Praying in Public

Norman Rockwell. Do Unto Others (click for credits)

By now people who follow such things have heard the outcome of the Greece v. Galloway case. The town of Greece, New York can continue opening its board meetings with prayers, even though most of those prayers over the years have been explicitly Christian--something many of the citizens of Greece are not. The handful of people who read this blog can guess what my humble little opinion will be--it was a bad decision. This is a religiously diverse country. Millions of Americans are Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, or Sikhs, while millions more are non-religious. City board meetings are representative assemblies of citizens, so it seems to me that their official proceedings should be, you know, representative.

There's just no way to have an official prayer that represents all creeds. You could rotate them, I suppose, having citizens of all the faiths in a town open meetings with prayers in their own faith. But that leaves out non-religious people, and it's sure to cause controversy. Imagine what's going to happen if a local Muslim doctor in a small town in West Virginia asks to open a council meeting with a prayer invoking Muhammad as God's prophet. It's not going to go over well. Better, I think, to just leave the prayers outside of government functions. People should be able to pray as often and as loudly as they want--just not as a part of an official government proceeding. By all means, pray all day long if you want to, just don't ask people who don't share your beliefs to stand up and pray with you.

Still, I realize there are bigger issues in the world than this one. Barrel bombs are dropping on children in Syria. Governments are killing people with drones. This is not an issue that will (likely) cause people to lose their lives, their livelihoods, or their freedom. In terms of church/state issues in particular, I can't get as worked up about this as I can about enforced school prayer, creationism in public schools, or religiously-based discrimination against gays (which does dramatically impact people's lives). Also, I know the stereotype a lot of people have about those who object to official prayers--they're seen as whiny liberals who want to impose their weird minority believes on the Christian minority. "Butthurt" is the lovely term I keep hearing. Obviously, I don't agree with that stereotype, but part of me thinks it would be better to save our objections for the bigger church/state issues. Is fighting against official Christian prayers, especially in places where the majority of people will be against you, worth the ill will it generates? Tough question. I know I prefer persuasion, whenever it's an option. Hence this post.

Anyway, even though I'm not religious, but I've stood and bowed my head for many Christian prayers at government functions. Not long ago, Senator David Vitter organized a town hall meeting where I live in Louisiana. At the beginning, he said something like, "First let's all get in the right frame of mind by having a prayer." Then we all bowed our heads, as a member of the local parish council (who seems like a very nice person) said a prayer that ended with, "in Jesus' name we pray." I looked around afterward and wondered how many other non-Christians were in that room. Probably not many, honestly. Out of 250 or so people in south Louisiana--mostly very pro-Vitter--I wouldn't think there were more than a handful of non-Christians. But I also bet I wasn't the only one. I know there are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist Americans in town, even I didn't recognize them in the meeting. Could it be that they didn't quite feel welcome?

As for me, I can handle going along with a public prayer, though I don't particularly like the assumption that I agree with it. It's not like I think I'm "cheating on" my own religion--I don't have one. Besides, if I had objected to that prayer, in that atmosphere, I might have left on a stretcher. But what about people of other religions? Imagine being a Jew in that meeting (and we do have Jewish citizens here). How would you feel if you were asked to stand and participate in a prayer that ended with "in Jesus name we pray?" You would think, "But we don't pray in Jesus' name. If we did we would be Christians, not Jews." Or if it's hard to imagine being non-Christian, let's say the shoe were on the other foot, and you were a Christian in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. Would you be OK with standing and participating in a Jewish prayer? How about a Hindu or Muslim prayer?

In Matthew 7:12, Jesus says "Do unto others what you would have them do unto you." Do you want to be asked to pray in a religion besides your own? Is that what you would want others to do unto you? Just before that verse, in Matthew 6:5-6, Jesus says, “And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you." What would Jesus have thought of official prayers in a pluralistic nation? I don't know, and I know we church/state advocates love to quote Matthew 6:5-6, whether we're Christians or not. But it's a question worth considering. Besides, he did say it.

