Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, 09 April 2006

Anupama Shrotri on Honest Inquiry

Someone called Anupama Shrotri, in a New Scientist list said it had been hilarious to read scientists’ letters replying to a fatuous article by a professor of theology at Kings College, London. It seems “scientists are a touchy lot”, objecting to any idea of a supreme being but merely replacing one god with another. So the “adore-me-or-be-damned” God must be replaced with the “agree-with-me-or-be- condemned” one. The writer continues:

People with common sense seem to be caught between the devil and the deep sea. Neither a theologian nor a scientist seem to be able to provide answers to all the mysteries of the universe. Until such time as someone does, how about less bullishness and more humility? What we all need is an honest inquiry, not only into the “how?” but also into the “why?” of the universe, which may well be the only way to the god of truth.

Obviously, Anupama Shrotri is one of the “people with common sense” asking nothing more than “honest inquiry” into the “why” as well as the “how” of the universe. It would be useful if people like this began by taxing themselves with a little inquiry before they made judgements that prove their ignorance. If scientists are touchy, it is because they offer explanations openly published for everyone to read with a sound methodology and carefully collected evidence to back it up, and yet dunces like this will equate all of that careful and transparently honest inquiry with the wild and unfounded speculations of theologians and other tricksters.

If a theologian tells us that something is God’s will, what methodology or evidence has he got to establish it as any sort of truth, and what use is the answer anyway? That God has willed everything in the world is no explanation of anything. Science is only equal to religion for people who are too idle to study it. Religion offers a lazy “answer” to everything but in fact no more explains “why” than it explains anything at all. Science answers questions of “why”, as well as other types of questions. Why a house collapsed can be answered by forensic engineers looking for the clues. Why a plague appeared can be answered by doctors scientifically looking at the symptoms, and biologists tracing its origins. Why an avalanche happened can be explained by earth scientists looking at the geology of the mountain.

What scientists cannot do is say what the purpose of anything natural is. That is the sort of “why” question the people of common sense want to be answered, but they are beginning with the assumption that everything has a purpose. That is the assumption religions make so that they can come up with the answer they want. It is God’s will. Science is too honest to use such tricks, and the people of common sense turn out to be people who want a religious explanation—in short, they are dishonest for not coming out with their hidden agenda. When religion has a methodology that does not begin with assuming the answer it wants, then it might deserve more respect.

Richard Dawkins on Darwinism and Morality

Richard Dawkins, in a BBC debate in 1996, observed:

I should like to say something as a Darwinian… if I were sitting around the table trying to come to some agreement about morality, the first thing that we should do is to throw out Darwinism.

Dawkins seems to be saying that because Nature is traditionally red in tooth and claw, it is a poor guide to morality. If one were just picking from Nature at random, it would be true, of course. Darwin was as shocked as anyone by the notion of the ichneumon fly maggot eating a caterpillar alive, the basis of the Alien films. Not much guide to morality there. Yet Nature also demonstrates altruism and cooperation. Nature, via science, provides us with guides to morality by considering carefully what the successful human society is Naturally like, and then adjusting it by introducing laws, for example, to reduce suffering to a minimum while improving security and happiness to a maximum. That is what the science of lawmaking is anyway, and studying human behaviour in the context of biology can only help us to do better. Our aim should be symbiosis with Nature, not conquering it. Biological knowledge, and the aim of symbiosis should guide us in making social decisions as fairly as possible. The importance of studying Nature through science is that it is not idealistic, but honest. If we must die, what comfort is there in pretending that we can live forever? What is the point of having babies that will sooner or late lead to a mass famine? Religious sentiments are no more the right guides to conduct than scientific ones.

Karen Armstrong on the Problem with Religion

Interviewed as a background piece on the publication of her book, The Great Transformation, Karen Armstrong says:

I can’t tell you how bored I get every time I step into a taxi and the driver says that religion is the cause of all the wars in the world.

It is surprising but encouraging that the taxi drivers of this world are more perceptive than religious gurus like Ms Armstrong. Keren Armstrong is the former nun who left her order after seven years and began a PhD at Oxford but failed it. It was a great boon for her because as a consequence she took to writing informative books on religion, books that many Christians and Moslems would benefit from reading. I refer to the fundamentalists among them. She is persuaded by her lifetime of religious study that religion is not primarily about belief in some set of dogmata but is about the good that the belief was meant to produce. And that is where her boredom by taxi drivers becomes insensitivity. After all, the evidence of history is that the taxi drivers are right. Religious belief ultimately does the opposite of the good that the founders of religions surely meant them to yield. They divide people by overemphasising their different outlooks on life, valid as they are in themselves, by the false certainty that their beliefs alone are God’s. Tribalism then has the approval of God and the most terrible outcomes are what we have seen in history.

The article suggests that Armstrong analyses fundamentalism correctly:

All fundamentalism is a riposte to secular modernity, whether it is Jewish orthodoxy, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu or Moslem.

Secularims has pushed God off the center stage, and that is what so-called religious people do not like. They no longer have the respect that they once had for their easy beliefs, applied rigidly. They have “their backs to the wall”, are “afraid” and “lash out violently”, Amstrong tells us. So much for the depth of their beliefs!

In their rage and fear, they… ruin the tradition they are trying to defend.

In other words, the impact on their own behaviour, of the religious tradition they profess, is so flimsy that the rage induced by society’s rejection of it meets no moral resistance by their religion convictions, and this is “nearly always” so. Religious people like Armstrong want a more understanding belief system, one that many Christians seem quite able to find in Christianity, despite the literal exclusiveness of it according to the bible. What they want is liberal religion. Religion that recognizes that God cannot speak to everyone in the same way, because they have different cultures, languages and mind-sets to begin with. So all religions ought to respect each other, and find what is held common, rather than disputing what is different. The problem is that the fundamentalists reject the liberal solution. That is why they are fundamentalists—for them it is the fundamentals of their faith that cannot be compromised, and they are most often the differences between them.

Armstrong told an anecdote. Presented in the feature to show how strong religion is in the USA, in fact, it shows how impossible it is to compromise with fundamentalists. At the millennium, spokepeople for different religions addressed a conference of 1500 people held in Oregan University. The seven theologians were concluding that no one religion had a monopoly on truth, when an enraged Christian leapt up in the audience screaming that Jews and Moslems had rejected Jesus and could burn in hell fire, together with all the theologians like the speakers who disputed it.

Armstrong concluded that people like the enraged believer had to be “listened to and understood”. Well, it is a very liberal position to take, but liberals in turn want to know that fundamentalists will listen to and understand them. There is no need to ask. The fundamentalist position is against any idea of understanding others, That is the trouble with fundamentalism. There is no compromise with it, all there is is yielding to it or making them accept secular freedom in society. If we yield, liberal society will be overthrown. It took well over a thousand years to escape the dark age rule of Catholic Christendom. Are we now to yield up another thousand years to Calvinist madmen? Liberal society can tolerate religions, naturally, but only religions that tolerate liberal society, and each other within it. If they are not willing to, then the law must make it so. If they get power, terrible laws will certainly be enacted. We are already seeing it in Guantanamo Bay, and in the erosion of our freedoms. Let the law be strict but fair in the defence of liberal secular society. Religion will never give us anything better.

