Inconvenient Bible Passages, part two.

Here are some more passages from the Bible that conservative Christians love to hate. I taught Christian students about them back in 1990.

“The Earth mourns, the world languishes, the high heavens languish with the Earth. The Earth is polluted through the touch of its inhabitants, because they have transgressed the laws and broken the covenant. Therefore a curse has devoured the Earth, and its inhabitants have paid the penalty.”

“On that day I will make a covenant with them, with the beasts of the field and with the birds of the air, and the reptiles of the ground; and I will sweep away the bow, the sword, and war from off the face of the land; and I will make them to lie down in security.”

The inhabitants of Judah were carried into captivity “until the land had enjoyed its sabbaths. All the days of the desolation the land kept sabbath, to complete seventy years.”

The Mind and Eternal Torture in Hell

One of the most important abilities of the human mind is the ability to “tune out” sensory information that is constant and ongoing. This allows the mind to respond to new information. Examples include scent and sound. If you smell something new, you notice it, but after a while your mind tunes it out, whether it is pleasant or unpleasant. After a while, people cannot smell their own body odor. If you hear something new, your mind pays attention to it, but after a while it is relegated to “background noise.” People often literally do not hear the barking of their own dogs. We call this sensory adaptation. It is one of the standard concepts I taught in general biology classes.

Sensory adaptation may be a property of minds in general, not just human minds. It is certainly true of other mammals, such as dogs that do not react to their masters’ presence, or birds that get used to you when they build their nests near your patio. You can even find examples of it on the level of single-celled organisms that respond to their environments but do not have what we would call minds. And it might also prove to be an important part of AI (artificial intelligence). A mind, even an artificial one, would “go crazy” and stop working if it reacted to every bit of information as if it were new and important.

And pain.

After a while, a person can often begin to ignore chronic pain. Pain exists for a reason. It is a body’s way of telling us, don’t do that. My painful knee tells me that I should give it a rest and let the tendon heal up. But my brain mercifully allows me to ignore this pain except when I am actually moving and need to be reminded. Pain is important, but it should be modulated by sensory adaptation. Let us call it mental adaptation, since it does not depend on actual sensory input.

But, according to Christian fundamentalists, there is one exception. Hell. They believe that Hell is unending, infinite pain, especially the Fires of Hell, but maybe all other kinds of pain as well. This picture is not consistently found in the Bible; for example, Job 10:21-22 talks of the afterlife (for both good and evil people?) as endless darkness. If mental adaptation is a characteristic of minds in general, including the alert minds of souls suffering in Hell, then after the souls have been in Hell for a while (a week? A century? But who’s counting?) their minds will at least partially tune out the suffering. That is, if they have minds at all, the damned souls should begin to adjust to the fires and tortures of Hell.

But fundamentalists insist that the pain and suffering of Hell are not only infinite and endless, through all eternity, but that you remain infinitely conscious of the exquisite pain during that entire time (so to speak; time does not exist in Hell, I suppose). But for this to occur, God would have to specifically create a miracle to suspend mental adaptation. The Bible makes mention of no such miracle. The fundamentalists just made it up.

Why would fundamentalists insist that the pain of Hell not only continues forever, but remains as fresh as the day it started? How could a God of infinite love specially create minds that are unable to ever tune out pain? Would such a God want souls to suffer as exquisitely in Hell after a million years as they experienced the first day? What kind of God would this be? Yet this is the image of God that fundamentalists offer to us.

The reason fundamentalists insist on this is that they want to make themselves infinitely deserving of our obedience to and reverence of them. To them, specifically, by giving money. If people began to suspect that Hell might not be so bad after a few centuries, they might not let the big fundamentalist churches tell them how to live or give the churches their money. It is not faithfulness to God, but to the evangelists Themselves, that is threatened by the concept of mental adaptation.

By the way, the same thing would apply to the pleasures of Heaven. You would think that, after a few million years, the blissful souls would start to get bored. Flying around on cloud banks and playing harps might be oodles of fun for, say, a couple of thousand years. This idea was elaborated by Mark Twain in Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.

One of the characteristics of religion is that it creates little artificial worlds of thought that are impervious to any outside evidence. Only within such an artificial world would rich evangelists be able to get people to give them money regardless of what they say or do.

