A recently posted piece on TodayChristian.net.came across my feed today.

They call the piece “10 Questions For Every Atheist: Some Questions Atheist Cannot Truly and Honestly REALLY Answer!“(sic)  This rather odd claim is followed by the observation: “Which leads to some interesting conclusions…”  (You can find the piece here.)

I hate to disappoint the author, but these are 10 questions atheists can answer very easily, and are really, really tired of answering, and which are rather condescending. But, just to play along, I will answer them.

1. How Did You Become an Atheist?

I was not raised into a religion, though I wasn’t really taught to despise it either. I actually did embrace Christianity for a while, but I found that none of it stood up to reason, nor was it actually very ethical (More not hat in a later essay). So I rejected it because I found it unreasonable and frankly, offensive. Later, once I began studying other religions and mythologies, it became crystal clear that this one was really no different from all the rest. The bible is a mishmash of contradictory ancient texts that only make sense as part of a series of tribal cults, each more backward and barbaric than the next. Reading the bible critically, the same way as one would read any ancient text, was more than enough to convince me it is no more credible or authoritative than the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Works and Days of Hesiod (and far less well written and edited).

2. What happens when we die?

Not much. We die, dead, gone, cease to be. Our bodies can nourish the earth or be preserved or incinerated, but who and what we are lives on only in the memories of our loved ones, and in the good we’ve accomplished in the world. And that’s awesome! The notion of eternity is monstrous, be it hell OR heaven. I think people who wax rhapsodic about eternity haven’t really thought deeply about it….

3. What if you’re wrong? And there is a Heaven? And there is a HELL!

See above, both are monstrous, and if serving a jealous, vengeful, and bloodthirsty god is the price of admission to the balcony, I’ll take the pit, thanks.

4. Without God, where do you get your morality from?

Man, I get tired of this You do realize that this question implies that the only reason you aren’t running rampant in the streets is that you think someone is watching? It’s like Santa for grownups. Don’t you think you can do better for a moral code than ‘better watch out; he sees you when you’re sleeping?’

To the actual question, I don’t need a god to tell me that treating others badly is wrong. I can deduce this using reason and empathy. I do the right thing not from hope of reward or fear of punishment, but because it is the right thing. Furthermore, without the notion of divine forgiveness, I know that I do, in fact, have to live with my own actions; there is no one to make it all ok. This is actually such a basic human thing, I can’t believe you’re even asking. It tells me that as a Christian, you don’t think self-reflectively about your own ethics. I do.

5. If there is no God, can we do what we want? Are we free to murder and rape? While good deeds are unrewarded?

Really? See above. Let me note here that if belief in a god that watches you and punishes or rewards you is all that’s keeping YOU from murder, rape and pillage, please, keep believing. I am happy to say that I require no such exterior ethical nanny, being able to determine for myself that rape and murder are wrong, and the doing good things is rewarding not only to me, but to those around me. I also find it deeply sad that you seem to think the only reward for doing good things comes from a god.

6. If there is no god, how does your life have any meaning?

My life has meaning because it is brief and precious. My life has meaning because I find meaning, I make meaning. I try to celebrate the beauty of life and the world around me and the beauty in others, and I try to make the world better, even if I can only do so in small ways. Every suffering alleviated, every mind educated, every harm prevented, every kindness done gives my life meaning. I find it equally sad that you need to look to an outside god to find meaning for yourself.

7. Where did the universe come from?

I don’t know. And that’s OK. What came before the Big Bang is a mystery that remains for us to pursue. This too, is a way that our lives have meaning; to unlock the mysteries of this amazing universe. That we may never succeed does not diminish the seeking. The only failure is to abdicate the search for understanding by plugging in ‘god’ as a convenient answer.

8. What about miracles? What [about] all the people who claim to have a connection with Jesus? What about those who claim to have seen saints or angels?

People have been seeing visions and hearing voices for eons. Why do you think only those who see of hear Christian ‘miracles’ are valid? Why do think anyone hearing voices is valid to begin with? Our minds are highly suggestible; people see what we want to see. It’s so easy to cultivate a ‘feeling’ of connection, especially when others in the room are claiming they feel it too. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s a basic trick of brain chemistry.

9.What’s your view of Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris?

They are brilliant and brave men who are finally taking a stand in the name of reason. We, as a society (most societies, even) let religion get away with murder (all too often literally). We excuse discrimination, denial of education or of healthcare, indoctrination, and oppression of others by religion, that if another group were to do, we would instantly condemn. More and more, people are realizing that we cannot keep marginalizing women, gays, those with other faiths, or those with no faith. We are realizing that we cannot let religion demand that we reject climate science, medical care, and other scientific knowledge, We are realizing that we need better answers than those penned by bronze age tribes. It is time for religion to be held responsible for its doctrines and their consequences just like any other creed or set of beliefs or precepts. Dawkins, Hitches, and Harris, along with countless others, are leading the way in doing that.

10. If there is no God, then why does every society have a religion?

Because all societies had to grapple with the same fundamental questions, and religions developed as our earliest answers. But we have grown past believing that stars are candles in a big ceiling, or that people die because of evil spirits, or that chanting or waving totems will heal the sick or harm our enemies. Religion is just the next phase of development from these primitive notions, but it too has been supplanted by real knowledge. It’s time for all societies to let it go along with the tomes and chanting.

A recent public opinion poll (released Feb 24, 2015) showed a couple of very scary points. There is a lot about favored presidential contenders (though none had yet announced), and some not very surprising assessments of public opinion regarding other figures such as Netanhayu and GWBush.

However, a few items caught my eye in particular:

Q15 (Republicans) Do you believe in global warming or not?

Believe in global warming: 25%
Do not believe in global warming; 66%
Not sure: 10%

Q16 (Republicans) Do you believe in evolution or not?

Believe in evolution: 37%
Do not believe in evolution: 49%
Not sure: 13%

These are not surprising, but they are worrying. These numbers show an almost suicidal rejection of the realities of climate change, and an almost equally dogmatic rejection of science generally. Students brought up to hold these views will not be competitive in the job market here, and certainly not globally. Those who hold such views are at a significant disadvantage in terms of their core scientific literacy, or their understanding of the role of science in our lives, or as a tool for describing physical reality.

The thing is, science is not actually up for debate of this nature. Of course, science is constantly testing itself, challenging itself, and correcting itself where the evidence shows something we didn’t see before. But that’s something different, though it is a process the Right has exploited to make it seem as though science is, in fact, negotiable, subject to majority consensus, or something on which to vote. But carbon is simply carbon, no matter who likes it or who doesn’t. Hydrogen will have one proton, even if Congress or the Vatican or an Imamm or anyone else decide differently.  Gravity has no respect for politics.

And at their core, the theories of evolution and climate change are just as fundamental. Ocean salinity doesn’t change based upon political declarations, and glaciers do not reappear when a talking head declares, with uneducated certainty, that global warming isn’t real. Both of these theories, in addition to being unalterable by mere decree, are vital to our survival. Yes, both. Entire fields like genetics, immune theory, even medicine generally, rely upon the understanding that organisms evolve in conjunction with their environments. But more salient perhaps, is the significance climate change has for our future. There is no dissent or disagreement or uncertainty among scientists; climate change is real, and we are causing it. Period. Full stop. Until we admit this fact, we won’t (and really, can’t) stop causing it. There are no bigger stakes attached to any issue in our times. And only 25% of republicans think this is real. The rest have stuck their fingers in their ears, and accepted the assurances of self-proclaimed “not a scientist” politicians that climate change isn’t real.

