Trump is Evil, But Is He Dangerous?

Trump is not only evil but is dangerous, and the reason has directly to do with Christianity.

Trump loves to abuse and insult everyone who disagrees with Him in even the smallest way. As documented in the new book (scheduled for release next Tuesday) Very Stable Genius, Trump has repeatedly insulted and lost his temper at his own hand-picked staff, including the former secretaries of State and Defense. He tweets insults, even some that are demonstrably false.

Meanwhile, his followers act like they are nice people. Trump’s worshipers are for the most part people who would not insult you. I know this does not include the Evangelical Core of Trump’s worshipers, but most of them act nice. However, they offer Trump their complete support. Trump says and does the things that they wish they could do to you. But they are too nice to do it themselves. They secretly want Trump to punish you for doubting His Godlike Wisdom.

And this is the danger. If Trump should ever try to suppress all opposition to Himself, something that seems only a matter of time, then these quiet Christians will support Him. This is exactly the way most Germans supported Hitler. They themselves did not kill Jews, but supported Hitler, who made his murderous intentions clear.

Trump will be able to call forth His Christian Army with very little advance warning.

Religion or the Lack of Religion: Not Just a Private Matter

Here is something for us to think about in this new year.

An acquaintance of mine recently lost her youngest son in an auto accident. The fact that it was his fault is irrelevant, as is the fact that the mother is a very gentle and nice person, quiet and inoffensive, and has already suffered much in her life: divorces, and the murder of her eldest son about a decade ago. This essay is not about “why God lets the innocent suffer.” This woman, while not a fundamentalist in any sense, is deeply religious.

Though I am not a close friend, this woman and I have had several meaningful conversations. I mostly listen to her as she talks. But that is what she needs. I do not need her help, but she benefits greatly from having people listen to her seriously, which is what I do. It is a kind of altruism, and like most altruism, it feels good: it makes me feel good to do something to help.

I did not know about her recent tragedy until her car pulled up alongside me as I walked to the bank to pay my mortgages. (I always do this in person and get a receipt, since at this bank they are not very careful with their paperwork.) She considered it a miracle that she happened to encounter me right at that time. She was headed to the same bank to put a freeze on her dead son’s bank account. She said she thought she would collapse without someone with her, someone who took her seriously and supported her. And there I was.

We went to the bank together and, as soon as I paid my mortgages (which for some reason is always a complex process for the poorly-trained tellers) I joined her in the office where she met with a bank representative. I did nothing except to remind her to write down what the number on the piece of paper the representative gave her was for; in her condition, she would easily have forgotten what it was for, just as I would have. Otherwise, I just listened, as she drove me the short distance to my house and we sat in her car.

She said again that it was a miracle that she had encountered me. She said I could call it synchronicity—an unusual coincidence—if I wanted to. She practically begged me to keep up my faith in God. She made it sound as if she would not be able to face the immediate future if I did not believe in God.

I was not able to confirm to her a belief in a God who answers prayer. A more general spirituality—I can admit this possibility. But, even if a woman who has just lost her youngest son begs me to believe in a personal God, I cannot consent. It is not right for her to demand this.

But neither did I have a right to criticize her. It would have been wrong for me to tell her that there was no good reason for her to believe in a personal God.

That is, religious belief is not merely a personal matter. Though each person has to decide for himself or herself what to believe, we must not hurt other people who believe differently.

At first glance, it might appear that we hurt one another—she by asking me to believe, me by refusing. But the relationship is not symmetrical. I am older, I am the man, and she is a vulnerable (slightly) younger woman. I am the professor, she is the office assistant (not of my department). But she is the one who suffers, while at the present time, I am the one who is mostly happy. I am the one with the surviving daughter, and a thriving and perfect granddaughter (by any objective measurement). It would be much, much more wrong for me to tell her that she should not ask me to believe, than for her to ask me to believe. We might have been unfair to each other, but she was the one who had more to suffer from it. I said nothing about this, and never will say anything to her about it.

She asked me to reconsider my skepticism. That was, I believe, a fair request. That evening, I rethought my reasons for not believing in a personal God who is in control of what happens in the world. I was serious about this. I wrote about it at considerable length in my personal journal. I did not change my mind, but I told her I would consider it. I did. I think this is what we owe to the people in our lives.

Part of the process of reconsideration was the synchronicity she considered a miracle: encountering one another at just the right time. But how many other potential synchronicities have not occurred? She considered this synchronicity to be something that God willed. But, while we sat in her car, another car turned onto the small street and drove past. This sensitive woman was nearly overcome by surprised grief. There were only two cars in town that looked like this one. One was the car destroyed in her son’s accident. This was the other one. I did not say anything to her, but I had to consider: was this a synchronicity overseen by the devil? or by a God who wants to make people like this fine woman squirm with agony?

