Just How Strong Is Altruism? The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, part 2

In my columns and books, I have written extensively about altruism. Altruism is doing well by doing good. It is what happens when one animal is good to another animal in the same species. Altruism has been studied extensively by evolutionary scientists, not only via mathematical theory, but with lots and lots of examples from the animal, including the human, world. Altruism occurs because, very often, the best way for an animal to pass its genes on to the next generation (which is what natural selection is all about) is to cooperate with other animals. It often pays to be good. Not only that, but natural selection has favored many positive emotions to encourage altruism: it feels good to be good.

But in order for altruism to work, there has to be a dividing line between the inside and the outside of the group in which altruism occurs. Natural selection may favor altruism inside the group, but favors behavior that is merciless, and feelings of hatred, outside of the group. An undeniable trend of human history has been the uneven and gradual extension of the dividing line, so that we incorporate more and more people as insiders. A lot of us include the whole world, even the non-human world, in our inside group, or at least we think we do. The question, therefore, is not whether altruism is beneficial or even possible, but how common is it? That is, altruism is part of human nature, but so is brutality. Is human nature good, or bad? I believed that it is both. One of my students, however, drew upon his military experience, in which he was traumatized by what he saw in Bosnia and Afghanistan, to say that human nature is evil. I thought he was wrong. Now I’m not so sure. After reading The Four Horsemen, I wonder whether altruism might be fragile and might even go extinct in our world of the immediate future. Are, as Ibañez said, the Four Horsemen the reality of the world?

 

For those of you who may not know, The Apocalypse is the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible, in which a man named John described a vision. In just part of this vision, he saw four supernatural horsemen. One was war, another was disease, another was famine, another was death. Can altruism really keep these metaphorical horsemen from galloping around the world? Or is the world actually theirs? I’m no longer sure.

Ibañez envisioned the Four Horseman galloping freely over the Earth. In one scene, Ibañez described an apartment in Paris in which a Frenchman was married to a German woman. As soon as the war began, the Frenchman went off to kill Germans. He did not consider his wife to be part of the hated outside group, despite her nationality. But she felt the guilt of knowing that she was a German surrounded by the French who did not deserve to be attacked by her people. She jumped off her porch and died in the plaza. It was the Four Horsemen, said Ibañez, who pushed her.

A French servant woman, having seen the devastation of war, said something that might summarize the thoughts above: “God has forgotten the world.”

Who Is to Blame for War? The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (novel), part 1.

As humans culturally evolve to a point of greater knowledge and understanding, one would expect war to become obsolete. There is probably nothing that war can accomplish that cannot be accomplished better through less violent means. But nations, unlike some individuals, have almost never been known to resolve conflicts peacefully. When they do, it is a cause for celebration; the European Union got the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize for simply not having war for six decades.

But wars are not just things that happen. Somebody has to start them. I thought about this as I read, in English translation, the classic novel about World War One: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, by Vicente Blasco Ibañez, written in 1916 even before the war was over. I will tell a little about this novel in a later essay.

Seldom are wars started solely by ordinary people who may want to take resources from, or who feel animosity toward, people of other countries. War is started by governments, who then stir up masses of ordinary people into a frenzy of patriotism, fueled by religion. And, sometimes, fueled by something else as well: scientists and other intellectuals. As a scientist, I hate to admit this, but…well, let me give you an example.

The war that is now called World War One (The Great War, prior to the second) was a war that, as it happened, and even a century after it ended, has been hard to explain. Ask anybody what caused World War Two, and they will say Hitler and Mussolini and the imperialists of Japan. But World War One? Most people would guess Germany—and that is the correct answer—but that is about as far as they could go. I didn’t know much more about it than this before I began reading the novel.

Germany started World War One. It arose from the unresolved animosity from the Franco-Prussian War. In 1870, Prussia insisted that it had the right to rule France. The German Prussians had to retreat from France, except for Alsace. Then, in the Great War, the Germans attacked France again. This time the Allies beat them back past Alsace, to the east of the Rhine River. Then they did it again. Full resolution did not happen until Germany’s unconditional surrender after World War Two. Since that time, peace has been maintained in most of Europe.

