No Such Thing As Evidence

One thing I have pretty much given up on is trying to convince religiously-based conservatives of anything.

I spent a lot of time, in earlier years, presenting clear and simple evidence for the science of evolution. I think my books were pretty good in this regard. But I was not trying to convince creationists. They know they are wrong, and creationism is just a way of them influencing other people to be their followers.

I have also spent a lot of time presenting clear and simple evidence for the science of global warming. I briefly thought I might convince some “climate skeptics” that they were wrong. But they already know they are wrong. “Climate skepticism” is just their way to influence other people to be their followers.

More recently, millions of people refuse to believe that there is any such thing as the covid pandemic. Some of them run state governments. Here in Oklahoma, the Republicans have repeatedly proclaimed that a mask mandate is just as bad as Hitler’s Holocaust. They ignore all medical evidence.

To religious conservatives, there is no such thing as externally-verifiable truth. This became abundantly clear during the Trump years. Trump’s followers believed, and still believe, that He won the election of 2020. Their evidence? None, other than the fact that He says so. I deliberately gave the God-capitalization to the pronoun.

The religious conservatives have always been half-hearted in their beliefs. When the preacher Rice Broocks visited the University of Illinois, before he became a cofounder of a major church, he publicized that he was going to speak about creationism, but he asked the audience to release him from this topic, so that he could talk more about all the miraculous healing that God was doing through his hands. When I contacted the leader of the Heartland Institute, asking him for evidence regarding some of his claims that global warming was a hoax, his personal email response to me was, “Snore.” I’m not sure what that means, other than that he has no time to answer any questions. He was too busy hoodwinking people into believing him.

But with the covid epidemic and the Trump campaign, religious conservatives have abandoned all pretense at presenting evidence. The total absence of evidence does not show them they are wrong but is simply proof that Satan is so good at hiding their evidence that nobody can see any of it. I heard a preacher claim, a couple of months ago, that Joe Biden stole 41 million votes. Where is the evidence for this? None. To them, the absence of evidence is evidence that they are right.

And not only right, but the very rightness of God. Religious conservatives are blasphemers, who believe that Donald Trump creates truth by saying it. Here in Oklahoma, I see their flags and stickers all over the place. And they have stockpiles of automatic weapons. They do not hide this fact.

There is no point in trying to convince anyone on the political right. They already consider themselves to be incapable of error, as inerrant as God Himself.

When I stood in line last summer at a state agency, a Trumper started telling us that the covid epidemic was caused by dirty Mexicans coming over the border, or else (he was unclear) Biden invented it as an excuse to take away our freedoms. I had to struggle to suppress my desire to raise my voice. He insulted me by saying that my extensive studies, leading to a Ph.D. in biology, were less important than his wild guesses.

Further evidence of their blasphemy is that they not only despise anyone who does not believe them, but they particularly despise their fellow Republicans. To Trumpers, Biden (and especially that colored woman who is his vice president) is an infidel, but moderate Republicans like Liz Cheney are heretics. Heretics are always worse than infidels. Shi’a extremists hate Sunnis worse than they hate Christians.

I continue to write about evolution and global warming, not to try to convince right-wing blasphemers, but to educate people who already know the truth but appreciate discovering new evidence. Only the people who already know about evolution and global warming and the pandemic and that Trump lost, only these people, are delighted to learn new things.

And as a science educator and writer I really enjoy helping sincere people understand the world better, and that is my only goal and the only reward. In a way it is a relief to not have the burden of convincing anyone.

Was Love Born in a Manger?

A church sign I saw out in the country in Oklahoma recently read, “Love Was Born in a Manger.” I will briefly explain why this is wrong.

Most of my life, devoutly Christian, I was deeply moved, almost suffocated, by my belief that Jesus represented the manifestation of God’s love to humankind. I was wrong. The stories of Jesus are wonderful—certainly, in my mind, Jesus represents some of the finest of human love—and I wish I could still believe that love was born in a manger at Christmas.

But I will now explain why this belief is wrong.

The statement implies that, without Jesus having been born, or foreordained from the beginning of Creation to be born, then there would be no love. But it is quite clear that love evolved. I do not mean  in some vague way as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote about decades ago. I mean that love evolved by means of natural selection.

I am talking about altruism. Love promotes altruism which promotes fitness. Not always, but often. To love your offspring and, to a lesser extent, your relatives increases fitness through inclusive fitness. To love your friends increases fitness through direct reciprocity. To have a reputation for being kind and generous increases fitness through indirect reciprocity. Natural selection favors whatever increases our fitness. Often this is hatred, but often (perhaps even more often) it is love. Natural selection gave us the instinct of love. The evidence is that it feels so good. We need food; natural selection favored millions of years of animals who, when hungry, love the taste of food. We need water; natural selection favored millions of years of animals who, when thirsty, love water. Love is an appetite, just as much as sex, food, and water. Whether we decide to use the instinct of love or not is up to each of us individually.

There is another problem with the belief that Jesus is the origin of all love. It implies that those of us who do not accept the doctrines about Jesus (however much we may love Him) do not really love other people, the natural world, or God. We are either faking it or are totally deluded. What I experience, when I feel love for Jesus or for other people or for the creation, is not genuine, according to this view.

But I know what I am thinking. I know for a fact that I am not faking it. Billions of people who are not doctrinal Christians love people, the natural world, and God very passionately. Some are lying, but we can’t all be lying. I cannot speak for anyone else, but it would be the height of arrogance to claim that I am the only non-doctrinally-Christian person who sincerely loves other people. Many doctrinal Christians would claim that those of us who reject their doctrines might sincerely believe we are sincere, but it is in fact a delusion. I am not deluded. The burden of proof is on doctrinal Christians who claim that all who reject their doctrines are either liars or lunatics.

If, in fact, love does not exist apart from a doctrinal Jesus, then it must come from somewhere else. It must be part of human nature. And, as I wrote above, I believe that evolution put it there. Love is a basic instinct.

Merry Christmas, y’all, and though you may not think it possible, I believe Merry Christmas.

Who Was This Guy Anyway?

I ran across a couple of articles written in 1987 and 1989 by some guy who thought not only that the world is ruled by a good God, but that he could prove it! How weird is that?

Lots of people believe that there is a good God, somewhere, but that this God does not do very much to help the world except maybe in some special once-in-a-while miracles, but that the universe pretty much operates as if there is no God. That is, they are not atheists. It’s just that God is pretty much irrelevant to the way the world works. But this guy saw the goodness of God operating all around him. I’ve got to hand it to him; he amassed a lot of disconnected information from his voluminous knowledge into a big steaming pile of assertions. He was apparently Piled higher and Deeper.

To his credit, this author spent his entire first article admitting that the natural world did not, in fact, reflect the God of love. Even the things that appear peaceful and beautiful actually resulted (by evolution) and continue to function (by ecology) by means of selfish processes. Pretty flowers, for example, are selfishly efficient at attracting pollinators, and singing birds are selfishly establishing territory and attracting mates. He admits, then, that the way for a Christian to look at what nature tells us about God is to look at it figuratively (as Jesus did in parables). The problem the author overlooks, however, is that the figure depends on the observer, resulting in circular reasoning about a God of love. This circular reasoning deliberately omits many important things. Jesus said, If God so feeds the birds of the air; but what about the ones God doesn’t feed, and they die?