Arkon Daraul on Piety

Arkon Daraul relates a little parable about the meaning of piety. It is an eastern folk tale about a Turkish sage and his son.

Centuries ago in Anatolia a sage lived with his small son in a hut beside a ziarat—a shrine where a holy man was buried. Over the years, the place had acquired such sanctity that pilgrims came from as far as Africa and the Indies tp say a prayer and invoke the sanctity of the unknown saint. The boy, on the threshold of manhood, decided that he would travel in search of knowledge, go to seek his fortune, as the Prophet Mohammed had once said, “yea, even unto China journey, for knowledge is the most excellent of all things”.

His father gave him a donkey to ride upon, and the youth set off. He passed through the famed cities of Islamic learning, through Isfahan, Bokhara, Samarkand, sitting at the feet of teachers, and then turned his steps towards China. In Kashmir, several years later, that the donkey suddenly lay down and died. The young man was beside himself with grief. Unable to decide what to do, he buried his only friend and sat in mourning upon the mound.

Certain travellers passing by asked what ailed him. “My only friend and companion is buried here—he who never failed me, who inspired me and who was my means of progress.” Deeply impressed by this, they assumed that he spoke of a spiritual teacher. They donated some money for a dome to be built over the grave of someone who must have been of much merit to inspire the sorrow which they had seen. The youth, Mustafa, never looked back.

More years passed, and his father found that the revenues of his own shrine were suffering through the diversion of pilgrims to this new and highly sanctified one in Kashmir. He decided to travel thence, to ascertain who this revered sheikh might be. As soon as Mustafa saw him, he broke down and confessed the truth. “Know, my son,” said the sage, “that all is ordained in advance. It was fated that there should be a shrine here and that you should become a shrine-keeper. For let it not be concealed from you that the grave of the Unknown Sage which is my own shrine, marks the spot where, under similar circumstances, the father of that donkey of yours expired.”

Secret Societies, 1961

No comment!

H L Mencken on US Fundamentalism

Over the past five years—thanks to the presence of a born-again Christian in the White House—the United States has witnessed a campaign of intimidation against the secular state by a newly empowered force in the American body politic—the Bible Thumpers. Of course, the polite, po1itica1ly correct term for these idiots would be “Fundamentalist Christians”. But like many an angry East Coast liberal, I am appalled by the attempts of these purveyors of gimcrack sanctity to alter the doctrine of the separation of church and state that is central to our temporal, democratic life. So let’s discard the “tread gently” approach of much of the American media these days, and call these people what they really are—self-satidfied religious fanatics who consider the US to be God’s Preferred Terrain.

When you have a clown as President who informs the public that he has two fatbers (his biological dad and the Man Upstairs), and when you have a ferociously fought campaign to have Intellgent Design (translation, Genesis 1:1) taught alongside Darwinsm in certain state school systems, any sensible and literate American must also start to wonder, “Where tbe hel1 is H L Mencken to vituperate these antediluvian purveyors of pious platitudes?”

I think that Mencken (1880-1956) would have approved of such extravagant phraseology, especially when directed against the religious right, because Baltimore’s most famous native son—and perhaps America’s best known journalistic disturber of the peace—spent much of his career railing with great stylistic extravagance against the absurdities of the country’s religious “mountebanks” (one of his favourite words), not to mention the entire doctrine of America the Righteous. To repeat one of his most often quoted statements:

Heave an egg out of a Pullman window, and you will hit a Fundamentalist almost anywhere in the United States today.

Plus ça change. Mencken railed against specious patriotism and all-American conformism, and our underlying Puritan tendencies. This was best exemplified during his lifetime by that inane experiment in national temperance, Prohibition, which he regarded as a complete infringement on personal rights, especially as he once called booze “the greatest of all the Devil’s inventions”.

Yet Mencken, the excessively gifted wordsmith, helped turn The Smart Set into one of the most influential literary journals of the early twentieth century. This was the Mencken who first published several of Joyce’s Dubliners stories in the US, who gave F Scott Fitzgerald one of his flrst literary breaks, who cbampioned that exponent of American naturalism, Theodore Dreiser, and who promoted the work of Sinclair Lewis and his acidic perspectives on small-town life (Main Street) and corporate class conformism (Babbit).

He could lambast the unquestioning masses—whom he christened “the booboisie”—as well as the general stupidity of politicians, while 1eading splendid character assassinations against the likes of William Jennings Bryan (the one-time presidential candidate who prosecuted the Tennessee teacher John Stopes for teaching Darwinism). Mencken decried him as “a poor clod… a peasant come home to the dung-pi1e”. More than any other writer of the first half of the twentieth century, Mencken understood the inherent paradoxes of the American character.

We posture as apostles of fair play, as good sportsmen, as professional knights-errant—and throw beer bottles at the umpire when be refuses to cheat for our side… We deafen the world with our whoops for liberty—and submit to laws that destroy our most sacred rights… We play policeman and Sunday-school superintendent to half of Christiandom—and lynch a darky every two days in our backyard.

That antiquated, pejorative expression for an African American—especially seen within the context of his literate rant against American hypocrisy—points up the manifold contradictions in the person of Henry Louis Mencken.

David Hume on Postmodernism

Until the advent of postmodernism, no one, ploughboy or scholar, doubted that speech and writing had to make sense, or nothing could be done. Now much that is written and spoken in the west is nonsense, poisonous nonsense! Yet, it is taught in our universities and spread in newspapers, magazines and broadcast media. Anything that purports to be true ought to be free of sentiment, prejudice, hope, myth, magic and anything fantastic, but postmodernists, as they call themselves, disregard truth, and feel able to admit into it anything that can be imagined. Logical expression is no better to them than the rambling of maniacs, and such lunatic ramblings are now freely accepted in academia, and in academic publications supposed to be contributing to knowledge. Concatenations of words meant to sound impressive are considered as good as careful study of the real world over many years. Alan Sokal famously proved it when he had a spoof paper published that meant nothing at all. In 1748, David Hume recommended:

If we take into our hand any volume of divinity or metaphysics, let us first ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity and number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

The Postmodern fad returns us to the drivel of the Church, and the consequences will be the same unless the sense of Hume returns to prominence—unfashionable though it might be. Without it, we shall return to the Dark Ages. That is what Postmodern quacks must want us to do.

