The Evolution of a New American Religion

 

In America today, a new religion has evolved: the worship of Donald Trump. Many or most of his supporters (or should I say His?) worship Him. They do not merely support Him. They have made Him into the representative of God upon the face of the Earth. Not all Trump supporters do this, but several million of them do. I will explain and give five ways you can tell that, to many Trumpers (His word) it is a new religion.

Religion is an instinct. Everyone has it, though some people (who consider themselves atheists) have psychologically diverted it into a different form. And religion is a universal instinct within the human species: all humans, and only humans, have it. Religion must provide a strong evolutionary advantage, or else it would not pervade the human species.

Religion evolved because it promoted evolutionary fitness of individuals. First, individuals who are members of a religious tribe benefit from the success of that tribe; a tribe whose religion causes them to fiercely fight other tribes, slaughtering them not merely as enemies but as heretics, benefit from the resources they get from the other tribes. Second, leaders of the religious tribe benefit within the tribe because they get more resource and reproductive opportunities. The rest of the tribe reveres them for their spiritual leadership. Today, many charismatic religious leaders get lots of money and sex from their brainwashed followers; this must have happened thousands of years ago also. The genes of the charismatic leader, including the genes for having intense religious experiences, are thus over-represented in the next generation.

Consider this photo, taken in rural Oklahoma in September 2020, in the run-up to a presidential election many of us are nervous about, since Donald Trump has not been very clear about whether he would give up power even if He loses. In this photo, a rich Trumper (a large house is a mile away surrounded by lawn which must take a couple of thousand dollars to mow, which is done frequently) has two flags: an American flag, and a Trump flag, both at the same height. In flag display protocol, the American flag should be highest, the state flag next, and other flags below them. This supporter, first, considers Trump to be equal to the United States in importance; and, second, that the United States has no value apart from Trump.

Here are the five characteristics that make Trumpism a religion:

 

1. They believe that everything Trump says is truth. Truth consists of His sayings, just as the Chinese recently considered the words of Mao in the Little Red Book to be Truth. Trump creates Truth as He speaks. Something that may not have been true before He said it becomes true when He says it. Trump cannot leap tall buildings in a single bound but, to His followers, He is omnipotent in this particular way.
2. Trump is not only omnipotent, but they think that He is, like Jesus, without sin. Every lie He tells, every promise He breaks, every sexual sin, all are holy in the sight of God. The brainwashed followers of many Christian evangelical leaders feel the same way about their evangelists; Trumpers do the same, which makes it a religion.
3. Trump’s followers know and care nothing about His policies. It is His image, not His substance, that they worship. Many of these followers (not the one in this mansion, but most of the run-down houses I see that fly Trump flags) are poor, and they cannot explain how His policies have made them any richer in the last four years. This is because Trump has no policies. What passes for policies are whatever Trump happens to get mad about on any given day. In this way, Trumpers are like many evangelical Christians, who follow Jesus but never read the Bible and thus have no idea what Jesus said. They are like the followers of the three generations of North Korean dictators.
4. There is no good-natured humor allowed. Many of us progressives allow ourselves to be ridiculed in a friendly fashion, and even do it ourselves. On my YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/StanEvolve) I often make fun of myself. But Trump hates anyone who makes fun of Him. He can’t stop the flood of anti-Trump cartoons, but if He ever gets the chance to silence them, He certainly will. In this sense, Trumpers are like the terrorists who attacked the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in France who dared to make fun of Mohammed.
5. There is no middle ground. You either adore Trump or else you are a heretic. Just look what has happened to moderate Republicans. Just as in the late Middle Ages Catholics hated Protestants more than they hated Muslims, so Trumpers hate free-thinking Republicans more than they hate Democrats. Well, except Hillary, whom Trumpers consider to be the devil incarnate. In my lifetime I have watched the destruction of a middle ground, progressive Republicans and conservative Democrats, a process that Trump has deliberately accelerated.

There are my five reasons. One of my Facebook contacts just wrote, “God is all in all. He will guide Trump.” This is a statement of faith—not in God, but in Trump. Why not just admit that Trump is merely a human being, whether you support Him or oppose Him? Because He has made Himself into a Messiah. Fortunately, not all Trump supporters worship Him—I know some who do not—but enough of them do that America could be in for some severe problems.

