By the Rivers of Babylon: The Bible as a Guide to Morality

Arthur Hacker. By the Waters of Babylon

Remember in school when we learned about state symbols? Growing up in Arkansas, I learned how the state bird was the mockingbird, and the state gem was a diamond (Arkansas being one of the only states with diamonds). Those are the only two state symbols I can remember. I guess it never struck me as an important topic. But some people apparently think it's very important. In fact, lately state symbols seem to have become a battle front in the church/state controversies.

There's the situation in South Carolina, for example, where a little girl asked the legislature to name the Columbian mammoth as the state fossil. This seems perfectly sensible, because the great beasts' bones were first discovered back in 1725 in South Carolina swamps. But things went sideways when certain legislators didn't want to have a state fossil without including Biblical language in the law; language about how the mammoth was created with the other beasts of the field on the sixth day. Naturally, this was controversial, and made it into the national news. As I write, it's still unclear whether the mammoth will become the official fossil of South Carolina, and whether the law that makes it so will reference the Book of Genesis.

Now there seems to be a similar fight brewing where I live in Louisiana. There's a proposal in the House to make the Bible the state book of Louisiana. My local paper ran a story about it, and it turns out even local pastors are divided on the idea. A pastor at the First United Methodist Church said, “The Bible is a testimony of mankind’s experience with God, and I don’t think the Legislature has any business dealing with that subject. This is a divisive waste of time.” But another local pastor disagreed, saying, "“I believe that making the Bible the official state book, the people of Louisiana would follow the lessons taught in it.”

I agree with the Methodist minister, but it was the other man's comment that really got me thinking. I hear sentiments like his all the time--that we should follow the lessons of the Bible, and that it's a great guide to morality. But I'm not so sure. I agree that some parts of the Bible, such as the Sermon on the Mount, are full of real wisdom about living a moral and compassionate life. But other parts I simply can't agree with, and I don't think the people who talk about following the Bible can either. 

To explain, let me take a brief detour into music. Despite my sometimes combative stance toward religion, I absolutely love African-American gospel music. Mahalia Jackson, The Fairfield Four, The Blind Boys of Alabama, early Staple Singers...I think they created some of the most moving music ever recorded. So my Pandora station plays a lot of that kind of thing. One day, I heard a beautiful acappella version of Rivers of Babylon, by the Soweto Gospel Choir. I'm imbedding a link to it below. I urge you to listen to it--it really is beautiful.

The song's lyrics come straight from Psalm 137, which famously begins, "By the rivers of Babylon— there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion." It turns out the song wasn't actually written as a Christian spiritual, as I thought when I heard it, but a Rastafarian one, by a Jamaican group called the Melodians (and of course, the Soweto Gospel Choir is South African, not African-American.) Whatever the case, the song is basically a part of the Bible put to music. When I heard it, still thinking it was an old American gospel song, I decided to look up the verse it came from, because I really did think the imagery was beautiful. 

And what a shock I got. Instead of describing it, I'll let the Psalm speak for itself:

1 By the rivers of Babylon—
    there we sat down and there we wept
    when we remembered Zion.
2 On the willows there
    we hung up our harps.
3 For there our captors
    asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
    “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

4 How could we sing the Lord’s song
    in a foreign land?
5 If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
    let my right hand wither!
6 Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth,
    if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
    above my highest joy.

7 Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites
    the day of Jerusalem’s fall,
how they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down!
    Down to its foundations!”
8 O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
    Happy shall they be who pay you back
    what you have done to us!
9 Happy shall they be who take your little ones
    and dash them against the rock!

Suddenly and jarringly, the gorgeous lamentation beside the rivers turns into a longing for a horrible kind of revenge--and not on the people who carried the Israelites away to Babylon, but their little children. Dashing them against the rock? Is this the kind of morality we really want to be promoting? I really hope nobody today thinks it is. Not only is it bloodthirsty and awful, it directly contradicts Jesus' admonition to turn the other cheek and love our enemies. 

