Exit Religion Enter God 9780998819624, 9780971919099

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Exit Religion, Enter God Beth Houston



Copyright © 2019 by Beth Houston Published in 2019 by New Deism Press newdeismpress.com bethhouston.com All rights reserved Requests for permission should be addressed to [email protected] First edition ISBN 978-0-9988196-2-4   Cataloging Record for Book I: Born-Again Deist Cataloging Record – Created 03.31.10  (print edition) Houston, Beth Ann. Born-again deist / Beth Houston. – Florida : New Deism Press, c2009. 334 p. ; 22 cm. Includes selected bibliographical references (p. 337-339). ISBN 978-09719190-7-5 1. Deism. 2. Spiritual biography. 3. Religious biography. 4. Spiritual life--Christianity. I. Houston, Beth Ann. II. Title. BL2747.4 .O837 2009 Cataloging Record for Book II: Natural God Cataloging Record – Created 10.01.12 (First Edition) Houston, Beth. Natural God: Deism in the age of intelligent design / second edition / Beth Houston. – Florida : New Deism Press, c2012. 486 p. ; 22 cm. Includes selected bibliographical references (p. 477-486). ISBN 978-0-9719190-9-9 1. Deism. 2. Evolution (Biology). 3. Intelligent design (Teleology). 4. Darwin, Charles d 1809-1882. I. Houston, Beth. II. Title.

BL224.4 .O68 2012 First edition published in 2012. ISBN 978-09719190-8-2 Beth Houston, MA, MFA, has taught creative writing, literature, and composition at ten universities and colleges in California and Florida. She has published several poetry, fiction, and nonfiction books and nearly three hundred works in literary and professional journals. She is a member of PEN America-Professional and the Academy of American Poets. Dear Reader: I hope you enjoy Exit Religion, Enter God. Did you know that posting a review at your favorite online bookstores and other sites makes the book more discoverable to category searches? It only takes a moment to tell like-minded readers what you like about a book you’d recommend. It’s a gesture we hardworking indie writers greatly appreciate. Unlike large book publishers with big marketing budgets and staffs to publicize their authors’ books, we indies rely on our readers to spread the word. Please visit www.bethhouston.com.



  Exit Religion, Enter God This bundle contains the following works:

BOOK 1

Born-Again Deist My Journey Beyond Religion to the Plain Truth of God (First published in 2009)

BOOK 2

Natural God Deism in the Age of Intelligent Design A Deconstruction of Atheism and Religious Fundamentalism (First published in 2012)  

Preface To Exit Religion, Enter God BOOK 1 Born-Again Deist My Journey Beyond Religion to the Plain Truth of God Chapter 1 The Coming of Age of Deism Chapter 2 A Philosophical Basis for Deism Chapter 3 Born-Again Deist Chapter 4 Portrait of a Barbaric God Chapter 5 Biblical Misinterpretation Chapter 6 Deconstructing Paul Chapter 7 To Worship God, Not the Bible Chapter 8 The Fallible Bible Chapter 9 Mythic Origins of the Bible Chapter 10 The Witches’ Hammer in the Twenty-First Century Chapter 11 The Reformation Myth Chapter 12 Freedom of Conscience v. Theocracy: The Rise of Deist Democracy

Chapter 13 Interlude: A Word From Our Founders and Distinguished Guests Chapter 14 The Exploitation of Magical Thinking Chapter 15 Snake Oil and Sanctimony Chapter 16 The Emperor’s No Clothes Chapter 17 Pat Robertson’s Mug Shot Chapter 18 Criminal Faith Chapter 19 Education v. Indoctrination Chapter 20 Taboo Chapter 21 New Deism Paradigm Shift Selected Bibliography BOOK 2 Natural God Deism in the Age of Intelligent Design: A Deconstruction of Atheism and Religious Fundamentalism PART I Deism Nouveau Chapter 1 New Deism: The Golden Mean Chapter 2 Deist Democracy: The Higher Ground

Chapter 3 Transcending the “Historical Jesus” Meme PART II The Intelligent Design Shuffle Chapter 4 The Origin and Evolution of Charles Darwin Chapter 5 Darwin’s Descent Chapter 6 Calculated Construction: The Science of Intelligent Design Chapter 7 Neo-Darwinism on Steroids Chapter 8 The Tinkering Watchmaker: The Deology of Intelligent Design PART III Slouching Towards Deism Chapter 9 Hogtied Chapter 10 Logos Lost Chapter 11 Soror Mystica Chapter 12 Aesthetic Transfiguration Chapter 13 The Big Other: Sex, Diversity, and the Meaning of Life Selected Bibliography

 

Preface To Exit Religion, Enter God When I published Born-Again Deist in 2009, I thought the title would be self-explanatory to anyone who read the book. It took me awhile to realize that most born-agains wouldn’t touch a book with “Deist” in the title, and most everyone else would turn away from “Born-Again.” Hence the addition of the subtitle: My Journey Beyond Religion to the Plain Truth of God. Similarly, after publishing Natural God: Deism in the Age of Intelligent Design in 2012, I realized that many interested in Deism are turned off by “Intelligent Design,” a term that’s been appropriated by fundamentalists. Hence the addition of the subtitle: A Deconstruction of Atheism and Religious Fundamentalism. Exit Religion, Enter God is comprised of those two books, published near the tenth anniversary of the release of Born-Again Deist, which began my public engagement in the centuries-old conversation about Deism. Deism literally means God-ism. God, not religion, is the still point at the center of my version of Deism, and common sense truth and spirituality replace obedience to dogma and blind faith in myths and superstitions both religious and scientific. In both books my aim is to explain why Deism strikes me as the most viable alternative to organized religion, less organized cults, atheism, pantheism, and the more outlandish permutations of metaphysical science pretending to be hard science. Readers won’t necessarily agree with all my conclusions, but those who read my books all the way through know that my research is extensive and my points well-considered.

At times I pile up examples to provide thorough evidence to make my case, painstakingly, for the sake of truth and persuasion. Yet readers who have closely read my books know that I’m not opposed to religion per se and/or to every version of evolution, nor am I unnecessarily liberal. My primary agenda, if one must call it that, is to demonstrate that though God exists, God is not religion, and religion is not God. And yes, that includes documenting the dangers of deified and exploited religion. We Deists understand our calling to be good stewards of every aspect of our world. My approach isn’t unique. Deists—sometimes known as freethinkers and humanists—have scrutinized religion and informed politics for centuries and in this country at least since the era of our Founders. Truth, freedom, justice, collective benevolence—these are ideals instilled in us and in our government by early American Deists and their forerunners. It should be obvious to anyone that follows current events that those ideals are effaced today as they were in the past by the unlikely bedfellows, oligarchs and bigots. We Deists still agree that institutions that control the parameters of our lives should not be allowed to elude our close moral inspection. Parts of Born-Again Deist and Natural God critique what Deism replaces, and that includes the treacherous aspects of religion fused with politics. I could add entire chapters on Trump-era scandals alone, not to mention the latest conterms (see Natural God, Chapter 10) like “fake news” and “entitlement,” that further prove my point. But no more exposés are needed to demonstrate that religion is far too often steeped in hypocrisy and deceit, and is perhaps most dangerous when it foments on a large political scale ideologies and actions that are blatantly inhumane. That condition is perennial and universal. Since social media is doing a good job of disseminating plenty of current instances, I’ll refrain from adding them to this present work. Revolt, of course, is as persistent as evil. Today as in the past, positive pushback movements are uniting people willing to express their truth and their outrage at injustice and indecency. When righteous revolutions erupt nonviolently, the time is ripe for spiritual evolution. I can’t imagine a more highly evolved perspective than

Deism. In the end, my “deology” offers a spiritual perspective that transcends, yet includes, the political. Several years ago I put up a web page, newdeism.com, that included the suggestion, “Or perhaps, like many, you don’t know you’re a Deist!” followed by this list: If you’re disillusioned with organized religion but have faith in the existence of God, you might be a Deist. If your beliefs derive from common sense, not from special revelation of organized religion, you might be a Deist. If you consider religious myths and superstitions to be literary representations, not literal facts, you might be a Deist. If your ideal religion would be the Golden Mean between atheism and fundamentalism, you might be a Deist. If you think the Creator reveals truth democratically to all via Creation apprehended via common sense, not to a chosen elite via special revelation apprehended via indoctrination, you might be a Deist. If you hold these truths to be self-evident, that all human beings are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, you might be a Deist (as were many of America’s most prominent Founders). If you are spiritually inclined and are seeking a religion grounded in provable truth, you are very likely a Deist! No doubt some unknowing deists today refer to themselves simply as “spiritual, not religious.” I trust that open-minded readers of this work—spiritual or otherwise—will find my overall argument convincing and pertinent, and will help me and other Deists spread the good news of Deism explicated in these pages. Let there be light! And may the Source be with you. — Beth Houston, May 6, 2019  



 

BOOK 1

Born-Again Deist My Journey Beyond Religion to the Plain Truth of God  



 

Chapter 1 The Coming of Age of Deism Have you ever had one of those aha moments when suddenly you just got it? If you have, perhaps you too have noticed that when perspective shifts, so does self-definition. A significant spiritual epiphany can trigger sine waves that rattle pretty much every facet of your life. Those paradigm shifts can be painful. But in my experience, truth is always cathartic and often catalyzes a spiritual high. Of course not all epiphanies happen in a flash. Something dawning on us can fade in like morning emerging from twilight— which, if you’ve ever sat still and closely observed the process, really does take some time. It’s hard to pinpoint the threshold moment when anyone would agree that day has dawned. But day does dawn. For me, most spiritual insights occur gradually as I’m thinking about something I’ve read, heard, or experienced. “Thinking about” can take place over a period of hours, weeks, even years, especially when a new insight necessitates a recalibration of prior knowledge and experience, not to mention relinquishment of a cherished assumption. But eventually the fog clears and the obvious truth stands there grinning at me quite matter-of-factly. That kind of crystallization process took me from being spiritually inclined to born-again Christian to progressive Christian to disillusioned agnostic to delighted Deist. The crystal clear truth of Deism has been a potent epiphany generating joy that’s like being born-again again. Although this book is a kind of spiritual memoir, it’s more a distillation of realizations rather than a recounting of events (though there’s that, too). Chronologically, at least, I embraced Deism first because of all religions it made the most sense. In fact, I can’t

imagine a religion making more sense. And shouldn’t religion be, above all else, true, and doesn’t true mean sensible? But conversion engages both intellect and spirit. I reached the threshold state of conviction because the principles of Deism that dawned on and in me provided the most direct encounter with God, both theologically and spiritually. Reaching that state took as much unlearning as learning. Most people today probably remember Deism from junior high or high school history class as an antiquated philosophy held by some of America’s Founding Fathers and other Enlightenment intellectuals in Europe. Merely a fringe worldview that resembled scientific determinism or pagan nature worship more than any of the major world religions, Deism had something to do with a Clockmaker God who wound up the universe and left it to run on its own like a ticking clock. The pop quiz definition, with its impersonal God and mechanical Creation, is a modern misconception of a thriving, immensely popular religion that pervaded American society during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a religion as thoroughly understood by early Americans as it is misunderstood by most Americans today. It’s true that traditionally Deism presented a common sense, nature centered spiritual perspective that didn’t necessarily claim to be a bona fide religion. Many Deists were suspicious of and even hostile toward organized religion, which for centuries had plagued the world with bloody, superstition-driven crusades, inquisitions, and pogroms. But at the same time, some Deists remained Christians. Some Deists rejected all religion, while a number embraced Deism itself as the one true religion, and others considered Deism to be an elevating complement to any religion. Was there, and is there, then, such a thing as one universal Deism? In my view, yes. Commonsense truth has always been the essential foundation and final touchstone for any version of Deism. And as the name implies, De-ism—de from deus, meaning God—is centered in God, and only God, whether the focus be on theory or practice or a fusion of both. The defining tenet of God-ism is that the

scope and elegance of Creation—both as noun and verb— necessitates a Creator that transcends that Creation. (A Creator actively Creating could also be to some extent immanent in Creation—but not in the sense of being a human or other material component of Creation. God purely and truly Creates —is “in” Creation as ultimate source and process of Creation—yet is wholly other than—transcends—all Creation. God can’t be Creation any more than a human poet is a word or line in a poem or the form and content of the poem as a whole. But unlike a human poet, whose poetry is always derivative, God Creates something from nothing.) The updated rendition of Deism presented in this book stems from the original version initiated in the early seventeenth century by British philosopher Edward Herbert, later First Baron Herbert of Cherbury. Brother of the well-known religious poet George Herbert, the Father of Deism was himself a metaphysical poet and literary scholar, besides being a diplomat, soldier, courtier, and historian. Edward Herbert’s seminal works on the nature of truth, the bedrock of Deism, include De Veritate (On Truth), De Causis Errorum (On the Causes of Errors), De Religione Laici (On the Religion of the Laity), De Religione Gentilium (On the Religion of the Gentiles), and his Autobiography. In his treatises, Herbert proposes that all humans since the beginning of time have held five innate, God-given religious ideas: belief in God, in the need for worship, in virtue as the ultimate form of worship, in the need for repentance, and in rewards and punishments in the afterlife. How these five concepts expressed as private beliefs and the fundamental beliefs of institutionalized religions determined whether the religion would be humane or barbarous. Subsequent Deist thinkers—the list includes Charles Blount, John Toland, Anthony Collins, Conyers Middleton, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Chubb, Thomas Woolston, Voltaire, Hermann Samuel Reimarus, Elihu Palmer, and Thomas Paine—modified and expanded Herbert’s ideas. Considerations by skeptics like Montaigne, Pierre Bayle, Montesquieu, and many other freethinking philosophers and poets further legitimized Deism.

Though some Deists and political philosophers like John Locke argued that Deism need not contradict basic Christian beliefs, conservative Christianity begged to differ, and seeing it a grave threat, set about discrediting Deism, deeming it unorthodox, if not heretical. Though equated with paganism, the intelligent, progressive naturalistic theology quickly spread. Though Deist ideas were rooted in ancient understandings, most notably those of the Greeks, centuries of Church constriction had smothered the principle of universal beliefs beneath the edifice of compulsory Christianity. The premise that religious ideas were innate was radical in its time—and still is today. If religion is innate to us all, we don’t need organized religion and its hierarchy of sanctified insiders to instill religion within us or bestow its blessings upon us. There is no, and can be no, intermediary between an individual and God. No doubt unwittingly, Herbert planted the seed of a truly democratic religion that would help fuel major secular movements like the French and American Revolutions. Probably most of us contemporary Americans don’t really appreciate the extent to which Deism informed the basis of our Constitution and our nation. Some of our most illustrious Founding Fathers, such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Adams, John Jay, and Benjamin Franklin, as well as other famous thinkers in America and on the Continent, were proponents of the popular new “natural religion,” Deism. Like most Americans of that era, our Founders learned about Deism primarily via Thomas Paine, who critiqued organized religion, especially Christianity, and espoused revolution, both spiritual and political; works like Common Sense inspired our Declaration of Independence, and books, pamphlets, essays, and letters promoted constitutionalism, freedom of religion, separation of church and state, and notions of justice and basic human rights upon which our laws and governing institutions were constructed. Although Paine’s religious affiliation was Quaker, a sect for which he continued to hold great respect, he adopted many of the Deist ideas circulating in Britain and France and brought them with him to America. Just as important to the development of American Deism was Elihu Palmer’s Principles of Nature, or A Development of the Moral

Causes of Happiness and Misery among the Human Species. A Baptist clergyman, Palmer was driven from the pulpit for preaching against the divinity of Christ. He wrote his monumental work after being left blind, widowed, and unemployed following a bout of yellow fever, an epidemic that plagued the early Republic. It was Palmer’s Principles that were most often read and discussed during meetings of early Deist societies. Conservative Christianity demonized Deist ideas during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment just as it had in the previous century. Many of us Americans were taught in our history classes that Thomas Paine was atheist or agnostic, and that the Deists’ Clockmaker God was obviously no longer engaged with nature or humanity, making God, in effect, the absent Father. But in fact Paine was a passionate believer in a dynamically creating, actively virtuous God, and Clockmaker God was a term coined by reactionary Christians who wanted to discredit the Deists and their rational theologies. Still today conservative religionists tout Deism as “humanism,” the error of well-meaning agnostics or the heresy of demonic pagans, depending on which conservative you talk to. But humanism is the expression of commonsense virtue, and heresy, like “paganism,” is simply a spiritual difference of opinion. What most upsets conservatives is the Deist claim that religious truth is not received through special revelation or exclusive insider knowledge of a religious body or sacred text. In the opening of Age of Reason, Paine makes this still very relevant point about privileging any particular revealed religion: Every national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals. The Jews have their Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles and saints; and the Turks their Mahomet, as if the way to God was not open to every man alike. Each of those churches show certain books, which they call revelation, or the word of God. The Jews say, that their word of God was given by God to Moses, face to face; the Christians

say, that their word of God came by divine inspiration; and the Turks say, that their word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from Heaven. Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all. As it is necessary to affix right ideas to words, I will, before I proceed further into the subject, offer some other observations on the word revelation. Revelation, when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man. No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication, if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it. It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication—after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him. For a Deist, in the eighteenth century and now, truth supersedes myth, no matter how steeped in tradition that myth might be. Any myth, be it of a talking devil-serpent or man-God or God-breathed text or man living in the belly of a whale, is derivative and unverifiable. That doesn’t prove it to be false; the point is that a myth cannot be proved to be true and therefore should not be deemed absolute sacred truth. This is especially the case for a myth that is clearly impossible besides being primitive and/or childish.

To curb scrutiny, the high priests of organized religions and less organized cults transmute their myths into “revelation.” The great “revelation” of a Christ/Bible is, to be quite honest, a man-made myth wearing a paper halo. (If that image offends you, ask yourself this: If your cherished assumptions were proven to be false, would you have the integrity to give them up? If the proof were valid and true, would you not agree that even refusing to hear the argument would be both dishonest and cowardly?) As I will prove beyond a shadow of a doubt (which used to mean something in this country), neither Christ nor Bible is God or divine or “truth” in the way the fundamentalist means it. The focus of Deism is on God as truth—and on truth as true. That Deism is not the mythic “special revelation” bestowed upon a chosen spiritual elite but is a universally inclusive natural religion available to anyone via innate, God-given faculties such as reason, conscience, and intuition continues to pose a threat to the privileged position of Church and Bible and their equivalents in other religious traditions. Although immensely popular in the era of our Founders—Paine’s books were major bestsellers, and tens of thousands more copies were distributed among the poor by political clubs at their own expense—Deism gradually faded, in large part due to misunderstandings deliberately spawned by Christian conservatives throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and by fundamentalists during the early twentieth. I believe that we have reached a critical threshold when Deism will be—indeed must be—brought to the fore again. Deism is the only theology intent on transcending the myths of ancient religions by following the map of common sense on the universal quest for God. Only by following the map together, with mutual respect for each other’s differences replacing the violent urge to destroy them, can we halt our battle march toward extinction. In a sense, Deism is the world’s most authentic religion. Prominent in any dictionary definition of religion is the word “belief,” or “beliefs”; few would not agree that religion is a set or system of beliefs. But probably most of us would acknowledge that typically, the more religious a person is, the more he asserts his “beliefs” as

absolute fact. The religious extremist replaces faith in certain beliefs with a claim to know ultimate truth with certainty. Deism, on the other hand, truly maintains its faith in beliefs and respects any belief that does not contradict common sense. One might even argue that common sense itself is the high priest of Deism. Deism critiques religion, including itself, for the sake of truth. Like other religions, Deism is rooted in a belief in the Divine. But Deism honors God and only God rather than honoring a religion about God. And Deism acknowledges that God is inscrutable—tentatively deduced via common sense, experienced via a kind of spiritual intuition, but never perfectly “known” in the sense maintained by organized religion. For the Deist, God is not an absolute fact “proven” by an absolute text conferred by an absolute human divinity confirmed by specially ordained priests. Enlightenment is not a stasis of having arrived but is a process of improvement via increased understanding. God is not contained in a box on the altar of any religion. The Deist deeply respects the transcending Mystery of God. Deism is perhaps the only religion invested in its own evolution rather than in upholding its traditions. The only “ultimate assumption” in Deism—and even that is recognized to be a belief deduced via common sense—is that God is the Creator and Sustainer of existence as we know it. Deism is a progressive spiritual perspective informed by honest reflection. It rejects the arrogance of religious absolutism in favor of a more humble lifelong quest for the absolute truth that is God. The quest never ends, because God, being boundless and unbounded, who transcends all Creation down to the essence of each minute detail, is ultimately inscrutable. Religious claims to a full authoritative knowledge of God are just plain absurd. My Deist beliefs represent one particular perspective among many others. While my rendition is similar to the Enlightenment version popularized by Thomas Paine, its focus is more decidedly a spiritual outlook rooted in a belief—operative word belief—in a Creator God who is both transcendent and immanent and with whom one has a perpetual relationship, whether or not it registers as an

encounter with the Divine. When it does register, one’s awareness is Deist—unless or until it is appropriated by organized religion. No one can prove that the spiritual exists. What I’m relying on here is the intuited understanding that I believe we all have but don’t all cultivate—the understanding of a very specific faculty, the spirit. If you are spiritually inclined, you will understand what I mean when I assert that spirit exists. If you are unspiritual or anti spiritual, if you don’t experience the spiritual yourself (or don’t register spiritual experience as spiritual) or assume that spiritual experience is impossible, you will likely reject my claims without even considering them, like the cynic who has never been in love (or more likely, has been rejected) argues that there is no such thing as love. Here lies a major problem with any discourse about spirituality: Actual spirituality requires a discerning spirit, and spirit, just like mind, body, or any other faculty, needs to be cultivated. Some won’t cultivate spirit because they believe it doesn’t exist. Others cultivate spirit the wrong way. As I will show, religion rooted in belief-as-fact, which inevitably becomes “organized religion” for its own sake, is ultimately a detrimental way to cultivate spirit. In fact, throughout history, more people have been persecuted, tortured, and murdered by organized religion for the sake of belief-as-fact than by any other cause on earth. New Deism—which is a theology of God and only God—holds as its fundamental tenets (beliefs) that God exists; that God is one; that God is Creator; that God is both transcendent and immanent in Creation; that God is all-knowing, omniscient, and omnipotent; that God is good; that God is just; that God transcends the limits of human knowledge, goodness, and justice; that God spiritually engages with human individuals; and that no human or text or material or immaterial object is God or embodies God or fully or accurately represents God: This version of Deism is extreme in its rejection of idolatry. Deism critiques fundamentalism for espousing belief in one transcendent (heavenly) spiritual Deity while in reality it is a religion of text worship. This is the case not just for Christian fundamentalism. Fundamentalist sects of the major religions have their own roots and beliefs, but each venerates a divine text, be it

book (Bible, Koran, Torah, Sutras…), or prophet (Jesus, Mohammad, Moses, Buddha…) or leader (Paul, pope, mullah, rabbi, Dali Lama…) embodied in writings, as its ultimate source of truth; worship of a divinely inspired infallible text—a text that incarnates the divine Word—is what makes a sect radically fundamentalist. The version of Christian fundamentalism prevalent in the U.S. today stems from an ultraconservative, anti-Enlightenment Protestant movement that arose in late nineteenth-century America to combat higher criticism—the historical-literary study of the Bible —and to thwart attempts to reconcile traditional Christian beliefs with contemporary experience and scientific knowledge. The fundamentalists, as they called themselves, transfigured the words of the Bible witness into God’s infallible Word, elevating the Bible to the status of full equality with God. This mystified “Word” not only justifies God’s authority, but by extension, it confirms the fundamentalist’s own authority. Most of us have heard at least one evangelist claim to be speaking and/or acting “in the full authority of God.” The evangelist’s word (i.e., his interpretation of the Bible) equals God’s Word equals God. Deism, on the other hand, is a truly democratic religion with a universal text of existence itself, which is available to anyone. Not a religion for “chosen” elite worshippers of a cultural or regional god, Deism is the ideal religion for people who truly believe that God is One. And when all the myths of religion and anti-religion have been demystified, who wouldn’t believe that?



 

Chapter 2 A Philosophical Basis for Deism Commonsense Truth and Humanism New Deism—the twenty-first-century version descended from Thomas Paine that I present here—is an experiment with noninstitutional, judicious spirituality that advocates reality-as-truth and embraces the process of educated inferring. It is rooted in the premise that true religion is a set of reasons that exist in the real world, not in the world of antiquated codes derived from opinions colored by superstitions certified by myths. Like traditional Deism, new Deism acknowledges the self-evident existence of a Creator, presumed to be one God that is good, omniscient, and eternal. Deism is humanism that includes belief in God, as opposed to atheistic humanism. When fundamentalists use the slur “humanism,” they usually mean atheism. The charge that humanists are necessarily atheists is false. Most humanists are fundamentally Deists, though they might not use that term. Most religionists, however, worship some false representation of God, making them idolaters (by those religions’ own definitions) or dishonest atheists. The disagreement isn’t really over the existence of God. The rift between humanism and religion is the difference between speculative and absolutist faith, between active revelation and static indoctrination, between humble and self-righteous assumptions about God. Contrary to the claims of religionists, Deism’s natural humanism doesn’t erase or displace God. But organized religion does, by deifying itself and its validating “God-breathed” texts; it elevates antiquated human knowledge to the status of absolute divinity while it denigrates human scientific and philosophic explorations of God’s natural Creation.

Humanism simply admits that at the center of all human concern stands the human being. It can’t be otherwise. Our experience even of objective fact is always subjective. We see with human eyes, reason with human minds, feel with human emotions, act with human wills. The universe is ordered in such a way that we truthseekers known as humans can catch a glimpse—but only a fragmentary glimpse—of its countless mysteries. In contrast to religious absolutism, humanism humbly acknowledges that every glimpse is finite, temporal human interpretation. Theories, experiments, exploration, deductions, and accumulated data can culminate as facts, but even facts can be updated and revised. Absolute truth might exist (and common sense tells us it does), but human knowledge is tentative. Subjective Objectivity Even the most basic assertions about God are always beliefs and as such are subject to revision based on new information. Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, pagans, and atheists feel confident asserting 2+2=4 as absolute fact, but should we be as confident contending that God exists or does not exist, or that God is good or beyond good and evil? Observation and mathematical reasoning confirm that gravity behaves exactly the same way everywhere in the universe. But on what basis can we assert that God is one, is transcendent and/or immanent, or is the creator and sustainer of the universe? Can there be true knowledge of God, the fundamental basis of religion, and if so, how do we know that our knowledge is absolutely true? Our need for a sense of security often makes us unwilling to concede that even “absolute facts” are beliefs. We thought it absolute fact that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line, but then Einstein demonstrated that because space is curved (or rather curving, since space is still expanding), the shortest distance between two points is a curve, and in fact, a perfect straight line doesn’t exist anywhere in nature, it only exists as a mental construct in the human mind. Knowledge is a process of coming to know; what we come to know is an aspect of reality.

It’s hard for most of us to wrap our very human minds around the possibility that the shortest distance between two points isn’t a straight line. Maybe Einstein was wrong, maybe the shortest distance is a straight line. Or maybe, as scientists explain, it depends on context, in this case, the extreme macro or micro dimensions of space-time; in the everyday world, the shortest distance between two points would still be a straight line when you’re buying wallpaper or building a deck. Regardless of any objective truth, each and every one of us can only know that truth subjectively. We call a red sweater red when in fact the sweater is all colors except red. Red is the wavelength of light reflected off the sweater rather than absorbed by it along with the other colors. Our retinas absorb that reflected wavelength, and our brains interpret it as red. Although we believe that the sweater is red, in actuality (in a sense), red is the color the sweater is not. Deists assume that God is not a static précis of reductive human knowledge but is the exuberant Creator that keeps us humans on our toes. Nature—all space-time existence—is the field where God engages with humans. Humans are that part of nature that humans are closest to; each human mind is the temple of knowledge, understanding, and experience of God, limited as it is. We take 2+2=4 to be an objective fact that is true whether or not we believe it. Granted, but its truth is not dependent on observation alone but requires interpretation via internal logic. For a time, Plato considered mathematics to be ultimate objective truth. But still, it is the preprogrammed human mind that subjectively judges the equation 2+2=4 to be true. Mathematical concepts, Aristotle reminded Plato, are mental generalizations of concrete reality— concepts that we all understand because we all share the same innate mental capacity to grasp generalizations about a common reality we all experience. The Will to Think Collectively we are human, but we are also human individuals. We are born with our learning apparatuses—our inherent faculties—but we must participate in the process of learning. Early in life we seem to catch on to many lessons instinctively, but later, more

sophisticated learning requires our active, willful participation. According to many experts, we are all wired to be geniuses. Most of us are not geniuses because we lack focus and flow; creativity and imagination to think outside the box; critical listening/observing learning skills; and persistent expression by which we engage in feedback loops. Geniuses are actively engaged in creation, synthesis, and articulation; non-geniuses—let’s just be honest—tend to be passively receptive mockingbirds. Genius is not about superiority; it is about thinking. We’ve all got good physical brains. It’s the way we use them, the way we think, that transforms our brains into intelligence. According to scholars in the field of accelerated learning, anyone can learn to think as a genius. Thinking is not instant recognition of truth. It is a willful process of weighing, evaluating, reasoning, and tentatively concluding. Sometimes there is that Aha! moment of recognition, for instance when a kid first realizes that if A equals B, and B equals C, then A equals C. But higher thought is always open-minded, which is another way of saying creative; it always admits the possibility of new information that leads to different conclusions. The earth is not flat. The sun and planets do not revolve around the earth. The shortest distance between two points is not necessarily a straight line. Fallacies of thought and semantic misinterpretations are as common as misinformation. One might assume that if A is B, then B is A. But just because God is love does not mean that love is God. That a car is red does not mean that red is a car. Even basic equations have to be thought through. Through implies evolution via process. In fact, evolution is process, and process evolution. Creation is process. Doubt as Spiritual Necessity Doubt (here meaning open-minded tentativeness) must be admitted as a legitimate and necessary condition of subjective truth-seeking and subsequent subjective apprehension of truth. Machines can be programmed, but humans need to understand. In this life, at least, doubt is a component of knowledge and knowledge a component of understanding. By denying doubt, we admit absolutist petrifaction;

we deny active engagement in truth-seeking—thinking—and therefore in living human consciousness itself. Only humans know Creation as creation. Creation is a perpetual coming into existence. Static absolutism is the real heresy against the Creator. Doubt is the natural consequence of two important subjective emotions that absolutists usually claim to own but don’t—humility and faith. It is doubters, skeptics, truth-seekers that humbly admit that no human mind or institution is the perfect receptacle of absolute truth. The human pea-brain is enormously limited in what it can and does know about our immense universe, not to mention its possible meaning. Perfect knowledge of anything can be perfectly doubt-free knowledge only if the knower perfectly knows everything. If we cannot and do not know the existence, means of existence, and operative substance of every minute particle and every mathematical dimension of every universe (just for starters), then there might be an exception or an unknown context for anything, even something as simple and obviously true for us non rocket scientists as the straight line being the shortest distance between two points. The humble knower is denigrated and often demonized by the arrogant knower, the knower who rejects new ideas and updated information, who burns heretics at the stake for dark arts like flying on broomsticks, copulating with devils, or acknowledging that earth is neither flat nor the center of the universe—nowadays translated as Harry Potter, gays, and evolutionists. This arrogant knower “obediently” clings to the “authority” of myths, legends, and superstitions generated by unknown authors in an age steeped in similar myths, legends, and superstitions, and calls that the “Word of God.” This is the imperfect knower who calls blind faith divinely inspired absolute truth. The Perfect Knower The perfect knower, it seems, can only be God. The reasonable assumption is that only the One who actually creates it all, knows it all. And that One necessarily stands “above” it all to some extent. (The Creator that creates existence can’t not yet exist).

Because the perpetual coming-into-existence of a universe as elegantly complicated as ours must be known by something ultimately intelligent, we can deduce the existence of an ultimate knower/creator God still actively creating our perfectly synchronized universe—which does not preclude the possibility of another God creating another universe or more than one God creating ours. But the transcendent creating Divinity is one in creating one elegantly coherent Creation. Spiritual Truth Via God-given Faculties To assert the a priori reality even of God requires faith that our limited inherent faculties are capable of accurately apprehending and/or deducing God’s existence just like anything else. Understanding this is crucial to dispelling the myths of absolutism. Again, faith necessarily includes doubt, because in order to believe anything else, first and foremost we must believe in the ability of our faculties to apprehend and experience; we must trust our faculties as our ultimate guide, yet we must acknowledge that our faculties are limited. Despite the limitations of our own faculty of reason, it is —it must be— by that faculty of reason that we can deduce from the massive evidence of our universe that at least one Creator exists (or that multiple Creators must be “one” in the process of creating one cohesive Creation). Even if we don’t realize it, we are also trusting in our innate faculty of aesthetic sensibility, which apprehends that this universe is consistently elegant, coherent, and magnificent beyond total human comprehension. Even just a glimpse of its sublimity inspires a quality of awe in many of us that can properly be called spiritual. That experience of awe is sometimes sufficient to persuade us of the necessity of a Creator, which tradition has named God/Gods. Furthermore, our faculties—intuition, conscience, aesthetic sensibility, reason, and all our other “registers”—are endowed upon us by something that necessarily transcends those faculties. Whether we believe that something to be Nature or God or some cosmic energy, we just have to trust that our endowed apparatuses are trustworthy—which further puts us in the logically precarious

position of having to trust the trustworthiness of our ability to trust. It is possible that we have been deceived. To believe that we have not been deceived, to trust the trustworthiness of our faculties, we must also trust that what endowed us is trustworthy, and furthermore, that trustworthy is good, good being that which ultimately benefits. We can choose to believe that we have been deceived, but that would lead to a kind of existential madness, which seems to be a kind of built-in aversion response diverting us away from naturally repugnant nihilistic thinking that ultimately harms rather than benefits us, and ultimately destroys rather than gives life. That instinctive response appears to be beneficial in averting anxiety, depression, inertia, and suicide. A beneficial response mechanism would most likely have been implanted in us by a benevolent Inventor. That is an opinion, a belief. But can we know that God is benevolent? Couldn’t God as logically be sadistic and deceiving? The ultimate sadistic deception, then, would be the (false) “revelation” of a good God. Can we know that the universe, or the powers of reason, or God truly exists? Can our belief that a Creator exists, can our register of sublimity, can our understanding that 2+2 was designed to be always 4 properly be called knowledge? Only if our definition of knowledge includes doubt, the kind of doubt that allowed us to reconsider the “fact” of a flat earth. We know what is, in part in contrast to what it is not. Skepticism Skepticism is the Golden Mean between the two extremes of absolutism—fundamentalism and atheism, both of which deny the possibility of truth that contradicts presumed knowledge. At this point in my life, my understanding is that absolutist beliefs that God is “out to get us” or that there is no God and thus life is ultimately meaningless stem in part from paranoid thinking. The absolutist Pollyanna belief, on the other hand, is that God is exactly what the believer thinks He is, that God won’t let anything bad happen to her, that God is her personal genii, who, if she rubs her Bible or rosary (or Koran, or tassel, or talisman) hard enough, if she says the right abracadabra and prays loud enough with her hands

extended to heaven, God must grant her every wish and serve her best interests. That is primitive/infantile thinking, the kind of nonthinking exploited by TV evangelists. Absolutist paranoid thinking and absolutist primitive/infantile thinking are both examples of blind faith. Both shut out skepticism and its critiques. Perhaps you too have noticed that paranoid and primitive/infantile thinkers tend to be know-it-alls. The problem with absolutists is that they land on an insight (often someone else’s that they claim as their own), stamp it as conclusive, codify it as absolute, and refuse to budge. They stop thinking. They stop seeking. They refuse to admit any data that doesn’t fit into the prefab little box of “truth.” Absolutists are the direct antithesis of truth-seekers. Knowledge is not blind faith. One can and should—and must— have faith in that which in us registers what we call truth, one’s own inherent faculties, including reason, conscience, intuition, experience, emotions (emotional intelligence), and the aesthetic (aesthetic sensibility, which registers beauty and the sublime). But even absolutists know how easy it is for these faculties to be ignored, misinterpreted, or deluded. When biblical infallibility has been proven beyond any shadow of a doubt to be false, to continue “believing” in infallibility requires that the believer reject the discerning of his God-given faculties in favor of a hand-me-down opinion that cannot possibly be proven true. Blind faith is no faith at all; it is the rejection of truth for a myth of truth. We only have authentic faith in that which appears most clearly true in that all our faculties concur. To “believe” as truth that which clearly is not true is the opposite of truth; it’s a lie. Today as always, religious myths like Noah’s Ark or the parting of the Red Sea are asserted as truth only by the ignorant, those in denial, the gullible, or purposeful deceivers. One is entitled to one’s opinions, religious or otherwise, but intent to deceive is not opinion. Absence of thought is not opinion. Belief that contradicts one’s inherent faculties is not opinion; it is the negation and displacement of faculty-generated opinion by indoctrination. That the Bible is not infallible and that religion is mythic at least in part does not prove that God does or does not exist, nor does it

prove that religion is devoid of truth, meaning, or value. But belief in biblical infallibility or religious tradition is not the same as belief in one’s own ability to register truth. Our faculties are all we’ve got to stand on; that is the foundation of humanism. To reject our inherent faculties is a kind of spiritual suicide. If we reject our faculties, we have nothing left by which to judge if anything is true. Enter Big Brother to program the lobotomized herd. The validity of any claim is only possible if we have the capacity to know that it is or is not. If we deny the validity of our faculties—say, in order to affirm a belief in biblical infallibility—we have nothing left by which to confirm that our belief is valid. We could believe absolutely anything. Meaning nothing. If we believe that 2+2 could equal 5 or 12 or 0 or red or insurance because the Bible says so, then there is no truth, only absurdity. Truth is what it is only in contrast to what it is not. Every biblical jot and iota has to be weighed and judged by our God-given faculties. In matters of faith, by refusing to discern between what is and what is not, fundamentalists reduce themselves to unthinking windup dolls. Of course, a human being is more than a collection of interconnected faculties. Our faculties are contained in a body, itself a faculty, and most of us believe that that body houses or embodies not only our interior faculties but also our spiritual essence, our core being. The spirit is the part of us that is most uniquely our own discrete self. Ironically, it’s the part that is most capable of “oneness” with others. I can’t prove that the spirit exists, or for that matter, that our faculties and bodies exist. I have no choice but to believe that they exist, because all my faculties concur that this is so and because I choose to be honest. Meaning as Knowledge of God’s Existence Why do some people deny the existence of God while others “just know”? I agree with many religions that God “touches” some of us in the sense that most “touched” believers mean they have had a concrete spiritual experience of God. “Touched” doesn’t quite name it. We are limited to our space-time language, which is never adequate to describe something that transcends space-time. The

atheist would argue that nothing transcends space-time; certainly nothing in space-time transcends space-time. But a great work of art, to offer but one example—its metaphors and symbols, its meaning, its aesthetic qualities—transcends the sum of its material parts. Truth that transcends the material realm and its space-time-bound language we apprehend metaphorically, by analogy, through the imagery of our material life. God the Father and God the Mother, for instance, allow us to intellectually understand and express by analogy our spiritual experiences. But they are legitimate metaphors only if we recognize that metaphors are not specifically the realities they represent. God is not male or female; God is not human. Belief in a literal male/female human God is primitive and childish, the product of minds lacking the sophistication to grasp the symbolic, or of hearts craving the security of a surrogate trans-parent to rescue us from chaos and death. Like all things symbolic, religion is subject to interpretation. My interpretation is my opinion, which might or might not accurately name actual reality. Opinions are guesses. My guesses about the existence and nature of God are educated, but that doesn’t make them correct. But our educated guesses are all we have to go on. And by educated I mean not only formal study at a university but also the natural education that comes via attentive reflection upon life itself. Like all opinions, guesses about religion are part of a process of adjustment to new information. In a sense, the meaning of life is revision, which is what it means to really “get educated.” My current guess regarding life’s ultimate meaning is that our religions, arts, and dreams provide us with mythic representations of transcendental truth. Even if there was no literal Edenic “fall,” we might be fallen in a transcendental sense, a real state that the myth of the fall unconsciously represents. Unlike many of my postmodern colleagues, I don’t believe that our myths represent attempts to create meaning out of life materials that are in themselves meaningless. Nor do I believe that our religious myths simply mirror the psyche or represent some other purely space-time experience. Many myths contain transcendental material or are themselves transcendental. They provide a conduit between our space-time existence and a transcendent “heavenly” dimension.

The God of Gestalt My notion of gestalt accepts that reality is fragmented like the frames of a movie and acknowledges that the frames are themselves representations of gestalts that convey only fragmentary material, but I do not accept that the resulting unified gestalt is an illusion created by humans who long for a unity that does not exist. A movie, or a discrete frame or picture, is lacking everything but one very limited perspective that is itself (in the picture example) limited to the visual. Life experience is “infinitely” more rich and complex. My guess is that meaning is not simply constructed of infinitely reductive materials that are inherently non-meaningful in themselves. I believe that everything down to its every minute particle is objectively meaningful, and I believe this because what I intuit makes sense to my rational and other faculties. Like a multitude of other people, I intuit that there is one unifying Creator, the unifier represented with the designator “God.” Is God the unifier created in our own image, or are we created in the image of the unifier? Of course, there are other possibilities, but do they make sense? Something in us wants either-or choices. Good v. evil. Is God a moral Creator that wants us to separate out the fragments of good and evil? What would it mean if God were not a moral Creator? I believe a case for morality can be made on the basis of unity. This contradicts the elitism of religions that seek to demonize good represented in other religions—that seek to demonize good as evil rather than unifying in the cause of universal good. The fragmenting of unifying good is exactly what makes religions dangerously evil. Good is that which benefits; evil is that which harms. All major religions lift up love as one of its highest ideals, because love is a condition that ultimately benefits because it ultimately unites while preserving independent uniqueness; it is, in the view of many, the consummate good. When religion prevents a black person from marrying a white person, a Muslim from marrying a Christian, a Catholic from marrying a Protestant, a young person from marrying an older person, a rich person from marrying a poor person, a respectable person from marrying a bohemian, or two gay persons from marrying, religion creates fragmentation of the good rather than

unity of the good. It fosters harm rather than the beneficial good of love, and isn’t that the definition of evil? The seemingly infinite fragments of what we perceive to be existence are really our fragmentary experiences of aspects of a unified reality. Through contemplation and communion we are able to deepen our understanding of the unity. It’s an overgeneralization to say that contemplation is the method of the pure rationalist while communion is the more direct method of the sensitive. Contemplation and communion are present together in nearly all of us, and certainly in the wise. The truly wise don’t make the mistake of dehumanizing humans by relegating them to convenient categories, like the thinking-type, feeling-type, creative-type, etc. We are far too complex to be represented accurately as cartoons. We are pieces—fragments —but those pieces constitute a unified whole. God is the source of unity but is not the unity itself—indeed, cannot be. The poem is not the poet, nor is the poet the poem, though something of the poet will always be in the poem, even if negatively. Shakespeare, for instance, is negatively “in” Macbeth; Macbeth represents what Shakespeare is not, what he despises, what he warns us against becoming. God, I believe, is to some extent negatively in existence in that the unity contains evil (what God is not, what he despises, what he warns us against becoming), and in that humans possess the free will to choose to do and be evil. But that does not make good and evil absolute polarities. They are discrete ingredients that have been tossed into the space-time blender. We can—and most of us would say should—attempt to separate those ingredients, to pursue the good and eliminate the evil. But it’s a fatal mistake to assume that those ingredients are ever truly separated in this space-time realm or that what we believe to be good is actually good. We remind ourselves of that ignorance via our myths and symbols—the poison apple, for instance, or even an ordinary, seemingly good apple offered by a venomous serpent initiating poisonous consequences. Because I guess that God is one, good, transcendent (“above” and “outside of” Creation), and the Creator of this space-time unity of “infinite” discrete entities (I think that space-time is not itself infinite/eternal, if only because it is still coming into existence), and

because I guess that God is a nonhuman, non-bodily “person” that is actively engaged from within (“immanent”) in the process of creation, my opinion is that the highest meaning of life is that life is inherently meaningful and it is our job to discover actual meaning. There is one meaning (and again, this is just my opinion), but there are infinite possible ways to represent that meaning. Our myths, arts, and dreams—indeed, human life itself—represent discrete, limited, individual interpretations of comprehensive meanings of meanings expanding outward with the Big Bang cosmos and inward to the Taoist still point in the turning wheel. Transcendental Truth Everything I have just said, of course, is itself a representation of a guess. My guess is that religions, arts, and dreams collect mythic representations of transcendental truth. Religions, arts, and dreams are themselves collections. Unfortunately, many people believe that the interpretive collections are themselves objective reality and ultimate reality. Fundamentalism is the misinterpretation of collected religious material as absolute God-breathed fact. For instance, the myth of the fall in the Garden of Eden is an ancient archetypal myth found in one form or another in numerous cultures and their religions throughout the world. The JudeoChristian version represents a transcendental truth of moral misjudgment, estrangement from the Creator, awakening to a need for redemption, and rebirth into the quest for the redemptive solution. This paradigm is told and retold in numerous myths of various religions. One could argue that the myth represents the core essence of religion itself. Milton represented it dramatically with the fall of Satan, the temptation of Eve and Adam, the principle of evil working to thwart redemption, and the coming of a redemptive hero to assist Eve and Adam in fulfilling their quest—in fact, to fulfill it for them. In this version, Eve and Adam lack the free-will power of Satan. My current interpretation of the subtext of Milton is that it reveals a primal belief—really a fear—that the power of evil transcends the power of good, and that Milton is confessing the primal hope that

some higher power of good, represented by Christ, will prevail. Milton’s glorification of Satan, the real protagonist in Paradise Lost (which Christ in Paradise Regained never matches), exposes his doubts about the divinity (even by adoption) of humanity and the efficacy of the Christian religion to save us by granting continued life. That Christianity has elevated Christ to the status of man-god exposes humanity’s doubt about its own ability to establish—or regain—communion with God as represented by the lost Paradise or hoped-for Promise Land, Heaven. It is a childish wish to hand over to a parental figure all personal responsibility and spiritual hard work of the experienced quest for meaning. My guess is that religious absolutism is an archetypal juvenile excuse to remain immaturely mediocre. Clean your room. Do your homework. No way, says the spoiled brat glued to his computer game. Mom or Dad or the housekeeper will do it for me. This guess about the universally represented myth of a transcendental fall informs my other guesses about reality and meaning. I further guess that we are truly fallen from some prespace-time (transcendental) communion with God. But I could be wrong; sometimes I agree with many that life is a test rather than a quest for redemption. All religion represents this kind of guesswork, and to assert otherwise exposes the person’s unwillingness to get his hands dirty in the necessary cultivation of his own life, his own meaning. But like a cultivated garden, we dig and water, but, as the saying goes, God gives the growth. We create, yes, but even our creation is intimately in communion with “discovery” of inherent existence and its meaning. Representations of God Christianity, Islam, Judaism, any religion can provide powerful representations of God, which authentically resonate and clarify when they are understood to be representations. At their best, religions aesthetically initiate focus and facilitate access to communion with God—keeping in mind that there are as many ways to commune with God as there are communers. Religions simply provide approaches that can be shared. But a good approach does

not exclude other approaches from being equally good or better. Religious elitism is never good, because it is based on a fallacy of inherent superiority; it plays God. Religions tend to reduce God to a representation. Each religion pretends that its representation is God and that this God is the revelation of God by God. But it is easy to show how mainstream religions have borrowed freely from the so-called pagan religions. Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and other worshippers of the anthropomorphic image of a legalistic, jealous, vengeful, violent male god are primarily modern remnants of the primitive cult of Zeus or some other patriarchal head of a familial pantheon. If it is idolatry to worship Zeus or any other anthropomorphic father-god, it is idolatry to worship the Judeo-Christian “God the Father,” that anthropomorphic old geezer with a cosmic voyeur ego leaning over the lip of the universe and perpetually wrecking havoc on innocent mortals—a representation naively worshipped as actual to this day. There are legitimate uses of aesthetic, mythic representations of the divine, but surely their worship is not among them. To worship God is to seek God. To have faith in one God is to consider all fundamentalist religions to be idolatry. Deism seeks God as God, the actual God, not superstitions, not self-righteous projections of our own shadow, not the schizophrenic God of sectarian wars. Deism seeks peace through love and love through truth. Perhaps only the truth-path of Deism can demystify humanity’s “sacred” path of self-destruction and establish unity for the benefit of love.



 

Chapter 3 Born-Again Deist Deism is a religion of commonsense truth. But it can also be an experience of immanence, which many call communion with God, or being in the Spirit. My beliefs, like anyone’s, have been derived through personal experience. The reality of the spiritual dimension is something I personally can’t deny. As a very young child—no older than five or six—I had spiritual “feelings” that I couldn’t understand. And by feelings I mean something quite tangible; and by tangible I mean something intimately “one” with the natural Creation—nature. Deep emotions accompanied the sensation but were responses to the visceral, sensual experience of some kind of “Presence” in nature. Many people have feelings of being “one” with nature. What is that sense of oneness if not an experience of immanence, the presence of the Creator actively creating, creative Eros, life-force itself? In my experience, the people who say “No” to that explanation are people who have never experienced that oneness. And most of them conclude that the experience therefore does not and cannot exist. I’ve talked with many people who had similar feelings of immanence as young kids, though for most, their authentic spiritual experiences were squelched by some contrary religious doctrine. I remember one grade school friend abruptly warning me matterof-factly, as if suddenly remembering something in the middle of our long conversation about “something” in nature, “You better not say that; that’s the devil.” The devil—now that was a new concept. To me the devil had been nothing but a fake-scary Halloween costume. Was that all he thought of my feelings?

My mystical feelings persisted, as did my need to understand them (and by “mystical” I mean a sense of Presence, and a heightened sense of life’s depth, for lack of a better way of putting it). In high school I tried to articulate my intuited understanding verbally and in journals, but the right words escaped me. I tried to find evidence of what I felt in religious books, including the Bible, but everything I read was boringly esoteric if not downright silly, and all of it colored by jargon derived from my immediate world’s specific religious tradition. None of it jived; none of it cut to the quick. It was all irrelevant. And that was the root of a big problem for me that was felt long before it could be intellectually understood. I felt something spiritual, and though “secular” writers like Thoreau, Frost, and Whitman twanged that nerve, I still felt my naïve ignorance about real religion, which translated emotionally as frustration, and by my teen years as depression and even anger. By the time I hit college, I was suffering from an acute need to know. My spiritual quest kept butting against a common dilemma, which back then was sensed rather than articulated: Regardless of our religious backgrounds and beliefs and our unique personal experiences, all Americans have been indoctrinated to think, judge, and act according to certain narrowly defined Judeo-Christian mores codified as part of our nation’s socio-political infrastructure. Independent mysticism is typically not part of the program. Organized religion had long ago supplanted spirituality with its agenda of knowing about via indoctrination rather than coming to know via personal experience, although it claimed to absolutely know and to be able to “force” that knowledge upon another. The irony is that religion’s agenda of knowing about, which is always indirect, is asserted as ultimate and intimate knowledge. Luckily, my family was not strictly religious. My parents were selfproclaimed agnostics who were raised by devout, but not aggressively dogmatic Protestants. My mom’s family was Lutheran, my dad’s Presbyterian (though only in the most vague, abstract way were Luther and Calvin my spiritual ancestors). My siblings and I were baptized in one or the other church, went through the

catechism process in both churches, and took the catechism vows to become members of the Beecher Presbyterian Church. Although sometimes my aunt, the church organist, recruited me to sing in the choir, church attendance was always my choice. My parents rarely attended church (I don’t recall my dad ever being in a church except for weddings and funerals), but they had no problem with God, only with the church’s behavioral dictates and the judgmental attitudes that came with them. My parents were very sociable people who became close friends with their neighbors and co-workers. They laughed and smoked and drank socially, and both had been professional jazz musicians—hardly candidates for piety. I occasionally went to church with my grandmother, who attended regularly and to whom I was quite close. If she influenced me at all, it was by the quiet force of her nature, which was truly morally pure and loving, but not in a way that I would call religious. She never mentioned doctrines or anything about religion at all, though she did sometimes recall good times with my grandpa’s best friends, the then local minister and his wife, but my grandpa died when I was five or six and the minister’s family had long ago moved away. Church was a profound bore for me, as it was for most kids I knew. But that didn’t keep us from staying up all night discussing serious questions about the meaning of life and God. It makes perfect sense to me that a charismatic religious leader could quell a person’s spiritual anxiety with exciting answers and promises of “The True Way.” Certainly it makes sense that intelligent adults who have dismissed their early spiritual sensations as make-believe or inappropriate could have those hidden memories triggered by just about any authority, even a charlatan, who affirms those experiences as valid. Surely acceptable, mainstreamed recontextualization of primal spirituality could help explain the enormous and dangerous appeal of obviously exploitive TV evangelists, cult gurus, and spiritual leaders calling for jihad, suicide bombings, and contributions of your life savings to bogus “missions” sweetened with promises of prosperity or salvation. As a university teenager, I did buy into hard-line fundamentalism for a time. But like many progressive born-agains I knew, I refused to

sacrifice my brains on the altar. Even during my initial born-again phase, I rarely went to church, and I never attended just one. Ironically, it was probably due largely to my agnostic upbringing that I would not, in fact could not squelch my own personal spiritual experiences, which I knew were “mine” and not the church’s. Even much later, during dry periods of limited sensations, the memories of Presence remained vivid in the back of my mind. Back when I started college I was depressed and “mad at the world,” frustrated by my unfruitful quest for answers. Then suddenly I began to get them. My college courses in literature, philosophy, and religion began to give shape to a spiritual interpretation of historical reality. Although I took classes in comparative religion and had a few liberal professors, my small Midwest buckle-on-the-Bible-Belt campus was Christian and so were most of my professors, including the handful who had taken time to engage with me in a serious way outside of class. My gestating concept of reality was shaping up into a decidedly Christian one. At age nineteen, I went through an initial born-again experience “alone” and for years insisted that it was completely independent of any influence. I realize now, of course, that that’s not true—couldn’t possibly be true. Being born-again was a powerful spiritual and emotional experience, a gestalt moment when all that appeared to me as spiritual chaos suddenly took a dynamically coherent shape rooted in an imposing tradition that had existed since antiquity. Where had I been! I was overjoyed. I basked in Christianity’s well-labeled tenets and in the loving fellowship and often deep friendship with those who accepted them as fact. At the time, it never occurred to me that my personal born-again experience was very much a socially orchestrated event. In fact, social motivation would have been my last possible explanation for the powerful spiritual trans-figuration I was going through. And while I don’t at all deny the spiritual nature of the experience, it is clear to me now that any person’s born-again experience occurs within a socio-religious context that erroneously claims to be the source of the experience. God “came” to me, a good Christian. By the time God “came”—as if God had not been “coming” to me throughout my

whole life—I had been thoroughly indoctrinated in the friendliest way by some of my closest friends and professors, and this was a small university in a town that boasted it had more churches per capita than any other town in the country, a small university where people were indeed very close. The closeness to smart, progressive people who were unabashedly spiritual was a blast of fresh air. As I read the Bible and went to Bible study groups and heard literature and philosophy courses and in effect all existence interpreted in a Christian context—all of it melded with time spent communing with likeminded Christian friends—my own spirituality was suddenly squeezed into a context of “having arrived.” The pressure of giftboxed answers and concentrated feelings produced the surge of joy and love that catalyzed the explosion classically termed a born-again experience. This is not to say that being born-again is not authentically spiritual. It most certainly is, or was for me. But because it occurs within a constricted context, a small gift box called “the real thing,” spirituality is squeezed into absolute definitions that are not accurate or even ultimately meaningful. It took awhile for me to come to my senses and acknowledge that God is not a Christian God and that religion appropriates authentic spirituality for its own dark and dangerous purposes at least as often as it worships Divinity or ministers to the human spirit. The dark side of authoritarian religion was not the only problem. From the other extreme came disdain of atheistic Freudians for whom religious ecstasy was a projection of repressed sexual fantasy, or more likely, sexual abuse in the hands of a macho fathergod—neither being the case for me—, and an equal distain of atheistic materialists, for whom matter was the be-all and end-all beyond which there was nothing. In the midst of religious and anti-religious extremism, without even knowing it I began to follow a straight and narrow path down the middle of “God-as-such.” Being born-again had happened in a flash of acceptance accompanied by that old “feeling” of immanence. The closeness I felt with many of my comrades, mostly roommates and friends, might not have been as extraordinary as I assumed at the time. I

have been an adjunct professor for twenty years and have taught at ten universities and colleges. I regularly pull students into “heavy” conversations, and the powerful spiritual epiphanies they share with me are not always religious. I have met young people in college, and older people in college, and all ages of people in other contexts whose lives were changed in ways that I would call born-again, but their experiences were within the non-Christian context of serving in the Peace Corps, or getting involved with environmental actions, or being immersed in the feminist anti-violence movement, or teaching kids on a reservation to read, or sharing mind-expanding ideas with kids from other traditions via online blogs, or being in-flow in music or writing or art, or getting immersed in non- or quasi-religious spirituality—any number of ways. Kids and adults alike feel the heightened sensation that comes with getting a new set of answers to the questions of life’s meaning and new forms of communion in the deeply spiritual sense. Just because their experiences occur outside the jurisdiction of church or religion doesn’t mean they aren’t getting in touch with God. In fact, I had gotten in touch with what most people call “God,” or rather God had gotten in touch with me, outside any hard-line religious context. I was quite young and uneducated when I first started having those numinous feelings (I don’t remember ever not having them). What the born-again experience gave me was the addition of seemingly rational answers and a sense of coherent tradition. It seemed that my quest had reached its goal. I accepted a biblically fundamentalist stance toward God and felt spiritually normal and acceptable for the first time. But that confidence was short-lived. As I read the Bible and learned more about Christian history and got to know and know about “good Christians” who were anything but good, my religion began to deflate. Eventually I realized that of course religion was not spirituality. And Christianity was far from rational and its tradition anything but coherent. When what I was being taught clashed with my sense of truth and decency, I had no choice but to deprogram myself—a painstaking, painful process. But in rejecting the rigid fundamentalist interpretations of Christianity, I was, like many

“recovering Christians,” being authentic and true to myself as a spiritual person. I was being faithful to my God-given reason, conscience, intuition, experience, and all my other inherent faculties. Once I reached the other side, I realized that it’s the social aspect of born-again spirituality that makes it hard for many well-educated, intelligent believers to doubt even obvious absurdities. Doubt became a cornerstone of my new-found truth. I never questioned the self-evident existence of God, but I did question religion and found it wanting. In the meantime, it did gradually dawn on me that there were other possibilities besides the either-or choice between religion and agnosticism, or between Eastern and Western religion. Once I had totally shaken the Christian identity, a new spiritual high overtook me. I felt elated realizing that God was not in any way controlled or embodied by religion. I experienced the same spiritual high that I had enjoyed as a Christian born-again. Today, I see the Bible as America’s golden calf. Extreme reverence for the Bible, initiated especially by Luther and other challengers of papal authority during the Reformation, has been amplified by fundamentalists into full-fledged Bible-worship. Because many fundamentalist adherents put faith above scholarship and reason, they don’t usually bother to check to see if the views expounded to prove a pulpiteer’s position are even actually biblical. Many of those faithful have been indoctrinated to be suspect of “liberal” scholarly exegesis, and even though the historical facts are easily accessible, they know little if anything about the contextual creation and recreation of the Bible in all its very fallible glory. At its worst, Christian pulpiteers today use Bible-worship to persuade adherents to accept views that contradict fact, common sense, and decency. Ironically, on the Bible’s own terms, fundamentalist text-worship is idolatry. Some high priests, like Benny Hinn, Jesse Duplantis, Oral Roberts, and Pat Robertson, claim to be prophets commanding direct access to God, thereby transcending even the Bible. They persuade because their prophecies mimic biblical stories and are couched in biblical rhetoric. Keep “God” on the tongue, and the text-worship fabricated

by high priests provides an efficient means to program and exploit the obedient. The modus operandi of too many successful contemporary evangelists and their political comrades is based on a model as ancient as the devil himself. Attract gullible sheep, locate a scapegoat, create a fictional menace, generate bigotry, justify it biblically, rile up the sheep, escalate bigotry into fear, then plead for money to help eradicate the cause of that fear, especially via rightwing political agendas. Support of political agendas, in direct defiance of church/state separation, is sometimes the sole justification for soliciting the contributions that make the evangelists and their tax-free churches filthy rich. Globally, high priests of fundamentalism instigate wars, inquisitions, jihads, and exterminations of practitioners of versions of fundamentalism that differ from their own. Fundamentalism is the direct antagonist of the democratic ideals of equality, liberty, and freedom of conscience. The truth is that no religion does, or can, dictate to us the absolute truth about God. Underneath all the pomp and circumstance, be it quiet exclusionism or violent authoritarianism, religion simply describes people’s inferences and preferences about what God might be. Deism—the version Thomas Paine conveyed to Americans —considers most religions to be false, idolatrous religions because they replace the quest for God with truth-claims asserted to be absolute God-inspired truth, making those claims and therefore those religions equal to God. Each religion claims that because its inspired truth is the only absolute truth, anyone disagreeing with it is destined for the Christian equivalent of hell. The pathetic hypocrisy of good Christians at times reaches a level of absurdity that makes me laugh. For instance, a few months before I moved from L.A. to San Francisco to begin graduate school, TV evangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker hit the front of every tabloid rack in America. For years the couple’s PTL (Praise The Lord) network had raked in millions from their fundamentalist viewers, most of them lower income, so the evangelists could themselves live in luxury. Jim Bakker had bribed Jessica Hahn, his church secretary, to keep quiet about his having drugged and seduced her, but he was

headed for prison for his illegal pyramid business scheme. Meanwhile, Tammy Faye’s obsessive lust for country singer Gary Paxton had broken up his marriage. Jim lashed out at reigning evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, accusing him of publicizing the Jessica Hahn scandal so he could take over PTL. Swaggart, a notorious gay basher who took in $150 million a year policing the good seed and the bad, had been busted by Rev. Marvin Gorman for frequenting a prostitute, who eventually told the public about Swaggart’s preference for ritual humiliation and abasement rather than the usual sex. Swaggart had gotten Rev. Gorman unfrocked for adultery, so Gorman got revenge by blackmailing Swaggart, who just said no. So Gorman “outed” Swaggart for his hypocrisy in viciously attacking him and other rival TV evangelists such as the Bakkers and Jerry Falwell. When the Bakkers resigned from PTL, they left their assets, which included PTL and their tacky Christian theme park, Heritage USA, temporarily in the hands of Jerry Falwell, whose Moral Majority and “Old Fashioned Gospel Hour” had been steadily stealing Swaggart’s client base. In no time, Bakker accused Falwell of trying to wrench control of PTL. Falwell called a press conference to make public the sworn affidavits he’d obtained from men who had had homosexual relationships with Bakker. Falwell also included Tammy Faye’s list of demands she would exchange for quietly disappearing: $300,000 a year for Jim, $100,000 for her; royalties on all PTL records and books; their mansion, cars, security staff, and hefty legal and accountant fees. In the midst of these tabloid scandals—I clearly remember Tammy Faye’s massive mascara dripping down her remorseful face, her lips pouting seductively against her beloved microphone—I started grad school at San Francisco State, right about the time that mega-rich Christian Coalition tsar Pat Robertson announced his bid for the presidency, right about the time that the self-proclaimed God Jim Jones tested his disciples’ faith with mass suicide via a communion of Kool-Aid and cyanide. The Jonestown incident struck me as profoundly symbolic. I decided to become educated about the connections between psychopaths and cults, between religion and violence. In the

process I uncovered a plethora of scandals involving the most famous TV evangelists, their lies, frauds, scams, adulterous trysts, lucrative business dealings with the world’s most vicious dictators, and everyday rip-offs gleaning God’s prosperity prophets millions— and in the case of Robertson, at least, billions—in profits for yachts, jets, and multi-million dollar mansions purchased with viewer contributions to bogus missions, and worse, with earnest investments of the truly needy in hyped promises of special prayers and healings. I also discovered numerous studies documenting a clear statistical correlation between authoritarian religious beliefs and incidents of rape, molestation, murder, torture-as-punishment, and numerous lesser offenses such as theft, fraud, and even divorce. Once I saw the statistics laid out on the page (which I will discuss in depth in later chapters), it became clear to me that proponents of a “Christian America” were throwing up a smokescreen. I thought I was well-informed by the time I got to grad school, but my education was only beginning. At least by then I understood that God was not religion and religion not God. In fact at times it seemed that God was as far from religion as from the devil. And perhaps even farther.



 

Chapter 4 Portrait of a Barbaric God One thing that led me out of born-again Christianity, through progressivism and agnosticism, and “back” into Deism was that when I read the Bible, I saw a portrait of God that varied greatly from the God I had come to know. Maybe “know” is a bit presumptuous. Should I use the more postmodern “understand”? How do we understand God if not through revealed religion? How else but through our various faculties. I do think we put quite a bit of ourselves into our definitions of God. That doesn’t mean that we create God in our own image, just that we represent our experience of God in our own language. I’ve always found the Old Testament to be dark and disturbing: Treks through the desert, tribal wars, dusty prophets casting whole nations into the sulfurous pit of hell. Of course heroes were deified in the age of myths, and scapegoats demonized to explain tragedies like the grave injustice of a murdered or otherwise violated hero. The ultimate scapegoat, of course, was the idealized devil, an omniscient, all-powerful god, like the Satan who made visits to heaven and tricked God into ordaining evil upon Job. I had to ask myself, which character really has more power in the Bible, God or the devil? Which character is more evil? Is the evil that the Bible attributes to Satan greater than the evil it attributes to God? The Bible is steeped with the brutality of an anthropomorphic god known as God. That God reportedly (by whom, we don’t know) spoke directly to Moses, telling him to muster an army of twelve thousand to invade and destroy the demonized Midianites. They killed all the males and took all the women and children captive, meaning they would become property available for rape (women and

children as property was part of the family values of the era). All the towns were burned, although they took “all the spoil and all the booty, both people and animals.” Moses was angry that the women had been allowed to live. He ordered all the women and all the male children to be slaughtered, “but all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves.” Child molestation was okay if it involved innocent children of non-invading “enemies” of God’s chosen. Not surprisingly, a huge chunk of the spoils and booty went to Eleazar the priest. In Genesis, God tests Abraham, the so-called “father of faith.” “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.” Why would God, who knows and can do all things, resort to this kind of cruel testing? That Abraham didn’t blink but instead obediently followed the orders of that voice in his head is deemed the ultimate gesture of “faith.” Today we would likely call such a man schizophrenic. Abraham’s god clearly was not a good, loving, mentally stable God. Yet today Jews, Christians, and Muslims still base their faith on Abraham’s primitive god who orchestrated the revered sacrifice of Isaac, a truly sadistic mind trip reminiscent of the games of psychopaths. Sanctification of this kind of blind obedience could only have been invented by a control-driven priest or chieftain like Moses. The Old Testament God was a god of human overkill. For instance, when Jacob’s daughter Dinah was reportedly raped by Shechem, who “loved the girl, and spoke tenderly to her,” and wanted her for his wife, Jacob and Shechem’s father, Hamor, sought a peaceful resolution. Shechem had said, “Let me find favor with you, and whatever you say to me I will give. Put the marriage present and gift as high as you like, and I will give whatever you ask me; only give me the girl to be my wife.” Dinah’s vengeful brothers tricked Shechem and Hamor into believing that they would give Dinah to Shechem in marriage. The sons of Jacob demanded that all the males be circumcised, and they were. Shechem’s gullible father told the people, “These people are friendly with us; let them live in the land and trade in it, for the land is large enough for them; let us

take their daughters in marriage, and let us give them our daughters.” The response of God’s chosen? Absolute barbarism. On the third day, when they [the circumcised] were still in pain, two of the sons of Jacob, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brothers, took their swords and came against the city unawares, and killed all the males. They killed Hamor and his son Shechem with the sword, and took Dinah out of Shechem’s house, and went away. And the other sons of Jacob came upon the slain, and plundered the city, because their sister had been defiled. They took their flocks and their herds, their donkeys, and whatever was in the city and in the field. All their wealth, all their little ones and their wives, all that was in the houses, they captured and made their prey. Then Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, “You have brought trouble on me by making me odious to the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites and the Perizzites; my numbers are few, and if they gather themselves against me and attack me, I shall be destroyed, both I and my household.” But they said, “Should our sister be treated like a whore?” Barbarians have always created gods in their own image not only to explain life’s injustices but also to sanctify their vicious behavior. Monotheistic barbarians are no different from their polytheistic neighbors, just more focused. Their one god’s prophets cry out “His” (their) curses like madmen in asylums. If these were presented as human prayers for vengeance, we might have more tolerance. But divinely inspired promises of revenge on a people years and even centuries later for the crimes of their remote ancestors come from a mythical god powerless to institute justice in the moment against the guilty parties. Priest parading as prophet is the oldest trick in the book. Prophetpriests hold the threat of God’s wrath over the heads of their gullible congregations. Centuries after their deaths, prophets are credited with fulfilled prophecies that even biblically never actually occurred. Future events that have little to do with the original prophecy are force-fit as its “fulfillment.” And of course prophecies fulfilled can easily be constructed after the fact.

Today, just like in the old days, prophecy is often a crapshoot. For instance, the first week of May, 2006, the History Channel first broadcast “Mega Disasters: West Coast Tsunami.” On May 8, Pat Robertson prophesied, “If I heard the Lord right about 2006, the coasts of America will be lashed by storms,” and on May 17 he warned, “There well may be something as bad as a tsunami in the Pacific Northwest.” Just as no authentic prophecy by a contemporary evangelist has been fulfilled, there is not a single prophecy in the Bible that can be substantiated as fact. Not one. But there are many prophecies recorded in the Bible that the Bible itself substantiates as having not happened the way the prophet prophesied. I will give an example, but first, I will offer a sampling of the terrors the Bible writers dangle over people’s heads. The kinds of wrath that the “great” prophets hoped for are reminiscent of the plagues that God brought down on Egypt. Exodus 7 begins, “The LORD said to Moses, ‘See, I have made you like God to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron shall be your prophet.’” Isn’t it dishonest of God to make Moses appear to be a god? According to the writer, God says to Moses, “You shall speak all that I command you, and your brother Aaron shall tell Pharaoh to let the Israelites go out of his land. But I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and I will multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt.” How can Pharaoh be held accountable if God hardens his heart? What choice does Pharaoh have? He might as well be drugged and hypnotized. God continues: “When Pharaoh does not listen to you, I will lay my hand upon Egypt and bring my people the Israelites, company by company, out of the land of Egypt by great acts of judgment.” How ridiculous! God, who could bring the Israelites out by any means whatsoever, forces a hard heart upon Pharaoh, conning both him and the Israelites, making them all suffer. And this, “God” calls justice. “The Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD, when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring the Israelites out from among them.” Yes, but what kind of evil, deceptive, unjust Lord will they know?

Now the magic tricks begin. Moses has Aaron throw down his staff; it becomes a snake, symbol of the devil; Pharaoh’s magicians do likewise, though the snake of Aaron eats the other snakes. Only the credulous would believe this happened, now or then. “Then the LORD said to Moses, ‘Pharaoh’s heart is hardened; he refuses to let the people go.’” Well, duh. That’s God’s doing. What’s the point of this silly display of sadistic machismo? Now God turns the Nile to blood. The fish die, the river stinks, and the people have no drinking water—all the people, all the innocent people, not just God-hardened Pharaoh. Next comes God’s plague of frogs that swarm over land and water. But the magicians produce the same. Then God kills the frogs, and they stink. Then “all the dust of the earth turned into gnats throughout the whole land of Egypt.” When the magicians couldn’t pull off this trick, they proclaim it produced by “the finger of God.” God is proven by the greater display of evil. God is the great God of gnats. It is meant to be impressive that God brings life, even annoying life, out of lifeless dust. Not satisfied, God causes Egypt to be “ruined” with swarms of flies, that classic symbol of rot and death. Then Pharaoh says he will let Moses and his people go into the wilderness to sacrifice to God, which was what God originally said He wanted. But God hardens his heart, and Pharaoh changes his mind. The sadistic game continues. Because God refused to let Pharaoh let Moses and crew worship in the wilderness, which is what God said he wanted Moses and crew to do, God sends a fifth plague. The other plagues were suffered by the Israelites as well as the Egyptians. Now God causes just the Egyptian livestock to suffer pestilence disease and die. But the sixth plague is for everyone. God tells Moses and Aaron to throw handfuls of soot from the kiln in the air so it can become a fine dust causing festering boils on humans and animals throughout the whole land. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and ashes to dust. Impressive. Things are about to get much worse. Why? “This is why I have let you live: to show you my power, and to make my name resound

through all the earth. You are still exalting yourself against my people, and will not let them go.” Well, in all honesty, it’s only the crooked maniacal god of Moses and Aaron that’s exalting himself and refusing to let them go. (In the real world outside the text, this is probably a be-patient, muster-the-troops exemplum written by an elitist Hebrew whose “chosen” tribe was intent on destruction of territorial and religious rivals.) Now lightning strikes with a vengeance and all hail breaks loose, utter destruction beating down on humans, animals, and crops everywhere but in Goshen, where the Israelites have battened down. After God sends the plague of locusts, “Pharaoh hurriedly summoned Moses and Aaron and said, ‘I have sinned against the LORD your God, and against you. Do forgive my sin just this once, and pray to the LORD your God that at the least he remove this deadly thing from me.’ So he went out from Pharaoh and prayed to the LORD. The LORD changed the wind into a very strong west wind, which lifted the locusts and drove them into the Red Sea; not a single locust was left in all the country of Egypt.” Pharaoh has repented. “But the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he would not let the Israelites go.” Instead, he causes “a darkness that can be felt” to spread over Egypt for three days. More repenting, more hardness of heart compliments of the God who is clearly projecting his own hardness of heart. Then, one midnight, God strikes dead all the firstborn of all the Egyptians and their slaves and animals. Then Pharaoh summons Moses and Aaron in the night, and says, “Rise up, go away from my people, both you and the Israelites! Go, worship the LORD, as you said. Take your flocks and your herds, as you said, and be gone. And bring a blessing on me too!” The text doesn’t bother to tell us that God hardens Pharaoh’s heart yet again, but it’s implied by the fact that Pharaoh’s entire army has followed, which Moses destroys by raising up the sea to drown everyone but the Israelites, who “walked on dry ground through the sea, the waters forming a wall for them on their right and on their left.”

It’s not hard to see how the writer has twisted and exaggerated the mishandled deeds of Moses—or a legend of Moses—into this gruesome children’s story about the will of an abusive God who has deemed these people special. It’s a classic allegory of an abusive father. My interpretation of the subtext is that Moses was probably the illegitimate son of Pharaoh’s daughter. Why else would she be allowed to raise Moses, the son of slaves, as her own son even though Pharaoh himself had decreed that all the male children born among the Hebrews should be put to death? Of course, this genesis of Moses is likely one of many folktales about a baby who escaped an ordained death, was hidden and raised by surrogate parents, and returned to fulfill his role as hero. Oedipus is perhaps the most famous example among Westerners. The Akkadian “Legend of Sargon” tells of a baby born in secret, placed in a basket of rushes sealed with pitch, floated down the Euphrates, retrieved by the water drawer who raised him as his own, and protected by the goddess Ishtar, under whose care he grew up to become a great king. This tale is clearly one prototype of the Moses legend. Like all legends, Moses is subject to interpretation. Perhaps Moses, who was born an Egyptian, was ostracized and deemed “an Israelite” because he fled Egypt after killing an Egyptian who was beating an Israelite (Ex. 2:11-15). Moses would have been demoted to illegitimacy and would not be in line to succeed Pharaoh. Seeing the incredible accomplishments of the Israelite slaves who were building and sustaining Egyptian society, and feeling incensed that he would be denied his rightful inheritance, Moses hatched a plot to seize for himself the labor force and its pack-and-carry infrastructure. Pretending to be one of them, he persuaded them that he would liberate their entire tribe. The well-educated Moses was no doubt impressive not only as a writer and presumably as a speaker; he had knowledge of magic that surpassed that of Pharaoh’s royal magicians, as was demonstrated in the big magicians’ poker game when he raked in all the chips. He who could not inherit Egypt left Egypt a king of multitudes. The only problem was that he left behind all the luxuries, not to mention the tools, building materials, and engineering experts he

would need to build his kingdom. The people had it pretty good in Egypt, but Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt into a desert wilderness. The Bible mentions God-given provisions of sweet water, manna, and pheasants, but the Israelites got tired of wandering and codependence. Rather than bring them into the Promise Land, the God of Moses set the Israelites to the task of invading other nations and stealing their provisions. In Numbers 13, God tells Moses to send spies into the land of Canaan, which God says he is giving to the Israelites. Why couldn’t God just give them the promised Promise Land? Furthermore, why couldn’t God, who knows everything, just tell Moses what to expect in Canaan without sending in spies? Perhaps because the barbarian god of the barbarian Moses is a god of stealth and subterfuge who likes to kick back and watch his subjects struggle. Moses sends a large band “to spy out the land of Canaan,” and says to them, “‘Go up there into the Negeb, and go up into the hill country, and see what the land is like, and whether the people who live in it are strong or weak, whether they are few or many, and whether the land they live in is good or bad, and whether the towns that they live in are unwalled or fortified, and whether the land is rich or poor, and whether there are trees in it or not. Be bold, and bring some of the fruit of the land.’” Should Moses be checking out the land that God already said he was giving to them, as if questioning whether it was good enough or not, or whether or not they could take it? Couldn’t God have filled him in? Couldn’t he have trusted God? “Now it was the season of the first ripe grapes” when the spies arrived. They “spied out the land from the wilderness of Zin to Rehob, near Lebo-hamath. They went up into the Negeb, and came to Hebron; and Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai, the Anakites, were there. (Hebron was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt.) And they came to the Wadi Eshcol, and cut down from there a branch with a single cluster of grapes, and they carried it on a pole between two of them. They also brought some pomegranates and figs. That place was called the Wadi Eshcol, because of the cluster that the Israelites cut down from there.” “Cut down” meaning stolen.

After forty days, they return to Moses with their report. “We came to the land to which you sent us; it flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit. Yet the people who live in the land are strong, and the towns are fortified and very large; and besides, we saw the descendants of Anak there.” Caleb, the band leader, says, “Let us go up at once and occupy it, for we are well able to overcome it.” But the men who had gone up with him disagree. “We are not able to go up against this people, for they are stronger than we.” After all, the people there are giants, “Nephilim,” they called them. (Whoops; never mind that all the Nephilim were killed during Noah’s flood.) In comparison, the Israelites “seemed like grasshoppers.” Moses had said that God had said that they were being given this land. But now that Moses has the official report, which doesn’t look promising, he blames the congregation of “complaining” against him, and changes his mind, or God’s mind, saying that God now says that they won’t take the land after all. For their concerns about attacking and subduing Canaan they have to suffer in the wilderness for forty years. And in the meantime, all the spies, except for Joshua and Caleb, are on the spot struck dead by plague. The congregation responds by saying that they are perfectly willing to go to the place that God had promised, and they repent of their sin. But Moses says, “That will not succeed. Do not go up, for the LORD is not with you; do not let yourselves be struck down before your enemies. For the Amalekites and the Canaanites will confront you there, and you shall fall by the sword; because you have turned back from following the LORD, the LORD will not be with you.” Mighty convenient prophecy, given the information provided by the spies. Those who try to fulfill God’s promise by going out to the hill country are defeated by the Amalekites and the Canaanites, who pursue them as far as Hormah, proving God’s promise to be false. Moses had promised the Israelites the Promise Land, then reneged. By Numbers 16, “two hundred fifty Israelite men, leaders of the congregation, chosen from the assembly, well-known men… confronted Moses and his cohort, Aaron.” Their complaint was just. “You have gone too far! All the congregation are holy, every one of

them, and the LORD is among them. So why then do you exalt yourselves above the assembly of the LORD?” Moses responds to this challenge to his priestly superiority, “Is it too little for you that the God of Israel has separated you from the congregation of Israel, to allow you to approach him in order to perform the duties of the LORD’S tabernacle, and to stand before the congregation and serve them? He has allowed you to approach him, and all your brother Levites with you; yet you seek the priesthood as well!” They were the priesthood. Then as now, priests were protective of their rank and file. Moses sends for their leaders, who refuse to come. “Is it too little that you have brought us up out of a land flowing with milk and honey [Egypt] to kill us in the wilderness, that you must also lord it over us? It is clear you have not brought us into a land flowing with milk and honey, or given us an inheritance of fields and vineyards.” A valid complaint. “Moses was very angry and said to the LORD, ‘Pay no attention to their offering.’” It looks suspiciously like it’s Moses who’s on high, bossing around even God Himself. Moses orders the “complainers” to each bring a censer to put in the fire with incense. According to the story, the ground splits apart and swallows the worshippers. Their two hundred fifty censers, however, are spared. In fact, “the censers of these sinners have become holy at the cost of their lives. Make them into hammered plates as a covering for the altar, for they presented them before the LORD and they became holy,” just like the tithes, sacrifices, pardons, dispensations, indulgences, and all the other holy-gilded spoils and relics of later Christian priests who damned complainers and burned witches as heretics. When the people complain that Moses has “killed the people of the LORD,” Moses and Aaron go to the tent of meeting, where “the cloud had covered it and the glory of the LORD appeared.” One wonders what desert drug was being burned in those censers that produced a cloud believed to be God. Moses tells Aaron, “Take your censer, put fire on it from the altar and lay incense on it, and carry it quickly to the congregation and make atonement for them. For wrath has gone out from the LORD; the plague has begun.” Atonement for what? For challenging the arrogance of a priest—a false one, from

all indications? The atonement evidently didn’t work very well. Moses “stood between the dead and the living; and the plague was stopped.” But not until “Those who died by the plague were fourteen thousand seven hundred, besides those who died in the affair of Korah.” In these and many other texts, Moses comes across as a petty tyrant who has created a tribal god in his own image to sanctify his decisions and to justify his mistakes. Christians rest their authority on this kind of Bible testimony. The belligerent use the biblical evidence of a belligerent God to justify their belligerence. But for most of us who actually read the texts, the unknown writers’ testimonies to their belligerent God run against the grain of basic morality and common sense. I have offered only a few examples, but the Old Testament is steeped in these kinds of stories. That the talking god speaks and acts like any jealous, macho, changeable human indicates that just like pagan myths, these stories were written by humans. These are qualities that we attribute to barbarians; and in fact, it was barbarians that attributed these qualities to God. Historical books have no authority other than the testimony. Common sense tells us that if the testimony is anonymous, we should not blindly accept that testimony as authoritative, certainly not as divinely inspired. At the very least we should remain skeptical. If the testimony presents the character of God in terms of human barbarity, common sense tells us that we should suspect that the testimony is likely manmade rather than blindly accept that testimony as the Word of God. If a Bible passage has obvious links to already existing myths or legends, common sense tells us that we should err on the side of probability that the Bible passage has borrowed from that myth/legend and is therefore itself also fictional. Like most myths and legends, the Bible stories are probably often rooted in actual people and events or are composites that have been exaggerated, conflated, and embellished. In the gospels, Jesus is presented as sometimes upholding the Old Testament law and sometimes challenging it. My guess is that some real “Jesus” was hated by the priestly Jews for challenging

their Old Testament law and their authority and for accusing them of hypocrisy. Jesus was probably a brilliant philosophical teacher more like Socrates than the in-your-face rebel, John the Baptist. The gospel writers probably didn’t want to alienate the Jewish status quo, so they watered down the words of Jesus and compensated by deifying their inspiring rabbi and arming him with validating miracles that rivaled those of other local gods. Thomas Jefferson expunged all the miraculous elements from the Bible, leaving us with a portrait of Jesus that is probably closer to the truth of the man than the gospel accounts give us. Unlike Jefferson, I am not saying the miracles could not have occurred; I am arguing that they probably did not. Just because something is in the Bible doesn’t prove that it’s true. What is true is that if the Bible is not word-for-word perfect, it can’t be the perfect Word of a perfect God. If the Bible is not wordfor-word “God-breathed,” then the authority of any Bible book is limited to the character of the writer or writers, and even a writer of good character might have gotten it wrong. But we don’t even know who the Bible writers were. Surely we dishonor God by calling a book the Word of God if it has an unknown origin; has been translated and changed; contains any self-contradictory material; portrays God as a mythological god with human qualities; contains words and deeds attributed to God that are contrary to the notion of a good and just God; describes God’s character as changeable, vengeful, jealous, wrathful, and petty, and his intellect as inferior to the stratagems of devils and humans; demands unreasonable blind “faith” in a doctrine constructed upon the same kind of murder/suicide sacrifice common among some primitive religions; accepts convoluted explanations for this murder/suicide that are the opinion of one man (Paul, for instance, who was not present when the main action occurred, who had persecuted the followers of the man he later deified, and who was by his own report and the reports of other Bible writers, a person of questionable character). Simply put, the Bible is not a valid authority on God’s nature, activities, or will. But if people do accept Biblical infallibility, they can

point to the portrait of a barbarian God as justification for their own barbarian behavior. Which explains a great deal about the brutal history of the world.



 

Chapter 5 Biblical Misinterpretation Most Christians would probably agree that religious leaders at times misrepresent biblical truth in the name of God. And why not? Certainly there is biblical precedence. If the Bible contains stories exposing God’s questionable morals or his chosen’s dubious “faith” in obeying, why shouldn’t evangelists speak in the tongues of dead prophets? If the Bible writers misinterpreted texts or events in their attempts to explain the inexplicable, why shouldn’t evangelists take the same liberties? The problem is that believers accept the Bible as true, and that sets them up to believe anyone who supposedly represents the Bible. Until experience taught me to doubt, I too trusted the emissaries of truth. Even if I thought their reasoning was absurd, I still trusted their motives. Like many believers, I approached the Bible with reverence, and I looked for inspiration or insight into the meaning of a text I already accepted to be honorable and true. My focus wasn’t critical. On the contrary. I passionately defended the Bible against critics. Soon enough, though, I began to see flaws that couldn’t be explained away. I couldn’t keep trying to accommodate biblical “truth” to—well, truth. When I realized that the barbaric biblical god was not God but was rather the projection of barbaric tribal leaders whose missions were steeped with not quite hidden agendas, the Bible was instantly demystified. But for a long time I kept trying to remystify the biblical god I occasionally glimpsed as the wise, loving God I had experienced especially during my born-again phase. It took awhile for the Bible’s numinous glow to fade, or rather for me to realize that the numinous sensation came from something

other than the Bible itself. For a time I felt like a spiritual schizophrenic. I still felt a powerful sense of Presence at the same time that I began to see how Christians and the Bible writers themselves misinterpreted key sections of the supposedly infallible Word, until the Bible finally became irreconcilably self-contradictory. Many believers are just as receptive to the truth of evangelists as they are naively trustful of the Bible. They have learned to rationalize, to doubt their own brains, to live in an illusory otherworld where Bible transcends reality. The evangelist justifies the Bible and the Bible sanctifies the evangelist. At some point we just have to pinch ourselves awake, to differentiate the fictional theme of the story from the objective truth of the real world. I remember the first time I took a good hard look at the myth of Abraham and Isaac. Frankly, I’d always been quietly appalled by the notion that God would tell his faithful servant or anyone else to sacrifice his son on an altar. All the explanations about its symbolic meaning and how God never intended to let Abraham follow through just didn’t ring true. But I kept hacking away at it, trying to fathom its truth. Then I heard a well-educated preacher explicate the text and thought I’d better have a closer look. Good literature graduate that I was, I approached the account of Abraham’s trial as if it were literal truth pregnant with transcendental meaning in need of my literary interpretation. I already knew what it meant. In a sense, Paul’s explanation of the text was the foundation of the Christian faith as a religion. Part of me already “in faith” believed it to be true that God sacrificed His own son as propitiation for our sins, and reckoned as righteousness Abraham’s faith in that future sacrifice. But another part of me was still trying to believe that God sacrificing His son for whatever reason wasn’t as primitive, barbaric, and inefficacious as Abraham sacrificing Isaac. The Abraham story of primitive sacrifice just had that quality of a classic myth. Finally I just had to be honest: It was a myth. Once I had thoroughly deconstructed the text, I wondered, what was the source of its numinousness? The Spirit was present, in my opinion. That was my felt experience. But I realized then that although the Spirit was present in the experience of grappling with

the text, the Spirit wasn’t the text and the text wasn’t God-breathed. I had reached a crossroads and had veered onto a path of truth—truth in the sense of just plain honesty. It was like suddenly growing up and feeling embarrassed about a comment I’d made about the stork. I believe that many people have trouble letting go of their religions and their Bibles for the same reason that I had trouble: the numinous sense of Presence one gets when encountering the dynamic sacred. The feeling is good as long as one realizes that the object itself is not the source of the feeling. The object facilitates the feeling, but the feeling actually comes from the quest, the focus, the entering into a deeper dimension of truth that we can’t exactly recognize because it’s transworldly: not otherworldly—transworldly, because it’s the transcendent aspect of this world. It’s like seeing the color of the world instead of only seeing black and white. We see in color, which is a kind of depth, but the world is still mysterious—even more mysterious, because now there’s yet another layer of reality that is really quite beyond our comprehension even though it’s our actual experience. Just because we can scientifically describe color doesn’t mean we understand it. We know about it, but that’s not the same as knowing it. Or put another way, knowing the scientific facts about color is not the same as being aesthetically moved by color. Religion and the Bible ideally might help us know something about God, but they don’t help us know God except in that they motivate the quest, the focus, the opening of a door to a deeper dimension. The spiritual is about deeper meaning. The numinous is the feeling of awe in the presence of deeper meaning. Because literary analysis seeks to enter a deeper dimension, even in the most anti-religious hands it is still a spiritual activity. At that point in my life, my hands were anything but anti-religious. In a backhanded way, even the Abraham myth brought me to a spiritual understanding of what a religious text was not. The back-story begins at Genesis 11:31, when Lot is migrating with his uncle Abraham and grandfather Terah from Ur of the Chaldeans toward Canaan. A quarrel breaks out between Lot’s and Abraham’s herdsmen (13:7), and Abraham suggests that he and Lot go their separate ways. Lot chooses to settle among the prosperous

towns of the well-watered plains of Jordan. Abraham chooses Hebron, located about twenty miles from present day Jerusalem on one of Judah’s highest mountaintops, where springs and wells provide an abundant water supply. Symbolically, by choosing to live on the mountaintop, the meeting or dwelling place of God in many religious traditions, Abraham demonstrates his desire to live closer to God. In contrast, Lot chooses to live down “in the valley of the shadow of death” among people whose lives demonstrate an utter disregard for communion with God. In the next chapter, Lot has been taken captive in a battle between the five Jordan kings and four invading Mesopotamian kings. With only 318 men, the ever-peaceable Abraham defeats the invaders and rescues Lot and his belongings. We do not hear from Lot again until 18:23-33, and then indirectly, when Abraham pleads with God to spare Sodom and Gomorrah for the sake of any righteous people living there, including, presumably, his nephew. But to get there, we need to back up to the beginning of Genesis 18, when the Lord and two other men appear to Abraham as he sits at the entrance of his tent in the heat of day. Abraham’s tent is located near terebinths, which are trees of unknown species, here translated as oaks. Terebinths, and oaks, are sacred trees associated with pagan worship in that area and elsewhere throughout the ancient world. The text calls the Lord and the two angels “three men,” which sounds quite pagan. Abraham runs to meet them, bows down, brings water for them to wash their feet, and invites them to rest under the tree. He hastens to Sarah, bidding her to make cakes using “three measures of choice flour,” a bushel of their finest flour. Then he runs to the herd to handpick a choice calf, and gives it to a servant, who hastens to prepare it. He prepares the calf himself, and he himself sets the meat before them, along with curds and milk, and like a servant, he stands by them under the tree as they eat. They all ask where Sarah is, and one of the men rewards Abraham for his hospitality with the promise that his old, postmenopausal wife would bear him a son. Sarah laughs to herself, saying, “After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?” Please note that pleasure is an assumed part of this

undertaking. Sex is not just about procreation, according to Abraham’s wife. And given that pleasure is still possible and often even better for post-menopausal women, Abraham no doubt had a bit of a performance problem, hence her laughing at the possibility of pleasure. The Lord responds to Abraham, not to Sarah. “At the set time I will return to you, in due season, and Sarah shall have a son.” This presents a space-time dilemma in that if God is omnipresent, how can he “return” to a specific place at a future point in time? How could it be that in the next verse, “the men set out from there, and they looked toward Sodom; and Abraham went with them to set them on their way”? Are God and angels men? Would God and angels need to “set out,” implying a journey, and would Abraham need to “set them on their way”? What purpose would it serve to rather dishonestly go through the motions for Abraham’s sake? God and angels here are old-fashioned pagan gods. The Lord decides to reveal to Abraham his plans to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah so that Abraham can charge his children and his household to do what is righteous and just “so that the LORD may bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.” In other words, the promise is only good if all the people of Abraham’s household attend to righteousness and justice. God had not bothered to inform Abraham of this condition when the unconditional promise was given. Then God, who has heard the great outcry against these two cities, says, “I must go down and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me; and if not, I will know.” It is a natural tendency among primitives to anthropomorphize God. Most of us realize today, as no doubt many realized back then, that the omniscient God does not need to “go down” to “see whether” these claims have any validity. But here, God is more like a king or any of the pagan gods whose subjects came to him with accusations that God/the god (or goddess) needed to go verify in person. Interestingly, the other two men head toward Sodom, but the Lord stays behind, with Abraham standing before him. This is where Lot comes in, possibly, and then only indirectly.

In this story, Abraham rather presumptuously challenges and even chastises God. “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; will you then sweep away the place and not forgive it for the fifty righteous who are in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” And the Lord said, “If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will forgive the whole place for their sake.” Then the bargaining begins. The presentation of Abraham’s plea to God uses a rhetorical style that today characterizes humor or stories for children. Suppose five of the fifty are lacking? Fine, I’ll spare the city for the sake of the forty-five. And if only thirty righteous people are found? Fine—and so on down to ten, at which point God, who has had enough, “went his way”—which leaves open the possibility that if there were less than ten righteous people there, God would destroy the cities after all. The Bible does not say that the angels went to Sodom to rescue Lot. When the angels arrive to destroy Sodom for its sins, Lot happens to be sitting at the gate. He invites the angels to stay with him, but they decline. He insists, they agree. According to the New Revised Standard translation of the Bible, which I am using throughout this book, Lot “made them a feast and baked unleavened bread.” The HarperCollins Bible Commentary notes, Abraham the tent dweller provides refreshment characteristic of a pastoral nomad: cream and curds (18:8; cf. Isa. 7:21-22) and a choice steer. Lot is a city dweller who lives in a house in Sodom and meets the two strangers who arrive in the evening at the city gate. Abraham runs to greet the travelers and serves them himself; Lot stands and bows in greeting. In place of bread made from about a bushel of the finest flour (18:6), Lot offers unleavened bread to his guests. Such differences may serve to contrast Lot’s entertainment of the guests with the greater generosity of Abraham. In other words, Abraham runs to his guests, runs to make preparations, and serves his guests abundantly in the heat of the

day, but Lot, who lives in prosperous Sodom, rises, bows, and invites his guests over for cheese and crackers. The story never says or implies that the angels visit Lot in order that he might be spared from the impending doom. Lot is spared because he has shown hospitality, though on a lesser scale than Abraham had, and it would have been immoral for the angels to not reward him. Abraham’s reward is a miraculous son. Lot’s reward is his and his daughters’ lives, and soon thereafter, two sons by abominable incest (the wife has been conveniently killed off). When the men of Sodom notice the angels, i.e. “two men,” they approach Lot aggressively, and for good reason; the men could well be imminent threats. Lot had bowed down to these men. Lot’s uncle Abraham had not long before defeated those Sodomite clans in battle. Those angels could be Abraham’s spies. The last time Abraham had let them off easy; maybe this time he would not. Rape was an efficient, traditional means of reducing men to the inferior, downright “nothing” status of women. The Sodomites were displaying power and sending back the message of aggression, and they were sending that message to Abraham via Lot. These days, when we hear about “Sodom and Gomorrah” it’s almost always in the context of a fundamentalist tirade against homosexuality. But the Sodom story clearly isn’t about the evils of homosexuality. The men, presumably all of them, and certainly not just the gay guys, collectively needed to conquer these two obviously powerful foreign men. The threatened gang rape of the two angels issued a formal communal warning. All “the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man” had shown up to intimidate these two foreign men. If all the men were homosexual, which statistically is improbable, the old men would likely not have engendered the young men. Yet there they all are. The Sodom story is about the thwarting of male power—the attempted thwarting of the angels’ power by the men of Sodom and the actual thwarting of the power of the men of Sodom by the angels. Although the men of Sodom threaten Lot, it is to get to the angels. The men are not really after Lot; in fact, they order him to stand

back. But Lot stubbornly refuses; it is his sacred duty to protect his guests. “Where are the men who came to you tonight?” the Sodomite men demand. “Bring them out to us, so that we may know them.” One wonders why fundamentalists conveniently omit Lot’s reply: “I beg you, my brothers, do not act so wickedly. Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please; only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof.” In the dusty old days of road bandits and no criminal justice system, protecting male visitors had become a sacred duty. Lot instead offered his two virgin daughters to be raped. Women and girls, after all, were—as they have been nearly everywhere throughout almost all history—the chattel (property) of men that could be bartered, sold, and used as bribes. The Sodomites’ response is a bit incongruous. They tell Lot to stand back. Then they say, “‘This fellow came here as an alien, and he would play the judge! Now we will deal worse with you than with them.’ Then they pressed hard against the man Lot, and came near the door to break it down.” It does not make sense to tell Lot to stand back, and then immediately call him an alien (foreigner) who is playing the judge, and then threaten him with worse than what they’ll give the angels. Lot’s negotiation tactics were wanting, so “the men [angels] inside reached out their hands and brought Lot into the house with them, and shut the door.” The angels answer the men’s demand by striking them with blindness. This gives Lot a chance to slip out to warn the relatives. “But he seemed to his sons-in-law to be jesting.” It is hard to believe that Lot’s frantic pleading to escape impending doom would be taken as a joke, especially when he could have easily confirmed the sudden disappearance of all the men. And wait a minute—wouldn’t Lot’s sons-in-law be part of the category of “all” the men of Sodom that had shown up at Lot’s house and were blinded? Men, it seems, even Lot, can be defiant and disobedient, even to the orders of angels in crisis situations. When the angels say, “Get up, take your wife and your two daughters who are here, or else you will be consumed in the punishment of the city,” Lot lingers. “So the men seized him and his wife and his two daughters by the hand, the

LORD being merciful to him, and they brought him out and left him outside the city.” Then they tell him, “Flee for your life; do not look back or stop anywhere in the Plain; flee to the hills, or else you will be consumed.” After all the angels have done for him, Lot still does not trust them. Rather childishly he argues, “Oh, no, my Lords; your servant has found favor with you, and you have shown me great kindness in saving my life; but I cannot flee to the hills, for fear the disaster will overtake me and I die. Look, that city is near enough to flee to, and it is a little one. Let me escape there—is it not a little one?—and my life will be saved!” Doting on their spoiled child, the angels give in. “Very well, I grant you this favor too, and will not overthrow the city of which you have spoken. Hurry, escape there, for I can do nothing until you arrive there.” So Lot heads for Zoar (Heb., “trifle”). Why were the angels not as generous with Lot’s wife? Was it such an abomination to look back to the city that was her home, where her friends and relatives lived, where she had raised her children, where all her worldly possessions lay as kindling for a holocaust? Was glancing back one last time such an abominable crime? She had not argued with the angels, she simply instinctively turned, a human, humane response, a kind of “No!” to the horrors now afflicting her friends and relatives, her home, her history. Or perhaps it was an instinctive response to an explosion. Scholars speculate that the rain of sulfur and fire was based on a story of an actual city destroyed by an earthquake caused by the release of combustible gasses. That region has numerous salt pillars, some of which look eerily human to anyone with imagination. It is easy to see how the story took its next turn. The angels helped Lot and his family escape, but Lot’s wife was turned to a pillar of salt for committing the horrific sin of glancing back. Soon after Lot’s wife had turned to salt, Lot’s two daughters give birth to sons conceived by an incestuous liaison with him. Even back then the penalty for rape or incest was death. Why let Lot and his daughters off the hook? It’s hard to believe that even after such a difficult day, Lot slept through the procreation process. But even granting the possibility of his innocence in the incest acts, he had

nonetheless offered his daughters to be raped, and his daughters had committed incest without incurring the death penalty. Though fundamentalists will tell you that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was homosexuality, the far more insightful Jesus clearly thought it was inhospitality (Matt. 10:5-15; Luke 10:1-12; Luke 17:2830). The context of Luke 17 implies that the people of Sodom were simply going about their unspiritual business as usual when punishment descended. The problem with Sodom, according to Ezekiel, is not homosexuality, which is not even mentioned (Ezek. 16:46-51), but the major abominations of pride, gluttony, prosperity, selfishness, and arrogance. The issue seems to be the poor and needy, not homosexuality. Isaiah’s take on the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah doesn’t include homosexuality (Isa. 1:10-17). Judges 19 gives a much darker version of the story, the one that fundamentalists do not want you to read; it too fails to mention homosexuality. One wonders why fundamentalists are preoccupied with interpreting this story as homoerotic. But then, misinterpretation is biblical. Consider how in Galatians 4:22-26, Paul completely rewrites scripture by allegorizing probably the most important text (Gen. chapters 15, 16, 17) used to support his theology of justification by faith. By allegorizing he disregards the accepted assumption that the text was literally true. Tell me, you who desire to be subject to the law, will you not listen to the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and the other by a free woman. One, the child of the slave, was born according to the flesh; the other, the child of the free woman, was born through the promise. Now this is an allegory: these women are two covenants. One woman, in fact, is Hagar, from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery. Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the other woman corresponds to the Jerusalem above; she is free, and she is our mother.

The truth is that both sons were born of the flesh; Isaac was not a virgin birth. In saying that the story is allegory, Paul implies that it is not historical fact. The truth is that the full covenant had nothing to do, really, with either Sarah or Hagar. The covenant per se was with Abraham, and the promise was simply descendants: “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be.’ And he believed the LORD; and the LORD reckoned it to him as righteousness” (Gen. 15:5-6). But the “law” (circumcision: sign of the covenant) was given from Sinai to the descendants of the freewoman, Sarah, through Isaac (Gen. 17:21) and not to the descendants of the bondwoman, Hagar, through Ishmael. The “everlasting covenant” (v. 19) was with Isaac, but Ishmael would also share in the covenant with Abraham (which promised descendants) in that he would be fruitful and exceedingly numerous even to the extent of becoming a great nation. Hagar is Sinai is Jerusalem? Sarah is—what? And abstract Jewish heaven? It seems odd that Paul only mentions Hagar by name when Sarah (“the other woman”) is the main character of the actual “everlasting covenant” story. Could it be that Paul, a former persecutor of Christians and “untimely born” apostolic outsider (1 Cor. 15:8), feels like a bastard child? He wants to become the legitimate son of Sarah. He certainly spends ample ink inflating his legitimacy and authority. For instance, 2 Corinthians 11:5-6: “I think that I am not in the least inferior to these super-apostles. I may be untrained in speech, but not in knowledge; certainly in every way and in all things we have made this evident to you.” Within the context of guilt, it makes sense that Paul, a Jew, would make the rather outrageous assumption that those who respect and adhere to God-given law desire to be subject—slaves—to the law. It is law that makes him guilty, enslavement to law that makes him ashamed—and surely in the presence of the super-apostles, he must have felt ashamed of his past as a persecutor of Christians. It is ludicrous to claim that there are two covenants—keeping in mind that God, or anyone else in the Old Testament, never mentions two covenants and that the one covenant was not just one of God’s many promises; this covenant with Abraham represented his

obedience, not just his faith; it represented the very essence of what it meant to be Jewish. The covenant is always referred to in the singular—except by Paul. And the law, which was given to Moses over four hundred years after the time of Abraham, did not annul the legal covenant made with Abraham. It’s certainly a stretch to assume that Hagar represents Sinai, the place where the law was given to Moses centuries after Hagar’s life and death. Paul says (Gal. 3:16), “Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring; it does not say, ‘And to offsprings,’ as of many; but it says, ‘And to your offspring,’ that is, to one person, who is Christ.” Of course, such stretching of the point is absurd. Nobody says “offsprings,” or “seeds,” as it is often translated, to refer to descendents. We—and that includes the Greeks and Hebrews— refer to descendents as offspring or seed. The only reference to offsprings or seeds referring to human offspring is Paul’s use of the word. Throughout the Bible, the word used for offspring is offspring, or seed, not offsprings or seeds. This according to Bible translations that include Young’s Literal Translation, New Revised Standard Version, American Standard Version, Darby’s New Translation, International Standard Version, King James Version (Old and New), New Living Translation, American Standard Version, The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language, as well as reference books that include HarperCollins Bible Dictionary, Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew Definitions, Easton’s Bible Dictionary, Holman’s Bible Dictionary, International Standard Bible Dictionary, Parsons Bible Dictionary, Strong’s Hebrew and Greek Dictionaries, and Thayer’s Greek Definitions, HarperCollins Bible Commentary, The Oxford Bible Commentary, Adam Clark’s Commentary, Disciples Study Bible, Matthew Henry’s Commentary, and New Commentary on the Whole Bible. As the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia politely puts it, “In Gal. 3:16 Paul draws a distinction between ‘seeds’ and ‘seed’ that has for its purpose a proof that the promises to Abraham were realized in Christ and not in Israel. The distinction, however,

overstresses the language of the Old Testament, which never pluralizes zera' when meaning ‘descendants’.” Paul’s “proof” is invalid, embarrassingly absurd, and downright dishonest. He isn’t dictating truth direct from God, he isn’t interpreting truth by the power of the Spirit, he’s twisting the truth of scripture to validate his own personal theology, which today we call Christianity, the faith of a chimerical second covenant. Paul’s magical thinking still grips a large portion of humanity. Only truth can loosen the stranglehold.  



 

Chapter 6 Deconstructing Paul The Human Paul Early in my born-again phase I began to be turned-off by Christians who seemed to revere Paul even more than Jesus. Long before I began to doubt the validity of the Bible as a whole, I began to doubt the validity of Paul. Fundamentalists say that we must trust his words because they’re scripture, which makes them the Word of God: Paul’s words are God’s words. But are all of Paul’s words inspired by God if Paul himself says in his second letter to the Corinthians, “That which I speak, I speak it not after the Lord, but as it were foolishly, in this confidence of boasting” (2 Cor. 11:17)? In 1 Corinthians 7:6 and 7:12 he admits, “But I speak this by permission, and not of commandment…But to the rest speak I, not the Lord.” Surely, I thought, the words of a selfproclaimed boasting fool were not divinely inspired scripture. At the very least, some sections of his letters were not God’s words, per Paul himself; they were certainly not scripture in the sense of being God-breathed. It’s odd that something we already know can suddenly hit us like a revelation. That’s how it felt when I realized the obvious fact that Paul’s letters were letters. Paul’s letters were written by Paul, not dictated by God. Why should I accept Paul’s opinion as absolute truth? Why should I believe that Paul’s opinions were God’s opinions? Wasn’t equating Paul’s theology with God’s absolute truth a form of idolatry forbidden by the First Commandment? Wasn’t lifting up the entire Bible as divine the same kind of idolatry that motivated Hezekiah to break in

pieces the bronze serpent of Moses to which the people of Israel made offerings (2 Kings 18:4)? I wondered how seriously I should take Paul’s claims when they often contradicted claims found elsewhere in the Bible. For example, according to Paul, “…by being the first to rise from the dead, [Jesus] would proclaim light to our people and to the Gentiles” (Acts 26:23). But Jesus was not the first to rise from the dead; other people rose from the dead before him, according to both Old and New Testament accounts. Jesus raised Jairus’s daughter (Mark 5:22-42; Luke 8:4155); Jesus raised the widow of Nain’s son (Luke 7:11-15); Jesus raised Lazarus (John 11:43-44); Elijah raised the widow of Zarephath’s son (1 Kings 17-22); Elisha raised the Shunammite woman’s son (2 Kings 4:35); a dead man rose when his corpse touched Elisha’s bones (2 Kings 13:21). How could Paul, or the Bible as a whole, be infallible when Peter and Paul, both of whom presumably had “the mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16), disagreed on important issues right there on the biblical page? In Acts 20:22, Paul tells the Ephesian elders, “And now, as a captive to the Spirit, I am on my way to Jerusalem, not knowing what will happen to me there.” On his way there, Paul “looked up the disciples and stayed there for seven days. Through the Spirit they told Paul not to go on to Jerusalem” (Acts 21:4). But against the advice of the disciples, Paul says, “When our days there were ended, we left and proceeded on our journey” (Acts 21:5). In the Spirit, Paul heads for Jerusalem. In the Spirit, the disciples advise him to not go there. Presumably still in the Spirit, against the advice of the disciples who are in the Spirit, Paul continues on. Is the Spirit sending mixed messages? Furthermore, Luke, the presumed author of Acts, presents this part of his narrative in the voice of Paul, even though these events occurred long before Luke recorded them and even though Luke was not present. Are we to accept these quoted words of Paul’s via Luke as God-breathed? As I studied Paul’s letters and Acts, I began to realize that it was Paul himself who asserted that he was one of the chosen few speaking for God.

Yet at the same time, he seemed to doubt himself. For example, in this passage from Acts, after years of preaching his version of the new religion, Paul needed to assert himself as someone validated by Christianity’s “acknowledged leaders.” Then after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along with me. I went up in response to a revelation. Then I laid before them (though only in a private meeting with the acknowledged leaders) the gospel that I proclaim among the Gentiles, in order to make sure that I was not running, or had not run, in vain. But even Titus, who was with me, was not compelled to be circumcised, though he was a Greek. But because of false believers secretly brought in, who slipped in to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus, so that they might enslave us—we did not submit to them even for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might always remain with you. And from those who were supposed to be acknowledged leaders (what they actually were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality)—those leaders contributed nothing to me. On the contrary, when they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel for the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been entrusted with the gospel for the circumcised (for he who worked through Peter making him an apostle to the circumcised also worked through me in sending me to the Gentiles), and when James and Cephas [Peter] and John, who were acknowledged pillars, recognized the grace that had been given to me, they gave to Barnabas and me the right hand of fellowship, agreeing that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised. They asked only one thing, that we remember the poor, which was actually what I was eager to do. After fourteen years of preaching the gospel, Paul feels compelled to get a stamp of approval from the “acknowledged pillars” of Christianity. This compulsion is interpreted to be a revelation. His phrase “response to a revelation” left undescribed suggests that it’s not a dramatic vision type revelation, but rather something more

subtle to which he responds. After fourteen years of preaching, Paul needs to make sure his message is okay with the big guys. It struck me as odd that Paul would assume that perhaps Titus would want to be circumcised, even though he was a Greek. Paul seemed more than a bit paranoid in assuming that there were “false believers secretly brought in, who slipped in to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus, so that they might enslave us.” Though true, there might have been Jews who were suspicious of Paul’s views about abolishing the covenant God established with Abraham by demanding that everyone discontinue the circumcision ritual. Reading this passage with the mystique brushed away, it’s easy to see that it’s a very human Paul that can’t help but show his contempt for the acknowledged leaders he wants to impress. Now they are “those who were supposed to be acknowledged leaders.” His aside shows his bravado, perhaps in response to having been scrutinized, slighted, and offered no money—“those leaders contributed nothing to me,” and in fact they asked Paul to “remember the poor,” as if Paul needed reminding. (And perhaps he did. According to Acts 11:27-30, the whole region was afflicted by a severe famine, and “The disciples determined that according to their ability, each would send relief to the believers living in Judea; this they did, sending it to the elders by Barnabas and Saul,” Saul, of course, being Paul.) Paul’s bravado adds the parenthetical “what they actually were makes no difference to me.” But a few seconds earlier they had made a great deal of difference, and why else would Paul have journeyed to Jerusalem after fourteen years to get their approval? He adds, “God shows no partiality,” which means they are not superior to Paul. It’s worth mentioning that in Acts 10:34-35, after Peter has a vision that leads to his conversion of Gentiles, he says to them, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” Please note that this is not a claim to the power of faith, à la Paul, but to the power of fear (also translated as awe or reverence) and good works. Mentioning James, Peter, and John by name and noting that they were “acknowledged pillars,” even following his comment that God shows no partiality, suggests that Paul was indeed eager for

approval and that the leaders’ status was important to him. Was it really such a big deal for them to give a preacher of the gospel the right hand of fellowship? Anyone could preach the gospel of Jesus, and many people did. Didn’t Paul say that he had the “mind of Christ,” was able to “discern all things,” and was “subject to no one else’s scrutiny”? Here again Paul makes it a point to state that the acknowledged pillars agreed that Paul should go to the Gentiles (where he had been going for the past fourteen years) and that the others, including Peter, should go to the Jews. Yet in Acts 10-11, Peter had already been designated, via powerful visions, to deliver to the Gentiles the gospel and the Holy Spirit. I began to wonder if it was somehow irreligious to elevate Paul to the same level as Jesus. Unlike the gospel accounts of Jesus, Paul’s letters and Acts reveal a human personality with character flaws. Here Paul appears to be jealous of Peter’s leadership role in converting the Gentiles. The purpose of his journey to Jerusalem appears to be to “correct” any credit Peter has been given for converting the Gentiles and to make sure that everyone was on the same page in bestowing all the credit upon him (Paul). According to Holman’s Bible Dictionary, Despite Peter’s role among the disciples and the promise of his leadership in the early church (see especially Matt. 16:17-19), Peter did not emerge as the leader of either form of primitive Christianity. Though he played an influential role in establishing the Jerusalem church, James, the brother of Jesus, assumed the leadership role of the Jewish community. Though Peter was active in the incipient stages of the Gentile mission, Paul became the “apostle to the Gentiles.” Peter probably sacrificed his chances to be the leader of either one of these groups because of his commitment to serve as a bridge in the early church, doing more than any other to hold together the diverse strands of primitive Christianity. In his role of “apostle to the Gentiles,” again from Holman’s, Paul’s typical procedure was to enter a new town, seek out the synagogue, and share the gospel on the sabbath day. Usually

Paul’s message caused a division in the synagogue, and Paul and Barnabas would seek a Gentile audience. From Paul’s earliest activities, it became evident that the gospel he preached caused tension between believers and the synagogue. In those early days, even among the “acknowledged pillars” and “leaders,” there was no consensus about the meaning or requirements of the Christian religion. But Paul comes across as more than a bit insistent that his way is the way. I heard a trumpeting of human personality rather than divine inspiration when Paul, who had the mind of Christ, severely criticized Peter, who had the mind of Christ, as recorded by Paul in Galatians 2:11-14: But when Cephas [Peter] came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood self-condemned; for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction. And the other Jews joined him in this hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that they were not acting consistently with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?” When I finally took his words at face value, I found it rather shocking that Paul, who formerly had hunted down Christians for the persecuting Roman authorities, now has the audacity to reprimand Peter, one of the original twelve disciples, about whom Jesus had said, “Upon this rock I will build my church,” and who was serving as a bridge between Jewish and Gentile Christians. I asked myself, how would Paul know that Peter withdrew because of fear of the Jews who came with James, the brother of Christ and leader of the Jewish Christian community? Maybe Peter preferred eating with his old friends for a time. Maybe he was respecting the preferences of Jewish Christians rather than Gentile

Christians (Paul’s Christians, who had basically thrown the symbolic ritual of faith, circumcision, out the window, and had thereby symbolically thrown out the Old Testament and Judaism with it). Maybe Peter was not willing to make eating with Gentiles an issue. Maybe he was building one end of a bridge. According to Paul himself, most Jews and Gentiles were not instantly zapped “perfect” by Paul’s standards, or even Christ’s. Certainly Peter could argue that Christ did not condemn or dismiss the covenant of circumcision —a covenant of faith even according to Paul himself. Paul had no right to judge the “circumcision faction” when Paul himself claimed that according to his theology of faith, people had freedom “in the Spirit” to make their own decisions about right and wrong. Rather than discuss his concern privately with Peter, who possessed the mind of Christ that discerns all things, Paul rather arrogantly opposed Peter “to his face…before them all.” How was eating with whom you choose hypocrisy, I wondered? Paul’s complaint as he stated it didn’t really make sense. Was Peter living like a Gentile just because he ate with them? Was that simple gesture enough for Paul to claim that Peter was therefore not living like a Jew, or even like a Christian? Presumably, even for Paul there surely must have been more to living like a Jew than eating with Jews and not with Gentiles. How was Peter, who had been converting Jews and Gentiles to Christianity, compelling Gentiles to live like Jews? Once I accepted Paul’s fallibility, it was quite clear to me that Paul was presenting remarkably irrational and exaggerated claims. Perhaps his rivalry with Peter over who should be credited with having taken the gospel to the Gentiles motivated his public attack. Notice Paul’s elitist judgment of Gentiles in his next comment about “Gentile sinners” (Gal. 2:15-21): We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; yet we know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. And we have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not by doing the works of the law, because no one will be justified by the works of the law. But if, in our effort to be justified in Christ, we ourselves have been found to be sinners,

is Christ then a servant of sin? Certainly not! But if I build up again the very things that I once tore down, then I demonstrate that I am a transgressor. For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing. Nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus say that believers are justified by faith alone and not held accountable for their works. Nowhere in the Old Testament is there a claim that the law is to be abandoned for “faith,” that no one will be justified by good works, or that every jot and iota of the law must be followed perfectly in order for a person to be deemed righteous. (Even Jesus transgressed the law when he ate the grains on the Sabbath, in Matthew 12.) Certainly faith was part of Christ’s message, but that was because many people didn’t believe that he was the Messiah. Nowhere in Christ’s message as it has been transmitted to us does it say or imply that faith in Christ alone supersedes good works. Yes, Christ said that believers must be perfect as God is perfect, meaning that the goal must be nothing less than perfection. But that doesn’t mean that less than perfectly good people would go to hell. Christ revised details of the law, or perhaps re-defined their original intent, but his re-vision was to bring good works closer to a motivation of inward goodness rather than to permit a legalistic gesture for the sake of getting a reward. How does eating with a group of Jews build up what was torn down? What was torn down? Paul seemed to think it was the law. Paul’s Law of Faith vs. God’s Law and Abraham’s Faith Ironically, Paul creates his own law—faith—and seems to think that eating with Jews violates his new law. Even granting Paul’s own unique version of the Christian religion, how does eating with Jews violate the law of faith? And how is Paul’s deeming Peter a hypocrite not itself hypocritical? Paul slams the law, then sets up his own law.

