Republicans and Christians: In the Entropy Business

The business plan is simple: just create havoc, disorder, mayhem, hatred, confusion (or, as scientists call all of this, entropy) and then sell people the things they need to survive in this entropic environment.

Oh, and by the way, they call this entropy “freedom.”

The Republican Party uses this plan in almost every way. Let me just use one example: guns. Republicans want everyone to have guns all the time everywhere. If you don’t have a gun, and somebody shoots you, it’s your own damn fault. What happens when you increase the number of guns in circulation among human beings, some of whom are ready to pull a trigger whenever they get angry? Predictably, you get more shootings. How do you protect yourselves from shooters? You need to get a gun also. The NRA keeps laws that restrict firearms from being enacted, resulting in more shootings; AND they represent manufacturers who will sell you firearms. The Republicans are in the entropy business: they create an environment of gun violence, then claim the solution to gun violence is more guns—then they sell you guns.

This is the plan in Oklahoma, anyway. The Oklahoma House passed a bill that would allow anyone who is legally able to carry a firearm to bring them to school. The governor vetoed the bill, but state representatives are threatening a special summer session to override the veto, and the NRA threatens to mount a campaign against her.

The Republican business plan:

• Create an environment of gun violence.
• Convince people that guns are the answer to gun violence.
• Sell guns.
• Make profit.

The fundamentalist churches are also in the entropy business. The first thing they do is to tell you that, unless you accept their doctrines and become a Republican and stand your ground regarding unlimited access to guns, then you are going to hell. If you even question Donald Trump, you are going to hell. They make everyone in their churches feel like all of society around them is damned, mostly because of Democrats. But, they offer the solution: give them your obedience and your money. The fundamentalist churches make lots of money and get lots of people to obey the Republican Party by convincing people that the only way to not be overwhelmed by the entropy of the world is to join them.

The Christian business plan:

• Create an environment of hell.
• Convince people that Republican churches are the only way to keep out of hell.
• Sell church membership.
• Make profit.

These business plans are working nicely. According to a recently updated CNN article, there have been 22 school shootings in the first 20 weeks of 2018.

Who Needs Nazis When You Have Fundamentalist Christians?

One of the unusual experiences you can have when you visit the South is that the airwaves are dominated by Christian radio stations. And not positive Christian stations, but stations that loudly proclaim all the worst things about fundamentalist faith.

When I drove through the Oklahoma City area recently, I found seven Christian stations. And on two of them, simultaneously, the preacher’s message was this: If you do not believe in an eternal hell of infinite and ceaseless torture, you CANNOT believe in Jesus Christ, and therefore YOU will go to hell. That is, the preacher was saying, if you do not believe in my interpretation of the Bible, you will go to hell. You will go to hell unless you believe in a literal, eternal hell.

Oh, but God loves you.

Now, suppose that the preachers, being mere humans, might have misinterpreted scripture. But, of course, this is impossible, since they consider themselves to be infallible and inerrant as individuals. They cannot be wrong, because God exists. They are no more likely to be wrong than for God to be wrong. What they are saying is, of course, blasphemy.

But they take their blasphemy even further. One of these preachers, representing Rhema Church in Tulsa, insisted that the Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves. All Jews are guilty of the crucifixion of Jesus, His blood is upon them, unless they become Christians.

This is exactly the message that preachers, under the orders of Hitler, proclaimed to Jews who were about to be transported to the death camps. The difference is that, if a German preacher under the Third Reich refused to say this, he could be killed. There is utterly no obligation for modern preachers to say this unless they are, in their heart of hearts, Nazis.

Why do they say this? Because, according to at least one gospel, a crowd of Jews insisted that Jesus be crucified, and they said, “Let his blood be upon us and upon all our generations.”

Leaving aside for the moment whether this really happened, the modern preachers are making a totally incorrect assumption, but one that they keep secret. They assume that the people in that crowds that day in Jerusalem two millennia ago had the AUTHORITY to condemn all Jews in all generations after theirs. Furthermore, that God Himself was OBLIGATED to obey them; God had to condemn all Jews through all time for the sins of the ones in the crowd that day long ago.