German aggression did not result simply from economic and military leaders ordering German troops to attack France (as well as Belgium and other countries). The German people (not all of them, but millions of them) believed with all their souls that Germans were the master race and deserved to rule as much territory as they could get, by whatever means they could get it. They believed whole-heartedly in the war, and the German soldiers fought ferociously. According to Ibañez, German soldiers killed anyone they could find in Belgium, even cutting off women’s breasts and nailing them to doors, or spiking babies on bayonets and parading them around town. Only religion—in this case, a religion of German superiority—can so strongly parasitize the human mind as to make people believe and do things like this.

The Germans began World War One with the claim that the war would be brief and intense. They claimed that by beating down the other countries, particularly France, with utter ferocity, they would make it impossible for any European war to ever occur again. They thought of it as the war that would rid the world of future wars. This was their justification for utter, and often insane, brutality. According to Ibañez, the Germans said that cruelty was actually kindness. Cruelty would force an earlier surrender and an earlier end to the sufferings. It was necessary to kill even the children because, if left behind, the children would grow up as Frenchmen who did not worship the power and glory of Germany.

Who stirred up the Germans to such an intensity of evil? The government and military leaders deserved most of the blame. Religion, far from engendering careful humanitarian thought, became just a rallying point for bloodthirstiness. Ibañez said that, to the Germans, “outside of Germany everything was despicable, even their own religion.” That is, the Germans were proud of their Christianity but hated that of the French. He also said that one of the kinds of people who vanished during the war was the man “of complex spirituality,” whose beliefs could not be summarized by a flag.

At this point in history, Germans considered themselves the most civilized people on Earth. Theirs was, they believed, the greatest music and the greatest art. And they fancied themselves to be the leaders of the intellectual world. Ibañez makes it perfectly clear that German scholars created a framework of intellectual justification for the brutality. Ernst Haeckel, the biologist, claimed to be inspired by Darwin. Actually, Haeckel took most of his inspiration from the Englishman Herbert Spencer, who believed that Darwinism proved the superiority of the white race. Haeckel substituted German for white. The German intellectuals had prepared the way for the war, giving it a “varnish of scientific justification,” in the words of Ibañez.

As I am an intellectual, this sent a chill down my spine. The words that I write in my books and blogs, and the things that I teach in my classes, might be ignored by most people. But, even if I do not intend it, some of my words might take on a life of their own and become a scourge to history. Those of us who have the holy duty of seeking and telling the scientific truth about the world need to be proactive, and always frame our statements in a context of humanitarianism, even of love.

I will next post an essay about The Four Horsemen and altruism.

The Right-Wing Radicalization of Christianity

If you think I am going to write a complete overview of this topic, forget it. It would take an encyclopedia (of which I have written two) to cover all the ways that right-wingers have kidnapped Christianity and forced it into their image, turning Jesus into their Weapon.

But there are many quiet ways in which they have radicalized Christianity. Just by chance, I noticed one of them. Back when I was a Boy Scout, when I was in junior high school, our troop was sponsored by the local Presbyterian church, whose pastor was our scoutmaster. Rev. Alfonso Luke Fritz was one of the finest people I have known. We all had to pledge allegiance to the American flag. And to the Christian flag as well. You’ve all seen it [photo], the white flag with the red cross in the dark blue canton. This was the short pledge: I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, and to the savior for whose kingdom it stands, one brotherhood, uniting all mankind in service and love.” Isn’t that wonderful? I ran across it on an old scout-rules paper I found in a box.

In recent years, I have noticed the Christian flag being flown from houses, some of them virtual compounds, within which right-wingers hide their weapons. In particular, there is a house on a hill outside of a certain rural Oklahoma town where the American and Christian flags always fly, along with, on occasion, a Trump flag or a Don’t Tread on Me flag. I could not imagine how their attitude could possibly be concordant with “uniting all mankind in service and love.”

I looked up the modern version of the pledge to the Christian flag. It now reads, “…one Savior, crucified, risen, and coming again with life and liberty to all who believe.” The differences are frightening. Gone is the unity of mankind in service and love. In its place is, first, a doctrinal constraint; you have to believe in the Resurrection: service and love are no longer enough; second, life and liberty to all who believe. If you are not a believer in this doctrine, you do not deserve life and liberty. And we who fly this flag will take it away from you.

The Christian flag, once a sign of love and peace, has become a symbol of violence, flown by violent people.

