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.

An Unlikely Place to Find a Nature Worshiper

I discovered a surprising book in my vast library recently: My Wilderness, East to Katahdin, by a certain William O. Douglas. Many of us think of the modern era of environmental awareness as having begun with the 1962 publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. But My Wilderness, published in 1961, has some of the same ideas, though in a less organized form. Rachel Carson organized the concepts into a powerful argument and provided all of the scientific references, but William O. Douglas and probably many others had thought of them earlier. To read more about these specific concepts, see the essay for this same date on my science blog.

Douglas was a man who hiked all over the continent. He writes of backpacking in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming; Zion National Park in Utah; Maroon Bells in Colorado; Baboquivari along the Arizona-Sonora border; Quetico Provincial Park in Canada; The Smoky Mountains; the Everglades; the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal near Washington, D. C.; and the White Mountains, Allagash, and Mt. Katahdin in the northeast United States. He was no stranger to the challenges of survival in the wild. The descriptions in this book are sometimes evocative and help you to feel like you are actually present in a place you will probably never visit. But, although I have no doubt that he saw all of these organisms, his descriptions were usually lists of plants and animals that sound like he copied them out of a guidebook. There were quite a few books of this sort published about the same time, such as The Singing Wilderness by Sigurd Olson, The Near Woods by Millard Davis, and One Day at Teton Marsh by Sally Carrighar. Douglas’s book is highly disorganized, except for each chapter being about his experience in one particular place.

What makes this book unique is the person who wrote it. Who was he? Do the black robes in this portrait give you a hint?

William O. Douglas was, throughout nearly all of the time during which he took the hikes he describes, a Supreme Court justice. He still holds the record of serving the longest on the Supreme Court, almost 37 years, from 1939 to 1975. Aside from Teddy Roosevelt shooting big animals and mistaking it for a love of nature, we have never had—and almost certainly will never again have—a prominent politician who had or will have such a passionate and thorough knowledge of the natural world. Today, with the new “conservative” (vs. conservationist) takeover, it seems that the less you know about science and nature, the more qualified you are for any office, particularly positions in which you are supervising government conservation and scientific activities. But even the few remaining liberals in government seem to think that the Earth is just a stage on which the human drama takes place. Douglas was most famous for writing the “Rights of Rocks” statement. In the Sierra Club v. Morton suit regarding the commercial development of Mineral King, just south of Sequoia National Park in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, Douglas wrote, “Contemporary public concern for protecting nature's ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation.” That is, trees should be able to sue for their own preservation. Can you imagine any Supreme Court justice, or any other prominent politician, saying anything like this today?

But the main point for this essay in this blog is that Douglas considered Nature to be a holy place. No wonder the right-wing fundamentalists hated and still hate him. Bob Dole and Gerald Ford both wanted to see him removed from office. Thousands of books are published with the theme that nature is holy, and millions of people believe it, but none of them in such a prominent position as the one Douglas held. Just read these words: “If we make conservation a national cause we can raise generations who will learn that the earth itself is sacred. Once a person breaks through to the level where love of beauty is the ideal, he will worship the rocks and plains that are America. Then he will look on a tuft of grass with awe. For it has the secret of chlorophyll that man hardly comprehends” (page 32). Nearly every modern conventional Christian would consider Douglas to be a pagan for saying such things. Yet his view is the only one that can allow us to survive into the future.

Happy Columbus Day, Part 2

Despite all of the things I wrote about in the previous entry, conservatives insist that we honor Christopher Columbus.

I started to go to the Conservapedia website to learn their view about Columbus, but Web of Trust (WOT) displayed a red circle and announced that this website was untrustworthy and dangerous for child safety. I had to specifically give my browser permission to continue going there. I felt a tingling of danger, as if I was sneaking a peek at pornography.

I can see why Conservapedia (the right-wing twisted-logic imitation of Wikipedia) would be considered untrustworthy. But why would Conservapedia be considered a dangerous website for children?

One of the things that conservatives hate the most is what they call revisionist history. They hate it when modern scholars tell us to rethink our assumptions about Christopher Columbus being a great hero of Christianity; or the same assumption about the Pilgrims; or to reject our cherished myth about How the West Was Won by heroic whites shooting dirty Native Americans.

Conservatives want to cling to the 1950’s-western-movie version of history, and to the assumption that God established the United States of America as his holy white land. It is easy to understand that it is dangerous to raise kids to think these things. If cowboys who shot Indians were heroes, then maybe, the kids might think, it is just fine to do the same thing today. For why else do their conservative parents keep caches of arms and ammo? Perhaps, then, Conservapedia, which enables (even though it does not expressly promote) a white supremacist version of history, is dangerous to kids for the same reason that jihadist sites are. I don’t know; jihadist sites appear to be blocked on my browser, so I don’t know whether they would show up with red circles or not. I can find only news sites and anti-jihad (including moderate Muslim anti-jihad) sites.

And now, continuing with Columbus. I was googling to find out what conservatives actually say about Columbus. I expected all of them to praise Columbus as the man who brought the light of Christianity to heathen Natives who deserved to be enslaved. And some conservative writers come pretty close to this (see below). However, most of the conservative sites I found openly admit the evil things that Columbus did. This included the Conservapedia entry, which provided a harrowing list of the evil things that Columbus did. As a matter of fact, this entry mentioned some things that the progressive historians sometimes do not, such as how Columbus’ men would skewer the Natives on pikes. The author conveniently omitted the part about cutting off hands, but was otherwise quite honest about Columbus’ brutality. I am glad that I checked up on what conservatives actually say rather than just lashing out at what I thought they said. I wish they would be so careful in criticizing progressives.