The response to the next question in the poll is perhaps even more alarming, because it’s not about rejecting physical reality, it’s about enshrining the right to not only reject physical reality, but the right to suppress anyone who does not also reject physical reality. In fact, it rejects pretty much anyone and everyone who doesn’t agree with the entire, anti-science, largely misogynistic, Randian, egocentric, ethnocentric worldview of today’s GOP. That question?

Q17 (Republicans) Would you support or oppose establishing Christianity as the national religion?

Support establishing Christianity as the national religion:  57%
Oppose establishing Christianity as the national religion:  30%
Not sure: 13%

Let that sink in a moment. Not even one third of Republicans, as polled nationally, think imposing a state religion is a bad idea. A few more aren’t sure if it’s a bad idea. This isn’t a question of the virtues or vices of Christianity; that’s a discussion for elsewhere. It’s a question of one simple phrase: “national religion.” In ANY nation, given ANY religion, this is simply a bad idea. Period. The founding fathers knew this, and saw the havoc state religion wreaked in Europe. We see the havoc it wreaks in the Middle East today.

Hypothetically, how might such a thing work, exactly? What would instituting a national religion mean in concrete terms? Would those of other faiths or no faith need permits, exemptions, badges? Would they be subject to a higher tax rate, as Islam dictates of Jews and Christians? Whose version of Christianity would the GOP like to establish as the national religion? Acrimony between the hundreds of denominations is often just as bitter as that between fully different faiths. What of science, of history, of cold hard fact; where those counter the claims of religion, would they be outlawed, as they are in parts of the Muslim world? Would the United States try to outlaw reality?

We have come close already. The House recently passed a bill that “forbids scientific experts from participating in “advisory activities” that either directly or indirectly involve their own work.” In other words, climate scientists are banned from consulting on legislation dealing with climate science. Several states have enacted bans on the use of the words “climate change.” Yet, oddly, the weather patterns in those states remain abnormal. In the same way, removal of factual sex ed, shockingly, doesn’t remove the sex drive from teenagers. Abstinence-only states have the highest rates of STDs and teen pregnancy. Anti-vaxx communities have the highest rates of previously controlled disease outbreaks. States that are the most aggressive in shutting down women’s health care are showing higher rates of HIV infection, breast cancer, and other maladies once prevented by Planned Parenthood and similar organizations. It seems banning facts doesn’t change them. Sticking our heads in the sand only invites us to get our asses kicked.

We are (and have long celebrated the fact), a diverse, pluralistic, and mixed society, strongly founded in science and reason. Yet a growing percentage of our population wish to reject all of that. The GOP has shown increasingly racist overtones, has supported and even enacted legislation allowing and protecting discrimination, marginalization of minorities and women. It has actively undermined public education, and pushed the poor further into poverty. All this in direct contradiction to the factual evidence that shows these are bad ideas that don’t work. And the general push among the GOP is overwhelmingly towards the demolition of the wall between church and state, and the incorporation of religion into government. It is not outrageous to consider that an empowered GOP, with a republican president, could in fact move in this direction.

Consider then, the shape of a such nation, arrayed under a state religion, which rejects, by fiat, the realities of the psychical world. Science and history along with other disciplines are shaped by what agrees with the creed of the state religion, and the facts are lost. Not only will we lose out technological capabilities, our medical knowledge, but we will lose our past. “Who controls the past,” Orwell famously wrote, “controls the future.” How would such a nation face the increasingly technologically based challenges of that future? Having destroyed our ecosystems, depleted or poisoned our water, weakened our population by increasingly favoring the whims of the ultra-rich over the wellbeing of the poor, and rendered the next generation scientifically and culturally illiterate, what will that future look like?  Is it a future we want? Is this a future we want to leave our children?

Find the Poll here: http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2015/PPP_Release_National_22415.pdf

I recently got chatting with someone I met in on a political forum, and found myself in a (surprisingly and pleasantly civil) political discussion. The other person and I tend to come from rather different views, but our discourse has been rewarding. He asked me to put forth some comments on the following question, and thought it was something worth sharing:

“What does the term ‘American Dream’ mean to you? And is it still possible for everyone to achieve it?”

My background is in interdisciplinary Humanities and cultural studies, so I approach these kinds of things from a lot of odd places. In this case, I’d have to say that I see this concept though the lens of Marx, Horkheimer & Adorno, Foucault, and Baudrillard. In a nutshell, the work of these thinkers culminates in the assertion that cultural values, particularly those related to material goods, are created entirely by the interests of industry.

For Marx, it’s the Superstructure; for Horkheimer and Adorno, it’s the Culture Industry ; for Foucault it’s Discourse; for Baudrillard, Simulacra. Essentially, the thesis is that the “Culture Industry,” which refers to not only the ‘oligarchy’ that holds power, but to all industry which produces media, art, and entertainment as well as material culture (everything we buy), cannot survive unless it is ‘powered’ by something. That ‘something,’ of course is we consumers. We MUST be kept not only quietly playing our part in the production of culture (both conceptual and material, remember), but we MUST keep consuming it.

This is, after all, the premise of The Matrix (which was based explicitly on Baudrillard’s Simulation and Simulacra). The ‘machine’ can’t run without an energy source, or ‘batteries,’ in the film’s vernacular. Our day-to-day lives are the distraction, and the rat-race the hamster wheel that keep us happily (or at least busily) producing and consuming. There is a reason that our culture reifies the nobility of sacrifice, and of struggling to get by until the big break comes along, and perpetuates the notion that “hard work and a little pluck can get you anywhere.” It is imperative that the majority of people have no real awareness of how the system works, lest they discover they are, in fact, only slaves to the machine. Though this has been done so well for so long, that most people, even if confronted with the reality, choose to shrug their shoulders and return to their hamster wheel. Like Cypher, we prefer to live in the dream, and believe that we are free, independent, and in control of our choices.

THAT is the “American Dream.” It has always been a prescription for consumerism. Get the job, buy the house, have the kids, furnish the house just so, buy a nice car, keep your lawn looking perfect, your family well-dressed, and so on. The American Dream pushed the marketplace into every corner of our lives, until there is no place left where we can be citizens and not consumers (see Naomi Klein’s superb documentary No Logo on this idea). The American Dream drove us out of cities into suburbs, fueled our obsession with keeping up with the Joneses. and gave us a goal just clear enough to inform our consumption while just vague enough to keep us always doubting whether we had ‘made it,’ or if we needed a bigger house, or a newer car before we could consider ourselves successful.

The American Dream kept generations of Americans complacent and complicit in their own imprisonment as cogs in the machine. Our grandparents fought viciously (and many Americans, particularly older ones, still do), to protect the rights of CEOs, tycoons, and the super-rich to not only stay that way, but to get richer on our backs because the American Dream promised them they would be numbered among those super-rich someday. They have been so fleeced by the American Dream that they resist taxing the rich, because they really believe that will be them someday. We see voters in the poorest areas voting squarely against their own best interests time and again.

The American Dream insists that America is the greatest nation in the world. But that certainty only prevents us from realizing that we are anything but, and thereby makes it impossible to change for the better. Any ideology that questions that notion, or the virtue of consumerism, or suggests that we the people are not free, that we are a commodity, a resource employed to fuel the agendas of industry, is condemned as ‘heretical,’ or, in current parlance, ‘socialist.’