Sorry, But Your Son Deserved to Die

On January 3, I posted an essay about the woman whose son died in an automobile accident. She insisted that I believe in God along with her. Of course, I do not know whether there is a God, as she defines God, or not. But the time of her bereavement was not the right time to discuss it, so I wiggled my way through noncommittal statements.

What I most certainly could not tell her was that her son deserved to die. Not more than other people, but along with many other people who, like him, get drunk then drive their cars at outrageous speeds. He ended up running into a tree. The laws of nature eliminated him. Natural selection eliminated him. There are many other people who drink and drive at high speeds who get lucky and do not die, or who kill other people who are innocent. But this young man got what he deserved. Driving so irresponsibly, he might have killed someone besides himself.

I’m glad his mother did not ask me about this aspect of the events.

Christianity Used to be an Intellectual Challenge

I have recently been looking through my scribbled notes from Bible studies back in the 1970s. Pages and pages of them, now barely decipherable. They were based on a close reading and analysis of many scriptural passages (avoiding, of course, the strange ones such as the fifth chapter of Numbers). We thought about, and discussed, everything, and analyzed our own lives in great detail. We had Friday night Bible studies and weekend conferences and retreats. These Bible studies were sponsored by Turnpike Road Church of Christ near Santa Barbara, a church that still exists. The youth ministers put a lot of thinking into the study sessions. Even though I now consider many of their assertions to have been incorrect, I remain amazed at the careful thought they put into it.

Those days are gone at most evangelical churches in America. Today, for many if not most white evangelical Christians, Christianity is very simple: Just worship Donald Trump. Even after Trump lost the election, evangelical support is still strong for Him. If you are a Republican—and very few centrist Republicans questions a single word from Trump—then everything is fine. You don’t have to worry about your materialism or your sexual morals, since God has given Trump and presumably His worshipers a blanket forgiveness for everything. You do not need to develop anything remotely resembling what we used to call a Christian character or an attitude of holiness. No longer do you have to wonder what sort of response you should have to immigrants; just kick them all out. No longer do you have to think about how a Christian should be a steward of God’s creation; the environment is nothing more than a source of raw materials for rich people to exploit. No longer do you have to consider that someone who disagrees with you might be partly correct; just assume that they are totally evil and treat them that way.

Perhaps the difference between then and now is best illustrated by what evangelical Christians are supposed to pay attention to. Back then, we read and discussed C. S. Lewis. Now, many evangelical Christians subsist on a fare of pure Fox News.

 

What the "Religious Freedom" People Really Want, Part Two.

 

Many extreme conservatives believe that the government is denying them the right to practice their fundamental religious beliefs. And sometimes this is true. Let me explain.

If your fundamental belief is that other people should be forced to live the way you want them to, then the only way you can practice your religion is by controlling other people against their will.

The 9-11 terrorists believed a certain version of Islam that told them that they had the right to, in Allah’s name, kill thousands of people. An uncountable number of terrorists around the world believe this. Our government, like others throughout the world, have denied terrorists their religious freedom whenever possible. Damn right, the government is restricting your religious freedom if you are a terrorist.

If your fundamental belief is that you must carry loaded automatic weapons in public and be prepared to use them at a moment’s notice, then the only way you can practice your religion is by carrying those weapons in public.

Do you want to live in a society in which other (probably white male) people can force you to live the way they want you to, or even kill you? But that’s what you will have if people whose religion is based on force and murder are allowed to practice their religion.

 

Few if any conservatives would claim that their religion is like that. But that is not the point. The point is that religious freedom is not unlimited. First amendment aside, it is already illegal to sacrifice children, for example. The government already has the right to restrict your religious practices if they threaten the public.

 

If your religion is “I have the right to force other people to do what I want, and maybe even to kill them,” then, damn right, the government is restricting your religious freedom.

What the "Religious Freedom" People Really Want, Part One

 

What the “Religious Freedom” People Really Want, Part One

Many extreme conservatives consider themselves to be evangelical Christians. Of course, what they are doing is making Jesus look like the source of all hatred. This is the opposite of evangelism, in which Christians should want to make people like Jesus, not hate Him.

But there are two things that the “religious freedom” people actually want. The first, which I here address, is that no business be required to offer its services to people whom the business CEOs do not like. If a store owner dislikes (or hates) gays and lesbians, they think they should not be forced to serve them. Let me explain why this is a supremely evil idea.