But there it is in the Bible, right at the end of one of the more famous passages in the whole book. That's why, when people say the Bible is a good guide to morality, I don't quite know what they're talking about. Maybe it is a good guide, but only if you have some means of deciding which parts to follow. Anyone who actually takes Psalm 137 as a guide to behavior should be locked up. I'm sorry, but that's as bloodthirsty a passage as I've ever read anywhere. And it's not that uncommon. The Bible is probably the most violent book I have ever read, and I've read most of the Game of Thrones series.

I didn't really mean to write about religion for for a while. I've been extra appreciative of all my friends lately, whatever their views, and I know I talk about this stuff too much. But I have to write when I'm inspired, and besides, the legislature in the state where I live is considering adopting--as its official book---a work that talks about bashing children against rocks! Yes, it talks about a lot of good things too, but still. Perhaps it's a debate worth having, and soon.

So here's my question to those who talk about the Bible as a guide to morality: "What are your criteria for deciding which parts of the Bible to take as a guide?" I've asked this many times, and never gotten a satisfactory answer. I don't say that to imply that there isn't one, or that I've backed anybody into a rhetorical corner. I really do want to hear their answer. If they have no answer, then I have to think they haven't put enough thought into what they're saying. If they say you have to follow the whole Bible ("you can't pick and choose," is what I often hear), then I have no choice but to conclude they're wrong. If you try to do follow the entire thing, the Bible is a terrible guide to morality. Not only does it advocate really awful violence, it's contradictory. You can't simultaneously turn the other cheek, love your enemies, and dash their children against the rocks. You just can't. So I ask again: If you think the Bible is a guide to a moral life, perhaps THE guide to a moral life, worthy of being recognized as such by our government, then what exactly do you mean? Which parts are you talking about? Because I simply can't imagine that you're talking about Psalm 137.

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Could Bible Become State Book? Houma Courier

A Sense of the Ages: Trying to Grasp Geologic Time

Two centuries ago, a young Napoleon Bonaparte convinced his superiors to let him invade Egypt. Rallying his troops before a battle near Cairo, he is said to have pointed toward the ancient pyramids on the horizon and cried, "Forward! Remember that from those monuments forty centuries look down upon you."

Forty centuries. It's a phrase that's always impressed me. And Napoleon was actually understating the age of the pyramids--even in 1798, the Great Pyramid had been standing for over 4,300 years. But it was an artful understatement. Saying "4,300 years" just doesn't give you the same visceral sense of time as "forty centuries." A century is a span we can really feel, if just barely. It's the length of a very long lifetime. So when we hear that something has been around for forty centuries, that feels like a long time indeed. And it should, because the pyramids were ancient even to the ancients. By the time the Romans built the Colosseum, the pyramids were already older than the Colosseum is today.

Yet the age of the pyramids is hardly any time at all next to the temporal chasms geologists talk about. As old as the Great Pyramid is, the Great Sphere it sits on is a million times older. That's not antiquity; it's mega-antiquity. We can't truly fathom that kind of time scale any more than we can swallow the oceans. But for some reason I keep trying, and I've found that writers more talented than me have, like Napoleon, succeeded in expressing it in ways that give us a taste of its immensity.

Consider this quote, from the excellent book Rough-Hewn Land: A Geologic Journey from California to the Rocky Mountains, by geologist Keith Mehdahl: "Earth processes that seem trivially slow in human time can accomplish stunning work in geologic time. Let the Colorado River erode its bed by 1/100th of an inch each year (about the thickness of one of your fingernails). Multiply that by six million years, and you've carved the Grand Canyon." When I first read that, I didn't believe it, and I actually got out a calculator and checked to see if it could be true. It is. Multiply 1/100th of an inch by 6 million, and you get roughly one mile--the depth of the Grand Canyon. If the Colorado River can dig down one inch in a century, that means it's dropped about a yard since the Great Pyramid was built. Compare an inch (a long life), to a yard (the Great Pyramid), to a mile (the Grand Canyon) and you start to get a sense of how long six million years really is.