"The Bible says..." about Slavery

Fundamentalist Christians universally claim, “The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it.” But this statement is, even from a literalistic view of the Bible, incorrect. What they really mean is, “The Bible says it, I interpret it, and that settles it.” The fundamentalist, therefore, puts Himself or Herself blasphemously into the line of authority. They expect us to believe their interpretation as if it were the very words of God. Literalist Bible believers should not do this. Many of them do, which is why I turn away whenever I hear them preaching.

Examples abound and I have written about many of them, both here  and in my science blog. But the example I am thinking of now is slavery; in particular, black slavery before the Civil War in the United States. I have just finished reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the novel that, according to Lincoln, was one of the major causes of the Civil War. In addition, Harriet Beecher Stowe was the brother of Henry Ward Beecher, a famous preacher who stirred up great audiences in the north, and in England, against slavery. Some historians have said that Henry Ward Beecher’s message was an important reason that England supported the north instead of the south, which was a profitable source of cotton, sugar, etc. The southern states had ample reason to hate both of the Beechers.

This novel was written in the hortatory, preachy style found in so many novels of that period. Some of my liberal friends will roll their eyes at it. But it was the novel that captured the attention of most Americans to show that slavery was a complex system of evil that pervaded the economy. This was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s challenge: So, you don’t own slaves? Fine. But you may have invested in businesses that get their money from slavery. And your national laws require you to betray runaway slaves to federal authorities. Slavery was an evil deeply intertwined with the American economy. Many northerners, who could not own their own slaves, supported policies that maintained slavery in the south. These people, Stowe made it clear, were as cruel in their thinking as the slave owners themselves, even the slave catchers.

Many people think that the federal government could not have stopped slavery. The constitution did not delegate that authority to the federal government. It was a state’s right to have, or not have, slavery. This is stupid and evil. Of course the federal government could have done it, via the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution. That is, unless slave owners and sellers could prove that slaves did not cross state lines. As soon as a slave was transported from, say, Alabama into Georgia, the feds could have said, federal anti-slavery laws now apply.

And now consider how slavery relates to fundamentalism. The Golden Rule, as stated in the New Testament, is do unto others as you would have them do unto you. You wouldn’t want someone to whip you, or to steal your wages, or to take your child or wife or husband from you; so don’t do that to anyone else. Seems pretty clear.

But antebellum fundamentalists had some contorted arguments that they considered to be absolutely Biblical. Stowe mentions three, and I have added a fourth:

• One is that Paul told the escaped slave Onesimus to return to his owner, Philemon. This is explained in the Book of Philemon. Never heard of it? Prepare to be surprised.
• Another is, in Genesis, God said, “Cursed be Canaan,” and said his descendants, whom the fundamentalist preacher in the novel said were African, would be slaves.
• Paul also told Christians to be content in whatever state they find themselves. The Southern preachers used this to tell slaves that God wants them to be contented with being slaves.
• Finally, some Biblical scholars came up with a theory that the black race was not really human and found some way or other to justify it with the Bible. This one was not in the novel. But I have known people, within recent decades, who believed this. Of course, this would mean that the black race had to be housed with the animals on the Ark. Fundamentalists don’t have an answer to this. As an evolutionary biologist, I am particularly bothered by this argument, which contradicts all we know about human biology.

To fundamentalist preachers in the antebellum South, these fragile arguments were enough to negate the Golden Rule.

Yes, twisting scripture to make it say what you wish, in utter contradiction to what the God of Love would want, has a long history within fundamentalism. It continues today. I will have more to say about this very soon.

Why I Hate Fundamentalism and How I Emerged from It

I wish to tell my own personal story about why I hate Christian fundamentalism. My experiences are similar to those of thousands of other people’s, and I want to add mine to the online collection of accounts of religious oppression. Oppression of the mind.

There might be a gene for it. My paternal grandfather was a religious fanatic who spent his time and money on fundamentalist preaching, to the neglect of his family. He left on a preaching tour while his son, my father, lay dying in bed from an infection, from which he recovered. When my grandfather died, he left his biological family $1. His church parasites got the rest and spent it on luxuries.