Two thousand years of Christian theology has no answer to this. All I know is that, whether evangelical Christian or skeptic or anything in between, we should not just blab out our opinions without considering their effect on the people who need us. This is especially true for people, like me and like many of you, who are in positions of power. Victims, I believe, do not need to meet as high standards as do leaders.

Blasphemy: Donald Trump and Kim Il-Sung

When I was in elementary school, I enjoyed listening to shortwave radio. I could hear some weird stuff. One transmission I heard was the English language service of RNK, Radio North Korea. This was back when the original communist dictator, Kim Il-Sung, grandfather of the current dictator, was in power. The female commentator said that Kim Il-Sung was “a genius of art, a genius of science, a genius of politics, a torch to light the darkened pathways of modern times.” Of course, no human could be all of those things, and all of us outside North Korea knew he was none of these things. I marveled that anyone could believe such statements.

But there are many Americans who believe such things today about Donald Trump.

Trump continues to say things about himself that no human should ever say because they are blasphemy. One website collected fifteen examples of Trump calling himself a genius or saying that he knew more about every aspect of the economy (jobs, banks, etc.) than anyone else. Trump also referred to himself as having “great and unmatched wisdom.”.

Even some Republicans are now beginning to question their blasphemous dedication to and worship of Trump. But I wonder if most Republicans will renounce Christianity and continue to worship Trump.

I have discussed Trump’s numerous blasphemies with others who know a lot about religion and history, and they agree with my assessment.

George Washington Carver: The Convergence of Art and Science

Many people were surprised that George Washington Carver painted flowers as well as studied them scientifically. But to him, art and science were both ways of approaching the truth, and there was no dissonance between them. Here is a scene from Linda O. McMurray’s book, George Washington Carver: Scientist and Symbol, page 302:

            [Carver] reached across the table for a tiny green herb. The soil still clung to its threadlike roots.

            “All these years,” the artist continued, looking at the weed in his hand, “I have been doing one thing. The poet Tennyson was working at the same job. This is the way he expresses it:

Flower in the crannied wall

I pluck you out of the crannies,

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,

Little flower—but it I could understand

What you are, root and all, and all in all,

I should know what God and man is...

            “Tennyson was seeking Truth. That is what the scientist is seeking. That is what the artist is seeking; his writings, his weaving, his music, his pictures are just the expressions of his soul in his search for Truth.

            “My paintings are my soul’s expression of its yearnings and questions in its desire to understand the work of the Great Creator.”

George Washington Carver

You have probably heard of George Washington Carver (1864-1943) as the early-twentieth-century Peanut Man who developed hundreds of commercial products from peanuts, and from other southern United States crops, in his laboratory at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. But these products were probably the least important part of his work, at that time and in his legacy today. He is also remembered as the black man who earned respect from whites who might otherwise have dismissed blacks as an inferior, perhaps uneducable, race. I have recently posted a video about Carver, filmed at his birthplace.

Carver had a brilliant mind for botany and chemistry. He was also a teacher whom his students loved, because he was humble despite his vast knowledge, and he cared individually about each student. He wanted each student to experience scientific discovery for themselves. While most science teachers today take this approach, it was uncommon in Carver’s day.

The fame was as much for his personal story as for his scientific work. He was born into slavery just before the end of the Civil War, then kidnapped. His owner got him back in exchange for a horse. After the war, George’s owner raised him as one of his own children. He struggled for years to get an education from whatever school would allow a black man to learn. He was the only black student at Iowa State University. His mentors there wanted him to stay as a faculty member, but instead he accepted a call from Booker T. Washington to join the Tuskegee faculty.

For much of his career, Carver labored in obscurity. Tuskegee president Booker T. Washington was impatient with Carver’s disorganized approach to college duties. Whenever Carver accomplished more, Booker T. Washington always thought of something more that he ordered Carver to do. At one point, even though Carver spent every waking moment working for the institute, Washington told Carver he needed to repair the bathrooms. Washington’s regimented and disciplined approach to everything conflicted with Carver’s slower and more thoughtful approach.

Then in 1921, Carver testified before the federal House Ways and Means Committee about all the food and industrial products that could be made from peanuts. The committee was interested because World War I had interrupted many imports into the United States, and they wanted to know what “home-grown” products we could have in the event of a future war. Even though these products ended up not being marketed, the committee was very impressed with this humble and brilliant man. From that point, Carver became a celebrity, and his fame spread worldwide.

Once at Tuskegee, Carver showed his ability to produce excellent work with almost no resources. Though he eventually had a lot of glassware for his teaching and research laboratories, he had literally nothing to work with when he first arrived. So, he found a whiskey bottle at the dump. He tied a string around the middle. He cooled the bottle in cold water, then lit the string on fire. The fire made the cold bottle crack in two. The top half was a funnel, the bottom half a beaker.

