Stepping Away

This is the last post I'm writing about religion for a while. I've sworn it off for the next two months, minimum. I'm not going to mention religion on Facebook for two months either. I need to step back. I've been too mouthy, commenting when I probably should have just bit my tongue. I need to give my religious friends a break, and I need to give myself a break. I feel my attitudes hardening. I feel skepticism taking a turn toward bitterness. Not toward religion in general, or toward Christianity, or any other religious tradition, but toward fundamentalism--fundamentalism in any religion. Toward the idea--held with so much certainty by so many--that all we need to do to fix the world is follow every letter of one old, pre-scientific set of writings or another.

Of all the issues in the world, I don't fully understand why fundamentalism bothers me most of all. I think a big part of it right now is that my two best friends in town are a lesbian couple, and I see what they have to deal with from fundamentalist Christians. They have high school friends who won't associate with them now, who tell them how they're sinning in the sight of the Lord. They love each other as much as any couple I know, but they can't even hold hands or kiss in public without getting dirty looks. They tell me they've always been attracted to women, and never had any choice in their sexual orientation, and I believe them. Who would know better than them, and besides, did I have a choice? But the fundamentalists think they know better. It's just a lifestyle, they say. A choice, and the wrong one. It makes me sad and angry. It's getting very hard to forgive the people who are denouncing them for who they are.

Or maybe my problem with fundamentalism is my view of science and nature. I see science as telling an amazing, beautiful story of the evolution of the universe--of nature, in the largest, grandest sense of the word. I even spent several years trying to write a book about it (unsuccessfully), and made an educational poster and website about it (somewhat more successfully). It's all based on mainstream science and hard evidence; on data painstakingly collected by scientists over centuries. As for me, I've spent way too much of my life reading way too many books, trying to teach myself how this stuff works. I've forgone things like marriage and children because I'd rather try to figure out what's true and how it might fit together. I'm not an especially hard worker, but I've worked hard on this. I'm no brilliant scholar, but I've done my best to understand how science and nature work.

But there are many who think it's all baloney. Who? Once again, fundamentalist Christians. Why? Because one single book, written by ancient people who thought the Earth was flat, tells a different story--a story featuring a talking snake, a man made from clay, and a woman made from his rib. It is a grand story, to be sure--one of the taproot myths of our culture--but it's based on tradition, not evidence or data. Yes, it claims the universe is millions of times younger than science says, and yes, you would have to abandon most of modern science to believe it literally, but people still want to teach it in science class. In public schools. Whether the students are Christians or not. Because government, as well as science, should be based on that one book, too. And everybody should be a Christian, anyway, because if they're not they're going to hell.

So. Some of my dearest friends are sinners, science is mostly wrong, and the universe is not remotely as grand as I thought. Not only that, but because of something my distant ancestors did (the clay man and the rib woman), God decreed that I was born deserving to be roasted in hell for all eternity. But he loves me! Of course, I can avoid all that, if I agree not to to think for myself and draw my own conclusions; but to accept on faith that his son died for my sins. As the tone of this paragraph might suggest, it's enough to make me a little bitter.

Anyway, it was last night when I realized I need step back last night, while reading about...religion. My interests go in cycles. I'll read everything I can find about one topic for a month or two, and then lose interest and move on to something else. Last month it was geology. This month it's been religion: philosophy of religion, textual analysis of the Bible, the history of Christianity and its ideas of God, and so on. But I got tired of dry and scholarly works, and had picked up a book called The Book of God. It's a novelization of the Bible, published by Zondervan--an evangelical Christian publisher. Which isn't the kind of thing I normally read, but it was written by Walter Wangerin, a well-regarded author who won a National Book Award for the fantasy The Book of the Dun Cow. So I gave it a shot.

It's pretty good, at least so far. I recommend it if you want to acquaint or reacquaint yourself with the the stories of the Bible, which (whatever you believe) are a major cultural foundation of the western world. I have read the Bible, but as usual, I had forgotten too much of it, so I wanted to reactivate some of those memories without tackling the whole thing again.

I was enjoying it, too. I mean, parts of it disturbed me--God asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham's unquestioning willingness to do so, God killing the firstborn children of Egypt (were they to blame for Pharaoh's stubbornness?), Moses butchering those who had worshiped the golden calf--but I was glad I was reading it. It is one of the world's great epics, after all.

