Should secularists fight for 100% separation of church and state?

Like most atheists, it really is of no concern to me what other people believe. If you do not believe in a god or heaven and hell in any form, then the question of what other people believe about god is as of little concern to you as questions about which sports teams they root for or what cars they drive.

If you are a follower of a theistic religion, however, you cannot help but feel part of a struggle against evil, and often that evil is personified as Satan, and non-believers or believers of other faiths can be seen as followers of that evil. Organized religions also need members to survive, to keep the institution going. So for members of organized religion, there is often a mandate to try and get other people to also believe, and thus we have revivals and evangelical outreach efforts and proselytizing.

But atheists have no organization to support and keep alive with membership dues. We have no special book or building or tradition to uphold and maintain. You will never find atheists going from door to door spreading the lack of the Word.

This raises an interesting question. Should atheists be concerned about religious symbolism in the public sphere such as placing nativity scenes on government property at Christmas or placing tablets of the Ten Commandments in courthouses, both of which have been the subjects of heated legal struggles involving interpretations of the First Amendment to the constitution? If those symbols mean nothing to us, why should we care where they appear?

In a purely intellectual sense, the answer is that atheists (and other secularists) should not care. Since for the atheist the nativity scene has as little meaning as any other barnyard scene, and the Ten Commandments have as much moral force as (say) any of Dave Letterman’s top ten lists, why should these things bother us? Perhaps we should just let these things go and avoid all the nasty legal fights.
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When principle collides with power worship, the wreck is not pretty

One of the leading intellectuals of the so-called “neo-conservative” movement (their motto: “We will not rest until all countries are invaded”) is Charles Krauthammer. However, just because one is a rabid warmonger does not mean that one has completely lost one’s senses and in a recent opinion column in Time magazine entitled Let’s Have No More Monkey Trials: To teach faith as science is to undermine both, Krauthammer came down hard on the issue of teaching so-called intelligent design (ID). He decries the recent events in Kansas as “new and gratuitous attempts to invade science, and most particularly evolution, with religion.” He calls ID a “tarted-up version of creationism” and hails evolution as “one of the most powerful and elegant theories in all of human science and the bedrock of all modern biology.”

He goes further and condemns Cardinal Schonborn’s recent ID-inspired critique of evolution, saying:

What we are witnessing now is a frontier violation by the forces of religion. This new attack claims that because there are gaps in evolution, they therefore must be filled by a divine intelligent designer….How many times do we have to rerun the Scopes “monkey trial”? There are gaps in science everywhere. Are we to fill them all with divinity?….To teach faith as science is to undermine the very idea of science, which is the acquisition of new knowledge through hypothesis, experimentation and evidence. To teach it as science is to encourage the supercilious caricature of America as a nation in the thrall of religious authority.

Pretty strong stuff. The problem was that on the very same day that article was published, President Bush, showing no consideration at all for one of his most ardent admirers, comes out in favor of teaching ID in science classes.

When confronted with this unfortunate turn of events, what is an intellectual to do? Does Krauthammer stick to his principles and say that Bush is wrong on this issue and should reconsider his stand? Of course not, because one of the tenets of neocondom is to see Bush as an equal with god in terms of infallibility. To question Bush’s rightness on anything (other than to suggest that he should invade more countries more quickly) is to invite immediate dismissal from the neoconservative club, presumably involving some secret midnight ritual sponsored by Fox News.

Instead Krauthammer showed that there is no principle that cannot be sacrificed, no position that cannot be backpedaled from, if one’s desire to grovel to power is strong enough.

In his rush to try and reconcile the irreconcilable and ensure that he does not have to face any more embarrassing Presidential undercutting on this issue, Krauthammer takes two contradictory positions. The first is the familiar one that is used to excuse all the policy idiocies of the current administration, that what really matters is the sincerity of the President, not whether the policy is good or even makes any sense (“We really, really believed Iraq had WMDs.”). As long as the administration believes in what they are doing, that makes it ok. “It is very clear to me that he is sincere about this,” Krauthammer says, “He is not positioning.”