When I was in junior high and high school, I was a devotee of Garner Ted Armstrong, a slick radio preacher whose every word I considered to be direct from God. I was even ready to, as soon as legally possible or sooner, join his church. His religion was a strange mutation of Identity Christianity, that is, the British and Americans were direct descendants of the patriarch Joseph and, as such, deserved world rulership. Many white-supremacist churches today believe that God wants them to have their guns ready to maintain white oppression, but Armstrong just said the problems of the world are too big for humans to solve, and that Jesus would come back and set things right, with white people ruling the world. I never realized the racist content of his message, since he never said “white” but just “Joseph.”

Part of the power of Armstrong’s influence upon me came from the fact that I first learned about the perils of the world from his radio shows—for example, famine and overpopulation; pollution; the threat of nuclear war. He said he and he alone knew the answer to these problems: God would solve them, not gradually, but in one big apocalyptic event.

Because of my devotion, I was blind to Armstrong’s immorality. One day, when I started to listen to his program—on which I took extensive minuscule notes—his father (Herbert W. Armstrong) was on the radio, giving Bible-centered fundamentalist sermon reruns. I found out later it was because Garner Ted had run off with a woman. Later the world found out that he had been systematically sleeping with girls from one of his Ambassador colleges, as described in In Bed with Garner Ted. Those young women, and his thousands of little donors, paid a much higher price than I did.

 

The reason I left the Armstrongs’s church was that I fell into another fundamentalist cult, the Church of Christ. They actually convinced me that they alone had the correct interpretation of the Bible. They had whole books and sermons about how “The Lord’s Supper” (communion or eucharist) was to feature just one cup, not multiple cups, of grape juice, not wine. The only way I could consider such a trivial point to be important is that they had complete control over my mind. This continued through my undergraduate days. Because I thought that it would be wrong for me to marry any woman who was not a member of our little branch of the Church of Christ (even other Churches of Christ were off-limits to “fellowship”), my social life was truncated into a frustrated loneliness. I drove fifty miles each way each Sunday to attend the one and only correct Church of Christ in my part of the world, ignoring the one right down the highway from me. They controlled my life. I remember how awful I felt when, even when I was in high school, the local preacher had denounced me as a dangerously wrong person when I taught a different interpretation of scripture than he did. I was seriously depressed from it. Gee, thanks, Brother Bob Sanders. One of the congregations to which I was devoted eventually closed, but was taken over by another openly oppressive fundamentalist church, this time Baptist.

Eventually, when I went to graduate school, I found I could not maintain this link. It was an emotionally wrenching experience when I tore away from my roots in that church. But, of course, I promptly fell into a new fundamentalist spiderweb: the creationists. My link with creationism had begun in my undergraduate days. As a biology major, I developed the intricate skill of believing the science that I agreed with and rejecting the rest, not realizing I was being dishonest.

After I began to learn scientific and careful thinking in graduate school, I questioned the creationists. I taught a church class about creation and evolution, which was basically a theistic evolution approach. Two old men, fierce creationists both, arranged to have me put on trial by the church leadership. I was not allowed to speak in my own defense. I found out later it was because the trial was just meant to let the old men blow off steam. But once again, it was an emotionally battering experience. Gee, thanks, Marlyn Clark.

Then I fell into the web of Christian colleges. My first two faculty jobs were at so-called Christian colleges. I was unspeakably inspired to be teaching students about science, not in opposition to but enriched by Christian views. This included environmental issues, about which I believed Christians should care. But, as I learned from these two jobs, a Christian college was just an excuse to pretend to have intellectual honesty. At the first college, The King’s College, factions of the faculty spent most of their time disputing with one another over college politics. Later, after I was gone, they chose a president (Dinesh D’Souza) whose only qualification for his job was that he hated Democrats and could write convincing lies against them. He would (and continues to) just make stuff up. The only thing that got him fired was when he had an extramarital affair. But even this King’s College experience did not disturb my idealism about Christian Higher Education.