Paul E Little on how we know God exists

Mr Paul E little, before his death in 1975, built himself such a reputation as a professor of Christianity that he was in great demand by evangelical Christians everywhere in the world to explain the complexities of their belief to the Christian sheep. So it was that he would write books with titles like Know What You Believe, and Know Why You Believe, the poor Christian ungulates having bound themselves in the bonds of Christian belief without knowing what it was or why they had done it. Needless to say, the books are patronizing in the extreme and utterly mendacious, but no one likely to buy books with titles like these, no one who believed something without knowing what or why, are going to have the sense to criticize books supposed to belatedly put them in the picture.

“How can we know God exists?” is a reasonable question Mr Little puts in one of his dazzling tomes. His answer is that we only know because God has revealed Himself, and He has done it in four ways—through:

1. creation
2. history, especially the history of the Jews
3. the prophets
4. Jesus Christ

Of course, no one would have known any of this unless God had arranged for it to have been written down. So that is what He did. He wrote it down in the Bible, and “bible” means book, so He wrote it down in a book! Now even the little lambs seem to know instinctively that, even though God can create the universe in six days, can part oceans and flood the world to the tip of a 17,000 feet high mountain, He has no track record as an author. Of the great miracles He can do, writing is evidently not one of them. All of the books we have show all the likely signs of human authorship, and no one has ever been able to produce any book certainly written by a god or an angel, though some have tried it, and inevitably been believed!

The bible is among the books with the tell tale signs of human authorship, putting it in the category of normal books recording human thoughts, and, indeed, the biblical writings show all the signs of having been edited, in some cases many times and incoherently. Mr little is, however, a head of the flock, as we can expect him to be as a master of biblical literature with a diploma from Wheaton College to prove it. God is perhaps not interested in doing silly little miracles like writing books—too demeaning, maybe—so, you know what, He gets people to write them for Him! Yep. God only likes to do the biggy miracles, so leaves the trivia for lesser spirits to organize. “The Word of God”, as the Christians like to call their book, is given to its authors by God, and written according to how they are moved by the Holy Ghost, a bit of God that seems to work on its own while God concentrates on other things. The lambs are thus satisfied by the wisdom of the great communicator, but some Bolshie ones might still be puzzled because they only have Mr Little’s word for it, marvellous though it might be. But he is ready. Ah, Ha! The proof is to be found in 2 Peter 1:20-21 and 2 Timothy 3:10, so there you have it. QED.

I remember getting this this from some doorstep evangelists who buttonholed me at my own front door forty years ago. They had obviously been reading Mr Little’s collected works, but even as a young and callow father, it made me gape in amazement before I burst out laughing. The evangelicals did not stay. They do not like being laughed at, but that is all you can do, and what I have done ever since. Anyone can see the idiotic circularity of it except besotted Christians. They are not called the flock for no reason.

The proof of the divine inspiration of the bible is… er… in the bible! No Christian can understand that the author of any spurious divine book—prepared for nefarious reasons, usually of personal gain—could add a sentence affirming its divine origins. For Christians it works perfectly. It is then certain sure the book is divine, and the proof is right there in the divine book! The remarkable thing about inspiration by God is that whatever is produced shows no signs of having been inspired. Every sign is that it is produced entirely by human beings. For Christians, what is considered to be inspired by God is inspired by God. The bible was written by men, Christian theologians freely concede, but these men, and no others, were not faking it because they, and no one else, were inspired by the Holy Ghost. (They did not then do it of their own free will! So much for free will.) All other books that use the same trick are, of course, fakes, and the claim of divinity in them would be proof of it!

Christians know this because they already trust this particular book to be divine on the authority of their parents or pastors, people like Mr Paul E Little, who are determined to keep the funds flowing into their coffers, and need sheepish people to make the contributions. Paul the apostle to the gentiles started it with his collections, and Christian confidence tricksters have carried on the tradtion ever since, the sheep remaining sheepish, and the world suffering indescribably whenever these cloven hoved intellectuals got into power. The Word of God is not the source of their belief at all, it is an instrument used to fool them. They trust the book on authority, and then use the content of the book as spurious evidence of their belief. They trust the book as divine and so the book is to be trusted. That is the circularity of the argument.

The snake of Paradise described in this book is called the most subtle of all the creatures God had made. So, it was more subtle than the man and woman whom it allegedly fooled, and must, on that account, be capable of fooling all thoughtless people with his wiles. Could it have fooled the poor flocks of Christians that this ridiculous book is the Word of God? Christians consider the snake to have been Satan, the evil spirit, and if they believe the holy book is divine, they must believe too that satan is capable of fooling them. Can any of them prove he did not?

Christian Taliban?

Fanny Charles, the editor of a small town free-sheet covering parts of Somerset and Dorset, wrote a splendid editorial in her tiny newspaper which normally gives church affairs a sycophantic covering, as small newspapers necessarily must. I reproduce it here to inform a wider public.

School boards in the Bible Belt of America’s mid west do not allow the teaching of evolution and Darwinism. A generation of children will grow up believing the creation story of Genesis as scientific fact. How they explain fossil trees, dinosaur bones or the development of Man through hundreds of thousands of years, from the hominids of East Africa is a mystery. Presumably they just deny everything as a sinful hoax.

Fanatical “Christians” have shot and killed doctors who work in abortion clinics. They also oppose stem-cell research that might lead to the prevention or cure of fatal genetic disorders. But these seemed to be extreme religious phenomena confined to the other side of the Pond.

Then the BBC decided to screen the award-winning Jerry Springer—The Opera. I never wanted to see the show on stage or on TV. I have more interesting things to do than watch a cynical presenter manipulate naïve publicity-seekers for the amusement of the audience.

But a relentless, strident “Christian” campaign against the programme made it essential viewing for millions. I thought it was boring. My tolerance of four-letter words and people making fools of themselves is minimal. I didn’t think it was funny, post-modern, ironic or clever. I thought it juvenile, tawdry and tedious. But that is my opinion.

So I exercised my freedom to switch it off.

I may not have liked it, but I defend absolutely the right of the company to stage the show and of a public service broadcaster to screen it. I don’t like reality TV or adverts for computer games, but I don’t want to ban them.

Last week, an organisation calling itself Christian Voice scored an extraordinary victory, persuading a cancer charity not to accept a donation of more than £3,000 from the cast of Jerry Springer-The Opera. They achieved this by threatening to picket and demonstrate outside the charity’s cancer centres. The money would be tainted, according to the spurious rhetoric of these blackmailing bullies, because the show is blasphemous.

Five hundred years ago people were burned and tortured to death as heretics for the slightest departure from the teachings of the (Catholic) Church.

Four hundred years ago people were hung, burned or pressed to death for blasphemy or witchcraft, because they did not bow to the prevailing puritanism.

Radical “Christians” have apparently so terrified Hollywood that the anti-religious content of His Dark Materials will be removed from a film version of Philip Pullman’s books. That is like filming Paradise Lost without Satan and the Fall.