By now I am sure you don’t need to ask if I think the ‘American Dream’ is still attainable; it never was. The pursuit of it has kept us occupied, like a carrot on a stick, rather than offering us a reachable future. We have to radically revise our ideas of what it means to be successful adults, human beings, and members of society before we will have a goal that we can reach. And it can’t be the ‘me first,’ ‘look out for number one’ consumerist dream. It can’t let corporate America make the rules. We have to reject the mall, the superstore, the supersize, the ‘lifestyle brands.’ We must be willing to stop filling our lives and our homes with the latest plastic crap, made in third world countries by little better than slave labor, from toxic compounds that load our air and water with pollutants, and which, once abandoned (as they must be if the machine is to produce and sell still more), will linger in our landfills and our oceans for centuries. We have to be willing to look at windmills in our yards, to walk a few blocks, to embrace public transport that works, to recognize that civic infrastructure HAS to be a priority, as does the health and wellbeing of ALL our citizens. We should be past fearing the consequences of getting sick, past copper wire internet, past fossil fuels, and past going into lifelong debt for education. We should be past arguing about women’s health care, or gay marriage, or whether science is actually a thing.

Other countries are past these things, and they are leaving us in the dust. Our conservative pundits call them godless and socialist and communist, and flog the masses into a frenzy of fear, telling us they are coming for our American Dream. And those other nations laugh at us, as well they should.

In conversation with someone I respect today about the #YesAllWomen issue, I mentioned the “M&M” analogy (imagine a bowl of M&Ms. Only 10% are poisoned. Grab a big handful. No? What’s the problem? Not all the M&Ms are poisoned….) as a counter to the “NotAllMen” response to #YesAllWomen. I was informed that viewing every male I encounter as a possible threat, as potentially hostile, and as a potential rapist/attacker/abuser/harasser was “not a productive way to establish relationships,” and a “poor way to move in the world.”

No kidding, ya think? Tell me something I don’t know!

While this person is someone I respect tremendously both in terms of intellect, reasoning, ethics, and all around decency, to get this response from him(yes, he), was painful and disappointing. He was, however well-intentioned, speaking from inside male privilege.

It is true he was not in my life when any number of relationships went bad, and I feared for my safety, feared getting hit, was hit, was stalked, was verbally abused either in the relationship or for ending it; but he has heard all these stories.

He was also not in my life when I needed to have my car towed 135 miles through the middle of nowhere. The tow truck driver, with whom I was riding, since my car was hitched up on his truck, spent most of that time telling me in graphic detail what he could do to a woman (and most definitely wanted to do to me), with the hand from which he’d lost the outer two fingers. How does one respond in that situation? I had no escape had he decided to demonstrate without my consent. I reported it of course, and was assured that man would never drive for AAA again. Ha!

That friend was with me three years later, though, when I next needed a tow in Chicago and the same man showed up, easily recognized by that hand. I consider myself a brave person, but I quite literally ran and hid. Seeing that man from my nightmares walking around free, still working for AAA, and still having access to women in potentially vulnerable situations told me just how cheaply my experience was valued. Although, come to think of it, my friend told me then he’d never really believed me until he saw the man himself. Surely, he had thought, I was exaggerating, I took it the wrong way, I blew it out of proportion. And anyway, not all men are like that!

He was, however, in my life when I was almost driven out of my Master’s degree following rumors of impropriety between myself and a male professor with whom I had dared be friends. He was in my life when I woke up in the middle of the night to find a stranger with a knife and a flashlight standing over my bed trying to pull the covers off of me.* I never knew who that intruder was; and I never felt comfortable in that neighborhood again; I moved two days later. That man had obliterated not only my sense of security, but my financial security by forcing me to move.

That friend was also in my life when my elderly and disabled mother was traded by her roommate to a drug dealer to rape in order to pay off a $50 drug debt.

So it was a shock to me that he could still protest, almost 20 years into our friendship, that approaching every male I meet as potential threat was a problem *I* had, a flawed approach on MY part, failure of MY reasoning skills, and yes, unfair to men. As enlightened as I otherwise find this person, he pounced on MY approach to men as a problem; because Not All Men. *sigh*

Yes, of course I know that this dynamic is a poor way to begin relationships, be they personal, professional, of transitory. EVERY woman knows this. But, as #YesAllWomen has so poignantly shown, we also know the price for rejecting this approach. We are told as young girls to be careful of every man we meet. We are told not to do a thousand things that will put us at risk. And I’m not talking about sex without a condom or skydiving, here. I’m talking about all the things large and small that women calculate all the time.

Don’t talk to strangers. If a guy at a bar asks for your number, give him a fake one, because it’s dangerous to just refuse outright. If you leave work (or anywhere) late, find someone to walk you to your car. Be sure to let a friend know when you leave somewhere, where you’re going, and then call them when you have arrived safe and didn’t get raped going home a few blocks at night. Give a friend the name and number of your date, and a time you will call to check in, so they can give police the info if you never come home from that date. Pay attention to how you walk if you’re alone at night; remember, don’t walk like a victim. Don’t wear a ponytail because it makes a convenient handhold for an attacker. Keep your keys between your fingers so you have a weapon at the ready. Yell ‘fire’ if you are attacked, because you have a better chance of actually getting help than if you yell ‘rape.’ This is a woman’s reality, every day. We all know this drill.

And let’s not even start talking about the professional world. I have never, in any of the jobs or careers I have had, been assured of fair treatment as a woman. I have been harassed, marginalized, underpaid, “gal-Friday’ed,” propositioned, threatened; the usual litany. All women have experienced some kind of misogyny or discrimination. That’s what #YesAllWomen means!

That is the reality that men cannot ever truly grasp; no more than I, however much I may care and want to make it better, can ever really grasp what it is to be a person of color. It’s just not my reality, and the best I can do is accept that it is a reality in which I will never participate, and accept that I do not deserve to be above suspicion in terms of my behavior on race until and unless I demonstrate that I’m not racist. I don’t have the right to co-opt the discussion of race by defending my not-racism. And I sure as HELL don’t have the right to tell a person of color that viewing all white people with caution is a “poor way to move in the world.”

Not that I haven’t done just that. I have “but not all white people’d” with the worst of them, with the best intentions. I have been guilty of this as surely as I have been guilty of racism, in ways I could have understood had I been paying attention, and in ways I probably could never understand because I live inside white privilege. But that’s just it. If you live inside a privilege, you don’t get to tell those who don’t share that privilege that their fear, caution, or misgivings are a “poor approach.” Very few people wear signs identifying them as racists. No one wears a sign identifying them as a rapist, an abuser, or a misogynist. And like racism, sadly for both, misogyny can be dangerous, even fatal. So yes, women do—and at present, have to—assume that because 10% of the M&Ms are poison, this M&M could, in fact, be poison.

And no, that doesn’t mean I hate men, or view them all badly. Is it unfair to men? Hell yes, it is. Misogyny hurts men, too, I don’t think anyone is arguing that. But it hurts men differently. And I’m not going to bet my life and safety to assuage the butthurt of a man who is offended because I regard any male I don’t know as a possible threat. Don’t like it, my male interlocutor? Be the change.