If these Christian businesses operated in a total vacuum from the rest of the world—that is, if all of their money came from other Christians and only from them—then they might claim the right to not serve people whom they, without God’s approval, condemn. I used to work at a so-called Christian college that rejected federal guidelines about discrimination. But they refused to accept any federal money, even scholarship money for the students. Apparently, this was legal.

But there are no businesses that operate in such a vacuum. Every business, even those like Hobby Lobby who claim this right, receive some federal money, even if indirectly. That is, their employees get federal money.

That is, these pseudo-Christian businesses accept, at least for their employees, taxpayer money, but they refuse to serve certain taxpayers. This means that gays and lesbians pay taxes but have federal benefits denied to them. These businesses take taxpayer money then refuse to pass along government benefits to their employees.

One would think that conservatives would be really upset about Americans being taxed while being denied the services for which their tax money pays. But, so long as it is people whom the conservatives hate, then it does not matter if they are required to pay taxes for benefits that they do not receive.

Their attitude toward people they don’t like is, tax them and then tell them they are going to Hell.

Consistency of Character

 

Below is a political cartoon from 1990. That is, thirty years ago. During the past thirty years, Donald Trump’s character has been unchanging. He was mean, dishonest, egotistical, and thought women should swoon over him even back then. Today, should anyone be surprised that he is still like that?

The Evolution of a New American Religion

 

In America today, a new religion has evolved: the worship of Donald Trump. Many or most of his supporters (or should I say His?) worship Him. They do not merely support Him. They have made Him into the representative of God upon the face of the Earth. Not all Trump supporters do this, but several million of them do. I will explain and give five ways you can tell that, to many Trumpers (His word) it is a new religion.

Religion is an instinct. Everyone has it, though some people (who consider themselves atheists) have psychologically diverted it into a different form. And religion is a universal instinct within the human species: all humans, and only humans, have it. Religion must provide a strong evolutionary advantage, or else it would not pervade the human species.

Religion evolved because it promoted evolutionary fitness of individuals. First, individuals who are members of a religious tribe benefit from the success of that tribe; a tribe whose religion causes them to fiercely fight other tribes, slaughtering them not merely as enemies but as heretics, benefit from the resources they get from the other tribes. Second, leaders of the religious tribe benefit within the tribe because they get more resource and reproductive opportunities. The rest of the tribe reveres them for their spiritual leadership. Today, many charismatic religious leaders get lots of money and sex from their brainwashed followers; this must have happened thousands of years ago also. The genes of the charismatic leader, including the genes for having intense religious experiences, are thus over-represented in the next generation.

Consider this photo, taken in rural Oklahoma in September 2020, in the run-up to a presidential election many of us are nervous about, since Donald Trump has not been very clear about whether he would give up power even if He loses. In this photo, a rich Trumper (a large house is a mile away surrounded by lawn which must take a couple of thousand dollars to mow, which is done frequently) has two flags: an American flag, and a Trump flag, both at the same height. In flag display protocol, the American flag should be highest, the state flag next, and other flags below them. This supporter, first, considers Trump to be equal to the United States in importance; and, second, that the United States has no value apart from Trump.

Here are the five characteristics that make Trumpism a religion:

 

1. They believe that everything Trump says is truth. Truth consists of His sayings, just as the Chinese recently considered the words of Mao in the Little Red Book to be Truth. Trump creates Truth as He speaks. Something that may not have been true before He said it becomes true when He says it. Trump cannot leap tall buildings in a single bound but, to His followers, He is omnipotent in this particular way.
2. Trump is not only omnipotent, but they think that He is, like Jesus, without sin. Every lie He tells, every promise He breaks, every sexual sin, all are holy in the sight of God. The brainwashed followers of many Christian evangelical leaders feel the same way about their evangelists; Trumpers do the same, which makes it a religion.
3. Trump’s followers know and care nothing about His policies. It is His image, not His substance, that they worship. Many of these followers (not the one in this mansion, but most of the run-down houses I see that fly Trump flags) are poor, and they cannot explain how His policies have made them any richer in the last four years. This is because Trump has no policies. What passes for policies are whatever Trump happens to get mad about on any given day. In this way, Trumpers are like many evangelical Christians, who follow Jesus but never read the Bible and thus have no idea what Jesus said. They are like the followers of the three generations of North Korean dictators.
4. There is no good-natured humor allowed. Many of us progressives allow ourselves to be ridiculed in a friendly fashion, and even do it ourselves. On my YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/StanEvolve) I often make fun of myself. But Trump hates anyone who makes fun of Him. He can’t stop the flood of anti-Trump cartoons, but if He ever gets the chance to silence them, He certainly will. In this sense, Trumpers are like the terrorists who attacked the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in France who dared to make fun of Mohammed.
5. There is no middle ground. You either adore Trump or else you are a heretic. Just look what has happened to moderate Republicans. Just as in the late Middle Ages Catholics hated Protestants more than they hated Muslims, so Trumpers hate free-thinking Republicans more than they hate Democrats. Well, except Hillary, whom Trumpers consider to be the devil incarnate. In my lifetime I have watched the destruction of a middle ground, progressive Republicans and conservative Democrats, a process that Trump has deliberately accelerated.