But what if the President is not sincere and comes out the next day and says that he was just joking, thereby making Krauthammer look foolish again? To cover that flank, Krauthammer also takes a backup position that that’s ok too, so the President is right either way. Krauthammer adds: “If you look at this purely as a cynical political move, it will help in the heartlands and people of my ilk care a lot more about Iraq than about textbooks in Kansas.”

In other words, who cares what the hicks in Kansas and the other loser states (codename: “the heartlands”) learn in their science classes? After all, our “ilk” and our ilk’s children don’t live there. We can sacrifice those other children’s education as long as it buys us votes and enables us to keep invading other countries.

James Wolcott, always quicker on things like this than anyone else, skewers Krauthammer’s craven behavior in his own inimitable style.

Distorting the message of Jesus

In the previous posting, I spoke about how the version of Christianity that predominates in the US and its media is one that does not draw much at all from Christ’s own teachings. This means that these particular “Christians” have to really stretch to justify some of the intolerant positions that they espouse.

For example, take the current hot-button issue of homosexuality and gay rights. Some Christian groups (like the followers of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson) go to great lengths to portray this as one of the great abominations. But the problem for them is that nowhere in the Bible does Jesus himself even speak about homosexuality, let alone rail against it.

So I was surprised by this letter in the Saturday, July 30, 2005 issue of the Plain Dealer. It was by a Rev. Robert C. Hull of Lakewood who said:

In the discussions about homosexuality, there has been much confusion and many misrepresentations of the Bible. For starters, the biblical references have always been focused on homosexual acts – on sodomy. There has not been a biblical discussion of homosexual tendencies or the inner proclivities of a human being regarding sexual preference.

Jesus speaks directly against sodomy in four passages of the Gospels, all of which are in sections of direct instruction for the immediate task of spreading his word to the whole world (Matthew 10:14-15 and 11:23-24; Luke 10:10-13 and 17:28-30). Since the word “sodomy” comes from the name Sodom, it is evident that the reason Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by God was because they engaged in sodomy, among other faithless acts. (emphasis added)

This was an impressive array of citations, enough to convince the casual reader that Falwell, Robertson and company are right and actually channeling Jesus on this issue. How could people like me have missed such a seemingly clear prohibition? But when you actually look up the verses you see that Hull’s thesis is a lie and it exposes the fact that these groups have to go to great lengths to distort Jesus’ message.

The first problem is that of sheer bad logic. All four citations are variations on the same theme, which in the first one (Matthew 10:14-15) has Jesus telling his followers to go and preach in his name and saying “If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake the dust off your feet when you leave that home or town. I tell you the truth, it will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town.”

So basically, Jesus is comparing what will happen to the people who reject his disciples to what happened to the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. Sodom is being set as a standard of punishment, not of crimes. You cannot infer from this that it is an indictment of homosexual behavior. At most, the words are clearly a warning against being inhospitable and rude and indifferent.

The second point is that the sins that the people of Sodom allegedly were punished for were not what we commonly think them to be. In fact, as the prophet Ezekiel (16:49-50) points out, “Now this was the sin of Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen.”

So if you want to associate a “sin” with the word “sodomy” and the people of Sodom, it would more properly apply to those who are haughty, arrogant, unconcerned, and who do not help the poor and needy.

The sexual connotations of the word sodomy were imposed as a much later development and to read them back into Jesus’s words is just plain wrong. If a lay person had written that letter to the Plain Dealer, I would have been generous and dismissed it as intolerance arising from ignorance. But since this is by a clergyman who should know better, I can only put it down to a willful attempt to mislead, its success depending on people being too gullible and lazy to look up the citations.

POST SCRIPT

Paul Krugman describes how those with overtly political agendas are using their rich sources of funding to create a parallel intellectual universe that has little to do with reality. This strategy was initially used with some success to promote things like supply-side economics despite the absence of any evidence that it worked, and now this method is being turned to subjects like global warming and evolution.

