New video

I just posted a new video on StanEvolve. It has not shown up on the main page yet but the link works, just click on StanEvolve. Rick Perry prayed for rain. Did God answer that prayer? Can you ever know? Science and falsifiability...

More Scriptural Justification for Killing

In previous entries, I have criticized fundamentalist Christians for using the Bible to condemn people who disagree with their doctrines. In fact, the Old Testament often calls for the killing of people who disagree with them.

These fundamentalists seem to ignore the distinction between the Old and New Testaments. The Old Testament called for the stoning of people having sex outside of marriage. But when hard-line religious people brought to Jesus a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery, Jesus forgave her. (One of course wonders what happened to the man, whose sin was apparently excused by the religious authorities.) Clearly Jesus was preaching a message of forgiveness rather than of condemnation: a code for a church rather than for a government. But modern Christian fundamentalists continue to quote Old Testament condemnations of people they do not like, especially gays and lesbians, even though the man whom they revere as Lord and Master disregarded Old Testament condemnations.

In most cases, this takes the form of white conservative Christian preachers condemning other people. But not always. Let me mention some counter-examples.

Many white fundamentalist preachers are infamous for using their oratory and organizational structure to defraud money from their followers. There are more examples of this than you can shake an assault weapon at. But there are a few examples of black evangelists bilking their poor black followers also. One example is from Tulsa, where I live. Willard Jones, a black Baptist minister, defrauded the community center that he led of $933,507 and he had $390,061 of unreported income in 2011. He got caught in 2014.

But the most famous example of religious oppression outside of white Christian fundamentalism is from radical Islam. I have written little about it, since it is a relatively minor force in the United States, especially the fundamentalist Christian stronghold of Oklahoma. But I want to discuss it briefly now. Islam, like Christianity, has many moderate adherents who do not believe that God, or Allah, wants them to condemn all the people that their religion condemned many centuries ago. My comments, therefore, are limited to Christian and Muslim fundamentalists.

The Koran does not have Old and New Testaments. It has version of one book, authoritative and inerrant for all time, according to conservative believers. All the following quotes are from Quran.com. And here are some of the things that the Koran says:

8:60: And prepare against them [unbelievers, according to verse 59] whatever you are able of power and of steeds of war by which you may terrify the enemy of Allah and your enemy and others besides them whom you do not know [but] whom Allah knows.

8:65: O Prophet, urge the believers to battle. [Unlike Jesus, Mohammed did not say that “my kingdom is not of this world,” thereby indicating a spiritual battle.]

9:5: And when the sacred months have passed, then kill the polytheists wherever you find them and capture them and besiege them and sit in wait for them at every place of ambush. [At least, we can take comfort that this is followed by “But if they should repent, establish prayer, and give zakah, let them [go] on their way. Indeed, Allah is Forgiving and Merciful.” But Muslim extremists kill other Muslims more often than they kill people of other religions.]

9:30: The Jews say, “Ezra is the son of Allah;” and the Christians say, “The Messiah is the son of Allah.” That is their statement from their mouths; they imitate the saying of those who disbelieved [before them]. May Allah destroy them; how are they deluded?

9:123: O you who have believed, fight those adjacent to you of the disbelievers and let them find in you harshness.

22:19-20: But those who disbelieved will have cut out for them garments of fire. Poured upon their heads will be scalding water by which is melted that within their bellies and [their] skins. [This is in the context of Hell for non-Muslims.]

47:4: So when you meet those who disbelieve [in battle], strike [their] necks until, when you have inflicted slaughter upon them, then secure their bonds, and either [confer] favor afterwards or ransom [them] until the war lays down its burdens. That [is the command].

It seems to me, then, that one of the principal dangers in the world is fundamentalism, in which people use their sacred writings as a justification for oppressing or even killing people of other religions, particularly pagans. And some creationists (especially at the Institute for Creation Research and Creationism.org insist that evolutionary scientists are pagans. There is no hope for the world unless the adherents of all religions agree that God is love, rather than believing that God wants all followers of other religions or of no religion to be dead.

Despite Science and Despite Humanitarianism, Racism Continues

The flames of racial unrest are burning in localized pockets across the United States right now. In three separate incidents—Ferguson, Missouri; Staten Island, New York City; and Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I live—white police officers have shot unarmed young black men. Wait; you haven’t heard about the Tulsa one? I guess I will have to tell you about it, since Tulsa has no violent protests such as in the St. Louis suburb and no Al Sharpton as in New York. You expect this sort of thing once in a while, but three at the same time seems a bit unlikely.

