What I Remember about Pete Seeger

The famous folk singer Pete Seeger died today at age 94.

I met Pete Seeger about 1988 when my family and I lived in Ossining, New York. Pete, as I recall, lived in Beacon, just up the Hudson River from Ossining. At the time, I was a young faculty member at The King’s College, a Christian college in Briarcliff Manor. I suspect that I might have been the only faculty member at that college who did not worship the Republican Party. I was not an activist for progressive causes at the time, but I did accompany my wife to some meetings of the Beacon Sloop Club (a sloop is a kind of boat), where you could always see Pete and his wife Toshi.

I actually don’t know very much about Pete’s musical career, nor would it be on-topic for a science blog like this one. But I do remember that Pete was always involved in making life better for the people of his local community. One time, about 1989, he was invited to address a public meeting of a municipal agency responsible for recycling and energy efficiency. While other speakers talked about technical issues, Pete sang some of his songs. To him, music was just part of what it meant to live rightly upon the Earth.

At one of the meetings of the Sloop Club, I talked to him about an annual event that the club sponsored: the Weed Wallow. Members and friends would wade into the Hudson River and remove by hand as many invasive plants as they could. I do not remember what the primary invasive species of aquatic plant was, but Pete told me that it had been introduced by a well-meaning clergyman who thought it could be used as food.

My memories may be slightly inaccurate. But it is clear to me that here was a man with a worldwide reputation but who was contented, even excited, to wade out into the mud and pull weeds. He lived rightly on the Earth, by his music and by his good ecological work.

Religion and War, Again

I think we all realize that religion has been used to justify war for a long time, perhaps ever since the human species has existed. I just want to add a couple more examples to your mental list. Both examples come from medieval and early modern Europeans, who despite their protestations of advanced culture were more bloodthirsty than the people they called “savages,” who were plenty bloodthirsty themselves.

The first example is from the Crusades, in which the pope would give indulgences to the soldiers in advance for whatever rape and pillage they might undertake against Muslims. We are talking about more than one pope and more than one Crusade.

The second example comes from Martin Luther. In a 1526 essay, quoted in E. O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth, Luther wrote that it was God who instituted the holy practice of war.  He said that Romans 13:1 indicated that God invented war; it was not a human invention. “For the hand that wields this sword and kills with it is not man’s hand, but God’s; and it is not man, but God, who hangs, tortures, beheads, kills, and fights. These are all God’s works and judgments.”

Now, if a fundamentalist were to hear this in church today, he or she would simply nod his or her head in agreement with the preacher. But those of us who care about evidence would do as I just did and go read Romans 13:1. It says nothing at all like what Luther claimed. It says to be subject to government authorities, because God has instituted them. That is, from the Apostle Paul’s viewpoint, God created governments. This does NOT mean that God approves of everything that every government does. So if your government tells you to torture somebody, that does NOT mean that God wants you to torture that person. Luther was just making all that stuff up out of his prejudiced, evil, bloodthirsty mind. Protestants revere him, but he sounds like Pol Pot to me, with a little God-puppet added. Luther was so consumed by hatred that he deliberately made stuff up about the Bible. He wanted so badly for whatever government (in what is today Germany) was supporting him to go out and torture Catholics that he used his ecclesiastical position of power to blasphemously stick words in God’s mouth. If there is a hell, Luther is in it, along with the Crusaders. Luther certainly did not believe that God instituted the Muslim governments and that God ordered Muslims to torture Christian captives, unless maybe they were Catholics.

Look, I’ll try to cut Luther a little bit of slack here, but I’m afraid it won’t be very convincing. Luther once said that he did some of his best thinking “over porcelain,” that is, when he was sitting on the toilet. He must have been having a hard time of it, if he had enough time to think up his theology of God-inspired torture. I wonder how many acts of torture were inspired by Luther’s words, which emerged from a recalcitrant turd in Luther’s bowels. Might history have been just a little bit less violent if milk of magnesia had been invented earlier?

Sorry to all you Lutherans out there, but you’d better get yourself a different hero.

Wishing You a Quiet New Year

This past year, as every previous year, I have written a lot about loud, bloviating fundamentalism. I have tried to avoid discrediting all religion when I criticize fundamentalists. But I want to take a moment to indicate that the purpose of this blog is not to attack religion as a whole but just doctrinal religions that make people think they have the final answers to every question.

Fundamentalist religions tend to be loud. Their preachers are loud and relentless. They give you no time to think for yourself and to consider possibilities other than the stark black-and-white choices they have set before you: to agree with they say (Heaven) or to doubt it (Hell). Even during times of supposedly silent prayer in a conservative church, the organ plays melodies of hymns that tell you what to think. At least that is the way it is in fundamentalist Christianity, and I suspect (without direct knowledge) the same is true in Islam.

