What's Really Shocking

It's 6:00 in the morning. I don't go to work until 9 most days, so I'm not usually up this early. But I couldn't sleep well. The thing is, I saw people expressing opinions yesterday that are weighing on my mind. First, I saw a picture of a sign in front of a pizza joint in my home state of Arkansas. It said "Leviticus 20:13. Why don't we listen?" Now, here's what that verse actually says.

If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads."

Well, that seems clear enough. This pizza place, called Heavenly Pizza Pies, seems to be calling for the killing of gay people, or at least gay men.* When there was an outcry, they took the sign down and claimed they were saying no such thing. Maybe they didn't mean it that way. I don't know. Here's the response that they posted on Facebook:

We as a company don't support same sex marriage, but we still care for everyone and would do anything to help. We posted a Bold Verse out of God's word, something that as a nation we have forgotten. As a nation we have taken God out of schools, we have taken prayer out of school and the work place, and now we take another one of God's law and throw it away. We will stand bold in honoring God's word in and out of the work place. If you were upset with this verse, remember its God's word, we will all stand before him in judgement.

What are we to make of people posting a sign like that? Honestly, I doubt they really want to see gay people killed, but you never know with some people. One thing we can conclude with confidence is that they're being extremely selective about which parts of Leviticus to take seriously. I mean, this is a pizza place--I'm pretty sure they put sausage, pepperoni, and ham on their pizzas, and all those things are made from pork. Leviticus 11:7-8 clearly says pigs are unclean and not to be eaten. Their carcasses aren't even to be touched, which, it has been often pointed out, would seem to rule out playing football with an actual pigskin.

When questioned, people say such dietary restrictions are part of the Old Covenant, and that the New Covenant makes them unnecessary. But those same people point to the verses about homosexuality in Leviticus and say they still hold. Why? What are their criteria for deciding which parts of the Bible are still valid and which are no longer applicable? I ask this question all the time, because I would really like to know, but I never get a clear answer. Usually I get no answer at all, even though I think I usually succeed in asking nicely. Apparently the question is gauche.

Seeing the picture of this sign in my home state disturbed me enough, though I can't say it surprised me. But what continued to disturb me were other things I saw people saying on the same topic, or in response to it. One woman, in a thread unrelated to the pizza joint sign, also mentioned the parts of the Old Testament that talk about killing gays. She wasn't exactly stating her approval, but she was mentioning it in support of her contention that the Bible says homosexuality is wrong. In a thread about the sign, a guy told me that homosexuality is clearly wrong according to the Bible, and cited Genesis 2:18, where God decides to create women:

The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.

This guy was apparently thinking of a different translation, and used the word "worker" instead of helper. Yes, worker. So, here's someone defending the idea that homosexuality is bad, by citing a verse saying women were created almost as an afterthought, to be "workers" for men. I'll admit, I found this kind of upsetting. What made it worse is that he seemed to be a decent guy, who honestly seemed to be trying to do what is right, based on his religion (he thought the pizza place sign was a bad thing, for example).

So I pointed out that he's deciding to how to judge one fraction of the human race (homosexuals), based on his interpretation of a text that says half the human race were created as helpers for the other half. Deciding how to treat that large a percentage of humankind is a pretty serious step to take, morally speaking. And he's doing it based on Genesis, the same book that tells us a snake talked, that people lived hundreds of years, and that Noah got two of every species on earth onto a boat (did he go to the Andes to get llamas? What about plants?).

Anyway, I asked to consider the possibility that the Bible is a book written by members of an ancient tribe living in a violent, sexist, superstitious time. Yes, it does say homosexuality is wrong, that homosexuals should be killed (along with suspected witches and children who curse their parents), and it also says that women were created to be "helpers". And when it does, it's wrong. And when people base their behavior toward women, gays, and others based on a literal interpretation of those verses, they are wrong, and perpetuate the unbelievable injustice that's characterized most of human history--millions of lives lost and wasted, for thousands of years, based on parts of the Bible that are mostly myth or myth-based ritual.

This suggestion was apparently out of bounds. Though I tried hard to be civil, I was the bad guy for saying such things. The man I was debating got mad, and a woman chimed in to say she felt sorry for me and would pray for me. Neither of them seemed at all shocked by Bible verses talking about killing gays, or describing women as "helpers" by design, even though one of them was a woman. Yet they were shocked by me saying those passages should be rejected as the writings of an ancient people who believed the earth was flat.

