An unreliable Witness (Part 2)
Previously on The Meming of Life: I expressed concern to a Jehovah’s Witness over my (allegedly) disobedient son. She confirmed that the Bible is completely reliable and accurate, and that its advice applies even today. We now return to our story, already in progress.
“I’m relieved to hear you say that,” I said. “You brought the answer to our problem right to our door, and I’m so grateful. It’s in Deuteronomy, chapter 21, verse 18.” I reached for my NIV Bible, strangely close at hand, and flipped to it. “If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen when they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town….Then all the men of his town shall stone him to death.”
Her reaction was immediate — a loud nervous laugh. “HAHA! Well we don’t want you to do THAT!”
I blinked. “But Jesus does.” I flipped open to Matthew 5:17 and pointed.
“I…I’m not so sure about that. I don’t know what translation you’re using there.” She pulled out her own bible — most likely the New World Translation, a JW version published in the 1950s — and flipped to Matthew. “And I see yours is in red letters,” she said. “I’m not sure what that indicates…”
“The words of Christ.”
“Oh, okay.” She scanned her own Mt 5:17. “Okay, yes, it’s basically the same. But it’s important to read the Deuteronomy verse in context. It is not suggesting that you can kill your son.”
“You’re right, it doesn’t say I can. I says I shall. I don’t see that I have a choice. In fact, in Mark 7:9 *flip flip flip* Jesus specifically criticizes the Pharisees for not killing their children as the Old Law commands. What context are you talking about?”
“You can’t just look at the words and say, okay, I’m done, I’ll do that. God was speaking to Ancient Israel. Our time is not the same.”
“I see. So you can’t read the Bible exactly as it is, you have to interpret it.”
“Yes. Well no! It’s a matter of context, not interpretation.”
“And in the context of Ancient Israel, it was moral to kill your disobedient child.”
“Yes. But not today.”
“So God’s moral law has changed.”
The eyes of the moon-faced boy were becoming enormous white craters. Voldemort was apparently toweling off. The smile was unchanged.
“No. God’s law is eternal. Only man’s law changes.”
“And Deuteronomy is whose word again?”
She looked down and nodded once. “I can see you’re struggling with this…”
“Ma’am, if one of us is struggling, I don’t think it’s me.” I dropped my pretense. “Look — I’m not planning to kill my son. It’s immoral now, and it was immoral in ancient Judea. The Sixth Commandment covers that. There’s no ‘context’ that makes it okay to kill a disobedient child. It’s also a bit of a problem to say that a book including such a clear instruction is to be followed to the letter.”
She paused. “Okay,” she said quietly. “Let me just say this. When I discovered the Bible many years ago, when I learned that this is the Truth” — she pressed her hand into the cover with soft intensity — “it made such a difference in my life. It helped me, and it can help you. We cannot possibly know what is right without it.”
I shook my head. “What you just said is not true. You’ve just shown that you are better than that.” I held the Bible up. “There’s a lot of really good stuff in here, but there is also a lot of absolutely wretched, immoral stuff. And you recognized that it was wrong to kill my son, despite what the Bible said. You used your own moral reasoning to sort that out. That’s a really good thing. It’s what we should all do.”
No reply.
“If you had come to my house two weeks ago and handed me a letter that simply told me to kill my son, I would have been justified in calling the police. Of course you would never do that. But you essentially gave me that same letter with a lot of other pages around it, and told me it was the perfect word of God.”
It was obvious that she had never had an experience like this. Though the boy was hard to read (or even to look at directly at this point), the Talker was clearly intelligent and seemed intrigued. We talked for another ten minutes at least. She asked if I wasn’t astonished by the perfect fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy in the Gospels. I asked if she was astonished by the perfect fulfillment of predictions from the first Harry Potter book in the seventh Harry Potter book. The gospel writers had the OT in their laps and shaped their retelling of the life of Christ to fulfill those prophecies — a common practice in Mediterranean religious literature. We talked about midrash and syncretism, which she had never heard of. I told her about the Jesus Seminar, which she had also never heard of.
“Do you believe in God at all?” she asked at last. I do not, I said, but I’ve always been fascinated by ultimate questions. The people I don’t understand are the ones who are indifferent to those questions. She agreed.
“Well,” she said, “I guess we can leave it there.” I apologized for keeping her so long, and she said, “My no. I’m the one who wanted to stay. This has been so interesting.” We shook hands, and off they went. I’d like to think they’ll remember it, and that it will nicely complicate their task from now on.
That night I told the story at dinner. While Connor (who is not, by the way, a difficult child) and I were clearing the table (see?), he said, “I can’t believe what you did to those people.”
Uh oh. Yeah, I wondered about that. Remember the cross necklace story a few weeks ago? Connor is a classic apatheist, and the collision of religious ideas makes him uncomfortable.
“Con, don’t worry, I was very gentle about it.”
“No no, that’s not what I mean. I mean…it was awesome how you did that. I can’t believe it.”
Well that did it. Now the stoning is off for sure.
An unreliable Witness
I don’t often fence with doorknocking evangelists. They always (always) interrupt me in the middle of a much more interesting thought that I’m eager to get back to, and the more I engage, the more my brain is distracted for the rest of the day by all the witty things I should have said.
I also don’t like to embarrass people, even when they’ve come to my door asking me to please do so. In most cases, these are decent, harmless folks trying to do what they think is right, however misguided, and influencing few others. Many former doorknockers confirm that the practice is mostly about making yourself feel good about “carrying out the Great Commission,” and that slammed doors are taken as evidence of your own Christ-like conviction in a fallen world. “Each slammed door helps us come closer to our Savior,” wrote one Mormon missionary.
I don’t want to be part of someone else’s martyr complex, but it’s hard to avoid getting testy when somebody knocks on my door and says something deeply silly, then asks for my thoughts. Still, I usually manage to thank them for their time and suddenly remember that soufflé.