The second college was Huntington College. Here, the pervasive assumption was that Christianity consisted of obedience to the Republican Party. This was at the time when Huntington native Dan Quayle was vice president. Since I taught environmental issues, which Dan Quayle considered to be leftist propaganda, I was in a precarious position. When I became the victim of secret political maneuvering, I was extremely upset and depressed for about two years. This time, I wanted to write a book about The Reality of a Christian College, an antidote to the widely read The Idea of a Christian College and to the hypocritical books written by Huntington president Eugene Habecker. I wanted to describe Christian Higher Education as corrupt while pretending to not be. It did not occur to me that nobody, including me, would want to read such a book.

The agony I experienced from these two jobs considerably lessened my ability to enjoy my beautiful daughter as she grew up from ages one to seven. I played the role of responsible father, but I could not experience the full delight of being her father, a delight I have thankfully recovered by enjoying my granddaughter at these ages. What joy I missed the first time around!

After these experiences, which lasted about 23 years, I settled into a calmer, more generalized Christianity. I could finally enjoy religion and life. All of the previous links, from Armstrong to Huntington, were dead to me.

But I eventually realized that even good religion was not worth the effort. For the last sixteen years, I have not been associated with a church. This, plus my rejection of popular entertainment such as cable TV and movies, has left me with an enormous amount of time to think about, write about, and enjoy the world of science. I had to wait until I was almost 50 years old before I could inhale the breath of freedom found in agnosticism. I now know that if there is a God, this God is a spirit of love, rather than a dictator of doctrines. My message to the world, in this blog and in many books, is not to hate religion but to hate its oppressive forms and seek inspiration directly from the natural and scientific world. I still read, and love, the sayings of Jesus, for example, without stressing out about the correct literal interpretation.

Evangelical Religion and Hypnosis

 

The following is a creepy story about religion and implanted memories. It makes me shudder because I used to be in a fundamentalist church that did not do anything like this, but could have. I cringe to think how close I came to a fundamentalist psychological hell, the way Paul Ingram did.

In 1988, Paul Ingram, a local Republican leader in Washington state, was accused by his daughters of sexual abuse, including ritual satanic abuse, over the course of several years. No evidence has ever been found that these acts of abuse ever happened. Despite this, the daughters’ testimony was accepted as evidence, and Ingram was convicted and given a twenty-year sentence. Ingram pled guilty to the charges. Subsequent research makes it clear that these events never occurred. The memories were implanted, through deliberate or inadvertent hypnotism, by the fundamentalist church to which the family belonged. An implanted memory can seem just as real as a true memory. A church seminar leader apparently asked one daughter, Ericka, to try to remember if she had been abused. This was enough for her to “remember” that it had happened. Then the memory was implanted in Paul.

This is what religion can do, especially the fundamentalist variety that believes that Satan is everywhere and can trick you into doing things that you would normally not even want to do—that is, unless you join and give money to a fundamentalist church. The Satan hypothesis was enough to send an accusation that would have gone nowhere in a mainstream church over the edge into an ever growing series of accusations in a fundamentalist church.

It kept growing. Paul Ingram was accused of killing 65 babies in satanic rituals. And he believed that he had done so. Needless to say, no evidence was ever found. No graves. Of course, the fundamentalist church could always claim that Satan had erased the evidence. By the time Ingram was released from prison, before the end of his term, he may not have been entirely convinced of his own innocence.

Fundamentalist churches use psychological manipulation which can go to absurd lengths and destroy people’s lives. They can do this because the churches believe in a Satan who can manufacture or erase evidence. This is another example of trance logic, which is a characteristic  of hypnotism.

In addition, psychoanalysts were happy to use three-quarters of a million dollars of taxpayer money to “recover” these “hidden” memories. Fundamentalism uses psychological manipulation and implanted memories to oppress people and destroy their lives, and some unethical psychologists are willing to make money off of this phenomenon.

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part twelve. The Problem of Politics

Back when I was writing in my spiritual journal in 2005, I felt a mission to the world, to rescue it from political oppression (as embodied in the right wing parties in every country including my own) from Easter 1984 until election day 2004, a period of just over twenty years.

I decided, in February 2005, to stop calling myself a Christian. I do not own the language. If I call myself a Christian, I wrote, people will think of me as a follower of George W. Bush. (Today it is even worse; to be a Christian is, in popular language, to be a Trumper.) The question is not, do I want to call myself a Christian; but, am I what the world thinks of when they hear the word Christian? Clearly, the answer was (and is) no.