But then the Israelites got to Jericho. Jericho is one of the oldest settlements in the world. People have been settling near its desert springs for the last 11,000 years--almost back to the end of the ice age. When the Israelites got there, led by Joshua, they destroyed it. Utterly. As Joshua 6:15-21 tells the story:

15 On the seventh day they rose early, at dawn, and marched around the city in the same manner seven times. It was only on that day that they marched around the city seven times. 16 And at the seventh time, when the priests had blown the trumpets, Joshua said to the people, “Shout! For the Lord has given you the city. 17 The city and all that is in it shall be devoted to the Lord for destruction. Only Rahab the prostitute and all who are with her in her house shall live because she hid the messengers we sent. 18 As for you, keep away from the things devoted to destruction, so as not to covet and take any of the devoted things and make the camp of Israel an object for destruction, bringing trouble upon it. 19 But all silver and gold, and vessels of bronze and iron, are sacred to the Lord; they shall go into the treasury of the Lord.” 20 So the people shouted, and the trumpets were blown. As soon as the people heard the sound of the trumpets, they raised a great shout, and the wall fell down flat; so the people charged straight ahead into the city and captured it. 21 Then they devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys. [Italics added]

Then Joshua cursed anybody who ever tried to rebuild the city.

His curse didn't take. Jericho was rebuilt, and is still there to this day. In fact, there's no archaeological evidence that Joshua's destruction of Jericho ever happened. Most historians think it didn't. I find that rather comforting, but still, it's a truly brutal story. One of the world's oldest cities destroyed, and its population--human and animal--slaughtered, by an invading army aided by of a violent God who prefers one ethnic group over another.

I had just started this book, and already multitudes of men, women, and children had been killed. And not by the book's villains, but by God and his chosen people. I had to take a break. So I got on my computer, and stumbled across the poem The Summer Day, by Mary Oliver. I don't want to post the whole thing here without permission, but click and give it a read, if you would. I'll wait.

I don't exactly know what the word "spirituality" means for most people, but that poem captures what it means for me. It isn't dogmatic or violent. It's gentle, observant, questioning, and reverent. She doesn't claim to have all the answers. She doesn't declare who made the world, or what prayer should be, or what happens after we die. She asks. She wonders. You wouldn't want to live your whole life according to that poem, probably (though I almost have) but there's a lot of wisdom there.

Anyway, after the brutality of the story of Jericho, the poem soothed me. The juxtaposition sent me into one of those mellow, thoughtful, half-melancholy/half-sublime states we all need ever so often. But it wasn't that late yet, so I went back to reading The Book of God.

I should have waited a while. After the battle of Jericho, Joshua's armies lost their nerve and were routed by the armies of Ai. God told Joshua he had taken their nerve because Israel had sinned against him. One of them had taken loot from Jericho. It was Achan, a man who Wangerin had made a sympathetic character. And so, according to Joshua 7:

24 Then Joshua and all Israel with him took Achan son of Zerah, with the silver, the mantle, and the bar of gold, with his sons and daughters, with his oxen, donkeys, and sheep, and his tent and all that he had; and they brought them up to the Valley of Achor. 25 Joshua said, “Why did you bring trouble on us? The Lord is bringing trouble on you today.” And all Israel stoned him to death; they burned them with fire, cast stones on them, 26 and raised over him a great heap of stones that remains to this day. Then the Lord turned from his burning anger.

That was enough for me. I turned off my Kindle and went to bed, depressed. That's the God I should worship? That's the God of love I'm always hearing about? I mean, I can see how that's the same God who decreed I would go to hell for the sins of my ancestors if I don't think the way he tells me too. But I'm just not seeing much love in all this. Am I crazy? Am I missing something obvious that others can easily see? Am I the bad guy for saying that these are terrible things this God is doing? I know some people who will say so. And I will never, ever understand.

