Philosophical Debate of Two Fetuses

I recently became aware, years later than everyone else, about a story that religious people use to “prove” that there can be life after death. It is about two twin fetuses in a womb. One of them is an agnostic, the other a believer, in Life After Birth. The same reasoning used by the two fetuses could be used by us in our discussions of Life After Death. It is a really clever story.

The skeptical fetus says, “What evidence is there for life after birth? We have not seen the outside world, even if there is one, nor has anyone come back into the womb to tell us about it.” The other fetus maintains his/her faith in Life After Birth. The believer insisted that there was such a thing as a “mother.

The conclusion of this story is that just because we cannot see into the afterlife, and just because nobody has come back from it doesn’t prove that there is no such thing as Life After Death. I have no problem admitting that there might be. If the unitary universe theory is true, then it is more than a possibility, but a certainty, even though by this theory we are trapped in our infinitesimal slice of time.

As far as this argument goes, there is nothing wrong with it. But most religious people do not want the rest of us to merely assent to the possibility of life after death. They make claims about the specific content of life after death, and that you ought to believe this content. Things about Heaven and Hell, saints flying amidst clouds, the gates of Heaven, etc. These specific beliefs are unprovable at best and in many cases ridiculous, as Mark Twain showed in Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.

But fundamentalists take it much further. To illustrate the point, let us continue the story of the two fetuses.

Both fetuses are born, and discover that there is, in fact, Life After Birth. And the Mother somehow knows which fetus was the believer, and which was the skeptic. She holds up the believer, swaddles it in rich clothing, kisses it, and declares that it is the heir of all of her considerable fortune.

Then she turns to the other fetus. “So, little one, you doubted my existence? Here’s what I’m going to do to you. I am going to skewer you and roast you forever over a fire. Your body juices will drip down into the flame, but you will never run out of body juices, because I will continually renew them. You cannot faint, for I will keep you awake. Forever. As punishment for not believing in Life After Birth.

“And if you had believed in Life After Birth, but believed something incorrect about it, it wouldn’t have done you any good. I would still roast you forever in conscious agony.”

“But, how could I have known?” asked the agnostic fetus.

“Your sibling told you,” answered the Mother.

“But how should my sibling have any more credibility than I?”

“Invalid question. Now, let’s get started. Angels, bring me a skewer!”

“But why are you doing this?”

“Because I FREAKING LOVE YOU, that’s why. Now, this is going to hurt as much as possible…”

I could go on, but you get the point. Fundamentalists sometimes use arguments that seem clever, until you start asking questions about them.

Religion and Human Misery, Worldwide and Throughout History

Throughout prehistory and history, religion has been a major source of human misery. Since the beginning of our species, religion has allowed some members of a society, and some societies, to dominate others, because they claim the authority of their god to do so. Most, if not all, religion is a delusion, but cultural selection (the social equivalent of natural selection) has favored it not because it was true but because it provided fitness benefits to its practitioners.

This delusion has been prevalent in the human species since the beginning. Civilization developed independently and differently in the Old World and the New World, but in both cases religion allowed powerful people in the cities to dominate masses of teeming poor and miserable victims. The list of atrocities carried out by the world’s first kings—who ruled more than just their village or small confederation of villages—is impossible for any sane human to comprehend all at once. Babylonian kings flayed their victims alive. Even the reputedly moral Israelites put whole cities to the sword. Chinese emperors carried out mass executions. African kings made some of their armies march into the sea and drown. And in America? More presently.

Peter Watson wrote The Great Divide back in 2011. This book is a quixotic quest to make sense out of all human history. This prolific writer must be a genius but his task was impossible. However, his book did help me understand one thing a little better. What caused history to take a different trajectory in the Old World from the New?

The major answers to these questions were, to my understanding, not very different in Watson’s book than in the more famous books (Guns Germs and Steel and Collapse) by Jared Diamond. The Old World had wild plants that could easily be bred into crops; wild animals that could easily be bred into livestock; and a geography that allowed easy movement of technologies and people east and west along latitudinal lines. North and south movement was more difficult because of climatic differences, something that was particularly important for crops. Agricultural civilization developed in both hemispheres, but much later in America, which is much narrower, especially in tropical Mesoamerica. New technologies diffused very slowly from one part of the New World to another.

But Watson also wrote about something I’d not considered: religion. He gave examples, just a few from countless ones, of the cruelties imposed in the name of religion. But something happened in the Old World that was different from the New.

All religions, Watson explains, began as shamanistic religions, in which a religious cult leader would go into a trance and believe himself or herself to be transformed into a spirit animal, or at least convince others of it.

In the Old World, this gradually transformed into religions in which there were fewer and fewer, and more powerful, gods, with priests who were not shamans. This was associated with the rise of agricultural civilizations, in which kings, standing in for gods, imposed order.