Then, in his second article, the author describes a “pervasive theme” in the natural world and in human history, when viewed as one might view a piece of literature: Blessings emerge from adversity. I’m sure you can think of lots of examples; the author drew together a mixed grab-bag of them. An ape, or what the Bible calls “dust of the ground,” became capable of understanding the world. How’s that for a blessing from privation? He cites lots of Bible examples of God elevating the humble to positions of prominence, such as Joseph, David, the prophets, in fact the whole nation of Israel and the whole church. Our own spiritual development, he says, depends on our optimistic response to challenges.

Then he turns to the natural world for lots more examples. Some of the greatest evolutionary innovations occurred in response to natural disasters. Right from the start! Oxygen in the air was a primordial poison, but the cells that could not just tolerate it but use it became the ancestors of nearly all life forms now on the Earth. And on and on for billions of years. Mammals spent more millions of years skulking in the shadow of dinosaurs than as the dominant animal life forms as they are today, from our perspective. Altruism has evolved. Parasitism evolves into parasitism. He even points out that rates of extinction in the fossil record have been declining, a point he got from reading Stephen Jay Gould. Even the acclimatization of individual organisms to changes in their environments (which is not evolution), and ecological succession (which is not evolution either), are examples of life proliferating in adversity. He ends the second article with a quote from a largely-forgotten Scottish botanist who looked at the world the same way.

With all of these examples, how could the pattern not be true? But the author could not say that the pattern was miraculous. The best he could manage was to say that blessings out of adversity was God’s “activity” in nature. Like, how is that any different?

Of course blessings can arise from adversity. But we only hear about the successful ones. We hear the hero stories of people who confronted terrible suffering, and not only persisted but lived to tell about it. We do not hear from the ones that got killed because they are dead. We hear the story of Malala Yousafzai, shot by Islamic terrorists who attacked a girls’ school and who worked for peace, receiving a Nobel Prize (this happened after the articles were published); we do not hear the stories of the girls who died.

Of course blessings can arise from adversity. Adversity creates opportunity, and some organisms are able to capitalize on it. A forest fire releases nutrients from dead plant matter and allows an influx of sunlight. Too bad about those trees that died, but the wildflowers bloom like crazy. But that is what wildflowers do.

This author’s view is a beautiful artistic view of the world, but it tells us nothing, nothing at all, about God. The author was, and is, happy, even if this vision is a fantasy.

As you have figured out, the author was myself, back in my evangelical days. Though I can no longer assert the actual truth of these statements, I really enjoy thinking about the things about the natural and human world that I like, especially when I need some diversion from the things I don’t like.

The articles appeared in the September 1987 and March 1989 issues of Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith.

A Child’s Machiavelli: A Primer on Power

 

These quotes are from a book by the title above. Once you have read them, you might not need to read the original. To what extent The Prince was right or not, I will not comment.

• It’s best to have a family with a famous name ‘cos then you’ll automatically impress people and become really popular.
• If you want to take over some place, don’t forget to kill not just the boss, but also all his kids!
• Either be really nice to people or kill’em. If you don’t kill’em and you’re not so nice, then they’re gonna come after you.
• If you just took over some place, raise everybody’s allowance. Then people will think you really like ‘em, and you can do whatever you want to ‘em for a little while.
• If you help make someone Big, watch out. They’re gonna wanna get rid of you so everyone thinks they did it alone.
• It’s easy to take over some place with a really strong Chief. Everyone’s used to being bossed around all the time, so when you get rid of him, people’re barely gonna notice.
• If you wanna take over some place where the people could decide for themselves, you have to destroy everything.
•  Never be afraid to beat someone up if you have to. First, try to talk ‘em into listening, but just in case, you know what to do!
• The hardest job you can ever do is try to make things better for the Little Guys. The Big Guys are gonna hate your guts. And the Little Guys will be afraid to open their mouths.
• People always think Bosses are bad news, so when you surprise ‘em with your niceness, they’ll be so happy, they’ll totally turn into your slaves!
• Try to make everyone you know totally dependent on you, then you don’t have to worry so much that they’re gonna try to get rid of you.
• When you take over some place, kill off everyone who’s against you, pronto, then act really nice to everyone left.
• A gun is a man’s best friend.
• Only give things away when people are watching. If you wanna give presents to people, make sure it’s other people’s stuff.
• If you’re not a Boss but you wanna be one, make sure you trick everyone into thinking you’re a really generous guy.
• Everyone says you should be nice, but no one really is, so if you do what you should and be nice all the time, you’re probably gonna get screwed.
• You can do anything to people. As long as you don’t steal their girlfriends, they’re never really gonna hate you.
• You’re better off having people scared of you than liking you. Now, it’s okay if people are scared of you. Just make sure they don’t hate you.
• Be really nice to your closest underlings. Make them love you by giving them lots of presents.
• If somebody’s got to hate you, make sure it’s a bunch of weaklings with no money.
• Don’t keep your promises if there’s no reason to anymore—nobody else does.
• Have five best friends who tell you what they really think, but only when you ask.

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part twelve. The Problem of Politics

Back when I was writing in my spiritual journal in 2005, I felt a mission to the world, to rescue it from political oppression (as embodied in the right wing parties in every country including my own) from Easter 1984 until election day 2004, a period of just over twenty years.

I decided, in February 2005, to stop calling myself a Christian. I do not own the language. If I call myself a Christian, I wrote, people will think of me as a follower of George W. Bush. (Today it is even worse; to be a Christian is, in popular language, to be a Trumper.) The question is not, do I want to call myself a Christian; but, am I what the world thinks of when they hear the word Christian? Clearly, the answer was (and is) no.

Some of what I wrote below was during the worst of my medical problems, but also at a time when a Republican president aspired to be a world dictator and use war as his tool of domination. Remember George W. Bush? [Bush and Cheney] “have galloped out on their Texas steeds to conquer the world, and other Republican horsemen of the apocalypse, only slightly worse than Democratic mules…Most of the universe is gas-jets of hydrogen, and in one small space, there is a miracle of complexity—and it is evil.”

“For the law of the universe seems to be thermodynamics—whenever there is, in one place, a brief shining moment of inspiration, beauty, order, and love, the great mass of stupidity, hatred, and bloated gluttony will flop over on it and obliterate it. All that is good and God is an aberration quickly blasted by the sick universe…Whenever there is a glint of beauty and peace, the leaders of the world delight in trashing it.”

I was reading Rabbi Kushner’s book, Who Needs God? But can there be one, even in the diffuse form I have fantasized? Kushner also wondered how one can get angry at a God that one believes does not exist. But we are angry because there should be a good God who will rescue the world.

Why I Can No Longer Participate in Organized Christianity

I have totally discontinued any involvement with organized Christianity. I can no longer affirm any Christian religious doctrines. But that is not the main reason I no longer participate.