“Christian” country?

When some people claim that the US is a “Christian” country, they may have a point. In the August 2005 issue of the invaluable Harper’s Magazine, Bill McKibben provides some statistics that indicate that the US is “among the most spiritually homogeneous rich nations on earth. Depending on which poll you look at and how the question is asked, somewhere around 85 percent of us call ourselves Christian. Israel, by way of comparison, is 77 percent Jewish.” McKibben also reports that 75 percent claim they actually pray to God on a daily basis, but only 33 percent say that they go to church every week.

But the interesting point about McKibben’s article The Christian Paradox: How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong is that what all these believers mean by being “Christian” may not bear much resemblance to what Jesus actually preached. In fact, what is conspicuous is the widespread ignorance about the religion and the leader they purport to follow.

For example, he points out that “[o]nly 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the Gospels” (my emphasis). And 12 percent believe that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife! (I have long had the impression that there is no proposition, however idiotic, that you cannot find at least 10 percent, often 20 percent, to agree to on such nationwide surveys.)

What McKibben’s article asserts is what I have long suspected, that the “Christianity” that is genuflected to in the US bears only a slight resemblance to the message actually preached by Jesus as recorded in the Gospels. As McKibben (a Sunday School teacher at his local church) points out, if one breaks down the essentials of Jesus’ teaching, it was very socially oriented, emphasizing the need for us to look out for each other. Jesus’ summary (Matthew 25: 32-46) of what distinguished a righteous person from the damned was whether they’d fed the hungry, slaked the thirsty, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger, and visited the sick and the prisoner. (The last requirement should be particularly easy to carry out since the US has six to seven times the number of prisoners of other rich nations.)

This social message has been replaced by a personal, individualistic, self-empowerment, ‘feel good’ one, that looks on personal wealth and well-being as signs of God’s favor. Consider Jesus’ advice (Matthew 19:16-24) to a rich man who had asked him what he should do to gain eternal life. He told him to sell everything he add and give it all to the poor, following that with this aside to his disciples: “Truly I say to you, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” This is not a message, one suspects, that is preached in the modern mega-churches which feature drive-through latte stands, Krispy Kreme doughnuts at services, and sermons on how to reach professional goals and invest your money.

Perhaps the most telling symptom of this deviation from the Gospel message is the fact that three out of four American “Christians” believe that the saying “God helps those who helps themselves” comes from the Bible. It was actually said by Benjamin Franklin and is directly opposite to the message of interdependency preached in the Gospels. But it fits in nicely with a political message that favors tax cuts for the rich, cutting welfare benefits for the poor, and reductions of foreign aid.

What we seem to have in the US (at least among the Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson crowd and their followers) is a religion that is based on the Bible except for the teaching of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels. It seems to be something cobbled together from pieces of the old testament, some of Paul’s letters, and the book of Revelations. What should this hollowed out religion be called? I have so far put the name “Christian” in quotes since this commonly used label hardly seems appropriate for a belief structure that ignores the essentials of Christ’s teachings. It seems clear that “Christianity” doesn’t fit. What alternative name might be suitable? Any ideas?

POST SCRIPT

I have never understood why people buy bottled water if you don’t happen to live in a country where tap water is contaminated. As this article points out, in the US itself, where there is every indication that tap water is in fact better than bottled water, people spend vast amounts of money for what they could get free. The author says that bottled water has become seen as a lifestyle choice, rather than as something that is necessary, and he goes on:

Clean water could be provided to everyone on earth for an outlay of $1.7 billion a year beyond current spending on water projects, according to the International Water Management Institute. Improving sanitation, which is just as important, would cost a further $9.3 billion per year. This is less than a quarter of global annual spending on bottled water.

I drink the bottled water that is now routinely provided at meetings. But I don’t spend my own money to buy it, except for the gallon or two I keep for emergencies.

The journey to atheism

In a comment to a previous post, Jim Eastman said something that struck me as very profound. He said:

It’s also interesting to note that most theists are also in the game of declaring nonexistence of deities, just not their own. This quote has been sitting in my quote file for some time, and it seems appropriate to unearth it.