However, by means of mental contortion, conservatives have figured out a way to ignore the evil things that Columbus did, right after admitting them. Here is how Conservapedia and another conservative website (The American Conservative) did it.

• First, Conservapedia claims that the main person to accuse Columbus of crimes against humanity was Ward Churchill, a professor who lost his job because of “academic dishonesty.” By claiming that Churchill was a bad man, they imply, though they do not say, that all accusations against Columbus are unreliable. We progressives do not base our opposition to Columbus upon Ward Churchill.
• Second, right after they admit that the 500 Taino captives that Columbus sent back to the slave markets of Seville were the first instance of an American slave trade, Conservapedia hastens to point out that more Natives died of European diseases than died of slavery. I guess that, since slavery was not the number one cause of death, then it can be safely ignored. Imagine applying this argument to current events today. “Diabetes kills more people than ISIS, therefore ISIS isn’t so bad” is a 21^st-century equivalent to “diseases killed more Natives than did slavery, therefore slavery wasn’t so bad.” I must note that Conservapedia did not say that slavery wasn’t so bad, but they clearly used disease as a way of minimizing the horror of slavery.
• Third, Conservapedia claimed that since the critics of Columbus had not adequately defined genocide, then this word cannot be used to describe the actions of Columbus. However, this contradicts what is written earlier in the entry, which says that within a space of 60 years a Native population of over a million on Hispaniola was totally wiped out. (I don’t know where they got these figures, but notice that they are even worse than the table of numbers I reported previously.) Only a rabid conservative would question whether or not this constituted genocide.
• Fourth, a writer for The American Conservative noted that all groups of people have had a brutal history. He proceeded to mention other acts of brutality in human history. Of course, this does not mean that we should admire Columbus. If conservatives revered a day to celebrate the Wounded Knee massacre, I would oppose it just as I do Columbus Day. I don’t think Cambodians should celebrate Pol Pot Day, if there is one. And so on. This conservative argument is only a diversion.

It is by such mental contortions that many conservatives deflect attention away from the evil things Columbus did, evils they will admit, and get their readers and admirers to turn against scholars and teachers who want to teach the truth about Columbus. I can only wonder how many home school conservatives teach their kids that Columbus was God’s humble servant.

Some conservatives, however, go much further in trying to sanitize and sanctify Columbus. Kenyn Cureton, vice president of the Family Research Council, says of Columbus, “He did do some things that weren’t right but his motives overall were, number one, to get gold to free Jerusalem but secondly to share the Gospel.” Think about that for a moment. That makes Columbus, overall, a force for good in history, right? Columbus didn’t want the gold for himself but to finance another crusade. And, Cureton continues, Columbus “was very much motivated by his Christian faith, and I think that is what is behind this effort to wipe his name out from history.” So you see, everybody, the only reason I would ever criticize Columbus, according to this particular conservative group, is because I hate Jesus. If I really really really loved Jesus, I would rejoice in what Columbus did. Please oh please somebody confirm that you don’t have to love Columbus in order to be a Christian.

The conclusion I reach is that nobody, anywhere, should celebrate Columbus Day. It should not, of course, be forgotten. October 12, 1492 should not be forgotten any more than September 1, 1939, the beginning of the Nazi blitzkrieg.

I posted this essay on my evolution blog.

Can Any of Us Really Be Safe?

In the previous entry, I wrote about the reservoir of rage in rural Oklahoma against anyone who stands for the teaching of evolution, teaching about global warming or any other environmental issue, or racial equality. And I correctly indicated that this rage is found in only a small percentage of the people.

But a small percentage can ignite a mass wave of hysteria. The examples I cited last time, especially the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, are famous. And even if they do not ignite hysteria, a small number of people can wreak havoc if they have and use guns, which, as I mentioned, the Confederacy of rural Oklahoma certainly does, though they have so far chosen not to use them. And, as any of the numerous recent shootings indicate, all it takes is one person.

Yes, all it takes is one person. My example is the man, Steve Raucci, who carried out 62 acts of vandalism, including terrorist acts (setting explosives on people’s cars and trying to burn down their houses), in Schenectady, NY. Ira Glass tells his story on the “Petty Tyrant” episode of This American Life.  Even  though the police and most of the people who were repeatedly victimized knew who was carrying out these terrorist acts, the police could not even get a warrant, not even to search the man’s office at a public middle school (an office that belonged to the taxpayers), until someone secretly recorded a nearly complete confession from the terrorist. Until that complete confession was placed in evidence, the people who worked at Mt. Pleasant Middle School were helpless, unless they had their own guns, which were not permitted at work. Raucci even had a bomb in his office, ready to use. His gripes were personal, not political or religious; imagine what he would have done if he thought himself an agent of God!

This is why I do not want to openly pursue, other than this blog and on Facebook, the story of the rural Oklahoma armed Confederacy. I will not campaign against it where I live. If any Confederates should decide to take violent action against me, there is virtually nothing I could do to stop them. They could spray-paint my house, or try to burn it down, they could put bombs on my car, and law enforcement would be unable to stop them. (And perhaps, based on my observations, some law enforcement agencies would not try.) Steve Raucci did all of these things to his victims, without law enforcement being able to even investigate him other than to record anecdotal observations. I strongly believe Campus Security officers where I work are doing and will do whatever they can to investigate some instances of crimes already committed against faculty on our campus, but their powers are limited.

