Glass Cathedral: A Novel that Faces Deep Religious Questions, with Humor, part two

Two of the main characters in Stan Rice’s Glass Cathedral are Dan and Misty. Dan is the atheist and Misty is the Christian, only of course it is not that simple. They are real people who are working through big questions, not like the stifling two-dimensional characters of Pilgrim’s Progress.

By the time God appears in the sky—or not—outside the California desert town of Susurrus, Dan is already an atheist. So what he sees is an unexplained natural phenomenon. But he does not arrive at his atheism thoughtlessly. His whole view of the natural world began when, as a kid, he saw a horsehair worm several inches long protruding from the anus of a cockroach. Nature, he realized, was an arena of struggle and parasitism. (He thus earned the name of Buttworm Boy.)

He did not have a comfortable atheism. He meets, is fascinated by, and is then attracted to a Mormon girl named Margaret. Dan never alters his strong opinion that Mormonism is the stupidest piece of illogical thinking he had ever encountered. But Margaret is not stupid. And as they slip into a physical relationship closer than either had expected, Dan finds himself wanting to believe as Margaret does. But he cannot. Dan’s background story is truly funny. He and Margaret end their contact as he goes to the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Misty, also at UCSB, begins as a dreamily idealistic Christian who lived for her weekly Bible studies and for her fiancé Dwayne. Dan meets Misty just long enough to fall in love with her. Misty and Dwayne plan a mission trip to Ecuador, to convert Catholics to evangelical Protestantism, something of which the Catholics were not fond. Neither were the communist terrorists, who kidnap Dwayne. Just as they release him back into Misty’s loving arms, the communist terrorists shoot him dead, splattering Misty with fragments of the man who was her life.

It’s not supposed to happen this way, Misty thinks. Long after Dwayne’s death was no longer in the national news, Misty visits her old UCSB Bible study. She has changed; they have not; and she realizes how they all had such easy answers to the big questions. She grabs a Bible from one of them and reads from the book of Job, in which God Himself tells Job, you think you have all the answers, don’t you? Well, you don’t. That was her message to her former compatriots as she stomps out.

Misty encounters Dan and they have, despite their religious differences, a truly meaningful conversation. They end up working at the same newspaper out in the desert, where God appears—or not—in the sky. This event seems to wipe all doubt away from Misty’s heart. Or does it? Does it need to? That’s what the rest of the book is about.

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.

Sam Harris and The Moral Landscape

I realize that I am adding my voice to the discussion about Sam Harris’s book, The Moral Landscape, long after its initial publication and after many others have spoken. My excuse is that I have only now read it.

Harris spends a lot of time in his book going over what I consider the prolonged and painful contemplation of the obvious. Of course there is a difference between right and wrong. Of course we should all act in ways that contribute the most to the general well-being. I am astonished that cultural relativists still exist and stand ready to exonerate evil practices simply because one society or another may consider them a cultural norm. If a tribe somewhere practices human sacrifice, it is simply wrong, even if it is a cherished tradition within that culture. I am astonished that some liberals defend the right of Fundamentalist Mormon polygamists to invite thirteen-year-old girls to be one of their many concubines (unofficial wives). (The mainstream Mormon church abandoned this practice in the late nineteenth century.) The thirteen-year-old girls cannot freely choose to be “multiple wives.” They are too young to understand what they are doing, and are easily overwhelmed by the powerful church leader who tells them that they will go to hell if they do not submit to being a multiple wife. (I obtained this information from a different book, Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven.) We all know this and there is no point in wasting time discussing such points with cultural relativists. They have had a field day attacking Harris with their own brand of fundamentalism: the unswerving belief that there is no absolute morality. So one problem I had with Harris’s book was that it defends an idea nearly all of us already know.

But there was a problem with Harris’s approach. He said that science can determine what is right and wrong. I do not believe that science is equipped to do this. I suggest that it is much easier if we take an evolutionary approach. Perhaps our major human evolutionary adaptation is altruism. Therefore, for our species, and probably for all other intelligent social species in the universe, things are good if they promote general altruism, and bad if they erode it. By general altruism, I mean for everybody, not just for your own rapacious tribe. Altruism can be scientifically studied. The only assumption we have to make is that this adaptation is not only successful but good. We have to start with some assumption somewhere. Harris points out that scientists assume the scientific method is good; that it is good to be honest about data and to be logically consistent about reasoning.

So I believe that Harris reached the right conclusion, and did so by the right path. He just apparently misnamed the path, calling it science instead of altruism. And we can scientifically study the degree to which any given behavior enhances altruism. Anyone who questions the goodness of altruism does not understand our species very well.



This entry will also appear in my evolution blog.

The Evolution of Christian Science

In May and June of this year, I took a journey out to California, and saw and filmed many natural wonders. I am posting several essays about this trip on my evolution blog. I have chosen a few of them for this blog also, because of their relationship to religion and science and human experience.

On June 9, I had the privilege of participating in a Victorian garden party in Pasadena, dressed as Charles Darwin. It was a fundraiser for Opera a la Carte, the opera company with which my college friend Carol has been working for many years.

Carol has other jobs as well. One of them is to be a singer for a Christian Science church in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, a job she has had for years even though she is not a member of that religious persuasion. I can never get enough of hearing Carol’s beautiful voice, even if it means sitting through a Christian Science service. But, the ever alert naturalist, I listened to and analyzed what the Christian Scientists were saying.

Christian Science began with the visions—most of us say delusions, her followers would say revelations—of Mary Baker Eddy in nineteenth century America. By chance, I also happened to be reading a book about the history and current controversies of the Mormon church, which began about the same time. The United States was a frontier country. America had been founded by breaking with European tradition of loyalty to monarchs and to state-supported churches. Many new religions, led by self-styled prophets, began at this time. They appealed to direct experience, and to divine revelation (indistinguishable from delusion by our mere human brains). They were like weeds growing in a field after a fire. Most of them, like most of the plants of the field, died out. But the legacies of Joseph Smith and Mary Baker Eddy live on. Mormonism has become a major political force, devoted as unswervingly to the political right as it is to God, while Christian Science has not fulfilled Mark Twain’s fear that it would become the religion that conquered American thought and action.

Today, Christian Science is known mainly for its opposition to conventional medical practice. Church services consist mainly of singing and of readings (without sermon comment) from the Bible and from the Mary Baker Eddy scriptures. On a previous visit to this church in 2006, the Eddy reading was something like (in my imperfect memory), “Do you have a carbuncle? Well, you don’t really have a carbuncle. The carbuncle is just an illusion.” Most of us think, how could these people be so delusional? But consider this. At the time that Mary Baker Eddy started Christian Science, conventional medical science was a bunch of snake-oil hokum. Eddy wrote against the scientific idea of a life force—an idea that has been long abandoned. Strange as it may seem, Eddy was appealing to reason and experience. Since its inception, Christian Science has ossified into a belief system that is impervious to new discoveries, and today is a carbuncle afloat on a sea of scientific evidence but which absorbs none of it. The Mormon Church has at least incorporated a little bit of new evidence—it now rejects polygamy and admits black men into its priesthood of believers. But it, too, has largely become an impervious bubble of ignorance. There is simply no archaeological evidence of the great battle between the fair children of God and the swarthy Native American children of evil which even mainstream Mormons continue to commemorate at their Hill Cumorah site.

Still, I left with a little more respect for Christian Science. At its inception, it was perhaps a viable alternative view, even testable by scientific hypotheses. Mary Baker Eddy was even open to the insights of Charles Darwin. But that was a long time ago.

A version of this essay also appeared on my evolution blog recently.