Could this turn violent? Might Trumpers get out their guns? I hope not. But some Trumpers are piling up weapons—one of them told me so. And it has happened before, when religion has inspired mass slaughter. During the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of August 24, 1572, Catholics killed thousands of protestant Huguenots in Paris. Then as now, Paris was one of the most civilized cities in the world. This isn’t ancient Babylonians we are talking about here, much less savages. Germany was very civilized when the Nazis arose to power.

If the Trumpers do attempt to grab power (if they lose the election) through violence, they will fail. The armed forces, sworn to defend the Constitution, will not support them. But they can cause a lot of domestic terrorism on the way down.

I also posted this essay in my science blog.

Ragtime: A Novel for Today

E. L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime, first published in 1975, remains one of the major novels of the twentieth century. It is one of the few novels I have read in a single twenty-four-hour period. If you haven’t read it, the time is now.

The main plot (just one of many interwoven plots) was what happened with a black musician, Coalhouse Walker. He tried to be a responsible citizen, but when an Irish fire brigade in New York trapped him and destroyed his car, and when no justice was forthcoming to make restitution for the car, Walker took the law into his own hands. The event that pushed Coalhouse over the edge was when his fiancée tried to confront the Vice President with the injustice done to Walker, and secret service agents beat her to death. The climax event was when Coalhouse committed a major act of domestic terrorism.

Clearly, every reader understands that Walker’s act of terrorism was completely out of proportion to the wrongs that he suffered.  But it is equally clear that he would not have done any of his crimes had he not been goaded into it by the systematic and severe racism that pervaded New York City at that time. The message is clear: people of all races need to be treated with dignity. If they are not, someone might lash out with major acts of destruction. The point is not to assign blame, but to prevent these deadly situations from occurring in the first place.

The parallel situation today is very clear. Minorities in America, including but not limited to blacks, are being treated very badly. Their response, such as destructive riots, has been much greater than the narrowly-defined wrongs done to them. The acts of violence that minorities are committing in America today are often property crimes, but are understandable. When you treat minorities with systematic abuse, their over-reaction is easily predictable. It is as if Doctorow’s novel is being played out today before our eyes; just substitute George Floyd in place of Coalhouse Walker’s fiancée.

What amazes me is the restraint that minorities have shown in response to the abuses against them. If a black terrorist were today to do what the fictional Coalhouse Walker did, it would not be surprising at all; modern black activists have been nicer than one could reasonably expect any group of humans to be under the circumstances.

If minorities were to rise up against the white oppressors, it would be wrong, but us white people (or, in my case, mostly-white) are just asking for it. Minorities must be very nice people to not react as Coalhouse Walker did in the novel.

Doctorow masterfully wove together story lines of many characters, as if he were Tolstoy only much more interesting. I almost felt as if I was reading a history book by James Burke, in which all possible connections were made. Pierpont Morgan, Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini, Sigmund Freud, and Booker T. Washington are just a few of the characters. The characters were, when named, usually real; the fictional characters were identified with names such as Father or Tateh or Mother’s Younger Brother. The one exception is the main character, a black musician named Coalhouse Walker, who as far as I can tell is invented. Many of the major events were real, for example, when Evelyn Nesbit’s husband shot her former lover on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden in 1906. Of course, Doctorow invented the ways in which the characters came in contact, such as Evelyn Nesbit taking care of the daughter of a poor Jewish artist who later became a major filmmaker. Doctorow probes the what-if of the inner lives of the characters: for example, what if Evelyn Nesbit was really a philanthropist? The situations were real; for example, in the first decade of the twentieth century, there really was a strong socialist movement in America.

The climax scene, a standoff between Coalhouse Walker and Booker T. Washington, was fictitious but perfect. Two very different approaches to solving the problems of race relations stood in conflict with one another: Coalhouse Walker advocating violence, and Booker T. Washington insisting that black people earn the respect of whites. Since Washington’s time, black people have shown themselves the equals of everyone else. However, white racists still refuse to respect them. Washington would have been extremely disappointed to see the continued racism in our society today.