By the end of his life, Carver was receiving many prizes and worldwide recognition. Meanwhile, in American society, the legal rights for black people were becoming ever more restricted. After an initial period of openness after the Civil War, southern states found ways to prevent blacks from voting, and they ended up with almost no political voice. While Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver were widely admired, most white people considered them individual exceptions from their otherwise benighted race.

Max Otto (see previous essay) quoted Russell Lord’s “deeply disturbing” book Behold Our Land. Lord wrote about the soil erosion, which ruined the livelihoods of poor farmers, that was going on “under the eye of a teaching and research staff of considerable distinction; and yet it all was, and is, by them completely ignored. They go right on teaching their geology, their botany, their zoology, their chemistry and physics, their archaeology, their Greek and Latin and English, with no thought or mention of the tragic transformation of the good green country roundabout.” Maybe Lord referred to the major universities, but George Washington Carver was the exact opposite of this disconnected academic lassitude.

Carver never sought fame (though it came to him) or fortune (which he had opportunities to refuse). He lived in a small room on the Tuskegee campus. Books were stacked floor to ceiling in the corner. He had a display case for his crochet work. Rocks and stalactites covered a table, and flowers crowded his window box. His personal space reminds me of my own.

I chose George Washington Carver as my favorite scientist in my recent book. The main reason was not so much because of his scientific research, which was creative but not of the highest quality, as for his motivation. He believed that scientific research at a university should prove directly helpful to the people living around it, and to the world in general. The inspiration of his peanut research (and also research on sweet potatoes and pecans) was to allow poor farmers to produce value-added products, at home, that they could sell for more money than peanuts. He also did research, and taught local farmers, about how to preserve soil fertility, so that they could produce more from each of their acres. This is also one of my main motivations in teaching and research. Like Carver, I am a mediocre scientific researcher, but my heart is in outreach to the wider community, opening their eyes to the wonders and practical benefits of science.

All this, despite the fact that Carver did not really follow what nearly every scientist in his day and today would consider good scientific method. That is the topic of the next essay.

Why I Cheered the Runners

I was about to leave my house and walk to my office one Saturday morning in October. I heard shouts outside and saw runners go down the street. (Not the sidewalk. In Durant, the sidewalks are in dangerous disrepair. So the street was closed by the police for the safety of the runners.) It was a community awareness and fundraising event. I did not know the background story of this event.

I still don’t. I decided that I did not need to know. The most important thing is, in my view, that this event was occurring at all. It was a wonderful example of altruism.

                                     

Altruism is where animals are nice to each other, and they both (or all) benefit from it. It is not necessarily self-sacrifice; it can be mutual benefit. And it is usually enjoyable. We humans not only have the instinct of being nice, but we enjoy it. The runners enjoyed running, their sponsors enjoyed donating money to the community benefit, and everyone enjoyed social interactions with their neighbors.

In Oklahoma, most people aren’t very good at altruism. Many of the Durant, Oklahoma altruists were involved in this event. But at least as many people in Durant are hostile toward altruism. They are hostile to their neighbors. They prefer to throw their garbage into their neighbors’ yards just to prove how hostile they are. (About ten percent of my garbage is what other people throw in my yard.)

So when I see altruism in action, I want to celebrate it. I was unprepared for this event, even though it went right past my front yard. But I stood out in the yard and clapped for the runners, none of whom I actually knew. And they thanked me. I got more “thank you” wishes in a half an hour than I usually get in a month.

Premature Optimism about Science and Religion in America

One of the foremost opponents of all attacks on evolutionary science has been Niles Eldredge, retired from the American Museum of Natural History. One of his many books was The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism (the last phrase was printed backwards on the cover, spine, and title page). When Eldredge wrote this book, he was pretty angry at the creationists.

In recent decades, I’ve stopped getting upset about what the creationists do. You cannot stop them from making false claims, and profiting from the support of millions of people whom they have duped. They are part of the conservative movement which now controls America, and they are not going to step back from the power and money that comes with it. They know they are lying, and it does no good to point out their errors to them, or to the people who willingly believe them.

Instead, what I do is to use creationism as an opportunity to teach science, and to do so by the use of humor. I have now published two articles in Skeptical Inquirer magazine entitled “Creationist Funhouse,” episodes one and two (readable by subscribers only). More are on the way.

Eldredge allowed himself to be optimistic toward the end of his book, which was published in 2000. He wrote, “The tired old creationism debate—mired as it so thoroughly is in the nineteenth century—simply has not prepared us for the kind of positive interaction between science and religion that I see as eminently possible as we enter the new Millennium and grapple with tough environmental issues.” As Eldredge and the rest of us now know only too well, religion and science are further apart than ever, because “religion” now often means unquestioning devotion to Donald Trump, and there is less hope than ever for environmental problems to be solved, once again because of unquestioning devotion to Donald Trump. Eldredge’s millennial optimism was a good try, but reality has proven worse than we could have imagined back in 2000.

This essay also appeared in my science blog.