I cannot participate in any church that has been swept along with the blasphemous Trump idolatry. These churches—and there are a lot of them—actively contribute to the downfall of America and the collapse of any hope for freedom in the world. I don’t worship Biden, either, but nobody does. There are millions—not many millions—who believe that truth consists of whatever Donald Trump says.

When I left the church of which I was most recently a member, I did not stomp out. I merely realized that my participation was a personal and social waste of time. In this church as a whole, and this congregation in particular, there were many social progressives. But there were just enough right-wing extremists that they could sabotage any efforts of the church to accomplish anything meaningful. In particular, I remember one older man (this was back in the Iraq war days when, to conservative Christians, the core of Christianity was to believe and to do whatever George W. Bush said) yelled at our assistant pastor because the assembly of leaders had voted to disapprove of the Iraq war. She had merely reported the vote and had not expressed an opinion. Her vote was secret. This was the same man who, in a church parking lot with limited space, took up eight spaces to park his truck and fishing boat. His total selfishness was not typical of the church, but he was able to sabotage the work and sentiments of the others.

Thus, it appeared to me, Christian churches were of two kinds: first, the ones that blasphemously championed the Godlikeness of Bush and then Trump; second, the ones that got sabotaged by the blasphemers.

This does not mean that I will never “darken the door” of a church again. I imagine that, if my démenagement en France goes according to schedule, my wife and I might very well participate in a local Catholic church along with many members of our extended French family. But it will be because of our membership in that family, not because I believe any Catholic, or other, doctrine. Just as spirituality has a personal function, so organized religion has a social function.

Nor does it mean that I do not revere Jesus. But my personal religious views are personal.

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part eleven. What is love?

As I continued writing in my journal in April 2005, I left behind the swings from agony to ecstasy and back. Instead, I wondered, what is love? Part of it, whether the love of friends or sexual love, is vulnerability, dangling over the terror of loss. This is something that God cannot feel, and has to experience it vicariously through us. At least, that was what I thought in 2005.

I wrote on 18 April 2005: “Love is sharing pain yet seeing beauty—neither a major or a minor [musical] mode but dorian, with a sad heart but an upward gaze.

This was my new outline of God, which as I read it now just puzzles me, but I will pass it on in case it makes some sense to you. “’The God Who Let Go.’ First, regarding God: The Father, infinite, creator, now present only as natural law [acting]; The Son, embodied briefly on Earth, now present only in his words [speaking]; the Spirit, pervading the universe, the only manner in which God has been continually present [feeling]. In order to experience love, God must now vicariously share in our experiences.”

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part ten.

Here is what I wrote in my journal on 8 April 2005 about what Stephen Jay Gould called The Great Asymmetry:

 

“It might seem perverse to meditate upon something written by agnostic Stephen Jay Gould, but it is important to our understanding of the problem of evil. Gould called it The Great Asymmetry. Goodness and order are built up slowly, whether in an embryo, through evolution, a city, a science, or a culture of learned decencies. Evil and chaos can occur in an instant—splat, an asteroid, a riot, acts of pure evil by terrorists (their very name tells us they want to destroy, not create). The fact that most of every day in most of the world is good and orderly means that good people must, mathematically, vastly outnumber evil people. Gould did not say whether this might exceed what one would expect from evolutionary altruism. This would mean it is the reality, not just the availability, of Spirit.

“But this does not, by itself, solve the problem. There may well be an overwhelming majority of good people, but we good people are those who choose to do good without apparent heavenly help. An intricate creation of goodness collapses from a human act of evil or a natural disaster that God does not, at least, prevent… What The Great Asymmetry does mean, as I interpret it, is that many billions of people, even some who follow evil men, have opened their minds to at least a little of the Spirit. I again reflect that the cosmos is godless but permeated by love, which is where God is, not causing anything directly but making love available.”

This might be the closest thing we ever have to proof that there is a Spirit of love. It isn’t much, but I will put it out there for your consideration. I concluded, by 12 April 2005, that I should live as if God is love, whether it is true or not. This is vague but powerful. It also means that I will not live or die by any specific doctrine.

“So, what should a materialist do? Conscience, as well as altruism, evolved; we are happiest when we feed both. Even atheists are happiest when they are altruistic beyond mere calculation of possible benefits they might receive. Sex and food are appetites but so is simple niceness…knowing we are living right in the world.”

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part nine.

 

I wondered why I kept writing in my journal every day. Was it just a “demented polygraphia”? Polygraphia is a mental disorder in which a person must continually write everything down. I admit I fit the description of this very well. But as for my journal, back in 2005, I answered, “It is an act of faith that somebody will want to reconstruct this framework of thought…” The world is like a comet, “which swings close to God’s sun then vanishes again into deep space. The fact that I bother to think and write at all is my fundamental…faith.

“I benefit now from all the soul-building work of the past. If I look upon the world and see only dirt, I am dead and unhappy. I must continue open to inspiration. I turn in disgust from most organized religion…But I remember the powerful inspiration I felt in a field of wildflowers 37 years ago [now 54 years ago]. I reaffirmed it this spring and will keep it alive, as if there is a God, which there probably is.” I was referring to the Sonoran Desert spring wildflowers.

 

But I also wrote, on 29 March, “It is clear to me that in this world, God is not in control. He has permitted a world of natural law, with cruel consequences, a world in which His love penetrates and contradicts, in which His love is of infinite value, and in which our purpose is to oppose all that is not love, all selfishness, even indifference. It is an artificial, contrived cosmos in which God makes us see how desirable love and beauty are, because of its stark contrast with crustal movements which grind all human life as if it were not there, with chromosomal breakages, and with forces of evolution, which have produce a species both intelligent and evil. To angels, goodness is ordinary. To us, goodness is sacrificial. And even if there is not life beyond, we have been permitted to taste and glimpse what is truly beautiful.”

The next day I wrote, “I stride into the future not knowing if God will even keep me alive, but ready in case he does (and, each second, each day, people live more often than they die).” I wrote this even as my illness returned. But even then, I wrote, because of my love for the creation, I was happier than Donald Trump. Yes, I wrote that in 2005, because even back then Trump was in the news as the perfect example of total furious selfishness.

At the same time, I was reluctant to leave religion which was, I thought, a human adaptation. “Religion is our warm hut of order, agnostic freedom is the cold swirling storm.”

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part eight

I will post, with minimal editing, what I wrote on 15 March 2005, during my trip to see desert wildflowers. This was, as close as it is possible to determine, the exact date on which I became an agnostic.