This is as ridiculous as for me to commit some evil, and then call forth condemnation on my daughter, her soon-to-arrive baby, and all my descendants for such evil as I may commit. This would mean that I can send my daughter and all my descendants to hell just by calling for God to do so.

Of course, those Jews had no such authority, nor did God have any such obligation. But the modern preachers assume upon themselves the authority to proclaim that God is so obligated. The only reason the preacher said this on the Rhema station is that he deeply loves what the Nazis did and hopes that some group of people do the same again. The assumption upon which they build their belief—and, apparently, their entire framework of faith—is so utterly ridiculous that no other explanation is possible except that they want to believe the Jews deserved the Holocaust.

It is things like this that make fundamentalist Christianity an imminent and severe danger to the future of the world. And if you want to hear things like this, just come to Oklahoma or any place else in the South and search the airwaves for just a few moments and you will find them.

Lynchings in the Depressed South

In the previous essay, I said that, since the fall of the Confederacy, white southerners have had little to live for, which explains their many dysfunctional symptoms of depression. That since they lost the Civil War, they have had nothing to live for or which could inspire them. But I realized that there was, in fact, something that could life the spirits of white southerners after the Civil War.

Lynching.

We usually think of lynching as white people taking out their anger on innocent black people by torturing and hanging them. And certainly, this is one of the functions of lynching. There was almost no form of torture that was not practiced somewhere or sometime during lynchings. That is, it went way beyond mere anger, but a lust for inflicting a maximum amount of pain and degradation on the black victim. Nor were all lynchings the result of a mob mentality that went out of control. Sometimes they were planned with cold ruthlessness.

Sometimes the lynchers particularly hated their black victims for having the very virtues that they claimed blacks did not have. In Okemah, Oklahoma, near where I live, a black mother tried to defend her son who had shot a white police officer. It is true that the son needed to face justice for his deed, but justice is not what he faced: it was lynching, without a trial. The mother, Laura Nelson, did in fact help him to resist arrest, but her crime was not a capital one. The lynchers, once they had subdued their victims, then raped Laura before killing both her and her son. If a white mother had defended her son, the southern whites would have esteemed her motherly virtues.

The point I wish to make in this essay is that lynching was not mere anger; it was a celebration of bloodlust on the part of an entire white community. That is, while the Confederacy had inspired them before 1865, it was lynchings that inspired them for the hundred years after that. It was a source of community pride and inspiration. And as I said previously, some of them were planned as community events. Here are some examples:

• The organizers sold tickets, and for an extra fee you could shoot the victim’s body. Sometimes the bodies were so full of shot that they were difficult to move.
• The organizers printed and sold postcards celebrating the lynchings.
• Lynchings drew huge crowds. One in Waco, Texas drew a crowd of fifteen thousand.
• Lynchings could not be prosecuted because the entire community would maintain a conspiracy of silence. Note: the entire community.

You can read more at this NPR interview.

I am a mostly-white man (although a member of the Cherokee tribe) of Southern origin. As such I bear some of the blame and responsibility for what my fellow whites did. When a black male looks at me, he may see simply another person, or he may see me as partly guilty for lynchings. I am not a racist, but how could a black man know this just by looking at me? I bear part of this blame unless I publicly proclaim my hatred of racism, as I have done often before, as I am doing now, and as I will continue to do, online and in published books.

Lynchings continue to occur, though they are now rare. A white racist dragged a black man, James Byrd, by a rope behind his pickup truck and killed him in 1998 in Jasper, Texas. But lynchings are no longer a readily-accessible form of white southern pride. They appear to have no outlet for their hatred any more, except driving their trucks around with Confederate flags or stickers. But the anger is still there and will find some outlet. And they have guns. I suspect that, soon, their victims will not just be black people, but all of us who love black people. As a non-racist surrounded by racists with automatic weapons, I no longer feel safe in America.

What's Wrong with the South?

