Sacred Enough to Kill For

*Note: Re-posted after the murder of secularist writer Avijit Roy in Bangladesh; a man brave enough to think and write freely even though he knew what the consequences might be. RIP

It is putting a very high value on one's conjectures, to have a man roasted alive because of them. - Michel de Montaigne

Today in Paris, three Islamic radicals walked into the office of a satirical newspaper called Charlie Hebdo and gunned down several unarmed people. Why? Because the newspaper had published cartoons depicting Muhammad and mocking radical Islam. During the attack, the gunmen shouted, "God is great!" and, "We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad."

It didn't matter that the newspaper mocked absolutely everybody, or that Muhammad has been dead for over a thousand years. These men believe there are certain ideas and certain people who simply cannot be mocked. And they believe anyone who does mock them deserves to die. They believe it so fervently they were willing to pick up guns and murder them themselves.

In other words, they didn't murder them for killing or raping anyone, or for stealing, or anything like that. They murdered them over a set of unproven, hypothetical ideas..

Nobody has ever proven that God/Allah exists, or that Muhammad was his prophet, or that God wants his followers to kill anyone who insults him or his representatives. There's no hard evidence of any of that. There are just claims made in a very old book, and it's as easy to make false claims in a book as true ones. In fact, it's far easier. That's no less true if the book is old, and venerated by multitudes. Millions of people once believed what the Iliad said about Athena, and some of them would have killed me for saying she doesn't exist. But she doesn't.

The tragic situation, then, is that 12 people were murdered today for daring to mock a set of unproven hypotheses. What's even more tragic is that millions of people throughout history have been murdered for the same reason, and by many other religions besides Islam. What's unusual about modern Islam is not that it has so many violent extremists, but that it still does.* The Montaigne quote at the beginning of this essay comes from a time when people in the west were routinely roasted alive for their beliefs.

History has shown that the ideas people are most willing to kill each other over are also the ones they are least able to prove. There's nothing in this entire world more disheartening to me than that. How could anybody be so sure of their beliefs that they're willing to kill another human being just for challenging them? Let's face it: whether he exists or not, God is invisible. You can't point to him, like you might point to the moon, and say, "See, there he is." Yet people aren't generally killed for denying the existence of undeniable things--the members of the Flat Earth Society don't need to fear for their lives--but people are killed for denying the existence of an invisible entity. That strikes me as insane. Common, but insane.

No idea is so sacred to me that I would kill somebody for questioning or mocking it. Life is far too short and precious, and the human mind is far too easily fooled. It's too easy to be wrong. [This past week, millions of people were shocked to discover they couldn't even agree on whether a dress was black and blue or white and gold.]

If I looked up in the sky and saw a great heavenly figure holding a tablet that said, "I am the Lord thy God. Kill anyone who insults me!", I would assume I had gone nuts. If a billion other people saw it and videotaped it, and it ran on the evening news, I would say, "Well, how do we know that was really God? And if it was, why would he say that? Isn't he supposed to be all-powerful and utterly good? Why would a being like that be so sensitive to insults as to wish death on his own creations? And why did he give us a mind if he didn't want us asking questions like that?" I simply can't imagine any evidence that would convince me that people should be murdered for mocking an idea (or a powerful, God-like being...should one ever unambiguously appear.)

Some ideas are surely worth dying for, but no idea is sacred enough to kill for. At least, not simply for questioning or mocking it. In fact, human ideas must be questioned, or we'll never be able to separate the good ones from the bad ones. That means all ideas; even the ones people hold sacred. If they're true, they can withstand the questioning. Besides, maybe the "sacredness" of some ideas is, as Douglas Adams suggested, an evolved characteristic of some ideologies--a kind of self-protective mechanism, like a tortoise's shell. Maybe it hasn't persisted because it's true, but because it says, "If you mess with me, I'll hurt you." That's how chain letters spread. Has the persistence of chain letters ever been an indicator of their truth? Maybe the ideas that need questioned most are those that have been hiding under that shell that says, "Don't question me."