“How can I begin to describe the beauty of the spring desert I beheld yesterday? And the greatest blessings came when I took the time to look closely, to slow down and immerse myself in it, to open myself to the Spirit.” While most people do not look closely at nature, out of a nation of 300 million, there must be a few million who do. “I must keep this in mind to counterbalance my cynicism, even though it is realistic and true…For the moment, I feel good not just about nature but even about the species of which I am a part.” I was reading a book, Evil and the God of Love, by John Hick. Hick “openly admitted ‘the fact of evil [which] constitutes the most serious objection there is to the Christian belief in a God of love.’ He calls it a fact; it is not, as Buddhists might say, an illusion, nor is it merely a form of human behavior. It is evil…Hick rejects an ‘inoffensive but unhelpful agnosticism,’ which provides ‘a perpetual burden of doubt’ to all believers, and has always done so, even back in the so-called Age of Faith. And Job’s answer, to be tremblingly quiet before God’s incomprehensible majesty, is not a solution…If God is intentionally involved in the world (and this may be his entire action), then we cannot expect God to see or manipulate the world from a cosmic viewpoint. Perhaps—I am speculating now—the Spirit Himself struggles to understand this? If so, then the Spirit’s answer is not an explanation but a delicate desert spring wildflower.”

I can remember where I was when I wrote this. I was eating breakfast in a restaurant in Yuma, Arizona. The trip I took out into the desert was spiritual as well as scientific.

The next day I wrote the following. To explore the wildflowers “was like walking in heaven. I also relived the beautiful part of my childhood,” when I walked amidst the spring wildflowers in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

But I continued reading and thinking about the problem of evil. The irrepressibly optimistic Harry Emerson Fosdick posed the opposite question to the problem of evil: “why is there so much inexplicable good in the world? Since the time of Fosdick, and of C. S. Lewis’s similar argument, altruism has been discovered. But it does not explain all of the goodness, greatness, our capacity for wisdom, love, science, and (what I now experience) biophilia.” This does not answer the problem of evil, “but what else can I do but stumble amidst flowers and rejoice while I can? I can rejoice in the flow of the Spirit, and say that this is the entirety of God’s work here and now. The Spirit also cleanses away the scabs of anger and the rot of selfishness.

“It does no good, Hick claims, to blame Satan, for now we just have to explain why God permitted Satan to exist, nor does it do any good to appeal to the finitude of creatureliness [only a theologian could come up with this], because even within our limits we could be good but are not. Sorry, John, but we will not reason out a solution. Our only response can be like a visitor to the desert spring, seeing a brief symphony of joy in a hard land, or a visitor to the desert summer, who can see nothing good but who must force himself to admit that life persists dormant.”

I continued to think about my deteriorating health. “There will be no miracles for me. But in the event that I survive, I will be an imperfect conduit of the Spirit, and enjoy it. God “allowed at least one species to evolve the intelligence to appreciate…that though most organisms simply decay, a few re-emerge as fossils, as objects of beauty…”

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part seven

 

[Rabbi] Kushner [whose book I was reading in 2005] said that prayer is just to remind us to be grateful for things, on a regular schedule, including for things it would not otherwise occur to us to be grateful for. God needs no praise, but He knows we need to feel gratitude. When I wrote about this on 7 March 2005, I felt as if I agreed with him. The answer to our prayers “is not an explanation but an experience. An often-overlooked benefit of prayer is that it changes us, so that we no longer envy the wicked.”

Three days later, I wrote, “My valleys of shadow, compared to others’, are often little mud-walled arroyos, such as I will soon see in the desert, but they seemed pretty dark to me anyway, and if you cannot climb out of them, they are deep enough.” I was already looking forward to my trip out west to see the desert wildflowers.

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part six

Here is a little interlude, which I needed during my heavy thoughts, and which you, the reader (if any) also need. I wrote this on 2 March 2005.

“And, finally, isn’t it past all rational solution? As I have repeatedly pondered, do I not believe in God because Dvorak did? Nietzsche had penetrating questions, or so I who have never read him am told. How to answer him? Kierkegaard’s leap? A scientist resists it but what else is there? What Mahler did was to celebrate evolution in his Resurrection Symphony. The stages of life on Earth: vegetative (second movement), animated (third movement), then to set Nietzsche to music (fourth movement), angels in heaven (fifth movement) as if it were a progression. But really it was just to put atheism and heaven next to each other, then goes on (sixth movement) to celebrate love. He listened, out in his summerhouse in the mountain meadow: ‘What the flowers in the meadow tell me,’ ‘What the animals in the forest tell me,’ ‘What the night tells me,’ ‘What the morning bells tell me,” and ‘What love tells me.’ Maybe these things all contradict one another; all we can do is listen.

 

“It helps to have friends with which to share this. Mahler had gotten over his love for Johanna Richter in the 1880s. He had a friend in the 1890s, Natalie Bauer-Lechner, who traveled with him and wrote down his thoughts. She was the one who wrote down the titles above. What was he thinking, not to embrace her after Alma Schindler had betrayed him. Ah, friendship is better than romance, as Mahler found out too late.”

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, Part Five

I wrote on 29 January 2005, “If God is, then God is love, and forgives me when I ask forgiveness for my rage against Him and, in fact, He understands it…I see no God dropping nuggets of revelation from Heaven. That’s because He exists in our wisdom, however obscurely, and since His work is what we do, I can no longer ask for miracles…” There is utterly no evidence of God; the most convincing thing about belief in God is that Antonin Dvorak wrote “thanks be to God” at the end of every one of his pieces of music. I said for a while, I believe in God because Dvorak did.

God, I saw, seems to punish every good deed. I wrote on 6 February 2005, “Jesus is the epitome of every trait that God punishes throughout history…I almost feel I am being punished for loving what is calm, green, and constructive rather than raping the planet like a good consumer…It is enough to make you think that God really does want the lords of the demesne to rule and the rest of us to be serfs.”

I continued suffering, worse and worse despite medication. I thought I would stumble along until sweet death dissolved me. It was almost as if demons were fine-tuning my pain. How would I know? But demons, I figured, were not smart enough to do this. “They would leave a fork-prong or a dab of deviled ham lying around where a scientist would find it” if they caused diseases.

Despite this, I wrote on 12 February, I still had a deep ineradicable joy. “The desire for wisdom is basic to all my perception of the world, no matter how rigidly or fluidly, happily or gloomily, adjectively or adverbially, my physical carnal synapses assemble a model of reality out of the photons, pressures, and chemical compositions of the cosmos around me.” This was the 196^th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth; I imagine he might have thought the same thing were he alive today. In order to maintain my happiness, I had to wear a hard plastron on my breast to protect my heart as I drag myself over the rough earth. “I attained wisdom, and God saw me, and slapped me down into a gray continuum of semi-wakefulness.”

Nevertheless, I continued to write on that same day, “I am ready to be convinced. Sometimes it seems as if the Spirit of love does make some progress. The false spring, the frost killing the fresh verdure of Prague in 1968 was eventually followed by a true Czech spring; however imperfect, it would have inspired some crazy-dancing hemiola and G double sharps from Dvorak. And to me the beauty of science, literature, poetry, and music are inexpressible; confronted by them, as by a burning bush, I cannot remain morose.”

