Get Out the Monkey Wrenches?

I spent three years teaching at a Christian college near New York City. I wish I could get that time back, but it is gone forever. (Then I went off and taught another three years at a different Christian college. I finally learned my lesson and went secular for the rest of my career.) The college in New York claimed to be Christian but it was at least at that time just a front for the Republican Party. While I was there, it was quietly Republican. Years after I left, it projected an image of extreme right-wing doctrine.

While on the biology faculty at the small college near New York, I taught environmentalism. I did this partly because it was the only honest thing to do, especially among people who supposedly believed that God created the Earth and everything that is in it. Also, I was not the only faculty member doing so. Of us four biologists, none of us taught that God wanted humans to grab whatever they desire from the natural world and leave it bleeding, battered, and gasping as it awaited the Second Coming.

But most of the students at that college were not at all receptive to environmentalism. I think it was because they had never been allowed to think about it as they grew up. Imagine my surprise when, one day, I was in the computer lab writing something (few faculty had office computers), when the student assistant was telling the Learning Resources director all about this wonderful group he had just found out about, and which he admired greatly: Greenpeace. He admired their strong defense of the Earth and their willingness to take decisive, some might say extreme, actions. If Greenpeace is right about human abuse of God’s Earth, then mildness is not an appropriate response. Despite the repressive fundamentalism of that college, the students occasionally thought for themselves.

Another group besides Greenpeace that takes actions that some consider extreme is Earth First!

What I used to think about extremist environmental actions was that they were doomed to failure. The civil authorities would just sweep the protestors away and everything would go back to business as usual. Indeed, it was possible that their antics would turn people otherwise receptive to environmental views against the entire movement.

And this is exactly what Dave Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First!, used to believe, as he describes in his book Confessions of an Eco-Warrior. He worked with and for conservation organizations that took what they considered a more practical approach to environmental issues. Groups such as the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, and many others would meet with leaders of government and industry and try to convince them that sound environmental policy was profitable for everyone. This seems reasonable, doesn’t it?

Only it didn’t work out that way very often. Foreman describes his experiences with the extreme right wing Sagebrush Rebellion ranchers who wanted to take federal grazing land away from the taxpayers and keep it for themselves. The Sagebrush people created violent confrontations, and they considered mainstream environmental organizations to be their enemies.

The conciliatory approach wasn’t working very well. If you are part of a conciliatory environmentalist group, the right-wing extremists hate you as much as if you were a radical. So, for all the difference it makes, you might as well be part of a radical environmentalist group. They will hate you, but they would hate you no matter what. And this is still the case today.

This is why Foreman and others started Earth First! Back when he worked with mainstream organizations, he “was told to be rational, not emotional…I would lose credibility if I let my emotions show…But, damn it, I am an animal. A living being of flesh and blood, storm and fury. The oceans of the Earth course through my veins, the winds of the sky fill my lungs…I am alive! I am not…a cog in the industrial world…When a chainsaw slices into the heartwood of a two-thousand-year-old Coast Redwood, it’s slicing into my guts…” He and a few others decided, let the rage flow.

It seemed hopeless that anyone would pay attention to them. But when they staged a protest on Glen Canyon Dam, not destructive but very, very visible, they got in trouble but also got worldwide attention. Today, Earth First! associate organizations are found in many countries: Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic (which did not even exist when Earth First! was founded), France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, New Zealand, the Philippines, Poland, Slovakia (which also did not yet exist), Spain, the UK, as well as the US.

One of the inspirations of the group was Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. This was a fictional organization that carried out pranks against corporations and governments. The name comes from “throwing a monkey wrench into the works,” a wrench useful in manual labor but which, when thrown into the workings of a machine, can cause the whole mechanism to lock up. Nobody gets killed, but a lot of damage results. Foreman writes on page 23, “A monkey wrench thrown into the gears of the machine may not stop it. But it might delay it, make it cost more. And if feels good to put it there.”