So, I have chosen to tell you all about the rural Oklahoma Confederacy and the potential dangers it poses, but I am not going to start any actions against it, even speaking out in public, except in these blog and Facebook outlets. I feel like a Syrian unable to say anything bad about Assad, or a Russian unable to say anything bad about Putin. I merely point out that the same situation exists in America, though it is not enforced by the government as it is in Syria and Russia.

Of course, the NRA would say that I could get lots of guns and have them ready to hand at any time and wherever I am. This is in fact what one NRA spokesman said regarding the Charleston church shootings: if the people in church all had guns, they could have stopped the shooter. He was seriously suggesting that people take their guns to church. I cannot have guns at my workplace, a university. I am certain that our enrollments, already low, would drop disastrously if the Oklahoma state government instituted (as has been proposed) a policy for professors to have firearms in class. Students would, rightly, fear for their safety in such an environment. And as for my home or on my person at other times? I’m not saying whether I am armed or not. But I am certain that such a defense is, or would be, imperfect.

As I wrote before, rural Oklahoma crawls with people who are angry and delusional enough that they could, if they chose, use guns against people who disagree with them about evolution, global warming, environmental issues in general, or racial equality. So far, they have chosen to not do so. And we cannot really protect ourselves against them. The story of Steve Raucci proves this.

I also published this essay on my evolution blog.

Bold Comments about Organized Religion

I do not often post strong comments on Facebook, since my friends are from all over the gamut on religion and politics. But I decided I had to say these things:

Many large religious organizations use their power and influence for political ends, and to guilt-trip money out of their followers. These organizations are not satisfied if a person says, “I will love God and love humans collectively and individually and love the earth that I share with them.” Instead they say, “No! That’s not enough! God also wants you to give us your money and believe every doctrine we proclaim!” The result is organized religion, which throughout history has been a scourge upon humankind.

When Isaiah wrote words that he attributed to God (chapter 1 verse 14), “Your…feasts and your appointed festivals I hate with all my being; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them,” Isaiah was referring to organized religion, not to individual religious people who loved their neighbors.

When Jon Stewart and associates wrote (in the 2010 book “Earth: The Book”) that it is difficult to kill a person, but easy to kill an infidel; and that “religion helped overcome man’s catastrophic tendency toward neighborliness,” he was talking about organized religion, not individual religious people who loved their neighbors.

I am repulsed by the big religious organizations that want to make Jesus merely an appendage of the Republican Party (or the Democratic Party; but you don’t hear much from them) and want nothing to do with organized religion. Pat Robertson’s gospel was, when I heard his show a few years ago, “Send money send money send money bomb Iran send money.” My religion is a private relationship with God. It is, as I said above, I will love God and love humans collectively and individually and love the earth that I share with them.

American Exceptionalism

If there is one single idea that is central to the various conservative Republican views of the world, it is American exceptionalism. Let me attempt a definition and description of this concept.

The first component of American exceptionalism is that conservatives in America are, and always has been, God’s chosen people, whom he will exempt from any judgment or consequence. If there is any judgment upon America, it will be because of those whom they call liberals. But anything, no matter how perverse, that a conservative wants to do is, in advance, already approved by God. Modern American conservatives, alone among all people who have ever lived, are inerrant and automatically exempted from God’s judgment. They can say whatever they want, without evidence, and it’s just fine. They can believe that God created the whole world just for them to destroy for their own pleasure right now, and it’s just fine. They can use Jesus as their finger-puppet to wiggle in the air whenever they want the appearance of God’s approval on whatever they say or do, and it’s just fine. They do not worship God; God is their tool, and they sneer at him even as they exploit him. It is themselves whom they worship.

Today is not the first time that some people, calling themselves Christians, have assumed that God has already forgiven them in advance for whatever they might do. When Crusaders sacked Constantinople (which was the capital of a Christian, not a Muslim, land), the pope had forgiven them in advance for whatever brutalities they might perform. And those brutalities, which I cannot bear to list, were far beyond anything the Bosnian Serbs or the Islamic State have been able to invent. One can only hope that modern conservatives are not going to do anything like this, but they apparently believe that there is no higher authority preventing them from doing so.

So that is the first component of American exceptionalism: American conservatives, alone among all the people of the world, are exempted from judgment by God, humankind, or history, for whatever they might do.

The second component of American exceptionalism is that conservatives think that God has exempted them from any consequences of the laws of nature. They think they can release all the carbon dioxide they want to into the air, and this carbon dioxide will not, in fact, do what carbon dioxide always does. Carbon dioxide always does cause and always has caused global warming, but apparently the carbon dioxide released by American conservatives and the corporations whom they worship will not have this effect on the Earth. And if it does? Well, they don’t care. Conservatives can just stay indoors with the air conditioning on, and the heat waves will kill Europeans (as in 2003) and Pakistanis (as earlier this summer), whose lives do not matter to them anyway. The comfort, indeed every sensual whim, of American conservatives is more important than the survival of other people. If American conservatives want to release carbon dioxide, then God had better miraculously exempt the world from the consequences of it, if God knows what’s good for him.

