Conservatives: Straining Out a Gnat and Swallowing a Camel

I have adapted this essay from one that will appear on my website soon, but have changed it to expand upon the religious message for this blog. My website is devoted to science, not to religion.

Conservatives are missing the point not only of what is important in the world but even what Jesus said. They are focusing their attention on things that are not important and are ignoring major problems that will destroy our nation and world if left unsolved. I focus on the first of these “camels” in this essay.

In Jesus’ day the Pharisees were a religious group that closely resembled the conservatives of today. They focused their righteous zeal on obeying minor Biblical laws in exquisite detail, while ignoring the important things. For example, they figured out intricate rules for how to tithe not just their income but also the herbs that grew in their gardens. Jesus denounced them in one of the angriest speeches in recorded history, preserved in the twenty-third chapter of the gospel of Matthew. He said to them, “You tithe mint and dill and cumin, while ignoring the weightier matters of the law.” He summarized their brand of religion by saying that they were “straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel.” Besides being a masterful bit of humor, this statement made it clear that religious conservatives, then as now, pay attention to small things that are not a problem—you could eat quite a few gnats without noticing them—and ignore major problems. Nor did they do so at random; conservatives, then as now, gave the most attention to the rules that would give their religious hierarchy the most power, and ignored all the principles that would empower and bless the poor and downtrodden, and save the Earth.

One example of modern conservatives straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel is the crusade of Sally Kern, an Oklahoma state representative, against gay rights. She gave a speech that was secretly recorded and a few minutes of which have spread around the internet, in which she compared gays to a spreading cancer and said that they were more dangerous than terrorists. It is not my intention to criticize her in detail, because I am no expert on the issue of gay rights.

The point I want to make here is that Sally Kern was straining out a gnat. There is no evidence that gays and lesbians are ruining society. Sally Kern, like anybody else, has the right to consider their actions to be wrong, but that is not the same thing as saying that they are destroying the country. I know some gay men, and they have never tried to recruit me to their ranks. They consider themselves to be born gay, and therefore they do not believe in recruitment. They just want people to leave them alone and give them the rights of American citizens. Did homosexuality cause Mesopotamia to fall? Persia? Rome? The British Empire?

Meanwhile, conservatives like Sally Kern are swallowing a camel. Gay rights will not destroy America, but our ecological problems may destroy us. Take, for example, the loss of our topsoil through wind and water erosion. This is a problem conservatives ignore. But it will, not many decades from now, undermine our ability to raise food.

Moreover, the sin of ruining the environment was one of the principal reasons, according to the Bible, that the kingdoms of Israel and Judah fell to the Assyrians and Babylonians. In the laws of Moses, the Israelites were commanded to let their land lie fallow every seven years, and to recover from the strain of agriculture. This law has been known as the Sabbath of the Fields. There is no evidence that the Israelites ever obeyed this law. According to tradition, the Israelite nation persisted for 490 years; therefore they owed the land 70 years. Near the end of the second book of Chronicles, the writer drew a clear connection between Judah’s failure to keep the Sabbath of the Fields and their downfall. The writer said, “And so the land enjoyed its rest.” The Israelite homeland lay fallow for 70 years.

The Bible clearly indicates that failure to take care of the land can cause a country to collapse, just as an individual can be hurt if a camel sits on him. There is no such statement about homosexuality—the gnat in the cup—causing a nation to fall. Why don’t modern conservatives decry the way America is destroying God’s creation, instead of spending all their time attacking gays?

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Requesting Your Input

As we begin the third year of this blog, I will continue to post essays that I have written based upon news items, books I have read, and selections from my books. I am a scientist, but my essays will not be limited to science. For example, in early 2010, I wrote about agnostic ideas found in the Bible and in works of music such as Carmina Burana and Die Winterreise.