A Tulsa policeman, Shannon Kepler, and his wife (also a police officer) adopted a girl with a troubled past. After many years, the girl’s troubles were apparently too much for the couple to handle. They took her to a shelter for homeless adults and left her there. Things like this happen sometimes. But what happened next was astonishing. The young woman went the house where her boyfriend, Jeremey Lake, lived. What would you expect her to do? And if you have just kicked your adopted daughter out of the house, you at least need to let her decide where she is going to live.

But Shannon Kepler did not do this. He drove over to Lake’s house and shot and killed 19-year-old Jeremy Lake and then shot in the general direction of the young woman also. Was Lake’s killing murder or was it manslaughter? And was Kepler actually aiming for his stepdaughter? That is, was there premeditation? Police investigators found that the step-parents had, in their home, a copy of Lake’s arrest records, on which they had written his address. This would seem to be premeditation. Kepler’s defense attorney said that the shooting was understandable because Lake was a sexual predator, which as far as I can determine was not the judgment of any court. So the defense attorney asked for a bail of only $50,000. The prosecutor asked for a bail of $1 ½ million. The prosecutor’s request that Kepler be fitted with an ankle bracelet for monitoring his location was denied by the judge, who imposed a bail about halfway between the two requests. The judge must have considered that this police shooting was not much of a continuing danger to the community. This decision was issued August 22, the same day that Staten Island and Ferguson, Missouri were in the news.

What the Tulsa World newspaper article of August 22 did not mention—and which I had to locate finally in the New York Daily News—was that Jeremy Lake was black. The Tulsa newspaper article did not mention this, nor as far as I could find did it print Lake’s photograph.

Whether this conclusion is justified or not, I know that if I were a young black man I would be worried right now, especially if I lived in Oklahoma, where police shooting young black men does not get much noticed by national media.

When are we going to stop thinking of white police shootings (or, in Staten Island, strangling) of black men as normal? (The authorities seem to have thought that the Staten Island victim was manifestly guilty of a dangerous, dangerous crime: selling untaxed cigarettes. That deserves getting someone killed, they seem to think.)

As most readers of this blog will know already, there is no biological basis for considering one race inferior to another. Pseudoscientific claims of black inferiority have been repeatedly discredited. And even if there was such evidence, it would not justify members of one race killing members of another and having it treated lightly by authorities.

I wonder what Jesus would have to say about this, especially since much of the racism in Oklahoma is reinforced by fundamentalist Christianity.

Religion and Les Misérables

I recently saw the Theatre Tulsa performance of the musical Les Misérables, and was deeply moved by it for a number of reasons. (I was not the only person to look for the director afterwards and say that I’d seen it on Broadway but found this performance more meaningful.) The novel and musical are about an escaped convict, Jean Valjean, who rose above hatred and tried to do good in the world.

Of course one of the main themes was that opposition to the overwhelming forces of oppression is nearly always doomed to failure. Victor Hugo’s novel, and the musical, are based on the 1832 “June Revolution” in France, a hopeless revolt against the re-establishment of the monarchy that had been overthrown during the earlier French Revolution. Those who are miserable because of the oppression by the rich will remain so. Even the American Revolution did not change this; in place of English kings we now have American corporations virtually enslaving us.

But the novel and musical also illuminate several aspects of religion which can, like any biological or cultural adaptation, be either good or evil.

First, consider the Javert kind of religion. This was the police officer who dedicated himself utterly to wreaking imprisonment and death upon anyone who had violated even the smallest law. He never stopped looking for Jean Valjean, to punish him first for stealing bread then for violating parole. This is a kind of doctrinal religion—here is the law, in violation of which you die—that leads to oppression. But even Javert had to struggle with a moral dilemma: confronted with the mercy that Jean Valjean showed to him, he could not decide what to do, and committed suicide.

Second, consider the Valjean type of religion. At first he simply did not know what to believe about the Catholic priest who showed totally undeserved mercy to him. What he ended up doing was, with a religious but not doctrinal faith, using what opportunities he had to try to make the world a better place, first by raising Cosette and then by joining with the June revolutionaries. As the musical said, if you’ve loved someone you have seen the face of God.