But earlier this month, something quietly snapped as I listened to two Jehovah’s Witnesses at my door. Actually, I only listened to one — there’s always a Talker and what I guess you’d call…a witness. The Talker had started by reading me a weirdly mundane verse from Psalms, then asked for my reaction. What follows is as close to verbatim as I can recall.
“To that? No particular reaction.”
She nodded, handed me a booklet titled WHAT DOES THE BIBLE Really TEACH?, and asked if she could come back to discuss it with me later in the month.
Well sure, I said.
Last week, she bested Jesus by coming back when she said she would. I was ready with a new twist on a very old approach.
“So…Dale, was it? Hi Dale. Did you have a chance to look at the booklet I left last time?”
“Oh yes!” I said with a bit too much enthusiasm. “I did. It was very interesting.”
She seemed pleased. “What was interesting to you?”
“Well it’s just full of answers, and it has these, these footnotes that point to places in the Bible. Did you know that?”
She did!
“So I started looking through the Bible because…” I paused for effect and lowered my voice. “Well, my family is having some difficulties, and we could really use some answers right now.”
The quiet one was different this time, a strange, moon-faced boy, about sixteen, with that mixed expression that always unsettles me. The mouth smiles, but the eyes seem to be looking at Voldemort in the shower.
“What kind of difficulties?” asked the Talker.
“It’s my son,” I said. “He’s sixteen. He’s stubborn and rebellious. When we discipline him, it just doesn’t seem to make a difference.” I looked up cautiously, expecting a change of expression as she figured out where I was going. Nothing. “And as I was looking for answers in the Bible, boom! There it was!”
“That’s how it is sometimes!” she said, eyes sparkling. “Boom!”
“Yes, boom! And I knew I could trust the advice, because the booklet you gave me said the entire Bible is ‘harmonious and accurate,’ with no contradictions. All the inspired word of God.”
“It is indeed.”
“That’s important to know, because the answer I found is in the Old Testament. I have this friend who said the Old Testament doesn’t count any more. He said the New Covenant of Jesus Christ replaced the Old Law.”
She shook her head. “Your friend is making a very common mistake,” she said. “He is interpreting the word of Jehovah God. You have to read the Bible exactly as it is, NOT interpret it. Otherwise there’s your interpretation, there’s my interpretation, and somebody else’s.”
“Right, we can’t have that,” I said. My porch was suddenly a barrel stocked with two fish, both of them dressed for a funeral for some reason. “So I went back to my Bible after I talked to this friend…and it fell right open to Matthew 5:17.”
I waited, nodding expectantly.
She smiled uncomfortably. “I’m not…too familiar with that passage.”
“Matthew 5:17, really?” I said, with honest surprise. “Right between the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer?” She smiled weakly. This was disappointing. If nothing else, JWs are usually scripturally literate. And this is not some passage tucked away in the Bible’s sock drawer — it’s from the Sermon on the Mount.
I closed my eyes and began: “Do not think I have come to abolish the Old Law or the Prophets…this is Jesus speaking…I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not the least stroke of a pen shall by any means disappear from the Old Law until everything is accomplished. Now I looked up ‘Old Law,'” I said, “and it means the first five books of the Old Testament.” I gestured around. “I don’t know about heaven, but Earth hasn’t passed away yet. So Jesus said the Old Testament is still relevant today.”
“That’s exactly right,” she said. “Every word is of Jehovah God.”
“And Jesus said, Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commands and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. I don’t want to be the least in heaven, and I’m sure you wouldn’t teach me anything that would make you the least in heaven, right?”
“Certainly not.”
“I’m relieved to hear you say that. You brought the answer to our problem right to our door, and I’m so grateful. It’s in Deuteronomy, chapter 21, verse 18.” I reached for my NIV Bible, strangely close at hand, and flipped to it. “If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen when they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town….Then all the men of his town shall stone him to death.”
Ten years of Calling Bernadette’s Bluff
My 500th post goes back ten years to the beginning of my public freethought life, before Parenting Beyond Belief, before Foundation Beyond Belief…
Spring 2001. I’m a mostly closeted secular humanist on the faculty of a Catholic women’s college in Minnesota. It’s Friday afternoon, so I’m sitting with a small, sad knot of St. Kate’s faculty men at The Dubliner, a pub in St. Paul. Guinness in and bile out.
A sociology prof and good friend named Brian Fogarty tells about seeing two students on the quad earlier that day, having a pitched argument. No contact, but plenty of heat. As Brian slunk by the two, another student leapt out from behind a column and thrust a slip of paper at him:
WHAT DID YOU DO ABOUT IT??
“You know,” he sighed after describing it, “if I did stick my nose in, it would have been ‘a male thing to do.’ You just can’t win.”
He was right about that. The campus was laced with these double-binds. “Somebody has to write a satirical novel about this place,” I said.
“Yeah yeah, you always say that. So write it.”
“Wha…me? I was actually thinking of a writer.”
“Write one scene,” he said. “See what happens.”
That night I wrote an eight-page scene in which a faculty committee discusses what to do about the school song. The meeting is called to order by Jack Kassel, who is, by the most extraordinary coincidence, a closeted secular humanist male professor at a Catholic women’s college:
Well then, we meet again to discuss changes to the college fight song.” Audible gasps around the table. Jack’s eyes inflate as he realizes his mistake. “I mean, the college song,” he sputters in a rush. “The song. The Hymn to Saint Bernadette.”
Oh goody, he thinks. Now I get to start in a hole. Shit on a stick.
The next day I laid out the storyline. Jack is already at the end of his rope when his oldest partner in disbelief shows up — as the campus priest, no less — and he finally plunges over the edge when his ex-wife enrolls their brilliant young son in a Lutheran school and the boy begins quoting Scripture in response to Jack’s questions. Back against the wall, Jack starts to come out as a nonbeliever at what turns out to be the worst possible time — as visions of the Virgin Mary begin appearing on campus.