It’s depressing to live in the South. Sure, there are pockets of economic and societal vibrancy, such as parts of Tulsa, such as Ft. Worth or Houston or Atlanta. But for the most part the South is a quagmire of stagnant depression. The only outlet for this depression is occasional anger, which they recently exhibited by pushing Donald Trump into the White House. He preached a Gospel of Anger, and the south whooped and hollered and passed around the beer. The only other time I have seen southerners inspired to excitement was when they drive around with huge Confederate flags flying from the beds of expensive trucks, before parking them beside their shacks.

For many of them, driving around in big trucks even without flags is a source of excitement, especially if the truck payments are more expensive than their rent. The trucks give them a feeling of power many of them have in no other way.

The South used to have a sense of purpose. The Confederacy was inspired mainly by one idea:

the right of states to have slavery. When Southerners lost the Civil War, they never got anything to replace their passion for slavery.

It is not just poverty, although much of the poverty comes from the inability of southerners to care about working reliably. It is depression.

I saw examples of depression as I walked across town yesterday.

First, I saw garbage piled up in their yards. Not everybody’s, but approximately every third or fourth house in Durant, Oklahoma, where I live. There is nothing about being poor that requires all this garbage. The garbage is a message to the rest of the public that they hate other people almost as much as they hate themselves.

(Image from City of Durant website)

Second, they let their dogs run loose and attack other people. One man sat on his porch and watched his dogs run an entire block to attack me. Fortunately, the dog repellant spray worked. There is nothing about being poor that requires people to let their dogs run loose and attack people. It is just a message to the rest of us that they hate us almost as much as they hate themselves.

Third, what do they do with the little bit of money that they get, either from poorly-paid and irregular work, or from public assistance? A woman sat out on her front porch and talked loudly into her cell phone, not caring who would hear. She said they would have lots of money saved up if her husband didn’t go out to bars all the time. He could just get drunk at home and save some money. So not only do white trash men hate themselves, they foist this hatred on their wives too. (Maybe if I’d listened longer I would have heard her talking about their lousy sex life. But I figured I’d better keep walking.)

They have nothing to live for but God and the Confederacy. But to them God is not the source of love but the idol around which they rally, a war god they believe will vanquish all the white liberals and descendants of ex-slaves whom they do not like.

How can this ever change? The inertia is too great.

This is the Bible belt where most people are creationists. I saw an advertisement for a movie, “The Truth about Dinosaurs,” in Bristow as I drove through on Sunday. It is, I can only assume, a darkumentary about how evolutionary scientists are all liars and are damning our souls by making us believe dinosaurs lived more than 4000 years ago. Whom are they trying to convince? Most people in the South already believe the Earth is only 6000 years old, and dinosaur fossils resulted from a flood 4000 years ago. The creationists already rule everything in Oklahoma. What are they trying to accomplish? They just want to proclaim that they are God’s truly chosen people who are the only ones who know the truth. They want to hate the non-creationists, most of whom live outside of the South.

Dogs that bite other people, trucks that run over other people: this is the only glimmer of enjoyment that many southerners have.

Oh, and having lots of kids. Not taking care of them, spending time with them to show them how to care about their neighbors. The mothers may do this, but the fathers are too busy driving their trucks around. One man parked his truck in my yard, so I had it towed away. He threatened me with violence, and said he needed his truck because he had five kids. His kids were not an expression of love but an excuse for aggression.

Bogged down in depression, acutely aware that slavery will never come back, and told by their preachers that they are God’s chosen people, Southerners will never change. Red state confederates sit around and live off of welfare provided by blue state tax dollars. And they are just fine with it.

Hypatia, You Are Not Forgotten

The movie Agora, starring Rachel Weisz, is one of the few fictional movies ever to be reviewed in Science magazine. I have now seen it three times and have come to understand it. It is one of the few essential movies that you need to see to understand the meaning of science in the human mind. You’d better see it at least once.