The writer John McPhee (who gets credit for coining the expression "deep time") also comes close to making us feel geologic time in his book Assembling California. As the title suggests, modern geologists think California was cobbled together from many different pieces of land and ocean floor that stuck to the edge of the continent as it drifted westward. "An island arc here, a piece of continent there--a Japan at a time, a New Zealand, a Madagascar--came crunching in upon the continent and have thus far adhered." That process has been a tumultuous one, accompanied by countless earthquakes and volcanoes. "In 1906," McPhee writes, "the jump of the great earthquake--the throw, the offset, the maximum amount of displacement as one plate moved with respect to another--was something like twenty feet. The dynamics that have pieced together the whole of California have consisted of tens of thousands of earthquakes as great as that--tens of thousands of examples of what people like to singularize as "the big one"--and many millions of earthquakes of lesser magnitude."

Californians see the great earthquake of 1906 as a defining moment in their state's history--the biggest natural disaster in near-living memory. But it only looms so large because the history of the political figment we call "California" is so short. In the history of the real California--the old California that existed before the USA, before the pyramids, before the human species itself--such an earthquake is barely worth noting; it's a single beat in the long drum roll that accompanied the regions's creation.

On this scale, centuries become as fleeting as seconds. It takes ten thousand centuries to make a million years...ten thousand periods equal to the one between the Civil War and the Beatles, or the Wright Brothers and the International Space Station. A million years is a long, long time. Yet it's as fleeting compared to the earth itself as a year is to the Great Pyramid.

What's the point of coming to grips with these kinds of timescales? Why not just live in the familiar territory of months and years? Do we really need to understand epochs and eons? I think we do. Seeing how fleeting we are compared to the land around us is a good way to stay humble, and any species that needs to be taught that it's not the center of the universe is a species that can use some humility. It's not just that our arrogance is unjustified. Getting over it, and taking a longer view, could actually be key to our survival. If we want to be around for the long term, we need to understand what "the long term" actually means. As the science writer Nigel Calder once noted, "In Darwin's paleontological estimation...Chicago and Leningrad sit in the chairs of glaciers gone for lunch." He's right. Though warming is a concern in the near term, in the long term we're living in a warm snap between ice ages. Time and again, mile-high sheets of ice have swept across the sites of Chicago and New York City. Long Island is just a big pile of debris left behind when the glaciers finally retreated--a place marker, of sorts. As for San Francisco, it will be hit by another "big one" someday. And then another and another and another. If we want that lovely city to last--at least as long as the pyramids, if not the mountains--then we'll have to display far more foresight than we've shown so far in our history. But then, our history isn't really a very long one. It might even turn out to be just a beginning; a sort of childhood. And that can only happen if we grow up and learn a little perspective.

Dear Atheists: Be Cool

I spend a good bit of time on this blog arguing against religious fundamentalism; gnashing my teeth about creationism, school-sponsored prayer, and religiously-based discrimination. I think of myself as an agnostic humanist, and I follow groups like Americans United, the ACLU, and the American Humanist Association on Facebook. I even follow more radically anti-religious organizations like the Richard Dawkins Foundation and the Freedom from Religion Foundation. It's a good way to keep up with what the religious right is doing, and to keep tabs on how Jefferson's "wall of separation" between church and state is holding up. But I don't always agree with those more radical groups. In fact, sometimes I find them completely offensive.

For example, a while back one of those organizations posted a picture from their office breakroom. They had a refrigerator magnet of Jesus on the cross, with various magnetic garments you could put on him, like a dress-up Barbie. I thought that was offensive and unnecessary, and I told them so, as did several other people who didn't think "openly non-religious" is the same thing as "tasteless and insensitive." After a while, they took the picture down and apologized. That's when it got really disturbing. More people complained about them taking it down than putting it up. They saw it as a sign of weakness; as a capitulation to religious sensibilities. There was a lot of trollish talk about how religious people are idiots, and offending them should be a point of pride. One guy remarked, "Isn't offending religious people what we're all about?"