I wrote for ten weeks straight, a fun and feverish thing, finishing up ten years ago this month. After months of refining, I published it through Xlibris, and in January 2002, just seven months after Brian’s taunt, Calling Bernadette’s Bluff went public.
The book was stocked in the college bookstore and sold out repeatedly. The local paper did a nice feature, and reviews have been good. The resemblance of “St. Bernie’s” to St. Kate’s (and the presence of characters said to resemble actual carbon-based people on campus, including the president, the dean of faculty, and half a dozen profs) was duly noted. The dean of faculty even asked for a signed copy. What fun.
The next year…not so much. That’s when my slow-burning conflict with the administration began over free expression on campus, leading eventually to my disgusted resignation in ’06.
Hard to believe how much has happened in ten years. Along the way, in addition to the parenting books, I wrote Good Thunder, which picks up three days after Bernadette ends. But I didn’t release that one until last year for various reasons, then didn’t announce the release to anyone until now. There’s just been too much going on.
And even now, I’m mentioning it only in the context of Bernadette’s Bluff because Good Thunder would be incomprehensible without reading Bernadette first. Don’t even think about trying.
I’m really surprised at how well both books hold up for me as a reader after all these years. I usually hate who I was and what I did over nine minutes ago, but these still say what I wanted to say.
It helped that so many characters are based on real people. The deeply nutty aspects of Catholicism are on display, but (as several reviewers have noted) the strongest and most likable character is Genevieve Martin, the Catholic dean, who was based on the actual dean at the time. So when Dean Martin butts heads with spineless Jack, it’s hard even for nontheists to entirely know who to root for. Likewise Leslie, the militant feminist with the blinding Grin, manages to make sense and nonsense and to convince and infuriate at the same time. I don’t think I could have written that character convincingly from scratch. Fortunately I’d known her in person, and been convinced and infuriated by her for years. She was one of several people at St. Kate’s who helped turn me from a passive feminist to a deeply committed one. But she also showed me, quite unintentionally, just how silly it could get at times, resting as it does in human hands.
The weirdest thing about Bernadette is the fact that several things in the story ended up happening on campus the next year. My favorite: A construction project on the fictional St. Bernie’s campus unearthed bones, and the Lakota Sioux claimed they were sacred and halted the project. A year after publication, a construction project on the non-fictional St. Kate’s campus unearthed an underground spring. The Lakota Sioux claimed it was sacred and halted the project.
Like they say, you can’t make this stuff up.
Screwing with Darwin – the final chapter
[Continued from Screwing with Darwin 2]
I had a passing knowledge of evolution in high school. Better than the average bear, but still sketchy. I majored in physical anthropology at Berkeley not for the dazzling job prospects but to fill in that sketch.
In addition to changing and deepening my understanding of what it means to be human, a fuller grasp of human evolution led me to wonder how traditional religion could in any significant way be made to fit with what we now know. (See earlier post.) And I remember wondering what Darwin thought about that.
He was seriously religious as a young man, even trained for ministry and annoyed his Beagle shipmates with fundamentalist pronouncements. If, after the Galapagos and the Origin and The Descent of Man, Darwin was still a conventionally religious man, I knew I must have really missed something. So I picked up Darwin’s Autobiography in my senior year to find out.
If I’d picked up the 1887 edition by his son Francis, published five years after Charles died and reissued many times since, I’d have been puzzled but chastened. He doesn’t get into religion much at all in that one, and when he does, he seems to mostly affirm his ongoing conventional beliefs. And I would almost certainly have never looked further.
Fortunately it was the 1958 edition by Charles’s granddaughter Nora that found me. As I mentioned in Part 2 of this series, Nora restored the bits that the earlier edition had expunged under pressure from Charles’s wife Emma. Nora was able to do this because all of the family members who’d nearly come to blows over what to leave in and what to leave out were now demised.
If I’d read the first edition, I might have imagined a man with religious convictions essentially intact:
FIRST EDITION (1887)
I liked the thought of being a country clergyman. Accordingly I read with care Pearson on the Creed and a few other books on divinity; and as I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our creed must be fully accepted.
Compare to this:
RESTORED EDITION (1958)
I liked the thought of being a country clergyman. Accordingly I read with care Pearson on the Creed and a few other books on divinity; and as I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our creed must be fully accepted. It never struck me how illogical it was to say that I believed in what I could not understand and what is in fact unintelligible.
A 12-page section titled “Religious Beliefs” underwent the most vigorous edits. The bracketed and bold text was omitted from the first edition:
During these two years I was led to think much about religion. Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers (though themselves orthodox) for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality. I suppose it was the novelty of the argument that amused them. [But I had gradually come, by this time, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow at sign, etc., etc., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.]
It’s sometimes fascinating to see what Emma insisted be struck out and what she allowed in. She allowed this passage but bracketed a portion (as I have below) for deletion. Francis obliged:
I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress [and have never since doubted for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.]
It’s not even his conclusion but the strength of his confidence that apparently unnerved his wife. As for the damnation, she wrote in the margin
I should dislike the passage in brackets to be published. It seems to me raw. Nothing can be said too severe upon the doctrine of everlasting punishment for disbelief–but very few now wd. call that ‘Christianity,’ (tho’ the words are there).
Tho’ the words are there. And 120 years later, the words are still there. I guess some books dodge the red pen more easily than others.
Francis oversaw an even more abbreviated 1892 American edition in which the entire 12 pages exploring Charles’s religious beliefs are replaced with a single bracketed fib:
[After speaking of his happy married life, and of his children, he continues:]
Mm. That Ninth Commandment is always the hardest, innit.
Yet if you look hard enough, in all but the God-Bless-America edition, you can find one quiet sentence in which Darwin is allowed to clearly state his actual theological position. Like Huxley, he utterly rejected belief in the claims and doctrines of Christianity, but said
The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.