Why should we trust the “new” religion of such a seemingly twofaced, irrational legalist? And why should the Jews trust Paul’s demolition of their Godgiven law? Should the “circumcision faction” disobey God’s charge to Abraham in Genesis 17? “I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.” Everlasting. Paul begs to differ with God. Should the “circumcision faction” disregard God’s instructions to Abraham’s descendants? “As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations. This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and you and your offspring after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised. You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you.” Should the “circumcision faction” disbelieve the consequence of breaking the covenant that God established with Abraham? “So shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant. Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.” Amazingly, Paul calls those who still observe this ritual of faith in the scriptural covenant “transgressors.” He is saying that by doing what is right according to the law, one demonstrates that one is a transgressor. That’s absurd. Even granting Paul’s extremist position of no law and all faith, how does fulfilling a commandment of God, a ritual instituted by Abraham, the “father of faith,” make one a transgressor? Ironically, it is this covenant with God that makes Abraham worthy to be, in Paul’s judgment, the father of Christian faith. I thought it ironic that Paul’s Old Testament legalism still cropped up so late in his career among the Gentiles, to whom he had preached salvation by grace through faith, that faith and that faith alone having been reckoned as righteousness. Paul couldn’t seem to make up his mind about the law—replace the law with faith, or make faith the law. Once I saw Paul’s

contradictions and tangled reasoning, I distrusted the legitimacy of his interpretation of the gospel. And he seemed to disparage Judaism as aggressively as he had persecuted Christians. Not only did Paul’s odd anti-Semitism make me doubt the validity of his theology, but his self-righteous stance on circumcision also made me dislike, or at least be suspicious of, Paul as a person. How could such a person be the spokesperson for God? Maybe Jesus was the Jewish Messiah; maybe Paul’s Christianity was a perversion of Judaism. (At one point, I seriously considered siding with the Jews by becoming a Jew.) Certainly Paul drove a great and dangerous wedge between Jews and Christians. Yet his stance was, in my view, clearly unclear. Listen! I, Paul, am telling you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you. Once again I testify to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obliged to obey the entire law. You who want to be justified by the law have cut yourselves off from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. For through the Spirit, by faith, we eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only thing that counts is faith working through love (Gal. 5:2-6). Even now I bristle at Paul’s self-righteous pronouncement that “Christ will be of no benefit to you” who are circumcised to fulfill Abraham’s covenant with God. Even Jesus (Luke 2:21) and John the Baptist (Luke 1:59) were circumcised. “I, Paul, am telling you”? Who does Paul think he is? Who is Paul to establish a kind of eternal death penalty for anyone unwilling to abandon God’s law in order to fulfill Paul’s new law of non-circumcision? Again, Paul is telling Jews to abandon God’s law, the law of today’s Christians’ Old Testament. Again, there was nothing about the ritual of circumcision that suggested it obliged the circumcised to obey the entire law. When the ritual of circumcision was commanded by God, the law of Moses didn’t even exist yet. There were no such legalistic strings attached to circumcision that Paul imposes here. “You…have cut yourselves off from Christ.” (No pun intended, I’m sure.) Jesus spent his entire career instructing people in the true

ways of goodness and fulfillment of the law. The only time he ever even mentions circumcision is in John 7:19-24. “Did not Moses give you the law? Yet none of you keeps the law. Why are you looking for an opportunity to kill me?” The crowd answered, “You have a demon! Who is trying to kill you?” Jesus answered them, “I performed one work, and all of you are astonished. Moses gave you circumcision (it is, of course, not from Moses, but from the patriarchs), and you circumcise a man on the sabbath. If a man receives circumcision on the sabbath in order that the law of Moses may not be broken, are you angry with me because I healed a man’s whole body on the sabbath? Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.” Jesus is certainly not condemning circumcision, and it could be argued that he is lifting it up as a righteous, sacred act of such holiness that it could be lawfully performed on the sabbath. It is an act worthy of comparison with the even more righteous and reverent act of healing. Obeying this law in the spirit originally intended would certainly not cut off a believer from Christ. In pronouncing that ultimate judgment, “you have fallen away from grace,” even on believers, doesn’t Paul demonstrate that extreme lack of humility that constitutes a kind of blasphemy against the Spirit of grace? Certainly we are taught “through the Spirit” how to be righteous, but Jesus never taught that righteousness was merely a hope that could not be accomplished in the present. In fact, he said that believers had already been cleansed by his message (John 15:3). Which didn’t mean you don’t occasionally need to have your feet washed (John 13:10, 14). Isn’t Paul just a bit presumptuous to pronounce absolutely Christ’s views on circumcision? Paul never even met Christ. Furthermore, if neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, as Paul asserts, why is Paul so obsessively judgmental toward those who are circumcised? If the only thing that counts is faith working through love, why is the act of circumcision—a ritual symbol of faith—so heinous? Paul’s

oversensitivity to this issue makes his legalistic theology of grace through faith self-contradictory. Paul amps up his judgments in verses 7-12 (Gal. 5): You were running well; who prevented you from obeying the truth? Such persuasion does not come from the one who calls you. A little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough. I am confident about you in the Lord that you will not think otherwise. But whoever it is that is confusing you will pay the penalty. But my friends, why am I still being persecuted if I am still preaching circumcision? In that case the offense of the cross has been removed. I wish those who unsettle you would castrate themselves! Here again Paul judges those who, according to his standards, were running well. Does he really think he is the superior judge of what constitutes “the truth”? Does he really believe he knows all the truth that could come from “the one who calls you,” meaning Christ? Instead of presenting a persuasive case to refute the case of “whoever it is that is confusing” them, Paul is more intent on making sure they know that God will make them “pay the penalty.” Not persuasion, but judgment and punishment are Paul’s tactics of indoctrination. Paul then implies that someone, such as he himself, preaching circumcision would not be persecuted; only someone preaching against circumcision (Paul) would be persecuted. History records a reality in which both Jews and Christians were persecuted for various reasons, most of them having to do with challenges to Roman rule and worship. If Paul was “persecuted” by the Jewish community, perhaps it was because of his in-your-face, Romanesque/authoritarian preaching style. After all, to reiterate a point made earlier (again quoting from Holman’s Bible Dictionary), in his role of “apostle to the Gentiles,” Paul’s “typical procedure was to enter a new town, seek out the synagogue, and share the gospel on the sabbath day. Usually Paul’s message caused a division in the synagogue, and Paul and Barnabas would seek a Gentile audience. From Paul’s earliest activities, it became evident that the gospel he preached caused tension between believers and the synagogue.”

The charge against Paul when he was arrested in Jerusalem was that he was “the man who is teaching everyone everywhere against our people, our law, and this place [the temple]; more than that, he actually brought Greeks into the temple and has defiled this holy place” (Acts 21:27-28). But when Paul was presented to the governor, Felix, he claimed that he had been innocently worshipping in Jerusalem. Paul must have felt the tension of being both a Roman and a Jew long before he added persecution of Christians and then his new Christian faith to his balancing act. Paul’s unsuccessful attempt to integrate these disparate aspects of himself could explain psychologically the contradictory nature of his prose in terms of both its form and its content. His obsession with moral and especially sexual purity and with punishment for slight offenses, combined with his contradictory obsession with salvation as resulting only from faith, indicates an inner turmoil that quite possibly stemmed from his guilt complex for having persecuted the early Christians. It would make sense that his bravado in the presence of the “authoritarian leaders” like Peter and James and the leaders of the synagogues would have been compensation for his feeling of psychological and spiritual impotence. It would also make sense that by persecuting the non-Christian Jews (that he had once been among and had served), he was projecting his guilt onto them in a gesture that would serve both as retaliation and self-punishment—yet another layer of selfcontradiction. If Paul could have resolved his inner conflicts, or at least have lightened up and accepted the forgiveness of Christ that he so fervently preached, perhaps his life and letters would not have fomented the kind of intense inter-religious conflicts that still plague the world today. Was Paul Homosexual? Another turn-off for me as I studied Paul’s letters was his overkill homophobia, especially since it served as both inspiration and validation for today’s hate crimes against gays. Exploitation of bigotry has always served high priests needing an extra jolt of power-over or looking for a fundraising gimmick. Today,

the scapegoat of choice for most Pauline fundamentalists is the homosexual. Homosexuals are so loathed that, as Rev. Fred Phelps puts it, “God doesn’t hate you because you’re homosexual. You’re homosexual because God hates you.” Next to the Genesis story of Sodom and Gomorrah, the opinion of Paul expressed in Romans 1:18-27 is probably the most widely cited biblical “proof” that homosexuality is evil. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse; for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done. They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents,

foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die—yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them. In other words, homosexuality is the result of worshipping images of humans or animals, and as a result of that, homosexuals are full of every vice, sin, and evil known to man, and they applaud others like them. By implication, heterosexuals, on the other hand, do not worship images of humans or animals, are not full of every vice, sin, and evil known to man, and do not applaud others like them. Contrary to Paul’s opinion, the truth is that there is absolutely nothing that could substantiate claims that homosexuals are any more likely than heterosexuals to worship images of animals or humans, or that homosexuals are any less loving, good, and spiritual than heterosexuals. The inference that homosexuals are categorically evil God-haters, and by inference that heterosexuals are not, is so absurd that one wonders how this passage could be accepted today as God’s word or even as a valid opinion. Stereotyping stems from prejudice, but maligning such as this, with such vile and distorted scorn, betrays a more profound bigotry. Many apologists try to prove that Paul did not say what he did in fact say: that homosexuality is evil and that homosexuals deserve to die. But the words speak for themselves. Certainly Paul’s assertion contradicts the vision Peter had early in his career, the vision that led to his conversion of the first Gentiles. About noon the next day, as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the roof to pray. He became hungry and wanted something to eat; and while it was being prepared, he fell into a trance. He saw the heaven opened and something like a large sheet coming down, being lowered to the ground by its four corners. In it were all kinds of four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air. Then he heard a voice saying, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat.” But Peter said, “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean.” The voice said to him again, a second time, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”

This happened three times, and the thing was suddenly taken up to heaven. This is not just about eating food considered abominations. In 10:28 he expands his revelation, “and he said to them [the Gentiles], ‘You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.’” Yet Pauline fundamentalists would have us believe that profane, unclean homosexuals (as opposed to heterosexuals) are filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, Godhaters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die—yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them. If they accept Paul’s words as God-breathed truth, they accept Paul’s words as God-breathed truth. If they accept these words of Paul’s written in the letter to the Romans, they reject Paul’s notion of saved by faith (or Luther’s saved by grace through faith), and they reject the revelation of Peter’s vision. In Matthew 12:1-8, Jesus demonstrates the principle of love versus legalism: At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the sabbath; his disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. When the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, “Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the sabbath.” He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him or his companions to eat, but only for the priests. Or have you not read in the law that on the sabbath the priests in the temple break the sabbath and yet are guiltless? I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is lord of the sabbath.”

The Pharisees’ misinterpretation of religion as legalistic sacrifice rather than the compassion of love is the kind of error that Paul makes, the kind of error that leads to the fundamentalist’s vicious judgment against two gay people who love each other. Paul’s excessive disgust for homosexuality (physical/moral) and circumcision (moral/spiritual) suggests a problem with his own sexuality that possibly involves a castration complex. Certainly the male genitals represented power. Homosexuality represented the inversion of male dominance and power. Circumcision was a kind of castration-lite. Besides being a powerful ritual representing Jewish faith, circumcision was perhaps the most intimate ritual in being performed directly and permanently on one’s own personal self. Once Paul recognized his error in persecuting Christians, he must have felt shame in being one of the circumcised. On the other hand, Paul’s theology was certainly not phallo-centric in the literal physical sense. Paul boasted that he was unmarried and encouraged others to remain single, and he spent an inordinate amount of ink admonishing even trivial “sexual immorality.” Many have wondered if the thorn in his flesh (2 Cor. 12:7) might refer to homosexuality or castration. Or might Paul be a repressed homosexual? One thing is certain: Paul was uptight about sex, as even a casual reading of his letters makes clear. In 2 Cor. 11:1-6, Paul’s bravado about his status is couched in sexual imagery: I wish you would bear with me in a little foolishness. Do bear with me! I feel a divine jealousy for you, for I promised you in marriage to one husband, to present you as a chaste virgin to Christ. But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by its cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ. For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you submit to it readily enough. I think that I am not in the least inferior to these super-apostles. I may be untrained in speech, but not in knowledge; certainly in every way and in all things we have made this evident to you.

The “super-apostles” were possibly Peter and James. Certainly the apostles were some or all of the disciples of Jesus. (It’s worth noting that we aren’t sure who exactly the disciples were. According to Easton’s Bible Dictionary, the term apostles was generally used as designating the body of disciples to whom he [Jesus] entrusted the organization of his church and the dissemination of his gospel, “the twelve,” as they are called (Matt. 10:1-5; Mark 3:14; 6:7; Luke 6:13; 9:1). We have four lists of the apostles, one by each of the synoptic evangelists (Matt. 10:2-4; Mark 3:16; Luke 6:14), and one in the Acts (Acts 1:13). No two of these lists, however, perfectly coincide. Paul’s fixation was on circumcision as a symbol of Jewish refusal to accept his version of Christianity. Or put another way, the Jewish law that forbade homosexuality denied him the freedom to be gay and thus had castrated him. He wanted a new religion that gave him that freedom, but being a Roman and a Jew, he needed the rule of law; he needed a new law, the law of faith, the law of love. But Paul’s old God said No. As if to expose his problem with “circumcision,” in a phrase almost extreme enough to be a Freudian slip, Paul hisses in a manner quite unchristian, “I wish those who unsettle you would castrate themselves!” (Gal. 5:12). This sounds less like the “authoritarian leaders” building bridges than a schoolyard bully. Such a comment, directed to an “immature” church, contradicts Paul’s absolutist claim to maturity (1 Cor. 2:6). In the next passage, he projects his own judgmental attitude onto others. “For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another” (Gal. 5:13-15). Freudian interpretation aside, who is biting and devouring if not Paul? Paul’s self-negating theology continues: “Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires

is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law.” Doesn’t Paul sound a bit like today’s ex-gays, who can’t do (sexually) what they want and therefore want you, too, to be deprived of doing what you want—and calling that communal deprivation spiritual? No doubt most of us who are not subject to the law would not want Paul dictating what it means to live by the Spirit. Most of us don’t really believe that gratifying the desires of the flesh—things like eating cheesecake, enjoying the weather, petting a kitten, playing baseball, appreciating a gothic cathedral, listening to Bach, dancing, smelling roses, making love, or any other pleasurable, sensuous physical activity—are opposed to the Spirit that created and still creates the blessings of the universe. Surely it’s really the dichotomy between freedom and legalism, not between spirit and flesh that has prevented believers throughout the ages from doing what they want —what they have the right to want if they are in the Spirit, love their neighbors, and are not subject to the law. As Paul himself puts it in Romans 14, Welcome those who are weak in faith, but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions. Some believe in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables. Those who eat must not despise those who abstain, and those who abstain must not pass judgment on those who eat; for God has welcomed them. Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another? It is before their own lord that they stand or fall. And they will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make them stand. Once again Paul is speaking out of both sides of his mouth. Don’t pass judgment? Who is Paul to pronounce vegetarians as weak in faith? Some judge one day to be better than another, while others judge all days to be alike. Let all be fully convinced in their own minds. Those who observe the day, observe it in honor of the

Lord. Also those who eat, eat in honor of the Lord, since they give thanks to God; while those who abstain, abstain in honor of the Lord and give thanks to God. Likewise those who love someone of the same gender, who want to be married in a church or mosque or synagogue like anyone else who is a free believer that wants to honor the Lord. “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.” Circumcised and uncircumcised, Jew and Gentile, heterosexual and homosexual. “Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister? Or you, why do you despise your brother or sister? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God. For it is written, ‘As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall give praise to God.’ So then, each of us will be accountable to God.” Why, Paul, do you pass judgment on your gay brothers and sisters? Why do you despise them? Are gay individuals—let’s narrow it even further—are gay Christians accountable to you and your homophobia or to God? You yourself said, “Let us therefore no longer pass judgment on one another, but resolve instead never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of another. I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself; but it is unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean.” Did I hear that right? Do not pass judgment? Never put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of another? Nothing is unclean in itself? Circumcision, and homosexuality, and gratifying the God-given desires of the flesh are only unclean for someone who thinks them unclean—someone, for instance, like Paul? The same Paul who despises circumcision, homosexuality, and eating with Jews, the same Paul who said, “If your brother or sister is being injured by what you eat, you are no longer walking in love. Do not let what you eat cause the ruin of one for whom Christ died. So do not let your good be spoken of as evil. For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit”?

Is this not the principle Peter followed when he ate with the circumcised, which Paul condemned publicly to his face (Gal. 2:11)? Personally, I don’t think that Christians eating with Jews or even those fearless souls on reality TV eating squiggly slugs injure or cause the ruin of one for whom Christ died, or anyone else. The one who thus serves Christ is acceptable to God and has human approval. Let us then pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding. Do not, for the sake of food, destroy the work of God. Everything is indeed clean, but it is wrong for you to make others fall by what you eat; it is good not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything that makes your brother or sister stumble. The faith that you have, have as your own conviction before God. Blessed are those who have no reason to condemn themselves because of what they approve. But those who have doubts are condemned if they eat, because they do not act from faith; for whatever does not proceed from faith is sin. There is nothing inherently “unclean” about being gay. If gay marriage proceeds through faith, it is clean. If a straight marriage proceeds through doubt or a lack of faith, specifically Christian faith, it is sin, for the Christian. Gay Christians who marry because they have faith do not sin. Straight Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, atheists, agnostics, or people who marry for reasons other than faith (love, commitment, companionship, or children, for instance) sin. Thus asserts Paul in the 14th chapter of Romans, the same book that began with Paul’s extreme condemnation of homosexuality. Paul’s complicated self-contradictions suggest a deep-seated confusion. Just as some Christians today challenge the weight and strength of Paul’s letters, so did some of the early Christians, as evidenced by Paul’s defensive comment, 2 Cor. 10:8-10: Now, even if I boast a little too much of our authority, which the Lord gave for building you up and not for tearing you down, I will not be ashamed of it. I do not want to seem as though I am trying to frighten you with my letters. For they say, “His letters

are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible.” The authoritative Paul was overbearing enough to frighten people despite his weak presence and rough, aggressive, and no doubt rude way of speaking. Paul himself was always battling this dichotomy: Circumcision is the rejection of faith: Circumcision is the covenant of faith. Perhaps this contradiction made the frustrated Paul angry. I believe that Paul’s unresolved attempts to reconcile these two contradictory positions reflect his attempt to forgive (“justify”) himself for his persecution of Christians within the context of his moral-based Judeo-Christian religion. I believe that despite Paul’s aggressive pushing of salvation by grace through faith, which would let him off the hook, he just couldn’t believe his own theology to the extent that he himself could feel truly forgiven. Paul’s overzealous moralizing is a projection of his own guilt. Even though he champions a new religion of faith alone, he continues to condemn others because he can’t forgive himself. Circumcision is the symbol that locates Paul’s attempt to reconcile his own self-contradiction (faith + morality), often by outright denying his guilt (faith alone). Paul’s letters, if closely read, reveal the schizophrenic tension that Paul must have experienced throughout his life. Had he lived today, he would have been a perfect candidate for ex-gay ministries. In the end I decided that Paul was not a man I needed to trust. Any human court of law would throw out such an inconsistent testimony as invalid. How much more should we challenge, and if need be reject, the clearly misleading opinion of a mixed-up, tormented, repressed evangelical who claimed to represent God.



 

Chapter 7 To Worship God, Not the Bible Giving up belief in the Bible as God’s Word is one of the most difficult steps that some of us ever take. There’s a sense of security in believing that we are standing on the same firm truth that others have stood on for centuries. For some, the Bible has its own numinous quality, if only by its being linked to positive experiences, like the initial spiritual high that many call being born-again, or social camaraderie within a church community. As I discussed in Chapter 3, although I was raised by agnostics, I went through a born-again phase beginning at age nineteen, and at first, I did accept a biblical literalist stance. I call my relinquishment of belief in biblical infallibility a spiritual step, but really it was a process that took place over many years. The initial letting go in my early twenties happened in an instant, when I just had to admit that the Bible was not literally perfect or even close and that all the explanations for its incongruities were just plain absurd. Even realizing that, I continued trying to make some watered-down version of Bible belief fit my relatively new but still firmly established Christian worldview. For years, even decades, I continued to think of myself as a Christian and to acknowledge the Bible as somehow having a direct connection to God. Eventually I decided to seriously research the origins of the Bible using scholarly rather than specifically Christian sources like those sold in Christian bookstores. That inquiry branched out into investigations into Church history, complete with its Vatican orgies, massacres of Jews and Muslims and other “holy” wars, and of course its famous inquisitions, which led to documented connections between fundamentalism and crime, the exploitation of “God” by pandering politicians, and the outrageous hypocrisy of mega-

mammon TV evangelists. Gradually I came to understand that many evils committed in the name of religion occurred because victims trusted the Bible (or other religious text) and those who claimed to represent it. It’s likely that many people reading this book believe that the Bible is from God or are uncomfortable with having abandoned that belief. If you’re one of those people, in the following chapters I will try, as gently but directly as possible, to demystify your belief in a divine or divinely dictated book. Rest assured that if I am wrong, your belief can only be strengthened. But if I am right and you are honest, you will need to readjust your stance. If the process makes you uncomfortable, I understand. I’ll be taking you down the same path I traveled myself, but with the weeds cleared away. In maybe an hour you’ll take a whirlwind tour of ground it took me years to cover. Let me clarify again that for me, Deism is the worship of one universal God at the exclusion of all other gods; therefore, Bibleworship is, to put it technically, idolatry. If you’re thinking to yourself that you don’t actually worship the Bible, you merely revere it as God’s words, let me ask you a question I finally asked myself: If you had to suddenly worship God without the Bible, could you? And what and who would that God be? This is a valid question, because although fundamentalism claims to be monotheistic and a monotheist by definition can’t worship both Deity and Book, many well-meaning believers have chosen to revere to the point of adoration—i.e., have chosen to worship—the Bible as God and therefore instead of God without even realizing it. The moment came when I understood that if I believed deep down that God would not butcher innocent women and children or condone molestation even of the children of infidels, but according to Numbers 31 God ordered Moses to butcher innocent women and male children and the blessed Moses gave the innocent girls to the butchers for their pleasure, only by denying my own God-given conscience could I accept the biblical account as true and righteous, and I certainly couldn’t condone upholding it as an acceptable model for the treatment of infidels. If I saw self-contradictions in the biblical accounts, and I saw a multitude, only by denying my God-given

reason could I continue to believe in the Bible’s divinity or divine origin. Very early on I began to realize that belief in such seemingly harmless and beneficial concepts as grace often led to passivity and irresponsibility and was often exploited to mask a multitude of sins. Thomas Paine once commented, “Accustom a people to believe that priests or any other class of men can forgive sins, and you will have sins in abundance.” It didn’t take long for me to catch on that many people who believe in forgiveness of sins freely commit sins with a conscience easily cleared by proxy. A theology of blanket forgiveness early on pinched my sense of justice. I experienced a dramatic lesson on the dangers of “grace” while still an undergraduate. I remember sitting alone inside the front of the campus church one evening a year or so into my born-again phase. I was leaning back against the altar, reading Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols in the spotlight bouncing off the cross as I waited to meet a friend who had class in the wing just off the sanctuary. I was deeply absorbed in my book when I realized that I had heard the front door open and someone was now sliding into a pew. I wanted to slip through the side door to the wing of classrooms, but I knew it was only unlocked on the other side. I decided to just stay put, hidden behind the altar. I continued reading. Suddenly a man’s voice wailed to the rafters, “Almighty God, forgive me. Oh God, I know you have the power to forgive me. You always forgive if a person asks, and I stand on that promise, I stand on that promise of forgiveness, oh Lord please, please forgive me.” On and on he pleaded. Then it got quiet. I listened hard. Curious, I glanced around to see an ordinary looking man a few pews from the front, head down, kneeling in prayer in the dim light. Then the wailing began again. “Please, Lord, forgive me. I’m so sorry. I’ll never do it again. I know if I ask you to forgive me, you have to.” The man’s pleas intensified. He confessed that he had raped another girl. I realized immediately that he must be the campus rapist responsible for several assaults over the previous several months. I knew about this only by word of mouth. A woman professor had been fired for being a lesbian, and that was well

publicized on this campus that wouldn’t teach Virginia Woolf or Gertrude Stein because they were lesbians, but the campus rapes, and there had been several, had been hushed up even when professors and students tried posting fliers and otherwise letting students know. Plenty was done to make students aware that homosexuality was forbidden on our conservative Methodist campus, but nothing had been done to protect women students like me from this rapist, sitting here now, a few pews back from where I sat alone and barely hidden behind the altar. On and on he cried out to the God he knew would forgive him yet again, would always forgive him, because God had no choice but to fulfill his promises, and anyone who confessed and believed would be saved. I sat perfectly still, barely breathing, my heart pounding as loud as his confessions. At one point I stifled a sneeze. He stopped mid-sentence. After a long, terrifying moment, he was off and running again. The more he prayed, the more I felt a powerful presence of evil. When the rapist finally felt sufficiently justified and sanctified to leave—I could sense him moving down the aisle—I reported the incident to the police, but I had only a generic description to give them. As far as I know, the rapist was never caught. But I do know he did rape again. Since that time I have come to understand that rape isn’t about sex or any physical drive, desire, or pleasure; it’s about sadistic pleasure of torturing and destroying another’s being, the very essence of the self. It’s about hate, control, power-over—that’s spiritual murder. “When I rape, when I kill, only then do I feel alive.” How many psychopaths have said something to that effect? Alive? They are killing life-force itself, and that makes them feel alive? I don’t think so. I began to see that sadistic behavior includes the self-justifying cruelty of judgmental Christians claiming that their cruelty is love. I was puzzled and in time shocked by holier-than-thous hammering their scriptures into lightning bolts to fling through “sinners’” hearts. I gradually saw, and saw clearly, the link between religion and bigotry: misogyny, racism, homophobia, anti-semitism, antihumanism, and profound loathing for any religious outsider, no

matter how small the religious difference, no matter how complex the ethical disagreement. I remember getting another lesson on self-righteousness up close and personal one Saturday morning in the mid-80s when I lived in Los Angeles. I and several other NOW members had volunteered to help lower income patients enter a clinic outside L.A. that was being blocked by right-to-lifers, and to explain to the patients, most of whom did not speak English, just what was happening. One right-tolifer was a young UCLA graduate student—the only black and the only non-member of the right-to-life action group. She was a Christian feminist with whom I had a long conversation that left us both confused yet relieved that our positions were not so far apart. We were both concerned about overpopulation, poverty, women’s rights to make decisions about our own bodies, and adequate birth control that would end all need for abortions. We agreed that what the world desperately needed was rejuvenation of spiritual prerogatives, including the primal values of love, freedom, and human dignity. High on that encounter, I introduced myself next to a cold, bitter Sunday-school teacher in dress, heels, pearls, and wide-brim hat. My attempts at connection were short-circuited by her non-stop scolding on the perversions of feminism, which was only interrupted by the leader of the pro-life action, a middle-age man wearing shorts, a tee shirt that did not quite cover his large belly, and a ball cap, who carried a Bible with a few wives-be-submissive-to-your-husbands and thou-shalt-not-kill passages marked with ribbons—marked by his pastor, I discovered after a few minutes of discussion, because this man knew nothing about the Bible (“that was the pastor’s job”). Yet he claimed, and I think he actually believed, that the Bible was absolutely true and that he was there “in the authority of God the Father.” When I explained to him that the clinic was not “an abortion clinic,” but rather a medical clinic visited by mostly poor Hispanic women, he responded by saying that I and all NOW members were sluts and whores and the only reason we were there was because we had all had abortions. I informed him that none of the dozen or so members present had had an abortion and some were lesbians and two were

obviously men and that the abortions performed at the clinic were infrequent and necessary. I will never forget his response: “If you girls wouldn’t pull down your pants, you wouldn’t get pregnant.” His continuing cartoon tirade about sluts and whores and birth control leading us down the path to Armageddon was interrupted when a car that had just pulled into the parking lot was swarmed by other right-to-lifers. One frail pro-life woman, who every ten minutes or so had been falling to her knees wailing, holding up a tiny plastic fetus she called the baby Jesus, had just slammed against the young Hispanic couple’s windshield her large, cumbersome placard decorated with pictures of fetuses and gruesome photographs of Nazi concentration camps framed by childish drawings of flaming pregnant devils complete with horns and tails. In bold letters were the captions Abortion, Evil, Abomination, Whores of Babylon, as well as Women Belong In the Home, beneath which was quoted Kinder, Küchen, Kirche followed by its translation, Children, Kitchen, Church, which this poor woman surely did not know was the slogan on billboards of smiling young blonde Christian German women in aprons that Hitler plastered all over Germany as part of his Aryan race propaganda. As the young Hispanic man attempted to emerge from his car, which was being rocked by the right-to-lifers, the frail woman shoved, and I do mean shoved, the plastic fetus in his face. When I and a few other members attempted to help his frightened wife from the other side of the car, the frail fetus-shover rushed around and bashed me over the head with her placard, and the organizer spit on me and called me and my friends bitches, witches, whores. All this as the police sat across the street in their cruisers. The young man and woman slid back into their car and drove away. Inside the haven of the clinic, where I had gone for a drink of water, an angry nurse, checking my head and attending to the deep cut I hadn’t noticed on my arm, told me she had asked the woman, who had been recently raped, to come in that morning to see the doctor because the woman’s test results just back from the lab indicated not only that she was pregnant; she had cancer. I will carry that poor, anonymous Hispanic woman’s look of terror with me to the grave.

I began to realize that all fundamentalist dogma and ostensible behavior was justified by the belief that the Bible was the equivalent of God. But did that explain the utter insensitivity of so many believers? The mean behavior of the right-to-lifers I encountered that day dramatically demonstrated the fallout of misogynist attitudes common among fundamentalist Christians, even women. That day in L.A., I was amazed at the extent to which those believers were willing to relinquish the rights and responsibilities of their faith—the core of who and what they were, the essence of life’s meaning—to a second party whose only credentials were a piece of paper and maybe a collar. I realized that the most intimate and the only ultimately critical engagement between a person and God had been delegated to a committee of so-called experts—preachers, evangelists, “Christian writers.” The ignorance, naïveté, and laziness of believers, combined with unreasonable respect for authority, concentrated religious power in a few hands that aggressively distorted their own gospel faith into a mockery of itself. Although fundamentalists argue that the Bible is God’s infallible Word, I’ve never met two Christians who completely agree about what the Bible actually says, much less what it means. One thing I have discovered is that most Christians have never studied, or even read, every single biblical text. Even widely read and studied texts are interpreted differently by different groups and individuals. By definition, Christian fundamentalists believe that the Bible is God’s absolutely infallible Word, perfect in every way. The Bible has become so mystified that believers are unwilling to objectively read what it actually says, if only because the Bible contradicts itself and fundamentalists must stay in denial in order to uphold their faith in infallibility. Isn’t that dishonest? Aren’t those believers engaging in a codependent relationship with a surrogate God? The Bible is so revered that many believers equate it with God. Isn’t that idolatry by the Bible’s own standards? The truth is that the Bible is not God; it is a book, or rather a collection of books. The canonical text we call the Bible resulted from editorial decisions by its early publishers. There were many “books” (separate texts written on scrolls) circulating during the first few centuries after the presumed death of Jesus. There were thousands

of different pre-printing press versions of the texts that were finally chosen to be included in the Bible. The theological/political elite known as the “church fathers” made those choices, often amid bitter and sometimes violent argument. To this day, agreement is not unanimous. The Roman Catholic Bible contains more books than the Protestant Bible, and the Greek Orthodox text includes all the books of the Roman Catholic Bible plus other books. It’s surprising how easy it is to substantiate that the Bible’s long deification process, begun centuries after the death of Jesus, was the result of human, not divine, intervention. Nobody knows for certain who wrote any of the specific books collected as the Bible. I have met Christians who believed that Moses wrote the entire Old Testament, and that the disciples, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, wrote the gospels known by their names. But the Old Testament was written over hundreds of years by anonymous authors. The New Testament gospels were written by anonymous authors many decades after the death of Jesus. Even assuming that the Bible is true, some of the events recorded in Matthew occurred before Matthew even knew who Jesus was. John could not have written “his” entire gospel, because near the end of that text, the author explains why John had died contrary to the rumor that Jesus had said he would not die. Luke became a follower late in Jesus’s career and would not have witnessed the events he describes. Mark was not one of the original twelve disciples; he was recruited by Barnabas to assist Paul, who originally persecuted the early Christians and became a Christian himself well after Jesus’s death. We are fairly certain that Paul wrote four of the books bearing his name, but again, Paul himself never even met Jesus. The Bible books’ original versions—the autographs—were not necessarily written by eyewitnesses. They could just as easily have been written accounts of previously received hearsay. The writer of Luke, for instance, makes no claims to have witnessed what he describes in his gospel. Nor does he make claims to divine revelation. His text opens, Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were

eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed (Luke 1:1-4). This opening to Luke’s gospel is clearly not the utterance of a prophet possessed by divine afflatus. Luke was more like a reporter who interviewed people—who knew people (who knew people) who were eyewitnesses—as part of his investigation. Even the actual eyewitnesses would not have perfectly or in precisely the same way observed, interpreted, and remembered exactly what happened, nor would all or probably any of them have remembered verbatim what anybody said. “Many had undertaken” the task of writing gospel accounts. The writer of Luke attempts to present his version as an “orderly account,” with correct chronology presumably being a concern. The person believed to be addressed is Theophilus, the Bishop of Antioch during the latter half of the second century. That would mean that Luke’s gospel was written well after the events narrated by Luke would have occurred. Dating biblical material is not as objectively historical as many Christians assume. To a large extent, dating surviving biblical texts is pure guesswork. Conservative Christian scholars date the four gospels close to the time of Jesus, while progressives assign later dates and convincingly document their reasons. The assignments of dates to Old Testament texts are even more divergent. Conservatives seem intent to prove that ignorant primitives borrowed from God’s truth and perverted it into myths and superstitions, while progressive scholars argue (and largely prove) that the Bible texts are mainly composites of circulating mythic materials often of far more ancient origin. Conservatives assign dates that most present the biblical stories as historical rather than mythical, because if they are mythical just like the stories of the other religions—and those stories bear striking resemblance to the biblical ones—then Judaism and Christianity are no more valid than any other religion. If conservatives admit that, religion as they know it disintegrates. The truth is that there is no way to know if the events narrated in the Old Testament ever took place; when they took place; the

accuracy of the narration; or the date of the writing of the related event. The written version relating the event could have been first committed to writing centuries after the event actually occurred. The written version inscribed a verbal telling that had evolved after repeated telling and retelling by people of varying memory abilities who were capable and willing to embellish to make a point or to entertain. To deny this is to deny that the storytellers were human. To prove that God created the Bible, apologists refer to the Bible’s so-called unity, beginning with the unity of God they claim is present throughout all its pages. But glean all the passages referring to God, His attributes and activities, then separate them into classifications, and it becomes clear that the image of God presented in the Bible is as fractured, inconsistent, and self-contradictory as any pagan god. We don’t even know if God is one or “us” (Gen. 3:22). Apologists try to impose a fictitious linear timeline to prove a divinely inspired unity to the biblical stories, as if they had been structured with a beginning, middle, and end into a unified whole like a Greek tragedy or Homeric epic. Such a unity only exists in the minds of those whose interpretations now create it. The fabricated unity of the Bible as the God-directed historical revelation to a chosen elite is a misrepresentation based on inaccuracies. The Bible’s narratives appear unified, revealed, and perfect only to those indoctrinated to believe that they are. The biblical “gestalt” argues less for inherent unity than for the deeply human need to find unity and to aesthetically represent our inklings of unity or to create unity for ourselves out of the given materials. The supposed unifying themes, such as creation, providence, redemption, justice, retribution, temptation overcome, and survival in the wilderness, as well as the unifying personages, such as wise prophets, shrewd chieftains, and a son of God king, are found in other ancient religious traditions and are to a great extent the very reason any religion survives. All successful religions claim divine inspiration and all persuade the credulous. Scholars point out that biblical law derived from and was essentially the same as the more ancient Sumerian laws of Ur Nammu and Lipit Ishtar, the Old Babylonian laws of Eshnunna and Hammurabi, the Middle Assyrian laws from Asshur, and the Hittite

law code. All these collections of cuneiform law are older than the legal collections of the Old Testament. In fact, the Old Testament law is part of a common law tradition shared throughout the region of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine. The only unique feature of the Hebrew laws was its claim to special divine inspiration. It took a Hebrew genius to realize that obedience would be more efficiently elicited if it were viewed as the human end of an elitist covenant with the Divine. Obey because you’re special and will be specially blessed was a more successful motivation for obedience than “obey, or be punished.” The Psalms read essentially the same as hymns and psalms of other Near Eastern cultures, especially Egypt and Mesopotamia. The wisdom literature, patriarchal stories, prophecies, the Song of Songs, even the blueprint for construction of the sanctuary have parallels in the literatures of other, more ancient religions. The HarperCollins Bible Dictionary makes this comment under its entry, “Archaeology, History, and the Bible”: The Bible creates special problems for interpreters because it is a composite corpus of literature. It is not a primary historical source; in fact, some of its historical sources are quite late. The biblical text is sometimes poorly preserved, ambiguous, or tendentious. The Philistines are a classic example of biased reporting. The biblical writers fail to acknowledge the Philistine contribution to Canaanite technology, art, and architecture. As a book of faith, the Bible is not always free of prejudice, presenting, as it does, historical events from a theological point of view. The Bible’s chief interest in relating an event is not “what happened” but “what it meant...”It is imperative that biblical texts be interpreted by literary-critical analysis, including form, tradition, textual, historical, and redaction criticism. The Bible was written “from faith for faith.” But is such a faith really blind faith? Is such a faith authentic and relevant today? Is the conservative presentation of the Bible as divinely inspired dishonest in being inaccurate?

Certainly the nineteenth-century scholars were often more accurate, honest, and courageous than many religious scholars writing in the twentieth century. This makes sense: The later scholars have been battling against the disintegration of Christianity by sidling up to fundamentalism, which sprang up and quickly spread at the turn of the century. They had no choice, and still don’t. If the Bible is not a definitive source of historical truth, then it’s not a definitive source of spiritual truth. In the case of the gospels, conservatives would rather be dishonest in placing the texts closer to the source: Jesus and his disciples. The Old Testament books need to be “proven” to be more ancient than the myths they so obviously appropriated. Given the immense amount of scholarship available, I’m certain that these conservative scholars must know they’re being deceptive. Probably they would rather rewrite history—i.e. lie—than witness the demise of their religion. Well over a century ago, Nietzsche proclaimed: God is dead: He died laughing. The real God, of course, has always been alive and well creating and sustaining the universe. But “God,” the “God” created in our image, the abstract Zeus-esque representation of God propagated by human religion, couldn’t stop laughing at our absurd superstitions. By the end of the nineteenth century, that gut-busted God was dead as a doornail. In other words, religious representations had displaced the actual God so that God no longer lived in the human spirit, at least not the spirit cannibalized by religion. The letter of the law replaced the spirit of the law. Indoctrination supplanted universal communion with God. The hierarchy of mediation had become so vast that God had long disappeared beyond the vanishing point parade of clerics. In a sense, Nietzsche’s critique echoed an ancient understanding. The wisest Greek philosophers and poets, for instance, understood that God, mythically represented as the local chief “Zeus” or collectively as gods, played a minor role among the heroes of art, poetry, and drama, and even lesser roles in actual human life they amplified. Temples of gods magnified human characteristics. Rituals and prayers signified humanity’s yearning to transcend itself, usually but not always in a positive sense. Art, like the preconscious art of dreams, moved us to desire self/conscious enlightenment and

catharsis, or at least to face our shadow. And what is the shadow if not our desire to be God in order to get what we want, including immortality? God, the deified representational “God,” is dead and in fact was never really living except in the human imagination. The problem with imagination is that the uneducated often mistake representation for the thing represented. But a painting of Socrates is not Socrates himself. God the Father is not a blow-up facsimile of a human father. Starting at the end of the nineteenth century, fundamentalism erupted into history to rewrite history by revitalizing the dead God of superstition. The impossibility of the story of Jesus as related by the contradictory gospels was transcended with the greater impossibility that all the biblical texts were God-breathed. One superstition supplanted another. Scholars of the nineteenth century had not been shy about pointing out that none of the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, Clement of Rome, Barnabas, Hermas, Ignatius, and Polycarp, written for the most part early in the second century, contain any mention of the four gospels. Justin Martyr, the most eminent of the early Fathers, wrote about the middle of the second century. In his First Apology 66 he makes one mention of gospels in the sense of written notes of instructions on the taking of the consecrated bread and wine that had been passed down among written reminiscences of the apostles. Apostles were not the twelve disciples; they were subsequent adherents to the new religion centered on Jesus. Paul was an apostle, as were later followers such as Barnabas (Acts 14:14), Andronicus, and Junias (Rom. 16:7). The term, which literally means “one who is sent out,” was still being used during the second century and beyond to refer to preachers, teachers, missionaries and priests; many evangelicals today refer to themselves as apostles and disciples. Justin’s mention of reminiscences doesn’t prove the existence of the four New Testament gospels. The word “gospel” literally meant “good news,” a term used in the Old Testament and among the Romans. The Roman proconsul Paulus Fabius Maximus, for instance, used the word when establishing the birthday of Caesar

Augustus as the beginning of the new year, proclaiming the day of Caesar’s birth “good news” (the same Greek word for “gospel”) for the whole world. In the New Testament, the term designates a message, teaching, or preaching. Paul, for instance, speaks of “my gospel” (Rom. 2:16; 16:25) and “our gospel” (2 Cor. 4:3), claims that his is the only gospel (Gal. 1:7), that his is the revealed gospel direct from God (Gal. 1:16; 1:11-12), that believers should turn from other gospels (2 Cor. 11:4; Gal. 1:6), and that his gospel demands obedience (Rom. 10:16). Justin’s extensive writings arguing proofs of the divinity of Christ used more than three hundred quotations from the books of the Old Testament and nearly one hundred from the Apocryphal books of the New Testament, but none from the four gospels, which would have been the definitive source of his proofs had they existed. He never even mentions the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John in any of his writings. There is no evidence that the four gospels existed prior to the time of Justin. The evidence indicates that Matthew, Mark, and John were written or pieced together like Luke’s gospel sometime in the latter half of the second century. The strikingly different Gospel of John begins with a description of the Logos, or Word, which personified an emanation or essence of divine wisdom. Although a very ancient concept developed by many philosophers and religions, John’s version especially echoes Philo, a philosopher living in or near Jerusalem during the time of Jesus. In all his writings, the prolific Philo never mentions Jesus or any of the newsworthy events relating to his life. Yet the writer of John, writing many decades after the death of Jesus, almost quotes Philo verbatim. Philo wrote: “The Logos is the Son of God” (De Profugis); “The Logos is considered the same as God” (De Somniis); “He [the Logos] was before all things” (De Leg. Allegor.); “The Logos is the agent by whom the world was made” (De Leg. Allegor.); “The Logos is the light of the world” (De Somniis); “The Logos only can see God” (De Confus. Ling.). Christianity is a composite religion; the Bible is its composite text of texts that mixed and evolved over time. Once the new religion centered on Jesus caught fire, it spread out into a multitude of verbal and written adaptations. The new religion

was from the start not a single religion but many interpretations, many religions. Once churches began to form, verbal teachings needed to be given consistency. Committing the teachings to writing conferred authenticity and authority. Texts expressing each church’s concrete theology became a necessary means of shaping and maintaining cohesion. Then the various churches needed to be consolidated into a single church. Preachers taught, many of them traveling like pollen in springtime. Most of the teachings were rejected by what established itself as the church hierarchy. Most of the writings were tossed out. It’s likely that most early Christian writings were destroyed and their ideas repressed during the first and second centuries, never to be heard of again. The New Testament texts referred to Old Testament texts that were regarded as sacred to Judaism, yet it wasn’t until the end of the first century A.D. that the Old Testament canon was established by the Council of Jamnia, likely in response to the heresy of Christianity and other local religions. Even then, not all collections of Jewish writings contained the same canonical books. By the time the Bible as we know it was complied in 397, there were thousands of manuscript versions of the various books that would finally be admitted into the Bible. There were over 5,000 versions of New Testament books alone, not counting thousands of additional versions of the Greek translations. No two of those thousands of manuscripts were exactly alike. Some books considered for inclusion were rejected altogether; this rejection was via vote, not divine instruction. Of the books voted to be included, none of the original autograph versions still existed. Each autograph original would have been written on papyrus or parchment, which disintegrated within a few years, making it necessary to recopy each manuscript, and then each copy, over and over and over. Because each had to be copied by hand (the printing press was not invented until 1450), human errors continuously crept in, which were then copied and passed on. Each copyist would pass on his version’s errors, while all the other copyists were passing on their own completely different sets of errors, so the discrepancies proliferated exponentially. Scribes glossed their copies with corrections, grammatical clarifications, and interpretive notes; they were free to

do so, since the books had not yet been assigned their “divinely inspired” status. Some of the additions were eventually incorporated into the actual text, and sometimes scribes adjusted one version of a text to better align with another. By 397, there were no autographs. Even autograph versions of the gospels were likely written compilations of accounts circulating via hearsay. Even if the original versions of the gospels and other texts were inspired or God-directed, when the church fathers voted in 397, there were no pure, literally perfect original versions, only error-ridden copies that contained more differences among themselves than there are words in the New Testament, as biblical scholar Bart Ehrman puts it. Furthermore, the Hebrew and Arabic Old Testament texts were written in consonants only, so each word had to be interpreted in context and vowels inserted during transcription. For instance, to make a comparison in English, b_t might be interpreted as bat, bet, bit, but, beet, beat, bate, abate, abut, and so on. Michelangelo’s Moses has horns protruding from his head because the Hebrew words that could have been translated horns or rays of light in the Renaissance Bible became horns. The consonants JHVH or JHWH, which stood for God in the Masoretic Hebrew text, were erroneously transliterated Jehovah. The letters of a separate word, Adonai (Lord), were inserted to remind the scribes who read the Hebrew text aloud that the word for God was too sacred for expression, according to their interpretations of texts such as Exodus 20:7 and Leviticus 24:11. Some later translators, however, assumed that this was the actual name of God, not a marking to remind the reader not to speak it. All religious literature, including the Bible texts, were composed by actual persons, each person writing within a specific historical context with its own figures of speech, cultural associations, and pool of knowledge, each person having his or her own discrete attitudes, assumptions, mores, and literary abilities. Vernaculars and figures of speech had to be interpreted. Interpretations could vary. Interpretive mistakes could be made. Jesus once commented that it’s harder for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle, but with God all things are possible. If Jesus was

referring to the eye of a sewing needle, the text means one thing. But a different, even opposite, interpretation becomes possible once we learn that the “eye of the needle” was the name of a passageway in the Jerusalem Wall so narrow that only very small camels could pass through, and only after their cargo had been unloaded and left outside the gate to be schlepped in later by humans. All this is fact that has been known for centuries. Even so, some fundamentalists today insist that discrepancies did not appear in the literally perfect “original Bible.” The truth is that there never was an original Bible. At no time did all the original autograph versions of the books of our Bible exist side-by-side in one volume, or anywhere else. Furthermore, God evidently allowed errors to creep in. One could even argue that God “directed” the creation of a fallible Bible. Perhaps God wanted to prevent the very idolatry—the worship of a graven image (text)—committed by contemporary fundamentalists. Perhaps God was concerned about the likelihood that Bible worship would replace the worship of God. It was centuries after the death of Jesus that believers began to think of the Bible as scripture. Even then, “scripture” simply meant literally “something written.” Only after the church had organized was graphe mystified to mean sacred writings, and only later still were the sacred writings apotheosized as the “God-breathed,” literally perfect Word of God. Fundamentalists argue that because the Bible says that certain behaviors or beliefs are wrong, God says they’re wrong. This argument falls apart if the Bible is not God, if the Bible was not directly inspired, or if the Bible is not literally word-for-word perfect. If the Bible is not God’s infallible Word, it is not God’s infallible Word. Biblical arguments then cease to be valid as anything more than opinion. Fundamentalists can’t help but find themselves in a morally precarious predicament when they must lie to uphold the “truth” of the infallible Bible. Sometimes they don’t lie but rather readjust, or purposely maintain their own ignorance as an excuse for inconsistency. For instance, most fundamentalists accept the Old Testament as infallible because it’s part of the infallible Bible. But

most fundamentalists who accuse others of this or that “abomination” don’t know that practically every day they themselves commit abominations that require the death penalty. Among the abominations most often committed are eating shellfish (Lev. 11:10); eating unclean or unsanitary food, even if you were a Katrina victim (Lev. 5:2-3; 7:19-21; Lev. 11); eating meat with blood in it, even if it’s served medium rare at Sizzler (Gen. 9:4); eating pork, even bacon on Atkins (Lev. 11:7); children who are drunks or gluttons, even if it’s McDonalds or Thanksgiving (Deut. 21:18-23); children, including terrible-twos and teenagers, disrespecting, cursing, or striking a parent (Lev. 20:9; Exod. 21:17; 21:15); piercings and tattoos (Lev. 19:28) (with no loophole to wipe away mutilation sins with reconstructive surgery); women wearing men’s clothing, such as pants (Deut. 22:5); having contact with a woman for seven full days while she’s “in her period of menstrual uncleanliness” (Lev. 15:19-24); adultery, which includes sex before marriage (Exod. 20:14; Lev. 20:10); a woman who marries when she’s not a virgin (Deut. 22:13); coitus interruptus or masturbation (Gen. 38:7-10) (had the death penalty prescribed for this abomination been in any generation actually rendered, the population of the planet would have been decimated centuries ago; perhaps it’s best to continue the tradition of exemption); defiling a neighbor’s wife (Ezek. 18:11), which probably includes window peeping and Playboy perusal, according to Jesus (Matt. 5:30); doing yard work or taking the kids to the movies or even just gathering sticks or firewood on the Sabbath (Exod. 31:15 and 35:2; Num. 15:32-36); approaching the altar of God if you have an astigmatism or any other defect or don’t have 20/20 vision (Lev. 21:20 ); males trimming the hair around their temples (Lev. 19:27); touching the skin of a dead pig, like, say, a football (Lev. 11:6-8); planting two different crops in the same field, or wearing garments made of two different kinds of threads, like a cotton/polyester blend (Lev. 19:19); cursing (Lev. 24:10-16); sleeping with in-laws (Lev. 20:14) (which contradicts Deut. 25:6, which stipulates that if a man dies, his brother must marry his sister-in-law); a violent son, a shedder of blood, one who eats upon the mountains (Ezek. 18:10-11) (which includes soldiers and picnickers); a raped girl who did not, or could not, cry for help

(Deut. 22:23-27); incense, like that burned during Catholic High Mass (Isa. 1:13); loaning money for profit and accruing interest, like banks do (Ezek. 18:13); pride, including, say, school pride, or pride in America (Prov. 16:18); kidnapping (Exod. 21:16; Deut. 24:7); lying, even white lying (Prov. 11:22; 12:22; Lev. 19:11) (Never mind that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and David all told lies: Gen. 12:12, 13; 20:2; Gen. 26:7; Gen. 27:24; 1 Sam. 20:6); obstinately disobeying a relative, even your drug-dealing uncle (Deut. 18:21); sowing discord in your family (Prov. 6:19); preventing foreign worshippers from entering your church (Ezek. 44:7); marriage of a believer and a nonbeliever (Gen. 24:3); race-mixing (Deut. 7:3); cursing or insulting royalty, even the English or Saudis (2 Sam. 16:9 and 2 Kings 6:3132); touching Mount Sinai, even if while on a Smithsonian tour (Exod. 19:12-13); oppressing/exploiting the poor and needy, even if indirectly (Ezek. 18:12); idolatry and idol worship, even Hollywood idols (Lev. 20:1-5; Deut. 13:2-18; 17:2-7); whoever would not seek the God of Israel (as opposed to the Christian God) (2 Chron. 15:13); and so on and so on. Even a glance at a list like this one (and it barely scratches the surface of the thou shalts, thou shalt nots) demonstrates that the moral injunctions of the Bible are relative at best. Even biblical literalists can’t help being selective in picking and choosing what they want to believe is really God’s Word, and what is really an abomination. Many biblical scholars, who simply cannot let go of their belief in a God-breathed Bible, insist that the Bible doesn’t really condemn this or that behavior; the Bible’s idioms, metaphors, and contexts simply need to be reinterpreted, the seemingly damning texts need to be retranslated. Many “literalists” treat the biblical text as a kind of Divine code still in need of cracking. Deconstructionists argue that Christianity is fraudulent because it is authorized by a text that is not literally perfect and therefore not a legitimate source of truth or religion. In response, fundamentalists have been forced to maintain that the Bible must be word-for-word perfect to be true at all. Yet I have never met a fundamentalist yet who lived what he said he believed; yet most fundamentalists are quick to judge others, especially those who don’t ascribe to their particular version of their particular religion.

If believers could acknowledge fallibility, if people could set aside religious elitism, superstition, egotism, and petty differences, our spiritual focus would shift away from the dictatorial constriction of organized religion and toward loving, living communion with the one God and with each other. In my view, the world could effect no greater good.



 

Chapter 8 The Fallible Bible I wasn’t raised fundamentalist and only in college started thinking in Christian terms. Interestingly, at the same time I was accepting the Bible as God’s Word, my religion classes were challenging the privileged Christian perspective, especially biblical infallibility. I studied the Bible on my own, Genesis through Revelations, closely underlining and writing marginal notes in several translations. I got books, concordances, commentaries, and tapes at Christian bookstores, joined Campus Crusaders and other campus Christian groups, attended a missions conference, read Christian magazines, went to churches (plural), engaged in lots of conversation and asked lots of questions. Although I accepted Biblical infallibility for a time, it was inevitable that I would have to let go of that belief for one fundamental reason: The Bible wasn’t infallible. One thing I know from experience is that if your mind is bent toward believing the Bible, it’s going to take a little effort on your part to allow reality to seep in. Even though my belief in the Bible was relatively new, I still felt considerable anxiety and depression when I went through the process of relinquishment. Of course that’s a natural response to any major life transition, especially one involving a critical paradigm shift. But the negative feeling didn’t last long. In time I felt a tremendous sense of relief. One thing I’ve learned is that in the end, truth always feels better than blind faith in myths, regardless of how many perks come with blind faith. In a few short years I’d made a major shift into Christian faith and another back out of that faith. Although in both cases there was a definite threshold that marked the start of the shift, the total volteface in each case took many years. Not until my forties was I able to consider myself entirely a Deist. But at the same time, the truth is

that deep down I’ve always been a Deist. Spiritually, God has always been Number One, and truth has always been the fundamental ground of what I believe and what I am. The question, of course, is: What is truth? Certainly there is truth that transcends mundane fact. But that truth never contradicts mundane fact. Higher truth and “lower” truth are always part of Truth. One never excludes the other. Ironically, I first saw the Bible’s fallacies in a religion class I was taking just before my initial born again experience. The emotion of the born again process and the influence of my many Christian friends and professors turned my head away from criticism and toward exploration and acceptance. But because I studied the Bible so closely for myself, it was inevitable that I would right away start seeing incongruities. Then I started looking for them, seeking them out, checking for outside resources. I found an immensity of proof that the Bible was not infallible, not by any stretch of the imagination. Not only that, scholars and lay people alike had been noting biblical incongruities for centuries. It would be impossible to cite them all. I think it important to provide ample examples, if only to help the reader, especially a fundamentalist reader, experience to some extend the process of relinquishment. To keep it simple, in addition to recent scholarly works and popular books and websites, for my primary sources I rely heavily on works that for me were most influential: The Christ: A Critical Review and Analysis of the Evidence of His Existence by John E. Remsberg; The Life of Jesus Critically Examined by David Friedrich Strauss (1892 edition translated by George Eliot); the writings of Thomas Paine (esp. The Age of Reason); and Understanding the New Testament, a college textbook by Howard Clark Kee, Franklin W. Young, and Karlfried Froehlich. Scholars have detailed numerous contradictions between biblical accounts and other, more reliable historical records. I avoid comparisons to outside sources, because the Bible’s own histories contain ample incongruities; I’m relying on the reader’s innate reason rather than on outside knowledge. I will concentrate on inter-text inconsistencies, which occur when two different text accounts of the exact same event contain contradictory elements, or when specific facts given in one text are

different from those facts given in another text. Some textbooks comparing the New and/or Old Testament lay out the texts in columns, which is especially useful when showing inconsistencies in chronology or detail. Apologists sometimes offer absurd explanations in order to force-fit the discrepancies into a distorted version of “truth.” My task here isn’t to critique the apologists but rather to present a case via examples appealing to any reader’s common sense. Consider first these inconsistencies: The sons of Eliphaz were Teman, Omar, Zepho, Gatam, and Kenaz (Gen. 36:11) v. The sons of Eliphaz were Teman, Omar, Zepho, Kenaz (Gen. 36:15-16) v. The sons of Eliphaz are Teman, Omar, Zephi, Gatam, Kenaz, Timna, and Amalek (1 Chron. 1:35-36). And: The fathers of the twelve tribes of Israel were Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Zebulun, Issachar, Dan, Gad, Asher, Naphtali, Joseph, and Benjamin (Gen. 49:2-28) v. The fathers of the twelve tribes of Israel were Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Zebulun, Issachar, Manasseh, Gad, Asher, Naphtali, Joseph, and Benjamin (Rev. 7:4-8). And: Jethro was the father-in-law of Moses (Ex. 3:1) v. Hobab was the father-in-law of Moses (Num. 10:29; Judg. 4:11). Maybe most Christians don’t really care about the genealogy of Eliphaz, don’t know why the fathers of the twelve tribes might be significant, and don’t have much interest in the wife of Moses, much less her father. But what about the bloodline of Jesus’s father, Joseph? Surely that’s important. But accounts differ. Joseph’s father was Jacob (Matt. 1:16) v. Joseph’s father was Heli (Luke 3:23). One might ask a literalist to explain why Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus is so different from Luke’s. Matthew 1:17 says, “So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David to the deportation to Babylon, fourteen generations; and from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah, fourteen generations.” That’s a total of forty-two generations. Luke’s list goes all the way back to Adam, the son of God, but from Abraham forward, Luke lists fifty-seven generations, not forty-two. Matthew and Luke are close in their list, starting with Abraham and ending with David, but Luke lists fifteen generations, not fourteen. The first

fourteen for each are the same except that from Hezron to Boaz, Matthew lists Aram, Aminadab, Nahshon, and Salmon, but Luke lists Arni, Admin, Amminadab, Nahshon, and Sala. From that point on, the genealogies are completely different. These discrepancies cast immense doubt not only on the ancestry of Jesus, but also on the accuracy of Old and New Testament genealogies in general and on the literal perfection of the Bible as a whole. Some “small” discrepancies make a big difference theologically. For instance, “No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man” (John 3:13) v. “Elijah ascended in a whirlwind into heaven” (2 Kings 2:11) and “Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him” (Gen. 5:24), and “By faith Enoch was taken so that he did not experience death; and ‘he was not found, because God had taken him’” (Heb. 11:5). Besides the fact that by being born, Jesus “descended” just like everyone else, accepting the assumption of John while ignoring the other texts casts doubt on the special Assumption of Christ, which casts doubt on his special ability to resurrect from the dead and to resurrect others from death, which casts doubt on his special saving grace. John’s assumption could justify an otherwise invalid conclusion that Jesus was the special Son of Man, the Son of God, or God. (And making Jesus one Person of the Triune God introduces polytheism into previously monotheistic Judaism; one might even assert that Christianity is the polytheizing of Judaism.) Sometimes seemingly small discrepancies have more complicated implications. For instance, Jacob was buried in a cave at Machpelah bought from Ephron the Hittite (Gen. 50:13) v. Jacob was buried in the sepulchre at Shechem, bought from the sons of Hamor (Acts 7:15-16). This discrepancy is important. For one thing, the writer of Acts is quoting Stephen, who was filled with the Holy Spirit and who saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God (v 54-55). Could someone so inspired incorrectly quote the scriptures? It’s just plain common sense that God didn’t inspire at least one of these key players: the writer (or re-writer) of Genesis, the writer of Acts, or Stephen. (It should be noted with irony that

Saul, aka Paul, that quintessential misquoter, witnessed and approved the stoning of Stephen, according to Acts 7:58-8:1). Can a true believer, speaking in the Spirit, get the facts wrong? Is the Bible simply recording human fallibility infallibly, or is the Bible itself fallible? We might accept that Stephen was a mere mortal with imperfect recall, but what about Jesus? Shouldn’t we be able to trust the Son of God’s words as literal truth? According to Matthew 13:31-32, Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree.” The problems here are that the mustard seed is not the smallest of all seeds (seeds of orchid, poppy, petunia, begonia, millet, amaranth, and tobacco, to name just a few examples, are smaller); the mustard seed does not produce the greatest of shrubs; and shrubs do not grow into trees. What do these inaccuracies prove? That God is ignorant about his own Creation? Then God is not omnipotent. That God doesn’t care about accuracy? Then there could be no claim that any of the Bible is word-for-word perfect. That the text is “accurate” within the context of that biblical time and place? Then that and any other given text need not literally apply to us here and now. That the text is merely symbolic? But symbols only work if they accurately represent something that exists, and besides, the entire content of the Bible, including the resurrection, the histories, and the existence of God, could then be considered merely symbolic. Do these inaccuracies prove that Jesus was ignorant of the facts? Then Jesus is not God or even privy to all that God knows. Or do they prove that the Bible was not written by God but by human beings? In Luke 4:17-21, Jesus misquotes Isaiah 61:1-2. If Jesus is not infallible, the Bible is not infallible. Who killed Saul? It matters. Saul killed himself (1 Sam. 31:4) v. A Philistine killed Saul (2 Sam. 21:12) v. An Amalekite killed Saul (2 Sam. 1:9-10) v. God put Saul to death (1 Chron. 10:14). Theologically, there is a huge difference between being killed by an enemy (and which enemy has its own implications), committing suicide, and blaming God.

Those in the “end of the world” camp cite Matthew 24:35, Mark 13:31, Luke 21:33, Psalms 102:25-26, 2 Peter 3:10, and Hebrews 1:10-11 to prove that heaven and earth will pass away. But other passages claim that the earth remains forever—Ecclesiastes 1:4 and Psalms 78:69, for instance. Sometimes the truth about God would be nice to know because it would give us a sense of security. For instance, God tempts no man (James 1:13); God tempted Abraham (Gen. 22:1); “Lead us not into temptation” (Matt. 6:13). 2 Samuel 24:1 says, “Again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, ‘Go, count the people of Israel and Judah.’” But in a different version of this same story, recounted in 1 Chronicles 21:1, “Satan stood up against Israel, and incited David to count the people of Israel.” Most of us would say that being incited by God is the opposite of being incited by the devil. Although the census must have been important, given that David had to be incited either by God or Satan, does anyone in this century really care about the census count results, which differ in each account (2 Sam. 24:9 v. 1 Chron. 21:5)? Does God change his mind? No: (Num. 23:19; Mal. 3:6; James 1:17) v. Yes: (Exod. 32:14; Num. 14:12, 20; 2 Sam. 24:16) v. God changes his mind, then changes his mind again (Amos 7:1-6), in which case, God relents on one curse only to create another. One of the biggest theological discrepancies in the Bible as a whole is whether or not one reaps what one sows in this life, and whether or not one is justified by works or by faith. Some sow wheat but reap thorns (Jer. 12:13). Some sow but will reap nothing (Mic. 6:15). Some reap without sowing (Matt. 25:26; Luke 19:22). A man reaps what he sows (2 Col. 9:6; Gal. 6:7). We are justified by works, not by faith (Matt. 7:21; Luke 10:36-37; Rom. 2:6; James 2:24). We are justified by faith, not by works (John 3:16; Rom. 3:20-26; Eph. 2:8-9; Gal. 2:16). Many Christians worry that they might have committed blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, the one unforgivable sin (Matt. 12:31-32; Mark 3:29; Luke 12:10). But how can there be an unforgivable sin if all sins are forgivable (Acts 13:39; Rom. 3:21-26; Col. 2:13; Heb.

10:12; 1 John 1:9)? If blasphemy is truly unforgivable, wouldn’t that mean that forgiveness is weaker than sin? Wouldn’t that imply that evil is greater than good, that the power of Satan is greater than the power of God? In Mark 2:26, Abiathar was said to be the high priest when David ate the bread. But Mark has misquoted 1 Samuel 21:1-6, which says that Ahimelech was high priest when David ate the bread. Since Abiathar was the son of Ahimelech, and both son and father were priests, this error in detail might seem inconsequential. But each man’s role in David’s life has a radically different significance. Ahimalech was the priest of Nob to whom David fled from the wrath of Saul (1 Sam. 21:1-15). It was he that gave David and his men the holy bread. He also gave David the sword of Goliath. Saul had Ahimelech and most of his family killed for helping David. Abiathar, on the other hand, escaped the murder of the priests of Nob and joined David’s outlaw band, serving as David’s personal priest (1 Sam. 23:6). Although Abiathar became chief priest as a reward for his loyalty to David, he was later banished by King Solomon because he had supported Adonijah, Solomon’s rival to the throne (1 Kings 2:26-27). Was Lot Abraham’s nephew (Gen. 14:12) or brother (Gen. 14:14,16)? Was Joseph sold into captivity by the Midianites (Gen. 37:36) or by the Ishmaelites (Gen. 39:1)? Did Aaron die on Mt. Hor (Num. 33:38) or in Mosera (Deut. 10:6)? After Aaron’s death, did the Israelites journey from Mt. Hor, to Zalmonah, to Punon, etc. (Num. 33:41-42) or from Mosera, to Gudgodah, to Jotbath (Deut. 10:6-7)? Did Joshua himself capture Debir (Josh. 10:38-40), or was Debir captured by Othniel, who thereby obtained the hand of Caleb’s daughter, Achsah (Judg. 1:11-15)? And just for the record, the total of all three tribes is 22,300, not 22,000 (Num. 3:17). The number of cities listed is thirty-six, not twenty-nine, as is summarized in the last verse (Josh. 15:21-32). The cities listed are fifteen, not fourteen (Josh. 15:33-36). The cities listed number fourteen, not thirteen (Josh. 19:2-6). More inconsistencies: Sisera was sleeping when Jael killed him (Judg. 4:21) v. Sisera was standing when Jael killed him (Judg. 5:25-

27). Jesse had seven sons plus David, or eight total (1 Sam. 16:1011, 17:12) v. Jesse had seven sons total (1 Chron. 2:13-15). Saul knew David well before his encounter with Goliath (1 Sam. 16:19-23) v. Saul did not know David at the time of his encounter with Goliath and had to ask Abner and then David himself who David was (1 Sam. 17:55-58). David killed Goliath with a slingshot (1 Sam. 17:50) v. David killed Goliath (again?) with a sword (1 Sam. 17:51). Saul inquired of the Lord but received no answer (1 Sam. 28:6) v. Saul died for not inquiring of the Lord (1 Chron. 10:13-14). Michal had no sons and would have no sons (2 Sam. 6:23) v. Michal had five sons with David (2 Sam. 21:8). David took 700 horsemen (cavalry) from King Hadadezer (2 Sam. 8:4) v. 7,000 cavalry (horsemen) (1 Chron. 18:4). David killed 700 Aramean chariot teams and 40,000 horsemen (2 Sam. 10:18) v. 7,000 Aramean charioteers and 40,000 foot soldiers (1 Chron. 19:18). 800,000 men in Israel and 500,000 men of Judah were able to draw the sword (2 Sam. 24:9) v. 1,100,000 men in Israel and 470,000 men of Judah drew the sword (1 Chron. 21:5). David paid 50 shekels of silver for the purchase of a property (2 Sam. 24:24) v. 600 shekels of gold for the same spread (1 Chron. 21:22-25). Solomon had forty thousand stalls for his horses (1 Kings 4:26) v. four thousand stalls (2 Chron. 9:25). Solomon had 3,300 supervisors in charge of the stonecutters and laborers (1 Kings 5:16) v. 3,600 overseers in charge (2 Chron. 2:18). Solomon had two thousand baths (1 Kings 7:26) v. three thousand baths (2 Chron. 4:5). Ahaziah began to rule at age twenty-two (2 Kings 8:26) v. age forty-two (2 Chron. 22:2). Solomon had 550 chief officers (1 Kings 9:23) v. 250 chief officers (2 Chron. 8:10). Jehoiachin was eighteen years old when he began to reign in Jerusalem, and he reigned three months (2 Kings 24:8) v. Jehoiachin was eight years old he reigned three months and ten days (2 Chron. 36:9). Nebuzaradan came to rule Jerusalem on the seventh day of the fifth month (2 Kings 25:8) v. the tenth day of the fifth month (Jer. 52:12). Seven males and one female do not total five (1 Chron. 3:19-20). But the names of five sons of Shecaniah are listed, not six. (1 Chron. 3:22). But the names of five sons of Jeduthun are listed, not six. (1 Chron. 25:3). The total of the gold and silver vessels is 2,499,

not 5,400 (Ezra 1:9-11). The whole assembly together is 29,818, not 42,360 (Ezra 2:64). The whole assembly together is 31,089, not 42,360 (Neh. 7:66). Ezra 2 and Nehemiah 7 list the subclans that returned from the Captivity and the number in each. Out of approx thirty-five subclans listed, over half of the numbers disagree. Jehoram was thirty-two when he began to reign and he reigned eight years, until his death at age forty (2 Chron. 21:20). His youngest son, Ahaziah, immediately took over the reign at age fortytwo (2 Chron. 22:1-2). How could a son, much less the youngest son, be two years older than his father? The devil took Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple, then to the mountaintop (Matt. 4:5-8) v. The devil took Jesus first to the mountaintop, then to the pinnacle of the temple (Luke 4:5-9). “Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor” (Matt. 4:8). Even from the tallest mountain, even with 20/20 vision, no one could see our entire spherical world at a glance. “Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. He left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali” (Matt. 4:12-13). Nazareth and Capernaum are both in Galilee. He didn’t withdraw to Galilee if he was already there. This is like saying he withdrew to California, leaving San Francisco to make his home in L.A. “Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis” (Mark 7:31). Sidon is to the north of Tyre on the Mediterranean Sea, and the Decapolis is south of the Sea of Galilee, both of which are south of Sidon and Tyre. It’s like saying he returned from Tulsa, and went by way of Chicago towards Atlanta in the region of Florida. Jesus gave the Sermon of [on] the Mount and later healed Peter’s mother-in-law (Matt. 5:3-12; 8:14-15) v. Jesus healed Peter’s mother-in-law and later gave the Sermon of [below] the Mount (Luke 4:38-39; 6:20-26). Jesus heals the leper before entering Peter’s house (Matt. 8:1-2; 8:14) v. Jesus heals the leper after leaving Peter’s house (Mark 1:29; 1:40). Jesus calms the storm and later calls Matthew (Matt. 8:23-27; 9:9) v. Jesus calls Matthew and then

calms the storm (Luke 5:27-28; 8:22-25). The cleansing of the temple occurs at the end of Jesus’s career (Matt. 21:12-13) v. The temple cleansing occurs near the beginning of Jesus’s career (John 2:13-16). The fig tree withers immediately after being cursed by Jesus; the disciples see it and are amazed (Matt. 21:19-20) v. The disciples first see the withered fig tree the following day (Mark 11:13-14; 2021). Jesus curses the fig tree and then cleanses the temple (Mark 11:13-15) v. Jesus cleanses the temple and then curses the fig tree (Luke 4:5-9). Jesus was crucified at nine o’clock in the morning (Mark 15:25) v. Jesus was brought to Pilate at about noon (John 19:14-15). Satan enters Judas before the supper (Luke 22:3-23) v. Satan enters Judas during the supper (John 13:27). Not everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved (Matt. 7:21) v. Whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved (Acts 2:21; Rom. 10:13) v. Those God calls to himself will be saved (Acts 2:39). The Transfiguration occurs six days after Jesus foretells his suffering (Matt. 17:1-2; Mark 9:2) v. The Transfiguration takes place about eight days after Jesus foretells his suffering (Luke 9:28-29). The presence of Jesus’s betrayer is revealed during the Last Supper (Matt. 26:21; Mark 14:18) v. The presence of Jesus’s betrayer is revealed after the Last Supper (Luke 22:14-21). Jesus is tempted in the wilderness and later John is arrested (Mark 1:12-13; 6:17-18) v. John is arrested and later Jesus is tempted in the wilderness (Luke 3:19-20; 4:1-13). Jesus begins his ministry after the arrest of John the Baptist (Mark 1:14) v. Jesus begins his ministry before the arrest of John the Baptist (John 3:22-24). After the feeding of the 5000, Jesus and the disciples go to Gennesaret (Mark 6:53) v. they go to Capernaum (John 6:17-25). Regarding the crucifixion: Was Jesus’s robe scarlet (Matt. 27:28) or purple (Mark 15:17; John 19:2)? Was the robe put on Jesus during his trial (John 19:1-5) or after Pilate delivered him to be crucified (Matt. 27:26-28; Mark 15:15-17)? Mark 15:25 says that Jesus was crucified at the third hour, Luke 23:43-44 says it was before the sixth hour, and John 19:14-16 says it was after the sixth hour.

Who first arrived at the empty tomb after the resurrection? Mary Magdalene and the other Mary arrived first (Matthew) v. Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome (Mark) v. “The women” (Luke) v. Mary Magdalene (John). When did she/they first arrive at the tomb? When it was still dark (John) v. As day was dawning (Matthew) v. Early dawn (Luke) v. When the sun had already risen (Mark). Who first sees Jesus? Mary Magdalene and the other Mary (Matthew) v. Mary Magdalene (Mark and John) v. Cleopas and another follower of Jesus; possibly Peter at the same time (Luke). Given what a pivotal character Judas was in the story of Jesus’s betrayal and crucifixion, one would think that Christians would have etched in stone the story of his life’s end. But notice how the accounts given in Matthew and Acts differ. In Matthew, Judas returned to the priests the thirty pieces of silver he got for turning Jesus over to the authorities, then hanged himself; the priests used the silver to buy the potter’s field as a place to bury foreigners, hence its name Field of Blood (Matt. 27:3-10). According to the Acts account, Judas bought the field with the silver; and falling headlong on the field, he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out, hence the name Field of Blood (Acts 1:16-20). Contrary to what it claims, the passage quoted in Matthew 27:510 is not in Jeremiah. Some argue that it refers to Zechariah 11:1213. But this passage refers not to Judas, but to the prophet Zechariah, who, “on behalf of the sheep merchants…became the shepherd of the flock doomed to slaughter.” The thirty shekels of silver were Jeremiah’s wages for the good work of a shepherd, money that God instructed him to throw into the treasury. Judas’s work was betrayal of a person for blood money, which by God’s law could not be given to the treasury. In Zechariah there is no mention of a potter or a field. Compare the stories of the Capernaum centurion, Matthew 8:513, and Luke 7:1-10. The centurion comes to Jesus in person (Matt.) v. The centurion sends Jewish elders to Jesus (Luke). The centurion says, “I am not worthy to have you come under my roof…” (Matt.) v. The centurion’s friends say, “I am not worthy to have you come under my roof…” (Luke). The exact quotes differ in each account.

The gist of the two passages is the same, but one is a direct quote of the centurion, the other an indirect quote from the centurion via friends. One claims that the servant will be healed, the other humbly asks that the servant be healed. Contrary to the claims of Creationists, there are many problems with the Creation story found in the first few chapters of Genesis. What was the source of light on the first day if there was no sun, moon, or stars until the fourth day? How could there be Day and Night on the first day if there was no sun? How could a vegetable kingdom in a stage highly organized and advanced enough to be reproducing fruit bearing trees exist on the third day without photosynthesis from the sun? Planet earth was derived from and could not have existed before the sun and stars that make up our galaxy. It has taken millions of years for the light of many of the stars in our galaxy to reach earth. Yom in Hebrew and hemera in Greek both mean a twenty-four-hour period from sunset to sunset, not an era or period of millions of years as claimed by some “literalist” fundamentalists. If a day equals an era, Adam, Eve, Cain, Noah, and the other characters of that period would have lived millions of years and the daily events of their lives would have taken vast amounts of time. How could plants and animals survive a million year night with no sunlight? “And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” Carnivores are not vegetarians. “So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field.” It would be impossible for a representative of every single of the tens of millions of species of living creatures to be delivered alive at Adam’s feet for naming. Many creatures, such as penguins, polar bears, whales, or salmon, could not survive in Adam’s Middle East environment. How would Adam even see microorganisms?

Which is correct? Trees were created before man was created (Gen. 1:11-12, 26-27) v. Man was created before trees were created (Gen. 2:4-9). Birds were created before man was created (Gen. 1:20-21, 26-27) v. Man was created before birds were created (Gen. 2:7, 19). Animals were created before man was created (Gen. 1:2427) v. Man was created before animals were created (Gen. 2:7, 19). Man and woman were created at the same time (Gen. 1:26-27) v. Man was created first, woman sometime later (Gen. 2:7, 21-22). God warned Adam that he could eat freely of every tree of the garden of Eden except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, “for in the day that you eat of it you shall die,” yet Adam did not die that day; he lived to be 930 years old (Gen. 5:5). The Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this [tempted Eve], cursed are you among all animals and among all wild creatures; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.” How would a serpent “go” in the first place if not on its belly? Do serpents eat dust? “Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord, and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch; and he built a city, and named it Enoch after his son Enoch. To Enoch was born Irad.” Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel, and Cain killed Abel. Where did Cain’s wife come from? Where did Enoch’s wife come from? Here are some of the problems with the story of Noah’s Ark. First, the ark measures 450 feet by 75 feet by 45 feet, which could not hold two of every animal representing tens of millions of species, not to mention their food. “I am going to bring a flood of waters on the earth, to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is the breath of life; everything that is on the earth shall die.” How were sea creatures killed, if they thrived in the waters? Noah was to take seven pairs of all clean animals and birds (Gen. 7:2-3) v. Noah took two of each animal, including clean animals (Gen. 7:8-9). Did all those animals just voluntarily show up right on schedule from all over the world? How did animals from other continents cross the oceans? How did polar bears withstand Middle East climate? How did tiny critters and microorganisms and

creatures with very short lifespans travel thousands of miles to reach the ark? What did animals with specialized diets, like pandas and koalas, eat during their trek to the ark and during the flood? How were animals kept from killing their natural prey? How did water creatures like whales and lobsters survive on board? Noah and his family enter the Ark (Gen. 7:7). Then, a little while later, Noah and his family enter the Ark (Gen. 7:13). According to Genesis 8:10-11, “He waited another seven days, and again he sent out the dove from the ark; and the dove came back to him in the evening, and there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf; so Noah knew that the waters had subsided from the earth.” Couldn’t he have just glanced overboard? If all life, including vegetation, had been destroyed after a year underwater, where did the freshly plucked olive leaf come from? If all life had been destroyed, how was the vegetation revived, and what would the herbivores eat in the meantime? What would the carnivores eat if not each other; and given that there were only two of each animal remaining, that would mean instant extinction for many species. Where did all that subsiding water go? According to Genesis 6:4, there were Nephilim (giants) before the flood. If all creatures were annihilated by the flood, including all humans except for Noah and his clan, how could there still have been Nephilim after the flood (Num. 13:33)? After the planet had dried out, people started repopulating. Eventually it became necessary to record genealogies to keep the nations of families straight. Genesis 10:5 begins the lists of Noah’s descendants: “These are the descendants of Japheth in their lands, with their own language, by their families, in their nations.” But one chapter later, Genesis 11:1-6 says: “Now the whole earth had one language and the same words…And the Lord said, ‘Look, they are one people, and they have all one language.’” Did these nations of families have one language or many? Terah was 70 years old when his son Abram was born (Gen. 11:26) v. Terah was 205 years old when he died, which makes Abram 135 at the time (Gen. 11:32). Abram was 75 when he left Haran; this was after Terah died; thus, Terah could have been no

more than 145 when he died; or Abram was only 75 years old after he had lived 135 years (Gen. 12:4; Acts 7:4). The accounts of Hezekiah recorded in Isaiah 38:1-8 vary considerably from the same accounts in 2 Kings 20. In addition, the Isaiah account says, “This is the sign to you from the Lord, that the Lord will do this thing that he has promised: See, I will make the shadow cast by the declining sun on the dial of Ahaz turn back ten steps.” If the earth stopped rotating at its normal speed or moved backward, the impact would be so catastrophic that the world as we know it would cease to exist. Joshua 10:12-14 records a similar event: The sun and moon stopped “for about a whole day. There has been no day like it before or since, when the Lord heeded a human voice; for the Lord fought for Israel.” No day before or since when the Lord heeded a human voice? Wrong. The Old and New Testaments are full of instances of the Lord heeding human voices, including Hezekiah’s. The sun did not stand still as it did for Joshua; it moved backwards. Habakkuk 3:11 also makes note of the moon standing still in its place. Such an image, even if only meant metaphorically, betrays the OT writer’s ignorance about physics. Such ignorance might be forgivable in a work of literature, given the era in which it was written, but when that literature is taken as absolute word-for-word Godbreathed perfection in an age that should know better, the consequences can be as catastrophic as our planet standing still. Matthew 26:47-56 ends, “But all this has taken place, so that the scriptures of the prophets may be fulfilled.” The details of “all this” are: The large crowd with weapons; Judas betraying Jesus with a kiss; the arrest of Jesus; one of the disciples cutting off the ear of the high priest’s slave with a sword; Jesus telling them that “all who take the sword will perish by the sword”; Jesus not calling legions of angels to save him. But not a single detail of “all this” fulfills any scripture or prophecy. 1 Peter 3:18-22 misinterprets the story of Noah’s ark: For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in

former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water. And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you—not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers made subject to him. Noah was not saved “through”/ by/ because of the waters, he was saved from the waters. Peter is saying that when Christ died, he “went” in spirit to make a proclamation to all those bad people that God had destroyed with the flood. He doesn’t mention whether or not Christ saved those people. How does the flood prefigure baptism, when Noah and his family were the only ones to not get wet? Peter implies that the flood was meant to remove dirt from the body, which makes no sense. The analogy between the flood and baptism is not only confused, it means the opposite of what Peter intends. The flood waters destroyed; baptismal waters save. Similarly, Matthew 12:17-21 misquotes Isaiah 42:1-4. Matthew 13:35 misquotes Psalms 78:2-3. John 13:18-19 misinterprets Psalms 41:4-9. In Acts 1:15-20, Peter misquotes Psalms 109:8 and Psalms 69:25. In Acts 2:16-17, Peter misquotes Joel 2:28. It probably doesn’t matter whether the old men dreamed dreams or saw visions, or if the young men saw visions or dreamed dreams. What matters is that Peter assumed that the Spirit had been poured out because it was the last days, which, 2000 years later, we know was not the case. What is Peter quoting in Acts 4:26-27? He is probably misquoting Psalms 2:1-2. Romans 9:33 and 1 Peter 2:6-8 both misquote and misinterpret Isaiah 8:14-15 and Isaiah 28:16. 1 Peter 2:21-22 misquotes Isaiah 53:9. Besides these textual problems, there are issues of common sense that cast doubt on fundamental Christian assumptions. For example, thinking Christians have realized that if Jesus was born of Mary, then Mary is his mother. If God is One, and if God (the Holy

Spirit) is the father, and if Jesus is God, then Mary is his “wife” (concubine, “handmaid”). If Jesus is God and if God is the Father of all mankind, then Mary is Jesus’s daughter. If Mary is the daughter of God and if Jesus is the son of God, then Mary is Jesus’s sister. If Jesus is God, then the son is the father and the father is the son, which by definition is impossible, since the father is the source of the son and the son the offspring of the father. The son must be younger than the father, in which case they could not be equal, or equally eternal. If God is One, then God cannot be two. If God cannot die, and if Jesus died, then Jesus cannot be God. Trinitarians should look up and read these excerpts from the Gospel of John, all of which are spoken by Jesus. Clearly Jesus and God are not the same being. (3:17; 3:34; 3:35; 5:19-20; 5:24; 6:29; 6:38; 6:57; 7:16-18; 7:28-29; 8:18; 8:28-29; 8:42-43; 8:54-55; 8:58; 10:14; 10:17; 10:18; 10:34-36; 10:38; 13:20; 15:1,5; 16:2628; 17:20-23). If you looked them up, you realize that these few verses from John alone make it obvious that Jesus and God are two separate beings. Yet fundamentalist contortionists torque the most embarrassing intellectual and moral explanations to force-fit God into Jesus. Jesus and God are two “persons” of the same God?—Or according to TV evangelist Benny Hinn, nine persons, three each for God, the Spirit, and Jesus? No. Jesus is clearly not God. Only God is God. If Jesus were a manifestation, aspect, or “person” of God, then God is the supreme egomaniac, giving birth to himself, praying to himself, worshipping himself, glorifying himself, even committing suicide for himself. But as should be obvious to anyone who has actually read the gospels, the Jesus portrayed there is in fact not a psychotic projection or half of a divine split personality; he is a loving child of God, and he is Messiah (whatever that might mean). Of course, in reality he might be a myth or legend deified by the Bible writers. The doctrine of the Trinity, proclaimed absolute and eternal 350 years after the death of Christ (by the Council of Constantinople in 381, when it ratified the Nicene Creed), is a dramatic instance of belief in an anthropomorphic male God giving rise to idolatry.

Some conceive Jesus as half man, half God. But half God is not God. For some, Jesus is all-God by virtue of his being part of a Trinity that is pure, absolute Deity. That perspective waters down God, elevates the human to the status of Divinity, and slices the God pie into three unequal pieces. Any way you slice it, mystifying the human Jesus diminishes the One God. Those who quote “the Father and I are one” (John 10:30) should also quote “I ask…on behalf of those who will believe in me through their [the disciples’] word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us…so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one” (John 17:20-23). If being in communion with God is being God, then Christians are pantheists, not monotheists. The biblical Jesus makes our relationship clear when he says that he is the vine, we are the branches, and God is the gardener. Though branches are dependent upon the vine for survival, branches are part of the vine and of the same vine substance. The gardener is of a completely different substance. The dependence of the vine and its branches upon the gardener is categorically different than the dependence of the branches upon the vine. The Bible writers are branches witnessing to the vine. The gospel writers are branches. Readers of the gospels are branches. We are not God. The gospel writers are not God. Jesus is not God, according to the biblical Jesus himself. Once I’d worked through all this, it was clear to me that the Bible was not God, was not the Word or words of God, was not an aspect or extension of God, was not the exclusive revelation of God. Only God was God. Although I didn’t yet know it, that was a decidedly Deist position, and I was a Deist. But until I realized that, until I understood that a shift in God context was not the Nietzschean death of God, my lost faith anxiety could not be relieved.



 

Chapter 9 Mythic Origins of the Bible Once I recognized the Bible’s fallacies, I couldn’t accept biblical infallibility without being dishonest. And really, neither can you. I would even go so far as to say that in this day and age, being ignorant of the Bible’s contradictions is being dishonest, or at least irresponsible. Once I saw the Bible’s fallibility, of course I wanted to share this new insight. My fundamentalist comrades tended to be indifferent if not hostile. Because they believed that their religious ideology was absolute, not only religious myths, but also self-contradictions and obvious inaccuracies in objective fact were disregarded, “explained” with fallacious arguments or downright lies, or deflected with mantras of memorized Bible verses. Never have I met a fundamentalist who has memorized the entire Bible or even more than a handful of select verses stocked to prove his convictions. Verses that disprove those same convictions are not just ignored; the person pointing them out is usually met with hostility. I myself have several times been called a child of the devil and worse just for showing fundamentalists—nicely, I might add— self-contradictory Bible verses. No doubt most staunch fundamentalists fear every “liberal” challenge to their preordained status quo, even honest soulsearching, because they fear change. Since their assumptions are absolute black-and-white, even a slight shift in perspective could bring their religion crashing down. If their Bible is not literally perfect, then there is no basis for faith, no Christ, no God, no afterlife, no reason to live; life is meaningless if they can’t derive ultimate certainty from their pre-expounded God-breathed Bible. If a new idea or updated fact contradicts their transcending religious ideology,

staunch fundamentalists reject it without even considering it. Alternative interpretations of their version of biblical truth are shunned like Satan himself, because considering any variation would be tantamount to doubting the absolute truth, which is equal to unbelief, a one-way ticket to hell. Pointing out the slippery slope fallacy of their reasoning doesn’t always convince. Thinking outside the narrow box they were born (or born-again) into is too scary for some fundamentalists to consider. Reexamining received doctrine for the sake of elucidative re-vision risks profanation and its retribution. Doubt contradicts faith; therefore, tolerance is a threat, pluralism anathema. Thinking itself becomes spiritual quicksand, soul-searching a descent riskier than Dante’s. The massive scholarship proving the pagan and ancient religious roots of every major aspect of Judaism and Christianity is the manifestation of Satan himself. It’s a jungle out there, and hacking ones way beyond the beaten path is dangerous. It makes sense that fundamentalists prefer to remain cooped up like a potted plant whose roots wrap around and around until the soil is depleted and the stunted plant shrivels up and dies. Stephen Jay Gould warned that when a species ceases to evolve, it becomes extinct. For humans, this principle applies to us not just physically, but intellectually, psychologically, spiritually. We are not meant to be automatons on an assembly line, stamping the same little seal over and over. Evolution, progress, just plain growth requires creative adaptation; each life is created in the image of Creation. Even fundamentalists claim that it was the gutsy, innovative love-perspective of Jesus, not the cautious, stagnant absolutism of the Pharisees that generated the revolution we now call “Christianity.” Fundamentalists must agree that love, not legalism, was Jesus’s fundamental message: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Matt. 22:37-40).

Simple. Who would argue with that? But that overarching, predominating message resulted in Jesus’s persecution and murder with the blessing of his own people: Crucify him! Words that sound frighteningly familiar in this era Pat Robertson, Fred Phelps, Randall Terry, James Dobson, James Kennedy, and Tom DeLay. Even when I gave up my faith in a God-breathed Bible, I still believed in Jesus, though I wasn’t sure who or what he was. The Jesus I believed in had claimed that the very clear directive of love had come directly from God. And yes, the guy was, after all, “different,” as religious trailblazers usually are. By now, I thought, we should have learned the bitter lesson that rejection of difference can be spiritually catastrophic. History, personal experience, even the Bible teaches that. As Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded us, “Salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” Many believers who identify themselves as fundamentalist are retreating because they are uncomfortable with self-righteous, judgmental, fear-fueling fundamentalists, and more importantly, because they have doubts about the literal perfection of the Bible. Many are on a quest for a more enlightened alternative to the fundamentalist versions of their religions. But society’s advance into progressivism is taking centuries, despite the availability of massive biblical scholarship that contradicts the claims of fundamentalism. Looking at Western history of the past two centuries is like watching a paradigm shift in slow motion. I believe that the paradigm can be shifted to warp speed with a good dose of strategic education. Thoughtful Christians, Jews, and Muslims of integrity are already meeting on common ground and adapting to progressive stances toward sacred texts and traditions. Staunch fundamentalists, of course, will refuse to listen, stubbornly marching along to their “special” antiquated tune, the one repeating over and over from the broken record: “If you’re not a bornagain Christian, you’re a failure as a human being,” as Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell put it. Born-again Christian meaning fundamentalist, according to fundamentalists. Deconstructing the Bible’s supposed revelation doesn’t preclude the possibility that some of the texts are true or are based on true events. Biblical fallibility doesn’t prove that Jesus didn’t exist or even

that he didn’t perform miracles or rise from the dead. But though it is possible (though unlikely) that he lived, taught, inspired, and died on a cross, it is highly improbable (though not strictly impossible) that he performed miracles or rose from the dead. Religion has a moral responsibility to sift through the data to glean obvious truth from probable fiction. Faith without skepticism is blind faith, which is not faith at all. Historically, high priests have sometimes manufactured the faithfully blind and stoked their bigotry with fear, especially fear of scapegoats buttressed by fear of a god that enforces his (their) bigotry with retribution. Radical fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson continued that tradition by claiming that their authority to promote bigotry (by whatever whitewashed name) was vested in biblical ideology. Their spiritual preference was clearly the image of the law-God who punishes to the exclusion of the graceGod who blesses. Once the Bible mystique had cleared, I realized that the values decreed by the Bible were nothing extraordinary. It didn’t take a divine conscience to “reveal” its rudimentary morality. The Ten Commandments, neither original nor profound, were obvious moral principles necessary to the order and stability of any society. The primitive Old Testament laws and codes seemed crude beside the ancient and sophisticated ethics of Confucius or philosophy and law of the Greeks. The distilled morality of the more recent Jesus stood on its own, without, or perhaps in spite of, all the miraculous bells and whistles. Paul took a giant step back from the simple maxims of Jesus (which evidently Paul never heard since he never refers to them), tangling himself in moral dilemmas he could never resolve. Many people today have asked what authority has deemed the Bible to be the ultimate authority. We don’t know who wrote any of the Old Testament, we don’t know who wrote any of the gospels, and we don’t know for sure which of the letters were written by Paul. Should we blindly accept as absolute truth an anonymous presentation of God’s words, acts, and character just because it is tradition? Once I knew these facts, for me the answer was No. In the land of the free, blindness isn’t imposed; blindness is the refusal to open one’s eyes. Even among the well-educated, the Bible

is accepted as authentic history without any valid documentation. The Bible’s books written in other genres of testimony are considered to be as objectively accurate as the histories. Clearly, to evaluate the authority of any history or other testimony we first need to know who the writer was and whether that writer was trustworthy. Next we need to consider whether the writer’s history or testimony contradicts other histories or testimonies. Finally we need to judge whether the testimony rubs against the grain of our inherent conscience and common sense. If you heard that a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend had been abducted by aliens twenty years ago and had given birth to an alien’s child, would you believe it? If you heard tenth-hand that in some perfect garden paradise in Tennessee, someone you’ve never met said that a talking snake tempted a woman to eat an apple, and that in doing so, she damned the whole world, would you believe it? Would you believe that God allowed or caused the snake to tempt the woman? If by remote rumor you heard that God raped a woman, who was engaged to another, and impregnated her with a “redeemer” to be “sacrificed,” murdered for the crime the snake woman committed in eating an apple (which wasn’t at all fair, since she was fully innocent and incapable of choosing), wouldn’t that raise an eyebrow? What moral person or court of law would execute an innocent person as a stand-in for a guilty party, even if the innocent person were willing? As Thomas Paine pointed out, surely God is too moral to murder his innocent son, and too smart to be put into a position of needing to. Rather than display the love of God, as claimed, the JudeoChristian myth betrays the amateurish ability of its storytellers. There is no actual accomplished redemption in the Bible, but rather a precedent for collecting sacrifices, tithes, pardons, dispensations, indulgences, and all the other holy-gilded spoils of priests. Demanding blind faith in an obvious fable primes even smart believers to believe foolishly. Who first knew of Mary’s impregnation? In one gospel, it was Joseph, who was informed by an angel. In another, it was Mary herself, who was informed by an angel. Did either or both in turn tell

other people, who actually believed them? Wouldn’t it be more sensible for the hearers of this news to suspect that the couple had committed adultery (which was what sex before marriage was back then, which was an abomination punishable by death), or that Mary had been raped? What kind of people would make up such a tale to cover their sin, we would ask today? If you had lived then, and you heard from a friend of a friend of a friend that someone you had never met supposedly claimed to know that some guy named Jesus was the Son of God (though he never made that claim himself), wouldn’t you be a bit suspicious? Or perhaps you would just shrug, given that back then there were dozens of gods who were said to be sons of some god, even sons of the highest god—like say, Zeus, Vishnu, Odin, or Osiris. It’s not surprising that the genealogies for Jesus presented in the gospels of Matthew and Luke differ radically from each other. Each author had different resources and was trying to force-fit a different meaning. Well, you insist, this is different. We’re talking about the Bible here, the Word of God. We’re talking about the real Son of God. Says who? That who is some unknown writer who told these stories about Jesus long after Jesus was dead and gone. That is the first and final authority of your faith. A nameless storyteller. Many nameless storytellers, and not always very good ones at that by literary standards. Such faith is blind faith, which is anything but authentic faith. To attribute amateurish, childish fables to the Almighty not only insults the Almighty, it does so by rejecting our God-given faculties, including reason, conscience, and experience. Rather than dig for the actual facts regarding Jesus, fundamentalists have settled for contradictory interpretations by anonymous writers who were not even around when Jesus was alive and teaching. Would God make belief in a “Son of God” contingent upon believing the unbelievable—unbelievable in being utterly contrary to God’s Creation? That would be confusing and mean. But God makes himself perfectly clear through the sublime eloquence of reality, an intrinsically reliable reality that can be discovered, understood, and depended upon, thanks to the nature of objective Creation and to the reliability of our God-given faculties. God’s benevolence in providing us with stable existence, consciousness, and conscience inspires in

us benevolent gratitude. Benevolence is natural; faith in unbelievable premises of a manmade religion rooted in barbarism is unnatural and leads to barbarous persecution. If the resurrection is the center of Christian faith, why are Christians asked to believe that it occurred as reported by unknown writers, and why did the big event occur in secret? Jesus supposedly appeared secretly to a few people in hiding; which few people varies from gospel to gospel. Very suspicious, if the point was to prove the real existence of such a monumental sign as resurrection. Why not resurrect publicly, so everyone could see and believe? It’s not like Jesus could be apprehended and killed again. Making belief a condition of faith in fifth-hand reporting is itself suspiciously typical of primitive priest-craft. Why would a good, loving “savior” ask anyone to believe a preposterous story told years after the fact by people who were not even there? Or even by people who supposedly were there? Why should we believe them? Should we believe the claims of miracleworking by contemporary faith healers? No miracle has ever been verified. Should we believe in aliens? Not without proof. The highly verified historian Tacitus tells us about a report that Vespasian cured a lame man and a blind man in the same way that the Bible writers later attributed to Jesus. Should we believe that earlier account? According to Josephus, another highly trustworthy historian, rumors circulated that the sea of Pamphilia opened to let Alexander and his army pass, just like the Red Sea parted in Exodus. Did it happen? Christmas and Easter are themselves each a collage of preexistent mythic material relating to equinox and solstice celebrations of this or that son of a god or goddess, some, such as Attis, Osiris, Dionysus, and Orpheus, born of a virgin and later killed and resurrected. Yet fundamentalists who celebrate these appropriated pagan holidays curse the obviously fictional Harry Potter books as satanic witchcraft. In his book, The Christ: A Critical Review and Analysis of the Evidence of His Existence, John E. Remsberg shows the parallel between Jesus and his contemporary Galilean, the Pythagorean teacher, Appolonius of Tyana. According to his biographers—and they are as worthy of credence as the Evangelists—his career, particularly in the

miraculous events attending it, bore a remarkable resemblance to that of Christ. Like Christ, he was a divine incarnation; like Christ his miraculous conception was announced before his birth; like Christ he possessed in childhood the wisdom of a sage; like Christ he is said to have led a blameless life; like Christ his moral teachings were declared to be the best the world had known; like Christ he remained a celibate; like Christ he was averse to riches; like Christ he purified the religious temples; like Christ he predicted future events; like Christ he performed miracles, cast out devils, healed the sick, and restored the dead to life; like Christ he died, rose from the grave, ascended to heaven, and was worshiped as a god. The Christian rejects the miraculous in Apollonius because it is incredible; the Rationalist rejects the miraculous in Christ for the same reason. Remsberg’s writing, addressing the everyday reader, is clear, straightforward, and well-organized. Like other freethinkers writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Remsberg was not afraid to show the parallels between Jesus and pagan gods, to reveal the mythic sources of Judaism and Christianity, or to explicate contradictions within the Bible and in church history. People responded by understanding. In retaliation, fundamentalism was born. Presenting so many of Remsberg’s examples, as I do below, might seem like overkill, but truly, they only scratch the surface. My summaries paraphrase Remsberg; his examples reference numerous scholars. Mythic Sources, Summarizing Remsberg Krishna, eighth Avatar or incarnation of the god Vishnu, one of the Hindu Trinity, “appeared in all the fullness of his power and glory” 900 to 1,200 years before Christ, at about the time of Homer (950 B.C.). His birth was similar to the birth of Jesus in these details: miraculously conceived; born of a virgin; divine incarnation; of royal descent; angels (devatas) sang songs of praise at his birth; cradled among cowherds; visited by neighboring shepherds; reigning tyrant, fearing he would be supplanted in his kingdom by the divine child,

sought to destroy him; saved by friends who fled with them in the night to distant countries; foiled in his attempt to discover the baby, issued a decree that all infants should be put to death. Interesting intersection: In their flight with the baby Jesus, Mary and Joseph stopped at a place called Maturea. Krishna was born at Mathura. Details of Krishna’s adulthood are also similar: mission salvation of mankind; performed miracles; healed the sick, cleansed the leprous, and raised the dead; died for man by man; washed the feet of his disciples (Brahmins); taught his disciples the possibility of moving a mountain; earliest followers from lower classes; many early followers were women; called “the savior of men.” Buddha, ninth Avatar or incarnation of Vishnu, one of the Hindu Trinity, was (like “Christ”) known by his title, “Buddha,” meaning “the enlightened one.” He lived from about 643 B.C. to 563 B.C. The canon of the Tripitaka, the principle “Bible” of the Buddhists, was determined at the Council of Pataliputra, 244 B.C., more that 600 years before the Christian canon was established. Buddha’s birth paralleled the birth of Jesus in many details: conception announced by a divine messenger; annunciation hymn resembling that of Mary; born of a virgin; genealogy traced descent from ancestral kings; voluntary incarnation; miracles at his birth; nature altered its course to keep a shadow over his cradle; wise men came from afar offering gifts and worshipped him; presented in the temple; “the child waxed and increased in strength”; prophecies of the aged saint Asita (like Simeon in story of Jesus) at his formal presentation to his father; discoursed before teachers; fasted in the wilderness; was tempted; ministered by angels (devatas); bathed in the Narajana (as Christ was baptized in the Jordan); about thirty years old when he began his ministry; fasted seven times seven nights and days; had a band of disciples; traveled from place to place and preached to large multitudes; his first sermon the “Sermon on the Holy Hill”; the phraseology of the sermons in many instances the same as the sermons of Jesus; at his Renunciation “he forsook father and mother, wife and child”; mission “to establish the kingdom of righteousness”; promised salvation to all; compared himself to sower sowing seed; simile of mustard seed is used; “Perishable is the city built of sand”; speaks of “the rain which falls on the just and on the

unjust”; story of prodigal son; similar account of the man born blind; story of righteous man who came by night (like Nicodemus); a converted prostitute, Ambapali, followed Buddha (like Mary Magdalene followed Jesus); commanded his disciples to preach his doctrine in all places and to all men; self-conquest and universal charity his fundamental principles; commanded his followers to conceal their charities; “return good for evil”; “overcome anger with love”; “love your enemies”; commanded of followers: “Not to kill; not to steal; not to lie; not to commit adultery; not to use strong drink”; traitor figures in his story; triumphal entry into Rajagriba (like Jesus into Jerusalem); “my kingdom not of this world”; eternal peace (like eternal life of Jesus). Both religions recognize a trinity. Catholicism’s similarities to Northern Buddhism: priests shave their heads; bells and rosaries; images and holy water; popes and bishops; abbots and monks of many grades; processions and feast days; confessional and purgatory; worship of the virgin; devoted missionaries spread the faith all over Asia, and as far as Egypt, Asia Minor, and Palestine, long before the Christian era. Remsberg points out an interesting parallel. “Three centuries after the time of Buddha, Asoka the Great, emperor of India, became a convert to the Buddhist faith, made it the state religion of the empire, and did more than any other man to secure its supremacy in the East. Three centuries after Christ, Constantine the Great, emperor of Rome, became a convert to the Christian faith, make it the state religion of his empire, and won for it the supremacy of the West.” Confucius, the great Chinese sage, was born 551 B.C. His followers believed him to be divine. His birth was attended by prodigies; magi and angels visited him as celestial music filled the air; his genealogy gave him a princely descent. Confucius gave us the Golden Rule: “What you do not like when done to yourself do not to others.” Remsberg points out that because the religions of both Jesus and Confucius enjoin absolute obedience to national rulers, “Confucianism became and has remained the state religion of China, while Christianity became and has remained the state religion of Europe.” Laou-tsze of China was born 604 B.C. His similarities to Jesus are: entry into world and exit attended by miracles; miraculously

conceived; ascended bodily into heaven; incarnation of an astral god (like star in Magi story); the “Tao” of his gospel, Tao Te Ching, means “the Way”; man both material and spiritual being; by renunciation of riches and worldly enjoyments the soul attains immortality; translated to heaven without suffering death (like Enoch and Elijah); taught men to be righteous and must become “as little children”; cast out evil spirits that caused diseases. His devotees live in monasteries and convents; his followers believe in a triune God. Bacchus was a Roman modification of the Greek god Dionysos. He was the god of wine who cultivated the vine, made wine, and hosted Bacchanalian feasts. His worship was united with the Eleusinian mystery rites of the goddess Ceres (Demeter). Cakes were eaten in her honor. Rituals included partaking of the bread of Ceres and wine of Baccus. Athenians celebrated the allegorical giving of the flesh to eat of Ceres, the goddess of corn and grain, and the giving of the blood to drink of Bacchus, the god of wine. Like Mithraic worship, which also included communion, worship of Bacchus included use of holy water for purification, purified themselves, and an image of a phallus that looked much like the early Church cross was carried in their processions. The Roman government suppressed the later Bacchanalian and Eleusinian feasts, along with the Christian Agape, which was celebrated exactly the same as the pagan feasts, because of their debaucheries, obscenities, and supposed infant sacrifices. The church became a temple, and the table of the communion an altar. That the Eucharist was a continuation of the Eleusinian mysteries, complete with the pagan’s incense, garlands, and lamps or candles, seems confirmed by St. Paul’s use of the word teleiois. Saturn, one of the oldest and most renowned of European gods, was worshipped in Italy more than a thousand years before Christ, centuries before Rome rose to power. One of the planets and one of the days of the week are named in his honor. In honor of Saturn, god of agriculture, most specifically bread, and of recurring fertility, the Saturnalia was celebrated for seven days, concluding on December 25. From the Saturnalia come the Christmas tables laden with bounties, giving of presents, and burning of many candles. The Romans decked their halls with garlands of holly, sacred among sun

gods as a symbol of good will and joy, and to Saturn as symbol of health and happiness. Christmas lights and ornaments evolved from the Roman custom of placing decorative candles in live trees and hanging small masks of Bacchus, the god of wine, on pine trees during the Saturnalia festival. The immensely influential Persian prophet Zoroaster lived and wrote at least 1200 years before the Christian era. Judaism and Christianity derived some of their most fundamental doctrines from his teachings. From Persian theology we got the idea that the universe is ruled by two great powers, Ormuzd (God) and Ahrimanes (Satan), the one represented by light, the other darkness, the one being good, the other evil. Zoroaster placed man at the center of the perpetual war between these two forces, each striving for his soul. God created man with a free will to choose between good and evil. Those who choose good are rewarded with everlasting life in heaven; those who choose the evil are punished with endless misery in hell; those in the middle go to purgatory. God sent a savior, Zoroaster, with a divine revelation, the “Zend Avesta.” Zoroaster had these features in common with those of Jesus: was of supernatural origin and endowed with superhuman powers; believed that Satan would be dethroned and cast into hell; believed that the end of the world and the kingdom of God were at hand; taught followers to worship God; was tempted by Satan; performed miracles; was slain by those whom he had come to save; instructed followers to obey the word and commandments of God. Zoroaster taught that those who obey the word of God will be free from all defects and immortal; God exercises his rule in the world through the works prompted by the Divine Spirit, who is working in man and nature; God hears the prayers of the good; all men live solely through the bounty of God; the soul of the pure will hereafter enjoy everlasting life; the wicked will undergo everlasting punishment. Devils and angels, baptism, communion, and confirmation rites are of Persian origin. Jews living under Persian rule in the region of the Euphrates and Tigris absorbed many of Zoroaster’s concepts. Remsberg comments, “The writings of Zoroaster were the principle source of the most important theological doctrines ascribed to Christ, as the Buddhistic writings were of his ethical teachings.” The “magi” of the birth of Jesus story

were Zoroasterian priests who had been instructed to follow an especially bright star to find a spiritual king. In even more ancient Persia, the god Mithra was the offspring of the Sun, and next to Ormuzd and Ahrimanes, held the highest rank among the gods of ancient Persia. Like Jesus: was one of a trinity; was born of a virgin; was the mediator and the spiritual light contending with spiritual darkness; through his work the kingdom of darkness would be lit with heaven’s own light, the Eternal would receive all things back into his favor, the world would be redeemed to God; through him the impure are purified and evil made good. Mithras is the Good; his name is Love. He is the source of grace; life-giver; source of life; redeemer of the souls of the dead into the better world. His ceremonies included baptism to remove sins; anointing; confirmation that gives the power necessary to combat the spirit of evil; a Lord’s supper that imparts salvation of body and soul. A consecrated wine, believed to possess wonderful power, played a prominent part. His birthday was December 25. His followers organized a church with a developed hierarchy; held Sunday sacred; preached a categorical system of ethics; regarded asceticism as meritorious and counted among their principal virtues abstinence and continence, renunciation and self-control; believed in Heaven inhabited by beatified ones, situated in the upper regions, and in Hell, peopled by demons, situated in the bowels of the earth; placed a flood at the beginning of history; assigned as the source of their condition a primitive revelation; believed in the immortality of the soul, last judgment, resurrection of the dead, and final conflagration of the universe.” Remsberg tells us, “In the catacombs at Rome was preserved a relic of the old Mithraic worship. It was a picture of the infant Mithra seated in the lap of his virgin mother, while on their knees before him were Persian Magi adoring him and offering gifts.” The Mithraic worship flourished throughout the ancient world into the second century. Manes, one of the Christian Fathers and founder of the heretical sect known as Manicheans, believed that Christ and Mithra were one. “Christ is that glorious intelligence which the Persians called Mithras…His residence is in the sun.”