No, it's not. At least, it's not what I'm all about. That guy seems to have confused the words "atheist" and "jackass." They aren't synonyms, though I suspect he is both. What's the point of being offensive for its own sake? Yes, it's true that religions can cause a lot of harm--honor killings among some Muslims, the Inquisition, the Westboro Baptist Church--these are bad things.That's why it's vital that religious ideas be as open to criticism as any others--there's no reason they should get special treatment.  But there's also no reason to be nasty about it.

I admit that I like to challenge people's ideas; to make them question what they take for granted. And I want them to challenge me right back. Life is too short not to think about what we're doing here. I'm OK with causing slight discomfort, but I never want to truly offend people. And I certainly don't want to outlaw religion or "kick God out of the schools." I just want to keep religious fundamentalism from creeping further into our schools and government, and to remind religious people that the non-religious in this country are Americans, too. I do have a bit of a missionary goal--I want to try to convince people to reconsider fundamentalism, creationism, religiously-based discrimination, and so on. But I actually don't want to convert Christians to my views. I don't want to be responsible for that kind of spiritual upheaval.

Still, I do want to convert conservative, fundamentalist Christians to a more moderate, modern, and inclusive variety of their faith. And if you want to try to convince people of anything, the last thing you want to do is offend them. Being offensive for no reason isn't just ugly--it's also counterproductive. Of course, I've been known to forget that in the heat of an argument, but in my cooler-headed and less-stupid moments, I'm convinced that if you want to change someone's mind, you need to be as friendly as you possibly can. Friendlier, probably, than you think is necessary. It's actually really hard, and I fail miserably at it sometimes.

Just as some people seem to have confused the terms "atheist" and "trolling jackass", others have confused atheism with "science" or "reason." Several times I've noticed people talking about atheism, science, and reason as though they formed a natural trinity. But one of those things is not like the others. Science and reason are not beliefs, but intellectual methods, based on a commitment to evidence and logic. Atheism is a belief, and not one based on compelling evidence. I can point to all kinds of evidence that the big bang or evolution happened, but I don't know of similar bodies of evidence showing that God doesn't exist. Of course, I don't know of bodies of evidence that he does exist, either. As usual, I'm with Carl Sagan on this question:

An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.

Atheism and science, then, aren't necessarily a package deal, and if people keep acting like they are, it's going to drive religious people away from science. Is that what we want? In the same interview, Sagan also said:

When people ask me after one of my lectures, “Do you believe in God?” I frequently reply by asking what the questioner means by “God.” The term means a lot of different things in a lot of different religions. For some, it’s an outsized, light-skinned male with a long white beard, sitting on a throne somewhere up there in the sky, busily tallying the fall of every sparrow. To others — for example, Baruch Spinoza, and Albert Einstein — God is essentially the sum total of the physical laws which describe the universe. I can’t imagine anyone denying the existence of the laws of nature, but I don’t know of any compelling evidence for the old man in the sky.

I'm with him again here. If by "God" you mean the violent and jealous deity of the Old Testament, who drowned the world in a flood and enjoyed the smell of burnt offerings, then yes, I'm an atheist. I actively believe he does not exist (and I don't say that to be offensive--it's just what I think is true.) But if "God" means a bigger, more transcendent entity that might have set the universe in motion; "breathed fire into the equations" as Stephen Hawking put it, then I don't know. Maybe there is such a grand cosmic being. As Sagan says, I don't think there's compelling evidence one way or the other. And since that's the case, neither theism or atheism should be put in the same category as science or reason. Both seem to me to require a leap of faith, and I've never had much faith in faith.

What I'm trying to say here is that atheists in the mold of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and even Ricky Gervais need to take it down a notch. Atheism isn't as self-evidently true as they think it is, and even if it is true, there's no reason to be rude. A lot of religious people assume that atheists and other secular types are all rude, arrogant, and immoral; and the more strident kind of atheist rhetoric does nothing but perpetuate that notion. You can't be nasty to someone and then be surprised when they decide you're a nasty person. All of us--atheists and agnostics; Christians, Muslims, and Jews--are only human. It's a big universe. None of us have it all figured out, and none of us have any business acting like jerks.