There was a kerfluffle a few years back about a police department that had lost the trust of the community because they had not acted swiftly and decisively to remove corrupt officers. I think this is much the same situation. Nobody WANTS to live in a world where they can’t trust the police, and of course, no one thinks every police officer is corrupt. But as long as you know that some are, you just can’t know. As long as some are, this one *might* be. And as long as people who report corrupt officers are ignored or disbelieved, do you really feel comfortable trusting any random officer with your life? Now replace ‘officer’ and ‘the police’ with ‘man/men,’ and ‘corrupt’ with ‘a rapist….’ Now do you get it?

But remember, only 10% of the M&Ms are poisoned. Eat up!

* Just to be clear, while this was a terrifying incident that stayed with me for years, I was not physically harmed. I woke up, and with all the good temper I usually show when awakened in the middle of the night, began cussing the guy out and demanding the get the &*^% #$@! our of my house right the hell &*^%$ now. Not the response we are taught to have, I know, but in this case, it clearly derailed his power fantasy, and after backhanding me across the face, he fled into the night, letting out my four cats in the bargain. And it does not escape me that had I followed the advice women are given for how to handle such circumstances, which is “don’t fight back, just survive.” I would very likely have been raped….

I got into a (very civil, actually) discussion on FB about this. The other person began with a CS Lewis quote claiming that the statement: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God” is a fundamentally ludicrous idea. I replied that, given what we know of both history and text, the notion of accepting the ethical ‘love your neighbor, care for the sick and the poor’ message of the historical teacher, while remaining skeptical of claims to divinity is quite reasonable. 

She reasserted that it was not really logically possible to accept even an ethical dimension to Jesus without accepting the divine. Her reasoning seemed to be little more than ‘because Bible.’ And also CS Lewis. Essentially, the argument is this: 1) Jesus was a great moral teacher (bible says so). 2) Jesus said he was divine (bible says so). 3) If he said he was divine and was not, he lied. 4) Great moral teachers do not lie (I say so). 5) Therefore, either Jesus was not a moral teacher, or he is divine. 

Oh, the fallacies just abound in that little bit of reasoning! Let us look for a moment at the false dichotomy of ‘he is or he lied.’ We know, even from the firmest apologist’s point of view, that the Jesus represented in the gospels spoke in metaphor and allegory. He is, even within the gospel texts themselves, often misunderstood. To suddenly pull a 180 and claim that much of anything that Jesus supposedly claimed is crystal clear and must be either true or a lie is a huge logical fallacy, even if we take all of the text at face value.

But there is far more going on here. For me, personally, and academically (which I can’t really separate) it is the evidence of history (and lack of evidence in some cases), that makes it plausible that there was a Jewish man named ‘Yeshua’ (a name as common as John or Bob in our time), who preached about loving God and loving your neighbor. That is, after all the core of the Jewish decalog. And there were literally hundreds of these messianic preachers in Judea in this time period. That he may have been crucified by Rome at the request of the Jewish establishment tells us nothing. The Jews didn’t like trouble makers (what occupied people want to make their occupiers really mad?) Rome didn’t look kindly on dissidents, either, executing scores of them in this time period, many by crucifixion, a favorite punishment for traitors and rebels.

However, the assertion of actual divinity is firstly almost inconceivable from a Jewish messianic preacher (a claim of actual divinity would be the pure blasphemy to any faithful Jew, which, if the gospels are to believed even historically, the Jesus portrayed therein most certainly was). Even among the splintered and fringe sects among 1st C. Palestinian Jews, this would simply been all but impossible. More to the point, regardless of the semantics of the claim itself, is the fact that such a claim also postdates the supposed time frame of this man’s life (the historical details we are given in the synoptics contradict each other, so we can’t be sure of the exact dates for anything). 

Paul, trained in the mystery cults of the Hellenic world, with their dying and rising gods, is the earliest author of the NT, and admits outright that he neither knows or cares about ‘Jesus the man’ in his lifetime. His vision of the Christ is highly rhetorical (not surprising given what we know of his training; his roots in classical rhetoric are evident in his text), and wholly spiritual. He says little to nothing about the mortal person of Jesus or the claims he may or may not have made. In fact, his entire narrative far more closely resembles that of the countless dying and rising god cults in whose narratives Paul was steeped, coming as he did from a classical education.

The synoptics (referring to Luke, Mark and Matthew, called thus because of their strong similarities in structure and content), come next, but the earliest of them is written roughly 30 years after when we think Jesus’ execution would have occurred, by followers of followers; third- and fourth-hand accounts, told by people with their own interpretations of things, and their own reasons for writing. You will notice, if you read them carefully, that there is little mention of a divine Jesus in the synoptics. Each of them reflects their writer’s ideas, background and perspective. And we know that these are not simply a person sitting down and writing what he recalled. For one, they come a generation or more after Jesus’ death. For another, we can see large sections that were copied directly from each other, and in some cases, what appears to be another source text which we no longer have. (This is part of what I mean by textual evidence; meticulous analysis of the text in terms of structure, syntax, grammar, etc. Much the same way we can tell the difference between the writing of say, Jane Austen and a novelist writing now. It’s the same language, but it reads differently, reflecting the time period. It would be fairly easy to spot a passage in Austen that was added in modern times, for example.)

John, the ‘odd man out’ among the gospels, was written fully 60-70 years after Jesus death, when the followers of this new form of Judaism (for that is what it was, at first – they weren’t speaking of a different god, after all) had begun to come into serious conflict with the Jewish establishment. This is evident in the text; almost every account we have of tension or violence between the followers of Jesus and the Jews comes from John. John is also the source of the vast majority of writing on the idea of Jesus as divine, which was the hotly debated and deeply divisive point of contention with the Jews. John is trying to establish this faith in Jesus as something different from Judaism; he is trying to defend and establish the idea of Jesus AS divine. However, the divinity of Jesus is not hotly debated right away, only once the new faith has come into contact with the Gentile, Hellenistic world, in the time when John was written. Why not? If it’s such a big point of contention, one would think it would have been the issue right away, but it isn’t.

The best explanation for this is that there was not an assertion of divinity by the possibly historical person (or amalgam of several people), we now know as Jesus, but that this was a development or adaptation of a core message which occurred when that message came into contact with other, similar narratives. We see this happen all the time, in this period and region, and throughout history. After all, we get Jesus’ winter solstice birthday from that of Sol Invictus; historically, it appears he would have been born in the summer months. We get many of our saints from local pagan gods (Nicolas in Scandinavia, Brigid in Ireland), and many of the Christian customs from those of the local people to whom the new faith spread. Is it so difficult to imagine that the unrecorded words of a single preacher among many might get adapted and added to over time, in a period when few knew how to read or write, and most of the transmission of the message came by oral tradition?

This is also is borne out by the rest of the historical evidence we have from the time, which is actually quite extensive; the Romans were obsessive record keepers. But neither Roman historians and record keepers, nor any others, ever make mention of Jesus in his supposed lifetime, only making note of the unrest and conflict in which the new ‘Jewish cult’ was involved in Palestine decades later. It’s much like a legend such as that of Paul Bunyon – a man becomes locally famous, a sort of icon, and the tale grows with retelling until it has become a legend. That doesn’t mean the actual meaning or value of the original message is void, only that it makes more sense once you clear away the legend. There is no reason to need the divine to make the ethical message valuable, any more than Gandhi or MLKJr need to be divine to have real, genuine value as figures worthy of respect, admiration, being held as ethical role models.