Taking money from a cancer charity is not the work of Christians. Morally, it is theft. But this is not about Christianity—a faith built on brotherly love, forgiveness of sin and acceptance of human frailty. It is about bigotry and bully-boy tactics.

Christian Voice is the creed of the puritans, spread by the intemet. They want to stop anything they don’t like. That isn’t just censorship—it is fascistic control in the name of religion.

In another country these people were called the Taliban.

Fosse Way Magazine, 539, 4 March 2005

Biogenesis

Some creationist online solemnly tells us:

The scientific law of biogenesis was discovered and proved by the great French creationist (sic) scientist, Louis Pasteur. This law of science states that life can come only from life and so life cannot spontaneously “arise”. Life can come only from pre-existing life. So the first life on earth must have been created by a living (and therefore personal), intelligent, supernatural Being. No one has ever made new life from scratch in a laboratory (and if they did it would prove intelligent creation by people in a laboratory, not evolution).

Life cannot arise spontaneously from no life, except when God makes it do, so the creationist believes. Even animals as clever as humans cannot make life in their laboratories, but God can. Yet this man says: “Life can come only from pre-existing life”. Quite so! As every schoolkid knows, Pasteur was countering the idea that life could commonly arise, as in maggots arising in meat and mice in dirty linen. Plainly enough, if they could, evolution would be proved wrong. The creationist thinks they can so arise, because God could make them so arise if He wanted to! Creationists actually believe that at some stage He did want to, and made life arise in just this manner. For some reason, God was then satisfied with creating life, and even creationsists think He must have now abandoned it, if Pasteur is correct, but why should a creationist think so? God could still be making mice from dirty linen and maggots from rank meat, and the logically self-consistent view of creationism ought to be to believe He does!

Pasteur showed that life was only generated by a previous generation of the same type of life. Mice give birth to mice, and maggots, the infant form of flies, are born of flies. Biogenesis is the birth of living things from their own kind. The creationist says:

So the first life on earth must have been created by a living (and therefore personal), intelligent, supernatural Being.

Pasteur was not saying that life was created (made!) by some other lifeform, but that it was born of the same species as itself. A supernatural being cannot be of the same kind as a natural species! In typical lying fashion, the creationist aims to trick his readers by sleight of hand. Whether the first lifeform arose spontaneously or was made by God, it is a violation of Pasteur’s “law of biogenesis”. Whether God did it or it happened spontaneously, it began the chain of being—the birth of each generation from the previous one—that led to all life that has ever been, explaining Pasteur’s discovery.

The scientist, like any rational person, has to ask which explanation is the simplest, or most parsimonious. The theistic explanation requires a superbeing called God already to exist—with no explanation of how or why—before any other life can be made. The natural explanation accepts that life can arise spontaneously from circumstances that can happen, even if infrequently, in the real world. The natural explanation is the simplest. It does not require the hypothesis of God, a being that Himself must have arisen spontaneously, but not in a simple form like the earliest conjectured life in the universe, but in an unlikely form complex enough to make the universe itself! Either that or God has lived eternally—that is for infinite time—as an intelligent supernatural entity and must—an infinite time ago—have gone barking mad.

Making Life!

Breathing life into inanimate matter was once thought to be something only God did. Not now. Scientists are trying to do it (New Scientist 12 February 2005). But what is it that denotes that something is alive? Christian Creationists will be more shocked than ever to know that the essence of life is Darwinian evolution. Living things do not merely reproduce, but they reproduce in such a way that they can evolve by natural selection—they can adapt to the environment. So, the living unit needs to be contained in some way so that it counts as a unit, it must have some way of transmitting its characteristics to its offspring, and it must interact with its environment in such a way that it can grow and eventually reproduce.

Conceptually, the easiest way of doing it is to begin with a cell-like membrane containing RNA that can catalyse its own reproduction. Harder is beginning with a living cell, to remove all its genetic information and replace it with a synthetic set of genes, an artificial genome. The lifeform made will not have been made from scratch, but will be something that currently does not live. US scientists are trying these approaches. More fundamental is to begin with a cell-like membrane and add in the ingredients of life until the right combination is found. Italian scientists are trying this. One US group is beginning ab initio and trying to make life from blobs of fat containing PNA, peptide nucleic acid as its genome.

Various parts of the processes have been tried and seem to work, but so far they have not been combined together. Feeding the proto-life forms is a problem that is being tackled by a project called PACE, programmable artificial cell evolution, by which the molecules needed to feed the first life form are fed to the proto-cell just as it needs them, with no problems from possible disruptive effects. These critical effects that might disrupt the growing life process can then be carefully studied and problems avoided. The idea is that once a hump is overcome, the feeding algorithm can be withdrawn and the proto-life cell left to its own devices. German scientists are tackling this.

When, though, will the proto-life form be alive? Here is a philosophical question that will prhaps be answered by the next stage, but there must be a grey region when the assembly is functioning as if it were alive yet is not quite there while it needs a support system. The next stage will be to check whether the proto-life is actually evolving, adapting to its conditions in such a way as to improve its efficiency at living. Statistical tests are being developed in the US to check this adaptation. Whether it is life or not will be clarified when the experiment is shown to succeed, because then the characteristics of the stages can be examined, and some criterion of life possibly determined.

If the researchers succeed in making life, then humans will be the creator gods of that particular form of life. The creationists and fundies will be outraged, but not Catholics. A Catholic theologian, John Haught, accepts that evolution has been creating life for 4 billion years, and this will be simply one more step that God had foreseen. He knew that humanity would eventually create life. We are still part of God’s plan. It is just that humans are getting closer and closer to the image of God.

Heaven and Hell

All believers imagine they will go to heaven when they die, even those who are criminals in life. They picture heaven much as a continuation of present life, but a place where they will reunite with all their best friends and loved ones that have already died. It is a good job for the clerics that these believers do not dwell too long on the conception of heaven and hell, for, if they did, they might not believe for too much longer. Many are incapable of thinking about it, of course. They are too simple or shallow. Life, much as it is for us, inevitably would end up monotonous if it were eternal. Christians cannot or will not think of that.

An interesting tale meant to illustrate submission to God’s will rather than the nature of heaven, nevertheless illustrates the latter too. In Leander’s Märchen…

…a man died and awoke in the other world. There S Peter appeared before him and asked him what were his requirements. He ordered breakfast, the daily papers, and all the comforts of life. He met all his friends regularly, enjoying life just as he had while alive. And, so he continued for many centuries until, eventually, he had got everything, been everywhere and done everything he wanted to do. He was fed up, swore at S Peter and complained of how dull and boring it was in heaven. S Peter looked surprised. “Heaven?” he said. “You are in hell. Hell is where you do as you like—you do as you will. Heaven is where you do as God likes—you do His will.”