But starting this year I would like to actively request ideas from my readers. You have always had the comment box, but I would now like to invite you to use it to suggest ideas and share your own insights, not just to respond to what I have written. What topics, related to religion and science and life, would you like to discuss? I think our small blog community could benefit from your insights. Our community is small, because I have not advertised this site on my other outlets. I am a professional with regard to evolution and ecology, and their political and religious connections, but I am an amateur with regard to many of the things I write in this blog. Amateur is not a bad word; in its Latin roots, it means “one who loves.” I love to discuss topics on which I am not an authority. Which is why it will be particularly interesting to draw in your insights.

Some readers find it difficult to post comments, since Google requires you to have an account with them in order to post your comment. If it is easier for you, feel free to send your comments to abutilongr@aol.com.

Let me know what you are thinking, by writing in the comment box. Also, feel free to send the link to other people you know who would be interested in the discussions on this blog.

I have also started tweeting. Follow me on Twitter, @StanEvolve.

A New Economy?

We are now closing the year 2011, which has been remarkably like 2010. Continued global warming, continued opposition to the teaching of evolution and global warming, continued economic uncertainty, and another year with a Congress that considers its sole function to be partisan strife and the promotion of Christian fundamentalism.

But one of these years, enormous changes will have to come. As economist Kenneth Boulding pointed out decades ago, and as environmental entrepreneur Paul Gilding has pointed out in his 2010 book The Great Disruption, growth cannot continue forever in a finite world. Gilding says that our current economic system will collapse, since it depends totally on economic growth. It will have to be replaced by an equilibrium economy. Gilding points out that this inevitable transition will not occur smoothly or gradually. At some point, a critical mass of people will realize that, in a finite world in which global warming will disrupt our lives, we have to change. Many of us realize this already; and we are a rapidly growing minority.

The change will be disruptive, since entire industries (such as coal and oil) have refused to admit that we are about to collide with natural ecological limits; they will fight to keep people not just using but wasting natural resources. Big corporations will continue to demand government bailouts for their own business mistakes. They preach capitalism but demand socialism. The resulting chaos, in a world with natural disasters and scarce food, will not be pretty. One of these years—it might be 2012—will make 2011 seem like a very uneventful year.

Gilding says that we will emerge from the chaos with a new and sustainable economic system. The old economy consists of many patterns of thought, which include: We have to keep growing to avoid collapse; we have to acquire ever more stuff in order to be happy; since the economy will always grow, we can put ourselves deeply into debt; ecological issues are something that we can take care of someday when we are all rich. These are the old, destructive thoughts that have brought our economy to the brink of disaster. But there are other economic patterns of thought: Our economy can be sustainable; happiness does not require lots of stuff; we can live within our means; we need to fit our economy into ecological limits now. There are millions of people (not enough millions) who believe this second set of ideas; and there are hundreds of companies that abide by them. That is, in the world of economic ideas, there is diversity.

And then along comes catastrophic natural selection: an economic collapse. If we were all hypnotized by consumerism, then this collapse would mean extinction. However, natural selection will in this case favor the companies and individuals that are ready to pursue sustainability memes. Yes, there will be an enormous collapse; but many individuals and corporations are at least partly ready for it. There are, for example, hundreds of alternative energy companies ready to fill the void that will be left by the downfall of the petroleum industry.

This sounds like good news. I wish I could believe it, but I believe that political conservatives will prevent us from making enough changes to survive the coming collapse; they will suppress the solutions. The CEOs of financial corporations, for example, want to keep us in debt rather than to let us live without owing them money. But they cannot wipe them out. At some point, a sustainable world may emerge.

It is not just conservative politicians, but also the dominant religion, that prevent the necessary changes in our economy. Conservative Christianity tells people that God wants them to have luxuries, no matter how many poor people may suffer from our pursuit of luxuries. The churches support the current economy, because they depend on contributions from happy parishioners. And they support the politicians who resist change. The last thing that conservative churches want to see is a country where millions of people have the sort of consumer ethics that Jesus of Nazareth had.

Another thing that I believe conservative churches fear about the coming economic transition is that it will require people to think for themselves. The churches want people to simply believe what they are told, by preachers or by corporations. Once people start realizing that they can change the world, no telling where it might end up: people might realize that they have been duped not just by corporations but by churches as well.

