who still operated as a force that always, if slightly, exceeded its legal limits. And just as in the original, Quixote did things that got him in trouble but which he did for sincerely good reasons. In the original, Quixote rescued a chain gang that was on its way to the galleys, men who were officially condemned by legal authorities. In this novel, Quixote helped a criminal to escape pursuit by the Guardia. As Quixote said, “the Good Samaritan didn’t hold an enquiry into the wounded man’s past.” He simply helped him, and did so immediately. Since in this novel Quixote is an innocent priest, his Dulcinea is a long-dead woman saint. Instead of Mambrino’s helmet, Quixote had a pechera, which is a kind of bib worn by high-ranking priests.

This novel could easily have become a fictitious framework for lectures. This is the feeling I got from the Alan Lightman novel Mr g, which has a deliberately ridiculous fictional background for exploring questions about cosmology. But Greene is a master of creating characters who have real reasons for what they believe and discuss and do, something quite lacking in Lightman’s novel.

The climax in Greene’s novel occurs when Quixote, hiding from both church and civil authorities, sees a Catholic procession which has been designed by the local priest as a way of getting larger and larger donations. Quixote stops the procession and denounces it as blasphemy. And at the end, Quixote ends up serving communion to the communist Sancho.

The most human part of the novel was that both men recognized the other as religious, but also as having doubts. Greene said that sharing a sense of doubt can bring men together more than sharing a faith. Sancho was no ordinary communist; he had studied to be a priest before giving up religion. And when Sancho suggested that Quixote read some Marx, the priest ended up liking Marx, noting that Marx, even if wrong, was trying his best to help the poor people whom capitalism had oppressed. Sancho had more faith in communism than in Stalin, and Quixote had more faith in Catholicism than in Rome. The priest noted that if you have complete faith, in the Bible or in Marx, you can quit thinking, something that both men refused to do.

Monsignor Quixote had a current of humor running all through it, neither of the two main characters taking himself too seriously. It was especially funny when they spent the night at a brothel, only Quixote did not know what it was. The bedside tables had condoms, and Quixote thought they were balloons, and he started to blow one up and it exploded. Sancho to Quixote: “Have you never seen a contraceptive before? No, I suppose you haven’t.” Quixote: “A contraceptive? But what can you do with a thing that size?” Sancho: “It wouldn’t have been that size if you hadn’t blown it up.”

The main point, at the very end, is that a man’s hate dies with him, while his love lives on past his death.

I didn’t like the original Don Quixote, by Cervantes. It has memorable scenes, which are clever, but otherwise I found it tedious. Most of Cervantes’s work is not about Quixote but are other stories told by other characters. Quixote is a minor character in his own novel. And Quixote is downright brutal to his follower Sancho, often hitting him violently. I got tired of that. It has some great one-liners, as when Cervantes says that to help a man ungrateful is to pour water into the sea. But, all in all, I would suggest watching a rerun of Man of La Mancha rather than reading the original Don Quixote. However, if you read Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene, you will have to read, or at least read about, the original or you will miss the numerous references to it.

The priest returns to a place where he knows he will die in The Power and the Glory; the emotionally-torn adulterer confronts himself in The Heart of the Matter; Monsignor Quixote is not only significant but funny. These great novels make me want to read a lot more by Graham Greene. Perfect for a Christian agnostic.

Novel as Experiment in Whitehead’s Underground Railroad

Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad was one of the most famous novels of 2016. In this novel, a young slave Cora escapes from Georgia on the Underground Railroad, and eventually...does she make it? I won’t spoil the ending. But in this novel the Railroad is really a railroad, with railroad cars on tracks running through tunnels.

One impression is inescapable, and intentional. The amount of deliberate suffering inflicted by slave owners and slave hunters on the slaves, and even on other whites, is almost infinitely brutal. In this novel, slave hunters would kill and rape white abolitionists. Slave owners would put the eyes out of a slave who tried to learn to read. A white daughter turned in her parents to be hanged for hiding a fugitive slave (Cora), in return for an elevation of her social status. One slave hunter wore a necklace made out of human ears. One slave owner tortured his male slave by cutting off the slave’s manhood, stuffing it in the slave’s mouth, and sewing it shut.

Remember, this is fiction. Many of these things did not actually happen. For example, it makes no economic sense for slave owners to torture and kill their slaves for minor infractions; slaves were expensive to buy and maintain. Slave owners would, in the real South, treat slaves like animals, but not usually worse. But Whitehead achieves the novelist’s purpose, to make the reader hate slavery, and to see how it turns slave owners into devils.

And then I realized that this was the point. Most of these brutal things occurred at some point in history, but not all at once. During the lynchings after the Civil War, whites would indeed torture blacks. In doing so, they were not losing any money, the way slave owners would have. Whitehead took actual events from the lynching period and stuck them into the time of slavery. Whitehead also created a superficially nice-looking South Carolina, where black escapees were treated nicely, but it turns out that they were being sterilized in the name of scientific eugenics, and being used in scientific experiments. These things actually happened in the first half of the twentieth century. By placing the brutalities of fictional Georgia and North Carolina alongside the superficial niceness of the fictional South Carolina, Whitehead was inviting us to compare them. Were eugenics and scientific experimentation (as in the Tuskegee experiments), any less brutal than slavery? We usually don’t ask that question, because they occurred separately in history. Whitehead lines them all up during one brief time in Cora’s life. He performs an experiment with history. Hypothesis: eugenics is less brutal than slavery. Conclusion: No, they are both brutal.

I tried this kind of literary experiment when I was in junior high. I wrote a short story in which I divided England into two counties, Rupertshire and Spratleyshire, and I gave them two different forms of government. I set them side by side and allowed a traveler to directly compare them. That’s all I remember about this story, which might be in a box somewhere.

The Underground Railroad will certainly stir your fury. The young escaped slave Cora did not take every opportunity for revenge that came to her. I found myself wishing she had tortured and slowly killed the slave catcher in Indiana, rather than leaving him alive and tied up. That is, Whitehead stirred my desire for revenge then confronted me with mercy. This literary theme will never grow old.

Colson Whitehead broke up the timeline of history in a way that is forbidden in most historical fiction: he altered the historical context. But he made this broken timeline into parallel segments and compared them, as in a scientific experiment.

I published this essay on my evolution blog earlier this fall.

The Comfortable Pew

Back in the 1960s, the Anglican Church in Canada asked the most famous Canadian writer of the time, Pierre Burton, who had withdrawn from active church affiliation, to write a book about why he had problems with Christianity. The result was his book The Comfortable Pew.

The major point was that churches, in Berton’s view, were irrelevant to important national and world issues. The title says it all; Christians withdrew from dealing with the problems of the world by hiding in church on their comfortable pews.

Imagine! That was the worst thing he could say about religion. Berton could not have imagined, I suspect, that in the next century powerful churches would practically control the American government and deliberately head the world toward war and Armageddon, that they would glorify politicians who lived in all the ways that they claimed were sinful. Today, in America, most fundamentalist Christians celebrate Roy Moore. He is famous for, as Alabama chief justice, defying federal courts regarding stone monuments inscribed with the Ten Commandments on public property in Alabama, defying court orders to do so. He is now running for the U.S. Senate. Numerous women have accused him of sexual harassment. Apparently, to American fundamentalist Christians, you don’t have to actually obey the Ten Commandments, but just carve them in stone and then ignore them.

I almost wish we could go back to the time when the most dangerous thing about religion was irrelevancy.

The American Image

What is the image that the world has of Americans? We all know what the image is: Americans are rude, self-centered, loud, big, fat, violent, and impatient. At least once a week some French news item reminds them of this. One recent example is a French news item about gun violence in America. Also, it was from the French news, not the American news, that I learned about the white supremacist rally in Shelbyville, TN on October 29. We might think that the image they have of us is not fair, but we keep feeding it with confirmatory data.