There are my five reasons. One of my Facebook contacts just wrote, “God is all in all. He will guide Trump.” This is a statement of faith—not in God, but in Trump. Why not just admit that Trump is merely a human being, whether you support Him or oppose Him? Because He has made Himself into a Messiah. Fortunately, not all Trump supporters worship Him—I know some who do not—but enough of them do that America could be in for some severe problems.

Could this turn violent? Might Trumpers get out their guns? I hope not. But some Trumpers are piling up weapons—one of them told me so. And it has happened before, when religion has inspired mass slaughter. During the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of August 24, 1572, Catholics killed thousands of protestant Huguenots in Paris. Then as now, Paris was one of the most civilized cities in the world. This isn’t ancient Babylonians we are talking about here, much less savages. Germany was very civilized when the Nazis arose to power.

If the Trumpers do attempt to grab power (if they lose the election) through violence, they will fail. The armed forces, sworn to defend the Constitution, will not support them. But they can cause a lot of domestic terrorism on the way down.

I also posted this essay in my science blog.

Ragtime: A Novel for Today

E. L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime, first published in 1975, remains one of the major novels of the twentieth century. It is one of the few novels I have read in a single twenty-four-hour period. If you haven’t read it, the time is now.

The main plot (just one of many interwoven plots) was what happened with a black musician, Coalhouse Walker. He tried to be a responsible citizen, but when an Irish fire brigade in New York trapped him and destroyed his car, and when no justice was forthcoming to make restitution for the car, Walker took the law into his own hands. The event that pushed Coalhouse over the edge was when his fiancée tried to confront the Vice President with the injustice done to Walker, and secret service agents beat her to death. The climax event was when Coalhouse committed a major act of domestic terrorism.

Clearly, every reader understands that Walker’s act of terrorism was completely out of proportion to the wrongs that he suffered.  But it is equally clear that he would not have done any of his crimes had he not been goaded into it by the systematic and severe racism that pervaded New York City at that time. The message is clear: people of all races need to be treated with dignity. If they are not, someone might lash out with major acts of destruction. The point is not to assign blame, but to prevent these deadly situations from occurring in the first place.

The parallel situation today is very clear. Minorities in America, including but not limited to blacks, are being treated very badly. Their response, such as destructive riots, has been much greater than the narrowly-defined wrongs done to them. The acts of violence that minorities are committing in America today are often property crimes, but are understandable. When you treat minorities with systematic abuse, their over-reaction is easily predictable. It is as if Doctorow’s novel is being played out today before our eyes; just substitute George Floyd in place of Coalhouse Walker’s fiancée.

What amazes me is the restraint that minorities have shown in response to the abuses against them. If a black terrorist were today to do what the fictional Coalhouse Walker did, it would not be surprising at all; modern black activists have been nicer than one could reasonably expect any group of humans to be under the circumstances.

If minorities were to rise up against the white oppressors, it would be wrong, but us white people (or, in my case, mostly-white) are just asking for it. Minorities must be very nice people to not react as Coalhouse Walker did in the novel.