Again, that’s an academic perspective. I deal in history, evidence, and parsimony. I have found, and not only with myself, but with virtually every other academic I’ve spoken to in the fields of history, cultural studies, religious studies, etc., that the deeper one studies any mythology, the more clearly one is able to see it as the product of its time and culture. This is especially true when you have studied multiple mythologies, and found that really, the stories are all basically the same, and the answers the stories give are all basically the same, reflecting the same core human experience. From there, it becomes simply impossible to imagine that any one is somehow exceptional, or is somehow literally true when the rest are merely allegory. And since certainly they can’t all be true, there is no reason at all to privilege any one over any other, as none make any more or less sense. As the quote goes, we are all atheists with regard to thousands of gods. You are an atheist with regard to all but one, I am an atheist with regard to all.

That doesn’t mean I wholly disdain those mythologies—quite the contrary. In all honesty, I find a few of the supposed teachings of Christ to be quite fine, if stunningly basic and unoriginal, and others to be every bit as archaic and (in contemporary terms), backwards as one would expect from a male member of a first century patriarchal sacrificial cult. I do appreciate the tenacity and creativity of Christianity as a movement in the first few centuries; as socio-political or cultural trends go, it is certainly a unique success story in terms of adaptation, integration into society and having a knack for surviving. I likewise have appreciation for the complexity of Hindu mythology. I have tremendous affection for mythology in general as an evocative and creative form of metaphorical thought. I am especially fond of medieval Christianity. It’s a core part of my academic work, after all; and you can’t devote a career to studying something if you don’t have some affection for it. And if my saying that in those terms bothers you, remember that millions of other people would be equally offended, not by my calling Christianity ‘mythology,’ but because I called the Hindu stories mythology.

So two stories came up on my FB feed today, and together, they made me see red. They are unrelated stores, and I will link to them both:

The first is about a heroic teen who saved a friend from a drunk driver: ”Teen saves friend from suspected drunken driver, gets hit instead”

In the first story (which was also carried on other news outlets), the main takeaway seems not to be that a teen boy risked his life by pulling a friend out of the way of a drunk driver, saving her life at the cost of some serious injury to himself. No, the takeaway is that that poor kid saved the bitch’s life, and STILL ends up in the ‘friend zone.’

And the second wasn’t a story, but a video someone shared: ”The Sex-Starved Marriage: Michele Weiner-Davis at TEDxCU”

If you don’t have the stomach for watching the TED talk, I can summarize: wives, stop mistreating your husbands, if he wants sex and you don’t, just live by the Nike motto, and ‘just do it.’ Yes, she actually said that. Just do it. In the comments, she said “What’s 15 minutes out of your life when you consider the great benefits to your spouse, your relationship and your well being?” She did say it’s not just a problem with women, but I all her examples were women, so….

Now the problem with the friend-zone is one I have been railing about for a while. The “friend-zone’ is essentially the idea that women are sex-dispensers into which so-called “nice guys” put niceness coins and therefore rightly expect sex to pop out. And if a woman is not romantically interested in a guy, even if he is (always by his own assessment, I notice) a ‘nice guy,’ he has been unjustly consigned to the ‘friend-zone,’ a pitiless realm where good men are denied sex by the women they desire. It’s misogynist claptrap of the highest order, but it simply won’t go away. 

The fact that roughly half of the comments on the first story revolved around how the “poor kid” was “friend-zoned for life” reveals the horrifying prevalence of the idea that there are times when a woman, not otherwise interested in a man, is obligated to give them sex. This is simply wrong. What’s more, it’s a prime specimen of sexist troglodyte rape culture.

There is NEVER an occasion in which a woman (or anyone) is obligated to have sex if she does not want to. There is NO amount of emotional blackmail, guilt-tripping, whining, or false entitlement that makes that expectation OK. Period. Full stop.

Now I am not saying that the kid in the story is guilty of this; the interviews don’t say. But certainly this is how this incident is parsed in the public conversation, and therein lies the problem. 

So how does the second item figure in? This woman, who claims to be a sex therapist, essentially accuses married woman of friend-zoning their husbands. She doesn’t use those terms, but it amounts to it. She says that the person who wants less sex/sexual contact needs to just do it. Just do it. If you don’t want to, if your sex drive suffers from age, hormones, fatigue, whatever? Too bad. Do it anyway, you might even end up enjoying yourself. Isn’t it worth a few minutes of your time if he’ll be happier and easier to live with? 

I can’t begin to say how wrong this is. This IS rape culture. Yes, she claims it’s not only women, but all her examples are women. And honestly, while I do know that men can suffer from low desire, I’m guessing the numbers are far from even. (I’d be delighted to be proved wrong; Medscape says 26-43% of women experienced low sexual desire compared to 13-28% of men; Archive of Sexual Behavior reports a far higher lifetime prevalence of low sexual desire among women (16%) than men (4%)) So please, spare me your slipshod veneer of ‘I’m speaking to guys, too.’ Shall I define ‘privilege’ for you?

Essentially, what this woman is saying is that if you are a woman who has a lower sex drive than your spouse, you are broken, you are selfish and unfair, and you are hurting him and courting divorce. (The entire video, outrageously, is couched as divorce avoidance advice; don’t get me started). Spouses are entitled to sex, so you have to provide it. In this formulation, being married is only one more set of circumstances in which women are obligated to put out whether they want to or not, and in this case, their relationships, home, and family may depend on it. ‘How dare you expect a man to stay in a relationship with you if you won’t give him sex? It’s only 15 minutes out of your day….’ HOW IS THIS EVEN OKAY?!

Gee, wait a sec, don’t we have some word for unwanted sex? Let me think…oh, yeah, RAPE. Oh, it’s a choice? It’s a choice to provide sex in exchange for financial, emotional or social stability and security? Oh, that is different. But don’t we have a term for exchanging sex for some other consideration? I know there’s something….oh, yes; we call that prostitution. A man doesn’t have to leave a $50 on the dresser for a woman to be aware that she is prostituting herself. 

Having known women who struggle with unequal desire in their relationships, I have seen the damage this does. Women who struggle with this end up trying to ‘just do it,’ and end up feeling cheap, used, objectified and ashamed, to say nothing of losing trust and intimacy with their partners. They struggle with feeling defective, broken, and unworthy because society (and, often, their spouses) tell them the inequity is their fault, and that it is their responsibility to fix it, to pay up and put out. They struggle with spouses who equate sex with caring, and use guilt and emotional manipulation to make them feel that ‘if they really cared, you’d be willing to have sex as often as I want it.’ It’s toxic, and it’s regressive, and we, as a society have to stop perpetuating this idea.

What is so terribly, horribly hard to understand here? What is so complex about women having sexual agency that is so hard to wrap our heads around? Are there actually men out there that WANT women to ‘put out’ when they don’t want to? (Don’t answer that; the obviousness of the answer is the whole problem!) But haven’t we fought this out by now? Hasn’t it been established that no, women do not have to lie down and shut up when men demand it, no matter the circumstances? Haven’t women struggled long enough with blame, guilt, and labels like ‘frigid’ or ‘cold fish?’ Do we really expect women to simply accept that dispensing sex is their function in life, and is more important than their own self-worth, their own sexual selves and sexual agency? Because I thought we were in 2014, not 1714. (I’m beginning to think I’m mistaken on that point, however….)

