The Jesus Algorithm

Evangelical Christians claim to love Jesus. But to them, Jesus is not a person. He is an algorithm.

An algorithm is a formula or computer code that controls something that happens, for example, that determines what the computer does. It has a certain function, and is valued just for that function. The algorithm certainly cannot decide for itself what to do.

To evangelicals, Jesus has just one function. He forgives sins. You are a sinner, they say, and what you need to do is to press control alt J to activate the Jesus algorithm. If you say the right words, all of your sins are totally forgiven, but if you do not, you are damned. Jesus himself has no say in the matter, any more than a computer does. If you are a good person, who obeys the Golden Rule, and truly loves other people, that does not matter. Jesus is not permitted to forgive or save you. And if you use control alt J, Jesus must forgive you even if he sees into your heart and knows that you are going to just go and do the sinful act again. To evangelicals, Jesus has no intelligence or personality. You have leeway for judgment. Jesus does not.

This is why Donald Trump is the darling of evangelicals despite his numerous, large, and ongoing sins. He uses the algorithm, or maybe has an intern do it for him.

It gets worse. Evangelicals (particularly the televangelists) fantasize that they have exclusive access to the keyboard. A Democrat cannot slip in and press control alt J. If you are a Democrat, you are damned, and there is nothing you can do about it. Republicans, on the other hand, have unlimited access to the keyboard. In fact, most of them seem to have special Cheap Grace apps on their phones that repents of their sins every ten microseconds, so that before they even realized they have sinned, they have asked forgiveness, which God is obligated to give. (Cheap Grace is a term invented by theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to refer to this kind of thoughtless repentance that does not cost anything in your life. Back in the 1970s, when I was an evangelical, we all respected Bonhoeffer, whom the Nazis executed. I guess evangelicals don’t do that anymore.)

And God? He’s totally out of the picture. He has given all of his authority to Jesus, who is completely under the control of the evangelicals.

I greatly admire, and love, the Jesus who said “Behold the lilies of the field...even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these” and “Ask not what your country can do for you...” Oh, wait, that second one was John F. Kennedy. I think I would really enjoy knowing Jesus, if only the evangelicals did not keep him in a box like a veal calf and prevent him from having any personality.

Cynicism for Fun, Health, and Profit, part two. Cynicism is not Paranoia

I waited for the light to change at an intersection in Tulsa. Dramatic music; you know what is going to happen next. When the green left-turn signal came on, I slowly proceeded into the intersection. Another car shot through the intersection against a red light and nearly collided with me. Had I not waited a couple of seconds before entering the intersection, I would not be writing this, unless possibly by using one of those Stephen-Hawking devices. Maybe I could have bought his, once he didn’t need it any more. I slammed on my brakes and avoided death. Had I simply followed the rules, I would be dead. I hesitated a couple of seconds, and am intact. Something similar happened scarcely over a year ago, when a big pickup truck backed up from a driveway at full speed and collided with my previous car, totaling it but leaving me uninjured. I was already being cautious before my most recent accident; but it was at that moment that I decided to become a cynic.

Cynicism is the expectation that bad things are going to happen to you. In the example above, a cautious person waits a couple of seconds before driving into an intersection; a cynic waits maybe four seconds before doing so. A cautious person looks at the other cars, as I did. All the other cars had stopped for the red light. The car that ran the light came from behind them at full speed and was invisible until the last moment. The cautious person dies; the cynic lives.

The cynic lives and is happy. This is because, if the event that the cynic feared occurs, he or she is ready to take evasive action. If the event does not occur, he or she can sigh in relief. Cynicism is the precautionary principle applied in a consistent and thoughtful way.

Paranoia, on the other hand, is a delusion. The paranoid person assumes everyone else, and all the forces of nature, are focusing malicious intent on them personally. There is no way that this could be true. There is no network of physical laws that could work this way.

In fact, it is also paranoia to think that the laws of nature conspire against anybody, not just you. “Don’t tempt fate” is a statement of paranoia, not cynicism.

Of course, evolution has instilled in our brains a mild paranoia. The shadows of leaves swaying in the wind, which you see from the corner of your eye, do not attract your conscious attention. But if one of the shadows moves a little differently from the others, it instantly grabs your attention. This attention occurs faster than conscious thought is possible and is accompanied by a brief rush of terror. A shadow that moves differently may be a predator ready to leap on you. Today, that predator is most likely to be another human being. This is an instinct that may have begun hundreds of millions of years ago when a clam shut its shell when a shadow, which may have been a predator detected by its simple eyes, passed overhead.