The result, I wrote on the next day, was counter-intuitive: I was laying each moment at God’s altar. “Then, oh this is wondrous strange, I am free to savor each moment, so I stumble along, deeply happy. I have no life, but only a series of moments each of which I make meaningful. If I live another 30 years, it will not be 30 years but 10,950 days at the beginning of each of which I will say, What, I’m still alive? What shall I do today? I no longer if I live, but if I do, I will make another day of progress towards goals which, if completed, will be good.”

I no longer suffer as much, but I still write down the blessings, as well as the setbacks, of each day. I would recommend that you do also. Write it down. You can look back at it and be amazed at how much, or how little, your life has changed.

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part four.

 

I here continue posting passages from my private journal, in which I document my transition away from fundamentalism and toward Christian agnosticism.

Here is some of what I wrote on 17 February of 2005. “Churchy people imagine God with a sword and a plan, who hands them the sword and reveals the plan which, marvelously enough, just happens to be what they were going to do anyway.”

I particularly struggled with the Trinity. Nobody seems to have a clue about the Holy Spirit. Much of my angst came from trying to force two-thirds of a God to do the work of the other one-third. It finally became apparent to me that what I was seeking was the Spirit, not God or Jesus. This Spirit “is the only presence of God in our universe—to love the flowers and trees, and help others do so, and associate with those who do; to not be surprised when people we had assumed to have true inner goodness turn out to be merely selfish; to await and use opportunities for helping to bring light into the world. This is all we can do, in a world where God’s presence is only through a Spirit who does not impart any answers but only creates love, where God’s presence does not create any miraculous interventions, but works only through the quiet mulch of those who love…I cannot ask God to humble the arrogant; I must just be happy that the arrogant have not yet stamped dead every flower in the world.”

On 24 February, I wrote, “But the main lesson, for those of us who truly have the Spirit of love in our hearts and are always in exile in a world run by selfishness at best, cruelty at worst, is that we must settle in, live our lives, raise families, take care of the earth, and be a blessing to all of society around us.”

Then in that same entry I wrote some humor that had occurred to me during my sleep study, when I was wired up to a computer with lots of sticky electrodes on my scalp. “In Hansel and Gretel, Englebert Humperdinck wrote something like, When I lay me down to sleep, fourteen angels watch do keep… Why stop at fourteen? Why not one for each organ, each hair follicle, or…During the sleep study, the computer (and the technician) monitored at least fourteen things, like an angel for each eyelid, my nose, four points on my cranium—is that what a Humperdinckian God is like? The computer recorded my every breath and blink. Not my every fart, there were no sensors there, but if pressed to answer, a fundamentalist would say God notices and remembers our every flatus.”

But I also wondered about the synchronicities I experienced in my life—things happening at just the eerily right times. As if “God has written me into His novel which is being carefully read by fourteen angels who have infinite time, since they have all the time in the world.” I still do not know if there might be some hidden structure to the universe, or whether these synchronicities were merely coincidences. And there is not much chance that I will ever figure it out.

The Excruciating Pain of Reading Old Novels

I suppose we should be happy that our society has moved away from racism and sexism, however incompletely, and however vigorously conservatives have resisted it. Also, we should be happy that fiction has moved away from pretentious and shallow writing (or not). What is there to not like about this? Right after this essay, I will get back to my series about how I became a Christian agnostic.

One thing is that there are hardly any old novels that we can read that do not make us cringe. I will use just one example: Sinclair Lewis, the first American writer to have received the Nobel Prize for literature. One of his major novels is Main Street. I thought that I should read this novel (which was in my giveaway pile). Even though I enjoyed his Arrowsmith when I read it decades ago. Arrowsmith was about a microbiologist in public health—what’s there not to like about that?

But Lewis’s writing would have gotten it immediately (and perhaps correctly) rejected by any modern agent or editor. To start with, the narration was self-consciously clever. Just to use one example, he wrote of the female character, “Ever she effervesced anew…” The main character was also not credible. She was a flighty college girl who had ever such a difficult time deciding what to do with her life, until she decided that she would leave the city and go out to a “prairie town” and tell them how to transform their stolidity into elegance. Even if such a character could exist, she is not someone I would want to spend lots of reading-time with. Agents always say, in their automatic rejection software, that “I didn’t connect with the character,” which implies that they actually looked at your submission. But in this case, it is true: it is difficult, if not impossible, to care about this person. Actually, she sounds like a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald characters.

Even worse, Lewis begins with a snub of “squaws and portages,” by which he dismisses the Native Americans (in this case of Minnesota) as gruesomely boring. Only white people are interesting or have stories worth telling, in the Lewisian mindset.

A few novels from the early twentieth century told interesting stories from non-white cultures. One immediately thinks of The Good Earth by Pearl Buck. While the entire novel is written in a condescending, paternalistic mode, The Good Earth was, within its context, an attempt to see an Asian culture with real people, good and bad, completely apart from white culture.

We now squirm with discomfort at the entertainment of nearly all previous ages, for example Spike Jones and His City Slickers performing Hawaiian War Chant. While we may lose much of value by turning our noses up at the past, it is the inevitable side-effect of ethical progress. In a similar way, while we may lose much insight by turning away from the religion, and religious writings, of the past—such as the Bible—it is necessary that we do so.

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part three

This is a continuation of insights that I wrote in my daily journal back in 2005, as I tried to navigate a transition from doctrinal Christianity to a Christian-spirituality-agnosticism.

But if God is in me, as in all creation, he is experiencing creation. He is in me in a way he is not in a rock, because in me he experiences consciousness. As I continued on 24 January 2005, if God pervades all of nature, “occasionally tendrils of the holy come together, coalesce, react, sprout into phenomena that deny explanation…All I know is that music and color and science are all more beautiful than we have any right to expect.” The next month I wrote, God pervades everything but does not actually cause anything in the Newtonian sense.

At the same time, I admitted the truth of agnosticism: “All of conservative Christianity is a scab that hides true religion and, in order to prevent the scab itself from being shed, doctrinal Christianity prevents healing.” It keeps you scratching at the wound. It keeps you going to church, instead of healing your mind and returning to clear and happy thought. “Religion is the great fester on the sick body of humanity.

“There is both senseless chaos and blessed order in the world. There is frightful chaos that is not God’s will…Each day we must reaffirm whether we concentrate on the beauty or on the terror. I have several reasons for choosing the beautiful. First, if I cannot be sure there is no God, then I assume there is. Second, our evolution has made us religious, and the mind requires some kind of religion just as the body requires vitamin C, so I might as well choose a healthy religion. Third, it is deeply, not intermittently, pleasurable to have a good religion. Just as our eyes and mind create a model of the world, with things such as color that are not really there, so our minds create religious order.

“…I swim through a reality of God’s thick presence. Thick light, the antithesis of Thick Darkness. [I am not sure what this means. But I just like the imagery. It helps me live. The Bible in several places used the imagery of thick darkness, the kind of foggy darkness through which you cannot even see a ray of distant light. I wrote a series of novels with this name. Thick light is the kind of light in which you cannot see the light source, but it is all around you.]