Anyone who’s read me for any time at all likely knows that I have little patience for either anti-science superstitious hysteria, or ‘one-world’ government, Illuminati conspiracy hysteria. In this category of intellectually offensive and ridiculous nonsense I include things like creationism, anti-vaccers, aromatherapy, micro-chipping, the Bilderburg conspiracy, chem-trails, black helicopters, and so on.

That said, there have been plenty of times that a new technology hailed as the greatest thing ever, the wave of the future, FDA-approved, and perfectly safe has been anything but. Cigarettes, DDT, lead paint, RBGH, and frakking come easily to mind; there are plenty of others. These things, once ‘scientifically verified’ as safe and beneficial, have since been proven otherwise. And certainly, early protests against these things were critiqued as being anti-science, conspiracy hysteria.

So clearly not everything government and/or industry tells us is safe actually is safe. Mistakes are made. It then becomes something of a minefield to navigate the fine line between unreasoning hysteria and recognizing and revealing a genuine threat. Enter the GMO.

One the one hand, progressive and pro-reason icons like Dawkins and ScienceBlogs roundly condemn GMO opponents as little better than anti-vaccers. Even the DailyKos published an article entitled “GMO Truthers need to be kicked out of the Progressive movement.” The article offers both a strident condemnation of GMO-related “anti-science,” and a short list of refuted claims. And there is certainly a lot of hysteria about GMOs that does mirror the anti-vaccer rhetoric, including claims that GMOs cause autism, or all the studies in favor are industry funded, to name only two.

On the other hand, a lot of profit relies on this technology, and not just in terms of food production for the starving of the world (though there are other, arguably better solutions that involve changing our entire culture of food, but that is a related, but different topic; next post perhaps). But to what degree IS it reasonable and rational to hold corporate stakes as determinative in assessing the relative safety of a food technology? And while the mere fact that other nations have enacted partial or full bans on GMOs is not a testament to their safety in and of itself, consideration of which nations have done so gives one pause. Of the 26 (as of late 2013, almost double the 14 in 2012), many are progressive nations whose overall approaches to issues like sustainability, health, and the environment are admirable: Germany, France, Australia, Japan. These are not nations known for their hysterical, superstitious tendencies (like the US). And while the main consensus is that GMO foods do not produce nutritional harms, there are significant questions about environmental impact, both of the crops themselves, the impact they may have on insect populations, and even more significantly, the impact of the chemicals and pesticides these crops are so often engineered to withstand. Round-up ready crops mean Round-up will be used, in abundance. We know that both herbicides and insecticides can have serious negative consequences. There are also questions about adaptability, seeding, and loss of native species (both crops and the ‘weeds’ that such crops are designed to resist). While some of that may technically be a licensing and patent issue, it is nevertheless inextricably tied up with the question of GMOs as healthy for not just our bodes directly, but our environment, our economy, and our world. So perhaps a GMO tomato won’t hurt me. But what happens if one company ends up owning the vast majority of crops? Corporate monopoly is, I think it is safe to claim, never a benefit to anyone but the corporation.

Mind you, you will not see anything in this post about ‘meddling with nature,’ or anything of that sort. This is not, from the tomato’s perspective, an ethical issue. However, it might be an ethical issue an far larger scales. So perhaps the claim that eating a ‘conventional’ cucumber will give you cancer IS hysteria. But I am not convinced that the question of the safety of GMOs is as simple as that. I think it’s a far more nuanced issue, with much farther reaching implications and questions. And on that level I take some exception to the notion that raising those questions puts me in the same camp as the anti-vaccers and chem-trail believers (or Oprah, for that matter!)

What are your thoughts? Is this an issue for you, and if so, on which side? Why? For those outside the US; how is this issue perceived and debated in your milieu?

Recently the self-proclaimed prophet Cindy Jacobs warned Jim Bakker that President Obama’s “anti-biblical” policies with regard to LGBT equality will lead to blizzards and “weather disasters” in the upcoming year. Such pronouncements from Jacobs are nothing new; in January of 2011 Jacobs attributed the sudden die-off of blackbirds in Arkansas to the groundswell of support for the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

Jacobs is considered a prophet in the Council of Prophetic Elders, a sort of steering committee for the New Apostolic Reformation. Together with Peter Wagner, Jacobs helped create the theology of “spiritual mapping” which seeks to battle demonic influences in specific geographic regions. In addition to prophecy, she claims powers of faith healing and the ability to cast out ‘gay demons’ (that is, the demons that cause homosexuality, not demons that are themselves gay). She is a somewhat marginal, though by no means unpopular figure in the religious right, and she has massive followings in several Spanish-speaking countries. She is also the co-founder of Generals International, a ministry dedicated to “achieving societal transformation through intercession and the prophetic.”

Her association of catastrophic events with America’s sinful ways is also not unique to her. Jim Bakker has made similar predictions, as have many other leaders of the Charismatic Right. In fact, this trend of interpreting world events as signs from God seems to be a hallmark of this new breed of evangelical activists.

It’s an odd development, showing a distinctly animistic influence, as well as a sort of paranoid form of blackmail directed at those who believe differently. “You’d better do what we say, or God will strike you with a tornado.” But more significant than either of these, is the relationship between these kinds of claims and the evangelical tendency towards climate change denial.

The denial of climate change is inextricably linked with the idea that God ‘micromanages’ his creation with a political and social agenda in mind. After all, if we humans can change the climate, then obviously God isn’t in control after all. One might think events like Katrina, the Japan earthquakes, or the devastation in Haiti might lead to this exact conclusion, but these events, too, are interpreted as part of the plan. But this bit of theology isn’t just about explaining away the usual run of natural disasters.

Explicitly connecting everything from dying birds to general weather patterns to specific political agendas offers the perfect explanation for the embarrassingly obvious signs that global climate change is, in fact, happening. By allowing their followers to attribute changing weather patterns to the ostensible sins of the nation, they remove any possibility that even the clearest evidence will convince them of the reality climate change, much less do anything about it.

That Jacobs, Bakker, and others put their unwavering support behind a political party that stands unquestioningly in line with corporate America and opposes sustainable energy and environmental regulation may or may not be an accident, but it is an alliance that certainly works well for both sides. That is a question I will explore in future essays.

How to Intelligently Criticize Religion: Atheist claims that are no better than Theist claims.

One of the most common criticisms of the religious is that they argue from poor information. Whether it’s cherry-picked, made-up, out of context (yes, sometimes things actually do require context!), or just flat-out wrong, this is a frequent tactic used by ill-informed faithful when trying to argue for their position. Sometimes, the person doing the arguing doesn’t even realize their facts are wrong, but we atheists certainly seem to agree they should take the time to get the facts straight before they whip out some hum-dinger of fiction like it’s an RPG.

I hate to be the one to say this, but atheists do this all the time, too, and it drives me nuts. We are the ones arguing reason, facticity, rationality, and critical thinking. For our side to trot out the same tired old tropes is doubly damning. We, by our own rhetoric, should know better. Therefore, I am entering the fray to set straight some of the biggest boo-boos atheists make in criticizing Christianity.

“Religion stifles knowledge; after all, the church taught that the earth was flat.”