In the paragraph above, after I wrote the phrase "sacred enough to kill for", I looked back at it and shuddered. What a truly awful phrase--the very idea is perverse and even oxymoronic. It's also tragically common. It may be one of the worst ideas humankind has ever had. Like all bad ideas, it needs to be thrown onto that vast pile of history's other horrible notions. And we shouldn't mourn it when it's gone, because no idea is too sacred to question, much less sacred enough to kill for. Life is what's really sacred.

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I'm not saying the history of religion has been nothing but violence. Religion seems to have a strange tendency to bring out the best AND worst in people. People have also done great and kind things in the name of the same religions that others have killed for.

Why I Believe Crazy Things

The other day I stopped in a rock shop and picked up this gorgeous little ammonite. While I was shopping, I overheard a couple looking at crystals. They were discussing the healing properties and energy fields supposedly associated with different ones. I rolled my eyes and wondered how anybody could believe something that crazy.

But then, after a little reflection, I realized I believe some crazy things too. I can't deny it...I go in for some pretty wacky ideas. For example, I believe that all the countless galaxies across the known universe were once all smashed together into one single tiny point. I believe that point exploded into a scorching sea of subatomic particles that would eventually evolve into the universe we see today. I believe there are dead stars in space, called pulsars, that weigh more than the sun but are no bigger than cities. They're out there right now, spinning hundreds of times per second and spewing electromagnetic radiation across the universe. I believe the earth is so old that if you tried to count its age in years you would die long before you finished.

I believe rhinoceroses, camels, and sloths the size of bears once roamed North America. I believe a wall of ice a mile high once scoured the places where New York and Chicago now sit, and that Long Island and Cape Cod mark the places where the ice began to recede. I believe that incredibly complex things like snowflakes, Siberian tigers, and the Great Barrier Reef--which look for all the world like they were created by an intelligence beyond our imagining--can actually be made by blind natural processes.* I believe a single particle of light can go through two holes at the same time, but will stop if you try to catch it in the act.

I could go on and on listing the crazy things I believe, but I think you get the point. On the face of it, these beliefs sound just as crazy as the idea that crystals produce mystical, healing energy fields, or that your astrological sign can influence your personality. So why do I believe them? And why do I think I'm right to believe them, and that people who believe in astrology, or auras, or young earth creationism, or crystal healing are (almost certainly) wrong?

It comes down to one word: evidence. Every crazy idea I just said I believe is well-supported by scientific and mathematical evidence. If you ask a scientist why she believes in something as crazy as the big bang theory, she can tell you why. She'll point to the way galaxies are flying away from each other, to the leftover radiation that fills the universe today, to the equations of general relativity, and so on. Ask a geologist why he believes ice sheets once covered the northeastern United States, and he can show you the scratch marks, the boulders, and the terminal moraines (like Long Island) that they left behind. Ask a paleontologist why she thinks rhinoceroses used to live in Nebraska, and she will tell you to go there and look at their bones still half-buried in the ground.

Evidence. That's the difference between scientific theories like the Big Bang and evolution, and pseudoscientific imaginings like crystal healing or the literal existence of Noah's Ark. The scientific theories aren't any less far-fetched--they're actually pretty outlandish, if you think about it--but they're backed up by evidence. It's true that it would be amazing if crystals produced healing energy fields or if stars light-years away altered our personalities, but the evidence just isn't there. It would also be amazing if the universe began in a great burst of energy that sent everything flying apart, or if woolly mammoths once roamed near the great ice sheets of Illinois. Especially if it's true.

And it is!

That's why I'm mystified when I go into a rock shop and find something like the ammonite pictured above, and see people walk right past it to the crystals (fascinating for their own reasons) and start telling make-believe stories about them. It's like seeing someone walk past a Van Gogh, stop in front of a Picasso, and start talking about how it was painted by space aliens with magic wands.