American exceptionalism, then, is the belief that there are no laws of God or man to which American conservatives are obliged; they are excepted from all of them. American exceptionalism is a species of blasphemy. So if a conservative begins his or her line of reasoning with a defense of American exceptionalism, you know that no discourse is possible with them. As for me, I will never have any conversation with a conservative unless he or she is willing to renounce American exceptionalism at the start. And if they do—if a particular conservative individual is willing to admit that the same God (if any) judges all of us and we all live on the same Earth with the same rules—then it might be possible to have an exchange of ideas.

Does Anybody Really Believe in Hell?

Conservative Christians claim to believe that everyone who disagrees with any of their doctrines (and presumably, intertwined with them, their political beliefs) will be condemned to uninterrupted torture literally forever in Hell. And it is the God of Infinite Love that will make this happen.

This is such an outrageous doctrine that nobody really believes it. If you can believe that a God of Love can do this, then you have the ability to totally jettison all mental faculties. Conservative Christians (and perhaps extremist Muslims too, I don’t know) claim to believe it, but they don’t. They simply cannot make themselves really believe it. If they did, they would be relentless in their attempts to get us to repent of being Democrats. They would not just denounce us but keep doing so in a desperate attempt to rescue us from infinite eternal torture. When one of them talks to me, friendly banter is more likely to come from their mouths than condemnation. And I believe that none of them would be themselves willing to be the people who subject us to eternal torture. They simply would not be able to stand over us and keep us at the end of a poker and roast us and listen to us scream forever. They probably couldn’t do it for five minutes.

That is, they—even the most ferocious of them—are more loving and merciful than they believe God to be.

Post-Election Demise of Reason

For those of us who wish to use evidence and reason to inform our beliefs and decisions, yesterday’s elections confirm our worst fears. The entire legislative process at the national level, and in most states, will now consist of attempts to implement conservative beliefs. And this has left me with a sense that nothing I do next is going to matter very much.

Now, if conservative beliefs—any of them—were the product of evidence and reason, even if the evidence is imperfect and the reason well-intentioned, then I would not feel this way quite as much. I would respectfully disagree with them. But conservative beliefs—as nearly as I can tell, all of them—are the result of assertions based solely upon their own opinions and held even when the evidence is against them. Evidence and reason simply do not matter to the new Republican majority.

One example of conservative substitution of wild assertions in place of evidence is the Christian preacher Rick Wiles, who posted recently about the ebola epidemic. His first claim was that God sent ebola as a way of punishing atheists, gays, and sluts. His second claim was that President Obama has intentionally spread the ebola virus in order to cause a crisis so that he can impose martial law. His words are nothing but insane hatred. Most conservatives do not agree with him. But have you heard any conservative preachers or politicians denouncing Wiles or other preachers who proclaim similar lies? I am not aware of any. Please post a comment if you are. Preachers such as Rick Wiles use religion to get people to, without the least bit of thought or evidence, embrace far right-wing politics. The right-wing politicians, even those who know that Wiles is wacko, are happy enough to let him lure people into their political sphere. Conservatives seem to not be bothered at all by having such people as Rick Wiles represent them.

All that remains for me to do is to try to do the right thing for my family, friends, colleagues, students, and readers. Scientific evidence and reason may not matter at all to the new majority, but they matter to a lot of people who are actually in contact with me. Though I have no hope of effecting any political change, I will continue to serve all of you.

In a way, those of us who understand and love science must continue working the same way the first-century Christians worked. They told others about what they thought was the Gospel (even though this Gospel evolved over time), they continued to meet (even when in secret), and they did so even though they knew they would have no immediate impact on a government run by clinically crazy Caesars in Rome.

Behold the Lamb

Back in my formally religious days, one of my favorite Biblical passages was what John the Baptist said when Jesus showed up to be baptized. He said, “Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world.”

To me, the most important word was the first one, behold. What was there, about a young Jesus, that might suggest that he was the Lamb of God, which you could see just by looking at him? Jesus had not yet begun his public ministry. It is very likely that John knew Jesus, knew about his character and his beliefs, but it is very unlikely that John knew about what would later be considered the essential theology of Jesus as Son of God and as King in the lineage of David. Based on evidence that Bart Ehrman has outlined very clearly in How Jesus Became God, it is not likely that Jesus even made these claims about himself. At the very least, Jesus almost certainly had not yet made such claims back when John baptized him.

So what could John see, and bid others to see, by looking at Jesus? They could see a man who really cared about his fellow humans, who noticed and championed those who are oppressed and poor, who turned away from the path of violent opposition to the Romans, who took time to notice the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. When you beheld Jesus doing things like this, you could conclude that he was the Lamb of God. As a scientist, I consider this to be a good, if primitive, application of the scientific method.

But when you behold a modern conservative Christian, you see almost the exact opposite of these things. Modern conservatives glance at the poor and oppressed and blame them for not being rich. To modern conservatives, laziness is the only reason that anyone is poor. Furthermore, to these modern Christians, armed opposition is the first choice against any power of which they do not approve. Jesus told Peter to put away his sword, but modern conservatives say that we should all have as many guns as we can afford, and be ready to use them. And to modern conservatives, the birds of the air and lilies of the field are invisible parts of a countryside that is just asking to be driven over by ORVs or developed into resorts. To listen to modern conservatives, you would think that Jesus got rich by ruthless business practices, shunned the poor, had as many weapons as he could carry, and aspired to live in a big house on the hill built by underpaid and uninsured laborers.