Cynicism, at the intense end of the scale, grades into paranoia. But unlike mid-range cynicism, paranoia makes you unhappy. The paranoid person assumes that the forces of man (less frequently, woman) and nature are a constant and focused threat, and happiness never follows when the anticipated evil does not occur. And the constant worry can make you sick. Worry actually depresses the immune system, leaving you vulnerable to infections that you might otherwise avoid. Moreover, it is very unlikely that the paranoid person avoids catastrophes any more often than does a healthy cynic.

Cynicism is not quite the same as pessimism. Pessimism is a lazy assumption that bad things will happen more than you expect that they will. We joke about it and call it Murphy’s Law. We also trivialize it by saying that a pessimist sees the glass as half empty, while the optimist sees it as being half full. The implication is that a glass, half of whose volume is filled, can be either half full or half empty, so you might as well say it is half full. But whether the glass is half full or half empty depends on what is happening. If the glass is getting fuller, then it is half full; if the fluid is being lost, the glass is half empty. In fact, a glass that is “almost empty” can be accurately described as “becoming full” in the first case. A cynic does not make lazy or trivial assumptions. The cynic wants to know more information. In the absence of such information, the cynic assumes the glass may be losing its contents, and it is time to make preparations for the time when it may be empty. Cynicism is an intelligent and thoughtful pessimism.

The half-full half-empty error applies to the world in general. The cynic anticipates that bad things are always ready to happen, for example while waiting at a stoplight. This does not mean that most drivers are evil or careless. It does not mean that half of them are. It does not even mean that very many of them are. The cynic recognizes, however, that even if only one in a hundred drivers is evil or careless, then you run the risk of a deadly collision once in every one hundred red lights. It does not take very many days to accumulate those one hundred intersections. The cynic does not assume most people, or even very many people, are bad, but just that the number is not zero.

Cynicism can lead to economic and legal policies that help to make us safer and happier. One example is no-fault insurance. This is the kind of insurance policy, on the government level, in which the insurance companies of both drivers pay equally for the resulting damage. It avoids the costs and delays of litigation. Of course, if significant injury is involved, the negligent (or evil) driver must be punished in some realistically-enforceable way. No-fault insurance assumes that there are a large number of negligent (or evil) drivers, and to litigate all of them would be impossible. My sense of justice flares up against this kind of policy. The driver who causes the accident should be penalized. I believe this very strongly. But no-fault insurance might be the only workable policy. Of course, insurance companies need to know which drivers repeatedly cause collisions so that they can charge higher rates or deny coverage. This, too, is a healthy cynical policy. Insurance companies know that, without charging higher rates for careless drivers, they will lose a lot of money.

Another example of cynicism at work is the development of driverless cars. The technology remains imperfect, and will always be so, but already it has a better safety record than that of human drivers. Its main advantage is to keep careless drivers from endangering other people and their property. But it also helps to protect responsible drivers who might make an unavoidable error, such as sneezing at the wrong time. A cynic assumes that everyone can make mistakes.

Cynicism, therefore, is not a personalized paranoia nor is it a lazy pessimism. It is a healthy anticipation of the countless evils that surround us.

Cynicism for Fun, Health, and Profit Part One.

I here begin a series of essays about the philosophy of cynicism—not necessarily the same as the ancient philosophy by that name, and certainly not in the general sense with which the word is used today. These are episodic thoughts rather than a reasoned argument such as I will develop for my eventual book on the subject.

When you think of a cynic, you probably think of a person who assumes the worst about anyone he or she does not personally know well, that is, about almost everybody else in society, and assumes that the world is out to get them, and that the worst thing that can possibly happen always will. This person, you assume, must be sad and depressed, certainly someone you would not want to know.

Well, there are cynics like that. But that is not what I here propose. What I will now describe is empowerment through cynicism: how cynicism can make you live better and be happier.

Really.

The first step is to recognize that cynicism is the correct interpretation of the facts of daily life, politics, and the economy. Without cynicism, when the inevitable catastrophes come, you will be shocked off of your feet and incapacitated with impotent anger, followed by dejection, and probably by wild drunkenness. If you are a cynic, you will not be taken by surprise. Whatever you need to do next, whether it is important work or truly refreshing recreation, you will be ready to do it right away.