I know the majority of religious people, including most fundamentalists, are basically good at heart. They are mostly trying to do the right thing, based on their understanding of what the right thing is. I know many of them are better people than me--kinder, more selfless people than me, often as a direct result of their religion (but based on books other than Joshua, I suspect). Some of them are far smarter and more learned than me. But I cannot and will not worship Joshua's God. I can't even believe such a God exists (though perhaps a grander and more universal one does). I'm convinced that if people insist on following those old writings about that violent, tribal God, we will never rise above our violent, tribal past, or see beyond the small, pre-scientific universe of our ancestors. We have to step away from fundamentalism, before it ruins us. And I have to step away from thinking about it, at least for a while, before it drives me crazy.

The Perks of Demon-Free Living

Martin Shongauer, St. Anthony Possessed by Demons

At the library where I work, there's a certain kind of patron who comes in and says, "Can you tell me where to find books on...(and here there's a dramatic, vaguely defiant pause)...the OCCULT?" They usually seem a little let down that I don't gasp, give them a dirty look, tell them Jesus loves them, or something. I just smile and say, "Sure, right back here."

These dramatic dabblers in the dark arts seem to want to be shocking or scary. They would dissappointed to hear that a different s-word pops into my mind when I hear talk about the occult: silly. As far as I'm concerned, they might as well be asking for books about training unicorns. They're reading about things that don't exist. If they go home and draw up a pentagram and burn some candles or something, they might freak themselves or their parents out, but outside of their own mind, precisely nothing will happen.

I've never seen any convincing evidence that dark supernatural forces (or any other supernatural forces) actually exist. I believe the world works according to regular natural laws. Nature doesn't care what kind of incantations you mutter. It doesn't alter its laws because you go digging up mandrakes at midnight or wear a hood and chant. That's not the kind of world we live in. Its levers are physical and psychological, not supernatural.

People often say they feel sorry for me when I express disbelief in the supernatural. I do see why they feel that way. If they fervently believe in the more positive aspects of traditional ideas of the supernatural--that prayer can cure illness, or that we go to heaven after we die, or that Jesus is still alive and loves us--those ideas would give them enormous comfort, and they would feel sorry for someone who didn't believe they were true.*

But there's a flip side to this equation. Yes, it can be depressing not to believe in the sunnier side of the supernatural, but it's also pretty nice not to believe in its dark side. It's nice not to believe in malevolent ghosts and demons. It's nice not to worry about bad omens. I once walked through an old cemetary next to my house in Baton Rouge, and saw two black cats mating on top of an above-ground tomb. I thought, "Wow. I'm glad I'm not superstitious, because if I were I would go straight home and lock the door." People throughout history have been paralyzed with real fear by such sights. I can just laugh it off. A common belief around the world is that sorcerers can make your penis retract into your body. This is something that truly terrifies some people to this day. Some Europeans believed it in the Middle Ages. In the Malleus Mallificarum, the notorious manual for witch hunters, we find this remarkable passage: "And what, then, is to be thought of those witches who in this way sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn." I'm really happy not to lose sleep over this happening to me.

Of course, I don't want to suggest that most Christians who feel sorry for me are superstitious in these archaic ways. Most of them aren't (though many still are, especially in other countries). But they do commonly believe things I'm very glad to think aren't true. Once I had a job as a day camp leader for kids at a resort community in Arkansas. We were doing some kind of craft, and one of the kids surprised me by mentioning how they had talked about demons in Sunday school. I was thinking, "Demons? Seriously? In Sunday school?" when the lady leading the craft activity surprised me even more by saying, "Well, that's great. I think demons are one of the most important things Christians need to learn about."

Many of the Christians I know would disagree, but such beliefs aren't that uncommon. Roughly half of Americans believe in demon possession, and the Catholic Church still has official rites of exorcism. Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the most powerful men in the country, got irritated with a reporter recently who expressed surprise that he believed in the devil:

You’re looking at me as though I’m weird. My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It’s in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.

I don't know how the reporter was looking at him, but he is right that most Americans (fifty-something percent, depending on the survey) believe in the devil. Anyone surprised by that figure really is out of touch.

But even if 100% of the people throughout history had believed it, that wouldn't make it true. Personally, I do not believe in the devil, and I really like it that way. Believing there is a super-powerful, evil genius bent on destroying the human race--that does come with certain worries. It's also quite nice not believing in hell. If you're a traditional Christian believer in hell, who thinks that anyone who doesn't accept Jesus as savior goes there, that means you believe that most of the people who have ever existed are currently languishing in hell. Billions and billions of people, suffering eternal torment, right this minute. I am thrilled to think that isn't true.