Sosiosh, the Messiah of the Persians, is the son of Zoroaster and constitutes part of the Persian Trinity. Zoroaster prophesied that he would be born of a virgin and that a star would indicate the place of his birth. “As soon, therefore, as you shall behold the star, follow it whithersoever it shall lead you and adore that mysterious child, offering your gifts to him with profound humility.” The magi of the birth of Jesus story were Zoroastrian priests. Like Jesus, Sosiosh was supernaturally begotten, but unlike Jesus, he exists only in a spiritual form. When he comes again he will bring with him a new revelation, and he will awaken the dead and preside at the last judgment. One of the most ancient of the sons of gods, Adonis, Tammouz, Tamzi, or Du-zi, as he was variously called, the god of light, life, and love, was a Babylonian deity whose worship gradually spread over Syria, Phoenicia, and Greece. In Phoenicia he was associated with the worship of Istar, and in Greece with that of Venus. The Jews worshipped Adonis by the name of Tammouz (Ezek. 8:14). Biblically he is “the only son.” The Hebrews named one of the months after him. According to some scholars, that the Jews considered eating or handling pork an abomination had its origin in the legend that Adonis was killed by a wild boar. Until recently, Catholics ate fish on Friday; Friday was consecrated to Venus by her Asiatic worshipers and fish was eaten in her honor. Most Old Testment stories derive from similar but far more ancient Babylonian and Persian stories such as those recorded in the Babylonian epic, the “Assyrian poem,” which cannot be later than the seventeenth century B.C. It antedates the oldest books of the Bible by at least 1,000 years, according to Remsberg’s dating. From the first pages of the Bible we find the sacred tree of Babylonia, with its guardian cherubs and flaming sword with seven heads. The flood account of Genesis not only agrees in details, “but even in phraseology with that which forms the eleventh lay of the great Babylonian epic.” As in Genesis, the Babylonian flood expresses deity’s chastisement of man’s corruption. The Assyrian poem details the building of the ark, into which are introduced the various pairs of male and female animals, the shutting of the doors of the ark, the duration, increase, and decrease of the flood, the sending out of a

dove, a swallow, and a raven, and so on. The Noah figure is Tam-zi or Tammuz, “the sun of life,” who sails upon his ark behind clouds of winter to reappear when the rainy season is past. He is called Sisuthrus of Berosus, that is, Susru “the founder,” a synonym of Na, “the sky.” His ark rested on a mountain in Nisir; on its peak the first altar was built after the flood. From the Babylonian stories came those of the tower of Babel or Babylon, of the Creation, of the fall, and of the sacrifice of Isaac—the latter forming the first lay of the great epic, which further describes the descent of Istar into Hades in pursuit of her dead husband Du-zi, “the offspring,” the Babylonian Adonis. Osiris, the son of Seb (earth) and Nu (heaven), appears in hieroglyphics of Egypt as early as 3427 B.C. The Savior of Egypt, his worship, universal in Egypt, spread over much of Asia and Europe, including Greece and Rome. Parallels between the Osiris myth and Jesus stories include: slain by Typhon (Satan), but rose again and became the ruler of the dead; presides at the judgment; good are rewarded with everlasting life, wicked are destroyed; immortality and bodily resurrection; worship of a divine mother and child; doctrine of atonement; vision of a last judgment; resurrection of the body; sanctions of morality; lake of fire; torturing demons; eternal life in the presence of God; personification of moral good. Isis, the sister and wife of Osiris (as Mary was technically the sister and wife of Jesus, if Jesus is God), was the greatest of female divinities. Her worship, like Mary worship of Catholicism, was coexistent and coextensive with that of her divine brother and husband. Remsberg points to the following picture of Isis in the Apocalypse: “And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars” (Revelation xii, 1). Isis was the ruling deity of the land to which the parents of Jesus fled when warned that Herod would try to kill them. Isis worship continued in Rome and Alexandria and commingled with early Christianity. The son of Osiris and Isis, the god Horus completed the Egyptian trinity. Horus, the rising sun, existed even before the incarnation of his father, Osiris, the setting sun. Although the doctrine of the trinity existed elsewhere—Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva of India, for instance

—the doctrine of the trinity in unity, which was accepted eight centuries before Christ, was an Egyptian one. As an infant, Horus was carried out of Egypt to escape the wrath of Typhon (Satan) (Jesus fled to Egypt to escape the wrath of Herod). He was carried out of Egypt, like Moses, who led his people out to escape Pharaoh. Like Moses, the baby Horus was hidden among the reeds by his mother. The story of his mother, Isis, stopping the sun and moon is echoed in the story of Joshua doing the same. Zeus, also called Jove and Jupiter, was the greatest of the sons of gods worshipped by Greece and Rome. His parents were the god Kronos (Time) and the goddess Rhea (Earth); one might say that Zeus was the child of space-time. Like Christ, Zeus assumed the form of man; his life was imperiled during infancy; he was secreted away and saved. As ruler of heaven and earth, he was, like the God of Genesis, dissatisfied with the human race, and with the aid of Pandora, who brought death into the world, he tried to destroy it that he might create a new race. Persophone, or Life (Eve also means Life), was the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, the Earth, goddess of earth and her bounty (like the Garden of Eden). Hades (later personified as Satan), the god of hell, seized Persephone and carried her to the lower world where she was forced to become his wife. At his urging, Persephone ate some of the enchanted pomegranate (the Garden of Eden apple is now considered to be more accurately translated as pomegranate). Although Demeter appealed to Zeus to return her daughter to earth, Persephone had to return to the underworld one month for every seed she had eaten. Her exit and entrance back to Hades causes the seasonal changes; Demeter’s joy and grief result in her engagement and disengagement in earth’s birthing and fruiting. Apollo, one of the principal solar deities, was the son of the virgin Leto, who was ravished by Zeus, who came to her in the form of a swan (like an angel) in light (as the Spirit came to Mary in the form of a dove in light). Leto gave birth on the barren isle of Delos, which was illuminated by a flood of light (like Jesus’s manger while sacred swans (like the angels) made joyous gyrations in the air above them. Apollo grew to become one of the most beloved gods of Greece. One of the most perfect types of manly beauty, he lived a lowly life

as a herdsman; came to reveal the will of his father; was endowed with miraculous powers; was the Savior who rescued the people from the deadly python (like the Edenic snake). Because it had long ago been prophesied that the virgin Danae would give birth to the god Perseus, the Herod-like ruler Acisius confined Danae in a tower, where Zeus “overshadowed” her in a shower of gold. Acisius placed the newborn Perseus and his mother in a chest and cast them upon the waters (much like Moses). They drifted to an island and the child was saved, grew to manhood, performed many wonderful works, vanquished his enemy, and ascended the throne. The solar god Hercules was the son of Zeus and the virgin Alcmeni. Like Herod, Hera tried to destroy him. Like Jesus, Hercules died a death of agony; his pyre was surrounded by dark cloud amid thunder and lightning; he ascended to heaven; he descend into Hades. His twelve labors, like the twelve apostles of Christ and the twelve tribes of Israel, correspond to the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Hercules’s festivals, Lenaea and the Greater Dionysia, correspond to Christmas and Easter, the last day of the festival being a sort of All Souls’ Day devoted to the gods of the underworld and the spirits of the dead. Dionysos, or Zagreus, son of Zeus, was slain by Titans, was buried at foot of Mt. Parnassus, and rose from the dead as Dionysos. He was the god of fruit and wine, the beloved son who occupied a throne at the right hand of his father. His empty tomb at Delphi was long preserved as proof of his death and resurrection. Resurrection stories like those of Adonis in Phoenicia, Osiris in Egypt, and Dionysos in Greece were ancient when Jesus was born. When Zeus became enraged at mankind, the Titan god Prometheus, like Christ, came to earth to intercede and suffer for the race. In Evolution of Israel’s God, A. L. Rawson notes in his consideration of the great Greek tragedy, Prometheus Bound, “Its hero was their friend, benefactor, creator, and savior, whose wrongs were incurred in their behalf, and whose sorrows were endured for their salvation. He was wounded for their transgressions, and bruised for their iniquities; the chastisement of their peace was upon him, and by his stripes they were healed.” R. B. Westbrook writes

regarding the death of Prometheus, “The New Testament description of the crucifixion and the attending circumstances, even to the earthquake and darkness, were thus anticipated by five centuries.” Esculapius, illegitimate son of the nymph Coronis by Apollo, was spared death at the hand of Diana, although his mother was killed. Esculapius was called “The Good Physician” for his wonderful curative powers that could heal all diseases, could make whole the lame, the paralytic, and those born blind, and could restore the dead to life. He was struck by a thunderbold and ascended to heaven. The vestal virgin, Rhea Silvia, bore twins by the god Mars. Because the twins were heirs to the crown, the evil ruler Amulius attempted to protect his usurped throne by drowning them, but they were miraculously preserved and rescued by a shepherd. Romulus became the founder and king of Rome. After his reign of thirty-seven years, he was translated by his father and eventually became the tutelary god of the Romans, named Quirinus; the sun was eclipsed, and he was gone. Mars carried him up to heaven (like Elijah) in a chariot of fire. He reappeared in a glorified form to Proculus Juilus, who prophesied the future greatness of the Roman people, and told him he would watch over them as their guardian god. Next to the Saturnalia, the most important religious festival of pagan Rome was the Quirinalia, which celebrated the Ascension of Quirinus. Odin, the All-Father, held the highest rank in the Northern pantheon and was worshipped by the Scandinavians, Goths, Saxons, other ancient German tribes, a thousand years or more before the Christian era. They believed in two worlds, one the warm South, the other the ice North. Like Eden, the entrance to the South was guarded by flaming sword. Out of two trees Odin made man and woman, breathed into them the breath of life, and for their abode, planted a fruitful garden in the center of the earth. Beneath the earth dwells Hel, the goddess of the dead. Like the Satan of Revelations, Loki, the god of evil, will be chained for a time and then released; a bloody war will ensue between Lodi and the hosts of Hell, and Odin and his followers. Loki will triumph, mankind will be destroyed, and heaven and earth will be consumed by fire. But Odin will create a new heaven and a new earth, and dwelling in heaven, will be the ruler of all things.

Thor, the son of the virgin Earth and Odin, was the first born son of God and the “Christ” of the Scandinavian Trinity. Like Christ, Thor died for man and was worshiped as a Savior. The evil Midgard had a serpent that threatened to destroy the human race. Thor attacked and slew the monster but was killed by the venom. The good and noble Baldur, one of the purest, gentlest, and best beloved of all gods, the beautiful son of Odin and Freya, was like many gods born on December 25. Loki (Satan) shot arrows, but it was the blind god Hoder that pierced his body with an arrow of mistletoe so that he passed into the power of Hel and descended into hell. In another and better world, where envy and hatred and war are unknown, Baldur will rise again. The ancient Germanic Yuletide festival celebrating the return of the sun god (and the sun) centered around the Yule log, cut from the heart of a tree trunk and dragged to a large fireplace, where it burned for twelve days, which later became the twelve days of Christmas. Apples were hung as ornaments from evergreen trees, sacred to Baldor, as a reminder that spring and summer would come again. In many ancient religious traditions, the evergreen was sacred to sun gods and to gods resurrected at the spring equinox or summer solstice. Candles were burned and good-luck gifts called Stenae (lucky fruits) were exchanged. The Druids contributed the tradition of kissing under the mistletoe, a divine plant symbolic of love and peace. Most of us never think of the Greek philosopher Plato as a god, but the legend of his immaculate conception via the god Apollo can be traced back to his nephew, Spensipus. Immaculate conceptions were among the most frequently recurring incidents in the myths and legends of ancient Greece. When Perictione, a pure virgin (like Mary), was impregnated by Apollo, the god declared the parentage of the child to her betrothed, Ariston (like Joseph). Many of Plato’s views were ascribed to Jesus: there is but one God, and we ought to love and serve him; the Word formed the world and rendered it visible; knowledge of the Word will make us happy; the soul is immortal, and the dead will rise again; death is “the separation of the soul from the body”; here will be a final judgment; the righteous will be rewarded, and the wicked punished. Plato’s design argument is

the chief argument relied upon by Christians to prove the divine origin of the universe. The philosopher Pythagoras taught in the sixth century B.C. at about the time of Buddha, Laou-Tsze, and Confucius. Greece was his native country, but he lived most of his life in Italy and traveled extensively in Egypt and India, where his ideas took hold. Like Plato, Pythagoras was the son of Apollo, performed miracles, and was endowed with the gift of prophecy. The Essenes, a Jewish sect to which Jesus was believed to have belonged, adopted much of the teachings of Pythagoras. Numerous other examples could be cited, but the point is that like all mythmakers, the Bible writers borrowed familiar material. And much material about a particular god could well have originated with an actual person who was magnified into a legend and then deified as a myth. It’s possible that Jesus was a philosopher or spiritual teacher so revered that eventually he was deified. Some scholars point out that the claim that the Bible is Godbreathed is contradicted by the amateurish writing style of so many of its books; none is even close to the quality of Tacitus or Josephus, or any of the great poets and philosophers of distant antiquity; certainly God could have done better. And the texts of those great geniuses have been better authenticated than any of the Bible books, with the possible exception of some of the letters of Paul. As one proof that the Christ of Christianity is a myth and not a historical character, scholars point to the profound silence of the writers who lived during and immediately following the time he is said to have existed. None even of the great historical biographers living where Jesus lived during his lifetime wrote so much as a word of his biography. Among the prolific writers who lived and wrote during the time of Christ or within a century after the time but who wrote nothing about Jesus were: Josephus, Philo-Judaeus, Seneca, Pliny the Elder, Suetonius, Juvenal, Martial, Arrian, Petronius, Dion Pruseus, Paterculus, Appian, Theon of Smyrna, Phlegon, Persius, Plutarch, Justus of Tiberius, Apollonius, Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, Quintilian, Lucanus, Epictetus, Silius Italicus, Statius, Ptolemy, Hermogones, Valerius Maximus, Pompon Mela, Quintius Curtius, Lucian,

Pausanias, Valerius Flaccus, Florus Lucius, Favorinus, Phaedrus, Damis, Aulus Gellius, Columella, Dio Chrysostom, Lysias, Appion of Alexandria. Enough remains of the writings of these authors to form a library. Many of those writings are about the very region and time within which Jesus supposedly lived, openly taught, and riled up religious and political leaders. But Jesus Christ is mentioned only in two proven forged passages in the works of a Jewish author, and two disputed small passages in the works of Roman writers—hardly probable if Jesus performed miracles and caused a revolution, given that many of these writers wrote many chapters and even entire books about every noteworthy person and event. The Dead Sea Scrolls, written up through the early part of the first century A.D. and by far our earliest surviving scrolls from the gospel period, make no mention of Jesus, John the Baptist, or early Christians. Jesus is simply absent from history until decades after he died (if he lived), and to pretend otherwise is patently dishonest. People of the Bible era lived in an age when myths and legends abounded, so a miracle-worker who rose from the dead was no harder to believe than any other ghost story. Julius Caesar was said to have done the same, and many believed it. I am not asserting that it is fact that neither rose from the dead. I am arguing the need for skepticism. Even widespread rumors were recorded by the historians; shouldn’t we have heard something about an amazing miracle worker who inspired multitudes with his preaching, for whom a multitude turned out in praise at his Triumphal Entry? Yet no legal or historical record survives from the age of meticulous Roman documentation. In times past, as today, it was not uncommon for martyrs to be glorified into exaggerated versions of themselves. If a real-life hero was unjustly or cruelly murdered, it was human nature to try to make that good person look even better as a kind of compensation for his having been cheated of life and good report. Sometimes the mythologizing was a kind of collective wish-fulfillment that the almost-supernatural hero could still serve and protect at an even higher supernatural level. Sometimes the hero story was just good entertainment. Sometimes the superman served as an exemplum.

To boost its claims to religious superiority, the early Christians glorified their martyrs as supernatural heroes, and their powers were “documented” by the Church in the official legends and lives of the saints, complete with dragons, unicorns, and of course miracles. In this day and age, even believers understand the mythmaking tendencies of human nature; know that the biblical stories originated in the age of myths and legends among peoples of unbounded credulity; acknowledge that myths and legends can spread like wildfire, accumulating embellishments along the way; and cannot doubt that those stories were passed down by unknown witnesses that do not even agree among themselves. Born-Again, Without Jesus? Even if Jesus was largely a myth, something about him or the myth of him has gripped humanity. At the same time, even if Jesus was a real man of extraordinarily inspiring wisdom, the Jesus of the Bible and Christianity is largely a myth. Given that, what explanation is there for Christians for whom being born-again involves what they call a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, meaning they have had a spiritual encounter with an actual spiritual entity? I say “they,” but I include myself in this category. There are millions of such people. We’re not all liars or crazy. I know I’m not. If the born-again sense of Presence was not a Jesus revelation or encounter, what, then, was it? It’s important to acknowledge that people of other religious traditions have similar born-again experiences, though they call them by other terms and attribute them to other sources. The spiritual dimension does exist, and quite a few people in this life do enter into that realm (for lack of better description). The high that accompanies that entry is something anyone can experience, regardless of one’s religious persuasion. I’ve often observed that the spiritual high comes with at least two different states of consciousness: the epiphany high and the encounter high. Many people have felt the exhilaration of suddenly understanding something sublime. It’s mostly an intellectual high, though it could

involve other faculties, such as emotions or aesthetic sensibility. That’s an epiphany high. Many people have felt the exhilaration of falling in love, or connecting with a person or group that is so rewarding that one’s response is a high. That’s an encounter high. In my experience, the spiritual, “born-again” high is the fusion of an epiphany high and an encounter high. If we experience the high in a Christian context, say of being “saved” or drawn into the fold, we assume that the high is the direct result of the context itself or of some embedded principle. But I think the high derives from something that transcends the context but that uses the context as a representation or a conduit, like an idea expressed in words, and the words presented through a medium like the human voice or pen and paper and an understanding mind. Jesus, or the myth of Jesus (it doesn’t matter which), is a representation of deeply human wisdom, which includes a deeply human urge for transcendence, that needed, and still needs, articulation—or further articulation; it’s not that most of this wisdom had not been expressed before. Carl Jung might view Jesus as a primitive archetypal overcoming of our shadow. We sometimes think we are experiencing the spiritual directly, but in fact our experience is always mediated by our own human qualities as they “live” in relationship with some aspect of the world itself. Existence is always dynamic. It’s as if the Creator God speaks to us not through an anthropomorphic, authoritarian voice booming through the clouds but through the Creation process itself, which for us means our living experience of, really our engagement with, something or someone else, be it nature, art, a religion, philosophy, love—whatever. My assumption is that God is real, that God does communicate to the receptive in a variety of ways, and that all this interconnected communication is dynamic wisdom expressing the immanent love and friendliness of a personal—but not human—God. Because people experience God in different ways, we need to stop judging one another and throwing lightning bolts at anyone whose context of spiritual experience differs from our own. We each find a context or contexts that we feel comfortable with, usually because they’re familiar. My pillow isn’t your pillow, but we all lie

back and dream a human Paradise, which is merely a representation of a transcendental reality we can only vaguely glimpse. But something about that glimpse strikes us to the core as being ultimately real. No wonder people get so intense about protecting their vision. We just have to remember that what we think we see is different from what others think they see, but what we actually are looking at is the same thing: God, by whatever name; and we are all seeing that God “through a glass darkly” and are all hoping to see God more directly in an afterlife. Acknowledging that God is One could save the world. Given the arrogance of our ideologies and the magnitude of our weapons, denying it could well destroy us. When I went through my fundamentalist period, I was about as defensive as a person can get. I was a passionate believer. Passion can be a good thing, and it’s easy to understand someone passionate about what is perceived to be ultimate truth wanting to defend that truth to the death. But there’s a difference between wise and foolish passion. It’s not just the object, or “truth,” of the passion that makes it wise or foolish, but the way one expresses the passion. Now I understand that damning the passionate truths of others is foolish, though of course one must deconstruct with common sense blind truths and lies. Passionately wanting to destroy those whose truths differ from our own is perhaps the most perverse and dangerous evil perpetrated by humanity.



 

Chapter 10 The Witches’ Hammer in the Twenty-First Century History bears witness to colossal evils that persons or groups employ to enforce religious ideology. The Christian Satan isn’t just a myth created by humans. The devil in any tradition is the representational projection of human evil. And how much more charged is that shadow when manifested through the very religion that professes to oppose it. It’s hard to imagine a devil-worshipping cult more satanic than the Church of the Inquisition. The urgency of our Founding Fathers’ demand for freedom of religion, still resounding today, addressed five centuries of religious tyranny that had murdered millions of heretics since its inception in the thirteenth century, when Pope Gregory IX wrote his Excommunicamus (1231) and Pope Innocent IV officially sanctioned torture as a means to extract truth from suspects (1252). The pope approved the establishment of a Spanish Inquisition at the request of King Ferdinand V and Queen Isabella I in 1478, shortly before the king and queen financed Christopher Columbus’s search for a shorter route to India that led him to “discover” America in 1492. Witch-hunt hysteria commenced in earnest in 1484, when Pope Innocent VII issued the papal bull Summis Desiderantes, which became the preface of Malleus Maleficarum, a kind of Inquisition textbook published in 1486 by Dominican inquisitors Heinrich Krammer and James Sprenger. In 1542, Pope Paul III responded to the Protestant insurgency by establishing the Congregation of the Inquisition in Rome, also called the Roman Inquisition of the Holy Office. In its attempt to suppress heretical ideas, the first Index of Forbidden Books was issued in 1559. The witch craze began to decline during the Enlightenment, although a late outbreak occurred in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692.

The Inquisition was finally suppressed in Spain in 1834, fifty-eight years after the signing of our Declaration of Independence in 1776, and forty-six years after our Constitution was ratified in 1788. For most of us raised in the U.S. during the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, the Inquisition is an abstraction tucked away in a dusty history book. Viewing the Inquisition more concretely helped me to understand our Founders’ concern to guarantee our religious and civil freedoms and to recognize the continued inquisitional spirit of fundamentalism. The fictional statistics and studies of Paul Cameron, the embarrassing “exegesis” of Fred Phelps, the absurd prophesies and judgments of Benny Hinn, Pat Robertson, Paul Crouch, Jerry Falwell, and all the other hysterical misrepresentations spewed by American evangelicals who wanted not-fundamentalists destroyed, betrayed an inquisitional spirit held in check only by humanist mores and laws founded on principles established by our Founders. The pope decreed the Malleus Maleficarum to be the Church’s official guidebook for the prosecution, punishment, and execution of witches because, as the Malleus put it, “after the sin of Lucifer, the works of witches exceed all other sins.” It was incontestable that the heresy of witches was “the most heinous of the three degrees of infidelity; and this fact is proved both by reason and authority.” The “reason and authority” exemplified in the Malleus was a complete mockery of its model, the advanced reason and authority achieved centuries earlier by Greco-Roman civilization. Witches caused natural disasters like storms, hail, and floods. They were seen transporting themselves through the air on animals, furniture, and broomsticks. They cast spells of love, hate, and madness, caused miscarriage and drying of the milk in animals and women, and were responsible for demonic possession, sickness, and death. When I first read the Malleus, I was surprised that the authors were so particularly preoccupied with the witch-inspired evils of sex. Dozens of pages graphically described sexual problems among men, complete with fantastical “scientific” explanations of witch’s spells, including demonic possession. Impotence, rape, incest, weak erection, lust for a married woman, demonic attack on sleeping nuns,

rape or molestation by priests, lack of attraction to women, masturbation, adultery, sterility, disappearance of a man’s “members,” a man’s members falling off, and the detailed, almost pornographic information concerning witches who copulate with devils—all this was quaintly, yet viciously, substantiated with quotes from philosophers, the Church Fathers, ancient literature, “the poets,” legal discourse, and of course, the Bible. “And what, then, is to be thought of those witches who in this way sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report?” Indeed, what can be said about them, I’ve asked myself? More to the point, what can be said about the inquisitors? Perhaps the fear of witches, like the fear of feminists, gays, blacks, and Muslims, is the shadow expression of a castration complex. More than fifteen centuries after the height of advanced Greek civilization, official representatives of Catholic superstition asserted, A certain man tells that, when he had lost his member, he approached a known witch to ask her to restore it to him. She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take which he liked out of the nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said: You must not take that one; adding, because it belongs to a parish priest. It doesn’t take a Freudian scholar to decipher the subtext. When a society is sexually repressed, and represses fear of castration, all kinds of shadow delusions serve to compensate, rationalize, and project blame. The Malleus is steeped with stories of demonic witchcraft that unwittingly demonstrate that repression often manifests as a shadow. Once a witch was accused, a confession was sought. Many accused witches, unsure of the rules of the inquisitional game, truly believed that to confess to the grave sins of witchcraft, even if innocent of such sins, would jeopardize the eternal salvation of their souls. To confess to acts of witchcraft was often considered by both

the accused and the accuser to be equivalent to committing the act, much like a child (or an inquisitor) might believe that saying it was going to rain made it rain. Or like childish beliefs can become the magical truths of myth, folklore, legend, religion, and the Malleus. Because the accused was questioned in the torture chamber, usually following “light” torture (like being suspended a few feet from the ground by her thumbs), she could easily assume that to confess guilt would result in even more torturous punishment and execution, usually by burning if not by the chamber torture itself. Because “Theologians and Canonists” differed on whether evil for the sake of good should be done to witches, the Malleus allowed judges to decide for themselves whether or not to lie to witches in order to obtain a confession. To enhance its effectiveness, the lie was generally told in the torture chamber, accompanied by leading questions spelling out the accusations, which the accused need simply affirm. A suspected witch could be promised that she would not be tortured, that she would not be tortured further, that she would not be burned, and even that she would be set free. At all costs, a confession must be obtained. Even in the Dark Ages, confession validated the superior role of the priest or other Church official. If a woman was accused of witchcraft, or if any “abnormal” circumstance required an explanation—a devastating hailstorm, for instance—, someone had to burn. Pick a witch, any witch. Then get that confession. No wonder so many were “bound to deny true and sacramental confession,” which the Malleus authors called “the evil gift of silence which is the constant bane of judges.” Many witches refused to confess because they would rather endure torture than risk eternal damnation. Some refused to confess because they saw through the inquisitor’s evil game. If the witch would not confess, however, she was often tortured into confession. It was a catch-22; damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Others preferred to confess because once “being” guilty, they could be forgiven, or so they were told. Most believers prior to the Reformation and most Catholics after believed that the pope literally held the keys to heaven and hell, and that a decision by him or any of his designates, even if he himself was evil,

could decide the person’s eternal fate. Better to confess and be pardoned via sanctifying torture and death than to go to hell. Once extracted, a witch’s “confession” became proof of the prevalence of witches. The inquisitors, who were lawyers and/or clerics under the jurisdiction of the Church, were eager to promote witch-scares to produce witches to prosecute, because all the witch’s possessions and all the possessions of her extended family, including descendents, and sometimes even friends, servants, or anyone who might be even remotely suspect as an accessory to the crime—all that wealth, minus execution expenses, went into the pockets of the inquisitor and those who assisted him. Even dead heretics could be dug up and burned and their property confiscated. It’s not difficult to see why so many witches were brought to trial. The Malleus authors Krammer and Sprenger were themselves indicted for various crimes like forging notarized documents to embezzle fees for indulgences. The Bishop of Brixen expelled the infamous Krammer from his territory because he disapproved of the inquisitor’s fraudulent means of framing women as witches and overseeing their torture. The inquisitors themselves were protected from the spells of witches by spells authorized by Catholicism, such as traditional and holy rites of the Church, exorcisms furnished in the aspersion of Holy Water, taking consecrated salt, carrying the blessed candles on the Day of the Purification of Our Lady and palm leaves on Palm Sunday. Today, in addition to rosaries, candles, and crosses, prayer helps, especially if you rub the talisman you received in your donation request envelope and then call or mail in your prayer request accompanied by a substantial donation to the soliciting evangelist’s “ministry.” Although not “afflicted” by devils, inquisitors were “pestered” day and night, “now in the form of apes, now of dogs or goats, disturbing us with their cries and insults; fetching us from our beds at their blasphemous prayers, so that we have stood outside the window of their prison, which was so high that no one could reach it without the longest of ladders; and then they have seemed to stick the pins with which their head-cloth was fastened violently into their heads.” Could

the woman’s “blasphemous” prayers have been genuine appeals for salvation? Were the inquisitors fetched by witches, or were they jolted awake by the shadow erupting from their own nightmares? Luckily, God took pity, and “preserved us as unworthy public servants of the justice of the Faith.” The inquisitors naturally had legal Catholic reasons why women, i.e. witches, were evil and needed the severest punishment. And not only witches, but “their followers, protectors, patrons and defenders incur the heaviest penalties,” and even “their children to the second generation on the father’s side, and to the first degree on the mother’s side, are admitted to no benefit or office of the Church.” No benefit or office of the Church meant they were excommunicated, which meant they would not go to heaven. And of course the children were deprived of their paternal inheritance. The inquisitors not only cast everyone into hell, they got all that male controlled money and property, hence the second-generation penalties on children on the father’s side, but only first-generation penalties on the mother’s (witch’s) side. “But to punish witches in these ways does not seem sufficient, since they are not simple Heretics, but Apostates.” Witches deserved the severest punishment “Because of the temporal injury which they do to men and beasts in various ways.” That injury, however, is pure myth, as is their supposed insider knowledge of Heaven: “Just as the degrees of blessedness in Heaven are measured in accordance with the degrees of charity and grace in life, so the degrees of punishment in hell are measured according to the degree of crime in this life.” Of course, there is biblical documentation. “See Deuteronomy xxv: The measure of punishment will be according to the measure of sin. And this is so with all other sins, but applies especially to witches. See Hebrews x.” The means to torture witches to extract confessions and then to punish exceed the imaginations of most of us today. In order to appreciate the perversity of the Church sanctioned Inquisition, it’s important to avoid abstraction and to face the concrete facts. The truth is that cults, dictators, and totalitarian governments throughout the world still use Inquisition torture devices. Exhibits of torture devices, like the exhibit I viewed some years ago in San Francisco,

have been touring worldwide. Permanent exhibits are on view at museums such as the Torture Museum in Ruesdesheim, Rhine, Germany. Photographs of the torture devices can be viewed online. It’s important to be vividly aware of the ever-present possibility of perverse brutality by the self-righteous claiming to be doing us a favor. Before being interrogated, witches were stripped naked and shaved to reveal birthmarks or moles—“devil’s marks,” which proved guilt. Larger moles, warts, or other skin growths, which most of us today would simply ignore or treat with over-the-counter ointments or with a quick trip to the dermatologist, were considered to be extra breasts, further proof of demonic congress. After being tortured, a witch was often thrown in a filthy, rat-infested dungeon, sometimes for a year or more, where she could (naked, of course) mull things over until she died or was further tortured and eventually burned. Of course, incarcerated witches would be routinely available for rape by inquisitors and their staff, including those employed as torturers. Here are descriptions of some of the more common torture devices: Simply designed of two metal plates that screwed together with the suspect’s thumbs between them, thumbscrews were small enough to slip in a large pocket, affording busy inquisitors convenient, efficient portability. Often the tongue was cut out of a victim that talked too much or too little. Commonly, the accused was whipped with scourges, often with sharpened barbs dipped in boiling saltsulfur water at the tips of the flails, until the ribs poked through and the internal organs protruded. The breast ripper, an iron tong with four hooked claws, often fired red-hot, shredded the breasts of suspected witches during the judicial interrogation process and was used to punish witches and unwed mothers. A similar device, the cat’s paw, or Spanish tickler, an iron claw attached to a handle, shredded the flesh off the bones of a naked victim suspended dangling by chains or ropes against a plank.

The Branks, or Scold’s Bridle, was a locked metal cage headpiece with protruding metal tongue-piece, often fitted with spikes or a rowel (small spiked wheel), that gagged and silenced scolding housewives. Chains decked with bells served to humiliate the nag escorted through town and secured to the hook attached to her family’s fireplace. More elaborate versions served as torture devices for witches. Engraved with “I recant,” the heretic’s fork was a sharppointed fork, reminiscent of a classic devil’s pitchfork, attached to a collar. With its bottom two prongs stuck deep in the sternum, and the top two prongs stuck into the chin’s underside, the heretic’s fork propped up the head, immovable and barely able to murmur “I recant.” Pressing was accomplished by crushing the victim under weighted boards (aka, “the turtle”), sometimes as she lay on top of a wooden or metal wedge. Racking took many ingenious forms, but the principle was the same—stretch the limbs until the joints were dislocated. Sources document cases of victims being painfully slowracked until their bodies were elongated by twelve inches. Some variations included stretching out the victim on a rack of spiked rollers, or incorporating other forms of torture, like branding the flesh with red-hot iron crosses, ripping off genitals, nipples, noses, or ears with red-hot pinchers, or forcing the victim to watch as her intestines were slowly wound onto pulleys. Quartering was a kind of ultimate racking, usually accomplished by tying each limb to one of four horses, then sending each horse racing simultaneously in a different direction. According to A. Hyatt Verrill’s The Inquisition, in 1497, Girolamo Savonarola, fiery critic of Vatican corruption, became perhaps the most famous person put to the tratti di fune or strappado, which consisted of tying the prisoner’s hands behind his back, hoisting him by the wrists, letting him drop for several feet and stopping him with a jerk before

he reached the ground. This proving ineffectual, weights were attached to Savonarola’s feet and he was dropped fourteen times. Weeks later, he was burned at the stake in the Plaza della Signoria. Perhaps the most painful torture device was the wheel, aka the “Catherine Wheel” after St. Catherine of Alexandria, a historically dubious martyr of the early fourth century. The naked victim, staked spread-eagle to the spokes, had her bones smashed by clubbers as the wheel turned, until she was transformed, according to a seventeenth-century chronicler, “into a sort of huge screaming puppet writhing in rivulets of blood, a puppet with four tentacles, like a sea monster, of raw, slimy and shapeless flesh mixed up with splinters of smashed bones,” who, still alive, was then “braided” through the wheel and hoisted on a pole for crows and vultures to feast on. Several women wheeled together provided one of the throngs’ most common forms of public entertainment. In some versions, the shattered rag dolls were hung up in cages for better viewing. The pear, shaped like the fruit or like hands folded in a rounded prayer position, and often engraved with the face of Satan, was inserted into the vagina, anus, or mouth, opened with the twist of its screw-action handle, then closed, extracting gutsy confessions from those chosen few who survived. The Judas cradle was a tall, pyramidal stool topped with a wood or metal pyramid seat onto which the harnessed naked victim, hoisted with chains, was lowered, the weight of her vagina, anus, or coccyx positioned on the point. Whether the adjusted pressure was just barely touching or total body weight, the victim could be rocked, or hoisted and dropped onto the point. The French called the Judas cradle “the wake” or “nightwatch.” The headcrusher was a metal helmet attached to a metal grid topped with a large screw used to exert the helmet’s

pressure down on the head. On some devices, the screw lowered the helmet, torturing or executing the victim; on other versions, the pointed tip screwed through the helmet and into the skull. A victim’s neck was attached to the garroting chair with a metal collar equipped with a pointed screw that protruded through a hole in the chair and drilled into the back of the neck. The rapidly spun whirligig simply caused the caged victim to vomit. Repeatedly. Shaped much like a baby’s highchair, the chair of spikes was just that. As if being strapped in was not enough, weights could be added and blows with mallets could enhance the spikes’ piercing power. Survivors of this form of torture, imprisoned in dungeons, often died of ensuing infection and tetanus. To quote historian William Manchester’s book, A World Lit Only By Fire, the iron maiden “embraced the condemned with metal arms, crushed him in a spiked hug, and then opened, letting him fall, a mass of gore, bleeding from a hundred stab wounds, all bones broken, to die slowly in an underground hole of revolving knives and sharp spears.” Sometimes impatient inquisitors resorted to more expedient means to prove a witch’s guilt. For example, a common method was to tie heavy stones or iron weights to the accused and then throw her into a lake or river. If she drowned, she was guilty, or innocent, depending on the inquisitor’s preference. Not all bishops and magistrates, not even all inquisitors, resorted to the fallacious rhetoric and zealous sadism characteristic of witchhunts. Many priests and their flocks piously faded into the woodwork of the Black Forests of the world, and even some of the more outspoken rebels, humanists and horrified Christians alike, managed to avoid excommunication and the heretic’s stake. Nonetheless, millions of “witches” and other heretics were tortured and murdered. Those who challenged the assumption that

witches were real—and there were many such skeptics—were themselves deemed heretics by the Malleus. Just like today, the medieval inquisitors had biblical reasons for their misogyny. “There was a defect in the formation of the first woman, since she was formed from a bent rib, that is, a rib of the breast, which is bent as it were in a contrary direction to a man. And since through this defect she is an imperfect animal, she always deceives.” The reference is to the Genesis Garden of Eden myth, which does mention that Eve was formed from the rib of Adam, but doesn’t mention “bent,” “contrary direction to a man,” “defect,” “imperfect animal,” and “always deceives.” The Malleus asserts that a woman is more carnal “as is clear from her many carnal abominations.” Even “the word woman is used to mean the lust of the flesh. As it is said: I have found a woman more bitter than death, and good woman subject to carnal lust.” All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman. Wherefore St. John Chrysostom says on the text, It is not good to marry (St. Matthew xix): What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colors! Therefore if it be a sin to divorce her when she ought to be kept, it is indeed a necessary torture; for either we commit adultery by divorcing her, or we must endure daily strife. According to the male authors of the Malleus, men were not likely to become witches. Naturally, “women voluntarily prostitute themselves to Incubus devils.” But “when men have connection with Succubus devils, yet it does not appear that men thus devilishly fornicate with the same full degree of culpability; for men, being by nature intellectually stronger than women, are more apt to abhor such practices.” Of course logically, if men were smarter and knew better, they should have been more culpable. Women are more superstitious, more credulous, more impressionable, “more ready to receive the influence of a disembodied spirit.” Women have “slippery tongues,” are weak, “find an easy and secret manner of vindicating themselves by witchcraft.”

They are feebler both in mind and body, are intellectually like children, which is why “No woman understood philosophy except Temeste,” and of course a fair woman without discretion is “a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout.” Women have little faith, like Eve, who “when the serpent asked why they did not eat of every tree in Paradise, she answered: Of every tree, etc.—lest perchance we die. Thereby she showed that she doubted, and had little in the word of God.” All this “is indicated by the etymology of the word; for Femina comes from Fe and Minus, since she is ever weaker to hold and preserve the faith.” Witches are sneaky, too. “They try as far as possible to conform with divine rites and ceremonies.” Why? “They can more easily deceive men under the mask of an outwardly seeming pious action.” It never occurs to the Malleus authors that these women might be genuinely pious. “For in the same way they entice young virgins and boys into their power; for though they might solicit such by means of evil and corrupt men, yet they rather deceive them by magic mirrors and reflections seen in witches’ finger-nails, and lure them on in the belief that they love chastity, whereas they hate it. For the devil hates above all the Blessed Virgin, because she bruised his head.” Biblically speaking, it was actually Eve that bruised the serpent’s head. Men are victims, according to the Malleus. Although women are witches, far more men are bewitched. “And the reason for this lies in the fact that God allows the devil more power over the venereal act, by which the original sin is handed down, than over other human actions. In the same way He allows more witchcraft to be performed by means of serpents, which are more subject to incantations than other animals, because that was the first instrument of the devil. And the venereal act can be more readily and easily bewitched in a man than in a woman, as has been clearly shown.” Why do these men think Eve’s original sin was sex? There was no sex involved, unless eating a piece of fruit is considered a sex act. Clearly the serpent is a phallic symbol. But wouldn’t Eve, then, be the victim of the phallus—a kind of victim of spiritual rape, perhaps? A victim of a Satanic Inquisition?

Hatred of sex is fear of sex. Fear of sex is fear of death at the most primal, animal level: fear of non-propagation. It could be argued that male fear of non-propagation has given “rise” to all organized religion, even though religion is supposed to be about the spirit, not the flesh. Women are the most heinous of all heretics. If a man can’t control the means of reproduction, his line might be cut off— meaning, his penis might be cut off, his life might be cut off. For this he blames the woman herself. Boys can be macho boys for sexual display, because they need to sow their seed, even if by force. Women are sluts when out of a man’s grip, because the man doesn’t really know whose seed produced “his” children. Add to that some men’s propensity for sadism, and you get an inquisitor, or a punishing fundamentalist. And it’s not just Christian fundamentalists. Absolute control of women is inherent in all forms of fundamentalism. Women are only good if so controlled. Mohammed’s law for removing part or all of a girl’s clitoris to rid her of sexual desire—a common practice in many parts of the world—is still “a noble practice which does honor to women,” in the opinion of Sheik Gad Al Haq Ali Gad Al Haq. Or in the opinion of thoroughly modern American Rev. Jerry Falwell, I listen to feminists and all these radical gals—most of them are failures. They’ve blown it. Some of them have been married, but they married some Casper Milquetoast who asked permission to go to the bathroom. These women just need a man in the house. That’s all they need. Most of the feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home. And they blew it and they’re mad at all men. Feminists hate men. They’re sexist. They hate men—that’s their problem. Satan symbolizes male fear turned sadistic; cursed with slithering, he personifies the de-mobilized shadow ever at a man’s feet, ready to strike Achilles’ heel, rendering him motionless, impotent, dead. He blames Eve, unfairly—she was innocent when she ate the fruit. Adam alone chose freely to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They both had their eyes opened, and to this day they stand face to face glaring at each other. The male/female dichotomy

is supposed to be transcended through love. Unfortunately, the inquisitional misogynist spirit destroys love. Serpents, classic devil images, were associated with witchcraft in the Dark Ages. Witches cast the spell of hatred by means of the serpent, “for the serpent was the first instrument of the devil, and by reason of its curse inherits a hatred of women; therefore they cause such spells by placing the skin or head of a serpent under the threshold of a room or house. For this reason all the nooks and corners of the house where such a woman lives are to be closely examined and reconstructed as far as possible.” Find a snake under the house or front porch, and the wife is burned for witchcraft. And not only snakes. Any object, “such as a stone or a piece of wood or a mouse or some serpent,” can be the devil’s visible instrument of witchcraft, especially if it is found in a hole. Ever been in love? During the Dark Ages, this was Philocaption, or inordinate love of one person for another. “He who loves his wife to excess is an adulterer.” Being “bewitched by love” a la Hollywood would have consummated in a hot date with the stake. Sexual control is always the subtext, if not the text, of inquisitors. Agendas of the unholy trinity (selfishness, greed, and pride) climax as sexual control, because sex represents the free expression of love and the uncontrollable propagation of life-force, and love and life-force represent ultimate power. This explains why rightwing Dominionists and other cult leaders today are obsessed with homosexuality, abortion, the inferior status of women, and domination of others. Aristocratic money-grubbing arrogance is a form of sexual perversion. Suppose you marry and want children but the man is impotent. “Extrinsically they [witches] cause it at times by means of images, or by the eating of herbs, sometimes by other external means, such as cocks’ testicles. But it must not be thought that it is by the virtue of these things that a man is made impotent, but by the occult power of devils’ illusions witches by this means procure such impotence, namely, that they cause man to be unable to copulate, or a woman to conceive.” Sometimes impotence isn’t the problem, it’s miscarriage, or rape. “Sometimes persons only think they are molested by an Incubus

when they are not so actually.” Actually they are molested by human men projecting the blame onto subhuman women. “At times also women think they have been made pregnant by an Incubus, and their bellies grow to an enormous size; but when the time of parturition comes, their swelling is relieved by no more than the expulsion of a great quantity of wind.” Luckily for accused witches, the Malleus authors presume that women don’t know the difference between pregnancy and indigestion. Suppose you marry and are lucky enough to avoid the spell of miscarriage. What Catholic witches do to infants is the stuff of legends and fairy tales. They offer them up to the devil and then eat each succulent limb and organ. Or they take the woman’s child and devils replace it with one of three varieties of changeling. “Some are always ailing and crying, and yet the milk of four women is not enough to satisfy them. Some are generated by the operation of Incubus devils, of whom, however, they are not the sons, but of that man from whom the devil has received the semen as a Succubus, or whose semen he has collected from some nocturnal pollution in sleep.” Today we call this adultery. Or rape. “And there is a third kind, when the devils at times appear in the form of young children and attach themselves to the nurses. But all three kinds have this in common, that though they are very heavy, they are always ailing and do not grow, and cannot receive enough milk to satisfy them, and are often reported to have vanished away.” Missing children were blamed on witches. Clever witches can transform themselves. Today, male witches transforming themselves are called gay; women are of course feminazis. The Malleus authors cite the case of Staufer of Berne, who “could change himself into a mouse in the sight of his rivals and slip through the hands of his deadly enemies.” Eventually, “when the Divine justice wished to put an end to his wickedness, some of his enemies lay in wait for him cautiously and saw him sitting in a basket near a window, and suddenly pierced him through with swords and spears, so that he miserably died for his crimes.” Talk about overkill. Superstition evolves into a story passed on as fact. The details of witchcraft are not only actual; they are also symbolic representations of fears. Superstitions of inquisitors, now

as in the Dark Ages, drip with male sexual anxieties. Witches drying up the milk in women and in cows were treated by the inquisitors with equal concern, because women and cows were essentially equal. That the drying of milk in women is due to witchcraft is substantiated with reference to Blessed Albert’s Book on Animals, “Milk is naturally menstrual in any animal; and, like another flux in women, when it is not stopped by some natural infirmity, it is due to witchcraft that it is stopped.” Nursing and menstruation are aspects of female, i.e. animal, sexuality that men have no control over. Hence, even to this day, nursing and menstruation are “dirty,” or at least embarrassing. The more important drying of milk in cows, a far more direct loss for men, was a bit more complicated. “For on the more holy nights according to the instructions of the devil and for the greater offence to the Divine Majesty of God, a witch will sit down in a corner of her house with a pail between her legs, stick a knife or some instrument in the wall or a post, and make as if to milk it with her hands.” The gesture itself is aggressively sexual, but the description is made more so by its relationship to milk, pregnancy (via sex), and breasts/udders. “Then she summons her familiar who always works with her in everything, and tells him that she wishes to milk a certain cow from a certain house, which is healthy and abounding in milk. And suddenly the devil takes the milk from the udder of that cow, and brings it to where the witch is sitting, as if it were flowing from the knife.” The subtext insinuates a woman’s violent masturbatory congress with the devil, which implies that aggressive sexuality in a woman is evil. If you’re lucky enough to get milk, an important ingredient in delicious foods available to men, then you should be able to have butter, which makes sensuous culinary experiences even more scrumptious. Women who delete men from sexual experience are even more evil when they also deprive men of their milk and butter. The inquisitors further control women by dictating the proper means of executing superstitious rituals that control the outcome of their churning and therefore the success of their role as churners. There are women who, when they have been churning for a long while to no purpose, and if they suspect that this is due to

some witch, procure if possible a little butter from the house of that witch. Then they make that butter into three pieces and throw them into the churn, invoking the Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; and so all witchcraft is put to flight. Here again it is a case of opposing vanity to vanity, for the simple reason that the butter must be borrowed from the suspected witch. But if it were done without this, if with the invocation of the Holy Trinity and the Lord’s Prayer the woman were to commit the effect of the Divine Will, she would remain beyond reproach. Nevertheless it is not a commendable practice to throw in the three pieces of butter; for it would be better to banish the witchcraft by means of sprinkling Holy Water or putting in some exorcised salt, always with the prayers we have mentioned. In such cases, it was not “superstitious to carry out Holy Relics or the Eucharist as a protection against the plagues of the devil.” Since cows are often destroyed by witchcraft, and milk and butter come from cows, people should “remove the soil under the threshold of the stable or stall, and where the cattle go to water, and replace it with fresh soil sprinkled with Holy Water” purchased from the local priest. Love your neighbor and do unto others has been smothered under centuries of superstitious tricks meant to force God to aid and forgive—and, of course, to punish. Rituals, rites, benedictions, prayers, indeed all religious beliefs and practices have replaced God with idolatrous human gestures of spiritual control. For the inquisitors, rites and rituals expressed fear, not faith, gratitude, or sacred connection. In many ways, their version of religion was the antithesis of true spirituality. Their focus was the devil, not God. In a very real sense, the devil was the God of the Inquisition. Any herbal or other medical remedies were considered deluded if not demonic. Many alchemists were burned at the stake during the Inquisition, just like believers, especially women, who happened to be folk doctors and pharmacists (chemists), were burned as witches, in part because the church-supported guilds, like drug companies of today, did not want their competition. Some contemporary preachers call New Age herbalists and practitioners of alternative medicine “the

heirs of witchcraft.” But Catholicism did sanction the use of certain herbs and stones, especially in exorcisms. Sickness and disease were also assumed to be the direct result of witchcraft. “For we have often found that certain people have been visited with epilepsy or the falling sickness by means of eggs which have been buried with dead bodies, especially the dead bodies of witches, together with other ceremonies of which we cannot speak, particularly when these eggs have been given to a person either in food or drink.” The famous Salem witch trials in 1692 took place when some young girls began to suffer from hallucinations and convulsions, the natural symptoms of ergot poisoning. Ergot is a fungus that grows on rye, barley, and other cereal grasses during specific weather conditions, such as those present in districts where those grains were ground into bread and witch-hunts ensued, including the district of Salem. Ergot, the source of LSD, has been found in the guts of bog people, including the famous Gramella Man. In 1951, in PontSaint-Esprit, France, exorcisms were performed on victims of ergot poisoning until one doctor’s research finally produced the scientific facts. In the early 1970s, psychologist Linnda Caporael made the connection between ergot and witch-hunts by showing correlations between rainy seasons in grain growing districts and outbreaks of witch-hunts. Of course the early Puritans had not been schooled in the medical symptoms of ergot poisoning, but had they not been predisposed to judge and condemn as evil what they didn’t understand, they could have erred on the side of natural science and compassion for the sick, as would have, say, the ancient Greeks. Many of us associate witches with the traditional black cats of Halloween. According to the Malleus, black cats could be witches’ familiars or actual witches. In one instance, a man accused of beating women got off the hook by countering that he actually beat some large cats that had attacked him. Battering was a charge easy to deflect. Notice how the Malleus authors exonerated this battering husband lurking in the subtext: “When a cow’s supply of milk has been diminished by witchcraft, they [witches] hang a pail of milk over the fire, and uttering certain superstitious words, beat the pail with a stick. And though it is the

pail that the women beat, yet the devil carries all those blows to the back of the witch; and in this way both the witch and the devil are made weary. But the devil does this in order that he may lead on the woman who beats the pail to worse practices.” Instead of prosecuting the batterer, the Inquisition sent battered women to the stake. Although dark and stormy nights were just as spooky in the Dark Ages as they are today, back then it was a witch rather than a boogieman that sent shivers down the spine. Luckily, today we don’t burn people at the stake for causing storms. Even so, the superstitious witchcraft-storm cause-and-effect is no more ridiculous than Pat Robertson’s assertions, “If the widespread practice of homosexuality will bring about the destruction of your nation, if it will bring about terrorist bombs, if it’ll bring about earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor, it isn’t necessarily something we ought to open our arms to,” and “When you see the rise of blatant open homosexuality and lesbianism, what you also know is God has given a society up…and we’re at the mercy of the elements, the mercy of war, the mercy of economic disaster.” It’s no more ridiculous than fundamentalists warning parents that Harry Potter books are demonic instruments that teach their children witchcraft. The Malleus agrees that natural “acts of God” are demonic in origin. However, witches themselves can be the agents and can cast spells that the devils honor. “Blessed Albertus Magnus in his work De passionibus aeris says that rotten sage, if used as he explains, and thrown into running water, will arouse most fearful tempests and storms.” To ward off hailstorms and tempests, “Three of the hailstones are thrown into the fire with an invocation of the Most Holy Trinity, and the Lord’s Prayer and the Angelic Salutation are repeated twice or three times, together with the Gospel of St. John, In the beginning was the Word. And the sign of the Cross is made in every direction towards each quarter of the world. Finally, The Word was made Flesh is repeated three times, and three times, ‘By the words of this Gospel may this tempest be dispersed.’” One needed to be meticulous, though, for “if the hailstones were thrown into the fire

without the invocation of the Divine Name, then it would be considered superstitious.” And the person should throw them “into the fire rather than into water, because the more quickly they are dissolved the sooner is the devil’s work destroyed.” This sounds to me like fighting witchcraft with witchcraft. TV evangelists tap into the same archetypal superstition with its ritual religious obedience, for instance when Marilyn Hickey and Oral Roberts make up special instructions to activate the fruit-bearing blessings guaranteed to every Seed Faith donation made to them. Perhaps faith-based Republicans who pooh-pooh global warming would agree that to still a tempest raised by witchcraft, you need to say this: “I adjure you, hailstorms and winds, by the five wounds of Christ, and by the three nails which pierced His hands and feet, and by the four Holy Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, that you be dissolved and fall as rain.” The Malleus relates a quaint story told in the Formicarius, which it cites as an authority, about a man who could raise hailstorms and tempests but was prevented from doing as much harm as he wished “because of the guardianship of good Angels…We can only injure those who are deprived of God’s help; but we cannot hurt those who make the sign of the Cross.” Many people today still make the sign of the cross to ward off impending disaster. The man told how using certain words in the fields conjured the chief of devils to attack their target. “Then, when the devil has come, we sacrifice to him a black cock at two cross-roads, throwing it up into the air; and when the devil has received this, he performs our wish and stirs up the air, but not always in the places which we have named, and, according to the permission of the living God, sends down hailstorms and lightnings.” This is the exact same method used by the homosexuals, feminazis, and Muslim terrorists who conjured Katrina and all those Florida hurricanes, according to religious radicals like Pat Robertson. When you think witchcraft is in the air, remember, “It is lawful in any decent habitation of men or beasts to sprinkle Holy Water for the safety and securing of men and beasts, with the invocation of the Most Holy Trinity and a Paternoster. For it is said in the Office of Exorcism, that wherever it is sprinkled, all uncleanness is purified, all

harm is repelled, and no pestilent spirit can abide there.” Keep in mind that “in the case of a Blessed Candle, although it is more appropriate to light it, the wax of it may with advantage be sprinkled about dwelling-houses.” Is this sacred ritual, or just plain old superstition: “But the surest protection for places, men, or animals are the words of the triumphal title of our Savior, if they be written in four places in the form of a cross: IESUS † NAZARENUS † REX † IUDAEORUM †. There may also be added the name of MARY and of the Evangelists, or the words of St. John: The Word was made Flesh.” Today it might just be easier to purchase the magical trinkets sold by TV evangelists.



 

Chapter 11 The Reformation Myth During the Dark Ages, Inquisition popes and their subordinate keepers of the keys to the kingdom became infamous not only for overwhelming psychological oppression but also for their murderous brutality, wild orgies, libraries of pornography, parade of mistresses and illegitimate children (some via incest), recreational gang-rape, and obscene wealth and the means of procuring it, all of which were well documented by clerical and secular contemporaries and by official records. Hatred of priests, which had been seething for centuries, came to a boil when Pope Innocent VIII institutionalized simony by establishing an official board to oversee the marketing of favors, absolution, and papal bulls. Medieval and Renaissance churchmen sold indulgences to erase transgressions in much the same way that TV evangelists peddle salvation today. Church abuses kindled the Reformation revolution. In 1517, Luther tacked (he did not “nail”) his ninety-five theses to the Castle Church door. As was customary in many university towns, the church door was used as a bulletin board to post issues for further discussion, often formally at the university. Luther’s position, which he titled Disputation for the Clarification of the Power of Indulgences, appeared along with other postings. An innocent spark of academic inquiry exploded into a thousand heretical fires. Luther’s scholarly defiance of the pope inspired instant mayhem throughout Germany. In A World Lit Only By Fire, historian William Manchester describes protesting (Protestant) students who tore crucifixes and pictures from the walls of local churches and were joined by mobs as they ravaged the countryside, destroying homes and libraries, gutting churches, hewing with axes Catholic icons,

altars, and paintings hacked to kindling to stoke the flames; priests were scattered, and women were stoned as they knelt before images of the Madonna. Inquiry backfired into inquisitions. Retaliation swelled into violent spiritual chaos. Executions became a new spectator sport. Within four years of “Luther’s” revolt, the number of Germans killed approached a quarter-million. God’s battle wasn’t just between Lutherans and Catholics. Protestantism immediately split into the Lutheran Church and the Reformed. Huldrych Zwingli, John Calvin, and John Knox formed their own sects. Splinter groups erupted—Anabaptists, Mennonites, Bohemians, and the forerunners of Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Unitarians—each as repressive and intolerant as Catholicism. Perhaps the clearest example of the intolerance of that era was the repressive “Reich” of John Calvin. His city-state of Geneva, known as the Protestant Rome, became a virtual police state of strictly enforced doctrinal regulations managed by a consistory of five pastors and twelve lay elders. Manchester’s description of “the bloodless figure of the dictator” strikes a startling similarity to Hitler. Frail, thin, short, and lightly bearded, with ruthless, penetrating eyes, he was humorless and short-tempered. The slightest criticism enraged him. Those who questioned his theology he called “pigs,” “asses,” “riffraff,” “dogs,” “idiots,” and “stinking beasts.” One morning he found a poster on his pulpit accusing him of “Gross Hypocrisy.” A suspect was arrested. No evidence was produced, but he was tortured day and night for a month till he confessed. Screaming with pain, he was lashed to a wooden stake. Penultimately, his feet were nailed to the wood; ultimately he was decapitated. Calvin’s theocracy, established in 1542, instituted an oppression that today’s authoritarians can only dream of. He preached longwinded sermons three or four times a week, and attendance was mandatory; slackers were burned at the stake. Like Hitler’s Nazis, Calvin’s Consistory could enter homes, summon anyone, do its own

investigations, create its own charges, and punish at will, all in the name of their God. Our Founders defended against this kind of invasiveness by guaranteeing our constitutional right to privacy and freedom of conscience, and all our other amendment rights. Calvin was a perfect exemplum of religious control our Deist Founders feared and rejected. His institution of biblical austerity, rivaled by the tyranny of Hitler, exemplifies the coveted dominion of today’s Christian Reconstructionists. Calvin respected no rights except his right to control—by the authority of God, of course. His legislation determined the number of dishes to be served at each meal; the color of garments worn; the kind of garments allowed, which were determined by one’s class. Declining to take the Eucharist was a crime. “Feasting” was proscribed. According to Manchester, so were “dancing, singing, pictures, statues, relics, church bells, organs, altar candles; ‘indecent or irreligious’ songs, staging or attending theatrical plays; wearing rouge, jewelry, lace, or ‘immodest’ dress; speaking disrespectfully of your betters; extravagant entertainment; swearing, gambling, playing cards, hunting, drunkenness; naming children after anyone but figures in the Old Testament; reading ‘immoral or irreligious’ books; and sexual intercourse, except between partners of different genders who were married to one another.” A father spent four days in jail for naming his newborn Claude, as did a woman who had worn her hair at an immoral height. A child was beheaded for striking his parents. Pregnant single women were drowned, along with their impregnators. Calvin executed his own relatives for committing adultery. The plague afflicting Geneva was blamed on fourteen witches, who were burned alive. As I read Manchester’s book, I could see the Christian tradition where today’s inquisitors, who actually believe that infidels bring about natural disasters, terrorism, and national decay, and deserve to die, might get their oppressive notions. Certainly Calvin’s inquisition provided models of judgment and punishment for contemporary fundamentalists like Randall Terry, Fred Phelps, Benny Hinn, Paul Crouch, James Dobson, and Pat Robertson, to name but a few. Calvin and the other Protestant theocrats, like

fundamentalists today, condemned those who held religious beliefs that differed from their own. Hitler, a student of Luther and Calvin, inspires contemporary fundamentalist cults like the Neo-Nazis. Hitler’s Reich imposed puritanical ideals meant to cleanse the world by his standards, to include purging the world of Jews. First, condemn and control normal, healthy appetites—itself a kind of perverting of nature. Parallel to the training of the body a struggle against the poisoning of the soul must begin. Our whole public life today is like a hothouse for sexual ideas and simulations. Just look at the bill of fare served up in our movies, vaudeville and theaters, and you will hardly be able to deny that this is not the right kind of food, particularly for the youth…Theater, art, literature, cinema, press, posters, and window displays must be cleansed of all manifestations of our rotting world and placed in the service of a moral, political, and cultural idea. Had he lived today in America, Hitler might have chosen a lucrative career in TV evangelism. Certainly today’s evangelists are Calvinist in their rhetoric, if not in their lives. Bob Jones, for instance, echoed Calvin’s condemnation of heretical Catholicism when he commented, “I would rather see a saloon on every corner than a Catholic in the White House. I would rather see a nigger as president.” (Like other fundamentalist schools, Bob Jones University forbids interracial marriage or dating.) Calvin’s accusations spread like wildfire that still burns today. Medieval Catholics were not to be surpassed by the Protestants in the righteous cause of punishment. Thomas de Torquemada, the Dominican monk who presided over the Spanish Inquisition, devised many of that era’s more grizzly devices of Christian brotherly chastisement. Perhaps the most famous instrument ever devised to teach a lesson was the old iron maiden. To use Manchester’s description, “The Jungfer embraced the condemned with metal arms, crushed him in a spiked hug, and then opened, letting him fall, a mass of gore, bleeding from a hundred stab wounds, all bones broken, to die slowly in an underground hole of revolving knives and sharp spears.”

Terror and pain—effective forms of instruction—insured obedience and punished anyone straying from the Christian status quo, especially women (aka “witches”), but even the handicapped and mentally ill, who were regularly tormented and tortured to death, and of course Jews, blacks, homosexuals, and other minorities were closely scrutinized and found wanting. Scholars (except for scholars employed by the Catholic Church) estimate that as many as four million people, mostly women, were killed during the Inquisition for various forms of heresy and other sins. Eventually bloodlust became an end in itself, and the Inquisition developed into a demonic frenzy in which not only “the different” were removed, but whole communities of unauthorized Christians were exterminated, and even animals, birds, and insects were tried, tortured, and publicly executed as witches and heretics. Even corpses were dug up, tried, and burned. Bigotry has always served the high priest in his battle to secure power and control. Priests construct a sacred hierarchy with themselves on top. The segment discriminated against is on the bottom. The large segment in the middle, the gullible masses, can be persuaded that the scapegoat on the bottom is inferior, bad, evil. The scapegoat is demonized as the real perpetrator of abomination. With a little indoctrination and a splash of fear, the masses can be riled up into zealots of hate. In order to be at the top—in the case of the high priest, the absolute top—others have to be beneath. The priest on his pedestal peers down on the lowly servants bowed to him in supplication. Sometimes the priest is a priest-king, like Moses or David; Charlemagne established a Holy Roman Empire. Sometimes the divine-right king elevates himself to the status of divinity, like some of the Pharaohs or Caesars, and sometimes others elevate him, as in the case of Jesus or Buddha. Sometimes priests wanting to rule challenge the authority of divine-right kings. The Holy Roman Empire, for instance, split roughly into two ruling factions, kings and priests. Once Luther challenged the pope, smoldering power struggles erupted into the Reformation, an unholy slaughter with royalty and priests battling against each other, and even, often most brutally, against themselves. John Calvin split from both the church

and state to create his own religious dictatorship in Geneva, complete with his own witch-hunts, tortures, and burnings. Religious wars are secular wars wrapped in priestly robes; the battles are battles for power-over, and power-over requires displays of control over a hierarchy. The power structure is always essentially the same. The entitled priest and/or divine-right king rules from on high. Beneath the ruler are the elite aristocrats. The royal court of aristocrats sometimes includes other elites such as chief warriors or politicians, but no matter how much power they wield, elites, aristocratic or otherwise, are always inferior to, always subjects of, the ruler. Subjects help the ruler govern the more inferior servants, and servants help subjects manage slaves. Subjects, servants, and slaves are all necessarily faithful followers of the ruler (or in some cases, his stand-in shadow ruler). Except in true democracies, the agenda of the ruler is always necessarily subjugation of inferiors. Bigotry serves to establish a threatening “other” that only the high priest and/or divine-right king on top, with the help of his obedient followers, can conquer, often via punishing extermination. The Christian Crusades massacred Muslims, along with Jews. Muslims retaliated by slaughtering Christians. The Inquisition sadistically tortured and burned or otherwise dispatched millions of innocent souls called heretics, especially those supreme heretics, witches. The Nazis continued a long history of punishment, ostracism, and extermination of Christ-killing, host-nailing “pigs,” also known as Jews. Historian Dagobert Runes estimated that 3.5 million Jews died at the hands of Christians from the 1100s through the 1500s alone. Add to that another six million executed by Hitler and you have a sampling of the many millions of Jews murdered by numerous religious holocausts that span two millennia. And that doesn’t include Jews forced to convert to Christianity, Jews “relocated,” Jews robbed, raped, tormented, and denied basic human rights, Jews forced by various popes to wear armbands signifying inferiority tantamount to damnation. A few Roman tyrants had responded similarly toward some early Christians. In a speech delivered on April 12, 1922, Adolf Hitler expressed the traditional Christian viewpoint:

My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice...And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people...When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people is plundered and exploited. Hitler’s cleverly sanctified bigotry is classic Orwellian “newspeak.” Substitute Muslim for Jewish and you have the sentiment of many Americans after 9/11. It wasn’t until 1961 that the World Council of Churches condemned anti-Semitism, and only in 1962 did the Vatican delete the words “perfidious Jews” from Good Friday worship services. In 1965, the Vatican finally decided to stop assigning collective Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus. In 1994, the Evangelical Lutheran Church pledged “to oppose the deadly workings of anti-Semitism in church and society,” repudiating the anti-Semitic writings of Martin Luther and acknowledging their use by the Nazis. In question were texts like this one, penned by Luther:

What then shall we Christians do with this damned, rejected race of Jews? First, their synagogues or churches should be set on fire...Secondly, their homes should likewise be broken down and destroyed...They ought to be put under one roof or in a stable, like gypsies. Thirdly, they should be deprived of their prayer-books and Talmuds in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught. Fourthly, their rabbis must be forbidden under threat of death to teach any more...Fifthly, passport and traveling privileges should be absolutely forbidden to the Jews...Sixthly, they ought to be stopped from usury. All their cash and valuables of silver and gold ought to be taken from them and put aside for safe keeping...Seventhly, let the young and strong Jews and Jewesses be given the flail, the axe, the hoe, the spade, the distaff, and spindle, and let them earn their bread by the sweat of their noses as is enjoined upon Adam’s children...To sum up, dear princes and nobles who have Jews in your domains, if this advice of mind does not suit you, then find a better one so that you and we may all be free of this unsufferable devilish burden—the Jews. Even Luther, the instigator of the Reformation, the father of Protestantism, the great emissary of “salvation by grace through faith,” could not protest his own dis-grace or reform his bigot’s faith in sacrifice. One wonders why Luther revered the Jew-written Bible or the Jew Jesus and his Jewish disciples, or why the critics of Luther continue to be Lutherans. The rift decisively effected by Luther—the schism between Catholics and Protestants—continues today, even in America. Globally, religious rifts threaten the survival of our species. And all religious rifts rest on claims of religious infallibility proven by each religion’s infallible religious texts. It’s tepid comfort, perhaps, that the Catholic Church can at times admit its errors, if not its fallibility. In 1992, for instance, three centuries after the Inquisition sentenced Galileo to life in prison for supporting scientific theories, especially Copernican, that supposedly contradicted Aristotle, the Vatican admitted its error by declaring Galileo “rehabilitated,” the less than perfectly spherical earth

continued revolving around the sun, and even the pope became subject to the laws of gravity. How did this “rehabilitation” come about? “Clarifications furnished by recent historical studies enable us to state that this sad misunderstanding now belongs to the past,” announced Pope John Paul II. By 1992, Galileo’s case had become “the symbol of the church’s supposed rejection of scientific progress.” Supposed? Sad misunderstanding? Estimates of the number of people murdered by the supposed sad misunderstanding of the Church’s Inquisition range to four million, many of them killed for heresies of the kind for which Galileo was prosecuted. (The modern Vatican made no mention of rehabilitating or forgiving those other untold millions imprisoned or burned at the stake as heretics.) Ironically, Galileo had always been a devout Catholic who saw no conflict between his religious and scientific beliefs. Along with many others then and before him, Galileo believed that Scripture revealed spiritual, not scientific, knowledge. Like other mathematics professors, Galileo was required to teach an astronomy course that assumed the theory that the sun and planets revolved around the Earth. This scientific “proof” in turn validated biblical “fact.” Although Copernicus himself taught heliocentrism as theory rather than as his own belief in order to avoid censure by the church (which would likely take the form of excommunication or death), Galileo was more out with his views. In 1613, he wrote a letter arguing the consistency of Copernican theory and Catholic doctrine. He further argued, this time before the Roman inquisitors, that Scripture had always been interpreted allegorically by the Church, and that his interpretation simply differed from the Church’s. Galileo’s was a light punishment this time. The inquisitors ordered that he not “hold or defend” the Copernican theory. But in 1632, Galileo boldly defied the church gag by publishing Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, a discussion among three characters, the Ptolemaic-Aristotelian theory, the superior Copernican theory, and the church, represented by Simplicio, meaning “fool.” This time Galileo was tried on “vehement suspicion of heresy.” Forced to swear that he “abjured, cursed, and detested” the work’s errors, he was sentenced to life imprisonment,

which he was permitted to serve under house arrest due to his old age, blindness, and ill health. Undaunted, and faithful to his understanding of truth, Galileo completed his Discourse on Two New Sciences, published in 1638. “The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hastenth to his place where he arose,” Melanchthon pressed, quoting Ecclesiastes 1:4-5. “The eyes are witnesses that the heavens revolve in the space of twenty-four hours…It is the part of a good mind to accept the truth as revealed by God, and to acquiesce in it… The earth can be nowhere if not in the centre of the universe.” This university professor, who at age twelve had changed his surname, Philipp Schwarzert, to its Greek equivalent, Melanchthon, meaning “black earth,” was the theologian most responsible for popularizing the teachings of his Wittenberg colleague, Martin Luther. Never mind that because of his attempts to create harmony between Protestantism and Catholicism and thus avert civil war—he was the author of the twenty-one articles of faith known as the Augsburg Confession, presented at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530—the Lutherans branded him a heretic. Like Luther, Melanchthon wanted all those who agreed with Copernicus silenced. And many were, by an Inquisition manned by Catholics and Protestants alike. The Dark Ages grew darker. More than three hundred years before the birth of Christ, Aristotle had determined that the planet was a sphere, and four centuries later, Ptolemy almost perfectly calculated the earth’s circumference and accurately partitioned the earth into climatic zones. Centuries later, the medieval Church rejected such facts, rediscovered via Muslims by humanist scholars, claiming that the facts did not coincide with its literal interpretation of the Scriptures. Instead the Church sided with the monk Cosmas, whose Topographia Christiana, based on his literal reading of the Bible, concluded that the world was a flat, rectangular plane, above which was sky, and above that, heaven. At the rectangle’s center was Jerusalem, edged by the Garden of Eden, which was watered by the four rivers of Paradise. Copernicus was attacked not only by the Catholic Inquisition, but also by the new Inquisition faction of Reformation heretics. Luther

wrote, “People give ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon…This fool wishes to reverse the entire scheme of astrology; but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth.” John Calvin quoted the Ninety-third Psalm, “The world also is stabilized, that it cannot be moved,” and asked, “Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?” Countless thousands were burned at the stake for proclaiming the truth of Copernicus. James J. Walsh, K.C. St. G., M.D., Ph.D., Litt.D., L.L.D., Dean, Fordham University School of Medicine, Professor of Physiological Psychology, Cathedral College, pointed out that the Roman Inquisition that prosecuted Galileo “endeavored to make a Church tribunal the judge of scientific truth, a function…which it was not competent to exercise.” Copernicus simply would not go away. In his Italian dialogues, philosopher Giordano Bruno declared that a rotating, orbiting earth was an unassailable fact. Because Bruno also believed that God was immanent in Creation, the Roman Inquisition burned him at the stake for the heresy of pantheism. Certainly the proprietors of absolutist salvation feared the superior intellectual powers of innovative geniuses like Leonardo da Vinci. According to Manchester, Leonardo, sui generic, questioned everything…So mighty was his intellect and so broad the spectrum of his gifts—he was, among other things, a master of engineering, biology, sculpture, linguistics, botany, music, philosophy, architecture, and science—that presenting an adequate summary of his feats is impossible. However, it is worth noting that at a time when Europe was mired in ignorance, shackled by superstition, and lacking solid precedents in every scholarly discipline, this uneducated, illegitimate son of an Anchiano country girl anticipated Galileo, Newton, and the Wright brothers. He did this by flouting absolute taboos. Leonardo was a formidable threat to Catholic society but was spared execution for heresy due to the corruption of the Borgia

popes, especially Cesare, who (among more heinous vices) exploited artists to enhance his rule with an aura of aesthetic grandeur. As Manchester eloquently points out, “Da Vinci, like Copernicus, threatened the certitude that knowledge had been forever fixed by God, the rigid mind-set which left no role for curiosity or innovation. Leonardo’s cosmology, based on what he called saper vedere (knowing how to see) was, in effect, a blunt instrument assaulting the fatuity which had, among other things, permitted a mafia of profane popes to desecrate Christianity.” Still today, sound science is sacrificed on the altar of biblical literalism. Though creationist science might strike most of us as an oxymoron, Henry Morris, the father of the creation science movement, defended it to the day of his death in 2006: “When science and the Bible differ, science has obviously misinterpreted its data.” Is it ignorance or arrogance that allowed Morris to claim in 1974, “The only way we can determine the true age of the earth is for God to tell us what it is. And since He has told us, very plainly, in the Holy Scriptures that it is several thousand years in age, and no more, that ought to settle all basic questions of terrestrial chronology.” Morris’s statement is similar to that made by Cardinal Bellarmino in 1615, during the trial of Galileo: “To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.” “The earth is flat, and anyone who disputes this claim is an atheist who deserves to be punished.” This was the view not of a Christian judge presiding over a medieval inquisition; this was a 1993 Muslim edict of Sheik Abdel-Aziz Ibn Baaz, supreme religious authority of Saudi Arabia. Both fundamentalists, the Muslim Sheik and Christian Morris could have shaken hands instead of upholding the tradition of mutual hostility. Martin Luther’s claim, “Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has,” echoes through modern religious pronouncements: “You cannot in academic honesty say that ‘I am a Christian,’ and that ‘I am a believer in God’ and ‘I accept evolution,’” asserted anti-academic, modestly educated fundamentalist guru, Jerry Falwell. According to sex-scandal scathed Jimmy Swaggart, also modestly educated,

“Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact. Only a spiritually bankrupt society could ever believe it…Only atheists could accept this Satanic theory.” James Kennedy added, “Every new advance and every step taken by science confirm not evolution but the Genesis account of creation. Yet evolution still continues to be taught as fact…Thus, the honorable place that had been given to human beings by God is surreptitiously aborted, and they are dragged down into the slime.” Kennedy’s first statement is patently untrue. I have already shown many of the incongruities in the Genesis story, which Kennedy, supposedly being well-educated, must surely have noticed. Given that, isn’t Kennedy being dishonest? I can’t help but notice that many fundamentalists exploit a perverse brand of creationism to make big bucks. Should we trust, for instance, Kent Hovind’s famous young Earth creationist seminars, given that in 2006 he was convicted of fifty-eight federal tax offenses and relate charges? Certainly part of the conservative agenda is to keep the wool fastened securely over the sheep’s eyes. Updating the science of ancient beliefs might raise questions that couldn’t be honestly answered in Christian terms. As Adolph Hitler put it, For how shall we fill people with blind faith in the correctness of a doctrine, if we ourselves spread uncertainty and doubt by constant changes in its outward structure...Here, too, we can learn by the example of the Catholic Church. Though its doctrinal edifice, and in part quite superfluously, comes into collision with exact science and research, it is nonetheless unwilling to sacrifice so much as one little syllable of its dogmas...it is only such dogmas which lend to the whole body the character of a faith. “We were convinced that the people need and require this faith,” Hitler understood, like today’s rightwing Republicans and TV evangelists. “We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.”

Hitler’s stamping out “atheism,” meaning opposition to biblical literalism, is what dominionists like James Kennedy work to accomplish. Judge Braswell Dean, quoted in Time Magazine, March 1981, concurs with fundamentalist creationists: “This monkey mythology of Darwin is the cause of permissiveness, promiscuity, prophylactics, perversions, pregnancies, abortions, pornotherapy, pollution, poisoning and proliferation of crimes of all types.” Alliteration aside, this playful prose poetically proves a paucity of common sense. It is disconcerting that in 1981, the monkey mind was as ignorant of slippery slope and basic biology as it was during the Scopes Trial of 1925. When Clarence Darrow defended John Scopes, who had broken the law by violating the Butler Act, a Tennessee law that forbade the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools because it contradicted the biblical account of Creation, at issue was not just the scientific validity of evolution and the constitutionality of the Butler Act; what was at stake was the accuracy of biblical literalism and the absolutist claims of religious tradition. Contrary to fundamentalist assertions, Charles Darwin was not an atheist. In his Autobiography, published in 1876, Darwin describes his decision, at his father’s suggestion, to consider training for the church rather than qualifying in medicine: I asked for some time to consider, as from what little I had heard and thought on the subject I had scruples about declaring my belief in all the dogmas of the Church of England, though otherwise I liked the thought of becoming a country clergyman. Accordingly I read with great care Pearson on the Creeds and a few other books on divinity; and as I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our Creed must be fully accepted. Darwin received the preparatory ordination degree from Christ’s College Cambridge but immediately upon graduation was diverted away from ordination by an offer to join the scientific crew of the now

famous HMS Beagle. In a chapter of his autobiography titled “Religious Beliefs,” Darwin describes his years on board: During these two years (March 1837 to January 1839) I was led to think much about religion. Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several officers (though themselves orthodox) for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality. I suppose it was the novelty of the argument that amused them. But I had gradually come by this time (i.e. 1836 to 1839) to see the Old Testament, from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rain-bow as a sign, &c., &c., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so, the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine. Darwin clearly grappled with the accepted tenets of the organized church. His honest, anti-elitist vision of truth could not discount the beliefs of more than half the world’s population. At present the most usual argument for the existence of an intelligent God is drawn from deep inward conviction and feelings which are experienced by most persons. But it cannot be doubted that Hindoos, Mahomedans and others might argue in the same manner and with equal force in favour of the existence of one God, or of many Gods, or as with the Buddhists of no God. / This argument would be a valid one, if all men of all races had the same inward conviction of the existence of one God; but we know this is very far from being the case. Therefore I cannot see that such inward convictions

and feelings are of any weight as evidence of what really exists. Later, Darwin realized that evolutionary adaptations giving rise to life forms do not contradict the existence of a Creator. In the face of horrendous suffering in the world, he said, we express a kind of existential faith in an omnipotent and omniscient God because “It revolts our understanding that his benevolence is not unbounded.” It revolts our understanding that his benevolence is not unbounded. Religious rifts revolt our understanding of unbounded benevolence. Deism, however, does not revolt one’s understanding in asserting the unbounded benevolence of God. Like Darwin, many Deists have scoured the Bible only to discover a disjointed book of incongruous myths and superstitions that contradict anyone’s understanding that God’s benevolence is unbounded. We have faced the Bible’s fallibility and lack of historical authority. Thanks to Deism, out of the cauldron of perpetual religious wars, inquisitions, and power-mongering emerged the distilled wisdom codified as America’s Bill of Rights. But even today, our fundamental rights of religious freedom have been compromised by rightwing authoritarians perverting the truth of America into a Calvin-esque notion of a “Christian nation.” In a world of religious fanaticism armed with nuclear weapons and an end-of-the-world death-wish, we would be wise to advance a healthier, more honest Reformation of universal, truly democratic Deism.



 

Chapter 12 Freedom of Conscience v. Theocracy: The Rise of Deist Democracy Far too many Americans take for granted the extraordinary experiment in freedom that our country has undertaken. Our remarkable republic could not have been possible had the powers of church and state not been, in principle at least, thoroughly separated. When church and state fused, as they had for centuries, authoritarian elitists always suppressed the masses into servitude to divine-right masters—themselves. The Greeks gave the world the democratic ideal more than two thousand years ago, but the long road to equality remains rocky because the powerful refuse to relinquish their power-over, and because many of the not-powerful don’t realize they’re being exploited. Early democratic ideals were quickly quashed when Rome overtook Greece and its high culture and ideals. Divine Caesars gave way to popes with their keys of Saint Peter to help them battle Mohammad’s Turks. Only after centuries of Roman elitism and Dark Age oppression was the dust blown off the annals of ancient Greece, inspiring humanist intellectuals, who inspired everyman to the hope of truly recovering the democratic spirit bequeathed by the greatest civilization the world had ever known. During the Renaissance and Reformation, monarchs made a comeback, challenging papal power and establishing their own national churches—the Church of England, for instance—which became more and more independent of the Vatican. By the end of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), the secular, centralized state began to dethrone the Church as the overlord of people’s fates. Military and civil bureaucracies expanded to such an extent that by

the time of Louis XIV, monarchs were at last rightfully becoming the servants of their own countries. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century further demystified divine-right worldviews. Philosophy split from Church regulated theology and sided with scientific humanism based on natural law. But as the Greek ideal rose like the Phoenix shaking off its ashes, Deism was born—really reborn like a returning Messiah. The Enlightenment of our Founders emerged against an immense backdrop of monarchial despotism and ecclesiastical tyranny. The ruled were scratching the itch for self-rule, freedom, and equal rights that wars and insurrections couldn’t fully quell. By the end of the eighteenth century, various revolutions, including the American Revolution, struggled to dissolve all forms of dictatorial power-over. Out of it emerged the fundamental assertion that every human being has an innate, God-given, equal right to power over his or her own life. Revolutions failed and recommenced as intellectuals and common people alike broke the chains of bondage—physical, intellectual, and spiritual. Once their revolts had gained the people their hard-earned freedom, they meant to keep it intact through governments and constitutions of, by, and for the people. Very different from today’s politically conservative Right that tends to vote Republican, Colonial Americans were tax resister Sons of Liberty who rioted like good liberals and abhorred imperialism, civil or clerical. America’s Revolution got a tremendous boost from Thomas Paine’s immensely popular book, Common Sense, which appealed for a manifesto that soon after became our Declaration of Independence. In France, Jean Jacques Rousseau’s doctrine of popular sovereignty inspired the third estate (the common people) to assert its Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789, establishing a constitutional monarchy. America’s Declaration of Independence of 1776, a humanist statement of principle asserting the rights of man and the legitimacy of revolution, rejected the sovereign rule of King George III. America completed its Constitution without yielding to the temptation to appoint its own king (which was seriously discussed on the floor) in favor of establishing a permanent republic of elected

representatives who would run the state machine that ensured liberty and equality. Our Founders also saw to it that God was left out of the Constitution, not because they didn’t believe in God, but because they wanted to prevent religious groups that thought they controlled God from thinking they controlled the country and its people. The Declaration of Independence When the call for independence was made by Richard Henry Lee on June 7, 1776, the colonists had failed to gain rights from King George and had created a Congress to make formal demands, all of which were denied or ignored. Congress appointed a committee of five—Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman—to draft a declaration of independence. All were erudite, but the young Jefferson was recruited to write the declaration due to “the Elegance of his pen,” as Adams put it. According to historian John P. Kaminski, The genius of Thomas Jefferson is that he infused the Declaration with “the proper tone and spirit called for.” Jefferson took a huge body of political literature—twenty-two thousand pamphlets published in Britain in the seventeenth century and several thousand more published during the eighteenth in Britain and America—and distilled it into five sentences—fewer than two hundred words—the introduction to the Declaration of Independence. Those five sentences constitute arguably what is the greatest statement in political literature. The Declaration asserts: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Jefferson was influenced by Enlightenment thinkers who believed that the natural world was organized by God in a logical and reasonable “self-evident” pattern accessible to God-given human reason. For Enlightenment thinkers, all men, being part of God’s natural Creation, are created equal in being equally human, and each person possesses certain unalienable rights. Jefferson upheld John Locke’s “social contract” by which government exists by consent of the governed, who should rebel if their natural rights are violated, as the American Revolutionaries who established the United States rebelled against British rule, both the monarchy and the Church of England. Like many early Americans influenced by the Enlightenment, Jefferson embraced the principle of “freedom of conscience.” That fundamental freedom ensured that corruption would not jeopardize our other freedoms. In Age of Reason, Thomas Paine stressed the importance of codifying the Declaration’s ideal of religious freedom in writing in a formal constitution. The circumstance [French Revolution] that has now taken place in France of the total abolition of the whole national order of priesthood, and of everything appertaining to compulsive systems of religion, and compulsive articles of faith, has not only precipitated my intention, but rendered a work of this kind [Constitution] exceedingly necessary, lest in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government, and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true. Our Founders agreed with Locke that the magistrate ought not to forbid the preaching or professing of any speculative opinions in any Church because they have no manner of relation to the civil rights of the subjects. If a Roman Catholic believes that to be really the body of Christ which another man calls bread, he does no injury thereby to his neighbor. If a Jew does not believe the New Testament to be the Word of God, he does not thereby alter anything in man’s

civil rights. If a heathen doubt of both Testaments, he is not therefore to be punished as a pernicious citizen. The power of the magistrate and the estates of the people may be equally secure whether any man believes these things or no. The Constitution of the United States In words that rank among the most momentous of all time, our Constitution begins with a succinct summation of our motivations and the overall structure of our intended government: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Like many of their contemporaries, the authors of our Constitution believed in the Enlightenment ideal of the perfectibility of humanity and government, which could only occur when individuals were allowed the freedom to develop their truest nature. The only purpose of government and law was to protect each individual’s freedom and security, which, by extension, protected society’s freedom and security. Laws could not be passed to impose the moral code of any person or group, religious or otherwise. The Founders did stress the importance of ethics in maintaining freedom and security, but the standards they established were not religious in the sense of being the province of one religion or sect, but were rather the Creatorgiven, necessary principles of conscience inherent in human nature. Those principles are summed up in the word freedom, one’s own freedom and respect for the freedom of others. Security means the preservation of any and all freedom, except what thwarts, damages, or destroys the freedom of others. Making love is a freedom; rape is not. We make laws to provide security from the rapist’s violation of another’s freedom. Liberating our natural freedom to pursue happiness has allowed us to coexist as a peaceful, productive society. Truly happy people don’t threaten the freedom and security of others. Denying freedom

and security destroys peace and productivity, and it chains our chances for the happiness our Declaration of Independence sanctified in the phrase, “pursuit of happiness,” a fundamental right often reiterated by Thomas Jefferson. “The care of human life and happiness and not their destruction is the first and only legitimate object of good government,” he told the Maryland Republicans in 1809. The following year he wrote to Thaddeus Kosciuski, “The freedom and happiness of man…[are] the sole objects of all legitimate government.” And a year later, “The happiness and prosperity of our citizens…is the only legitimate object of government and the first duty of governors.” In 1812, he wrote to M. van der Kemp, “The only orthodox object of the institution of government is to secure the greatest degree of happiness possible to the general mass of those associated under it.” The First Amendment Even though the Constitution was itself a declaration of our rights, some of our Founders—the Anti-Federalists—refused to sign the Constitution until it was agreed that our basic rights would be explicitly spelled out in a Bill of Rights, which became the Constitution’s first ten amendments. The First Amendment was first for a reason: Those basic rights were absolutely paramount, nonnegotiable, and irrevocable for the survival of a radically new kind of Union based on equality, freedom, and justice. The First Amendment states this, in its entirety: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” The phrase “establishment of religion” is called the Establishment Clause; “free exercise thereof” is known as the Free Exercise Clause. The Establishment Clause forbids not only practices that “aid one religion” or “prefer one religion over another,” but also those that “aid all religions.” “Separation of church and state” refers to a phrase used by Thomas Jefferson in his letter dated January 1, 1802, addressed to

the Danbury (Connecticut) Baptist Association to assure them of their religious freedom: Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between church and State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties. The “wall of separation” was intended to protect religion from the meddling of government, and government from the meddling of religion. Separation of church and state was so important that it was worded as the very first phrase of the first amendment in our Bill of Rights. Our Revolution and Constitution insured separation of church and state to preserve freedom against the challenges of civil despotism and religious tyranny that included not only mighty kings but also the monolithic Catholic Church of the Inquisitions, Crusades against Muslims, and Jewish pogroms; the Puritans with their dictatorial “City Upon a Hill”; Lutheranist-Calvinist theocraticism; and the domineering Church of England. Our Founders eloquently pledged their intellectual and moral allegiance to the principle of separation of church and state, ensuring our freedom of religion, an imperative component of freedom of conscience. The operative word here is freedom. All citizens have the exact same freedom. Being forced against our will and conscience to abide by someone else’s religious mores is not freedom of religion.

Constitutional Rights and Protections The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, states, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Two clauses, Due Process and Equal Protection, both protect, for instance, the right to gay marriage and all other gay rights; the right to worship freely as a Deist, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, agnostic, or any other faith, or to not worship at all; the right to own a house without auxiliary economic restraints imposed by the state, insurance companies, banks, and other institutions; the right to not be exploited by filthy rich capitalists destroying equal individual freedoms and property/economic rights and creating mandatory serfdom under the guise of “free” enterprise. What the Supreme Court calls “Substantive Due Process” extends constitutional protection to cover personal rights like the right to privacy and the personal rights to marry, have children, and raise children according to parental preference. In the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court struck down a Connecticut state law prohibiting married couples from using contraceptives, because the law interfered with the basic intimacy of marriage. In 1973, the Roe v. Wade decision concluded that states cannot bar a woman from having an abortion, thereby upholding a woman’s constitutional right to privacy and her constitutional right to control her own body. In 1954, the Equal Protection Clause came to the fore in the landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled that “separate-but-equal” is “inherently unequal.” Because racially segregated black schools can never be equal to white schools, desegregation was mandated. Segregating a segment of the population on the basis of sexual preference is also inherently unequal. Bias against gay marriage is analogous to bias against interracial marriage. Even though the Court ruled in the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision that the States (specifically the State of Virginia) could not make it illegal for black and white persons to marry, many fundamentalists still believe the Old Testament law that race-mixing is an abomination. Some

fundamentalist cults, like Christian Identity and the KKK, are even more extreme in their bigotry toward non-Christian non-whites and toward all gays. “Integration and equality are myths; they disguise a new segregation and a new equality,” argues R.J. Rushdoony, founder of Reconstructionism, which advocates reinstituting slavery and the death penalty for homosexuality and other abominations. “Every social order institutes its own program of separation or segregation. A particular faith and morality is given privileged status and all else is separated for progressive elimination.” Rushdoony is a man who would be king of nazi discrimination and extermination, American style. He dishonestly distorts the concept of equality, implying with a kind of whining bravado that fundamentalists are the ones being discriminated against. He pits his actual elitist agenda of segregation and inequality against a fictional antifundamentalist agenda of democracy. Ironically, it’s fundamentalist anti-Darwinists, not progressives, who maintain an obsolete, survival-of-the-fittest worldview. Bigotry, including the religious bigotry of reconstructionism, betrays ingratitude for everything America represents, and it thwarts fulfillment of the American ideal. Presently, the denial of gay marriage rights is probably the most blatant violation of the Constitution. The myth of “traditional family values” stands at the center of most anti-gay arguments. Many Americans don’t know that in the U.S., marriage is simply a legal contract—specifically, the civil marriage license—between the couple and the government. The actual document can be signed in the vestibule of a church, synagogue, temple, or mosque—or at a court, city hall, clerk’s office, park, house, or rented back room in a Vegas hotel. The place of ceremony is of no legal consequence; what matters is that the witness officiating the signing is designated by the government to do so. Even a high mass wedding is technically only a civil marriage. The sacramental aspect of the wedding ceremony performed within a religious institution is not a requirement of marriage and stands apart from the legal definition of marriage. In fact, the wedding ceremony is optional, and when performed, it is auxiliary. Over forty percent of marriages performed in the U.S. today are purely civil ceremonies

that include no ritualistic or religious aspects whatsoever, and that percentage is rising. Many Americans don’t know that the sacrament of marriage is not an institution thousands of years old, as the sanctity of marriage coalition would have us believe. For more than its first thousand years, the Church was not involved with marriage at all; marriage was not an official sacrament, weddings were not then performed in churches, and based on strict biblical interpretation (which anticipated the imminent coming of Christ), celibacy and even abandonment of one’s family were considered spiritually superior to marriage (Luke 20:34-35; Matt. 19:10-12; Matt. 22:30-32; Luke 14:26; Mark 13:12; Matt. 10:35-36; Mark 3:31, 33-35; Matt. 8:2122; Matt. 4:21-22; 1 Cor. 7). Many Americans don’t know that the traditional family of one man, one woman, and children was not the norm or even necessarily an option prior to modern times, contrary to what the traditional family values coalition would have us believe. Throughout the ages, marriage represented dynastic or property arrangements. Arranged marriages were common, sometimes even between infants of different countries whose families had never met. In ancient times, the “basic family unit” might include a child bride, harem, concubines, or eunuchs. Quite a few “basic family units” came into existence via pillage and rape. Families were male-dominated households consisting of extended families and their servants and slaves, and by some definitions, their animals. In many cultures, households extended to encompass clans, villages, and nations. These antiquated structures are still upheld in some area of the world. The status of marriage for women in America before the twentieth century was based on the concept of coverture, a common law doctrine under which a wife, like a slave, was “civilly dead.” Women were wives, and wives were slaves in having no independent legal existence apart from her master, her husband. Only men could request divorces. Women could not write wills, sign contracts, or obtain loans. Their property rights were very limited. Women had almost no access to education. They had basically no legal rights over their children. Nearly everywhere, no laws existed to prevent

their being brutally raped or beaten by their husbands. Very limited types of work were open to them, even though many women were expected to contribute to the family income. Equal pay for equal work was not even a concept. The oppression of womanly men and manly women is another chapter in the history of oppression of women: Fundamentalists want gay men and all women to get back into their proper, assigned roles. Blacks, other racial minorities, and people of other religious traditions have also been relegated to the inferior, secondary, “womanly” position by white men who want power-over. Limitations that create inequality define the woman’s role that fundamentalists today are reclaiming as part of their biblical package of traditional family values. It’s likely that deep down, even staunch fundamentalist women dread relinquishing to inferior values their natural right to equality. Blacks experienced limitations similar to those endured by women prior to the first wave of feminism. Progress accelerated when the common causes of blacks and women fused into a single revolution for equality. Today, gay is being called “the new black” due to the many levels of discrimination, hatred, and judgment the gay community is currently enduring. And of course family values Americans are still squeamish about sexuality. But the times are changing. Interracial marriage is acceptable in progressive circles; although it’s always been a constitutional right, for most of America’s history it has been illegal. Sodomy became legal in July 2003 with the landmark Lawrence v. Texas Supreme Court decision, which ruled state sodomy laws unconstitutional. The Supreme Court not only overturned its prior decision in the 1986 case, Bowers v. Hardwick, which had upheld the right of states (specifically Georgia) to enact sodomy laws (married couples could spend years in prison for having non-missionaryposition sex in their own homes), but also for the first time ever, the U.S. Supreme Court openly critiqued itself. It had been a mistake to rule that the government had any business voyeuristically policing the sexual behavior of two consenting adults in the privacy of their own bedroom.

Perhaps the exceedingly loud cry for family values is merely a cover-up for sexual license. The news is full of the sexual improprieties of prominent evangelists and family values politicians, though the media has largely failed to highlight the blatant hypocrisy of those adulteries, molestations, domestic violence, homosexual trysts and other sexual escapades, not to mention other “sins” and crimes. The Myth of Traditional Family Values What does traditional marriage mean today in our egalitarian society when over sixty percent of marriages end in divorce? (And that percentage is rising.) “The American family must be kept together at all costs, says Mr. Gingrich, Bob Dole and Phil Gramm—all of whom are on their second marriages and looking the other way at Bob Packwood’s sexual escapades,” to quote a 1994 New York Times article. And that was back in the good old days of budding “family values.” The collective sins of all-powerful Gingrich, for instance, currently on his third marriage (and busted for various adulteries), led to a far more heinous fall from political grace. What does traditional marriage mean when a substantial majority of families are headed by a single parent, usually mothers who receive little or no support from the father, who as a rule earns substantially more than she does? Is traditional marriage an institution worth continuing, given the high rate of spousal abuse, child abuse, and familial molestation within traditional families? Is there something wrong with this picture of happy traditional families when by some expert estimates, over half of all women will be raped at some point in their lifetimes, mostly by men married to other women? Even the Christian-based marketing research company, Barna Research Group, Ltd., reported in an article, “Christians Are More Likely to Experience Divorce Than Are Non-Christians,” that according to their large-scale study, conservative born-again Christians had a higher divorce rate than less conservative Protestants and non-Christians. Liberal blue states are in fact more classically conservative than the “conservative” fundamentalist red states. In his book, Crimes

Against Nature, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. points out that divorce rates and unmarried pregnancy rates tend to be far lower in blue states than red ones. Massachusetts has the most durable marriages in America. Divorce and teen birth rates in Texas are nearly double those of the Bay State’s. Every single one of the nine states with the highest divorce rates went for Bush. The nine states with the lowest divorce rates went for Kerry. Marriage itself is less popular in Texas than in Massachusetts. In Texas, the percentage of unmarried people is 32.4 percent; in Massachusetts, it’s 26.8 percent. Red state residents are more likely to watch salacious shows like Desperate Housewives, buy pornography, commit murder and other violent crimes, and impregnate your teenage daughter than blue state citizens. Numerous studies on domestic violence have concluded that violence against wives results from patriarchal customs and laws that historically have perpetuated stereotyped masculine gender roles, which have always given men an incontestable status of domination and control over women. As sociologists Richard J. Gelles and Ann Levine explain in their textbook, Sociology: An Introduction, “The Bible was interpreted as teaching that woman was created from Adam’s rib, as an afterthought, to serve man’s needs; that she was weak by nature and easily lured into temptation; and that as punishment for Eve’s transgression, she must live a life of subjugation.” In their book, Battered into Submission: The Tragedy of Wife Abuse in the Christian Home, James and Phyllis Alsdurf show that as the rigidity of the church’s teachings about gender roles and hierarchy increases, so does the probability of wife abuse. The expectation of absolute obedience required by fundamentalism is one explanation why women can’t grasp the selfdeprecating, self-destructive incongruity of a stance held by women that opposes basic rights for women. In her book, Cults In Our Midst: The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menace, cult expert Margaret Thaler Singer explains that within oppressive groups, enforcement of obedience depends on punishment patterns that include ridicule and name-calling. If you doubt or question, the group

uses its own disparaging terms to make you feel like a renegade, a spy, an agent, a nonbeliever, or Satan—or abortionist, feminist, Marxist, humanist, or Christian-hater. The closed logic of the cult is reinforced by peer pressure, and the internal language meant to ridicule and denigrate is always present. The simple choice is to stop doubting and questioning, to adapt, conform, go with the flow. It’s easier to conform and to learn to be a good believer, a good follower, rather than resist the dictates of the group. This is the kind of cult coercion that keeps religious women in their timid, inferior, subservient role, the same kind of coercion that enforces gays’ futile attempts at becoming ex-gay, the same kind of coercion used by wealthy politicians to push down anyone who challenges their economic superiority. America is not a straight “Christian nation” in the sense that the fundamentalists mean it. Oppressive coercion is what revolutionaries like our Founders have always fought against. Ironically, a 1989 survey of Christian women found that only three percent looked to their ministers for moral guidance. Yet fundamentalist women at the top of anti-feminist organizations who are ordering women to submit to hierarchical marriage are apparently looked up to for advice. And these women at the top are being made rich by that advice. It’s not unreasonable to speculate that these rich manly women at the top could well be repressed lesbians who remain repressed because of their faith in an infallible Bible. Guilt and the shame of stigma keep repressed lesbians lying even to themselves about their natural sexual orientation. Women raised in authoritarian homes could easily misconstrue male control as love, so they content themselves with being submissive, i.e. heterosexual. Sociologists Charles W. Peek, George D. Lowe, and L. Susan Williams conducted a study in 1991 that revealed that although conservative Christian men and women are equally sexist, fundamentalist men derive their sexism via affiliation with fundamentalist groups, but women’s sexist attitudes stem from their biblical literalism. In their article, “Gender and God’s Word: Another Look at Religious Fundamentalism and Sexism,” they noted that

“Women who take the word of God with a grain of salt are less sexist.” The superior male is validated by association with other superior males. Each male plays out the same God-ordained role, which “proves” collective superiority. Fundamentalist men collectively play out the myth of themselves. It could be argued that the internal self eventually smothers behind the mask, so that only the mythic external self remains. At that point, the fundamentalist man is the myth of himself. Because it is biblical literalism, especially as pontificated by male evangelicals, that coerces fundamentalist women to accept their inferior position, demystifying the Bible is critical to effecting equality for women, and by extension, for gays. For women, the destructiveness of sexism is internalized. For men, it is projected outward. Both tendencies are consistent with the tendencies of violent criminals: women internalize and become selfdestructive, but men externalize their violence. The correlation between sex role socialization and rape of women and gay men has been firmly established. Rape is one means misogynist men subordinate, degrade, humiliate, and punish women and gays. Numerous studies and statistics have demonstrated the correlation between fundamentalism and violence against women. Opposition to equality and reinforcement of sex roles make rape more likely. In her article, “The Worst Sexual Sin: Sexual Violence and the Church,” Christine Gudorf, Professor of Theology at Xavier University in Cincinnati, points out that the Church’s interpretation of the crucifixion is used to rationalize sexual violence when it tells victims that it’s God’s will, that it’s “good to suffer,” that victims “earn God’s special favor.” Catholic researchers report that nearly thirty percent of nuns have experienced sexual violence from within the church. 14.1 percent of Southern Baptist clergy have sexually abused members. The actual incident rates could well be much higher. Because these victims often fail to report being raped, perpetrators know there will be no repercussion for their acts, so their rapes continue and incidents increase.

Domestic violence worldwide is the leading cause of death of women between the ages of fourteen and forty-four. In the U.S., a woman is beaten every fifteen seconds, and one-third of women murdered are victims of husbands, boyfriends, or former partners. One in four women will be raped at some point during her lifetime (some experts say the rate is closer to one in two, or half of all women). Two decades of research have indicated that in an average twelve-month period, at least two million women in the U.S. would be victims of severe assaults by their male partners. Most assaults against women are committed by current or former male partners. “At least twenty-one percent of all women are physically assaulted by an intimate male at least once during adulthood. More than half of all women (fifty-two percent) murdered in the United States in the first half of the 1980s were killed by their partners,” as Dr. Lisa Goodman summed it up during her testimony before a congressional hearing on domestic violence. Is it any wonder that a 1999 study by the University of Chicago found that nearly half of all women have sexual dysfunction? But it’s not just those disgusted with male violence that are turned-off. Masters and Johnson found that many sexually dysfunctional women were religious conservatives who had internalized negative views about sexuality for the sake of pleasure. Hypoactive sexual desire disorder and sexual aversion disorder are commonly the result of fundamentalist upbringing, and are also common among those “trying to have sex with a partner of the non preferred sex.” Among animals, only humans have sex purely for pleasure, and only humans have sex whenever they choose, not just when fertile females are “in season.” Ironically, the fundamentalist bias is against normal human sexuality and for the base animal preoccupation with strictly procreative sex. Pleasure is one of the most powerful expressions of love—an experience that is uniquely human. Shouldn’t Christians be less concerned about sex and love and more concerned about their absence? Do women, even fundamentalist women, really want to be relegated to the inferior, passive position dictated by the apostle Paul (Eph. 5:22-27)?

Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the Savior. Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, in order to make her holy by cleansing her with the washing of water by the word, so as to present the church to himself in splendor, without a spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind—yes, so that she may be holy and without blemish. According to Paul’s reasoning, women are to men as men are to Christ. Given that according to conservative Christianity, Christ is God, Paul is saying that women are to men as men are to God— which (given how much lower even male humans are from God) locates women a few planes lower than amoebas. (In Romans 1, Paul pushes gays and lesbians down further from divinity, down through the cusp into hell.) Women are saved and made holy and pure not by Christ, certainly not by her own works or faith, but via her husband serving the middleman role of Christ in his priestly, savior role. Even most conservative women today laugh at such traditional machismo fanning its sanctified peacock feathers. Which is not to say that their conservative husbands are laughing. Take Pat Robertson, for instance: “I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that’s the way it is, period.” Men aren’t superior because the Bible says so; the Bible says so because men are superior. Of course it was men in superior positions who wrote the texts that other superior men chose to be part of what we call the Bible. That choice codified patriarchal power as the incontestable, absolute tradition. The “superior” male must maintain the myth of his moral superiority, even at the expense of reason, honesty, and fairness, not to mention the larger half of humanity. Anti-feminist women would be enlightened if they checked out the stats available online via resources such as the National Sexuality Resource Center, San Francisco State University; the professional

website of Karen Franklin, one of the top experts in forensic psychology; or the professional website of G.M. Herek, Psychology Professor at the University of California at Davis, whose team has done extensive research on gay violence; or Kimberly Blaker’s The Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America. Even given that many rapes are committed by repeat offenders, probably at least 10% of men have committed rape. 25% of men surveyed in recent studies admitted “sexual aggression,” and 35% or so admitted “sexual coercion,” both of which could be defensive admittance of rape. 35% of male college students admitted that they might rape a woman if they could be assured of not getting caught. That’s more than one in three of our all-American guys. Assaults against gays fulfill the same motivations as assaults against women, according to most experts. Karen Franklin’s study of high school and community college students in the very liberal San Francisco Bay Area revealed surprisingly high levels of expressed homophobia. Studies of community colleges in Northern California and elsewhere have shown even higher levels. 10% of college students admitted to having threatened or physically assaulted a gay man or lesbian; 24% of college students, 32% of community college men, and 50% of male college students, and 70% of San Francisco Bay Area college males admitted to name-calling (this could be because of the larger, more visible gay population); 35% said they would harass or assault a gay man or lesbian if flirted with or propositioned; 18% had physically assaulted a gay man or lesbian. In her published articles (available online), Franklin cites statistics from a 1992 overview complied by Berrill summarizing two dozen national, regional, and local victimization surveys. Franklin considers these to be perhaps the most comprehensive. Berrill’s overview revealed the extent of experiences we call collectively “gay bashing”: 80% verbal harassment; 44% threats of violence; 33% chased or followed; 25% pelted with objects; 17% physically assaulted; 13% spat upon; 09% assaulted with objects or weapons. Also included in Franklin’s articles are statistics derived from the 2001 national survey by the Gay Lesbian & Straight Education Network. These stats are important, because most rape victims and most gays who have been assaulted don’t report the crime to police.

Women don’t want to re-experience the trauma through repeated examination and cross-examination, which is what the legal process demands. That gays don’t report makes sense, given that in 2002-2003, for instance, in 15%-20% of assaults on gays reported to police, the officers refused to accept a report. The gay violence stats also exclude closeted gays and heterosexuals who were mistakenly thought to be gay, an estimated 10% of victims. Furthermore, police often don’t classify incidents as antigay hate crimes or report them to the FBI under the voluntary guidelines of the Crimes Statistics Act of 1990. Though the guidelines are being updated, attitudes within law enforcement still need to be adjusted through education and sensitivity training. According to the Gay Lesbian & Straight Education Network national survey of 2001, 91% of homosexuals heard frequent antigay comments at school; 14% had been punched or kicked; 28% had been shoved, pushed, or otherwise physically harassed. Interestingly, according to Franklin, “Many of these assailants were not vehement in their antigay attitudes, instead citing negative societal stereotypes about homosexuality as justifications for their assaults. Key stereotypes cited were that gay people violate gender norms and that they are sexually predatory.” Gay people are sexually predatory? How ironic, coming from predatory men—I mean the large segment of the male population that have admitted having committed coercion, sexual aggression, or rape. It’s unlikely that gay men are any more predatory than straight men. In fact, if a gay man hits up on another man, isn’t he doing what a straight man does? Isn’t it the male’s role to “hit up”? Doesn’t our culture endorse male sexual assertiveness? In effect, straight men are condemning gay men for doing what men are supposed to do, by the straight men’s own standards. Gay people violate gender norms? A gender norm is a fad. Not that long ago, women couldn’t wear pants, couldn’t cut their hair short, couldn’t have rights equal to a man’s. Men couldn’t stay home with the kids, couldn’t grow their hair long (remember the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young lyric, “letting my freak flag fly”?),

couldn’t share rights equally with a woman. There’s a new gender norm now. It’s called diversity. Legal Queries Regarding Gay Marriage Can the government justly deny any consenting persons the right to have sexual relations of any kind within the privacy of their own homes? To do so would codify discrimination; it would deprive citizens of the freedom and security it was appointed to protect. On what basis can the legislature or the Supreme Court dictate the legally sanctioned rules for or against marriage between consenting adults? Is it the government’s right to support denial of marriage rights—which could equally be called rites—to gays and lesbians in committed, monogamous relationships while supporting those rights—and rites—for straight couples? What right does the government have in the first place to require a state document confirming a private, often sacred, act of marriage? Doesn’t that violate separation of church and state? What justification is there to demand an act of marriage to legitimize a relationship between consenting domestic partners? Why require civil marriage at all? The practical answer is that legal marriage grants to each person protections from and responsibilities to each other, their families, and society—protections and responsibilities that the courts and legislatures are denying segregated citizens. The Constitution first and foremost honors the fundamental principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence, the selfevident truths that all human beings are created equal and that all are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In addition, government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, not from the commands of dictators, religious or otherwise. Rather than uphold fundamental constitutional purposes, contemporary society, government, and the judicial system have permitted ostracism of gays and lesbians; have admitted laws that abet persecution through prosecution of obsolete, sexually restrictive offenses (most of which apply equally to straight couples, though

prosecution is far more often against gays); and have refused to validate the rights of gays and lesbians as full and equal citizens. This nation’s government has fomented disorder and thwarted perfect union by denying gays and lesbians equal rights and protections guaranteed by the Constitution, including the right to religious freedom, as well as the right to privacy as it has evolved through court interpretation; has institutionalized injustice by upholding certain tenets of a conservative, fundamentalist minority and thereby unjustly validated them as the norm of society; has undermined the domestic tranquility of gays and lesbians wishing to marry, raise children, and generally participate in society without meddling, harassment, and legal prosecution; has deprived gays and lesbians of full legal protection from persecution, discrimination, and violence; has not promoted the general welfare, especially given that a large segment of the population is gay, lesbian, or bisexual, or friendly toward those groups; has denied gays and lesbians the blessings of liberty by forbidding certain activities that are not the province of government to dictate or forbid. Denying gays and lesbians the right to marry relegates a substantial segment of the country’s population to a position of second-class citizens—a position that is not supposed to exist under the equality ethic of democratic America. The government has shirked its responsibility, according to the definition of its role in protecting the gay person’s right to happiness; denying gays and lesbians the right to equal marriage deprives them, their children, and their friends and relatives of happiness in many contexts. Violations of Church/State Separation The Establishment Clause prohibits fundamentalist or any other version of Christianity from imposing its definition of marriage on American citizens. The Free Exercise Clause prevents government intrusion in the rite of marriage. Yet gays and lesbians are denied equal protection against discrimination and refused the full privileges granted to straight couples. Gays and lesbians married in Massachusetts are being denied equal protection within other states. Lawmakers try to

legislate inferior substitutes for marriage, such as civil unions and domestic partnerships. But separate but equal is as inherently unequal for gays and lesbians of this nation as it has been for blacks and women. Marriage is still forbidden to gays—which is clearly unconstitutional—because fundamentalists have succeeded in persuading a sizable segment of the public and several lawmakers that somehow gays are not entitled to the same status as every other American. Jews can marry. Muslims can marry. Native Americans can marry. Buddhists can marry. A hundred-year-old woman can marry an eighteen-year-old boy. But gays, even gay Christians, cannot marry—only because fundamentalists have incited enough public sentiment against gay rights to promote their own unconstitutional religious bigotry. In denying homosexuals the exact same equal right to marriage that it offers to heterosexuals, in denying even progressive Christian homosexuals the exact same equal right to marriage that it offers to fundamentalists, the state acquiesces to fundamentalist demands to enact laws, promote mores, thwart freedom, obstruct rights, disallow equality, and foment oppression, all in preference to one religion—or rather, one version of one religion. This nullifies the intent of our nation’s Founders, who institutionalized freedom of religion as a sacred right. Separation of church and state was codified to prevent both ecclesiastical and governmental despotism at the very least through a kind of balance of separate powers. The union of church bigotry and state subjugation was the marriage our Founders committed to extinction. All of the First Amendment rights protect our freedom; they protect us from governmental intrusion, even on the seemingly small scale of legal restraints. Yet today, when gays are denied the civil right to marry, the government illegally forces restraints that express antiquated, conservative religious biases, thus colluding with religion, in direct opposition to our Constitution. Despite the claims of Jefferson’s letter and of the First Amendment, which both stipulate that religion is not the business of government or politics, legislatures in several states are instituting

laws respecting fundamentalist beliefs about the sin of homosexuality. According to Jefferson and the Constitution, legislature cannot dictate faith and worship, and for that reason, it cannot define or even acknowledge sin. Yet today, several state legislatures are passing laws making it illegal for gays to enjoy the full rights granted to those who partake of the sacrament of marriage within churches that do not identify homosexuality as a sin. Legislature cannot make a law that prefers—establishes—one religion’s views over another’s. Yet again, state legislatures are passing laws that dictate fundamentalist Christian perspectives to the exclusion of other beliefs, including progressive Christian. Denying gay marriage is a specifically fundamentalist agenda, because homosexuality is a sin according to literalists who assume biblical infallibility. But of course even literalists are selective about which infallible abominations they choose to admonish and which they choose to practice themselves. Homosexuality is a selective sin and homophobia is selective bigotry. Legislature can never pass a law that prohibits the free exercise of any religion or belief. Yet state legislatures are passing laws prohibiting the free exercise of secular, religious non-Christian, and even progressive Christian beliefs that allow for the free exercise of gay marriage. The Constitution has built a wall of separation between church and state. Yet in denying gay rights, the state is tearing down that hard-earned wall by passing laws that dictate one particular, narrow, conservative Christian religious stance toward gay marriage.



 

Chapter 13 Interlude: A Word From Our Founders and Distinguished Guests For most of the Founders most instrumental in creating and upholding our Constitution, freedom of religion and separation of church and state were considered absolutely fundamental to the survival and integrity of our nation. Those Founders would have supported equal rights, including today’s hotly-debated gay rights, gay marriage, and gay adoption, because they supported absolutely each citizen’s right to freedom of conscience. America is not a Christian nation. We are, and have always been, a religious melting pot. Many of our most distinguished and influential Founders understood the danger of succumbing to the demands of authoritarian superstition. The Enlightenment replaced the dictates of blind faith with the scientific method and ideals grounded in common sense. Scholars debated the validity of sacred texts as a source of historical fact or spiritual truth. Thomas Jefferson even revised the Bible, omitting from his Jefferson Bible, or The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, as it is formally titled, the supernatural elements, which he believed were padded onto the actual events after the fact to legitimize the deification of Jesus. As Jefferson explained in a letter to Joseph Priestley, his version of the Bible would admit only the remaining “principles of pure deism” (his words) taught by Jesus. As he undertook his task of distillation, he wrote to John Adams, In extracting the pure principles which he taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been

muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to themselves. We must dismiss the Platonists and Plotinists, the Stagyrites and Gamalielites, the Eclectics, the Gonstics and Scholastics, their essences and emanations, their logos and demiurges, aeons and daemons, male and female, with a long train of...or, shall I say at once, of nonsense. We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus, paring off the amphibologisms into which they have been led, by forgetting often, or not understanding, what had fallen from him, by giving their own misconceptions of his dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves. There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is an octavo of forty-six pages, of pure and unsophisticated doctrines. Not only was the United States of America not founded as a Christian nation, it was founded specifically to prevent the domination of any religion, Christian or otherwise. Freedom of conscience was and is the cornerstone of our nation. To illustrate my point, in the spirit of Jeffersonian cut-and-paste I have called here as witnesses a few of our most famous and influential Founders. In each author’s case, numerous quotes have been collaged together into a discourse that argues for freedom of conscience. We will hear first from French philosopher John Locke, who perhaps more than any other philosopher of the time inspired their democratic ideals. Then we will hear from Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, John Adams, and Samuel Adams. JOHN LOCKE

(from A Letter Concerning Toleration and Second Treatise of Government) The toleration of those that differ from others in matters of religion is so agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to the genuine reason of mankind, that it seems monstrous for men to be so blind as not to perceive the necessity and advantage of it in so clear a light. No private person has any right in any manner to prejudice another person in his civil enjoyments because he is of another church or religion. All the rights and franchises that belong to him as a man, or as a denizen, are inviolably to be preserved to him. These are not the business of religion. Those whose doctrine is peaceable and whose manners are pure and blameless ought to be upon equal terms with their fellowsubjects. Thus if solemn assemblies, observations of festivals, and public worship be permitted to any one sort of professors, all these things ought to be permitted to the Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists, Arminians, Quakers, and others, with the same liberty. Nay…neither Pagan, nor Mohammedan, nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth because of his religion. The care of souls is not committed to the civil magistrate, any more than to other men. It is not committed unto him, I say, by God; because it appears not that God has ever given any such authority to one man over another as to compel anyone to his religion. For no man can, if he would, conform his faith to the dictates of another. The care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists only in outward force; but true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God. A church, then, I take to be a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord in order to the public worshipping of God in such manner as they judge acceptable to Him and effectual to the salvation of their souls. I say it is a free and voluntary society. But, after all, the principal consideration, and which absolutely determines this controversy, is this: Although the magistrate’s

opinion in religion be sound, and the way that he appoints be truly Evangelical, yet, if I be not thoroughly persuaded thereof in my own mind, there will be no safety for me in following it. No way whatsoever that I shall walk in against the dictates of my conscience will ever bring me to the mansions of the blessed. It is in vain for an unbeliever to take up the outward show of another man’s profession. Faith only and inward sincerity are the things that procure acceptance with God. In a word, whatsoever may be doubtful in religion, yet this at least is certain, that no religion which I believe not to be true can be either true or profitable unto me. In vain, therefore, do princes compel their subjects to come into their Church communion under pretence of saving their souls. If they believe, they will come of their own accord, if they believe not, their coming will nothing avail them. And therefore, when all is done, they must be left to their own consciences. It is not the diversity of opinions (which cannot be avoided), but the refusal of toleration to those that are of different opinions (which might have been granted), that has produced all the bustles and wars that have been in the Christian world upon account of religion. The heads and leaders of the Church, moved by avarice and insatiable desire of dominion, making use of the immoderate ambition of magistrates and the credulous superstition of the giddy multitude, have incensed and animated them against those that dissent from themselves, by preaching unto them, contrary to the laws of the Gospel and to the precepts of charity, that schismatics and heretics are to be outed of their possessions and destroyed. And thus have they mixed together and confounded two things that are in themselves most different, the Church and the commonwealth. This is the unhappy agreement that we see between the Church and State. Whereas if each of them would contain itself within its own bounds—the one attending to the worldly welfare of the commonwealth, the other to the salvation of souls—it is impossible that any discord should ever have happened between them. THOMAS PAINE (from Age of Reason and Common Sense)

The intellectual part of religion is a private affair between every man and his Maker and in which no third party has any right to interfere. The practical part consists in our doing good to each other. But since religion has been made into a trade, the practical part has been made to consist of ceremonies performed by men called priests, and the people have been amused with ceremonial shows, processions, and bells. By devices of this kind, true religion has been banished; and such means have been found out to extract money even from the pockets of the poor, instead of contributing to their relief. No man ought to make a living by religion. It is dishonest so to do. Religion is not an act that can be performed by proxy. One person cannot act religion for another. Every person must perform it for himself; and all that a priest can do is to take from him; he wants nothing but his money and then to riot in the spoil and laugh at his credulity. As to religion, I hold it to be the indispensable duty of all government to protect all conscientious professors thereof, and I know of no other business which government hath to do therewith. Let a man throw aside that narrowness of soul, that selfishness of principle, which the niggards of all professions are so unwilling to part with, and he will be at once delivered of his fears on that head. Suspicion is the companion of mean souls and the bane of all good society. For myself, I fully and conscientiously believe that it is the will of the Almighty that there should be diversity of religious opinions among us: It affords a larger field for our Christian kindness. Were we all of one way of thinking, our religious dispositions would want matter for probation; and on this liberal principle, I look on the various denominations among us to be like children of the same family differing only in what is called their Christian names. I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind and monopolize power and profit. I do

not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe. To God, and not to man, are all men accountable on the score of religion. Be ye sure that ye mistake not the cause and ground of your testimony. Call not coldness of soul religion; nor put the Bigot in the place of the Christian. O ye partial ministers of your own acknowledged principles. THOMAS JEFFERSON (from The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, America Series) We have solved, by fair experiment, the great and interesting question whether freedom of religion is compatible with order in government and obedience to the laws. And we have experienced the quiet as well as the comfort which results from leaving every one to profess freely and openly those principles of religion which are the inductions of his own reason and the serious convictions of his own inquiries. I have no fear, but that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master. Could the contrary of this be proved, I should conclude either that there is no God, or that He is a malevolent being. There are certain fences which experience has proved peculiarly efficacious against wrong, and rarely obstructive of right, which yet the governing powers have ever shown a disposition to weaken and remove. Of the first kind is freedom of religion. Our Constitution… has not left the religion of its citizens under the power of its public functionaries. To suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own.