There are yet other kinds of religion from which to choose. One is the conviction that, if you assent to the correct doctrines, you are on God’s side and you can do whatever you want to other people, with God’s blessing. That is, you are saved even if you do horrible things to other people. Another is the flip-side of this belief, that people who do not assent to your doctrines are damned, even if they have done nothing wrong. Both of these kinds of religion are beyond the scope of Hugo’s novel. But France was no stranger to them. They were the foundation of all of the persecutions against Protestants and Jews in the middle ages, most notably the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572.

We cannot be ignorant of the fact that the ground is fertile for these two kinds of religion to continue growing. They are only too well known in the Muslim world—to many Muslim extremists, your religion makes you right and even the slightest deviation from it makes you worthy of death. This is also uncomfortably close to the view of many American conservative Christians—as I have written before, this has been an important part of my experience, and I share this experience with many hundreds of thousands of other Americans. These conservatives have guns and I do not see how, under the right circumstances, they could keep themselves from using them, since they believe that God has commanded them to have their guns ready.

I would not expect the American conservative Christians I have known to have Javert’s kind of moral dilemma before turning on me, under the right circumstances.

I renew my devotion to oppose all hateful versions of religion, with the even slight hope that a (probably doctrine-less) religion of love can replace them.

The Biblical Solution to the Palestinian Crisis

As of today, about 1800 Palestinians, mostly civilians including children, have been killed by Israel, while Palestinians have killed only about 70 Israelis, mostly soldiers. It is clear that both sides are committing horrible acts, but the about 25-to-1 disparity shows that the main result of this conflict is the death of Palestinian civilians. The Israeli prime minister has made it clear that he has no interest in what the rest of the world may think about his response to this crisis.

The reason that this matters to many Americans is that American conservatives consider Israel to be (second only to the USA) God’s nation on the face of the Earth. Israel, in their view, can do whatever they want to do, because God has approved of them in advance. And conservative American Christians base their views on the Old Testament. This raises the question about what the Biblical response to the Palestinian crisis might be—a response that American conservative Christians should clearly champion.

The Old Testament makes it clear that God led the tribes of Israel into the region that some of their descendants now possess, told them the land was theirs, and not only authorized but commanded them to slaughter every Canaanite man, woman, and child. In fact, in some instances, when they left a few Canaanites alive, God took retribution against Israel for disobedience. Genocide was, according to the Bible, God’s clear command. And if, as Christians believe, God is unchanging forever, then genocide must still be God’s command. In order to be consistent with their Biblical literalism, American conservative Christians should demand that Israel carry out a campaign of genocide against the Palestinians (who are Arabs, not Canaanites, but are still residents of the land the Bible says God gave to Israel). And the Republican Party, based solidly on whatever the Christian Right wants them to do, should demand that the United States support this genocide. As it is, Israel is just playing around; just 1800 Palestinian deaths? This can only mean that, despite his protestations, the Israeli prime minister does in fact have some fear of world opinion.

Of course I do not believe genocide would be the right solution. The very idea makes me personally sick, especially since one of the best students I ever had was a Palestinian American woman and whom I very much respect. But I also do not believe the Bible is a set of commands for what we must do. I believe the Old Testament is a record of the primitive and often evil actions of people who used God’s name to justify whatever they wanted to do. I believe the incomplete genocide carried out by ancient Israel is exactly the wrong, not exactly the right, thing to do. What I do not understand is why American conservative Christians do not wave their Bibles in the air and demand a campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people.

American conservative Christians today seem to consider physical force to be the preferable option in nearly every case. They were happy to have the Bush II Administration use torture against detainees (which they now blame on Obama). I vividly remember Pat Robertson calling for air strikes on Iran years ago. This is very different from the fundamentalist experience I had back when I was in high school. The Church of Christ sect of which I was a member was pacifist. Back when the draft was still in effect, nearly every young man in our sect published a prepared statement, “My position on carnal warfare,” in our nationwide newsletter, Old Paths Advocate, stating that the Bible clearly forbade us to kill our enemies. I think we were right, but virtually NO conservative Christian leaders today reflect this idea. Today, the Christian church seems to be primarily an arm of the military-industrial complex. Just think of all of the weapons we could sell to Israel if they took their Old Testament duty seriously and began a campaign of genocide that they have so far resisted.