Doctorow masterfully wove together story lines of many characters, as if he were Tolstoy only much more interesting. I almost felt as if I was reading a history book by James Burke, in which all possible connections were made. Pierpont Morgan, Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini, Sigmund Freud, and Booker T. Washington are just a few of the characters. The characters were, when named, usually real; the fictional characters were identified with names such as Father or Tateh or Mother’s Younger Brother. The one exception is the main character, a black musician named Coalhouse Walker, who as far as I can tell is invented. Many of the major events were real, for example, when Evelyn Nesbit’s husband shot her former lover on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden in 1906. Of course, Doctorow invented the ways in which the characters came in contact, such as Evelyn Nesbit taking care of the daughter of a poor Jewish artist who later became a major filmmaker. Doctorow probes the what-if of the inner lives of the characters: for example, what if Evelyn Nesbit was really a philanthropist? The situations were real; for example, in the first decade of the twentieth century, there really was a strong socialist movement in America.

The climax scene, a standoff between Coalhouse Walker and Booker T. Washington, was fictitious but perfect. Two very different approaches to solving the problems of race relations stood in conflict with one another: Coalhouse Walker advocating violence, and Booker T. Washington insisting that black people earn the respect of whites. Since Washington’s time, black people have shown themselves the equals of everyone else. However, white racists still refuse to respect them. Washington would have been extremely disappointed to see the continued racism in our society today.

Doctorow used several techniques that most modern writers consider to be forbidden. For example, he would insert intrusive sentences about how the events look to us today, long after the events, introducing a jarring break from the time line of the story. But this didn’t matter to me as I read. Some of the characters, such as Houdini, played roles that were entirely unnecessary for the plot of the novel, and a modern editor would have insisted that Houdini’s story line be removed from the novel. A more serious problem for a modern novelist is that the main character did not enter the novel until chapter 21 on page 178. I would just say that beginning novelists such as myself should not try things that Doctorow got away with. Ragtime is a masterpiece despite things of which, 45 years later, editors and agents disapprove. I enjoyed them, however.

If you haven’t read Ragtime, now is the time to do it!

Guns: We Worship Them in Oklahoma

In Oklahoma, we worship guns. It is part of our worship of Donald Trump and of whatever part of the Republican Party that, at the moment, obeys his absolute command. In Oklahoma, we believe that we must all be armed to the teeth to protect ourselves from anyone who might threaten the absolute power of Donald Trump, whether it is Democrats or Republicans who are too moderate for Trump to tolerate.

 As of May 2020, the entire state of Oklahoma became an anti-red-flag-law state, the first and possibly only state to do so statewide. A red-flag law is one that allows judges to block certain dangerous individuals from possessing firearms. What this means is that the sheriff’s departments have decided to not enforce anything that might restrict the absolute right of any person (translate: white male) to do whatever he wants with his guns. This includes any laws that limit the access of any person to guns, even if a judge has determined that this person is a danger to his neighbors and should be temporarily deprived of his guns. The designation of “second amendment sanctuary” could not mean anything else, since the second amendment itself is the law of the land. In May, the governor signed a bill that permitted all counties to disregard red-flag laws and any judges’ orders related to them.

Sheriffs of these rural counties claim that this move is necessary for public safety. They claim that all citizens should have a right to defend their homes in counties with such a low population density that law enforcement officials cannot arrive in a timely fashion. But citizens already have this right, except for those that have shown themselves to be a public danger. This policy can only benefit the criminals, not the homeowners. These sheriffs have not cited any instances in which the sheriffs’ failure to enforce court orders has led to anyone being victimized.

The sole purpose of these declarations must be to allow militias to form in order to be ready, at a moment’s notice, to begin shooting any government official, or any neighbor, who refuses to follow the orders of Donald Trump.

The leaders of these rural counties worship the second amendment. It takes precedence over every other part of the constitution, every other law, and every part of the Bible. The Jesus whom they claim to worship never says that His followers have absolute rights to weapons, nor the obligation to make themselves victims to their neighbors who collect storehouses of weapons.

Suppose that there is a dangerous person in the county, and a judge orders this person to not have weapons. But the sheriff will not enforce this order. A mentally unstable man with a gun could shoot me at a convenience store, or even on the highway.

Why Fundamentalists Must Believe the Coronavirus Pandemic is a Hoax

I have posted a video that describes the ideas below.

Thousands, if not a million or more, fundamentalist Christians in the United States believe that the coronavirus pandemic is a hoax that has been started by Democrats to make Donald Trump look bad. Part of this is because white evangelicals have, as the title of a recent book indicates, chosen to “worship at the altar of Donald Trump.” In some cases, fundamentalist belief that there is no coronavirus pandemic has led them to acts of aggression, as certain recent viral videos have shown.