What about the rest of the verse? Lamb of God referred to the idea that Jesus was to be the sacrifice that would take away the sins of the world. The Apostle John said that “God sent not his son into the world to condemn the world but that through him they might be saved.” But according to conservative Christians nearly everyone who has ever lived is going to suffer unspeakable torture in Hell forever. In most cases, it will be because these people never even heard of Jesus. In many other cases, it is because these people beheld the actions of Christians and concluded that, if Christians imitate Christ, then Jesus must be evil. And in most other cases, it will be because these people did not accept the interpretation of the Bible that conservative Christians insist is the only correct one. For example, the Book of Revelation depicts 144,000 people being saved. To most of us, this is clearly a figurative number, based on holy numerology and the number seven. But conservative Christians believe that if you do not believe this number to be literally exact, then you will not be among that number. Or if you do not believe that this or that or some other specific political event is in fact the beginning of the End Times and Armageddon, then you are damned. If about 100 billion people have lived in the history of the world, and only about 100 thousand will be saved, this is a one-in-a-million success rate—or, a 99.999999 percent failure rate, for God’s announced purpose of saving the world.

No wonder conservative Christians hate us. When one of them looks at you, he or she knows that there is only a one in a million chance that you will be with them in heaven. This being the case, why should they care to treat you with any respect? Why should they hesitate to throw garbage in your yard? I wrote about this earlier, in which my former neighbor (who wears a God-and-guns-and-American-flag T shirt) trespassed into my yard to use my trashcan (or did, before I locked up my trashcan on an enclosed porch). Why not? I am just hell-fodder anyway, and so, probably, are you.

In the famous parable of the Good Samaritan, a student of religious law asked Jesus to define the term neighbor. A neighbor, Jesus indicated, is whoever you give assistance to when they need it, even if you find them out on the road. But to modern conservative Christians, even the person who lives in a house next door is not a neighbor, but is merely some biomass headed for Hell.

When I behold modern Christians, I cannot see at all the figure of Jesus as depicted in the gospels. The Jesus I love is someone I must wholly construct out of fantasy.

A Letter I Plan to Send

To Gregory Alan Thornbury

President, The King’s College

56 Broadway

New York, NY 10004

Dear President Thornbury,

My name is Stanley Rice. I am a professor of Biological Sciences at Southeastern Oklahoma State University in Durant. I am also the president of the Oklahoma Academy of Science. I was a faculty member at The King’s College from 1987-1990, at which time I chose to leave for other employment (I was not asked to leave). I was a sabbatical replacement, then a temporary instructor, then an assistant professor of biological sciences.

I wish to express my disappointment with the way King’s, a supposedly Christian college, prostituted itself to the Republican Party, as well as some relief that, with your appointment as president, a more theological and less political direction seems to have been restored. From what has been in the news, it appears that the only thing that was important, from the viewpoint of the administration and governing board of King’s, was that a faculty or staff member adhere zealously to the Republican Party. This was particularly evident in the case of your former president, Dinesh D’Souza, who apparently considered himself exempt from the laws of both man and God as he broke the civil law regarding campaign contributions and God’s moral law regarding faithfulness. While King’s could not have known about his utter disregard for personal morality when D’Souza was hired, it was clear even long before he became the president of King’s that he believed he could say anything he wanted, regardless of fact or evidence, against Democrats, especially President Obama, and that God would approve of it. While this may not be what you intended, the message that the outside world gets from this is that D’Souza was acceptable as your leader merely because he is a zealous Republican, and that, for King’s, Christianity is merely a disguise for rabid political conservatism. Previous presidents of King’s (I was there during the administration of Friedhelm Radandt) were not famous conservative zealots but were more interested in education as, it appears, you are. At the time I worked at King’s, I felt uncomfortable with this switching of Republicanism with Christianity, and now I am completely ashamed of it. Just be assured that the outside world does not deride The King’s College for being Christian, but for being unchristian.

During my time at King’s, I knew some truly outstandingly good individuals, most notable of whom was Dr. Wayne Frair. But even these fine individuals got caught up in the continual warring factions that eventually led to the 1994 temporary closure of the college.

When King’s should prove ready to heed the call of the prophets, ancient and modern, to care more about the poor than the rich, and to care about the earth, as commanded in Exodus, and to behold the lilies of the field, as Jesus did, then let me know. I would be happy to circulate your response to those who read my writings.

Sincerely,

Dr. Stanley Rice

I’m So Glad to be So Out of There

From 1987 to 1990, I was a faculty member at The King’s College, which at the time was in Briarcliff Manor, New York. I voluntarily left in 1990. I was a moderate Christian at this very conservative religious college. Some of my colleagues had inquisitive minds, but many were simply closed-minded to anything outside of conservatism. Many of them spent their time fighting one another in power struggles and doctrinal disputes. The students got really tired of it and eventually there were so few students that the college closed in 1994. Then it reopened in New York City.

I am so glad to be out of there. You see, I called it a conservative religious college, not a conservative Christian college, because the only things they really affirmed with any enthusiasm were the tenets of the Republican Party.

I had stopped paying attention to The King’s College until I heard a news report about the hyper-conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza. It turns out he was president of the college from 2010 to 2012. D’Souza is the perfect example of the belief that all you have to do to be saved is to worship the Republican Party—that is, the extreme right wing of the Party. Moderate Republicans do not count.