Biblical Ignorance from Two Directions

Most religious conservatives are ignorant of the Bible. Anyone who can think that everything in the Bible can be taken literally must not know very much about it. Literalism can only be held as a vague belief by people who are unfamiliar with the details of scripture. Now, the preachers and God-appointed political leaders who tell everybody what the Bible says must actually study it, and know that what I am saying is true. But the average fundamentalist in church does not read the Bible very much. They may read the passages that their preachers tell them to read—especially the book of Revelation—but they certainly do not read the passages about social justice or taking care of the land or, especially, the agnostic passages in the book of Ecclesiastes. In my evolution class, when covering the friction between evolutionary science and religion, I mention that one of the big problems is why a good God would use heartless natural selection as his method of creating. And I point out that this is not a new problem; the book of Ecclesiastes addressed this problem thousands of years ago. (See early 2010 entries in this blog.) I read to them from the book of Ecclesiastes, and none of the students in my class recognized it. One of the class creationists asked for an exact reference so she could (to her credit) look it up, and I just said to read the whole thing. I suspect there are many things in the Bible that fundamentalist preachers do not want people to actually read. If they made a movie out of the book of Joshua it would be rated R for violence and explicit sex, sometimes in the same scene. Fundamentalists suffer from Biblical ignorance. They should read the Bible. They would find to their astonishment that the Bible does not say that Obama is the antichrist, and that it presents a social model that is closer to socialism than it is to free market capitalism.

Of course, there is also a lot of Biblical ignorance among the agnostics and atheists. This is regrettable for several reasons. One is that lazy agnostics and atheists (unlike thoughtful ones) have no idea what they are rejecting or why, and they can make themselves look stupid if they criticize religious people. But the other is that the Bible is a rich source of some of the greatest literature, in which some of the most important questions of the human spirit are investigated. The stories! The Iliad and Odyssey are excellent both in the quality of stories and the way they address eternal issues of the mind and spirit, but the Bible has them beat, easily. There are hundreds of millions of people in secular western culture who have no idea that Jesus saved a woman from being stoned by saying, “Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone.” They have to reinvent the idea for themselves as if the world just now began, with their generation. This is just one example. The people of the past were not just a monolithic pile of dirty violent morons. They struggled with the same important questions that we struggle with, and the Bible is a record of some of the most glorious struggles and beautiful insights.

If I were dictator, I would have everyone in our western society learn about the Bible, without insisting that they assume any particular theology. This would immediately raise the level of mental experience in both fundamentalists and the non-religious people.

A Statement of Respect

This morning, my colleague from graduate school, Art Zangerl, died after a long battle with cancer. I posted a scientific statement of respect for Art on my evolution blog. In it I mentioned that Art personified what it means to be a dedicated scientist. He had a zeal for using science to understand not just his own area of study (coevolution of insects and herbivores) but the whole human experience of the world.

Art’s wife posted his final message online right after his passing. One of the things that he regretted seeing in our society today was the large number of people who attack science general and evolution in particular in the name of religion. He wrote, “Evolution is like a magic key. Once you understand it, really understand it, so much becomes clear.” He said that evolution helps us understand the darker side of human nature, but also what he called the social side, such as altruism. Although evolution has made us a species capable of hatred, we are also a species that can fight against hatred and oppression. Art particularly admired the work of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Art also expressed some of his feelings about science and religion. He was not afraid to face death. He wrote, “Please do not mourn me.” And he was dissatisfied with the type of religion, such as the Catholicism in which he was raised, that required beliefs without proof. All humans have beliefs; but science requires you to give up beliefs if it fails to match the evidence. “That’s not easy, even for scientists.” But science as a way of understanding the world has proven, he said, phenomenally successful.

This is the same day that Christopher Hitchens died. But I never heard Art lash out against people who hold religious beliefs, in the way that Hitchens was famous for doing. Art was more interested in intellectual honesty than in attacking religion. I ally myself with Art Zangerl rather than Christopher Hitchens.

I hope that I can leave behind as good a legacy of honest intellectual inquiry and genuine human warmth as Art Zangerl.