The distortion of Darwin’s views continued for years. One of the most galling attempts was by Lady Elizabeth Hope, an evangelist who published a fabricated story in 1915 claiming to have heard Darwin renounce evolution and embrace Jesus on his deathbed. Francis redeemed his editorial self brilliantly. “Lady Hope’s account of my father’s views on religion is quite untrue. I have publicly accused her of falsehood, but have not seen any reply. My father’s agnostic point of view is given in my Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. I., pp. 304–317,” he wrote to a publisher in 1918. “I was present at his deathbed,” said Charles’s daughter Etty. “Lady Hope was not present during his last illness, or any illness. I believe he never even saw her, but in any case she had no influence over him in any department of thought or belief. He never recanted any of his scientific views, either then or earlier. We think the story of his conversion was fabricated in the U.S.A. …The whole story has no foundation what-so-ever.”
Etty’s niece Nora eventually put the pieces back together, but the genie never goes all the way back in. As of today, 6 of the 10 bestselling versions of Darwin’s Autobiography on Amazon are the Francis Darwin edition.
Thanks for trying, Nora.
What, me worry? End Times Edition
My daughter Delaney (9) is no sucker. She has a mind like a steel trap, a phrase which I’m sure must mean something. But she’s worried that the world might end on December 21, 2012.
“I know it probably won’t,” she said, almost precisely echoing the preamble of my own fears at different points in my life — of hell, of radon, of cults, of the Mafia, of my heart stopping just for laughs, of that itchy mole. The preamble is always followed quickly, as am I, by a big but.
“…but how do you KNOW?” she asked. “How do you KNOW it isn’t going to end?”
“I don’t,” I admitted. “It might.”
“What?!”
“Well of course it might. Might end tomorrow, too.”
“Yeah but nobody says it’s going to end tomorrow. LOTS of people think it’s going to end in 2012.”
“Why do they think that?”
She shrugged. “I dunno. But they do. And it makes me worried.”
“When you get old enough to see about ten of these end-of-the-world things not happen, you’ll stop worrying.”
“Yeah, IF I get old enough.”
Laney was actually a bit obsessed with this one, simply because of this big unknown Claim, something so entirely credible they’d made a movie about it.
Time for an intervention.
I explained that somebody who knew nothing about the Mayan calendar apparently got hold of it, saw that it “ends” on December 21, 2012, and started in with the Chicken Little. I told her that it “ends” in the same way ours “ends” on December 31. Which is to say it doesn’t.
“We have weeks that repeat, right? When we get to Saturday, we go back to Sunday. Months repeat. When we get to the 31st, or whatever, we go back to the 1st. And when we get to the last day of December, every year, you don’t scream that the world is going to end — you just flip the page, and you’re back in January. The Mayans had another big cycle called a baktun. It’s like 400 years long. And when you get to the end of a baktun, you just flip the page. New baktun.”
“Oh. So somebody just didn’t know how it worked.”
“Yeah. Still worried?”
She paused, then grinned sheepishly. “A little.”
That’s the way it goes. Even with the Wire Brush of Reason, once the chicken has shit, it’s hard to get it out of every corner of the henhouse.
The malformed chicken that is the human brain is in a state of perpetual defecation, so I wasn’t too surprised when only last week I learned that we’ve shit out yet another pellet. Turns out the world is also ending a week from tomorrow. I hadn’t heard.
I immediately informed Delaney, whose eyes inflated nicely.
“Next Saturday?” I knew she was running her soccer schedule through her head.
“Yep.”
“Who said this one?”
I pulled out the news story I’d printed up, with the ridiculous headline, “Biblical scholar’s date for rapture: May 21, 2011“. I said that the guy in the story is not a scholar but some minor Christian radio host named Harold Camping (whose website is still for some reason accepting donations). Seems Camping crunched the numbers in the Bible and came up with a “guarantee” that Jesus will return on May 21, 2011, rapture up 3 percent of the world’s population, and commence a five-month smiting of the rest of you.
Turns out it’s not the first time he made such a guarantee. His book 1994 also predicted the end, though I can’t remember what year.
“Huh. Just like that other guy, with the people on the hilltops.” That would be Baptist minister William Miller, whose prediction of apocalypse sometime between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844 was called, on March 22, 1844, “The Great Disappointment.” He moved the date to October 22, 1884, which became the Second Great Disappointment. His followers, many of whom had sold everything they owned and left crops to rot in the fields, were mostly (to their credit) disinclined to make it a trilogy.
Camping and Miller both used Bible roulette for their calculations, which makes it especially surprising that they came up with such wildly different dates. But I shared Camping’s method with Laney so she could decide whether to worry.
And that, before we get off-topic, is what this post is about — not whether Camping and Miller are reflections on other believers, not whether eschatology in general is silly. This is about how to help kids develop the ability to decide on their own whether to believe a claim.
I looked her in the eye. “When you’re trying to figure out what to believe, a good way to start is to just ask why other people believe it, then decide whether it’s a good reason. So this man says Jesus was crucified on April 1st in the year 33. There are 722,500 days between that day and next Saturday. Now, the number 5 equals ‘atonement’…”
“What?!” Connor (15) had wandered in. “Where’d he get that?”
“Dunno. So he says 5 equals ‘atonement,’ and 10 equals ‘completeness,’ and 17 equals ‘heaven.’ Multiply those together, then square the whole thing, and you get 722,500, again.”
Laney blinked. “So?”
“Well exactly. That’s why I’m not worried — because the reason he gives for believing it doesn’t make any sense. Add that to the fact that he’s been wrong before, and a hundred other people have been wrong before, and I don’t worry when somebody says the world will end on a certain day.”
This might seem like a small thing, but it’s huge, and it applies to countless things, including religion. After years of wondering whether the God question was even askable, I realized I could indeed come to an intelligent conclusion not by looking for God, but by looking at the reasons others believe.
Once I decided the reasons were poor, I stepped away from religious belief, and all the false hopes and real fears it brings, with very little difficulty.
Pushing the point…or not
Adomaswillkill at DeviantArt
Once you cast doubt on man’s place in creation, the entire Biblical story of salvation history, from original sin to Christ’s incarnation, is also threatened.