D’Souza expresses this opinion most vividly in his absolute hatred of Barack Obama. In a Forbes magazine article in 2010, D’Souza said that Obama was “...trapped in his father’s time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father’s dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.” D’Souza stops just short of saying that President Obama is demon-possessed.

Even those aspects of history and current affairs that most conservatives find disturbing seem to be pretty damn acceptable to D’Souza. For example, he thinks that the European conquest of Africa was just fine. According to Wikipedia, “In the second chapter of What's So Great About America, D'Souza defends colonialism, arguing that the problem with Africa is not that it was colonized, but rather that it was not colonized long enough.”

D’Souza also claims that the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib was the fault of liberals, not of certain members of the American military or the Bush Administration. He said the tortures and degradations (which the whole world saw on video) were caused by “the sexual immodesty of liberal America”.

In May, 2014, D’Souza pleaded guilty to making illegal campaign contributions in a senatorial race. He and his wife each made contributions to the full legal limit, but then he made further contributions through “straw donors,” one of whom was the woman with whom he was having an affair. On September 23, he was sentenced to eight months in a halfway-house rather than prison; five years of probation; and a fine of $30,000.

As I read the Bible, God considers it wrong to have affairs and to break national laws and to lie about people (as D’Souza has lied about Barack Obama). But D’Souza apparently thinks, or at least thought, that he was exempted from God’s laws because of his worship of the Republican Party. I wonder if his sexual immodesty will cause a new rash of tortures of detainees.

Although The King’s College had the integrity to pressure D’Souza to resign his presidency once the sexual scandals emerged, I very much doubt that the College has opened itself up to reasonable thinking any more now than it ever did in the past. I thank whatever God there may be that I got out of there.

Atonement

It is the Christmas season, which for most people just means materialism and religious rituals and images. But for some people, religious or not, it is a time to think about “peace on Earth, goodwill toward men.” One of the main ideas in traditional Christian belief is that Jesus brought “atonement” between God and humankind. According to this view, human sin had caused a rift between God and humankind, and Jesus’ incarnation and later his crucifixion atoned for that rift.

I wondered recently what “atonement” means to conservatives. They claim to believe in the atonement brought by Jesus Christ. But what do they mean by this? They think that they obtain atonement from God every day when they pray and every week when they go to church. But then they continue doing the same evil things as they did before, the same things that the Old Testament prophets denounced, such as grinding the poor into the dust. Apparently, to them, atonement means that God forgives them in advance for whatever they might do, sort of like the pope conferring indulgences in advance for whatever rape and pillage the Crusaders might do once they reach the Holy Land.

The conservative viewpoint is very male. Males seem to be like medieval knights: they enjoy jousting with one another, pennants and draperies waving in the air, while the people around them are sick and starving. Congress (which is mostly male) recently created an artificial budget crisis, not all that different from medieval jousting matches, so that they could joust while ignoring the real problems that bring suffering to the masses. And they fantasize that females drool over their jousting sticks. Male thinking, like male reproduction, is an ugly ramming, unlike the nourishing roundness of the female body and female thinking. Conservatives, whether Christian or Muslim, generally believe in the right of males to dominate females, which includes the primacy of male ramming over female nurture. Atonement, then, to their way of thinking, must mean to wash away female niceness and replace it with male ruthlessness.

This view of atonement is completely different from the original Christian meaning, back when Christians were a little socialistic altruistic band and before Christianity became a political force.

Do conservatives really care about the poor?

Conservatives claim to care about the poor, and one of their criticisms of Democrats is that progressive policy undermines the “social safety net.” This is, to say the least, very strange. I have no doubt that conservatives think they care about the poor; few if any actually wish the poor to just go away and die. But they do not care enough to endorse meaningful action.

Consider, first, that many of them refer to progressives as “bleeding heart liberals.” They intend this as a criticism, even though the term refers to the bleeding heart of Jesus. They scorn the kind of concern that Jesus felt. I have written about how Studs Terkel pointed this out.

Second, who can forget what Mitt Romney said during the 2012 presidential campaign, about how the 47 percent of Americans who receive some public assistance (even if it is not their entire income but just supplementary help) see themselves as dependents and victims. He simply dismissed them as being lazy. Of course, the memory of this statement is already fading.

But there is one way in which conservatives really do care about the poor. The poor are, for them, political capital. Republicans believe they can gain political capital by talking about the poor. In this sense, they resemble the antebellum Southerners who used slaves as political capital.

The Southerners before the Civil War did not want their slaves to be free, or to have rights and receive fair wages. But neither did they want to harm their slaves. Slaves were the most expensive part of running a plantation. Prices for slaves ran from about $50 for old men up to almost $1000 for a nubile young female, according to a museum display I saw a couple of years ago. This was big money at the time. The slave-owners would have to be crazy to beat their slaves. Of course, some of them were crazy.

During the Constitutional convention, the delegates from Southern states refused to consider an end to slavery. They did, however, consider two limitations upon it. First, they agreed that the importation of slaves would end in the future. They did not, however, foresee any eventual goal of ending slavery. Second, they insisted that slaves be counted in the population census.

This second point makes it look like the slave-owners considered their slaves to be people rather than property. But this is not true. The only reason the Southerners wanted slaves to be counted in the census was so that their states would have more representatives in Congress. The compromise they reached with Northern delegates was that each slave would count as three-fifths of a person. Slaves were political capital, nothing more.