I consider the government of the U S. as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises. This results not only from the provision that no law shall be made respecting the establishment, or free exercise, of religion, but from that also which reserves to the states the powers not delegated to the U.S. Certainly no power to prescribe any religious exercise, or to assume authority in religious discipline, has been delegated to the general government. This blessed country of free inquiry and belief has surrendered its creed and conscience to neither kings nor priests. All religions are equally independent here, our laws knowing no distinction of country, of classes among individuals, and with nations, our [creed] is justice and reciprocity. The manners of every nation are the standard of orthodoxy within itself. But these standards being arbitrary, reasonable people in all allow free toleration for the manners as for the religion of others. This country, which has given to the world the example of physical liberty, owes to it that of moral emancipation also. That differences of opinion should arise among men on politics, on religion, and on every other topic of human inquiry, and that these should be freely expressed in a country where all our faculties are free, is to be expected. But these valuable privileges are much perverted when permitted to disturb the harmony of social intercourse and to lessen the tolerance of opinion. The inquisition of public opinion overwhelms in practice the freedom asserted by the laws in theory. It is inconsistent with the spirit of our laws and Constitution to force tender consciences. Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing to slavery. I suppose belief to be the assent of the mind to an intelligible proposition. Our opinions are not voluntary. The opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds. Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to God alone.

Ignorance and bigotry, like other insanities, are incapable of selfgovernment. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck. Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both. We are destined to be a barrier against the return of ignorance and barbarism. What an effort…of bigotry in politics and religion have we gone through! The barbarians really flattered themselves they should be able to bring back the times of Vandalism, when ignorance put everything into the hands of power and priestcraft. The clergy, who have missed their union with the State…and the political adventurers, who have lost the chance of swindling and plunder in the waste of public money, will never cease to bawl on the breaking up of their sanctuary. In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. The law for religious freedom… [has] put down the aristocracy of the clergy and restored to the citizen the freedom of the mind. The advance of liberalism…[encourages] the hope that the human mind will some day get back to the freedom it enjoyed two thousand years ago. But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State. The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and engrafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man. Millions of innocent men, women, and children since the introduction of Christianity have been burnt, tortured, fined, and imprisoned, yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. As the Creator has made no two faces alike, so no two minds, and probably no two creeds. The Christian religion, when divested of the rags in which they [the clergy] have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity of its benevolent institutor, is a religion of

all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind. I have ever thought religion a concern purely between our God and our consciences, for which we were accountable to Him and not to the priests. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. I am for freedom of religion, and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another. We ought with one heart and one hand to hew down the daring and dangerous efforts of those who would seduce the public opinion to substitute itself into that tyranny over religious faith which the laws have so justly abdicated. It would seem impossible that an intelligent people with the faculty of reading and right of thinking should continue much longer to slumber under the pupilage of an interested aristocracy of priests and lawyers, persuading them to distrust themselves and to let them think for them. Awaken them from this voluntary degradation of mind! No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority. Our civil rights have no dependence upon our religious opinions more than our opinions in physics or geometry. The purpose of government is to maintain a society which secures to every member the inherent and inalienable rights of man, and promotes the safety and happiness of its people. Protecting these rights from violation, therefore, is its primary obligation. The principles of government…[are] founded in the rights of man. It is to secure our rights that we resort to government at all. The most sacred of the duties of a government [is] to do equal and impartial justice to all its citizens. The general insurrection of the world against its tyrants will ultimately prevail by pointing the object of government to the happiness of the people, and not merely to that of their selfconstituted governors. Every man, and every body of men on earth, possesses the right of self-government. The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind. The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them. A free people

[claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate. Natural rights [are] the objects for the protection of which society is formed and municipal laws established. Under the law of nature, all men are born free, every one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will. This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the Author of nature, because necessary for his own sustenance. The constitutional freedom of religion [is] the most inalienable and sacred of all human rights. The equal rights of man, and the happiness of every individual, are now acknowledged to be the only legitimate objects of government. It issued finally in that inestimable state of freedom which alone can ensure to man the enjoyment of his equal rights. God…has formed us moral agents…that we may promote the happiness of those with whom He has placed us in society, by acting honestly towards all, benevolently to those who fall within our way, respecting sacredly their rights, bodily and mental, and cherishing especially their freedom of conscience, as we value our own. The Giver of life gave it for happiness and not for wretchedness. The only orthodox object of the institution of government is to secure the greatest degree of happiness possible to the general mass of those associated under it. Bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God. If ever there was a holy war, it was that which saved our liberties and gave us independence. We are bound, you, I, and every one to make common cause, even with error itself, to maintain the common right of freedom of conscience. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (from A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain; Benjamin Franklin On the Federal Constitution, Speaking before the Convention in Philadelphia, 1787, and his Letter to Ezra Stiles, March 9, 1790)

There is said to be a First Mover, who is called GOD, Maker of the Universe. He is said to be all-wise, all-good, all powerful. These two propositions being allowed and asserted by people of almost every sect and opinion, I have here supposed them granted, and laid them down as the foundation of my argument; what follows then, being a chain of consequences truly drawn from them, will stand or fall as they are true or false. Most men, indeed, as well as most sects in religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them, it is so far error. Steele, a Protestant, in a dedication, tells the pope that the only difference between our two churches in their opinions of the certainty of their doctrine is, the Romish Church is infallible, and the Church of England is never in the wrong. But, though many private persons think almost as highly of their own infallibility as of that of their sect, few express it so naturally as a certain French lady, who, in a little dispute with her sister said: “But I meet with nobody but myself that is always in the right.” I believe in one God, creator of the universe. That he governs it by his Providence. That he ought to be worshiped. That the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental principles of all sound religion, and I regard them as you do in whatever sect I meet with them. As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the system of morals, and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw, or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble. I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if that belief has the good consequence, as it probably has, of making his doctrines more respected and better observed, especially as I do not perceive that the Supreme takes it amiss, by distinguishing the unbelievers in his government of the world with any particular marks of his displeasure.

I shall only add, respecting myself, that, having experienced the goodness of that being in conducting me prosperously through a long life, I have no doubt of its continuance in the next, though without the smallest conceit of meriting such goodness. I have ever let others enjoy their religious sentiments, without reflecting on them for those that appeared to me unsupportable and even absurd. All sects here, and we have a great variety, have experienced my good will in assisting them with subscriptions for building their new places of worship; and as I have never opposed any of their doctrines, I hope to go out of the world in peace with them all. JAMES MADISON (from Letters and Other Writings of Madison, Published by Order of Congress) The experience of the United States is a happy disproof of the error so long rooted in the unenlightened minds of well-meaning Christians, as well as in the corrupt hearts of persecuting usurpers, that without a legal incorporation of religious and civil polity, neither could be supported. A mutual independence is found most friendly to practical religion, to social harmony, and to political prosperity. Union of religious sentiments begets a surprising confidence, and ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption, all of which facilitate the execution of mischievous projects. Poverty and luxury prevail among all sorts. Pride, ignorance, and knavery among the priesthood, and vice and wickedness among the laity. This is bad enough. But it is not the worst. I have to tell you that diabolical hell-conceived principle of persecution rages among some, and to their eternal infamy, the clergy can furnish their quota of imps for such business. This vexes me the most of anything whatever. There are at this in the adjacent county [Virginia] not less than five or six well meaning men in close goal for publishing their religious sentiments, which in the main are very orthodox…So I leave you to pity me and pray for liberty of conscience to revive among us. That liberal catholic and equitable way of thinking as to the rights of conscience, which is one of the characteristics of a free people… is but little known among the zealous adherents to our hierarchy.

That religion or the duty we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, being under the direction of reason and conviction only, not of violence or compulsion, all men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise of it according to the dictates of conscience; and therefore, no man or class of men ought on account of religion to be invested with peculiar emoluments or privileges, nor subjected to any penalties or disabilities. Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect. We hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth “that religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.” The religion, then, of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right. It is unalienable because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds, cannot follow the dictates of other men. It is unalienable also because what is here a right towards men is a duty towards the Creator. It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of civil society. Before any man can be considered as a member of civil society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe. We maintain, therefore, that in matters of religion, no man’s right is abridged by the institution of civil society and that religion is wholly exempt from its cognizance. If religion be exempt from the authority of the society at large, still less can it be subject to that of the legislative body. Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects? If “all men are by nature equally free and independent,” all men are to be considered as entering into society on equal conditions; as relinquishing no more, and therefore retaining no less, one than another, of their natural rights. Above all are they to be considered

as retaining an “equal title to the free exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience.” While we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess, and to observe the religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us. If this freedom be abused, it is an offence against God, not against man: To God, therefore, not to man, must an account of it be rendered. Experience witnesses that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution. Enquire of the teachers of Christianity for the ages in which it appeared in its greatest lustre; those of every sect point to the ages prior to its incorporation with civil policy. If religion be not within the cognizance of civil government, how can its legal establishment be necessary to civil government? What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on civil society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; in many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been seen the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government instituted to secure and perpetuate it needs them not. Such a government will be best supported by protecting every citizen in the enjoyment of his religion with the same equal hand which protects his person and his property, by neither invading the equal rights of any sect, nor suffering any sect to invade those of another. Are the U. S. duly awake to the tendency of the precedents they are establishing in the multiplied incorporations of Religious Congregations with the faculty of acquiring and holding property real as well as personal! JOHN ADAMS

(from “Thoughts on Government, 1776”) Upon this point all speculative politicians will agree, that the happiness of society is the end of government, as all divines and moral philosophers will agree that the happiness of the individual is the end of man. From this principle it will follow that the form of government which communicates ease, comfort, security, or, in one word, happiness, to the greatest number of persons, and in the greatest degree, is the best. All sober inquirers after truth, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, have declared that the happiness of man, as well as his dignity, consists in virtue. If there is a form of government, then, whose principle and foundation is virtue, will not every sober man acknowledge it better calculated to promote the general happiness than any other form? Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it. SAMUEL ADAMS (from The Rights of the Colonists, “The Report of the Committee of Correspondence to the Boston Town Meeting,” November 20, 1772) Every natural right not expressly given up, or, from the nature of a social compact, necessarily ceded, remains. All positive and civil laws should conform, as far as possible, to the law of natural reason and equity. As neither reason requires nor religion permits the contrary, every man living in or out of a state of civil society has a right peaceably and quietly to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience. “Just and true liberty, equal and impartial liberty,” in matters spiritual and temporal, is a thing that all men are clearly entitled to by the eternal and immutable laws of God and nature, as well as by the law of nations and all well-grounded municipal laws, which must have their foundation in the former.

In regard to religion, mutual toleration in the different professions thereof is what all good and candid minds in all ages have ever practiced, and, both by precept and example, inculcated on mankind. And it is now generally agreed among Christians that this spirit of toleration, in the fullest extent consistent with the being of civil society, is the chief characteristic mark of the Church. Insomuch that Mr. Locke has asserted and proved, beyond the possibility of contradiction on any solid ground, that such toleration ought to be extended to all whose doctrines are not subversive of society. In the state of nature every man is, under God, judge and sole judge of his own rights and of the injuries done him. By entering into society he agrees to an arbiter or indifferent judge between him and his neighbors; but he no more renounces his original right than by taking a cause out of the ordinary course of law, and leaving the decision to referees or indifferent arbitrators. The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but only to have the law of nature for his rule. In short, it is the greatest absurdity to suppose it in the power of one, or any number of men, at the entering into society, to renounce their essential natural rights or the means of preserving those rights, when the grand end of civil government, from the very nature of its institution, is for the support, protection, and defense of those very rights, the principal of which, as is before observed, are life, liberty, and property. If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate such renunciation. The right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave. *** Amen, and thank you. Fundamentalists can argue that the opinions of these men are unchristian, according to their definition of that religion. We are all entitled to our opinions. My opinion is that these men and their principles speak more directly to the values of Jesus than does the

elitist propaganda of domineering Christians. The Dominionists’ contention that our Founders intended to establish a Christian nation, however, is not opinion; it is a false assertion of fact based on ignorance and/or deception. Dominionists distort the theology of Jesus and the ideals of our Founders. That makes them hypocritical on the first count, un-American on the second. We Deists rest our case.



 

Chapter 14 The Exploitation of Magical Thinking Sometimes it seems as if humanity has barely reached puberty. We’re like a kid processing the news that Santa isn’t real, trying to decide if giving up the myth will stop the flow of gifts. While it seems that collectively we humans aren’t yet mature enough to alleviate the world’s evils, what’s not so clear is whether we’re smart enough to instigate those evils on such a grand scale. And if we aren’t that smart, who or what, then, is instigating them? Evil exists in humanity, that’s clear enough. But how and why does evil originate in us? Is evil behavior a reaction to some threat to our survival? Are selfishness, greed, arrogance, and violence survival traits of the strong, or symptoms of neurosis in the weak? Do we judge the sadism of a psychopath devoid of conscience as evil because such a person threatens us? Or do good and evil transcend the brute evolutionary processes of this world? Evolution isn’t the brute process that many seem to think it is. The universe as a whole is not a machine but is more like an organism. Everything is alive in some way. One could consider the changes of the world and of the universe as a process of growing up. But is it or does it contain some inherent evil? Is our nature evil? Is it half evil? A quarter evil? A matter of individual nature or personal choice? Is evil the result of immaturity, or stunted maturity the consequence of evil? Does evil or just a lack of personal development prompt one to victimize scapegoats to assert the superiority of oneself or one’s own group? Are we humans irresponsible or just naïve to willingly bow down before authorities that obviously harm us, as a species and as individuals? Is gullibility a kind of masochism?

Are we to blame if the wool has been pulled over our eyes? What can we do to protect ourselves when victimization is conducted most successfully via those who most convincingly claim to be helping us? Certainly it’s dangerous to lift up “childlike” as a sacred virtue, especially when childlike usually means childish. Humanity is more often than not like a lot of little kids with really big guns. Bullies, brats, or just clueless five-year-olds, it doesn’t really matter if you’re the one that’s been shot. Today we’ve reached the critical moment of decision: Grow up, or blow up. Murder is no longer concrete. Instead of looking our human enemy in the eye, we push a button and blow up a point on a map. “The enemy” is an abstraction, their civilization a mere concept. The deaths of a few or few thousand or few million innocent men, women, and children who are no different than our own innocent men, women, and children are inconsequential if we’ve knocked off a couple gang members or terrorists, or flexed our muscles for a few politicians and their corporate bosses. Why have people throughout the ages destroyed each other? Among primitives, means of survival and religious ideology; among moderns, mammon and religious ideology; among individuals, greed and pride, fused as power, which is playing God, a religious ideology. Whether an individual or group is in charge of the destruction, it needs the willing support of the masses to launch its attacks; it needs to control religious ideology. Simple conformity and obedience, prized virtues exploited by leaders eager to maintain superiority, can lead to Inquisition witch burnings, racist lynchings, anti-Semitic holocausts, terrorism, and war, all executed in the name of God. In America, gay bashing, execution of blacks and Jews, and murder of uppity women are biblically sanctioned acts of obedience according to radical fundamentalist cults like Neo-Nazis, Reconstructionists, and the KKK, and if we add those who commit these hate crimes in their hearts, we can include a cult of ordinary good Christians. Religious people throughout the world are not simply being discriminated against in the name of God. For the sake of differences of religious superstitions, people are still tortured and

sacrificed on a large scale—Islamic jihads, brutal religious horrors in Iran, Lebanon, Sudan, and India, atrocious oppression at the hands of religious leaders in Saudia Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and elsewhere throughout the Middle East and Africa, and indeed the whole world. Even in civilized “Christian” nations, Christians are at war even with themselves. Irish Protestants and Catholics are still battling it out. American gay Christians and gay people of other God-worshipping faiths are denigrated, ostracized, and denied basic human rights with unchristian vehemence in contradiction to the fundamental constitutional laws of our “Christian” nation. All over the modern civilized world, gays, blacks, Jews, and Muslims are murdered for being just that in the name of somebody’s version of “righteous.” Yes, in some of its incarnations, religion is downright evil. And it’s not just pagan religions like, say, the Aztecs, who sacrificed 20,000 victims each year to a sun god who might not shine on them if they didn’t provide him with a daily meal of ripped-out hearts and blood. Flesh from victims’ arms was ritualistically eaten in a more literal version of “this is my body, this is my blood.” As many as 10,000 skulls were displayed at a time on special skull racks designed to impress. The sun god was not the only divinity needing appeasement. Dancing virgins were decapitated and skinned, and their skins worn by priests who continued the dancing to please the maize goddess. Tears of children sacrificed weeping were offered to the rain god. In the humble view of the Deist, God is not the god of sacrifice created in the image of high priests. If those Aztec priests were not blood-brothers of Ed Gein, Edmund Kemper, and Jeffrey Dahmer—or Hitler, or the bombers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the Christian Church of Bosnia, or the Christian president who dropped weapons of mass destruction on Iraq for oil “to make the world safe from terrorists”—then perhaps they serve as examples of con artists commanding power by generating fear of extinction among the lowly masses and instituting major sacrifices—over which they preside, of course—to appease the gods and thereby alleviate the fear. The sun had never not shone on the Aztecs; it was utterly, documentably steadfast. Perhaps they

wanted the sun to back off. Maize harvests and rainfall might have been less predictable—their civilization probably disappeared due to drought—, but what devil decided that a divinity needed tens of thousands of butchered female virgins or children for lunch to alleviate the problem? The fearful faithful were not really kneeling before the gods; they were bowing down to blood-thirsty, dangerous high priests, lofty in the power and prestige afforded those who can influence the gods. Control the gods and you rule the people. As long as the sun shines and there’s bread on the table, no one complains. Priests are lifted up to the heavens. The gods are brought down to the level of humans. Then the anthropomorphic gods are controlled by humans. One god is easier to control. Humans become God and God the servant of humans. God becomes an angry, vengeful, violent servant of the priest sanctified by his priest-written “inspired” Text. The bloodlust of “God” starts with a simple myth created by power-hungry priests for the sake of exploiting gullible sheep, materially and spiritually—or by terrified priests who believe that other human beings are the cause of the problem and are expendable. Bloodlust culminates in a sadistic sacrificial frenzy for God in the name of God, like the Christian Inquisition or the Crusades. Witches were the primary recipients of medieval torture. Today spiritual misogynists are usually restrained by humanist laws from such extreme physical abuse. Instead, contemporary inquisitors typically resort to verbal judgment: “The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” When Pat Robertson uses the terms feminist, agenda, equal rights, women, socialist, anti-family, leave husbands, kill children, witchcraft, destroy capitalism (implying humanism), and lesbians, he’s tapping into antiquated fears associated with the superstitions of the Dark Ages. Like Robertson, Church of England vicar Rev. Anthony Kennedy seems to miss the good old days, illustrated in his comment about

those supporting ordination of female priests, according to a London Times article, March 9, 1994: I would shoot the bastards if I was allowed, because a woman can’t represent Christ. Men and women are totally different, that’s not my fault, and Jesus chose men for his disciples. Priestesses should be burnt at the stake because they are assuming powers they have no right to. In the medieval world that was called sorcery. The way of dealing with sorcerers was to burn them at the stake. It’s illegal now but if I had my way that is what would happen to them. In medieval times, I would burn the bloody bitches. The justification for misogyny and the use of torture devices is, of course, biblical. “Even the devil can cite scripture for his purpose,” Shakespeare reminded us. As his friend John Selden put it, “Scrutamini scriptura [search the scriptures]. These two words have undone the world.” During his trial for war crimes, Nazi death camp administrator Adolf Eichmann justified his murder of thousands by stating that he was merely following the orders of his superiors. Spiritual terrorists claim that they are merely following the directives of the Bible. Because of their conformity and obedience, even decent people will commit atrocities commanded by charismatic leaders. Hitler understood that to dominate the world, he would need to spiritually motivate good people to commit acts that they would otherwise consider abhorrent: “Only in the steady and constant application of force lies the very first prerequisite for success. This persistence, however, can always and only arise from a definite spiritual conviction. Any violence which does not spring from a firm spiritual base will be wavering and uncertain.” It could be argued that the Church has survived because of its leaders’ successful manipulation of its spiritual base. But although fear and intimidation have always been useful tactics of high priests, at times the laymen revolt and the Church “reconsiders,” as in the sainting of Joan of Arc. Even some Catholic laymen thought the Church made a mistake in canonizing her. Surely not even Dark Age angels in the middle of

the Hundred Years War would literally speak to an illiterate teenage peasant girl, much less instruct her at length about her divine mission to reunite France. Others argued that just because the rest of us have never heard angelic voices doesn’t prove that Joan of Arc was equally uninspired. According to Vida Sackville-West’s definitive history of the saint, Joan was a mere twelve years old when she began hearing the angelic voices that commissioned her to reunite France. Would an uneducated peasant girl in the thirteenth century have understood enough current affairs to imagine such a sophisticated plot? Perhaps, given her father’s active engagement in politics. But then again, maybe she really was divinely inspired. Whatever the source, by the time she was sixteen, Joan’s commission had become urgent. The dauphin, Charles VII, was in exile, and enemy English and Burgundian troops blocked his path to Reims, where kings of France were crowned. Joan’s mission was to clear the way for his crowning. Good and faithful disciple that she was, she set about bringing to fruition the angels’ prophecy about herself. Psychologists point out that people with psychological disorders associated with dissociation, including children who have been molested or have suffered other traumas, sometimes hear voices of accusation or comfort. Joan might have been abused. Yet the massive published testimony about her family and childhood indicates otherwise. Perhaps she was a repressed lesbian asserting her spiritual right to name herself la Pucelle, the virgin, not by passively withdrawing to a nunnery but by engaging in literal battle to legitimize the illegitimate “neutered” king of France. Charles’s illegitimate birth could only be redeemed by his being crowned a legitimate king; Joan could only redeem her illegitimate birth gender by fulfilling his redemption. That makes sense symbolically/ psychologically. Theologians assure us that while psychological explanations might be true, they don’t prove that mystics don’t communicate directly with the supernatural. The supernatural does indeed exist, and mystics sensitive to its presence are often labeled “crazy.” If super-intelligent higher beings such as angels exist, they could be

capable of communicating with humans. There is no proof that Saint Joan was not divinely directed. Historians remind us that most medieval people were uneducated, gullible, and superstitious. Nearly everyone but the most educated humanists believed in fantastical beings, both Christian and pagan: trolls, succubi, witches, fauns, devils, griffins, ancestors, goddesses, and the ever-popular angels, to name but a few. They also had a tendency to inflate their heroes into mythic superheroes. Theologians counter that trolls and fauns are mythical, but angels and devils are biblical fact. Why shouldn’t angels talk to Joan of Arc? Why couldn’t she have accomplished ostensibly miraculous feats? History, in fact, proves that she did. As steeped in legendary detail as Joan of Arc might have been, and as much as we might want to believe that hers was a selffulfilling prophecy, it is a fact that this petite teenage girl did accomplish the seemingly impossible. Historians find it inexplicable how in less than seven months, Joan convinced the governor of Vaucouleurs to permit her to travel, disguised in men’s clothes as divinely directed, with two of his friends to Charles’s court; how she convinced Charles to give her a royal army; how within days of her arrival in Orleans, her troops destroyed the powerful besieging English forces there, a turning point in the war. Although seriously wounded, Joan continued to lead the army. It’s worth noting that according to her trial records, she herself never killed anyone or even drew blood. Still, by the sheer power of her presence, this valiant warrior recaptured numerous towns as she cleared the path to Reims, where Charles was crowned with the short teenage girl standing at his side, in armor, her standard in her hand. Everyone present and throughout the country knew all this had come to pass via angelic instruction. Joan had always been severely devout, and all who knew her well, personally and professionally, attested to her purity and intense devotion to God and her angelic guides. Joan went so far as to endanger herself and her army by halting her troops to listen to church bells, by insisting on her need to attend Mass in dangerous enemy territory, and by refusing to launch critical attacks on Sunday.

Ironically, her forced devotions to the higher powers that insured her success led to her downfall. After being wounded several times in her continued campaigns to recapture French towns, in 1430, Joan herself was captured, sold to the English, and transported in stages to Rouen, where she was tried for various forms of heresy. Inquisitors interrogated her about her voices, her sense of mission, and the male clothes she refused to give up because she had received no instruction from her voices to do so. Her several guards tormented and mocked her day and night, and she was spied on during her confessions. She was spared the horrors of the torture chamber only because of the shrewd intercession of a sympathizer among her prosecutors. After attempting escape by jumping from the tower of Philip Augustus where she was incarcerated, the country’s hero was secured upright in an iron cage, tied by the throat and hands, and bound by her feet to a chain attached to a beam. Unlike most heretics, who were tried by one or two inquisitors, Joan’s case required a whole team of expert prosecutors to flaunt Church authority as a warning to all Christendom, including the warring political powers. Although she could easily have been executed like any other captured soldier—the English were hovering like vultures over her tribunal—, Joan’s trial, itself a sham to justify her preordained burning at the stake, required the services of one cardinal, six bishops, thirty-two doctors of theology, sixteen bachelors of theology, seven doctors of medicine, and one hundred and three other associates because she was a woman who had both heard angelic voices and worn men’s clothing, without apology, for all the world to see. She was a mystic transvestite superstar, or in their words, a witch. Her heinous offense was adhering “steadfastly to the principle of private judgment which was in conflict with the attitude of simple obedience exacted by the Church.” She was granted no advocate; no witnesses were called on her behalf; no one was permitted to assist or direct her (the many who took her side were afraid to voice that opinion for the record); no formal indictment was read to her until her very last days; her team of judges bombarded her with subtle questions meant to confuse and trap her while her other prosecutors watched and scribbled notes.

Officially her judges charged, among other things: The woman commonly named Jeanne la Pucelle...shall be denounced and declared as a sorceress, diviner, pseudoprophetess, invoker of evil spirits, conspiratrix, superstitious, implicated in and given to the practice of magic, wrongheaded as to our Catholic faith, schismatic as to the article Unam Sanctam, etc., and in several articles of our faith skeptical and astray, sacrilegious, idolatrous, apostate, accursed and mischievous, blasphemous towards God and His saints, scandalous, seditious, disturber of peace, inciter of war, cruelly avid of human blood, inciting to bloodshed, having completely and shamelessly abandoned the decencies proper to her sex, and having immodestly adopted the dress and status of a manat-arms; for that, and for other things abominable to God and men, a traitor to laws divine and natural and to the discipline of the Church, seductress of princes and the populace, having in contempt and disdain of God permitted herself to be venerated and adored, by giving her hands and her garments to be kissed, heretical, or at any rate vehemently suspected of heresy, for that she shall be punished and corrected according to divine and canonical laws. Then followed the first of the seventy articles comprising the Act of Accusation. The judges stressed, “If the prelates of the Church do not see to it, subversion of the whole authority of the Church may ensue; men and women may arise on every side, pretending to revelations from God or His angels.” After the judges had presented their case against Joan, it was referred to the University of Paris. Their decision was that “the woman commonly called la Pucelle had so disseminated her poison that it had infected the very Christian flock of almost the whole western world.” They charged her with being a heretic, sorceress, schismatic, and apostate. After months of resistance, ill and exhausted, Joan was dragged into the courtyard of the St. Ouen church and forced to sign a statement of abjuration in which she denied that her voices were divine. She was sentenced to life imprisonment and her head was

shaved to rid her of her boyish cut. She put on a woman’s dress as directed—her voices had given her permission—and on that basis her judges told her she would not be excommunicated. But some English soldiers of the guard forced her to put back on her former clothes, and she was raped by a nobleman. Three days after her abjuration, she retracted. Joan of Arc was excommunicated and sentenced to be executed on May 30, 1431. Multitudes turned out for the event. In front of the stage erected for the spectacle, her captors erected a board painted with the words: “Jehanne who called herself la Pucelle, liar, pernicious, deceiver of the people, sorceress, superstitious, blasphemer of God, presumptuous, disbeliever in the faith of Jesus Christ, boastful, idolatrous, cruel, dissolute, invoker of devils, apostate, schismatic, and heretic.” Many strange signs and wonders were reportedly witnessed by shaken and terrified onlookers, and some of their accounts were officially noted and added to the court record. Many onlookers wept as they brought out the heretic, who continued praying even as her tormentors placed on her head not a crown of thorns but a tall paper cap like a mitre, which bore the words, “Heretic, relapsed, apostate, idolatress.” For the heresy of resolute faithfulness to her mystical guidance, at age 19, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. As the flames leapt and crackled, she cried out loudly and repeatedly to Jesus. Even some of her prosecutors wept and turned away in horror. John Tressart, secretary to the King of England, exclaimed, “We are lost; we have burnt a saint.” The executioner, frightened and contrite, sought out the priests who had attended Joan, telling them that he was damned and that God would never forgive him for burning the saint. He said that despite all the oil, sulfur, and fuel he had used, Joan’s entrails and heart could not be reduced to ashes, so he had thrown all that remained of her into the Seine. The dramatic example of Joan of Arc still inspires heretics throughout the world. As in the past, heretics today challenge the Church’s authority to decide matters of truth, knowledge, belief, and behavior. If you beg to differ on points of dogma or claim to have had a spiritual experience outside the rituals orchestrated by the Church,

you position yourself beyond ecclesiastical control. Nothing is more anathema, nothing more blasphemous than challenging the divine right of the high priests to dictate the definition and very essence of your soul. Twenty-five years after Joan of Arc’s public execution, Charles VII and Joan’s mother petitioned the pope to restore her to the Church. Among Dark Age Christians, excommunication was a one-way ticket to hell—unless, of course, the pope intervened. The transcripts survive of the interviews with numerous people who corroborated the truth of Joan’s incredible life. Who really was this pious mystic who rallied royalty, nobles, and soldiers to the cause of fulfilling her supernatural mission, this intuitive kid with a gift for debunking false prophets, who defied the highest authorities of the Church with exactly their claim of divine authority? What was this non-conformist transvestite and transgressor of conventional mores that centuries after her death forced her persecutors to redefine holiness on her behalf? Joan wasn’t just another heretic. Although Pope Calixtus III revoked her sentence in 1456, the protest over her excommunication continued for over five centuries. Joan of Arc was an actual person whose life transfigured into a legend representing higher spiritual and political meanings that resonated with believers and nonbelievers alike. Both the faithful and the secular weren’t content that she be restored to the Church; they wanted their martyred hero canonized. They wanted justice. Perhaps the infallible Church was just brushing off tedious generations of complainers when in 1920 it reversed her heretic status to sainthood. What harm could come from adding yet another legend to their long roster of saints? The infallible Church, it should be noted, conferred her sainthood matter-of-factly, without admission of error or mention of bonfire. Or perhaps the Church was shoring-up its crumbling bastion. Modernism challenged not just the Church’s claims to divine inspiration, but also the reality of divine inspiration itself. If talking to angels posed a threat to the Church of the Dark Ages, the impossibility of talking to angels posed an even more serious threat to the Church of the early twentieth century. By the

end of the nineteenth century, the Bible had been deconstructed, angels and devils demystified, and the elitist Church hierarchy all but dismembered. Deeming the historical Joan a saint would be one way to reinvigorate belief in angels, saints, and the Church’s power to confer sainthood, the same power that qualified any believer’s admittance into heaven. Like other religions, Christianity argued most forcefully through its appeals to superstition. Protestant fundamentalism was spreading like wildfire. Catholicism needed another super-saint to grip the flock’s attention. Joan of Arc was the Catholic Church’s answer to its rivals, agnosticism and Protestant fundamentalism. Humanity is addicted to its superstitions. Our habit of answering hard questions superstitiously seems to be hardwired in our DNA, our collective unconscious, perhaps even our spirits. We worship not our gods but our idols, representations, myths, superstitions. We experience God not directly, spirit to spirit, but as in a cracked, dusty funhouse mirror of reflected shapes and light. Perhaps Joan of Arc personified her own remarkable intuitive gifts as guardian angels. The Greeks believed in guardian spirits they called daemons. Even the rational Socrates thanked his guardian daemon for his intuitive military skills that saved his life when he fought with Athens during its war with Sparta. The Romans called these ingenious daemons genii, plural for genius. Deifying our own strengths gives us hope that there’s something “out there” that can supplement those strengths. Our greatest strength is ingenuity. We call upon the gods of ingenuity to make us heroes. We create heroes as our protectors and as models of our potential strength. Our gods and our heroes inspire us to become better than ourselves. Throughout history it has been common practice to mythologize heroes into legends that greatly inflate and embellish their actual feats. Chieftains and their high priests establish themselves as the official keepers of the mythic legacies, which gives them a mystique of authority and power by intimate association. The Catholic Church’s officially documented lives and legends of the saints, complete with miracles, dragons, and unicorns, provide numerous cases in point. The pope’s hypocritical “high drag” and the pomp and

ceremony of public appearances, rituals, sacraments, and official pronouncements are props validating his authority to represent the unassuming Jesus. Rich and famous fundamentalist evangelists lift themselves up as representatives of their humble, poor, selfsacrificing Lord. No more false representation of the biblical person Jesus has ever existed than the Christian Church itself. People long to believe in super-human versions of themselves. People “worship” movie stars, rock stars, and sports heroes. Many adults continue refining the childhood arts of gossip, exaggeration, and make-believe to magnify their humdrum world. Even today educated Americans believe urban legends, like the hook-arm caught on the car door handle at lovers lane, or the drying-off poodle exploded in the microwave. How much easier to persuade gullible believers indoctrinated in mystified Christian tradition that Joan of Arc, the notorious heretic burned at the stake, was now a saint. Whatever its agenda, the Vatican was surely intent to reinvent itself as the only authority defining one’s standing as a soul before God. It was engaged in a public relations campaign to upgrade its image, which upgraded the image of the God housed in the Vatican’s privileged Holiest of Holies. If Joan of Arc had been a man, would he have been tortured and burned? Probably not; more likely he would have been promptly executed by an English firing squad. Joan had committed no act of treason against the Church. She showed all the signs of being a true warrior-prophet of God in the tradition of Moses, Joshua, and David. The problem with Joan was that she was a woman, and according to the Dark Age Church, most women were “bad,” the worst were heretics, and the worst heretics were witches. All heroic deeds, political accomplishments, and spiritual anointings were irrelevant for a woman who wore men’s clothes. The sadistic tyranny of the Inquisition murdered millions of heretics, most of them witches. According to the Malleus Maleficarum (The Witches’ Hammer), the Church’s official guidebook for the prosecution, punishment, and execution of witches, “after the sin of Lucifer, the works of witches exceed all other sins.” The heresy committed by witches was “the most heinous of the three degrees of infidelity; and this fact is proved both by reason and authority.”

Heresy is nothing more than any challenge to some ultimate authority. In contemporary America, heresy often represents disrespect for the false authority of the Religious Right. Almost everyone who challenges authority does so on the basis of some other authority. In America, most of us believe in everyone else’s right to an opinion. But if my opinion, experience, or religion differs from the fundamentalist’s, he will disrespect my authority with the assumption that I am either wrong or lying. It is one person’s claim to authority versus another’s, but the fundamentalist arrogantly asserts that his claim is the only one that’s valid and true. Are Dominionists today truly interested in instituting a “Christian nation,” or is “Christian nation” persistently chanted to ignite a definite spiritual conviction exploited by Dominionist leaders needing violent backing to force their own domination? When spiritual authorities direct Christians to judge, reject, and/or hate Muslims or Russians or gays or humanists, many comply even when it makes them uncomfortable doing what deep down they think is wrong. The only way to prevent compliance is to demystify the authority of the Bible and its priests and to remystify conscience and common sense. In America today, that translates as civil disobedience toward the Right and spiritual disobedience toward organized religion. Is disobedience so much to ask for the sake of truth? Maybe so. For decades scientists have documented just how far people will go to be obedient. In the early 1950’s, psychologist Solomon Asch created an experiment in which a subject, along with six researchers posing as fellow subjects, sat at a table and were asked to view several sets of lines, each set consisting of one standard line and three comparison lines. Each subject was then asked in turn to decide which comparison line equaled the length of the standard line. On certain sets, all the researchers posing as subjects purposely selected the wrong line even though the correct line was quite obvious. The actual subject, who knew the right answer but wanted to avoid appearing different, went along with the incorrect majority 37 percent of the time. Numerous studies have demonstrated that people adjust their behavior to conform to the group even if the adjustment involves lying. Conformity exerts the most pressure when the group is

unanimous (say, within a congregation), when the choice is difficult, and in cultures that value interdependence, conformity, and social harmony over individual goals. It’s easy to see how fundamentalists can be coerced by their churches into damning even good Christians whose views differ from their own. During the 1960’s, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a famous series of controversial experiments to demonstrate the extent to which people behave in obedience to authority. 1,000 subjects were asked to act as teachers in a study of the effects of punishment on learning. Each time the learner made a mistake on a memory test, an experimenter would order the subject, the “teacher,” to administer painful electric shocks. The intensity of the shocks would increase in increments of 15 volts up to 450 volts. The learner was actually another experimenter who only pretended to receive the shocks. Usually the “teachers” could not see the learner but could hear audiotaped responses that increased from grunts of pain to shouting to complaints of heart trouble to agonized screams. When the teacher’s punishment reached the 330 volt level, the learner became silent. Yet the experimenter continued to order the teacher to raise the intensity of the shock. Though many of the teachers experienced anguish over the pain they thought they were administering, and exhibited signs of distress such as sweating, trembling, lip-biting, and fits of nervous laughter, 65 percent of the teacher subjects delivered the sizzling 450 volt punishment rather than disobey authority. The shocking truth is that the majority of “average people” will passively, willfully obey authority even if it is obviously abusive— because they have been taught to be obedient. Conformity and obedience are “virtues” drilled by fundamentalists promoting the doctrine of infallibility. How can these “virtues” keep even welleducated believers in denial when they know that for centuries, wellmeaning scholars have exposed hundreds of incongruities in the Bible texts that thoroughly disprove biblical infallibility? Psychologists call the preference to maintain contradictory beliefs rather than amend them cognitive dissonance, an aspect of magical thinking. People who lack critical thinking skills and educated information, as well as those who have a vested interest in

preserving the contradictory elements, resort to magical thinking to justify their pre-existing beliefs and to avoid the effort of re-vision. People who make use of magical thinking are often unable or unwilling to distinguish between perceived and actual patterns; they see or fabricate relationships between things that don’t exist. Consider this comment by Pat Robertson: “If the widespread practice of homosexuality will bring about the destruction of your nation, if it will bring about terrorist bombs, if it’ll bring about earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor, it isn’t necessarily something we ought to open our arms to.” A Yale educated lawyer and self-proclaimed genius, Robertson presumably would understand the fundamental rules of rhetoric. But here he freely employs several logical fallacies. His argument centers around an “if…then” construction, but the “if” begs the question in that Robertson implies as given the source of the disasters (homosexuality) he needs to prove for his “if” clauses to be valid. His circular reasoning supports his assertion with the assertion itself. Robertson concludes with a non sequitur (“it does not follow”); “we ought not open our arms” follows an irrelevant argument. Robertson implies that homosexuality brings about the disasters he has listed, and if homosexuality brings about these disasters, he says, then we ought not be sympathetic to homosexuality. It doesn’t take a lot of critical thinking or education to know that earthquakes, tornadoes, meteors, and the destruction of a nation like America are not caused by homosexuality. But faithful Robertson followers trust that they are. Jacked up about the “homosexual menace,” they send him money because he tells them to. Although science explains how, it can’t answer why. Magical thinking provides a “why” answer. Any answer to “why” is always a guess, but if the guess seems plausible and provides a sense (even false) of assurance and security, that guess can become a “fact” in the believer’s mind. Robertson’s explanation for disasters is so absurd that it’s surely a ploy rather than a sincere guess. What matters is that people believe him (and send him money). As more people are persuaded of the truth of the false “fact,” that “fact” accumulates validity. The bandwagon appeal does not prove

the validity of the “fact,” it simply seduces with the irrelevant argument that “millions of viewers just like you” are already on board. If everybody else in Robertson’s “Club” believes it, it must be true. (If everyone else is sending him money, it must be the right thing to do.) Humans are incorrigibly superstitious, even when their superstitions are self-contradictory. Those who believe that Pat Robertson is a prophet seem unconcerned with the ambiguities of his prophecies. Are his believers simply immature? In Witchcraft, Magic, and Oracles Among the Azande, E. E. Evans-Pritchard relates an incident of a roof falling on a person, which the Azande attributed to a magic spell cast by another person. Although the Azande did “scientifically” understand that the roof collapsed because termites had eaten through the supporting posts, they needed an explanation for why the roof collapsed at that precise moment on that particular man. Coincidences, or contingencies, are explained magically by the superstitious. Robertson’s claim that homosexuality causes disasters is equivalent to the claim that magical spells caused the roof to collapse. How many times have victims of catastrophes shrugged and mumbled that it must have been God’s will, they must have needed it, they must have deserved it? Hundreds of tornadoes have ripped through Oklahoma City in the last fifty years, but people keep building and rebuilding flimsy houses above ground in the target zone because a tornado would not shred their homes or kill them if it were not the will of God. Yet they never make the connection to the warning of Jesus to not build their houses on the sand—an analogy that only makes sense if the example makes literal sense. Magical thinking seeks to verify its beliefs. When one of Robertson’s listed disasters occurs, the gullible say, “Aha! That proves it. Robertson was right.” Of course, it proves no such thing. This tendency to seek and find substantiation (even false) for an illogical conclusion, which is an aspect of what psychologists call confirmation bias, is similar to a baseball player doing his lucky ritual of choking up and tapping his shoe a certain number of times, or a golfer always wearing his lucky shirt. Even though both the ball player and golfer have good and bad games, each will chalk up his

victories to his lucky ritual, his lucky shirt. “Luck” is an irrational mental construct designed to verify a fiction. It’s bad luck to think bad thoughts because they will come true and you will thereby be punished. “Instant karma,” as many of us have said, only half jokingly. Even mentioning the devil will conjure his appearance, especially if you’re alone late at night. Better keep your thoughts on the Virgin Mary, better rub that lucky St. Christopher medal. Light a candle. Burn incense. Cleanse the room with sage. Think positive: If you pray hard enough, if you stand on God’s promise to answer the prayers on your list posted on the fridge, if you rub your special Bible like a magic lamp, God will pop up to grant your every wish. But don’t step on cracks or you’ll break your mother’s back. Don’t leave church without signing a cross. And of course, if you’re wearing holey underwear, you’ll be in a car crash. It’s one thing for a child to be superstitious. But adults need to use their brains. Pat Robertson is a master of pontificating the ridiculous because he is unafraid to lie and because his lies appeal to those who refuse to think for themselves. What American adult could believe this, for instance: “The courts are merely a ruse, if you will, for humanist, atheistic educators to beat up on Christians.” Does Robertson, who holds a law degree, truly believe that the purpose of the courts is to serve as a ruse for educators; that all educators are atheist; that all humanists are atheists; or that educators have the time or inclination to “beat up on” Christians? Does Robertson honestly think that there are no Christian employees of the courts, no Christian educators, and no Christian humanists? Does he know the function of the courts? Does he even know the definition of “ruse”? It’s not hard to understand a liar when lying has made him rich. The mystery is that even educated adults believe him and pay him for the honor.



 

Chapter 15 Snake Oil and Sanctimony I’m the type that likes clarity. I like standing with my feet balanced firmly on solid ground. I feel most comfortable when good and evil assemble at opposite ends of the playing field. Though I squint at the thin line between naïveté and stupidity—or are they the same thing? —I do understand a naïve Christian, having been one myself. Perhaps because I prefer the cut-and-dry, and want to rescue the hoodwinked naïve, during my transition from progressive Christian to disillusioned agnostic I became intrigued by the fuzzy blur between the seemingly genuine faith and huckster histrionics of TV evangelists. I was not as uncomfortable with the suckers, having been one myself, as I was with the evangelists themselves, who seemed to actually believe the outrageous lies they told to get filthy rich. Were they schizophrenic? I was so amazed by the success of their religious infomercials that I started watching their shows just to analyze their games. Word of Faith, or “Seed Faith,” was the biggest game in town. Its strategies competed with Send Me Money Because I Said So and Send Me Money To Support My Mission. It’s no coincidence that the rise of mega-rich evangelists coincided with the forging of the Dominionist alliance, which included evangelists along with rightwing politicians, major corporations, and the neocon. Each quarter had its own agenda, but the bottom line was always money and the power that comes with it. Evangelists enjoyed their federal handouts, tax-exempt status, and upper-class lifestyle along with their comrades while providing them with a righteous veneer. No longer the root of all evil, money had trans-figured into divine usary via the lucrative postmodern doctrine of Seed Faith: You send

me money, and God will reward you—with interest. Why? The Prayer of Agreement clause. Jesus promised that where two or more agree on anything in his name, he would grant it to them. I have come to bring you joy, Jesus said. Well, it was clearly money that put the fun in fundamentalism, so there you had joy. And the Bible (but not Jesus himself) said that God wants to prosper you in spirit, and what better prospers the spirit than monetary prosperity? That’s what God really meant by prosper. Jesus promised anything. Seed Faith evangelist John Avanzini publically disagreed with Christians who argued that Jesus was addressing his disciples, not the rest of us, and that he certainly wasn’t writing a blank check to be filled in by greedy hypocrites. The disciples lived in luxury, Avanzini contended, and God wanted the rest of us to as well. Even Jesus took advantage of the Prayer Clause. Although Jesus seemed to live humbly, he actually was well off, which was proven by the purple robe his tormentors wrapped him in before the Crucifixion. “John 19 tells us that Jesus wore designer clothes. I mean, you didn’t get the stuff he wore off the rack. No, this was custom stuff. It was the kind of garment that kings and rich merchants wore.” Religion was Avanzini’s life, or at least his chosen livelihood. What bothered me was that to make a buck, Avanzini misrepresented a detail out of context to prove the direct opposite of the context and the gospel as a whole. And viewers bought it. Shouldn’t they know that the purple cloak of John 19 didn’t belong to Jesus any more than did the crown of thorns? Both were provided by the soldiers for the sake of mocking Jesus. Avanzini would know this, as would the deluded had they checked the passage for themselves. I watched amazed at how skillfully the hucksters persuaded the desperate and the gullible that God set himself up to be legalistically conned into keeping his word to give anyone, even the most evil psychopath, whatever he or she asked, because whoops, God blurted that he would. How could anyone be gullible enough to believe that? How could I, a decade earlier, have been that gullible? Granted, Seed Faith evangelists are good at their pitch. God doesn’t want you to suffer, they argue. God has everything at his disposal; making you rich is no

big deal to God. God doesn’t want you to be uncomfortable. God wants you to have nice things, and nice things are expensive. But I never accepted that all those children in Africa were starving because they weren’t Christians, they hadn’t prayed to the right God, or hadn’t prayed hard enough or with the right intent, they had fallen short, when really they had just been born at the wrong place at the wrong time. Oh but wait, that was predestined. I couldn’t wrap my mind or conscience around that explanation. Nor could I drop my hard-earned coins in the collection envelope because if I gave to their relief, God would bless me. Once I stepped outside the Christian box—epiphany! God’s insider tip to the evangelists themselves was that “free” enterprise was the freedom to rip off your neighbor tax free and to call that a “church.” Even though the media had repeatedly busted Seed Faith evangelists for downright fraud, people still sent them their hardearned money, hoping for a return with heavenly interest. Just get out of the way and let God make you a millionaire. The millionaire evangelists themselves served as advertisement that their program worked. You would be blessed and that was a fact. Greed—aka “blessing”—was sanctified and glorified in the name of Jesus, Kenneth Copeland assured us all, because God was subject to the laws of faith and words. In other words, God was at our mercy. If you asked for a million dollars in faith, preferably by demanding that God keep his promises, you’d get the million. Never mind that everything Jesus was, did, and taught contradicted any doctrine of greed and any form of spiritual manipulation. Word of Faith evangelists guaranteed: Agree, pray in faith, use the right abracadabra, and poof, prosperity was yours. Or as Kenneth Hagin put it, in the exact words he received in a vision from Jesus, “Say it. Do it. Receive it. Tell it.” Hagen furthered his disbursements through sales of prosperity books such as Godliness Is Profitable and How to Write Your Own Ticket with God. The seductive Word of Faith prosperity movement got its start during the early twentieth century, when fundamentalism, which promoted biblical literalism, was coming into existence. Fundamentalism made it easy to mystify the validity of prosperity via

the Bible. E.W. Kenyon popularized his idea that the “power of faith” to bring health and wealth was God’s idea. He wanted to give gifts, but people needed to ask. Kenyon coined phrases like “What I confess, I possess” to get his Word of Faith message across. Greedy, get-rich-quick Americans loved this theology. Oral Roberts was the great propagator of the Seed Faith tradition. You had to send his ministry seed money to activate the promise. Once you gave, your money would be multiplied many times over, as per the Bible. If you didn’t get the payback, you were doing something to “block God’s blessing.” Most likely, you didn’t have enough faith, or you’d held back and were not giving God (i.e. the Roberts ministry) a fair share of the money he had already given you. The “health and wealth” gospel, aka “name it and claim it” (and “blab and grab”), took no pity on the poor viewer. No matter what your circumstance, you were required to give to the evangelist’s “ministry.” On his show Take It By Force, Clarence McClendon told viewers that God instructed him to tell the financially strapped that they should use their credit cards to “sow a seed.” “Get Jesus on that credit card!” he ordered listeners. In return, God would make sure that their debt would be paid off within thirty days. Broke or in debt? Send a check today, because God was especially generous to those who gave when they could least afford it. Jesus himself said so regarding the poor widow. Paul Crouch told viewers on one of his telethons, “He’ll give you thousands, hundreds of thousands. He’ll give millions and billions of dollars.” TV evangelists were just as dependent on direct-mail solicitations as they were on pitches via satellite. The person credited with developing mail solicitation “ministries” was Rev. James Eugene Ewing. Ewing had no ministry, and no church other than a Tulsa post office box by the name of Saint Matthew’s Churches (formerly St. Matthew Publishing, Inc.), which took in the millions of dollars generated by direct-mailings sent out to mostly poor, uneducated sheep via operations at Ewing’s mansion in Los Angeles. The “church” had two listed phone numbers in Tulsa, both answered by recorded religious messages.

Ewing’s seed faith ministry-by-letter often included free gifts like prayer cloths, Jesus eyes handkerchiefs, fake gold coins, communion wafers, and sackcloth billfolds to inspire recipients to a sense of obligation, if the lure of magical reward for seed-cash sewn in faith didn’t convince us to send him money. Unlike most seed-faith evangelists, who wanted you to spread the word for them, Ewing often warned recipients to open their special letters in private and to keep the magic secret from less gullible friends or relatives. When it incorporated in Tulsa in 1997, St. Matthew Publishing Inc. filed IRS forms reporting $15.6 million in revenue. In 1999, the last year it made its tax records public, according to online media, Saint Matthew’s raked in $26 million, tax-free, of course, for an abstract “church” that didn’t actually exist except as a mail machine generating the millions lining Ewing’s pocket. Not abstract, however, were the millions of fleeced sheep who believed in the Seed Faith prophet’s perverted gospel of Jesus. Ewing’s mass-mailing enterprise early on reaped him a crop of seed-faith gigs writing and mailing letters for big evangelists like Robert Tilton, Rex Humbard, and Rev. Ike. Usually the letters were identical except for the signatures. Ole Anthony, head of the Christian watchdog organization Trinity Foundation, christened Ewing “God’s Ghostwriter.” One of Ewing’s letters brought evangelist Rex Humbard $64 per mailing. In 1968, Ewing doubled Oral Robert’s cash flow almost overnight. In gratitude, Roberts gave Ewing an airplane, according to Wayne Robinson, a former Roberts aide. It could be argued that fundamentalism was saved from modernism by the grace of Ewing mass-mailings “signed” by con artists posing as disciples of Christ. Mega-million dollar evangelist Oral Roberts, the granddaddy of contemporary direct-access TV evangelists, originated the concept “Seed Faith,” aka “Giving and Receiving,”—emphasis on receiving by giving money to Roberts. Seed Faith claimed the biblical promise that God must return a believer’s investment with interest, accrued as a set rate of multiplication, a doctrine Roberts disseminated through his TV programs, books, and Oral Roberts University. God wanted believers to be wealthy, healthy, and happy, Roberts

preached, and He wanted them to receive those blessings as reward for generously giving—to Roberts. As Oral’s son Richard put it in a 2004 email newsletter, The story of Jesus feeding 5,000 tired, hungry people with two loaves of bread and two fish in John 6:1-14 is a much bigger scene than meets the eye. It’s a story about you and me when we’re hurting—when we’re down to our last few dollars and the bills are piling up. This miracle tells us that when we come to the end of ourselves, we’re in position to cross over to the miraculous. If Jesus could stretch the little boy’s seed-lunch into miracle proportions to feed a crowd of 5,000, He can multiply our seeds of faith into a miracle supply. Of course, the kid’s lunch wasn’t brought as “seed-lunch”; it wasn’t brought in faith, it was brought as his lunch. The boy had no clue what Jesus would do with the bread, nor was he motivated by or even aware of the possibility of a miracle “stretching” of the bread to feed the crowd. Jesus didn’t perform the miracle because somebody had magical faith and said the abracadabra words to make it happen. Roberts’s pitch mixed in sentimentality and trigger words to transmute the passage’s “message” from faith in Jesus to faith in one’s own faith. What disturbed me most was that the evangelists themselves seemed to actually believe their own lies. The polar opposites, truth and falsehood, seemed to have risen “beyond good and evil”—a Nietzschean anti-religion concept I had never accepted. I began to reconsider the idea in a new light. Those evangelists weren’t psychopathic liars, I thought. Something darker was at play when they could lie even to themselves. As with the other charismatics, Oral Roberts spent his life perpetually performing the high drama of binding the devil with a binding that presumable didn’t work very well, given how often he had to repeat it. And none of Roberts’s claims to healings over five decades was ever substantiated. Oh, there were plenty of people claiming to have been healed of this or that. But none of those people’s ailments were ever medically validated. People with obvious problems—the blind, the lame in wheelchairs, the terminally

ill, or folks with missing body parts—never experienced any kind of healing. Doctors couldn’t save Roberts’s own grandchild, who died two days after birth, even when Roberts was assisted in his faith healing with the prayers and laying on of hands by mega-healer Kenneth Hagin and his wife, other ministers, and Lindsay, the child’s mother, who was wheeled to the baby’s side. Shouldn’t a faith-healer prophet who lived by the creed of guaranteed wealth, health, and happiness expect God to heal him? But in 1999 Roberts had an angioplasty procedure following a heart attack. In 2006, The Associated Press reported that Roberts had fallen and broken his hip and that surgery was expected. Should a faith healer seek the help of modern medicine? Should a faith healer build a medical center? Roberts did. And frankly, from what I read in the papers, it was nothing but an outrageous moneymaking scam. Of course, that’s just my opinion. Below are some facts I’ve based it on, arranged chronologically. In 1977, Roberts received a vision in which God instructed him (the faith healer) to build the City of Faith Medical Center. A 900 foot Jesus, also present in the vision, added that the City of Faith would be a success. In 1981, City of Faith opened, still under construction. The same year, the Associated Press published Roberts’s $178,000 personal income for 1978. In addition he enjoyed generous expense accounts and use of his company-owned jet. And of course he controlled the ministry’s millions. In 1982, Oral Roberts University endowment funds were used to purchase one of Roberts’s two California homes, a $2,400,000 house in Beverly Hills to be used as Roberts’s West Coast residence and office. In 1983, Jesus appeared to Roberts in person, not in a vision, to tell him to find a cure for cancer. In 1986, God told Roberts, “I want you to use the Oral Roberts University medical school to put my medical presence in the earth. I want you to get this going in one year or I will call you home. It will cost $8 million and I want you to believe you can raise it.” God said, Fork over $8 million or you’re a dead man! Roberts issued a plea to his loyal fans. He got the money.

In 1987, God told Roberts that City of Faith had not sent out medical missionaries. God told him that he would take Roberts’s home if he didn’t raise $8 million by March to use as scholarships for medical missionaries. Roberts issued a plea to his loyal fans. In April 1987, Roberts announced that he had received $9.1 million. In September 1988, Christianity and Crisis reported that Oral and Richard Roberts were sued by Ruth Creech of Cincinnati for $11.5 million. Roberts’s promise of healing had led to $55,000 of unnecessary, crippling operations, which Roberts blamed on Creech’s lack of faith. In November 1988, Roberts announced that City of Faith was closing down. In January 1989, Roberts discontinued the medical scholarships. In March, the scholarship fund went bankrupt, and students were required to repay their scholarships at 18 percent interest. In September, City of Faith, never fully completed, officially closed. Not only Roberts, but God and the 900 foot Jesus had failed the ousted students and unemployed staff and faculty. Of course, being a man of Seed Faith, Roberts himself had made a killing. In the months and years following, Roberts received numerous revelations from God explaining why his earlier revelation had failed. His trusting, naïve, logically challenged fans continued to send Roberts the donations that made him even richer. Meanwhile, just as the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker scandal hit the newsstands, Oral Roberts had a revelation from God telling him that Jim Bakker was innocent and Jimmy Swaggart and the Charlotte Observer, the paper that broke the story, were guilty of evildoing. In a live broadcast in March 1987, Roberts proclaimed, in false prophet rhetoric typical of evangelists, And the Word of the Lord in my mouth is to you, my brother [Swaggart], whom we all love, you’re sowing discord. And the Lord said, “Discord will come back to you.” Free my brother, the Lord is saying to those people in the headquarters of that denomination [Assemblies of God], where Jim out of graciousness turned in his ordination papers because they wanted him to, and you’ve not accepted it. You’ve said, “No we’re gonna strip him. We’re gonna crush him...” The Word of

the Lord is coming to you from Oral Roberts’s mouth today, if you strip Jim Bakker, you’ve touched God’s anointed, you’ve harmed God’s prophet. And the Word of the Lord says, “Touch not my anointed, do no harm to my prophets...” I beg you, headquarters of a great denomination, one that we respect and love, desist, move back, and treat Jim Bakker as what he is, an anointed man, a prophet of God. And the hand of the Lord will not fall upon you. But the Lord will bless you. And to the great newspaper [Charlotte Observer]: You seem so immune to what our God can do. You’ve come into an unholy alliance with these others in the name of religion and morality. You’ve set yourself up to be a standard of morality, when you’re not. The Word of the Lord comes unto you from my mouth. And the Lord says that He’ll create a great dissension in your ranks. You’ll have such dissension in your ranks. You’ll have such dissension that it’ll spread across the news media of America and you will not know what you’re doing. There’ll be much falling out and falling apart, anger among yourselves. And you’ll wonder why this has happened. Contrary to Roberts’s prophecy, Swaggart and Bakker were both disgraced, and so was Roberts. And the media thrived to hang out even more dirty laundry. Oral Roberts University was $40 million in debt when son Richard Roberts took over the presidency. So much for Seed Faith. But not to worry. Son Richard was also a prophet, just like his dad. Part of his stage act was to interrupt himself in front of millions, saying “Yes, Lord, I’ll do that.” Only he knew what God just said, because it was uttered only to him, directly via revelation, because only he was that special. Be sure, though, that it had something to do with instructing those millions to send him money. TV evangelists in action started looking to me a lot like a Wizard of Oz hiding behind his tacky little curtain, pulling levers and pushing buttons to produce awe-inspiring special effects—flashing lights and smoke and a voice booming like God’s, plus, of course, that allimportant promise of a way back to Kansas. But nope, it was your simple love of home and family that woke you from your dream of

magical enchantment and landed you where you always truly wanted to be: right there in your own skin in the real world. The performances of TV evangelists remind me of a story that Joseph Campbell told Bill Moyers about the Australian tribe that used the bullroarer to keep people in awe of the gods. The bullroarer is a long flat board with notches, or slits, at one end, and a rope at the other. When you swing it around your head, the action produces a musical humming. The sound struck the primitive tribes as otherworldly, causing them to tremble in fear that the gods were angry. So the elders would go into the forest and come back with word of what it would take to placate the gods. And the people would oblige. Now when a young boy in the tribe was ready to become a man, a ritual took place. Wearing masks, the elders would kidnap him and take him into the woods, tie him down, and with a flint knife slice the underside of his penis. It was painful, but the medicine man said this is how you became a man. It meant shedding one’s innocence. At the end of the ritual one of the masked men dipped the bullroarer in the boy’s blood and thrust it in his face, simultaneously removing his mask so the boy could see it’s not a god at all—it’s just one of the old guys. And the medicine man would whisper, “We make the noises.” Ah, yes—it’s not the gods after all. It’s just the old guys—Uncle George, Uncle Dick, Uncle Don. The “noise” in the woods is the work of the old guys playing gods, wanting you to live in fear and trembling so that you will look to them to protect you against the wrath to come. It takes courage to put their truth-claims to the test of reality, to call their bluff. These days I wonder what Richard Roberts’s God is advising him to do, now that he’s been forced to resign as president of Oral Roberts University, having been named in 2007 as defendant in a lawsuit alleging misuse—his personal use—of university funds and resources, which he had attempted to hide, even instructing his accountant to, in the accountant’s words, “cook the books.” The Robertses aren’t the only crooks. In 2007, Senator Chuck Grassley opened a probe into the finances of other TV evangelists

preaching the “prosperity gospel,” including Kenneth and Gloria Copeland, Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn, Eddie L. Long, Joyce Meyer, and Paula White. But they’re still on TV, raking in millions. Why do so many fundamentalist Christians lack the courage to test the truth-claims of big name evangelists? Are they so ignorant, so immature? Or are they just greedy enough to hope against hope that God will make them rich, too? Personally, I have nothing against wealth. I nod in agreement with Ben Franklin’s advice to be healthy, wealthy, and wise. But what if wealth could only be acquired at another’s expense? What if religion conspired with the rich against the poor? Certainly a “blessed are the poor” theology keeps the poor satisfied with their poverty and reduces the risk that they’ll revolt against the rich. From a moral standpoint, the problem is the unequal distribution of wealth. It’s often been said that if the world’s wealth were dispersed equally, every person on earth would be a millionaire. The problem isn’t wealth, it’s greed and its attendant exploitation and general absence of compassion. Honest labor that results in wealth is one thing, but most of us would agree that to lie, cheat, steal, fraud, coerce, or swindle to get rich is slimy if not downright evil. What could be slimier than swindling to get rich in the name of God? And by rich we’re talking rich! Several prominent newspapers and watchdog organizations have reported recently that the roughly 2,000 electronic preachers, including eighty nationally syndicated TV evangelists, generate billions of dollars per year exploiting the superstitions of their gullible sheep, especially the poor and uneducated. The big evangelists are mega-millionaires with multiple million-dollar mansions and all the accouterments. In 2003, Paul and Jan Crouch’s Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN)—the granddaddy of TV evangelism—claimed it took in more than $184.3 million from its viewer TV ministry, with $71.1 million unspent after expenses, on top of at least $311.6 million invested in securities. In 2002, TBN listed assets of $583 million, including $238 million in Treasury bonds and other government securities and $31 million in cash. Besides Paul and Jan and the big evangelists who bought expensive air time, TBN depended on several guest “prophets” to

help spread the too-good news of quick-fix prosperity and/or healing. Prominent guests included John Avanzini, Kim Clement, Kenneth Copeland, Creflo Dollar, Jesse Duplantis, John Hagee, Kenneth Hagin, Marilyn Hickey, Benny Hinn, T.D. Jakes, Joyce Meyer, Rod Parsley, Frederick K.C. Price, Oral Roberts, Richard Roberts, and R.W. Schambach. For years Benny Hinn’s scandalous rich-and-famous lifestyle compliments of the poor was criticized by watchdog groups. TV programs like CNN’s “Impact” aired exposés of some of his con games. By 2000, Hinn’s ministry brought in $60 million a year in donations. His parsonage was a $3 million, 7,200 square-foot oceanfront house in Dana Point, California, his office a 58,000 square-feet office building that he built and owned. Hinn traveled first class to his “healing” performances. Even several years earlier, members of Trinity Foundation pulled from a dumpster an itinerary for Hinn’s trip from New York to London that included tickets at $8,850 each and hotel suites at $2,200 a night. Hinn’s toys include very expensive cars, clothes, jewelry, bodyguards—you get the picture. In 1989, as part of his pitch Hinn prophesied that in the 1990s, Fidel Castro would die and God would destroy the homosexual community. On the October 19, 1999, TBN program Praise the Lord, Hinn prophesied, If some dead person be put in front of this TV screen, they will be raised from the dead and they will be by the thousands. I see rows of caskets lining up in front of this TV set and I see them bringing them closer to the TV set and as people are coming closer I see loved ones picking up the hands of the dead and letting them touch the screen and people are getting raised as their hands are touching that screen. Trinity Foundation provided property records and videos that prompted CNN and the Dallas Morning News to question Hinn’s “fundraising” for a $30 million “World Healing Center” in Dallas that was never built even though Hinn had raised over $30 million for the project. Hinn also solicited donations to build an orphanage in Mexico City. It, too, was never built. NBC News reported on December 27, 2002, that an empty house on the property, owned by

the ministry, had a sign, “temporary orphanage,” attached, and the local official in charge of construction in the town said the ministry had never been issued a building permit. Money, money, money, the love of which is the root of all… Evangelist Mike Murdock described himself as just another “WalMart guy.” But IRS records from 1993 to 2000 showed his ministry’s average yearly earnings at $21,040,299. Last time I checked, Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church brought in over $50 million in contributions per year. Creflo Dollar’s ministry paid $18 million in cash for his World Changers Church International outside of Atlanta. Evangelist Juanita Bynum indulged her traditional family values by spending over a million dollars on her wedding, which included an eighty member wedding party, twelve-piece orchestra, flowers flown in from around the world, Swarovski crystals hand-sewn on the gown, headpiece of hand-designed sterling silver, and 7.76 carat diamond ring. Robert Schuller’s “Tower of Power” TV ministry brought in over $50 million a year. T.D. Jakes of Dallas drove a new Mercedes, wore expensive tailored suits, sported flashy jewelry, and resided in a luxury $2.6 million, seven-bedroom home located next door to oil tycoon H.L Hunt. “I do think we need some Christians who are in first class as well as coach.” The locals at his hometown of Charleston, West Virginia, didn’t approve of his second million dollar residence, located in town, the “single” residence being two homes side by side that included an indoor swimming pool and a bowling alley. A local columnist called Jakes “a huckster.” Evangelists Paula and Randy White’s purchase of a $2.1 million home was no problem. As of 2003, their church was bringing in $10 million yearly. Joyce Meyer built her 158,000 square-feet ministry headquarters for $20 million, not including the $5.7 million worth of items such as art objects and furniture, and not counting her fleet of vehicles worth approximately $440,000 and a Canadair CL-600 Challenger jet worth $10 million, not including two full-time pilots. Etc.

Evangelicals were coming up with creative new gags and gimics to make big bucks compliments of Jesus. Take Rodney HowardBrowne, whose Tampa area church brought in over $16 million the last time I checked. Witnesses reported that at a camp meeting at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Howard-Browne taught pastors that “sheep needed to be fleeced or they would have too much hair and could not see where they were going. It was the pastor’s job to fleece the sheep.” Howard-Browne was known among media critics as “a world-class hypnotist. A manipulator leading followers into a cult. A circus ringleader making a good living.” He characterized himself as “the Holy Ghost bartender” who served the new wine of Christ until service attendees got “drunk with joy,” often breaking out in uncontrollable “holy laughter,” shaking like Shakers, dancing and prancing in the aisles, falling to the ground, “slain in the Spirit.” In his book, Counterfeit Revival, Hank Hanegraaffe called evangelists like Howard-Browne “false prophets.” As president of the nonprofit countercult ministry, Christian Research Institute, and host of Bible Answer Man, which airs on 100 Christian radio stations, Hanegraaffe warned that Howard-Browne was “nothing but a good stage hypnotist…What he is doing is not harmless. [He] is using sociopsychological manipulation tactics to make people think they’ve encountered God…So many people who come through the front door of these ‘revivals’ end up falling out the back door into the kingdom of the cult. He’s not leading us into a great awakening…but a great apostasy.” (Hanegraaffe represents a new money-making angle among evangelists: They sell books that attack each other. But can we trust them? After all, Hanegraaffe, like other evangelists, markets books he claims he wrote that were actually written by ghostwriters. To deny that is called lying, and that’s what these evangelists do. Reporters and activists have located ghostwriters of books written by such blockbuster “liars” as Hal Lindsay, Chuck Colson, Jim Bakker, Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, David Wilkerson, Norman Vincent Peale, John Ankerberg, David Jeremiah, and Jerry Falwell.

Sometimes if the money’s good, evangelists bash not each other but themselves. But even that can be a lie. In the 90s, for instance, Mike Warnke was just another popular evangelist and comedian with run-of-the-mill multiple marriages, affairs, and divorces. Then critics of his blockbuster Satan Seller proved the impossibility of the details of his former career as a satanic priest and drug dealer.) Not all fundamentalists are deceitful. Thus far trustworthy is Trinity Foundation’s Ole Anthony, who said that Howard-Browne’s revivals produced “a phony euphoria. He’s telling people what they want to hear…What happens to these converted people when the crusade packs up and leaves town? They get depressed. They get confused. So all they can do is wait for the next one so they can go back and get another fix.” Joe Davis, general manager of two New York Christian radio stations with a half-million listeners, called a Howard-Browne meeting he attended in Long Island one of the “most bizarre” events he had ever witnessed; he was shocked, he said, by how many people were out of control. But those kinds of charismatic revivals would not succeed at large venues like Madison Square Gardens. In Davis’s view, “We’re too religiously jaded here in New York to put up with sideshows like that.” And so they should be. It’s our responsibility to be clearheaded, responsible, and wary. I’m reminded of an excerpt from Dr. Robert Hare’s book Without Conscience: Psychopaths are often witty and articulate. They can be amusing and entertaining conversationalists, ready with a quick and clever comeback, and can tell unlikely but convincing stories that cast themselves in a good light. They can be very effective in presenting themselves well and are often very likable and charming. To some people, however, they seem too slick and smooth, too obviously insincere and superficial. Astute observers often get the impression that psychopaths are play-acting, mechanically “reading their lines.” Gag lines, Bible verses, prophesies, anecdotes of personal encounters with God, any pitch that reaps money.

When they’re not passing the hat, evangelists often become embroiled in outside projects, like Howard-Browne’s involvement with Carpenter’s Home Church pastored by his close friend, Dan Strader, who in 1995 was sentenced to forty-five years in prison for 238 felony counts for fleecing $2.5 million from the elderly. Howard-Browne’s resume said that he earned his bachelors, masters, and doctorate degrees from the School of Bible Theology in San Jacinto, California. When the Tampa Tribune could find no accreditation, Howard-Browne admitted that it was a correspondence school. The school was a diploma mill, like other diploma mills created to confer bogus degrees on high-roller evangelists. Howard-Browne also received a Doctor of Divinity and Doctor of Theology from another diploma mill, Life Christian University of Tampa. That school advertised that it gave “advanced standing” for published works, presumably including the books by famous evangelists written by ghostwriters. It boasted that “our illustrious alumni include such internationally-prominent ministers as…” Besides Howard-Browne, the list included, Joyce Meyer, Kenneth Copeland, Norvel Hayes, Mike Francen, Dick Mills, Benny Hinn, and Kevin McNulty—the usual rich, sanctimonious antischolars anointed with the snake oil of moral deception. TV evangelism thrives because gullible people believe these prophets’ claims of divine inspiration and accomplished healing. Are fleeced sheep that expect million dollar miracles but get nothing but ripped off getting what they deserve? If they could actually have healed, a big contribution might have been worth it. But the truth is that there has never been a documented actual healing in the entire history of faith healing. Faith healing is a con game of mind manipulation. Occasionally a person claims to have been healed. I’ve seen in person some of those supposedly “healed.” Some of them were no doubt hypochondriacs; some were probably narcissists wanting to be on TV; some (I’m guessing most) had no doubt been paid off on the side; and some likely exaggerated or misdiagnosed ailments that would have cleared up on their own anyway. Faith healers are notorious for “healing” only internal conditions that no one can see. The healed are notorious for not producing evidence that they have

ever been sick. Gullible sheep believe the faith healer’s claim of healing, even though the miracle is something that can’t be seen or verified. Sometimes the faith-healer pretends to have the sick person’s ailment “revealed” by God. It’s hot air. As far back as 1987, evangelist Peter Popoff’s prophetic gifts were debunked when it was proven that he received the divine information about audience members via an in-ear receiver. Benny Hinn, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, Richard Roberts and other faith-healing false prophets continue to be outed year after year after year. But people continue to tune in and believe. Many viewers are not motivated by a need for healing. “All you little people” and “all the little grandmas,” as TBN’s Jan Crouch has condescendingly called them, often just want answers to little prayers. Many of those little prayers are requests for a little necessary financial help. “The people on TBN are living the lifestyle of fabulous wealth on the backs of the poorest and most desperate people in our society,” according to Ole Anthony. “People have lost their faith in God because they believe they weren’t worthy after not receiving their financial blessing.” “It is difficult to fathom how anyone familiar with the abundance of biblical teaching about the ‘deceitfulness of riches’ could have devised the prosperity gospel,” commented William Martin, a Rice University sociology professor and author of a biography of the enormously prosperous Billy Graham. The prosperity con artists manipulate their victims into colluding with their selfishness. The gullible not only turn over their hardearned cash to the con artists, they actually believe that in doing so they can righteously con God. Rub that Bible hard enough and the Big Magic Genii will pop out to grant your every wish. He has to. But of course you can’t just rub that Bible; you also have to send TBN (or sibling evangelist) money to tap into the “powerhouse of heaven” and receive God’s gifts. And then you must spread the news. Get your friends to tune in, send money, allow TBN to expand its outreach to the trusting and the gullible. Needless to say, the prosperity doctrine has its critics within the Christian community. Many condemn not only the false prophesies

and false healings, but also TBN business practices and TBN Seed Faith family’s luxurious lifestyles. As owner of TBN, Paul Crouch has occasionally felt obligated to respond to critics, as he did, for instance, on his Praise the Lord TV show in November 1997: God, we proclaim death to anything or anyone that will lift a hand against this network and this ministry that belongs to You, God. It is Your work, it is Your idea, it is Your property, it is Your airwaves, it is Your world, and we proclaim death to anything that would stand in the way of God’s great voice of proclamation to the whole world. In the Name of Jesus, and all the people said Amen! For years Crouch literally shook his finger at the camera, angered by those who criticized his self-righteous comments. He blew off his critics with comments like these, from a Praise-a-Thon, April 2, 1991: “I think they’re damned and on their way to hell; and I don’t think there’s any redemption for them.” And, “To hell with you! Get out of my life! Get out of the way! I say get out of God’s way! Quit blocking God’s bridges or God’s going to shoot you if I don’t. I don’t even want to even talk to you or hear you! I don’t want to see your ugly face!” Some viewers of Word of Faith TV shows need a bit more than appeals to greed to get fired up enough to send seed money. Intimidating prophesies often do the trick. As Paul Crouch once put it, “God spoke to me clearly and said, ‘Did I give my son Jesus on the cross expecting nothing in return?’ God bankrupted heaven and gave the best gift he could give. You can bring God a gift fully expecting something in return. Get to the phone!” Rod Parsley agreed. “God gave his best at Calvary. He told me, ‘Don’t you dare come before me if you don’t give your best.’” Both Crouch and Parsley implied that they were prophets with direct access to God and that not getting to the pledge phone was a demonstration of profound ingratitude for all that Jesus and God had done for you. Evidently there were quite a few Christians ignorant enough to believe that heaven was ever bankrupt. “Have you got something that you have been praying about ten, fifteen, twenty years?” Crouch asked. “You have been praying for it

and haven’t gotten it? It could be that you haven’t gotten it because you’re a tightwad and you haven’t given your ten percent.” Yes, fork over ten percent of your yearly wages to Paul Crouch and you’ll get that special something God hasn’t yet given you. It’s in the Bible. “You’re on the brink of a miracle,” cried Parsley. “Go to the phone and give $1,000, $10,000, and $1 million. Go to the phone…God has a miracle waiting on your response.” And, “To reap a perpetual harvest, you need to sow a perpetual seed.” Meaning, don’t just give once, give continuously. He added a jingle, “I got a need for seed.” “Get up! Get up! Get up! Go to the phone…The spirit of God promised me that he would bless your seed! Go to the phone right now! If you’re sowing $1,000, do it now! If you’re sowing $100, do it now!” ordered Clarence McClendon, who slyly connected money with the biblical “blessed seed”—literally offspring—of Abraham’s faith. Abraham offered up his son Isaac as a sacrifice; all you have to do is send in a few measly bucks. All the TBN Word of Faith evangelists anointed themselves as special prophets able to impart miracles, blessings, and healings. Marilyn Hickey’s special anointing allowed her ministry to “release the power of the prayer agreement” by “bringing our faith into agreement with yours” when viewers sent in prayer sheets. Of course, if they sent in the request, they’d likely feel obligated to include a donation. Hickey claimed to have special powers to break the spell of generational curses like cancer, poverty, child abuse, alcoholism, bad temper, and depression. The magic abracadabra was spelled out in her book, Breaking Generational Curses. “I will sow this book into your life…as you sow a gift of $20 or more into the ministry. It’s our way of saying ‘Thank you’ for your support at this crucial time… and a way for me to build your faith for miracle results. I really want you to receive a copy of this book!” I.e., she wants your money. All the seed swapping was beginning to sound like spiritual adultery. And then there was the special Miracle Point of Contact Prayer Cloth, the special Blue Christmas Candle Letter, the specially prepared and blended anointing oil, “Outpouring, Special Edition 2001” (and subsequent repeats), available in a gold-colored metal

locket, and all the other magical talismans Hickey would like you to have. Marilyn Hickey was perhaps unique in promising an especially lucrative payback, called a Miracle Overflow Next Generation Anointing, for her paid-up Faith Covenant Partner members and viewers who sent Your Best Seed, the largest offering possible, to be given exclusively to her ministry. A Proxy Seed Faith Offering was also available for those wanting to bribe God on behalf of others. Hers was the kind of bargain indulgence (feste dies) offered as a “jubilee” special by Pope Sixtus IV via Johann Tetzel in 1476. Like Hickey’s proxy seed faith offerings, the medieval proxy indulgences could spring from hell even sadistic serial killers who raped nuns. They could even buy forgiveness for future sins. Luther challenged those preposterous propositions by offering theses of concern and correction that got him in heretical hot water and prompted the already brewing Reformation. We just don’t learn. Greed fuels wishful thinking fuels faith in superstition. Our most potent hopes and fears and their miraculous antidotes are all listed in big bold letters on every label slapped on a vial of snake oil.



 

Chapter 16 The Emperor’s No Clothes Near the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., at 133 C Street SE, sits a building known as C Street Center. Registered in tax records as a religious and commercial building, it houses prominent fundamentalist lawmakers, some of whom counsel each other through their extramarital affairs. For instance, in July 2009, the media reported that C Street resident Chip Pickering, former conservative Christian congressman from Mississippi, who was known as a defender of decency and who had urged President Bush to declare 2008 The National Year of the Bible, had had an affair that, according to his wife’s lawsuit claims, ruined their marriage and derailed his political career. A month earlier, the front page headlined C Street resident Senator John Ensign of Nevada, a conservative Promise Keeper and member of the Pentecostal International Church of the Foursquare Gospel who had called on President Clinton to resign, had been having an affair with Cynthia Hampton, wife of his best friend and cochief of staff, Doug Hampton. Ensign resigned as chairman of the Republican Senate Policy Committee in the wake of revelations that his parents had given his mistress and her husband and child $96,000. Also in June, C Street’s pro-life, anti-gay Mark Sanford, South Carolina’s conservative governor and former congressman, confessed that he was having an affair with a woman in Argentina. A moment later, the vocal advocate against excess government spending was busted for squandering hundreds of thousands of state taxpayer dollars on private jet trips to Argentina, and other improprieties were being investigated.

The C Street Center, also known as The Family and The Fellowship, a secretive international organization that believes that the elite win power by the will of God, is guided by a mission intent on convincing politicians across the globe that they were chosen by God to help fulfill his divine plan. Was it part of God’s divine plan when Paul Stanley, a forty-sevenyear-old married family-values, pro-life, anti-gay Tennessee state senator who loudly opposed sex outside marriage, found himself the victim of extortion by the boyfriend of his mistress, twenty-two-yearold legislative assistant McKensie Morrison, who had been charged with cocaine possession and whose husband was in a Florida prison? Perhaps God should have warned Stanley not to make that disk copy of nude photos, including some of his mistress taken at his apartment. What you do in the privacy of your own home is one thing. But what must God think of Louisiana senator David Vittner’s “serious sin,” as he called it, after his phone number appeared on the infamous D.C. Madam’s list. Maybe God was busy thinking about other offenders, like Coy Privette, the Baptist preacher and conservative activist and politician prominent in North Carolina moral battles, who was president of the Christian Action League and sat on the board of directors of the Baptist State Convention, and who in 2007 was charged with six counts of aiding and abetting prostitution. (And of course in 2008, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer resigned admitting “private failings” that included his involvement in a highpriced prostitution ring.) No doubt far more prurient peccadilloes lurk undetected in the shadows of whorehouses and noble houses in respectable neighborhoods. Ultra-right Strom Thurmond, for instance, a perennial senator from South Carolina and staunch segregationist, asserted that “All the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, into our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement.” But in his own home, for his own recreation and amusement, he fathered a child by his sixteen-yearold family Negro maid, paid for his mixed-race daughter’s university education, and gave her money before she married and after she

was widowed. Only after the elderly Thurmond died did seventyeight-year-old Essie Mae Washington-Williams reveal her father’s dark secret. Despite his seeming generosity toward his own DNA, Thurmond’s exploitation of a black girl remained classic bigotry. Democratic Christians have also slipped into sins of the flesh. Right after candidate John Edwards told America about his Baptist leanings during a presidential debate, and right after he had won America’s heart by pledging his undying love and support for his wife, who was fighting terminal cancer, Americans learned about Edwards’s long-term affair with a staff member. Although it’s certainly accurate to cry “hypocrisy,” it’s only fair to acknowledge the extensive precedent for mixing a little illicit sex in with one’s fundamentalism. Decades ago the believing public was scandalized by the extramarital affair and faked death of angelic evangelist Aimee Sample McPherson. Although for the most part sexual improprieties have been successfully hushed up, more than a few evangelists recently have blessed the public with the titillating details of this or that scandal. In 2007, the Chapel Hill Harvester Church in Georgia discovered that over the many years, their pastor, Bishop Earl Paulk, had had sexual relations with numerous members of the congregation, including his sister-in-law, who had borne him a son. In 2008, Joe Barron, minister at Prestonwood Baptist Church—at 26,000 members, one of the largest churches in the U.S.—was arrested for meeting for sex with a minor he had met online. In 2008, the Christian community gasped when they learned that Todd Bentley, a leader of the Lakeland revival in Florida, had had an affair with a member of his staff. Also in 2008, Tony Alamo’s Christian Ministries headquarters in Arkansas was raided by the FBI as part of a child pornography investigation that included allegations of physical abuse, sexual abuse, polygamy, and underage marriage. Antigay rhetoric is starting to sound like a mere smokescreen thrown up by prominent conservatives like Idaho’s Republican senator Larry Craig, who pled guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct for soliciting gay sex in a Minneapolis airport restroom.

We might expect hypocrisy of politicians, but the list of antigay gay ministers might explain why good Christian politicians feel justified in their behavior. For decades a closeted gay Pentecostal evangelist and a major figure in the Jesus Movement, Lonnie Frisbee died of AIDS in 1993. When he was photographed in a gay bar in 2000, ex-gay John Paulk, leader of Focus on the Family’s ex-gay Love Won Out and chairman of the board for ex-gay Exodus International, claimed he wasn’t there. Then he admitted that he often lied about gay matters. Among the many others busted for the sin of homosexuality in 2006 were Paul Barnes, senior member of the evangelical church, Grace Chapel, and senior pastor of South Tulsa Baptist Church and member of the Southern Baptist Convention, Lonnie Latham, who was arrested for propositioning a male undercover officer. Some offenders are more diverse. Big-name radio evangelist and author Billy James Hargis founded American Christian College to promote fundamentalist principles but found himself in hot legal water for sexual misconduct with both male and female students, as well as kids in the youth choir, All American Kids. In the Clinton era, famous family values politicians busted for sexual improprieties could deflect attention by pointing the finger at another politician—Clinton, for instance. Before running for the nation’s highest office, Gary Bauer headed the Family Research Council, one of many multimillion dollar family values organizations created to exploit the “gay agenda” for profit by supporting, among other things, deceptive ex-gay ministries. A hard-right homophobic, misogynist moralist with a track record dating back to the Reagan White House, presidential hopeful Bauer reminded America, “Adultery is a big deal. Harry Truman knew this, ‘How can I trust a man if his wife cannot?’ the plainspoken man from Independence said.” Nine members of Bauer’s own presidential campaign staff quit because of his big deal adultery. Bauer’s campaign manager, Charles Jarvis, and former chief of advance operations, Tim McDonald, publicly protested Bauer’s “inappropriate” behavior, emphasizing that they had repeatedly warned Bauer about “the appearance of impropriety” he was creating by traveling alone and

spending “hours and hours and hours behind closed doors with a young single woman,” twenty-six-year-old deputy campaign manager Melissa McClard. Bauer’s secretary of fifteen years, Betty Barrett, and his media consultant, Tom Edwards, also quit. Other inside sources told the media that Bauer traveled with McClard on a daily basis in a “husband-wife relationship.” Bauer called a press conference to lie about the “devastating” rumors. He argued that he met privately with every member of his campaign staff. He denied being warned by staff. Another presidential hopeful, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the original family values poster boy, “would have won in 1974 if we could have kept him out of the office, screwing her [a young volunteer] on the desk,” according to Dot Crews, Gingrich’s campaign scheduler throughout the 70s. “It was common knowledge that Newt was involved with other women during his marriage to Jackie…he had girlfriends, some serious, some trivial.” One of those girlfriends, Anne Manning, confirmed that he was involved with her during the 1976 campaign. “We had oral sex. He prefers that modus operandi because then he can say, ‘I never slept with her.’” Well, at least he’s honest. Gingrich’s former campaign treasurer, Kip Carter, recounted walking Gingrich’s daughters back from a football game and seeing a car with “Newt in the passenger seat and one of the guys’ wives with her head in his lap going up and down. Newt kind of turned and gave me this little-boy smile. Fortunately, Jackie Sue and Kathy were a lot younger and shorter then.” Even Christian boys will be boys. “She isn’t young enough or pretty enough to be the president’s wife,” Gingrich said of his first wife, Jackie. “He walked out in the spring of 1980,” Jackie recounts. “By September, I went into the hospital for my third surgery [for cancer]. The two girls came to see me, and said, ‘Daddy is downstairs. Could he come up?’ When he got there, he wanted to discuss the terms of the divorce while I was recovering from my surgery.” Left nearly destitute, Jackie ended up taking Gingrich to court to get him to contribute to basic utility bills. Even one of his ex-lovers was appalled by Gingrich’s insensitivity. “He’s morally dishonest. He has gone too far believing that ‘I’m beyond the law.’ He should be stopped before it’s too late.”

By 1995 the press was reporting on Gingrich’s latest relationship with Callista Bisek, a “willowy blonde congressional aide twentythree years his junior,” who was spending the night and had her own key to his apartment even as Gingrich was lynching President Clinton for his adultery with Monica Lewinsky. At least Gingrich was still a good Christian. MSNBC reported that Bisek sang in the National Shrine Choir of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, and Gingrich would wait for her at the Shrine, listening to her sing while he read the Bible. Finally, in August 1999, Gingrich filed for divorce from his second wife, Marianne, perhaps as part of his climb toward the presidency. Besides womanizing, Gingrich was embroiled in illegal lobbying, creation of non-profits and PACs to fund his own partisan projects, and bouncing a mind-boggling twenty-two rubber checks written on government money. His various scandals led to hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, criticism from his Republican allies, resignation of the administrator of his congressional offices, IRS investigations, and his eventual resignation as Speaker of the House. He got off easy only because as speaker, he appointed the ethics committee that should have prompted further action against him. Another big name family values ultra-right Christian Republican, Robert Dornan, was found guilty of a “violent attack” on his wife in 1966. Though he was ordered to go to jail, there is no record of his having served time. His wife Sallie left him a few times and tried to divorce him because he had been beating her for years. In a 1961 divorce suit, she stated that he dragged her “about the house…by the hair and…exhibited a revolver.” Sally recanted when Dornan’s opponent in the 1992 election exposed the charges. But should we believe her? After all, Dornan even punched Democrat congressman Tom Downey on the floor of the House of Representatives. Should we believe Dornan, who bounced a rubber check during the House banking scandal and told his heavily Catholic district it was to pay for a grotto of the Virgin Mary in his back yard? And then there’s ultraconservative Oregon state legislator Drew Davis, who led police on a fifteen-mile car chase, and with good reason. In his possession were pornographic magazines, a MAC 11

assault pistol, telephone bugging equipment, a police scanner, and the narcotic Vicodin. A few years later Davis made headlines when the Moonies filed a lien on his mansion and business because he had failed to repay a loan. And then there’s ultraconservative Christian county commissioner Gordon Shadburne of Portland, who sent local fundamentalist churches a letter on county stationery proclaiming that homosexuality was “the stronghold of Satan.” This struck the press as odd, because one of Shadburnes top aides, a former county commissioner, was openly gay and wrote the gay rights law that Shadburne opposed. Shadburne fired him, bribing him with four week’s severance pay if he wouldn’t talk, which prompted another aide to quit. Then Shadburne’s ex-wife testified during mediation proceedings that Shadburne himself was homosexual. The County Auditor reported that Shadburne’s “friend” and former roommate was being paid $29,000 for nine months of questionable, poorly documented work from home as an independent contractor, which made him one of the highest paid public officials in the county. To top it off, Shadburne was convicted twice for using county money for personal business and was accused of cocaine use and orgies during a business trip billed to the county. The Shadburne case raises an interesting question: How many family values right-wingers are actually gay? How many gays are outspokenly homophobic fundamentalists as a cover-up? Certainly pretending to be straight can be a kind of “drag” and a form of fleecing donors. Which extremist homophobes are lying and which are repressed? When Republican senatorial candidate Jane Griffin was invited by Equality Tennessee to attend (not to “address,” as she mistakenly assumed) the fifth congressional district candidate forum in 2002, along with all other candidates running statewide, Griffin responded in writing, “It is with deep regret…I cannot address your conclave of leeches. It would have been a delight to condemn roundly the most worthless and no-count populace of women in Tennessee. You are too lazy to get yourself out of your filthy practices and who would want to marry a pervert? Certainly no decent man in Tennessee. Womanhood has fallen to a low degree indeed but you are the worst.

It is my suspicion that you have a tax-exempt foundation so your perverted donors and fake benefactors can get their April 15 kickback. By the Grace of the God of our Fathers, I will redeem the name of America and Tennessee Volunteer.” One can’t help but wonder if Griffin’s over-the-top response isn’t the knee-jerk overreaction of a repressed lesbian. Could she be hiding something? Certainly these days, when busted by the media for sexual improprieties, family values violators exploit the gay issue as a red herring. “Who me? Look over there at those queers! At least I’m not as bad as those perverts!” In 2006, National Association of Evangelicals president Rev. Ted Haggard, whose clout extended to Congress and the White House, resigned amid accusations from male Denver prostitute Mike Jones that he and Haggard, who called himself Art, had had drugenhanced sexual encounters nearly every month for three years. Haggard admitted buying meth from the prostitute but said he never used it, and claimed he never had sex with Jones, only a massage after being referred to him by a Denver hotel. Jones pointed out, “No concierge in Denver would have referred me,” because he openly advertised his escort services only in gay publications and on gay websites. He had no idea who “Art” really was until he saw Ted Haggard on TV publicly condemning gay sex and supporting the ballot measure that would amend the state constitution to ban gay marriage. Eventually Haggard admitted to another gay relationship, with Brant Hass, a male member of his church. Not long ago, Art—I mean Ted—Haggard proclaimed himself cured and claimed that his ordeal had strengthened his marriage and relationships with his children and his church. Often conservatives blame others for their sins. Take Republican Florida congressman Mark Foley, who resigned in 2006 after revelations that he had propositioned male pages—alas, minors— sometimes emailing them from the House floor. His excuse? He’d been molested by a priest. Foley did admit being gay, but he just couldn’t do it without pointing the finger of blame, continuing the ancient conservative tradition. Though he’d never married, Foley

was an avid family values supporter and opponent of same-sex marriage. That’s how it works. The party people and lobbyists who give you money to run your campaigns, who offer you political support, who line up as your allies and who tell you what to do, the whole rightwing machine requires that you prove your allegiance to its antigay agenda. Another fallen angel, Paul Crouch, owner of Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN)—the world’s largest televangelist organization, which pulls in a couple hundred million dollars a year in donations from fundamentalist viewers—was outed back in 1996 by gay TBN employee Lonnie Ford, a convicted felon with whom Paul had sexual relations. In a 1998 settlement, Ford was paid $425,000 to keep quiet. But when TBN breached its end of their confidentiality agreement, Ford offered to sell his memoir about Crouch’s forceful seduction and tryst with him. Although originally hired to work TBN’s phone bank, Ford had been reassigned by Crouch to do special projects with him, even though Ford had no knowledge or experience. Having wined and dined his employee for a few days at the expensive Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, Crouch then had Ford drive them to the TBN-owned cabin at Lake Arrowhead to have sex there. It wasn’t consensual. Ford, an openly gay man and thirty years Crouch’s junior, felt compelled because he feared that Crouch would throw him “straight out of that cabin” and fire him. He was sickened by being coerced into sex by his boss, “But at the same time, I still looked up to him. He’s a very powerful man, [head] of the largest Christian network in the world. I just put my blinders on.” The next morning, Crouch read Ford a Bible passage, Proverbs 6:16-19, and explained that because homosexuality wasn’t one of the seven “detestable” behaviors listed, what they had done wasn’t a problem for God. But because there were people who “wouldn’t understand,” Ford should keep quiet. Crouch promised that his ministry would pay Ford’s debt of about $17,000 and offered him a rent-free apartment. Ford offered to sell his memoir of those events to Crouch for $10 million. Crouch’s counteroffer was reportedly $1 million. Even more disconcerting than hypocritical homophobes are overkill homophobes like the Rev. Fred Phelps, whose church exists

solely to bash gays. His church websites, God Hates Fags (.com) and God Hates America (.com), proudly proclaim perhaps the most famous homophobic claim of all time: “God does not hate them because they are homosexuals; they are homosexuals because God hates them.” (On second thought, he’s rehashing St. Paul.) The in-your-face hate antics of master picketer Phelps includes pickets even of events having only the remotest connection to gays, like the funeral of Bill Clinton’s mother and funerals of soldiers, gay or straight, killed in active duty—according to Phelps, the entire army is “fag-infested.” Phelps and his relatives—he has thirteen children and fifty-two grandchildren at the time of this writing—shove nastygram placards in people’s faces and shout through megaphones slogans like “God hates fags,” “fags are nature freaks,” “AIDS cures fags,” “thank God for AIDS,” “fags burn in hell,” “fags doom nations,” “no special laws for fags,” and “God is not mocked.” God-mocking is reserved for holier-than-thou Phelps, who ridicules God by mimicking a barbarian god obsessed with divine retribution. In the judgment of Rev. Phelps, who dismisses science along with biblical scholarship and common sense, the Asian tsunami was caused not by natural phenomena such as an earthquake but by homosexuality. My question for Phelps is whether homosexuals or God committed all that mass murder. Filthy fags and pedophiles have been going to Asia for many, many years to have sex with little children—and suddenly you’re worried about children? Shame on you. It is God’s prerogative to kill children to punish their evil, Godless, vile, filthy parents and others who were raising them for the devil anyway; they are most certainly better off now than they were in the hands of such evil people. He always has done that, and He always will. Deal with it. Thank God for the tsunamis—& we hope for 20,000 dead Swedes!!! Let us pray that God will send a massive Tsunami to totally devastate the North American continent with 1000-foot walls of water doing 500 mph—even as islands in southern Asia have recently been laid waste, with but a small remnant

surviving. God Hates Fag America! Thank God for Tsunami. Thank God for 3,000 dead Americans. Politically biblical, Rev. Phelps blames 9/11 not on terrorists but on homosexuals. On his website, he explains his contempt for the New York City “fag fire department.” Phelps’s God Hates America website “proves” biblically that the Gulf and Iraq wars were the direct result of homosexuality. “When you fill the army with fags and dykes and spit in the face of God, you have sown the wind, and shall reap the whirlwind,” he proclaims like a reincarnate Isaiah. “Pray for more American bodies blown to smithereens by cheap home made Iraqi IEDs—like the IED America bombed WBC [Phelps’s Westboro Baptist Church] with August 20, 1995, hoping thereby to terrorize us into silence about America’s fag sins.” Sexual impropriety among prominent fundamentalists isn’t just adultery or homosexuality. In 1999, Ned Graham, youngest of Billy Graham’s five children, admitted to Christianity Today his problem with alcohol abuse and “inappropriate” relationships with female staff members. Graham’s wife of nineteen years, Carol Graham, had divorced Ned a few months earlier, and not just for alcoholism and adultery. Ned’s sins ranged from wife abuse—a judge had issued a restraining order against him—to pornography and drug use. Graham’s Southern Baptist church, Grace Community Church of Auburn, Washington, revoked Graham’s ministerial credentials. Most of the staff and board members of Ned Graham’s East Gates Ministries International resigned amid his ongoing indiscretions. TV evangelism has always thrived as a circus of sensationalized sins, with lion-tamers leaping through fiery hoops for money. In March 1987, the Charlotte Observer busted the infamous North Carolina TV evangelists, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, owners of PTL (Praise The Lord) network, for what back then was considered sexual scandal. For years the Charlotte Observer had noted the hypocrisy of the fundamentalist couple’s aggressive solicitation of money even from people who couldn’t afford it so they themselves could live in unchristian luxury in their oceanfront condo (with its infamous $22,000 floor-to-ceiling mirrors in the bedroom). Besides

begging on camera, the Bakkers had fattened their bank accounts with cash taken in from their tacky Christian theme park, Heritage USA, and the illegal pyramid business scheme that landed Jim in prison. In March 1987, the Observer ran its story that in 1980, Jim Bakker had drugged and seduced Jessica Hahn, a church secretary and former Playboy playmate from Long Island, and had paid her $250,000 to keep quiet. In the meantime (as you’ll recall from a previous chapter), Tammy Faye, famous for her massive makeup, big hair, and tacky, attention-getting attire, had become so obsessively in lust with country singer Gary Paxton that she had broken up his marriage. Both Bakkers admitted their guilt, but Jim nonetheless attacked Jimmy Swaggart, who had publicized the scandal, in Bakker’s view so he could take over PTL. The contrite Bakkers resigned from PTL, leaving it temporarily in the hands of Jerry Falwell, whose Moral Majority and Old Fashioned Gospel Hour were making him even more famous than Swaggart. Shortly after, Bakker attacked Falwell, accusing him of trying to gain control of PTL. Taking this advantage to appear righteous, Falwell called a press conference to share with the public sworn affidavits by men who had had homosexual relationships with Bakker. Falwell also included Tammy Faye’s list of demands she would exchange for disappearing quietly: $300,000 a year for Jim; $100,000 for herself; royalties on all PTL records and books; their mansion, cars, security staff, legal fees, and accountant fees, which would be hefty given the Bakkers’ financial irregularities. (Jim Bakker, who was convicted of wire fraud and served five years in prison, has since started a new TV ministry with a new wife in Branson, Missouri, joining the hosts of evangelists peddling religious stuff, plugging money-grubber Christian writers and entrepreneurs, and interpreting Revelations for sadistic fun and mega-mammon.) Shortly after he denounced the Jim and Tammy Bakker PTL scandal as “a cancer on the body of Christ,” Swaggart himself was outed by Rev. Marvin Gorman for openly frequenting a prostitute. Rev. Gorman, one of the many evangelists viciously attacked on Swaggart’s TV program, decided to get revenge by hiring a private investigator to document and film a series of Swaggart’s visits with a

prostitute to the Travel Inn on Airline Highway in Metairie, Louisiana. Gorman requested that Swaggart confess his sin, and Swaggart agreed. Or rather, lied. After four months of waiting, Gorman reported the incidents to Assemblies of God. The story hit the newsstands on February 10, 1988, and the next day Swaggart tearfully confessed to an unspecified sin, comparing himself to King David. Assemblies of God imposed the mandatory two-year rehabilitation required of all its ministers who fall into sexual sin. When Swaggart refused to cooperate, his ordination was revoked. Swaggart retaliated by trashing Assemblies of God from the pulpit for their “unforgiving” position. When his audience began to turn away, Swaggart claimed that the devil made him do it and that evangelist Oral Roberts had cast out the demons over the phone, cleansing him of any moral defect. In 1989, Swaggart was outed for having a ten-year affair, and on October 11, 1991, police in Indio, California, stopped the evangelist for driving on the wrong side of the road and found him to be accompanied by prostitute Rosemary Garcia. In 2002, the heirs of Pentecostal Bible teacher Finis Jennings Dake filed a plagiarism lawsuit against Swaggart. In 2004, the exorcised family values advocate said in a sermon taped at his New Orleans ministry that he would kill gay men. “I’m trying to find the correct name for it...this utter absolute, asinine, idiotic stupidity of men marrying men…I’ve never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry. And I’m gonna be blunt and plain; if one ever looks at me like that, I’m gonna kill him and tell God he died.” Though his comment implied that he would murder and would lie about it to God, it was met with enthusiastic applause from an audience that included big-name evangelists James Dobson and “ex-gay” Tony Perkins. Omni 1, a Toronto television station that carries Swaggart’s program, apologized publicly to viewers for the “serious breach” of Canadian broadcast regulations after Swaggart’s gay threats prompted an investigation by the Canadian Radio Television Commission. Because hate speech is a criminal offense under Canadian law, lawyers contended that both Omni 1 and Swaggart

could incur additional charges in addition to penalties imposed by CRTR. Sometimes fundamentalist big guys exploit their brethren’s fall, and sometimes they cover. Online watchdog activist John Davies complains that Christianity Today, founded by Billy Graham, failed to report the alleged rape committed by Ollin Collins, pastor of Harvest Baptist Church in Fort Worth and board chairman at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, the world’s largest evangelical seminary. Following the rape of two unsuspecting, trusting women who had sought counseling, Rev. Collins was suspended from his church with pay, and he resigned from his board position the day after the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported the women’s allegations and their intent to sue. On the other hand, Davies points out, Christianity Today did report the consensual adulterous relationship committed by Henry Lyons, president of the National Baptist Convention and senior pastor of Bethel Metropolitan Baptist Church in Clearwater, Florida. Davies interprets this as favoritism for a white Southern Baptist over a black National Baptist. Although there might be some truth to that, Rev. Lyons is no innocent victim. In 1999 he was sentenced to four years and three months in prison and ordered to pay $5.2 million in restitution for federal charges that included tax evasion, bank fraud, and making false statements to a bank officer and the federal government, not including his state sentence for racketeering and grand theft. As part of a plea bargain, federal prosecutors dropped forty-nine of fifty-four charges, which included money laundering, wire fraud, and extortion. His co-defendant, Bernice Edwards, the convention employee with whom he committed adultery, was acquitted. Nicknamed “the Black Pope,” Lyons lived in a posh $700,000 waterfront home and enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle paid for in part by the $4 million swindled via a secret bank account from corporate donations to his organization. Lyons also misused $250,000 the AntiDefamation League contributed to rebuild Southern black churches destroyed by fires.

Lyons, who declined to testify, continued to profess his innocence outside of court and proclaimed that God would reveal the truth. His wife Deborah and his congregation naïvely continued to believe him. Despite the massive incriminating evidence, supporters like Rev. E.V. Hill of Los Angeles, who testified on Lyons’s behalf, claimed that the all-white jury had not given Lyons a fair trial. One witness, Lacy Curry, stated that National Baptist Convention presidents were free to reap rewards from deals made with corporations that wanted to profit from the convention’s congregation. With a classic Baptist flourish, Lyons contended that the devil made him do it. “When the devil came to Jesus Christ, he tempted him with fame, power and wealth, and I’ve fallen far short of the standards set by our Lord. I’m just a man. I have made mistakes.” Yes, rather big “mistakes” committed by a trusted “high priest.” Cover-ups of molestations by Catholic priests are common knowledge; cover-ups of sexual crimes are just as common among fundamentalist organizations. In 2001, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that Dallas Theological Seminary had allowed Dallas-area pastor, Jon Gerrit Warnshuis, to graduate with a master’s degree in theology in 1992, even though he had been charged with sexual assault and sexual indecency and had previously been expelled from the seminary for other sexual allegations. Furthermore, the seminary officials didn’t disclose information about the charges to prospective employers calling for references for the minister, and the school broke Texas law by failing to alert authorities about Warnshuis’s previous incidents. Also in 2001, the Houston Chronicle reported the arrest of Evangel Christian Academy football coach and former principal, Dennis Dunn, for sexually assaulting a fifteen-year-old student. The Shreveport, Louisiana, Assemblies of God school was not only infamous for its staunchly self-righteous Christian approach to education but also for breaking the rules by improperly recruiting players for its top-notch football team (the national high school football champion in 1999). Extreme right fundamentalist Randall Terry made a name for himself by founding the anti-abortion organization Operation Rescue

in the late ‘80s. Getting himself arrested for his version of the cause has kept him in the news. In 1992, Terry was arrested and sentenced to five months in prison for having a fetus in a jar delivered to Bill Clinton at the Democratic National Convention. Between 1987 and 1994, his organization’s activities resulted in over 70,000 arrests. Terry was co-defendant in the 1994 Supreme Court case NOW v. Scheidler. NOW’s claim was that the anti-abortion Pro Life Action Network (PLAN) used threat of or actual force, violence, and fear against abortion clinics in order to prevent patients from using clinic services, activities that involved racketeering forbidden by the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). The court did rule that RICO allows anti-abortion activists to be convicted, but they made no decision about NOW’s allegations. In a 1998 lawsuit, NOW sought to force anti-abortion leaders to pay damages for attacking clinics. Terry settled out of court, then filed bankruptcy. In 1998, Terry ran for Congress as a member of the New York State Right to Life Party on a platform of “no property taxes, no IRS, no social security, no abortion, and no homosexuals” and lost by a landslide. In 2002, this prominent family values advocate divorced his wife of nineteen years and remarried. Terry’s church of fifteen years censured him for his “pattern of repeated and sinful relationships and conversations with both single and married women.” Flip Benham, who inherited Terry’s Operation Rescue (renamed Operation Save America) in 1993, further chastised Terry for his lack of “Godly sorrow…It’s very difficult for him to speak out with any kind of Christian authority with his kind of character flaws.” Soon after, Terry purchased a $432,000 home in Florida, presumably with some of the non-tax-deductible donations he solicited on his website. He bragged that he needed a nice place to entertain “people of stature, people of importance. I have a lot of important people that come through my home. And I will have more important people come through my home.” The same month he paid his down payment in Florida, Terry submitted an affidavit in New York stating that he was three months behind on his rent and was selling personal belongings to survive; later that month a New York court found Terry negligent in paying his ex-wife a “fair share of child support.”

In 2003, Terry called for the impeachment of the Supreme Court justices ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, which decided that Texas law against sodomy violated constitutionally protected rights. Terry often lies about homosexuality and exploits the fabricated “gay agenda” as a fundraising gimmick. So when his adopted son Jamiel came out in Out Magazine in 2004, Terry disowned his son and claimed that he was gay because he was abused before Terry “rescued” him at age eight (according to Jamiel, he was living with the Terrys at age four but wasn’t adopted until age fourteen). Randall Terry is part of the fundamentalist Reconstructionist sect that favors the Old Testament death penalty for homosexuals, which presumably includes Jamiel and his partner. Does Terry’s son deserve death? By all accounts, Jamiel was a model church-going child. Terry knew his son’s exemplary character so well that he asked Jamiel, still a kid living at home, to work with him on his campaigns. When Terry jilted his wife, he told Jamiel to talk to reporters and to “Christian leaders to keep the story quiet. The story didn’t break for eight months because I kept it at bay,” Jamiel said. “All I had done since he separated from my mother is protect him and defend him and do everything in my power to make sure that he maintains his reputation.” Jamiel revealed that he had been struggling with “this sin thing…I was hating myself” until “I was literally on the verge of suicide, and constantly talking to him about the fact that I was on the verge of suicide” during a period from September 2002 to May 2003. His father wasn’t there for him when he needed him. Like many fundamentalist parents of gay kids, Terry dealt with the problem with condemnation rather than comfort. When his parents divorced, Jamiel did some soul-searching. The divorce “made me question everything I had been raised with. It made me question truth, it made me question morality. Before that, I would have said…that the Bible is the infallible word of God. Now I’m like, it’s kind of good sayings and I’m sure that God had something to do with it, but it was written by men, so it can be fallible. As for the divorce, in my eyes, he was doing something wrong.” Jamiel confesses that he would never choose to be gay, but he is not ashamed of being gay now.

Jamiel naively nailed the contradiction of “Christian” authoritarianism when he commented, “My father has to understand the intense, almost idolatry we kids have for him. When he’s talking, he just convinces you to do something, even when you don’t want to do it.” Here’s the crux of Jamiel’s conflict. Veneration. Adoration. Obedience. And Randall Terry begs to be lifted up onto the God pedestal. Even members of Mother Teresa’s order have denounced Terry as a dangerous extremist, although Terry claims to have received a letter of praise from Mother Teresa herself (many believe it to be a forgery). Terry rejected both his adopted daughters when they became pregnant outside of marriage; one later became a Muslim. Now Terry has forbidden Jamiel to step foot in his house, he says because Jamiel gave CNN pictures of the family, which Terry called “an unbelievable lack of honesty.” Perhaps Jamiel will come to see his father’s unbelievable lack of honesty. Republican fundamentalist Alan Keyes is another intolerant parent of a gay child whose personal morality is questionable. Keyes has made a career of running for office; he has run for the senate three times and the presidency twice with minimal credentials—his best is Ambassador to the UN Economic and Social Council under Reagan, a low-power job consisting of no diplomacy and lots of speechmaking. He alienated himself from other Republicans in 1992 when the press revealed that he was paying himself a salary of over $100,000 per year out of campaign funds—unheard of in a presidential race. According to Maryland Republican Party Chair Joyce Lyons Terhes, “When he decided to use campaign funds for his salary, that discouraged a lot of Republicans, and even Maryland voters.” Keyes’s staff urged him to stop to no avail. When reporters asked his 1992 campaign staffers if they supported his run in 1996, all responded negatively. But Keyes benefits even from losing. Just running assures a lucrative career as public speaker and radio personality. Time Magazine reported that his 1996 campaign doubled his speaking fee from $7,500 to $15,000 per speech. Given how much money Keyes takes in, it’s odd that he has such problems paying his bills. After taking the $100,000 a year from his 1992 Senate campaign, he claimed, “I personally do not owe the

debt that was owed by the campaign,” which according to the FEC was substantial even not including the additional $20,000 in bad checks written in 1995. Keyes’s strategy is to run, raise campaign money, pay himself an exorbitant salary, take out loans to pay the campaign debt (which he claims is not his debt,) then run again. Keyes’s monetary success depends upon his ultraconservative stump speeches. On a radio interview, he blasted Mary Cheney, the lesbian daughter of Vice President Cheney, calling her a “selfish hedonist.” Then added, “If my daughter were a lesbian, I’d look at her and say, ‘That is a relationship that is based on selfish hedonism.’ I would also tell my daughter that it’s a sin and she needs to pray to the Lord God to help her deal with that sin.” According to Keyes’s lesbian daughter Maya, Keyes had already confronted her about being gay when she was in high school, constantly reminding her that sexuality was wrong and sinful. At the time of her father’s public comment, Maya was a college student at Brown and had taken a year off to teach in India. She wrote online, “Most parents would be thrilled to have a child who doesn’t smoke, have sex, do drugs, hardly drinks…, does well in school, gets good grades, gets into the Ivy League…, goes regularly to church, spends free time mentoring kids…I’m all about working for global justice. THEY don’t care about that. THEY only care that I am an evil dyke.” Her parents not only kicked Maya out of the house for coming out, they refused to even talk to her. Of course there’s nothing new about sex-scandal hypocrisy among ultraconservative Christians. Once in a great while I read a book that absolutely floors me. One such eye-opener was historian William Manchester’s A World Lit Only By Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age. Talk about a paradigm shift! I already knew from my narrow experience that the Church was less than perfect. But I was not prepared to be jolted awake by Manchester’s juicy chronicle of a Church dripping with sordid sins, outrageous blasphemies, and appalling crimes, the details of which survived despite the Church’s concerted efforts to rewrite its history.

Priests, nuns, bishops, cardinals, popes—no sacred post had gone untainted. From Manchester I learned shocking details about the infamous members of the Borgia family, one of the most colorful of the papal families. Previously I had only recognized them as subjects of numerous paintings from the Baroque to the present. In 1456, Rodrigo Lanzol y Borgia (later renamed Alexander) was elevated to the College of Cardinals by his uncle, Pope Calixtus III. In 1460, the now reigning Pope Pius II happened to run into the twenty-nine-year-old Cardinal Borgia at a wild party in Siena, where, Pius noted, “none of the allurements of love was lacking.” The party’s guest list had included Siena’s most beautiful young women, but contrary to customary decorum, their husbands, fathers, and brothers had been excluded “in order that lust be unrestrained” without the protection of any male relatives, according to Pope Pius. Pius knew lechery when he saw it. As Bishop Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, he had fathered several children by various mistresses —but when elected pontiff, he shrugged it off, telling his court, “Forget Aeneas; look at Pius.” From his many illicit affairs, Cardinal Borgia was known to have produced a son and two daughters, and later, in his forties, another daughter and three sons with Rosa Vannozza dei Catanei. As priest, Alexander had married Rosa to two men during the time that she was his lover. Although he had other lovers, Rosa was his “regular.” At age fifty-nine, he decided it was time they parted. To soften the blow, he made her brother a cardinal. Alexander was seeking younger flesh to entice him. One of the young women that excited Cardinal Borgia was nineteen-year-old Giulia Farnese. After her arranged marriage, her husband, Signor Orsini, “was told his presence was required elsewhere,” as Manchester put it. Still wearing her bridal gown, Signora Orsini “was led to the sparkling gilt-and-sky-blue bedchamber of the cardinal, her senior by forty years. A maid removed the gown and, for some obscure reason, carefully put it away. She cannot have thought that Giulia would want to keep it for sentimental reasons, for thenceforth Borgia’s new bedmate was known throughout Italy as sposa di Cristo, the bride of Christ.”