The modern idea of heaven is not the spiritualist idea held by most Christians, but more that of the Jews who rested in the bosom of Abraham. Just being with God gives perfect contentment. Perhaps so, but is that actually eternal life? Physical death, in which the body decays and the brain stops functioning, is also perfect contentment. How do they differ? Life has to involve the things that characterise life, surely, otherwise it cannot be said to be life at all. Resting forever in Abraham’s or God’s bosom, assuming we are still conscious and self-aware, is impossible for an eternity. It would be more boring than Leander’s hell, and must drive us insane very quickly on the eternal timescale.

The truth is that eternity necessitates the absence of time. There can be no time in heaven, more especially as heaven is meant to be a perfect place, and what is perfect cannot be changed without it losing its perfect state. Any change to perfection must be a flaw. To prevent change, the source of it, time, must be eliminated. A perfect heaven therefore must be static, a place in which nothing moves or changes, but always remains perfect as it was created. This static heaven again sounds little different from death. It is certainly not life in any way that we know it.

What applies to heaven must apply to an eternal place of torment too. To exist eternally, it too must be timeless and so nothing can happen in it. There can be no tortures therefore. The original place for sinners mentioned in Revelation was not a place of eternal torture but was absolute death—the second death. People died from physical life, in this concept, were resurrected for judgement, and, if the judgement went against them, they were tipped into a notional sea of utter blazing destruction to suffer the second, the absolute, death. So, the choice is utter total death for sinners or the bliss of a static perfection eternally in heaven for the righteous. It’s not that much of a choice really is it?

Thank God for That!

Terrific news from the Archbishop of Canterbury. The British have become a society of atheists.

On the role of the church in contemporary Britain, Dr George Carey admitted that “a tacit atheism prevails” and people have stopped believing in life after death. Dr Carey appealed to Anglicans to redouble their efforts to reach out to unbelievers. A sermon at S German’s Cathedral on the Isle of Man, acknowledged that most of the UK population were no longer Christian. In a population of 60 million, the number who turn up at Anglican services on Sundays has dropped below one million. We have moved, in the course of a century, from being a Christian society to one that is much more diverse in its beliefs. This is a good thing. Yet people still express views that resemble deism or even animism, suggesting disillusionment with traditional forms of worship as much as with the notion of a supreme being.

The Anglican establishment might conclude that this is as bad as unbelief, and from a self-interested point of view it would be right. The church’s authority has been undermined, perhaps terminally so, with its teachings on sex and marriage widely disregarded. Few believe that fornication, as it was quaintly called, will lead to the torments of hell, no matter how often Dr Carey insists that lifelong heterosexual monogamy is the only acceptable expressian of adult sexuality.

Carey thought the idea that death is the end of life is “bleak”, and results in a narrowing-down of human aspiration to “greatly scaled down forms, such as our longings for family happiness, the next holiday or personal fulfilment”. If human beings have nothing to strive for or fear in another life, so the argument runs, they will necessarily be diminished in this one. Never mind the truth of the matter, what bothers bishops is why anyone would be altruistic if individual extinction is certain. Why not just blow your savings on a new car or taking your family to the Bahamas, and let the poor fend for themselves? And worse still, the bishops!

There are several fallacies here. One is the notion that religious convictions are the sine qua non of a moral existence. The church’s teaching says many of us are leading flagrantly immoral lives. Britons indulge in sex before marriage, serial adultery, homosexuality, and so on. Britons have seen through the great con-trick of religion, its perverted obsession with regulating private behaviour. A man, otherwise a saint, is immoral for having sex with another man. Most of us, in this country, have outgrown such infantile attitudes.

Far from having a monopoly on goodness, Christians are no more likely than atheists to behave well to their fellow human beings. On the contrary, the Churches have been singularly wicked throughout hsitory. The Roman Catholic church had a deplorable record of colluding with fascism throughout the twentieth century, from the congratulations it bestowed on General Franco after the Spanish civil war to its efforts on behalf of General Pinochet. Hitler was far from a text-book Catholic but the wartime pontiff, Pius XII, was happy enough to come to an arrangement with him and steer clear of potential embarrassments like denouncing the Holocaust.

People can be committed to equality and justice without being told to subscribe to them by a supernatural authority. Establishing universal human rights, as international conventions and domestic law, has been driven as much by atheists and agnostics as believers. For those not beguiled by the prospect of an afterlife, it is all the more important to change the life they live now, and that we all hand onto future generations.

Some of the world’s most inspiring thinkers, such as the poet Shelley, were atheists long before it was safe to admit it. Lord Byron, stopping in 1816 at an inn in Switzerland where Shelley had stayed, was dismayed to discover that his friend had inscribed the word “atheist” in Greek after his name in the register. Byron crossed it out, but it was Shelley’s habit, and was subsequently denounced by other English tourists, including the devout but inferior poet, Robert Southey.

The most revealing aspect of Dr Carey’s sermon was his contention that people who used to seek help from their parish priest when depressed are now likely to ask their medical doctor for pills. They are behaving “as if doctors can cure all ills and even postpone death for ever”. Postponing death is perfectly sensible for those enjoying life, whether or not they believe in an after-life. Far from hurrying to meet her maker, Mother Teresa flew to Los Angeles in her later years for state-of-the-art medical treatment.

The archbishop’s remarks are a reminder of the function of religion in mediating the fear of death. Believing in God was not so much altruistic as consolatory, and the bishops’ quid pro quo was the power they gained over their congregation. Indeed, Dr Carey’s sermon may have been franker than he realised, acknowledging not just the loss of that power but the poverty of the church’s contemporary vision. Clerics may disapprove of Prozac, but fairy stories are all they have to offer as an antidote to the human condition.

Kurt Wise

Kurt Wise, a well known creationist and supposedly a scientist, writes, in In Six Days: Why 50 Scientists Choose to Believe in Creation edited by John F Ashton, the following admission:

I am a young-age creationist because that is my understanding of the Scripture. As I shared with my professors years ago when I was in college, if all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate. Here I must stand.

So, even if all the evidence in the universe flatly contradicted scripture, he admits he would just deny the evidence. What, one wonders, is the point of science for this scientist? It illustrates the insanity of these people. No evidence will convince them. They are already convinced by no evidence. Richard Dawkins comments:

It implies that there is no sensible limit to what the human mind is capable of believing, against any amount of contrary evidence.

It shows the utter wickedness of Christianity, explains why the world was in a millennium-long Dark Age, and suggest the dangers that we still face as long as this insanity persists.

Where are the Scientific Voices?

Kenneth Marsalek, president of Washington Area Secular Humanists, in Secular Humanist Bulletin 13:2 is rightly concerned that scientists pander excessively to religious belief. Before he died, Stephen Jay Gould began to sound like a theologian. Carl Sagan hesitated, at his Pale Blue Dot lecture at the Smithsonian, to admit that God has no place in scientific theories. Marsalek commented:

If I were a cynic I might suggest that such discretion is motivated by a desire to keep book royalties flowing. Or, it could be based on a sincere desire to avoid alienating one’s audience to the point of losing them altogether, and then accomplishing nothing. Still, my preference is for more intellectual humanists to come out of the closet.