But in the New World, there were fewer agricultural civilizations, and they rose later: the Mound Builders, the civilizations of Mexico and of Peru. And, something I’d not considered, the New World has far more species of hallucinogenic plants. Priests continued to be ceremonial shamans using hallucinogens to connect with the spirit world in America long after it had mostly stopped in the Old World. (Indeed, in the Old World, starting in several places independently about 500 BCE, many people began challenging religious tradition with demands for justice and morality, examples being the Old Testament prophets, Buddhism, and Taoism.) I’d also not considered that Old World people could not get stoned as much—they preferred mild drugs like alcohol—because if they did it would be dangerous for them to handle large livestock animals, animals that the New World inhabitants did not have.

And it wasn’t just hallucinogens; in the Native American civilizations, people induced a trance state by self-brutalization. The Spanish conquistadors saw a king and queen come out and, in public, lacerate themselves: he drew a rope through his own penis, she through her tongue. Once there was a contest to see how many sticks a man could run through his tongue; the winner pierced his tongue with 405 sticks. In Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest, there were 1500 ball courts. In these games, the losing team was sacrificed, and sometimes the winning team also. Archaeological evidence indicates that at the major city in North America before the European invasion, Cahokia (in modern Illinois), when one of the chiefs died, his relatives were killed also, as well as fifty women aged 15 to 18 years of age.

Some of what we know about the extremes of religion in ancient America come from their own records (those that the earliest Spaniards did not burn); but it is also based on historical observation, and not just by the conquistadors. In 1720, a French explorer, Le Page du Pratz, was visiting a Natchez village, when the chief died. At his funeral, the chief’s two wives and six concubines were stupefied then strangled. At least, in North America, the cruelties were less extreme than those I describe below.

Much has been written about the cruelty of the conquistadors who massacred and enslaved the Native Americans, starting with Columbus’s expedition. I have written a lot of it myself. I have repeatedly called for the elimination of Columbus Day. This is all true. But the Aztecs and Incas were not peaceful civilizations hacked to pieces by demonic Europeans. If anything, the Native American civilizations had continued the self-feeding spiral of religious cruelty far beyond anything that had evolved in the Old World. In the Old World, human sacrifice stopped. Had it continued, and had it undergone an autocatalytic explosion, it would have produced something like what the Aztecs and Incas had.

Aztec warriors would raid more and more distant towns and bring the captives to Tenochtitlán. Some warriors would flay the skin from the victims and then wear it until it rotted away, which was a religious display of renewal and resurrection after death. Warriors were given the flayed skin of girls to wear. Every student of history has learned about the Aztec sacrifices in which the priests cut out the still-beating hearts of victims, eviscerated them, rolled their bodies down the pyramid steps, then cut off and made stew out of the limbs. This was often after pulling out the teeth and fingernails of the captives. Hundreds of children were sacrificed, particularly by the Incas, after cutting their ears off.

Both the Aztecs and the Incas had to keep expanding their territories not because they needed food for an expanding population, or because of the desire to rule larger empires. Indeed, with no horses or wheeled vehicles, a central priestly government simply could not control a large empire, nor could they import heavy tributes or perishable food. (Old World agriculture produced mostly grains, while New World agriculture produced mostly perishable products, except dried corn, which was actually a late product.) Almost all that they wanted was sacrificial victims with which to feed their ravenous, unpredictable, and horrible gods. Sacrifices intensified, starting about 1440 CE (by the Mayan calendar) and continuing until the conquest in 1521. By the time of conquest, the Aztecs were processing twenty thousand victims a year. It was a spiral of cosmic paranoia. They were worried that their sun good, Huitzilopochtli, might run out of food; this was at a time when the sun was, in fact, getting dimmer because of eruptions of volcanoes such as Popo (Popocateptl) not far away from the Aztec capital city. There was no American equivalent of a supreme God who could be satisfied with prescribed animal sacrifices. While the Old World had storms and droughts and volcanoes, the New World was rife with them. The Native Americans were much more afraid of their gods than the Eurasians had ever been of theirs.

Some Pre-Columbians could see that human sacrifice was becoming crazily excessive. The Toltec leader Topiltzin tried to stop human sacrifice, but failed.

Their only desperate hope to escape from this cycle of bloodshed appeared to be that the god Quetzalcoatl would come from oversees and rescue them. Cortez came, and the Aztecs thought that he must be Quetzalcoatl.

Meanwhile, the conquerors from the Old World were just as evil, with the exception of not having human sacrifice. The Spaniards roasted their captives alive, or cut off their noses, lips, or chins. Many European scholars of many lands (Juan Sepúlveda, Cornelius de Pauw, Oliver Goldsmith, etc. etc.) wrote that Native Americans were little more than animals and had no right to not be killed. A few, like Bartholomé de las Casas, stood up for the humanity of the natives.