Southerners also used slavery in their propaganda against the North. They loved to point out that Northerners, and the British as well, condemned slavery while profiting from trade in the goods that slaves produced, especially cotton. Sometimes Southern propaganda went to extreme lengths. A tract written by George Fitzhugh, Slavery Justified, claimed, “We love our slaves!” I think he sincerely meant in the fraternal, not carnal, sense. He pointed out that Northerners could just dismiss their servants, and allow these servants to sink into poverty and disease and death, at any time. In contrast, Southerners were obligated to keep, feed, clothe, and house their slaves. Southern black slaves were treated better than Northern Irish servants: this was Fitzhugh’s message.

Of course, Republicans care more about the poor even than the Southern plantation owners did about the slaves in which/whom they invested so heavily. But the process is the same: Republicans use the poor, as slave-owners did their slaves, mainly for political capital. Their message is that making rich people richer will help the poor, a claim that has been repeatedly disproven.

Another Conservative Camel

This essay, like the previous, is adapted from one that will appear on my science website.

In the previous essay, I wrote about how conservatives, such as Oklahoma state representative Sally Kern, are straining out gnats and swallowing camels, to use the same wonderful imagery that Jesus used in criticizing the conservatives of his day. In that essay, I explained that the gnat that the conservatives were straining out was gay rights. They claim, totally without evidence, that homosexuals will bring about the collapse of America. Meanwhile, they ignore the clear dangers posed by our destruction of the environment, dangers that are severe enough to cause our downfall. Conservatives supposedly believe that the environment is God’s Creation, but they seem to not believe this very passionately. And the Bible has identified one particular environmental problem—the loss of topsoil, resulting from the failure to let the fields rest from agriculture—as one of the principal reasons that the Kingdom of Judah fell to the Babylonians.

There is another major theme that conservatives ignore. While they scream about homosexuals, they ignore the problem of poverty. I know that some conservatives (among them Sally Kern) make a show of working in soup kitchens, but they staunchly and zealously support the economic structure that reinforces poverty. They want what they call a “free market” in which the rich can get richer by oppressing the poor. For example, they believe that banks should have unlimited rights to do whatever they want to their poor creditors, such as charging usurious interest rates that not only force the poor to remain poor but drive them further into poverty and prevent them from ever repaying their debts. (At the same time, conservatives utterly reject a free market approach to solving the marijuana problem.) The burden of debt is so heavy, and the bank CEOs are getting so rich from it, that most Americans (the middle class, not just the poor) feel utterly crushed by it. But conservatives want to maintain this system. The freedom of the free market is enjoyed only by the very wealthy. Judging from its actions, the Republican Party would rather have America collapse than to have the taxes on millionaires raised even slightly.

This situation brings to mind some things that the Old Testament prophets said. The second prophet who went by the name Isaiah (chapter 40, verse 1) spoke words that have been immortalized in the music, played each Christmas, by George Frideric Handel: Comfort ye my people, cry unto them that their warfare is accomplished. How can I express the feeling of relief that comes from this music and these words? You can just feel the burdens of a nation sliding off of our shoulders. But how is this to be accomplished? Not by the free market. According to the third verse, a voice cries in the wilderness. And what does this voice say? The fourth verse says, “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low.” The meaning of this passage is clear to everyone except conservatives. The rich and powerful will be humbled, and the poor shall be raised up. Not just given some food in a soup kitchen, but actually lifted out of grinding poverty. The only way that our nation, like ancient Israel, can experience relief from our burdens is by making our social relationships more equitable. This is not a call for socialism or communism; there will always be some people who are richer than others, often but not always because they deserve to be. But the extreme disparity between rich and poor in America—which is greater than any other nation in the industrial world and greater than any time in the last hundred years—has to end. The laws and policies that enforce this disparity have to change. As the first Isaiah said (chapter 3, verse 15), God opposes those who “grind the faces of the poor into the dust.”

The solution to our environmental problems also depends on bringing relief to the poor. If people are desperate, they will do whatever they need to do in order to survive. For example, they will try to raise food in marginal soil, which will erode away and cause deserts to spread. There is no hope for our Earth, just as there is no hope for our society, unless the valleys are exalted and the mountains humbled.

Conservatives consider themselves defenders of Biblical religion. But the only thing some of them talk about is how evil homosexuals are. And their solution is that these evil people need to come to their churches and donate money. Conservative churches cannot make money off of denouncing the rich or defending the Earth. On the issues that the Biblical prophets considered most important, conservatives are eerily silent.

Announcement: I want to ask again if anyone wants to submit comments on what you would like to discuss. Unfortunately, at the moment, Blogger is malfunctioning and I cannot read your comments. I hope I can fix that problem soon.

Conservatives: Straining Out a Gnat and Swallowing a Camel

I have adapted this essay from one that will appear on my website soon, but have changed it to expand upon the religious message for this blog. My website is devoted to science, not to religion.

Conservatives are missing the point not only of what is important in the world but even what Jesus said. They are focusing their attention on things that are not important and are ignoring major problems that will destroy our nation and world if left unsolved. I focus on the first of these “camels” in this essay.