In 1483, the lusty Cardinal Borgia became Pope Alexander VI, and his cardinal sins were multiplied. According to Manchester, under Pope Alexander VI, Vatican parties, already wild, grew wilder. They were costly, but he could afford the lifestyle of a Renaissance prince; as vice chancellor of the Roman Church, he had amassed enormous wealth. As guests approached the papal palace, they were excited by the spectacle of living statues: naked, gilded young men and women in erotic poses. Flags bore the Borgia arms, which, appropriately, portrayed a red bull rampant on a field of gold. Every fete had a theme. One, known to the Romans as the Ballet of the Chestnuts, was held on October 30, 1501. The indefatigable Burchard [papal magister ceremoniarum from 1483 to 1506] describes it in his Diarium. After the banquet dishes had been cleared away, the city’s fifty most beautiful whores danced with guests, “first clothed, then naked.” The dancing over, the “ballet” began, with the pope and two of his children in the best seats. Candelabra were set up on the floor; scattered among them were chestnuts, “which,” Burchard writes, “the courtesans had to pick up, crawling between the candles.” Then the serious sex started. Guests stripped and ran out on the floor, where they mounted, or were mounted by, the prostitutes. “The coupling took place,” according to Burchard, “in front of everyone present.” Servants kept score of each man’s orgasms, for the pope greatly admired virility and measured a man’s machismo by his ejaculative capacity. After everyone was exhausted, His Holiness distributed prizes—cloaks, boots, caps, and fine silken tunics. The winners, the diarist wrote, were those “who made love with those courtesans the greatest number of times.” Alexander’s daughter with Rosa, Lucrezia Borgia, is perhaps the most famous offspring of any pope. Used as a sexual pawn in her father’s political negotiations, at thirteen she was first married to Giovanni Sforza, a powerful Milanese and Lord of Pesaro, who

would benefit him in his scheme against the Aragonese dynasty of Naples. He annulled that marriage and the others following, when her charms were needed to help him form yet another important alliance. In 1497, when Lucrezia was seventeen, Alexander divorced her from her husband, whom he publicly called impotent. Lucrezia’s husband, Sforza, retaliated by accusing the pope of an incestuous relationship with his daughter. This was no shock to Rome; her incestuous entanglement with both her brothers was well known and her relationship with her father suspected. One of Lucrezia’s brothers, Cesare Borgia (1475-1507), who as a prince of the Church had committed multiple murders, was the model for Niccolò Machiavelli’s Il principe. On June 15, 1497, the corpse of her other brother, Juan, who had been stabbed nine times, was found floating in the Tiber. Cesare was assumed to be guilty. Between marriages, the seventeen-year-old Lucrezia conceived her illegitimate son Giovanni either by her father or by Cesare. Even pregnant, Lucrezia seems to have inspired a re-vision of holiness everywhere she went. The nuns of the Convent of San Sisto on the Via Appia learned a few things from Lucrezia, who had withdrawn there to pass the time to term with one of her lovers, a young Spanish chamberlain. By the time she left, an Italian historian wrote, the nuns had abandoned “the old austerity of their regime” to such an extent that “sweeping reforms were necessary to bring them back to the sublime joys of self-mortification and to exorcise the atmosphere…which had grown up inside those pious walls.” In spite of the internal scandal, her secret could have remained cloistered. But her father was impatient to arrange another politically advantageous marriage for her. “Later it would end tragically when Cesare murdered the groom.” A few years after Lucrezia gave birth, Alexander legitimized her child, the Infans Romanus, by issuing two papal bulls, one public and the other secret, on September 1, 1501. The public bull identified the child as the offspring of Cesare and an unmarried woman (“coniugato genitus et soluta”). According to the second bull, the child was the son of the same woman and Alexander himself (“…non de praefato duce, sed de nobis et de dicta muliere”). Pope Alexander

VI named the boy a duke and awarded him the duchy of Nepi and Camerino (he was, after all, either the pope’s son or grandson). Alexander was not the first pope, and certainly not the last, to decline celibacy. From the 1470s on, pontiffs sleeping with mistresses and granting titles and dowries to their offspring became common practice. Nepotism was far more damaging to the structural integrity of the Church than the pope’s sexual indiscretions at home, though of course the two vices issue from the same gene pool if not the same loins. The legitimacy of the practice of nepotism, like that of lust, trickled down from on high. Sixtus IV (r. 1471-1484) appointed first two of his dissolute nephews to the sacred College of Cardinals, to be followed by three more nephews and a grandnephew. Among his other appointees were two young children, an eight-year-old boy as archbishop of Lisbon and an eleven-year-old boy as archbishop of Milan. Sixtus’s successor, Innocent VII, spoiled his son by a nameless courtesan. Besides gang-raping young women, including nuns, until they were unconscious with serious injuries, Franceschetto Ciboo indulged a lifestyle that forced his pope father to escalate simony and to “mortgage the papal tiara and treasury to pay for [his] wedding.” His new bride’s fourteen-year-old brother was made a cardinal, who eventually became Pope Leo X. Even these very few examples from Manchester’s book serve my point: A few centuries here, a few millennium there—In spite of all our modern gizmos and sophisticated scientific insights, have we really advanced at all?



 

Chapter 17 Pat Robertson’s Mug Shot Although the photo’s date stamp reads 8/1/1994, according to a Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) spokesperson the photo of Pat Robertson leg pressing 2,000 pounds was actually taken on February 1, 2003, when Robertson was 73. The elderly evangelist attributes his superhuman strength to regular training with his doctor, who leg presses 2,700 pounds, and to his “age-defying energy shake.” Experts say the shake contains essentially the same ingredients as other energy shakes, minus the divinity. (GNC recently stopped carrying it.) So much for the shake. But what about those leg presses? Robertson’s 2000-pound leg press shattered the world record set by mega-buffed Dan Kendra, a Florida State quarterback who later played for the NFL. A special leg press machine had to be modified to fit Kendra’s record 1,335 pounds of weights, and the strain during his phenomenal lift was so intense that the capillaries in his eyes burst. But there in the CBN-authenticated photo, a thin, clear-eyed, seventy-something—kicked back, looking relaxed, even casual— tops Kendra’s record by 665 pounds. That’s Pat Robertson, Christian Coalition chieftain and owner of CBN, and perhaps the most famous and powerful fundamentalist in America. Certainly among the prophets of profits, he’s the superstar people believe in enough to have made him a billionaire. From atop his huge Virginia mountain mansion, complete with private airstrip, Robertson surveys his kingdom, the kind of kingdom that Satan offered Jesus, the kind of kingdom that’s built on that grand oldfashioned principle, “There’s a sucker born every day,” or as Robertson calls it, “God’s marvelous system of money management.”

It’s worth noting that according to his autobiography, Shout It from the Housetops, Satan told him early in his Christian life, “Jesus is just playing you for a sucker, Robertson,” and then assured Robertson that when he died, he would wind up in hell for having blasphemed the Holy Spirit. It’s hard to argue with that. According to Robertson’s Bible, Jesus rebuked demonic spirits for disclosing the truth about who he was, and Ananais and Sapphira were struck dead for blasphemy when they lied about withholding money from the church (they were allowed to withhold, they just weren’t allowed to lie about it). What does it profit a person if he gains the whole world but forfeits his soul? Jesus asks Pat Robertson at least as much as the rest of us. You have turned my Father’s house into a den of thieves, blessed are the poor, etc. Most of us know at least this much Bible to know that Jesus condemned riches. But unlike Jesus, Robertson plows forward through a fame-andfortune underworld with the slippery skill of Old Scratch himself, fearlessly tweaking the facts, brazenly rewriting his history, like he did on the resume he distributed during his presidential bid in 1988. For instance, according to the Dallas Morning News, Robertson, who has variously ranked his genius IQ between 137 and 159 (it doesn’t take a genius to notice the spread), stated on his resume and in his book, America’s Dates with Destiny, that he was a “Yaleeducated tax lawyer,” although he never passed the bar. What Robertson described on his resume as graduate study done at the University of London was only an introductory summer arts course for visiting Americans. Robertson claimed to be a member of the board of directors of the United Virginia Bank, but the Washington Post reported that in fact he only served on a community advisory board. When the Wall Street Journal busted Robertson for adjusting his wedding date so people wouldn’t know that his wife was seven months pregnant when they wed, Robertson scolded reporters in Philadelphia, “It is outrageous to pry into a man’s past and try to do damage to a man’s wife and children under the guise of journalism.” Although Robertson claimed to be a combat veteran of the Korean War, he never served at the front or saw combat, thanks to

his father, a well-to-do congressman and senator. When Congressman Pete McCloskey, who served in the same unit as Robertson, stated that Robertson had boasted of his father using his influence to “get him out of combat duty,” Robertson sued for $35 million. But during depositions, Paul Brosman, a retired university professor who had also served with Robertson, confirmed McCloskey’s story, and added that Robertson had “consorted with prostitutes and had sexually harassed a Korean cleaning girl who worked in the barracks.” Robertson dropped the suit and was ordered to pay part of McCloskey’s court costs. Robertson created the Freedom Council, a political group for born-again Christians, to help fund his presidential campaign. Millions were illegally raised and spent. The Federal Elections Commission audit detailed numerous violations of federal campaign guidelines. “We’re talking about very, very substantial amounts of money…I’m not aware of any publicly funded presidential candidate exceeding limits by that amount,” according to Commissioner John Warren McGarry. During his trying campaign days, God’s marvelous system worked for Robertson in ways that outperformed mere money management. Even during the hectic days of presidential campaigning, Robertson was busy with God’s business in other arenas, healing, diverting a hurricane, inadvertently creating international crises when he announced that the Soviets had placed nuclear missiles in Cuba and that he knew the location of American hostages being held in Lebanon. Closer to home and more recently, he proclaimed that Congress and the president don’t have to obey Supreme Court rulings if they don’t want to, that only Christians and Jews are fit to hold public office, and that women must obey men, and he concurred with Jerry Falwell in announcing that 9/11 was caused by “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way—all of them who have tried to secularize America.” Pat Robertson is a man obsessed with redefining brotherly love as self-righteous loathing. “How can there be peace when drunkards,

drug dealers, communists, atheists, New Age worshipers of Satan, secular humanists, oppressive dictators, greedy money changers, revolutionary assassins, adulterers, and homosexuals are on top?” he complains. A notoriously bad Samaritan, he demonizes even other Christians. “You say you’re supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don’t have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist.” Although God let him down on the campaign trail, he never stopped helping Robertson build a mammoth media, educational, and legal kingdom with a current estimated value of over a billion dollars. God’s marvelous system of money management kicked in when Robertson founded the CBN in 1960. In addition to fundraising via its 700 Club, CBN’s slick marketing targeted millions through direct mail and telephone “counseling centers.” A large percent of CBN’s airtime was spent selling programs, books, trips, etc. He suckered in thousands of viewers, many of them retirees, to sell coupon books for his new American Benefits Plus program, a Biblebacked multi-level marketing scheme like Amway that promised earnings of $15,000-20,000 a month. When that failed, he changed the name to Kalo Vita and started selling vitamins. Though he couldn’t come up with money to help faithful participants recoup their losses on his investment schemes, he did have enough cash to gamble on investments in race horses, including $520,000 for Mr. Pat and a $125,000 stud fee for a horse he bred with one of his mares. Over the years Robertson’s shady business practices got him into plenty of legal hot water, but like a modern-day Faust he flaunted his squeaky clean image and billionaire status. Lying didn’t hurt. For instance, in 1997, Robertson sold his International Family Entertainment and its Family Channel for $1.9 billion. Although his website claimed that he sold it to Fox Kids Worldwide, Inc., he actually sold it to Fox owner Rupert Murdock, publisher of the British tabloid The Sun, famous for its pin-up nudes, and owner of DirectTV, which was the world’s top provider of satellite porn. CBN viewers never heard of Robertson’s high-stakes investments or his legal tangles because they got their news whitewashed on

CBN. Among his viewers he was a hero, famous for his political prattle, social sophisms, and unabashed pleas for money to help finance his divinely profit-inspired propaganda. His ongoing backand-forth on separation of church and state—saying he was against it, then saying he never said that—provided a spiritual sparring of specious and spurious both entertaining and enlightening. Demonization of gays, abortion doctors, ACLU, any liberal cause, hyped to a pitch of Hollywood sensationalism, facilitated God’s marvelous system of money management. Robertson’s blasphemies included blatant lying, swindling, and fraud, all well documented, and some instances so outrageous they were downright comical. But Robertson’s addiction to business gambles led him to cast his bread upon very dark waters. Perhaps his most heinous indiscretion was to form business partnerships with Zaire’s brutal dictator, President Mobutu Sese Seko, and Liberia’s equally brutal dictator, President Charles Taylor. In 1964, Joseph Désiré Mobutu successfully staged a coup with the help of the CIA and installed himself as president of the Republic of Congo. Cancelling future elections, Mobutu refused to implement democratic reforms, and instead, turned his country, still ravaged by its civil war, into a base of operations for repulsing invasions by successionists backed by communist forces in neighboring Angola. He changed the country’s name to Zaire, compelled Zairians to change their non-African names, and renamed himself Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku wa za Banga, “the all-powerful warrior who, because of his enduring and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake.” During his thirty-year reign, organizations around the world protested Mobutu’s ruthless violations of human rights, which included religious persecution, censorship, torture, and the murders of tens of thousands of citizens. Due to Mobutu’s atrocities, by 1993, European nations and the U.S. had withdrawn economic assistance, and in 1994, the U.S. Department of State officially charged Mobutu with human rights violations and refused to grant him a visa. By this time, Mobutu had systematically transferred to his personal accounts in Switzerland and Belgium billions of dollars of Zaire’s money and revenues from natural resources, and according

to U.S. intelligence agencies, had embezzled billions of dollars in aid given to Zaire during the Cold War. The World Bank reported that in one year alone, $400 million, a quarter of the nation’s entire export revenues, disappeared from the books of the government’s mining conglomerate. Although the nation’s forty-three million people continued living in extreme poverty, Mobutu was one of the world’s richest men by the time he partnered with Pat Robertson in 1992. On February 16, 1992, Mobutu’s troops opened fire on demonstrating Zairian Protestants and Catholics asking for reform. On the 700 Club, Robertson criticized the U.S. State Department’s criticism of Mobutu’s bloody massacre, defending the all-powerful warrior leaving fire in his wake as a loyal U.S. ally in the war against communism. In June 1992, Robertson chartered the African Development Company to take advantage of the vast lumber and mineral concessions Mobutu granted him along the upper Zaire River and the 50,000 acre farm he would operate outside Kinshasa, the nation’s capital. Although African Development Company was a private venture, with Robertson as president and sole stockholder, Robertson used his CBN’s non-profit missionary money and equipment, along with Mobutu’s personal fleet of planes and yachts and a crew of Zairians that amounted to slave labor, to facilitate his diamond mining operations. Mobutu continued trying to gain international acceptance by establishing ties to the U.S., and Robertson continued to lobby for him. In the February 27, 1995, issue of Time, Dr. Makau Mutua, Projects Director of the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School, called Robertson “Mobutu’s biggest catch.” When Laurent Kabila and his rebels closed in on Mobutu’s last strongholds in 1996, Robertson sent a personal representative “offering his assistance and cooperation.” Robertson solicited his CBN viewers for donations to fund a “Flying Hospital” to support his Operation Blessing missionary outreach to Africa. But the pilots told the Virginia-Pilot and the Virginia Office of Consumer Affairs that the planes and equipment were used almost exclusively by Robertson’s African Development Company’s private diamond mining operations, which included the

Zairian slave laborers. The pilots’ testimonies were sealed by the Attorney General’s office, perhaps because Attorney General Mark Earley received $35,000 in political contributions from Robertson, and because Robertson gave Governor Jim Gilmore $50,000 in contributions and was a member of Gilmore’s transition advisory team. In legal hot water over Zambia, Robertson shifted his attention to Liberia. In 1998, Robertson negotiated a business partnership with Liberia’s president, Charles Taylor, a U.S. prison escapee turned brutal dictator, who, when Robertson met him, was under UN economic sanctions and indictments for war crimes. Robertson brought his own special CBN program to the Liberia airwaves for eight consecutive nights, after which, at a national three-day prayer and fast rally compliments of Robertson, Charles Taylor declared Jesus president and ordered the 65,000 attending the rally to prostrate themselves and join in song. This might seem miraculous, given Taylor’s greed at the expense of his poverty-stricken nation, given Taylor’s support for rebel insurgents whose weapons of war included rape, torture, and mutilation of civilians, and given that the U.S. strongly suspected that Taylor was linked to Al-Qaeda terrorist cells. On the 700 Club, Robertson blasted the U.S. president for adopting a policy of regime change that included implementation via American troops. “We’re undermining a Christian, Baptist president [Taylor] to bring in Muslim rebels to take over the country. And how dare the president of the United States say to the duly elected president of another country, ‘You’ve got to step down’. The State Department has tried as hard as it can to destabilize Liberia and to bring about the very outcome we’re seeing now. They had no endgame, they have no plan of what to do, they only wanted to destroy the sitting president and his government, and as a result, the place is being plunged into chaos. And it breaks my heart.” Robertson’s, of course, was a heart of gold. The 1998 business partnership with Taylor gave Robertson, in exchange for a ten percent kickback, gold mining rights to a plot of land reported to hold five million ounces of pure gold valued at about $1.5 billion. In the

tax evading Cayman Islands, Robertson created his new company, Freedom Gold, which was subsequently manned by a crew of thirtyfive Liberian slave “miners.” Meanwhile, back home, Robertson said in interviews that the explosion of a nuclear weapon at the State Department headquarters would be good for the country, and on his 700 Club he reiterated, “What we need is for somebody to place a small nuke at Foggy Bottom,” Foggy Bottom being the location of the State Department headquarters. Undaunted by his legal setbacks, Robertson never quit testing the limits of God’s marvelous system of money management. On August 22, 2005, Robertson announced that the United States should assassinate Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. Many speculated that Chavez was standing in the way of some new Robertson enterprise in the works there. Robertson put it, “You know, I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war…We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don’t need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.” Two days later, Robertson backpedaled: “Wait a minute, I didn’t say ‘assassination.’ I said our special forces should ‘take him out,’ and ‘take him out’ can be a number of things, including kidnapping.” Later that day he issued a written statement: “Is it right to call for assassination? No, and I apologize for that statement. I spoke in frustration that we should accommodate the man who thinks the U.S. is out to kill him.” I’m sorry, but put on the dunce hat and go sit in the corner with your global village idiot award.



 

Chapter 18 Criminal Faith Charged with at least twenty counts of felony drug tampering for diluting over a hundred doses of chemotherapy drugs, Robert R. Courtney claimed he needed the bucks to pay off his $600,000 federal income tax bill and his $330,000 pledge to his Assembly of God church, where he was a deacon and where his father had ministered. Courtney’s minister father, who worked as Courtney’s bookkeeper during the time of the fraud, called Courtney “an ideal son in every sense of the word.” Worldcom CEO Bernard Ebbers, once worth $1.4 billion and one of the world’s richest men, was busted for receiving huge undisclosed perks from Solomon Smith Barney, including over $11 million in illegal IPO profits while small shareholders were left holding Worldcom’s bankruptcy due to $3.8 billion in creative accounting and other offenses. According to the Wall Street Journal, when news of the scandal reached Brookhaven, Mississippi, Ebbers told his brethren at Easthaven Baptist Church, where he taught Sunday school, “I just want you to know you aren’t going to church with a crook.” Thank God for that. Though Brother Ebbers owed Worldcom $400 million to repay shady loans and was out of work, he would still get his severance pay of $15 million per year. Easthaven’s collection plate would not be empty. Empty, however, is relative. When the media revealed that former Secretary of Education and Drug Czar William Bennett had lost more than $8 million due to his addiction to casino gambling, Bennett filled the tank with tens of thousands in speaking fees earned by rallying audiences to the cause of conservative moral values. The doubledealing author of The Book of Virtues reprimanded President

Clinton’s “moral failure” while arguing that his own moral failure didn’t make him a hypocrite because he had never claimed to be a moral authority. The broadcast “moral failures” of right-wingers became so commonplace that even drug-basher Rush Limbaugh’s drug addiction drew little more than a yawn. Understanding that the Bible was not God-breathed nudged me from born-again to progressive Christianity. Coming to grips with Christianity as “the Christian myth” pushed me into my disillusioned agnostic phase. But it was researching what I called Christian crooks that led to my reconversion back into Deism. I was already upset by the blatant perversion of Christianity perpetrated by TV evangelists and rightwing Republicans when Al Gore “lost” to George Bush. Within one Bush-Cheney year it was clear to me that the sick, sinister version of Christianity spun by the rich and powerful and their passive sheep was so dangerous that the essence of America was truly in jeopardy. When I checked my emails one day only to witness the first Twin Tower billowing smoke, I thought it had to be a movie trailer. Within a couple seconds I read the caption. It’s a pathetic testament to the state of our Union that my first thought was “Dick Cheney.” I wanted to prove to myself just how dark the smokescreen had gotten. Although I viewed Christianity as mythic, I really hadn’t fully shaken my faith in the Christian message—meaning the message of the biblical Jesus—as a good, even a sacred thing. Distressed by 9/11, I just had to know why America was swarming with fundamentalist serial killers, fraudulent evangelists, Cheney politicians, Jesus worshipping billionaires, and violent Christian cults. If I couldn’t figure out why, I at least wanted to know how bad it really was. The consistent prevalence of evil within a religion that nonetheless survived to honor a man/god like Jesus and to preserve the good message essentially intact was almost a case for the existence of such a person and for the divine protection of the texts that preserved him. I found myself defending Christianity, or at least the teachings of Jesus, with the zeal almost of a born-again against the flood of Orwellian perversion.

But I wasn’t a Christian, and I knew that. What exactly was I? I was no longer comfortable calling myself a progressive Christian, and I wasn’t content with being a disillusioned agnostic. Oddly, before becoming a born-again Christian at age nineteen, I considered myself to be a Deist. During my Christian days I defended Deism with the same kind of zeal with which I later defended Christianity as I moved back into Deism. While researching “just how bad it had gotten,” I also started rereading Thomas Paine. The more I read about Christian hypocrisy the more I knew I was a Deist and only a Deist. Many articles and books contributed to my understanding of the evils of contemporary fundamentalism. But a number particularly affected me, perhaps because I read all these works very quickly one right after the other: Kimberly Blaker’s well-documented exposé of the Religious Right, The Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America; cult expert Margaret Thaler Singer’s Cults In Our Midst: The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menace; Dr. Robert Hare’s Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us; articles and books by theologian Karen Armstrong; Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush & His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country & Hijacking Our Democracy by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.; books by Molly Ivans; Rob Boston’s The Most Dangerous Man in America: Pat Robertson and the Rise of the Christian Coalition; Mel White’s Stranger At the Gate: To Be Gay and Christian in America (White had been ghostwriter of many big-ticket fundamentalist books); and a large number of media and watchdog websites. It wasn’t that theirs was exactly new information. It was the avalanche of examples all at once that made me realize at a deep visceral level that evil isn’t just an occasional eruption but is the fundamental foundation of organized religion. It’s not that religion itself is organically evil. It’s that otherwise good or at least harmless religion becomes evil when it becomes organized, because evil people realize that it’s easy to exploit the naiveté and trust of inherently religious souls who assume that other religious people are honest and good, and those evil exploiters always weasel their way into positions of power.

Another problem with religion is that it doesn’t prevent evil, it excuses and forgives and therefore encourages it in everyone but the scapegoat. Numerous studies link fundamentalism with all kinds of criminal behavior. According to a 1991 Roper survey, following conversion, born-again Christians’ behavior deteriorates in areas such as driving while intoxicated, illegal drug use, and engagement in illicit sex. And why not? You can always be forgiven. In 1980, cult researchers Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman found that more than thirty of the forty-eight cult groups they studied that year “had emerged out of fundamentalist or other branches of conservative Christianity,” and that those thirty “ranked higher than the most destructive cults…studied in terms of the trauma they inflicted upon their members.” The United Nations reported that between 1989 and 1992, of the world’s eighty-two armed conflicts, seventy-nine occurred not between countries, but among religious zealots within their own countries. In the U.S., the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nation, Christian Identity, Neo-Nazis, Reconstructionists, the Christian Right, and another estimated 400 militia-type Christian supremacist groups stand ready, and often armed, to help enforce their version of the true faith. The white racist militia, Aryan Nation, or Church of Jesus Christ Christian, maintains heavily-armed compounds in Utah and Pennsylvania and have been linked to at least several dozen murders since 1980. Christian Identity leader David Lane, convicted of violating the civil rights of a slain Jewish talk-show host, in addition to racketeering and conspiracy, said while in jail, “I am the symbol that is going to stop the Judeo-American murder of the white race. Killing is always justified for the preservation of your kind.” Under the influence of Christian Identity, Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 to protest the government’s storming of the Christian cult, Waco Branch Davidians, and to avenge the shooting deaths of the Christian Identity followers, the supremacist Weaver family, at Ruby Ridge.

Christian Identity followers believe that the federal government, or ZOG (Zionist Occupation Government), is controlled by Satan and the Jews and is intent on destroying the Aryan nation. The true holocaust will occur in America during the wars of the Last Days, or Tribulation, when the Jews, who have stolen the title of Chosen People from the Aryan race, will annihilate the U.S. and the white race; there will be no Rapture. Christian Identity members have been responsible for paramilitary raids on ZOG that have killed state officials and have bombed and set fire to abortion clinics. Another radical fundamentalist cult, Army of God, has been linked to kidnappings, bombings, shooting deaths, and the 280 anthrax threats made to abortion clinics following 9/11. Church & State reported that during the Army of God’s 2001 White Rose Banquet, “numerous speakers called for violence against abortion clinics, approved murdering abortion providers, and made jokes about killing homosexuals.” According to Army of God’s Chuck Spingola, “Now, these people [gays] are vile folks…If you deal with these people long enough, you understand the wisdom of God when he says they should be put to death.” Most Christian militia groups mirror the Reconstructionist ideology. Reconstruction founders, Texas economist Gary North and R.J. Rushdoony, advocate “reconstructing” America into a totalitarianism based on their literal interpretation of the Bible, which would necessitate reintroduction of slavery, elimination of birth control, and imposition of a non-intervenable capitalist economy. One Reconstructionist website, God’s Order Affirmed in Love, asserts, “Christianity has historically been a religion of the white race regardless of how hard whites have tried to convert the world,” and, “In addition to being grounded upon a biblical foundation, Reconstruction must be built upon preserving our families which includes the greater racial family (nation) that we were born into.” These racist Reconstructionists don’t know their history, or they would recall that Christianity was originally a religion of Jews and other people from the Middle East and Mediterranean areas. Not surprisingly, Reconstructionists stress instilling absolute obedience in their children. Children must conform to their parents, and parents must conform to Reconstructionist leaders. This

mentality contradicts the spirit of democratic freedom that characterizes America. Philosophically, Reconstructionism is not only cultic, but also treasonous. Cult children grow up to be adults that bring to the outside world the racial, religious, or political intolerance they have been taught. They also bring their belief that they are chosen, elite, superior, which makes it difficult for them to be self-expressive or to form their own opinions, since they might be inferior to the norm. Like all terrorist cults, Christian Reconstructionist and militia sects link some absolute authority—in this case, their version of the Bible—with violent enforcement of their narrow ideals. Violent enforcement equals violence equals cruelty for its own sake: Violent punishment of disobedient scapegoats becomes the sadist’s justification of his sadism. Justified sadism is glorified into sacred duty. Theologians like Karen Armstrong, a foremost authority on American religious affairs, warn about the increasing militancy of some fundamentalist sects. Publications like The Field Manual of the Free Militia “prove” the inerrancy of the Bible and claim that being armed is a Christian duty authorized by Jesus. In his article, “What Does the Bible Say About Gun Control?” Reconstructionist Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, argues that the Old and New Testaments approve killing in self-defense. Fine; but he further claims, “Christ accused the religious leaders of the day of also opposing the execution of those deserving of death—rebellious teenagers.” Pratt gets away with his glaring misrepresentation of Jesus as an advocate for the execution of rebellious teenagers because his followers, who believe in the infallible Bible, don’t actually check the Bible, they just blindly accept Pratt’s word as gospel. Only someone who had never really read the Gospels could possibly buy Pratt’s blatant lie. Although President Obama has been in office only a few months at the time of this writing, it’s disconcerting to me that he has taken no action to halt the construction of mega-churches on military bases, paid for by American taxpayers, most of whom believe that fundamentalist extremists and armaments are a dangerous combination, not to mention a violation of separation of church and state.

In The Fundamentals of Extremism, edited by Kimberly Blaker, Bobbie Kirkhart’s essay, “Little Ones to Him Belong,” documents numerous studies that have linked fundamentalism and child abuse. According to a 1974 report by H. Erlanger in the American Sociological Review, religious affiliation was found to be a better predictor of violent behavior toward children than age, gender, social class, or size of residence. In “The Role of Parental Religious Fundamentalism and Rightwing Authoritarianism in Child-Rearing Goals and Practices,” social psychologist Henry Danso cites extensive research that links child discipline by corporal punishment to the religious conservatism that generates the authoritarian personality type common among fundamentalists of all religions. Although not all fundamentalist groups are cultic, all do foster ideologies that can skirt the edge of cultic extremism. In Cults In Our Midst, Singer describes cult behavior in terms that fit many fundamentalist homes: “Each cult regards itself as above the laws of the land, as a sovereign state with its own superior rules…Often cult parents are led to regard children as creatures similar to wild ponies, who must be ‘broken.’” It’s not surprising that extremist authoritarians advocate the death of rebellious teenagers, which Pratt dishonestly claims that Jesus advocated. According to Singer, “Extremely strict and punitive behavioral controls are exercised over children in many cults. Severe beatings to ‘break the will, beat out the sin, overcome the demons’ are accepted means of handling children. In some cults, exorcisms are performed on children to drive out evil spirits, devils, and such. These can be brutal, terrifying events.” As a top psychological expert called to testify in many criminal cases involving cult violence, Singer knows from first-hand experience that parents who have been thoroughly indoctrinated into totalist thinking can stand by and watch their own children be severely abused and even killed right before their eyes. Here are a few of the many chilling accounts that she describes in her book. Five-year-old Luke Stice died of a broken neck in a survivalist cult in rural Nebraska. Reportedly, his neck was broken either during a regular “discipline session” or deliberately, to force

Luke’s father to return because he had fled the cult leaving behind Luke and two other children. Before Luke died, the leader had made him spend most of his time in undershorts and forced him to wallow naked in mud and snow. Twelve-year-old John Yarbough allegedly was beaten to death in a Michigan cult, the House of Judah. Before his death, when John had been beaten several days in a row and could not eat or walk, the leader tried to pick him up by the ears with pliers. Another boy reported that he was burned on the face for punishment; one testified that another boy had hot coals put in his mouth and on his hands… In a custody battle related to a nameless religious sect in Gwinnette County, Georgia, members testified that they sing to their children and offer encouragement during beatings with wooden rods or refrigerator hoses and insisted that they didn’t strike in anger. According to child welfare investigators, one girl said “the only way she knew her daddy loved her was because he whipped her. He would tell her he loved her while he was doing it.” One case in which I testified [concerned] a ten-year-old boy who was held by four grown men over the arm of a sofa and hit with a large wooden paddle 140 times, with the group calling out the count. The boy’s mother stood by and watched. The cult leader was in a nearby building directing the beating over the phone. The leader of a cult in the northeastern United States had all adults carry large wooden cooking ladles and strike any child who deviated from group rules until the child “surrendered.” In fundamentalist households, as in cults, children are expected to submit, surrender, obey. The authoritarian world that fundamentalist children are socialized into is the antithesis of democratic society. Children brought up in authoritarian homes that disdain negotiation and compromise are taught to shun critical, evaluative thinking and new ideas. In some homes, independent thinking is considered sinful or demonic, which warrants suppression and severe punishment.

Children learn to simply obey. In their polarized world, it’s “us,” the good guys in the right, v. “them,” the bad guys who are wrong. These children develop anxious-dependent personality traits that include self-righteousness and paranoia regarding outsiders. Being gay, of course, is anathema. Gay children learn to bash the gay within themselves and in others. Not surprisingly, most exhibitionists are male and married, and come from strict and repressive backgrounds commonly found among fundamentalists. Chicago Transit Authority machinist Larry Slack and his wife Constance, a nurse in a children’s hospital, were strict Jehovah’s Witnesses who home schooled their children; they were also rigid, devoutly religious parents who accepted child beating as biblically sanctioned practice. On November 10, 2001, when the children were unenthusiastically helping Constance find her jacket with her wallet, Larry whacked the youngest, eight-year-old Lester, with a threequarter inch cable. During the search for the jacket, Larry observed that twelve-year-old Laree had not done the laundry, so Larry whacked Laree a few times. When she tried to squirm away, the two teenage boys were instructed to tie her face down to a metal futon frame, and Larry whacked her thirty-nine times, the biblical forty lashes minus one. Then Constance whacked Laree another twenty times. When Laree started to scream, Larry stuffed a towel in her mouth, securing it with a scarf around her head tightened with a stick. The other children assisted in removing her clothing for the next round of Larry’s thirty-nine strokes and Constance’s additional twenty. Then Larry turned her over for another thirty-nine whacks with the cable. Within an hour of her arrival at the hospital, Laree was dead. In June, 2001, five staff members of the Heartland Christian Academy in rural Missouri were charged with child abuse for what the New York Times called “old-time religion and old-fashioned discipline to try to save the lives and souls of its students.” This was a school where “the teachers do not spare the rod…and they expect the children to pray.” In one incident, when paddling was not effective for students who would not pay attention or who talked back to teachers, eleven kids were forced to stand in pits of cow dung at a nearby dairy farm.

Studies show that the fundamentalist male’s views on the roles of women and children contribute significantly to spousal and child abuse. Incest rates are much higher among fundamentalist fathers. Noted physicians and child-protection advocates Ray E. Helfer and C. Henry Kempe report, “The assault rate on children of parents who subscribe to the belief of male dominance is 136 percent higher than for couples not committed to male dominance.” Ruth Miller, Larry S. Miller, and Mary R. Langenbrunner Miller published the findings of their 1997 study, “Religiosity and Child Sexual Abuse: A Risk Factor Assessment,” which found a pronounced correlation between religious conservatism and sexual abuse by a family member: The more fundamentalist, the greater the child’s risk, especially in isolated families that were less likely to participate in religious activities. In Characteristics of the Incestuous Family, Jackie J. Hudson points out that although sexual abuse is typically higher among stepfathers than biological fathers, in conservative Christian families the incest rate is so high that the rate of sexual abuse by biological fathers is higher than abuse by stepfathers in the general population. Even today, the religious Right promotes traditional “biblical” sexist attitudes of male domination that are tolerant of sexual abuse. Fundamentalist wives and children have been conditioned to fear the autocratic father figure, who expects unquestioning, automatic obedience, which he is entitled to according to Old Testament mores. Studies show that when fundamentalists adhere to the patriarchal family structure of male ownership and the traditional view that all sex is so sinful that even mentioning it is taboo, incest by a father who “has the right” is hidden in secrecy and silence. Rampant clerical molestation stems from the same ideology of male authoritarianism that enforces secrecy to maintain power and control over those lower in the hierarchy, who are taught to listen, not speak; obey, not question; “take it,” not resist. Although every state requires doctors, teachers, and other authoritative officials to report suspected child abuse, at this writing clergy are exempt from the requirement in twenty-four states, which means that if a wife or child “confesses” abuse, it can be handled internally or not at all, with no legal repercussions. The male head of the male controlled church is

considered “above” the rules and restrictions that apply to the rest of us. “Child sexual abuse has become a scandal within the Catholic Church…because it is embedded in the very structure of Roman Catholicism,” in the opinion of Frank Bruni and Elinor Burkett, authors of A Gospel of Shame. That structure includes patriarchy, a priest addressed as Father, the view that all sex is sinful, the vow of celibacy, and the confessional secrecy. Believers assume the unlikelihood of sexual abuse from within the church, which itself becomes the cloak abusive clerics hide behind. Priestly pedophilia globally has cost the Church well over a billion dollars in settlements. A report by Rev. Tom Economus estimated that up to 16.3 percent of priests are pedophiles. Over a hundred priests have been implicated in the Boston archdiocese alone. Some child molesters claim they are acting in obedience to a commandment from God. David Koresh, for example, leader of the Branch Davidians, maintained that while in Jerusalem, he had a vision instructing him to father a child with his wife’s eleven-year-old sister. Even clean-cut all-American fundamentalists can be embroiled in sexual scandals. U.S. House Representative John George Schmitz was a Catholic fundamentalist “family values” advocate working as part of the Reagan Revolution, and his wife Mary was an antifeminist active in the Right to Life League, when a former student of John’s was charged with abuse of one of her two children Schmitz had illegitimately fathered. Meanwhile, Schmitz’s young daughter, Mary Kay, became pregnant, married, and moved to Seattle, where she had more children and taught as an elementary school teacher, until she got pregnant by a sixth-grade student with whom she had fallen in love. Another fundamentalist, Susan Smith, who in 1994 drowned her two children, wrote in her confession letter, “My children, Michael and Alex, are with our Heavenly Father now, and I know that they will never hurt again. As a mom, that means more than words could ever say…My children deserve to have the best, and now they will…I have put my total faith in God, and he will take care of me.” According to Smith’s later statement to police, her stepfather,

Beverly Russell, began molesting her when she was fifteen. Russell, county chairman of the Christian Coalition and a member of Pat Robertson’s state G.O.P. executive committee, concluded a day of posting “Pat Robertson for President” posters all over town by molesting Susan. Even after the molestations became public, Russell retained his position within the Robertson organization. During 1980 and 1981, average guy Paul O’Brien searched for an explanation for why his schoolteacher friend had murdered his own wife and three children less than a year after he had become very religious and started carrying a Bible. “My wife and children are now in heaven,” the friend said on a tape he made before his execution. “I’m happy to join them now.” For a year and a half, O’Brien clipped news stories about mass murderers and serial killers from the Flint Journal to find out what they had in common. Eleven of the twelve reported mass murderers and serial killers had either a very religious upbringing or belief in demons and devils. O’Brien learned that mass murderers and serial killers tend to be fundamentalist and that “Most carried a Christian Bible with them at all times.” One of those eleven, Sampson Kanderayi, a Christian known as the Ax Killer, murdered more than thirty people “to appease evil spirits.” Another, a frequent Bible reader, received messages from God to find women home alone and to stab them to death. Teenager David Kellers, whose “whole life revolved around church and religion,” murdered his parents with a shotgun. Patricia Dueweke, a devout Catholic who had extensive religious training and had gone to a convent to become a nun, dropped her three children off a hotel balcony. Curtis Martin put his three children in a factory’s steel melting pot and walked away reading the Bible aloud as his children “turned into charred ash.” A 1992 study by M.H. Medoff and I. Lee Skov, and a 1995 study by David Lester, a world-renowned authority on murder, concluded that “fundamentalism may be a cause of murder, because of the oppressiveness of fundamentalists’ strict moral code.” An inability to conform can result in emotional and spiritual suffering “with adverse consequences.”

Studies by criminologists have revealed that anxiety, fear, and absolute dependence on faith leads to “evil imagination” expressed as hostility, judgment, condemnation, hatred, the need to punish, and violence. It could be argued that fundamentalists use “Christianity” and biblical literalism to uphold inequality because that entitles them to exploit others, even to the extent of subjecting innocent people to the status of victims of sadistic pleasure. Preacher Joe Combs and his wife Evangeline of Bristol, Tennessee, for instance, were just your average respectable fundamentalist parents who home schooled their children, until they were busted for the kidnapping, rape, and abuse of Elsa Garcia, their “adopted” daughter that they never bothered to legally adopt. Because the Combs family kept Elsa and the other children isolated from society, it was only when Elsa attempted suicide by drinking antifreeze that doctors discovered the scars all over her body. She fell down a lot, the good Christian Combs couple explained. Almost everybody accepted the honest word of the respected preacher. But that explanation just didn’t ring true for police detective Debbie Richmond-McCauley, who continued an investigation. After being sequestered from her family for more than a year, Elsa finally was able to reveal the truth. Besides being the Combs couple’s resident slave, from the age of five Elsa was forced to have oral sex daily with the preacher, who justified his behavior by quoting Scripture such as “King David had concubines.” When Evangeline found out, she beat the girl for “her” sin. Throughout Elsa’s “sinful” life, the couple beat her often with bats and garden hoses, cut her with tin can lids, burned her skin with a craft wood-burner, pulled off pieces of flesh with pliers, and on one occasion, sewed up with a darning needle the wound caused by a beating with a wooden shoe. They called her years worth of scars “the marks of the beast.” State medical examiner Dr. Gretel Harlan testified that the layering and location of Elsa’s 410 visible scars ruled out the possibility of accidental or self-inflicted injuries. Science and American jurisprudence triumphed over the preacher’s biblical right to have concubines and the couple’s biblical right to beat slaves. It’s easy to see the hidden agenda of biblical

literalism and hatred of science, the courts, and everything “humanist.” The Combs couple dramatically represents the “heart” of rightwing fundamentalism. According to Christian values, what you do in your heart, you truly do. The elitist “Christian” stance justifies subjugation, arrogance, and sadism. This form of Christianity is in Christian terms the “antichrist” in that it opposes everything Christ represented. The pseudo-science of the pseudo-Christian literalist perverts yes into no, love into hate, truth into biblical distortion to the point of blasphemous mockery. The abuse of the Bible in the hands of hypocrites systematically, “scientifically” sanctifies the demonic in the name of God. Behind the holy mask of biblical literalism, the devil himself smirks. One only need think of Wichita’s Dennis Rader, aka the BTK killer, so named for his modus operandi, blind, torture, kill. Rader was finally arrested in February 2005, at Christ Lutheran Church, where he had been a member for about thirty years and was president of the Congregation Council. A good Christian family man with a wife and two kids, a Cub Scout leader, a college graduate with a degree in Administration of Justice, a former employee of ADT Security Services and the current overly strict and invasive supervisor of the Compliance Department at Park City who “put down” residents’ pets unnecessarily, Rader was also a sadosexual murderer of at least ten women. The devil sneered through the wide painted grin of Pogo the Clown visiting sick kids in the hospital or appearing at charity events, or showing thirty-three young men who would become his victims one of his magic tricks using fake handcuffs that weren’t fake. John Wayne Gacy’s squeaky clean image was a cover-up for sadosexual murders that could possibly have been projections of his father’s violent hatred of homosexuals, which he verbally and physically took out on his son, berating him with accusations of being gay and taunting him for his very real health problems—a heart condition, which continued throughout his life, and blackouts resulting from an early head injury—which his father claimed were faked for attention. Destroying the scapegoat, or the evil nature of the scapegoat, becomes the sacred duty of enforcing the true faith that ensures

one’s purity. Once a believer’s purity is absolutely covered, he can do whatever he damn well pleases. Take Claude Allen, for instance. In January 2006, conservative Christian Republican Claude Allen was interviewed by police when he left a Target store with items he had not paid for. Allen denied any wrongdoing but still resigned his position as top domestic policy advisor with the Bush administration, saying he needed to spend more time with his family. Allen was a lawyer living in a $600,000 home, so Bush was surprised when Allen was arrested in March 2006 for at least twenty-five counts of fraud in a shoplifting scam involving fraudulent refunds for shoplifted merchandise amounting to thousands of dollars. And that was just one store. Many in Washington speculated that Allen left his White House post because he was unhappy that military chaplains were being forced to conduct nondenominational services. When Allen worked at the health department, he pushed for abstinence-only AIDS prevention programs. During his time as health administrator in Virginia, he blocked welfare payments to a rape victim wanting an abortion. Bush’s nomination of Allen for federal appeals court judge in 2003 was rejected by the Democrats. While working as an aide for Jesse Helms in the 1980s, Allen helped fuel an antigay agenda that included accusing one of Helms’s opponents of having ties to “the queers.” More recently he contributed to the antigay language in the Republican Party’s 2004 platform and has been a staunch supporter of a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. “Our desire—and Claude shares this—is for him to walk with humility and integrity,” the pastor of Allen’s church, Covenant Life Church, said during a Sunday service, perhaps a bit naively, if not hypocritically, given Allen’s propensity for bigotry and scams. Anyone who keeps up with the latest news or watches TV programs like Court TV or Prime Time Live has seen ample evidence of the extent to which religious conservatives commit crime. According to the Annual Statistical Table on Global Mission, compiled by Professor David B. Barrett, “Ecclesiastical-related crime, or crime in religious institutions, has grown from $300,000 annually a century

ago to $3 billion by 1990. It is estimated that the year 2024 will bring $65 billion in ecclesiastical crime.” According to a more recent estimate, published April 2008 in The Christian Century, the cost of ecclesiastical crime, which climbed from $5 million in 1970 to $16 billion in mid 2000, and reached $25 billion by July 2008, was projected to reach $65 billion by 2025. While big money is paid to victims, bigger money is made thanks to willing victims. For instance, when mega-rich prophet Morris Cerullo claimed to channel God, in fact announced that God spoke directly through him and instructed him to tell the faithful via divine afflatus, “Would you surrender your pocketbooks unto Me, saith God, and let me be the Lord of your pocketbooks…Yea, so be thou obedient unto my voice,” suckers handed Cerullo millions. In May 2000, John Paul Warren, a minister and former Senior Executive with Morris Cerullo World Evangelism (MCWE), filed a lawsuit against Cerullo for defrauding donors. According to Warren’s lawyer, “Cerullo purports to have first met God at the age of eight. Since then, his life has apparently been one unbelievable experience after another. He says he was led out of a Jewish orphanage by two angelic beings; transported to heaven for a face-to-face meeting with God; has the ability to predict the future; can heal the sick; and has told audiences when they look at him they ‘are looking at God.’ He also asks them to ‘give me your pocket books.’” Harry Turner, who resigned as MCWE vice-president in 1999, had previously filed suit against Cerullo for donor fraud, lies, and other grievances. But Cerullo continued to fleece his donor base consisting of millions of trusting, gullible, uninformed American elderly, widows, and the poor, as well as suckers in third world countries. They made him mega-rich; his jet alone, a Gulfstream G4 with gold-plated interior, was worth $50 million, not including two fulltime pilots and a stewardess. Even non-evangelicals know how to pull the fleece over the sheep’s eyes, but the state, still separated from the church, is ever wary. Michigan regulators shut down IRM Corp., which solicited investors via religious television and radio programs. The sale of bogus promissory notes and limited partnerships supposedly linked

to the California real estate market brought in $400 million before IRM was busted. Sixty-five-year-old minister Gerald Payne of Greater Ministries International Church of Tampa, Florida, was sentenced to twentyseven years and his wife Betty to thirteen years in prison on fraud charges for their $448 million scheme. The couple would not reveal where they stashed the cash. Like all prosperity evangelists, Payne cited various “Give, and it shall be given unto you” Bible verses that proved investor money would double because God said so. For the privilege of investing in “God’s” cargo ships and in precious metals and diamond mines in the Caribbean and Africa, twenty thousand faithful investors were persuaded to mortgage their homes, rack up huge credit card debts, and cash in retirement funds, because God promised through his infallible Word that their investment would return to them doubled. U.S. District Judge James Whittemore called Payne a “wolf in sheep’s clothing…The fact that you used the word of God to perpetuate a fraud is absolutely despicable.” Payne waved to his loyal supporters even as he was led out of the courtroom. Payne’s gesture reminds me of a comment made by a psychopath called “Jack” recounted by Dr. Robert Hare in his book, Without Conscience: “I had to steal sometimes to get out of town, yeah, but I’m not a fucking criminal.” According to AP business writer Marcy Gordon, during 19982000, securities regulators in twenty-seven states took action against hundreds of companies and individuals that used religion to gain the trust of more than ninety thousand investors. When the Baptist Foundation of Arizona (BFA) offered a 6.7 percent return on investments, more than thirteen thousand people, many of them elderly Baptists, invested $590 million before the foundation declared bankruptcy and was shut down by state regulators in August 1999, after the Phoenix New Times broke the story through its prize-winning series of investigative reports. Three of the eight accused foundation officials pled guilty to defrauding investors as part of a plea bargain to further investigations of five others charged with thirty-two counts each of theft, fraud, and racketeering. BFA became the largest fraud case involving a non-

profit organization and the largest collapse of a religious financial institution in U.S. history. IRM Corp., Greater Ministries, and BFA were all Ponzi schemes, which means that funds to pay previous investors came from payments made by newly recruited investors—a scheme that greatly enriches insiders, until the whole scam collapses. In a news conference, Deborah Bortner, president of the North American Securities Administrators Association and Washington State’s director of securities, warned about investment schemes playing on religious loyalties. Forrest Bomar, a retiree who appeared with Bortner at the news conference, served as a case in point. Bomar and his wife Lee were impressed by the salesman who came to their house. He seemed to share their values, and they trusted him. In the end, they lost almost all their $236,166 investment. Another case in point: The Rev. Armstrong, a retired Southern Baptist minister, and his wife Lois. When they sold their home and wired the $160,000 to their BFA account, they had already “loaned” $460,000 to BFA at a high rate for promissory notes, which of course promised repayment of the money they never got back. Now the couple lives in a trailer, and Rev. Armstrong can’t pay for treatments for his diabetes, cancer, and liver problems. Investors need to be as skeptical and careful investing with a member of their faith as with anyone else, Bortner advised, pointing out that increasingly sophisticated investment schemes are on the rise. “I’ve seen more money stolen in the name of God than in any other way.” Promoters of investment schemes based on religion often beg for financial help needed to save their church, or their pitch specifies plans to invest part of the profits in a worthy cause. Some scam artists kneel to pray with their victims. It’s worth noting that the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA), the self-policing, non-reprimanding evangelical watchdog group that monitors moneygrubbers, was established by Baptist Billy Graham’s business manager after an embarrassing discovery in 1977 by the Charlotte Observer that Graham had an undisclosed twenty-three-million dollar fund in Texas that had not been mentioned in the accountings for Graham’s ministry. “There are some charlatans coming along and the public

ought to be informed about them and warned against them,” Graham self-righteously proclaimed. Federal law requires that all non-profit corporations, including universities and ministries, make public their five top salaries. But in 2001, the Associated Baptist Press reported, “About half of Baptist organizations contacted by the independent newspaper Baptists Today would not disclose salary information for their top executive. Three Southern Baptist Convention entities said policies allowed them to release only salary ranges.” Even evangelicals who disclose salaries might receive additional undisclosed salaries for extra job titles as well as perks that can add up to millions of dollars. ECFA is accountable only to itself, meaning its member evangelicals, not donors and other ministry supporters. In spite of its standards rating system, critics consider ECFA to be merely a sanitizing front for multimillion dollar mega-ministries seeking donors. ECFA currently boasts a membership of 1,203 organizations with a combined income of approximately $15 billion. ECFA will not release information about many of its secretive members. The outrageous wealth “earned” by top evangelists might deter some potential donors, and less money for the evangelists means less membership money for ECFA, hence their reticence. Are these “superior” evangelists godly men, or something closer to evil?—A psychopath, perhaps? “Psychopaths have a narcissistic and grossly inflated view of their self-worth and importance, a truly astounding egocentricity and sense of entitlement, and see themselves as the center of the universe, as superior beings who are justified in living according to their own rules,” Dr. Hare points out. Even today Graham’s ministry, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA), does not meet ECFA’s criteria. In addition, the Better Business Bureau’s BBB Wise Giving Alliance requested but did not receive complete information on the organization’s governance and oversight, effectiveness measures, finances, solicitation materials, donor privacy, and fundraising disclosures and is unable to verify the organization’s compliance with BBB’s twelve standards for charity accountability. Although Graham was almost entirely disabled in 2004, his ministry listed a total income

(presumably for work not performed) of $116,887,687, with total assets of $384,374,883. Billy’s son, Ned Graham, has also fallen short of ECFA standards. Besides problems with alcoholism, drug addiction, porn use, adultery, and spousal abuse, Ned’s highly lucrative East Gates International, a Bible distribution company, had to deal with the resignations of most of his company’s staff and board members, which he replaced with siblings and in-laws in violation of ECFA standards, which required that a majority of board members not be related by blood or marriage. You can get all this, as I have, from the media. But of course, “The media is ruled by Satan,” according to Jimmy Swaggart, who has used television media to build his $150 million a year ministry. “But yet I wonder if many Christians fully understand that. Also, will they believe what the media says, considering that its aim is to steal, kill, and destroy?” Snake oil sanctimony became especially dangerous during the Reagan era. TV evangelism ramped up its power and profits when Pat Robertson orchestrated his quarter of the divine-right Dominionists alliance—evangelists, rightwing politicians, major corporations, and the neocon—which brazenly violated church/ state separation and cultivated anticommunist, antihumanist, antifeminazi, antigay, anti-Muslim, antiterrorist, anti-this-and-that agendas as lucrative fund-raising hooks. Evangelism’s moral tirades provided a critical red herring to deflect attention away from the rightwing Dominionists’ concerted appropriation of America (in layman’s terms, the enrichment of the already rich off the backs of the not rich), and it served as a symbol proving its righteousness, by which it goaded, and still goads, the sheep onto the free-market/family-values bandwagon, where they could be seduced into colluding in their own exploitation. The original family values poster child, Newt Gingrich, and his protégé, Tom “Hottub” DeLay, both former Speakers of the House, are examples of classic dirty politicians who masterfully exploited the squeaky clean image bestowed upon them by fundamentalists. Their well-publicized womanizing and adultery were only sins, but real crimes led to public outcry and President Clinton’s censure and the

speakers’ eventual forced resignations. Is it any wonder that faux family values Gingrich and DeLay led the Clinton-Lewinsky lynch mob? Their version of revenge was almost humorous. Gingrich was himself such a notorious adulterer that during his presidential campaign, his entire core staff resigned because of it. Gingrich and DeLay were each indicted for felonies committed against the American people and their laws, and both lost their jobs as House speakers because of some of them. Some of the worst of those crimes were committed with the active support of prominent fundamentalists. Good Christian President “Dubya” Bush added insult to injury his first year in office when he transferred President Clinton’s entire $5.6 trillion surplus—the largest in American history—to the already-rich. Every year thereafter, Bush’s corporate pals pocketed trillions more of our hard-earned tax dollars—real money paid out in the form of debt against our future treasury, most of it borrowed from China and Japan. Bush shelled out over $100 billion a year in direct subsidies to the oil and other energy industries alone. In February 2006, CNN reported that a new federal investigation had discovered that $18 billion in money allocated for the Iraq War was “unaccounted for,” and investigators considered that just the tip of the iceberg. Corporate welfare for the rich fueled the Dominionists machine. Bush & co. must have been laughing at poor dumb-sheep Christians who didn’t even know that subsidies (i.e. corporate welfare) consisting of their tax dollars were being handed out to corporations already raking in billions in profits—Exxon Mobile, for instance, posted $36 billion in profits in 2005—when many of those corporations weren’t paying any taxes themselves. “American” corporations were dodging an estimated $70 billion in annual taxes by setting up shop via P.O. boxes in offshore tax havens like Bermuda or the Cayman Islands. Many corporations paid no taxes at all, while others, taking advantage of loopholes, paid a little token tax. According to economic experts, simply closing some of the more outrageous loopholes could have increased annual tax revenues by at least $110 billion. As if being ripped off economically were not enough, after 9/11, frightened Americans willingly handed over their rights on behalf of

The Patriot Act, perhaps the most unpatriotic fraud ever perpetrated by an American president. The Patriot Act covertly represented the self-interested will of corporate aristocrats attempting to appropriate America while pretending to represent America, with God’s blessing. There was no war on terror. There was only the Iraq-Afghanistan War, which was a global-positioning business venture of an oil cartel acting as an independent nation—all paid for by scammed American taxpayers while our elected representatives quietly fingered their pocketed perks and next year’s campaign contributions. Good Christian President Bush told America that the war in Iraq was “making the world safe for democracy” and that his illegal invasion of that country was “maintaining stability in the region.” The truth was that American invasions of other nations created instability, terrorism, and hatred of America throughout the world. The truth was that the corporate nation exploited the American military to “secure”—i.e., steal—oil from those countries. While it picked America’s pocket to pay for its business venture of stealing Middle East oil, the corporate nation demonized Islam to sucker in American fundamentalists and other “Christian” bigots who could be mobilized to support “America’s” destruction of the Islamic devil. I began to wonder if America’s military was purposely being weakened and our arms depleted by a corporate nation creating its own military elsewhere with the intent of conquering America and the entire world. It didn’t strike me as farfetched, given that the corporate nation owned the corporations that manufactured our arms and provided the military’s services, and given little hints like Halliburton’s announcement that it planned to move its headquarters from Texas to Dubai—it was a Dubai corporation that Bush wanted us to sell our ports to. Was I being a bit paranoid to surmise that a corporate nation takeover of America might be in the works? Certainly the corporate nation owned far more than the military. Much of America’s infrastructure was controlled not by Americans but by huge multinational corporations. The corporate nation owned the energy that powered our cars, businesses, and homes. It controlled our natural resources, our air and water, the timber that became paper products and lumber for homebuilding, the metals manufactured into products and the machinery used to make them. It

owned our airlines, carmakers, trucking companies, and railroads; the internet and phone companies, banks, media, and food producers; the tools and applications of everyday life. It was heavily invested in medical technology and owned medical facilities and drug companies. Thanks to crooked governors, large corporations were buying bridges and highways paid for by taxpayers for taxpayer use. The Dominionist corporate alliance already owned and managed America, and America meant you and me. Presently, I thought, we were essentially serfs. Soon we would be slaves if we didn’t instigate a cultural revolution to publicly “out” and overthrow Dominionism. In January 2007, CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight broke a story that top corporate Republican Dominionists had been meeting secretly with the presidents of Mexico and Canada with the goal of eliminating the three countries’ borders and forming a North American Union. Their theme was Homeland Security and Prosperity, as the cabal nicknamed their tryst. In other words, there would be no more Mexico, Canada, or United States, there would only be one huge continental “nation” of multinational corporate conglomerates supported by America’s corporate-controlled military, otherwise known as Homeland Security. By 2008, the Dominionist corporate alliance had become arguably the most dangerous political-religious entity to ever exist in America and potentially in the world. In essence, it was a powerful covert nation at war with America; its treasonous goal was corporate takeover. Its masquerade as “American” business abiding by “American” free-market capitalism sanctified by its alignment with religion put it beyond scrutiny and above the law. Dominionists publicly championed a “Christian nation”; behind our backs, they were surely snickering with the devil at us dumb-sheep Americans paying them large tolls to cross the bridge to slavery. Big Brother had arrived, or so I was beginning to think. Through stealth and subterfuge, the corporate aristocracy, instigated as “America” (there’s the real identity theft), was already executing world domination. Money, money, money, the love of which is the root of all evil, according to the very Bible those rich rightwingers thumped to

sanctify their unrighteousness as they pulled the wool over the dumb sheep’s eyes. Of course, we were dumb in part because thanks to Reagan era deregulation, rich corporations, who now owned the media, had snuffed the Fairness Doctrine, which once upheld the principle of accurate and balanced reporting, so we didn’t get much of this from TV newscasters. Nor did we get straightforward facts from elected representatives who sacrificed truth to greed, fear, or “politeness.” Therefore, millions of Americans honestly believed that Bush/Cheney & co. were good Christians and wanted Bush/ Cheney & co. to institute a good Christian America. Millions of Americans jumped on the Bush bandwagon to proclaim the evils of stem-cell research, abortion, gay marriage, the Islamic threat. Millions of Americans never connected the dots between corporate greed and massive pollution that was literally poisoning our planet of very real human beings, including our and their own children. How could that level of exploitation, how could that degree of ignorance, have happened in America, I wanted to know? It was during the Bush years that I realized that brazen Orwellian newspeak was possible only because God’s Big Brother stood on his big podium spouting his big lies while thumping his big Bible. People were gullible—had always been gullible. I was gullible. I, like others, had been subjugated by my own ignorance against my own will. By the time I finally decided to write this book, two things had become clear to me: Political ignorance was spiritual ignorance, and “Christian America” had absolutely nothing to do with the actual reality of either God or America. Although the popular religious movement of our Founders had fallen out of vogue, Deism remained, in my view, the most sensible, egalitarian, and relevant alternative to organized religion the world had to offer. What would it take for Deism to make a come-back? What would happen, what would be rectified, if religion were suddenly supplanted by belief in the commonsense God of Deism?



 

Chapter 19 Education v. Indoctrination In 1786, a decade after he penned the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson advised in a letter to George Wythe, “Preach…a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils [of monarchial government].” The revolutionary ideals of the Enlightenment that spread throughout the world brought with them an understanding that freedom from the elitist entitlement to oppress depended upon the corrective will of educated citizens. Jefferson observed, There is one provision [in the new constitution of Spain] which will immortalize its inventors. It is that which, after a certain epoch, disfranchises every citizen who cannot read and write. This is new, and is the fruitful germ of the improvement of everything good and the correction of everything imperfect in the present constitution. This will give you an enlightened people, and an energetic public opinion which will control and enchain the aristocratic spirit of the government. Jefferson believed that we the people of the new America, “especially when moderately instructed, are the only safe, because the only honest, depositaries of the public rights,” and that we “will err sometimes and accidentally, but never designedly, or with a systematic and persevering purpose of overthrowing the free principles of the government.” Our Founders believed that liberty could only be assured if a liberal arts education was freely available to all American citizens,

not just to a “special” few. Critics argued that the majority of people were not and would never be capable of ruling themselves, much less an entire nation. Many thought that the common man was intellectually inferior and incapable of being educated. Jefferson disagreed. “I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.” Public education for all citizens was important enough for the survival of our fledgling nation that George Washington addressed the issue in his First Annual Message: There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is, in every country, the surest basis of public happiness. In one in which the measures of government receive their impression so immediately from the sense of the community as in ours, it is proportionably essential. To the security of a free constitution it contributes in various ways: by convincing those who are entrusted with the public administration that every valuable end of government is best answered by the enlightened confidence of the people; and by teaching the people themselves to know and to value their own rights; to discern and provide against invasions of them; to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority. President Washington so strongly favored the establishment of a liberal arts university that he offered to help finance one with a substantial contribution from his own wealth. A plan for the establishment of a University in the federal City…I have greatly wished to see a plan adopted by which the Arts, Sciences and Belles lettres, could be taught in their fullest extent; thereby embracing all the advantages of European tuition with the means of acquiring the liberal

knowledge which is necessary to qualify our citizens for the exigencies of public, as well as private life; and (which with me, is a consideration of great magnitude) by assembling the youth from the different parts of this rising republic, contributing from their intercourse, and interchange of information, to the removal of prejudices which might, perhaps, sometimes arise from local circumstances…I will grant, in perpetuity, fifty shares in the navigation of Potomac River towards the endowment of it. What annuity will arise from these fifty shares, when the navigation is in full operation, can, at this time, be only conjectured. The considerable annuity from Washington’s contributed shares helped establish Washington University. Thomas Jefferson’s blueprint for a broad liberal public education warned against establishing schools that promoted the doctrines of one specific religious sect. Instead, students should be free to explore many religious traditions. After stating the constitutional reasons against a public establishment of any religious instruction, we suggest the expediency of encouraging the different religious sects to establish, each for itself, a professorship of their own tenets on the confines of the university, so near as that their students may attend the lectures there and have the free use of our library and every other accommodation we can give them; preserving, however, their independence of us and of each other. This fills the chasm objected to ours, as a defect in an institution professing to give instruction in all useful sciences…And by bringing the sects together, and mixing them with the mass of other students, we shall soften their asperities, liberalize and neutralize their prejudices, and make the general religion a religion of peace, reason, and morality. The goal of our early American Revolutionaries like Washington and Jefferson was not to promote the rigid belief-system of

authoritarian Christianity; it was to preserve truth, security, tolerance, and liberty. Not all religious schools educated for the sake of indoctrination. Thomas Paine, one of history’s most reasonable advocates of separation of church and state, cherished the well-rounded instruction he received at a Quaker school. Even a religious education can open one’s eyes to religious corruption. In Citizen Representative, Paine recommended quality education as the antidote to the corrupting morals of priests: [The Quakers] are equally as remarkable for the education of their children. I am a descendant of a family of that profession; my father was a Quaker; and I presume I may be admitted an evidence of what I assert. The seeds of good principles, and the literary means of advancement in the world, are laid in early life. Instead, therefore, of consuming the substance of the nation upon priests, whose life at best is a life of idleness, let us think of providing for the education of those who have not the means of doing it themselves. One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests. If we look back at what was the condition of France under the ancient regime, we cannot acquit the priests of corrupting the morals of the nation. Their pretended celibacy led them to carry debauchery and domestic infidelity into every family where they could gain admission; and their blasphemous pretensions to forgive sins encouraged the commission of them. Why has the Revolution of France been stained with crimes, which the Revolution of the United States of America was not? Men are physically the same in all countries; it is education that makes them different. Accustom a people to believe that priests or any other class of men can forgive sins, and you will have sins in abundance. Education was a necessary prerequisite for the advancement of our stated ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all citizens. “I do hope,” Jefferson wrote magnanimously, “that in the present spirit of extending to the great mass of mankind the

blessings of instruction, I see a prospect of great advancement in the happiness of the human race.” Although he cautioned, “I do not, with some enthusiasts, believe that the human condition will ever advance to such a state of perfection as that there shall no longer be pain or vice in the world, yet,” like all humanists then and today, he did “believe it susceptible of much improvement, and most of all in matters of government and religion; and that the diffusion of knowledge among the people is to be the instrument by which it is to be effected.” “Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty,” he wrote to James Madison. And in a letter to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, he commented, “Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.” The enlightenment our Founders envisioned is still to some extent an unfulfilled hope. TV evangelist Jerry Falwell expressed the sentiments of perhaps millions of his followers when he said, “I hope I will live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them.” Falwell didn’t live to see that day. But before he died, he raked in millions pitching his agenda. Opposition to education and to just plain thinking is nothing new. Luther proclaimed, “Whoever wishes to be a Christian, let him pluck out the eyes of his reason.” “Christ wants to slay reason and subdue the arrogance of the Jews.” “Whoever wants to be a Christian must be intent on silencing the voice of reason.” Not surprisingly, many fundamentalists even today denigrate “humanists,” scholars, and academia, the protectors of reason. Several outspoken evangelists are hostile to education that encourages free-thinking, imagination, scrutiny, and interpretation, and instead insist on indoctrination, often inculcated through Christian schools and home schooling, to assure obedience to their God-breathed Bible, especially interpretations of translations

sanctioned by their own particular denomination, church, or preacher. Indoctrination “teaches” absolutes revealed by God that can’t be questioned. Students are molded into passive sheep taught the absolute virtues of conformity and obedience. Obedient students become obedient adults who will deny their own God-given reason, conscience, intuition, and experience to conform in obedience to the commands of their domineering teachers. If leaders teach them that good is evil, that right is wrong, that God has instructed them to sacrifice a thousand dancing virgins or to burn witches at the stake, indoctrinated adults will obey rather than risk going to hell. Indoctrination is exactly that method used by cult leaders to gain control. To counter the push for progress, rightwing fundamentalists have become particularly adept at rewriting history to imply that until recently, public education was religious education, specifically Christian. “We’re going to bring back God and the Bible and drive the gods of secular humanism right out of the public schools of America,” announced presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, addressing an anti-gay rally in 1996. Fundamentalists like Buchanan seem unaware that God and the Bible never went anywhere, and that our humanist Founders created our nation as a rejection of the controlling despotism of religion and state. America’s creators were keenly aware, as were their humanist forebears, of the danger of church merging with state to create an even deadlier version of the oppressive Holy Roman Empire. To overcome church/state separation, fundamentalists fuse church and education and make upholding that fusion a sacred duty. Jerry Falwell warned his viewers, “The public school system is damned…Christian students should be in Christian schools. If you have to sell your car, live in a smaller house, or work a night job, put your child in Christian schools. If you can’t afford it, home school.” Fundamentalists like Falwell teach their children that our Founders established a Christian America that must be rescued from humanist liberals. Public education, the invention of Thomas Jefferson and one of America’s proudest institutions, nurtures open-mindedness, truth,

and progress; it opposes discrimination, provides accurate, up-todate information, and facilitates exploration. The so-called Dominionists—radical fundamentalists working to take control of America—want public education replaced with podiums for propaganda. Spokesperson Gary North sums us the extremist Reconstructionist agenda, So let us be blunt about it: We must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God. To gain independence? To deny religious liberty? Isn’t that perspective a kind of treason? By “neutrality” North implies freedom, which he opposes. His clear goal is his own elitist, dictatorial rule of slaves who will “get busy” doing his bidding. Many other prominent leaders maintain similar positions. Robert Thoburne, headmaster of a far Right Christian school near D.C. proclaims, “Our goal is not to make the schools better…the goal is to hamper them, so they cannot grow…Our goal as God-fearing, uncompromised… Christians is to shut down the public schools… step by step, school by school, district by district.” J.M. Sutherland of The Christian Alert Network believes, “Only stupid parents would leave their children in the filthy, immoral, dangerous, public ‘education’ institutions for indoctrination by socialists…who don’t seem to care about the safety of children…only their pay checks.” James Kennedy is another prominent evangelist that regularly bashes public education. “Not all the educators in our public schools and universities are deliberately deceitful, not all of them want to destroy this nation, but many do. The major teachers’ unions certainly do,” he blatantly lies. “Just a few years ago, there were as many as ten thousand Communist professors in American universities. The average person never saw any of them, and many would doubt the truth of that statistic. But I can assure you it is

true.” And his ignorant followers actually trust his assurance. “Teachers in many of our public schools have acceded to the policies of the liberal teachers’ unions to make sure that students from kindergarten through high school will be stripped of any sense of moral or ethical absolutes. Right and wrong are non-issues in our public schools.” Having myself taught for over twenty years as a professor at ten universities and colleges and at a public charter high school, I can assure you that Kennedy’s assurance is delusional. Only blind sheep would believe that teachers’ unions are deliberately deceitful and want to destroy this nation. Only blind sheep would believe that ten thousand American professors are Communists. Only blind sheep would believe that teachers’ unions want to strip students of any sense of morality and ethics. Only blind sheep would believe that public schools do not address issues of right and wrong. Well-educated James Kennedy and his well-educated colleagues are deliberately blinding the under-educated sheep via propaganda. The blinded sheep then collude in blinding their children via Christian schools or home schooling with self-indoctrinating “educational” materials. Kennedy and clan have made themselves filthy rich spewing their bunkum. To inspire fear and fire up a witch-hunt mentality toward academics, Pat Robertson promotes a book titled The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America: That’s just a short list of the 30-40,000 of them, they’re like termites that have worked into the woodwork of our academic society and it’s appalling...These guys are out and out communists, they are radicals, you know some of them are killers, and they are propagandists of the first order and they don’t want anybody else except them. That’s why Regent University [which Robertson owns] for example is so terrifically important and why we’re setting up an undergraduate program that hopefully will see shortly 10,000 students, and then from there 250,000 because you don’t want your child to be brainwashed by these radicals, you just don’t want it to happen.

Not only brainwashed but beat up, they beat these people up, cower them into submission. Perfect hook: Radicals beat up children; radicals, not fundamentalists, “cower” children into submission. The solution? Buy my book. Send Regent money. Only obedient, indoctrinated sheep would nod at this typical Robertsonian snake oil. I have to admit that some of the rationales of anti-education pundits are so ridiculous they’re amusing. While addressing the “God and Country II” rally, evangelist William Murray (ironically, the son of the famous atheist leader, Madalyn Murray O’Hair) stressed the need for in-school prayer and Bible recitations because “Young boys are on Ritalin and a lot of the problem is because we have a female-dominated educational system which tries to make little boys act like little girls.” Senator Jesse Helms warned in a fundraising campaign mailer, “Your tax dollars are being used to pay for grade school classes that teach our children that cannibalism, wife-swapping, and the murder of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior.” What makes public schools such a problem? “Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith…We need believing people,” as Adolf Hitler put it, April 26, 1933, in his speech during negotiations leading to the Nazi-Vatican Concordant of 1933. In contrast to the Jeffersonian ideal of religious tolerance, radicals like Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson distort nondiscriminatory openness to the ideas of all religions, making it seem anti-Christian. Buchanan told graduating college students in their commencement address, “America’s public schools, we consciously deny them all religious instruction, and deny them access to that primary source of morality, God’s own word. The Bible is the one book from which they are expressly not allowed to be taught.” This, of course, is untrue. The Bible can be taught as a religious or literary work at any university. It just can’t be lifted up as the only

source of absolute, literal truth to which all Americans must bow, which is the fundamentalists’ demand. Pat Robertson claimed on his 700 Club, “The public education movement has also been an anti-Christian movement…We can change education in America if you put Christian principles in and Christian pedagogy in. In three years, you would totally revolutionize education in America.” In 1993, James Kennedy amped the rhetoric to the level of a war against education: “The Christian community has a golden opportunity to train an army of dedicated teachers who can invade the public school classrooms and use them to influence the nation for Christ.” Christianity still hasn’t shaken its propensity for domestic terrorism. Steven Showers, Director of The School Prayer Resource Center, Newbury Park, California, expressed his plan of attack in a letter to The Simi Valley Star & Enterprise, January 1, 1995: “If a local community provides for school prayer, and the children of that community voluntarily choose to participate in it, this collective decision allows God to intercede in the public dimension of that community. Restoring school prayer will allow God’s angels to leap into action to arrest hellish energy patterns before they can sprout and spill over into the public square.” Of course, school prayer is not voluntary, and it violates separation of church and state, not to mention the rights of students who are Jews, Muslims, or members of other religions. Pat Robertson hit on a lucrative fundraising strategy when he coupled education phobia with pedophilia, which he erroneously equated with homosexuality. “It’s one thing to say, ‘We have rights to jobs…we have rights to be left alone in our little corner of the world to do our thing.’ It’s an entirely different thing to say, well, ‘We’re not only going to go into the schools and we’re going to take your children and your grandchildren and turn them into homosexuals.’ Now that’s wrong.” Well, it might be wrong if it ever happened. It could happen, just like a heterosexual could obtain a teaching position for the purpose of gaining access to children he or she could molest. But there has never been a reported case of a homosexual going into the schools

specifically for the purpose of turning children into homosexuals. Yet Robertson dishonestly implies that this is commonplace homosexual rhetoric and, by implication, behavior. This is pure Robertsonian mythmaking generated by that extremist fear of difference called paranoia. All the major professional psychological and medical organizations distinguish pedophilia as a separate sexual preference, as different from homosexuality as homosexuality is from heterosexuality. The pedophile’s preference is not for males or females, it is for children, often of either gender. A pedophile is a child molester, not a homosexual. A homosexual is a homosexual, not a heterosexual “turned into” a homosexual. These are scientific facts denied by fundamentalists. Fundamentalist Robert Knight also links homophobia with education. Though he would be the last person to know anything about the homosexual subculture, Knight nonetheless claims, “There is a strong undercurrent of pedophilia in the homosexual subculture. Homosexual activists want to promote the flouting of traditional sexual prohibitions at the earliest possible age…they want to encourage a promiscuous society—and the best place to start is with a young and credulous captive audience in the public schools.” And he adds, “Homosexuals say they don’t want the children, but boy they put a lot of energy into going after them.” Homosexuals say they don’t want the children because they don’t. Needless to say, Knight’s “a lot of energy into going after them” is a lot of hot air into going after gays. Like many other fundamentalist evangelists, Knight is a master of the fallacy of false authority— himself. The homo-pedophile frenzy is a modern witch-hunt. It’s often difficult to tell if the rhetoric is motivated by genuine paranoia or if it’s simply an underhanded fundraising gimmick. In one of his direct mail letters, Don Wildmon of the American Family Association makes the preposterous claim that homosexuals recruit children to “breed.” He exploits this claim to raise money, and it works. “For the sake of our children and society, we must OPPOSE the spread of homosexual activity! Just as we must oppose murder, stealing, and adultery! Since homosexuals cannot reproduce, the

only way for them to ‘breed’ is to RECRUIT! And who are their targets for recruitment? Children!” Thomas Jefferson must be rolling over in his grave. After two centuries of public education, an American citizen can still reach that kind of ludicrous conclusion. Why do American citizens continue to support these clearly dishonest, reason-challenged, hypocritical TV evangelists? Jimmy Swaggart, for instance, is a self-avowed pornography addict who was more than once jailed for paying a prostitute to commit “pornographic acts,” but when Jimmy shouted, “Sex education classes in our public schools are promoting incest,” people cried “Praise the Lord” and sent him money. Why? Lack of education and basic critical thinking skills. Even an ass can bray like a prophet, and out there somewhere, someone will believe it. Fundamentalist extremists like Pat Robertson are masters of pontificating the ridiculous. For instance, “The courts are merely a ruse, if you will, for humanist, atheistic educators to beat up on Christians.” Does Robertson, who holds a law degree, truly believe that the purpose of the courts is to serve as a ruse for educators; that all educators are atheist; that all humanists are atheists; or that educators have the time or inclination to “beat up on” Christians? Does Robertson honestly think that there are no Christian employees of the courts, no Christian educators, and no Christian humanists? Does he know the function of the courts? Does he even know the definition of “ruse”? Here’s the ruse. In contrast to the humanist liberal arts education of public schools, fundamentalist private school indoctrination forbids students to explore their own thoughts and feelings—unless they conform to the biblically acceptable. It devalues uniqueness and individuality. It subverts self-confidence by badgering children with their supposed incorrigible sinfulness, frightens them into believing that obedience is the means to escape hell, brainwashes them into being passive toward their “elders.” It destroys their humanity. The way legalists leash their children, and want to control the rest of us, mirrors the agenda of behavioral psychologists like B.F. Skinner, who believe that human beings are flawed machines that

can be overhauled by science. Skinner demonstrated his version of a “more effective technology” by raising his daughter “scientifically” in his Skinner baby box—a large, air-conditioned, germ-free box equipped with levers that provided rewards for appropriate actions. In contrast, anthropologists studying child-rearing among various groups around the world have documented that children given the freedom to “creep and crawl,” to explore and discover the world on their own, have consistently higher IQs and are more secure and successful than children routinely restrained by anything from a mother’s tugging hand to playpens (pens?). This is true even of groups related genetically and living side-by-side that have recently split into separate clans because of ideological differences. Grownup creep and crawl kids have strong self-esteem and think for themselves. They learn to value freedom. Today education has been severely constricted to teach and test only those skills subject to corporate exploitation. There’s talk of extending the school day, the school week, the school year. Should this happen, the consequences will be counterproductive. Kids spend too much time cooped-up in classrooms already. The agenda to train more worker bees for long hours of work is part of a broad agenda of economic exploitation. Instead of implementing the commonsense solution—redistribute wealth, establish economic equality, decrease the work day/week/year—we allow the weight of fat-cats to flatten us into pancake puppets. Let’s just say No! to that agenda. People need time to relax, to play, to enjoy life, to really get educated by reading for pleasure, taking ballet, learning to throw pots, performing in local musicals, going fishing with Walt Whitman. A longer school and work week will only make us natives restless, frustrated, angry. The day will come when workers will rise up to snap off the fat-cats’ horns and tails and raze their mocking mountaintop castles. Free public education is an American invention intended to promote equality by giving every human being the basic knowledge and skills to think, speak, and act responsibly. Responsible action is always an independent decision reflecting personal preference. American education is founded on the process of discovery. The

student learns best what he discovers for himself, which comes about with the guidance of a teacher. American education is not clichéd propaganda propagated by coercion. To know about is not the same as to know. To know comes about through active inquiry, willful engagement, and creative expression. Ironically, it is not public but “Christian” education that thwarts authentic soul-searching. Instead of getting the attention they need, today’s students are packed like sardines in schools and classrooms, schools are underfunded, and teachers are neither respected nor adequately paid, and it’s that condition, not some evil agenda of humanists, that foments bullying, violence, illiteracy, and kids’ loathing of “school.” America’s Founders valued education as the means to protect liberty from forces of coercion and to ensure the continued progress that would contribute to our pursuit of happiness. The goal was that education would be liberal, guarding against the closed-field of overspecialization by providing equal access to information and skills; open-minded in allowing for new ideas and creative exploration outside the box; and public in providing equal educational opportunities for every citizen. It assumed the Aristotelian notion that people are built by God to experience pleasure and that it is wisdom attained via ongoing learning that gives the liveliest pleasure. Fundamentalism, on the other hand, wants to confine education within its narrow box of stale histories, antiquated moralities, and juvenile sciences that reduce profound theologies and vivid representations to clichés and superstitions, none of which can be subjected to scrutiny or analysis, much less criticism. The word education comes from the Latin educare, “to draw out.” Socrates was such a master of “drawing out” that we call his relentless process of provocative questioning the Socratic Method. The intellectual and artistic achievement that burst from the small city-state of Athens can be attributed in large part to the critical thinking exemplified by the Socratic Method employed by Socrates himself. His process of drawing out inherent knowledge (even from an uneducated slave, as Plato recounts in his Theatetus) stimulated an environment in which true genius could flourish. Because each individual’s revelation was brought to light from within, both ordinary lessons of common sense and profound insights of genius registered

as deeply personal and long-lasting enlightenment. So long-lasting that many still revere the art, literature, and philosophy of Classical Greece as the epitome of advanced civilization. The Socratic Method is a kind of guided freethinking; the teacher facilitates the process of learning to think for oneself. Genius can be learned, but indoctrination by rote often stifles intellectual potential. Albert Einstein, the quintessential modern genius, provided organic proof that genius could be learned. Or rather, his brain provided the proof. In 1911, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, the father of neuroanatomy, discovered that it was not the number of neurons that determined genius, but the number of synapses, or interconnections between neurons. Glial cells, axons, and dendrites connect other nerve cells and help transmit signals between neurons. Dr. Marian Diamond, neuroanatomist at the University of California at Berkeley, demonstrated through several famous experiments that when rats were subjected to high-stimulus environments, their brains grew in size as the number of transmitting nerve cells increased. The more stimulating toys the rats mastered, the more their intelligence increased. Conversely, rats that were given little stimulation stagnated and died younger, and their brains developed fewer cellular connections. When Einstein died in 1955, chunks of his brain were distributed to researchers for study. Dr. Diamond’s examination found a large number of glial cells in Einstein’s left parietal lobe—indications that his intelligence was the result of mental exercises similar to the kinds she had provided her laboratory rats. Following his exhaustive study of Einstein’s life, works, interviews, and papers, psychologist Robert B. Dilts concluded that “instead of words or mathematical formulas, Einstein claimed to think primarily in terms of visual images and feelings…Verbal and mathematical representations of his thoughts came only after the important creative thinking was done.” Einstein himself “believed that you could stimulate ingenious thought by allowing your imagination to float freely, unrestrained by conventional inhibitions.” Some of his most ingenious insights occurred to him while he was playing the violin or freethinking. He was a sixteen-year-old

daydreaming when he first glimpsed what was to become his Special Theory of Relativity. In his final Autobiographical Note, Einstein remembers that he was wondering what it would be like to run beside a light beam at the speed of light. He kept chewing on that image. Later he imagined himself riding on the end of a light beam. According to the accepted laws of physics, you would not be able to see your reflection in a mirror. Since the speed of light was the absolute speed limit of the universe and nothing could travel faster, there would be no time left for his reflection to travel back to him; his reflection would have to travel faster than the light beam he was riding. But that just didn’t feel right to Einstein. Riding in a fast-moving train, can’t we still walk at our normal pace from one end to the other? Though earth is rushing with the rest of our galaxy at 45,000 mph, and is spinning around in our own orbit at 66,000 mph, can’t we still stand still? He trusted his gut instinct that he would see his reflection in a mirror that even traveling at the speed of light was still a few inches from his nose; the mirror was relative to him, not relative to some observer not on the light beam watching the light beam, and his mathematical proof of what he had intuited—the famous e = mc2—revolutionized the world. The free play of his imagination led him to a profound insight into Creation that contradicted what the experts accepted as absolute truth. Intuition transcended indoctrination. Early in life, Einstein had begun applying the Socratic Method to himself, relentlessly asking himself questions, in daydreams, journals, letters, and conversations, that “drew out” of him solutions to seemingly trivial physical riddles that would unlock realities as vast as the universe. Einstein’s method of drawing out was the opposite of indoctrination handed down from on high. When people are not encouraged to be self-manifesting, when their ideas and will and drive to know are stifled, they stagnate, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Einstein attributed his scientific prowess to what he called a “vague play” with “signs,” “images,” and other elements, both “visual” and “muscular.” He wrote, “This combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.” A free play of the

imagination, not learning by rote, is what leads to authentic and often startling insights that can then be explained and made useful. “Invention is not the product of logical thought, even though the final product is tied to a logical structure.” A liberating liberal arts education, which “draws out” by encouraging authentic thought and by nurturing the free play of imagination, is the most practical antidote to set-thinking, including the close-minded absolutism of fundamentalism. Ignorance stems from an unwillingness to step outside the Text Box into the real world of updated information and creative solutions. If fundamentalists of all religions could be persuaded to broaden their minds to the possibility that their ultimate Text Box (Bible, Koran, Torah, pope…) might not be equivalent to God, and if those fundamentalists could grasp the obvious truth that knowledge and wisdom are attained through the process of learning, many of the world’s greatest woes would vanish. Now as in the past, common sense tells even Christians that God’s truth embodies all Creation, only a minute sliver of which our dinky pea brain can grasp. Denying the validity of the monumental text of the universe in order to preserve the mystique of “exhaustive biblical knowledge” is a mistake stemming from a misunderstanding of both the universe and the Bible. God never asks for blind obedience. It’s the wolf pulling the wool over your eyes that asks you to park your brains outside the temple door. Dominionists understand that controlling education is a key component in attaining dominion. Indoctrinate them while they’re young and you’ll own them for life. The quickest way to seize control over education is to privatize schools. Privatization means that businesses would own schools. Be assured that schools, like businesses, would merge—quite possibly into a single, corporate-owned “school system.” Schools would no longer be public, which means that people would have to pay to send their kids to school. The rich and their conservative patsies, of course, have no problem with this. Rich children brought up on the luxuries of corporate welfare don’t think the rest of us, who foot their bills, are entitled to an education we pay for with our own tax dollars.

“Where did this idea come from—that everybody deserves free education…It’s like free groceries. It comes from Moscow. From Russia. Straight out of the pit of hell,” as Texas Representative Debbie Riddle put it. As an attempted first step toward privatization, President Bush and his Republican Congress introduced vouchers, which were meant to transfer tax dollars into private schools. Even though the vouchers bill failed to pass, federal tax dollars could still be transferred from the public schools to for-profit, non-profit, and faithbased private schools. Bush’s 2004 budget included $5 billion taxpayer dollars for two voucher programs funding private schools. As Plan B on the road to privatization, the president who famously queried, “Is our children learning?” thrust upon the nation’s public schools his version of No Child Left Behind. Many children have been left behind thanks to Bush’s budget, which cut public education funding by one third. He left no funding for rural education, giftedand-talented programs, small schools, and technical education. There was so little money allocated for special education that Vermont senator Jim Jeffords abdicated from the Republican Party in disgust. Also cut were funds for educating children of parents active in the military. No Child Left Behind was launched as a concerted scheme by the Dominionist controlled federal government to seize total control of every phase of public education (although it paid only seven percent of public education costs), allocating funds on a reward system, dictating its policies and procedures, and even determining a school’s survival. Schools that didn’t make the grade didn’t get the money. Of course, schools not making the grade needed more money, not less. But they got less; and less. And as a result they “deserved” less and less. Those schools just happened to be schools already disadvantaged, meaning poor. Keeping the lessdeserving poor uneducated would maintain a large rock-bottom class of lowest-paid slave labor. Denying funds is an effective way to control the more progressive schools. In February 2003, Bush’s Department of Education defied the Constitution by demanding that schools schedule time for “constitutionally protected prayer” or lose federal aid for the poor. If

Dominionists were going to invest “their” money in poor schools, those schools had better crank out obedient little workers used to bowing to authority, and progressive schools had better get on board. The school prayer initiative rewarded obedient conservative “churchy” schools already programmed to produce future workers willing to salute boss man. Dominionists understand that standardized tests lead to standardized answers lead to standardized people. Bush’s purposely constricting No Child Left Behind mandated a reductive, closely scrutinized teaching apparatus consisting of focused, simplistic lesson plans that produced specific results that were judged and rewarded solely on the basis of standardized tests. Such a narrow education produces narrow minds. The champions of narrowmindedness, of course, want narrow minds programmed by narrow habits that prepare them for obedience to Dominionist indoctrination. To develop the habit of standardization, public school teachers have been forced to adopt a standardized teaching philosophy utilizing one teaching method that focuses on teaching to test. Educational values reduced to basic math/basic English standardized testing devalues critical thinking and programs students to see life as black-and-white right-and-wrong. The habit of absolutism makes programmed workers unable to resist bandwagon appeals to us-versus-them, “us” being “our” corporate nation. Standardized thinking allows corporations to program workers to value the entire corporate unit as “us.” Even reduced to the lowest level of servitude within a corporation, the lowest-paid worker will still rally behind “his” unit. Corporations gain by the competitive spirit of bigotry, the habitual rejection of and hatred toward “them.” Privatization is the real objective of No Child Left Behind. As more and more schools economically sink, the public will respond to the crisis by gladly turning over the business of running schools to more competent hands. The school-as-business model is already being implemented. “Teaching to test” that narrows curriculum to subjects that can be easily evaluated via standardized tests is modeled on the business-driven standards-and-accountability design. “Our” corporate-purchased elected representatives are transforming our schools into training centers where kids only learn skills that make

them productive laborers in the competitive global market. Even President Obama and the Democratic Congress agree with that agenda. Large corporate publishing conglomerates have stepped in to make a killing facilitating the transition to corporate controlled education. Outrageously expensive textbooks have always been publishers’ highest profit category. Now they can rake in even more peddling their overpriced teach-to-test study guides, teaching guides, workbooks, drill programs, and of course the standardized tests and testing apparatuses themselves. At Bush’s January 2001 White House education summit, an old family friend, Harold McGraw, chairman of McGraw-Hill, proclaimed, “It’s a great day for education, because we now have substantial alignment among all the key constituents—the public, the education community, business and political leaders—that results matters.” The truth, of course, is that parents and educators and much of the rest of the public think that education has severely deteriorated thanks to No Child Left Behind. Nobody besides the rich big guys likes its results-demanding bullying. Most educators and most parents are against limiting a child’s world to standardized math and grammar. Almost all educators and parents want kids to learn music, art, theater, dance, science, literature, creative writing, history, and critical thinking. A broad education rich in arts, humanities, and sciences creates broadminded citizens capable of thinking and making choices for themselves. Standardized tests program standardized, homogenized, mechanical citizens who salute even a president like Bush, whose narrow vision for education assured us, “You teach a child to read and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.” If you can pass a Bush-level literacy test, you can be a product that in turn produces lots of money for a sub-literate Big Brother. People educated to think for themselves by using good critical thinking skills rebel against blatant brainwashing and exploitation. For that reason, Dominionists aggressively work to eliminate “humanist” arts and humanities programs, and even public television. Most sciences pose a threat, because the scientific method requires close scrutiny and evaluation, and science has the dangerous habit

of debunking antiquated “facts” and contemporary junk science. Junk economics fertilized with junk theology produces the junk science that savvy minds reject and often ridicule. Dominionists don’t like being ridiculed; they like being saluted. Arts, humanities, and sciences, which focus on benefiting the human community, are systematically purged, and independent thinkers, especially those associated with universities, are demonized. Meanwhile, corporations launch public relations campaigns complete with “education funds” and sentimental commercials geared toward duping their workers and the public into believing that corporations really are generous, really are green, really do care. The only effective defense against the wolf is a good education.



 

Chapter 20 Taboo Throughout this book, I’ve purposely left out one of the most important details of my spiritual evolution. I’m gay. These days it probably doesn’t seem odd that falling in love, having a relationship, being rejected “by necessity” by the other person, and subsequently dealing with sexual status and selfdefinition, not to mention emotional trauma, could catalyze a trajectory from born-again Christian to progressive Christian to disillusioned agnostic. But to delighted Deist? Ironically, Christianity’s judgmental and blatantly unloving rejection of homosexuality drove me to locate biblical support for my side, and that helped me reach the epiphany—which had been dawning on me all along—that the Bible was not God, nor was it God-breathed or necessarily a source of truth or even human wisdom. At first this struck me as a bad thing, hence the disillusioned agnostic phase. But then I realized that it was a good thing. In fact, a great thing! There was no gay taboo “revealed” by God. As a child I thought taboos were just plain dumb. Kids couldn’t even walk through the adult section of my hometown library. My parents, however, said their kids could read any book on the shelves, so of course I flaunted my freedom and browsed the adult section under the uptight librarian’s grimace every chance I got. In junior high a neighborhood mom reprimanded me for hitting baseballs farther than any of the boys (or even men teachers). Silly, yes, but still her judgment brought me to tears. Luckily my mom, nice as she was, called up the lady and chewed her out (which I only learned about much later via my grandmother). The lady didn’t complain when she later found out that I was even better at basketball.

In high school I thought it was ridiculous that you couldn’t say “hell” or “damn” except in church but you could scream “heck” or “darn” or “go to the devil” in somebody’s face with fierce hate that bordered on demonic. My saintly grandmother would say “Oh murder!” at bad news, but even my free-cussing dad wouldn’t dream of saying “fuck.” What was more heinous than murder, except maybe rape or molestation, which you could also say? But the word that means something that everybody does and everybody likes and is the source of life itself and is celebrated by major sacred rituals like marriage and births, not to mention is the preoccupation of movies, advertisements, books, songs, gossip columns, daydreams, and day-to-day life, you couldn’t even mention? Absurd. Sex seemed like an incongruous taboo until I learned about misogyny and patriarchy’s subjection of women via denial of monetary and sexual freedom. Men were men and women were property of men. Because womanly men and manly women threatened the hierarchy, they were of course forbidden, and anything that permitted the threat—sexual freedom, for instance— became shrouded in taboo. A taboo is an arbitrary forbidding for the sake of maintaining power-over. Being a person who enjoys my freedom, I’ve never been one for bowing to taboos. But the gay abomination grabbed the bornagain me by the scruff and gave me a good hard shake. I was nervous, maybe even a bit scared. My girlfriend was terrified. Needless to say, our closet relationship was doomed from the start. Even so, it was hard as hell to tear ourselves apart. But tear apart we did. And in the process I realized that the taboo was evil and the tearing apart an act of emotional and spiritual violence. Most people don’t have to deal with being gay. But I know many good souls who have suffered tremendous agony because they have violated—or dared not violate—some taboo imposed by their religion. I have also known many otherwise good souls who have upheld a taboo despite doubts about its validity. Not that long ago a divorced person was considered by many religionists to be damned. Sodomy was practically blasphemous. Inter-racial romance could get lovers

murdered. Homosexuality defied God’s natural plan for his children, so clearly if you were homosexual, you weren’t a child of God. Of course all these taboo behaviors were illegal, even for those who disagreed on righteous, constitutional grounds. Taboos are a justification for meanness. Bullies wield taboos like bully clubs. The self-righteous paste scarlet letters on your forehead to prove their superior righteousness. The underworld promotes the forbidden as a means to get rich. Even spouses and best friends exploit taboos to keep “loved ones” in their place. The rich and their political patsies create taboos to concentrate power and money in their own hands. In this country, it’s “unAmerican” to critique capitalism, even though capitalism, which is driven by exploitation that’s driven by greed, necessarily destroys democracy, which promotes equality and mutual benefit. Dick Cheney can get away with stealing millions (or billions) from America’s Treasury, but even knowing his guilt, many Americans cringe when someone like me suggests that Cheney is a traitor who should be tried for treason. Incongruous as it is in a democracy, for many the taboo against criticizing the president (and “vice” president) is as American as apple pie. Catholic priests are so pure it’s taboo for them to marry. And look where that’s gotten us. Priests by the droves are busted for child molestation and other sexual misconduct; historically priests and popes have fathered illegitimate children and committed far worse sins; many priests are trying to repress and/or hide their homosexuality. No doubt some leering priest upholds the tradition of confession as a means to vicariously enjoy taboos. If I sidestepped the gay taboo by neglecting to mention the very critical detail of my being gay, it was only to prevent a fundamentalist or other reader from assuming that I’m bashing Christianity because I’m gay. I’m not bashing Christianity at all. My battle is with lies, fallacies, and evils, Christian or otherwise. It’s probably taboo for some fundamentalists to read this book in the first place. For them it’s taboo to question cherished assumptions. It’s taboo to think outside the box, to think for themselves, really to think much at all. Thinking for staunch traditionalists is really just contemplating and/or memorizing the

thoughts of other traditionalists. Thoughts are controlled, feelings disciplined, difference punished. They aren’t allowed to consider the thoughts of radicals like me. That’s taboo. And of course it’s taboo to use the word “stupid.” The evil exploit by keeping us stupid by making it taboo to point out how stupid it is to be exploited and to be kept stupid. All these taboos seem ludicrous compared to what I view as the mother and father of all taboos: fear of death, and doubting God’s goodness. If we really trusted God’s goodness, many of us would cease to fear. Some of us, of course, would fear that we wouldn’t be good enough by God’s standards to deserve an afterlife—a well-justified fear, perhaps, in some cases. I believe that we all doubt God’s goodness to some extent but that we’re afraid to admit it. We admit being afraid of death, but most of us fear accusing God of being less than ultimately good. Even so, we feel that doubt even if we don’t express it. The doubting God taboo forbids us to even think it. Is God good when a mother watches an alligator drag her child into a lake? What about a woman told she has terminal cancer and a few months to live? Should the surviving residents of the Hiroshima bombing thank God for his goodness in granting their survival? Questioning God’s goodness is anathema. Cursing God in anger for being less than good is for most a form of blasphemy. I shake my head at tornado victims that thank God for his goodness in sparing them, when their houses are toothpicks and their valuables strewn across three counties. For this they thank God? Why would God do such a thing? Is God a cosmic terrorist plotting his next attack? Is God bullying us into masochistic submission to his will? The Deist must address these dilemmas head-on, without cowering in fear, without assuming the stance of a “grateful” victim. Why does God cause or permit (there’s not much difference) bad things to happen to good people? The only answer that makes sense to me is that God has given us free will, and the will can only be truly free if it is capable of suffering unjustly and inflicting unjust

suffering. We choose to rebuild our houses on a target that’s been hit by tornadoes a hundred times in a hundred years. A psychopathic serial killer chooses to rape and dismember an innocent child—a deciding act that manifests and defines him as evil. The tornado victims to some extent choose to be victims by building their houses on the sand, so to speak. The psychopath chooses to be evil. The child does not choose to be a victim. It might seem insensitive to say this, but the child’s suffering lasts a moment but eternal life, if it exists, lasts forever. There’s some consolation in that possibility; it’s possible to logically infer that eternal life is a reality. However, we can’t be free if we know God is judging us. We need that shadow of a doubt to be truly free to choose good over evil. If your life were perfect, and if the perfectly good God were watching you, it would be easy to be “good.” But that version of good would be plastic, not organic. True goodness must be good “in spite of.” Most people won’t lie if they know they’ll get caught, but the truly good person won’t lie even if there is no chance of getting caught. If life thrives by eating other life, is the Creator of life compassionate or brutal? To believe that the Creator is compassionate and good requires faith in the Creator’s transcendent goodness. When bad things happen to us, we can curse God or choose to believe that we’re in this jungle for a reason. I believe that at least one reason is to prove our own transcendent goodness. Again, it’s easy to be good when there’s no reason to be otherwise or when we know other people are watching. The true test is to be good even when the universe is brutal, even when it seems like God is either evil or not paying attention, even when we have everything to lose and nothing to gain but our own goodness. In other words, for us to be good—i.e. become good—we must be good not because it’s the status quo, not because it’s easy, not because there’s a reward, not because we’re under surveillance, but only because it’s a free choice to be good “in spite of.” Likewise, we can choose to believe in God’s goodness “in spite of.” We can choose to believe in the possibility that there is a God and that God is good, and that we can transcend our expectations and demands and be good no matter what, which is the only way to be good. To be good is to just be good. Period.

This world isn’t poolside in a lawn chair with a shaved ice martini and a box of chocolates. I think life is much more serious than that. We have work to do. It’s a test, it’s a learning process, we have a job to do—describe it as you will. But most of us have a gut feeling that there must be a purpose for existence and a purpose for suffering. Maybe the old adage of Jesus is right—you must lose your life to gain your life. I don’t think that’s just a message of self-sacrifice. I think it’s a simple recognition of the obvious. Every split second, your old self dies and a new self is born. You’re not the same as you were in the womb, or ten years ago, or even ten minutes ago. Growth is change, which is a kind of death. Death is ultimately painful. Bad things happen because we are undergoing change. Some changes are more painful than others. We’re getting older; then we’re old. Old friends and relatives have suffered and died. We’ve loved and lost. We’ve accomplished like Sisyphus watching the stone roll back down the hill. Is God mean to put us in such a body, in such a life? Maybe we really are being punished, as many have believed. Or are we transmuting from a finite, temporal, selfish soul into something transcendent? Most of the greatest mind/souls of all time have believed that we are, in one way or another. It’s true that we just have to believe in God’s goodness and in the wisdom of choosing to become inherently good. That kind of free choice seems impossible. How can someone choose to change his own self to such a degree that the change is inherent, as if it were there all along? The thought is taboo: We’re playing God if we think we have that much power. But I think that kind of turning away from our own power is cowardly and irresponsible. To simply assign “It’s God’s will” to every tragedy is lazy. When we challenge God we recognize that God doesn’t want us to suffer but suffer we must if we’re to transcend ourselves. But we transcend not by suffering but by understanding that we must suffer not as passive victims but as survivors who survive by an act of free will. We must be free agents of our own souls. Michelangelo claimed, “I saw the angel in the marble, and I carved until I set it free.” If as free agents we resist passivity, we

carve every moment of our lives. Our life, our life’s work, our sculpture is a representation of the transformation that we have created in ourselves. We are that free. In that sense, we are created in the image of God. We are creating a godly goodness that is our highest self. There is nothing more difficult or more taboo for us than to grasp this truth about ourselves.



 

Chapter 21 New Deism Paradigm Shift Perhaps the greatest pitfall of religious deconstruction is the tendency to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Letting go of the fictions and fallacies of old world “revealed” religion doesn’t require giving up on religion per se. Replacing blind faith with mature respect for truth can itself be a deeply religious gesture. Although Deism makes no claim to absolute knowledge of anything spiritual, it does acknowledge the validity of certain religious assumptions. Its most fundamental assumption is that God exists, if only because an elegant Creation infinitely/eternally in the process of becoming necessitates a Creator of transcending intelligence actively creating. There’s a reason why the religious impulse has always been at the core of human experience. The Deist assumption, quite simply, is that God exists and that we are spiritual beings in need of some kind of relationship with God. Problems arise when a person or group tries to dictate to others exactly what that relationship should be. Deism avows unconditional religious freedom while acknowledging that religious faith rooted in truth is as necessary as air to the healthy thriving of every human being. Truth is the operative concept, and truth is reality that each individual must discover for him/herself, even if it simply involves deciding yes or no to the opinions of others. To a large extent, one’s authentic decisions define oneself. Deism is a religion rather than simply a philosophy in that it both objectively and subjectively focuses on God as living spiritual truth and experience rather than on the abstract concept “God.” I believe that Deism is a universal solution to the vacuum that many people experience after shucking off their outgrown religion. The tired

symptoms of alienation, depression, and despair that register the absence of God and/or meaning vanish with the restorative vigor of Deist conviction. Perhaps the greatest appeal of Deism is its commonsense, nature affirming approach to spirituality. Deists might agree with a traditional theological stance such as “Our intellect is led by our senses to divine knowledge,” but unlike the great Catholic scholar Thomas Aquinas, we wouldn’t conclude that divine knowledge includes the Trinity, which contradicts intellect (three beings do not equal one being), our senses (humans are not God, God is not human), and knowledge (Jesus-is-God is a myth). Unlike many other religions, Deism isn’t at war with “worldly” Creation. In fact, God’s immanence is a critical component of new Deism: though transcendent, God is a personal Creator intimately engaged in Creation (verb and noun, or noun-verb: space-time). The Deist, therefore, accepts the stewardship of nature. Going Green is a deeply spiritual agenda. Deism is also appealing because a religion rooted in common sense and nature is truly democratic in being equally available to everyone. The Deist accepts the spiritual responsibility to ensure equality. “Socialism” and “collectivism” have been poisoned by rightwing denigration, but these terms represent concepts that are part of the new Deist agenda. If all men and women are created equal, then we should work to thwart violations of equality. The upper and lower classes must be replaced by a middle class that provides opportunity and security for all. Exploitation by greedy, arrogant predators must end. The capitalist façade must be replaced with small collectives that guarantee that workers get their fair share of the profits they generate. Obscene wealth among so-called “good Christians” (or Jews, or Muslims)—the Grand Hypocrisy—must be critiqued, and all upper-tier wealth the world over must be steadily redistributed to benefit the common good. Elitism always manifests as bigotry. For the elite, everyone “beneath” them is inferior and worthy of exploitation. Big bankers who defrauded Americans by spending bailout billions on themselves should be imprisoned. We have got to stop glorifying the

rich. Concept to education to action: Deists can lead the way in building an equal society, which is a giant step toward spiritual renewal. The Deist agenda is a necessity. The threat of nuclear holocaust has shoved us to a unique threshold: We’re stepping over a point of no return, the old world upheld by the rusted scaffolding of religious myth and superstition is caving in on itself, a new world is being constructed where the arrogant and the greedy can no longer hide behind the mask of righteousness. Obedient sheep are awakening to find themselves to be human, the gullible are wising-up, the passive are taking the initiative of responsibility, the religious are practicing tolerance and are exercising their freedom of choice. The time is ripe for a worldwide revolution of the soul and spirit. Marx called religion the opiate of the people. The days of codependent addiction to old world religion are ending, if only because we’re smarter and our needs and wants have evolved. We’re tired of being ripped-off. We’re sick of lies. Deism is an expression of hope that we can kick the habit, clear the fog, and collaborate in the intelligent, ethical quest for the God of reality. Humanity has grown up enough to realize that organized religion is fraught with frailties and every kind of evil in spite of any good it might offer. That true religion is not organized religion is not new information. Great writers and philosophers of Greece and Rome knew this; medieval humanists knew this; their understanding was reborn and given new vitality during the Renaissance; in every subsequent era the intelligentsia enlarged that understanding, and fresh insights of writers and artists unshackled the soul of humanity even as organized religion continued to tighten the chains. The good news is that we no longer need to bow before false gods or conform to the dictates of religious power-mongers. In part because of the internet, even those oppressed by dictators have the freedom to explore religious possibilities and to freely choose what to believe and how to act. Technically, we Americans have always had that freedom of choice, but how rarely most of us have exercised that right—a right given to us by God, according to our Founders.

But with every right comes a corresponding responsibility. It’s our responsibility to take the first step to religious freedom, and then take the next. The first step for you is to slough off that old skin of old religion. The next step is to establish your own working principles of faith founded on common sense and accepted as experiments: Instead of accepting principles blindly, put them to the test. Earlier in this book I offered my own short list of working principles (working because they’re subject to improvement), and I’ll reiterate them here as a possible starting point for anyone interested in exploring Deism. First, new Deism is a religion of God and only God, theologically grounded in open-minded common sense. Its fundamental tenets (beliefs) are that God exists; that God is one; that God is Creator; that God is both transcendent and immanent in Creation; that God is all-knowing, omniscient, and omnipotent; that God is good; that God is just; that God transcends the limits of human knowledge, goodness, and justice; that God spiritually engages with human individuals; and that no human or text or material or immaterial object is God or embodies God or fully or accurately represents God. In addition to these working principles, I’d like to offer some suggestions for becoming a Deist and perhaps creating a Deist community. People that give up their old religion for Deism need not give up the best of that religion. Deists think and behave ethically; Deists pray, worship, and do good works, alone or in groups. What Deists don’t do is exploit their religion for personal gain, monetary or otherwise. Rather than building cathedrals and giving priests or preachers the opportunity to get rich, Deists meet with like-minded people in homes or conference rooms or cafes or under a tree somewhere. A church is fine, but of course buildings cost money, and money can never be a central concern for a Deist. Deism can never become a big-time organized religion—that would be a contradiction in terms. Rather, it should remain a movement rooted in simple Deist theology that can be practiced by anyone alone or in small groups or in small, self-supporting communions. I’m calling both the group and the activity a “communion.”

And lest I be falsely called a communist, let me ask the reader to look up the definition of communist in any dictionary. Communion and other words derived from the same root mean something quite different, even contrary or opposite. Allow me to clarify by offering some basic Webster’s Unabridged definitions. Not to be confused with Holy Communion, regular communion can mean a group of persons having a common religious faith; a religious denomination; or, association; fellowship; or, interchange or sharing of thoughts or emotions; intimate communication or rapport: to commune with nature; the act of sharing, or holding in common; participation; or, the state of things so held. Communion, from the Latin version of the same word, meaning a sharing, equivalent to commun(is): common. Think of all the positive words that share this root: communal; commune (v.); commune (n.), which has many definitions; communicate; communication; communicative; communicator; communitarian; communitas; community; commutable; commute. And so on. I recommend both online and face-to-face communions. Talk to your friends and relatives about Deism, then maybe find a good meeting place and start a communion. Visit other communions. Invite people from other communions to visit yours. You can locate communions at NewDeismPress.com. Articulation is a crucial aspect of spiritual as well as general personal growth. Journaling is an effective way to start figuring out exactly what you believe and don’t believe. Generating a list of affirmations about your new beliefs and meditating on those affirmations as often as possible (preferably at least daily) will help clarify your new stance. (This version of meditation means thinking about/contemplating/pondering, not erasing/emptying thought or mental programming.) Many people would probably benefit the most from discussion groups. These communions can be entirely collective or can be facilitated by one or more participants. But there should never be a designated “high priest.” If someone in your group gets too bossy, get out and start a new communion. There should be as much equality as possible.

On the other hand, if one person has a skill for leading discussions, that person could keep the dialogue flowing, as long as she/he isn’t overly controlling. It might be useful for each person to write questions or topics on index cards that a participant or participants would then randomly select for discussion. Of course, if an individual Deist wants to start a discussion group or blog on a specific topic, he/she has every right to keep the discussion on track. It’s your discussion, it’s your blog. If some people don’t like the topic or dialogue, they can start their own discussions elsewhere. In Deist discussions, the focus is on God—one’s relationship or attempted relationship with God, questions about God, things one is learning or realizing about God. But that doesn’t mean that you have to say “God” every two seconds. Some people might feel more comfortable not mentioning God at all. (The Hebrews might have been wise to decide that the word for God could never be uttered or written.) God can be in the background as you address personal and spiritual growth or political and social agendas and actions. However much God is part of the discussion, remember that Deism is speculative rather than absolutist. You might start with this basic question: What does God want me/us to do? To a large extent, you are what you do. I believe that prayer is critical, both individually and in communions. In my view, the focus of prayer should be praise and requests for clarity; we should avoid what I call “begging and bitching.” Don’t ask for money; work to establish economic justice. Don’t complain; work with others for others. Most prayer is narcissistic, so it makes sense that most religion is narcissistic. If you believe in God or a God at all, or even in the possibility of God, when was the last time you thanked God for the awesome, wonderful minutia of Creation, or even just casually thought, Hmm, life is cool, life is good! Ingratitude is a symptom of narcissism, and vice versa. Ingratitude is both a cause and effect of wrong belief and unbelief. The good news about Deism is that there’s no human high priest to bow down to. There’s no sacred text that tells you why you’re not good enough. There’s no huge list of thou shalts and thou shalt nots,

there’s only the basic humanist expectation of truth, justice, and compassion—what the Greeks called the Good. To become a Deist, simply affirm that you are. If you’ve crossed that threshold, why not share your experience with others? Communicate; engage. I believe that if you do, you will experience a joy that you never dreamed possible. Born-again, enlightenment, illumination, ecstasy, or just plain peace, joy, love—call it what you will. Engage with God, and somehow God will engage with you.



 

Selected Bibliography Omission of footnotes and citations is an aesthetic choice. Because this book is not a research work but rather a spiritual memoir, facts and quotations have been offered to represent the flow of ideas and/or events in my life. I have referenced critical sources and have tried to distinguish between my own ideas and information I obtained from others. Most current information mentioned is common knowledge to those who keep up with the news, and quotes not cited have circulated widely on the internet and can be accessed via a simple online search. This bibliography is by no means a complete record of all the works and sources I have quoted or consulted. It indicates the substance and range of reading upon which I have formed my ideas, and I intend it to serve as a convenience for those who wish to pursue further study. Armstrong, Karen. The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism. New York: Random House, 2000. Blaker, Kimberly. The Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America. New Boston, MI: New Boston Books, 2003. Boston, Rob. The Most Dangerous Man in America: Pat Robertson and the Rise of the Christian Coalition. New York: Prometheus, 1996. Boswell, John. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980. Conway, Flo and Jim Siegelman. Holy Terror: The Fundamentalist War on America’s Freedoms in Religion, Politics and Our Private Lives. Garden City: Doubleday, 1982. Darwin, Charles. Autobiography (1887). Project Gutenberg, 1999. gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/adrwn10.txt.

Ehrman, Bart. Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005. Franklin, Karen. “Enacting Masculinity: Antigay Violence and Group Rape as Participatory Theater.” Sexuality Research & Social Policy 1, no. 2 (2004). Gay, Peter. Deism: An Anthology. Princeton, N. J.: Van Nostrand, 1968. Hare, Robert D. Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. New York: Guilford, 1999. HarperCollins Bible Commentary. Edited by James L. Mayes. With the Society of Biblical Literature. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. HarperCollins Bible Dictionary. Edited by Paul J. Achtemeier. With The Society of Biblical Literature. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Haught, James A. Holy Horrors: An Illustrated History of Religious Murder and Madness. New York: Prometheus, 1990. Helminiak, Daniel A. What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality. San Francisco: Alamo Square, 1994. Hill, Jim and Rand Cheadle. The Bible Tells Me So: Uses and Abuses of Holy Scripture. New York: Doubleday, 1996. Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Ivans, Molly. Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush’s America. New York: Vintage, 2003. Jefferson, Thomas. The Quotable Jefferson. Edited by John P. Kaminski. Princeton: Princeton University, 2006. Jefferson, Thomas. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh. 20 vols. Memorial Edition. Washington, D. C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1903-04. Also available: Project Gutenberg, 2007. www.gutenberg.org/etext/21002. Jefferson, Thomas. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Edited by Paul Leicester Ford. 10 vols. Ford Edition. New York, 1892-99. Etext.virginia. edu/jefferson/quotations/.

Kee, Howard Clark, Franklin W. Young, and Karlfried Froehlich. Understanding the New Testament. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965. Kennedy, Robert F., Jr. Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush & His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country & Hijacking Our Democracy. New York: Harper, 2005. Krammer, Heinrich and James Sprenger. Malleus Maleficarum. Translated from the Latin by Montague Summers, 1928. Transcribed by Wicasta Lovelace and Christie Rice. malleusmaleficarum.org/. Locke, John. “A Letter Concerning Toleration” (1689). oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/locke/locke2/locket/locke_tole ration.html. Locke, John. “Second Treatise of Government” (1690). Project Gutenberg, 2005. www.gutenberg.org/etext/7370. Luther, Martin. Luther’s Works. 55 vols. Edited by H. T. Lehman and J. Pelikan. CD-Rom: Minneapolis and St. Louis: Fortress and Concordia Publishing House, 2002. Madison, James. “Detached Memoranda” (1817). The Founders’ Constitution. Vol.5, Amendment I (Religion), Document 64. The University of Chicago Press. presspubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_religions64.html. Manchester, William. A World Lit Only By Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance. Boston: Little, Brown, 1992. The Oxford Bible Commentary. Edited by John Barton and John Muddiman. New York: Oxford, 2001. Paine, Thomas. The Age of Reason. New York: Citadel Press, 1948, 1977, 1988. Originally published: Paris: Barras, 1794. Paine, Thomas. The Thomas Paine Reader. Edited by Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick. London, England: Penguin Books, 1987. Remsberg, John E. The Christ: A Critical Review and Analysis of the Evidence of His Existence. New York: Prometheus, 1994. Originally published: New York: The Truth Seeker Company, 1909.

Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Christianity and the Making of the Modern Family: Ruling Ideologies, Diverse Realities. Boston: Beacon, 2000. Sackville-West, V. Saint Joan of Arc. New York: Doubleday, 1991. Singer, Margaret Thaler. Cults In Our Midst: The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menace. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003. Strauss, David Friedrich. The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. Translated from the German by George Eliot (1892). Reprint: Sigler Press, 2002. Washington, George. First Annual Message (January 8, 1790). The Avalon Project at Yale Law School. yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/presiden/sou/washs01.htm. Washington, George. Letter to the Commissioners of the District of Columbia (January 28, 1795). pbs.org/georgewashington/collection/other_1795jan28.html. Wenger, Win and Richard Poe. The Einstein Factor. Rocklin, CA: Prima, 1996. White, Mel. Stranger At the Gate: To Be Gay and Christian in America. New York: Plume, 1995. Wolfson, Evan. Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People’s Right to Marry. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.