When the Old World met the new, religiously-inspired massacre met religiously-inspired human sacrifice. Not only in society after society, but by entirely separate evolutionary development in the two hemispheres, religion facilitated, even demanded, the greatest cruelties the human mind could devise.

What do we do about it? Do we give up religion? Can we? Would it change anything? I do not have time to write, nor you to read, any attempt at answering that question right now.

Untitled

Throughout history, emperors and dictatorial leaders have used violence and torture upon their foreign and domestic subjects. Homo sapiens has been the most violent and bloody species in the evolutionary history of the Earth. Far from limiting this tendency, religion has mostly made our human evil more potent. That is, religion evolved primarily as a means of suppression. For our species, it is evil, since we know the difference between altruism and oppression, between love and hatred. A wolf is just a wolf but a violent man is evil.

Many of us grew up with the belief that the United States of America was different, that America was a force for good in the world. Of course, we should have known that this is not true. I should have known this because of what the United States government did to my Cherokee ancestors and to members of every other tribe of Native Americans. And we all should have known that America was not a good country because of government approval of slavery and later of oppression against black people.

Some of us dared to hope that America is not like that anymore. Although much oppression and police brutality remain, the government no longer kills Natives or enslaves blacks. But the recent release of the Senate report on brutality against detainees after September 11, 2001 must cause us to reconsider whether our government is a force of good. Our government’s response was not just to track down terrorists and bring them to justice, but also to grab Muslim men at random and torture them. A detainee is simply someone who has been thrown in prison, without regard to evidence of guilt.

CIA operatives, in some cases, did their best to degrade detainees by “interrogation techniques” that had absolutely no chance of yielding useful information. Torture is not just evil but is scientifically worthless. CIA operatives:

• Used rectal injections on detainees as a method of torture, with no medical justification.
• Subjected detainees to up to 180 hours of sleep deprivation.
• Stripped detainees naked, hooded them, and dragged them down the prison hallways.
• Forced detainees with broken feet or legs to stand in stressful positions.

And the list goes on. Now, suppose I were captured in a random sweep of white American men by a Muslim government and subjected to these tortures. I would confess to anything to get the pain to stop, since it would be clear that this would be the only way to stop the pain. I would confess to being a secret agent from Mars.

As if this news was not bad enough, Dick Cheney has gone on record as saying that he had no regrets about having the CIA do any of these things, and that he would do them again in a minute. He is proud that we torture people to force them to say what we want them to say. This is what the former Vice President wants the world to think about the United States.

Cheney proclaimed that we should not have been nice to the people who attacked us. But the people who actually attacked us on 9-11 were dead. And some of the detainees were guilty, and some were not; torture did not yield any useful information regarding which was which. It would be like terrorists grabbing random Americans and torturing them—which is, in fact, what they do, and something that, until now, we have pretended we did not do.

Okay, so we were not as bad as many other countries, such as Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. And today we are not as bad as, let me think, North Korea. But that is not the point. We claim moral superiority, that we are a good nation fighting against bad ones. The fact that our government differs from evil governments in degree rather than quality is of little comfort to those of us who wish we could be proud to be Americans.

Not all Americans are bad, of course. Barack Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize, after all. At least he has some respect in the world. But the world also knows the utter and pure hostility with which Republicans confront Mr. Obama. And there are millions of other good Americans, some of whom are reading these words. But what difference does it make? They hear what Mr. Obama says, and they hear what the CIA has done, and they believe the actions rather than the words. And for every Barack Obama saying peaceful things, there is a Dick Cheney proclaiming that America will do whatever it wants to whomever it wants whenever it wants.

Having Dick Cheney be the face of America in the world right now proclaims one thing and one thing only: America is strong only because of its force and wealth. The moment that we falter, economically or militarily, we deserve no cooperation or mercy from the rest of the world, which we have disdained. Because of this, I am ashamed to be an American. I am not ashamed of good Americans, including some who are very rich but who spend their wealth to try to eradicate diseases such as malaria that afflict millions of poor people in the world. But the actions of my government cause me to hang my head in shame.

Islamic extremists claim, You call us barbaric? You call us evil? While this does not justify their continued acts of terrorism, it is perfectly clear why they hate us. And I can make no defense for the official actions of the United States of America. Of course we are not as evil as they are (e.g. shooting Malala Yousafzai in the head; she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize the same day that the report was released). But they are terrorists, and we are supposedly the nation of goodness and peace, so the mere fact that we are not as bad as they are means nothing for our image.

We are strong in the world because of our military power and our wealth. That is all. We cannot expect any respect from other countries, but only fear. They will be nice to us because they don’t want us doing something evil to them. We spend more money on military activities than all other countries combined, so it is clear that we can wipe the floor with anybody’s asses if they stand against us. We are the Babylon, the Roman Empire, of the modern world. And that is pretty much all there is to it.

Can you see why I cannot think of a title for this essay? What word or phrase could encompass the profound stain that permeates America’s image now?