Some of what I wrote below was during the worst of my medical problems, but also at a time when a Republican president aspired to be a world dictator and use war as his tool of domination. Remember George W. Bush? [Bush and Cheney] “have galloped out on their Texas steeds to conquer the world, and other Republican horsemen of the apocalypse, only slightly worse than Democratic mules…Most of the universe is gas-jets of hydrogen, and in one small space, there is a miracle of complexity—and it is evil.”

“For the law of the universe seems to be thermodynamics—whenever there is, in one place, a brief shining moment of inspiration, beauty, order, and love, the great mass of stupidity, hatred, and bloated gluttony will flop over on it and obliterate it. All that is good and God is an aberration quickly blasted by the sick universe…Whenever there is a glint of beauty and peace, the leaders of the world delight in trashing it.”

I was reading Rabbi Kushner’s book, Who Needs God? But can there be one, even in the diffuse form I have fantasized? Kushner also wondered how one can get angry at a God that one believes does not exist. But we are angry because there should be a good God who will rescue the world.

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part one

I underwent my transition from doctrinal Christian to Christian agnostic almost exactly sixteen years ago. I had no blog at that time, so I wrote all my thoughts in a journal. I had written entries in the journal every day since 1989. I continue that journal, which now has over 11,500 entries and four and a half million words. The journal started off as a strict devotional, back when I was a fundamentalist. I am nearly a stranger now to the person I was at that time. In each entry, I studied scriptures, and then forced an evaluation of my life into a scriptural format. I seldom let my actual feelings show in those entries, since they were intended as an offering to God. But in 2005, all of that began to change. Until recently, I had not looked back at those entries. Now, I am curious about what I was thinking at that time and why. Perhaps some of this will resonate with you as well.

In case you think that religious fundamentalism is stupid and that is all there is to it, I remind you that religion is an appetite, just like the appetite for sex or food, and, in some of us, every bit as strong.

I used a strict devotional format of A (adoration), C (confession), T (thanksgiving), and S (supplication)—ACTS for short. But toward the end of 2004, my devotional format began to break down. By 2005 the ACTS structure had become “a pseudogene whose structure can be detected, sometimes and partially, in all that I write.” My daily entries became reflections of what I was experiencing, rather than what I was reading. I stopped regularly referencing Biblical passages. By that time, I had read and written about the entire Bible—as well as the Apocrypha—twice. I gradually slipped back into this practice, but not on a regular basis. My Biblical references were from the prophets, who struggled to understand what was happening on the Earth, as those whom the prophets considered to be God’s people were turning from him. I did not reread passages of doctrine and commandment. My journal entries changed from devotions to enigmas.

One major reason for the transition from fundamentalist to agnostic was that I was ill. Nearly every day, I was in a fog of tiredness, brought on by insomnia and muscle spasms that lasted nearly all night. I realized that I did not suffer nearly as much as millions of other people; but my complaint was part of a vast wave of suffering that God, if any, should hear. I felt I was going to surrender my vivid experiences into a brain-dead grayness. I literally thought I would die from the lack of sleep in a hospital. I was, at that time, on sabbatical, so I did not have a daily schedule of work, though I was writing book manuscripts, on which I put a great deal of effort. At last, I had surgery that corrected the sleep apnea. After I recovered from the surgery, I took a trip to see the desert and foothill wildflowers in Arizona and California in what turned out to be one of the best wildflower years. Thus, my rethinking of Christianity was started by personal suffering, but the suffering turned to the joy of seeing the beauty of the natural world. But, having once realized that I had been wrong about doctrinal Christianity, I did not go back to it.

Here follow (in this and later essays) some of the things I was thinking in January 2005. During my meditations, I was not talking to God, but to myself, although I liked to imagine that God was with me. Instead of holding onto God, I was letting him hold onto me, if he wanted to do so. I previously believed that God is love, but I now realized that love is God: “He exists within all processes, relationships, and situations of love.” I saw myself, and all humans, as “…protoplasm, sometimes twitching, sometimes broken, sometimes a broth for bacteria.” I decided to relax and accept the beauties of life that I could see, and listen for the “still, small voice” that Elijah found in the wilderness, “only I am not going to theomorphize it.”