“Religion is a coping mechanism. We can face disasters but not chaos. The question Can I trust the world requires a religious, rather than a scientific, answer…We must simultaneously admit suffering yet affirm the good in the world. The mother telling the child everything will be all right, and religion telling us the same thing: both are equally truth or lie. No one would think of censuring the consoling mother.

“…the pursuit of goodness and love is worth it, even if no one ever hears a heavenly voice saying, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’”

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part two

One of the books I was reading during my transition from fundamentalism into agnosticism in 2005 was Rabbi Kushner’s Who Needs God. This was exactly the question I was asking myself, and Kushner’s writing was clear and simple, so this was the perfect time to read his book. I did not need any complex theology.

I wanted to enjoy wisdom. Wisdom, I wrote in my journal, is the only pleasure worth having. One can get enough of sex, but not of wisdom, as King Solomon the sex fiend discovered with his thousand wives and concubines. And because of wisdom, every day, no matter how tired I was during my medical problems, I had a deep sense of awe, as if the whole universe were awash in holiness. Maybe it was just an altered mental state, but if so, it was a state of happiness. I had come to doubt that there was a God of love, but I wanted to live as if there was a God of love.

At the same time, I was really angry at any God who might possibly exist. Kushner asked, how can you be angry at a God you do not believe exists? But I was angry at the fact that there should be a God who, just once, rescues the world from its misery. I could not come to terms with the fact that were was not.

This entry, from 9 January 2005 and subsequent days, is transcribed almost verbatim from my journal. I might note that I wrote in huge paragraphs, which I have here broken up and, in some cases, rearranged. I have added minimal comments, in brackets.

“I begin now to read Kushner’s Who Needs God. I need a break from ancient scripture which I read, first in devotion, then wisdom, then analysis; for example, I recognized Jeremiah’s manic-depressive extremes. I need to escape not from scripture so much as from a tyranny of how humans have used it.

“God challenged Job, asking if he had measured the earth, sky, and sea and knew everything in them. Now, we have done this. We cannot any longer identify God with what we do not know. Or can we? We calculate unknowable dimensions, as if the mere calculation of them makes us their masters.

“I admit that while I was wrong about much traditional doctrine, a mystery remains to which I must be open. Kushner said scientific research is an act of religious devotion, honoring the creator of mind. I use what I write as a religious gift, not as a challenge or a reason to be cynical. Cynical means “like dogs,” happy or angry from merely immediate circumstances. I need to focus on how my work of teaching and writing are my service to God, to lay claim again on the joy of what is before me to do. Enjoy now, not some day.

“God is depicted as bringing order out of chaos, and this is what scientists, serving God even if they think they are not, are doing. My scientific work is as holy as that of a priest. Kushner wrote, “…I am saying what I think and feel to be true, not what I think God wants to hear, and I have to believe that God respects that” (p. 21). The issue is not what we believe about God but about what we do. God’s existence is now unclear to me, but I continue to act on the assumption that God is love. This is the only way [for me] to be happy. Abram did not wait for all the answers before stepping out in faith.

“Rather than asserting, I am waiting, open to insight. As Kushner says, religion is not primarily a set of beliefs but a way of seeing. It cannot change the facts about the world but changes the way we see them…Here we are. What is our purpose? Religion shows us another answer from [that of] those who say our purpose is as consumers or as party members. Big religious leaders claim more, and less; they have grandiose eschatologies, and yet they tell their followers all they have to do is to give them money…

“Once humans became [in evolutionary time] intelligent enough to see the pain and misery of the world, religion was a way to keep going without being paralyzed. As long as we insist an Almighty God is on a throne, independent, then we can wonder why he allows suffering. But if we see God as having melded himself with creation, like bacteria evolving into mitochondria or mycorrhizae integrating into plant roots, we can see that, first, God cannot manipulate everything for us, and second, no priest is closer to God than we are. God is one with his world now. That is why life is good, not mere matter and energy. This is religion, from the Latin word for connection. It is not merely the carbon cycle, not merely evolution, that connects us with the soil and trees and animals. I feel connected because I am connected.”

I will continue exploring my 2005 journal in the next entry, and I hope it helps whoever may be reading this.

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part one

I underwent my transition from doctrinal Christian to Christian agnostic almost exactly sixteen years ago. I had no blog at that time, so I wrote all my thoughts in a journal. I had written entries in the journal every day since 1989. I continue that journal, which now has over 11,500 entries and four and a half million words. The journal started off as a strict devotional, back when I was a fundamentalist. I am nearly a stranger now to the person I was at that time. In each entry, I studied scriptures, and then forced an evaluation of my life into a scriptural format. I seldom let my actual feelings show in those entries, since they were intended as an offering to God. But in 2005, all of that began to change. Until recently, I had not looked back at those entries. Now, I am curious about what I was thinking at that time and why. Perhaps some of this will resonate with you as well.

In case you think that religious fundamentalism is stupid and that is all there is to it, I remind you that religion is an appetite, just like the appetite for sex or food, and, in some of us, every bit as strong.

I used a strict devotional format of A (adoration), C (confession), T (thanksgiving), and S (supplication)—ACTS for short. But toward the end of 2004, my devotional format began to break down. By 2005 the ACTS structure had become “a pseudogene whose structure can be detected, sometimes and partially, in all that I write.” My daily entries became reflections of what I was experiencing, rather than what I was reading. I stopped regularly referencing Biblical passages. By that time, I had read and written about the entire Bible—as well as the Apocrypha—twice. I gradually slipped back into this practice, but not on a regular basis. My Biblical references were from the prophets, who struggled to understand what was happening on the Earth, as those whom the prophets considered to be God’s people were turning from him. I did not reread passages of doctrine and commandment. My journal entries changed from devotions to enigmas.

One major reason for the transition from fundamentalist to agnostic was that I was ill. Nearly every day, I was in a fog of tiredness, brought on by insomnia and muscle spasms that lasted nearly all night. I realized that I did not suffer nearly as much as millions of other people; but my complaint was part of a vast wave of suffering that God, if any, should hear. I felt I was going to surrender my vivid experiences into a brain-dead grayness. I literally thought I would die from the lack of sleep in a hospital. I was, at that time, on sabbatical, so I did not have a daily schedule of work, though I was writing book manuscripts, on which I put a great deal of effort. At last, I had surgery that corrected the sleep apnea. After I recovered from the surgery, I took a trip to see the desert and foothill wildflowers in Arizona and California in what turned out to be one of the best wildflower years. Thus, my rethinking of Christianity was started by personal suffering, but the suffering turned to the joy of seeing the beauty of the natural world. But, having once realized that I had been wrong about doctrinal Christianity, I did not go back to it.

Here follow (in this and later essays) some of the things I was thinking in January 2005. During my meditations, I was not talking to God, but to myself, although I liked to imagine that God was with me. Instead of holding onto God, I was letting him hold onto me, if he wanted to do so. I previously believed that God is love, but I now realized that love is God: “He exists within all processes, relationships, and situations of love.” I saw myself, and all humans, as “…protoplasm, sometimes twitching, sometimes broken, sometimes a broth for bacteria.” I decided to relax and accept the beauties of life that I could see, and listen for the “still, small voice” that Elijah found in the wilderness, “only I am not going to theomorphize it.”