Doctorow used several techniques that most modern writers consider to be forbidden. For example, he would insert intrusive sentences about how the events look to us today, long after the events, introducing a jarring break from the time line of the story. But this didn’t matter to me as I read. Some of the characters, such as Houdini, played roles that were entirely unnecessary for the plot of the novel, and a modern editor would have insisted that Houdini’s story line be removed from the novel. A more serious problem for a modern novelist is that the main character did not enter the novel until chapter 21 on page 178. I would just say that beginning novelists such as myself should not try things that Doctorow got away with. Ragtime is a masterpiece despite things of which, 45 years later, editors and agents disapprove. I enjoyed them, however.

If you haven’t read Ragtime, now is the time to do it!

Guns: We Worship Them in Oklahoma

In Oklahoma, we worship guns. It is part of our worship of Donald Trump and of whatever part of the Republican Party that, at the moment, obeys his absolute command. In Oklahoma, we believe that we must all be armed to the teeth to protect ourselves from anyone who might threaten the absolute power of Donald Trump, whether it is Democrats or Republicans who are too moderate for Trump to tolerate.

 As of May 2020, the entire state of Oklahoma became an anti-red-flag-law state, the first and possibly only state to do so statewide. A red-flag law is one that allows judges to block certain dangerous individuals from possessing firearms. What this means is that the sheriff’s departments have decided to not enforce anything that might restrict the absolute right of any person (translate: white male) to do whatever he wants with his guns. This includes any laws that limit the access of any person to guns, even if a judge has determined that this person is a danger to his neighbors and should be temporarily deprived of his guns. The designation of “second amendment sanctuary” could not mean anything else, since the second amendment itself is the law of the land. In May, the governor signed a bill that permitted all counties to disregard red-flag laws and any judges’ orders related to them.

Sheriffs of these rural counties claim that this move is necessary for public safety. They claim that all citizens should have a right to defend their homes in counties with such a low population density that law enforcement officials cannot arrive in a timely fashion. But citizens already have this right, except for those that have shown themselves to be a public danger. This policy can only benefit the criminals, not the homeowners. These sheriffs have not cited any instances in which the sheriffs’ failure to enforce court orders has led to anyone being victimized.

The sole purpose of these declarations must be to allow militias to form in order to be ready, at a moment’s notice, to begin shooting any government official, or any neighbor, who refuses to follow the orders of Donald Trump.

The leaders of these rural counties worship the second amendment. It takes precedence over every other part of the constitution, every other law, and every part of the Bible. The Jesus whom they claim to worship never says that His followers have absolute rights to weapons, nor the obligation to make themselves victims to their neighbors who collect storehouses of weapons.

Suppose that there is a dangerous person in the county, and a judge orders this person to not have weapons. But the sheriff will not enforce this order. A mentally unstable man with a gun could shoot me at a convenience store, or even on the highway.

Why Fundamentalists Must Believe the Coronavirus Pandemic is a Hoax

I have posted a video that describes the ideas below.

Thousands, if not a million or more, fundamentalist Christians in the United States believe that the coronavirus pandemic is a hoax that has been started by Democrats to make Donald Trump look bad. Part of this is because white evangelicals have, as the title of a recent book indicates, chosen to “worship at the altar of Donald Trump.” In some cases, fundamentalist belief that there is no coronavirus pandemic has led them to acts of aggression, as certain recent viral videos have shown.

But there is another reason that fundamentalists MUST reject the fact that the coronavirus pandemic is caused by a virus. And that is because the Bible says so. I first pointed this out in a blog entry in 2012.

Actually, the Bible does not say that there is no such thing as viruses, or that they never cause disease. But I present below the evidence that the New Testament describes one-third of all diseases as being demonic in origin.

Here is a complete list of Jesus’ healings, in which I indicate which ones were and were not attributed to demon possession. In order to do so, I have tried to determine which of the parallel Gospel accounts refer to the same event, so as not to double-count them. And here they are (demonic events in bold).

