Joseph Lewis vs. the Faith Healers

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Department of This Can't Possibly Be True

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Trash in Oklahoma

 

On November 12, 2019, members of a fraternity at Southeastern Oklahoma State University cleaned up garbage that had been thrown along the wooded roadside along a 0.2-mile stretch of Wilson Street down from the biology building where I work.

We did not count the pieces of garbage, but there were six large bags, which means several hundred pieces of garbage, some of it large and some of it dangerous. (At least this year we did not find discarded syringes.) Simple math indicates that the garbage intensity (I think I just made that term up right now) is about 1500 pieces of garbage per mile.

I assumed that this entire amount had built up during the two years since our last garbage pickup, conducted by a sorority. But when I drove down this stretch of street five days later, on November 17, I could see twenty large new pieces of garbage.

From this I conclude that when I see garbage along Oklahoma streets and highways, much of it is newly-deposited, rather than an accumulation from many months.

How can we expect the average Oklahoman to know or care about evolution, global warming, or the environment, if the world outside of their immediate experience—even land that belongs to their community or their neighbors—has no value whatsoever? I am happy to report that there is a significant minority of Oklahomans who do care, but is it any wonder that we are having little if any effect on the community and political life of our state?

 

The preceding appeared in my science blog. For this blog, I must add that rural Oklahoma is considered to be the most intensely Republican and intensely Christian part of America. If Republican Christians completely take over the rulership of our country—something they fully expect God to make happen—you can expect it to have many evil characteristics, not the least of which will be that it will be smothered in garbage. This is just one more way in which Republicans hate altruism.

Lame Deer Told It Like It Was

In 1972, John (Fire) Lame Deer told his feelings and recollections to Richard Erdoes, who helped him make it into a book: Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions. It is the life of a full-blood Lakota man who became, after various hilarious failures, one of the respected medicine men in his tribe. He lived on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, and he saw it all. He told Erdoes, and Erdoes wrote down, exactly what he thought about the past and ongoing oppression of Native Americans by whites, especially in South Dakota where there is very little intermixing of the cultures and races.

Lame Deer cried out that there was no justice for Natives. He said that white sheriff’s officers arrested young women for being drunk, whether they were drunk or not, put them in prison, and raped them. (Even today, young Native women vanish.) Indians get executed for killing whites, but a white might be able to kill an Indian without even doing jail time. To Lame Deer, the era of genocide did not end with the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890.

Lame Deer was particularly incensed that a white man could come into the Black Hills and start carving up a mountain into a gigantic statue. The fact that the statue, the incomplete form of which you can still see from the main highway, is of Crazy Horse, means that the white man can claim that he is doing it for the benefit of the Indians. All his gift shop earnings are tax-free. (This man has since died, as has Lame Deer.) The man’s vision includes a university free to all Indians, somewhere on the grounds of the monument. Where will it be, wondered Lame Deer—perhaps in Crazy Horse’s big toe or the horse’s hoof? But what he disliked most was the fact of building a big monument. Throughout white history, most monuments have been celebrations of killing, such as a pharaoh building a monument that tells how many cities he burned and how many people he impaled.

This photo shows me at the head of Crazy Horse.

Sometimes I think Lame Deer was just trying to shake us up. He openly wished for the old days in which the Lakota ate raw buffalo guts.

The chapter titles are irresistible. “That Gun in the New York Museum Belongs to Me,” “The Green Frog Skin” (referring to greenback dollars), “Sitting on Top of Teddy Roosevelt’s Head” (about Mt. Rushmore), “Don’t Hurt the Trees,” “The Upside-Down, Forward-Backward, Icy-Hot Contrary,” and “Blood Turned into Stone,” are just a few of them.

Lame Deer was quite resentful of white religion, but mainly because of hypocrisy. White actions bore little resemblance to white Christianity. He wrote, “I respect other religions, but I don’t like to see them denatured... You’ve made a blondie out of Jesus. I don’t care for those blond, blue-eyed pictures of a sanitized, Cloroxed, Ajaxed Christ. How would you like it if I put braids on Jesus and stuck a feather in his hair? ... Jesus was a Jew. He wasn’t a yellow-haired Anglo. I’m sure he had black hair and dark skin like an Indian. The white ranchers around here [South Dakota] wouldn’t have let him step out with their daughters... His religion came out of the desert in which he lived, out of his kind of mountains, his kind of animals, his kind of plants. You’ve tried to make him into...a long-haired Billy Graham...and that’s why he doesn’t work for you anymore. He was a good medicine man, I guess. As you read it in the Bible, he sure had the power, the healing touch.”

Jesus did not have desires for physical wealth, the way most of his followers do. But, “if this earth should ever be destroyed, it will be by desire, by the lust of pleasure and self-gratification, by greed for the green frog skin, by people who are mindful only of their own self, forgetting about the wants of others.” Elsewhere, Lame Deer wrote, “White man makes himself something more than God.”

Lame Deer ends his account by saying that you could learn from him, “if you want to be taught by an old man living in a dilapidated shack, a man who went to third grade for eight years...”