I had great aspirations for myself, especially to become a well-known writer. That aspiration has not materialized as I hoped, although my five popular science books have been well received and widely read. I decided I would be satisfied to be a small plant down in the shade; it was not worth the effort and expense to try to be a tree, to be up in the light, where I might attract the attention of lumbermen.

I continued to write meditations, because I was ready to receive insights from God, though I did not seriously expect it. At the same time, I had to continue interacting with other people—my family and, once I was back from sabbatical, my colleagues and students—because I did not want to have bizarre ideas rise and grow in my isolated thoughts, “like island monsters.” (I was thinking of the strange species that evolve on islands.)

Join me in exploring these ideas born of struggle, leading away from doctrine and toward a certain measure of celebration.

Greek Mythology: Pretty Depressing, Most of It

Athena, the goddess of wisdom, committed violent and senseless acts. The king of the gods, Zeus, went around raping women, and his jealous wife Hera went around afflicting the women. Apollo, the god of Truth, was a liar. In addition to this, he loved a human woman, Coronis, but she didn’t like him, so he had her killed. And it goes downhill from there.

The human heroes, as well as the demigods, were also far from being models of behavior. Hercules, for example, was a total jerk except when he was depressed. One time he went crazy and killed his family. Then he felt such intense remorse that he forced his famous Labors upon himself. The Greek king Agamemnon sacrificed his own daughter, Iphigenia, so that the Greek ships could sail to Troy. Even after reading about it, I could not understand why Medea killed her children.

Punishments, meted by the gods upon demigods or humans, seemed random. Some, like Tantalus, deserved the eternal torture that they received in Hades. (In his case, he was eternally hungry, and fruit hung right before his mouth but moved away whenever he reached for it, forever, and he was eternally thirsty, and water came right up to his mouth, but flowed away when he tried to drink it, forever.) I think Tantalus was one of the guys who killed his children. There were a lot of those. But Sisyphus was condemned to roll the stone uphill forever from a minor infraction. The Danaïds had to carry water, forever and forever and forever, in jars with holes in them, then refill them, for reasons that were not clear to me even when I read about them. And poor Oedipus. It was apparently the whim of the gods that condemned him to kill his father and marry his mother, and not realize he was doing it. The mother of Tithonis asked that he receive eternal life. The gods granted it. But she forgot to ask for him to remain young. So, he lived forever, just getting older and older and older. He must be a pile of flesh somewhere even today; if you step in a pile of goo, it might be him. Helen was immortal unless someone killed her.

The logical Greek view of the universe, as written by philosophers, came after a long history in which people thought of themselves as part of a universe that made no sense, and could never make sense. I can imagine living in a world of Aristotle, where effects follow causes, but I cannot imagine living in the world of Homer. The gods were just like humans, some good, some bad, most of them alternately and unpredictably both. The only difference is that they were powerful and immortal. How can you even get up in the morning if you believe the world is unpredictable?

The Romans were so unimaginative that they took the whole load of Greek mythology and adopted it as their own, just changing some names, like Zeus into Jupiter, Chronos into Saturn, Hephaestus into Vulcan, etc.

There were some bright spots. You will find them in the Iliad and the Odyssey. In the Iliad, there was one brief moment of humanity, in which Achilles returned the body of Hector to Hector’s grieving father, Priam the king of Troy. And the Odyssey is stirring because, despite the stupidity of fate, Odysseus (Ulysses) never gave up his quest to return home to Ithaca and to his wife Penelope, now two decades older. Some consider the Odyssey the first, and possibly the greatest, novel ever written.

Another bright spot is that the Greeks did not yet have our modern sense of racism. Andromeda, one of the beautiful princesses rescued from sea monsters, was Ethiopian.

Against the background of randomness, the priests of the gods (especially at the oracles) could pretty much make up whatever they wanted and claim that it was the will of their particular god. The priests of Zeus would listen to the susurrus of the wind in the oak leaves to discern the god’s will. However much I love the wind in the trees, I think these priests were just making shit up.

The only thing worse than Greek mythology was Norse mythology, which was just as grim, but the gods, rather than being immortal, had to eventually die in the Götterdämmerung.

So, dear students, if you have to study Greek mythology, be prepared for some grim and tiresome stuff, except for an occasional beam of light that will enter your mind the way Zeus entered through a tiny slit into the dome where the human woman Danae dwelt.

Joseph Lewis vs. the Faith Healers

 

My previous essay was about Joseph Lewis the freethinker. I learned some important things from his published speeches, even though his anti-religious fervor sometimes got tiresome.

In the above image, Lewis is the white-haired man at the right at the dedication of a Thomas Paine statue in 1956.

Where Joseph Lewis was at his white-hot finest was when he criticized faith-healers. One of these was Jack Coe, who called together people with TB to be healed. Not only did Coe fail to heal them, but he violated quarantine by assembling so many consumptives together. Coe was earning $800,000 a year, which was a fortune back then. Lewis challenged Coe to heal a child of polio in a hospital where it could be observed; and if Coe healed the child, Lewis would donate $60,000 to medical research. (Needless to say, this didn’t happen.)

My favorite part was when Lewis lashed out against Oral Roberts, who remains to this day the darling of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I currently live. He, too, was a faith healer. Lewis accused Roberts of malpractice because he took advantage of people when they were at their most vulnerable. It was worse than the Catholic church selling indulgences in previous centuries. He challenged Roberts: how can you prove that you represent God? And where does the money go? Roberts also had the same problem as Coe: gathering four hundred people with TB together in order to (pretend to) heal them is a health menace. The boy that Roberts supposedly cured of epilepsy—how do we know he was really cured? In fact, how do we know he was ever sick? Maybe he was just a “shill”, a fake, planted in the audience. Once again Lewis challenged the faith healer to do his work under hospital conditions, a challenge that as far as I can tell went unanswered.

I have a special reason to dislike Oral Roberts. It gets personal. My wife’s grandmother sent Roberts much of her money, and the entire family continues poor as a result. My wife is perhaps the richest of them, as a part-time librarian and wife of a middle-class professor at a small university.

However interesting it was, I got tired of Lewis’s attacks on faith healers. It sounded as if he was trying to convince Oral Roberts that he was wrong. This was, of course, impossible. It is not a matter of reason. As Gad Saad explains in his book The Consuming Instinct, faith healers are meeting the emotional needs that have been placed in our brains by evolution. Sometimes I think that Lewis’s insistence on the primacy of reason is as un-evolutionary as the faith healers’ rejection of evolution. Religion is not something that is either true or false; it evolved.

Joseph L. Lewis was the leader of the Freethinkers in America for most of the first half of the twentieth century. He was as zealous in his fight against religion as any preacher could be in support of it. I recently read a collection of his essays, which the Freethought Press put together into a book using the plates from Lewis’s pamphlets—without even adding page numbers. Much of it got pretty tiresome, especially when it seemed as if Lewis was offended by anyone around him who was religious. He wrote insulting letters to Billy Graham, and his television interviews (including on May 22, 1957, by a very young Mike Wallace) were rambling in their anti-religious assertions. Lewis wrote, “Throughout the ages religion has imprisoned and chained and stultified the brain of man.” He wrote this same idea in various ways—but almost always using the word stultified—throughout his work.