Religion can stifle knowledge, for sure, and there are loads of examples of that. But not this one, because they didn’t.  The earth as a sphere was postulated by Greek philosophers as early as the 6^th C. BCE, and proven in the 3^rd C. BCE by Eratosthenes, among others. There is nothing in the Roman inheritance of Greek ideas to suggest they doubted this, and in fact, the idea of a spherical earth spread throughout most known civilizations by the 1^st C BCE or so. It remained the central theory, despite a few early Christian theologians who took the Hebrew scriptures as reason to doubt it. Of these, the most famous would likely be Athanasius, who was otherwise a brilliant thinker, but whose insistence on a flat earth remained eccentric, and was never widely accepted. In the Middle Ages, the Church’s position remained that the earth was spherical, as evidenced by the works of the Venerable Bede, Thomas Aquinas, and Hildegarde of Bingen to name only a few. The whole thesis of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy revolves around (no pun intended) a spherical earth, and Dante was nothing if not orthodox relative to Church doctrine. Incidentally, the Islamic world likewise inherited the spherical earth from the same classical sources. 

The idea that former ages, most notably the medieval period, believed in a flat earth is the mythical product of 19th century historiographical tradition. Much like the lurid accounts of the Inquisition exaggerated that phenomena all out of historical proportion (more on that below), the same tradition supposed that medievals thought the earth was flat. Overall, they went to great lengths to exaggerate the ‘backwardness’ of the ‘dark ages.’ In part, this is owed to the Enlightenment and the shift towards scientific thought in opposition to religion, in part this is due to the Protestant ‘propaganda’ campaign against the Catholic Church. In other words, such a myth arose out of much the same sentiment that encourages its propagation today – the admirable desire to reject a dark and superstitious past in favor of a new age of reason. However, it’s still wrong.

It is also the case that in the Middle Ages in particular, the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge rested almost entirely with the Church. Secular universities were not a thing until well into the 14th C., meaning the whole of the 12th C. Renaissance took place within and thanks to the cathedral schools and monasteries. We have dozens of manuscripts showing passionate and meticulous investigation of the natural world throughout the Middle Ages, and the Church was, in fact, the primary funder of all kinds of learning and teaching. Even a cursory survey of medieval Christianity will show a celebration and appreciation for the natural world, and a genuine hunger to understand it. Unique in the history of Christian theology, the Christianity in the Middle Ages revolved around the principle that reason, instead of conflicting with faith, could and should inform it, and a faith that was not build on a firm foundation of reason was worthless. The later Middle Ages and the Renaissance did occasionally regress, but that regression was typically fueled as much by the Protestant anti-Catholic rhetoric than any inherently religious motive. After all, if the Catholic Church was the primary source of education, the Protestant was all but obligated to oppose such education as only more ‘popery’ to be rejected at all costs. We see ample evidence of this in the doctrinal positions of many of the founders of Protestantism. But not until the colonial era was any kind of universal repression of knowledge or learning a program of the Church, and even there it was sporadic, and motivated less by religion than by racism.

“In the Middle Ages, the church burned millions of heretics, including anyone who didn’t agree with everything they said.”

Well, yes, the Inquisition did investigate heresy. The Inquisition was founded to “inquire” into (from the same root as our term ‘inquest’), or investigate heresy where it occurred. In the vast majority of cases, especially during its first couple centuries when it was under the direct control of the papacy, its primary aim was convincing heretics to turn back to the proper path. This was done by discussion, ‘exhortation,’ and often education. Remember, we have a low literacy rate, so people came to understand their faith from whoever preached it where they lived. Typically just correcting misunderstandings was enough.

Yes, we can quibble about the appropriateness of a central entity controlling the beliefs of individuals all you like, and I’ll address that in a moment. First the facts. In its first century (give or take), the Papal Inquisition followed a far milder process of jurisprudence than did the secular courts of its day, who employed torture as a matter of course, even for freely confessing offenders. The Church forbade the use of torture by the Inquisition for decades, and when they did capitulate under outside pressure, then only allowed it under strict and narrow conditions. Harsh, yes, but a more enlightened approach than the secular courts. Similarly, the Inquisition’s rules of evidence and testimony were far more rigorous and protective of the accused that the secular courts, and their conviction rates, to say nothing of execution rates, were drastically lower. Inquisitors (and we have extensive documentation from many) might go a lifetime and pass severe sentences on no more than 5 or 10 out of thousands; far less than the horror stories we hear would lead us to believe.

Where the Inquisition did become significantly more brutal was in Spain, where it became a demented project of Ferdinand and Isabella (yes, the same monarchs whom we praise for funding Columbus). The two Spanish monarchs desired a fully Christian kingdom. Upon ascending the throne, they decreed that all Jews and Muslims must either convert or leave Spain. The vast majority of those being peasants lacking the wherewithal to leave, most converted or pretended to. The Spanish Inquisition, under Ferdinand and Isabella, and directed most famously by Torquemada, was turned wholly against ‘false’ or reverted converts.

It was here that torture became more prevalent, and numbers of executed began to rise. However, even the Spanish Inquisition’s tenure accounted for no more than about three thousand lives over an almost 150 year run;a far cry from the ‘millions’ so often bandied about. The inquisition in Spain was repeatedly censured by a Papacy at the time barely able to control events in its own curia, and utterly unable to exercise any control over events in Spain. But Spain’s Inquisition was not approved by the Church.

Certainly we would say that any lives taken in the name of religion, or the ‘wrong religious belief’ are too many. However, we must recognize that our acknowledgment of this is entirely a product of modern, post-enlightenment thinking. It is ludicrous to hold people in the Middle Ages to the same standard; ideas like freedom of religion, pluralism, or individual rights as we understand them simply didn’t exist then. It makes as much sense to blame people for not thinking in these terms as it does to blame them for not administering antibiotics to their children – the tools did not exist. For them, religion and the fabric of society were one and the same, and the concern for those who might get it wrong and suffer eternally was actual, genuine concern for the well-being of others. Hard as that is to understand today, it is a fact of history.

Secondly, we must distinguish between the true numbers and the “untold millions” spoken of today. The Inquisition was an attempt to save those who were understood as having fallen into error. In that respect, yes, it is an example of oppression by current definitions. But it was not the murderous, bloodthirsty reign of terror as it has been described. The same historiographic tradition that promoted the flat earth myth, promoted this exaggeration as well, building on the anti-Catholic propaganda circulated by the (at least as oppressive, if not more so) 16th C. Protestant Reformation. Layer on a few decades of Enlightenment anti-religionism, and a dollop of Romantic literary leanings (the original source of the gothic genre) and you have a medieval period set in a lurid and nightmarish landscape that history simply does not support.  Certainly, the Inquisition stands as an example of the dangers of religious thinking. However, if we are to critique the Church’s history, let’s be sure we are clear on what it actually is.

“The church executed Galileo for saying the earth revolved around the sun.”