Perhaps the author K. W. Oxnard said it best. The United States is a childish country that cannot make friends or clean up after itself. The author wrote this over twenty years ago, long before the Infant-In-Chief took office. Remember that the Infant-In-Chief got about half the votes in the country. About half of Americans want the world to think we are like him.

Altruism in America and in France

I have written recently about how the social environment of America has become hostile, largely due to the hostility that Trump Republicans hold against all other Americans, even other Republicans. Altruism binds together members of a group in a pact of mutual aid. Altruism can actually help a group be more efficiently violent against people outside of the group. Trump Republicans have drawn the borders of their group very tightly and restricted altruism to within their group. Therefore, altruism is dying in American society in general.

This trend is being reflected in government policy. National Parks, monuments, etc. were created for the common good of all Americans and all species. They were created for the future. Now the Trump Republicans want to dismantle the system of protected lands. They want to make a profit on land that Americans (especially the Republican Teddy Roosevelt) set aside for the future. But Trump Republicans literally do not care about the future. They could use as their motto, “What has posterity ever done for me?”

Also, in October, the Senate voted (50 to 50; Mike Pence cast the deciding vote) to make it illegal for Americans to sue financial corporations even if those corporations violate contracts and defraud them. We can date the end of altruism from that vote. As of that vote, the American people have no financial rights, and corporations have no responsibilities. You have money in the bank? You might still have it. You have a fixed rate mortgage? You might still have it. As of this vote, not only are corporations people, as Republicans have long proclaimed; but now, they are the only people. People aren’t people. Gone from society is the altruism of reliable laws and contracts; replacing it is the struggle for existence, only it’s not much of a struggle—we know who is going to win. The Republican government, and the corporations. What is to keep them from making us their slaves in everything but name?

Meanwhile, altruism continues in France. When I was in Strasbourg, I liked it, but was not sure exactly why. Now I realize what it is: everyone treats everyone else altruistically. With few exceptions, nobody throws trash in the street or creates loud noises. As a matter of fact, when you recycle glass (and nearly everybody does), you have to do it during the day so as to not create noise that could disturb the neighbors. If you use a public building for an event, and you create too much noise, the electricity will shut off. Translation: Attention! Limit to Noise! Please do not make sound at too high a level. If you pass a noise level of 90 decibels, the electricity of this hall will be cut off. Thank you for taking this into account.

As I said, altruism can create hostility toward outsiders, too. And after I move to France, I will never be completely French. The French are very happy to let you know that you are not one of them. I will always be something of an outsider, and I will not fully enjoy the benefits of French societal altruism. I know this is the way it is going to be, but I will accept this risk rather than to stay in America where I have no rights, where corporations can cheat me, where my risk of being killed by someone’s gun is five times greater, per capita, than in France. And I will enjoy the altruism (the French call it l’entraide, or aid-between) that is the dominant atmosphere there.

The Best Job Ever?

The Congressional Chaplain, Father Patrick J. Conroy, earns a salary of $172,500 per year, over three times what I earn as a professor. To earn this salary, all he has to do is to open each session with a prayer, a duty that he frequently delegates to an assistant.

Not only does this give Father Conroy a lot of free time to do other things, many or all of which could make him more money (I don’t know what he does with the rest of his time), but it also provides him with a huge amount of influence on Congressional deliberations. While I have not seen any videos of Conroy’s prayers, I have posted a video of a Baptist minister in Oklahoma who opened a session of the Oklahoma House of Representatives with aprayer that had clear political content. This would be very easy to do without being overt. A Congressional chaplain could say, “Guide us O Lord in our deliberations to defend the current government of the people who have claimed in the past to be Your Chosen Nation, and guide us to support the political party that claims to have special exemptions from Your Moral Law…” Well, maybe that would be a bit overt, but what is to stop him from doing it?

They Will Never Have Enough

So, the Trump Republicans have control over virtually everything except the courts. The path is now clear before them to chop down every policy and law that might impede their conquest of nation and Earth for their private gain. They have not been able, as of this writing, to destroy the Affordable Care Act, but Trump has already singlehandedly disabled its implementation. And they have negated nearly every environmental policy that existed prior to the current administration, even rules that date back to previous Republican presidents. Sure, some kinds of pollution remain illegal, but the Executive Branch will simply not execute those laws.

You would think these would be the Halcyon Days when everything is going their way, sort of like what the Democrats had in 1993-1994 and the Republicans had in 2001-2006: single-party rule. You would think that they could just relax and enjoy their hegemony.

But instead, the Trump supporters have become even more fierce. They need not bother to attack Democrats, who have no power. Despite this, they still do so. Right-wing Republicans continue to insult Hillary Clinton on social media. What? What is the point? Hillary has no more political clout. There is no reason to attack her except to continue wallowing in hatred of her.

But the Trump Republicans also attack moderate Republicans, Bipartisanship is now considered treason. Trump even attacks His own hand-picked cabinet. Just recently, Trump has openly insulted retiring Senate Republicans Bob Corker and Jeff Flake.

The Trump Republicans do not just want to be in sole control of the nation. They want to be the only voices that are heard. Already, nobody listens to Democrats. The Trump Republicans want moderate Republicans, as well, to simply bow and obey.

One vivid recent example of this is the October 29 white supremacist rally in Shelbyville, TN. They shouted, marched, wore Confederate insignia, and some of them declared that “the Jews will not take our place.” While not all Trump supporters are Nazis, we are still waiting to see if any Trump supporters speak out against them. Why don’t the neo-Nazis just sit back and enjoy the far-right domination of all of American life? They will never have a Nazi in the White House, at least by legitimate means; they have it as good as they ever will. But they cannot enjoy the Trump victory which has created a golden space for them. The white supremacists have tasted blood and they are on a roll.

White rage is happening not just in politics but in general society. Where I live, in rural Oklahoma, most of the people are Trump Republicans, not moderate Republicans. They have the whole arena of public space under their control. But what do they do? The people of rural Oklahoma are even more militant in their hatred of non-supporters of Trump than they were before the election of 2016. They overtly demonstrate their hatred of their neighbors even more than before. If you are out in public in rural Oklahoma, it feels like a theater of war. At least for people like me who look like liberals; I wear science T-shirts rather than camo. It is now hostility that I encounter, not the quiet dislike such as I experienced before.

Already, Trump Republicans can accumulate all the automatic weapons they want, at least in Oklahoma. But they have redoubled their efforts to build up their stockpiles since the beginning of the Trump administration. I know this because one of them told me. Who are they building up their weapons against? Is it against the remaining minority of progressives such as myself, progressives who do not dare to speak out? My car has no bumper stickers on it, but the fact that it is a Prius calls attention to the fact that I am not a Trump supporter. I might, for all anyone knows when they see me in my car, be a moderate Republican who sees energy efficiency as a great investment (which it is). I feel as afraid to speak my mind in public as do the people in the Zoroastrian or Christian minorities in countries ruled by Muslim strongmen. I am less likely to get killed than a religious minority in a Muslim country, but, I wonder, for how long? How long will Trump Republicans keep accumulating weapons before they decide it is time to use them, perhaps not just against progressives but against moderates within their own party?

They will never be satisfied, so long as those of us who do not agree with them exist in even barely noticeable numbers.

Altruism: Don't We Wish

I recently heard an interview with Jonathan Haidt, a professor at New York University. He had some really interesting thoughts; and not just thoughts, but results of his own research. Oh how I wish I could agree with him.