I had great aspirations for myself, especially to become a well-known writer. That aspiration has not materialized as I hoped, although my five popular science books have been well received and widely read. I decided I would be satisfied to be a small plant down in the shade; it was not worth the effort and expense to try to be a tree, to be up in the light, where I might attract the attention of lumbermen.

I continued to write meditations, because I was ready to receive insights from God, though I did not seriously expect it. At the same time, I had to continue interacting with other people—my family and, once I was back from sabbatical, my colleagues and students—because I did not want to have bizarre ideas rise and grow in my isolated thoughts, “like island monsters.” (I was thinking of the strange species that evolve on islands.)

Join me in exploring these ideas born of struggle, leading away from doctrine and toward a certain measure of celebration.

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.

The Right-Wing Radicalization of Christianity

If you think I am going to write a complete overview of this topic, forget it. It would take an encyclopedia (of which I have written two) to cover all the ways that right-wingers have kidnapped Christianity and forced it into their image, turning Jesus into their Weapon.

But there are many quiet ways in which they have radicalized Christianity. Just by chance, I noticed one of them. Back when I was a Boy Scout, when I was in junior high school, our troop was sponsored by the local Presbyterian church, whose pastor was our scoutmaster. Rev. Alfonso Luke Fritz was one of the finest people I have known. We all had to pledge allegiance to the American flag. And to the Christian flag as well. You’ve all seen it [photo], the white flag with the red cross in the dark blue canton. This was the short pledge: I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, and to the savior for whose kingdom it stands, one brotherhood, uniting all mankind in service and love.” Isn’t that wonderful? I ran across it on an old scout-rules paper I found in a box.

In recent years, I have noticed the Christian flag being flown from houses, some of them virtual compounds, within which right-wingers hide their weapons. In particular, there is a house on a hill outside of a certain rural Oklahoma town where the American and Christian flags always fly, along with, on occasion, a Trump flag or a Don’t Tread on Me flag. I could not imagine how their attitude could possibly be concordant with “uniting all mankind in service and love.”

I looked up the modern version of the pledge to the Christian flag. It now reads, “…one Savior, crucified, risen, and coming again with life and liberty to all who believe.” The differences are frightening. Gone is the unity of mankind in service and love. In its place is, first, a doctrinal constraint; you have to believe in the Resurrection: service and love are no longer enough; second, life and liberty to all who believe. If you are not a believer in this doctrine, you do not deserve life and liberty. And we who fly this flag will take it away from you.

The Christian flag, once a sign of love and peace, has become a symbol of violence, flown by violent people.

Just Go Straight

Back when I was a fundamentalist member of a Church of Christ sect, I listened to a lot of sermons by a man named Orvil who had little formal education but who studied the Bible a lot. But he did not study it with an open mind. He studied the Bible in order to take each verse, each word, in an absolutely literal manner, and in addition to force it to fit into the sect’s doctrine. He did not believe that the Bible had any figures of speech, any approximations, or any human context of interpretation.

This is not always what the fundamentalist Churches of Christ say. Back in the 1980s I attended some lectures by John C. Clayton, who headed up the “Does God Exist?” ministry of the Church of Christ. I was surprised to hear that he is still alive. In one of his magazines, Clayton said that literalism does not mean that the Bible cannot have figures of speech or approximations. But Orvil would have considered Clayton to be misguided and flat-out wrong. Clayton was, after all, a member of one of the branches of the Church of Christ that ours thought was in error. If Clayton’s church used multiple cups for communion instead of a single cup as Jesus did (I am not making this up), then what else might they be wrong about?

One time, Orvil was telling me about a road trip he took with his wife in their mobile home. He had driven most of the way, and he wanted to rest. He asked his wife to drive. They were on a major interstate and he told her to just go straight.

He awoke to some heavy bouncing. He found that his wife had driven the RV out onto a dirt road. The interstate had curved, but this road was the one that was closest to going straight ahead so she took it. (Even she did not go absolutely straight.)

Orvil told this as a funny story, but if his interpretation of Truth was correct, what his wife did had to be the right thing. She was the literalist in this instance.