What kind of world are we living in when a large percentage of people still look at Iron Age documents about killing people, or treating women as second class citizens (because of a story involving their creation from a man's rib) and they aren't shocked by them? Not only are they not shocked, but they believe them and live their lives by them. What they do find shocking is someone questioning those verses. That strikes me as very, very twisted, especially since many of them really are trying to do the right thing. It's just that they're basing their judgement of what's right on very questionable, hard to interpret sources.

Please don't get me wrong. This may be a screed, but it's not an anti-Christian screed--many of the people I admire most are Christians. It's a screed against discrimination based on Biblical literalism. Taking these writings as straightforward guides to behavior is very, very hurtful. The guy I was debating claimed that the Bible verse about killing gays should be interpreted to mean they would be suffer "eternal death" (Hell) not earthly death. That's also hurtful, but I also think he's wrong about the interpretation. I think that verse means exactly what it says, and that it's surely caused untold numbers of violent deaths. Who knows how many people were stoned to death because of that verse, or others like it? It says what it says, and it's wrong.

Obviously, I have a big problem with this kind of fundamentalism. But I have a far bigger problem when its practitioners try to write their Old Testament views of morality into law. If people want to believe these things, that's their right. I think they're wrong and hurtful beliefs, but I'm not going to try to force them to change. That's not the kind of country we live in. But I am going to keep telling them they don't get to force that view of morality on me or anyone else. They were allowed to do so for millennia, and that needs to end. Soon.

Does that mean laws should never enforce moral codes of any kind? Certainly not. Justice Antonin Scalia once asked, if he shouldn't say homosexuality should be illegal, whether he could still say murder should be illegal. Of course he should! Murder clearly hurts people, and you don't need to appeal to any religious text or supernatural entity to see that. Murder, rape, theft, perjury, and dozens of other things are clearly hurtful for obvious, real-world reasons, and should of course be illegal. But ideas about what is wrong based on religion or the supernatural are very debatable, and therefore shouldn't be written into law, especially if not everyone in the country subscribes to that religion. If you want to follow additional moral rules, based on religion and beyond the proper scope of law, that's your prerogative. But I don't see why you should be able to force anyone else to. If you want to tell gays they don't get to have the same right--to love and marry another adult--that you have, you need to realize that you are denying them something most people consider an essential part of a happy life. You'd better have ironclad proof that homosexuality is wrong and damaging, and for reasons that don't appeal to the supernatural. I've never seen any such proof.

And if you want to go on thinking that homosexuality is bad, or that women are "helpers", then that's your right. If you want to quote Bible verses saying homosexuals should be killed, I guess that's your right too, as much as it makes my lip curl to hear it. But please, please ask yourself this: Which is more shocking? People questioning Bible verses that promote such ideas, or the verses themselves?

______________________________________________________________

* I hate that I feel like I need to mention this, but since I'm 41 and single, people will wonder, and that will distract from the point I'm trying to make. I'm straight. I'm not the bravest guy, but I like to think that if I were gay I would have had the guts to come out years ago. This issue is important to me because I have a lot of gay friends I love, and I hate seeing injustice, especially when it's justified with such dubious reasoning.

Long Ago and Far Away: How Galaxies Disprove Creationism

Several times lately, I've found myself explaining to my conservative Christian friends what I find so objectionable about creationism. My biggest beef is with young earth creationism (YEC), which holds that the earth was created just as described in Genesis, in six days, just a few thousand years ago. In my explanations, I've been saying the same thing over and over again: YEC is objectionable because someone who is willing to believe it isn't just rejecting evolutionary biology and parts of geology--they're basically rejecting all of science.  All the major branches of science--astronomy and physics, chemistry, practically all of biology, and even anthropology and archaeology--are unanimous in telling us the earth is incredibly ancient.  I keep saying this, but I just realized I haven't really explained what I mean, by giving examples from sciences other than biology. In this post, I'd like to do just that, giving an example from astronomy.  The most distant galaxies tell us that the universe is far older, and far grander, than the authors of Genesis could have imagined.

If you get out a star map and consult the skies, you'll see that the Little Dipper is embraced by a dragon; a serpentine constellation known as Draco. Draco, however, has been conquered by another constellation: Hercules. In old maps of the constellations, Hercules is kneeling, club aloft, with his foot on Draco's head. Of course, this is all mythology--the constellations are just random arrangements of unrelated stars, but it's interesting mythology. Even if Hercules and Draco exist only in our minds, the stars are real. If you had super-vision, you could walk out at night and look right through Hercules, past the stars to the distant galaxies beyond them. If you did that, you would see what the Hubble Space Telescope can see: the great cluster of galaxies in the image above.