BOOK 2

Natural God Deism in the Age of Intelligent Design: A Deconstruction of Atheism and Religious Fundamentalism

 

PART I Deism Nouveau



 

Chapter 1 New Deism: The Golden Mean Survival of the fittest; kill or be killed; look out for Number One: Most of us accept these axioms as facts of life. Or do we? What about cooperation, love, compassion? Clearly these two sets of assumptions contradict each other. How is it, then, that most people today do believe both sets? Humans are born with an innate conscience, and very early on kids heed the intrinsic urge to do the right thing, to be good, to not hurt others or themselves. Even preschoolers know when someone else does the wrong thing and is bad towards them: It hurts. We humans feel moral violation, whether perpetrated by us or upon us. We wise up early to the necessity of looking out for Number One, yet we also instinctively know, and quickly learn to deeply appreciate, the virtue of—virtue. The philosophical discrepancy between do-unto-others and stickit-to-others as valid worldviews starts for most of us in grade school when we’re taught to accept Darwin’s theory of evolution as verified fact. As adults we think we see kill-or-be-killed quite naturally played out every day, just for starters on TV nature shows and front-page battle fronts, and less transparently in college classrooms and corporate offices, on football fields and playgrounds, in advertising and political campaigns and hedge fund banking, really in every competitive environment (and what isn’t competitive). So what choice is there but to concur with science that at least at some level, a survival-of-the-fittest approach to life is valid, necessary, and perfectly natural, if not good, even though it contradicts other moral, social, and experiential facts that we also accept as true. But what if Darwin’s theory has been disproven? Would it change how you look at the world if you discovered that although minor

lateral change within a species group, or microevolution, is accepted by everyone, scientists now concede that the fossil record—Darwin’s Big Proof Number One—provides absolutely no evidence of Darwinian macroevolution, the smooth upward transitioning from one primeval ancestral organism to all other life-forms? In fact, after years of digging, paleontologists have not found a single fossil definitively linking any two major organism types. But neo-Darwinians, notorious for squeezing fossils into boxes labeled “a priori assumptions,” still fabricate textbook pictures depicting jagged, quantum leap “transition” based on a few fossil fragments that do not actually demonstrate lineage, much less smooth transition from one universal ancestor via “natural selection,” science’s bowtie jargon for survival of the fittest. Would it change your philosophy of life to learn that Darwin’s theory has been debunked, that microbiologists have recently discovered that at the deep level of DNA—Darwinians’ Big Proof Number Two—life is not inherently a struggle for survival, that all living systems are inherently cooperative, that the molecular factory of life itself is composed of workers performing specific functions for the production of healthy growth within the whole system? Separate fields of science have confirmed that the principle of survival of the fittest, kill or be killed, look out for Number One is not the driving structural feature of living systems or of the universe finely tuned to produce and sustain them. All the rich diversity of life is composed of the same shared star-stuff perpetually manifesting purposeful (Darwinians prefer “directional”) uniqueness via the exact same, though extraordinarily differentiating—and not fundamentally powerover generating—DNA. Throughout nature, mutual accommodation among life-forms is far more prevalent and profoundly creative and procreative than “eat or be eaten.” Surely this knowledge could benefit the world. Why then, if it has been disproven, is kill-or-be-killed Darwinism still taught as fact? Because invested Darwinians have not only dismissed the data, they have also persuaded academia and the government that if Darwin isn’t valid, then creationism (or biblical Genesism, as I call it), i.e., religious fundamentalism, must be right. Genesists agree.

Unfortunately, the possibility that this either-or might be a fallacy has been largely overlooked. Atheist biologist Richard Dawkins calls biology “the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose,” stressing that “the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design.” Of course, even Darwinians’ stylized Tree of Life—make that Trees, because they can’t agree upon one—depicting a well-designed, logically ordered evolutionary process, real or imagined, contradicts the bar-God, ban-design naturalism of both Dawkins and Darwin. Though extrapolation of Darwinian macro from micro has proven to be invalid, “fundamentalist” Darwinians like Dawkins continue to assert their hypothesis that an original organism somehow (they know not how) randomly erupted into existence by chance and somehow knew to, and knew how to, exist and survive and even reproduce itself—all very sophisticated processes—and that all subsequent fullyfunctioning, highly-complex life-forms somehow randomly accidently mutated or otherwise erupted into their own existence by some as yet unexplained, seemingly logical but really illogical mechanism that caused each discrete life-form to know to, and know how to, exist and reproduce itself in such a way that its entire life-form type would survive due to some random but inherently superior trait that seemingly logically but really illogically allowed it to kill rather than be killed. As I’ll show in later chapters, atheist physicists’ multiverse theory just inflates x-God Darwinism ad absurdum. Meanwhile, to exorcize anti-design extremism with biblical literalism, while accommodating the overwhelming scientific verdict that Earth was not created in six days, radical “young earth” Genesism asserts that contrary to what the Bible seems to say, the “days” of the Creation story are actually “eras” that are longer than a literal day, and that God really created Creation in less than ten thousand years, not in six days. Never mind that the scientific consensus is that Earth is about 4.6 billion years old and the universe somewhere upward of 10 billion years old. Never mind that the Bible says nothing about these fabricated “eras.” When back in the late ‘80s an international sampling of genes tracked a DNA trail to “mitochondrial Eve,” the woman whose mtDNA was ancestral to

that in all living people, researchers estimated that she lived in Africa 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, to which young earthers cried, “See, the biblical Creation story is right,” give or take another 90,000 to 190,000 years or so. Never mind the rib, the apple, the talking snake, the god walking in the Garden asking questions… The Deist view is that the young earth theory is as made-up as the original biblical Creation myth itself, which is as made-up as the random-chance natural-selection Creation myth of neo-Darwinism. Recently, Deism has reemerged as the voice of common sense ensuring that both science and religion are demystified, myths and superstitions deconstructed, mistakes and misinterpretations corrected, lies and white lies and “noble lies” shelved with other relics of the past so that truth—the whole truth and nothing but the truth—can prevail. Unlike ever before, the survival of the planet depends on it. We Deists consider it fitting that the artificial dichotomy between science and religion is best transcended, and the fallacies of both domains best rebutted, by the same Deism that guided America’s most illustrious Founders. From the time of the ancient Greeks, and especially since the eighteenth century, scientists and humanists have laid the foundation of truth-centered Deism by instituting its most fundamental tenet: Nature alone, not special revelation, reveals equally to everyone the supremely intelligent and creative Creator. We still hold these truths to be self-evident, that in this natural way, all of us are created equal and are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Deistic natural revelation, unlike special revelation dictated by organized religion, does not violate one’s freedom to choose. The Deist perspective simply appeals to each person’s own reason and other inherent faculties, those same faculties that have caused so many people to doubt both scientific and religious fundamentalism. The progress from theism to deism (a perspective) to Deism (a bona fide religion) has been slow but sure. Deists have always been a minority, but in this day and age of intelligent design, Deism is leaping into the foreground. In 2001, the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) reported that between 1990 and 2001,

the number of self-identified Deists grew at a rate of 717 percent, making it by far the fastest growing religious classification in the U.S. Since then, other surveys with limited, predefined categories (which do not include Deism) show the greatest growth to be the category of those who believe in a supreme being but have no direct religious affiliation, which makes those people at least philosophically deist. Recent science proving intelligent design has added momentum to the enduring Deist revolution that gained steam during the Enlightenment. Although fundamentalism and scientific determinism both challenge Deism, they are more formidable opponents of each other. While these two armies battle it out, Deism peacefully persuades on the sidelines, where the God of ordinary people manifests through a universe of small things far more significant than religion or science or the sum of their concerns. Touchstone Truth All of us—fundamentalists, Darwinians, and Deists—would surely agree that truth is the solution to evolution confusion spotlighting today’s science/religion dichotomy. But how can we know what’s true? How can we know what’s really real? Deism argues that although logically it is incontestable that reality exists, clearly reality transcends what we perceive it to be—we including scientists and religionists. As I explain more fully in Chapter 8, what and how we perceive are limited, and being finite and temporal, human perception is subject to best guesses, which, let’s face it, sometimes add up to misinterpretations. Unlike Darwinism and fundamentalism, Deism willingly revises its stance as it considers all possible angles in its search for truth. But it avoids blind acceptance of hearsay, including hearsay glorified as tradition: Deism is the “show me” religion. The touchstone of Deism is truth accessed via God-given common sense—common sense being the consensus of all our inherent faculties, including reason, conscience, intuition, experience, aesthetic, emotion, volition, and spirit. While Deism acknowledges the necessity of a Designer/Creator God, it advocates a humble, open-minded approach to theology and maintains a skeptical stance toward absolutism, both religious and scientific. Deism seeks to end the Great War between absolutist

factions, especially between people who contend absolutely that reality is spiritual and physical existence as most of us know it is illusion or evil, vs. people who insist that physical existence is absolutely the only reality and the so-called spiritual realm is illusion, and even evil. Modern Deism prefers secular holism and religious integration, ultimately seeking an ideal synthesis of science and religion, knowing, of course, that seeking is a perennial process of revision. We humans are a passionate species, and that’s a good thing, until crude fervor transmutes our natural cooperation into uncivilized competition. Deism encourages friendly disagreement as a means to truth. But disagreement escalated into kill-or-be-killed is a moral failure at best, at worst the tragic flaw that will destroy us all. Deism notes that the most evolved science and religion both affirm that egalitarian cooperation benefits, brute competition harms. Deist ethics in a nutshell is: That which benefits. Or put another way in this age of situational ethics: Maximum benefit with minimum harm. Why the easy road to ultra-beneficial concord is so hard for us humans remains the great spiritual query. It’s not the classic mind/body (or mind/matter) dichotomy, today couched as religion vs. science, but rather the aggressive misinterpretation of the dichotomy as us vs. them that pits extremist spiritual/material binaries against each other, creating either-or fallacies that lead to invalid and dangerous conclusions. Soulless capitalists exploiting their own grandmothers; tormented religionists flagellating themselves for their sins; suicide, world hunger, unemployment, crime, global warming, lynching, crusades, inquisitions, pogroms, terrorism, wars, nations blowing up nations— multitudes of woes we humans have brought upon ourselves as civilizations and as individuals are deeply rooted in fallacies translated into extremist choices established by this dichotomy. Deism rejects the assumption that exploiting the choice of us vs. them is a natural necessity. Creation, both noun and verb, embodies the source and sustenance of our existence and of our truth. Truth is natural. Nature, holistically apprehended and understood, embodies truth, both scientific and religious.

In contrast, the unnaturally polarized creationist visions, Genesism and neo-Darwinism, represent the crux of spiritual bisection. Each contender claims to be the purveyor of absolute truth. The Genesist insists that creationism is true because the Bible says so and the Bible is God’s Word, i.e. God. The neo-Darwinian insists that science continues to prove as incontrovertible fact its version of creationism, Darwin’s theory of descent via natural selection—or these days, random variation (mutation) shaped by natural selection. Ironically, each contender plays God by assuming an authority that transcends nature and the Creator of Nature. Just as ironically, Genesism doesn’t prove, and Darwinism doesn’t disprove, the existence of a Creator. Deism, however, demonstrates that Nature itself reveals the necessary and self-evident Creator. Though neither fundamentalism nor Darwinism is exactly correct, each view contains some measure of truth. The Bible is easily proven to be a manmade miscellany of mythic, literary, and pseudohistorical material that contains many profound representations of truths along with mistakes, propaganda, and superstitious absurdities assumed by fundamentalist believers to be absolute fact. Although the Genesis story of Creation is mythic, the impulse to understand and explain the origin and meaning of Creation, literally and via poetic representation, is valid and good. At the same time, recent science demonstrates that core Darwinian assumptions regarding bottom-up macroevolution are just plain wrong, although the fundamental concept of microevolution remains unchallenged. New propositions include the way change occurs and the degree to which change demonstrates rational purpose. If Darwinian evolution were true, Deism would accommodate it just as easily as it would any other version of intelligently designed creation. Deists accept as valid whatever has been most convincingly substantiated. Our common sense insists that elegantly designed existence necessitates a transcending designer. Because creation is an ongoing process, some Deists, myself included, believe that the designer is immanent as well as transcendent. Having assimilated recent knowledge, our evolved common sense concludes that that designer God can be neither Darwinian nature nor the God of fundamentalism.

Technically for Christian fundamentalism, that’s Gods. Fundamentalist factions of various religions have their own versions of God or Gods. Christian fundamentalists have one God who is really three Gods, that are really two Gods, since God the Spirit is a manifestation of God the Father, and Jesus is a human sub-God child of God the Father/Spirit. Deists believe that there is one God, or one unified entity, the Designer/Creator and Sustainer of existence as we know it. The latest theory of intelligent design has already superseded Darwinism and Genesism, and though many scientists and religionists and culture in general are dragging behind like a comet’s tail, ever-progressive Deism asserts that intelligent design is a current scientific and religious fact, and that any version of intelligent design, whether prewired or programmed on the fly, necessitates an intelligent designer of Nature who operates well beyond the catechisms of either religion or science. Even Darwinism logically necessitates a rational designer. The Darwinist’s quandary is that because he doesn’t like that designer personally, he must preserve the ersatz scientific theory that discredits design. Ironically, this parallels exactly the fundamentalist’s quandary in preserving biblical literalism to discredit Darwin. Even progressive Darwinians are as militantly closed-minded in their zeal to impose the anti-intelligent design dogmas of natural selection as other religionists are to impose their own theologies. Religious fundamentalists (Christian, Jewish, Islamic, etc.) worship their manmade texts as God-breathed; biology fundamentalists venerate their manmade text (Darwin) as nature-breathed. Stark nature—as interpreted and defined via their profoundly limited human perception—is their equivalent god. Neo-Darwinians ignore validated facts to uphold their faith in chance/random emergence, as if that would disprove intelligent design, just as religious fundamentalists deny the multitude of contradictions in their sacred texts, as if those texts prove an intelligent Designer. Though both hard-line Genesist and Darwinist beliefs have been debunked, each side continues to lionize its dogma. Each side claims to uphold the truth while ignoring and even denying the truth. Religion accuses Darwinism of inciting ruthlessness. Darwinism ties

the score by stressing how red in tooth and nail competing religions can be. To some extent, each side defends its extremist view in reaction to the extremist view of the opposing side: Darwinists hate the evil and irrationality perpetrated by religious superstition; the religious hate the total denial of a supreme being, dehumanization, and theology of ultimate meaningless. Neither side will admit that its own view is just as extremist as the other—and just as wrong. Neither side will admit that there is some truth, or some kind of truth, to the competing position. Neither side will even truly listen to the other. Worst of all, when they feel threatened, both sides attack any challenge to their authority. It’s tragic that in our modern world, wars are fought, societies destroyed, Earth itself ravaged over colliding ideological fallacies of these two “civilized” worldviews. Not that every battle is between religion and Darwinism. But intentionally or not, atheistic Darwinism and religious fundamentalism sanctify any worldview of militant extremism that foments eradication of opposing ideologies. Even calling Darwinism secular can be misleading, since Darwinism has become an antitheistic natural religion, and the vocal apologetics of its more passionate defenders disclaiming a Creator other than nature is at present most certainly a theology condemning the idolatry of scientists not bowing to natural selection. Most Americans reside uncomfortably in a murky compromise between those two extremist ideologies. Though historical movers and shakers and those who benefit from their upheavals often support extremist principles that privilege their power, many philosophers, poets, and ordinary folk have felt that truth lies deep below the historical, sociopolitical, science-culture “real world” bustle of everyday life. Most people are equally distressed by religious terrorism and the spiritual deicide committed by atheism. Society has tried to average out the insufficient and contradictory answers provided by religion and science to our most primal metaphysical concerns: the origin and purpose of life. That attempt has failed. Ours is an age of spiritual angst. Cultural-Spiritual Schizophrenia

Thanks to scientific indoctrination, most people today accept, albeit tentatively, Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest evolution as a fact, kill-orbe-killed as a necessity, look-out-for-number-one as common sense. Sanitized clichés of healthy competition make it easy even for us progressives to ignore that Darwinian convictions endorse the ruthless self-interest impelling most of the gravest evils threatening the survival of the modern world. “Natural selection acts by life and death, by the survival of the fittest, and by the destruction of the less well-fitted individuals,” Darwin informed his often scandalized audiences. “Extinction and natural selection go hand in hand.” His truth, embraced by atheists and magnates of British Imperialism, forced another mysterium upon Christians and a serious quandary upon secular humanists. In the twentieth century, extinction of enemies became an outright global agenda of dictators, of the most vicious forms of communism, socialism, and Nazism, and even of Christian, Muslim, and other religious fundamentalism that today sanctifies terrorism. From time to time, in spite of, or perhaps because of, our education, common sense defers to misinformation. But the shock of brutality does prompt our reflection. Though natural selection has been taught as fact in science classes for generations and is a fundamental assumption in every other field, most of us deep down don’t really believe it. Though, of course, we do accept it “intellectually.” It makes perfect sense, right, that grandma was an ape, and great-grandpa, a worm? Certainly academia’s tacit obligation is to uphold Darwinism, if only as the most viable antidote to Genesism and to fundamentalist extremism in general. But this is a mistake, both logically and politically. Besides competing with the almost universal conviction that humans are not just animals, endorsement of humanism on the one hand plus survival-of-the-fittest evolution on the other appears contradictory even to freshmen. The political Right exploits the misunderstanding, misleadingly positioning itself as the exclusively Christian (Genesist) “Right” pitted against the atheist (Darwinist) “wrong,” the Left. Leading fundamentalists and Darwinians amplify the confusion by publicizing their polarized ultimatum: You either trust Darwinism or have faith in Genesism. The either-or is as

dishonest as it is fallacious. Leaders on both sides know perfectly well that there are other choices, but they allow, even propagate, the two-option-only fallacy. But though academia, the government, and the media authorize Darwinism, usually at the exclusion of competing theories, including any that posit intelligent design, recent statistics show that the majority of Americans don’t fully embrace all the tenets of Darwinian evolution. That doesn’t mean they consider the creation myth of Genesis, or any other creation myth, to be literal fact; most people don’t. According to recent Gallup polls, no more than thirty percent of Americans interpret the Bible literally. But polls show that at least ninety percent of Americans believe in God or some form of supreme being, and that percentage includes many liberals and agnostics that the Christian Right and Darwinians have both stereotyped as atheist. About half of the population believes that God created humans in their present form; an additional quarter-plus percent think that God guided the process. Only about thirteen percent (not all of whom are atheist) believe that a supreme being had no role in evolution. That thirteen percent is significant. As much as Darwinians deny it, Darwinism is a religion. One of its fundamental doctrines is that anything supernatural is superstition, and superstition must be cleared away before real science can take place. It’s true that superstition must be replaced with truth. Many of us believe that the survival of the planet depends on it. But is anything supernatural necessarily superstition? Perhaps more to the point, does the supernatural really fall under the jurisdiction of science? Several atheist scientists believe that it does, and they’ve explicitly stated that they construct scientific theories specifically for the purpose of disproving the existence of a supreme being. Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most outspoken of the many atheist scientists writing books and lecturing on the evils of theism, has publically avowed that his goal as a scientist is to “kill religion.” By frontally attacking God, Dawkins and crew have stepped outside the arena of pure science and beyond the realm of metaphysics into the domain of theology—the very God-centered theology their arguments incessantly rant against allowing into any discourse concerning reality, especially in the field of science.

Meanwhile, fundamentalists accuse those scientists of tossing out the kill-God red herring because their attempt to scientifically prove Darwinian evolution has miserably failed. Darwinists condemn fundamentalists for believing in the special revelation of a “God-breathed” Bible and for worshipping Jesus as a divinity or as Divinity itself. But Darwinian scientists regard Darwinism as an even more special revelation disclosed to their consecrated prophet, Charles Darwin. Darwinism, like Christianity, is a theory named for the human being who synthesized it. Just as many Christians conflate the four divergent gospels into “The Gospel,” and often call the entire Bible and even all of Christendom “Christ,” or “Jesus,” Darwin devotees often refer to evolution, implying every version of evolution, as simply “Darwin.” Darwinians criticize fundamentalists for worshipping as Christ a person who cannot be proven to have existed, and for selectively choosing only Bible verses and stories they like while utterly ignoring all the rest because it contradicts their wishful beliefs. Yet even lauded disciples of Darwin betray surprisingly little acquaintance with, or remembrance of, or concern about, the biographical and autobiographical details of their prophet’s life. And their reverence for his great gospel, The Origin of Species, doesn’t prevent them from extracting only skewed minutia to support the theory of bottom-up, simple-to-complex macroevolution that even Darwin himself doubted. The actual human being that synthesized the religious theory— Christ or Darwin—no longer exists; his dust has evolved into a motif, and his life into a myth. The theory lives on in all its mutant incarnations pretending to be a unified whole asserting itself as a religion. (Darwinians might prefer “philosophy.”) Each generation thinks it has reached the pinnacle of knowledge. It has moved past the myths and mistakes of the past and has at last arrived at the ultimate truth. Some people today see the ancients as ignorant, superstitious primitives whose brains were less evolved than our own. (The Neanderthal brain was even bigger than ours, but of course Neanderthals don’t count, being extinct, and not an ancestor of us superior Homo sapiens.)

The reality is that humans today have the same brains as our cave-cozy ancestors and can be just as ignorant and superstitious as ever. The main difference is that advances in technology allow us to spread ignorant, superstitious assertions at viral speed. Darwinists want you to agree that they have saved the world from blind faith in the supernatural by the grace of bald-eyed Darwinian confidence in scientifically proven mechanistic determinism. Old equals ignorant equals supernatural; new equals enlightened equals evolution. Deism Rising People want truth. People embrace truth when it’s presented to them directly, in clarifying, detailed terms. But when the trusted authorities of faith lie, believers defend the lie they have been indoctrinated to believe is truth. Even so, truth always finds a way to seep through any subterfuge, as it did here in America, for instance, with the rise of Deist democracy, right around 1776. By the mid-eighteenth century, the Enlightenment had enlightened the multitudes. Church crusades no longer directed attacks toward infidels of other religions, like Jews and Muslims, but toward the multitude of backsliders. New inquisitions were mounted, not against witches and other heretics, but against humanist intellectuals, especially those most dangerous heretics, those treacherous truthtellers, Deists. The so-called quest for the historical Jesus (the topic of Chapter 3), groping for any beam to prop up the crumbling basilica, gleaned not one shred of proof that such a man-god or man Jesus had existed, and a heap of evidence that he had not. When Darwin’s ape stepped on stage in 1859, properly dressed in tails and top-hat, the excommunicated seized his hairy hand and announced that here was the new Messiah. Just off stage right, fundamentalism was born. Darwinism spawned the fundamentalist backlash, which spawned yet another backlash, neo-Darwinism, a truly fundamentalist sect of science. Both breeds of fundamentalism murder truth for the sake of their absolutist cause, and at their worst, their deceptions sanctify war and other atrocities. Evil is one short step down from ignorance.

The Good News of Deism today is that science is right now proving as true what many people have intuited since the birth of humanity: The exquisitely intelligent universe was and is still being perfectly designed by an intelligent designer. The Creator, the God of existence, is none other than the natural God affirmed by Deism. Just like our ancestors, we seek for the meaning, purpose, and origin of our life. Just like them, we make guesses based on the latest available information. Their guesses were no more primitive than our own; ours are just informed by new information made available via the latest technology. In Darwin’s time, or in the era of our Founders, or even two or five thousand years ago, our ancestors would have been no more open or resistant to verified truth than we are today. From the Deist’s perspective, truth is not indoctrination by either science or religion; truth is eloquently expressed through Nature, the true, rational Word of God, offered democratically to everyone. As I will show, there’s plenty of evidence from science and religion that hope and joy and meaning and purpose are profoundly illuminating realities embedded in the material structure of existence. God is astounding, and so is the natural realm so conspicuously created for a reason. Common sense guides us to self-evident truths taught by Nature, truths that constitute the essence of Deism, the religious philosophy of choice of many of our democracy’s most seminal Founders, like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine, to name but a few. Deists believe that the Creator reveals truth, including spiritual truth, to everyone through our space-time existence, or Nature, via innate, God-given faculties, not just to a chosen elite via special revelation. Contrary to the fundamentalist and Darwinist claim, naturalism is not atheism. Nor is Deism the religion of an absentfather God who wound up the universe and left it to run on its own like a ticking clock. Some Deists believe that, but certainly not all, or even most, and certainly not the originators of Deism. Most Deists accept William Paley’s famous watch analogy to intelligent design, dating back to the eighteenth century—if you stumbled upon a watch out on a heath, you’d know it was designed by an intelligent person; likewise, Nature is clearly designed by an intelligent Mind. Paley’s analogy follows Robert Boyle’s comparison of the universe to the

Great Clock of Strasbourg, a century earlier. Even the pre-Socratic Greeks understood that Nature is structured. But many Deists, today as in the past, reject the false correlation of an intelligent First Cause to a checked-out watchmaker/clockmaker God. Exquisitely designed Creation necessitates a transcending Intelligent Designer that is immanently engaged in the perpetual process of creating novelty sustained within the secure margins of natural laws. Even granting chance, free will, and cause-effect, because Creation of novelty is an ongoing process, God is necessarily immanent as well as transcendent, and immanent means present. Most people don’t mind that scientists are human beings with religious or philosophical interest in the source and purpose of our existence. From earliest antiquity, people included spiritual considerations in their investigations of the natural realm. With the advent of the scientific revolution, the subject of scientific study narrowed to the specifically material realm, but at the same time, almost all great scientists in Europe, America, and the Middle East prior to the nineteenth century were theists: they believed in a transcendent God. Many European scientists were ostensible Christians with deistic leanings in an era when it was dangerous to contradict the Church. Although today mixing the fields of science and religion is generally censured by both scientists and religionists, traditionally both domains fell under the authority of the Church, and nonconformist views from either domain were typically condemned only by religious oligarchs. Most scientists were religious and saw no contradiction between religion and science. Copernicus, for instance, sought to uncover “the mechanism of the universe, wrought for us by a supremely good and orderly Creator.” But one consequence of this honest inquiry was that for centuries many scientists who agreed with Copernican cosmology were branded heretics by the Inquisition. All scientists seek to discern the mechanisms of existence; not all scientists today agree that those mechanisms were wrought by a Creator. And very few scientists in the nineteenth century of Darwin and even fewer today consider the biblical creation myth to be literal fact. In the late nineteenth century, fundamentalism came into being to fight skepticism toward religion, especially toward biblical

literalism, but in doing so it alienated large numbers of theists, including not-fundamentalist Christians. In the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, fundamentalists still falsely accuse Deists and agnostics of atheism. Ironically, the kill-religion assumption of antidesign Darwinian evolutionists is exactly the stamp-out stance taken by radical fundamentalists of any religion toward competing religions and non-religious critics, even those that believe in God. The elegantly simple truth Copernicus deciphered within his domain of the material realm revolutionized our thinking about our place in the universe, and like many great scientific discoveries, the Copernican insight informed our spiritual understanding as well. Materialists ever since have concluded that because Earth is not in any way the center of the universe, humanity is insignificant, life has no ultimate meaning, existence is utterly devoid of inherent purpose. Copernicus didn’t take that radical leap of non-faith. He merely highlighted the obvious immensity of God’s discernible Creation, a matter-of-fact gesture that humbled man and elevated God. But the cosmic decentering caused by the impact of his calculations knocked the Church into orbit along with the planet. Threatened by this challenge to its central position as divine authority, organized religion burrowed deeper into denial, buttressing its myths of elected superiority with persuasive arguments like inquisitions, crusades, pogroms, and, perhaps even worse than torture and death, excommunications, those precious tickets to eternal hell. These tactics were only ostensibly religious; their chief purpose was to bolster Church authority by controlling wealth, and more importantly knowledge, especially stubbornly candid science, which “transcended” religious dogma and monopolized new wealthgenerating technologies. Today the Church agenda is executed by fundamentalists trying to hijack the science of intelligent design to support biblical literalism, or at least to shore up the superior validity of their religion. The strategies used by fundamentalists to force-fit science into proofs for biblical fact-claims—most significantly misrepresentation of facts (lying) and intellectual/moral coercion—are quite similar to force-fit tactics used by the Church of the Inquisition, which ironically are quite similar to force-fit tactics used by kill-religion atheists today to

disprove a transcending Designer. (Today, of course, we don’t usually bodily kill our fellow citizens who disagree with us, just their souls, though citizens of enemy nations are still fair game.) It’s perversely ironic that until the modern era of materialist determinism, religion squelched spiritual knowledge far more aggressively than science did. Copernicus and his theist-deist progeny such as Galileo, Kepler, and Newton exemplified the most fundamental spiritual principle of human existence: Truth must be embraced; or put negatively: Truth must not be shunned. Armed with his telescopes and a pen, Galileo fought with and ridiculed the pope even while under house arrest for heresy; Kepler, a sometime Christian astrologer, hid his un-Aristotelian elliptical orbits in obscure Latin treatises circulated quietly; Newton spent far less time on science than he expended interpreting alchemical and biblical texts that to him were clearly not literal fact, and those forbidden metaphysical manuscripts, the bulk of his life’s work hidden out of fear, were only discovered after his death. The annals of history are replete with the names of leaders and groups who boldly risked everything, including their lives, to assert the rights of their truth. But more often than not, fear prevented the heretic from making his views public. Newton is a classic example. Best known for his advances in physics and mathematics that centuries later are still revolutionizing civilization’s quality of life, the name Isaac Newton often conjures the portrait of a cold rationalist responsible for our mechanistic determinism. Most people are unaware that Newton’s work in physics and mathematics simply built on discoveries he made very early in his life, in 1665-1666, or that he also secretly wrote over 100,000 pages of heretical ideas on alchemy, astrology, and the occult, unorthodox commentaries on Revelations and the prophecies of Daniel, and essays that debunked the traditional doctrine of the Trinity, just for starters—only recently have we gained access to the sealed trunk of voluminous papers he left behind at his death. John Maynard Keynes, a British intellectual with early access to those papers, made this amendatory observation: In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of

scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason. I do not see him in this light. I do not think that anyone who has poured over the contents of that box which he packed up when he finally left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child born with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage. Newton sealed that trunk to protect his good name both as a scientist and a Christian, and he certainly had just cause to fear revealing his mysticism. Not only did the scientific method itself challenge church authority, Newton’s radical conclusions also contradicted accepted interpretations of biblical truth and therefore threatened clerical power. In 1553 another important contributor to science, Spanish physician Miguel Serveto, author of On the Error of the Trinity, was burned at the stake for repudiating the tripartite personality of God, one of his more radical views shared by Newton. Better to seal up those pages in a trunk than have them stoke a bonfire. But Newton was a man in love with Creation, and that love, fueled by a kind of inner integrity that strove for truth, drove his genius. He once said about himself: “I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a child playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a lovelier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” As Newton’s great admirer, Einstein, understood, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” Einstein felt a profound affinity with his fellow rebel against the status quo, especially with Newton’s appreciation of the intricate, aesthetic order of Creation.

Rational observation and experimentation within the material realm—the scientific method—is the tradition of science as a field of study. Atheist scientists today don’t just explore the material realm; they claim that the material realm is all there is: The mechanisms of the universe weren’t created by a transcending Creator; they either “just are” as a result of random chance and mechanistic determinism, or they are self-created, meaning the mechanistic/deterministic universe itself is God. Many of these scientists today believe that nothing is beyond their ken. That’s right: Elite members of a species spawned by a crap shoot of blind chance driven by the rational irrational god natural selection are able to grasp the myriad nuances of all existence—some would go so far as to say control and even retroactively create existence (more on that in Chapter 7). At the very least they are very close to constructing a unified theory of everything, even reconciling Einstein’s theory of relativity with quantum physics, which at the moment remain incompatible. They are very close to creating life and building artificial intelligence. They are on the brink of grasping the fundamental essence that unifies all existence. Hard to believe, isn’t it, that a tiny, albeit complicated speck of dust can vanquish the complex immensity of existence. Their boast is meta physical: metaphysical. They perpetuate the ancient tradition of creating gods in their own image and think their knighted evolution is a uniquely enlightened concept. Yet the walking shadow they worship as their god, by their own admission ultimately signifies nothing: That’s the heart and soul of atheism. Intelligent Design and the Golden Mean of Deism Whether the challenge of Darwinism intensifies or fades, conservative believers must still grapple with mounting proofs that the Bible, like Darwin (as I’ll show in Chapters 4 and 5), is a defective authority. Believers realize that it is untruthful to deny that its pages are packed with incongruities, with false and contradictory histories, with obvious myths and superstitions lifted from far more ancient religions. Scholars know—though many downplay or conveniently “forget”—that the books collected in what we now call the Bible were understood at the time they were written and

compiled to be largely conjectural and evolving, most being based on fluid oral transmissions that were later written down by various individuals, and then rewritten, edited, and compiled by many more people who had heard different versions or had different understandings and agendas. Even early Christians understood that it had taken the various Jesus religions a very long time to consolidate into a relatively stable religion, eventually christened Christianity, which by that point had become the property of an elite controlling body, the Church. Even within the Church itself, battles over faith definition and ownership raged for centuries, among the bloodiest clashes being the Inquisition and the Reformation, each of which took the lives (and according to the Church, the souls) of millions. For the last century, fundamentalism has thrived because academic theologians and freelance evangelicals, threatened by the intellectual honesty that culminated during the Enlightenment, have herded believers into a retro Dark Ages. Rather than reveal the facts to believers, scholars and their schooled priests and preachers have chosen to perpetuate a Noble Lie of blind faith, a practice still enshrined today. Operative word: Lie. As the absurd, dishonest battle between Darwinians and fundamentalists rages on, Deists, myself included, must once again challenge the Ignoble Lie of the status quo with straightforward, commonsense explanations supporting the fact of intelligent design —a hip concept that’s older than Darwin’s grandmother. In reality, smart theists have critiqued religious superstition for millennia. The challenge has always been to persuade believers to step back and recognize their irrational belief in primitive magic. Do religionists still, in the twenty-first century in America, really believe that a talking snake seduced a woman into eating a piece of fruit that caused all subsequent newborns to be guilty as hell of sin? Do they really believe that an antediluvian man built a boat that could hold two of literally all animals, including snakes, elephants, polar bears, kangaroos, whales, eels, mosquitoes, and germs (there are a quarter million species of beetles alone, and who knows how many species of microorganisms, which leads to questions of collection process, not to mention food gathering, storage, and distribution, and

then there’s the nasty job of poop scooping)? Do they really believe that a stick turned into a snake, or that a man lived forty days in the belly of a whale deep under the sea? Do they really believe that their God impregnated a virgin with his son, and do they really believe that that impregnation process is qualitatively different from, say, Zeus raping Leda, or from men “possessing” women as chattel? Do they really believe that their man-god had to cast demons into swine because he couldn’t or wouldn’t just destroy them? Do they really believe that a man ascended into heaven in a flaming chariot, that a woman was turned into a pillar of salt, that a voice out of heaven spoke through a bush that burned without burning up or out? Do they really believe those ten black-magic plagues of Egypt more brutal than Inquisition torture devices where inflicted upon innocent people whose king was trying to repent but couldn’t because God wouldn’t let him? Do they really believe that manna rained down daily in the desert, that Balaam’s donkey spoke, that a dead man’s bones revived the dead, that the sun stood still one day, and moved backward another? Do they really believe that a very dead rabbi came back alive, which insiders claimed was a hoax? Or that Satan tricked God into tormenting Job. Or that God demanded rape, murder, plunder, slavery, bigotry, hate, or lies? Do Christians really believe that their superstitious beliefs are literally or even symbolically real but the superstitious beliefs of other religions are—well, superstitions? Many scientists acknowledge that something that appears to be miraculous could have happened naturally. We Deists agree that we must seek the facts and evaluate all the evidence. Las Vegas swarms with masters of “believable” magic tricks. And today’s health craze has made everyone aware that thought, emotion, visualization, breathing, herbs, nutrition, and other natural techniques can cure— really help the body itself cure—illness and disease. Someone not privy to the tricks and trade secrets might judge them to be supernatural. We know that the Bible is not a reliable source of facts; we know that it is steeped in magical stories that derive from or resemble stories of other ancient religions; we know that people are gullible; we know that religious dogma can short-circuit reason, whether the

believer accepts its magical elements willingly or has been brainwashed. Common sense and education concur that there never could have been a talking snake or a stick that turned into a snake. Even children raised on Harry Potter don’t buy that shtick for very long. But do Darwinians really expect fundamentalists to give up their faith in biblical magical realism for an esoteric claim that their grandpa was an ape that randomly mutated from a bacterium by the grace of the mindless god “selection”? Most of us look at apes…look at humans…shake our heads. Even on a purely organic level we humans are clearly a discrete category. Darwinians make much ado about the “identical” DNA we share with chimps, while ignoring that every life-form is composed of the same DNA, and brushing aside the tried-and-true typological view of nature first illustrated by Aristotle and still used today with only minor tweaks. Thanks to microbiology it’s even more obvious today that living beings can be grouped together according to major defining categories of shared biological characteristics that correspond with morphological classifications. Each discrete group is what it is. Clearly there are characteristics that define a group—species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom, domain, life—and that make that group not any other group. It’s no surprise to fundamentalists that paleontologists have never located transitional missing links between major types that would substantiate Darwin’s theory of macroevolution. Today most Christians have settled upon some form of “God created evolution,” though Darwinians on the one side and strict fundamentalists on the other still decry any such compromise. Darwinism continues to dominate academia and the government, but during the last decade or so, as paleontologists systematically disconfirmed Darwinian macroevolution, shrewd fundamentalists have stepped in to appropriate the new secular science of intelligent design to support biblical creationism. The truth is that intelligent design supports neither Darwinian evolution nor biblical creationism. Darwinism is obsolete, though it’s taking awhile for some textbooks to catch up. Genesism is a bit

harder to demystify, if only because religion privileges faith, even blind faith, over fact. But reality doesn’t just vanish. As fundamentalist leaders shroud the truth in smokescreens, academics and ordinary truth-seekers continue exposing the facts. This might sound very progressive, very contemporary, but this exposé was going on long before your greatgrandparents started courting. Fundamentalism, a late conservative development, which originated during the mid- to late-nineteenth century as a reaction to Darwinism and to the far more dangerous deconstruction of the Bible and the historical Jesus, has lately found itself in the uncomfortable position of needing to evolve. To divert attention away from the devastating dismantling of biblical infallibility and Christian authority, prominent fundamentalists toss out their latest red herring, intelligent design, outrageously naming one of their own, Phillip E. Johnson, the “father of ID.” Johnson—a lawyer, not a scientist—might have used the phrase “intelligent design” in his 1991 book Darwin on Trial, but he derived his concept and research from scientists already writing on the subject, like agnostic microbiologist and medical researcher Michael Denton, author of the groundbreaking book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, published in 1985, well before Johnson’s book. Conferring titles like “father of ID” smacks of elitist self-promotion, if not outright deception. As most educated people know, including Johnson and his cronies, intelligent design itself has a rich philosophical and scientific history reaching back well over two millennia, and just stirring in the latest scientific data confirming the ancient theory doesn’t change that fact that the theory is ancient. Nor does dousing fundamentalism with a little science scientifically validate fundamentalism. Certainly the grandparents of intelligent design were our ancient ancestors, who realized that our amazing life in our amazing cosmos had to have been created by a transcending, supra-natural Creator —god, gods, goddesses, immanent spirits: Whatever the representation, the understanding was that some higher power was clearly in control of designing, generating, and sustaining existence. The real progenitors of intelligent design, at least in the West, were the Greek philosophers. Being the first critics of religious myths and

the first teleological naturalists, those ancient questers were the sires of deism. Deism is a more legitimate heir to intelligent design than is fundamentalism. My vote for father of ID would not be a person, but rather a synthesis of the meta-physical naturalism of Plato and Aristotle, whose rational philosophies explicated nature far better than the often mocked pre-Socratic Greek materialists, sires of Darwinism, and pre-pre-Socratic mythology, sire of fundamentalism. In essence, Deist religion is an updated synthesis of Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics with an added dose of contemporary ethics. Deism has always been theism with a conscience. Truth and love —philos, brotherly love—are two fundamental pillars of Deism; deception and hate, in all their permutations, are anathema to a Deist. Surely it would change the way civilization functions if most of us believed that compassion and creativity, truth and justice, liberty and the pursuit of happiness really were inherent truths within the grasp of us all. Aristotle observed that between two extremist positions there is usually a better position, which he called the Golden Mean. Not a watered-down gray between black and white, the Golden Mean transcends the extremes and is a positive between two negatives. Courage, for example, is a Golden Mean between the polar extremes of cowardice and rashness. Intelligent design is a Golden Mean between Genesism and Darwinism. Deism is a Golden Mean between fundamentalism and atheism. Deist religion respects differing perspectives sustained by common sense. But even in the name of open-mindedness, the Deist version of intelligent design cannot support Genesism, which contradicts common sense. The entire Bible, not just the Old Testament account of Creation, has been so thoroughly deconstructed that to continue lifting it up as God’s Word in this day and age displays not so much profound ignorance as much as unconscionable dishonesty. Nor does Deism align with Darwinian or neo-Darwinian definitions of evolution. As a matter of conscience, New Deism embraces scientifically evidenced intelligent design and rejects disproven Darwinian macroevolution. Darwin’s theory of evolution begins with similarities between, say, humans and apes, and attempts to

establish a smooth transition between their separate distinguishing features. We now know that no smooth transition exists. While the similarities between humans and apes might prove something, they don’t prove Darwinian evolution. In contrast to Darwinism, Deism stresses similarities within specific categories of distinctive difference. Humans and apes are currently classified as primates; humans are very much not apes. How we are like apes is certainly an important point in any consideration of what it means to be a living being on Planet Earth. But whether we evolved from apes or not, being a human is categorically different from being an ape, and the distance between us—and I don’t mean brain size—is astronomical. If we are not evolved from apes, we might have more in common with our CroMagnon ancestors than we suspect. Deism critiques the random chance natural selection of neoDarwinian-materialist atheism, and endorses the version of life coming-to-be confirmed by very recent scientific discoveries in biology and mathematics, specifically genetic information systems and probability. Should a mechanism proving some version of macroevolution be discovered, we Deists will gladly accept it as an aspect of an intelligently designed Creation. Deism understands that any valid version of coming-into-being, including Darwinian evolution, would be rational creation that requires a transcending designer. From Evolution Confusion to Intelligent Design Since the time of the pre-Socratic Greeks, science, or natural philosophy, has always been far less engaged in proving theories than in falsifying them. It’s not just the perpetual waterfall of new information that forces scientists to constantly adapt and adjust even those theories marketed as facts. All of us who rely upon pronouncements of science must be vigilant in also considering a scientist’s motives, which even these days tend to be philosophical more than academic or monetary. The stated objective of science is to ascertain facts. In reality, though, the goal of many scientists is to metaphysically interpret ascertained facts.

Comparing contradictory conclusions by two scientists explaining the exact same fact illustrates the subjectivity of ostensibly objective science. For instance, in an essay titled “Dawkins, God, and the Scientific Enterprise: Reflections on the Appeal to Darwinism in Fundamentalist Atheism,” theology professor and writer Alister McGrath compares two empirically equivalent statements describing the MO of genes interpreted via radically conflicting a priori ontological and teleological assumptions. The first statement is from Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, the second from The Music of Life by noted physiologist and systems biologist Denis Noble. The book titles themselves already blare interpretative difference. First Dawkins: “[Genes] swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence.” Now Noble: “[Genes] are trapped in huge colonies, locked inside highly intelligent beings, moulded by the outside world, communicating with it by complex processes, through which, blindly, as if by magic, function emerges. They are in you and me; we are the system that allows their code to be read; and their preservation is totally dependent on the joy that we experience in reproducing ourselves. We are the ultimate rationale for their existence.” That’s two theologies. In spite of its reputation for minute precision and objective facts, at times science confuses more than it clarifies. It isn’t the seemingly complex semantics of DNA as much as the skewed semantics of basic scientific jargon that causes probably the biggest source of evolution confusion among laypersons. Even scientists have to deal with the “species problem,” as they call their inability to define a species: There are over two dozen distinct definitions of the word species used among biologists, because no one definition applies to all organisms or contexts. If a couple dozen contradicting definitions of this important scientific term weren’t enough to muddy our understanding of a species and its origin, just add common dictionary meanings, like class, type, kind, sort, genus, variety, group, order, and so on. Many people think of humans and apes as separate species. Cats and

dogs are species, as are bats and butterflies. But in a scientific context, cats, dogs, butterflies, and bats, aren’t all technically species. There are 14,000 (some experts say 28,000, others 100,000) species of butterflies belonging to the order Lepidoptera, but most of us, who know a butterfly when we see one but probably can’t identify or name many species, and even some scientists who can, call the butterfly group a species. Darwin himself used the word species in different and sometimes conflicting ways, and in the Origin of Species laments that “No one definition has satisfied all naturalists; yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of species. Generally the term includes the unknown element of a distinct act of creation. The term ‘variety’ is almost equally difficult to define.” He adds, “I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other…it does not essentially differ from the term variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms. The term variety, again, in comparison and with mere individual differences, is also applied arbitrarily, for convenience sake.” When most of us talk about the human species, what we really mean is Homo (genus) sapiens (species). The international nomenclature system always assigns a new species a two-part name of genus + species. This all sounds very cut-and-dry, but even at the level of genus, categorization is not an exact science, only a convenient way to group together into taxa life-forms sharing a few similar, mostly external physical characteristics. And which characteristics define the genus and its species, like interbreed ability and hypothetical ancestry of species within a genus, are matters of contention. We Deists might ask biologists why physical aspects are privileged in the first place. Microbiology, with its subatomic examination of organisms, further complicates species identification. Some scientists now use terms like phylum, form, group, class, or type to designate discrete, selfcontained morphological entities—really discrete containers with well-defined borders, which often contain other smaller selfcontained containers. Think nested Russian dolls or Chinese boxes.

Species definition is especially frustrating for Darwinians, who approach species changes as links in their theoretical evolutionary chain from first organism to all subsequent organisms. For them, a species serves as proof of evolution. Whatever that means; evolution is just as hard to define as species. Nobody contests the obvious reality of change within a species group—say, a butterfly type developing orange or yellow wings; and after a series of such changes, which scientists call “trivial,” the butterfly type can justifiably be given a separate species name, which could change with addition of new data. But those adaptations or any other kinds of trivial changes occur because the potential for such change is already programmed in the butterfly type’s DNA. A butterfly can become a different version of butterfly. A butterfly might laterally microevolve, but a butterfly doesn’t macroevolve into a bat or a bird or any other not-butterfly. The butterfly container contains many varieties of butterfly but no varieties of bat or bird. The butterfly container doesn’t transmute, suddenly or slowly, into a bat or bird container. Anatomists and other ordinary observant people realized early on, and certainly knew in Darwin’s day, that even considering unique characteristics of species within a group, there was, as Michael Denton puts it, “an underlying unity in design of each group of organisms,” and furthermore that “the distribution of these characteristics conformed to a highly ordered pattern which permitted the species to be classified into a hierarchy of increasingly inclusive classes”: Containers within containers. Darwin’s microevolution simply restates speciation within a class (or type, or group, or container, call it what you will), which even the Greeks understood. Microbiology has proven, and each new finding further proves, that Darwin’s extrapolation of macroevolution from microevolution is a fallacy. It’s still the case that species can evolve into new species within a species class. Selective breeding can generate new varieties so different from each other that they are classified as new species. But even aggressive genetic modification and cloning only prove what scientists already knew, that there are limits to breeding possibilities. There is always a threshold beyond which a species type can’t be

altered. We understand maximum capacity and thresholds intuitively and through experience: This jar can hold only so much water; that runner can run only so fast. A species type can only evolve in so many ways. In this age of microbiology, the old Greek discretecontainer typology turns out to be an accurate template. A class, or type, is a complex whole. You can’t just tweak one part of a regular watch and get a digital watch—a new type of watch; you’d need to make other simultaneous changes so that all the components still function together in a coherent and integrated manner. This is even more the case for an organism, even a teeny tiny minor one, which is not only far more complex than a watch, its complexity is alive. Because organisms are complex, it took awhile for the old anatomists to sort the various species into their respective containers. One problem was that there are very different kinds of resemblances. According to the so-called “analogous” resemblance, species in different containers share similar structures, like the whale flipper and the fish fin, or the forelimbs of a mole and a mole cricket. The “homologous” resemblance shows that species in different containers have essentially the same organ or structure that serves very different functions, like the forelimbs of terrestrial vertebrates. One might ask the Darwinian how a very few, totally unrelated species—humans, certain snails, the octopus, a group of jellyfish called the box jellies—developed the same kind of very complex eye —the “camera eye,” as opposed to, say, the compound eye found in insects—via very different evolutionary routes in order to accomplish the exact same function, to see, but to see in very different ways in very different environments requiring very different adaptations. How and why could a pair of human camera eyes be constructed like the camera eyes on the tentacles of primitive animals that don’t even really have a brain, just a nervous system? Although Darwinians point to this odd occurrence as proof of “punctuated equilibrium” macroevolution, in fact it simply highlights that there are discrete containers containing life-forms that have been designed intelligently according to similar sophisticated blueprints. Until molecular biology began comparing organisms biochemically, there was no mathematical way to measure the

morphological complexity of life-forms or the difference between, say, cat and dog compared to cat and mouse. During the 1960s, as scientists began cataloguing protein sequences, it became clear that molecules wouldn’t provide evidence of sequential arrangements in nature, as required by Darwin, but rather further reaffirmed “a highly ordered hierarchic scheme from which all direct evidence for evolution is emphatically absent.” And what a scheme! Denton notes, “The division turned out to be more mathematically perfect than even the most diehard typologists could have predicted.” Once molecular biologists had created the “percent sequence difference matrix” to classify species into groups, it became clear just how precisely molecular and morphological groups correspond. Even each identifiable subclass of sequences is isolated and distinct, and transitional or intermediate classes are completely absent. “The almost mathematical perfection of the isolation of the fundamental classes at a molecular level is astonishing!” Denton exclaims. “There is not a trace at a molecular level of the traditional evolutionary series: cyclostome to fish to amphibian to reptile to mammal. Incredibly, man is as close to lamprey as are fish!” The mathematical exactness in the degree of isolation means that the amphibia are not intermediate between fish and other terrestrial vertebrates; in fact, their molecular makeup is as far from fish as from any group of reptiles or mammals. “To those well acquainted with the traditional picture of vertebrate evolution,” Denton muses, “the result is truly astonishing.” Although human and chimp sequences differ on average at only one base in a hundred, and every gene identified in the human genome has its counterpart in the chimpanzee genome, the percent sequence difference matrix comparing protein, DNA, and RNA sequences of primates shows that the classes of monkeys, apes, and humans are entirely non-overlapping. Besides, genes take up only about five to ten percent of our DNA. Many latent genes are just waiting to perform functions accommodating some future need—or in humans, desire. Latent potential might have something—but not everything—to do with the enormous difference between human and chimp.

It’s not unusual that morphologically different organisms are very closely related at the building block level of DNA. We’re all constructed according to “a basically identical genetic architecture,” as paleobiologist Simon Conway Morris puts it. A multitude of very different structures have been constructed using the exact same building materials. The difference between a human and a chimp is greater than the difference between a picture created by Michelangelo and one painted by a five year old in the same room using the same canvas, brushes, and paints. Recently, some scientists have proposed a top-down version of evolution, which starts with the blueprints of major phyla that came into existence all at once during the Cambrian explosion. The blueprints include features allowing for adaptation, like longer beaks developed by birds in order to lunch on larger seeds. Intra-type microevolution happens all the time. There are 14,000 species of butterflies (again, some reference books say 28,000, some 100,000 species) belonging to four families, which along with moths (150,000 species) and skippers (3,000 species) make up the order Lepidoptera. But inter-type Darwinian evolution doesn’t happen. Butterflies don’t become bats or birds. Since molecular intermediates that cross over between classes are as absent as fossil missing links, scientists now refer to organism relationships as “sisterly” (I prefer “lateral”); no organism is “ancestral” or more “primitive” or “advanced” than its relatives. The extraordinary orderliness of the discrete divisions made up of the exact same molecular building blocks—some scientists liken a gene to a Lego—is persuasive evidence of intelligent design. All of this, of course, has spiritual implications. Here are a few slivers of the natural miracle sanctioned by Deism: Matter exists (a mindboggling fact, if you really think about it); every thing exists, embodies the same existence, and is composed of the same spacetime matter, therefore we are one; but each thing is a discrete entity unlike each other entity, therefore each of us is unique; collectively all of us unique beings are many and one. Life—now that’s a miracle. Life exists; every organism exists, embodies the same life, and is composed of the same life matter, therefore we are one; but each organism is a discrete entity unlike each other entity, therefore

each of us is unique; collectively all of us unique living beings are many and one. The case against Darwin becomes more and more convincing the closer scientists peer through their ever-thickening lenses. Darwin assumed that the smaller the building block, the less complex, in descending order down to the primal building block, the cell. Looking through his nineteenth-century microscope, the cell looked like a simple little blob of Jello that didn’t do a whole lot. Today we can see that cells are structurally enormously complex and perform elegantly elaborate functions; even at the tiny atomic level, primeval doesn’t mean simple. As if to dazzle us with artistic cunning, the Builder has assembled wildly diverse organisms using the same DNA molecule. The genetic information in every life-form is coded in a universal language of four letters, A, G, C, T (adenine guanine, cytosine, and thymine), the four chemical compounds that comprise the DNA double helix. As a substance, DNA doesn’t vary among species; only the order of its letters changes. The individual letters are meaningless in themselves, but they combine into meaningful words, sentences, paragraphs, books—whole libraries of discrete organisms. Typed out on a page, the code of our particular DNA would look similar to computer code written by programmers. By definition, code, which translates into a message, is never random. The code of DNA is vastly more elaborate than computer code, not to mention, it’s alive. And if it’s truly code, what is its message? Code isn’t code unless it means something. Code is language. Language conveys meaning. What is the message, the meaning of life, of your life? The answer demands teamwork; deciphering the code requires a synthesis of science and religion, which is the task of Deism, which assumes that God is a Natural God articulating truth intelligently through Nature: That’s naturalism; that’s Deism. The neo-Darwinian’s Little Bang theory starts with a simple little genome that randomly slithers up the slippery slope to the first mutant human being—whose genetic information is written as three billion letters along a single DNA filament! In some places, the filament winds around itself, forming twenty-three more segments, the chromosomes. Since we each inherit a complete set of

chromosomes from each of our parents, we each have twenty-three pairs of chromosomes. Our genetic story is written in six billion pairs, or twelve billion letters (that we thus far know of). And the plot thickens: Where did the idea of reproduction come from; why two of a kind to tango? Where did number two come from (or the number two, or numbers)? Two separate languages—DNA constructed from a four letter alphabet, and proteins from a twenty letter alphabet (the twenty amino acids)—communicate via one translation mechanism to form the paragraphs of our bodies, our cells. Does that sound randomly not-really-designed to you? All those living building blocks perform amazingly sophisticated, perfectly choreographed predetermined tasks with atomic precision at astronomical speeds. Add to consistent form a cell’s structural efficiency, and you’ve got a good case for intelligent design. As deterministic as all this wonder seems to the Darwinian materialist, the predetermined, always pragmatic purposes of DNA and proteins can’t explain the wildly innovative creations of the human spirit yearning to transcend itself. All Nature down to our subatomic core provides us unique humans with the most fantastic form through which we can express the rich poetic essence of ourselves. Darwin must be rolling over in his grave. The recent discovery that even the organism’s molecular building blocks themselves are not only complex, they’re also self-contained is but the latest catch-22 for random Darwinian materialist determinism. Michael Katz coined the term “irreducible complexity” for this atomic dilemma: “Contemporary organisms are quite complex, they have a special and an intricate organization that would not occur spontaneously by chance. The ‘universal laws’ governing the assembly of biological materials are insufficient to explain our companion organisms: one cannot stir together the appropriate raw materials and self-assemble a mouse.” Or even a mousetrap, a simple illustration often used by geneticist Michael Behe, though his more compelling examples include five cellular systems (which I discuss more fully in Chapter 6). As Behe describes it in his influential book, Darwin’s Black Box: The

Biological Challenge to Evolution, an irreducibly complex system is “composed of several, well-matched interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.” For example, the DNA molecule, which excels at stockpiling and duplicating information, can’t build itself without the help of proteins. But proteins are incapable of reproducing themselves without the information provided by DNA. Even the elaborate system of the miniscule cell was created as a fully functioning whole. An organism type is an irreducibly complex system. There could not possibly have been a sudden random addition of one magical part that made it a new type; changing one part would require simultaneously changing millions and possibly billions of other perfectly interlocked gears in the organic watch if it’s to continue ticking, especially ticking the correct time. An organism, being alive, consists of a multitude of precisely integrated materials and processes that allow it not just to be, but to be alive. Every cell is an engineering masterpiece beyond anything the human pea brain can comprehend. Clearly a transcending intelligence must have designed and constructed Nature in a way that ensured that its stability of form would be perpetually maintained in a way that ensured perpetual change. Now that’s a bunny from a hat that makes a Deist clap. DNA microbiology has made classification immensely more complicated because it sees that life is characterized by surprising “discontinuities”—as scientists call those discrete containers—that contradict the obsolete Darwinian model of smooth evolutionary continuity. Conflation of the terms discontinuous and discontinuity seems inaccurate enough to be a bit unfair. In Darwin’s mind, it seems, continuous macroevolution fit the a priori scientific assumption of absolute natural continuity, even though he knew that old-fashioned typology could also exemplify continuity. Even in the nineteenth century, science offered the Great Chain of Being as emblematic of its version of continuity, even though a chain is composed of discrete, “discontinuous” links. Continuity literally means permanence, stability, connection, link. One dictionary definition is “uninterrupted duration or continuation, esp. without

essential change,” and “the property of being mathematically continuous.” Geometrical forms, for instance, can come in many shapes, yet each shape conforms to its discrete form’s definition. All triangles are equidistant from any quadrilaterals. All triangles have three sides, although the lengths of the sides and corresponding angles can vary according to the “species” (so to speak): equilateral, acute, obtuse, scalene, isosceles, right triangle. The abstract containers triangle and quadrilateral are both contained within a larger container, polygon. Containers are absolute forms, or archetypes. Each form can be defined and named because it is decidedly this, not that: Each ideal form has its own defining essence. And we’re back to Plato meets Aristotle. Missing links are—links. Darwin knew as well as neo-Darwinians today know that nature is “discontinuous,” that its continuity consists of discrete, nested, “Euclidian” containers. Even neo-Darwinism’s newfangled punctuated equilibrium popularized by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould is just another way of “explaining” those discontinuous containers, which is just another way of reframing unexplainable, necessarily creative, intelligent, and purposive engineering. But really, wouldn’t Darwin’s notion of transitional evolution also be a way of reframing unexplainable, necessarily creative, intelligent, and purposive design? Science seeks first and natural causes of physical phenomenon—an entirely deistic agenda. Science, which deems itself super-intelligent, is inherently vested in the intelligibility of the material realm. Need I say more? What’s amazing is that, yes, we do need to spell out the obviously necessary first and abiding cause of intelligibility: God. Darwinians spend so much time dissecting the brain that they’ve no time left to study their own minds. Brain, mind: two very discrete containers. Darwin posited that species very gradually evolved from the bottom up, starting with a very simple cell and building up from there. Microbiology revised the description of a cell from simple to astoundingly complex. Either model necessitates an intelligent organizational blueprint. Even neo-Darwinians admit this;—well, they say it only appears to be a blueprint. It’s become increasingly clear that life that exists today began all at once (in geological time) during the Cambrian explosion as

discrete phyla types that changed from the top down. I’m not a scientist; I accept this view, but frankly, I can’t see that the top-down model solves the bottom-up model’s central problem of transition; it doesn’t eliminate a necessary divine first-cause intervention for every type of first cause. All models fail to show the incremental steps or a mechanism that makes even microevolution possible. All start with the extraordinary complexity of the tiniest building blocks and the irreducible complexity of discrete building materials and their final product—but even that’s incomplete. The problem isn’t just forms, but how forms gel. Maybe it’s time for biologists to throw out universal ancestry and start with a fresh paradigm, like, say, extraordinary potential within constant form. Replace either-or with a synthesis of transition and boundary, freedom and conformity, individual and type; start with a broader definition of essence. The fact is that the more we discover, the less we can explain the origin of life, not to mention its perpetual flowering. I believe that future study will uncover more and more profoundly ordered complexity. God, after all, is infinite in a way and to a degree that transcends space-time. (“Infinite” so to speak—because infinite is a space-time term, and again, God transcends space-time.) We know that Zeno’s arrow crosses infinite subunits of space—a foot, an inch, a quarter inch and so on infinitum. But we can never know how the finite traverses the infinite; we can never even really fully know what finite and infinite are, or what we are, or what anything is in any absolute sense of knowing. We get glimpses, very real and in a way, very comprehensive traces, but ultimate reality never fully discloses itself to us. We instinctively accept more on faith than most people realize and most scientists will admit. Atheist determinists might feel frustrated and even angry at the tiny dimensions of their pea brain. But throughout all the ages, many of us geniuses—and that’s what Homo sapiens are—have stood in awe, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes humble, before the manifest Creator of Nature. And we naturally intuit that each trace of reality presents a vital clue to the purpose of our being here. Whether life evolved top down or bottom up or sideways or inside out, scientists now know that even the simplest life-forms function

according to elaborate blueprint specifications. So do the most complex life-forms, like us. The interminable “kill religion” Richard Dawkins, never one to shave with Ockham’s razor, offers his ironically named Mt. Improbable as his solution to the Darwinian quandary: Life is like a mountain; on one side the smooth cliff face appears unscalable, but on the not-seen back side of the mountain lie materials built up step by step into the mountain. Life only appears to be intelligently designed, he argues; really Darwinian evolution obviously works via some not yet discovered Darwinian-esque mechanism that’s… unintelligent? Putting aside the invalidity of his mountain analogy (for example, complex life is categorically different from simple inanimate matter, even a mountain of it), even if Dawkins were right that evolution is bottom up, that would not eliminate complex purpose executed step-by-step according to a logical plan to accomplish a logical end via logical means, i.e., intelligent design. The point that finally pops the neo-Darwinian bubble is that you can’t randomly assemble DNA code into a coherent complex organism any more than you can mindlessly toss out alphabet letters and get Romeo and Juliet. Not ever. Not once, much less trillions of times to get trillions of different “plays,” or complex wholes. Not even just the letters on the page, not to mention their meanings and the overall significance of the play. It’s ridiculous to argue that a DNA letter, which alone means nothing by itself (and where did the letter come from; and why) could meaningfully “attach” by random selection to another (and why select; what intelligence decides that that selection is best) and so on, giving rise to an intelligible play of life written in poetry rich with metaphoric connotations, significance, and beauty. And where do analogy and symbolism come from? Even though die-hard Darwinians know these facts, they still assert that the “essentially identical” DNA in chimps and humans “proves” that chimps and humans are essentially identical. Really? I picture Darwin Jr. walking down the aisle with a chimp— a lovely, stylish chimp, but still. No, my friend, chimps don’t write poetry, don’t engineer spacecraft, don’t weep at the movies, don’t kill over love, don’t implode from ennui or explode with the angst of injustice or suffer such excruciating despair over the meaningless of

life that they jump off bridges. Chimps are categorically different from humans, and that great gulf of difference lies not in quantity of DNA strands but in quality of spirit. What’s truly astounding is not that we are so quantitatively close to chimps and all other organisms in terms of our DNA and other corporeal raw materials, but that there is that humungous extra something about us that is qualitatively “other” than our material make-up. It’s time to stop privileging the material as a starting point of anything. The neo-Darwinist angrily grumbles that Zeno’s arrow has somehow hit the target. As a Deist, my whole being ripples with delight at the inexplicable miracle of existence. Descartes was right, but the mind/body dichotomy is really a distinction between spirit and matter, and more broadly, between the spiritual and the materialistic worldviews. If matter is created by God, it could be infused by God with spirit, the way Shakespeare infused Romeo and Juliet with poetic beauty and meaning. But the self-evident necessity of God could as easily escape the atheist-materialist Darwinian mind as could the theme of any great play. Personally, it makes no difference to me whether Darwinian macroevolution is a fact or not. Creation for me is a work of literary art. (And how does one understand metaphor?) I study the imagery (which scientists call facts) and then work to interpret, appreciate, and enjoy the meanings they represent. Scientists agree that any version of the coming into existence of life describes extraordinarily sophisticated interconnecting mechanisms, apparatuses, functions, and material “stuff,” not to mention informational instructions and the near-perfect execution of the instructional information, all of which obviously comes from somewhere—really someone, since a where isn’t intelligent, isn’t creative, couldn’t engineer or program or orchestrate even the tiniest component of our immensely elegantly calibrated universe and its awesomely exquisitely complex life, a structure that even includes wiggle room where chance and free choice can take place. In later chapters I will discuss scientifically verified intelligent design in more detail, including some atheist scientists’ amazingly ludicrous alternatives to the eloquently simple “Creator.”

All scientists know that science is wrong far more often than it is right, that the inside history of science is a chronicle of fact checks, adjustments, corrections, and starting from scratch. Both Darwinian and scientific infallibility are cultural memes. The truth is that Darwinism has never identified a mechanism by which natural selection could bring about changes at all. There is no soft tissue, genetic, or embryonic evidence verifying causal Darwinian relationships among types, or direct connection to a common ancestor. But there are multitudes of examples of attributes shared— oddly, unpredictably—by life-forms not genetically related. The baffling yin/yang fusion of dissimilarity and similarity is one very painful thorn in the side of Darwinism. Concurrently, and perhaps not coincidentally, difference as oneness is a thorny ache civilization is currently trying to resolve. A scientist is not a brain in a jar. Even the great Charles Darwin was a human being with proclivities, emotions, and agendas. In Chapters 4 and 5, I demystify Darwin the man in order to expose his very human motivations for promoting a theory he deeply doubted and quite possibly disbelieved. It’s not my concern to negate Darwinian evolution for its own sake, but rather to show that science, like religion, can be steered by presupposition, ignorance, closedmindedness, and personal weakness. Warp-Speed Evolution What is humanity, then, if neither apish nor fallen? What are you if you could know that God truly is the God of love? How would it change you if you knew you were free—truly free—to choose your own self-definition? By synthesizing natural religion and science of nature, Deism seeks to discover the purpose of our being here. Science helps to objectively verify religious truth; religion helps decipher the deep meaning encoded in scientific discoveries. Science and religion together help us understand purpose to be a dimension of existence itself—of Nature perpetually created by the God of Nature. All of us, even atheists (when they’re honest), begin with the understanding that Nature is intelligible because it is intelligently designed.

Science demonstrates qualitatively that the major systems with which we and all things are made are by necessity designed. Science becomes religious when it asks who or what has done (and is doing) the designing. And why. This book begins with why, represented by the incredible instance of American democracy (Chapter 2), then builds on the deconstruction of funda­mentalism begun in Born-Again Deist with a critique of the so-called quest for the historical Jesus (Chapter 3). Part II (Chapters 4-8) deconstructs Darwinism, including neoDarwinism (bear with me, for that decon­struction will be thorough), delineates the basic science of intelligent design, and outlines a working deology (Deist philosophy/theology) of intelligent design. Part III (Chapters 9-13) demonstrates some contemporary dangers resulting from fallacious Darwinian and fundamentalist absolutism and offers solutions with a confidently optimistic grin. Whenever I refer to Deism as new, I am simply distinguishing my personal version from that of old-school Deists, like, say, Edward Herbert, the early seventeenth century British philosopher and poet credited with initiating bona fide Deism, and brother of metaphysical poet George Herbert. Deism has always welcomed differences of opinion. New Deism is simply traditional Deism in the fresh context of the present. My version of Deism differs from that of other Deists writing today in that it is rooted not in reason alone, but in common sense, which as I mean it is the consensus of our faculties, including reason, conscience, intuition, experience, emotion, aesthetic, volition, and spirit. Though our faculties are inherent and rational, they must be constructively educated and exercised. Amazingly, high-level engagement of our faculties can shift our paradigms at warp speed. High-level engagement is the Deist challenge. As far as I can tell, all Deists believe in one Creator God, in transcendental truth manifested in Creation, and in the primacy of reason, or of common sense, in apprehending truth. Like all Deists, I believe in the inviolable laws of nature that constitute the structural integrity of existence and therefore reject miracles that violate natural law. But as I discuss especially in Chapter 8, I also affirm wiggle rooms where chance and choice can take place. Personal

preference, or individual free will, is an ancient understanding confirmed by recent scientific conclusions of non-determinism based on several key concepts centered on randomness—most recently chaos theory, following Gödel’s incompleteness, Heisenberg’s uncertainty, Turing’s uncomputability, Shannon and Weaver’s entropy as disorder, Chaitin’s randomness and chaos, and the information theory revolution. Deists accept the latest scientific interpretations of intelligent design, knowing that science is rarely absolute and is perpetually under reconstruction; we appreciate Creation myths as not-literal representations subject to literary analysis and interpretation. Though I share many beliefs with fellow Deists of the past and today, I take full responsibility for this book’s assertions and arguments. To give you a sense of where you’re headed, below I list Eighteen Premises of New Deism that I substantiate throughout this book. Eighteen Premises of New Deism 1) Truth is absolute. 2) Human apprehension of truth is limited and tentative. 3) Humans apprehend truth via common sense. 4) Common sense is the consensus of human faculties. 5) God exists. 6) God is transcendent and immanent. 7) God is good. 8) Existence is intelligently designed by God. 9) Existence consists of perpetual transformation within constant form. 10) Existence embodies more than matter and forces. 11) Existence has purpose. 12) Existence has meaning. 13) Humans are moral, spiritual beings. 14) Humans have free will. 15) Good being manifests as good doing. 16) The Good consists of unselfish benefit. 17) In relationships and in society, ideal benefit is reciprocal.

18) Good humans transcend throughout this life and on into an afterlife. For me, writing a book is a process of discovery. I’ve assembled the thoughts herein for myself, for fellow Deists, and for those interested in Deism. (I only dimly hope to unbolt the brains of the closed-minded.) At their best, books provide portals to paradigm shifts. This book’s paradigm is Deism, in my experience the best allnatural antidote for spiritual disenchantment. Ultimately, my intent is to honor the amazing Creator that designed this intelligible universe for the amusement and edification of our intelligent minds (among other reasons, I’m sure), and to warn my fellow global citizens against dishonoring Creator and Creation with our selfishness and our stubborn ideological wars. I hope to persuade every reader that replacing the dangerous matrix of misunderstanding with a more adult vision of God and each other can ultimately benefit us all.



 

Chapter 2 Deist Democracy: The Higher Ground Within the limits of real world possibilities, what would an ideal society look like? Like our Deist Founders, Deists today assume that the best society is a highest-functioning democracy, and that each of its citizens is an exemplary democrat—not specifically a member of the Democratic Party, but an eager, principled participant in the democracy. What if I suggested that the exemplary democrat is by necessity the Golden Mean between doormat and despot? If you’re a good Democrat, or even a good Republican, and certainly if you’re a good Independent, you might think seating doormat and despot together on the same couch would spell trouble at even the most cordial party thrown by the most exemplary democrat. Remember, the Golden Mean is not the winner of a competition; nor is it a compromise between competing interests: It’s not a watered-down average, but the transcending positive between two opposite negatives, like courage is the Golden Mean between cowardice and rashness. Despot, you think, is certainly negative, but despot seems more the antithesis of democrat than of doormat. Isn’t it a bit unfair to put doormat on a par with despot as the negative opponent of democrat, as if doormat could or would oppose a highest-functioning democracy? How is it just to blame doormat equally with despot? Isn’t holding the poor, helpless doormat responsible for anything simply a case of blaming the victim? Deism posits that if the best society, the highest-functioning democracy, is run by consensus of exemplary democrats, at its

highest level of operation it would produce no doormats or despots: no victims, no victimizers. Furthermore, in a democracy like ours still striving toward ideal fulfillment, a Golden Mean democrat stands midway between, yet entirely above, doormat and despot. By “above” I mean in a position to help cure the democracy of doormat and despot, of victim and victimizer. By victim—in the Golden Mean model, the negative opposite of the negative victimizer—I do not mean an unwilling victim. I mean willing, or at least unable to be unwilling. Does anyone really want to be a victim? Perhaps not. But in America, easy targets abound, and in a democracy, easy targets must be taught survival tactics, first because it’s the right thing to do, but also because the only implacable enemy of a democracy is the predator, and predators need victims: despots need doormats. “Don’t feed the animals” here is no joke. Most of us Americans— even the strongest Darwinian and most prayerful fundamentalist— have been thrown to the wolves in one way or another. The planet itself bleeds from wolf tooth and nail—and by wolf I mean human. There are copious concrete reasons why this might be so. But in the abstract, there is really one root cause. Victimization, predation, exploitation, oppression, despotism—it’s all the same problem. And that problem is the antithesis of a democracy “of, by, and for the people”: It is elitism, in the broadest sense. Despots come in many flavors, from tyrannical, abusive fathers to child-molesting priests to control-freak bosses who force you to lie, cheat, fraud, and “handle” insider trading. Every despot rules from his/her elite position of control. In the broader context of a democracy, specifically in America, the currently ruling one-percent elite is the despot, and the ninety-nine percent allowing this despot to rule is the doormat. Well, technically the one-percent elite is Dr. Frankenstein, and his monstrous projection, Frankenstein (junior), is the psychopathic corporate “person” terrorizing the global village, the ninety-nine percent. The Natural Urge for Democracy

Although many credit Plato for inspiring an ideal republic and Aristotle for inventing democracy, both were elitists who repudiated democracy or a republic of free and equal citizens. It’s understandable that in a tiny haven populated by both aristocrats and uneducated peasants surrounded by barbarians and warmongers, two of antiquity’s greatest geniuses advocated rule of the many by an elite class of philosopher-kings. If they lived today, Plato and Aristotle might join the ranks of later geniuses who favored modern representative democracies. But like Thomas Jefferson, they would insist that government be fully transparent and all citizens well-educated; the politically savvy majority, Jefferson believed, would rein-in despots, elites, predators, victimizers—any individuals or groups that might jeopardize the rule of, by, and for the people. Our Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and system of just, equitable laws were largely influenced by the Roman Stoics, who argued that an inherent spark of reason endowed every human being with the capacity to apprehend a universal natural law to which we could harmoniously align our behavior. Once people understood that conformity to the natural law of mutual cooperation most benefited each individual as well as the whole of society, the majority of people would naturally abide by those laws. Governments were created to check the selfish exploitation of the “unnatural” minority, whether a solo psychopath or an elite aristocracy. Generally speaking, political philosophers throughout the ages have either believed that mankind is essentially good and that a minimum of laws could be created to restrain the not good, or assumed that mankind is essentially selfish and that an elite minority of the enlightened or otherwise superior should rule in order to maintain order and security. Our Founders, inspired by thinkers like the Roman Cicero, envisioned a commonwealth that served as an association of friendly parties seeking various ends within the overall harmonious structure, and they believed that this association, rightly constructed, would be held together by laws that reflected universal natural laws that constituted the cosmic, God-given order. The Romans never achieved the ideal commonwealth envisioned by Stoic political philosophy. Dictators flourished in the midst of wars and

assassinations, plunder and rape. America’s Founders took a quantum leap closer to an ideal commonwealth: “rule by the people” (the definition of democracy)—an extraordinary intellectual and practical feat many Americans today take completely for granted. The fundamental principles of deist naturalism and democratic possibilities emerged thousands of years ago, but as conquests by both State and Church took the human spirit hostage and instituted a dark-age denial of Nature’s Prime Mover, mediated obedience to elite-controlled institutions obliterated natural communion with God along with individual freedom. Humans economically controlled were further reduced to spiritual serfs by divine-right autocrats. Chiseled by centuries of struggle, at the dawn of the Enlightenment Deism’s definition of human had evolved, and so had its position to the God held hostage by organized religion. After years excavating the Self from the rubble of antiquated religion and science, Deists blew the dust off the book of life only to discover the pulsating unified organism that is Creation, both noun and verb. “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” The self-evidence of truth was a radical concept, a revolutionary humanist stance that simply recognized that we don’t need otherworldly priests conferring truth any more than we need political masters barking orders. Creation, Deists insisted, is rational and can be understood by our rational minds. Humans are meant to understand. Humans understand because we have been intelligently designed to intelligently understand. Furthermore, it is rational to believe that all the highest values of humanity have been rationally bestowed. The assumption that the power of the religious and political aristocracy constitutes the framework of civilization had become so entrenched by the eighteenth century that it’s remarkable that America’s Founders even thought to, much less fought to, segment power by establishing a democracy with separate branches of government, and within that framework to allow independent state governments, and at the same time limited religious monopoly by codifying separation of church and state to protect freedom of conscience. The Founders themselves recognized their remarkable position in history and acknowledged the guidance of Providence. Democracy

came into existence in America because of a belief in God, the necessary Cause, the obvious Designer of the massive, elegant design of existence, a benevolent Creator that willed the good of naturally free humanity. God was the Good of Nature; “super-nature” described God’s active, transcendent benevolence in creating Nature. The Stoic assumption of a transcendent constitution of ordered, fixed equality manifested through the laws of nature was echoed in Thomas Jefferson’s eminent words, “We hold these truths to be selfevident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with [inherent and] certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” It’s worth noting that Jefferson’s original version included the words “inherent and,” which I’ve indicated with brackets. Congress struck those words, which in my view diluted the intended meaning that our rights are ours at birth and are not conferred upon us or earned by us at a later date. In the final version, the ambiguous “certain” could mean definite, which Jefferson surely meant, or particular, which needed qualification as to what those rights might be, and which could be limited by the qualification. In theory, at least, the principle of responsible liberty equally enjoined was and is the requisite bedrock of our democracy. Unlike the social contract of the European Enlightenment, expounded by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a sacred covenant legally enacted for the common good, the sacredness of our contract was ascribed by its authors not to a Christian God but to a universal Creator equally available to all. This truly democratic religious vision is decidedly Deistic. Although there were forerunners (most notably Roger Williams) to our refusal to be exploited either by state (in that case, the monarchy of King George III) or by religion (the Anglican Christianity that supported it), the best-selling works of Thomas Paine, especially Common Sense, The Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason, were most central to Americans’ understanding of humanity’s place in the universe and

the role of government in securing every person’s God-given right to liberty and equality. The Founders responsible for authoring our seminal Declaration of Independence and the Constitution drew upon their extensive knowledge of great thinkers, especially Enlightenment philosophers. Jefferson, a confirmed Deist, is known to have consulted in addition to books both ancient and modern, dozens if not hundreds of pamphlets, manifestos, and other writings circulating at the time. The Founders infused their texts with Deist theism popularized especially by Paine, whose writings enjoyed unprecedented international success. The merging of revolution and Deism ushered the world into a truly new era characterized by a belief that equally endowed individual rights, epitomized by life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, could best be protected within a society of cooperative democracy. Deism inspired revolution and revolution animated Deism, which more than any other religion truly represented “love your neighbor as yourself” and the spirit of reciprocity. Deists, not religious authoritarians, codified the clear separation of church from state in addition to the division of powers within the state. Deists, not the Continental philosophers, established our democratic republic upon uniquely radical interpretations of constitutional and procedural stability, representation, accountability, and transparency. Deists, not autocrats, formed a more perfect Union that preserved equally for each individual the universal civil liberties inscribed in the Bill of Rights. It was Deists who stood up for Everyman by instituting true equality and freedom for all. From the very beginning, we the people debated the definition of equality and freedom. Some argued that slavery and denial of women’s rights violated our understanding that all people are created equal and are equally endowed with the inherent, unalienable right to liberty. But others countered that overturning the institutions of slavery and women-as-chattel violated a white JudeoChristian aristocrat’s freedom to make money, retain property, and maintain the traditional male-dominated household. To allow slaves and women their liberty would not only diminish the competitive edge of the aristocracy and the personal power of the individual male, it would defy the hierarchy of organized religion and would therefore

lead to the collapse of civilization. Today blacks, Hispanics, feminists, gays, liberals, and Muslims continue the long tradition of perceived threats to aristocratic power-over. A leftist-multiracialMuslim lesbian mother is tantamount to spiritual castration and a sign from heaven that the End Times are near. We Americans revere life, liberty, equality, and justice as the most fundamental principles upon which our nation was founded. Our happiness depends on our possessing these conditions. As individuals and as a society, we value freedom from the restraints of others; we warrant universal freedom from exploitation, which constitutes the essence of equality; and we demand that exploiters be brought to justice. In our society, the greatest crime is murder, and close behind are violating forms of assault, like rape and molestation, that while leaving the victim physically alive, torture (“murder”) the psyche (self, soul). Even most Darwinians agree that plundering the freedom of others to enhance ones chances of survival is immoral, much more immoral if it would not in any way contribute to survival. Even Darwinians would likely agree that coldblooded murder and rape do not contribute to survival, do not enhance superiority, and do not define the fittest. Why, then, do they not also agree that socioeconomic slavery and capitalist serfdom neither benefit humanity nor ensure its survival? Oh right, because agreeing wouldn’t fatten their 401k. Darwinians view Nature as the kill-or-be-killed province of natural selection, like many fundamentalists view it as the treacherous province of Satan. But the growing congregation of enlightened Deists equates Nature with Creation intelligently designed by a benevolent Creator, who has built human freedom and responsibility into the structure of Nature itself. Human nature is part of Nature; moral integrity conforms to the structural integrity of Nature; willing conformity to moral integrity contributes to authentic happiness of the individual and of humanity. Natural law as our Founders understood it is natural, and even the pragmatist’s understanding included a conviction of innate philos. Brotherly goodwill in any form contradicts the fundamental principles of Darwinism, including cutthroat capitalism whitewashed as free enterprise. Just as rape is never love, the enterprise of exploitation is

never truly free; to equate “free enterprise” with freedom as our Founders meant it is intentional deception spun by the ultra-greedy pretending to be righteous Americans. Authentically righteous Americans promoting the freedom of our Founders are labeled “socialists” by these traitors. The most insidious hucksters mask their greed with a godly persona, Bible in hand, accusing their critics of atheism. Pure red herring. What exploiters don’t grasp is that violent destruction is ultimately self-destruction at every level, including the spiritual level, where morality resides. In a society established on civilized principles of beneficence, or at least mutual benefit, rather than on obsolete theories of unnatural competition, secular or religious, everyone benefits, even the rich and powerful, who are only harmed by their own greed and hubris and are ultimately consumed by their selfishness. If people didn’t exploit one another, we wouldn’t need governments. But we do need governments—of, by, and for the people, not of, by, and for the rich, those ultimate controllers of power-over. On the other hand, sometimes governments fail us. Then what? Our Founders concluded, in words we all learned in grade school: “When in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have confined them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.” It is a necessity, they believed, that people shuck off the shackles that confine them to another. In America today, the “political bands” that shackle us to another are more subtle, more Machiavellian than the British monarchy and the Anglican religion that legitimized its rule in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Of Psychopaths and Kings If you think about what a democracy embodies, it’s everything a psychopath is not. For starters, every psychopath is an incorrigible

liar. For a democracy to succeed, it must be built upon a solid foundation of truth—in government, that’s “transparency,” in the press, that’s not giving “equal time” but rather documenting facts. It’s interesting that in America, what is a kind of lying—identity theft, fraud, robbery, slander—is illegal, but except under oath in a legal proceeding, lying itself is not. That’s part of the problem. Even a society like ours that glorifies free speech still needs to guard against deception; otherwise fast-talking predators will gobble up free speech and every other expression of liberty. And everything good, including truth, hinges upon personal and collective liberty. Your personal liberty—your Self being itself—and the blessings of your liberty by which you enjoy and express your Self—your stuff—are what the predator stalks. The predator lies to steal, you and yours. Among the many breeds of predators threatening our maturing democracy, those superlative villains, psychopaths—clinically, exploiters without conscience—are the only inexorable enemy. In the opening of his book, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, Dr. Robert Hare, a foremost authority on psychopathy, describes psychopaths as “social predators who charm, manipulate, and ruthlessly plow their way through life…Completely lacking in conscience and in feelings for others, they selfishly take what they want and do as they please… without the slightest sense of guilt or regret.” Should we be letting these people run our relationships, our workplaces, our churches, our banks, our schools, our governments, our militaries, our lives? Of course not! Yet we do. The news trumpets examples of our failure to resist, to reign in, to reckon with predators, and those headlines represent just a sliver of actual instances. Can’t we do more? Are we doormats? Willing victims? Unwilling victims? How much responsibility should good democrats—good human beings— assume? Of the roughly two million psychopaths currently living in North America, only a minority are gruesome serial butchers splashed by the media. Most psychopaths slip under the skin of individuals or groups like a deadly undiagnosed parasite. Many spread like incurable plague, destroying individuals, institutions, nations, potentially the world.

Though psychopaths are by nature narcissistic and self-absorbed and therefore greedy isolationists who hide their hoard (be it stashed cash or stockpiled frozen penises a la Jeffrey Dahmer), solo predators at times join a hunting party to boost their game. Think Holocaust. Think gang rape. Think Carlyle Group. Think Spanish Inquisition. Think smiley-face “helluva good job” back-patting in the face of Katrina’s worsening catastrophe. Think cocktail party egoenriching dilettantism. Think politicians. Psychopaths relish catastrophe as business as usual with a twist of lime. Every variety of psychopath comes packaged in lies. These are the pimps who charm their way close enough to pick your pocket, seduce your wife, and “recruit” your daughter to their sex trade. These are banksters who “appropriate” your house and pilfer the treasury of your tax dollars for their overseas expenditures. These are insurance vampires who suck the blood of the dying pleading for transfusions. These are political traitors who represent the corporate nation’s “extraction-war” with America. These are religious terrorists parading in the pomp and circumstance of obscene wealth, passing the collection plate for coins to damn gays and infidels and feminists but actually to sequester their cult of child molesters and rapists and mammonites. These are the dragons spewing poison in the air, excreting your next meal. These are the tribal chieftains shaking their spears tipped with nuclear warheads. Like individual psychopaths, an aristocracy, including the corporate oligarchy currently sacking America, is self-centered, callous, and remorseless, is profoundly lacking in empathy, and functions without the restraints of conscience. “What is missing in this picture [of the psychopath] are the very qualities that allow human beings to live in social harmony.” Social harmony—highestfunctioning democracy—does not include the Darwinian exploitation of one class by another that currently defines America. But aristocrats try to persuade you that it does. The most insidious hierarchs wrap themselves in designer robes of “free” market rectitude that you yourself paid for. That self-righteous, holier-thanthou aristocrat you shelled out to elect as your representative?— He’s the repair roofer who cut a bigger hole in your roof and ripped off even your kitchen sink right under your nose.

Killing is a form of lying, because the killer asserts that the person killed had to be killed for a legitimate cause, even if that’s just the killer’s power and pleasure. In our democracy, “had to do it” is the reigning justification for every evil brought to light. It’s true that not all CEOs and lobbyists and political gofers are necessarily psychotic killers, except, at times, indirectly. But even when they’re not bombing Bagdad, even when they’re not sending coal miners back into half-collapsed mines, even when they’re not yachting in Dubai to escape their oil rig slicks, even when they’re not tanning in the Cayman Islands to escape their stacks’ soot and taxes, their acts still gush from a crude “cold, calculating rationality combined with a chilling inability to treat others as thinking, feeling human beings.” Social thugs, their mugs fit Dr. Hare’s depiction to a T. Not deranged, disoriented, or distressed, these cheap chump chatters are just plain wicked, charming though they might be. Darwinian and religious psychopaths share this feature: They claim that they “have to” hurt others, like the rich “have to” hurt the lower classes to stay rich, like insurance companies “have to” deny care when it’s not profitable, like inquisitors “have to” torture and kill heretics, like men “have to” beat their wives into submission, like factories “have to” spew poisons to make their products profitable, like real men “have to” bash gays, like Christians “have to” destroy Islam, like CEOs “have to” ship American jobs overseas, like politicians “have to” represent the corporate elite, like Americans “have to” blow up nations to get to their oil, like rapists “have to” rape. Some cunning psychopaths argue that they are the victims. They’ll tell you that people are messing with them, trying to rip them off, attacking them, like CEOs asked to pay themselves less, like the rich expected to contribute their fair share of taxes. After claiming that he was a warm, caring guy, one psychopath sulking in the slam for kidnapping, rape, and extortion, was asked if he felt bad when he hurt someone. “Yeah, sometimes. But mostly it’s like…uh… [laughs]… how did you feel the last time you squashed a bug?” Many experts believe that psychopaths are born that way. In other words, they are what they are from the very beginning. Psychopaths tend to exhibit their true colors even as young children. Horrified

parents are unable to control the ruthless self-gratification that runs the gamut from lying and stealing to rape of other children to torture and butchery of animals as practice for future hunts, which, by their twenties, comes as easy as plugging Alaskan moose from a chopper. How do they get their dark knowledge, their evil skills? They’re not the victims that they claim to be; they use that line to victimize victims. No, they seem to be born to be what they manifest themselves to be. Is this free will? Yes, because they choose to be what they are, as do we all. It’s hard to believe that we start choosing from the moment we’re born. Negative experiences and harsh treatment can take its toll. But “I can find no convincing evidence that psychopathy is the direct result of early social or environmental factors,” Dr. Hare tells us. Although negative socio-environmental influences can be reversed and deep emotional damage can be healed in not-psychopaths, psychopaths have no inner ability to want healing, or to even know they need it. Unlike sociopaths, psychopaths can’t be cured, only trained to pursue evils less pinching on the scale of social consequences. Not that psychopaths really care about consequences. They are fearless to the point of absurdity, risking their own and other people’s lives without so much as a blink. But they like the game, and they must win. Though anti-social at heart, if psychopaths could be said to have a heart, being masters of disguise they shape-shift at will, molding their persona to fit the conquest. “Unlike psychotic individuals,” like, say, schizophrenics, “psychopaths are rational and aware of what they are doing and why. Their behavior is the result of choice, freely exercised.” Italics, Dr. Hare’s. In a democracy, doesn’t it make sense to subject our elected officials to thorough psychological evaluations and lie detector tests, not to mention exams on citizenship, history, the Constitution, economics, sociology, etc.? Technically our representatives are our employees. How is it, then, that they’re telling us what to do? The political purpose has become a lie. Well okay, it does make sense that they’re telling us what to do, because they don’t know what

they’re doing, other than that they’re pulling the wool over our heads while they tax us broke so we’ll work cheaper to make them richer and subsidize them for the honor. I’m overgeneralizing about politicians; but the point is that the system itself is becoming psychopathic, which forces even honorable politicians to get in the game with the psychopaths. The game, of course, has already been won, thanks to a marked card: In the land of the free, each American like Pavlov’s dog drools for a job that leashes him to serfdom. Isn’t it important to understand what makes a psychopath tick, to become savvy about a psychopath’s characteristics and MOs in order to protect ourselves as individuals and as a society, and to prevent our government from becoming full-blown psychopathic? Surely an authentic democracy depends, as our Founders understood, on due diligence on the part of its citizens. We should care—really, really care—that the psychopath’s portrait looks way too familiar, like famous con artists we see on TV that run much of our country and too many of its institutions and the corporations that pilfer them. Psychopaths have many traits in common, but anyone who looks closely will notice right away that psychopaths are notoriously superficial liars. Dr. Hare quotes from the chilling The Mask of Sanity, in which psychiatrist-author Hervey Cleckley describes the psychopath in terms that probably sound a lot like a politician, CEO, or TV evangelist in your neighborhood. “The [psychopath] is unfamiliar with the primary facts or data of what might be called personal values and is altogether incapable of understanding such matters.” Psychopaths only understand how to manipulate your values by charming their way into your heart and your bank account. “It is impossible for him to take even a slight interest in the tragedy or joy or the striving of humanity as presented in serious literature or art.” Which is why we should keep a close eye on bored politicians who push math and science but slash funding for educational and other programs in the arts and humanities. Of course, the psychopath, a master of disguise, can easily fake interest and knowledge. That good-looking fast-talking charmer with the gift of bull that makes everyone laugh knows all about literature and art. He’s an expert on biology and politics and psychology and

religion. Hell, he’ll talk your ear off. But the real experts in the room roll their eyes at this humbugger’s humdingers that no one else seems to notice. Those no one elses are the doormats and victims that make an ideal democracy impossible and a hobbling democracy painfully expensive. In truth, the psychopath is, as Cleckley warns us, “indifferent to all these matters in life itself. Beauty and ugliness, except in a very superficial sense, goodness, evil, love, horror, and humor have no actual meaning, no power to move him.” It’s all for display; it’s bait in the trap. In one, this indifference to depth is atrophy, the willful erasure of meaning and purpose. In another, indifference fulfills a predatory nature, climaxing in absolute emptiness. The essence of the fulfilled predator is his absence. What appears to consume is self-consuming, spiritually speaking. How the Exploitation of Jesus Threatens Democracy Fundamentalists will tell you that Jesus was the opposite of a psychopath. His authentic goodness transcended that of all other humans. As hopeful as the protagonist Jesus makes us feel, the Jesus narrative is fiction; that much we know (as I’ll show in Chapter 3). Whether the original narrative was inspired by an actual person, we will never know. Regardless, the character Jesus merges qualities derived from protagonists of Greek tragedy, heroes who were “ourselves but better than ourselves,” as Aristotle would have it, blessed and cursed of the gods and often born of them, who represented concretely, with the high seriousness of loftiest thought and conscience, humanity’s deepest striving for meaning and purpose. The hero’s fate, always suffering and usually death, displayed the judgmental mystery that controlled human destiny. Submission to fate was considered spiritually noble. Doormats of the gods, needless to say, tend toward pessimism. The god-man status of Jesus clearly derives as well from the great Homeric and other epic traditions of warrior-kings with the blood of one or another divinity in their veins. Jesus’ wise sage teaching style, which borrowed from existing archives of parables and wise sayings and continued a long dialogue tradition that culminated with the Greeks, plus the similarity between the itinerate

rabbinic Jesus and Plato’s Socrates suggests that Jesus was the brainchild of a Greek-educated rabbi. The character Jesus is certainly “better than ourselves.” We might be tempted to imagine that the author himself was a man of the highest moral character, but that can’t be proven, nor should it be assumed. The author had a reason for representing high moral and spiritual qualities in his Jesus, but we can’t know that reason. Perhaps the author himself passionately believed that humans should aspire to live up to the Jesus ideals. Perhaps the author was instructed by an elite Roman or Jewish official to create a hero that could serve as a model to the masses, aiding the official’s efforts to subdue rebels while extracting property and taxes. Perhaps the character Jesus emerged as the best aesthetic choice of an author with serious literary intention. Whatever the motivation, the author’s character succeeded in gripping its audience by the collar and holding it spellbound for two millennia. Even if the Jesus character were the reigning king of longevity, which it isn’t—many mythic gods and man-gods and heroes have survived much longer—that doesn’t prove that it’s literally true. What’s interesting is that the Christians who most loudly argue that the story’s longevity is proof of its literal authenticity are the very Christians who most brazenly pervert and exploit the character Jesus. It’s true that the god qualities in Jesus contribute to the mass appeal. A miracle man who promises healing, blessings, and eternal life is going to be as big a hit as Zeus and Venus, as Krishna and Buddha, as twilight vampires and Harry Potter. But it’s the moral wisdom of Jesus that explains the god-man’s survival into the twenty-first century. Because that wisdom is so impressive, and because that wisdom is part of the god-man package, many believers force themselves to believe the god part of the god-man narrative in order to honor the man and his wisdom—never realizing that the wisdom of Jesus is entirely derivative and the god-man package older than mud, a fact that honest scholars have been documenting for centuries. Extracting the man from the god-man, as many have done— Jefferson, for instance, in his cut-and-paste Jefferson Bible, as it’s

now called—exposes a moral philosophy that is rooted in love of God and benevolence toward one’s neighbor as equal to oneself. This is a moral philosophy found in many ancient religions and philosophies. Love of God expressed through benevolence toward all humanity is the foundation of the Deist democratic ideal. What most fundamentalists ignore is that the aspect of loving God and humanity most highly accentuated by Jesus is the absolute rejection of mammon-lust. Selfishness, manifested as greed and its Siamese sibling hubris, is the antithesis of love of God and benevolent love of one’s neighbor and oneself. This embodies the heart and soul of Christianity; this does not embody the heart and soul of most Christians. Through a mythic principle of blanket grace that has been spread over Christianity like a magic shroud over a corpse to make it appear alive, mammon-lust has become justified and sanctified as a form of rightfulness. In the perverting minds of the greedy self-righteous, it is actually the will of Jesus that you be rich—if you believe hard enough. The original wisdom narrative has been torqued into the very opposite of what it actually says. Compassionate giving and sharing have been replaced with an accounting spreadsheet that allows you to calculate how much you have to invest in the Church or your favorite TV evangelist to force God to cough up a huge dividend. From the humble beginnings of the Jewish rabbi Jesus preaching against mammon has sprung a Christian aristocracy operating a lucrative wealth-generating politicized franchise preaching a morality of mammon in the name of their anti-mammon Savior. You see, they say, “because Jesus died for our sins,” we no longer have to be poor. We can be rich, because it’s God’s will that all his children be rich— his children being those born-agains who belong to the right club. God’s job is to make you rich—because he promised. And God can’t break his promise. All this is contained in the legal contract known as the Bible. Thus saith the TV evangelists and rightwing politicians. Oh yeah, and anyone who isn’t on board with this deserves punishment and death in this life and hell in the next. I have thoroughly deconstructed many spiritual frauds in BornAgain Deist, and have demonstrated there and in less depth in later

chapters of this present book that the Bible is packed with factual errors and logical incongruities in addition to its pervasive fictive mythic and superstitious elements. I have documented what others have proven, that the god-man Jesus is a myth. Yet like many nonbelievers, including many of our Founders, I do deeply respect the ethical wisdom conveyed by the author of the Jesus literature. What’s amazing to me is that the people who still claim that the Bible and Jesus are absolute literal truth are the very people who most contradict the moral code of Jesus by perverting his anti mammon morality with their own pro mammon-lust. We who don’t believe the Jesus myth literally aren’t doing that. The “believers” are. Evangelists preaching the love, caring, and compassion of Jesus shroud his risen body in the gilt of selfish greed and self-righteous hubris. Jesus was poor so we don’t have to be poor: This is the essence of their message. These mammonites succeed in becoming filthy rich by seducing filthy-rich wannabes into the net of willing victims. The spiritual doormats only wake up when exhausted with keeping the faith they realize they’ve been filched. In a fully realized Jeffersonian democracy of well-educated citizens, this level of foolishness could not exist. To illustrate my point, let me add one more case study to the long list of wolves in sheep’s clothing. Please bear in mind that this specific description of one TV evangelist could generally apply to any genre of psychopath. Think of the psychopathic evangelist as a metaphor for one of the most deadly diseases afflicting democracy. There’s a Sucker Born Again Every Day Like other “prosperity gospel” evangelists, Robert Tilton promises magical quick fixes for everything from cancer to alcoholism to credit card debt to job layoffs, anything for those who “vow” $1,000 donations. Watchdog groups have documented that he spends at least 68% of his airtime asking for money (so he, the high-priest middleman, can persuade God to give you money). As with other shearers of the flock, Tilton’s tastes have always run toward the extravagant—the usual luxury vehicles, yachts, and mansions in San Diego, Dallas, and Miami, compliments of the shorn.

In the 1990s, Robert Tilton’s Success-N-Life show appeared in all 235 U.S. television markets for 5,000 air hours, pulling in $80 million a year. Tilton registered his tax-free Word of Faith World Outreach Center Church, Inc. in Florida, but the registration was inactive as of November 21, 1991, when ABC’s PrimeTime Live ran an exposé, prompted by Ole Anthony’s watchdog organization, the Trinity Foundation. During its six-month investigation, ABC learned that Tilton had used twelve addresses in one decade, three of them in Fort Lauderdale, but two were commercial mail drops. His traffic tickets handed out in Broward County indicated that he at least hung out in Florida. As it turned out, Tilton was one of several “seed faith” evangelists that raked in a fortune via a post office box in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Like most TV evangelists, Tilton promised to pray over each miracle request sent to him. When ABC pulled thousands of requests and letters from garbage dumpsters in Tulsa—minus the food stamps, wedding rings, and money deposited at a nearby bank—a state fraud investigation and further investigations by the FBI and Postal Service followed. As ripped-off sheep filed lawsuits, Tilton insisted that the trashed requests were part of a plot against his “church.” During her divorce from Tilton in 1996, Leigh Valentine testified: Bob’s mail ministry is a lie and a total deception. He does not write those [mass-mailed] letters. He did not even proofread them during our marriage. He makes it sound like [he’s] writing to you right now, this is what God spoke to me for your life, Jesus will appear to you tonight; if you sleep with this little red cord under your pillow, you will prosper. He doesn’t even know what’s going out to those people, and he doesn’t care, as long as they send their money in. One time he said in one of the letters that was sent, I will be taking these to the East Coast to pray for you by the ocean where Jesus prayed for his people. So we flew to Fort Lauderdale and we checked into a four- or five-star hotel on the beach and got a nice penthouse view...That is stealing from people. Most of those people are on welfare. They’re little Hispanics and blacks. And he even said, what I do is I look at a map and we go after the ghettoes, we go after those on welfare, we go after those that don’t read, those

that are lower socioeconomic backgrounds. That’s who we send our letters to. Suits, countersuits, and public humiliation didn’t stop Tilton. The year after his divorce, the “prophet of prosperity,” as he calls himself, began recycling taped versions of his old shows on cable’s Black Entertainment Television (BET), though he himself is white. He sold his Dallas church in 1999 for $6.1 million and started preaching new prosperity shows on BET, pitching his latest “free” books, How To Be Rich and Get Anything You Want and How To Pay Your Bills Supernaturally, building his already huge mailing list by offering to send you his “free” Faith Aid Miracle Healing Kit with anointing oil, prayer cloth, and prayer of agreement, not to mention the large poster of Tilton in the prayer-grimace position. In 2001, Tilton was still dumping unread prayer requests, stripped of money, food stamps, and other offerings, in the exact same dumpsters he was using when busted in 1991. Patricia Morrow, one of a dozen employees of Tilton’s Mail Services Inc. expected to produce a quota of at least $1,000 per hour from the opened letters, quit in disgust when she realized the extent of exploitation of what she described as lonely, homebound people from rural Florida and Georgia sending apologies with their offerings of small amounts, sometimes including coins. At last report, Brother Bob was raking in $30 million a year and living in a $4 million Miami mansion. He has formed additional non-profits to supplement his tax-free takings. Entirely subsidized by “good” Christians, Robert Tilton and his seed-faith cronies are exactly the kind of hypocritical moneychangers that the biblical Jesus drove from the temple, a fact apparently lost on the sheep, if not the shepherd. TV evangelists get rich easily because religious indoctrination has already trained adherents to be trusting and obedient toward any authority figure that solicits them in the name of God. If told that, say, a “gay agenda” threatens our “Christian America,” millions of couch potato sheep will gladly send money to help eradicate that threat, especially if the donation will also reap an immediate “seed faith” reward from God. Plant a seed in faith, and God will reward your seed with growth. Translated, send me money [sucker], and God will reward you with answers to your prayers and a monetary “increase”

greater than the interest rate [on nothing] at your local bank. You don’t have to work for it. You don’t even have to get up off your duff. Just pull out your wallet and pick up the phone. God and I will do the rest. Ironically, it’s the flamboyantly nontraditional TV evangelists, with their Christ-mocking rich-and-famous lifestyles and doctrines of biblically contradictory superstitions, who most loudly exploit biblical “truth.” Add the handful of rightwing Republicans they underwrite— who strive for a rewrite of the consummate neocon/dominionist Bush administration—and that’s a powerful, unchallenged core group that exploits for huge profits the Islamic feminazi socialist anti-white communist pedophilic gay menace concealed behind illegal immigration terrorism. Yes, folks, we have much to fear, right here in River City. Who’s jumping out from behind the bush to scare the sheep isn’t even the manufactured terrorist; it’s the proverbial wolf in the wool, the evangelist himself, or herself, who terrorizes the fold. Evangelists’ lust for sheepskin—or seed, as the seed-faith evangelists put it (perhaps spilling the Freudian beans on their other repressed desires)—is supported by the rightwing herders they in turn support in a perfect symbiotic waltz of mutual sheering for profit: You give me no-tax status, I give you votes. To continue the con game, the wolves must pull the wool over the sheep’s open eyes. Thus far, no shepherd has successfully pulled back the wool and exposed the wolves’ game, at least not to the conned sheep themselves. Even seeing wool, they still send money, they still vote far-Right. Robert Tilton and all the other exploiting TV evangelists, like Pat Robertson, Benny Hinn, and Jim Bakker, to name but a few megarich sheep-fleecers, operate by the same principles, but on a larger scale. Got Truth? Exploitation of Jesus is only possible because scholars and their protégé who know better continue to perpetuate the myth that the Bible is God’s Word and that Jesus is a historical person. People are longing for spiritual truth—real truth, not empty myths and

disappointing superstitions. If those scholars refuse to tell the truth, if those scholars promote the suffering of the longing, we Deists have no choice but to expose their deception and to deconstruct their assertions. Pursuit of truth—no, insistence on truth is as critical today as it was when our Deist Founders voted to reject political myths in favor of a bold new government founded upon natural, self-evident, universal truths. “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” Other countries struggle to establish governments upon those same fundamental truths—truths designed by intelligently derived Deism. Self-evident truth is the absolute foundation of Deism. It is the bedrock of reason, conscience, intuition, experience, aesthetic, emotion, and every other human faculty. Individually, it is the grounding of spirituality. Collectively, it is the keystone of democracy. Upholding truth begins by filing myths in the folder labeled Myth. From a Deist perspective, the intellectual battle today between neoDarwinian materialist atheism and religious fundamentalism is as mythic as their respective tenets, but those myths, parading as truth, jeopardize a democracy based on truth. Though academically their differences amount to a local feud between two clans sniping with rusted muskets, because profiteers continue to wage sophisticated wars constructed upon genocidal ideals promoted by those two feuding clans, the feud must be ended. If perpetuation of those myths—lying—by intellectuals who know better could light the fuse of horrendous oppression and suffering worldwide that even children know could explode into nuclear holocaust, if it doesn’t first obliterate Earth’s ecosystem, isn’t it the responsibility of those intellectuals to tell the truth, loudly, articulately, so the whole world can hear? Shouldn’t intellectuals critical of their deliberately misleading colleagues out them with the truth? The fact is that not all scientists are neo-Darwinian, materialist, or atheist; not all the religious are fundamentalist or submissively allegiant to any organized religion. Many scientists and religionists are technically deists—they believe that a transcending intelligence created our intelligently designed universe and are open-minded if not skeptical about the unproven tenets of science and religion.

The timidity of this silent majority is due in part to legal actions taken against many professors and schoolteachers, who as public employees are currently denied their right to free speech (unlike those really loud-mouth public employees, politicians), thanks to a distorted interpretation of the constitutional clause forbidding promotion of religion by the state. The Left has protected the distortion to prevent fundamentalist intrusion into education. But the hands-off hush-hush don’t push religion stance toward Darwinians and religionists mystifies and validates those myths. Allowing open debate and expression of opinion in a classroom is not the same as promoting religion. Discussion of the merits of Darwinism and fundamentalism would promote truth, which would certainly benefit the open-minded truth-seeking of commonsense democracy. Deists seek to critique deception for the sake of truth and the peace truth naturally fosters. Simply by speaking up, Deists can muster allies to truth and peace, in and beyond academia. The truth I’m speaking of is of course a metaphysical concern, a matter of universal morality that can be advocated objectively and is experienced subjectively. Peace is simply the state of moral people getting along—both cause and effect of a working democracy. Obviously not everyone is motivated by truth, peace, or any version of morality. Ideally, laws protect the morally motivated from the perverted morals of sociopaths and nonexistent morals of psychopaths, who according to the experts have no conscience at all. Outside the walls of academia, Deism appeals to many people these days because it avoids the defensive emotionalism of authoritarian absolutism that even in polite society gags its children at sunrise and pelts the neighbors before lunch. Although materialism and fundamentalism have succeeded in establishing themselves as monolithic institutions, their truth-claims and methods of conveying them are challenged more and more by ordinary people, as much for the sake of common decency as in the spirit of old-fashioned honest freethinking. Materialists and fundamentalists continue to spar, each side asserting its thoroughly disproven theories as absolute fact. Although the terms theory and fact are not synonymous, under the thumb of

absolutism, custom has legitimized conflation of those terms if they represent concepts within the domains of science or religion. Deism, on the other hand, stresses the critical distinction between theory and fact. The theory of Darwinism and religious doctrines today are accepted as truth not because people arrived at those conclusions after careful thought. They are traditions received from certain scientists or clerics who presented those assumptions as fact. We’re taught to trust those authorities to be correct, or at least honest, but scientists and clerics are human beings, and even neo-Darwinian and fundamentalist professionals and scholars can be, as we’ll see in later chapters, neither correct nor honest. Deism leads the way in making this point, because it has no problem abandoning disproven theories and recalibrating its facts, and it doesn’t balk at exposing fallacies and lies. Deism is fully invested in truth, not in perpetuation of received traditions. We Deists like our education to stress critical thinking, not indoctrination. Fundamentalists sometimes argue that truth transcends mundane fact—truth meaning their truth. I’ve heard people say, “If God said that 2+2=5, I would believe God.” Leaving behind the issue of how one would know that God said something, if the Creator God is the source of truth and the source of reality understood as fact, how can truth and fact contradict each other? They can’t. Even God can’t cook the books, not even for TV evangelists or rightwing politicians. Though transcendent truth might supersede mundane fact (as in, spiritual afterlife superseding physical death), it can never contradict it. Transcendental truth and space-time truth are always part of Truth. One never excludes the other—evidence, in fact, that God is a natural God who is good in being consistent. Like fundamentalists, Darwinians pretend that the theories they posit as facts are the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Period. And by truth they mean reality. One might ask, which is more arrogant, the proclamation of fundamentalism: “Our truth is the truth because God said so, directly to us,” or the assumption of scientific materialism: “Our facts are reality which is the truth, because we said so”?

Deism is a religion that pursues truth-as-such, meaning all the facets of facts and their nuanced implications, physical, mental, and spiritual. Deists acknowledge that theories are not facts, even if they might in time prove to be factual; that accepted facts (like, the sun revolves around the earth) are not necessarily truth; that sometimes new evidence necessitates tweaking or abandoning a cherished theory or established fact. We humans can ask whether a fact is true because there is a difference between fact and truth. An accepted fact can be tentative, like the theory that space-time is curved, or that the speed of light is the absolute speed limit of the universe; or an accepted fact can be self-evident, like 2+2=4, or yes does not equal no. Truth is the goal of the open-minded. Deist freethinkers, who are not afraid to change their minds, are those truly seeking objective truth. In fact, we Deists relish changing our minds, because that means we have discovered new facts or have been persuaded of new perspectives that move us closer to the truth. Deists, not religious authoritarians, truly seek God, the God of truth, not the God of 2+2=5. Being static, authoritarianism atrophies. Organic and alive, Deism perpetually grows. Being open-minded doesn’t mean giving equal time to absurdities. 2+2 will never equal 5; exploitation will never elevate society. It’s irrational to sanction any form of uncritical faith in Darwinian natural selection or in biblical literalism and the so-called historical Jesus (or other god), if only because the intense, sustained efforts to support such claims, scientific or religious, remain utterly fruitless. Extremist dogmas of Darwinian atheism and religious myth are equally ludicrous. Even a staunch freethinker cannot in good conscience tolerate egregious error in deference to Everyman’s right to his own preposterous opinion. We Deists never attempt to enforce our beliefs—with this one caveat: Each person is entitled to his or her opinion as long as it is sensible, i.e., not nonsensical. Permitting nonsense presented as fact empowers a lie. Our motto is: Truth must be embraced; or, truth must not be shunned. We counteract nonsense not with violence but with rational discourse. We prefer that debates be friendly, but when opponents won’t permit that, we insist that they be honest. Deism upholds truth for its own sake, but also for the sake of that high level

of freedom that facilitates individual self-actualization, and for the sake of protecting each other from the injury of lies. Deism as philosophy and practice provides the simplest, surest means to anyone’s essential authenticity. Our fundamental ethic is simple: That which benefits is good, that which harms is not good to varying degrees, the greatest degree of harm being evil. Within that definition there is wiggle room for discussion—the Deist’s forte. But a Deist is not an exclusionary rationalist. We are multi-rational in that we consult all our faculties, not just reason, in our quest for truth, and of course it’s our duty to act ethically upon our findings. Unlike traditional religion, Deism is a multi-rational naturalism rooted in the inherent and acquired knowledge of the transcendent, immanent Creator, the Natural God—transcendent in being necessarily outside Creation and immanent in being actively engaged (“present”) in the perpetual process of creation. As with other religionists, for us, space-time reality includes a spiritual dimension. How pervasive that dimension is and what it consists of is subject to debate. We relish debate. Debate engages us in rigorous thought, and thought leads to wisdom. We don’t believe in the lazy dogmatic “special revelation” of traditional religion or “received truth” of New Age science. God’s Creation, Nature itself, perpetually reveals truth that imparts knowledge that matures into wisdom, spiritual and secular. Some revelations come easy; others require hard work. But for those of us who love the quest for truth, work is play. Deists try to ask the right questions. Why are we alive? What is the meaning and purpose of life, and of my life? Is there an afterlife? The Spirit of Liberty For as long as we humans have been asking ourselves profound questions, we’ve been proposing answers. Some say that life is meaningless, and when you’re dead, you’re dead. Others assume that life is a test. Still others see life as a series of reincarnations that take us toward some ultimate transcendence (to what is subject for speculation). Many people sense that life is a practice of soul creation, or perhaps soul refinement. The truth is that we just don’t

know for sure. But that doesn’t mean we can’t guess correctly, or that rational speculation isn’t itself meaningful. Like many, I believe that life is a process of self-creation that is really self-manifestation. The process of self-creation is fostered best in a highest-functioning democracy, where people are free to explore the most beneficial possibilities for themselves in the most nurturing environment. Perhaps the greatest revelation is our revealing ourselves to ourselves through our overt choices and our natural proclivities that express our innate decisions to be what we are. What’s interesting to me is how difficult it is for many people to believe in themselves as free self-creations. We are so aware of how profoundly our experience and environment mold us that we find it hard to accept that we have anything substantial to do with our being what we are. Most people find it easier to have faith in impossible miracles and “the devil made me do it” than to believe in their own freedom. But there have always been enough strong-willed freethinkers shaking their shackles that most of the rest of us must admit the possibility that we do have at least that much free will. I find it a compelling proof of free will that even many of those who don’t believe in it will fight to the death to preserve the least semblance of it. Deists believe in free will. Our freedom is limited, clearly, but often the limitation strengthens the will to be free. The extent to which we are free is one measure of our humanness. I can be shackled and still exert my free will mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. I can be crushed via mind control and torture without succumbing to the quality of evil that crushes me. And even if I can be forced to succumb, my programmed “will” is against my will. Ultimately, freedom is a spiritual imperative. A person who passively conforms to external pressure is not a free spirit. Is such a doormat even fully human? Isn’t a fundamental difference between humans and other animals our freedom to choose in accordance with our common sense, the consensus of all our innate faculties? And doesn’t it make sense that only those choices that are reasonable are truly free and good? There is no freedom and no authentic goodness in accepting what others program you to accept.