Yes, I have to keep my emotions in their proper place when I do scientific research. But I am not just a scientist. I am also a passionate lover of the Earth. My role is not to stage protests, but to write, mostly books, but also blog essays like this one. I have retired from the academic world and feel too tired to participate in monkey wrench protests. But I am glad Earth First! is still at work, a counterbalance to the greenwashing [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing] of corporations that just pretend to be environmentally sound.

I suppose it is appropriate that I post this essay on midterm election day. In this election, environmental issues are mostly ignored.

Professor God

The way God is depicted by conservative Christians, he would have been the worst professor ever.

Suppose I, before I retired from professoring, had taught a class the way God supposedly teaches. According to conservative Christians, nearly everyone who has ever lived has been or is damned on account of disagreeing with one of numerous essential doctrines. This, of course, includes the people who never had a chance to even hear about these doctrines. Suppose I taught a course in which I locked the door and kept most of the students from attending the class. Then, I would give exams so hard that most of the class that got in the door failed the exams. What would my supervisor have said if 99% or more of the grades in my class were F? This would have been justification for corrective, and probably disciplinary, action on the part of the administration. Professor God could say, I taught the truth to pre-selected (predestined) students and if I didn’t like their answers, I flunked them, and that’s that.

It gets worse. I recently watched The Ten Commandments, the Cecil B. DeMille movie starring Charleton Heston and some inspiring sidekicks like Edward G. Robinson, Vincent Price, and, of course, Yul Brynner. I know it is fashionable today to spurn the “sand and sandals” epics of the mid-twentieth century. Those movies, of which The Ten Commandments was the most prominent, are easy to ridicule, especially when Heston (as Moses) seemed to be, after he became holy, nearly a log with a mask, speaking in Biblical phrases, and the narration, in faux King James English, were nearly intolerable. In this movie as in movies such as The Robe, the good characters seemed like robots. At least in The Robe, Jay Robinson played a really wickedly funny Emperor.

 

But I admit a secret admiration for sand and sandals movies. If only the line between good and evil were as clear as it appears in The Ten Commandments, and if only God’s presence were as easy to see as the red light on top of Mount Sinai!

In The Ten Commandments, God taught through proclamation. It would seem that Professor God was like the old-fashioned professor, one whom everyone would now hate, wearing his academic gown and proclaiming truths for students to write down. Almost no professor does this anymore.

Today, the ideal of education is to reveal the facts of the world and let the students explore them, figuring it out for themselves. In reality, they need some framework, some guidance for their explorations, but not rote memorization. It is amazing how long it took for academics to figure this out. One of the few academics before Thomas Henry Huxley (inventor of the modern biology teaching laboratory) who made the students explore the world for themselves was Aristotle. He invented the field trip. He had his students (in Asia Minor, not Athens) go to the seashore and the mountains, find things, and try to figure them out. They collected beetles (as Darwin did two millennia later) and birds’ nests. They dissected snakes. There was not yet any textbook to tell the students what they were supposed to find.

But Professor God would not have allowed this. If we see something in the world that puzzles us, we are not supposed to wonder about it, but simply accept what the ecclesiastical authorities, posing as God’s representatives, tell us. If you draw your own conclusions, you flunk. If you even ask inconvenient questions (how could a God of Love create an eternal Hell?) you flunk. Which means you burn in Hell forever.

Many of us believe that God, if there is one, invites us to look at all the facts of the world, explore them, draw our own conclusions from them, in discussion with one another. But this is not Professor God in the conservative Christian universe.

CheapGrace, a New Phone App

I have just posted a new video about a new phone app, which allows you to sin all you want to and yet get forgiven a thousand times a second. Available only to Republicans.

There is no such thing as human nature, I think. We have instincts, some we consider good (such as love) and some we consider evil (such as hatred). As we live, we create our own human nature, by (one would hope) practicing the good ones and minimizing the bad ones. This is true for all humans individually, if mentally normal; all ethnicities; and at all times in history. It is the legacy of evolution, of altruism. The reality is much more complex than this, but there is no time to explore this topic now.