Actually, the Church did not execute Galileo. They didn’t even censure him at first. Initially, his strongest opposition came from his fellow astronomers. When he presented his ideas, the initial opinion of the Church was that his work seemed entirely orthodox. Nevertheless, they asked him to hold off publishing it until they could look it over. Galileo, however, grew impatient, and published his work anyway, despite having signed a binding contract not to. He was arrested for breach of contract. Once Galileo had forced the issue, the Church was prepared to allow the possibility of his theories, but not grant them full factual status until they made their own study of his work. (Like it or not, it was essentially the late medieval form of the peer review.) Had Galileo quit there, he would have been fine. However, Galileo responded with a treatise defending his ideas which included a scathing personal critique of the Pope. He was arrested again, and accused of being “vehemently suspected of heresy” at which point, he hastily and under virtually no duress, recanted. He was placed under house arrest, and spent the rest of his days living in considerable luxury under that house arrest, with his later work undisturbed and even funded by the Church. Again, this may seem barbaric to our modern sensibilities, but for the standard of his day, Galileo was downright coddled. Certainly, he was never the brave and stalwart champion of science we like to imagine, ruthlessly persecuted by a vicious and backwards church, another misconception we can safely attribute to the 19th century.

“The Crusades were a massive land/power/money grab by the church, launched against a peaceful and enlightened Islamic culture”

It is true that the culture of the Islamic world in the Middle Ages had some real advantages over Western Christian culture at the time. Supremacy of sophistication in areas like medicine, mathematics, early sciences, and some literary areas certainly do belong to the Islamic world. But that’s about as far as this claim can go. In purely military matters, both sides were equally brutal, and equally likely to commit acts of violence and bloodshed that are truly shocking to us today. Massacres of innocents, torture, exceptionally cruel forms of execution, and general brutality were evenly distributed.

In terms of the Crusades as a power grab or quest for plunder, we have no evidence that this was the case, and plenty to suggest otherwise; many people impoverished themselves and their families in order to participate in what they truly believed was a noble defense of their way of life. While one cannot say Christendom fought a purely defensive war, nether was it purely offensive. From its inception in the late 8th century, Islam spread like wildfire throughout the southern Mediterranean. What began as a small movement among a largely fragmented Arabic people, had in under two centuries spread (rarely by peaceful means), to encompass not only the Middle East, but much of North Africa, most of Spain, and parts of Southern France to the west, and large swatch of Asia Minor reaching nearly to the doorstep of Constantinople to the east.

By 1000, over half of what had been the Roman Empire was dominated by Islamic caliphates. And they had not stopped or even slowed their expansion in the 11th century. It was in part the advancing Islamic conquest towards Constantinople that set off the Crusades. The other proximate cause involved a sudden change in Islamic policy towards Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land. For the majority of Islam’s first two centuries, relations with Christendom had been cordial. Both Christians and Jews living in the Levant had been mostly left to themselves, and pilgrims were welcomed. However, in a sudden and unexpected move in 1009, the Fatamid Caliph Al-Hakim desecrated the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, and suddenly began persecuting Christians in Muslim lands. This, together with the steady advancement into Christian lands makes the Crusades at least a moderately defensive war.

“The bible teaches that all people came from two men, Cain and Abel.” Or “…from Cain and Abel and their sisters/mother – incest!”

It’s easy to conclude this if, like most Christians (as we are so fond of pointing out), you haven’t actually read the book. However, the text itself makes no claims that Adam and Eve were the ONLY humans present in the beginning. There are several places where Genesis refers to other humans besides those Yahweh created. Part of this comes from the textual problem of taking creation myths from one source, and grafting them onto tribal origin stories from other sources. Most of these myths began as tribal origin stories, not as world creation myths. The Old Testament in particular reads more like an anthology of late neolithic and early bronze age myths than a cohesive myth artifact from a single culture. It is to be expected that they would contradict. Understanding this is key to critiquing it intelligently.

First off, when Cain is marked by God, it is so that no one who sees him will kill him. So far, we only have Adam, Eve, and Cain (and in some versions, a third brother, Seth). Clearly this tells us there are other people around, otherwise, for whom is this mark intended? He is banished from his family, so it must be for the benefit of other people. However, marking of a criminal or outcast so that other tribes would not kill him was a common practice in ancient Middle Eastern cultures. Secondly, Cain goes off to the ‘land of Nod’ and finds a wife and builds a city. Now unless Cain grabbed an as yet unborn sister before leaving home, and unless he’s a loon who builds a city in the middle of nowhere just for himself, there are clearly other people out there, and they are referenced in the text of the Bible. Once again, there are plenty of absurdities in the Bible without having to harp on those that actually aren’t there. Besides, this case offers a lovely example of how little many theists really know about their sacred book…

In the last week or so, I’ve come across two largely unrelated news items that have gotten me thinking. I suspect they are not unique, nor are the they sort of headline that typically gets everyone talking. But I can’t help but think these are terrifically important, both in their own right, and as a mark of something fundamentally wrong.

The stories are as follows:
160 year-old Documents Intentionally Destroyed in Franklin County, N.C.
The basic story (full story at the link) is that an entire roomful of historic documents (whole shelves of record books along with boxes of wills, deeds, photos, letters, etc.) was discovered in a previously sealed room under the Franklin Co., NC courthouse. Researcher, overjoyed as such a find had just begun the slow process of sorting and cataloging them, when they were told to cease doing so. After some weeks of red tape, an as-yet-unamed local government agency swooped in, took the lot to the basement, and systematically and intentionally burned them in the incinerator.

The other story, halfway across the world:
Lebanon Library Torched, 78,000 Books Burned By Islamists
In this story, a historic library in Tripoli was burned by arsonists after a pamphlet considered offensive to Islam was found tucked into one of the books. The library contained thousands of rare historic texts and manuscripts, from both Islamic and Christian history.

So what do these have in common, aside from the obvious destruction of historic materials? I think that the connective thread here is simply that: that there exists the idea that destroying the past is a good thing. That the destruction of history in the furtherance of one’s current ideology is acceptable. And I think this is the worst, deepest, most fundamental kind of violence.

George Orwell, in his masterwork of political tyranny and destroyed history, Nineteen Eighty-Four, wrote the following:
“If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened — that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death? And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'”

Who controls the past, controls the future. An odd truth, but a powerful one. One of the deepest horrors of Orwell’s dystopia is that the past has no meaning, there is no past but that authored by the Party. Ellie Wiesel, writing so often of the holocaust, demands that the past be protected from violence. Because in doing violence to the past, all violence is allowed.

And so, these news stories represent the very worst kind of violence; violence to truth, violence to the past. The author of the first story conjectures (with reasonable foundation), that the records were destroyed to hide the shady doings they might reveal done by the forefathers of someone currently in political power. Islam has a long record of destroying the past, from the Buddhas of Bamiyan to the proposal to destroy the Sphinx. In the second story, we don’t even need an ostensibly offense pamphlet to see the destruction of a library, a historic library at that, as a purely brutish sweep against knowledge, against the past, any past, and record that things might ever have been other than as they are now.

The Christian right attempts violence to the past regularly, with its ongoing attempts to rewrite the past of our own nation, making of its Enlightenment progressive deists a crew of Christian fundamentalists; Thomas Jefferson recast as he Sam Brownback of his day (there’s a terrifying thought!). And this is, ultimately, the mark of the unsustainable worldview. When your doctrine requires that there be no past, only a harsh glare of a bright. unchanging, ever-present NOW, you have, in essence, become The Party of Orwell’s Oceania.

And once there is no past, no truth, no objective reality, then all violence is possible. This hated enemy has always been hated, has always been the source of all our ills, and must be eradicated. And once gone, they never were. Without the past, without memory, there can be no genocide, no holocaust. There are no ‘atrocities,’ because there is no ‘never again.’ When the past has no meaning, and is rewritten at will, there is no wrong, for what was done, was not done.