Hypatia of Alexandria (Egypt), in the fourth century of the Christian Era, was a philosopher and teacher. She accepted students of diverse faiths, including a Roman pagan and a Christian. She taught them that if two things are equal to a third, then all are equal, and she insisted that this applies to herself and to her students: she the (we would say today) atheist, and her pagan and Christian students, were all equal.

Hypatia’s faith was different from those of any of her students. They believed that truths were revealed by one or more gods, while she believed that the highest pursuit of the human spirit was to understand the universe itself, to decipher what it is telling us. In particular, she wanted to understand why the planets did not move in a perfect circle around the Earth. Ptolemy had said that the planets and sun traced their own little circles as they orbited the Earth, but this seemed whimsical: if the universe is perfect, why should these little epicycles be necessary? Then she found out that the philosopher Aristarchus, centuries previously, had suggested that the planets, including Earth, went around the sun. But if the universe was built on perfect circles, then the Earth must describe a perfect circle around the sun, which it does not: sometimes the sun was smaller (more distant) and dimmer than at other times. Then she figured out that the Earth travels in an ellipse around the sun. After she died, and her writings were lost, it took another 1,200 years until Johannes Kepler rediscovered this truth. To Hypatia, the universe had to have mathematical perfection, and it was our job to understand it. This remains the fundamental belief of scientists, although we now recognize that a great deal of historical contingency, what we might call messiness (for example, the Big Bang created globs of galaxies, not perfectly spaced ones) that Hypatia might have found unacceptable.

Alexandria was going through successive waves of turmoil all during this time. Unlike Hypatia and her students, the adherents of religions all hated each other. The Egyptian pagans attacked the Christians, then the Christians attacked the Egyptians and destroyed the library of Alexandria, the most famous condensation of knowledge in all of history, gleefully rejoicing in the burning of scientific books. Then the Christians turned on the Jews. The Romans couldn’t do much; they were the nominal rulers, but the Empire was in decline and the Roman soldiers couldn’t do much. Hypatia’s Roman student became the Consul of Alexandria, and he very publicly loved Hypatia. Her Christian student became a famous bishop. They tried to keep violence from getting out of hand, but the majority of Christians did not listen to the peaceful bishop; instead they followed the radicals who called upon Christians, in the name of Jesus, to stone to death everyone who did not agree with them, and this eventually included Hypatia. The charges leveled against Hypatia were that Scripture forbade a woman to teach in public. They should just stay home and, if they should happen to venture out in public, keep their damned mouths shut. Hypatia spoke in public and was a scholar. This was plenty of reason for the Christians to push her to the altar, strip her, stone her, and drag her mutilated body through the streets. A young Christian man, who had been Hypatia’s slave but whom she liberated even though he sexually assaulted her, tried to save her, but not very hard.

In this image, Hypatia tries to save scrolls from the Library of Alexandria as it is being pillaged and burnt.

All of the religions that were concentrated together in Alexandria were guilty of killing people of other religions. But in Alexandria during Hypatia’s time, it was clearly the Christians who carried out the most and the worst violence, and who eventually became the leaders of the western world. The leaders of this violence became saints, such as Saint Cyril.

Hypatia was troubled by the fact that the events on the Earth were so messy and random, while all around the Earth, the heavens were perfect, though in an elliptical rather than a circular way. The recurring imagery of the movie is the ellipse—such as the circular opening in the library vault, seen from the side—and a view of Earth from outer space, focusing down onto Alexandria, and then receding again into the indifferent stars.

Today, most of the American opponents of scientific truth are evangelical Christians, and they are closer to using violence against scientists than we usually think. American evangelical Christians do not even want to question whether the proclamations of their preachers and of Donald Trump are consistent with the Bible, much less with scientific and historical truth. At other times and in other places, there are other enemies of truth: Stalin killed geneticists, and Islamic terrorists don’t want anybody to disagree with them about anything. But for me, here in America and now, it is the evangelical Christians whom I consider the most dangerous, just as they were to Hypatia of Alexandria. The violent Christians (that is, most of them) set science back a millennium. Many of them appear to want to do so again.

Whether the tragedy of Hypatia is repeated again, or not, we should not forget her or the power of a woman’s mind.