That is the evolutionary view. The fundamentalist Christian view, however, is that everyone is a sinner unless God specifically forgives them. But as soon as you commit another sin, you have to ask forgiveness over again. The good news is that there is no Biblical limit to number of times God will forgive you. Even fundamentalist Christians would say that you cannot ask forgiveness a hundred thousand times and expect God to keep forgiving you, but, strictly speaking, there is no Biblical basis for this assertion, however reasonable it seems.

Theoretically, then, you could just keep doing whatever you want, and every time you sin, say “Woopsie, forgive me,” and God will forgive you.

But you could sin a hundred times a day. What happens if you die right after unforgiven sin number 57? What you need to do is to keep muttering “Woopsie, forgive me” all the time. This would be mind-numbing, but it would work.

What follows next is fiction.

You would go crazy by praying “Woopsie, forgive me” a hundred times an hour. But you don’t have to! This is the age of the phone app. You can download a phone app, “CheapGrace,” that is named after a concept created, disparagingly, by the World War II era Christian martyr Dietrich Boenhoeffer. It will send text messages to God demanding forgiveness. The free version (available from Gotohell.com) texts God 10 times per second. The version that you pay for will do it a thousand times a second. You think that God cannot handle a thousand pleas for forgiveness from billions of people each second? Remember, this is an infinite God we are talking about. This app will run in the background, so you can just forget all about it, and your sins are taken care of.

There are a couple of caveats, however.

First, it is available only to Republicans. You must click on the box indicating “I am a Republican,” and another box saying, “I am not a robot.”

Second, it is not available while your phone is updating itself, but that is usually at night when you are asleep, and you cannot sin. Of course, if you have insomnia, or if it turns out you can sin while asleep, then you are taking a little bit of a risk.

Technology can be fundamentalism’s best friend, in some cases.

Oklahoma: Land of Boastful Ignorance

Are you planning a move, or is your company planning a relocation? Companies like to relocate their employees to states that have a good quality of life. For employees who have kids, this means a good educational system.

But don’t come to Oklahoma.

According to a recent report, Oklahoma ranks 40^th for overall child well-being. I think you or your company’s employees would not want to raise your kids here, unless you can afford a private school.

Oklahoma ranks 45^th in childhood education. The major reason for this is (according to the Democratic candidate, and one of two Republican candidates, for state superintendent) a teacher shortage. It is difficult to recruit new teachers or to keep old ones. Why?

One reason is that teachers are not paid very well, in comparison to other jobs or states. But many or most teachers enjoy teaching and would not quit just because of low salaries. The Oklahoma teachers’ strike in 2018 was primarily over school funding, not salaries, although the state did increase their salaries that year.

One thing that discourages teachers in Oklahoma is that they are in the crossfire of conservative anger. If parents do not want their children to have to wear masks during a pandemic, it is the teachers to whom the parents complain, sometimes abusively. If teachers dare to mention that people of color (especially Native Americans in Oklahoma, which used to be Indian Territory) have experienced oppression, parents can complain that those teachers have violated an actual state law (HB1775) that prohibits the teaching of historical oppression of people of color. Ostensibly, the law is just against “critical race theory,” but teachers often avoid all mention of racially charged historical events like the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 in order to stay out of trouble. If teachers even mention LGBTQ, they might find themselves in trespass of SB615. And if a science teacher mentions evolution…well, they just don’t.

Teachers are tired of having ignorant politicians dictate what they should teach and are tired of being the brunt of conservative hatred. There are other jobs at which they can use their talents, that pay more, and at which their opinions can remain private.

The solution, so far, has been to hire teachers on “emergency certification.” This means that the teacher needs no qualifications other than, I assume, to not be a criminal. If they have a college degree in a subject, but no education courses, they can get “alternative certification.” But for emergency certification, you don’t need the subject matter courses either. From what I could tell from state websites, the emergency teacher has to submit a portfolio of experience. But approval is up to local school boards.