–TULLIO GREGORY, Libertinisme Érudite in Seventeenth-Century France and Italy
As I may have mentioned, I’m up to my neck in fun and fascinating work right now, including an anthology project called Voices of Unbelief: Documents from Atheists and Agnostics.
I was invited to write this book by an editor at ABC-CLIO, a publisher of beautifully-produced and researched reference works in a variety of fields. The final product will be 45 documents by atheists and agnostics — letters, diary entries, essays — each with an intro, framing questions, historical context, and additional resources. It differs from other freethought anthologies by being strictly limited to atheists and agnostics, meaning no heretics (Spinoza, Montaigne), no deists (Paine, Voltaire, Jefferson), and no one whose position can be taken as mere skepticism of the local gods (goodbye to Socrates and most of his chums). I’m also casting a wider net culturally than usual (China, India, Persia, Uganda), filling that annoying 1200-year gap between the Romans and the Renaissance, and aiming at high school and early college readers. Due out August 2012.
When I said last month, “I’m in the research phase for some really engaging writing projects right now…while I’m overturning cool rocks, I always find some fantastic tangent wriggling underneath,” THIS is what I was talking about.
While doing background on the clandestina (several compelling anonymous atheist booklets circulated secretly in 17th c. France), I came across the Gregory line at the top of the post, which reminded me of Darwin’s Autobiography, which reminded me that I hadn’t touched the blog in weeks.
So here’s my bit on the problem posed by evolution for traditional religious belief.
Evolution was the most recent in a series of discoveries knocking us from our central and special role in the scheme of things. The Abrahamic religions are all premised on our central and special role in the scheme of things. It’s hard to think of a more foundational assumption of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam than the special relationship of God and Human. Every major assumption, from sin to soul to savior, relies on the idea that we are separate and distinct from other animals.
Millions of Christians accept evolution. But the implications for belief are almost never dealt with, since they require an incredibly radical rethink. Instead, many say that God created life, then used evolution to create the diversity of life. And I’m left wondering whether to push the point.
Analogy: Suppose the 2012 election approaches. I very much want Barack Obama to continue in office. A friend of mine expresses deep and fervent support for Obama, saying “I just really love the idea of a Muslim president.”
Do I push the point…or pat the back, glad for the ally, and whistle my way on?
The first question I ever asked Richard Dawkins was about Catholic support for teaching evolution. Do we push the point that evolution creates serious, arguably fatal problems for some of the defining tenets of Christian belief, or be happy for allies against evangelical opposition?
“You’ve asked a tactical question, I suppose,” he said, grinning. “Not really a tactical fellow myself. So I think it depends on whether you are Richard Dawkins or Stephen Jay Gould.”
Since only one of us was either, this didn’t entirely help.
He went on to say that he would certainly push the point, and does, since that’s what inquiry is about. The very idea of withholding challenge to protect a pet hypothesis is anathema to Dawkins. Gould was more tactical and strategic, taking allies where he could find them.
I’ve struggled with years over which is pragmatically best. When I bring up the problem of reconciling evolution and Christian belief even to extremely intelligent and progressive religious friends, they get really tetchy, mumble foolish things about our inability to know how God works, then huff at me for…what, I dunno. I feel terrible for forcing them to suddenly sound so silly, and I never get around to saying why I find the positions incompatible.
So here’s why.
Evolution was not aimed at making us. Thinking otherwise guts the whole enterprise. The countless blind, reckless, wasteful, weaving paths and dead-end alleys of the history of life on Earth make it plenty clear that, clever and handsome as we (currently) are, we are merely one of these side streets, impressive in our way and to ourselves, but otherwise unremarkable. The process that created us is necessarily unguided on the large scale, and is only guided locally by the ever-fickle demands of natural selection. To make evolution a tool God used to create “Man” requires either a complete upheaval in the concept of evolution, or a complete upheaval in the concept of God, neither of which is forthcoming in the mutterance Goddidit.
I’ve always granted evangelicals a point for noticing the problem (if for little else).
Saying God had us in mind from the start does violence to what we know about evolution. Saying he didn’t have us in mind does violence to the conception of an all-knowing God. Take your pick.
Also problematic is the idea of the soul. If other animals are without this lovely thing, God must have chosen a moment in evolutionary history when we were “human enough” to merit souls. Since evolution is an achingly incremental process, there was no single moment when we crossed a line from “prehuman” into “human.” And even if there was, we’re left with the odd prospect of a generation of children who are ensouled but whose parents are not, or some similarly strange scenario. I’d be very happy to hear an argument for ensoulment (of the species, not the individual) that makes more sense, but have not yet.
There’s also the fact that the astonishing wonder of evolution is that it works entirely without a puppeteer. That’s not a reason for accepting it, but so much wonder is lost, so much color and beauty drained, with the introduction of those divine strings.
There are many other reasons, but they all boil down to the decisive dismantlement of human specialness wrought by evolution properly understood. One can apparently be Christian and accept evolution — millions do — but I’d love just once to hear someone acknowledge the profound revolution of Christian belief that is required.
So we’re back to the tactical. It’s easy to wax rhapsodic about inquiry courageous and pure, but the longer I think of this, the more I seem to choose to make but not push the point, at least not uninvited — to allow those who wish to keep their compartment walls well-spackled to do so. Most people forced to choose between doing violence to science or to their conception of God will have little trouble making up their minds.
But I’m wide open on this one. What do you think?
Screwing with…His Holiness?!
I’m in the research phase for some really engaging writing projects right now. That’s good except for one thing: while I’m overturning cool rocks, I always find some fantastic tangent wriggling underneath. I chase after it, giggling like a wee lass, and forget all about the original task.
It’s an actual problem.
Exhibit A: I’m under contract for a fun anthology project I’ll tell you about later. In the course of that, I uncovered the way Darwin’s agnosticism and critiques of religion were hidden from view by his own family as they edited his Autobiography. That led to my “Screwing with…” blog series, which I knew needed to start with Sam Pepys.