As Justice Elena Kagan pointed out, asking people to participate in other people's prayers at goverment meetings puts them in an awkward position. Very often, they've come to ask for something. For example, I live on a street full of children, but people are always driving through here like they're practicing for NASCAR. I truly worry that someone is going to get run over. What if I went to a council meeting and asked that speed bumps be installed? Would it be a good idea to remain seated, head up and eyes open, during the prayer, before I asked for those speed bumps? It's easy to imagine being voted down just because a couple of council members peaked at me during the prayer, and didn't like what they saw. It's even easier to imagine if you were obviously "different"--if I looked Middle Eastern, for example, or spoke with a non-English accent. Of course, most people wouldn't let that affect their vote, but we all know some would. So, people who feel they're violating their own faith by participating in a prayer have a tough choice--go with your conscience and abstain...and risk retaliation? Or sit quietly, feeling like a traitor to your faith? Not an easy choice to make. And not one that any American citizen should be asked to make.

Under the Seas of Arkansas

Modern Crinoid,
Gulf of Mexico (click for photo credit)

Finding a fossil in the wild is one of the most profound encounters you can have with nature. It makes abstract theory real in a way no book or museum ever will. You can read all day about how dinosaurs once roamed the area. You can go to the museum and see the displays about oceans that once covered the dry land under your feet. But it's all secondhand. It doesn't seem real until you get out in the country, away from the books and museums, and dig the bones of an ancient, wild creature out of a cliff face. That's when you feel in your own bones that it's real. It's not just in books written by people with too many letters after their names. It happened right here, way out in the middle of nowhere; back when the whole world was wild.

I grew up reading those books about fossils and ancient seas, and tromping around the cliffs and creeks near my parents' house, which is on a cliff in the Arkansas Ozarks. I had a vague understanding that the sandstone in the cliff was once the coastal sand of a vanished sea. But it never quite seemed real. I never truly connected the landscape around me with what I was reading until I decided to go fossil hunting. I got in my car and headed about 20 miles north, to a valley near Leslie, Arkansas. I pulled over to the side of Highway 65, and walked over to a line of cliffs along the road, at the base of a noble little hill called Chicken Wilson Knob. 

I had passed those cliffs hundreds of times before, on the way to my grandparents' house up the road in Marshall. It's a beautiful spot. In wet weather, springs gush from holes in the cliff face. Sometimes in the winter they freeze into beautiful ice cascades. But this was summer, so I picked my way through the kudzu, keeping an eye out for copperheads, until I found a streak of crumbling shale between two layers of limestone. Sifting through the debris, it was no time at all before I found my first fossil. It looked vaguely like a piece of petrified bamboo, about as big around as a broom handle. It was sticking about six inches out of the rocks, with the other end disappearing into the hard-packed shale deeper in the cliff. I tried to dig it out, but I ended up breaking off the part that protruded. The other end is still in that cliff, for all I know. 

Fossil Crinoids from Indiana / Indiana State Museum

I had found the stalk of a large crinoid; also known as a sea lilly. Sea lillies still exist today. They do look like big, exotic flowers, but they're actually animals that spend most of their lives fixed in place at the bottom of the sea. And I had just dug one out of a cliff in the middle of Arkansas, hundreds of miles from the nearest coast. That's when it really hit me that all that stuff in the books wasn't just dreamed up by eggheads in universities--it really happened, right where I was standing, in the middle of rural Arkansas, by the highway that takes people to Branson. 

That crinoid had lived right where I was standing; at the bottom of a shallow Arkansas sea, roughly 320 million years ago. That's where it died, was buried, and slowly turned to stone. Rather a lot has happened since then. At first, more layers of muck, composed mostly of the carbonate shells of tiny sea creatures, built up and turned to limestone. Eventually, higher land rose to the north and east. As it eroded and washed into the area, it formed rivers, deltas, swamps, and beaches. The mud from the highlands turned to shale and the sand turned to sandstone--some of which forms the caprock cliffs of the southern Ozarks. The southern continent of Gondwana slowly crashed into what would become North America, buckling the old sea floor into the Ouachita Mountains to the south, and raising Ozarks as a plateau. For the next 300 million years, the area would be dry land. The dinosaurs evolved, ruled the land for ages, and then vanished. Birds, mammals, and flowers spread over the landscape. Continental glaciers came and went (though they never got this far south.) The ancestors of Native Americans migrated from east Asia after the last glacial cycle, about 100 lifetimes ago. Europeans came and spread through the hills, founding the town of Leslie. When Highway 65 was built, they dynamited the cliffs along Cove Creek, exposing that sea creature that lived so long ago. And then I came along and broke it.