That little fossil they ignored was once a creature that lived so long ago that mountains have risen and eroded away since it died. It's a creature whose gorgeous spiral shell was literally turned to stone like some mythical beast. And it's a creature with a story to tell--you can dig ammonites out of rocks on a mountaintop in the desert, and be certain there was once a sea where you now stand. That little fossil is absolutely packed with wonders, if you know the science behind it. Not only that, but those wonders are real, and backed up by hard evidence.

So why do people ignore them in favor of make-believe tales of healing crystals and horoscopes? If you want to believe in crazy ideas, why not believe in the ones that have the advantage of being true?

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* Which is not the same as saying I believe such an intelligence doesn't exist (I don't have enough evidence to decide that one way or another). Maybe some super-intelligence designed a universe with the right characteristics to produce complexity without her ongoing intervention, but the evidence suggests such intervention is no longer required.

Why Would A Straight Guy Get So Worked Up Over Gay Rights? An Allegorical Tale

One of the axes I tend to grind on this blog is gay rights. Very few things trigger my sense of injustice as much as seeing the animus, discrimination, and intimidation my gay friends have had to face all their lives. It burns me up; it really does. This may strike people as odd, since I'm a straight guy. It may even strike some of my gay friends as odd, and they may even prefer that I pipe down about it. Why do I get so worked up about an issue that doesn't directly effect me? Let me try to explain with an extended, and probably rather strained, analogy.

Imagine you grew up as a non-Hindu in India. In Indian culture, the left hand is seen as somewhat taboo. Now imagine a sort of alternate-reality Hinduism, in which the left-hand was seen as a grave taboo, and being left-handed has traditionally been seen as a huge sin. Imagine that when the Vedas were written, people were routinely stoned and burned to death for being caught using their left hand. As recently as fifty years ago, left-handers were arrested, charged with a crime, or required to undergo treatments to make them right-handed. For the last few decades, though, more and more left-handers have been openly writing with their left hand, and demanding that they be treated equally with right-handers.

But many--mostly religious traditionalists--still insist that the left-handed lifestyle is wrong and shouldn't be tolerated. They insist that being left-handed is a choice, and the wrong one. These people are still quite powerful, and campaigning on an anti-lefty platform is a sure way to get votes in many regions. Many left-handers are still disowned by their families and denounced by their friends when their handedness is revealed. People suspected of being left-handed are often taunted and called names, and occasionally beaten or even killed. 

But, as I said, you aren't Hindu (alternate-reality Hindu--this really is a strained analogy, isn't it?). You realize Hinduism an ancient, important world religion with hundreds of millions of followers, and you know many of them are trying to do the right thing as they see it.  Most of your friends are Hindu, and you respect their intellect even if you don't agree with their opinion.

But that's the thing--you can't agree with them about left-handedness. You believe some people simply grow up to be left-handed. You've talked to your left-handed friends, and they assure you it wasn't a choice. It's just one of the facets of human diversity, like red hair or green eyes. You can't see that left-handedness hurts anybody, so you can't see any reason it should be considered a sin. Furthermore, some of your best friends in the world are left-handed, and you've seen what they've gone through. You've heard the stories about when they got beat up, or kicked out of their parents' house. You see the nasty slurs against them in comment threads, and think about how they must feel when they see them. You've seen people give them dirty looks, and mutter nasty epithets under their breath. You've seen the epithets scrawled across their car windows (yes, I've seen this). You've watched TV with them and seen the politicians and priests come on TV talk about the scourge of left-handedness.

So...how would you feel in this situation? I suspect you would think it was a huge injustice that left-handers were being denounced for something they have no control over. You would probably get pretty damn angry when you saw people treat your lefty friends badly, or tell them they're living an immoral lifestyle. You would write more blog posts about it than you probably should (OK, maybe you wouldn't do that). You would challenge people when you heard them making anti-left-hander comments. And if they said, "It says right here in the Vedas and Upanishads that left-handedness is an abomination", what would you do? I suspect you would say something like, "Well, how do you know the Vedas and Upanishads are right? How do you know they weren't simply written by people like you and me, who lived in a more superstitious and violent time? How do you know they're not simply wrong about left-handedness?"