The religious right have been working towards a new Dark Age for seventy years, and where are the prominent scientists who feel strongly enough about all their lies and deceit to stand up and counter it with something frank and honest? The ones who do are a tiny minority.

Note this. Jerry Falwell Ministries has campaigned to get 35 million Christian right voters registered to influence US election systems. This violates charity law. And this. A closed-door meeting of the Christian Coalition held around 1995 was secretly taped and made public by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. In it, the Coalition founder and chairman, Pat Robertson, outlined a conspiracy to elect federal, state, and local officials. Robertson’s remarks prove that the Christian Coalition was never merely a religious organization, allowing it a 501(c)4 tax-exempt status, but was illicitly a political secret society. The Federal Election Commission has sued the Coalition in the past for contravening its charitable status by coordinating campaigns with Republican candidates in 1990, 1992, and 1994. Robertson bragged that the organization could have the power to select the next president of the United States. Curious that!

Why is there no co-ordinated movement for “Truth” as opposed to the “God’s truth” of the neo-cons and their lunatic leaders.

We have the utter farce of a US President, whose basic humanity is so much in doubt that cartoonists all over the world portray him with simian characteristics, claiming—as a recent book (The Faith of George W Bush, S Mansfield) now reveals—that God chose him! Those who think they are chosen by God are almost uniformly insane, and sufficient proof of it must be that this jungle king had to be appointed by God fiddling the ballot to discount half a million votes. Christians are never daunted by making God into a crook, like themselves. In return for God’s favour, Bush in September 2003, made $60 billion available for religious “charities” who will use much of it for right wing Christian propaganda—more bunkum.

While good men and women just stand by while all this Christian trickery goes on, we can look foward to a return to compulsory self-cooking as a punishment, though it will doubtless be in man-sized microwave ovens to make sure of its efficacy. In the US, organizations like the Campus Freethought Alliance have been opposing the religionists as part of its “Save Our Science” campaign. Scientists, historians, progressives, liberals and anyone appalled by the Christian swindlers ought to take a stance on this while they can. If they do not, it might not be long.

Fact v Faith

Creationists cannot ignore scientific truth.

After he has sorted out the mystery of the missing £500m in school budgets, the education secretary has a second somewhat older question to sort out—the mystery of life. Thanks to the painstaking nineteenth century research of Charles Darwin, this second mystery should be much easier to resolve. It has only resurrected itself because the Vardy Foundation, which operates a successful state-funded secondary school in Gateshead, is about to open a second in Middlesbrough this autumn and is in talks which would bring seven state supported schools under its control.

The current row dates back to last spring, when the Guardian revealed that the Gateshead school’s evangelical Christian teachers were undermining the scientific teaching of biology because they did not believe in evolution. Undeterred by that row, John Burn, the foundation’s chief academic adviser and former head of the Gateshead school, repeated last week his old assertion that the “competing accounts” of creation (six days by God or billions of years by evolution) were both based on faith. They would both be presented to pupils, who would “be left to take a view of it themselves”.

What is wrong with that? Something fundamental, which does not involve censorship or the right to free speech—the importance of teaching children the differences between fact and opinion. No one needs to deny creationists the right to believe in the Genesis story, but what an education secretary must insist on is that Vardy teachers make it clear to pupils that their belief is based on faith, but evolution is backed by mountains of science and hard facts. This is what the foundation refrained from doing last year, and publicly resisted last week. The first goal of a science teacher should be to show children the importance of searching for evidence and truth. Far, from trying to restrain such searches, a teacher’s duty is to promote them.

If Charles Clarke, the education secretary, is indignant about being sucked into such a quagmire, he should have a word with his friend in Downing Street. It was the prime minister who insisted on an expansion of faith schools. The Vardy Foundation, which is funded by an evangelical Christian’s 80 car dealerships, is promising £2m grants to each of its proposed seven schools, but most of the building and running costs will still be picked up by the state. Vardy should be told to respect scientific truths.

Guardian Leader, 5 May 2003

It is beyond coincidence that the UK government is fighting annual wars again, is defying the best of scientific practice in favour of mythology in schools, and is led by a evangelical Christian. These pages have been warning of a resurgence of the Dark Ages. Inquisitions and witch hunting are threatening in the US, and we begin to see symptoms in the UK. Watch out you wishy washy liberals who think the Christian religion is harmless. It is gratifying however to find that the expression we have been using here is now substantiated by the Guardian. The Christian God is the God of used car dealers.

Newman and Coulton

Many facts of history might be established with practical certainty, if only we were willing to take a little more trouble.

G G Coulton Ten Medieval Studies

On the other hand:

How successfully the ideas of millions can be moulded by the steady influence of teachers who preach plausible untruths systematically, ex cathedra…

G G Coulton Ten Medieval Studies

Someone suggested to Cardinal Newman, the well-known Victorian Catholic convert, the idea of founding a Catholic Historical Review. Newman replied in despair:

Who would bear it? Unless one doctored all one’s facts, one would be thought a bad Catholic.

Catholic Month, Jan 1903

Newman was honest enough to recognize that scholarship and faith all too frequently pulled in different directions. Many more modern Christians, not just Catholics, are nothing like as honest as Newman. They call themselves scholars but will not let their scholarship speak over their faith. These scholars prefer the words of Cardinal Manning who boldly denounced the appeal to history as “a treason and an heresy”. Christians who are fond of listening to authorities ought to listen to Coulton and Newman speaking. Between them, they say that nothing a Christian says about the history of their faith can be believed, because their scholarship cannot get past the blue pen of the holy censor in in their heads.

G G Coulton, who was an Anglican scholar engaged in historical polemics with professional Catholic “historians” was scathing about his Catholic opponents around the beginning of the last century, but had he been alive today he would not have been able to distinguish the historical lies of Catholic apologists from Protestant ones. Their finer points of theological exposition would doubtless have let him know which was which but the historical lies would have barely differed. Christian history is primarily fraud and fiction, because it must uphold the Christian story as it is popularly known. It is not interested in getting to the truth. Coulton wrote, in his Ten Medieval Studies:

If any zoologist of repute had based an important theory upon the alleged total absence of felidae from the fauna of Borneo, and, if another zoologist had replied by producing thirteen visible and tangible specimens of different felidae, there might indeed have been much curious speculation concerning the causes of the original error. But one thing is certain. The peccant theorist would never have dared to republish without a single word of apology, his original mis-statement of fact, and his original theories based on that falsehood. Even if it were remotely conceivable that he should have done so, we may at least feel assured that his speculations would have been tabooed in all serious scientific circles…

Coulton did not have a sudden interest as a church historian in zoology. This is an anaology meant to draw attention to the fact that Christian historians behave in precisely this anti-scientific way. It is accepted among them. In his day, Coulton was particularly interested in exposing the multiple falsehoods of Cardinal Gasquet, but he could have found many Protestant equals of him now, as well as many Catholics carrying on in the same tradition.