I've hunted for fossils off and on since then, but I've always been more careful, and try not to disturb things too much. Now I know some of the most important fossils are unrecognizable in the field to anyone but professional fossil hunters. I started thinking I might break or displace some ancient fish that could have transformed our understanding of evolution, if I had just left it alone and let someone find it who knew what they were doing. Yesterday, I realized just how real that possibility was. I had been hearing about a fossil that's changing the way scientists think about shark evolution. Modern sharks, it seems, aren't the living fossils they're often made out to be. They're highly modified from their ancient ancestors, who had a very different jaw structure, as shown by the new fossil that was making the news a couple weeks ago. Reading up on Arkansas geology yesterday, I saw where the fossil had been found: Leslie, Arkansas. 

It was just a few miles up the road from my crinoid, in a slightly older layer of rocks (the Fayetteville Shale, which is currently being "fracked" to extract its natural gas.) What's most striking about photos of the fossil is how ordinary it looks. It's just another rock, at least to the untrained eyed. The paleontologists studying it had to use high intensity x-ray scanning at the European Synchrotron to see the shark skull inside. I could have picked it up, peered at it, and tossed it aside, or worse, taken it home as a curiosity. Similar things have happened many times, I'm sure. I hate to think how many missing sections in the tree of life are sitting in a box in the back of someone's closet. 

Anyway, these days I'm more careful about fossil hunting (or I would be if I didn't live in a swamp with no rocks at all). Usually I just leave them for someone else to find. Maybe they will know what they're doing, and will know if it happens to be an important find. Or maybe someone like my younger self will find it; someone who's read the books and learned the theories, but never seen for themselves that they were true.

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Ancient Fossil Shark Reveals New Insights into Jaw Evolution

Geologic History of Arkansas Through Time and Space

Geologic Map of the Leslie Quadrangle

Truth, Hope, and other Uncomfortable Ideas

Toro Pensant. Barcelona. Click for photo credit.

Lately I've been calling it the Philosophers Disease. It's an affliction I have. I've always been astonished by this strange world I find myself in, and compelled to understand as much of it as I can in the short time I'm here. I'm neither proud nor ashamed of this--it's just a fact about my personality. I don't actually think I'll ever succeed in figuring it out, and I could probably spend my time in more constructive ways. I know I probably irritate my religious or new agey friends, who I'm always disagreeing with. But I can't seem to help myself. It's like ponderous pondering is wired into my genes as much the need for food or sleep. I want to know what the world is really like, not just what it seems like, or what I want it to be like.

Knowing what the world is really like is, I'm quite convinced, important. After all, lots of harm has come from factual errors--think of the multitudes who have died from "cures" based on misunderstandings of the human body. Think of all the mentally ill people who have been imprisoned or killed because they were thought to be in league with, or possessed by, demons. I once read that as many as 30,000 people were killed between the 1520's and 1630's in Europe because they were suspected of being werewolves. Werewolves! This is in spite of the obvious fact that there's no such thing as a werewolf. That means those 30,000 people died--like so many others throughout history--due to tragic confusion about what's true and what isn't.

When falsehood is harmful, it's clear that truth is important. But what about cases where falsehood might not be harmful, or might even be less harmful than the truth? Is it better to cling to a belief you can't justify, and might even suspect to be wrong, if it gives you hope? Or should you reject it and be less hopeful, but closer to the truth? In other words, can truth clash with hope or optimism? I don't want to think so, but I know it can. There's a well-known phenomenon in psychology called depressive realism. If you ask people to rate how likeable, attractive, and smart they are to others, and then compare those ratings to the actual ratings of others, non-depressed people turn out to be too optimistic. Others aren't quite as impressed with them as they think. Only the depressed rate themselves accurately. I have to say, I find that fact a little depressing.