Haidt’s research shows that our political convictions—in particular, being liberals vs. conservatives—is based on psychology rather than reason. Of course, liberals have always “known” this about conservatives: those conservatives are just mean people who want to oppress and victimize other people. And conservatives have always “known” this about liberals: those liberals are just immoral people who want to destroy the moral compass of society. But Haidt has shown that liberal vs. conservative biases may come from the deepest part of our brains. Conservatives have a need for order, while liberals relish diversity. This even shows up in the conservative preference for dots on a screen that move in lock-step with one another, and liberal preference for dots moving independently.

But what do we do with this information? It is here that, I fear, Haidt has gone off on a cloud of wishful thinking. If both liberals and conservatives can just recognize that their beliefs have a psychological basis, then they could start to talk and work things out. This is, as I understand it, Haidt’s gospel, as it were. He also says that our society needs both liberals and conservatives, to keep each other from going overboard.

Alas, there are two problems here.

• Liberals are much more likely to agree with Haidt on his basic points. Conservatives will usually reject the very premise that psychology has any influence on their beliefs. They believe that they are God’s chosen and that they are as unlikely to be wrong as for God to not exist. The Holy Spirit has made them conservatives. That being the case, a true conservative will consider it unnecessary or even evil to have a meeting of minds with liberals. Haidt reached his conclusion from his liberal background; can he point to even one conservative scholar who has reached the same conclusion from his or her conservative background? Maybe he can, and if so, I’d like to hear about it.
• Conservatives have a lot more guns piled up, ready to hand, than liberals. How can any parity of discussion be reached when one side is heavily armed and the other side virtually helpless? If you have guns, who needs dialogue?

These are two deadly asymmetries that make discussion impossible between liberals and conservatives, in general. Happily, some individual conservatives and liberals can talk, but this will not happen on a large enough scale to influence the immediate future.

Haidt gave an example of how liberals and conservatives could discuss an issue and perhaps come to a better understanding of one another. The issue: global warming. The liberals could begin a discussion by citing a military general, rather than an environmentalist, who talks about the dangers of global warming. Great idea. Only we climate scientists have already tried this. Defense Secretary Maddis has already said that global warming will cause international conflicts to which the U.S. military must pay close attention. Maddis is not just a conservative, but a hand-picked Trump follower. But the conservative global-warming denialists have either taken no notice or have been hostile toward this prominent conservative. A search of the most prominent denialist website turned up no matches with “Maddis.” The reason is, of course, that the denialists are paid by fossil fuel corporations, or individuals who have gotten rich from them, or foundations started by them.

Haidt also said that, on average, religion makes people more moral. But in order to justify this statement, Haidt had to include, in the term “morality,” those activities that bind the group together, even if it means that the group is hostile toward other groups and causes a great deal of harm to the world in general. I am sure Haidt does not mean to establish a moral equivalence between, say, the United Nations and the Nazis, but I am unclear about how he avoids this equivalence.

This problem is the very same one we encounter when we consider altruism, about which I have often written. Altruistic behavior, encouraged by empathetic feelings, enhances an individual’s evolutionary success within his or her social environment. In ancient times, the social environment was very local. Today, the environment can be the whole world. Natural and cultural selection may favor warm, fuzzy feelings within the group, but may also favor extreme hostility. This hostility can take two forms: the feeling of sweet revenge against cheaters within the group, and extreme hostility toward people outside the group, whether they are cheaters or not. It might be enlightening to think that conservatives draw the line between “us” and “them” more narrowly than do liberals. Haidt may have written about this someplace.

In a related thought, Haidt also said that, according to surveys, conservatives care more about the people around them, while liberals care more about the people of the world. And here is where I have to draw a completely different conclusion from my Oklahoma experiences than Haidt may draw from his New York experiences. The conservatives who live around me in Oklahoma seem to be hostile toward everyone except, maybe, their own families. They dump garbage in their neighbors’ yards and allow their dogs to attack anyone who is out on the street. Many of them fly Confederate flags, which displays their hostility toward even many of their immediate neighbors. And, in this reddest of red states, “Oklahoma is ranked 3rd in the nation for women killed by men in single victim-single offender homicides.” (see data here). Red states are not moral, at home, or in their communities. I wonder if the surveys that Haidt has conducted indicate more about what people like to think about themselves than what they actually do. Prominent conservatives, from Bill O’Reilly on down, proclaim Christian morality while pursuing immoral personal lives.

What I come away with, from Haidt’s statements, is that individual conservatives and liberals might try to understand one another better, after finding some personal common ground. This common ground might be something as strange as a shared adoration for the music of the 1930s country singer Jimmie Rodgers—which I share with a very conservative person I’ve not yet met but if I do I will talk to her about this rather than about politics. But on a national level? I think it is hopeless.

Haidt’s views might be appropriate for a society at equilibrium—that is, one in which liberal and conservative views can mix and respond to one another, reaching some kind of stable balance. But right now, our country is experiencing extreme disequilibrium. This is not true in every country. In France, a country about which I know a little, the conservatives and liberals disagree vividly. But the conservatives do not have stockpiles of guns in France the way they do in America. Even if American conservatives choose not to use these guns, they have the psychological advantage: we all know that they have them.

Why I Am Not a (Public) Christian

I received an email from a man whom I knew back when I was an up-and-coming leader in an organization of Christians in the sciences, the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA). Had I stayed with them, I might have been one of their most prominent members. But my participation became sporadic after 1994, and I attended no meetings after 1999, as my conventional faith gradually fell apart. This man had run across a 1987 article I had written for the ASA journal, in which I struggled with the ideas about why God would allow apparently evil things to happen in the natural world. He wanted to know what had become of me and hoped I was still a Christian.

At first, I intended no response whatever. Not because I have any ill feeling toward the ASA; they are reasonable and sincere people, unlike most self-described evangelical Christians, but because I could write a book in response. I finally decided to write a short but vivid response, parts of which I include below. I decided on a pamphlet-length response, sort of a Thomas Paine instead of an Aquinian Summa Theologica.

“Dear Ted,

I was surprised and pleased to receive your email, but I am afraid that what I have to say won’t be entirely pleasant. I have nothing bad to say about the ASA, or the many fine people I have known in its ranks, which includes you.

But I have entirely distanced myself from any public identification with Christianity. My private views are between me and God, however defined. I am one of those people whom an evangelical Christian would label as an atheist, although I do not affirm this label. Thank God American evangelicals will not be my judges. (Do I hear an amen on that?)

American evangelical Christianity has increasingly become the private playground of the Republican Party and, more recently, worshipers of Donald Trump. To me, American evangelical Christianity has become blasphemous. It’s been like this a long time. When I first worked at The King’s College, it was pretty much a Republican institution. After I left, they hired Dinesh D’Souza as president, mainly because of his political views, ignoring the warning signs that later they had to admit: that he was morally unsound. When I worked at Huntington College, it was another Republican institution, although those were back in the gentle days of George H. W. Bush and Dan Quayle (Huntington was his hometown). Under George W. Bush, American evangelical Christianity was largely supportive of war and torture. And now, the American evangelical church seems to either worship Donald Trump, or to go along with those who do. Where is there any public outcry among evangelicals against Trump committing nearly every sin that is possible for a man to do? For the love of God, I keep my distance from American Christianity and its support of, or its silent acquiescence to, Trump.

Moreover, I live and work in rural Oklahoma, where Christianity is also tied almost completely to the accumulation of automatic weapons. The local church, which sometimes posts condemnatory signs against me (I’m the local evolution professor), sometimes gives away automatic weapons as door prizes for its revivals.