	Event	Matthew	Mark	Luke	John
1	Healing a leper	8:1	1:40	5:12
2	Centurion’s servant	8:5		7:1
3	Peter’s mother-in-law	8:14	1:29	4:38
4	Same day: demoniacs	8:16
5	Gadarene swine	8:28	5:1	8:26
6	Forgave the paralytic	9:2	2:1	5:17
7	Resurrected ruler’s daughter	9:18	5:21	8:40
8	Woman with hemorrhage	9:20	5:24	8:43
9	Two blind men	9:27
10	Dumb demoniac	9:32		11:14
11	Man with withered hand	12:10	3:1	6:6
12	Blind dumb demoniac	12:22
13	Canaanite woman with demon daughter	15:21	7:24
14	Epileptic boy falling into fire	17:14	9:14	9:37
15	Blind men near Jericho	20:30	10:46
16	Demoniac near Capernaum		1:21	4:31
17	Deaf dumb man, Decapolis			7:31
18	Blind man at Bethsaida		8:22		9:1
19	Young man in his funeral			7:11
20	Another woman with flux			13:10
21	Man with dropsy			14:1
22	Ten lepers			17:11
23	Official’s son				4:46
24	Lame man at Bethsaida				5:2

I cannot be sure of some of the classifications; item 23 might be the same as item 2, but I have erred on the side of caution in favor of fundamentalists; item 2 refers to a servant, item 23 to a son, which most of us believe could just be a garbled transmission of the account, but fundamentalists do not believe garbled transmission is possible in the Bible. I have omitted the famous account of Lazarus, since it was considered an example of a resurrection, not a healing.

The point here is that seven of the 24 healings were specifically described—in all the parallel accounts available—as the casting out of demons. This is 29 percent. If you count the stories separately, 14 out of 46 involve demons, which is 30 percent. That is, in roughly one-third of the healings, exorcism was involved. In one of them (14), clear symptoms of epilepsy are described.

Creationists make a really big deal about evolution. Decades ago, they wanted to outlaw the teaching of evolution. When that didn’t work, they tried to mandate equal time for creation and evolution. When that didn’t work, they wanted to mandate the inclusion of a mention of creationism. Clearly, over the decades, evolutionary science has been their target. More recently, they have begun attacking the science of global warming with nearly as much fervor as they once attacked evolution.

But they didn’t have any trouble with medical science. Their children learned about how viruses, bacteria, protists, fungi, and parasitic worms cause contagious diseases, and how mutations can cause other diseases—in medical school, in college, in high school, even before high school. In none of these places, except perhaps their own schools and colleges, was demonology mentioned. I have never heard of fundamentalists trying to get legislation passed to mandate the inclusion of demonology in the medical science curriculum. They chose to allow a figurative interpretation of, or perhaps just to ignore, those Bible passages that attribute disease to spiritual causes. Fundamentalists occasionally attempt exorcisms, but they never insist that the rest of us agree with them.

How can the creationists do this? They think that God has given them the right to decide which parts of the Bible to take literally and which parts to take figuratively. “Day” is literal in Genesis 1 and figurative in Genesis 2; “the Earth” was figurative in Peleg’s day but literal in Noah’s day; and natural law accounts for the wind and the rain and diseases but not the origin of species.

I wondered, in 2012, what God would do without fundamentalists to tell us which parts of the Bible to believe and which ones not to believe. But now I know. They have embraced a literal Bible interpretation to such an extent that they reject medical science, except when they get sick. There are more stories than any of us can list of fundamentalist preachers rejecting the coronavirus pandemic, only to themselves die of covid.

A lawyer famously asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” Just as famously, Jesus did not answer the question directly but told a story. Don’t you just love that?

In Oklahoma, during racial tensions and the pandemic, I wonder just how many “neighbors” there are. Rather than simple neighborliness, we have either one extreme or the other.

• First, there are the bad neighbors, who are neighbors only in the sense of physical proximity. They are otherwise full of hatred toward their fellowman. Here in Oklahoma, especially in the rural town where I work (in contrast with Tulsa, where my family lives), a lot of people in the immediate neighborhood do everything they can to make themselves bad neighbors. Loud music is common. And twice, people have used my yard as a place over which to shoot their fireworks. They let their dogs run free and bite people (two of my colleagues, not yet me), they throw their garbage everywhere, in their own yards and everyone else’s. They make themselves as obnoxious as possible.
• Second, there are the good neighbors. But we cannot just relax and be neighbors. My wife and I were out walking and we met one of our neighbors, a black man who was cleaning up branches from his yard. We could have just been neighborly and said Good Morning, but it was the day of the Trump rally and racial tensions in Tulsa, so we felt an obligation to create small talk with him, which we all enjoyed. Those of us who are not part of the problem have to use every opportunity we can to promote the solution, in this case interracial friendship. We cannot just take neighborliness for granted. Altruism is so rare that it might die if we do not actively feed it.

