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.