But Lewis had some good points. Religion has often held back scientific, and human, progress. He didn’t just mean evolution, about which he had relatively little to say. One of his examples was that Timothy Dwight, President of Yale College, preached against smallpox vaccination because, he said, smallpox was the decree of God. (I wonder what Lewis would think of the religious opposition to vaccination and mask-wearing today.) He also said that some religious people objected to Benjamin Franklin’s invention of the lightning rod because, they believed, lightning struck whenever and wherever God wanted it to, and intended the consequences.

Many religious people think that people without religious faith are evil. But Lewis was boundless in his celebration of Thomas Paine, who was praised by the Americans during the Revolution but vilified later for his lack of religious faith. Paine devoted himself to making life better for everyone. He even, in 1800, proposed a Congress of Nations (similar to the League of Nations and later the more-or-less successful United Nations) to prevent war. Lewis also praised Robert Ingersoll, who also dedicated himself to improving the lot of humankind. These famous freethinkers did not use their lack of religion as an excuse to take advantage of other people, as many preachers use their religion to do. It seems that most of Lewis’s work was to go around the world and preside over the unveiling of statues of Paine and Ingersoll.

Clearly, Thomas Jefferson was a freethinker. He wrote, “In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty.” Jefferson urged us to “question with boldness even the existence of God,” since, if God exists, He would be more pleased with our intelligent belief than with ignorant superstitious devotion. But when Lewis tried to prove that Abraham Lincoln was a freethinker, the result is much less clear.

Lewis brought up some good points about Biblical history being unbelievable. For example, the story of Moses. Moses led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, according to the Bible. But there is no record of this in Egypt. Most fundamentalists say this is because the Egyptians didn’t want anyone to know about the embarrassing Exodus of the slaves. But surely, said Lewis, the next dynasty would have written about how the preceding dynasty had messed up and allowed slaves to escape. Then, Moses came down the mountain with tablets of stone on which the very finger of God Himself had carved the commandments. When Moses saw the idolatry of the Israelites, he threw the tablets and shattered them. This seems a really odd thing to do with tablets that God Himself had written. Then Moses went back up the mountain. This time, it was Moses who carved the tablets, God just dictating, according to Lewis. This reminds me of the golden tablets of Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism. The tablets on display in Salt Lake City are replicates of the originals that somehow mysteriously got lost. Funny how vital evidence supporting the truth of religion gets lost over and over.

Though the repetitive writing got tedious, I learned some things from reading the works of Joseph Lewis.

Want to Know Where the Bible Came From? Don't Ask a Fundamentalist

 

I recently read Whose Bible Is It? by the prominent scholar Jaroslav Pelikan. It was an interesting overview of facts that are found in many other books, such as those by Bart Ehrman. Ehrman’s books are somewhat combative, which is understandable, since he emerged from a fundamentalist background. Pelikan came from, and remains in, a scholarly environment, and he is telling the fascinating story of where the Bible came from without feeling the need to fight the anti-information crowd.

Pelikan tells of the gradual accumulation, over centuries, of the books of the Old and New Testaments, and the books that didn’t make it into either one. The Bible is not a book; it is a collection (Bible comes from the Greek word for library). Different versions of the Bible included different books, and even as late as Martin Luther there was disagreement about which books really belonged in the Bible.

One point that Pelikan made that I had not previously thought about was this. The world of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, was one totally unfamiliar to modern people. When the scriptures say that Jesus is a shepherd, modern people have no idea what a shepherd actually does. Also, people thought that diseases were caused by demons, not germs or genes; the Bible contains not a single example of a medical healing. Also, the Old Testament world was one of continual and continuous war. When the prophets longed for turning swords into plowshares, they were not just thinking about spiritual warfare within one’s spirit but relief from suffering right now. And in the New Testament, when they expected the Second Coming, they expected it right away, not in the undefined future; so much so that Paul said that we shouldn’t even bother getting married. When so many of the expectations of the Israelites and Christians failed to materialize, they had to scramble around to find an excuse for it.

Another point was that some major Christian doctrines have a very shaky Biblical basis. In one place, our modern Old Testament says, of the redeemer, “They have pierced his hands and feet.” But it could just as easily be read as, “They have mauled his hands and feet like lions.” The first one sounds like a prediction of the crucifixion, the second does not. The difference is one slight line in the text—these are Masoretic vowel points, not even letters—a yod vs. a waw, which look very similar on paper. Something important was lost in translation.

Another thing that was lost in translation was the character of Jesus. When Jesus told the religious authorities that God can make children (ben/banim) of Abraham out of these stones (eben), it was evident that He loved puns. You just can’t get this in English. Most of us realize this, although there are some churches that believe that it was the 1611 King James Bible that was inspired by God, rather than the original writings.

The Bible is not a book—or, rather, a library—to be quickly read or superficially interpreted. Fundamentalists seldom have the patience to examine closely what they consider to be the scriptures.

Department of This Can't Possibly Be True

In Oklahoma, we do things that sound like they come out of an SNL routine that was expressly designed to ridicule Okies. That is, we seem to want to create an image of ourselves that fits the widely-held stereotypes. The events I am about to describe are all exactly what you would expect from benighted rednecks, and the odds against all of these things happening at once are huge. I can only conclude that rural Okies want to make themselves look stupid. Chance cannot explain this.

All of these news items were posted on May 22, 2020. All of them occurred in Rogers County, three of them in the same town (Inola). Remember that rural Oklahoma is the buckle of the Bible belt, exactly where you would expect people to behave in a religious, even if not sanctimonious, fashion.

• First, the pastor of the Cowboy Gatherin’ Church in Inola was arrested for raping and molesting three underage girls. That’s really the name of the church. It meets either outside, amidst cattle barriers, or under the tin roof of an auction barn.
• Second, there was a fatal stabbing at a rodeo.
• Third, a man sustained burns when he set fire to his estranged wife’s house.
• Fourth (this is the only one not in Inola; it was in the Oologah-Talala school district), a former special education teacher was arrested for having sex with one of the girls in his class.

These things all fit our stereotype: fundamentalist religion, illegal sex, cowboy culture including cowboy churches and rodeos, stabbings, deadly marital strife, and arson.

If I wrote these things—separately, or together—into a novel, an editor would rightly accuse me of creating stereotypes, and ask me to remove at least two or three of them. But in Oklahoma we feed our stereotypes, and that is why all four of these things appeared in the news on the same day.

One inescapable conclusion is that the prevalence of the Christian religion does not make people behave any better. Creationists like to claim that believing in evolution will make us behave like apes. But does fundamentalism make us behave better? Are evangelicals more moral? Remember they believe they have the Holy Spirit living within them to empower them to act righteously.

Oh, and by the way, tornadoes were coming through the same day.