Sometimes to follow a road “straight” you have to curve all around, sometimes (as in my recent drive through northeastern Kentucky to visit Cherokee sites) in lots of tight circles. You could call it “Kentucky straight,” although this sounds like a kind of whiskey. For me, the “straight” road is no longer one of doctrine, but of love. I can see Love in the distance, and I want to get there, but there is no straight road to it. All I have to make sure of is that I do not do unloving things during the journey toward it, something at which I have occasional success.

Religion and the Immune System

A healthy skepticism is like a healthy immune system. Skepticism allows the thinker to defend him or herself from attacks of stupidity and destructive thoughts. But it is not over-reactive: it does not, or should not, lead the thinker to be deeply suspicious of and react against everything. Skepticism is also like the immune system in the way it develops. A mind, like an immune system, may be initially naïve against an initial assault, whether of antigens or of stupid ideas, but upon second contact, antibodies and skepticism react quickly enough that hardly any discomfort or danger occurs. I refer to skepticism, not militant atheism.

In contrast, religion is like a dysfunctional immune system. It is dysfunctional in both extremes. First, religion lowers a person’s defenses so that the craziest and most brutal ideas can slip or march right into the brain. If a revered religious leader says you should believe something, then you just might believe it, even without evidence, even against evidence, even against every feeling of altruism and empathy. Religious services, in particular, are designed to allow this to occur. The organ plays softly, you bow your head in prayer, and the preacher specifically instructs you to clear away all skeptical thoughts from your mind. The he (or she) may go right ahead and say something like, “Help us, O Lord, to see that Donald Trump is doing your will on Earth and leading us into the righteousness of which you approve...”

Second, religion overstimulates our defenses as well. It makes believers react against the very things that make us empathetically human. When we see someone in need, religion can make us actually see that person as a sinner who deserves suffering. Religion does not have to do this but often does. Religion can make us look upon environmental pollution and destruction, which ruins the livelihoods of millions of poor people who want to raise themselves out of poverty but cannot do so because their soil is eroding away or they are sick from toxins, and see that environmental destruction is actually God’s will, since it blesses billionaire industrialists with additional billions.

Religion says “O” while skepticism says, “oh.” Destructive religion says, “O Lord, confirm us in our beliefs,” while skepticism (and religion that is skeptical and thoughtful) says, “Oh, Lord, how could we have been so wrong?”

It will be entertaining to see whether religion plays any role in the current war of the billionaires. The Koch Brothers say that Trump’s tariffs are destructive, while Trump says that the Koch Brothers are “a total joke in real Republican circles.” He says he does not need their money in the upcoming elections. This remains to be seen. But what I want to know is, what will the rabid fundamentalists do about this?

Whatever they do, you can bet it will not be based on reason.

The Danger from Christian Fundamentalists, part five.

Elicka Peterson Sparks, in her book The Devil You Know, draws links between conservative Christianity and crime. As a criminologist, she knows what she is talking about. The first link was that violence is part of Who God is, according to a long, long list of Bible passages. A Bible-based society, therefore, is one in which violence is one of the possible options in social interactions. The second is that fundamentalists like to pretend that the Bible demands harsh punishment, usually death, for a long list of perceived offenses, something that results in high incarceration rates and higher crime rates. The third is that the Bible calls for the oppression of women, which facilitates criminal violence toward women.

All of Sparks’s claims rest upon one assumption: that Christian fundamentalists have a significant effect on the way our nation and government operate. The news, every day, gives evidence of this. But Sparks refers specifically to Christian nationalism, the Christians who believe that the United States is God’s special nation today. But is this view reflected in the general opinion of Americans today?

Apparently, the answer is, yes. A generalized poll asked people from several countries if they thought their culture was superior to others. Forty-nine (49) percent of Americans agreed, much higher than the 27 percent of French who thought French culture to be superior to others. We believe in our national superiority more than any other country does about theirs.

Christian nationalists also believe that, without God—indeed without their particular version of God—you cannot have morality. The poll results including the following, in agreement with the claim that you have to be religious to be moral:

            United States: 49 percent

            Germany: 47 percent

            U.K.: 33 percent

            Spain: 19 percent

            France: 15 percent

Is this correlation or causation? If causation, then it means that Americans think themselves superior to others, and think that religion is necessary for morality, and that these patterns are caused by our overwhelming percentage of Christian citizens. While we cannot know if it is causation, it is very clear that Christian fundamentalists are trying their best to make it causation.