“I contend we are both atheists – I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you reject all other gods, you will understand why I reject yours as well.” – Stephen F. Roberts

This quote captures accurately an important stage in my own transition from belief to atheism. Since I grew up as a Christian in a multi-religious society and had Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist friends, I had to confront the question of how to deal with other religions. My answer at that time was simple – Christianity was right and the others were wrong. Of course, since the Methodist Church I belonged to had an inclusive, open, and liberal theological outlook, I did not equate this distinction with good or evil or even heaven and hell. I felt that as long as people were good and decent, they were somehow all saved, irrespective of what they believed. But there was no question in my mind that Christians had the inside track on salvation and that others were at best slightly misguided.

But as I got older and reached middle age, I found the question posed by Roberts increasingly hard to answer. It became clear to me that when I said I was a Christian, this was not merely a statement of what I believed. Implicitly I was also saying, in effect if not in words, that I was not a Hindu, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, etc. As in the quote above, I could not satisfactorily explain to myself the basis on which I was rejecting those religions. After all, like most people, I believed in my own religion simply because I had grown up in that tradition. I had little or no knowledge of other religions and hence had no grounds for rejecting them. In the absence of a convincing reason for rejection, I decided to just remove myself from any affiliation whatsoever, and started to consider myself a believer in a god that was not bound by any specific religious tradition.

But when one is just a free-floating believer in god, without any connection to organized religion and the comforting reinforcement that comes with regular worship with others, one starts asking difficult questions about the nature of god and the relationship to humans for which the answers provided by organized religious dogma simply do not satisfy. When one is part of a church or other religious structure one struggles with difficult questions (suffering, the virgin birth, the nature of the Trinity, original sin, the basis for salvation, etc.) but those difficulties are addressed within a paradigm that assumes the existence of god, and thus always provides, as a last option, saying that the ways of god are enigmatic and beyond the comprehension of mere mortals.

But when I left the church, I started struggling with different questions such as why I believed that god existed at all. And if she/he/it did exist, how and where and in what form did that existence take, and what precisely was the nature of the interaction with humans?

I found it increasingly hard to come up with satisfactory answers to these questions and I remember the day when I decided that I would simply jettison the belief in god altogether. Suddenly everything seemed simple and clear. It is possible that I had arrived at this conclusion even earlier but that my conscious mind was rejecting it until I was ready to acknowledge it. It is hard, after all, to give up a belief that has been the underpinning of one’s personal philosophy. But the feeling of relief that accompanied my acceptance of non-belief was almost palpable and unmistakable, making me realize hat my beliefs had probably been of a pro forma sort for some time.

Especially liberating to me was the realization that I did not have to examine all new discoveries of science to see if they were compatible with my religious beliefs. I could now go freely wherever new knowledge led me without wondering if it was counter to some religious doctrine.

A childhood friend of mine who knew me during my church-religious phase was surprised by my change and reminded me of two mutual friends who, again in middle age, had made the transition in the opposite direction, from atheism to belief. He asked me if it was possible that I might switch again.

It is an interesting question to which I, of course, cannot know the answer. My personal philosophy satisfies me now but who can predict the future? But while conversions from atheism to belief and vice versa are not uncommon, I am not sure how common it is for a single person to make two such U-turns and end up close to where they started. It seems like it would be a very unlikely occurrence. I don’t personally know of anybody who did such a thing.

POST SCRIPT

It is always interesting how the media instinctively resorts to certain standard tropes to reinforce religious beliefs, even when they are wholly inappropriate. Jon Stewart on his Daily Show skewers this way of thinking when the media quickly jumped on the “It’s a miracle!” bandwagon to “explain” the lack of any fatalities from the recent Air France plane crash in Toronto when there was a perfectly natural and even admirable alternative explanation at hand. This reason is of, course, the competence of the crew that managed to get everyone off the plane less than two minutes after the crash. And yet the media, rather than giving credit to all the emergency personnel involved, quickly started playing the “miracle” theme.