So if a qualified teacher leaves, an emergency teacher can replace her or him. This person could then teach creationism, global warming denialism, and hatred (or at least mild disgust) towards LGBTQ people. While they cannot (I think) teach racism, they can teach that there are no problems with racism that require any change in societal thinking.

And more change is likely to come. One of the Republican candidates for state superintendent openly proclaimed that teachers should be required to teach that America is the best country that has ever existed in the history of the world.

Already, 3,600 out of 45,000 teachers in Oklahoma have emergency certification. This downward slide can only favor the indoctrination of children with extreme conservative views. This is already a major problem for recruiting new employees into the Oklahoma work force. For every new company moving to Oklahoma, another leaves.

Where there is the worst, there is also the best. Many high school biology teachers are members of NABT, the National Association of Biology Teachers. They have a new president each year. Three of the presidents in recent decades have been from Oklahoma. All three were high school teachers, though they are now on college faculties or in administrative positions. Three! This shows that, in Oklahoma, to be a good science teacher, you have to be motivated almost as much as a missionary.

I have little personal interest in this, as I have retired and plan to leave Oklahoma. I was just hoping that I could feel good about not only having been born in Oklahoma, having spent most of my career in Oklahoma, and about my Oklahoma family roots that go back six generations. But instead I will have to be at least a little bit ashamed.

Why I Hate Fundamentalism and How I Emerged from It

I wish to tell my own personal story about why I hate Christian fundamentalism. My experiences are similar to those of thousands of other people’s, and I want to add mine to the online collection of accounts of religious oppression. Oppression of the mind.

There might be a gene for it. My paternal grandfather was a religious fanatic who spent his time and money on fundamentalist preaching, to the neglect of his family. He left on a preaching tour while his son, my father, lay dying in bed from an infection, from which he recovered. When my grandfather died, he left his biological family $1. His church parasites got the rest and spent it on luxuries.

When I was in junior high and high school, I was a devotee of Garner Ted Armstrong, a slick radio preacher whose every word I considered to be direct from God. I was even ready to, as soon as legally possible or sooner, join his church. His religion was a strange mutation of Identity Christianity, that is, the British and Americans were direct descendants of the patriarch Joseph and, as such, deserved world rulership. Many white-supremacist churches today believe that God wants them to have their guns ready to maintain white oppression, but Armstrong just said the problems of the world are too big for humans to solve, and that Jesus would come back and set things right, with white people ruling the world. I never realized the racist content of his message, since he never said “white” but just “Joseph.”

Part of the power of Armstrong’s influence upon me came from the fact that I first learned about the perils of the world from his radio shows—for example, famine and overpopulation; pollution; the threat of nuclear war. He said he and he alone knew the answer to these problems: God would solve them, not gradually, but in one big apocalyptic event.

Because of my devotion, I was blind to Armstrong’s immorality. One day, when I started to listen to his program—on which I took extensive minuscule notes—his father (Herbert W. Armstrong) was on the radio, giving Bible-centered fundamentalist sermon reruns. I found out later it was because Garner Ted had run off with a woman. Later the world found out that he had been systematically sleeping with girls from one of his Ambassador colleges, as described in In Bed with Garner Ted. Those young women, and his thousands of little donors, paid a much higher price than I did.

 

The reason I left the Armstrongs’s church was that I fell into another fundamentalist cult, the Church of Christ. They actually convinced me that they alone had the correct interpretation of the Bible. They had whole books and sermons about how “The Lord’s Supper” (communion or eucharist) was to feature just one cup, not multiple cups, of grape juice, not wine. The only way I could consider such a trivial point to be important is that they had complete control over my mind. This continued through my undergraduate days. Because I thought that it would be wrong for me to marry any woman who was not a member of our little branch of the Church of Christ (even other Churches of Christ were off-limits to “fellowship”), my social life was truncated into a frustrated loneliness. I drove fifty miles each way each Sunday to attend the one and only correct Church of Christ in my part of the world, ignoring the one right down the highway from me. They controlled my life. I remember how awful I felt when, even when I was in high school, the local preacher had denounced me as a dangerously wrong person when I taught a different interpretation of scripture than he did. I was seriously depressed from it. Gee, thanks, Brother Bob Sanders. One of the congregations to which I was devoted eventually closed, but was taken over by another openly oppressive fundamentalist church, this time Baptist.