In Jesus’ day the Pharisees were a religious group that closely resembled the conservatives of today. They focused their righteous zeal on obeying minor Biblical laws in exquisite detail, while ignoring the important things. For example, they figured out intricate rules for how to tithe not just their income but also the herbs that grew in their gardens. Jesus denounced them in one of the angriest speeches in recorded history, preserved in the twenty-third chapter of the gospel of Matthew. He said to them, “You tithe mint and dill and cumin, while ignoring the weightier matters of the law.” He summarized their brand of religion by saying that they were “straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel.” Besides being a masterful bit of humor, this statement made it clear that religious conservatives, then as now, pay attention to small things that are not a problem—you could eat quite a few gnats without noticing them—and ignore major problems. Nor did they do so at random; conservatives, then as now, gave the most attention to the rules that would give their religious hierarchy the most power, and ignored all the principles that would empower and bless the poor and downtrodden, and save the Earth.

One example of modern conservatives straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel is the crusade of Sally Kern, an Oklahoma state representative, against gay rights. She gave a speech that was secretly recorded and a few minutes of which have spread around the internet, in which she compared gays to a spreading cancer and said that they were more dangerous than terrorists. It is not my intention to criticize her in detail, because I am no expert on the issue of gay rights.

The point I want to make here is that Sally Kern was straining out a gnat. There is no evidence that gays and lesbians are ruining society. Sally Kern, like anybody else, has the right to consider their actions to be wrong, but that is not the same thing as saying that they are destroying the country. I know some gay men, and they have never tried to recruit me to their ranks. They consider themselves to be born gay, and therefore they do not believe in recruitment. They just want people to leave them alone and give them the rights of American citizens. Did homosexuality cause Mesopotamia to fall? Persia? Rome? The British Empire?

Meanwhile, conservatives like Sally Kern are swallowing a camel. Gay rights will not destroy America, but our ecological problems may destroy us. Take, for example, the loss of our topsoil through wind and water erosion. This is a problem conservatives ignore. But it will, not many decades from now, undermine our ability to raise food.

Moreover, the sin of ruining the environment was one of the principal reasons, according to the Bible, that the kingdoms of Israel and Judah fell to the Assyrians and Babylonians. In the laws of Moses, the Israelites were commanded to let their land lie fallow every seven years, and to recover from the strain of agriculture. This law has been known as the Sabbath of the Fields. There is no evidence that the Israelites ever obeyed this law. According to tradition, the Israelite nation persisted for 490 years; therefore they owed the land 70 years. Near the end of the second book of Chronicles, the writer drew a clear connection between Judah’s failure to keep the Sabbath of the Fields and their downfall. The writer said, “And so the land enjoyed its rest.” The Israelite homeland lay fallow for 70 years.

The Bible clearly indicates that failure to take care of the land can cause a country to collapse, just as an individual can be hurt if a camel sits on him. There is no such statement about homosexuality—the gnat in the cup—causing a nation to fall. Why don’t modern conservatives decry the way America is destroying God’s creation, instead of spending all their time attacking gays?

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Biblical Ignorance from Two Directions

Most religious conservatives are ignorant of the Bible. Anyone who can think that everything in the Bible can be taken literally must not know very much about it. Literalism can only be held as a vague belief by people who are unfamiliar with the details of scripture. Now, the preachers and God-appointed political leaders who tell everybody what the Bible says must actually study it, and know that what I am saying is true. But the average fundamentalist in church does not read the Bible very much. They may read the passages that their preachers tell them to read—especially the book of Revelation—but they certainly do not read the passages about social justice or taking care of the land or, especially, the agnostic passages in the book of Ecclesiastes. In my evolution class, when covering the friction between evolutionary science and religion, I mention that one of the big problems is why a good God would use heartless natural selection as his method of creating. And I point out that this is not a new problem; the book of Ecclesiastes addressed this problem thousands of years ago. (See early 2010 entries in this blog.) I read to them from the book of Ecclesiastes, and none of the students in my class recognized it. One of the class creationists asked for an exact reference so she could (to her credit) look it up, and I just said to read the whole thing. I suspect there are many things in the Bible that fundamentalist preachers do not want people to actually read. If they made a movie out of the book of Joshua it would be rated R for violence and explicit sex, sometimes in the same scene. Fundamentalists suffer from Biblical ignorance. They should read the Bible. They would find to their astonishment that the Bible does not say that Obama is the antichrist, and that it presents a social model that is closer to socialism than it is to free market capitalism.

Of course, there is also a lot of Biblical ignorance among the agnostics and atheists. This is regrettable for several reasons. One is that lazy agnostics and atheists (unlike thoughtful ones) have no idea what they are rejecting or why, and they can make themselves look stupid if they criticize religious people. But the other is that the Bible is a rich source of some of the greatest literature, in which some of the most important questions of the human spirit are investigated. The stories! The Iliad and Odyssey are excellent both in the quality of stories and the way they address eternal issues of the mind and spirit, but the Bible has them beat, easily. There are hundreds of millions of people in secular western culture who have no idea that Jesus saved a woman from being stoned by saying, “Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone.” They have to reinvent the idea for themselves as if the world just now began, with their generation. This is just one example. The people of the past were not just a monolithic pile of dirty violent morons. They struggled with the same important questions that we struggle with, and the Bible is a record of some of the most glorious struggles and beautiful insights.

If I were dictator, I would have everyone in our western society learn about the Bible, without insisting that they assume any particular theology. This would immediately raise the level of mental experience in both fundamentalists and the non-religious people.