As Stewart says: “The only thing that was a miracle in that situation was the lightening that hit the plane, that was the act of God. If anything, God was trying to kill these people. His plan was foiled by the crew’s satanic competence.”

See the video here.

Foreign news and foreign correspondents

In July 1983, I lived through a major upheaval in Sri Lanka where rampaging mobs raged through the streets looking for the homes and businesses and members of the minority Tamil community, killing and destroying everything in their path, with the government and the police just standing by doing little or nothing. There was strong speculation that the government had actually instigated and guided the events to serve their own political agenda, but since the government itself was doing the subsequent investigation, one should not be surprised that nothing came of it.
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Scientists’ Achilles heel

I was reading an article the other day about how, during the World War II, the US government assembled a team of anthropologists to investigate whether there were any fundamental differences between the Japanese “race” and white people which could be exploited to wage biological warfare that would harm them only.

The anthropologists found no differences and that particular war plan was abandoned. This is consistent with our modern scientific consensus that “race” has no biological markers and only makes sense as a social and cultural construct.

But the interesting point is that the anthropologists were told to not consider the ethical implications of their work, and that ethical issues would be taken into account by others when decisions on implementing the biological weapons were made. And presumably, the anthropologists went along with that.

This is the Achilles heel of science, the fact that so much of our work can be easily twisted to serve ends that we might not approve of. And yet we do it anyway. The allure of science is such that it draws in people to work on problems that could, with a few slight modifications, be used to harm innocent people.

Physicists are perhaps the most culpable. After all, we have been responsible for the invention and development of atomic weapons that, in the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, resulted in the deaths of a quarter of a million people. And when one counts the deaths from ore conventional weapons that physicists have helped bring into being, the numbers run probably into the tens, if not hundreds, of millions.

(Some physicists have refused to go along with this. Physics Professor Charles Schwartz at the University of California, Berkeley felt that university federal-funded science (especially physics) was so closely tied to the Pentagon that he refused to ask for grants and started to advise physics students on how to avoid getting sucked into making the Faustian bargain with the military machine. This seriously hampered his career but he stuck to it.)

How can physicists do our research and still sleep at night, knowing the purposes for which it might be used? I think we do the same thing that the anthropologists did. We avoid thinking about the ethics of our actions and hope that others will take ethics into account in due course at the appropriate time. We hope that policy makers will not take advantage of the science we develop for evil purposes, although time and again that hope has proven to be ill-founded. Or we persuade ourselves that while we may be doing something evil, we do it in the cause of preventing an even greater evil. Or we say that on balance science does more good than evil and has saved millions of lives in other ways. (A few of us may actually believe that developing weapons is a good thing and suffer no angst at all.)

All these things are true and they do provide some consolation. But they never quite wash away all the blood on our hands and I think that we physicists justifiably bear a burden of guilt that academics in other disciplines such as (say) history or English or music do not.

In his memoir A Mathematician’s Apology, written in 1940, G. H. Hardy takes pride in working on pure mathematics because he felt that it was “useless.” By this, he did not mean that it was of no value (he loved the beauty of the subject) but that he felt that, unlike applied mathematics, his field could not be used for evil purposes, that it had no applications at all to the outside world. But time has proved him wrong, and mathematics results that might have been considered too esoteric to have any real usefulness then are now being used in all areas.

It is probably safe to say that there is no area of science or mathematics that is immune from potential misuse. Apart from avoiding science altogether, perhaps our only option is to simultaneously work to prevent governments from using our work for destructive purposes.

POST SCRIPT

The Knight Ridder newspapers say that President Bush has endorsed the teaching of “Intelligent Design” in schools. This should not be too much of a surprise. He has been saying similar things in the past.

Harry Potter, Karl Rove, and the allure of puzzles (safe to read – no spoilers!)