Erdoes also has some things to say about the false religion of American Christians. “Christians who no longer believe that they could bump into Christ at the next street corner, what are they? Jews who no longer think they could find God in a pillar of fire, why would they go on being Jews?”

When you read this book, you can feel something of the rage that still burns in the Plains tribes, and that erupted a few years ago in protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline [ref]. This rage can seldom be found anymore in tribes, such as my Cherokee tribe, who were conquered long ago and who have intermixed extensively with the whites. Native Americans are the forgotten minority, and are to a great extent the victims of the white perversion of Christianity.

Face to Face with War: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Part 3

This is the third essay I have written about the novel The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Spanish novelist Vicente Blasco Ibañez. The world in 2021 is no less vulnerable to war than in any previous year, decade, century, or millennium.

I suppose it is about time to describe the novel itself. It is focused on Marcelo Desnoyers, a Frenchman who fled France to avoid being drafted into the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. He earned a fortune in Argentina and returned to France for what he considered to be the pinnacle of cultured life. He bought a big house, and then bought a castle in the country near the Marne River. He filled both places with incredible treasures. His two children were Argentinian citizens. One of them, his son Julio, became well-known in Paris for his dancing and his wasteful lifestyle. In particular, a married woman was his lover.

When the Great War started, Marcelo was too old to fight, and Julio was exempt because he was not a French citizen. The war changed everything for all of them. Marcelo went out to his castle, just in time, it turned out, for the Battle of the Marne. He saw it all from his castle, which the Germans attacked and plundered. The Germans not only slaughtered all of the people they could find in the village near the castle but were also full of arrogance. The German officers feasted on Marcelo’s food, and even dressed themselves in his daughter’s dresses and danced around. They shat upon the rugs. Ibañez vividly describes the scenes, using all of the senses. In the wounded villagers, brains were visible, throbbing behind faces without noses. A cannon ball tore off the head of one soldier, who for just a split second kept walking, with two jets of red blood shooting upward from his neck. Disemboweled horses trampled their own entrails. It was at the greenest time of year, when the wheat was in full grain, the most vivid contrast possible between life and death.

The German officers also pretended to be sincerely good people. They carried photos of their beloved families and proclaimed that only by destroying France would their families be able to live. This was an incredible lie but one that, Ibañez suggested, the Germans actually believed. They recognized Marcelo as the castle owner, and instead of just shooting him they tried to convince him of the righteousness of their cause.

But the Germans were beaten back. During their retreat, they transformed the ruined castle into a military hospital. Here Marcelo watched some of the very officers who had so recently boasted of their inevitable victory return, mangled almost beyond recognition, and die. When the French army returned, the Germans fled.

Northern France began to recover. But life for the Desnoyers family changed forever. Julio’s lover, feeling guilty at cuckolding her husband, found that the husband had become a military hero as he was wounded in battle. She sought him out, stayed by his side, and nursed him back to health. Julio, heartbroken, felt that he could do only one thing: join the French army as a foreign volunteer. He did so and became a hero himself. His motivation was not patriotism so much as it was forlorn love, and to just do something with his life rather than just to enjoy his wealth. His father Marcelo, who every day felt the guilt at having fled his patriotic duty in 1870, was now intensely proud of his son.

As you can certainly guess, Julio was killed in battle. The story ends, after almost 500 pages, with Marcelo and his family feeling almost infinite grief out in the middle of the burial fields, months after the battle was over. The bodies of slaughtered French soldiers had been piled up and their burial places marked only with little wooden crosses. The bodies of the German soldiers were piled in unmarked pits and covered with dirt.

The scale of the burial fields is nearly impossible to imagine apart from Ibañez’s description. I got only a tiny glimpse of what it must have been like when I hiked with my son-in-law’s family in the Vosges Mountains that divide Alsace and Lorraine in France in 2016. We went quickly past a World War One cemetery. The French family had seen it, and dozens of others, scattered throughout the mountains, but for me it was a powerful experience.

To a large extent, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was a story that wove together improbable circumstances in order to give the author, who was a journalist with first-hand experience, the excuse to write about the ideas that led to the war. How likely would it be that the sister of Marcelo’s wife would just happen to marry a German who became a top official in the evil German government, and explained his point of view to the rest of the family in great detail? How likely that Julio and later Marcelo should befriend a Russian socialist living in Paris, who explained his point of view in great detail? He said that the supposed Christianity of the Germans was actually the worship of Thor rather than of Jesus. It was the atheist socialist, not the German Christians, who believed that “blessed are the peacemakers.” But the characters were not simply excuses for ideas; they were, to me, vividly real.

And was it not all ultimately futile? Ibañez wrote, through the mind of Marcelo, “I wonder if any star knows that Bismarck ever existed! I wonder if the plants are aware of the divine mission of the German nation!” But I wonder if Ibañez would have been able to guess that, a hundred years later, the European Union, led by France and Germany, would get the Nobel Peace Prize?

But hope remains defiant. At the very end, Marcelo’s daughter hugged her fiancé, a wounded hero, right out in the middle of the burial fields—love may not triumph over, but it remains defiant against, death.