As I finally got to Darwin in that series, I needed the date on which Pope John Paul II made the strongest-yet Vatican acknowledgement of evolution as established fact.
And you won’t believe what was wriggling under THAT rock.
First some background: The Vatican came to accept evolution the same way it agreed that Galileo deserved an apology — glacially and partially. This isn’t entirely a strike against Rome. I’ve always at least given the Catholics credit for seeing something that is too often denied by others: that evolution, properly understood, presents a very serious problem for some of the most fundamental assumptions of their religion. More on that another time. (See what I mean? Even tangents birth tangents.)
Since Darwin, a few popes had skated at the margins of the question. They rarely mentioned evolution in the last few decades of the 19th century but repeatedly affirmed “the special creation of man” — one of the above-mentioned fundamental assumptions that evolution severely guts.
In Providentissimus Deus (1893), Leo XIII decried “the unrestrained freedom of thought” — yes, his actual words — that he saw running rampant as the 20th century approached, and warned that religion and science should stay out of each other’s sandboxes.
Whatever sharpens your hat, I guess.
In Humani generis (1950), Pius XII said “the Church does not forbid” research and discussion related to biological evolution. But the encyclical contains a self-cancelling message typical of papal pronouncements: “Men experienced in both fields” (science and theology) are free to study the issue, so long as their conclusions do not contradict assumptions x, y, and z. Included in that list: that “souls are immediately created by God,” and that humans cannot have ultimately come from non-living matter.
Excluding possibilities a priori is, of course, one of the best ways to get things entirely wrong. But that’s not the wriggle I’m chasing at the moment. And before we jeer too much at the Vatican for taking 91 years, we need to recognize that much of the scientific community had only fully accepted evolutionary theory in the previous decade. It was the modern synthesis with genetics, articulated by (among others) Ernst Mayr in 1942, that answered the most serious remaining questions and cemented the scientific consensus on evolution.
In an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1996, John Paul II improved on Pius XII. “Today,” he said, “more than a half-century after the appearance of [Pius XII’s] encyclical, some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than an hypothesis.”
Ignoring the (shall we say) fallible math, here’s where it gets interesting. The speech was in French, with the above sentence rendered thus:
Aujourd’hui, près d’un demi-siècle après la parution de l’encyclique, de nouvelles connaissances conduisent à reconnaître dans la théorie de l’évolution plus qu’une hypothèse.
Like all major papal holdings-forth, the October 22 address was translated into several other languages. The English language edition of L’Osservatore Romano, the papal paper, translated it like so:
Today, more than a half-century after the appearance of that encyclical, some new findings lead us toward the recognition of more than one hypothesis within the theory of evolution.
Somebody diddled with the Pope!
The difference is huge. If the pope says “[there is] more than one hypothesis within the theory of evolution,” that’s a yawn. If he says “Evolution [is] more than an hypothesis,” that’s an earthquake.
A correction appeared three weeks later. But you know how that is. The faithful worldwide jumped on whichever translation they preferred. Some major media stories even got it backwards, claiming that “more than an hypothesis” was the original error, and that “more than one hypothesis” was the correction. Answers in Genesis and other creationist organizations accepted the correct translation as evidence against the Catholic church. That’s all the expected gum flapping, none of it as interesting as the initial act of mistranslation.
In the correction, the English edition editor explained that they had taken an “overly literal” translation of the French text. But one enterprising media outlet ran the text by four French language experts, none of whom saw any possible reading other than “evolution [is] more than an hypothesis.”
Whether the switch was intentional is the fascinating question here. And it’s always safe and fun to play the cynic and assume the conspiracy. But it’s pretty hard to picture anyone in the Vatican having sufficiently well-developed cojones to intentionally scramble the Pope’s words, something that was easily discovered. The fact that the editor in question was transferred from Rome to a parish in Illinois seems at first to suggest retribution, but that was five years after the bungle. And he was returning home.
Now to find my way back to whatever the hell I was working on before this shiny object caught my eye.
“This just isn’t going to happen”
Late last week, as I sat down to write a post about Rock Beyond Belief, I received notice that it had been cancelled.
Quick summary for those who haven’t followed this:
Last September, an evangelical Christian rock concert called “Rock the Fort” was held at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Sponsored by the Fort Bragg chaplains, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and 20 area churches, the event was promoted as an opportunity to win souls by “[bringing] the Christian message to all of Fort Bragg and the surrounding community.” Ft. Bragg chaplain Col. David Hillis made it clear in a letter to local churches that “Rock the Fort is evangelical in nature…The concert will conclude with a clear gospel message.”
It worked. Event organizers claimed 700 on-stage conversions of soldiers and civilians.
Rob Boston at Americans United for Separation of Church and State correctly stated that “the military has no business sponsoring a rally that is clearly designed to convert people to evangelical Christianity – or any other religion, for that matter.” The Freedom From Religion Foundation and Military Religious Freedom Foundation likewise weighed in with constitutional concerns. “Churches have the right to reach out to anyone to spread their religious messages,” Boston said, “but the government is not allowed to help them do it.”
The Staff Judge Advocate soothed worried brows with a letter promising equal treatment:
This was echoed in a letter from the base commander.
One soldier at Fort Bragg, Sgt. Justin Griffith, decided to take the base commander at his word. If the military is going to sponsor events of this kind, they must do so for other perspectives as well. Thus was born ROCK BEYOND BELIEF, a day of fun and entertainment featuring secular bands and speakers including Richard Dawkins, Dan Barker, Hemant Mehta, and Eugenie Scott (and me).
Justin was a class act from the beginning. He was determined to make the event a positive expression, not a poke in the eye. Every time someone tried to paint RBB as an anti-religious event or an attempt to “spread the atheist message,” Justin slapped it down. This would be a positive celebration of secular values, but never an attempt to recruit, convince, or attack. No de-conversion or de-baptism ceremonies. High road all the way.