When I teach my classes, I begin the first day by writing on the board, “Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.” I have yet to have any student, although most of them have been drilled in Sunday school, identify the source of this quote. They think of Jesus holding a machine gun, not as getting down on his knees to look at wildflowers. I want to get them to start looking at the natural world around them and marveling at it, regardless of its origin. I give surveys to my classes, which consistently reveal the profound ignorance that my students have about the Bible, the religious ones even more than the non-religious ones.

A recent national survey showed that only 30 percent of white evangelicals, in 2011, thought that a president could be forgiven of moral lapses; today the figure is 72 percent. Evangelicals hated Barack Obama, an astonishingly moral man, while admiring the pussy-grabbing Donald Trump. This has nothing to do with God, Jesus, or the Bible. It’s all about politics, money, power, and guns.

The scientific credo of American evangelical Christianity seems to be, regarding what they call God’s creation, “It’s okay if you pour oil on it, it’s okay if you chop it down, it’s okay if you shoot it, it’s okay if you drive your truck over it, so long as you don’t believe that it evolved.” (Did I mention that I live in Oklahoma?)

Meanwhile even the moderate Christians seem powerless to stand up to the right-wing conquest of Christian faith. Last year, I wrote to every member of the English department at Calvin College (from which my daughter graduated) to ask their views on what constitutes Christian literature. I believe I sent twelve emails. I received not a single answer. I know that the messages were received. I think the faculty must have just been confused: to them, the world consists of Calvinism and atheism, therefore their brains simply had no binding sites for the peptides of my intermediate ideas.

Meanwhile, the ASA has, I assume, remained reasonable. But after a while, I began to feel the futility of agonizing over unanswerable questions. I remember how hard David Wilcox struggled with trying to reconcile Adam and Eve with the record of human evolution. Good try; I admire him still. I think it is safe to say that the ASA has no discernible impact on American Christianity. I have devoted myself instead to writing books (I’m completing number 5 now for fall publication) about topics that might actually help to educate people, for example, how to think scientifically.

Maybe the ASA needs to refocus. When it started, Christianity did not dominate politics. Today a twisted version of Christianity is threatening the world. Maybe the need now is not to get more people to believe in God but to get believers to rediscover peace and love.

Maybe when we move to France, which we plan to do some year soon, I might start going to church again. In France, nobody becomes a Christian for money, power, or sex. The only Christians in France are those who want to be.”

Altruism as Evil: The Work of Donald Trump

Altruism occurs when (usually) animals cooperate with one another, to the benefit of all of them. One kind of altruism, recognized by evolutionary scientists, is indirect reciprocity, in which an individual gains recognition and admiration for doing generous acts—and along with that admiration comes profit. We all want to do business with people who have a public reputation for generosity.

Nearly everyone recognizes altruism as good. Everyone, that is, except Donald Trump. He seems to believe that it is evil to do good things for other people.

One way that more fortunate countries have of helping the less fortunate ones is through the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Educational and scientific exchanges promote world peace, one of the express purposes of the United Nations in general and UNESCO in particular. UNESCO facilitates altruism, especially indirect reciprocity.

But Trump has removed the United States from UNESCO. Not only does he not believe that the United States should promote world peace in this way, but he also appears to hate the reputation for goodness that the United States used to enjoy as a member of UNESCO. It used to be that when the world looked at America, it thought, “they want to help us,” and we got a lot of admiration for that. But today the world looks at us and thinks, “they hate us.” Trump, who is always sneering and insulting everyone else, already promoted this image, and has now backed it up by action. We hereby send the message to the world that, even if you are our friends, we do not need you. We do not even like you.

Trump’s consistent message has been “America first.” But this is not what he meant. Probably every nation puts itself first. What Trump meant, apparently, was “America only.”

America, Trump thinks, does not need the admiration or goodwill of the world. All we need to do is to intimidate them.

The End is Near?

The end is near! The end is near! The Republicans are going to get out their guns and start shooting the rest of us! Oh, and the sky is falling, too.

I know what I would have said to this even a couple of days ago: Yeah, right. The Republicans talk tough, about how there should be absolutely no restrictions at all of any kind for any reason on building up huge stockpiles of any kind of weapon. (Except, oddly enough, nuclear weapons. I haven’t quite figured out why they find a nuclear weapon ban acceptable.) They say that people like the Las Vegas shooter should have been utterly free to build up his stash of weapons in his hotel room, weapons that he had altered from semi-automatic to automatic. They even say that kits that allow semi-automatic weapons to be so altered should be freely available for purchase by everyone, even people with a known history of psychiatric problems. Only after the man starts shooting should law enforcement be allowed to take any action.

But the Republicans aren’t really going to do this. They never plan to actually use all those weapons they are hoarding.

Well, that’s what I thought, until I was in Wal-Mart yesterday. The line consisted of people with huge numbers of things to purchase. The late-middle-aged woman ahead of me saw that I had only a few items, and asked me to go ahead of her. I accepted the offer, since it would help me a great deal and make no difference to her. They were, after all, still waiting for a prescription refill. I realized this was an Oklahoma redneck actually living by the Golden Rule rather than just talking about it. For about a minute, I felt good and thought maybe I have misjudged this rural Oklahoma hotbed of fundamentalist gun nuts.

Then, for no reason that I could tell, she started telling me that her husband had just purchased an AK-47 at a pawn shop for over $400, and she said that lots of people were purchasing them because they knew the price was going up, probably to $700, very soon. I wondered what had prompted her to tell me this. I looked at my T-shirt. Was it a flaming liberal T-shirt? No, it was from the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest in California. My shirt did not say, “Dump Trump, shoot me right here,” with a target painted on it. And the woman’s voice sounded utterly friendly and sincere.

I knew that here was my opportunity to learn something about the people among whom I am embedded, one of the few people in town who does not worship the NRA. I asked her why her husband purchased the AK-47. She talked about how, in her neighborhood down by the lake, there were drug deals going on all over the place. They have up No Trespassing signs but the drug dealers tear them down. I realize that an argument can be made for them to have a gun, but an AK-47? I did not ask this question, however. I just let her talk. I did not ask her in what way gun restrictions might harm them—surely, they have a good reason to get permission for a gun, to protect themselves. Surely her husband could pass a background check.

Finally, I did ask if he planned to actually shoot people with the AK-47. She said absolutely not—she is the kind of person who wouldn’t hurt an animal, much less a human. She even uses glue to repair turtle shells. She said she didn’t want to go to hell for shooting someone. She said her husband would just shoot the AK-47 into the treetops to scare criminals away.

I am assuming her husband (who was standing behind her, his mind a thousand miles away) was not crazy. But if he started shooting his AK-47, what would stop him from shooting just a little bit lower and maybe killing someone who was actually not a criminal? Can we be one hundred percent sure that her husband would never slip, for just a moment, into fury? He doesn’t have to be crazy; he just has to be imperfect, make a single mistake, which is something that all humans do—especially according to religious people like her who believe the mankind is sinful.

Unless, of course, she believes her husband is as perfect as God, which is blasphemy.

Moreover, whoever the person was whom her husband planned to shoot at, but not shoot, might be crazy, and have his own AK-47, and come after them. If I say you should have a background check before getting an AK-47, I do not mean that you are crazy, but that this should be a standard procedure to make sure that only people like you can make such an acquisition. The crazy intruder might shoot them, their children, and the grandchildren the woman was so profusely praising.

The chip reader beeped, so I removed my card and left, without drawing any conclusions from the conversation. The woman said she was stockpiling food since the Big Battle was about to begin. Strangely enough, it was all frozen food, which would decay if electricity was lost during the Big Battle. I let her continue hauling frozen dinners onto the conveyor belt.

You can see why I am now wondering if the Republicans are about ready to start shooting. Here is one couple who would not start The War themselves but who are waiting eagerly for the first sign that they believe will tell them it is time to start shooting.