Take a second, if you will, to look at this image and reflect on just what you are seeing.  Those aren't stars; those are entire galaxies. When you look up at a starry sky, almost everything you see with your naked eyes is inside our own galaxy. In this image, we're looking beyond our galaxy, at a whole cluster of other galaxies. Each one has billions of stars; more stars than you could count in a lifetime. The objects in this photograph are almost too big to fathom, but here's my favorite way of trying: a beam of light goes fast enough go from New York to San Francisco nearly 100 times in a second, yet it would take that beam of light over 100,000 years to cross a galaxy the size of the Milky Way. If the galaxies in the image are like our own, many of the stars inside each one are circled by planets. There might even be life on those planets, perhaps on millions of those planets. There could be ancient, advanced civilizations, as sophisticated compared to us as we are compared to flock of geese. That's speculation, but not wild speculation. When you're looking at an image containing trillions of suns, a whole lot of things seem possible.

The big, fuzzy football at the center of the image is Hercules A, which is a giant elliptical galaxy. Like many giant ellipticals, it's grown fat by devouring other galaxies. In fact, if you look closely, you can see a smaller galaxy that may be in the process of being engulfed. Giant elliptical galaxies are huge even by galactic standards. They may contain over a trillion stars; a trillion thermonuclear fireballs, each one far larger than the earth. In fact, the data indicate that Hercules A is about a thousand times as massive as the Milky Way.

That's all very impressive, but there are countless galaxies as big as Hercules A across the universe. Why focus on this one? Because Hercules A has a secret.To see it, you have to look at it in a different light.  Literally--you have switch from visible light to another part of the spectrum, and form an image out of radio waves. In the picture below, a radio image from the Very Large Array, a set of 27 enormous radio dishes in the New Mexico desert, has been superimposed on the visible light image above.

Here we can see that Hercules A is dwarfed by twin jets of subatomic particles emerging from its center.  Each of these jets is about 1.5 million light years long, which means it would take a beam of light (and I mentioned how fast those go) about 3 million years to get from one end to the other. What's causing the jets is a humongous black hole at the center of the galaxy, weighing about 2.5 billion times as much as our sun. Matter is swirling into the black hole and disappearing, forming a giant disk of luminous plasma at the center of the galaxy, perpendicular to the jets. All this creates powerful magnetic fields, which funnel electrons and other particles out from the center of the disc in both directions.  Moving at nearly the speed of light, these particles form the jets in the image, which give off radiation in the form of radio waves.

That's all pretty astounding, even before we consider how truly weird a black hole is. We're talking about something so massive that nothing can escape, not even light.  Space and time themselves stretch and warp at the edge of the black hole until the known laws of physics break down. Physicists admit they have no idea what happens inside a black hole, and won't know until some new Einstein can unify quantum mechanics and general relativity. Respectable scientists at places like Oxford and Yale talk about how black holes might give birth to new universes, or to wormholes that link far-flung regions of our own universe by taking a sort of shortcut through space-time. So, all in all, Hercules A is rather impressive.  But I started this post talking about creationism, particular young earth creationism. What does a distant galaxy have to do with that?

First, it shows how little the writers of Genesis understood about the universe. They were smart people, but they were writing long before modern science. The earth was flat for all they knew, and the stars and planets were absolute mysteries to them. They couldn't have known that the stars shone with their own light, while the moon and planets reflected the light of the sun. They would have had no clear concept of a galaxy, even though the great band of the Milky Way would have been visible in those ancient desert skies. It would be millennia before Immanuel Kant speculated that the cloudy blobs we see in our telescopes weren't just nebula in our own Milky Way, but "island universes" in their own right. And this wasn't confirmed until the early 20th century, when Edwin Hubble realized just how far away galaxies are, and that they are all rushing apart as the universe expands. Modern astronomy has shown us a universe far grander than the writers of Genesis could have imagined. They were doing their best, but they were living in the early Iron Age. If they had had telescopes, they might have written a different story.

The other thing distant galaxies tell us about young earth creationism is that it can't possibly be true, at least if it suggests that the universe was created at the same time as the earth. If Adam was created right after the whole universe was created, he would have looked up on the first night to see a sky devoid of stars, because the starlight wouldn't have arrived yet. The closest star visible from the northern hemisphere is Sirius A, the Dog Star. It's 8.6 light years away, which means that light takes 8.6 years to get from there to here. That means Adam would have had to wait over eight years to see the first star appear in the sky. Over the years, more and more stars would have appeared, but there are some stars so far away that Adam never would have seen them, even if he lived 930 years, as Genesis 5:5 tells us he did. In fact, some of the stars in the night sky are so far away that, if the Earth really were ten thousand some-odd years old, we still wouldn't see them. Their light wouldn't have reached us yet because they are over 10,000 lights years away. And that's just what's inside our own galaxy.