Eventually, when I went to graduate school, I found I could not maintain this link. It was an emotionally wrenching experience when I tore away from my roots in that church. But, of course, I promptly fell into a new fundamentalist spiderweb: the creationists. My link with creationism had begun in my undergraduate days. As a biology major, I developed the intricate skill of believing the science that I agreed with and rejecting the rest, not realizing I was being dishonest.

After I began to learn scientific and careful thinking in graduate school, I questioned the creationists. I taught a church class about creation and evolution, which was basically a theistic evolution approach. Two old men, fierce creationists both, arranged to have me put on trial by the church leadership. I was not allowed to speak in my own defense. I found out later it was because the trial was just meant to let the old men blow off steam. But once again, it was an emotionally battering experience. Gee, thanks, Marlyn Clark.

Then I fell into the web of Christian colleges. My first two faculty jobs were at so-called Christian colleges. I was unspeakably inspired to be teaching students about science, not in opposition to but enriched by Christian views. This included environmental issues, about which I believed Christians should care. But, as I learned from these two jobs, a Christian college was just an excuse to pretend to have intellectual honesty. At the first college, The King’s College, factions of the faculty spent most of their time disputing with one another over college politics. Later, after I was gone, they chose a president (Dinesh D’Souza) whose only qualification for his job was that he hated Democrats and could write convincing lies against them. He would (and continues to) just make stuff up. The only thing that got him fired was when he had an extramarital affair. But even this King’s College experience did not disturb my idealism about Christian Higher Education.

The second college was Huntington College. Here, the pervasive assumption was that Christianity consisted of obedience to the Republican Party. This was at the time when Huntington native Dan Quayle was vice president. Since I taught environmental issues, which Dan Quayle considered to be leftist propaganda, I was in a precarious position. When I became the victim of secret political maneuvering, I was extremely upset and depressed for about two years. This time, I wanted to write a book about The Reality of a Christian College, an antidote to the widely read The Idea of a Christian College and to the hypocritical books written by Huntington president Eugene Habecker. I wanted to describe Christian Higher Education as corrupt while pretending to not be. It did not occur to me that nobody, including me, would want to read such a book.

The agony I experienced from these two jobs considerably lessened my ability to enjoy my beautiful daughter as she grew up from ages one to seven. I played the role of responsible father, but I could not experience the full delight of being her father, a delight I have thankfully recovered by enjoying my granddaughter at these ages. What joy I missed the first time around!

After these experiences, which lasted about 23 years, I settled into a calmer, more generalized Christianity. I could finally enjoy religion and life. All of the previous links, from Armstrong to Huntington, were dead to me.

But I eventually realized that even good religion was not worth the effort. For the last sixteen years, I have not been associated with a church. This, plus my rejection of popular entertainment such as cable TV and movies, has left me with an enormous amount of time to think about, write about, and enjoy the world of science. I had to wait until I was almost 50 years old before I could inhale the breath of freedom found in agnosticism. I now know that if there is a God, this God is a spirit of love, rather than a dictator of doctrines. My message to the world, in this blog and in many books, is not to hate religion but to hate its oppressive forms and seek inspiration directly from the natural and scientific world. I still read, and love, the sayings of Jesus, for example, without stressing out about the correct literal interpretation.

Religion Allows No Gray Areas of Uncertainty (for Abortion)

Nearly everything on Earth (and probably every place else in the universe) has areas of uncertainty between opposites. For example, there are plants, and there are animals, but there are some protists that could be considered neither one nor the other.

But religion is in the business of creating absolute distinctions. You are either going to Heaven, or to Hell; something is either sinful, or it is not; there are the sheep, and the goats.