This is also why I am an agnostic. In America, being a Christian means that you worship the NRA and the Republican Party, and probably Donald Trump also. In America, being a Christian has nothing whatsoever to do with Jesus. This is why I want utterly nothing to do with American Christianity. Maybe, if I move to France, I will start going to church again. In France, Jesus does not carry an AK-47 around.

Republican Psychology

Lots of things have been written about the Republican Brain. I’ve probably written a fair percentage of them myself. Do we need another overview of Republican psychology? Yes, because it has suddenly become the dominant, powerful psychology of the United States. It is now the face we show to the world. Not everyone who identifies as a Republican shares these features, but the powerful ones do. To the powerful Republicans who are now in control, the moderate Republicans are as irrelevant as Democrats.

Here are some of the characteristics that you find in almost all conservative Republicans:

• First, they must believe themselves to be uniquely right in the eyes of God. They cannot believe that there might be more than one right approach. Not only are they right; they are the only ones who are right.
• Second, they must find people to accuse of doing the things they declare to be sinful. Nowadays they are finding lots of people like that: Democrats, Muslims, immigrants, Native Americans.
• Third, they must make their accusations loud and public. The recent Las Vegas shooting was carried out by a 64-year-old man, whose motives remain unclear at the time I post this essay, but right-wing news outlets quickly said that a Muslim extremist had done it. The right-wing fake news was the story that caught the attention of French online media. For good reason, the French think Americans are by and large crazy, though they are willing to make individual exceptions to this rule of thumb. At least my French relatives make an exception for my family.
• Fourth, they have a psychological requirement to be hypocrites, to then do the things they accuse others of doing. One example, nearly trivial but illustrative: In his campaign tweets, Trump accused Obama 38 times of taking time off to go golfing. He promised to not do this, “I’ll be too busy working for you.” But he took golfing vacations (and other vacations at immense taxpayer expense) six times in his first thirty days. Of course, Trump like Gingrich was famous for serial marriages, each starting with an affair while still married to a previous wife. Conservatives condemn this but then must either do it or utterly approve and worship leaders who do. This is an essential step in closing the circle.
• Fifth, they accuse Democrats of being “bleeding hearts,” and they just assume that Democrats will not stand by and let people starve or die of disease. Therefore, the Republicans who run the federal and many state governments will stand by and let Democrats pay for food and health care for the poor out of private donations. This starts a downward spiral in which altruistic Democrats get weaker and poorer as Republicans get richer and stronger.
• Finally, there is no problem in the world, certainly in the country, that cannot be solved by just letting people have as many guns as possible, without any background checks. While it is just as legal for a Democrat to buy an assault weapon as for a Republican, the Republicans buy more. Republicans claim they will never use these guns, but this means that we are supposed to think they are stupidly wasting their money. Notice I never accused them, above, of being stupid. Maybe they won’t have to use their guns, because they know that we all know that they have huge stockpiles of weapons and we do not want to piss them off.

While Republicans are not as evil as Nazis, their psychology is just as dangerous to the future peace of the world as was the Nazi psychology.

Just Under the Surface

In the current political climate, where Christians consider Nazi racism to be one legitimate viewpoint even if they do not themselves embrace it, it is certainly possible to believe that the time is not far away when conservatives will institute an evil reign of terror. It seems unlikely that this will happen, but could Germans in 1933 have guess what Hitler would do? And he did it because they let him.

We are surrounded by nice people all day every day. But occasionally we get glimpses of the evil that hides in human nature and which can come out under the right circumstances. Here are some examples.

First example. I had a student a few years ago who was very smart and dedicated, and very nice. Strange topics sometimes come up in individual conversations during laboratory sessions. For some reason, some of us were talking about Vlad the Impaler and this student, with a straight face, made the case that he deserved to be the national hero of Romania. This student, so nice on the outside, harbored at least this bit of evil in her heart. If she should ever in a future dictatorship be in a position to make decisions about what to do with political dissidents, such as myself, what would she do? I doubt she would come up with the idea, but I also doubt she would resist it if a future dictator liked the idea of impaling his enemies.

Second example. In Durant, Oklahoma, a white man who identified himself as “Goofy” went on a verbal rampage against all Mexicans, and said that World War III is going to begin right here with whites against immigrants. Most white people do not feel the way he does, but there must be at least a couple of million people who do and who can cause an immense amount of terrorism once they get started. All they need is some event that will unleash their currently latent fury, like (in this case) hearing a woman speak Spanish on a cell phone. (The woman has been in America legally for 40 years.).

We all have evil in our hearts; evolution has made human nature both good and bad. While altruism is part of human nature, we must understand that we are altruistic only toward those people whom we consider to be inside of our group. Slowly through history we have expanded the boundaries of what we consider our group to be. To many people, altruism extends not only to all humans of every race, but to higher animals, to trees, etc. But there are millions of people who still consider other races to be outside the realm of altruism and therefore not deserving even the simple decency of being allowed to live.

Even a small terrorist minority can ignite the worst elements of human nature and cause a wave of terrorism. Let’s hope (stupidly, perhaps) that this does not happen. Conservative religion, whether Christian or Muslim, frequently unleashes the worst in human nature.

This essay appeared on my science blog, without the final sentence.

Goodbye Old Folks, Hello Guns

The nursing home down the street from me has closed. The first thing I noticed was that there was no longer any liquid garbage on the street outside. The nursing home staff always poured lots of uncontained liquid garbage into dumpsters, which would then leak out all over the street and cause a stench. (Isn’t this against the law? At least they did not pour uncontained shit into the dumpster, as far as I know). I noticed that the street was not an open sewer. It was only then that I noticed that the parking lot was usually empty, except when it had pickup trucks of the kind that handymen use.

This nursing home is run by the local fundamentalist church. Apparently, they spread themselves too thin by running this nursing home. They apparently need to focus their efforts. And I am pretty sure what those efforts are. They mainly want to focus on getting their members to buy guns and have them ready to use, perhaps in the near future. I do not know this, but I have evidence that suggests it. This was the church that sponsored what they called a freedom rally a few years ago. The door prize was an assault weapon. By shutting down the nursing home, which I suspect was plagued by health code violations, this church can afford more assault weapons.

Another thing they can focus on is to verbally attack evolutionary scientists like me. This is the church that put on their marquee, “Evolution: The science of calling God a liar.” They have guns; I am their enemy, they think; should I be scared? Maybe. I am certainly vigilant. I keep a low profile. I never put bumper stickers on my car, and seldom put campaign posters in my lawn. (I did once. It was a sign urging a no vote on state question 777, which gave almost unlimited power to agribusiness corporations. Amazingly enough, the question was defeated.) I still walk to work, right out in the open, sometimes wearing an evolution shirt, but I am ready to start driving, by an alternate route, if necessary.

Rural Oklahoma fundamentalists and racists have a pent-up anger that needs only a slight stimulus in order to erupt. Just a couple of days ago, a Durant, Oklahoma man went on a verbal rampage against a Mexican woman, cursing her for being an immigrant and speaking Spanish. (She was indeed an immigrant, but has resided in America legally for 40 years.) He threatened to start World War Three over immigration. The woman shot a video, which was aired on a local news channel.

Of course, that lone crazy man cannot start a war by himself, and most people just considered him batshit. But there is A LOT of pent-up anger and violence in millions of conservatives in America. All they need is the right stimulus, one big enough to begin a chain reaction of fury and religious zeal. We cannot know when that might occur. They could not start a war, but they could wreak a devastating amount of terrorism; this is something that just a few thousand of them could do—it would not require a mass uprising.