The Abbot Gasquet had earned a reputation as a Church historian. Coulton had issued a 54 page criticism of Gasquet’s lies, which he politely called “blunders”, some of which he said were so blatant that it was as if Gasquet was unaware that his own surname began with a “G”. Gasquet refused to reply properly or acknowledge any errors, and was promoted for his historical apologetics to the Cardinalate, showing that the Church also refused to recognize he was wrong.

For the Church, Gasquet was not wrong. The Church has its beliefs to uphold and they are more important than truth, as Newman had acknowledged long before. No one can bear historical truth in the Christian community, and so the facts are indeed doctored. It is the doctored facts that are remembered and taught in Sunday schools, not the historical truth. Christians accept that a lie for God is not a lie at all.

Emmet Fox

There is no better example of a Christian pious liar than a man called Emmet Fox who died in 1951. He describes himself as a scientist, a philosopher and a spiritual teacher, but, judging by his banal writings, he was bogus and a dangerous fraud. Even so, he was a successful fraud, which says something about how Americans will hide reality in rhetoric. He attracted large audiences to his meetings in the depression years. Why he was not lynched is another peculiarity that only Americans can answer because he told them, “There is no depression in nature!” His audiences were only imagining it, and they evidently went away nodding their assent. It took Roosevelt’s “New Deal” to solve the problem—or perhaps Hitler and Pearl Harbour—but Fox’s reputation seemed unsullied by his pious idiocy. It proves what Hitler himself knew quite well but people today forget, that the best lie is the biggest lie, especially when it is told by your own leaders.

Today a pious idiot telling 6000 unemployed people that they were imagining their predicament would start a riot, at least in Europe, but Fox retains a fine reputation as a scientist and religious orator that earned him a lot of bucks. Astonishing! No wonder religion was invented!

Perhaps the crowds he attracted were largely the middle classes who remained worried but comfortable through the depression, and liked to have their worries alleviated by being told they could have no responsibility for something that did not exist. The idea that all troubles are unreal pervades all of Fox’s writings. It is hard to believe that such pious pap could appeal to anyone at the time other than those whose main worry was whether to choose salmon or pastrami in their baguette.

At the Hippodrome, Sunday, 14 March 1937, he told over 6000 people on the verge of the war:

As the new understanding begins to work out, an era of great peace, harmony and unprecedented progress will dawn for humanity.

All, that is except the 55 million who died a few years later. It seems he was addressing the 55 million who died! It would have been true, perhaps, for them. Unless people are intent on dying, like Moslem martyrs, what good can anyone do ignoring everything except finding God. The Christian God himself, or the Son, if that is what you prefer, expected the world to end there and then so that his next glass of wine would be in heaven. He therefore could argue that the lilies of the field were sufficient for anyone. After 2000 years, even most Christians must be dubious, although plenty cling on to the pathetic Christian adverb “soon.”

You might as well say that the only thing that matters in life is finding Peter Pan or Popeye the Sailor. All are equally imaginery.

Unless the world is about to end within weeks, it cannot be right that everyone should stop such matters as ploughing fields, milking cows or earning an honest dollar, and set off trying to find God someplace. Even if there is an old bearded fellow watching us critically from some other dimension, it cannot be true that He expects us to give up toiling. After all, He it was who condemned us to it. Only Christians, who notionally, at least, cannot wait to die to find God, can deny that finding sustenance for yourself and your spouse and kids is more sensible than hunting for the figmentary father of the pious liars. You can be sure that the collection of a few cents from each of the audience of 6000 believers would have bought the pastrami sandwiches for Fox.

Hitler, an Atheist?

John Patrick Michael Murphy, a retired lawyer, in Free Inquiry, says preachers and politicians are distorting history. In the religious right campaign against freethinking, they routinely claim Adolph Hitler was an atheist. The truth is that Hitler was an Austrian, Austria being a Roman Catholic country, and was himself a baptized Roman Catholic. He was a communicant and an altar boy and was confirmed as a “soldier of Christ”. Moreover, Hitler admired Martin Luther, who, although he condemned the Catholic Church for its pretensions and corruption, supported its history of pogroms against the Jews. Luther hated Jews whom he called “ungodly wretches”:

The Jews deserve to be hanged on gallows, seven times higher than ordinary thieves.

Luther

We ought to take revenge on the Jews and kill them.

Luther

Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, and repeated the same words in 1938:

I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord’s work.

In 1941, he said to General Gerhart Engel:

I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so.

He never left the Church, and the Church never excommunicated him, or even condemned him.Hitler’s Germany established the Church. Jesus’s prayers were mandatory in all schools. Priests often sprinkled soldiers of the Wermacht with holy water, and Wermacht soldiers wore belt buckles inscribed: “Gott mit uns” (God with us). Hitler biographer John Toland explains:

Still a member in good standing of the Church of Rome… he carried within him its teaching that the Jew was the killer of god… extermination could be done without a twinge of conscience… he was merely acting as the avenging hand of god.

This is an atheist?

S Gregory

S Gregory (329-390 BC) was the Bishop of Nazianus in the fourth century. He wrote:

A little jargon is all that is necessary to impose on the people. The less they comprehend, the more they admire.

Christian Right Wingers

Dennis Bernstein, the Jewish host of KPFA Radio’s Flashpoint current affairs programme, regularly recieves hate e-mail from Christians. Here are some examples which he read out to the Californian audience of the First Congregational Church at Berkeley:

You mother-fucking asshole self-hating Jewish piece of shit. Hitler killed the wrong Jews. He should have killed your parents, so a piece of Jewish shit like you would not have been born. God willing, Arab terrorists will cut you to pieces Daniel Pearl style, AMEN!!!

I hope that you, Barbara Lubin and all other Jewish Marxist Communist traitors anti-American cop haters will die a violent and cruel death just like the victims of suicide bombers in Israel.

Read this and weep, you mother-fucking self hating Jew boy!!! God willing a Palestinian will murder you, rape your wife and slash your kids throats.

Dennis Bernstein is a Jew who had the temerity to report to America the Israeli invasion of Jenin in April 2002 and actually interview British journalists who had investigated the killings that went on there. Even the New York Times, as pro-Israeli a newspaper it is possible to get without being renamed Ha Aretz and which gives endless column space to William Safire to tell us that Sharon is the messiah, reported that Israeli soldiers at Jenin used civilians as human shields. Bernstein’s father was an internationally respected orthodox Jewish rabbi. Barbara Lubin is a former Zionist but now a critic of Zionist Israel, and SEO of Middle East Children’s Alliance.