Repeatedly on radio interviews, black people say that they are afraid that white police will shoot them even if they try to be nice to them and cooperate. They feel all white guns pointed at them, and they do not take a single day of life for granted. They fear that, each day they get out of the house, they might get shot. This is a horrible burden to have to bear. Are they overreacting? Actually, the chance of a black person getting shot by a white policeman is very small—but still much larger than the chances a white person faces. After what they have been through, a little overreaction is understandable. I cannot lecture them and say, You probably won’t get shot, so just calm down. My responsibility is to contribute to a solution.

I remember back to a time, not long ago in our neighborhood, when you could just treat everyone the same. But today, under Trump’s leadership of perceived hatred, good white people have to notice which of their neighbors are black and make special efforts to befriend them. People like us are the ones that will keep America from descending into racial chaos.

Fourth of July, Celebrating What? Part two.

As I posted previously, the Fourth of July is a celebration of white supremacy.

The “self-evident truths” about “unalienable rights” applied only to white men, later to white women, and never completely to people with darker skin. Non-white people have very little to celebrate.

I have reached the conclusion, slowly over the years, that the white races have been the primary source of evil in the world. In many places around the world, lighter-skinned people have conquered and enslaved darker-skinned people. This was even true in India, where lighter-skinned people invading from the north conquered darker-skinned southern people and created a caste system to keep the dark people suppressed. The genetic signature—a Y chromosome from lighter races—proves that, in many parts of the world, light-skinned men dominated and inseminated dark women, as described in David Reich’s masterful book Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.

We all know that each and every human being is both good and evil at the same time, and that every race, however defined, has both good and bad people. But I have now concluded that the people of the world should make the preliminary assumption that white people are evil. That is, this is what we should assume in the absence of further evidence; the null hypothesis should be that white people are evil. What this means is that white people carry a burden of guilt for being the primary oppressors in human history. It is therefore the responsibility of every white person to present evidence for public examination that they are actively dedicating their lives to making the world a better place. It is not good enough for white people to simply not be bad. White people should have to prove themselves good, or otherwise should be assumed to be evil. The burden of proof is therefore on white people to prove themselves to be good.

For many or most white people, this should be pretty easy to do. Just post on your social media outlets the evidence that you are a good person who loves people of other races. But if you remain silent, the dark majority of the world will assume that you are one of the oppressors.

For dark people, the world should make the preliminary assumption that they are good. This is the null hypothesis, to be accepted in the absence of further evidence. Of course, many of them are not, and the evidence for it comes from criminal records, financial or other scandals, etc.

Therefore, I proclaim to you what we must do. White people must present evidence that they are actively performing acts of goodness, while for dark people, all you have to do is not be evil.

Every person is still responsible for their own goodness or evil. If you are religious, you would say that God judges each of us individually, regardless of race. But the standards of evidence are different. White people have to work to counteract our history of evil; dark people just have to not make it worse.

What about those of us of mixed ancestry? I celebrate my Cherokee ancestry, but I look white. I am ashamed of my white ancestry, but what can I do? I must err on the side of love: I will make myself obviously good, so as to stand out from the history of evil created by my white ancestors. Maybe I don’t have to try as hard as a pure white man, but I still need to work hard. If you are half-white, you might have it easier, but you still have work to do.

When you have a world full of white people and almost-white people trying to make the world better, and dark people just not being evil, that sounds like a much better world than the one we live in right now.

And with all of this, I don’t have time to go around shooting off fireworks and driving a big pickup truck around with a Confederate flag waving from it. Okay, my fellow whites and almost-whites: get busy, and post on social media about the good things you are doing. Maybe you are already doing them. Well, let your neighbors, especially your dark neighbors, know you care about them. This will lead us to the next essay.

This essay has appeared in a blog about evolution primarily because, from an evolutionary viewpoint, human races do not actually exist.