If the Earth were that young, we wouldn't be able to see a single galaxy beyond the Milky Way. Our closest galactic neighbor is the dim, recently-discovered Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy, which practically hugs the Milky Way at a distance of 70,000 light years.  Hercules A, by contrast, is 2.1 billion light years away. Since we can see it in our telescopes, that means the universe is old enough for its light to have reached us--and that would have taken around 2 billion years (the expansion of the universe complicates the calculations for faraway galaxies, so that's a ballpark figure). Hercules A, then, tells us that the universe is at least 2 billion years old.

If we're seeing two-billion year old light when we look at Hercules A, that means we aren't seeing it as it is today. We're seeing it as it was two billion years ago. The farther back astronomers look, the farther they are looking back in time. If paleontology worked that way, studying evolution would be a cinch. A paleontologist could look off in the distance with a telescope and see bison in the foreground, mammoths in the middle distance, and dinosaurs in the background. That might solve the creation-evolution debate.

As remote as it is, Hercules A is far from the most distant galaxy known. The farthest known galaxy right now is 13.3 billion light years away. If we can see it, the universe must be over 13 billion years old. In fact, other measurements indicate that the universe is 13.7 billion years old. That means that we can see galaxies as they were just a few hundred million years after the universe began.

None of this makes any sense if you believe the universe only thousands of years old. If you do, the only way you can explain the fact that we can see distant galaxies is by saying God created the universe so it just looks like light from those galaxies had been traveling for billions of years. Some creationists really say this, talking about how the universe was created "with the appearance of age". In other words, according to this theory, if the Hubble Space Telescope had been present on the first day of creation, and had picked up a beam of light forming an image of Hercules A, the beam of light would have had to be created at the same time as Hercules A itself, but over two billion light years away from it. If that's true, then that seems like a pretty elaborate deception on God's part.

But it gets worse. If the light carries an image of Hercules A as it would have looked 2 billion years ago, but the universe is far less than 2 billion years old, then the light beam is showing us something that never happened.  That would mean the pictures above are pictures of something that never was.  They are just illusions created by God.  Now, some hard-core young earth creationists would actually accept this explanation. Some people really believe that things like fossils were put in place to test our faith in the Bible. These people would rather believe in a God who intentionally deceives us than believe that the universe really is far older than humankind.

Needless to say, I can't accept that. Genesis is an ancient, mythological text. Perhaps there is wisdom to be found in it, but not by taking it as literally true, because it isn't. The universe is far more awe-inspiring than the authors of Genesis could have known, and we are lucky to be living in a time when science is making its wonders known to us.  If there's a God, he's a lot greater and more sophisticated than the God suggested by Genesis, who creates a puny little universe through crude hocus-pocus. Those who believe in God and also accept the lessons of science, with its ancient galaxies and evolving earth, have concluded that science has made God greater than the ancients could have known.  This isn't a God who creates some spring chicken of a planet and fashions people out of clay. This is a God who flings galaxies. As for me, I don't claim to know if there's a God or not, but if there is, he would have to be a magnificent cosmic architect compatible with real science, not the deceptive tinkerer imagined by creationists.

__________________________________________________________________

A Radio-Optical View of the Galaxy Hercules A

Visiting the Very Large Array

Star Tales: Hercules

I got the argument that young earth creationism would require God to create images of things that never existed from the book Finding Darwin's God, by Kenneth Miller, a respected biologist who is also a devout Christian.

Why I'm Being a Pain About Science and Religion

Lately I've been getting a little more vocal about my religious beliefs, or lack thereof.  Since I have a lot of friends who are religious, most of them Christian, I want to explain why I've gotten so vocal. I'm not doing it to bait Christians, or to try to make them abandon their faith. I don't get any particular kick out of trying to shock people or being a rebel. I don't have the slightest wish to see Christianity, or any other religion, outlawed, though you sometimes hear people saying that's what people like me want. What I do want is to feel like I don't have to cover up what I believe. I grew up in rural Arkansas, where most people are devout and conservative Christians. If you tell people there that you aren't a Christian, they will be shocked and worried for you, whether you want them to be or not.  Because of that, I used to keep my beliefs quiet. I still do, around some people, just too avoid a conversation I don't want to have (or quite possibly in some areas, a butt-whupping I don't want to have). But at the age of forty, I feel like I shouldn't be afraid to say what I think, at least to people whose opinions I respect.