The second step is to use the knowledge conferred by cynicism to make preparations to keep yourself safe. If you know that our politicians are leading us toward a white supremacist totalitarian state, you can make preparations; some people can make more, some less. You might want to move out of a red state if you live in one, or even out of the country, while you have plenty of time to make the transition smoothly, rather than waiting until you have to be a refugee. A cynic knows not to trust anything a major financial corporation says. Most of us already drive defensively, but a cynical driver knows that a small but significant number of other drivers would just as soon kill you as not. If you drive like a cynic, you are less likely to be their victim. By letting cynicism forewarn you of even just a few of the nearly infinite number of evils that await you, you can be able to instantly react to them in a constructive fashion.

The third step is that, by acting pre-emptively, you can feel more in control. A great deal of modern suffering comes with feeling that you have no control, utterly no control, over the circumstances of your life. A cynic, acting pre-emptively, avoids this feeling precisely because he or she IS more in control of the circumstances of life.

The fourth step is that, by feeling more in control, you can stop worrying about all the things that might happen. You know they are going to happen; you are ready for them; you are in control, as much as any wretched weak human being can be; now you can focus on the big picture—getting the most out of life, enjoying every day. Take a walk. You know that dozens of dog walkers have left piles of dog shit on the path; so, you frequently look down, and that way you don’t step in them. There’s nothing like a steaming pile of dog shit on your shoes to ruin a nice walk. A cynic would never let that happen. We all know that a lot of people let their dogs poop in public parks; but here in Tulsa I have seen people scooping dog poop out of their yards into public parks. This is a deliberate insult against one’s fellow citizens. But the cynic smiles and says, “I was expecting this.”

You can even enhance your sense of humor. Think about some of the most lovable, and the most effective cynics: Lewis Black, Paula Poundstone, Dave Barry, and the late George Carlin. They knew or know how to make cynicism work for them. (And earn them some money too. Please buy my book on this topic when it comes out.)

Fifth and last, if there is a God in Heaven, it must be a kind of God Who does nothing to prevent all these evil things, large and small, from happening. Back before I was a cynic, when I expected the world to make sense and God to help us out, even just a teeny weeny little bit, I spent a lot of time in agony over the evils of the world. Now I seldom think about it, except when I am writing essays like this.

In upcoming essays, I am going to focus on some specific and, I hope, interesting examples of cynicism at work.

Religion and the Immune System

A healthy skepticism is like a healthy immune system. Skepticism allows the thinker to defend him or herself from attacks of stupidity and destructive thoughts. But it is not over-reactive: it does not, or should not, lead the thinker to be deeply suspicious of and react against everything. Skepticism is also like the immune system in the way it develops. A mind, like an immune system, may be initially naïve against an initial assault, whether of antigens or of stupid ideas, but upon second contact, antibodies and skepticism react quickly enough that hardly any discomfort or danger occurs. I refer to skepticism, not militant atheism.

In contrast, religion is like a dysfunctional immune system. It is dysfunctional in both extremes. First, religion lowers a person’s defenses so that the craziest and most brutal ideas can slip or march right into the brain. If a revered religious leader says you should believe something, then you just might believe it, even without evidence, even against evidence, even against every feeling of altruism and empathy. Religious services, in particular, are designed to allow this to occur. The organ plays softly, you bow your head in prayer, and the preacher specifically instructs you to clear away all skeptical thoughts from your mind. The he (or she) may go right ahead and say something like, “Help us, O Lord, to see that Donald Trump is doing your will on Earth and leading us into the righteousness of which you approve...”

Second, religion overstimulates our defenses as well. It makes believers react against the very things that make us empathetically human. When we see someone in need, religion can make us actually see that person as a sinner who deserves suffering. Religion does not have to do this but often does. Religion can make us look upon environmental pollution and destruction, which ruins the livelihoods of millions of poor people who want to raise themselves out of poverty but cannot do so because their soil is eroding away or they are sick from toxins, and see that environmental destruction is actually God’s will, since it blesses billionaire industrialists with additional billions.

Religion says “O” while skepticism says, “oh.” Destructive religion says, “O Lord, confirm us in our beliefs,” while skepticism (and religion that is skeptical and thoughtful) says, “Oh, Lord, how could we have been so wrong?”

It will be entertaining to see whether religion plays any role in the current war of the billionaires. The Koch Brothers say that Trump’s tariffs are destructive, while Trump says that the Koch Brothers are “a total joke in real Republican circles.” He says he does not need their money in the upcoming elections. This remains to be seen. But what I want to know is, what will the rabid fundamentalists do about this?

Whatever they do, you can bet it will not be based on reason.