What might the stimulus be? Fundamentalist pastors claim that they speak the very words of God, and their “sheeple” follow them blindly, not even reading their Bibles. Some of these churches celebrate and encourage the hoarding of assault weapons. If a fundamentalist pastor wanted to start a terrorist uprising, there is not much that could stop him.

October update: They were just cleaning out the old folks home; the old folks are back.

The Evolution of Language...and Manipulation

What are the evolutionary purposes of language? Most people would, without further thought, assume that the principal purpose of language is communication of information. That is, indeed, one of its purposes; but, I believe, it is a secondary purpose. The primary purpose of language is social interaction: to influence others to do what you want them to do, to create a good (or bad) impression of yourself in the minds of others, to identify yourself as a member of their particular group.

This is the principal reason that there are languages, plural. Each “tribe” even today has its own language. These languages are much more complex than they have to be, and the main reason is that if you cannot master the complexities of the language and its pronunciation, you are probably an outsider.

But even within a society, language is primarily a tool of social interaction, and often of manipulation. We can see this in the current eruption of white supremacist and neo-Nazi sentiments in the United States. The use of these terms would prejudice a reader against them, and I would avoid them, except that the right-wing extremists are proud of them. Some of them carry Nazi flags, and the others allow them to.

1.      When a white supremacist rammed his car into a crowd of anti-Nazi protesters in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017 [http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/18/us/charlottesville-james-alex-fields-charges/index.html], President Trump vacillated between condemning neo-Nazi activities and considering them to be merely part of the spectrum of political opinion. At no point did he or any other member of his administration call this an act of terrorism. But it fits all definitions of terrorism. The terrorist was not targeting a particular individual with his car; he was attempting to create terror among the people who were protesting against the white supremacists. And he used deadly force. If he had been Muslim, he would have been instantly branded as a terrorist. The selective use of the word “terrorist” against Muslims but never using against white Christian extremists is a clear use of manipulative language.

2.      The white supremacists call their cause and their rallies “free speech rallies” rather than neo-Nazi or white supremacist rallies. By getting millions of people to use this term for their activities, they project the message that, “You can’t possibly be against free speech! So you have to allow us to shout out our hatred against our fellow citizens.”

Technically, they have the legal right to say whatever they want to, so long as they do not incite people to violent action. But they are evil. We cannot allow them to depict their actions as mere defenses of free speech. All of us who are not aspiring Nazis must keep calling these people, and all who sympathize with them or speak out in their defense, what they are: the modern defenders of Adolf Hitler.

Some conservatives have tried to excuse the terrorist by saying that he had suffered abuse as a child. I have no opinion about this. But a black man could not have used this excuse.

Hitler himself was a master of language manipulation. (He wasn’t a master of much else. His leadership was disastrously delusional and destructive for his own German people, for example.) Most of us think of the phrase “Deutschland über alles” (Germany over all) as being Hitler’s phrase for world domination. But it was originally used to unite the German kingdoms (such as Saxony and Bavaria) into a single country: Germany was more important than its constituent kingdoms. Hitler stole the phrase and all the sympathy that went with it. Also, if Hitler had publicly proclaimed that he planned to slaughter millions of Jews, if he had called it an attempt at extermination, he would have had much less support from the German people. But he called it a “solution,” and who wouldn’t be in favor of this? A person is as likely to support a “solution” as “free speech.”

Political conservatives hate, viscerally hate, our modern language practices in which we attempt to counteract the racism of the past. They call it “political correctness,” which implies that anyone who does not use racist terms is doing so only for political influence. Our use of “black” instead of “nigger” can only mean, to conservatives, that we want political power; they think it cannot possibly be because we want to show respect and love to people who people who have been oppressed and slaughtered in the recent past. Conservatives want to refer to what happened in Tulsa in 1921 as a race riot, implying that black people were doing the killing and burning. In reality, it was a white mob hunting down and shooting blacks. Prominent Tulsan and KKK member W. Tate Brady was pleased to see a black man being dragged behind a car with a noose around his neck. It is not “political correctness” that makes us refer to the 1921 incident as a massacre or as an act of terrorism rather than a riot. It is a desire for truth, and to try to make up for the white massacre of blacks in the recent past.

To test the hypothesis of “language exists largely for manipulation,” all we need to do is see the spectacular failure of invented languages. Esperanto was invented to create world peace under the misguided notion that a common language will prevent miscommunication. But liars can lie in Esperanto. Charles Bliss created a system of symbolic communication that, he believed, would prevent language from being manipulated. He printed up six thousand copies of his book and sent them to government and other leaders all over the world, and got no response whatever, until some nurses noticed that this system might help children with cerebral palsy, who cannot communicate what they are thinking, to connect with the world. Bliss’s system thereby escaped extinction. But soon it was being used, not in place of other languages, but as a way of learning them, leading right back to the manipulation that Bliss, an escapee from World War Two, hated so much.

So when humans have created new languages for the express purpose of avoiding social manipulation, the new languages become the venues of social manipulation. This is an experimental confirmation of the hypothesis that languages evolved for social interactions, one important component of which is manipulation.

And there is nothing we can do about it, other than to keep using language in such a way as to try to counteract evil people from using their words to oppress others in their attempt to revive Nazi sentiments and make them palatable.

I also posted this essay on my science blog.

After posting a video on this topic, I received a comment saying that the white supremacist in the car was merely trying to get out of the crowd, and that his car was being attacked by leftist protestors. Well, of course this is what happened, AFTER he drove his car at high speed into the crowd. Of course his car was attacked AFTER he committed his act of terrorism. This is obvious to anyone who has seen the videos, such as this one. The fact that there was someone even within my small circle of YouTube viewers who believes that it is okay for a white supremacist to ram his car into protestors, that killing someone is a form of free speech, is frightening. My video, so far, has had only 18 views, and this comment came from one of this small number of viewers. Extrapolating to the total adult population of America, this means that there are approximately a half million right-wingers in America who believe that such action is justified. There might be more, as my videos tend to be viewed by progressives.

Christians Worship Trump

In America today, Christianity consists entirely of the worship of Donald Trump. Christians believe that everything Trump says is correct and must be believed, is good and must be obeyed. The Bible, and Jesus, are totally irrelevant to modern American Christianity.

Of course, you will immediately say that there are millions of Christians regarding whom this statement is incorrect. And you would be right, of course. I happen to know a few and so do you. But there are many other millions of Christians who loudly proclaim the near-divinity of Donald Trump.

What I have chosen to do, for the sake of simplicity, is to assume that all Christians are worshipers of Trump. I will then make individual exceptions for those Christians who make a public denunciation of Trump in some way or other. If you are a Christian who does not worship Trump, your denunciation must be public, as on Facebook, or a blog. Something that is searchable on the internet. You cannot secretly worship Jesus while publicly worshiping Trump.

I realize that it is something of a risk to identify yourself as a Christian who denounces Trump. His followers have guns and love them. But the danger is not nearly as great now as it will be later, once Trump’s worshipers have more power. And your public denunciation is likely to have more of an effect now than later.

The German churches largely went along with Hitler. If they had stood up to him in 1933, history might have been different. But by 1939 it was no longer possible for the churches to change anything. By then, not just Germans but Vichy French and other sympathizers were committing acts of unspeakable cruelty—acts that they might sincerely have not wanted to commit—while claiming that they were just following orders.

Some possible places to post your opposition to Trump:

• The whitehouse.gov website (keep a copy)
• On Facebook
• Your blog

So if you identify yourself to me as a Christian, I will assume that you worship Trump and wish Him to be the great spiritual leader of America. But I will ask you if you have publicly denounced Trump, and where you posted your statement. If you can answer that question, then I will concede that you are a Christian. Otherwise I can only assume that you are a worshiper of Trump, with whom for my own personal safety I must communicate as little as possible.