He pulled together a volunteer staff and began the long approval process in November. Funding was a serious concern. But a Freedom of Information Act request by FFRF revealed that Billy Graham’s Rock the Fort event had received over $54,000 in direct support from the Dept. of Defense.
The next step was simple: the base commander had promised “the same level of support to comparable events,” so a request was made for a similar level of financial support for Rock Beyond Belief.
The approval was a no-brainer, and the base legal staff recommended that Rock Beyond Belief receive the same support Rock the Fort had received.
The last step would be the signature of the garrison commander. He “approved” the event per se, but added what Justin rightly called “crippling restrictions.” Instead of the outdoor post-parade ground that Rock the Fort had used, Rock Beyond Belief would be confined to an indoor theatre that holds 700. There would be no financial support of any kind. And unlike Rock the Fort, he required that all advertising carry a disclaimer that the event carried “no endorsement by Fort Bragg, the US Army, or the Department of Defense.”
Justin had no choice but to cancel.
The whole thing rang loud bells for me. Justin was attempting to hold the Army to its own stated principles, not to mention the US Constitution. And instead of progressing straight to court over Rock the Fort, he had chosen to request equal treatment. A promise of equal treatment was made, then withdrawn.
Eight years ago I tried something similar, albeit on a smaller scale. I was on the faculty of a Catholic women’s college that trumpeted an atmosphere of open inquiry and critical thinking in all of its public statements and recruitment materials. All points of view were said to be welcome in this vibrant marketplace of ideas.
The college also considers itself a feminist institution, but the fact that the overwhelming majority of feminist pioneers have been atheists or agnostics was never mentioned. So when an informal student humanist group I advised wanted to bring Annie Laurie Gaylor on campus to talk about feminism and freethought, I thought it a perfect fit with the college’s stated values. Annie Laurie wrote Women Without Superstition, the definitive book on the topic.
We reserved the room, clearly stating the nature of the event, paid the required fee, and received an approved contract. We advertised openly on campus and in the papers for four weeks. But 45 minutes before the event, a security guard arrived and locked the hall, “By order of the president.”
I called Sister Anita for an explanation and was told that I had not reserved the hall. When I replied that I had the reservation in hand, she was silent for several seconds.
“Look Dale,” she finally said, “this just isn’t going to happen.”
The next day, as word of the lockout spread, she sent a campus-wide email claiming that I had intentionally misrepresented the nature of the event. The day after that, the first student protest in the history of the college took place on the quad. Major media stories ensued, and I received some blistering hate mail.
I managed to stay three more years, trying to improve the climate of inquiry on campus, before nausea led me to resign and pursue my current work.
Though religion is in play in both of these situations, the principle applies to countless others as well. If a minority point of view is on the verge of gaining a fair hearing within the rules, someone in the majority will simply change the rules. The women’s movement struggled against the same kind of goalpost-moving, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 essentially said, “Okay, from now on we will follow our own rules.” The majority party in Congress regularly changes procedures to hogtie the minority. Rules are useful, goes the reasoning of the powerful, until they aren’t. At which point etc.
Some defenders of the garrison commander will surely point out that he didn’t cancel the event, Justin did. A bit like saying, “Sure, I shot you, but you’re the one that fell over.”
Eight years ago I was heartbroken that what could have been a simple, positive expression of the important place of religious doubt in our history instead yielded a melee of angry protests, accusations, and hate mail because someone decided their own rules were meant to be broken as needed. Now Justin’s attempt to create something positive is instead devolving into ugliness and lawsuits for the same reason.
The suit is justified and necessary (and, as the Military Religious Freedom Foundation’s Mikey Weinstein put it, “a one-inch putt”) — but once again I’m heartbroken at the duplicity and the lost opportunity.
I hope I’d behave better than the garrison commander and Sister Anita in a position of majority power. But if I were to do otherwise, I hope the minority voices I trample on would shame me into integrity.
Believe it or…look, just believe it.
I’ve been in such a good mood lately, and now the Universe is trying to muck it up.
One thing that never fails to pee on my Yule log this time of year is the “Yes, Virginia” editorial. I had so far avoided it, then the wretched thing found me through #@*&% Facebook:
DEAR EDITOR, I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, ‘If you see it in THE SUN it’s so.’ Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?
VIRGINIA O’HANLON. 115 W 95th St.The editor replied:
VIRGINIA, Your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except [what] they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.
Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias! There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.
Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.
And so on.
Let’s look at this. A little girl says, “Please tell me the truth.” In response to her direct request, the adult not only lies, but tells the girl that the world would be intolerable and devoid of poetry if this thing he knows to be false were false. And the world coos with delight.
I’m convinced that the roughly six percent of kids who feel “betrayed” when they find out Santa isn’t real most likely had their belief perpetuated beyond its normal course, usually by the parents. I advise parents who do Santa to use a light touch and allow kids to find their way out naturally. They start with tentative questions about this or that aspect of reindeer aerodynamics or house entry. When my son asked how Santa’s sleigh flies, as I described in PBB, I gave him the opportunity to work it all out:
“Some people say the sleigh is magic,” I said. “Does that sound right to you?” Initially, boy howdy, did it ever. He wanted to believe, and so was willing to swallow any explanation, no matter how implausible or how tentatively offered…But little by little, the questions got tougher, and he started to answer that second part – Does that sound right to you? – a bit more agnostically.
For two years he intentionally avoided the obvious direct question, because his desire to know had not yet overtaken his desire to believe. But once he asked directly if Santa is real, as Virginia O’Hanlon did, I answered honestly and congratulated him on his self-propelled journey to that answer.
“Yes, Virginia” is an unbeatable example of Daniel Dennett’s hypothesis that any given magical belief is less about a given god or text or myth than simply “belief in belief” — the untethered but deep compulsion that belief itself (in gods, faeries, Santa, karma, good luck charms, The Secret) is a good to be treasured and its loss a thing to be grieved. It’s one of the greatest insights into the religious impulse I’ve ever heard.