Conservatives are Missing the Point, part one

I have begun reading a book by Oklahoma state representative Sally Kern. Kern is infamous not just in Oklahoma but around the nation for certain inflammatory remarks she has made regarding gays, as well as her attacks on evolutionary science. So I decided to read what she has said about herself in her book, The Stoning of Sally Kern.

What was it that she said that has become so infamous? In a speech, which was secretly taped, she compared gays to a cancer, and implied that they were worse than terrorists. Gays will cause America to collapse: this is her clear message.

I would like to make four points, in this and upcoming essays, about what Sally Kern said in her speech and in her book.

First, she seemed genuinely surprised that she received so much hate mail and public notoriety for her statements. She received thousands of emails, many of them filled with unprintable invectives. Protests against her public appearances have been vitriolic. Her opponents have treated her with extreme disrespect, and have passed on some false information about her. For example, they said that her son had been arrested for homosexual activities, and that she was therefore a hypocrite. But, as it turns out, the man who was arrested had the same first and last names, but not the same middle name, as her son. I am not aware that Kern’s critics have retracted or apologized. She repeatedly describes herself as a cookie-baking grandmother who loves everybody, including gays—she really wants God to heal them of their evil.

But, of course, she should not have been surprised at the response. Gays believe themselves to have been born gay. Therefore to criticize their sexual orientation is to criticize their very biological identity.

Gays respond to such criticism the way minorities respond to racism: with a deep visceral anger. I have only the slightest experience with this. A woman in our neighborhood has repeatedly displayed evidence of racism against Native Americans. As a member of the Cherokee tribe, I felt deeply offended and became angry far past the bounds of logic and reason. And yet I am only part Cherokee. How might fullbloods have felt? One of my former neighbors, a young Native woman, cried as she told me about the woman’s racist remarks, almost a year after they had been made. When you condemn someone for who they are, rather than for something they have chosen to do, they will react violently. In a similar way, gays responded to Kern’s message with their guts, which is where she kicked them, rather than with their heads. It’s not right, but it’s very human and only to be expected.

Second, Kern presents her brand of Biblical conservatism as the only alternative to amorality. She defends her position by explaining how America, like any society, has to have some concept of right and wrong. This is true, of course; but her brand of morality is not the only possible ethical standard upon which a nation can be built. She uses the same faulty reasoning that the creationists use: you have to believe that the Earth is only a few thousand years old and believe in the Flood of Noah, or else you are an atheist. Not surprisingly, Kern is a creationist who is as infamous for her creationist legislation as for her attacks on gays.

Third, Kern focuses her attention on a relatively minor issue and ignores the big ones. There is no evidence that homosexuality has ever caused a nation to collapse. But there is evidence that nations have collapsed as a result of environmental catastrophes. Kern appears to be opposed to any policies that would encourage environmental stewardship, choosing instead to embrace the so-called free market. The Old Testament clearly links the collapse of the Kingdom of Judah to their failure to take care of the land (see next essay), rather than to gays and lesbians.

Fourth, Kern also totally ignores the problem of poverty, as a legislator. She works in a food kitchen for the poor but defends the economic system that keeps them enslaved in poverty. The Old Testament prophets, especially Isaiah (see later essay), clearly link the problems of Israel and Judah to their oppression of the poor, never once saying that gays and lesbians caused God to punish them.

Politics and Religion again

At the moment I am writing numerous other things, which at the moment are not connected with this blog. But I hope to write more things for this blog very soon. I just want to reassure you that this blog is not dead. If you have not checked on the archives, particularly some of the earliest posts, please do so. An agnostic is not someone who carelessly decides to not bother thinking about what, if anything, God might be, but one who is always asking new questions and looking for new ways of thinking about what God might be.

But I have noticed that in the tumultuous landscape of the race for the Republican presidential nomination, Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain are the leading contenders. Both are bedeviled with sexual scandals--those of Cain alleged, those of Gingrich confirmed. The Republicans still consider themselves the defenders of Christian family values. But it is Barack Obama, and his family, that actually live in a Christian manner. Christianity is not something you say but something you do.