So, You Want the Gospel?

So, you want the Gospel? I wouldn’t suggest going to church to find it. Just listento this song by Glen Campbell, who died yesterday.

Thoughtful Quotes from All the Light We Cannot See

One of the best books I have recently read is All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, which was a best-seller last year. It is so well-written and thoughtful that it was compelling despite an adventurously fragmented arrangement of short chapters. A blind French girl and a young Nazi radio operator were both very aware that the universe is full of photons that we must perceive with something other than our eyes.

“Why bother to make music when the silence and wind are so much larger?”

“...she hears the bones of dead whales stir five leagues below, their marrow offering a century of food for cities of creatures who will live their whole lives and never see a photon sent from the sun.”

“But God is only a white cold eye, a quarter-moon poised above the smoke, blinking, blinking as the city is gradually pounded to dust.”

Dinosaur Trackways on the Blank Slate of the Mind

I have posted this essay on my science blog as well, but I include a final paragraph on this blog that was not on the science blog.

The last couple of days, I have had the privilege of working, again, with Glen Kuban down in the bed of the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas (Dinosaur Valley State Park). Usually we work alone, or with a couple of other people, but this time there was a little crowd. A BBC film crew brought their cameras and even a photographic drone to get video footage of the dinosaur trackways, which I have written about numerous times previously in this blog, for example here). They also came to interview Glen, who has worked on these tracks (and knows each footprint by name) for 37 years, and he will not get some worldwide recognition for the work he has done. Congratulations, Glen! You deserve it.

Watch for the BBC video when it comes out. It will be called Rediscovering T Rex. The trackways in the park are not T. rex, but there are very few verified footprints of T. rex. But in the Paluxy river bed you can see long trackways of Acrocanthosaurus, which was similar to T. rex in many ways. The BBC does not yet have an American distributor for this video, so far only Canada and France, but I’ll bet that within a year or so you can find the video on Amazon or your local library.

I have posted a YouTube video of Glen and the film crew, if you want to experience what it was like to be there.

We were at the trackway site that was made infamous in the 1970s-era creationist movie Footprints in Stone, where creationists claimed that human footprints overlapped dinosaur footprints, thus proving, they claimed, that the entire evolutionary timetable of Earth history was wrong. The evidence of human footprints in 110-million-year-old mud (now limestone) was skimpy and some of it faked. Most creationists, even those who have not publicly disavowed the “manprints of the Paluxy,” pretty much ignore them. The son of the producer of the creationist movie, when he discovered that his father had misled his viewers about these footprints, destroyed all remaining copies of the movie. There was no discussion of this uniquely American controversy with the BBC crew, even though they knew about it, because it is such a dead issue even among creationists; certainly European viewers would wonder why anyone took so much as two breaths to talk about the supposed man-prints.

But there are still passionate creationists, mostly in the Glen Rose vicinity, who believe that the supposed man-tracks are real and that they prove that not only are all evolutionary scientists wrong, but even most creationists. They are a crazy little cult. They still have a museum right near the state park, although it appears to be on the skids and is now only open two days a week. I have posted essays in this blog about the Mantrack cult in the past (for example here). The state park personnel who were with Glen, me, and the BBC crew told me that this little cult has so effectively spread the hoax that lots of visitors still ask them how to find the man-tracks. It gets pretty intense sometimes, and rather than to create a confrontation, the park personnel sometimes have to simply walk away or busy themselves with some other park visitor.

We sort of expected that some members of this cult would come and try to disrupt the BBC filming. This did not happen, however, perhaps because there were a half dozen park employees on the scene. This track site is hard to find but the cult members, some of whom own adjacent land, can get there. They act as if they also own the river bed, and have in the past tried to keep Glen from studying the tracks. Actually, the river bed belongs to the state of Texas.

But one of the cult members came by, claiming that he was taking photographs for the City of Glen Rose. I very much doubt that the city government actually sent him, however. They might have posted some of his photos in the past, but he was acting in no official capacity. Of course, this man, whose name I forgot, and just as well, started going through his little speech about how belief in the man-tracks took less faith than belief in what he called “strict evolution.” Glen had told me beforehand almost verbatim what this little speech would be. It is as if the cult members are programmed to give their little speeches, and they will not respond to anything you say. They act as if they are brainwashed.

But that was not actually the precipitating event. The man started by saying that a cold front was coming through this weekend, and that it would only be about 92 degrees instead of the normal 97 degrees. This, he claimed, disproved the entire science of global warming. As I am one of the climate scientists that Donald Trump hates and Emmanuel Macron loves, I had to point out that this was an invalid conclusion. Global warming does not mean that temperatures never decrease; it means that they increase more, and more often, than they decrease. Well, this was all the cue he needed to self-identify as a right-wing extremist (or words to that effect; I did not yet so label him) and launch into his speech.

This man went on to comment on the fact that paleontologists have stopped using the genus name Paluxysaurus and started using Sauroposeidon instead. This shows, said the man, that scientists are wrong about this and, why not, everything else also. But changing names of organisms reflects the ongoing process of coming to better understand the evolutionary history of the organisms. And, of course, science advances because scientists make mistakes and then learn from them, something that religious cults almost by definition cannot do. Cults believe themselves to be directly inspired by God, and to admit one mistake totally undermines their reason for being.

I wish to make two points from this. First, the religious fundamentalists are now attacking all of science and education on two fronts. Formerly, they focused all their attention on evolution. Now, they also consider climate scientists to be servants of Satan. This is why scientific and educational organizations, all the way from national and international organizations such as the AAAS and NCSE to local ones such as the Oklahoma Academy of Science and Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education, of both of which organizations I am a past president, disseminate as much information about climate science as about evolutionary science.

The second point explains the title of this essay. The lumpy limestone of Dinosaur Valley State Park has proven to be one of the most creative blank slates upon which a religious cult can write its own version of the history of the universe. The dinosaur footprints are real enough. The supposed man-tracks are incomplete dinosaur footprints. On some of these prints, the dinosaur toes have eroded away. On others, the creationists have deliberately ignored the dinosaur toe prints. Early creationists film footage and notes show clearly that they knew the dinosaur toe marks were present. In a few infamous instances, creationists have even carved human toes on the dinosaur prints, or carved entire fake human footprints in the limestone. Rather than getting insights from the evidence in the limestone, they have used the limestone as a blank notebook on which to write their own version of reality, a version not even shared by most creationists.

It is unclear whether these cult members are dangerous. Of the hundreds of videos I have posted on my Darwin Youtube channel, the only ones on which rabidly angry comments have been posted were those in which I showed Glen Kuban at work in the Paluxy riverbed. A couple of times I have wondered whether to report these creationists to the FBI, but their comments were just short of personal threat. Of course, there were atheist comments also, which insulted the creationists. The creationist comments did not threaten the atheist commentators, Glen, or myself with any violence; they merely hoped that God would rain down fire and brimstone from the sky to destroy us and our children, that’s all. The blank pages of limestone on which this cult writes its version of reality includes at least the hope that everyone who disagrees with them will be destroyed.

I must now add that I have had many of the same experiences as many of the readers of this blog. We have been driven away from doctrinal religions because of fundamentalists and the rabidly violent things that they believe. Is this fair? Should I reject Christianity because of fundamentalists who believe that God wants them to have their guns ready to use against the rest of us? Of course there are members of every religion who esteem the pathway of peace. There are lots of churches, and mosques, that proclaim peace and love. Should they be held guilty for what their bloodthirsty co-religionists do and say? No, but here is the problem. There is nothing within the structure of religion itself, particularly not the doctrinal ones such as Christianity or Islam, that prevents hatred and violence. I consider peaceful Christians and Muslims to be enablers of the violent ones because they believe that their scriptures are, in fact, the sword of the Lord. I have the greatest esteem for Jesus of Nazareth, even while I totally reject Christianity. Christianity is a system of violence and oppression that has falsely taken the name of Jesus as justification for its destructive evils.