But there is another reason that fundamentalists MUST reject the fact that the coronavirus pandemic is caused by a virus. And that is because the Bible says so. I first pointed this out in a blog entry in 2012.

Actually, the Bible does not say that there is no such thing as viruses, or that they never cause disease. But I present below the evidence that the New Testament describes one-third of all diseases as being demonic in origin.

Here is a complete list of Jesus’ healings, in which I indicate which ones were and were not attributed to demon possession. In order to do so, I have tried to determine which of the parallel Gospel accounts refer to the same event, so as not to double-count them. And here they are (demonic events in bold).

	Event	Matthew	Mark	Luke	John
1	Healing a leper	8:1	1:40	5:12
2	Centurion’s servant	8:5		7:1
3	Peter’s mother-in-law	8:14	1:29	4:38
4	Same day: demoniacs	8:16
5	Gadarene swine	8:28	5:1	8:26
6	Forgave the paralytic	9:2	2:1	5:17
7	Resurrected ruler’s daughter	9:18	5:21	8:40
8	Woman with hemorrhage	9:20	5:24	8:43
9	Two blind men	9:27
10	Dumb demoniac	9:32		11:14
11	Man with withered hand	12:10	3:1	6:6
12	Blind dumb demoniac	12:22
13	Canaanite woman with demon daughter	15:21	7:24
14	Epileptic boy falling into fire	17:14	9:14	9:37
15	Blind men near Jericho	20:30	10:46
16	Demoniac near Capernaum		1:21	4:31
17	Deaf dumb man, Decapolis			7:31
18	Blind man at Bethsaida		8:22		9:1
19	Young man in his funeral			7:11
20	Another woman with flux			13:10
21	Man with dropsy			14:1
22	Ten lepers			17:11
23	Official’s son				4:46
24	Lame man at Bethsaida				5:2

I cannot be sure of some of the classifications; item 23 might be the same as item 2, but I have erred on the side of caution in favor of fundamentalists; item 2 refers to a servant, item 23 to a son, which most of us believe could just be a garbled transmission of the account, but fundamentalists do not believe garbled transmission is possible in the Bible. I have omitted the famous account of Lazarus, since it was considered an example of a resurrection, not a healing.

The point here is that seven of the 24 healings were specifically described—in all the parallel accounts available—as the casting out of demons. This is 29 percent. If you count the stories separately, 14 out of 46 involve demons, which is 30 percent. That is, in roughly one-third of the healings, exorcism was involved. In one of them (14), clear symptoms of epilepsy are described.

Creationists make a really big deal about evolution. Decades ago, they wanted to outlaw the teaching of evolution. When that didn’t work, they tried to mandate equal time for creation and evolution. When that didn’t work, they wanted to mandate the inclusion of a mention of creationism. Clearly, over the decades, evolutionary science has been their target. More recently, they have begun attacking the science of global warming with nearly as much fervor as they once attacked evolution.

But they didn’t have any trouble with medical science. Their children learned about how viruses, bacteria, protists, fungi, and parasitic worms cause contagious diseases, and how mutations can cause other diseases—in medical school, in college, in high school, even before high school. In none of these places, except perhaps their own schools and colleges, was demonology mentioned. I have never heard of fundamentalists trying to get legislation passed to mandate the inclusion of demonology in the medical science curriculum. They chose to allow a figurative interpretation of, or perhaps just to ignore, those Bible passages that attribute disease to spiritual causes. Fundamentalists occasionally attempt exorcisms, but they never insist that the rest of us agree with them.

How can the creationists do this? They think that God has given them the right to decide which parts of the Bible to take literally and which parts to take figuratively. “Day” is literal in Genesis 1 and figurative in Genesis 2; “the Earth” was figurative in Peleg’s day but literal in Noah’s day; and natural law accounts for the wind and the rain and diseases but not the origin of species.

I wondered, in 2012, what God would do without fundamentalists to tell us which parts of the Bible to believe and which ones not to believe. But now I know. They have embraced a literal Bible interpretation to such an extent that they reject medical science, except when they get sick. There are more stories than any of us can list of fundamentalist preachers rejecting the coronavirus pandemic, only to themselves die of covid.