Besides, I'm worried about my country. The last few decades have seen a huge growth of fundamentalism in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and fundamentalist Christians have gained enormous political power in this country.  They're using that power to try to break down the wall between church and state that was one of the founding principles of the United States.  Several of the most important founders, especially Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and Thomas Paine, were free-thinking sorts who weren't Christians in any traditional sense. Jefferson even edited the Gospels, literally cutting out all the supposed sayings of Jesus that he didn't think Jesus would have said. You often hear people say those guys were Deists, but Thomas Paine is the only one who was a true Deist throughout his adult life. Still, they sure as heck weren't Southern Baptists.

Since so many of the founders were free-thinkers, I think it's vital, nearly 250 years later, for modern free-thinkers to stand up and say, "Here I am, and I'm an American, too". It's also vital that we push back against attacks on the separation of church and state. We non-religious types aren't alone in that, because many Christians and other religious people support that separation, too. They remember that the whole idea of separating church and state originally came from religious people who didn't want to be persecuted by a state-sponsored majority religion. People who want to weave religion and government back together always seem to assume it will be their version of religion that prevails. That's a dangerous assumption. If I were Catholic, Jewish, or belonged to any other minority religion (instead of a non-religious minority), I would think very carefully whether I wanted to mingle religion and government. 

I also want to question fundamentalism itself, particularly the kind of biblical literalism that suggests that the world was literally created in six days, and that Noah actually got two of each animal on earth into an ark (did he go to Australia and get kangaroos?) Those things just can't be true, and I want to convince people not to believe them any more. But that doesn't mean I want to convince anyone to abandon Christianity itself. I don't. In fact, if someone told me they had stopped being a Christian (or believer in any other religion) because of something I had said, I would probably feel a little queasy, and ask them if they were sure that's what they wanted to do. Setting aside a lifelong faith isn't something to be taken lightly, and I don't want to be the sole reason anybody does it. After all, it's not like I know everything.

What I do know is that the world wasn't created in six days, and it's not just a few thousand years old. Noah didn't get all those animals in the ark. He just didn't. Dinosaurs didn't, as some creationists say, walk the earth when people did. So, I would like to convince my more literal-minded Christian friends to abandon creationism and absolute biblical literalism (they want to convince me to be a Christian, so fair is fair). You can be a good Christian and still believe that humans, and every other living thing, evolved from simpler life forms. You can be a good Christian and believe that Noah and the flood are legends (derived from earlier Sumerian legends, in fact) and never really happened. I know a lot of Christians who see the world this way.

Some of my Christian friends talk to me about this stuff, and ask, "Why is this such a big deal to you? Does it really matter how old some politician, for example, thinks the earth is?" Yes, it does, for several reasons. First, someone who believes that Genesis is literally true is more likely to think men were created prior to women, and that women were a sort of afterthought created to give Adam some company. Biblical literalists are more likely to believe the earth was created for humans, and that we were created in the image of God. That makes them more likely to think other living things are simply here for us to use as we see fit. Worse than that, someone who literally believes in Genesis is more likely to think God created the earth with a preconceived plan, and therefore wouldn't let anything like global warming come along and ruin it.  I've heard influential politicians make this very argument. It's dangerous to think God will protect us from screwing up the whole earth through global warming, nuclear war, or some other disaster, because we really could do it.  I saw the following quote a while back (by William Gore, the 5th Baron Harlech, of all people): "It would indeed be the ultimate tragedy if the history of the human race proved to be nothing more noble than the story of an ape playing with a box of matches on a petrol dump." Pessimistic, yes, but the quote haunts me. What if the universe is littered with the bones of creatures that got just intelligent enough to blow themselves up? Survival of the fittest, indeed.

Another problem with biblical literalism is that if you believe the earth is just a few thousand years old, as young earth creationists do, mainstream science says you're making a mistake of enormous magnitude. If the earth is really 4.5 billion years old, as the overwhelming majority of scientists think it is, that means it's 450,000 times as old as you think it is. Not only that, but if you're willing to believe that the Bible is literally true when it says the whole universe was created all at once in a few days, that means you're willing to deny all the sciences, not just evolutionary biology. Nearly every branch of science--astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology, biology, anthropology and archaeology--all of them point unanimously to the fact that the earth and universe are incredibly ancient, and that even latecomers like humans have been around a few million years. I tell people this all the time, but I've realized lately I don't offer them examples. So it's time I offered a little evidence. In my next post, I want to talk about faraway galaxies, and what they have to tell us.