Why be a mockingbird when you can be a free, creative spirit? It might seem reasonable to choose evil to benefit oneself, but such a choice isn’t ultimately reasonable if one’s selfish attainments weaken the infrastructure that makes selfish attainment possible, as in, say, exploiting workers or subjugating nations. The benefits of evil are always tentative and transitory and carry their own inherent harms; the wealthy, for instance, live in fear of losing their wealth and never know for sure who loves them just for their money or who would stab them in the back for a crumb of the pie. If there is a God who is good and just, if there is even the remote possibility that there is an afterlife, then choosing evil is never ultimately rational. The ideal human is free in rationally choosing the good. This is the definition of a purely natural human according to Deism as I understand it. A democracy functions as the highest level of association among responsible humans whose rights of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, and truth are legally ensured and in every way protected. A citizen has the right to own property and even great wealth, but not at the expense of others. A healthy democracy differentiates between wealth and exploitation; a failing democracy conflates them, and greed prevails. What does it say about an individual human life, what does it reveal about the human spirit, when mankind’s history highlights war and political intrigue, power-over and greed? What does it say about collective humanity when history records civilization’s perennial struggle to shuck the shackles of selfishness embodied by religious and economic overlords? Why is it that even for us noble animals nothing ever changes? Still the struggle continues; we are forever driven to be free of our oppressors. It’s an ancient strategy for religious and secular elites to join forces, even to merge into one divine-right regime, in order to subjugate and exploit humanity’s exuberance that naturally freely manifests through advancements in the humanities, arts, and sciences. Remarkably, despite eons of outrageous oppression, the human spirit could never be quashed. Instead, we adaptable creatures have settled as comfortably as possible into the million tiny rooms that constitute the larger institutional edifice. The evil irony has always been that without the oppressive edifice, the rooms—our

homes, our lives—would not exist. But even though we have successfully adapted to the limits on our freedom, we know there’s a better way to exist than to subsist at the mercy of power-lords. We Deists believe that it is every human being’s sacred duty to bring about that progress. Promoting the Common Good: The Sacred Duty of Democracy We Deists accept that God exists, that God creates, that Creation is a perpetual process, that humans were created to be a distinct species, whether all at once or over a long period, and that among our distinctive features are our sophisticated faculties and the free will to use them. We also recognize that moral conscience is clearly a faculty as natural as reason or intuition. We assume that moral conscience was bestowed by a transcendently good God and that the natural, healthy growth of the individual includes moral progress developed through pursuit of the good. But what is good? Philosophers have argued over a definitive definition for eons, but there has always been a consensus about certain features. Sadism, for instance, is never morally good, even in the minds of most sadists. The opposite of sadism is benevolence, the impetus and essence of moral good in the opinion of most people. From a practical Deist perspective, the good is that which most benefits, which includes that which most eliminates suffering. Benefit is the consequence of benevolence and unnecessary suffering the consequence of cruelty (unnecessary suffering as opposed to, say, the pain of surgery and side-effects of chemo). Our Founders believed in a Creator that entitles us to an equal station in life, separate from oppressors. This principle, they asserted, is encoded in the laws of nature. Today we understand that the principle of cooperation is even encoded in our DNA. Existence is the perfectly choreographed yet perpetually fluid interconnection of all things. Human society works best when every person has a truly equal opportunity to achieve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to the fullest. This is a spiritual, not a mercenary, agenda. Although mechanistic Darwinism and authoritarian religion appear to be mortal enemies, under the surface their fusion constitutes a

perverse church-state regime that enforces the worship of one unnatural, tyrannical god. Yes, one god—the god that sneers at human beings. We are windup dolls at the mercy of our materialistic makeup or are fallen clay dolls at the mercy of our ancestors’ shattering. It doesn’t make much difference which worldview you subscribe to: Human beings aren’t good. But if we aren’t good because there is no inherent goodness (Darwinism) or because we are built with an inherent design flaw that makes us necessarily not good (religion), doesn’t that contradict the Darwinist’s claim that life is good, so good it’s worth struggling for, doesn’t that contradict any religious claim that Providence is consistently benevolent in not creating innocents bad? Darwinists and religionists agree that human beings should be good. Why? Even Darwinists agree that the rape, torture, and murder of a child is evil. We know this because conscience tells us that this is so. Is conscience learned or inherent? Clearly it’s inherent, except perhaps in a psychopath. Is good behavior also inherent? Deism says the potential for good behavior is inherent, but the good is something one must choose. The potential for good in people and the freedom to choose are both evidence of a good Creator of that good. God’s goodness is of course categorically different than our own. God’s goodness is perfect and absolute, or so we assume, because goodness exists as goodness; abstract goodness exists as concrete goodness, which could only be created by a moral being of transcending goodness. Human goodness is derivative. We don’t create goodness, we choose it—we choose to embrace it or shun it. In order to be good we have to choose to be good. A good God would not create us evil; a good God would not even create us necessarily good. Either way, we would be automatons. A truly good God would create us free to choose to be good or to be evil. A creature that is self-propelled to create itself—now that’s an impressive creation! It is the gift of our perpetual freedom to choose rationally to be not that but this that makes us seem at least a little created in the image of God. Who doesn’t think that freedom to choose is good? Well, Darwinists and fundamentalists. Darwinists think there’s no good at all, just temporary survival for the sake of propagation, and

fundamentalists think humans can never be good, just codependently reliant on a good God. While Darwinian materialists and religious fundamentalists paint themselves into their stuffy fatalistic corners, Deism steps outside into the awesome perfection of an intelligently designed universe. Deism is the real Good News. Even Nature’s seeming imperfections contribute to the perfection that nurtures human free will. Because this makes sense, throughout the ages we humans have acknowledged the good God’s involvement in the meaning and purpose of our lives. Many people have sought to get to know that God better, some motivated by respect, some by curiosity, some by a sensate awareness of connection experienced as oneness or emotional bond registered as love. This is the impetus of religion before it becomes organized and misrepresented as myths and superstitions. This is also the catalyst of democracy. The concept of a personal relationship with God is a perfectly natural emergence. Some people pray to that God to get things, like security or money. But many people pray because they sense the Presence of God, by whatever name, and want a more intimate connection. Some Deists don’t believe in the efficacy of prayer, which in their view is irrational and unnatural. Many Deists do believe in Providence—in the vein of, say, Deist George Washington—and see no reason why prayers can’t be answered in a form that doesn’t violate God-ordained laws of nature. Answers to prayer could occur in the wiggle rooms (the “gaps” of “freedom” per recent mathematics and physics) where chance and choice and change take place, especially that square footage reserved for human free will. I might, for instance, get guidance on a career choice, but if I ask for the power to step out my front door and walk to the moon, it’s not going to happen. Too often people throw hissy fits when God fails to grant all the requests—aka “promises”—on the prayer list taped to the fridge. That’s the kind of disrespectful, ignorant, arrogant entitlement that makes a Deist sneeze. Frustrated pray-ers respond in a way that manifests their true Self. Some try to get what they want anyway, by taking matters into their own hands. The consequence could be good or evil depending

on the person’s motives and goals. Good people strive for the good. Selfish people strive to exploit the good via tyranny, on a grand or minute scale. Our Founders believed that any form of tyranny unnaturally transgresses Providential benevolence expressed through Nature. History records that many of the Founders prayed to Providence for guidance in securing freedom from British rule and in establishing a nation that ensured freedom, equality, and justice. A Deist prayer today could be this simple: “God bless America and all the world. May we live in peace.” Our commonsense Founders understood that progress of humanity involves progress of societies of progressing individuals. If they were alive today, the authors of America would surely warn us that Darwinist and fundamentalist ideologies, which justify elitist despotism, necessarily thwart progress of individuals and societies. Any individual or group—king, dictator, church, or corporate oligarchy—seeking to destroy progressive, creative development of universal human potential is as clinically psychopathic as Ted Bundy or Jim Jones. Ruthless violence or subtle brainwashing—the goal is always power-over, the method always spiritual terrorism. Collective human happiness is not on their to-do list, even if they pretend that it is. At the heart of every crisis is the spiritual imperative to benefit humanity and the world that sustains us. This imperative is truly spiritual, even for those who consider themselves agnostic or atheist or utterly disinterested in or even disgusted by anything smacking of religion. It’s the centrality of spirituality, our profound sense of core inner Self vested with value and purpose, that has allowed the feuding atheist and fundamentalist clans to convince the masses that their myth of either-or ideals divides the whole world into two camps, Darwinists or fundamentalists, and that the other side is fully responsible for all the falsehoods and unrest. But each side and the battle between them are equally guilty as charged. A cloud of psychosis has settled over the Earth. Too many people in charge are psychotic, too many of their machines programmed to attack with ice-cold precision, too many of their institutions, assuming a life of their own, calculate the next assault with the

empty, heartless gaze of the predator. American wars today are fought not for democratic ideals, but for the corporate aristocracy, a cartel of self-centered, callous, remorseless gold-gluttons who glibly disregard the moral bonds that promote social harmony. Aristocrats recruit idealistic serfs for their armies, making the aristocrats themselves indirect killers hidden from blame. The aristocrats’ battle plans are brute, calculating, rational conquest of fellow human beings. Because that looks bad, which is unacceptable to any psychopath ego worth its salt, the aristocrats lie, brazenly, breezily spinning their fables, shamelessly gloating behind their smiley-face masks. I picture the whole apparatus that feeds psychopaths as a giant octopus, the classic Leviathan perhaps, its long preying arms lined with suckers tightly grasping everything in its path. With its every move, each discrete arm participates in one coordinated task of ruthless selfishness. Its complex coldblooded eyes glare from a head only slightly demarcated from the body of arms joined at the center, the mouth, where sharp horny beaks drill shells and file-like radula rasp away flesh. When the body squirts ink, each arm is shielded. This diabolical god of the dark watery underworld of our nightmares represents any entity—from psycho killer to the Corporate Nation— that embodies the antithesis of “love your neighbor as yourself,” the essence of Deist democracy. Who can escape such a monster? The answer, of course, is that we can. But slaying such a beast means slaying the predatory impulse within ourselves, within each other, and that takes effort, that takes an overhaul of human culture parading as human nature. Thus far in our evolution, democracy has emerged as the ultimate maximizer of benefit and minimizer of harm, at least in theory. No democracy is ever perfect, because the morals of individual citizens range from righteous to wicked. America’s democracy has always been deficient, because there have always been morally deficient citizens who elbow their way to positions of power for the purpose of accommodating their selfishness. Individual or group self-interest isn’t a social problem unless it violates the rights of others. Democracy protects us all from

violations. Deism proposes true democracy as the surest route away from exploitation, the defining sin of elitism. Overt psychopaths inflict damage like a bullet to the head. But covert psychopathy grows like a cancer, at times even spreads like a lovely poisonous wildflower blossoming in the garden. Evil interpreted as good is far more dangerous to society than a blatantly treacherous psycho-killer. But though society provides a sophisticated apparatus for coping with the overt psychopath, it barely addresses the dangers wreaked by covert psychopathy. A true democracy is the only safe haven that can equally protect us all from psychopathy. It is the duty of Deist democrats, therefore, to shine the light on the feuding dark lords covertly thwarting democracy: Darwin’s noble savage, and the reactionary fundamentalist hunting him down.



 

Chapter 3 Transcending the “Historical Jesus” Meme Remember when you believed in Santa Claus? Not the scary parade Santa; the real Santa Claus, with awesome, magical benevolence grander than a great-grandpa of Superman or Harry Potter. The Santa Claus even grownups revered with extended, very expensive celebrations of their own. Early on, Mom assured you that the grubby fake Santa at the mall was really a stand-in elf—no wait, elves were short and had pointy ears; he was a human stand-in, the middle-school music teacher to be exact, because it being so near the delivery date, the real Santa Claus and his elves were very busy in the North Pole putting the psychedelic decals on your new Schwinn bike. Oh, you were getting a bike, not the telescope you’d put at the top of your list (a bike wasn’t even on the list). That’s because, Dad explained later as you unwrapped your helmet, the telescope went to a starving child in Africa to help him search for food. (Mom groaned.) But couldn’t Santa give you both telescopes? Guess you weren’t good enough, Grandma chimed in with a (you thought rather sadistic) wink. Though a lesser god, perhaps, your god was no less genuine than the great deities of classical mythology. It’s no coincidence that the festival commemorating the god Santa—or if you prefer, the godlike Santa—coincides with another god’s holiday. More than a thousand years before Christ, the Italians honored Saturn (for whom the planet Saturn and Saturday were named), god of sowing and seed, with the seven-day Saturnalia, which traversed the solstice and concluded on December 25, the beginning of the new year. From the Saturnalia came Christmas feasting, candle burning, gift exchanges, and halls decked with garlands of holly, which the Romans considered sacred to sun gods as a symbol of good will and joy, and additionally to

Saturn, of health and happiness. Christmas lights and ornaments derived from the Roman custom of placing decorative candles in live trees and hanging small masks of Bacchus, god of wine, fruitfulness, and vegetation, on pine trees during the festival. Many people today assume that the ancient primitives naively believed in a literal god Saturn. As a whole, the ancients, of course, were no more or less naïve than we moderns. Many of our spiritual ancestors did believe in a literal Saturn, but at least by the time of the Greeks, many ancients, especially the well-educated, understood the named gods and their celebrations to be representational—of what being as subject to speculation as such queries remain today. But like Saturn, pretty much every god everywhere was a natural god—a god embedded in nature and usually controlling some jurisdiction of natural phenomenon. Just like today, enlightened ancients understood the gods to be poetic, fictional, analogous representations of the fundamental human quest to understand and explain the profound mysteries of nature—if they weren’t created just for entertainment value. Now as then, manmade deities aesthetically express our intuited awareness of the spiritual dimension of existence and its connection to us humans. Now as then, some people take those representations literally. Now as then, high priests exploit religious representations for power and profit. Because belief in deities, mythic or otherwise, has always been a core human value, it’s not surprising that a god like Santa has persisted into the twenty-first century. In America, at least, the myth of the jolly old North Pole toymaker who bestows gifts under Christmas trees of the good and deposits coal in chimney stockings of the bad provides parents with an empowering conduct-control device that makes the Santa story “good for kids.” It makes sense that most parents want their brood to believe in a real Santa for as long as possible. Besides, the clockwork gaiety allows adults a guaranteed yearly escape into the nostalgia of childhood. Back when you were six or nine years old, no-Santa was a hard concept to wrap your mind around. Maybe you even engaged in verbal combat with opponents of the Santa fact-claim. There was a Santa, all right, you were absolutely sure of that, and you substantiated your faith convincingly.

But then one day, the big moment of revelation, a trusted friend or big sister or grandpa persuasively announced: There’s no Santa Claus. You were stunned. Or maybe you already had your suspicions—the stash of presents in the basement closet, sightings of Mom and Dad arranging the doll house and football under the tree. Weren’t you lied to? Not exactly, you were told. The Santa story embodied the Christmas spirit of righteous giving. But Santa was kid stuff. No-Santa ushered you through the firewall between childhood and the coveted rank of adolescence. If you were Christian, the focus shifted to the Baby Jesus. Eventually you were embarrassed by manger scenes—still too kid-stuff, even your wellness art project, Still Life with Smoking Camels, for which you received an A. You moved on to virgin birth, miracles, resurrection, the end of the world, and if you were Catholic, rosary beads and saints. You questioned, you doubted: Were you really guilty of an original sin? Were the wafer and wine really transmuted into the literal body and blood of Christ? Was blasphemy really an unforgivable sin that your beloved drunken uncle had recently committed? Were people who had never heard of Christ really going to burn in hell for all eternity? Were people who doubted that the world was flat really once hanged as heretics? Were women with moles really tortured and burned as witches who copulated with devils—millions of witches, for centuries? Once you learned that Christmas was a calculated blend of manger scene and Santa legend spiced with elements from the Roman Saturnalia and other ancient religious festivals, you wondered, what wasn’t just childish superstition? As a twenty-first century adult, you’ve been politely admonished by people you respect to Question Authority. You’ve been tutored to use your own God-given noggin. You’ve observed firsthand the dangers of imprudent belief. Now, at the crossroads, a seductive whisper sings: Imagine there’s no Jesus. I wonder if you can. Many Americans can’t. And even if they can, they’re trying hard not to. And these aren’t just Baby-Jesus fundamentalists, a minority

of Americans. Even progressive Christians assume that the human Jesus existed, though he might not have been a miracle-working, grave-busting God. Your priest or preacher doesn’t seem to think that Jesus was just an addition to the pantheon of more ancient gods and heroes. They believe—they want to believe—that unlike Saturn or Santa, Jesus was an actual historical person who was born and lived at a specific time and place. That’s easy enough to prove, right? Well, not really. The very experts who teach the historical Jesus don’t actually posit a historical Jesus as established fact. The reason is quite simple: There is absolutely no data that proves that Jesus ever lived. Hard to believe, isn’t it? I know it has been for me. I, too, want there to have been a Jesus. What person, actual or fictional, has surpassed him in spiritual wisdom and integrity? The deep human need to believe that such a heroic figure could exist makes it difficult to let go of, or even to closely scrutinize, the Jesus meme. But for the sake of truth, we must. Regardless of what you’ve been told, the fact is that there is absolutely no proof that the actual human Jesus ever existed. There’s not even much circumstantial evidence, and none that is reliable. Of course, there’s plenty of evidence that a Jesus myth existed, and still exists. Because there is no information about Jesus dating from the era in which Jesus supposedly lived, Jesus scholars resort to working their way backward from much later mythic material about Jesus, mainly the four Gospels, to the “historical Jesus,” which, as it turns out, is like working backward from The Odyssey to Helen of Troy or the goddess Athena, or like proving macroevolution with the fossil record. Faith, or Blind Faith, in Jesus But then people who believe in a talking snake, people who accept that a woman turned into a pillar of salt, people who are positive that a man lived in the belly of a whale, that a stick turned into a snake, that the sun stood still and moved backward; believers who never doubt that God impregnated a virgin with a human-god or a just-god, or that a man ascended into the clouds in a flaming chariot, or that

God spoke through a perpetually burning bush; the faithful who smile knowing that their good God inflicted sorcerous plagues on innocent subjects of a pharaoh whose repentance God himself blocked so He could harden the pharaoh’s heart, the same beneficent God who commanded his most faithful servant to murder his own son, and only pulled him back at the last moment, and called this sadistic trick a “test”; Bible believers who never blink asserting that food rained down daily from the desert sky, that a man’s donkey spoke, that a dead man’s bones revived other dead people, or that dead men were called back from tombs and even ascended bodily into heaven —these people, schooled by teachers who know better, find it easy to believe in a tenuously hypothetical historical Jesus. A lot of these believers, instructed by satellite evangelists or some knuckle-rapping nun, want Santa Claus and his sled of elves tossed from Christmas because they’re as “pagan” as the witchcraft of Harry Potter is demonic. These are the faithful unruffled by brain teasers such as: If Jesus was born of Mary, then Mary is his mother. If God is One, and if God (the Holy Spirit) is the father, and if Jesus is God, then Mary is both “wife” (concubine, “handmaid”) and mother of Jesus and of God, making her the originating God. But if Jesus is God and if God is the Father of all mankind, then Mary is Jesus’ daughter. If Mary is the daughter of God and if Jesus is the son of God, then Mary is Jesus’ sister. If Jesus is God, then the son is the father and the father is the son, which by definition is impossible, since the father is the source of the son and the son the offspring of the father. The son must be younger than the father, in which case they could not be equal, or equally eternal. Even in a realm that transcends our space-time universe, surely if God is One, God cannot be two. Here on Earth, surely if God cannot die, and if Jesus died, then Jesus cannot be God. It doesn’t help most of us in the twenty-first century to call it a miracle. If God is God and Jesus is the spawn of God, Christianity is not monotheism, but another version of “pagan” polytheism. But believers don’t seem to care that logically Jesus and God cannot be the same person. Throw these contradicting verses from the Gospel of John their way (3:17; 3:34; 3:35; 5:19-20; 5:24; 6:29;

6:38; 6:57; 7:16-18; 7:28-29; 8:18; 8:28-29; 8:42-43; 8:54-55; 8:58; 10:14; 10:17; 10:18; 10:34-36; 10:38; 13:20; 15:1,5; 16:2628; 17:20-23), and they will smile and wave as the train pulls out hauling you off to hell. The faithful refuse to grasp that if Jesus were a manifestation, aspect, or “person” of God, then God is the supreme egomaniac, giving birth to himself, praying to himself, worshipping himself, glorifying himself, even committing suicide for himself. (It’s even worse if he murdered his innocent “Son.”) If God is the father of Jesus, why do the literally-perfect Gospels offer human genealogies that include the line of Joseph? And why are they different? Matthew 1:17 says, “So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David to the deportation to Babylon, fourteen generations; and from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah, fourteen generations.” That’s a total of forty-two generations. Luke’s list goes all the way back to Adam, the son of God, but from Abraham forward, Luke lists fiftyseven generations, not forty-two. Matthew and Luke are close in their list, starting with Abraham and ending with David, but Luke lists fifteen generations, not fourteen. The first fourteen for each are the same except that from Hezron to Boaz, Matthew lists Aram, Aminadab, Nahshon, and Salmon, but Luke lists Arni, Admin, Amminadab, Nahshon, and Sala. From that point on, the genealogies are completely different. The Gospels are steeped in self-contradictions to which believers in a God-breathed Bible pay no mind. For instance, the Gospel of John claims that “No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man,” but the Old Testament says in 2 Kings that “Elijah ascended in a whirlwind into heaven,” and Genesis claims that “Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him,” and Hebrews adds, “By faith Enoch was taken so that he did not experience death; and ‘he was not found, because God had taken him.’” And if Jesus was born in a manger, did he really “descend” from heaven in a unique way? What kind of guy was Joseph to buy his fiancé’s story that she was still a virgin and that God was the father of her child? Or maybe to save face for his own indiscretion, he spread that rumor.

All Christians know about the significant moment when Jesus tells his disciples that he will suffer and die. Christians consider the Transfiguration to be another extraordinary, one-time-only event, which, according to Matthew and Mark, occurs six days after Jesus foretells his suffering, or was that eight days after Jesus foretells his suffering, as Luke claims? The presence of Jesus’ betrayer is revealed during the Last Supper according to Matthew and Mark but after the Last Supper in Luke. Mark says that Jesus is tempted in the wilderness and later John is arrested, but in Luke, John is arrested and later Jesus is tempted in the wilderness. Jesus begins his ministry after the arrest of John the Baptist according to Mark but before the arrest of John the Baptist per the gospel writer’s narrative voice, “John” (the gospel writer’s real name is unknown). After the feeding of the 5000, do Jesus and the disciples go to Gennesaret as Mark claims, or to Capernaum, as it says in John? Answering that Jesus fed 5000 twice, or that he went to both Gennesaret and Capernaum, doesn’t help if each gospel is read as a whole or melded into a single narrative. Laying out the Gospels side by side reveals a mountain of contradictory chronology and logistics that simply cannot be logically resolved unless Jesus lived (lives) in parallel universes, which I suspect will be apologists’ next line of defense. For Christians, the crucifixion is one of the most important events in the Bible. Maybe believers in a literal Bible don’t care whether Jesus’ robe was scarlet as per Matthew, or purple as it says in Mark and John. Does it matter whether the robe was put on Jesus during his trial (John) or after Pilate delivered him to be crucified (Matthew and Mark)? Mark says that Jesus was crucified at the third hour, Luke says it was before the sixth hour, and John says it was after the sixth hour. They can’t all be right. Who first arrived at the empty tomb after the resurrection? Was it Mary Magdalene and the other Mary (Matthew)? Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome (Mark)? “The women” (Luke)? Mary Magdalene alone (John)? When did she/they first arrive at the tomb? When it was still dark (John), as day was dawning (Matthew), at early dawn (Luke), when

the sun had already risen (Mark)? Again, they can’t all be right. Who first sees Jesus? Mary Magdalene and the other Mary (Matthew), Mary Magdalene alone (Mark and John), or Cleopas and another follower of Jesus, and possibly Peter at the same time (Luke)? The betrayal of Jesus by Judas is one of the most widely explicated stories in the Gospels. But what happens to Judas after the betrayal? According to Matthew, Judas returns to the priests the thirty pieces of silver he got for turning Jesus over to the authorities, then hangs himself; the priests use the silver to buy the potter’s field as a place to bury foreigners, hence its name Field of Blood (Matt. 27:3-10). But according to the Acts account, Judas buys the field with the silver; and falling headlong on the field, he bursts open in the middle and all his bowels gush out, hence the name Field of Blood (Acts 1:16-20). Preachers pick the version that suits their sermon. Preachers quote Jesus as if his words were absolute fact, never mentioning that those exact words taken from one gospel are a bit different in another. Theologies are built upon the exact wording of simple Jesus sayings, and upon those systems of belief, thought is dictated, feeling manipulated, natural spirituality quashed because of an interpretation of the precise meaning of a sentence or phrase that might be presented with different wording and meaning in another text. Do preachers really believe there were stenographers meticulously writing down Jesus’ conversations word for word at all, much less with a hundred percent accuracy? Yet congregants are taught to fear misquoting as if that were tantamount to driving in the crucifixion nails. Superstitious reverence for magical words substitutes for sacred reverence for God’s Creation; text worship replaces worship of God; blind faith transgresses responsible common sense. Congratulations: your congregants are now dummied down, ripe for your exploitation, or someone else’s. These very few examples of incongruities from among the multitudes highlight one very significant problem for serious scholars: With so many different versions of when and where and under what circumstances critical events occurred, how can we know for certain which ones if any are accurate? If early Christians didn’t even know

the easy particulars concerning the birth and crucifixion of Jesus, why should we trust the far-fetched magical aspects as facts? The inaccuracy of significant historical details does not definitively prove that Jesus never existed. But scholars have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the aura surrounding him was airbrushed in by generations of believers who never even met the man. And the list of fallacies, contradictions, and erroneous facts, not counting apologists’ contorted exegeses, is longer than Pinocchio’s nose. Resurrecting the Jesus Myth For centuries, very sensible intellectuals and ordinary folk have doubted the Christian stories of a miracle god-man who rose from the dead. Even the Gospel of Matthew notes that in tandem with reports of resurrection there were rumors already circulating that followers of Jesus had stolen the body. The Greco-Roman philosopher Celsus insinuates that because Jesus was born a bastard, which wasn’t very noble, the writer of Luke tossed in the virgin Mary census/manger story with its overkill peasant-pleasing details of magi led by a magical star and shepherds awestruck by angels, all particulars lifted from popular regional myths. Miracles, divine incarnation, even the existence of someone named Jesus were disputed right and left. Governments—the Romans, for instance—early on outlawed Christian superstitions along with all the others. Challenges to the veracity of Christianity continued throughout the centuries, though in many quarters, the heresy of doubt was viciously repressed. Though many great thinkers prior to the Dark Ages assumed that a teacher named Jesus had existed, many considered the subsequent Jesus religion to be part of the folkish tradition of myths, legends, and superstitions prevalent among the masses. To correct this “misconception,” bishops devised creeds instituting their magical God-Jesus, who was tortured and executed and who rose from the dead. After centuries of coping with doubting Thomases, Dark-Age inquisitors were forced to torture and execute detractors. There had always been critics of the Church’s assumption of divine authority. But as the Church allied and sometimes fused with State, begging to differ with orthodoxy led to dire consequences that

forced many critics to bite their tongues. But the rumblings continued. When critics are silenced, abuse runs rampant. Symbols of spiritual perfection, the clergy became infamous for the multitude of their sins. Eventually Luther challenged corrupt clerical power by suggesting that the Bible, as God’s Word, was the ultimate religious authority. Luther’s innocuous presumption sparked the bloodbath we now refer to as the Reformation. For centuries, defenders of the Church as Christ on earth clashed with advocates of the divinely inspired Bible, each camp claiming divine right until Church and Bible each became God in the minds of their respective believers. These twin Bible-as-God, Pope-as-God idolatries held sway until both Church and Bible lost considerable credibility during the Enlightenment. Twentieth century fundamentalism had to be created to reestablish the authority of the “God-breathed” Bible. Conservative propaganda succeeded in generating Christian faith in the divine Word despite continuation of the ongoing commonsense critique reaching back to the genesis of the primitive Jesus-religion itself. The Current Quest to Excavate Jesus from the Rubble of Myth For many of us ex-believers today, serious skepticism about the Santa Jesus—the one that performed miracles and rose from the dead—commenced once we could no longer trust the ultimate authority on the matter, the Bible. With the exception of a few teachers at fundamentalist colleges, all scholars associated with seminaries and university religion departments the world over agree that the Bible is not literally word-for-word perfect. In fact, it’s steeped with inaccuracies. There are hundreds if not thousands of discrepancies within the texts themselves, besides numerous incongruities between the biblical historical accounts and external historical records and scientific facts. To protect their preconceived cherished assumptions that Jesus existed and that the Gospels are admissible evidence, God-breathed Bible apologists torque the facts to “explain” how their sacred book was indeed divinely dictated, directly or telepathically. Progressive Jesus scholars instead try to untangle a few strands of “probable” facts about Jesus from the wildly incongruous Gospel narratives.

But it doesn’t work. There are no probable facts. On the contrary; considering all the Gospel materials with the requisite scrupulous objectivity, critical-historians concede that the existence of any person resembling any version of the Jesus presented in the Gospels is extraordinarily improbable. Yet those same scholars persist in their quest for the historical Jesus as if that Jesus were a demonstrable fact. For example, in The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, prominent Jesus scholar John Dominic Crossan begins his Prologue with this startling disclaimer: “Historical Jesus research is becoming something of a scholarly bad joke.” He chooses to view as positive “the number of competent and even eminent scholars producing pictures of Jesus at wide variance with one another.” In the Prologue’s second paragraph, Crossan offers an illustration of the “present problem”: an address by Daniel J. Harrington to the Catholic Biblical Association that included “a short description of seven different images of Jesus that have been proposed by scholars in recent years,” namely, Jesus as a political revolutionary, as a magician, as a Galilean charismatic, as a Galilean rabbi, as a Hillelite or proto-Pharisee, as an Essene, and as an eschatological prophet. In the third paragraph, Crossan acknowledges that “the plurality is enough to underline the problem,” and “that stunning diversity is an academic embarrassment. It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.” Crossan then notes that the “problem of multiple and discordant conclusions” requires an updated theory and method. The continuation of “cultural looting” by contemporary Jesus scholars that has ignored “scientific stratigraphy” has led to a big problem with archeological research: at the very least, the absence of the “detailed location of every item in its own proper chronological layer,” meaning that “almost any conclusion can be derived from almost any object,” and that gives “the distinct impression that the researcher knew the result before beginning the search.” Crossan then assures the reader that he will not “add to the impression of acute scholarly subjectivity in historical Jesus research” but will “raise most seriously

the problem of methodology” and follow his chosen method “most stringently.” Next, Crossan explains that his methodology will attempt an “effective synthesis” of anthropological, historical, and literary levels, acknowledging that “weakness in any element imperils the integrity and validity of the others.” He promises to address “the interweaving of retention, mutation, and creation within the Jesus tradition.” He notes the books he will use as models for his study, then provides us with a list of primary texts he’ll use to make his case for a historical Jesus: not surprisingly, just the four Gospels, which he calls “biographies” by “individuals all directly or indirectly connected with him and all composing within, say, seventy-five years after his death.” He says “within, say,” because no one knows for sure when those works were first written, and seventy-five years is a long time in an era of no media, printing press, or quick and easy transport, not to mention short lifespan of persons. No one knows whether any one gospel was the work of one person, or whether the gospels were written accounts taken from decades of various mutating oral traditions (the singular “oral tradition” here is misleading in that it implies a single seminal story). No one knows whether the writers were even of the same era or from the same region as Jesus. Many scholars believe that the links between Jesus and the Gospels are many and tenuous. Crossan asks offhandedly if these four sources are not better than sources for other ancient biographies. He asks rather than states, because the honest answer would be “no.” In paragraph nine, Crossan admits that “that fourfold record [the four canonical Gospels]…constitutes the literary problem.” Readers who read the four texts “vertically” from beginning to end, one after another, “get a generally persuasive impression of unity, harmony, and agreement.” But read horizontally, or comparatively, with similar “units” laid side by side, what “strikes one most forcefully” is the “disagreement,” a wooly word often used by Jesus scholars to underplay “contradiction” and “incongruity.” Then Crossan makes an astonishing admission: “By even the middle of the second century, pagan opponents, like Celsus, and Christian apologists, like Justin, Tatian, and Marcion were well aware of those discrepancies.” One solution to this problem was “to reduce that plurality to unity” by

either eliminating all gospels but one (take your pick) or blending them into one narrative (take your pick of unit elements). During the last two hundred years, other gospels have been found, and rather than clarifying a portrait of Jesus, they have only added to the collection of divergent units and their elements. Studies of the four canonical Gospels admittedly do not add up to a cohesive total collection or a random sampling; they were works selected deliberately for specific reasons. Scholars have concluded that differences and discrepancies among the various gospel accounts are due to “deliberate theological interpretations of Jesus.” Brazenly begging the question, Crossan takes an enormous leap of blind faith when he adds that “the continuing presence of the risen Jesus and the abiding experience of the Spirit gave the transmitters of the Jesus tradition a creative freedom we would never have dared postulate were it not forced upon us by the evidence.” Even the writers of the four Gospels “are unnervingly free about omission and addition, about change, correction, or creation in their own individual accounts…subject to their own particular interpretation of Jesus. The Gospels are neither history nor biographies” but are “some individual’s or community’s opinion or interpretation.” I.e., fiction. Searching for an actual person named Jesus is fair enough, as fair as searching for an actual Krishna or King Arthur, but presenting Jesus as historical rather than hypothetical is technically dishonest. Even the ethical biblical Jesus says it’s unconscionable for anyone, especially a scholar—a scribe, a Sadducee, a Pharisee—to sacrifice truth on the altar of religion. Every biblical scholar knows that the Bible is an unreliable source of raw factual data. That doesn’t mean that there are no facts in the Bible; it means that much that is in the Bible is not factual. By not factual I don’t mean that it hasn’t been proven to be true, or that it is symbolic; I mean that there is much biblical material presented as fact that has been proven to be false. I have provided a multitude of examples in Born-Again Deist, following the lead of the many authors writing on the subject over the course of centuries, so I won’t belabor that point here. The point that I do want to stress is that the people who teach us about the Bible—from seminary professors to preachers in the pulpit to Christian bookstore apologists—know the

truth about the falseness of the biblical texts yet perpetuate among the masses the “noble lie” of a true and valid Bible. From there it’s easy to maintain the “pious fiction” of an actual historical Jesus. Of course, no lie is noble, and there’s nothing pious about fiction presented as fact. Perhaps Jesus scholars don’t think they are deceiving any more than Mom thought she was lying about Santa Claus. But really, do you want to be treated like a child, or do you want to know the truth? I believe that most people want truth, and that’s why multitudes are ditching the church for alternative forms of spirituality, and many more are just staying with the “church club” safe-zone because it offers positive social connections for themselves and moral instruction for the kids. As mentioned in Chapter 1, according to the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), between 1990 and 2001, the number of self-identified Deists grew at a rate of 717 percent, making it the fastest-growing religious classification in America. By 2008, 12 percent of Americans identified as Deist, but this figure is misleading, since surveys define Deist as someone believing in a higher power but not in a personal God. Many Deists—myself included—do believe in a personal God, but not a God of natureviolating miracles or special revelation in the Christian sense. Since 1990 there has been a significant exodus from churches and denominations. The number of people who still considered themselves spiritual or who believed in God but not in a particular religion rose from 14.3 million or 8 percent in 1990 to 34.2 million or 15 percent by 2008. Some surveys showed even higher increases. During the same time frame, the number of respondents who identified as Christian dropped by ten percent. No doubt that trend will accelerate as more and more Christians learn the facts, or lack of facts, about the historical Jesus. Of course, many Christians prefer to remain in denial. Scholars who beg the question by assuming that Jesus existed, for instance, spend their time trying to dig up proof to substantiate their claim that Jesus existed. Every scholar knows that a statement begs the question when it assumes as given what it is in fact trying to prove; such circular reasoning slyly supports an assertion with the

assertion itself. Among scholars, fallacies are generally proscribed, yet academia assumes the same hands-off approach toward theological distortion that the legal system until recently assumed toward clerical child molestation. Jesus scholars’ only source material is contained in the Bible, specifically the Gospels. This begs the question further in that the Gospels are contained in a book that is qualitatively unreliable and in that the Gospels themselves, being subjectively theological rather than objectively historical, are unreliable as source material for any academic contention that Jesus was a historical person. Luke is sometimes considered to be historical. But at the beginning of that gospel, the author explains up front that he is attempting to construct some kind of chronology based on numerous conflicting accounts of Jesus circulating at the time, which was long after the events supposedly occurred. Even my college undergrads know they can’t use sources that are not authoritative and unbiased. Yet Jesus scholars do just that, basing their conclusions on the invalid premises that Jesus existed and that the Gospels are factual, or at least historically valid sources of facts about Jesus. Not only are they part of an unreliable source (the Bible), the Gospels as independent sources are also more generally unreliable for several reasons: They were written long after the events recorded in the Gospels occurred and by people who were not present when and where the events took place; they were based on oral tradition, which like any oral tradition is subject to typical human interpretation and embellishment; they were written down by people intent on making faith-claims; they were written to make faith-claims not about Jesus so much as about particular “denominations,” or cults, of a diffuse Jesus-religion that had evolved over decades; they were written to establish the primacy of specific faith-claims of particular Christian groups among the many Christian groups that existed at the time of writing; in order to convert nonbelievers, they incorporated entrenched beliefs: myth, legend, folklore, ritual, and wise sayings, which made Christianity more familiar and allowed converts to retain prior beliefs; they were written, edited, rewritten, revised, and rewritten over and over; the original autographs, the actual original written versions, no longer exist and have not existed

probably since the decade when they were written; the original autographs were likely transcriptions of oral narratives and other preexistent, malleable materials; the original autographs of each of the four Gospels did not all exist at the same time; out of the many different versions circulating back in the mid- to late-fourth century C.E., a few centuries after Jesus supposedly died, only four gospels were chosen to be included in what we now call the Bible; “a few centuries after Jesus supposedly died” is a very long lapse of time in an era of camel express, no media or local libraries, and “paper” of papyrus or other volatile materials that disintegrated in less than ten years (far less if they were regularly handled); disintegrating texts were copied by the educated elite that knew how to read and write and edit and tweak; the gospels chosen out of the many circulating represented the faith-claims of elite bishops; those faith-claims were put forward to establish, by order of Roman Emperor Constantine, one orthodox position distilled from the chaos of conflicting positions; even the faith-claims of the elite bishops varied, in some respects greatly, and the selection, sometime in the distant-from-Jesus fourth century, was not unanimous or even friendly, which no doubt explains the compromise that allowed tremendous variations—aka contradictions—among the four Gospel accounts; the embarrassing contradictions were kept under wraps by maintaining the texts in languages only understood by priests and a few scholars (until very recently, Catholic Mass was still performed in Latin to protect believers from this truth of contradictions and to enhance the aura of priestly authority). It’s true that an actual Jesus might have existed. But there is no reason to assume that the Gospel accounts were based on actual events or that the people mentioned in the accounts were actual people. The Gospels could be versions of an entirely fictional story that was told or written. Many similar fictions—which Christians dismiss as pagan myths despite their striking resemblance to the Jesus story—were circulating at the same time, and the content of those stories changed at the whim of each storyteller just like the Bible stories were altered when the need or desire to alter arose. We all know that Greek myths transformed over time and were further renovated by the Romans. We know that there were many—possibly

hundreds or even thousands—of Jesus gospels circulating during the first few centuries C.E. and that it was just luck that a handful remained intact and in the hands of the fourth-century elite who decided what material would make it into what we now call The Bible. And of course those four Gospels vary hugely. Amazingly, perhaps desperately, some Jesus scholars actually argue that the variation among the four Gospels is the very quality that indicates their validity, because the early believers really only cared about the central fact of Jesus’ miracle-working life, his message, and his resurrection, not minor details like Jesus’ miracleworking life, his message, and his resurrection. Other scholars assert that the real autographs, or one real autograph, was the authentic source, and the task is to try to reconstruct the original (or originals) from cut-and-paste excerpts from the four existing Gospels, and maybe even the non-canonical gospels, all to locate the real Jesus. One might as plausibly cut-and-paste elements from the various myths of Zeus to uncover the real Zeus. Jesus scholars know that just as the Greek/Roman god Zeus/Jupiter mutated, so did the Hebrew/Greek/Roman god Messiah/Christ. We all know that no god, no goddess, no hero, no religion has not transfigured in the forge of human imagination. And unlike the Egyptians, as Edith Hamilton reminds us in her Mythology, the Greeks and the Romans created their gods in their own image. Jesus Christ was one of those Greco-Roman gods, whether or not he began as a human. Excavating a human Jesus from ruins of mythic proportions is not going to happen. Much less a human who is God. The Jesus Collage The multitude of “textual problems,” as scholars today nonchalantly refer to the internal contradictions, is most pronounced in the four Gospels. Regular readers of the Bible balk at this assertion because they usually peruse particular passages of the Gospels, often their favorite excerpts, over and over again, or they read a Gospel vertically from beginning to end, or all the Gospels vertically, one after another, and they see no problem. But again, comparing the texts horizontally, arranging the same units—events, sayings, etc.—

side by side, one can’t but be struck by the massive “disagreement” between and among the accounts. Apologists argue, “What they really said,” or “What they really meant,” or “What really happened,” or “Back then they didn’t care about chronology,” or “Back then they didn’t care about accuracy,” or “Back then the oral tradition was more important than anything written,” or “Those grammatical errors just prove that the followers of Jesus were regular guys,” or… But why go on? The critical contortionism of apologists only proves the point they’re trying to confute: The Bible is manmade. In fact the Bible is an ancient miscellany of manmade texts that even edited retains numerous species of flaws and creative flourishes. The Gospels don’t agree on the basic facts of the years that Jesus was born or died or who his ancestors were, data that was extremely important to the Jews of that era. The letters of Paul, which are supposedly the earliest Jesus material, say nothing about Jesus the man; Paul’s writings are purely apologetic symbolic theology. Since Jesus scholars can’t ignore the historical inaccuracies of the Gospels, they cite their choice of them, or cutand-paste excerpts from among them, to “prove” that Jesus existed. Cherry-picking from illegitimate texts is like citing the smoking gun to prove the innocence of the defendant with the smoking gun in his hand. What’s truly astounding is that even many Jesus scholars who should know better still celebrate pagan-steeped Christmas and Easter to commemorate a savior-God born of a virgin who was crucified for our sins, rose from the dead, and ascended into the clouds. On the basis of absolutely no conclusive evidence—a position they themselves have substantiated—almost all Jesus scholars still believe in a seminal historical Jesus. They believe because—just like Darwinians who believe in macroevolution—they want to believe; they want to believe rather than to know. Because various circular explanations cannot resolve the variant Gospels problem, uncomfortable scholars search for puzzle pieces outside the Gospels. But the external sources have been deemed unreliable, too, because they were written decades after Jesus would have lived, and for the most part they speak not of Jesus but simply note that unorganized Jesus-followers with ill-defined beliefs

(sometimes referred to as “superstitions”) were floating about, along with followers of other gods and goddesses. Incongruities between the Gospels and external historical materials are just as striking as discrepancies between the Gospels themselves. In Jesus’ era, the Romans, meticulous record-keepers and vigilant overlords, never mention the birth, activities, trial, or crucifixion of Jesus. Not a peep about the radical multitudes that supposedly turned out to be healed or to hear their Lord’s message or to lay palm fronds under his treasonous feet upon his kingly Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem. The earliest mention of Jesus, written by a Roman governor, Pliny the Younger, in 112 C.E., nearly a century after the death of Jesus, records that a cult calling themselves Christians were meeting illegally. Shortly after that, in 115 C.E., the Roman historian Tacitus mentions the “superstition” of Christianity that had spread to Rome, and notes that Nero had allegedly blamed Christians for the fire he set in Rome in 64 C.E., an event that took place half a century before Tacitus recorded it. That Nero blamed Christians is doubted by most scholars today. Regardless of whether Nero did blame Christians or whether later Christians blamed Nero for persecution they later experienced, there are no records of any kind from the era of Jesus that mention Jesus or his followers. The four canonical Gospels were written decades, possibly many decades, after Jesus supposedly died, and they were written in Greek by foreigners in foreign lands, not in Aramaic, which was the language of the time and place of Jesus. Luke 3:1 mentions the joint high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, for example, when there could be only one high priest at a time; there were never two high priests at the same time. The writer of Luke (the gospel lifted up as “history”) doesn’t know that, because he was writing at a time and place and culture far removed from Jesus-era Jerusalem. Luke also locates the birth of Jesus during the reign of Herod at the time of the famous census of Quirinius, which necessitated lodging for out-oftowners Mary and Joseph that wound up being a manger. But Quirinius was not the legate of Syria while Herod was alive. Jesus’ crucifixion is also a problem. John says the execution occurred on Friday, 14 Nisan (Nisan is the name of a month

according to the Jewish calendar), the Friday when the Passover lambs were sacrificed (Passover was on the 14th day of the first full moon of spring). The other three Gospels date the execution on Friday, 15 Nisan. But there was no year in the late twenties or early thirties, the range of years during which Jesus could have died, in which 15 Nisan fell on a Friday. It’s worth noting that John is considered the least authentic gospel, yet Christians make much ado about Jesus being sacrificed on Passover and even refer to him as the Passover Lamb, a concept that doesn’t jive if Jesus was executed on the date reported in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The only external source taken seriously by some is a brief paragraph attributed to Josephus written half a century after the death of Jesus—that late date being sufficient to dismiss it, yet this text is typically discredited because it is a hearsay source that relied on other unreliable sources and was later edited by a Christian monk (Christian monks “owned” the text); some scholars assert that it was actually written by the Christian monk, because it puts Christian faith-claims in the mouth of Josephus, a decidedly Jewish priest. It should be noted that Josephus himself was not a consistent historian. Furthermore, details of Josephus’s early life, like his being consulted by high priests when he was fourteen and his three-year sojourn in the wilderness undertaken when he was sixteen, suggest possible material incorporated into subsequent Jesus stories. Archeology doesn’t prove that Jesus existed, either. At best it only confirms that a couple places and rulers mentioned in the Gospels actually existed, but what scholar doubted those in the first place? Though perhaps based on archeologically verifiable people, places, and events, the Gospel’s characters, settings, and plots might be no more literally actual than similar references in Homer’s mythic Iliad and Odyssey or Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days. Looked at through a literary lens, elements of myth, legend, and folktale in the Gospels are as obviously imaginative as those same elements found in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the odes of Pindar, the ancient mythographies of Callimachus and Euphemerus, Ovid’s poetic Metamorphosis, Virgil’s epic the Aeneid, and the legend of Santa Claus. Viewed through the lens of historical methodology, the Gospels are no more historical than Chrétien de

Troyes’ Arthurian romances or, three centuries later, Thomas Malory’s Le Mort Darthur, and are no more historically exact than the history plays of Shakespeare or more recent historical novels and movies. Texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls give us a narrow glimpse of worldviews and practices of the era but never mention anything about Jesus or Jesus-followers. The truth is that there is no authoritative, unbiased source that proves that Jesus existed. Even if we surmise the possibility that someone named Jesus actually existed, we have absolutely no idea who or what he actually was, or even when he lived; in fact, there is no way we could know. Scholars searching for proof of the historical Jesus have groped as futilely as Darwinians scouring fossil beds for missing links. History as Creative Writing Even college students know (or should know) that good research in any field requires not only sources that are authoritative and unbiased, but also rational, on-point analysis of the data and coherent, fallacy-free presentation of valid conclusions. Common sense is the ultimate authority, truth the ultimate data. Why, then, do religious scholars who point out all those biblical discrepancies and incongruities and other textual problems at the same time cite the Bible as a legitimate—really, the only—source of information about the historical Jesus? Much depends on what is meant by “information” and by “historical Jesus.” If you’re researching ancient beliefs about Jesus, yes, the Bible could be a valuable source of information. But if you’re researching the existence of an actual person named Jesus who is represented as such in the Bible, not so much. Some scholars seem unable or unwilling to distinguish between these two agendas. Not only is their fact-claim that Jesus was an actual person based on sources that are neither authoritative nor unbiased, the fact-claim itself is based on a prior assumption that Jesus was (and is) actual; in other words, the “fact” of Jesus is an a priori bias. The concluding fact-claim drawn from this invalid premise is invalid. The syllogism falls apart, the research begs the question, and the presentation of a living, breathing “historical Jesus” is

necessarily incoherent and fallacious. Put another way, scholars work backward from the Gospels’ Jesus myths, legends, and folktales toward a bias-created “real Jesus” that is based on nothing but the Gospels’ Jesus myths, legends, and folktales. In any other academic field (except perhaps Darwinian biology), this “methodology” would be laughable. Even college freshmen understand the fundamental difference between content taught in Creative Writing and in straightforward Exposition or Argument. Yet Jesus scholars downplay the obvious fact that the books of the Bible, and certainly the Gospels, are creative writing. Even if a historical Jesus existed, the Gospels paint imaginative, divergent, often contradictory portraits of that person. Once creative enters into the writing, the actual person Jesus disappears. Rarely is writing not creative. Even a scholarly historical account of a well-documented famous person is by necessity part speculation, part interpretation, part gap-guessing, and part cherrypicking hearsay, which is another way of saying part fiction. Did George Washington really cut down the cherry tree? How articulate was George verbally? What were his passions, his fears, his authentic religious convictions, his opinions about John Adams and Thomas Jefferson? What did he have for dinner on the fifth of July, 1776? Did someone assist him in writing his First Presidential Address? We know almost nothing about George’s life, much less about the actual person. We know he attended church (which was required by law) but skipped communion as a matter of conscience. We know he had wooden teeth, but don’t know if he was ever madly in love or had ever cussed at his horse—and which is more important in getting to know the real man? Yet we think we know all about George Washington. We know virtually nothing. We don’t even know much about George Bush or Barak Obama, though the imagecrafting media makes us believe that we do. Historians take tremendous liberties when painting portraits of people and events, filling in massive gaps, omitting almost everything surrounding those people and events, because almost everything is unknown. And those “scholarly” creative renderings become established “facts” that are peer-reviewed by other creative

scholars, which perpetuates the fiction as “fact.” (Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a “fictional autobiography” of her closest friend, Vita Sackville-West, is a dazzlingly brilliant exemplum of this process.) When doing research, we must scrutinize not only the scholarship but also the scholar. Historians are human individuals with their own proclivities, agendas, and aesthetic inclinations. History is as subjective as what is more frankly called myth, legend, and folktale; history just mixes in more objectively verifiable details. Presenting history, especially ancient history, as pure objective fact is just plain dishonest. A teacher named Jesus might have inspired the original story of Jesus, but that story (or album of stories) was a fiction that even during the first few decades C.E. evolved into further fictions. Jesus scholars who claim that they know that Jesus was or did this or that are citing biases conjured in their own imaginations. That a bias is rooted in a two-thousand year tradition does not excuse the academic dishonesty of presenting the bias as fact. Most scholars understand their biases; therefore, they knowingly lead people astray. Why assume that a real-person Jesus existed when the only accounts of Jesus that we have are the four Gospels of the Bible, which religious scholars know were not intended to present a history or biography of Jesus but were rather crafted to inspire faith, to explain faith-positions, and to create and maintain coherence within a wildly diffuse Jesus-religion? Nonetheless, the plodding pedants meander through the dusty terrain of their so-called Quest for the Historical Jesus, arguing over sources and dates of composition, criticizing each other’s research and interpretative methodologies, perpetually begging the question in that no one has moved an inch closer to locating any actual person named Jesus. I find this remarkable, if not scandalous. They could as justly assume the scholarly task of determining if Santa Claus always wore the red suit and if only eight reindeer could have pulled the sleigh. Locating the historical Jesus in the Gospels is like deducing the sex appeal of Cleopatra from analysis of the character played by Liz Taylor. Jesus questers are scholars of skimpy assumptions no less than Darwinian biologists I dissect in Part II of this book.

If Jesus existed, who, or rather what he was is anybody’s guess. Some speculate that he was a wise rabbi or peasant rebel living roughly at the time scholars have settled on. At the other extreme, some argue that since Jesus proclaimed the imminent end of the world, which of course never happened, perhaps he was a fraud (like end-of-the-world cult leaders today), or at least a failed prophet, and therefore not a legitimate “messiah,” certainly not a god or God. Scholars who pontificate about the eschatology of Jesus being spiritual rather than literal have neither addressed the fact that the biblical Jesus himself considered the imminent end of the world to be a literal fact nor proven that Jesus ever existed. Even if Jesus had been an actual person, the Jesus of the Bible is not that person. The Jesus of the Bible is the protagonist of a story that has been created, edited, and recreated into the fiction we now have. Even if that fiction was based on seminal facts about an actual person, we have no way to know that or even to assume that. All we have is the fragmented Jesus material known as the Gospels, a miscellany of references to Jesus in other New Testament books, and a few inadmissible artifacts. What we have is literature. The Jesus Literature Whether an actual teacher named Jesus existed or not, the biblical Jesus is simply a literary character, like King Arthur of the Round Table, like the gods and goddesses and heroes of ancient Greece or Rome, like the George Washington who chopped down the cherry tree of American legend—a fabricated fiction, it should be noted, inserted into the fifth edition (1806) of The Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington by Mason Locke Weems, aka Parson Weems, an Anglican clergyman and itinerant book hawker for the publisher Mathew Carey. Though perhaps modeled on some actual person or persons, the character Jesus of the written texts was created, just like other gods, goddesses, and heroes, by some imaginative literary writer or writers. Only some of the uneducated masses, the “children” of society, believed in those obvious fictions about gods and goddesses and heroes handed down via oral tradition and then written down by poets, dramatists, philosophers, and historians. Some of those

myths, like Apuleius’s Psyche and Cupid, were creative writing that never pretended to be literally true. Apuleius ends his tale, “So all came to a most happy end. Love and the Soul (for that is what Psyche means) [parenthesis his] had sought and after sore trials had found each other; and that union could never be broken.” The story of Jesus bears a striking similarity to the story of his contemporary Galilean, the Pythagorean teacher Appolonius of Tyana. Like Jesus, he was a divine incarnation; like Jesus his miraculous conception was announced before his birth; like Jesus he possessed in childhood the wisdom of a sage; like Jesus he is said to have led a blameless life; like Jesus his moral teachings were declared to be the best the world had known; like Jesus he remained a celibate; like Jesus he was averse to riches; like Jesus he purified the religious temples; like Jesus he predicted future events; like Jesus he performed miracles, cast out devils, healed the sick, and restored the dead to life; like Jesus he died, rose from the grave, ascended to heaven, and was worshiped as a god. Christians reject the miraculous in Apollonius because it is preposterous; rationalists reject the miraculous in Christ for the same reason. Motivations to create Jesus/Apollonius fictions are similar to motivations to perpetuate the fiction of Santa Claus or Zeus or cherry-tree George or any other myth, legend, or folktale. Instead of trying to prove the historical truth of myths, legends, and folktales, or pursuing some provable tidbit of source material as if it were the Grail, wouldn’t it be more productive to examine our perfectly rational reasons for creating religious fictions and our non-rational motives for perpetuating them as historical truths? Once we wipe away the whitewash, we can more fully appreciate the ethical and spiritual insights of the Jesus literature, just as we appreciate the writings of Sophocles and Shakespeare, Homer and Dante, Tolkien and George Bernard Shaw. Like many creative writers throughout the ages, the creators of the Jesus/Apollonius fictions borrowed from prior sources. To some extent, borrowing from other texts is part of the tradition of creative writing. Without literary cherry-picking, very little of the canon of narrative literature would exist. There would be almost no Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer, almost no Greek or Roman drama

or epic, almost no Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu, or Buddhist scripture. Great literature surpasses history like the quest of the human spirit transcends the treadmill of day-to-day survival. Literature always embodies symbolism, meaning, and representation even when it incorporates facts. Religion is a genre of literature, and as such, the scholar must consider the creative intentions that generated the religion. Certainly in many of its details and in the scope of its symbolic intent, the Jesus myth retains conspicuous features derived from far more ancient Greco-Roman, Middle-Eastern, and other regional myths that circulated along trade routes. There is virtually no element of Jesus’ life, teachings, divine incarnation, death, and resurrection that were not also present entirely or in large part in myths of Krishna, Buddha, Zoroaster, Mithra, Osiris, Horus, and a host of other gods, goddesses, and prophets. The Eucharist continued Bacchanalian and Eleusinian feasts suppressed by the Roman government. Christmas continued the Saturnalia and other pagan holidays. Angels, devils, incarnate semi-human sons and daughters, wizard-prophets, magicians, and other supernatural beings were present in virtually every religion of the East and West. One could easily imagine a Jesus-religion arising from a myth created by a single ingenious Homer able to amalgamate circulating versions of myths, parables, fables, legends, and wisdom-sayings into one relatively cohesive wise-man or god-man hero. Even if the story was not generated as a single literary work, the stories that propelled the original Jesus-religion evolved into monolithic Christianity not because an actual historical Jesus existed, but because a compelling Jesus myth gripped the imaginations of people for whom fear required mitigation, injustice demanded restitution, and collectively concurrent rectitude merited enshrinement in legends, parables, and wise sayings. It’s easy to understand the emotional evolution from appreciation of a story to reverence of God’s man to worship of a god-man as God—a creative, archetypal evolution present in a multitude of religious and other literary traditions. Fantasy representations in literature allow us to explore possibilities of transcendental realities, like soul, karma,

divine intervention, and the afterlife, and to creatively contemplate good and evil. Even believers in an actual historical Jesus must still quote him the way we would quote the Virgil of The Inferno, or perhaps the way we quote Plato’s Socrates; we should not quote Jesus as if he is God or the Bible is God. Why does this deification of Jesus and the Bible continue even among scholars who know better? Driving religion is humanity’s insatiable quest for truth, meaning, purpose, and everlasting life with the Creator of life. Who are we? How did we get here? Why are we here? Where are we going? Deep philosophical questions propel religion, even more than does fear, that great archenemy of rational reflection. Literary Tradition of Philosophizing Assessing whether Aristotle sported a beard, the badge of the philosopher’s profession, or whether he shaved, as an ancient biographer noted, Jonathan Barnes points out in The Cambridge Companion of Aristotle that “ancient biographies are not cordon blue concoctions of fact—they are crude stews, the rare gobbets of fact swimming in a sauce of dubious inference and unreliable anecdote… we know very little about [Aristotle’s] body and very little about his soul.” We do, however, know that Aristotle lived and wrote, because he left behind an immense body of work (though less than a third of his opus survives intact), because a host of prominent people traveled to his Lyceum to learn from him, because he was a prominent figure in other notable lives—he was Alexander the Great’s tutor, for instance—and because he and his work were referenced in works written by his peers and students and by a multitude of philosophers and students in the years and decades following his death. Official government records of the era also validate his historical existence. Even the writings that do survive are likely not Aristotle’s published works, which were known throughout the region to be literary and eloquent; the surviving works read more like his working drafts and lecture notes. Even so, Aristotle’s influence on philosophy is second to none. What we do know from a great deal of valid evidence is that Aristotle himself lectured and wrote in Athens and

elsewhere, and we do have proof of that from the era in which he lived. Perhaps more importantly, Aristotle’s thought gripped the imaginations of a host of the world’s greatest thinkers and changed forever the way we think and the objects of our thoughts. A generation earlier, Plato, Aristotle’s teacher, also taught and wrote, and it appears that all his writing has survived. Plato’s texts present other problems. We don’t know exactly in what order he wrote his works; we aren’t sure about the authorship of a few works, though all his major and most of his minor works are certain; and most challenging, we can’t know the accuracy of his dialogues, which involve real people but were written years or decades after the supposed discussions took place, or which use real people as characters through which he articulates his own philosophy. Scholars usually divide his work into three groupings, but because Plato didn’t begin writing until after Socrates’ death, even his early dialogues with Socrates as the central figure are far from literally accurate. We suppose that Plato made every effort in the early works to convey the actual words and positions of his teacher, who himself wrote nothing. Literary analysis of Plato’s later work shows extreme shifts in both discourse style and philosophical ideas. Plato was working to produce a system of thought, but Socrates was known to have been uninterested in any such system. Plato took liberties in using the beloved and revered Socrates as the leading character in his dialogues, which are essentially closet dramas (plays meant to be read, not performed) expressing philosophical concepts via the so-called Socratic Method of Q&A rather than dramatizing events. But Plato uses mythmaking and other conventions utilized by poets and playwrights, although Plato always makes it obvious that the myths are myths. In fact, in his Republic, poets are banned for misleading the naïve masses and especially youth into thinking that the mythic representations of anthropomorphic gods are real entities and valid role-models. Misleading, of course, was and is not the goal of poets any more than it was Plato’s goal in presenting his Socrates “as is.” Although Socrates was a real person, the representation of Socrates that we get through Plato and other writers of the era is not the actual historical person Socrates—who, it should be noted, bore

a remarkable similarity to the later Jesus. Socrates became a template for many writers in the years following Plato; the character Jesus is in many respects quite similar to the Socrates prototype. The “Socratic dialogue” tradition evolved over three centuries into a genre including various discourse styles, including those employed by the gospel writers. The people reading the works of Plato and subsequent Socratic writers knew perfectly well that those representations of Socrates were just that. Some, especially the early Plato dialogues, were approximations of what Socrates said, but everyone knew that the writer of the representation had his own agenda and did not have a photographic memory regarding anything or anyone, including Socrates. Historical accuracy was not Plato’s objective. The tradition of generating creative works to represent philosophical and theological speculations dates back hundreds of years B.C.E. Literary forms like dialogue, with a Socrates-type sage at the center of the discussion, as well as myth-stories, fables, hero legends, and proverbs (or what today we might call quotable quotes), had been entrenched in Greek culture for centuries. It’s not surprising that during the first century C.E., the Jesus story, with all the typical literary trimmings, would be written by a Greek Jew. Nor is it surprising that the story caught fire. Great epics by poets like Homer and Hesiod, who didn’t originate their material but lithified it by writing it down, were commonplace artifacts in the GrecoRoman culture and psyche. In the centuries before and after the era of the Jesus story, multitudes gathered to hear recitations of the great epics and to view the great plays. Stories were a common form of entertainment. And literature—essays, dialogues, plays, poetry, proverbs, epics—were common vehicles for philosophical ideas. The famous ethics of Jesus are derived from already existing ethical ideas and systems generated by the Greeks, Romans, Persians, Jews, and earlier Assyrians and Babylonians, as well as the Chinese. Pointedly articulating ethical ideals was itself a literary genre. The originator of the Jesus story brought together common literary elements, including a variety of popular regional myths, the dialogue form with its central sage engaging in teaching and debating, proverb recitation, and archetypal motifs.

Most of the Gospels’ philosophical concepts were lifted right out of philosophical traditions of the Greeks of Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum, with some pre-Socratic morsels mixed in. From Greek speculations regarding logos and epistemology and arguments for immortality, to Greco-Jewish messianic eschatology and concepts of prophecy fulfillment—all propositions embodied by Jesus were already centuries old and widely utilized. The Gospel’s ethics fused especially Greek, Roman, and Jewish ideals, distilling from them the essence of what the creative Jesus author thought was ultimately real, good, and sensible. The presentation of the ethical essence was simple enough for the uneducated to understand, and that pedagogical style has been a major reason for the story’s perpetual appeal. Literary Representation is More Fundamental than History A literary work’s longevity is not a proof of historical authenticity or of divine providence. It is an indication of engaging form and compelling content. It’s important to study the Gospels as didactic literary works and to ask why the content of the Jesus story is still so spiritually forceful. Is Christian zeal simply the result of indoctrination, or does Jesus impart a deep message we long to hear? Does the story represent a transcendental truth we can’t always quite consciously grasp? Is the portrait of the spiritual wise man consistent with an inherent ideal? Does the philosophy represented speak to our needs and desires? In terms of civilization as a whole, all of the above. Jesus scholars know this; scholars have known this for centuries. In fact, the process of myth generation was understood by the Greeks centuries before the Jesus myth was even created. Whether it began as oral mythmaking that eventually was written down or originated as a written work that was continually revised is something we will likely never know. What we do know is that miracles and resurrection were common literary elements, not literal truths. Common sense tells us that Santa Claus won’t be driving his sleigh over our rooftops now or ever. Scholars, like children, need to grow up and start acknowledging the truth—the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Adults understand that representation is just that. Children, not adults, believe in twilight vampires, wiccan spellbinding, and Santa Claus. Children believe in a virgin-born, human baby-God. Children believe in myths, fairytales, and superstitions. Children accept that the impregnating Father is also magically the Son, and that the Son is sacrificed by the Father like an animal for unknown, inherited crimes of children—a belief perhaps easier to hold by adults who were abused as children by their fathers. Do the puerile imagination and emotion that propel the mutant Jesus religion also propel most Jesus scholars? What other explanation is there? Projection? Academic or spiritual codependency? Are scholars really searching for the man Jesus? Or are they desperately hoping against hope to locate the man-God at the center of their prefab religion? Pursuit of the man named Jesus is valid, though perhaps futile, but seeking the man to authenticate a weed-patch religion that only might have sprung up in a garden, not to mention distorting a few artifacts to establish causality, and to pervert that causality into proof of miracles, is not only morally wrong, it’s dangerous. Once Jesus was deified to certify The One True Faith, the Bible had to be deified to confirm the God Jesus. Many have documented the anti-Christ atrocities committed by the authority of the God-breathed Bible. “Even the devil can cite scripture for his purpose,” Shakespeare long ago reminded us. As his friend John Selden concluded, “Scrutamini scriptura [search the scriptures]. These two words have undone the world.” Every religion, including New Age self-help theologies, claims to have The Big Secret through which you can have and be anything you choose. To the extent that they worship the Unholy Trinity— selfishness manifested as greed and pride—those religions are false. I would go so far as to call them evil. Don’t most of us deep down believe that the center of religion must be God, the Natural God of Creation? Don’t most of us deep down believe that real worship consists of ethical behavior and gratitude centered in the God of all that is considered to be The Good? Personally, I think it’s just that simple. Complicating the matter causes doubt, anxiety, fear, and bloodbaths. Stepping outside

the simple truth leads one down the crooked path of elitism, prejudice, hate, and self-loathing. If discovering core truth is an inherently joyous occasion—and I believe it is—surely Jesus scholars are as unhappy as Darwinian atheists. Seeking truth, finding truth, accepting truth, assimilating truth—it’s all a joyous process. Perpetuating delusions must be a disappointing profession. Certainly, any version of Jesus, biblical or historical, would not recommend lying in defense of religion. Stepping Off the Jesus Merry-go-round It might seem surprising that the Jesus myth sprang up centuries after the Athenian renaissance of great rationalists like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. But contemporaries of Jesus were no more philosophical or educated than the typical citizen of ancient Greece or the average person today. Despite technological advancement, the human species itself hasn’t evolved much in the last couple millennia. People today are no more likely to prefer enlightenment to entertainment than they ever were. Even many people seeking truth shun truth that jolts them out of their comfort zone. So it makes sense that after centuries of critique, the quest for the mythvalidating historical Jesus continues on into the twenty-first century. Why does superstition prevail? In grade school we learn that the religious worldview dramatically changed with the discovery of the New World and the scientific discoveries by Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. Once the world and the universe got a whole lot bigger; once the Age of Reason rescued humanity from Dark Age constriction that followed Roman expansionism; once newlyestablished universities launched humanist challenges to the brutalities of the Inquisition and the Reformation; once the eighteenth century Enlightenment resurrected Greek reason to usurp authority from blind tradition embodied by Church and State; once civilization shucked off the shackles of religious superstition and political tyranny; once the authority of rational inquiry into the laws of nature displaced divine revelation, we just naturally stepped into the far more evolved worldview, Deism. By “we” I mean, of course, a few humanists in history books juxtaposed alongside your average Jack and Jill and the usual dictators, aristocrats, oligarchs, and instigators

of war and exploitation who have cloaked themselves in the robes of any available religion—Christianity, Judaism, Islam, capitalism. Fusion of Church and State is still the world’s most dangerous fuse. There had always been a better way, but Deists mainstreamed enlightenment. Borrowing from the Greco-Roman philosophy, Deism posited a supremely rational Creator God whose Creation was structured upon inviolable laws available to anyone’s inspection. Humanist ethical principles inherent in nature promoted a more progressive, humane society. Seventeenth century British and French Deists paved the way to concerted biblical criticism with their critique of divine revelation and miracles. British philosopher Edward Herbert, the Father of Deism, presented the first fleshed-out system of Deist thought early in the seventeenth century. Herbert’s seminal works on the nature of truth, the bedrock of Deism, include De Veritate (On Truth), De Causis Errorum (On the Causes of Errors), De Religione Laici (On the Religion of the Laity), De Religione Gentilium (On the Religion of the Gentiles), and his Autobiography. In his treatises, Herbert proposes that all humans since the beginning of time have held five innate, God-given religious ideas: belief in God, in the need for worship, in virtue as the ultimate form of worship, in the need for repentance, and in rewards and punishments in the afterlife. How these five concepts expressed as private beliefs and the fundamental beliefs of institutionalized religions determined whether the religion would be humane or barbarous. Subsequent Deist thinkers—the list includes Charles Blount, John Toland, Anthony Collins, Conyers Middleton, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Chubb, Thomas Woolston, Voltaire, Hermann Samuel Reimarus, Elihu Palmer, and Thomas Paine—modified and expanded Herbert’s ideas. Considerations by skeptics like Montaigne, Pierre Bayle, Montesquieu, and many other freethinking philosophers and poets further legitimized Deism. Though some Deists and political philosophers such as John Locke argued that Deism need not contradict basic Christian beliefs, conservative Christianity begged to differ, and seeing it a grave threat, set about discrediting Deism, deeming it unorthodox, if not

heretical. Though equated with paganism, the intelligent, progressive naturalistic theology quickly spread. Skepticism toward the Gospels gave rise to the historical-critical method of evaluating the validity or non-validity of biblical texts. In his book published in 1738, British Deist Thomas Chubb presented the intractable Jesus as a Deist sage of reason and natural religion. Challenging the status quo like many thinkers before him, Enlightenment Deist Hermann Samuel Reimarus applied the scientific method even to biblical texts and to Jesus himself and announced the important distinction between the Jesus presented in the Gospels and Jesus as an actual historical person. Although Reimarus disputed miracles and the resurrection, rather than reject Jesus altogether, he proposed that the very human Jesus was wrong in assuming the coming kingdom of God through military force that would establish him as Messiah, and that therefore Jesus was misguided in his urgent call to repentance on the brink of the end of the world—the so-called eschatological worldview. After his death, Jesus’ loyal disciples were forced to perpetuate the fraud of a divine savior of the world to ensure that the ethical and spiritual teachings of their beloved rabbi would thrive. Reimarus pointed out that history did not control doctrine, but that doctrine created history, therefore both history and doctrine were fallacious. Reimarus’s critique is credited with initiating the quest for the historical Jesus. But it really got off the ground around 1835, when David Friedrich Strauss published The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. Though Strauss thought that the Jesus story could have been generated by a historical event, the miraculous elements did not arise from the historical events of Jesus’ life but rather from the faith-based worldview of the gospel writers. Not exactly outright fraud, Jesus followers unconsciously incorporated into their stories mythic elements that best represented their belief in Jesus’ divinity. The Jesus myth could not then be considered history but must rather be viewed as the spontaneous, unreflective, uncensored “sacred legend” of creative imagination. Only twenty-seven when he published his book, Strauss was spurned by academics and lost his opportunity for a promising university teaching career. In the end, after a life of ostracism while relentlessly pursuing truth, Strauss, like

many Deists, completely disavowed his Christian faith. But his unflinching, deliberate unmasking and amplification of mythic elements, such as New Testament fabrications incorporating Old Testament elements, gave rise to form criticism as a permanent methodology in subsequent Jesus studies. Strauss also introduced explicit, metacritical self-consciousness as a condition of historical studies. Because any methodology is necessarily motivated and guided by presuppositions that could lead to biased conclusions, reason and fact must supersede dogma. Bruno Bauer took Strauss’s point a step further. According to his Christ-Myth theory, Jesus was not an actual person in history; the “historical Jesus” was all myth. The First “Liberal” Quest for the Historical Jesus, spawned by Reimarus and Strauss, viewed the Gospels skeptically; no longer divinely revealed, the Gospels were now considered to be merely human witnesses to revelation that could only be understood in their original historical and cultural contexts. Jesus scholars published many portraits of Jesus as they sought to disentangle original historical elements about the human Jesus from later Church embellishments that included miracles and doctrines of Jesus’ divinity. Ironically, the Jesus portraits of the nineteenth century, such as Ernest Renan’s extremely popular Romantic-era The Life of Jesus, which portrayed the human Jesus as a great moral teacher, were as steeped as the Gospels themselves in interpretative fictional embellishments. Some scholars argued that Jesus escaped the crucifixion, got married to Mary Magdalene, and had kids and grandkids. Some claimed to have found the bones of Jesus in the Jesus family gravesite. In some accounts, he traveled to Asia and returned a kind of Buddhist magi. Some “proved” that Jesus was really the apostle Paul. Some scholars rejected the divinity of the just-human Jesus; some rejected his humanity altogether. Ironically, Jesus scholars themselves serve to illustrate the point that people unrestrainedly elaborate or concoct details to create fictions that embody their presuppositions, all the while believing that they are representing the truth. It is this tendency to creatively adlib that Deist rationalism has always critiqued.

Source criticism emerged to pump up some historical credibility for the Gospels deflated under the pressure of skepticism. Because the Gospels were mutually contradictory, source critics posited a two-source solution to the “synoptic problem.” Mark, in their view the earliest Gospel, and a second source, Q (from the German Quelle, meaning source), which is not a tangible text but just a speculative abstraction, together provided the source material for Matthew and Luke. The John material, being qualitatively different from the other Gospels, presented its own set of problems. Scholars of the era decided that Mark was the earliest written gospel, an opinion of convenience still widely held today. The agenda of Mark and subsequent gospels was to pass on traditions from oral preaching, which meant that although there were specific writers, there were many contributors to the oral tradition leading to the written versions. Furthermore, the oral tradition, which perpetuated after-the-fact faith-claims, did not necessarily include much or any accurate historical information about Jesus. The sequence of events in the Gospel narratives were also arranged differently, included contradictory information, and presented conflicting and subjective portraits of Jesus and his message that included assumptions of an imminent end of the world that didn’t happen. Albert Schweitzer accused Jesus scholars of projecting what they wanted the Gospels to be into their interpretations, creating their God in their own image. Following the lead of Johannes Weiss, Schweitzer portrayed Jesus as a liberal social reformer and teacher of love who was swept up in the end-times fervor, and who, in the end, believed that his own suffering was pivotal to the culmination of this world. Because Jesus predicted an end of the world that never happened, he was a failed apocalyptic prophet, but we can still embrace his message of love even as we reject the obsolete Jewish end-times worldview. Scholars like Rudolph Bultmann, attempting to demythologize the Gospels, concluded that the historical Jesus could not be excavated and that it didn’t matter because the “Christ of faith” was more important than the “Jesus of history.” Being a Lutheran, he privileged Luther’s privileging of Paul’s salvation by grace through faith

accomplished through Jesus’ death and resurrection. Martin Kähler raised a theological objection to the quest, arguing that all the various historical Jesuses concealed the living Christ. Following World War I, Neo-orthodox scholars like Karl Barth and Paul Tillich maintained a reserved stance toward the historical questing. After the First Quest petered out in the nineteenth century, the Second Quest for the Historical Jesus reconvened in Germany after World War II. (One might think of its impetus as the Quest for a Redeemer of Edenic German reason and tradition fallen under the satanic spell of nationalized Nazi-Christianity.) The seminal theoretical concept was that whoever and whatever the historical Jesus was, and as little as we can excavate about him from the Gospels, a person named Jesus was important enough that his followers told and wrote stories about him. Of course, the same could be said about any god or legendary hero or about any of the great myths, epics, and philosophical dialogues spontaneously generated the world over; in fact, the same could be said for urban myths and legends and ordinary gossip. Even minor literary characters can take on a life of their own via the creative imagination of good storytellers—and few of us human beings aren’t good storytellers. Scholars began to apply the rules of historicity as they systematically sieved the Gospels to uncover some authentic morsel of Jesus data. They advanced the rule of “discontinuity,” the principle that assumed that when the Gospel Jesus did or said something that differed from prior Jewish tradition or later Church teaching, those elements are likely authentic—although the writers’ tradition was Greek, and later teaching was, well, later. Scholars reasoned that the Jesus tradition must have arisen from a unique, memorable, compelling personality. Of course, literature is steeped in fictional characters that are unique, memorable, and compelling, so discontinuity doesn’t really indicate historical accuracy. Other scholars thought Jesus was better understood not as an exception to but as a product of Jewish culture, and their portraits privileged that assumption. But again, the Gospel writers were products of Greek culture.

Even seeking to reconstruct a plausible Jesus based on occurrences and events that typify his teachings and conduct, these scholars engage in the same Jesus-mythmaking process as the generators of the myth itself; the Quest movement itself exemplifies the process by which the Jesus myth evolved. Looking even outside the canon for continuities that best represent a plausible portrait of Jesus, the Third Quest is plagued by their generation’s multitude of possible portraits, none of them substantially plausible. Attempting to purify the quest with a more rigorous historical methodology, the scholarly conclusion remains that “Jesus is inaccessible by historical means,” as William Hamilton put it succinctly. Amazingly, the resolution to this problem is, as William Arnal sums it up, “The historical Jesus does not matter…The Jesus who is important to our day is not the Jesus of history, but the symbolic Jesus of contemporary discourse.” The quest for the historical Jesus is theologically unnecessary. Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner commented, “And since when do matters of fact have any bearing on the truths of faith?” Scholars today, like those belonging to the Jesus Seminar, grapple with the obvious problem of their own subjectivity while groping toward every tenuous mirage that might miraculously materialize into concrete reality. All of their approaches smack of rationalized justification. “Multiple independent attestation” is selfdefeating; the more the sources don’t match, the less, not the more likely they are to be authentic. “Embarrassment”? Here, too, the more embarrassingly inconsistent the less likely the authenticity. Embarrassingly “creative” stories aren’t more plausible just because they’re fantastic. Just ask any kid. “Historical plausibility”? To date, there isn’t any. “Characteristic Jesus”? What Jesus? The Possible, Improbable, Preposterous Historical Jesus For the past three centuries, numerous books have been written about the absence of an actual historical Jesus. Of course that doesn’t keep the professors from speculating; bookstores and libraries are flooded with their books advancing one or another theory of the historical Jesus. And why not? Even though Jesus

probably never existed, that doesn’t rule out the remote possibility that he did. Once they establish possibility, they can also entertain the possibility that Jesus performed miracles and that he was God, even though those scholars themselves have demonstrated those possibilities to be extremely unlikely. In fact, the possibility that there ever existed anyone remotely resembling the biblical Jesus is as improbable as the possibility that Darwinian evolution is a fact (a “fact” I deconstruct in the next four chapters). In other words, it’s almost, or even essentially, impossible. Yet seminary-trained pastors continue to preach “the risen Lord” because resurrection is possible—remotely possible, almost impossible, probably impossible, but still. A living Jesus, real or symbolic (does it really matter?), is good for us. The Christian elite—seminary trained pastors, professors, theologians, Christian writers—only admit the possibility that Jesus existed because they can. Academia respectfully grants them this license. As improbable as they know the historical Jesus to be, as far removed as that Jesus must be from the Gospel representation, the Christian elite perpetuate the Santa myth as fact. Whoops. Did I say Santa? But really, doesn’t the Christian elite continue the traditional myth because they think we “children” can’t handle the truth and can benefit from the fiction? Didn’t the tradition likely arise in the first place to entice the hope that good behavior would result in gifts and bad behavior in a lump of coal (hell, or worse, extinction)? Or perhaps it alleviates the fear of death. Some Jesus scholars have called the perpetuation of the possibility of a historical Jesus embarrassing. More pointedly, it’s insulting at best, dishonest at worst. Like Darwinians, Christians hang their hats on the flimsy hook of astronomically remote possibility. It’s possible or it’s probable. Or it’s improbable. In academia, you’re not supposed to call a colleague’s theory strictly impossible; the moon could be made of blue cheese, mushrooms could mutate into muskrats, humans could evolve from bacteria. Probable, possible, improbable, a drug trip—those are the choices offered by

the methodology of responsible history, of good science, of cordial theorizing. But do these choices suffice? In the spirit of intellectual rectitude, I’d like to add a new option to the list: Preposterous. (I prefer impossible, but I’ll settle for preposterous.) I’m sure many Jesus scholars have considered this concept before, but the keepers of the keys of the kingdom suppress (or repress) this antidote to ignorance to save their jobs in the ministry or seminary, or to maintain academic politeness among the peers they must cite, or to protect the gullible “children” of the world, or to prevent civilization from chucking traditional values for the slippery slope joyride to barbarism, or to exploit the passive sheep, or to enhance their own power, or to honor the traditions of their ancestors, or to explain an ineffable numinous experience, or to shore up their own fears and righteous indignation, or to mummify the prophets of their area of expertise—but why go on? In the quest for truth, the claim preposterous trumps presumptuous propaganda. A Case Study: A Spiritual Manifesto In 1862, three years after Darwin’s The Origin of Species shocked the British Empire, an Anglican mathematician and the Bishop of Natal in South Africa, John William Colenso, D.D., published a work of biblical criticism far more disturbing than Darwin’s ape. The dust stirred up by Chubb, Reimarus, Strauss, and other scholarly troublemakers had been quietly swept under the academic carpet, but the timing of Colenso’s courageous commentary, prefaced with confessions of doubt, juxtaposed against Darwin’s cocky convictions triggered an uproar that couldn’t quite be squelched. Allow me to crank up the amplifier. The controversy began when Colenso’s pious intention to translate the Bible into Zulu led him to closely examine the text word by word. By the time he completed the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua, he realized that the Bible was neither scientifically nor historically accurate, and felt it was his duty to systematically present his findings. By today’s standards, the thesis of this first of his books seems quite tame: “proving the unhistorical character, the later origin, and the compound authorship, of the five books usually

attributed to Moses.” Because Colenso “desired to place, in a clear and intelligible form, before the eyes of the general reader, the main arguments which have been advanced,” and published his writings in a book available not just to scholars but to every believer, all Christendom reeled under the weight of the truth. Though most people today (other than lit. and religion majors) have never heard of John William Colenso, his spirit still haunts the alleys and cafes of Main Street. Many of us can “relate” to Colenso’s spiritual crisis if not the indignant accusations of heresy and insanity and worse launched by both his academic peers and threatened laymen. Despite his genuine humility, Colenso boldly asserted that religious belief should not conflict with historical scholarship or scientific fact or be shackled to outdated myths and superstitions. For his honest insights regarding the historical “forgery” and logical absurdity of the Old Testament, plus his opposition to the doctrine of eternal punishment and his toleration of polygamy among the Zulus, Colenso was tried for heresy, deposed as bishop, and excommunicated by his superior in Cape Town; later he was reinstated by the church Privy Council in England due to a legal technicality; later still he was deposed again, this time by the English bishops. Nonetheless, Colenso continued in his post, ministering to his dwindling congregation, and there wrote commentaries, a New Testament translation in Zulu, a grammar, and a dictionary. The forthright self-scrutiny Colenso includes in the Preface to his book is worth reexamining for three important reasons: His indictment of his own conscious sidestepping of the truth gives notice to scholars still lying today; his description of submitting to the truth encourages believers undergoing the same process; and although he probably wouldn’t think to call himself a Deist, Colenso’s fundamental belief is decidedly Deist: “The Law of Truth must be obeyed.” He writes, Engrossed with parochial and other work in England, I did what, probably, many other clergymen have done under similar circumstances,—I contented myself with silencing, by means of the specious explanations, which are given in most commentaries, the ordinary objections against the historical character of the early portions of the Old Testament, and

settled down into a willing acquiescence in the general truth of the narrative, whatever difficulties might still hang about particular parts of it. In short, the doctrinal and devotional portions of the Bible were what were needed most in parochial duty. And, if a passage of the Old Testament formed at any time the subject of a sermon, it was easy to draw from it practical lessons of daily life, without examining closely into the historical truth of the narrative...But, on the whole, I found so much of Divine Light and Life in those and other parts of the Sacred Book, so much wherewith to feed my own soul and the souls of others, that I was content to take all this for granted, as being true in the main, however wonderful [fanciful], and as being at least capable, in an extreme case, of some sufficient explanation. Here, however, as I have said, amidst my work in this land, I have been brought face to face with the very questions which I then put by. While translating the story of the Flood, I have had a simple-minded, but intelligent, native,—one with the docility of a child, but the reasoning powers of mature age,—look up, and ask, “Is all that true? Do you really believe that all this happened thus,—that all the beasts, and birds, and creeping things, upon the earth, large and small, from hot countries and cold, came thus by pairs, and entered into the ark with Noah? And did Noah gather food for them all, for the beasts and birds of prey, as well as the rest?” My heart answered in the words of the Prophet, “Shall a man speak lies in the name of the LORD?” Zech. xiii.3. I dared not do so. My own knowledge of some branches of science, of Geology in particular, had been much increased since I left England; and I now knew for certain, on geological grounds, a fact, of which I had only had misgivings before, viz. that a Universal Deluge, such as the Bible manifestly speaks of, could not possibly have taken place in the way described in the Book of Genesis, not to mention other difficulties which the story contains...Knowing this, I felt that I dared not, as a servant of the God of Truth, urge my brother man to believe that, which I did not myself believe, which I knew to be untrue, as a matter-of-fact, historical,

narrative. I gave him, however, such a reply as satisfied him for the time, without throwing any discredit upon the general veracity of the Bible history. But I was thus driven,—against my will at first, I may truly say, —to search more deeply into these questions; and I have since done so, to the best of my power, with the means at my disposal in this colony. And now I tremble at the result of my enquiries,—rather, I should do so, were it not that I believe firmly in a God of Righteousness and Truth and Love, who both “IS, and is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.” Should all else give way beneath me, I feel that His Everlasting Arms are still under me. I am sure that the solid ground is there, on which my feet can rest, in the knowledge of Him, “in whom I live, and move, and have my being,” who is my “faithful Creator,” my “Almighty and most Merciful Father.” That Truth I see with my spirit’s eyes, once opened to the light of it, as plainly as I see the Sun in the heavens. And that Truth, I know, more or less distinctly apprehended, has been the food of living men, the strength of brave souls that “yearn for light,” and battle for the right and the true, the support of struggling and sorrow-stricken hearts, in all ages of the world, in all climes, under all religions... Our duty, surely, is to follow the Truth, wherever it leads us, and to leave the consequences in the hands of God…After reading that article [by Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg on the Pentateuch, which deliberately dismisses biblical discrepancies and opposes the historical-critical method], I [Colenso] felt more hopelessly than ever how hollow is the ground upon which we have so long been standing, with reference to the subject of the Inspiration of Scripture. I see that there is a very general demand made upon the clerical authors of “Essays and Reviews,” that they should leave the Church of England, or, at least, resign their preferments. For my own part, however much I may dissent, as I do, from some of their views, I am very far indeed from judging them for remaining, as they still do, as ministers within her pale,—knowing too well, by my own

feelings, how dreadful would be the wrench, to be torn from all one has loved and revered, by going out of the Church. Perhaps, they may in time feel it to be their duty to the Church itself, and to that which they hold to be the Truth, to abide in their stations, unless they are formally and legally excluded from them, and to claim for all her members, clerical as well as lay, that freedom of thought and utterance, which is the very essence of our Protestant religion, and without which, indeed, in this age of advancing science, the Church of England would soon become a mere dark prison-house, in which the mind both of the teacher and the taught would be fettered still with the chains of past ignorance, instead of being, as we fondly believed, the very home of religious liberty, and the centre of life and light for all the land. In my view, John Colenso is one of Deism’s great spiritual heroes, even though he never ceased being, in a sense, a Christian, and a Christian priest at that. He was beginning to understand what many believers of his era were beginning to understand, but unlike most scholars and believers then and today, Colenso was honest in his insights, doubts, and skepticism. Well over a century after Colenso wrote his popular books, we have, even in democratic America, aggressive challenges to religious liberty and God-given common sense from far-right fundamentalists, from dominionists, from TV evangelists, from the Tea Party, from self-righteous wannabe spiritual dictators like Rick Santorum and Sarah Palin. There’s a good reason why Jesus called the devil “the father of lies.” The lie is the real root of all evil. The Deist position remains quite clear: Preposterous religion denigrates truth and defaces God. Our agenda today is centuries old: Stop lying. “The Law of Truth must be obeyed,” Colenso proclaimed. Now that would bring salvation. Coda: The End is the Beginning For some of us, Colenso’s confession of doubt resounds like a mighty bell calling us to join the congregation of Truth. Relinquishing our cherished assumptions might sting like a painful divorce, might

pinch like outgrowing an old friend with whom we still share fond memories and to whom we owe a debt of gratitude for helping us become who we are. But the aches of growing up, of crossing those thresholds that mark life’s shifts into higher paradigms of ourselves— even those sometimes excruciating pangs register catalysts that only hurt as we pass through them. Who doesn’t want to grow up? What adult still needs Santa Claus, or spiritual codependence? Maturity requires a little suffering, or a lot, but if the midwife causes pain, it’s to hand us the joy of new life— our life. I know very intimately what relinquishment feels like. Leaving your religion can feel like a death, but it’s only a death that brings you to your senses—to the reality of yourself, your wiser Self, and to a transcending knowledge of the reality of God as God. We are perpetually dying in order to live. In fact, death is life, is perpetually new life. And we humans are built to know this, which is so amazing it’s exciting. If you really think about it, death as life is an extraordinary paradox. Resurrection didn’t happen to one man in one place at one moment in history. Resurrection is everlasting. Imagine: Every moment dies, and in each departing moment a part of you “dies,” yet you never die—you continue on into the fullness of your constantly coherent Self coming into being. Isn’t it irresponsible to take such an intelligently designed miracle completely for granted? Certainly it’s reasonable to assume that the big Death is but another threshold, just another paradigm shift into the better angels of ourselves. Understanding death as life alleviates fear of Death in its myriad incarnations and defuses the fallout of that fear. John William Colenso, like many soul-searchers throughout the ages, like me, like you perhaps, understood the necessity of embracing reality in spite of. Living in a fiction has its perks. But Truth is the source of genuine happiness, regardless of the pain it takes to get there. The reality of God is the ultimate source of joy. What is joy really but the experience of being truly alive in your authentic Being, as your most real and true Self in relationship with

the literally real and true God? Isn’t that the religion we’re all searching for?  



 

PART II The Intelligent Design Shuffle



 

Chapter 4 The Origin and Evolution of Charles Darwin Sometimes even respected scholars forget that theories aren’t sacred tomes from heaven crashing on consecrated heads of prophets sitting under Bodhi trees. Theories might seem to spring full-grown like Athena from the head of Zeus, hence the mythic representation. But in truth, theories sprout in the brains of ordinary humans whose thoughts reverberate with mix-and-match thoughts of other humans, multitudes of humans, entire milieus of humans: Even the thoughts of the dead pace and chatter in the brains of the living. Theories aren’t facts. Synonyms of theory include: hypothesis, supposition, conjecture, speculation, premise, presumption, guess. A theory is an opinion, a belief. It’s common sense that theories need to be weeded and the best cultivated and hybridized. But because theories are often steeped in agendas that relegate reason, brilliant deductions can flare and fizzle while absurdities infest and mutate like a plague for millennia. Theories are thoughts evolving. A theory gets a name once it gels in a brain capable of transcribing it into published words that make enough sense that the theory’s name stands for something recognizable, even if only vaguely understood: How many people really understand Einstein’s E=mc ²? How many people can accurately define Darwinian evolution? Theories evolve, and so do the brains that devise them. Because the official theory of evolution emerged from Darwin’s evolving brain, and because that theory remains controversial, it’s fair, perhaps even essential, to assess Darwin the theory in light of Darwin the man. Darwinians, of course, as much as they revere evolution, prefer to assert Darwinism as a not-evolving absolute fact, and they certainly don’t want you to know that The Autobiography of Charles Darwin

candidly reveals that Charles Darwin did indeed evolve, and even devolve—though using a different term, Darwin referred to it as the atrophy of faculties beginning early in adulthood. The term “evolve,” of course, means many things. It means change; it means grow up; it indicates macroevolution, and microevolution, and the current demand to distinguish between the two. For Darwin, even the term itself evolved: In the first edition of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle For Life, published in 1859, he uses only forms of the word “descent” rather than “evolution.” Not until the sixth edition, published in 1872, does he use the word evolution. Most people aren’t taught that the theory of evolution via natural selection was not a Darwin original. Darwin, being at the right place at the right time in the right income bracket, was naturally selected by his peers to be the prophet to facilitate the theory’s evolution into “fact.” The basis of this so-called fact has always been challenged, even by Darwin himself. The self-avowed inadequacies in Darwin’s personal evolution over the course of his lifetime perhaps reveal more about the insufficiencies of his theory than does the theory itself. That Darwin would be the fittest to survive the race to the title Father of Evolution probably could not have been predicted early on. Far from being a child prodigy, Darwin admits, “I was considered by all my masters and by my father as a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect.” He did, however, master the fine art of telling tall tales and spreading false rumors. Though morally disgusted by the failures of amateur con artists, he appreciated the talent of skilled hoodwinkers—unless he himself was a victim. He takes considerable time in his Autobiography to describe several notorious scientific hoaxes, which interested him immensely, and chuckles at some of his own juvenile successes. Darwin maintained that even as an adult he was not a superior thinker. “I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men, for instance, Huxley,” referring to Thomas Henry Huxley, his great friend and his theory’s greatest

advocate, for which Huxley was nicknamed “Darwin’s Bulldog.” Lacking the acute, quick perception of his intelligent friends, Darwin tells us, “I am therefore a poor critic: a paper or book, when first read, generally excites my admiration, and it is only after considerable reflection that I perceive the weak points. My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited; and therefore I could never have succeeded with metaphysics or mathematics.” Since Darwin was a poor critic of the works of others, we could justly ask whether we should trust his objective, critical evaluation of his own work, especially given that The Origin of Species was researched and written and rewritten over the course of twenty-plus years, during which time he was often unable to work due to illness —and written while he worked concurrently on other projects, which could well have been confusing. The only reason he published the Origin at all was that his peer, Alfred Russel Wallace, had already just publicly announced his own discovery of the principle of natural selection. In truth, the theory that eventually became known as evolution had been explored by many other scientists of the era and earlier. Darwin notes some of those scientists and other thinkers in the introduction to the sixth edition of the Origin, though in the Autobiography he brusquely stakes his claim to originality. (Ironically, Wallace, an accomplished naturalist and a theist who believed the spirit survived after death, would be one of the pallbearers that would carry Darwin not to his family plot in the local churchyard where he wanted to be buried, but to Scientists’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.) In an era when science was exploding with new discoveries and information, not to mention ensuing controversies, but that had no computers or typewriters, surely the long-term, drawn-out composition of the Origin would require a sharp memory and data filing system. But Darwin confesses, “My memory is extensive, yet hazy: it suffices to make me cautious by vaguely telling me that I have observed or read something opposed to the conclusion which I am drawing, or on the other hand in favour of it; and after a time I can generally recollect where to search for my authority. So poor in one sense is my memory, that I have never been able to remember for more than a few days a single date or a line of poetry.”

His confession of poor memory alone recommends our caution as we consider the validity of his monumental theory, especially since it is enormously dependent on research data. Commenting on his critics who complained that “he is a good observer, but he has no power of reasoning,” Darwin notes that his book, “one long argument,” has convinced more than a few illustrious scientists, proving to him that he has at least some power of reasoning. Yet again he admits, “I have a fair share of invention, and of common sense or judgment, such as every fairly successful lawyer or doctor must have, but not, I believe, in any higher degree…With such moderate abilities as I possess, it is truly surprising that I should have influenced to a considerable extent the belief of scientific men on some important points.” Darwin’s Ambition/Competition Inherited by Natural Selection Perhaps Darwin’s ambition more than anything else accounts for his success. It certainly explains his rush to publish the Origin—after twenty years, still in progress—once Wallace arrived on the scene. It is also conceivable that the central role of survival-of-the-fittest competition in his theory of natural selection was a projection of his own ambitious nature. Though he doubted his intellectual agility, he considered his talent for observation and collection of facts to be superior, and his love of natural science, “steady and ardent.” One might conclude that he was a natural naturalist, but by his own admission, his love of nature was “much aided by the ambition to be esteemed by my fellow naturalists.” While at Cambridge, his reading of a couple books by naturalists “stirred up in me a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science.” During his famous voyage on the HMS Beagle, he worked not only from the pleasure of investigation, but also from his “strong desire to add a few facts to the great mass of facts in Natural Science…I was also ambitious to take a fair place among scientific men.” Some of the letters he wrote to a friend during the voyage were read and copies distributed among members of the Philosophical Society of Cambridge, and the fossil collection he sent along was examined by paleontologists. When he learned from a

return letter that one of his mentors, Professor Adam Sedgwick, had noted that Darwin could become an important man of science, the young Charles “clambered over the mountains of Ascension with a bounding step, and made the volcanic rocks resound under my geological hammer. All this shows how ambitious I was.” Darwin well knew that his one shot at an important contribution would only be his theory of natural selection. Despite his own grave doubts, by the time the Origin was published and barked by his Bulldog, Darwin was fully invested, if not in his theory’s validity, then in the need for it to be valid and true, or at least highly esteemed. That need itself evolved. Early on, Darwin was less than intellectually inclined. Ambitious as he was, his years at Cambridge were, in his words, a waste of time. He pursued only what interested him, and his academic interests were quite limited and his performance well below par. He hired a tutor and slogged his way through enough algebra to pass the required course for his B.A.; geometry he found more interesting. But in his Classics course, he “did nothing except attend a few compulsory college lectures.” The only schoolwork he considered to be worth his time was his careful study of arguments William Paley presented in A View of the Evidence of Christianity and The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, as well as Natural Theology, a work based on the seventeenth-century work by John Ray, Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation. At this point in his life, Darwin was a religious young man, so it is not surprising that he was fully convinced by Paley’s famous watch analogy proving that Creation was clearly as intelligently designed as a watch one might stumble upon out on a heath. Paley’s proof ticked in the back of Darwin’s evolving mind for the rest of his life. Once he returned from his voyage on the Beagle, Darwin was most strongly influenced by Sir Charles Lyell, a science mentor who “was very kind-hearted, and thoroughly liberal in his religious beliefs, or rather disbeliefs; but he was a strong theist.” Perhaps more than anything else it was Lyell’s encouragement, advice, and example that most ignited Darwin’s aspiration to prove specifically a theory of origin—a topic very much in the air, and one that was sure to impress the impressive Lyell.

Despite his tendency toward self-deprecation, Darwin’s ambition fueled his vanity and triggered defensiveness toward his “original” theory of natural selection. Though his goal was to impress a few select people, he did relish the fame that came with success. Is ambition vain or humble if the writer cares not about the readers who made him famous? In Darwin’s case, perhaps a bit of both: “I think that I can say with truth that in after years, though I cared in the highest degree for the approbation of such men as Lyell and Hooker, who were my friends, I did not care much about the general public.” On the other hand, he notes that the continued public success of his first work, the Journal of Researches, which recorded his observations on volcanic islands visited during the Beagle voyage, “always tickles my vanity more than that of any of my other books.” Vain or not, the fundamental force that drove his work was desire for that high esteem among fellow naturalists that can only be attained by an important contribution to “the noble structure of Natural Science.” Darwin the Collector/Cataloguer: The Surface Data of Natural Selection Throughout his life, Darwin had a passion for three things: collecting (his obsession being beetles), dissecting, and hunting—especially hunting, or shooting, as the Brits call it. It should not be surprising that Darwin supported a scientific theory established on the principle of kill or be killed (the phrase itself coined by economist Herbert Spencer), being himself a person who enjoyed the pleasure of killing for its own sake, collecting life forms for the pleasure of displaying conquest and perfecting his own superiority, and dissecting to objectify life for the satisfaction of voyeuristic perusal. Darwin was aware of the implications of a well-developed “taste” and ardor for collecting that “leads a man to be a systematic naturalist, a virtuoso, or a miser.” But his dominant passion was shooting. He reminisces that once, to his “deep mortification,” his kindly, beloved father scolded him, “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” Darwin admits,

I do not believe that any one could have shown more zeal for the most holy cause than I did for shooting birds. How well I remember killing my first snipe, and my excitement was so great that I had much difficulty in reloading my gun from the trembling of my hands. This taste long continued, and I became a very good shot. When at Cambridge I used to practice throwing up my gun to my shoulder before a lookingglass to see that I threw it up straight. Another and better plan was to get a friend to wave about a lighted candle, and then to fire at it with a cap on the nipple, and if the aim was accurate the little puff of air would blow out the candle. The explosion of the cap caused a sharp crack, and I was told that the tutor of the college remarked, “What an extraordinary thing it is, Mr. Darwin seems to spend hours in cracking a horse-whip in his room, for I often hear the crack when I pass under his windows.” Darwin’s competitive perfectionism was so acute that he kept an exact record of each bird he shot. One time while hunting with a couple friends, each time Darwin killed a bird, one of the friends pretended to have shot the bird himself, and only hours later confessed the joke. But it was no joke to Darwin, “for I had shot a large number of birds, but did not know how many, and could not add them to my list, which I used to do by making a knot in a piece of string tied to a button-hole. This my wicked friends had perceived.” Darwin felt so ashamed of his zeal for gunning down birds that eventually he tried to persuade himself that shooting was an intellectual skill. Gradually his love of shooting succumbed to the pleasure of observing and reasoning, but not before his rich father, who worried that his son was turning into an idle sporting man, suggested that Darwin embark on a career. Darwin had already proven his distaste for medicine, which he had been studying at Edinburgh. Though not a religious man himself, Darwin’s father thought perhaps Charles might consider becoming a country clergyman. Although he liked the idea of the semi-idle life of a parson, Charles had scruples regarding some of the dogmas of the Church of England. After reading a few books on divinity, he persuaded himself that he must fully accept the

Creed. At that point, he believed wholeheartedly in the “strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible.” All was decided. Those plans, however, quickly vanished when a fresh opportunity knocked: An invitation to accompany a gentleman captain on his voyage on the HMS Beagle. The Cold-Blooded Side of Darwin/ism Given his early religious convictions, we might well believe Darwin’s claim that he was a humane boy. Yet he admits, “I owed this entirely to the instruction and example of my sisters. I doubt indeed whether humanity is a natural or innate quality.” He substantiates this startling claim with personal anecdote: “I was very fond of collecting eggs, but I never took more than a single egg out of a bird’s nest, except on one single occasion, when I took all, not for their value, but from a sort of bravado.” Yet he did always take one from each nest. Perhaps he left the rest to hatch into birds for future shooting. Coming from a shooter, his comment that he never took more than a single egg implies that this qualified him as a good boy by his sisters’ standards. Taking all the eggs as an act of bravado evidently was equivalent to sin. It’s fair to ask the future Father of Evolution how he decided which single egg to choose. Was his selection the not-fittest and therefore the one targeted for non-survival? Did that make him a pawn of the demigod, natural selection? Certainly if humanity is not innate or natural, and if the thoroughly modern Darwin considered himself and all Homo sapiens to be just animals, a position antagonistic to any form of spirituality traditionally assumed to be the source of the humane in human, Darwin the nest-bandit shooter likely tangled with Darwin the devout Christian. It’s not uncommon for a person to greatly evolve over the course of a lifetime. Ideally, personal evolution manifests the authentic inner self. But sometimes, as in Darwin’s case, personal evolution regurgitates psychic glitches in a widening loop. Discrepancies in Darwin’s theory are not surprising coming from a man whose nature accommodated rather than resolved self-contradiction. For instance, his intense passion for dogs made him “adept in robbing their love from their masters,” yet he “acted cruelly” in beating a puppy “simply

from enjoying the sense of power.” Though he says the “crime” he committed “lay heavily on my conscience,” we might assume this to be the conscience he owed “entirely to the instruction and example of [his] sisters” rather than to innate or natural humanity. What is the source of his or any boy’s sadistic power-lust? It’s easiest, of course, to blame evolution. Darwin’s autobiographical confessions highlight the dualism in his nature, which represents the schism in human nature translated into great metaphysical puzzles such as life vs. death, good vs. evil, sacred purpose vs. meaninglessness, God vs.—not, for Darwin, atheism, but natural selection, the surrogate “Christ” representing the Word (logos), the brute force of life emerging from cold material existence. Ironically, evolutionary theory justified the natural evils that horrified the still religious young Charles Darwin during his famous five-year expedition with the Beagle. The predatory nature of life, exemplified by every link of the food chain from civilized savages to the parasitic ichneumon wasp that farmed living caterpillars as food for its grubs, provided sufficient evidence against beneficent design. The paragon of animals, Homo sapiens was created in the image of no god but Animalia. Darwin observed that the “difference between savage & civilized man is.—It is greater between a wild & domesticated animal,” noting that even the civilized practiced genocide and slavery. Without rejecting God outright, where the South American jungle paradise exposed its heart of darkness, Darwin settled upon his compromise of natural selection. Only a divinely created mechanism that ran on its own steam could explain the gruesome savagery that led to extinctions of the less than fittest as the natural means of advancement. Certainly his Unitarian pedigree would have made Darwin comfortable with radical ideas of friends like Charles Babbage, inventor of the calculating machine, who viewed God as a divine programmer that had preordained life via natural law. Darwin could understand morality as the current culmination of social instincts of troop animals, could view love of deity as an effect of the brain’s structure, could accept that fierce competition and struggle up the

food chain and the heaps of dead in the wake of the victor simply conformed to mechanistic law laid down by the ultimate calculator of the universe. But what kind of God would create such a cold-blooded mechanism? And why? Darwin couldn’t say. Nor did he try. His not trying still matters. In the twenty-first century, extinction of life itself would be but the most extreme collective consequence of bowing to a radical tradition of survival of the fittest when even our own inherent faculties, like reason, conscience, and intuition, cry No! Many of us simply don’t accept that kill-or-be-killed is the fundamental mindless/purposive mechanism of nature. Isn’t mindless—or chance, or random (as neo-Darwinians put it)—and purposive—proceeding with consistent intent for a specific outcome —self-contradictory? And murder as the means of “improvement” strikes some of us as incongruous and unnatural. But extinction—as in rendering something extinct—is life, according to proponents of natural selection. Time passes; five minutes ago is dead except in our memory. Space itself is perpetual change. New technology renders the old ways extinct. Species come and go. Competition, as natural as apple pie, forces us to kill or be killed, figuratively and literally. Rights, freedoms, cultures, values, individual souls are regularly exterminated not only by ruthless dictators but also by power-mongers as conventional as corporate aristocrats and self-righteous evangelists. Survival of the fittest consecrates elite entitlement to our means of existence, physical and spiritual and everything in between. Granted, similar precepts were driving civilization long before Darwin convinced us we descended from apes. But though selfishness in the nineteenth century was not a new insight, Darwin unwittingly provided a rationale for Everyman to compete with the power players for the means to exploit. Although theoretically this leveled the battlefield, the cost was high: Humanist arguments for do unto others on grounds of conscience and reason were shredded by tooth and nail of scientific fact. God was dead, Nietzsche proclaimed. Angels evolved into animals.

From the very beginning, not everyone agreed with Darwin and his naturalist progeny, and even many scientists refused to forfeit humanist values or to sacrifice God on the altar of science. The Christian mutant, fundamentalism, emerged to thwart ape descent with even more primitive Genesism. But eventually Darwinian evolution theory mainstreamed, enforced by academia backed by law, partly in resistance to Genesist extremism but mainly because many of Darwin’s assumptions appeared to be true. Darwin pointed out, for instance, the remarkable similarities among living organisms. How true, we exclaimed, although great philosophers and ordinary people had been noting the resemblances for millennia. Beginning in the 1960s, molecular biology enormously amplified knowledge of our genetic connectedness. No scientist disputes these connections among living things. But just because we are all constructed of the same building materials and have similar features does not prove that one distinct type did or can descend from another. Even Darwin fretted, “Why, on the theory of Creation, should there be so much variety and so little real novelty?” and, “Why should similar bones have been created to form the wing and the leg of a bat, used as they are for such totally different purposes?” These cases, he lamented, are “inexplicable…on the ordinary view of creation!” He quickly realized that they certainly aren’t explained by evolution. Few doubt that distinguishable differences within a species are due to modifications in successive generations; and yes, we call this evolution. But since the time of Darwin, the theory of cross speciestype evolution—the macroevolution of one major type into another— has continued to be challenged by at least one very persuasive argument: There is no scientific evidence that individual types originated in other preexisting types, but there is massive scientific evidence that they did not. Darwin’s Flawed Research: Malthus and Population Survival Darwin’s theory of large-scale evolution was profoundly influenced by Thomas Malthus’s views on population trends, which Darwin first learned about indirectly while he was on the Beagle, by reading Malthusian pamphlets written and sent to him by his friend Harriet

Martineau. Soon after he arrived home, he read Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus believed that population increases exponentially while the means of production increases only linearly, so the population must be limited via birth control, starvation, disease, or war (for animals, predation). For Darwin, the limited means of survival created a struggle for existence through competition that led to the fittest surviving, reproducing, and gradually evolving. But Darwin, like Malthus, was wrong in assuming that populations always outpace resources. Researchers have found that populations are held in check not by starvation, disease, or predation but by intrinsic forces; there is no overarching “struggle for existence,” no natural selection that preserves the strong and destroys the weak. This doesn’t mean that there is no struggle, only that some cosmic fundamental struggle is not the core motivation for life; life is not created and sustained by a struggle for food. Even in times of catastrophe, such as extreme drought, species survive by adapting or moving on, and geneticists now know that the ability to do either is already preprogrammed in the species. During the hard times, reproduction rates adjust to the new environment. Plants, for instance, maintain equilibrium by sensing density; when growth is dense, they produce less seeds; when growth is sparse, they produce more seeds. Animals reproduce at a rate that can be accommodated by available natural resources. Plants and animals almost always stop increasing long before they exhaust their habitat. Humans, the glaring exception, who express love, hate, and a great many other things through sex, reproduce at the drop of a hat, not just “in season,” and our prolific species must choose to control our birth rate. Our population explosion is uniquely unnatural among species because our failure to choose is unnatural within our choosy species. Evidently, choice as a natural aspect of human was/is programmed by a programmer expecting us to choose. We come specially programmed with the facility—the expectation, the natural demand—to act responsibly; to act irresponsibly is unnatural. Responsible choice benefits the individual, the species, the whole planet of living beings. Responsible cooperation, not selfish

competition, is most natural for us humans, if by natural we mean contributing to survival. Evolution via Adaptation Within a Self-Contained System Darwinians are right that nonrandom small-scale evolution can occur, but it occurs when a new need arises due to a change in the organism’s behavior to adapt to a change in its environment. This isn’t a process of natural selection in the sense of survival of the fittest. Usually survival isn’t at stake; usually it’s a matter of adaptive fine tuning for the sake of convenience. Scientists have observed that rodents, for instance, sample new foods, and when they find a food they like, they continue eating that food. The whole rodent community joins in the food fest, and they pass on their preference for that food to their young. The preference is inherited culturally rather than genetically. If, let’s say, the new food is a large, hard seed, the rodent’s jaw and tooth structure abruptly change, but not due to mutation or natural selection; the whole rodent community has accommodated its new large-seed diet; it has adapted to its new environment. In rare instances when there is a need to struggle for survival, the consequence is that some survive. It’s not even necessarily the strong that survive. Usually the individual organism that best adapts survives, and yes, sometimes it’s just luck that you find that extra seed you need to stay alive. The struggle for survival is about survival, not about evolution. Survival is one thing, evolution another. Adaptation is called evolution, but because it is a nonrandom change in phenotype (meaning how you purposely change as an individual) and not a random change in genotype (meaning an accidental molecular change that is passed on genetically), it is not evolution in the Darwinian sense. In fact, many biologists today point out that the missing links in the fossil record consist solely of adapted teeth and bones, which are not links between species types at all. Nor is this evolution according to the neo-Darwinian theory of random chance mutation. As W.H. Ho and P.T. Saunders note, “It stretches credulity to imagine, for example, that the woodpecker first got a long beak from some random mutation followed by other

random mutations that made it go in search of grubs in the bark of trees.” Modern Ancient Intelligent Design: Paley’s Watch and Mendel’s Peas Although even the ancients assumed the necessity of a First Cause or Prime Mover or Creator of the universe, today’s notion of intelligent design derives from the eighteenth century phrase “argument from design” coined by William Paley, who reasoned that a very complex object must have been designed and therefore there must be a designer. It made sense to Darwin the college student that if you found a watch out on the heath, for instance, you wouldn’t assume that it had come into being by chance. Someone must have deliberately designed and constructed it as an integrated whole that performed a specific function, unlike, say, a rock, which could have resulted from natural processes and didn’t have any functional work to do. There was a time (no pun) when Darwin was impressed and fully convinced by Paley’s argument. It is common sense that if the simplest organism is far more complex than a watch (it is), an intelligent Creator must have created life. This self-evident fact had been one of the fundamental tenets of Deism since it was transplanted to Britain by Edward Herbert in the early seventeenth century. For the Deist of the late eighteenth century, Watchmaker God referred to Paley’s assumption of intelligent design, not to an absent father who wound up the universe and left it to run on its own with no child support, the intentional misinterpretation conferred upon Deism by maligning Christian critics. In order to buttress his theory of evolution, Darwin the theoryproving adult countered that the watch argument doesn’t work for living beings, because a species—like, say, pigeons—could evolve by natural means. Of course this begs the question, because Darwin and his followers have never shown how or why or that evolution by natural selection exists; a “trivial” change (as scientists call it) within a species type (a change possible because its potential is already programmed in the species’ DNA—think of it as English language

possibilities allowed by its alphabet and grammar rules) is not a macroevolution transition. Even if Darwin’s version of evolution did work, it could only work because it was designed to work. The intricate mechanism that allows any version of evolution to work—the laws of nature—must have been designed in order to consistently exist at all, not to mention as an elegant, rational entity. Existence itself, and the continued existence of existence, must have been designed. Back in Darwin’s era, science itself demonstrated that even in terms of small-scale evolution, Darwin got it wrong. He thought he understood that inherited traits would be mixed and diluted, that breeding black and white pigeons would produce gray pigeons, or pigeons with both black and white patterns; he assumed that a tall father and short mother would result in a medium sized daughter. Logically, though, blending would not cause a “going beyond” which defined macroevolution but more of a self-contained averaging out, a lessening, a diluting. On this point, Darwin’s theory was selfcontradictory. A mere six years after the original publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, Gregor Mendel reached conclusions regarding natural selection that undermined Darwin’s fundamental assumption. Mendel’s experiments showed that mixing a yellow pea and a green pea does not result in a yellowish-green pea. The offspring would be either yellow or green. The daughter of a blue-eyed father and brown-eyed mother would have either blue eyes or brown eyes, not eyes of bluish brown. Mendel’s peas made sure Darwin’s pigeon breeders didn’t stop Paley’s watch from ticking. A watch and a pigeon are both as complexly designed as two peas in a pod. So where did blue eyes come from? How does difference emerge? That’s the “mystery of mysteries,” as Darwin’s friend astronomer John Herschel put it. Even today Darwinians can’t explain how less could produce true more—a complex cell consisting of complex integrated cell stuff from a bacteria, say—or how less creates true other, like a new species type, or even a trivial difference like blue eyes. Spontaneous generation, the emergence of

life from not-life, is utterly beyond us. That mystery of mysteries alone confutes atheistic naturalism; hence Darwin’s agnosticism. For Darwin’s freethinker grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, and for other thinkers of that era, like Malthus and Paley, higher creatures evolving from lower and all from one common ancestor didn’t in any way negate, and in fact affirmed, a Creator God. But nobody could explain how evolution could exist at all in the first place. Evolution, really, is a form of natural supernatural creationism. Even if some natural mechanism could be located, where did that possibility come from? The “it just is” of neo-Darwinians is an admission that the mystery of mysteries is actually the miracle of miracles. Why not embrace the miracle of naturalism, the Deist asks. That would certainly challenge the creationism of fundamentalist myth. Nobody contests the obvious occurrence of “trivial” change within a species group—say, the human type developing blue and brown eyes. What agnostic Darwin didn’t know, and what stubbornly staunch neo-Darwinians do know, is that potential for that kind of trivial change was already programmed in that species’ DNA. Like neo-Darwinians today, Darwin was well aware of the underlying, cohesive unity of design that defined each organism type, each container (as you’ll recall from the first chapter). Extrapolation of macroevolution from microevolution is just as fallacious in Darwin’s day as it is today. Yes, pigeons can be bred for variation. And variations can be multiplied to the extent that eventually versions of the overarching type will be given, for convenience’s sake, a new species name. But breeding can’t exceed the threshold boundary of the container; you can’t breed something that escapes its container. Genetically modify wheat all you want and you might get wheat obese with new gluten protein chains but you will never get cabbage. Even if you could get cabbage it would only be because nature’s blueprint allows for such design tweaks. Any mechanism that allows for any version of evolution works because it was designed to work, and to work within a far vaster network of complementary design elements. Biologists now know that pigeons can be bred for variation because the laws of nature governing the process of breeding are “given,” and the information/instructions governing variation are

already present in the pigeon; the information/instructions needed to bring out certain traits are already encoded in the pigeon’s DNA; the latent information/instructions can be activated by environmental triggers. In other words, within the inexorable parameters of a specific structure, there is preprogrammed potential for great—but not infinite—variation. For the Deist, the wiggle room of bounded potential supports the possibility of free will and of mind existing independently of brain; it indicates a bridge between material manifestation and transcending creativity—and I’m talking about you, the spiritual creator, not God, the ultimate Spirit Creator of your potential creativity. This view is entirely anti determinist-Darwinian. We now know that Darwin was even wrong about small-scale microevolution. And he was certainly wrong in assuming that largescale macroevolution was a series of very small steps guided by natural selection—an intellectual leap that is especially strange given his assumptions about mixing for averages, a form of watering down, not creating newness. Although it’s true that mutations can result in small-scale changes, because no heritable information/instructions are added to the organism—in fact, information is almost always lost, usually resulting in degeneration and disease or even death—the process would not result in long-term, large-scale evolution. Darwin’s Flawed Research: Embryos Even though Darwinism today contradicts the confirmation rules embodied by the scientific method; despite the marked absence of evidence and reasons to validate Darwin’s natural selection; despite evolving coherence, completeness, and correctness of fossil record assessments that conflict with Darwin’s theory of very long, drawnout origin of species; despite the conspicuous lack of necessary and sufficient conditions to substantiate his fundamental claim; even though neo-Darwinism violates the fundamental rules of formal logic, not to mention everyday common sense—all of which the next few chapters of this book will confirm—Darwin’s theory, or a neoDarwinian version of it, continues to be the only theory of origin taught. In fact, Darwinian theory is presented as absolute, scientifically verified fact. For example, Encyclopedia Britannica (2008 Ultimate

Reference Suite DVD) states: The virtually infinite variations on life are the fruit of the evolutionary process. All living creatures are related by descent from common ancestors. Humans and other mammals descend from shrewlike creatures that lived more than 150 million years ago; mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes share as ancestors aquatic worms that lived 600 million years ago; and all plants and animals derive from bacteria-like microorganisms that originated more than 3 billion years ago. Biological evolution is a process of descent with modification. Lineages of organisms change through generations; diversity arises because the lineages that descend from common ancestors diverge through time. The grammar school textbook description that every organism evolved from a single common ancestor as a result of natural selection acting on random variation was never presented as a theory; it was truth: We descended from worms—like those worms we were forced to dissect. Many of us recall the surprise, if not horror we felt on first viewing the family portrait depicting our descent from our more recent ancestor, apes. (Perhaps you, too, wondered why it wasn’t called ascent.) Most of us remember the picture of Darwin’s Tree of Life, the evolved modern version, with protists branching up and outward into various types, and the other more contemporary trees of life, all depicting universal descent, our genesis, from one common ancestral form, the single-celled, atomsmall Adam. Nobody bothered to mention that those representations were purely speculative, that those convenient ways of showing relationships were not in any way demonstrations of lineage. The branching, we were told, took millions or billions of years, because it took that long for enough differences to accumulate into a completely different species—multiplied by millions and billions of species. Our little elementary bodies, crippled by the weight of scientific authority, flocked to the lunchroom food-fight with renewed animalistic zeal, or fled to the depressive isolation of a clique honing the skills of escapism. We cracked books with monkey minds, we aped apes.