In this sense, fundamentalist religions resemble entertainment. Many modern movies consist of nearly continuous action. If you stop for a moment to think, you might get attacked by orcs, so you have to keep slashing with your sword. That is, these movies are like video games. And, as in video games, all of the characters are unchangeably good or bad. Genre fiction also never takes time for reflection. There are movies and literary novels in which you have to think about which direction the characters will choose and in which good vs. bad is not always very clear. But these reflective movies and books make a lot less money than action movies and genre fiction.

The big churches that sell religion and the big corporations that sell entertainment do not want you to take time for reflection. Fundamentalist religious leaders worry that, if you think for yourself, you might become a Quaker (if Christian) or Sufi (if Muslim). You might be less useful of a follower, less likely to give money to a church, less likely to take up arms when called to do so. And the corporations are afraid that you might have a good time by doing something that does not require you to make a purchase.

I wish for you, in this coming year, freedom. And you can find freedom by taking time to think carefully for yourself. Walk in the woods and notice things. Shut up and listen. Read the Bible, and think about what Jesus and the prophets said rather than what the big preachers say. Do not be afraid to be alone with your own thoughts.

Christmas Message 2013

It is the Sunday before Christmas. Doctrinal churches call it the last Sunday of Advent. It’s been a while since I’ve been to church, but this does not mean I am without religious feelings and sensibilities. And I would like to share some with you.

We recently had an ice storm, which deposited about three-quarters of an inch of ice on every exposed surface except for the ground. Streets remain clear, but everything else is glazed with a layer of crystal. It is not always symmetrical; a branch may have a half an inch of ice on one side and a quarter on the other.

There is not much that we can do about the ice except, on a Sunday morning, go out and appreciate its beauty: to notice such things as the asymmetry of ice on branches. The ice transforms everything into an object of beauty. Buds, already half-swollen for spring, are encased in it. Spheres of sycamore seeds become bizarre tree-ornaments, hanging from the trees by their loose stalks. Best of all, the ice magnifies and distorts beautiful colors, such as crimson holly berries and blue cedar berries. When the sun briefly emerges from behind thick gray clouds, the world becomes a crystal palace, like the one that Lara and Yuri walked through in Dr. Zhivago. Inevitably, the music of Journey through Snow Country and Dance of the Snowflakes from The Nutcracker filled my mind. I wonder if Tchaikovsky, who was depressed and who particularly despised the Nutcracker music that he himself wrote, could have imagined that someone almost 140 years later would me walking around in Oklahoma (which did not even exist at the time) thinking of his music. I consciously invited the beauty of ice and music to fill my mind.

We could, I suppose, have gone to church to sing about and listen to sermons about doctrines. But I believe we made the better choice, to go walking in the ice with hearts open to the beauty of the thin layer of cosmos that clings to our little path of Earth.

Back at a “Bible church” of which I was a member long ago, a former missionary related a story to me. An African tribal chief had said that he knew there was a God because he could see God’s tracks, just as he knew that certain animals were present, though unseen, because of their tracks. We might say, instead of tracks, God’s phenomena—the appearance (Greek phainen, to manifest) of the unseen in the world of the seen. The missionary meant, by this, that you could recognize the presence of God because of the evidences of creationism. While I consider creation-science to be ridiculous, I have to admit that, if there is some kind of God of love, I saw God’s phenomena this morning.

Whatever beliefs you may have or lack, I wish you a time of looking for, and finding, beauty.

Atonement

It is the Christmas season, which for most people just means materialism and religious rituals and images. But for some people, religious or not, it is a time to think about “peace on Earth, goodwill toward men.” One of the main ideas in traditional Christian belief is that Jesus brought “atonement” between God and humankind. According to this view, human sin had caused a rift between God and humankind, and Jesus’ incarnation and later his crucifixion atoned for that rift.

I wondered recently what “atonement” means to conservatives. They claim to believe in the atonement brought by Jesus Christ. But what do they mean by this? They think that they obtain atonement from God every day when they pray and every week when they go to church. But then they continue doing the same evil things as they did before, the same things that the Old Testament prophets denounced, such as grinding the poor into the dust. Apparently, to them, atonement means that God forgives them in advance for whatever they might do, sort of like the pope conferring indulgences in advance for whatever rape and pillage the Crusaders might do once they reach the Holy Land.