Any free discussion of Israeli policies and actions are effectively censored in the USA by the powerful pro-Israeli lobby funded from Israel by the donations of sympathetic Americans. Bizarrely, the Zionists are happy to be supported by the Christian Fundamentalist right wing whose Christian language is illustrated here in what is obviously a co-ordinated campaign of intimidation and villification of anyone critical of Israelis. Bernstein says that the only people in the USA with the courage to criticize Israel are Jews, often formerly Zionists, who are horrified at butcher Sharon, a man who began as a butcher decades ago and cannot give up the habit. Jews are specially targeted because they are Jews and cannot be accused of being anti-Jewish.

Any US journalist, columnist, editor, college professor student-activist, public official or clergy member who dares to speak critically of Israel or accurately report the brutalities of its illegal occupation will be villified as an anti-Semite.

Dennis Bernstein

For Christian Fundamentalists who campaign for Israel, truth is the last thing they want to know. As ever, they already know it, presumably because God told them through their local equivalent of Isaiah—Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell. “PLO butt-kisser,” “Jew hater” are typical insults directly by them at Jews! They even accuse right wing pro-Israeli newspapers of being biased against Israel, showing exactly how fascistic the Christian right wing is. These people are brown shirts yet pro-Sharon Jews support their ravings.

The unholy alliance began in 1978 with a Likud plan for Fundamentalist Churches to support Israel. They set up International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem, and in 1985 the Christian Zionist lobby was launched by Benjamin Netanyahu. This in turn spawned the National Unity Coalition for Israel as the lobbying arm of Christian Zionism with its contacts in Washington. Christian Zionists believe, according to Uri Avnery of Gush Shalom, the Israeli peace group:

The Jews must congregate in Palestine and establish a Jewish state on its territory so as to make the second coming of Jesus Christ possible… The evangelists do not like to dwell openly on what comes next—before the coming, the Jews must convert to Christianity. Those who do not will perish in a gigantic holocaust in the battle of Armageddon. This is basically anti-Semitic, but who cares so long as they support Israel?

They should care! The Institute for Historical Research at Newport Beach, San Francisco, the holocaust deniers, have already taken note of the power of the Israeli lobby because it fits their Nazi propaganda that Jews control the world. Jews ought to know how dangerous it is to walk with a footpad as a companion, but that is what they are doing. They had better start changing their names now, because the political right is ultimately fascist, Christian or not.

Erin

A correspondent only identified as Erin made this fine contribution to the website Ship of Fools.

Looking through the news last week, I noticed an ever-present problem rearing its ugly head again. The Archdiocese of Boston agreed to turn over the names of alleged victims of sexual abuse by its clergy to five district attorneys.

Meanwhile, in Australia, Queen Elizabeth’s trip was marred by allegations that the Governor General covered up sexual abuses by priests and staff when he was the Archbishop of Brisbane. Just the latest examples of systemic sexual abuse in the Christian church. Color me shocked.

I’ve come to the only possible conclusion: the church is to blame for this whole mess. Not because it’s covered it up for centuries (though that ranks about a 9.0 on the dirtball-meter), but because of what it’s been teaching all along.

Think about it. What have we heard from the church on the subject of sexuality? For centuries they have told us when, how, and with whom we can have sex, as if any of that is anyone else’s concern. Thankfully, some have started moving away from that (though both the Mormons and Rome, along with smaller groups, will tell you that masturbation—masturbation! touching bits of your very own skin!—is still way off limits). And let’s not even get started on the story of condoms, the pill and the Vatican.

You still can only have sex if you’ve walked down the aisle. And you definitely can’t have sex with someone whose plumbing is the same as yours. If any church does attempt to back off, others launch bishops and pastors, like intercontinental ballistic missiles, to save the day.

What has this accomplished? It’s taken a miracle of God—a beautiful, amazing experience—and turned it into something dirty, shameful and completely away from its original purpose. In the church’s hands, sex is no longer an expression of love. It is a means of control.

This basic human need—as vital as food, water, and shelter—has been appropriated by the church as a weapon against its own people. The church controls us by setting the sexual limits, and further controls us by allowing its priests to break those limits through abuse. At that point, the victims are so ashamed and wracked with guilt that they rarely protest.

Yet we still look to them for guidance. After screw-up after monumental screw-up, we still look to the church for our sexual limits. We still base modern secular society’s views on sex on ancient church teachings—teachings the church can’t even live up to. We still let the church dictate who we can love, and when, and how.

What I want to know is simple, really. Why? Why do we care what the church has to say on this subject? They have never got sex right. Never.

The church sets itself up as the arbiter of all things sexual, and what has happened? The biggest failings come from within. They come from men who have taught the rest of us that sex is a necessary evil, for procreation’s sake alone, and that’s all a good Christian boy or girl should have to do with it. God forbid you enjoy it. The sad and scandalous thing is, they’re living out a 2,000 year-old cycle of abuse of sex as power.

As a bisexual divorcée who is called to neither celibacy nor marriage, I think it’s about time to break that cycle. Until the church can prove that it recognizes sex as a fundamentally positive experience, it needs to shut up about it and just listen to the groups whose lives it’s destroyed.

And do something useful for a change, like, oh, I dunno… maybe go feed the poor?

Albert Einstein

Einstein was not religious in the conventional sense, but it will come as a surprise to some, aware of his statements such as that God does not play dice, to learn that Einstein clearly identified himself as an atheist and as an agnostic.

Thus I came—despite the fact I was the son of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents—to a deep religiosity, which, however, found an abrupt ending at the age of 12. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived… Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude… which has never left me.

Albert Einstein

Boston’s Cardinal O’Connel attacked Einstein and the General Theory of Relativity and warned the youth that the theory “cloaked the ghastly apparition of atheism” and “befogged speculation, producing universal doubt about God and His creation.” On April 24, 1929, Rabbi Herbert Goldstein of New York cabled Einstein to ask:

Do you believe in God?

Einstein’s return message is the famous statement:

I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.

From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist… I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our being.

The Life and Times, by the professional biographer Ronald W Clark (1971), contains one of the best summaries on Einstein’s God:

However, Einstein’s God was not the God of most men. When he wrote of religion, as he often did in middle and later life, he tended to… clothe with different names what to many ordinary mortals—and to most Jews—looked like a variant of simple agnosticism… This was belief enough. It grew early and rooted deep. Only later was it dignified by the title of cosmic religion, a phrase which gave plausible respectability to the views of a man who did not believe in a life after death and who felt that if virtue paid off in the earthly one, then this was the result of cause and effect rather than celestial reward. Einstein’s God thus stood for an orderly system obeying rules which could be discovered by those who had the courage, the imagination, and the persistence to go on searching for them.

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