Just as I was recovering from the yearly “Yes, Virginia”-induced nausea, a related piece of spam plopped wetly into my inbox from EZSantaLetters.com:
How to Convince Your Child That Santa is Real
One of the major drawbacks of life in today’s world is the fact that children grow up too fast. Belief in Santa Claus is one of the aspects of childhood that is usually first to go. Promoting the belief in Santa is one of many things parents do for their children. Several methods exist to accomplish this, but two of the best are a Santa call and Santa letters.
A call from Santa Claus will go a long way in promulgating the belief in him in most children. Children do not normally receive many phone calls as a rule. Since they are usually a special event to begin with, calls from Santa Claus will be especially well accepted.
…
As parents, we all want our children to be able to hold onto their childhood as long as possible. One aspect of childhood that we encourage is the belief in Santa Claus and all he stands for. Arranging for a child to receive a phone call from Santa and planting evidence of his visit are two ways to help keep children believing as long as possible. These will add to the child’s enjoyment of Christmas as well.
I’ll let you do the commentary. This Santa spam and its “Yes Virginia” ancestor are like drops of amber with a bit of human nature inside — that urgent human yearning toward belief, and revulsion to disbelief.
What fascinating and funny things we are.
Isn’t it romantic
I like stories. I like reality. I don’t so much like stories posing as reality.
Two different parents wrote to me recently about a Veteran’s Day flag-folding ceremony in their children’s public school. The ceremony in both cases was filled to the gills with religious language. A few excerpts:
The flag folding ceremony represents the same religious principles on which our country was originally founded…In the Armed Forces of the United States, at the ceremony of retreat the flag is lowered, folded in a triangle fold and kept under watch throughout the night as a tribute to our nation’s honored dead. The next morning it is brought out and, at the ceremony of reveille, run aloft as a symbol of our belief in the resurrection of the body…
-The first fold of our flag is a symbol of life.
-The second fold is a symbol of our belief in eternal life.
…
-The fourth fold represents our weaker nature, for as American citizens trusting in God, it is to Him we turn in times of peace as well as in times of war for His divine guidance.
…
-The twelfth fold, in the eyes of a Christian citizen, represents an emblem of eternity and glorifies, in their eyes, God the Father, the Son, and Holy Ghost.
-When the flag is completely folded, the stars are uppermost, reminding us of our national motto, “In God we Trust.”
My correspondents had reasonable concerns about the separation of church and state. Me too. But I had just as much concern about the separation of fiction and reality.
If there’s an original meaning to the flag-folding ceremony, that’d be interesting to know. Less interesting is learning what someone somewhere dreamt up and applied ex post facto. And that’s what happened here, according to both Snopes and the U.S. Air Force, whence the religiously-saturated ceremony is falsely said to have sprung.
By 2005, the Air Force (apparently tired of having this ceremony falsely attributed to it) wrote a script of their own. “We have had a tradition within the Air Force of individuals requesting that a flag be folded, with words, at their retirement ceremony,” said the USAF protocol chief in the Air Force Print News. The article continues:
This new script was prepared by Air Force services to provide Air Force-recognized words to be used at those times…Individuals who hear [other] scripts end up attributing the contents of the script to the U.S. Air Force. But the reality is that neither Congress nor federal laws related to the flag assign any special meaning to the individual folds. “Our intent was to move away from giving meaning, or appearing to give meaning, to the folds of the flag and to just speak to the importance of the flag in U.S. Air Force history,” he said.
The new script replaces unconstitutional Christian triumphalism with entirely constitutional nationalistic triumphalism. An improvement, I guess — at least in public schools.
The new script includes actual footnotes. References to the flag’s role in the Battle of Baltimore, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the moon landing lead to my favorite:
3Based on historical facts.
I wished I’d known about that source in grad school.
Another parent email:
My son came home from (public) first grade today and told me that they read the legend of the candy cane at school. He told me, “It’s about Jesus.”
Ring a bell? You may have seen this one in your inbox:
A Candymaker in Indiana wanted to make a candy that would be a witness, so he made the Christmas Candy Cane. He incorporated several symbols for the birth, ministry, and death of Jesus Christ. He began with a pure white, hard candy. White to symbolize the Solid Rock, the foundation of the church, and the firmness of the promises of God. The candymaker made the candy in the form of a ‘J’ to represent the precious name of Jesus, who came to earth as our Saviour.
Red stands for what it always stands for in these things — hemoglobin. The tale goes on, but you can already smell the ex post facto. And sure enough, Snopes has this one debunked as well.
Incredibly, there was a court case about the candy cane legend in schools. A Michigan teacher asked his fifth graders to develop products as a class assignment. One student sold candy canes with the “J is for Jesus” story attached.
A skittish administrator said it constituted religious literature and pulled the project. The boy’s family sued, and a federal judge ruled that the boy’s rights had been violated. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the ruling. The case then went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear it.
Obviously I don’t know the details, but I can’t imagine what the Appeals court was thinking. A teacher reading a book about the candy cane as a tribute to Jesus presents a problem. But a student expressing religious convictions in school is protected speech and has nothing whatsoever to do with government endorsement of a particular religious perspective.
But again, it’s not just the church-state thing for me, but the preference of pretty fictions over mere reality. That’s Romanticism, the declaration that reality just isn’t good enough. Whether it’s candy canes or something Lincoln or Voltaire or Margaret Mead supposedly said, or whether Jesus actually secured us an afterlife option — well two, if you think of it — I’d rather see the world as it is than imagine it as I’d like it to be. Period.
The best epiphany I ever had during my teaching career was that the history of music, the arts, even of culture itself, can be effective understood as a struggle between Enlightenment and Romanticism. The current “culture war” fits nicely into that paradigm.
Inspired by flags and candy canes, I’ll start the New Year with a short series on romanticism, and why I so bloody frigginly hate it.
Ah, but there’s plenty of time for frothing later. First, have a Merry Krismas!