Those of you who have followed the series know that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is the penultimate book. There are clearly many ways in which the saga can proceed to its conclusion and there are heated discussions as to the various ways that the story could end. I myself have had a series of discussions with people where we compared our various predictions of where the stories would go. The people I was arguing with had carefully read all the books and had noted all kinds of details, which they insisted were hints at the author’s intention. Since I am told that J. K. Rowling had mapped out the entire plot line in advance, these hints had to be taken seriously.
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Harry Potter’s school life and mine (safe to read – no spoilers!)

One of the appealing things for me personally about the Potter books are the similarities with my own education, which results in waves of nostalgia sweeping over me as I read the stories. I went to a single-sex private school in Sri Lanka that was modeled on the British boarding school like Hogwarts, although about half the students (including me) commuted from home. We were called ‘day-scholars’ which, looking back now, seems like a quaint but dignified label when compared to the more accurate ‘commuters.’
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Harry Potter’s school life (safe to read – no spoilers!)

I just finished reading the latest episode of the Harry Potter saga. I cannot claim to be a rabid fan since I have read only book 2 (Chamber of Secrets) and book 6 (Half-Blood Prince), although I have seen all three film versions, but they have all been enjoyable.

Reading these books reminds me of my own school days and of much of the British schoolboy literature I read as a child, especially the Billy Bunter series and the Tom Merry series, both written by the same author Frank Richards. (These books were produced at such a prodigious rate that there were suspicions that ‘Frank Richards’ was the pseudonym of a whole stable of authors just churning out the stuff.)

There was a rigid formula to these books, the main features of which the Potter series largely adheres to. The schools were all boarding schools, and the stories started with students arriving at the beginning of the academic year and having various adventures that fortuitously ended just at the end of the school year. (There was a complementary series of children’s books by Enid Blyton which took place during the summer, with a group of friends arriving at their home town from various boarding schools, and having an adventure that ended just in time for them to go their separate ways the next academic year.)

The big difference between Harry Potter and the earlier Billy Bunter and Tom Merry series is that although the context of a British boarding school is the same, the Potter books are far better written, with complex plots and characters developed realistically, dealing with important issues of good and evil, and real human emotions. The books I read as a child had stereotypical characters (the smart student, the bully, the figure of fun, the lisping aristocrat, the athlete, the sarcastic one, etc.) who all behaved in highly predictable ways. Those characters were two-dimensional and never changed, never grew or matured. This was reassuring in some ways because you knew exactly what you were getting with the books, but you cannot enjoy them as an adult the way you can with Potter.

The earlier books and schools were also single sex and we young boys only read the books about boys’ schools, while girls only read equivalent books dealing with girls’ boarding schools. The only members of the opposite sex that appeared in the books were siblings who made cameo appearances. For all we knew, the books written for the boys may have been identical to those written for the girls with just the genders (and sports) of the characters switched, such was the rigid separation between what boys and girls read when we were growing up. There was no romance whatsoever in any of the story lines. Hogwarts, on the other hand, is co-ed, a major difference.

Another similarity between Potter and the earlier books is that the educational practices in all the schools are pretty conventional. The classes are run in an authoritarian way. As someone pointed out, Hogwarts seems a lot like a trade school, with students learning very specific skills involving potions, hexes, and the like, mostly by rote memory and repetitive practice, similar to the way the earlier books had students learning Latin and Greek. There does not really seem to be a theory of magic or even any interest in developing one. Some magic works, others don’t, with no serious attempts to discover why. There is little or no questioning of the teachers or class discussions, or inquiry-oriented teaching.

Rowling is mining a very rich vein of British school literature. As we will see in the next posting, the world she creates is probably very familiar to anyone (like me) who grew up in an English-language school anywhere in the British colonies. What she has done is added magic (and good writing) to a tried and true formula. But since that tradition of boarding school-based fiction is not present in the US, it is interesting that she has managed to strike such a chord in readers here as well.

POST SCRIPT

An anonymous commenter to an earlier post gave a very useful link to the various shades of meaning attached to atheism and definitions of atheism and agnosticism.