One recent example of the difference between science and fundamentalist religion involves abortion. I have written very little about abortion, since I know little about it, and my opinions have little validity. I will let other people get angry on one side or the other. I am more interested in the light band of grayness between the two sides. Here are two relevant stories.

A Texas couple looked forward to having a child and were overjoyed with preparation for its arrival. Then, mid-pregnancy, an unthinkable tragedy occurred. The woman’s water broke, and all the amniotic fluid was lost. The fetus was thus doomed to death. But Texas has a heartbeat law. Abortion is murder if a heartbeat is detectable. In this case, the fetus still has a heartbeat, and under Texas law a doctor cannot abort the fetus. The woman has to carry the fetus, which has no hope of survival (unless God performs a miracle), perhaps risking her own health, until the heartbeat stops, something that could take a long time. What kind of law would insist that a woman carry a fetus until it inevitably dies? Only a law that attempts an absolute definition of pregnancy and allows of no exceptions, that’s what.

In Ohio, a nine-year-old girl was raped, and became pregnant. But Ohio law forbids abortions once a fetal heartbeat can be detected. She had an abortion in Indiana. What kind of law would force a now ten-year-old girl to carry through a pregnancy from a rape? This assumes that her body would even be capable of handling this. Only a law that attempts an absolute definition of pregnancy and allows of no exceptions, that’s what.

I am not saying whether or not a state should or should not have an anti-abortion law. But it is clear to me that individual exceptions must be allowed. But individual exceptions are something that fundamentalist religions will not allow.

The only thing I am absolutely sure about is that we can trust the women. A mother’s love is a force of nature. Mothers are not looking for a chance to kill their fetuses unless an old white man points a gun and tells them not to. Abortion is an act of desperation, as the above examples and thousands of other news items illustrate.

Among other things, life is about gray areas of uncertainty. An absolute light/dark distinction is a characteristic of death. Science fiction writer Clive Staples (C.S.) Lewis made this distinction in his Perelandra novels. In these novels, the forces of evil wanted to make everything black and white, as on the Moon; but on Earth, there is a lot of penumbra. Many religious fundamentalists today would side with Lewis’s forces of evil. But Lewis was a Christian and used to be, at least when I was younger, a very popular Christian writer. Times, apparently, have changed, or at least Christianity has.

People like Me

If the world were full of people like me, I fantasize, it would be a much more peaceful world. It would be a world in which time and resources were more efficiently used because people would not use them against one another. I enjoy being good. People from my past, some of whom I had completely forgotten, keep re-emerging on social media hunting me down to share their memories of me. I’ve done some not-so-good things as well, but it appears, from my reputation, that the good things have prevailed in my image.

But there is one very real sense in which the world would be a shambles if everyone was like me. You see, I don’t consume very much. I do not take expensive vacations or patronize expensive entertainment. I do not go out to eat very much. I am frugal and I enjoy it. A lot. And my wife is even more frugal and enjoys it even more. The high point of her month is when she shows me the utility bill, which compares the average Tulsan, an energy-conscious Tulsan, and us, and we use less electricity than even those considered to be energy conservationists.

Our French in-laws have a similar view of life. Their idea of a good time is to get together and eat sausages, sauerkraut, and pretzels, or go hiking in the mountains. Their only non-frugal expenditures are on wine and fragrant cheese. Of course, this is because they are French. But just as you will not find me and my wife taking a vacation to Vegas, you won’t find our French relatives going to the Côte d’Azur or Monaco.

As the economy “climbs out of the recession caused by the pandemic,” many sectors (particularly hospitality and entertainment) cry out for us to patronize them. My wife and I are the world’s worst big-time consumers. We were before, and we are even more so now, living as we do in Oklahoma where only a little more than one in three people are vaccinated.

The only way our economy can recover is if a lot of people start wasting money. This is, however, a problem that results from our unrealistically hedonistic economy. Sorry, I cannot help you there.