The fact that the Bible Belt states have high levels of crime and poverty may also be an example of correlation without causation. It would be difficult to prove that fundamentalist Christianity makes such states as Oklahoma, where I live, so poor and crime-ridden. Is it possible, instead, that people in depressed southern states turn to religion as a solace for their problems? But one thing is clear: fundamentalism has not made these states richer or better places to live.

And within America, it is the most religious presidents, based on church attendance and professed belief, that have been the most socially immoral. Sparks identifies Nixon, Johnson, and George W. Bush as very religious. All three of them used false information to justify American military action. An exception is Jimmy Carter, who is very devout. As commentators have pointed out, he is 200 years old and still building houses for poor people. But Carter is the one president that Christian fundamentalists hate the most.

This is nothing new. Andrew Jackson read his Bible daily, attended church, but as any Native American can tell you, he was an evil man. He defied the Constitution to drive away natives from their homelands. His religious views made him very happy to be a slaveholder, unlike the agonized Jefferson who wished he could free his slaves.

Sparks could not have guessed how bad it would get. Christian fundamentalists virtually worship Donald Trump, who put a painting of Andrew Jackson up in the Oval Office.

Sparks presented numerous specific hypotheses regarding the Christianity-crime connection. I was expecting her to present figures and tables to test those hypotheses. She presented numerous references, but I would like to have seen numbers to back up the hypotheses.

Sparks concludes that there is no point in arguing with fundamentalists. They believe that the process of reasoning is ungodly. And, especially in the Trump era, their power is increasing. They are polarizing themselves from all the rest of us deliberately and strongly. They present themselves as being a persecuted minority. They are doing this specifically to destroy any possibility of dialog: you cannot reason with or show compassion to your persecutor. This means, I believe, that under the right circumstances fundamentalists will burst forth in violence.

I hope Elicka Peterson Sparks and I are wrong, but fear that we are not.

The Danger from Christian Fundamentalists, part four.

Elicka Peterson Sparks, in her book The Devil You Know, draws links between conservative Christianity and crime. As a criminologist, she knows what she is talking about. The first link was that violence is part of Who God is, according to a long, long list of Bible passages. A Bible-based society, therefore, is one in which violence is one of the possible options in social interactions. The second is that fundamentalists like to pretend that the Bible demands harsh punishment, usually death, for a long list of perceived offenses, something that results in high incarceration rates and higher crime rates.

The third link is through Biblical oppression of women. Most crimes are committed by men, many of them against women, as with rape and domestic violence. The relatively small number of domestic violence cases of women against men are often, as in the infamous Lorena Bobbitt case, women taking revenge for abuse by men.

All of ancient society, in which the Bible was written, was misogynistic. The question of whether the Bible is more, or less, misogynistic than its social context is irrelevant. Fundamentalists pick out the passages that oppress women and hold them up as the will of God. In the Bible, as in the world at large, a woman has to marry whomever her father orders her to marry. Women are property.

The general attitude, enhanced by fundamentalism, that women are lesser creatures contributes to an atmosphere that contains rape and domestic violence. In the Old Testament, rape is a property offense. If a man rapes a woman, the rapist has to pay the woman’s father, then she is required to marry the rapist. Happy ending! Deuteronomy 21:11 permits conquering Israelite men to take captive women as their wives, plural. They are spoils of war.

My old fundamentalist self, like many modern Christians, tried to deny this. We emphasized the passage in which the Apostle Paul told husbands to love their wives. Clearly, according to conservative Christianity, a man is not supposed to viciously harm his wife; he is supposed to treat her nicely even while treating her as property.

Even though the Bible does not say it, many fundamentalist Christians believe that women want to be molested. President Trump said that women enjoy having their pussies grabbed by rich men. Many Christians believe everything Trump says as if it were in the Bible. Maybe they think it is. Most of them haven’t read the Bible.

In the next essay, I will present some final thoughts that came to me as I ready Sparks’s book.