But don't get me wrong. It's not that I don't believe it because it makes me happy not to. I can't very well say, "You can't just believe heaven exists because it would be upsetting to think it didn't," and then turn around and commit the same fallacy (the consequentialist fallacy) with hell. No, the reason I don't believe in these things is that I've never seen any good evidence that they exist. I've never seen anything to indicate that the world's workings are based on the action of dark forces or entities that somehow exist outside of natural law. There are always simpler, naturalistic explanations that don't require us to postulate complex supernatural entities.  I certainly can't prove such entities don't exist, of course. But that's not where the burden of proof lies. If you're saying, for example, that hell exists, but you can't find it with a telescope, seismograph, or any other scientific instrument, then I think the burden of proof is on you, not me.

Evil itself, however, does exist. History is full of evil, awful deeds, and I have met evil, awful people (though not many.) But that doesn't mean evil is some sort of active supernatural force or entity. Evil, I think, can be explained naturalistically. While nature itself is not evil, it is callous and amoral. Nature doesn't stop and think, "No, if Vesuvius erupted again, that would just be too tragic. Better not." What happens in nature just happens. As for human evil, I think you can account for that with evolution. Evolution is based on competition for scarce resources. That means organisms--even members of the same species--are in a sense programmed to struggle with each other over those resources, often in very nasty ways. (That doesn't mean it's right, by the way. If we can transcend those nasty tendencies, great.) Given the way evolution works, it's no surprise that people are prone to being horrible to each other. We evolved in a rough, callous world.

But evolution isn't the only source of evil deeds. One major cause of human evil, I'm convinced, is believing in things that aren't true...believing, for example, that mentally ill people are possessed by demons, or that women have been especially prone to sin ever since that incident in the Garden of Eden. Oddly enough, then, dark supernatural forces can be destructive, even if they don't exist in the physical world. They can be destructive simply because people believe in them, and act accordingly. In that case, it's not just the believer who is made unhappy by them. The misery gets exported.

Think of all the people who have died horrible deaths because others thought they were witches or sorcerers. They weren't, and they died for no reason. Even if a few of them really believed they were witches, they were wrong. They weren't really able to call forth dark forces and cast malevolent spells (except through a kind of placebo effect, which really can hurt people--but once again, only people who believe in it.)

Here in the United States, we think this kind of thing is confined to past ages. It's true that its less common in western culture than it used to be, but it still happens. Mentally disturbed people are still sometimes subjected to exorcisms when they should be getting psychiatric treatment. As recently as the 1970's, the exorcism case that inspired the movie The Exorcism of Emily Rose resulted in the death of a mentally ill girl through starvation and neglect. Even today, people in places like central Africa and Papua New Guinea are regularly killed as witches. Saudi Arabia officially executes suspected sorcerers. In some parts of Africa, albinos are killed by witch doctors who think their body parts can help them work powerful spells. This happens today; in a time when we've eradicated smallpox and landed a car on Mars. What the hell?

If evil supernatural forces don't exist, and the occult only has power to the extent that people believe in it, these are terrible tragedies. Even in more sophisticated regions, if there is no hell, no demons, no devil, it's a tragedy that people are still terrified by these things. It's a tragedy that children are still told they might go to hell and meet those demons if they don't believe certain things. It's a tragedy that they are being told what to believe, not based on evidence, but based on the consequences of disbelief. That's always seemed like a form of existential blackmail to me; with a memetic logic exactly like that of a chain letter. Believe and pass it on, and good things will happen. Don't believe, and you're in big trouble. Chain letters can spread and multiply for years because of that logic. Maybe hell is just one big chain letter?

There are plenty of real sources of evil and suffering in this world. Why add a bunch of made-up ones on top of them? Even if people in countries like the United States aren't quite as terrorized by imagined forces of darkness as we used to be, the tendency is still there, and we could easily retreat toward the dark ages. As usual, Carl Sagan expressed this worry much better than I can, so I'll leave my ending to him:

I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. 

The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.