Your Evolution Professor Telling You to Read Your Bible

Many of my students are creationists and claim to be Bible believers. But many of them have not read much of the Bible. On the first day of class I always write a passage from the sermon on the mount (“Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these”). Almost none of the students, even the ones in the Jesus T-shirts, recognize it. They go to church and listen to preachers quote select passages of scripture, usually chosen to reflect Republican agenda items. Rarely if ever do members of these fundamentalist churches check up on the preachers, or read the passages that the preachers avoid.

So here is what I did. I teach at a secular university (thank God!) so I could not tell students what to think about the Bible; or even what I think about it. But I did tell them that if they believe the Bible they should read it for themselves—all of it, not just the parts their preachers quote. And they should think for themselves about what it means, rather than the interpretation the preacher insists that they believe.

Their evolution professor, telling them to read the Bible? These students have been living off of tidbits of the Bible that their preachers give them, sort of like pre-Reformation Catholics being unable to read the Latin Bible and having to just believe whatever the priests said. Only this is worse; these students do have access, in all formats (except clay tablet), to the Bible. I have, perhaps, made the Bible fully available to them for the first time, if only by irritating them to read it.

In this way, I am like John Wycliffe or Martin Luther, Protestant reformers of the late middle ages who, along with others, made the Bible available in languages the people could read. I, like them, am encouraging people to actually read the Bible.

I also posted this essay on my science blog.

Psychological Differences between Conservatives and Liberals

I continue writing about the study of 1,252 people by Wilhelm Hofmann et al. (Science, 2014) that I summarized in the preceding essay. One of the purposes of the study was to compare the moral values of liberals with those of conservatives.

Liberals cared more about fairness, liberty, and honesty, while conservatives cared more about loyalty, authority, and sanctity. That is, the values to which conservatives fundamentally cling are those that make them march in lock-step with one another and believe whatever their religious and political leaders tell them. Many of us would say that the moral values of liberals—try to be fair to and honest with people, and give them the liberty to live as they please, so long as they do not harm others—are superior to the moral values of conservatives, that is, to impose their moral values on other people.

In what I write next, I am going beyond the conclusions of the paper.

It is the conservative moral values that are leading our nation and world into peril. Conservatives are loyal to the Republican party and defend the authority of Donald Trump (though this was not yet the case at the time the article was published). They believe themselves to have sanctity, that is, saintliness, and for anyone who disagrees with them to be impure. Whatever their leaders tell them, they cling to it and are ready to rise up and fight any who differ from them, under the right conditions.

The values to which we liberals cling, however, are not those that are getting the world into trouble. We want to be fair to everybody: for example, it may be fair for you to have a gun, but it is fair for us to not be shot by your gun, and life is more valuable than gun possession. We liberals want liberty for everyone, but we recognize that your gun liberty is restricting our liberty to live. And we want to be honest, which is why our statements are more moderate and cautious than the simplistic and flaming rhetoric of the conservatives, and why such a breathtakingly high number of lies have issued forth from the current Republican political leaders. Practically every Trump tweet contains an easily recognizable lie. Conservatives want to be loyal to their party and to their exalted leader, and will make stuff up to bolster that loyalty.

Of course, there are spectra of liberals and of conservatives. But the liberals are more likely to recognize this. A typical conservative cannot have a decent conversation with any liberal: loyalty, authority, and sanctity are of prime importance. But I would rather have an honest conversation with a thoughtful conservative than spend time with a ranting liberal. I doubt, however, that most conservatives would prefer talking quietly to me to listening to the rants of Rush Limbaugh.

One cannot help being attracted to a political viewpoint that matches his or her psychological inclinations; but some of those inclinations endanger the future of the world, and others do not. Your desire to shoot me, and my desire to not be shot by you, may be equally the products of our inclinations; but your desire is bad, and mine is good.

Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-NY) said on a February 21, 2018 news program that most mass shooters are Democrats. I wonder if she, and others like her, are beginning to stir up the moral sentiments of conservatives to begin to take physical action against liberals.