The conservative viewpoint is very male. Males seem to be like medieval knights: they enjoy jousting with one another, pennants and draperies waving in the air, while the people around them are sick and starving. Congress (which is mostly male) recently created an artificial budget crisis, not all that different from medieval jousting matches, so that they could joust while ignoring the real problems that bring suffering to the masses. And they fantasize that females drool over their jousting sticks. Male thinking, like male reproduction, is an ugly ramming, unlike the nourishing roundness of the female body and female thinking. Conservatives, whether Christian or Muslim, generally believe in the right of males to dominate females, which includes the primacy of male ramming over female nurture. Atonement, then, to their way of thinking, must mean to wash away female niceness and replace it with male ruthlessness.

This view of atonement is completely different from the original Christian meaning, back when Christians were a little socialistic altruistic band and before Christianity became a political force.

The Real Creation Model

Most people, including most readers of this blog, think that creationism is the belief that God made all the components of the universe in perfect form just a few thousand years ago.

But that is only part of the creationist creed. There is another part, which they do not openly proclaim, but which they believe.

We all know there is a political correlation between rejection of evolution and rejection of environmentalism. I merely maintain that is correlation is real, not accidental. There is a reason for it.

The full statement of the creation model is that God made all the components of the universe in perfect form just a few thousand years ago for us to use up now.

Creationists believe that the Earth will come to an end soon, so we might as well go ahead and use up all the natural resources, like coal and fish and trees, as fast as we can. Why preserve them, only to have them burned up in Armageddon? Why preserve them, only to leave them behind in the Rapture and let damned sinners have them? Why have a livable Earth in 2100, if the end of the world will already have occurred?

A creationist said to me, several decades ago, that the basis of his belief was time. (That’s funny; I would have expected it to be God.) We know that Jesus is coming soon, he said, therefore just as the future is short so must the past be short. I thought this was rather strange, but now it makes perfect sense.

So when you look at the full statement of creationism, their opposition to both evolution and environmentalism makes perfect sense.

If you are, or know, an environmentalist creationist, all I can say is, glad to hear it. And I could have a respectful conversation with such a person. But this is clearly the exception to the rule. If anything, conservative creationists probably hate environmentalist creationists even worse than they hate evolutionists. An environmentalist creationist is embracing a burden of frustration.

The political correlation between anti-evolutionism and anti-environmentalism is real, not accidental. I believe the reason is that creationists think God made the Earth for us to use up right now. If you have a different explanation, please feel free to post a comment. If your argument makes sense, I would be glad to acknowledge it.

How Far Can You Trust Religious People?

Pretty far, but not far enough.

I now present a second reason why orthodox religion (as opposed to religious sensibility or mysticism) is really bad for the human species.

The religious conservatives believe that God has given them absolute truth; they are God’s chosen, and the rest of us are God’s enemies; they are saved, we are damned.

In the past, religious conservatives took this belief to mean that they have the right to torture and kill anyone who disagreed with them, whether brown-skinned pagans or white-skinned heretics. Today, of course, they do not do this. They will lie about us in order to get their followers to hate us, but they will not torture or kill us.

But why not? If in fact they are God’s chosen, why shouldn’t they kill us? After all, Joshua killed the Canaanites, putting entire cities to the sword. Religious conservatives say this was right. But they will not put us to the sword, because…why? Perhaps, that’s just not done anymore. Or perhaps it is because they recognize the authority of human governments, which declare murder to be illegal, even if it is done in the name of God. But if God is the same for all time, then if he commanded genocide in the past, he could do so again.

So they will not kill us. But the basis for their refusal to kill us is operational, not fundamental. Read that again. They have operational, not fundamental, reasons to not kill us. They believe God gives them the right to, but has indicated that this is not the right time or place to do so.

But even recent history shows how quickly an operational restraint can change. Just a few years after the fall of Yugoslavian communism, genocide was raging across the Balkan states.

There is nothing fundamental in the refusal of religious conservatives to kill the rest of us. It is purely operational. And if, by some means, they should become convinced that the situation has changed and that God does, after all, want them to kill us, then they will do so, though perhaps with some hesitation. This can happen almost overnight. I prophesy that it will, and I fervently hope I am wrong.

In contrast, science provides a fundamental reason to not kill people who disagree with you. And that fundamental reason is that all of our conclusions, about what to believe and how to live, are tentative. Scientists cannot (without no longer being scientists) kill heretics because there are no heretics in science; there are only people who are wrong. We never say “God has proclaimed that…” but can only say “The evidence clearly indicates that…” In science, there always remains a slight margin of possibility that we are wrong, even about the most obvious things. Maybe the Sun really does go around the Earth, and God just makes it look like it’s the other way around. Therefore scientists cannot pass summary, lethal judgment on anybody on account of their beliefs. But religious conservatives believe that there is no slight margin of possibility of error.

Murderous religious zeal, so common in the past and still so pervasive in large parts of the world, remains within American religious conservatives like a tiny population of bacteria, so tiny that most conservatives refuse to believe it is there, just waiting to emerge when the conditions are right.