At this point, however, don't be surprised if you're the bad guy in the eyes of the anti-left-hander you're talking to. They might offended by you questioning the holy authority of the Vedas and Upanishads. They may even say YOU'RE being narrow-minded and intolerant? So what do you do? Do you backpedal? Which is worse--calling somebody's holy scriptures into question, or staying silent about an injustice that's gone on for thousands of years and hurt millions of people for no good reason? I don't know about you, but for me, staying silent seems far, far worse.

I don't need to spell it out of course, but if you substitute "gay" for "left-handed", and "Conservative Christian" for "Hindu", you'll see how I feel about living in a country where gays are so often denounced, mostly on the basis of tradition and religious texts. When I hear someone quoting the Bible to denounce homosexuality, I'm sorry (and I don't say this to offend, but I probably will) but I'm not impressed. If you say, "God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve", I'm going to say, "No, he didn't make Adam, Eve, or Steve. Adam and Eve never existed." I respect the Bible as one of the world's most ancient religious texts, just like the Vedas or Upanishads, but I don't feel any more obligation to follow what it says than I do to follow the Upanishads. I think it was written by people, not God, and they were mostly people who thought the earth was flat and demons cause disease. They were people who believed God was pleased by the smell of burnt animal flesh. They were probably wrong about a whole lot of things.

So that's why I get so worked up about Christians (and traditionalists in other religions) giving gays a hard time. If you believed the way I do, you would too. If you believed the old texts that say homosexuality is a sin are simply opinions of ancient, pre-scientific people, and wrong opinions at that, then you would think that an absolutely enormous injustice has been perpetuated for the thousands of years since those texts were written. Probably millions of people since then have been subjected to really awful kinds of suffering, ranging from being stoned to death to having to live a scary and unsatisfying lie. Yes, it's gotten better in the last 40 years or so, at least in some parts of the world, but it's still not great. I mean, would you want to be a gay teenager about come out to religiously-conservative parents and friends, even in 2014? I wouldn't.

Of course, I may be wrong. Maybe the scriptures ARE correct, and actually do reflect the will of God. Heck, I'll even admit I'm wrong if that's true. But I do have one condition: you have to prove it. Show me hard, physical evidence--the kind that would convince the majority of scientists--that the Bible is the word of God. Then show me hard, physical evidence that homosexuality is simply a choice some people make. Finally, show me hard evidence that it causes harm; enough harm to justify telling gays they can't have what most people consider some of life's main sources of happiness: love, sex, and marriage. Show me all that, and with a very heavy heart, I'll tell my gay friends that, yes, what they are doing is wrong. But I haven't seen any such evidence for any of those things, and I really don't expect to.

Anti-gay Christians are always saying they have a right to their opinion as much as anyone else does--if they want to say being gay is wrong, they should be able to. I agree. It is their right, and they should be able to. But there's a flip side to that equation. I have the right to say that denouncing people and denying them rights for something harmless and out of their control, is wrong. Yes, morally wrong. Hurting people for unjustifiable reasons is morally wrong. If you want me to accept your right to say being gay is wrong, you should be able to accept my right to say the traditional Christian treatment of gays has been morally wrong. That isn't to say people who believe the traditional Christian view are necessarily bad people--they aren't for the most part. They are trying to do the right thing as they see it. It's just that I think what they see as the right thing has been a terrible, tragic mistake. A big enough mistake that I'm willing to risk offending people by saying their religion has caused them to participate in a terrible historic injustice. To make such a claim is a big deal, yes, but not nearly as big a deal as the possibility that gays throughout history have suffered for no good reason. If saying that your religion has caused harm makes me the bad guy, then so be it. There are bigger issues at stake than avoiding offense.

So, why do I get so worked up when when I see gay friends suffer because of what's in the Bible? For the same reason you would get worked up if you saw your left-handed friends, or your green-eyed friends, suffering because of lines in the Vedas or Koran. I believe they've suffered a deep injustice for no good reason, and yes, I do believe it's wrong.