Religion and Human Misery, Worldwide and Throughout History

Throughout prehistory and history, religion has been a major source of human misery. Since the beginning of our species, religion has allowed some members of a society, and some societies, to dominate others, because they claim the authority of their god to do so. Most, if not all, religion is a delusion, but cultural selection (the social equivalent of natural selection) has favored it not because it was true but because it provided fitness benefits to its practitioners.

This delusion has been prevalent in the human species since the beginning. Civilization developed independently and differently in the Old World and the New World, but in both cases religion allowed powerful people in the cities to dominate masses of teeming poor and miserable victims. The list of atrocities carried out by the world’s first kings—who ruled more than just their village or small confederation of villages—is impossible for any sane human to comprehend all at once. Babylonian kings flayed their victims alive. Even the reputedly moral Israelites put whole cities to the sword. Chinese emperors carried out mass executions. African kings made some of their armies march into the sea and drown. And in America? More presently.

Peter Watson wrote The Great Divide back in 2011. This book is a quixotic quest to make sense out of all human history. This prolific writer must be a genius but his task was impossible. However, his book did help me understand one thing a little better. What caused history to take a different trajectory in the Old World from the New?

The major answers to these questions were, to my understanding, not very different in Watson’s book than in the more famous books (Guns Germs and Steel and Collapse) by Jared Diamond. The Old World had wild plants that could easily be bred into crops; wild animals that could easily be bred into livestock; and a geography that allowed easy movement of technologies and people east and west along latitudinal lines. North and south movement was more difficult because of climatic differences, something that was particularly important for crops. Agricultural civilization developed in both hemispheres, but much later in America, which is much narrower, especially in tropical Mesoamerica. New technologies diffused very slowly from one part of the New World to another.

But Watson also wrote about something I’d not considered: religion. He gave examples, just a few from countless ones, of the cruelties imposed in the name of religion. But something happened in the Old World that was different from the New.

All religions, Watson explains, began as shamanistic religions, in which a religious cult leader would go into a trance and believe himself or herself to be transformed into a spirit animal, or at least convince others of it.

In the Old World, this gradually transformed into religions in which there were fewer and fewer, and more powerful, gods, with priests who were not shamans. This was associated with the rise of agricultural civilizations, in which kings, standing in for gods, imposed order.

But in the New World, there were fewer agricultural civilizations, and they rose later: the Mound Builders, the civilizations of Mexico and of Peru. And, something I’d not considered, the New World has far more species of hallucinogenic plants. Priests continued to be ceremonial shamans using hallucinogens to connect with the spirit world in America long after it had mostly stopped in the Old World. (Indeed, in the Old World, starting in several places independently about 500 BCE, many people began challenging religious tradition with demands for justice and morality, examples being the Old Testament prophets, Buddhism, and Taoism.) I’d also not considered that Old World people could not get stoned as much—they preferred mild drugs like alcohol—because if they did it would be dangerous for them to handle large livestock animals, animals that the New World inhabitants did not have.

And it wasn’t just hallucinogens; in the Native American civilizations, people induced a trance state by self-brutalization. The Spanish conquistadors saw a king and queen come out and, in public, lacerate themselves: he drew a rope through his own penis, she through her tongue. Once there was a contest to see how many sticks a man could run through his tongue; the winner pierced his tongue with 405 sticks. In Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest, there were 1500 ball courts. In these games, the losing team was sacrificed, and sometimes the winning team also. Archaeological evidence indicates that at the major city in North America before the European invasion, Cahokia (in modern Illinois), when one of the chiefs died, his relatives were killed also, as well as fifty women aged 15 to 18 years of age.

Some of what we know about the extremes of religion in ancient America come from their own records (those that the earliest Spaniards did not burn); but it is also based on historical observation, and not just by the conquistadors. In 1720, a French explorer, Le Page du Pratz, was visiting a Natchez village, when the chief died. At his funeral, the chief’s two wives and six concubines were stupefied then strangled. At least, in North America, the cruelties were less extreme than those I describe below.

Much has been written about the cruelty of the conquistadors who massacred and enslaved the Native Americans, starting with Columbus’s expedition. I have written a lot of it myself. I have repeatedly called for the elimination of Columbus Day. This is all true. But the Aztecs and Incas were not peaceful civilizations hacked to pieces by demonic Europeans. If anything, the Native American civilizations had continued the self-feeding spiral of religious cruelty far beyond anything that had evolved in the Old World. In the Old World, human sacrifice stopped. Had it continued, and had it undergone an autocatalytic explosion, it would have produced something like what the Aztecs and Incas had.

Aztec warriors would raid more and more distant towns and bring the captives to Tenochtitlán. Some warriors would flay the skin from the victims and then wear it until it rotted away, which was a religious display of renewal and resurrection after death. Warriors were given the flayed skin of girls to wear. Every student of history has learned about the Aztec sacrifices in which the priests cut out the still-beating hearts of victims, eviscerated them, rolled their bodies down the pyramid steps, then cut off and made stew out of the limbs. This was often after pulling out the teeth and fingernails of the captives. Hundreds of children were sacrificed, particularly by the Incas, after cutting their ears off.

Both the Aztecs and the Incas had to keep expanding their territories not because they needed food for an expanding population, or because of the desire to rule larger empires. Indeed, with no horses or wheeled vehicles, a central priestly government simply could not control a large empire, nor could they import heavy tributes or perishable food. (Old World agriculture produced mostly grains, while New World agriculture produced mostly perishable products, except dried corn, which was actually a late product.) Almost all that they wanted was sacrificial victims with which to feed their ravenous, unpredictable, and horrible gods. Sacrifices intensified, starting about 1440 CE (by the Mayan calendar) and continuing until the conquest in 1521. By the time of conquest, the Aztecs were processing twenty thousand victims a year. It was a spiral of cosmic paranoia. They were worried that their sun good, Huitzilopochtli, might run out of food; this was at a time when the sun was, in fact, getting dimmer because of eruptions of volcanoes such as Popo (Popocateptl) not far away from the Aztec capital city. There was no American equivalent of a supreme God who could be satisfied with prescribed animal sacrifices. While the Old World had storms and droughts and volcanoes, the New World was rife with them. The Native Americans were much more afraid of their gods than the Eurasians had ever been of theirs.

Some Pre-Columbians could see that human sacrifice was becoming crazily excessive. The Toltec leader Topiltzin tried to stop human sacrifice, but failed.

Their only desperate hope to escape from this cycle of bloodshed appeared to be that the god Quetzalcoatl would come from oversees and rescue them. Cortez came, and the Aztecs thought that he must be Quetzalcoatl.

Meanwhile, the conquerors from the Old World were just as evil, with the exception of not having human sacrifice. The Spaniards roasted their captives alive, or cut off their noses, lips, or chins. Many European scholars of many lands (Juan Sepúlveda, Cornelius de Pauw, Oliver Goldsmith, etc. etc.) wrote that Native Americans were little more than animals and had no right to not be killed. A few, like Bartholomé de las Casas, stood up for the humanity of the natives.

When the Old World met the new, religiously-inspired massacre met religiously-inspired human sacrifice. Not only in society after society, but by entirely separate evolutionary development in the two hemispheres, religion facilitated, even demanded, the greatest cruelties the human mind could devise.

What do we do about it? Do we give up religion? Can we? Would it change anything? I do not have time to write, nor you to read, any attempt at answering that question right now.