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Anneliese Michel (exorcism victim)

YouGov Survey on Belief in the Devil and Demonic Possession

The Demon-Haunted World / Carl Sagan

The Persecution of Witches, 21st Century Style

Koro (fear of penis retraction) 

*New Age sorts have also said they feel sorry for me, but more because they think I live in a humdrum, mechanistic world devoid of wonder. I don't. I'm constantly bowled over by the world's wonders--it's just that I don't think something has to be unexplained to be wondrous. As Terry Pratchett once said, "It doesn't stop being magic just because you know how it works."

Good Presidents and other Matters of Opinion

Lately I've witnessed a couple of vitriolic instances of a common American pastime: arguing about whether some president or other was good one or a bad one. People seem pretty sure of themselves when they declare that president A was great, and president B was horrible. Of course, others are just as sure it's the other way around, which may explain why the arguments get so heated. But why do people feel so certain in the first place? They act like it's a simple question with an obvious answer. It isn't. For one thing, it's pretty hard to figure out how much you can credit a president for events and trends that happen during their terms. It's a chaotic world, and presidents face powerful opponents, not least within their own government. That's how the system is supposed to work, after all.

Most people understand that. But what they rarely acknowledge is that deciding who's a good or bad president will always be a value judgement--a matter of opinion as much as fact. People act like there's an agreed upon standard for deciding what makes a president good or bad. There isn't. Whether you think a president, or any other politician, is good or bad depends on what you want that president to accomplish. It depends on what kind of country you want him (or her, eventually) to work toward. Answering "Who's a better president" isn't like answering "What's the temperature outside?" You can't just pull out a thermometer and take a reading. It's more like asking whether steak is better than lobster. It is--at least in part--a matter of opinion. It's a matter of what you value, and different Americans value different things. If you want to live in a country where the government has a strong presence and works toward more economic equality, you'll think someone like FDR is the model of a good president. If you want to live in a country with minimal government, where economic freedom is valued over economic equality, you'll think someone like Reagan was a good president. There's no law written across the sky that says exactly what constitutes a good president, or a good country.*

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying there are no objective standards for judging these things. You can certainly measure unemployment or inflation, for example, though once again, it's not easy to say how much they depend on a president's actions. I'm not saying it's completely a matter of opinion, just that it's substantially a matter of opinion. It's weird that people don't acknowledge this. I'm also not advocating some kind of radical relativism here. I don't mean that what makes a leader or society good is nothing but a social construction. Mao, Stalin, and Hitler were bad leaders who oversaw bad things in their societies. Still, politics is to some extent a social construction--what constitutes a good country or president depends on what We The People want and value. The good society just doesn't objectively exist in the same way the deepest part of the ocean does, at least not in a way we know how to measure.

Besides, it's not like any of us are in a position to rule on these matters once and for all. We like to think our opinions are based on pure, clear-eyed reason, but for the most part they aren't. I suspect most political opinions are largely a matter of upbringing, socio-cultural identity, and innate temperament. Reason and evidence are bit players at best. How many people ever really engage in some kind of radical Cartesian doubt; setting aside every belief and trying to reason out from scratch which ones are strong enough to remain standing? Hardly anybody. Some may try, but it's not even clear that humans are capable of that kind of pure objective reasoning.

In short, judging societies, or policies, or politicians is at least as much a matter of opinion as a matter of fact, and our opinions aren't exactly based on superhuman rationality. We're only human, our politicians are only human, and our politics are only human. All too human. That doesn't mean we should just give up and conclude it's hopeless to try to muddle our way toward a better society. Maybe there are better ways of measuring the goodness of a society.** Maybe one day we'll come to an agreement about what kind of country a president should work toward, and then we'll have more objective way to measure whether she did a good job or not. Until then, maybe we should spend less time ridiculing the political judgements of others, and more time questioning our own. None of us has it all figured out yet.

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*Or if there is, we haven't found a way to verify with enough certainty that everyone can agree on it.

**Some sort of national happiness index, like Bhutan has, seems promising to me, but I know people who would think that's crazy. The overall life satisfaction of a country's citizens does seem like a real, semi-measurable criteria by which to measure a government's success. Way better than GDP, anyway. Well, in my opinion.