How Can We Know Whether Organized Religion Is a Big Scam?

The answer is quite simple.

I have read several books by Bart Ehrman, and am currently reading How Jesus Became God. Like all his books, this one is clear and delightful and reasonable. I will have more to say about this book a little later, but for now I would like to briefly examine something that Ehrman has said in book after book after book. He always says that the things in his book are common knowledge among pastors.

Nearly every divinity school teaches about scriptural contradictions and historical influences on the Bible. Nearly every divinity school teaches that the Bible is a human document, not dictated by God, and it contains within it the evidences of its own evolutionary ancestry. Of course, places like Bob Jones University do not teach this, but every mainstream divinity school does.

This does not mean that we should not esteem the Bible; its authors were making the best attempt they could to understand what was going on. In Ehrman’s current book, it is clear that early Christians had numerous ways of trying to understand how Jesus could be both human and divine, how he could be both killed and resurrected. They did the best they could. They were not liars. But neither were they dictating fully-formed truths from God.

But apparently most people who go to church—not just fundamentalists—want to believe that God wrote the Bible. And so their pastors do not tell them about the very human origin of what we call scriptures.

This does not mean that clergy are lying (although many do). But it does mean that they take their role as pastor (shepherd protecting stupid sheep from confusing truths) more seriously than their role as guide to the scriptures. They quite rightly assume that, if they told people the full truth about the Bible, they would make them upset; and clergy, in their role as pastors, have a duty to try to help people cope with life. And with death.

So is organized Christianity a scam? Sometimes. But in general it is deceptive, even when it is not a scam. Pastors in general believe that we cannot handle the truth. And they are usually right.

Science and Religion: The Case of George Washington Carver

I have written in my other blog about my immense admiration for George Washington Carver as the model scientist. He is also a very interesting example of the meeting of science and religion.

Throughout his life, but less subtly in his later years, George Washington Carver considered his work to be God’s little laboratory, and that God was revealing the secrets of nature to him.

Carver apparently meant this literally, as when, in 1924, he gave a speech in New York City. The New York Times editorial was highly critical of his religious approach to science.

At first the editorial just seems racist, even though the writer might have meant well (saying that a hocus pocus approach to science makes blacks, who are quite intelligent, look like they are not). But this brings up an interesting point: at what point does religion interfere with a scientist’s quality of work?

I am not talking just about creationism. I have written extensively about how creationists use their pseudoscience as a tool to advance a political agenda. It is really bad science and used to promote a really bad goal. Instead, I am talking about deep religious convictions of scientists that motivate them to pursue scientific research as a holy calling—scientific research that might be just as good as that of any other scientist.

This remains a current issue among scientists. The religious convictions held by Francis Collins were the basis for Sam Harris to claim that he should not be the director of NIH. And the religious faith of Kenneth Miller caused some controversy in the Society for the Study of Evolution when Miller received the Stephen Jay Gould Award in 2011. While, in this link, Jerry Coyne is undoubtedly right that a person who publishes books about science and faith open themselves up for public criticism, I have to wonder if Coyne’s opposition to Miller’s professions of faith is entirely fair.

Is it true, then, that real scientists don’t, or shouldn’t, talk the way George Washington Carver did? To me, this is not a very important question to answer. The real anti-scientists are causing so much trouble that we shouldn’t pick fights with real scientists who happen to be religious. A fair percentage (though of course we keep no records of it) of members of the Oklahoma Academy of Science will describe themselves as people of faith. And if they keep doing good work (such as getting students to look closely at the natural world, which may or may not be God’s creation), I am their enthusiastic colleague. I admit I have problem with some religious institutions, such as Oral Roberts University, whose administration uses every opportunity to promote the belief that God directly told Oral Roberts what the truth was, and that settles it for all time. This resulted in a really disquieting moment at the AAAS Southwest and Rocky Mountain Section meeting in Tulsa in 2012 (which I described in my other blog). My first reaction is always to distrust religious scientists, based on my Oklahoma experiences, which have been mostly negative. But in many individual instances, I have found my religious scientific colleagues to be really fine people.

Some of you might, however, have different views. I encourage comments. I will be posting this essay on the Oklahoma Academy of Sciences blog and, later, on my evolution blog.