But psychological studies aren't what got me started thinking about this. The Easter season did. Christmas may celebrate the day the Christian Savior was born, but Easter celebrates the actual events that Christians believe give them salvation--the death of Jesus on Good Friday as atonement for the sins of humankind, and his resurrection on Easter Sunday. Easter, then, is the day you hear Christians talk most about the core tenets of their faith. Every year, I hear them and think, "I'm sorry, but I simply can't believe that." And every year, I feel like the Grinch scowling down on Whoville. I think, "If those beliefs give people hope, who am I to contest them?" And then I think, "But it MATTERS whether it's true or not, and that just doesn't sound true." (Bear with me. If I sound cocky now, I won't later.)

I've written elsewhere about why different aspects of Christian doctrine don't ring true for me. Here, I want to focus on one idea in particular: that God, and his Son (who is in some sense God himself) loved us so much that he saved us from death; saved us, in fact, from the eternal torment Christians think we deserve (based on original sin.) Every Easter I hear people express their awe for God's love--the love that led him to sacrifice his Son--and led his Son to allow himself to be sacrificed--all for our sake. I would be in awe too, if I could accept the reasoning. But I can't. I can't help thinking people aren't considering the whole equation. They're only focusing on the uplifting part of the story.

Let's accept for the sake of argument that God loves us and did actually give his Son to save us. Who is he saving us from, and who is he sacrificing his Son to? The only possible answer, as far as I can tell, is God himself. After all, who but God could have decided that the appropriate punishment for Adam and Eve's original sin was death and damnation? Who but God could have ruled that this punishment wouldn't just be for those two, but for all their descendants as well?* It seems to me you can't credit God for his love in saving us and stop there. You also have to credit him with creating the situation he is saving us from. Yes, it sounds inspiring and hopeful to talk about how God loved us so much that he sacrificed his son to save us. But it sounds a lot less inspiring when you say, "God loved us so much that he sacrificed his son, to himself, to save us from...himself." But that's the situation, isn't it? (If it isn't, please enlighten me.) Does it make sense to give God credit only for the warm and inspiring stuff, and not the horrifying stuff? "Horrifying" may sound like a strong word, but what else can you call the idea that a single sin should be punished by eternal torment for the sinners and their descendents?

Here's another example of this kind of unconscious deck-stacking. Often you'll hear how someone got an awful disease which looked like it might kill them. If they recover even partially, people say, "God is great!" But why are they crediting God with the cure, and not the initial disease? And what if the sick person doesn't recover? You don't often hear people say, "God let him die." But why not? Why isn't that just as plausible as "God saved him"? Why shouldn't God be just as responsible for the bad as the good? This kind of thinking is like an accountant adding up all of a company's assets and declaring it a red letter year, without bothering to subtract all the liabilities. That's faulty accounting, and I can't help thinking it's faulty reasoning.

But then, what if crediting God with the good, and not with the bad, gives people hope? What if makes their lives happier? What if it even makes them kinder to others? Let's assume--and this is a big assumption--that it does no harm otherwise.** If I'm right that this kind of thinking is cockeyed optimism (and I might be wrong), what's so wrong with it? If it helps people get through an undeniably tough world, can it be that bad? What if that kind of hope and optimism actually makes them better people, capable of doing more good than the depressive realists of the world?  I'll be the first to admit I know religious people who are better and stronger people than me, and I think part of what makes them that way is their faith in ideas I cannot accept as true. How's that for a conundrum?

I want to think that truth and optimism and hope are all compatible. But it's possible they aren't, at least entirely. It may very well be that the truth is tough to face--tougher, even, than we already know it to be. If that's the case, then what side should we err on? For myself, I have to err on the side of truth and evidence. In fact, I think it's possible to maintain hope even in the face of hard truths--it might be easier for me to be happy if I believed in heaven, but it's not necessary. But if others err on the side of hope and optimism, and if it does no harm otherwise, then I'm not going to fight them about it. Who knows? They might even be right.

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* I know there's the idea that they had free will, so it was their choice to make, but if God is truly omniscient he would have known what they would choose before he ever created them. And setting that aside, God is still the one who decided what their punishment would be (unless you want to say he had no choice, and then he isn't omnipotent.)

** In the case of salvation from hell, the idea that we are born deserving eternal damnation--if false-- seems pretty harmful to me.

Werewolf statistics from The Gale Encyclopedia of the Unusual and Unexplained