Spawn of Darwin, we evolved into Victorians, nakedly insignificant now as cold metal gears in a mammoth machine. As if the Tree of Life would not suffice to terrorize us back into our furs, our advanced biology textbooks treated us to the lovely nineteenth-century depictions of embryonic stages of some species drawn by Ernst Haeckel. A classic Victorian, Haeckel dutifully obtained a practical medical degree before his father would agree to allow him to study art in Italy. Although he considered pursuing art as a career, Haeckel (pronounced heckle) eventually settled upon the more responsible profession as professor of zoology. After reading Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, Haeckel embraced Darwin’s theory as the precious unification Grail sought by many scientists to explain nature in toto in terms that soundly defeated the first and final causes confirmed by the Church. Inspired by rumors that certain structureless organisms had been discovered in deep-sea dredgings, Haeckel concluded that the lowest creatures were protoplasm without nuclei that had spontaneously sprung into existence through combinations of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and sulfur. Even when scientists announced that the rumors were in error, Haeckel brushed off the facts and continued to convince his audiences that animal, vegetable, and neutral protista had evolved from the monera that had colonized his creative imagination. Eagerly informing his audiences that both inorganic and organic nature could be explained by the same physical laws, Haeckel embellished his popular Darwinian writings and lectures with his own theory that life originated spontaneously from inorganic matter by a kind of crystallization, a concept that occurred to him as he studied certain members of the one-celled protozoan group Radiolaria, which appeared to his artist eye as crystalline. Artist that he was, Haeckel drew up numerous genealogical trees in his quest for ideal symmetries. Always grappling with the problem of heredity, at one point he speculated that the cell nucleus had something to do with inheritance. To further unify nature, Haeckel envisioned embryos as microcosms of the macrocosmic process of evolution. At the time it was assumed that humans evolved from fish,

so Haeckel reasoned that the human embryo would develop as a fish before passing through the rest of the evolving stages prior to developing specifically human characteristics. In order to demonstrate his theory, Haeckel worked on various drawings depicting embryos of different species looking almost identical in early stages but growing different as they develop. Haeckel’s theory didn’t emerge from scrupulous assessment of research findings. Haeckel created art works that depicted a theory of life he created in his own imagination. It might have been art, but it definitely was not science. Even in Haeckel’s day it was known that he had cherry-picked and exaggerated his examples and that his drawings did not accurately represent early embryos. In 1894, distinguished embryologist Adam Sedgwick complained that the doctrine of early similarity and later difference was “not in accordance with the facts of development.” Haeckel’s Darwinian embryos were freaks and his presentation a carnival show. (Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde might well be read Haeckel and Hyde.) Yet even in the late twentieth century, our male teachers were gleefully telling us girls that someday we would be pregnant with fish. When photos of actual embryos were published in 1997 by embryologist Michael Richardson and a team of international experts, Richardson told an interviewer at Science magazine, “It’s turning out to be one of the most famous fakes in biology.” In 2000, Stephen Jay Gould remarked that “Haeckel had exaggerated the similarities by idealizations and omissions. He also, in some cases— in a procedure that can only be called fraudulent—simply copied the same figure over and over again,” and exclaimed, “We do, I think, have the right to be both astonished and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of these drawings in a large number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks!” Staunch neo-Darwinians have shrugged off the obvious fraud. Biologist Jerry Coyne claims that Haeckel’s drawings were merely “doctored.” Anthropologist Eugenie Scott, perhaps the most outspoken advocate of Darwinian education today, admits that Haeckel “may have fudged his drawings somewhat.” Textbook author Douglas Futuyma pooh-poohs that Haeckel “did improve his

drawings.” Why should we trust these guys? Why should we accept that reptiles evolved from amphibians when the eggs of reptiles and amphibians are as different as omelet and caviar? Darwinians ignore the significant fact that both Haeckel and Darwin relied on the research of embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer to bolster their creation myths—the myths they created. Several decades before Darwin published his Origin of Species, von Baer showed that embryos of some vertebrates look similar at a certain stage of development. Von Baer knew of many exceptions of this, and he did not consider embryology as evidence for evolution. After rejecting Darwin’s proposal of his theory based on what had become known as “von Baer’s law,” Von Baer himself criticized Darwinists, including Darwin, for having “already accepted the Darwinian evolutionary hypothesis as true before they set to the task of observing embryos.” Even knowing that “von Baer’s law” was misleading, Darwin still maintained that “the embryos of the most distinct species belonging to the same class are closely similar, but become, when fully developed, widely dissimilar.” Even after von Baer himself explained that this was wrong, Darwin insisted that von Baer’s law was “by far the strongest single class of facts in favor of” his theory of descent. “It seems to me, the leading facts in embryology,” meaning von Baer’s observations, “which are second to none in importance, are explained on the principle of variations in the many descendants from some one ancient progenitor.” Deliberately distorting the facts, Darwin claimed that early embryos “show us, more or less completely, the condition of the progenitor of the whole group in its adult stage.” Darwin knowingly relied on a complete falsification of von Baer’s observations to prop up his theory of descent. Haeckel trumped Darwin’s falsifications with falsifications of his own, resulting in fraudulent distortions of distortions codified as textbook definitions of Darwinism dogmatically enforced today by the academic police. It’s shocking if not absurd and more than a bit ironic that atheist scientists accept their state of psychological denial in order to deny Divinity—or as Richard Dawkins puts it today, to “kill religion.” Of course, atheists are “free” to assert their opinions, as wrong as their scientific guesses might be. But should we listen?

Humans have always tried to arrive at a palatable version of truth. Six centuries before Christ, the Greek Thales of Miletus attempted to find a scientific answer to the question, “What is the world made of?” His search for the permanent, unchanging substance beneath all change led him to guess that the primal substance was water. We no longer listen to someone who asserts this antiquated opinion, though we acknowledge the view itself as historically meaningful. Thales’ student Anaximander thought the primal substance was a formless lump of matter that was always in motion. He called his version of Chaos “The Unlimited,” a perpetual battlefield where opposites—hot and cold, wet and dry—fought and separated themselves out. As heat dried up the wet to form land, our world began to evolve. Life, which first appeared in the ocean, resulted from the action of heat on moisture. We and other land animals evolved from fish that adapted to dry land. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it. It’s a tune of “new” Darwinian science with the lyrics of very old creation myths. Such theories are important historically, but we no longer accept them as scientific fact. Darwin was never confident that natural selection answered the riddle of how we had come to be. At the urging of his friends, divine intervention had to be ruled out. Evolution was the only viable alternative. Darwin’s Exploding Research: The Missing Fossils Proving Descent Darwin believed that his best evidence came not from fossils, but from embryos. Fossils, however, were necessary to document the process of species types morphing into other types. The crucial component that Darwin’s theory lacked, and still lacks, is the actual glue that binds discrete types together into one long smooth ascending road from the first primal cell to the first human being. We have massive evidence that a vast diversity of species have existed. What we don’t have are the so-called missing links, those intermediate steps that indicate the process of macroevolution from one major species type to a completely different type. All we have are indications of small-scale microevolution within a species type.

The truth is that no fossil, embryonic, or molecular links between major types have ever been found—not to mention that the differences between discrete types is so marked that there would need to be humungously many links between any two types. Those links simply don’t exist. As discussed in Chapter 1, there is no gradual gradation between apes and humans, or between any two types. There is no macroevolution—a species type morphing into another species type; there is only microevolution—a species type changing within itself, like humans developing blue, green, and brown eyes. This is not new information. The ancient Greeks—Aristotle in particular—long ago quantified the clear demarcation between types. Darwin himself admitted this major problem with his theory: “One, namely, the distinctness of specific forms and their not being blended together by innumerable transitional links, is a very obvious difficulty.” In all fairness, it’s pretty much the difficulty. On the basis of this “difficulty” alone, Darwinism should not be taught as the only viable theory of species origin, if at all. It’s odd that a newsflash from the 1890s—Darwinism Exploded by Fossils, for instance—could still be news today. It’s odd that it was a newsflash in the 1890s. To his last breath, Darwin remained puzzled by the complete absence of fossils showing transitions between specific forms—the necessary missing links. What’s particularly puzzling about Darwin is his persistent advocacy of natural selection when it had already become clear to him, as it had to many other scientists, that this critical data was conspicuously missing, which cast a deep shadow of doubt over any theory of macroevolution. Darwin’s theory of natural selection was no more factual, therefore no less speculative, than the theories of Thales and Anaximander, or any of the world’s creation myths. For well over a century, paleontologists have known that during the Cambrian explosion, a vast array of phyla suddenly appeared during a very brief moment of creation. Darwin knew about this, too. In 1831, when he was fresh out of college, and three months before embarking on his expedition with the HMS Beagle, 22-year-old

Charles Darwin assisted the geologist Reverend Adam Sedgwick (not to be confused with his grandnephew, Adam Sedgwick the embryologist), an advocate of Providential design in the animal world, with his excavation of Cambrian fossils from rock strata in Northern Wales. Already it was apparent that in a very brief moment of geologic time, complex animals first began to appear all at once, in what scientists call a “radiation,” an explosion of different life forms, an enormous diversification, an inexplicably abrupt appearance of amazing biological complexity. This fireworks of diversity was not a long drawn-out process of evolution driven by natural selection. So why, decades after the Wales excursion, did Darwin continue to promote a theory of natural selection? Darwin was a man of many theories, almost all of which were debunked by researchers in his own day. For instance, Darwin hypothesized that an organism’s tissues dispersed tiny “gemmules” to sex organs by means of pangenesis, a process by which tissues permitted copies of themselves to be inherited. When experiments performed by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton failed to find evidence of gemmules, that theory was abandoned. (It is worth noting that pangenesis was not a new concept. Aristotle, for instance, the first person to classify animals into genus and species, wondered whether animals were fully formed in their embryo at conception, or whether the different parts developed as the embryo grew. Aristotle correctly maintained the latter. Interestingly, despite his theories of dynamic change, Aristotle rejected Empodocles’ theory of evolution.) Darwin published in the Philosophical Transactions another of his failed theories, a paper he later called “a great failure,” so great he added, “I am ashamed of it.” He attributed the parallel lines in the elevated land of South America to the action of the sea, a theory discredited by Alexander Agassiz’s glacier-lake theory. Darwin excuses his mistake: “Because no other explanation was possible under our then state of knowledge, I argued in favour of sea-action; and my error has been a good lesson to me never to trust in science to the principle of exclusion.” Of course, Darwinians trust in

Darwinism to the exclusion of all other theories, especially ignoring if not ridiculing the well-documented proofs for intelligent design. Darwin’s failed theories continue to pile up. For instance, the recent “giraffe gaff,” as it’s referred to. Darwin believed that the giraffe’s elongated neck and whole frame were “beautifully adapted for browsing on the higher branches of trees.” During droughts, he argued, giraffes with shorter necks would have died off, and the taller giraffes with the competitive edge able “to reach even an inch or two above the others, will often have been preserved…those individuals which had some one part or several parts of their bodies rather more elongated than usual, would generally have survived.” That’s Darwinian evolution in a nutshell. But in the twentieth century, researchers Robert E. Simmons and Lue Scheepers documented that “females spend over 50% of their time feeding with their necks horizontal” and that “both sexes feed faster and most often with their necks bent.” Giraffes spend the dry season feeding on low Grewia bushes and migrate up to 200 miles to feed on the tall Acacia trees during the wet season, when new leaves are plentiful and no competition is expected. The researchers concluded, “Long necks did not evolve specifically for feeding at higher levels.” No competition, no natural selection. In his Autobiography, Darwin candidly confesses his poor track record on theories: “With the exception of the Coral Reefs, I cannot remember a single first-formed hypothesis which had not after a time to be given up or greatly modified. This has naturally led me to distrust greatly deductive reasoning in the mixed sciences. On the other hand, I am not very skeptical,—a frame of mind which I believe to be injurious to the progress of science.” Given Darwin’s track record on failed hypotheses and disinclination to be skeptical about his own work or the work of those upon which his theory of natural selection rests, it seems necessary to ask: Why trust his theory of evolution? Darwin begs us to ask this question with his apologetic disclaimers in the Origin of Species itself: “This abstract, which I now publish, must necessarily be imperfect.” Why, one asks, necessarily? His answer would not fly in a typical undergraduate college class: “I cannot here give references and authorities for my several

statements…No doubt errors will have crept in…I can here give only the general conclusions at which I have arrived, with a few facts in illustration…” That’s lame enough. But now the clincher: “For I am well aware that scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived.” By the time the reader of the Origin reaches Chapter VI, titled “Difficulties of the Theory,” Darwin sheepishly acknowledges, “Long before the reader has arrived at this part of my work, a crowd of difficulties will have occurred to him. Some of them are so serious that to this day I can hardly reflect on them without being in some degree staggered.” Even today Darwinians distort these “difficulties” as cold, hard scientific fact. I don’t hear neo-Darwinian assertions as honest as Darwin’s admission, “We are profoundly ignorant of the cause of each slight variation or individual difference.” His excuse still echoes today: “We are far too ignorant to speculate on the relative importance of the several known and unknown causes of variation.” “No one ought to feel surprise at much remaining as yet unexplained in regard to the origin of species and varieties,” he assures us to our surprise, “if he make due allowance for our profound ignorance in regard to the mutual relations of the many beings which live around us.” Darwin taught Darwinians how to shrug off profound ignorance and the much unexplained as if facts were not contingent upon knowledge and proofs. “Who can explain why one species ranges widely and is very numerous, and why another allied species has a narrow range and is rare?” The point, of course, is that his theory of evolution claims to explain this. Is natural selection just another of Darwin’s failed hypotheses? Right up front in Chapter VI, Darwin lists a few of the “difficulties and objections” that disconfirm, or show strong evidence of disconfirming, his theory: “Difficulties of the theory of descent with modification—Absence or rarity of transitional varieties—Transitions in habits of life—Diversified habits in the same species—Species with habits widely different from those of their allies—Organs of extreme perfection—Modes of transition—Cases of difficulty— Natura non facit saltum [nature makes no leap]—Organs of small

importance—Organs not in all cases absolutely perfect—The law of unity of type and of the conditions of existence embraced by the theory of natural selection.” A list like this from Darwin himself should be sufficient to give us pause when asserting Darwinism as scientific fact. Failed Quest For the Holy Grail Keenly aware that the lack of evidence for the progression of one distinct species type into another was a problem, Darwin decided that announcing the problem would stave off the criticism that he was purposely hiding the problem. In Chapter X of the Origin, “On the Imperfection of the Geological Record,” Darwin again lists some of the more glaring problems right up front: “On the absence of intermediate varieties at the present day—On the nature of extinct intermediate varieties; on their number—On the lapse of time, as inferred from the rate of denudation and of deposition number—On the lapse of time as estimated by years—On the poorness of our paleontological collections—On the intermittence of geological formations—On the denudation of granitic areas—On the absence of intermediate varieties in any one formation—On the sudden appearance of groups of species—On their sudden appearance in the lowest known fossiliferous strata—Antiquity of the habitable earth.” What but his desire to impress the impressive Lyell and his other intellectual heroes could have led Darwin to develop a theory he suspected might well be false? The anxious contradiction he reveals in the Origin is far from trivial: “We do not find infinitely numerous fine transitional forms closely joining [species] all together. The sudden manner in which several groups of species first appear in our European formations, the almost entire absence, as at present known, of formations rich in fossils beneath the Cambrian strata, are all undoubtedly of the most serious nature.” Although the lack of transitions might well have been sufficient cause for Darwin to reconsider his theory, he not only glosses over these, he presumes to transcend even the experts: “We see this in the fact that the most eminent palaeontologists, namely, Cuvier, Agassiz, Barrande, Pictet, Falconer, E. Forbes, etc., and all our

greatest geologists, as Lyell, Murchison, Sedgwick, etc., have unanimously, often vehemently, maintained the immutability of species.” Then, no doubt with relish, he notes: “But Sir Charles Lyell now gives the support of his high authority to the opposite side, and most geologists and paleontologists are much shaken in their former belief.” Though “most” being “much” shaken no doubt overstates Lyell’s influence, Darwin would have interpreted Lyell’s minor tremor as a significant event for him personally. Now that he had his coveted pat on the back from Lyell, Darwin had no choice but to honor the endorsement by accepting his own shaky theory of evolution as absolute fact. Never mind the absence of the most important evidence for his theory. His excuse argues fallaciously: “Those who believe that the geological record is in any degree perfect,” which of course is no one, “will undoubtedly at once reject my theory.” Yes, but leading scientists who did not believe the record to be perfect also rejected his theory. Still, Darwin reveals the source of his confidence in his theory to be a metaphor. Not actual hard scientific evidence—a metaphor, offered by none other than Sir Charles Lyell, the one named “high authority” who switched his support to Darwin’s side. “For my part,” Darwin affirms with bravado, “following out Lyell's metaphor, I look at the geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept and written in a changing dialect.” Histories and dialects, it’s important to note, are products of intelligent, rational creatures, not of mindless blind forces of nature. “Of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved, and of each page, only here and there a few lines. Each word of the slowly-changing language…” Wait a minute: the “language” of geology never changes, only our interpretation of it, “… more or less different in the successive chapters, may represent the forms of life, which are entombed in our consecutive formations, and which falsely appear to have been abruptly introduced”? Lyell, clueless that his metaphor has broken down, continues confidently, “On this view the difficulties above discussed are greatly diminished or even disappear.”

Not so, of course. Difficulty obtaining proof does not diminish the necessity of proof. Darwin himself notes: “But I do not pretend that I should ever have suspected how poor was the record in the best preserved geological sections, had not the absence of innumerable transitional links between the species which lived at the commencement and close of each formation, pressed so hardly on my theory.” What he is admitting here is his lack of knowledge about the fossil record that developed his theory of evolution, a theory that depended utterly upon the fossil record for its confirmation. “Pressed so hardly on my theory” was a quaint way to admit that his theory was being crushed by the weight of its own inadequacy. “Some of the most ancient [pre-Cambrian] animals…do not differ much from living species; and it cannot on our theory be supposed, that these old species were the progenitors of all the species belonging to the same groups which have subsequently appeared, for they are not in any degree intermediate in character.” The absence of necessary intermediate links between any two discrete species groups disconfirms his theory. Furthermore, the vast number of species that must have evolved before the Cambrian period to give rise to all subsequent species is a problem. As Darwin admits, regarding his theory, “Here we encounter a formidable objection; for it seems doubtful whether the earth, in a fit state for the habitation of living creatures, has lasted long enough” for the vast menagerie of living creatures to have come into existence. Not only that, there is no evidence of that presumed multitude of originating forms. The common assumption was and is that the fossil record does not reveal those multitudinous creatures because there was no multitude. Darwin doesn’t accept that answer. His answer? “To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer.” His answer is that he has no answer. But he’ll stick to his theory, by gosh, because without it he’ll have no claim to fame and will wind up the embarrassed, disgraced failure that his father had predicted. “Nevertheless,” he admits, “the difficulty of assigning any good reason for the absence of vast piles of strata rich in fossils beneath the Cambrian system is

very great.” He acknowledges that erosion or “metamorphic action” cannot be used as an explanation, because geologists would have found fragments. Furthermore, he says, older formations are not always the ones to suffer from erosion and metamorphism. Remarkably, he admits, rather dryly: “The case at present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views [Darwin’s theory] here entertained.” Darwin himself pointedly asserts that the utter absence of fossil evidence is a valid argument against his theory of evolution. But that didn’t keep him or his fellow Darwinians from affirming his theory as fact. Darwin’s theory of natural selection relied upon future excavations digging up links showing the gradual progression from one species type to another. But subsequent fossil finds have only widened the gap between types. When in 1886 geologist R. G. McConnell excavated the Mount Stephen shale bed in British Columbia, he uncovered billions of fossils and collected hundreds of new species specimens. In 1907, Charles Doolittle Wolcott, an expert on Cambrian paleontology, excavated a site fifteen miles north of McConnell’s dig. This new site, the Burgess Shale, a massive reef that geological upheaval displayed 7,000 feet above sea level, revealed thousands of soft-bodied specimens that had been buried alive, so well preserved that one could see a Morella crab’s lunch of shellfish undecayed in its gut. Darwin’s assertion, “No organism wholly soft can be preserved,” was wrong, in more ways than one: Those well-preserved softbodied specimens contributed to the disconfirmation of his theory. Even the delicate geological process exquisitely embalming all those extraordinarily “not-preservable” life forms and transporting them from the ocean depths to mountaintops neatly stratified like a museum exhibit so we humans could discover them in an era when these findings are most pertinent looks suspiciously like the directional immanence of a purposive Creator. The Present Future Disconfirmation

Over a century ago it was already clear that so many new phyla with their own discrete major body plans appearing all at once—all of a sudden, with no intermediate steps to be found—had not evolved slowly via natural selection acting on random variation as Darwin predicted. There was no abundance of transitional forms leading back to a common ancestor. No incremental steps have ever been found. Although one could believe that God created evolution in the Darwinian sense, such a stance would be misguided. Darwin himself knew that “The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain formations, has been urged by several paleontologists—for instance, by Agassiz, Pictet, and Sedgwick, as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation [evolution] of species.” Darwin himself explicitly concurs: “If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of evolution through natural selection.” Darwin knew that numerous species types really started into life all at once. There was no “If.” The Cambrian explosion was fact, and Darwin knew it. And he knew that fact was “fatal to [his] theory.” As if that were not crushing enough, “There is another and allied difficulty” to the absence of transitions in the fossil record “which is much more serious. I allude to the manner in which species belonging to several of the main divisions of the animal kingdom suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks.” It is not just that species types appeared all at once; the manner in which they appeared is much more serious, because it implicates the immanent hand of an active Creator in the act of creating. In the very book in which Darwin supposedly proves his theory for evolution, he disproves that theory. What is truly astounding is that Darwinian scientists today continue to argue for Darwin’s theory while further disproving his theory. This shocking disconnect between fact and belief among Darwinian “fundamentalists” is the exact type of disconnect between fact and belief for which Darwinians criticize religious fundamentalists. Numerous excavations by universities and scientific organizations on every continent throughout the last century have only further verified the magnitude and global scope of the Cambrian explosion,

and paleontologists have confirmed with a near-collective sigh the complete absence of missing links between major species types. The missing link meme is fast becoming a cultural artifact. Yet desperate Darwinians continue screeching against God, now usually referred to as “the God of the gaps.” They want believers to dismiss God, too, but get really angry when believers won’t dismiss those pesky gaps. No wonder they’re angry: The fissure in their theory is evolving before their eyes into an enormous, ever-widening chasm. The 1984 discovery of the amazing fossil site, the Chengjian Fauna, in Yunnan, China, provided scientists with more diverse, better preserved, and even older fossils from the Cambrian explosion, some of which are older yet anatomically more complex than those excavated from the Burgess Shale. A similar fossil site has been discovered in Greenland. What this means is that the Cambrian explosion not only occurred, it occurred simultaneously at different locations throughout the world and produced the same life forms. By the 1990s, when even perfectly preserved embryos had been discovered and studied down to their molecular composition, it had become all but impossible to uphold Darwin’s antiquated theory of evolution. The Cambrian explosion was a sudden worldwide phenomenon. Recent analysis of drill cores from oil wells, of radioactive minerals, and of changes in the earth’s magnetic field have led scientists to acknowledge the unlikelihood of ever locating any missing links predating the sudden emergence of Cambrian life forms. Pre-Cambrian, Cambrian, or post-Cambrian missing links simply aren’t there because they never existed. Furthermore, paleontologists today point out that fossils found from eras subsequent to the Cambrian fit into groups already established. In other words, the Cambrian explosion provided all known body plans, including biologically complex structures like heads, compound eyes, skeletons, spinal cords, the nervous system, and fully articulated limbs that have existed since the explosion and still exist today. All these consistent features have continued to exist, albeit in many cases in different final designs: Exuberant design

differentiation is a fundamental quality of nature. But differentiation within a species is not the same as evolution into a completely different species type. Exuberant design differentiation is characterized by discontinuities —discrete containers—like those produced by the Cambrian explosion, not by long, drawn-out continuity predicted by Darwin’s evolution. The internet is full of deceptive claims of transitions between species types that turn out to be discrete species with a few minor features similar to those found in the species to which it supposedly links. Instead of transitional creatures, what we actually find in nature is what Michael Denton calls a “mosaic” of fully developed traits within the respective classes. We find mix-andmatch, such as animals that have some organs from one taxon and some from another, but we never find organ systems that are intermediate stages between the higher taxa. Blueprints and Building Materials The unity sought by scientists like Darwin and Haeckle exists, but it doesn’t disprove God; it further substantiates the miraculous elegance of Creation. Each animal species is built of the same materials, but no two animal species are exactly alike. Scientists point out that discrete species types are like different styles of house made of the same materials. Wood, nails, stone, and concrete result in structures as diverse as a Southwest adobe and the Taj Mahal. But we recognize a building and its style when we see one. We know an organism when we see one, be it an amoeba or an asp. Humans have become so adept at classification that far too often we can’t see the trees for the forest. We’re Homo sapiens, yes, but we’re also people. When pragmatism pooh-poohs aesthetic sensibility, when materialism denudes our intuitive awe, we murder that innate faculty we used to boldly call the human spirit. When science desiccates muscle and marrow and mind into mechanistic diagrams, and tracks the source of humanity to fossils that can’t even be found, it’s time for science to go back to school for a few courses in the arts and humanities. The kids I know, and even most adults, are amazed that though all snowflakes are crystals, and almost all are hexagons, no two

snowflakes are alike. Yet even a preschooler knows a snowflake when he sees one. Most of us can see that no two humans are alike, yet humans are human. No two apes are alike, yet apes are apes. Snowflakes are not humans any more than humans are apes. A human is no more an ape than a spiral galaxy is a nautilus shell. There’s a similarity, but we know the difference. It is the category of difference and each category’s unique features that define each specific category. Which is amazing. During the Cambrian explosion, new styles of life were constructed out of the same materials, generating species types of animals as unique as the examples within the species themselves: humans are not apes; no two humans are exactly alike. Yet in spite of seemingly infinite variation within a species type, there’s a continuity of form: apes are apes; humans are human. Humans are human, despite our myriad differences. Humans with blonde hair and blue eyes are as recognizably human as humans with black hair and brown eyes. Not only are types uniquely themselves, each discrete type displays what scientists call stability: Despite small changes within the species type, the type remains identifiably itself forever—for as long as it survives. And within types, species don’t really ever change (or microevolve) all that much, contrary to Darwin’s theory of gradual but radical change over time. As Stephen J. Gould puts it in his 1993 book, Natural History, “Stasis, or nonchange, of most fossil species during their lengthy geological lifespans was tacitly acknowledged by all paleontologists, but almost never studied explicitly because prevailing theory treated stasis as uninteresting nonevidence for nonevolution…The overwhelming prevalence of stasis became an embarrassing feature of the fossil record, best left ignored as a manifestation of nothing (that is, nonevolution).” Even so, many scientists note this dilemma in their books and papers. Species do change; they aren’t exact facsimiles tossed from a cosmic photocopy machine. Every discrete member of a species is unique, but the species itself remains its own discrete, unique type. So-called living fossils, which are very ancient species that have members living today, are evidence against Darwin’s evolution. For

instance, scientists thought fossils of the prehistoric coclacanth fish had small fin bones that could have evolved into fingers that eventually became our fingers, then subsequently discovered coclacanth fish swimming in the Indian Ocean that looked exactly like the fossils of the prehistoric coclacanth, hence the name “living fossils.” Is it really likely that just one rebellious coclacanth fish developed fingers, or rather almost-fingers, and then just one rebellious almost-coclacanth fish developed the more literal fingers, and then another rebellious fingered not-really-coclacanth fishy thingy added some transitional partial feature, and on and on through the zillions of other transitional features that would eventually resemble humans, when absolutely no evidence of those transitional thingys exists yet we have fossils of the prehistoric coclacanth fish in a box and the modern coclacanth fish trashing on the end of a hook? And how would a new species type reproduce when species aren’t supposed to be able to successfully mate outside their own species type? Even if evolution has proceeded from a common ancestor on up to the higher species types like us Homo sapiens, isn’t each transition just as miraculous as any one-time act of Creation in the biblical sense? Any Creation myth is just an aesthetic representation of the mystery of mysteries, the miracle of miracles, actual natural Creation, organic and material. We Deists see the miracle of Creation as an ongoing process. One has to wonder what kind of intelligent designer cares enough to maintain the magnitude of perfect equilibrium between stability and flux, between stasis and creation that constitutes our universe. And cares enough to create us able to perceive that. But instead of being impressed, by the time of the Descent, Darwin &co. ascribed this creative feat to a mindless mechanism. Darwin assumed that nature takes no sudden leaps. So how many links would it take to provide the smooth transition between species types that Darwin anticipated? Five? Fifty? Infinite? But there are none. The more scientists discover about the structures of animals, the clearer it becomes that stable animal forms that exemplify distinct phyla never blend imperceptibly into one

another. There was no smooth ascent from some primitive life-form to us. Yet we continue to teach Darwinian evolution as absolute fact. What is fact is that the history of life was an extremely long period of very minute life creation and almost no change, disrupted by one huge creative blast, the Cambrian explosion. And despite the few very minor eruptions since, the body plans that burst into being during the Cambrian era are the exact body plans that exist today. The building blocks are the same, though new kinds of buildings are being built. “Explosion” is No Exaggeration To get a sense of how fast the Cambrian explosion took place, consider that the first life form, single-celled bacteria, appeared about 3½ billion years ago. Over a very long time these cells gathered into clusters to form blue-green algae. For three billion years, life changed very little. Multi-celled organisms appeared right before the Cambrian period; some larger organisms arose, as if God were warming up, then they disappeared. Following their extinction, in the biological Big Bang, the Cambrian explosion, the basic blueprints for almost all species types that have ever existed came into being. Biologists’ classic example of one clock day of life puts the first life, appearing about 3.8 billion years ago, at the beginning of the day. For almost the entire clock day, nothing appeared but those simple single-celled organisms. Then about 500 million years ago, at about nine p.m., in the space of about two minutes, or roughly ten million years, the full spectrum of all the major animal forms exploded into being in the forms they have had down to the present. These animal forms didn’t evolve from the bottom up, branching up and outward, as Darwin assumed. Each form appeared suddenly, fully intact from day one, and evidently, from there each species developed and evolved its variations, like our blue and brown eyes, and blonde and black hair. Each species type diversified—evolved— from the top down; it produced variations on the same original theme: Each species type is its own tree sprouting its own branches and leaves. And this same process continues today.

The major body plan—the blueprint, the “top”—for each species type was present at its Cambrian beginning. With any complex design, the theme—the blueprint—comes first. The first car was built according to a blueprint for that car; the fundamental design comes before the first car is built. Every variation on the car theme is a car, as differentiated as a platinum Rolls-Royce is from a staid black hearse is from a psychedelic stretch Beetle is from a lipstick-red Spitfire convertible. There is one kind of diversity between species— a human is a human, an ape is an ape—and another level of diversity within species—you and me and the wacky guy next door. Again: Life emerged in a way that is clearly contrary to Darwin’s slow evolution model, and life continued for eons to exist in the same, essentially unchanged phyla forms, those escaping extinction still remaining today. Those species types weren’t evolving according to Darwinian predictions; in fact, there is no evidence that any type originated from another type. Although Darwin’s ambition would suffice to drive his theory forward, it took other conditions to plow him deeper into that high degree of denial that allowed him to willfully perpetuate scientific fraud. Conditions similar to his exist today among Darwinian scientists. Correction might save us from far more than the nuisance of misinformation. What’s the Problem With Creation? Darwin acknowledges that many of the “difficulties and objections… urged against the theory…are serious.” His solutions to the problems come in two forms: self-contradiction, and reliance upon future discoveries, the latter of which, as we have seen, has only further disconfirmed his theory. Darwin’s problems begin “In the beginning” in the biblical sense. “I think in the discussion light has been thrown on several facts, which on the belief of independent acts of creation are utterly obscure.” What renders creationism obscure is the clarifying theory of natural selection. Never mind that his theory is not clarifying because it is obscured by not-proven and even disproven “facts.” Creation by a Creator doesn’t make sense in Darwin’s mind not because the “facts” he’s working with suggest his version of evolution, but

because his version only makes sense if he can rule out a Creator creating “independent” species. Darwin tries desperately to explain away the absence of evidence for his version of evolution. “We have seen that species at any one period are not indefinitely variable,” which proves nothing, because species having aspects in common does not prove evolution; in fact, it suggests “independent” creation of similar aspects in animals not genetically related. Darwin argues that species types “are not linked together by a multitude of intermediate gradations, partly because the process of natural selection is always very slow, and at any one time acts only on a few forms; and partly because the very process of natural selection implies the continual supplanting and extinction of preceding and intermediate gradations.” Please note that he says that species “are not linked together,” not that they “appear to be not linked together.” If species are not linked together, lowest to highest, encompassing the entire realm of life-forms, then they have not evolved according to his theory. Also, remember that he himself pointed out that there has not been enough time in the history of the planet for the slow process of evolution, even if all species were evolving at the same time; and here he says that evolution only acts on a few forms at a time, in which case Darwin’s version of evolution would take an even astronomically longer time than his basic theory predicts. His next explanation for the absence of links (or the apparent absence of links) is the continual supplanting and extinction of preceding and intermediate gradations. Yet he just said that evolution only acts on a few forms at a time, not on all forms continually. Furthermore, the supplanting and extinction process would still leave many traces in the fossil record. But there are no such traces. “We have seen that a species under new conditions of life may change its habits, or it may have diversified habits.” But again, adaptation is not Darwinian macroevolution. “Many large groups of facts are intelligible only on the principle that species have been evolved by very small steps.” This is neither accurate nor valid. The “facts” Darwin is referring to are not actually facts. The actual facts, even the facts that Darwin was himself aware

of (like the absence of fossil evidence for macroevolution) are intelligible on principles other than evolution by small steps. “Although very many species have almost certainly been produced by steps not greater than those separating fine varieties,” he asserts against the evidence, or lack of it, “yet it may be maintained that some have been developed in a different and abrupt manner.” Development in an abrupt manner is an admission of Creation. This he concedes because there is no choice. The obvious fact of the Cambrian explosion he could not deny. Instead, he cautions against believing all that massive fossil evidence for it. “Such an admission, however, ought not to be made without strong evidence being assigned.” Yes, but by his own admission, there is strong evidence for Creation, and by his own admission, as we saw in his previous chapter, there is no hard evidence for macroevolution. As Darwin well knows, that strong evidence was documented and presented to him while he was still a student. Granted, he wasn’t necessarily a good student. Even so, he was well aware of the evidence, and so were all scientists of the era. “One class of facts, however, namely, the sudden appearance of new and distinct forms of life in our geological formations supports at first sight the belief in abrupt development.” Ah, so it only appears to be an abrupt development. All those scientists are mistaken; all their fossils prove nothing. This is classic Darwin in denial. “If the record is as fragmentary as many geologists strenuously assert, there is nothing strange in new forms appearing as if suddenly developed.” The record of the abrupt appearance of discrete species types was not as fragmentary as Darwin implies, and it has only gotten far less fragmentary in recent years. Furthermore, there surely is something strange from a Darwinian perspective in new developed forms suddenly appearing at all, not to mention that it is even stranger to observe that if the record is fragmentary. “But against the belief in such abrupt changes, embryology enters a strong protest.” Ah yes, the fraud of embryology. Fraud upon fraud to save face, to fulfill his ambition. Fraud today deified to prove the impossibility of a divine Creator, the grandest of Darwin’s failed hypotheses.



 

Chapter 5 Darwin’s Descent Darwin’s Dis-ease Though Darwin’s long life was replete with abandoned theories— most scientists’ lives are—he never abandoned his assumption that species originated via the process of natural selection, despite his grave doubts; in fact, it could be argued that he willingly force-fit false data into his pet theory, much like Freud (now famously) forcefit bogus clinical data into his theory of hysteria. Perhaps Darwin’s stubborn persistence was a matter of filial loyalty. Like many freethinkers of the time, his grandfather and his father both believed in descent through natural selection, as did many other intellectuals who frequented the same soirees. In his youth, Charles had been a ne’er-do-well and a drifter (his five-year excursion on the HMS Beagle was as a self-financed gentleman companion to the young captain, Robert Fitzroy, himself an aristocrat), and yet Charles always lived a privileged life thanks to the great wealth he inherited. Perhaps he felt obliged to his genetic patrons to propagate the seeds of their philosophy, if only to rationalize his family’s entitlement to the easy life of the gentry, and to justify his inherited elitist position: Despite any potential for “improvement” (“taming”) among even the “lowest” races, Charles maintained that non-whites, “primitive” classes, and women were his natural inferiors; this was his explicit, typically Victorian position despite his abolitionism, concern for the poor, and dependence upon women throughout his life (his doting older sisters raised him, his doting wife nursed him through decades of illness). One might dismiss Darwin’s self-contradictions as typical of the era. One could even imagine Darwin as the protagonist of an Oscar Wilde satire. But though in his later years Darwin could afford to be

the sweet, affable, grandfatherly old man that codified his ancestors’ faith in “the deity Natural Selection” (by which Darwin reportedly swore), the world that survived him could not afford Darwinian eugenics practiced by the Nazis or cost-benefit exploitation of nature, including humans, perfected by modern corporations. There is no indication that Darwin himself expected such malevolent outcomes. Early in life he became a devout Christian, influenced more by his years at the Anglican Shrewsbury School and Christ’s College, Cambridge, than by his two years at Edinburgh University or his Unitarian family. But soon, appalled by Christian myths of eternal torment and by the sadistic side of humanity observed on the Continent and in the field abroad, Darwin became a self-proclaimed agnostic—a term he borrowed from Huxley. Motivated less by all-out rebellion (a la Nietzsche or Freud) against the cosmic Father figure who would allow profound and perennial suffering—for instance, the profound suffering Darwin experienced with the deaths of his promising young brother, two of his children in infancy, and his beloved daughter Annie—Darwin and his agnostic colleagues offered evolution and natural selection as the rational, scientific alternative to the mythic absurdity of divine, “benevolent” creation. But does Darwinism really erase the possibility of a transcendent or even an immanent Creator? Does evil in the world necessarily rule out the possibility of a benign Creator? Darwin tried to think it did. Which makes sense, if by “sense” one is content to indicate superficial justification. If the Romantic poets or transplant essayists like Friedrich Engels accurately portrayed the Blakeian underworld that was London, the stench and blinding assault of poverty, abuse, and hopeless agony would have slugged any proper chap in the chop. Any squire with cash in his coffers would be well aware of the savage exploitation that defined British Imperialism. Psychologically it makes sense that a rich white male heir to the British Empire would need to rationalize his rank when faced with the sins committed by the power of his own superiority. Although Darwin loathed philosophy, he embodied the Noble Lie inherited from another wealthy elitist, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, whose ideal Republic necessitated stratification of society into three

classes. “This myth,” Plato asserted, “would have a good effect making them more inclined to care for the state and one another.” For most of his mature years, Darwin led a double life. Outwardly he enjoyed his relaxed station as an immensely wealthy respectable gentleman, and eventually the ambitious careerist achieved the position of a highly successful natural scientist who commanded the respect of numerous devotees, in large part thanks to the aggressive promotion of evolution by Bulldog Huxley’s “X Club.” But Darwin worked guardedly as he developed his theory of transmutation, which he learned about very early from his freethinking grandfather and family friend Robert Grant, among others, and later refined as evolution through the influence of his inner circle of fellow dissident materialists, mostly Whig reformers repelling the tight control of Anglican clerics, with their conservative morality and religious myths of divine Providence. Early, when he kept his scientific theories and writing secret from almost everyone, even his wife, a devout Unitarian Christian, he did confide to Kew Gardens botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, a close friend, that believing in evolution was “like confessing to a murder.” While outspoken evolutionists were jailed for blasphemy, Darwin, nervous and nauseous, internalized his fear. Darwinism, which atheist Daniel Dennett recently called a “universal acid” that “eats through just about every traditional concept,” was eating Darwin alive. It’s not surprising that his sickness grew more and more intense the harder he hacked away at religion’s views on Creation. Surely he knew he destroyed, for better or for worse, the ordered moral foundation upon which he and civilization precariously perched. As society threw off the shackles of Anglican oppression, eventually with the help of Darwin’s theory expressed through his writings, Darwin the man embodied the new malaise that filled the vacuum where the soul had been. Reduced to talking apes, humanity was no longer the crown of creation designed by a present and loving God. The giver of ultimate laws of randomness and destructiveness, God was reduced to the father-savage created in the darkest image of man. Such an anti-vision might well lead to a sickness unto death

for the anti-hero created by its image; one could at least theorize that Darwin’s heart and stomach problems were an illness of angst. It is not without irony that in that age when the death of God the Father and the ascent of the Ubermench (superman) was proclaimed by Nietzsche—the “father of postmodernism,” an underling plagued his whole life by sickness who died poor and alone, a ranting, syphilitic madman—the sickly Darwin could not attend his father’s funeral or act as one of his executors. But Darwin was no atheist. He simply could not reconcile the dark side of nature with any religious vision of a loving or just God. He never considered that the presence of both good and evil might have some higher purpose, like the opportunity for humans to freely choose the constitution of their own souls, as a number of philosophers had suggested. Choosing might involve giving up one’s inherited wealth and status. It’s not surprising that the Darwin who loathed his classical education and failed in the fields of both religion and medicine would ultimately interpret the organized chaos of the world, and even the most beautifully ordered structures, as the work of a cold, distant taskmaster, an abstract Watchmaker God that wound up the universe and left it to run (amok) on its own, instead of as the free creation of an avant-garde Artist, or an Inventor tinkering at his workbench. The Blind Aesthete and his Murdered Muses Darwin was a man of contradictions. He loved his dogs and his beetles, but he also loved killing and collecting trophies. Early on he believed in God and the Bible and even fervently defended his religion against the taunting crew of the Beagle; later his religion gave way to agnosticism which gradually slipped toward atheism. Darwin evolved—he grew up, he changed. Adapting to his new environment of questioning scientists, of religious doubters and political rebels, Darwin sought to fulfill his ambition the best way he could. And he succeeded. But in spite of his fame and place beside the great scientists of the age, Darwin was aware that something profound and natural in him had been sacrificed: first and foremost, the faculty of aesthetic sensibility.

During his Cambridge years, Darwin was, as he put it in his Autobiography, “inoculated” by his friends and professors with a taste for quality art. He frequented the Fitzwilliam Gallery and the National Gallery in London, and the intense pleasure he got from the art of Sebastian del Piombo excited in him “a sense of sublimity.” He acquired a taste for music from his musician schoolmates. But though he regularly listened to the daily anthems in King’s College Chapel and even hired the chorister boys to sing in his rooms, he admitted, “I am so utterly destitute of an ear, that I cannot perceive a discord, or keep time and hum a tune correctly; and it is a mystery how I could possibly have derived pleasure from music.” Can someone tone deaf who can’t discern pitch or melody or harmony or rhythm be said to truly hear the music? Can he be said to hear the actual work itself? Can he appreciate that actual work? Wouldn’t such a person be existing on a plane far removed from musical experience? The flat, one-dimensional plane would not be the same rich, multi-dimensional musical plane experienced by Chopin or the conductor and musicians of a professional orchestra, or even by someone of modest schooling who had an acute musical sensibility. If Darwin’s aesthetic faculty was so severely handicapped, what is the quality of pleasure he derived from flat, distorted sound not actually discerned as music? What is the quality of pleasure deprived of the depth and meaning of genuine appreciation? Was Darwin only pretending to “derive pleasure” from music? In his early years, he says, art brought him “intense pleasure” and sometimes “excited” in him a “sense of sublimity.” Though he was informally taught to appreciate art and probably did derive pleasure from it, given his disconnect from music it’s fair to ask whether by looking at art he was actually seeing and appreciating the work itself. While on the Beagle, he also delighted in reading metaphysical books and the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Milton, his favorite at that time and most famously the poet of Paradise Lost. But his love of metaphysics and poetry waned during his twenties. Even if Darwin’s aesthetic sensibilities were not refined, his pleasure was evidently genuine. It is no mere coincidence that as Darwin’s theory of evolution developed, his spiritual and aesthetic

faculties atrophied. His own assessment of the demise of his personal aesthetics is worth quoting in full: I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily—against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better. This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organized or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of

my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature. It strikes me as a peculiar tragedy worthy of Shakespeare or Milton or any of the great Romantics that the man most responsible, nominally at least, for the sacrifice of the human spirit on the altar of mechanistic determinism could admit nonchalantly that he had in essence willfully programmed his mind into a machine—a computer —that resulted in loss of happiness, injury to moral character, emotional enfeeblement, and, ironically, severe mental atrophy. Darwin the man created the theory that symbolizes the absurd predicament, perhaps even the tragic flaw, of modern humanity. Darwin’s faith in his theory of evolution reached the pitch of religious conviction even while he expressed his doubts about the theory’s validity. The passionate naturalist, cannibalized by the dark lord kill-or-be-killed, leaned toward mechanistic atheism. As if on auto-pilot, Darwin describes the objects and processes that his close observation once reckoned as beautiful, yet his stance now seems aloof and flat, as if his enjoyment of nature was like his tone-deaf “enjoyment” of music or his atrophied pleasure in art and poetry. Something was missing. That “something” was exactly that which could be registered directly as spiritual, or even fully real. The dimension that gives life lived to the fullest its zing always seemed to be missing, an absence, fully realized, that verged on extinction. By the time he finished the Origin, and certainly his later Autobiography, beauty had ceased to be beauty at all. Darwin objectified nature into a kind of intellectual pornography for scientific voyeurs; beauty was observed and used like a prostitute for a distant satisfaction of an immediate need, never for love of beauty for its own sake, never for the pleasure of intimate contact. Darwin, like some neo-Darwinians today, could state the facts of elegance and beauty in an objective, abstract tone even while the descriptions themselves betray the inherent vitality of their own inherent elegant beauty. Beauty is in the eye—or rather, the spirit— of the beholder. Atheists and mechanistic agnostics like Darwin—

and I really can see no important distinction between the two—know intellectually that nature is beautifully constructed while emotionally denying that it is. The aesthetic atrophies when the spirit does, or when the spirit lies dormant and inactivated. It is not the death of God but rather the fear or hate of God that inevitably leads to a kill religion/death of God theology of mechanistic determinism and Darwinian natural selection. There is never any death of God, only the murder or suicide of the killer’s own God-given faculties. Darwin’s Spiritual Dissociation Far from being scientific treatises proving natural selection, Darwin’s writings betray the psychological angst of a man plagued by selfdoubt, contradiction, and denial. Read closely, his work becomes a casebook exposing the consequences of spiritual dissociation that has infected modern thought. The atrophy of the aesthetic faculty and its subsequent flattening of perception is a crucial symptom of spiritual dissociation rarely considered when assessing declarations of scientific theory as fact. Darwin realized that his mind had become a machine for grinding out abstractions from collections of facts, but because he had repressed his spiritual faculty and erased the possibility of a spiritual dimension from Nature, he was unable to understand why his aesthetic faculty had atrophied. What he acknowledges as “the higher tastes,” so intimately connected with meaning and appreciation, are at their highest, spiritual experiences. That profound awareness of connection to that “something more” conveyed via the deep meaningfulness of beauty—the beauty of beauty—is akin to the sensation of spiritual Presence experienced via religious rituals, or feeling “one” with Nature, or that intimate “oneness” felt by lovers passionately in love. These experiences of touching transcendence are different facets of the same numinous sensation of touching the finger of God, as it’s often represented figuratively, aesthetically. What Darwin knew about he could not truly know. Yet the flat, objective, abstract observation of nature’s beauty and design left Darwin uncomfortable with his theory. When on his Beagle voyage, he realized that differences among species “could

only be explained on the supposition that species gradually become modified; and the subject haunted me.” This “supposition” was only necessary because he had ruled out the possibility that species had been created and became modified, in the sense of microevolution, by the engagement of innate potentials responding to environmental cues. “But it was equally evident that neither the action of the surrounding conditions, nor the will of the organisms (especially in the case of plants) could account for the innumerable cases in which organisms of every kind are beautifully adapted to their habits of life…” Please note his use of the haunting word “beautifully” and his beautiful examples: “for instance, a woodpecker or a tree-frog to climb trees, or a seed for dispersal by hooks or plumes. I had always been much struck by such adaptations, and until these could be explained it seemed to me almost useless to endeavor to prove by indirect evidence that species have been modified” via macroevolution. He spent the rest of his life trying to prove that species types have been modified into new types. He never succeeded. To an artist, transcending modifications are perfectly natural. Darwin was unable to process the creation in Creation. As any true artist knows, creation is a generous act of love, even if the representation must be as “ugly” as Picasso’s Guernica. Darwin decided early on that nature was brutal and selfish: “Natural selection cannot possibly produce any modification in a species exclusively for the good of another species; though throughout nature one species incessantly takes advantage of and profits by the structures of others.” Like Anaximander, Darwin considered life to be a battleground where opposites fight and separate themselves out, but Darwin’s “good” was brute selfishness, the antithesis of anyone else’s definition of good. His theological vision had no choice but to conclude, “But natural selection can and does often produce structures for the direct injury of other animals, as we see in the fang of the adder, and in the ovipositor of the ichneumon, by which its eggs are deposited in the living bodies of other insects.” In Darwin’s world of fangs and ovipositors, good equals harm successfully inflicted on another. In other words, benefit exists only through harm. Isn’t that like saying that good is evil, evil is good? Darwin knew that his theory was dependent upon the inherent

ruthlessness of Nature, not upon something reminiscent of the benevolent God of his abandoned religion. “If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory, for such could not have been produced through natural selection.” It seems logical to assume that a species, or an individual member of a species, has not been created for the exclusive good of another species or individual. Even theists agree that nothing has been created to masochistically serve the sadistic selfishness of another. But that doesn’t mean that a species or individual does not serve any good of another. An artist produces art for his own good and for the good of the viewer. In fact, producing art is only ultimately good for the artist when it is good for the viewer. (Art that serves as therapy is not the high art appealing to the “higher tastes” that Darwin referred to and that I refer to here.) Mutual benefit is a given in the processes of living things. Yes, there is a brutal aspect to animal existence. But it is not exclusively brutal. Just because nature is not masochistic does not prove that it is exclusively driven by brutally selfish natural selection. Furthermore, as we have seen, Darwin’s version of natural selection itself has never been proven; in fact, it has been disproven. Perhaps Darwin’s insistence that natural selection is ultimately brutal is a projection of shame for the brutal side of his own nature. Natural selection justifies brutality and sanctifies guilt. The brutal cannot face a God who might not condone brutality. Therefore, religions create their gods in the image of their own brutality to justify and sanctify brutality, and science creates its god, natural selection, the shadow of civilized man, for the same purpose. The cooperative goodness produced by the God proclaimed by every major religion and recognized by the vast majority of people who have ever lived is an abstract construct to the tone-deaf, spiritually myopic Darwin. Intellectually, abstractly, Darwin understands the facts. Yet he never sees their multidimensional actuality, their transcending depth. He never even sees the glass half full, like, say, Anaximander or the vast majority of souls ever since. For Darwin, the glass is entirely empty. Life exists only to reproduce itself in an endless loop of brute survival for its own sake. One might

ask the Victorian Darwin if marriage is knowing about a person or knowing that person. Is living knowing about life or knowing life? If one does not know life, can one know God, and vice versa? Yes, this is a metaphysical query, and one scientists often pose, if only negatively by denying its validity. There is the knowledge of the collector and the knowledge of lovers, madmen, and poets. To know about like a collector is not to know like a lover of art. Darwin and neo-Darwinians and atheists and many agnostics don’t know. They can’t know what they refuse to believe exists—God and the spiritual dimension that animates everything. Darwinians are like people who visit art museums but are never deeply moved by the art. For them, Nature is a picture of life, a still life produced with paints on a two-dimensional canvas. Nothing more. What escapes them is depth, representational meaning, the correspondence between one world and another. Their faculties are not fully engaged. Reason is diluted by reductive scansion; intuition, emotion, and aesthetic exist like phantom limbs. Conscience rests upon self-congratulation, which looks suspiciously like a smokescreen masking the worship of brutality. Darwin had already provided proof of natural cooperation for mutual benefit in the few pages preceding his assertion that natural selection never modifies to benefit another, and offers yet more proof in the pages following. For instance: “Seeds are disseminated by their minuteness, by their capsule being converted into a light balloon-like envelope, by being embedded in pulp or flesh, formed of the most diverse parts, and rendered nutritious, as well as conspicuously colored, so as to attract and be devoured by birds, by having hooks and grapnels of many kinds and serrated awns, so as to adhere to the fur of quadrupeds, and by being furnished with wings and plumes, as different in shape as they are elegant in structure, so as to be wafted by every breeze.” The fact is that things exist for each other: Seeds are nutritious to birds; they are the food, the sustenance of the birds’ existence. Birds assist a plant’s survival, and even participate in the reproductive process. The profound beauty of the symbiosis of living seems completely lost on Darwin. At first glance, it appears that seeds merely exploit available means of dissemination. It’s fair to ask right off how seeds know how

to exploit. Ah, Darwinians respond, seeds don’t know this. Natural selection knows this. That would be a satisfactory response for someone whose answer to the mystery of Creation is a drawer of seeds and a few stuffed birds and quadrupeds. Darwin doesn’t seem to realize that natural selection is a knowing intelligence, a god. He also dismisses the fact that birds do benefit from seeds. Have seeds been formed for the exclusive good of birds? Well, have birds or quadrupeds been formed for the exclusive good of seeds? The good is not exclusive if it is reciprocal. Good is good only if it is not exclusive. Nature is democratic with its goodness. Darwin misses the point that there is as much good for birds in seed dissemination as there is bad for the victim of the adder’s fang. Darwin avoids dualism and “unifies” Nature by making it exclusively selfish. Intelligent Creation Darwin never asks how natural selection, or Nature, got so smart. For instance, “pollen does not spontaneously fall on the stigma, some aid is necessary for their fertilization. With several kinds this is effected by the pollen-grains, which are light and incoherent, being blown by the wind through mere chance on to the stigma; and this is the simplest plan which can well be conceived.” Who drew up this complex “simplest” plan? Who put the plan into action? “An almost equally simple, though very different plan occurs in many plants in which a symmetrical flower secretes a few drops of nectar, and is consequently visited by insects; and these carry the pollen from the anthers to the stigma.” If the first plan worked, why create another? Ask any artist why she paints picture after picture. Nature isn’t a mere plan; it’s a humungous gallery continuously stocking new works displaying exuberant creativity. When aesthetic atrophies, when amazing feats of nature are reduced to flat facts on a spreadsheet, reason, too, flattens. The flat reason of Darwinian biology takes the formation and processes of life for granted and fails to notice that their existence is no more scientifically necessary than Picasso’s Blue Period Old Guitarist or his controversial Les Demoiselles d’Avignon or the Analytical Cubism he developed with Braque. Creativity spreads outward,

always pregnant with something new; reductionist science squeezes the life out of life. Reductionists can’t answer why, if natural selection is so smart, does fertilization need to take place at all? And why is it such an elaborate process? Darwin continues to describe the amazingly beautifully elaborate natural process, but he does so coolly, dispassionately, as one unable to aesthetically feel what is witnessed: From this simple stage we may pass through an inexhaustible number of contrivances, all for the same purpose and effected in essentially the same manner, but entailing changes in every part of the flower. The nectar may be stored in variously shaped receptacles, with the stamens and pistils modified in many ways, sometimes forming trap-like contrivances, and sometimes capable of neatly adapted movements through irritability or elasticity. From such structures we may advance till we come to such a case of extraordinary adaptation as that lately described by Dr. Cruger in the Coryanthes. This orchid has part of its labellum or lower lip hollowed out into a great bucket, into which drops of almost pure water continually fall from two secreting horns which stand above it; and when the bucket is half-full, the water overflows by a spout on one side. The basal part of the labellum stands over the bucket, and is itself hollowed out into a sort of chamber with two lateral entrances; within this chamber there are curious fleshy ridges. The most ingenious man, if he had not witnessed what takes place, could never have imagined what purpose all these parts serve. But Dr. Cruger saw crowds of large humble-bees visiting the gigantic flowers of this orchid, not in order to suck nectar, but to gnaw off the ridges within the chamber above the bucket; in doing this they frequently pushed each other into the bucket, and their wings being thus wetted they could not fly away, but were compelled to crawl out through the passage formed by the spout or overflow. Dr. Cruger saw a “continual procession” of bees thus crawling out of their involuntary bath. The passage is narrow, and is roofed over by the column, so that a bee, in forcing its way out, first rubs its back against the viscid stigma

and then against the viscid glands of the pollen-masses. The pollen-masses are thus glued to the back of the bee which first happens to crawl out through the passage of a lately expanded flower, and are thus carried away. Dr. Cruger sent me a flower in spirits of wine, with a bee which he had killed before it had quite crawled out, with a pollen-mass still fastened to its back. When the bee, thus provided, flies to another flower, or to the same flower a second time, and is pushed by its comrades into the bucket and then crawls out by the passage, the pollenmass necessarily comes first into contact with the viscid stigma, and adheres to it, and the flower is fertilized. Now at last we see the full use of every part of the flower, of the watersecreting horns of the bucket half-full of water, which prevents the bees from flying away, and forces them to crawl out through the spout, and rub against the properly placed viscid pollenmasses and the viscid stigma. This wildly exotic orchid-bee choreography far exceeds the creativity of any dance conceived by Twyla Tharp. Granted, this process might not be a mass orgy of mutual benefit. Then again, who’s to say the bees don’t enjoy this trip to the baths? And it was Dr. Cruger who killed the bee preserved in the spirits of wine (now the bee’s spirit has mixed with the wine’s). Perhaps more to the point, Mr. Darwin, is such an elegant art work as the fertilization of an orchid really an example of ruthless, to-the-point natural selection? But this sticky point persists: Why not stick to the finished product, if it works? Why embellish? The construction of the flower in another closely allied orchid, namely, the Catasetum, is widely different, though serving the same end; and is equally curious. Bees visit these flowers, like those of the Coryanthes, in order to gnaw the labellum; in doing this they inevitably touch a long, tapering, sensitive projection, or, as I have called it, the antenna. This antenna, when touched, transmits a sensation or vibration to a certain membrane which is instantly ruptured; this sets free a spring by which the pollen-mass is shot forth, like an arrow, in the right direction, and adheres by its viscid extremity to the back of the

bee. The pollen-mass of the male plant (for the sexes are separate in this orchid) is thus carried to the flower of the female plant, where it is brought into contact with the stigma, which is viscid enough to break certain elastic threads, and retain the pollen, thus effecting fertilization. I can’t help but feel that God is messing with Darwin’s mind. Darwin simply muses, “How, it may be asked, in the foregoing and in innumerable other instances, can we understand the graduated scale of complexity and the multifarious means for gaining the same end.” We can’t, unless we accept that Creation is the opus-inprogress of a wildly ingenious Creator. Early on Darwin wondered why the world teemed with beautiful creatures and objects, most of which no human had ever witnessed. He was quick to assure himself and us that beauty was not God’s gift to humanity. It never occurred to him that God might want to create beauty for its own sake rather than to impress humans. Dismissing any notion of divine art for art’s sake, never considering an innate human aesthetic faculty for the sake of aesthetic appreciation— whatever “god” existed was certainly not a personal God—by the time he published his Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex in 1871, Darwin had reduced beauty to a means for sexual selection, never considering why beauty as a means would be necessary or even possible from a reductive standpoint. Eventually, in the fullness of his atrophied brain, Darwin decided that beauty, like creation itself, was simply a byproduct of a mechanical process. The beauty of orchids was a result of selection that led to petals’ construction to attract bees and guide them to nectar, where pollen sacs could be deposited and extracted, transporting the pollen from flower to flower…Why orchids should be beautiful to humans who are not involved in the orchids’ blossoming sexuality at all he never resolved. By the time of his Descent, Darwin believed that nature created nature, even beautiful nature, and that nature was simply the function of natural laws. Darwin’s agnosticism had evolved into absolute reverence for the mechanistic god, natural selection. Selection is a god, for what selects if not a willful intelligence? And are laws, which in themselves are abstract, that rational, that smart,

that creative to produce even one flower? Nothing about the elaborate, beautiful process of an orchid could have been implemented by irrational intent, because intent is rational, intent has foresight, and even beauty—if beauty exists—is the culmination of aesthetic decisions. And even that culmination isn’t static but is perpetually coming into being as unique form. Orchids are elegantly orchestrated complexity. Only an intelligence—not a mindless, willless “mechanism” devoid of aesthetic—could design and implement such a plan as the blueprint orchid, much less the innumerable variations on the orchid theme. And an orchid isn’t the blueprint; it’s a realized process of existing —a process of becoming and being an absolutely unique version of an absolutely fixed form. Isn’t it impossible for mindless mechanisms to maintain the integrity of discrete form while promoting its perpetual transformation? Just contemplating this reality abstractly, much less its myriad concrete manifestations, confounds the human mind, including Darwin’s. While reading Darwin’s long description of the orchid I couldn’t help but notice the many words he used to describe the intelligent, willful creation of such an organism: aid, plan, contrivances, purpose, effected, entailing changes, etc.; not to mention the incredibly intricate apparatuses and complicated procedures of pollination— plural because nature, be that God or some blind mechanism, likes to tinker with his/her/its inventions; not to mention the breathtaking beauty of the general order orchid (Orchidales, consisting of four families, the largest of which consists of approximately 1,000 genera and 20,000 species); not to mention any of the utterly unique concrete examples of orchid. None of this was lost on the astute naturalist, Mr. Darwin. Yet something was very, very lost. Though time echoed in the back of his mind, Darwin could no longer hear Paley’s watch ticking on the heath. Intelligent design was reduced to mindless natural selection brutally mindful of anything that would assure survival. Well, even that’s not quite right. Wouldn’t natural selection be mindful of the survival of all species? And wouldn’t natural selection therefore prefer a plan of cooperation that ensured protection of otherwise victim species? Darwin’s god isn’t

concerned with mere survival; his god wants superior predators with hearty appetites and big muscles. The Darwin who could not see the self-contradiction of mindless mindfulness ruled out a Creator and therefore divine, or natural, art for art’s sake. Darwin makes a startling admission of the limitations of scientific observation when he says, “If green woodpeckers alone had existed, and we did not know that there were many black and pied kinds, I dare say that we should have thought that the green color was a beautiful adaptation to conceal this tree-frequenting bird from its enemies; and consequently that it was a character of importance, and had been acquired through natural selection.” If Creation that he had observed alone existed, if he did not know that there was much more to Creation, like say DNA, and if he did not know that there was a designer of the ticking watch or wildly diverse ticking life forms, from his self-contained, reductionist, limited, elitist, privileged, narcissistic vantage he would have no choice but to observe, “As it is, the color is probably in chief part due to sexual selection.” Probably. He has no solid evidence that this is a fact. In chief part. And the rest? Darwin’s theory is a flat, one-dimensional, reductionist assumption. His perception was distorted by his belief that certain obvious realities did not exist, therefore other realities had to be constructed. He stopped his ears to the ticking until his hearing atrophied. He made himself deaf. So deaf that he sometimes couldn’t hear his own contradictions. For example, he acknowledges that “Some naturalists [argue] against the utilitarian doctrine that every detail of structure has been produced for the good of its possessor. They believe that many structures have been created for the sake of beauty, to delight man or the Creator (but this latter point is beyond the scope of scientific discussion), or for the sake of mere variety... Such doctrines, if true, would be absolutely fatal to my theory.” In other words, if some details of structure did not simply serve utilitarian purposes, his theory would fall flat. Yet he continues, “I fully admit that many structures are now of no direct use to their possessors, and may never have been of any use to their progenitors; but this does not prove that they were formed solely for beauty or variety.” This might not prove beauty or variety as the sole purpose, but it does not

disprove beauty or variety as a purpose, and nonutility certainly disproves necessary utility of natural selection. If Darwin has not reached the point of atheism, if his agnosticism dislocates God to a transcendent realm utterly dislodged from life, Earth, and the universe, then beauty has absolutely no purpose beyond the procreation of beautiful creatures (which still begs the question: why something as convoluted as beauty), and there is no reason why creatures utterly disconnected from the sexual process of that species should register that same beauty as beautiful. Humans have always wondered why things should strike us as beautiful. Even atheist scientists wonder why we register beauty when it serves no utilitarian purpose. Darwin offered a typically flat scientific explanation, which doesn’t really explain the purpose of beauty, or the faculty of beauty. He pronounces, “With respect to the belief that organic beings have been created beautiful for the delight of man—a belief which it has been pronounced is subversive of my whole theory—I may first remark that the sense of beauty obviously depends on the nature of the mind, irrespective of any real quality in the admired object; and that the idea of what is beautiful, is not innate or unalterable.” Darwin skirts the issue, of course. Humans are delighted by the beauty of organic beings, and shrugging it off by arguing that this human delight isn’t natural, it’s only a human construct, doesn’t make sense if humans have always been delighted by the beauty of organic beings. Even small children choose certain colors just because they like them. Their preference expresses a budding, innate aesthetic. Darwin has ruled out a priori the possibility that a Creator is involved in Creation, so the idea that anything, including beauty, has been created for our delight is impossible. Most of us believe on the basis of common sense that a Watchmaker might well have created a watch for more than utilitarian purposes, and that life’s beautiful embellishments might well have been created for our joyful appreciation. Those of us whose aesthetic has not atrophied feel a deep intuitive connection to the Source of beauty. That the sense of beauty depends on the nature of the mind only supports the point that the mind has been designed to register

beauty as beauty, not as a red light flashing in Hooker Alley. The mind has been constructed to apprehend and appreciate beauty. Darwin asserts that beauty is somehow disconnected from any quality of inherent beauty. But how could we register any beauty at all if there were not some objective condition that could be perceived as beautiful? It’s true that people differ in their tastes and preferences. But above the varieties of beauty, there is some reality of beauty. I might prefer a French garden to a New Mexico cactus garden, but I don’t think anybody would argue that either inherently lacks beauty. Issues of quality aside, most people understand that preference for a version of beauty is a matter of personal taste. For a mechanistic determinist, taste, which depends on free choice, isn’t even an actuality. Darwin believes that the idea of what is beautiful is not innate or unalterable. It is true that the aesthetic sensibility can be honed, just like reason can be schooled and experience can be enlarged. We are born with potentials, but they must be activated and cultivated. Use it or lose it. Even our bodies must be exercised and nutritiously fed to grow normally. But normal growth is possible and is perfectly natural. Growth of all our faculties depends upon normal, natural functioning. Darwin is right that the idea of beauty is not innate or unalterable. But even Darwin naturally responded to beauty as a child. His beetles were beautiful. The many objects that he collected were to him beautiful. Nature was beautiful, and he intuitively, instinctively felt its beauty emotionally. The aesthetic faculty to register and experience beauty is innate, but taste—the conceptual idea of beauty—results from one’s own preferences choosing a “style” as well as from enculturation. One’s taste might change as one experiences new forms of beauty. One’s preferences might change as one apprehends and assimilates, discerns and distinguishes and decides. This is possible because the Creator of beautiful has given us in addition to the aesthetic faculty the even more amazing facility of free will. Even when the adult Darwin doubted his own childhood experience of beauty, he could still recognize beauty when he saw it. But his a priori bias against a Creator and against any possibility that beauty was a matter of art for art’s sake diverted him from logical

conclusions. His research and observations, tangled in selfcontradiction, prevented him from really seeing what he was looking at. Although he could ask the right questions, he could not see that asking those questions in itself confirmed the rational basis of reality, including beauty. “Few objects are more beautiful than the minute siliceous cases of the diatomaceae: were these created that they might be examined and admired under the higher powers of the microscope?” he asks. Of course he cannot entertain the possibility of Yes. Yet he does not and cannot prove his implied No. “The beauty in this latter case, and in many others, is apparently wholly due to symmetry of growth.” Symmetry might explain some versions of beauty, but of course asymmetry could as easily explain the beauty of windswept cypresses on the craggy cliffs of costal Monterey. “Flowers rank among the most beautiful productions of nature; but they have been rendered conspicuous in contrast with the green leaves, and in consequence at the same time beautiful, so that they may be easily observed by insects.” Of course, being easily observed and being beautiful are two very different qualities of reality. Now we have contrast, and perhaps color: the beginning of a very long list of what we humans might register as beautiful. Do other creatures also register at least some of these aspects of beauty as beauty? Symmetry. Contrast. Color. That’s smart. Who decided to make “easily observed” easy? Who decided to make it easy in a billion different ways that are beautiful? Who made us humans, at least, register symmetry and contrast and color as beauty? “That the gaily-colored fruit of the spindle-wood tree and the scarlet berries of the holly are beautiful objects—will be admitted by everyone.” Such universal admitting contradicts his earlier assertion that beauty is not innate or unalterable. “But this beauty serves merely as a guide to birds and beasts, in order that the fruit may be devoured and the matured seeds disseminated.” Why should birds and beasts need beauty to guide them to fruit and seeds? The gailycolored fruit and scarlet berries could beckon like a lighthouse beacon without their colors registering as beautiful either to animals or to us humans on the sidelines. The registering of beauty goes well beyond recognition of the object. It exists on its own plane of

existence; it is a separate dimension that transcends the object as object; it is a reality that exists both as a quality of the object and as a quality of perception in our minds. Beauty is one of the aspects of existence that connect things to one another for the sake of connection, not for any utilitarian purpose on the flat plane of Darwinian nature. “On the other hand, I willingly admit that a great number of male animals, as all our most gorgeous birds, some fishes, reptiles, and mammals, and a host of magnificently colored butterflies, have been rendered beautiful for beauty’s sake.” Did I hear “beautiful for beauty’s sake”? Ah, “But this has been effected through sexual selection, that is, by the more beautiful males having been continually preferred by the females, and not for the delight of man.” First, beauty for the sake of sexual selection isn’t beauty for beauty’s sake. Second, even if it wasn’t created for us voyeur humans, it still is delightfully beautiful to us. Why is that? Why this instinctual response to beauty? Third, why are animals attracted to beauty? How is this attraction to beauty in any way an aspect that makes a creature fittest to survive? How does beauty contribute in any way to survival? It could even be argued that all that beauty draws extraordinary attention to the animal, making it an easier target for predators and therefore much less fit to survive. “So it is with the music of birds,” the tone-deaf Darwin continues. “We may infer from all this that a nearly similar taste for beautiful colors and for musical sounds runs through a large part of the animal kingdom.” This taste for art surely does not directly contribute to a creature’s survival, though it may make him or her sexy. But why is that sexy? Taste gives pleasure. Beauty gives pleasure. Pleasure exists to motivate behavior but it also exists for its own sake, which is one reason dieting is so hard and birth control so necessary. Most people don’t visit art museums or attend operas just to pick up one night stands or even life partners. Limiting the aesthetic faculty of humans to sexual function is absurd. Darwin has locked himself into a dark cellar in his brain where the remarkable elegant designs of nature are reduced to pin-up girls and dudes displayed for masturbatory perusal. Without God, the multitude of wondrous depth and dimension of which we are

composed shrivels up and dies. This is the experience of atrophy from which Darwin suffered. He asks, “Can instincts be acquired and modified through natural selection? What shall we say to the instinct which leads the bee to make cells, and which has practically anticipated the discoveries of profound mathematicians?” This is quite a claim coming from a man who barely passed algebra. What shall we say to the lack of instinct that leads a man to perceive so much profoundly intelligently designed beauty with a clinical eye devoid of any insight that most of us call spiritual? The answer to the deepest mystery of life’s origin is staring him in the face, eyeball to eyeball. Does he really believe that the sense of beauty is nothing more than habit, and instinct a mindless accident? What shall we say, he asks almost rhetorically, yet I sense in his recognition of the profoundly exquisite cell-making of bees the longing of a shriveled old man seeking a comb of honey. “How the sense of beauty in its simplest form—that is, the reception of a peculiar kind of pleasure from certain colors, forms and sounds—was first developed in the mind of man and of the lower animals, is a very obscure subject. The same sort of difficulty is presented if we enquire how it is that certain flavors and odors give pleasure, and others displeasure. Habit in all these cases appears to have come to a certain extent into play; but there must be some fundamental cause in the constitution of the nervous system in each species.” The fundamental cause must be God. But he argues, “Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man?” Perhaps the habit of trying to prove his theory to fulfill his personal ambition has blinded him to the truth that he might have sensed in his youth, beginning with “the Creator,” a Freudian slip here, a confession of his unwillingness to let go of the concept. Clearly he senses a Creator; he just wants to recreate God in the image of his own theory. Natural selection is his god, a lesser god, I think even Darwin would admit. “We must suppose that there is a power, represented by natural selection or the survival of the fittest, always intently watching each slight alteration in the transparent layers; and carefully preserving

each which, under varied circumstances, in any way or degree, tends to produce a distincter image.” What but a god is always intently watching? “We must suppose each new state of the instrument to be multiplied by the million; each to be preserved until a better is produced, and then the old ones to be all destroyed. In living bodies, variation will cause the slight alteration, generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement.” What but a god picks at all; what but a god picks out with unerring skill? “Let this process go on for millions of years; and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument [the eye] might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man?” The logic here is that the god of natural selection can produce a complex eye—a part of the works usually attributed to the Creator— that is as superior to a glass eye as the works of the Creator are to man. More simply put, the Creator (in the guise of natural selection) can produce nature that is superior to the devices created by humans. Natural selection is, in other words, God, or the working of God. Why not just admit that Nature is the intelligently designed creation of the Creator we all know and love? Because then his precious theory fails, and all his glory is one of those ingenious scientific hoaxes he so admired in childhood. But hoaxes don’t cut it in old age. The possibility of discovery of this magnitude makes a vain man’s integrity sick. Literally. I feel sorry for the man. I feel sorry for all the drawers of collected objects that represent a life not lived. Oh, for the good old days of collecting beetles. Not art, not music, certainly not academic studies were pursued at Cambridge “with nearly so much eagerness or gave me so much pleasure as collecting beetles. It was the mere passion for collecting, for I did not dissect them, and rarely compared their external characters with published descriptions, but got them named anyhow.” I will give a proof of my zeal: one day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so

that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! It ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one…I was very successful in collecting, and invented two new methods; I employed a labourer to scrape during the winter, moss off old trees and place it in a large bag, and likewise to collect the rubbish at the bottom of the barges in which reeds are brought from the fens, and thus I got some very rare species. No poet ever felt more delighted at seeing his first poem published than I did at seeing, in Stephens’ Illustrations of British Insects, the magic words, “captured by C. Darwin, Esq.” Darwin was, in a sense, a lost soul. And that childhood zeal was the soul he lost. Throughout his life Darwin discussed his theological concerns with his wife Emma. Shortly before he proposed to her, Darwin confessed the dwindling of his faith. A Unitarian, Emma didn’t accept all the dogmas of traditional Christianity, such as the Trinity or certain miracles, but she did believe in the love represented by the Christ of John’s Gospel and in the afterlife. The couple supported their local church, and sacrificed time and money to its charitable causes, some of which were so progressive that they drew heated controversy and resentment from at least one of their pastors. Emma was well known for her personal generosity toward the poor and the sick. Being a loving person and a devoted wife, she agonized over the fate of Charles’ soul. What drives a man who seemingly has every good gift that matters in life to reject the personal God of love—for his denial was rejection. Could he not sense that depression and perennial illness were symptoms of a soul slipping into an abyss—red flags of his living being devolving? Even before they married, Emma made no secret of her fear that the great spiritual chasm between them would persist throughout their marriage. She cherished spiritual love as the highest expression of the highest level of human potential. Their spiritual disconnect was the cross she bore. Surely Darwin didn’t will his dislocation from the burnished ideals and numinous ecstasies he had cherished in his youth. What

happened to the Fern Hill joy of innocence? Perhaps Darwin felt, as Dylan Thomas would a century later, that even young and easy in the mercy of Nature’s means, time held him green and dying as he sang in his chains like the sea. Spiritual dissociation; spiritual depression: These seem to me to be masculine frailties expressed in both men and women. Emma’s spiritual love-ness and confidence in afterlife certainly exude lifeforce, whereas natural selection grunts its joyless hopelessness. Darwin would never grasp the mysterious mechanism of life. He would never join his deceased parents or beloved children. Death would remove him from Emma forever. If that’s evolution, who wants it, who needs it? Why would Darwin choose to believe it even when he knew conclusive evidence was blatantly lacking? Isn’t Darwin’s tragic flaw his frustration at not knowing? If only he could have relaxed into Keatsian negative capability, “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” so that “the sense of Beauty overcomes every consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.” Emma would surely agree with Keats, “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—what the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth— whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love: they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.” I can hear Emma, exasperated with Charles, “O for a Life of Sensation rather than Thoughts!” It’s not farfetched to assert that delusions of mindless creation result from privileging fossilized husks of reason over common sense, which includes all our inherent faculties, like intuition, aesthetic—and yes reason, but reason that’s vibrant and juicy. Scientists who get their hands dirty with the loam of life are too often content to simply catalogue their discoveries instead of reaching deeper to touch life’s dynamic source. Even their dirty hands must ultimately look abstract to them. And it’s this tendency to abstract the concrete into subservient caricatures of reality that allows an otherwise decent man to push a button and blow up a point on a map that abstractly represents millions of “enemies.” Oh for the day when we had to look our target

in the eye. Instead we pin our little flags to a map, like butterflies to a corkboard. Nothing Darwin hypothesized or proved disproved the possibility —or even necessity—of a creating Mind. But science decided that that Mind could not be a transcendent or even immanent Creator but rather had to be an impersonal “mechanism” like natural selection. If humans were just smart apes, why couldn’t a mechanical messiah “direct” the windup universe, even if part of that universe breathed? Remarkably, this notion was not considered absurd by Darwin and his cronies. Darwin continued to work on his theology—er, theory, for the rest of his days. It is not without irony that the mighty Darwin concluded his life with the publication of The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms. When he died of a heart attack (symbolism noted), his union with lowly worms was a consummation devoutly wished, and he considered “Down graveyard as the sweetest place on earth.” Alas, he will spend eternity embalmed in marble, immortalized in his corner of Westminster Abbey, estranged from his beloved family buried in their local churchyard plot. To the end, Darwin hoped that future excavations would dig up links showing the gradual progression from one species to another— a kind of last ditch nod toward a materialist’s version of eternal life. Darwin became a scientific hero by being a victim of his age. Perhaps the felt sense of divine immanence so potent in childhood was more than his repressed Victorian reason, oppressed by ambition, could accommodate.



 

Chapter 6 Calculated Construction: The Science of Intelligent Design Intelligent design, the ancient wisdom introduced by Greco-Roman philosophers, and later energized by humanists from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, and then modernized by Paley’s watchmaker motif, and now touted as “new” and “exciting” by the sages of cutting-edge science, is making a huge comeback, and so is the timeless natural religion it scientifically confirms. Deism is the fastest growing religion in America in part because of the growing popularity of today’s rendition of intelligent design. Meanwhile, fundamentalists, scrambling to shore up biblical creationism with each new discovery that demonstrates design, equivocate using cherry-picked data, skewed logic, and bogus exegesis starting with “What the Bible really says is…” The truth is that intelligent design confirms neither religious creation myths not the creation myth of Darwinian evolution and its mutant brainchild, mechanistic determinism. Meanwhile, nervous neo-Darwinians ramp up their assertion that Darwin proved and knew he had proven the fact of evolution via natural selection, even as more and more scientists disagree with the claim that evolution is a fact or even a valid theory. At issue today is not that category of evolution we now call microevolution, or evolution within a species type. What is disputed is macroevolution, or the metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa into a giant cockroach. The truth is not just that macroevolution has not been proven; the glaring reality is that it has been disproven. Furthermore, Darwinians from Bulldog Huxley to Rottweiler Dawkins have been well aware that even in their holy scripture, The Origin of Species, Darwin indicates profound anxiety about the validity of his theory of evolution

by Means of Natural Selection of the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. Darwin himself establishes the criteria that would disconfirm his theory; on the basis of those criteria, his theory has been disconfirmed. But Darwinians have always been adept at selective science. They know that in the Origin, Darwin, a man of contradictions, contradicts himself and a great many leading scientists of the era as well. Darwin’s rhetorical fallacies alone demand a skeptical stance toward his theory, but Darwinians treat them like trivial incidentals. Neo-Darwinians transcend science with their special brand of mysticism centered in their material Creator, natural selection, eschatologically driven by blind chance. Recent scientific discoveries that have disproven fundamental Darwinian assumptions are skewed or skewered in the sacred name of atheism. Meanwhile, Darwinians scramble semantics in order to index circus animals found in cloud formations they can add to their box of embarrassing proofs of macroevolution. Take the fish fossil Panderichthys, back in 2005 the celebrated mascot of evolution, the clincher (i.e., only) transitional fossil demonstrating our transition from sea to land, specifically from fish to tetrapod, due to its pectoral fins’ radial bones that proved that fingers evolved from distal radials of fish. Then in 2006, a new fish fossil, Tiktaalik, arrived in science’s small in-box of fossil fragments, and suddenly almighty Panderichthys was abandoned as not really revealing “tetrapod synapomorphies” or evidence of transition after all. Whoops. But Tiktaalik rocked. It was the premier fossil fragment that proved transition. The National Academy of Science’s 2008 “Science, Evolution, and Creationism” booklet called it “a notable transitional form.” Even PBS tooted its horn in the special, “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial.” But then by fall 2008, someone gave the little Panderichthys fossil fragment a CT scan, and thought a few radial bones in its pectoral fins did look an awful lot like something that could evolve into fingers. And really, Tiktaalik wasn’t such a good specimen after all. In fact, the quality of the specimen was now classified as “poor.” Whoops. But Panderichthys rocked. Until evolutionary biologist Michael Coates, a Darwinian, noted that

radials aren’t really finger-like, aren’t really precursors to fingers at all. In fact, the fragments that kinda sorta maybe looked like future fingers could well be just fragments of damaged bones, which is the current consensus. Whoops. Of course he still believes in X-God humans-evolved-from-fish. And here we have the fruits of Darwinian speculation, carefully crated and cataloged under “I think I see a fish crawling ashore in that cloud over there.” And thus fish evolved into birds. Really. Just ask any authority on ancient mythology. On the Discovery Institute website, biologist Jonathan Wells frames his critique of absurd Darwinian assertions as questions aimed at producers of school textbooks. For instance, “Why do textbooks use pictures of peppered moths camouflaged on tree trunks as evidence for natural selection—when biologists have known since the 1980s that the moths don’t normally rest on tree trunks, and all the pictures have been staged?” “Why do textbooks claim that beak changes in Galapagos finches during a severe drought can explain the origin of species by natural selection—even though the changes were reversed after the drought ended, and no net evolution occurred?” “Why do textbooks use fruit flies with an extra pair of wings as evidence that DNA mutations can supply raw materials for evolution—even though the extra wings have no muscles and these disabled mutants cannot survive outside the laboratory?” “Why are artists’ drawings of ape-like humans used to justify materialistic claims that we are just animals and our existence is a mere accident—when fossil experts cannot even agree on who our supposed ancestors were or what they looked like?” I might not agree with Wells’ theology, but I respect his insistence that Darwinian proselytizers explain their misrepresentations, which are required reading for schoolchildren. As Keats might have said, axioms in philosophy-as-science are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses. He might well have wondered if progress might be better served by leaving scientific fact-gathering to scientists and assigning interpretation of facts to the literati. It makes me sad that I, who grew up loving and trusting science, must join the growing ranks of increasingly diligent science skeptics. But I’m excited by the prospect of redefining science as a

representational genre and subjecting it to the rigors of literary analysis. (I dream of a science course titled Fun with Fallacies.) Academics know not what they do, at least not fully, when they bow to the authority of scientists who bow to the authority of “Darwin,” when even Darwin himself had grave doubts about his own conclusions; when science itself has disallowed Darwin’s theory of natural selection; when the Darwinian worldview is rigorously advanced by people and groups bent on exploiting it. Most people never actually see a neo-Darwinian defiantly shake his clenched fists at the empty sky, stubbornly poised to make that final leap of faith into the abyss of personal extinction, some on their way down slashing their wrists on the blunt edge of pseudo-science. Most of us never see the neo-Darwinian world devoid of any hope of an afterlife, of any inherent meaning or ultimate justice, of any God, of any reason to go on living other than to shove their beliefs down the gullets of the gullible. Neo-Darwinians know perfectly well that Darwin consciously and willingly pressed a theory that relied on biased and bogus research concluding with a “crowd of difficulties” ranging from the inaccurate bottom-up design assumption of his great Tree of Life to Haeckel’s falsified embryonic depictions that were fraudulent distortions of von Baer’s observations. Darwin’s cool disregard for the hard facts of the Cambrian explosion and the complete absence of transitional links in the fossil record, his disagreement with his own agreement with Paley’s watchmaker design argument, his reliance on Malthus’ fallacies regarding population growth, and his ignorance (or ignoring) of Mendel are Darwin’s frauds, frauds of the past, frauds we know to be frauds. Yet this “crowd of difficulties” is the basis of neoDarwinism upon which today’s atheism has been propped. It’s true that neo-Darwinians rely less on fossil and embryonic evidence and more on molecular proof of evolutionary mutation. Unfortunately for them, the fact is that beneficial mutations that would promote evolution are extremely rare and are biochemical in nature; and contrary to Darwin’s assumption, most mutations are harmful or fatal, or they don’t produce any noticeable effects, and few mutations are reproducible anyway. But even beneficial mutations only add very minor changes (wondrous minor-key jazz

riffs called “trivial” by underwhelmed, anti-design scientists); even if reproducible they result from latent adaptation potentiality triggered by the environment. As scientists like Jonathan Wells point out, mutate DNA of, say, a fruit fly in every possible way and you can only get a normal fruit fly, a defective fruit fly, or a dead fruit fly. Mutations never radically transform the species. Per Wells et al, they certainly never change the species type (those discrete “containers” explained in Chapter 1) into another species type: That has never happened. Sax improv is still sax. Even if beneficial large-scale molecular changes could occur, even Darwinian biologists (and atheist physicists like Stephen Hawking) agree that the number of steps from the earliest living form —a bacterium, say—to any one contemporary species would take hundreds of trillions of times more time than the lifespan not just of Earth but of the entire universe. And that’s just for one major species type to another. Even admitting this, even knowing this, they stubbornly assert Darwinism (and its neo idée fixe, multiverse) as fact. Their self-contradiction is consistent with the self-contradiction of Darwin’s theory and with Darwin the man. Abstractly, one might be able to imagine one species gradually morphing into a different genus, or a genus morphing into an order into a class. But even Darwin understood that for many reasons incremental change cannot possibly explain the appearance of a complex organ. “Although the belief that an organ so perfect as the eye could have been formed by natural selection, is enough to stagger anyone; yet in the case of any organ, if we know of a long series of gradations in complexity…” But we do not know of any process of gradations in complexity that leads to the formation of so perfect an organ as a fully developed, unified eye. I will discuss this more fully later; suffice it to note here that Darwin himself in his next breath argues against himself by admitting that “we know of no intermediate or transitional states.” Yet those states must exist or Darwin’s theory is disconfirmed, because as Darwin himself states, “On the theory of natural selection we can clearly understand the full meaning of that old canon in natural history, ‘Natura non facit saltum [nature makes no leap].’”

Darwin’s explanation to this conundrum is but another contradiction. [Patient reader, please bear with just a few more quotes as I drive these last couple nails in Darwin’s coffin: The man has been dead, after all, for quite some time.] He asserts, “It is generally acknowledged that all organic beings have been formed on two great laws—Unity of Type, and the Conditions of Existence. By unity of type is meant that fundamental agreement in structure which we see in organic beings of the same class, and which is quite independent of their habits of life. On my theory, unity of type is explained by unity of descent.” Problem One: Only an intelligence could recognize, much less create, much less create organically, any kind of structural unity. Designing, implementing, and maintaining unity of type is an intellectual, aesthetic component of the creation process. Unity of type among untold millions and billions of species types and their discrete species and their individual members requires aesthetic intelligence well beyond human comprehension. It takes a personality who loves creating orchids and butterflies. It takes a God. Problem Two: Darwin claims that each species type, or discrete container, consists of structures that are specific to the species type, or even a single species within the type, that are not dependent upon habits of life, meaning they do not depend upon and did not emerge from environmental cues. But throughout nature we see a huge variety of genetically unrelated species that possess the same structures—legs, eyes, skin, brains, and bright colors, for instance. If they did not emerge naturally when triggered by environmental cues, then they were spontaneously created by God, or, as neoDarwinians assert, emerged randomly. But can anything truly unique, even if practical—especially if practical—not have been created by design? In the same passage in which Darwin makes his point of species differentiation, he acknowledges, “The common rule throughout nature is infinite diversity of structure for gaining the same end; and this again naturally follows from the same great principle.” Again, diverse species possess the same structures. Furthermore, the very fact that species seek the same end (survival and procreation) and follow this naturally (something in them drives

them) and they seek and are driven by a great principle (a rational directive inherent in all species) is a way of saying that an intelligent mind willfully created (past tense)—or creates and drives (present tense)—natural selection. That which would confirm Darwin’s theory is exactly that which disconfirms it: intelligent design. When Darwin tries to explain why species have unity of type independent of their conditions of existence, he inadvertently reveals the hand of God once again: “In many other cases, modifications are probably the direct result of the laws of variation or of growth, independently of any good having been thus gained.” Laws of variation for its own sake (independent of any good gained) contradict the law of unity of type. Variation suggests creative design —art for art’s sake. As we saw earlier, Darwin maintained that the fundamental and only purpose of natural selection is the good gained by the species, so he has just contradicted himself. “But even such structures have often, as we may feel assured, been subsequently taken advantage of, and still further modified, for the good of species under new conditions of life.” This suggests that something, whether the species itself or something outside the species, made (makes) the conscious decision to take advantage of purposeless (independent of any good gained) structures (which aren’t supposed to happen in the first place, according to Darwin’s theory) and modified (modifies) them for the good of the species. “Modified” means changed. A thing changes to serve a purpose (the good of the species) because something changes it, whether it be something within the thing itself or something outside the thing itself. In either case, the thing causing the change causes it— meaning willfully changes it to serve the purpose: in this case, causes it for the good of the species—meaning creates the change in order to benefit the species. That It that is causing the good must know what will be good. That means it must have the intelligence to discern the good and the foresight to predict the future good outcome. It also must have some motivation to benefit the species and to promote its continued existence. It’s absurd to think that “nothing,” or some random and/or mindless non-entity called a

“principle,” could or would do that. But neo-Darwinians follow Darwin in believing just that. Darwin knew that most people wouldn’t buy a theory that ran so counter to common sense, including his own. Chapter VII of the Origin, titled “Miscellaneous Objections to the Theory of Natural Selection,” begins with Darwin’s list of what he calls various objections advanced against his views. “Longevity—Modifications not necessarily simultaneous—Modifications apparently of no direct service—Progressive development—Characters of small functional importance, the most constant—Supposed incompetence of natural selection to account for the incipient stages of useful structures— Causes which interfere with the acquisition through natural selection of useful structures—Gradations of structure with changed functions —Widely different organs in members of the same class, developed from one and the same source—Reasons for disbelieving in great and abrupt modifications.” Darwin specifically acknowledges the “serious objection…urged by Bronn, and recently by Broca, namely, that many characters appear to be of no service whatever to their possessors, and therefore cannot have been influenced through natural selection.” This is a crucial point, because Darwin understands clearly that nonutilitarian qualities disconfirm natural selection and point to the creative license of a Creator. The second crucial point is that Darwin himself highlights examples that lend themselves to disconfirmation, perhaps leading the reader to infer that Darwin himself was not fully convinced by his own arguments: Bronn adduces the length of the ears and tails in the different species of hares and mice—the complex folds of enamel in the teeth of many animals, and a multitude of analogous cases. With respect to plants, this subject has been discussed by Nageli in an admirable essay. He admits that natural selection has effected much, but he insists that the families of plants differ chiefly from each other in morphological characters, which appear to be quite unimportant for the welfare of the species. He consequently believes in an innate tendency towards progressive and more perfect development. He

specifies the arrangement of the cells in the tissues, and of the leaves on the axis, as cases in which natural selection could not have acted. To these may be added the numerical divisions in the parts of the flower, the position of the ovules, the shape of the seed, when not of any use for dissemination, etc. Nageli’s belief “in an innate tendency towards progressive and more perfect development” is the fundamental assumption of both Darwinism and religion. But while Darwinism defines progressive and more perfect development as more efficient means to procreate and survive, religion defines it as spiritual transcending, not just from this life to the next after death, but as a perpetual process occurring in this life. Death is just a door into another room in the same house: another phase of the same process. In every instance, progression is logical: intelligent: designed. Darwin clearly respects Nageli’s opinion and probably agrees with it. In this passage, as in many others, Darwin betrays his doubt via his contradictions. He really isn’t sure that natural selection is truth; he has never really entirely abandoned his early religious tendencies. Reading between the lines, it’s possible to imagine Darwin grappling with his inherent faith in the spiritual perfectibility contradicted by animal brutality and human evil. Neo Noodling Unlike Nageli and Darwin, Darwinians today contend that the evolutionary progression of purely material life, like the emergence of all existence, is driven by the powerful force of contingency, meaning luck, or what has lately of necessity been dubbed “organizing convergence.” Amazingly, these scientists don’t have a problem believing that randomness and organization “just are” and that their coexistence is not contradictory. Everything just happens to be the way it is. Super-organization out of seemingly infinite potential isn’t for them an amazing display of Intelligence; it’s a random and unsupervised “event.” To someone literate, the myopic Darwinian scientist might look a bit like a chimp watching Hamlet. Infinite potential within the highly consistent structure that we apprehend as the laws of nature constitutes a worldview we humans have always intuited: Much is given, but within the given there is

plenty of wiggle room for creativity and free choice, and yes, even for chance, in the extraordinary process of change. The world’s creation myths creatively articulate our primal understanding that there has to be a transcending cause of the overarching structural consistency— a God—and of our ability to choose within the given parameters— free will. A recent devastating blow to Darwin’s unity of types and thus to evolutionary development biology (aka evo-devo, a hip 80s handle for embryology) has been the disconcerting discovery that radically different animals share developmental genes that are so similar that a gene serving as a kind of non-specific switch needed for eye development in, for example, a mouse can induce eye development in, say, a fruit fly embryo, yet the fruit fly develops fruit fly eyes instead of mouse eyes. This contradicts the Darwinian assumption that different organisms have their own sets of genes that very specifically control embryo development, and that any mutations in those genes would change the embryo, which equals evolution: Inheritance of mutation is evolution—macroevolution, according to Darwinians. The problem is that some radically different organisms that do not share a common descent share the same developmental “switch” gene, while other organisms that are in other ways genetically closer do not. It would be like a contractor mixing a special fixative in concrete used for the foundation of an adobe in New Mexico and a cathedral in Spain that he doesn’t use when building the split-levels next door to the adobe or the synagogue down the block from the cathedral. Darwin, of course, didn’t know about our astoundingly intricate DNA. Through the best microscopes of the nineteenth century, which magnified cells times seven hundred, a cell’s nucleus looked like a simple blob. Magnified by our microscopes times a thousand million, the nucleus becomes about as elegantly complex and sophisticated as a planet or a universe. We aren’t even close to unraveling its mysteries. Darwin also didn’t have access to the extensive findings of paleontologists that for over a century have only verified the complete absence of any missing links between species.

But neo-Darwinians today do have knowledge of DNA yet continue to promote Darwin’s misconceptions. Why? Because science is confirming intelligent design, and that’s tantamount to confirming a Creator God. The evidence of God is right there in our genes, and even more irritating, right there in their own genes. For example, recent discoveries in genetics have revealed that adaptation is possible because there is latent, built-in informational instruction capability that can be activated by environmental cues. Any genetic change comes about after the adaptation has occurred. The organism must have a reserve of extra, latent instructional information that can be accessed as needed. Whether the change occurs in the structure of an organ, in its function, or in the animal’s behavior, evolution occurs because evolution is possible, and it is possible because information and instructions—building blocks and instruction manual—for the new form already exist in the animal’s molecular structure. The more instructional information programmed in the organism, the greater the potential for change. The potential for evolution is prepackaged; the raw materials of evolution are already inherent in the animal—any animal, from day one. Darwinism argues change via mutation “from the ground up,” a version of making something (adding the extra) from nothing (what does not yet exist). But can one apple plus one apple make a pear, much less a pair of pears (needed to reproduce)? As it turns out, almost all mutations delete genetic information rather than add new information. The quandary for Darwinians today is that species types appear to be self-contained systems that could not possibly have evolved from other types, at least not by any means explained by survival-ofthe-fittest Darwinism or random chance neo-Darwinism. (And how can something random be mechanistically consistent; how can chance intend for the fittest to survive?) Today scientists deduce that species change—evolve—from the top down, meaning a species type begins as itself and then changes varieties within the parameters of its prepackaged potential. New species—like Darwin’s finches—still fit within the species-type container. Neo-Darwinians know this. Yet they still insist that the awesomely intricately fine-tuned universe is the result of blind chance and that

human existence is just a lucky throw of the evolutionary dice that resulted in you, the culmination of random genetic mutations that are astronomically more improbable than tossing magnet-poetry letters at the fridge and getting the blank verse of Paradise Lost. How to Know How Perhaps the crux of geneticists’ critique of classical evolution is the extraordinary fact of irreducible complexity, a concept perhaps most succinctly articulated by Michael Katz in 1986. Katz pointed out that “Contemporary organisms are quite complex, they have a special and an intricate organization that would not occur spontaneously by chance. The ‘universal laws’ governing the assembly of biological materials are insufficient to explain our companion organisms: one cannot stir together the appropriate raw materials and self-assemble a mouse.” Even a simple, inorganic mousetrap has to be designed and assembled by an intelligence, specifically, a human. Biological designs such as cells, DNA molecules, and proteins are vastly more complex than a mousetrap and need a vastly greater than human intelligence to design and implement them. Katz notes that “There are useful scientific explanations for these complex systems, but the final patterns that they produce are so heterogeneous that they cannot effectively be reduced to smaller or less intricate predecessor components.” Humans build with available materials. The designer of complex biological systems creates the materials and the systems. Katz’s simple insight, “These patterns are, in a fundamental sense, irreducibly complex,” is as devastating to any current version of macroevolution as an elliptical Earth revolving around the sun was to the sixteenth-century Church. In his book Darwin’s Black Box, geneticist Michael Behe describes an irreducibly complex system as one that is “composed of several, well-matched interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.” For example, the DNA molecule, which excels at stockpiling and duplicating information, cannot build itself without the help of proteins. But proteins are incapable of

reproducing themselves without the information provided by DNA. A species type is an irreducibly complex system. There could not possibly have been a sudden addition of one magical part that made it a new type. Think of an irreducibly complex system as a discrete, complete whole. A simple mousetrap, to borrow Behe’s description, consists of five parts: the flat wooden base on which the other parts are mounted, the metal hammer to crush the mouse, the wire spring connected to the base, and the hammer, a pressure-sensitive catch on which the bait is placed, and the bar connected to the catch, which holds the hammer back when the trap is cocked. Remove any one of these components—base, hammer, spring, catch, or holding bar—and the mousetrap doesn’t work; in fact, it is no longer a mousetrap. The materials used are not aspects of the system’s irreducible complexity; what’s decisive is its design. Substitute a bone for the classic metal bar or metal for the wooden base and you still have a working mousetrap. Well-designed or not, this mousetrap is an inanimate object that was clearly intentioned by a human being. It’s absurd to ask the Darwinian: What designed the vastly more creative irreducibly complex organic systems? Common sense leads us to phrase the question reasonably: Who designed them. A what is not intelligent or creative; only a who fits the bill. What most disturbs Darwinists today is not only the discovery that small—say, a strand of DNA—isn’t necessarily simple, but also the fact that many tiny structures are irreducibly complex systems within other tiny irreducibly complex systems. The discovery of irreducibly complex organic systems delivered the knock-out blow to Darwinian macroevolution. Irreducibly complex organic systems within systems dragged them out of the ring. Although Behe likes the easily understood example of a mousetrap, one of his favorite examples of an irreducibly complex whole is the bacterial flagellum, which operates like an outboard motor attached to bacteria. E. coli, the intestinal bacterium we hear about now and then on the news, usually has six to twelve flagella protruding from the bacterial cell’s body. Flagella are linked to a system that enables the organism to sense and follow chemicals

more efficiently than fishermen follow trout. The flagella bundle together to form the cell’s rotary engine, operating on a proton motive force drive system that spins up to 100,000 rpm. In addition to its astonishing acceleration capability, the whiplike flagellum sports a sophisticated braking and steering mechanism that includes a bushing with L and P rings, a universal joint, a stator with studs and C ring, a rotor with M and S rings, and a drive shaft. This outboard baby can stop on a shrimp’s dime and abruptly twist to reverse direction in quarter turns. Geneticists have discovered that when any protein required for assembly or operation of the flagellum is removed or otherwise rendered inoperable, the cell can’t work—at all. It would be the equivalent of a hunk of metal falling off the fisherman’s outboard motor and sinking to the Siren song of mermaids. And remember, the cell’s motor is alive. The fact of irreducible complexity complicates a fundamental scientific quandary: How does a system—or anything, for that matter —know? How does it know how to function, how to be, how to know? How would a species know to produce, much less know how to produce, the blood-clotting cascade? A person with even a minor cut would bleed to death if the body didn’t know how to form a clot to stop the bleeding and close the wound. The clot forms only when all of more than a dozen extremely complex protein molecules interact sequentially at just the right time and place. Should the clot form in a blood vessel when it’s not needed, the person dies. Because all the molecules must contribute to the clotting, the system is irreducibly complex. The absence of just one molecule, as in the case of hemophilia, crashes the program. How would an eye know how to become an eye? If an organism had no sight, how would it know what sight would be, how would it decide it needed sight? If the organism isn’t deciding, who or what is? Granted, an eye would be beneficial, but building an original eye from scratch step by step by adding incremental levels of sophistication requires a predetermined blueprint of a completed eye. An organism doesn’t just randomly stumble upon an eye; nor would or could it incrementally develop such a highly structured

organ. An eye isn’t just a spongy ball in a socket (and where did the socket come from?). Darwin acknowledged that the gradual evolution of such a complex organ as the human eye was essentially a disconfirmation of his theory. The eye’s elaborate operation begins when light striking the retina is absorbed by a molecule that alters an attached protein. What follows is a cascade—a precisely integrated series of molecular reactions—that transmits a nerve impulse to the brain. The eye is irreducibly complex in that every part of the light-sensing mechanism must function or the person is blind; if a single molecule is missing or defective, no light transmission takes place. Darwin’s theory couldn’t explain how, much less why, all the necessary component molecules could or would assemble into an intricately constructed, fully functioning eye, much less a pair of eyes. As if that were not enough of a quandary, neo-Darwinians can’t explain how or why many creatures have many different kinds of structural eyes. The so-called camera eye that humans have is the same kind of eye present in only a few other species, which are not genetically related. How could and why would those discrete species develop the same version of the same elaborate organ? Because Darwinians know a close similarity that doesn’t result from common ancestry contradicts natural selection, they hide the contradiction behind a fancy scientific name: “convergent evolution.” Let me explain. Darwinians claim to have proven evolution by noting similar, less developed aspects of human eyes in the eyes of other organisms. Michael Shermer describes the long, complex pathway of the eye’s evolution: “Initially a simple eyespot with a handful of light-sensitive cells that provided information to an organism about an important source of the light.” Shermer doesn’t give a clue to why and how the simple eyespot came about, how such a profoundly simple organism could recognize “information,” much less how it could process it in such a way as to decide it needed to “create” an eyespot, in Shermer’s view apparently by itself. What were the tools, materials, and blueprint that the uneducated blind organism developed and used to “build” such an eyespot? Shermer doesn’t say, perhaps

because he knows that tools, materials, and “mental” blueprint are a tad beyond the creative intelligence of the simple organism. Shermer continues: “It developed into a recessed eyespot, where a small surface indentation filled with light-sensitive cells provided additional data on the direction of light.” I had to read that twice. This simple organism must have an IQ of at least Shermer’s to have designed, manufactured, and implemented such a sophisticated apparatus for processing data about light direction. Even Edison couldn’t do that. Shermer adds: “Then into a deep recession eyespot, where additional cells at greater depth provide more accurate information about the environment; then into a pinhole camera eye that is able to focus an image on the back of a deeplyrecessed layer of light-sensitive cells; then into a pinhole lens eye that is able to focus the image; then into a complex eye found in such modern mammals as humans.” I’d like to meet these creatures, have a conversation over coffee about their creative process, ask them to explain how they thought of fully-developed eyes, or even just a simple eyespot, their having never had or seen them. Ah, Darwinians don’t think the creatures themselves designed the initial or intermediate stages of what became a wondrous organ even in their estimation. No. Natural selection designed the eye, along with all its permutations. Well then, I’d like to chat with natural selection, whoever that is. In spite of how ingenious an eye is, and how desperately I’d love to have a few moments of focused brain-picking with natural selection, Shermer swears, almost under his breath, that the design is, well, not up to his standards. “The anatomy of the human eye, in fact, shows anything but ‘intelligence’ in its design.” If Shermer in all his glorious brilliance has created something better that had never before been conceived, even abstractly, I could find no evidence of it in the literature. Shermer complains, “It is built upside down and backwards, requiring photons of light to travel through the cornea, lens, aquaeous fluid, blood vessels, ganglion cells, amacrine cells, horizontal cells, and bipolar cells before they reach the light-sensitive rods and cones that transduce the light signal into neural impulses— which are then sent to the visual cortex at the back of the brain for processing into meaningful patterns.” What would the aesthetically

challenged Dr. Shermer make of Dali’s Melting Time, or Gaudí’s Sagrada Família, or Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Only a dreadfully boring science accountant would snarl, “For optimal vision, why would an intelligent designer have built an eye upside down and backwards?” My guess is, to make you ask that question. But more to the point, Dr. Shermer, why did Ginger Rogers dance backwards and in high heels? Darwinians who should know better claim that they have located in other creatures all the intermediate stages of the construction process. Human IT guys have built computer models that have shown that the theory “works.” But then, a computer animated game “works” if it’s designed to work. Personally, I don’t think computer “simulation” proves anything relating to biology. Even though “it” works, their proof of evolution is the ineptness of the design and the accidents of blindness, like that caused by brilliantly designed microscopic parasites. In an essay, “Organs of Extreme Perfection and Complication,” Darwin himself worried: “To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.” What’s really absurd is Bathylychnops exilis, a sea creature with four eyes, one pair to look outward, another pair to check out what’s below. Darwinians consider it a proof of macroevolution. Dr. Daniel Nilsson, an authority on four-eyed fish, put it nonchalantly, “This species has reinvented the lens despite the fact that it already had one. It serves as a good support for the view that lenses are not difficult to evolve.” In my view (but granted, I have but one set of eyes), the good doctor’s claim that a fish, even a lowly two-eyed fish, could “reinvent” the lens is almost as ludicrous as his assumption that lenses “are not difficult to evolve.” Purportedly he added in a letter to Richard Dawkins, “A creative deity, of course, would have been more likely to double the complement of optics in the first place, which would have left us with nothing to wonder about, or to discover.”

Nilsson, the expert on what a creative deity would do, no doubt complains to his longsuffering wife that if Leonardo would have inched up Mona Lisa’s smile a bit, we wouldn’t have to call it “enigmatic”; and if Bach would have just cut out all those laboriously convoluted and repetitive passages from his fugues and chorales, his opus could fit on one CD; and god knows tribal gyrations cannot be updated simply by outfitting preverbal anorexics in tutus and tights. No doubt she complains about her shipshape reductivist brute that makes love with a manual in one hand. One fatal flaw of Darwinism is that it can’t explain how an orgasm —whoops, organism, would know how to construct itself into something greater than itself, or how it would know to know this. A complete bacteria flagellum, a process as complicated as blood clotting, a pair of camera eyes could each only come into existence as an end product of a step-by-step assembly process. If that process is natural selection, it would take an enormously long time, even granting it “intelligence.” But there’s a bigger problem for Darwinians. If the result of the assembly process is a flagellum, a blood clot, or a pair of eyes, that result began in the past as a future goal of completed assemblage that would serve a remarkably sophisticated function for the benefit of something, for the benefit of yet another something, greater than itself. A pair of human eyes facilitates sight, which enhances the human’s chances of staying alive, which contributes to the endurance of the species, and it also contributes to a quality of meaningful, purposive life for the individual and for the species that far exceeds mere survival. Nature doesn’t just randomly “assemble” anything as elegant, as rationally purposive as a flagellum, a blood clot, or an eye. It doesn’t even just randomly assemble the complex units of the less complex first step or second step or third step that “evolved” into the final step. Even that tiny step must serve a purpose. And the purpose can’t be served until the structure functions, which can’t happen until all the structure’s parts, all the interconnected units and subunits, are in place. Even an itsy bitsy step would need to serve a future function. How would the organism know this? The ultimate purpose of the flagellum, a blood clot, or an eye transcends the functional

assemblage. The flagellum services a cell’s life, which services the organism’s life; a human life rescued is an actuality that exists above and beyond the blood clot; the eyes see: sight is an “entity” separate from physical eyes. Purpose is always greater than the sum of its functional parts—even its future functional parts. Everyone knows this, even Darwinian materialists. Even the possibility of creation—the creation process itself—must be set up by an intelligence—a mind—that possesses an understanding of the process that is greater than the process itself. Construction of a factory requires an architectural blueprint drawn by an intelligent mind smarter than a factory; the factory’s function requires skilled workers who follow specific instructions to perform specialized tasks using dedicated tools with particular expertise. We can look at a factory manned by human workers and know that humans built it; it didn’t just magically appear. But how can a busy factory exist and operate at the molecular level, or even the not-living mechanical level? If the factory produces, say, computers, an organic mind smarter than a computer—humans—must have designed the hardware and programmed the software. A machine doesn’t design and program machines that can function at a higher level than it does. A chimp doesn’t design and program computers. Nothing short of a transcending Creator could design and program irreducibly complex microsystems like the enormously sophisticated bacterial flagellum, or perfectly synchronized waterfalling cascades that constitute the process of blood clotting, or the elegantly cascading mechanisms of the human eye. Each of these amazingly complex structural entities is so efficient and its components so proficient at performing its tasks and even in some cases adlibbing the tasks of other components when needed that they could almost be called talented. These components don’t have minds; they were designed and programmed by a super-Mind. A predetermined theology like atheism can drive even a smart scientist like Francis Crick to board the spaceship of science fiction in search of a non-supernatural explanation for life on Earth. Aliens. That’s right. Aliens planted the seeds of life on Earth, according to Crick. Of course, this begs the question: Where did the aliens come

from? Aliens from multiverses, the latest jazzed-up scientific version of ancient mythological deities, are as passé clichéd as a Victorian soirée. Less whimsical but equally fogeyish Darwinians still living in Newtonian outer space of boundless possibilities argue that given an infinite amount of time, space, and mass, anything, even an irreducibly complex system, could come into existence by random chance. But could that “anything” be a chimp computer programmer? Could that “anything” be an elaborately elegant universe composed of a dizzying array of uniquely elegant parts all perfectly choreographed into a dazzling multidimensional symmetry that transcends any human or alien adult’s understanding of random? Not to mention that given the almost universally accepted Big Bang model of a finite universe that’s roughly 13.7 billion years old, space-time is nowhere near big or old enough for the probability, or even possibility, that anything, must less everything, just sort of accidently came into being. This according to all scientists. Then there’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which in effect says that the movie of existence runs in one direction only in what is called a “thermodynamically irreversible process.” As the scientists point out, we don’t grow younger, ashes don’t turn back into logs, broken dishes don’t spontaneously reassemble, time flows from past to present. Hmm…Very consistent; very logical. Ordinary people “get” this via common sense; scientists have spent dozens of years and millions of dollars proving it to themselves via elaborate mathematical computation. Eventually, physicists arrived at their concept of entropy, which measures the degree of disorganization of a system. Left to run on its own, a system trends toward disorganization (entropy) rather than spontaneously organizing. Everything runs down, even time and space themselves, which is why a perpetual motion machine is impossible. Again, very consistent, very logical. Nonetheless, as if messing with entropy, existence as a whole, its material parts, and all the various systems that define them in terms we call the laws of nature, partake of predictable directionality; life itself and its myriad life-forms within life-forms possess predictable directionality toward functional competence, even if that just means

growing up. Perpetual entropy in perfect equilibrium with perpetually blooming existence is a reductionist orgy of random and illogical. Anybody recognizes compositional order in anything that’s organized. As any housewife or secretary will tell you, there’s no such thing as random order; accidental organization is a coffee break fantasy. Piaget would note that at an early stage of development—by the concrete operational stage, ages seven to twelve, or at least by the formal operational stage beginning at age twelve—children understand that complex structures don’t just magically assemble. Surprisingly, things not only are, they can also be represented by something else, like the housewife and secretary, who aren’t examples of organization or disorganization, but who stand as symbols of those conditions by being what understands those conditions via experience. That’s a very indirect connection, yet somehow we grasp the connection instantaneously via understanding. Things are, and things are understood to be. Being and knowing are two different things, and being and knowing are two different aspects of the same thing. The thing we know doesn’t teach us to know it. We know it because we have been programmed to know how to know it. Once we know something, that knowledge of it becomes part of us. The two become “one” while remaining two. The “how” of existence transcends the mere material aspect of being. Poets and artists have always intuitively commanded the art of symbol and metaphor. Mathematicians display a symbolic, though less layered equivalence to some material structure, such as two apples plus two oranges equaling four pieces of fruit. Not only is there symmetry between math and matter, there is symmetry within math and within matter. Aspects of existence mirror other aspects of existence; infinitely receding mirrors facing mirrors represents multidimensional intricacies that far transcend mimetic mathematics. Meaning transcends data; aesthetics transcends science; our innate faculties transcend the material stuff they comprehend. Meaning is an aspect of being human; it’s a quality of the unique, meta-physical human spirit. Common sense tells us that the sophisticated program of Nature necessitates a transcending programmer, a superior Mind that exists

outside of the program. Common sense itself must have been designed by something that transcends common sense and the things that common sense “just knows.” This is an ancient understanding that most of us ordinary folk have never doubted— except perhaps for a few years in college while under the spell of academic dogmatists, like scientists who worship materialist determinism (not even nature, much less a creator) and its requisite atheism; or postmodern philosophers, who worship the narcissistic delusions of anti-thought; or long-haired gurus of fringe philosophies like monism or suicide-angst existentialism. To call the superior Mind a mind might be misleading. Unlike the human mind, which understands a tittle and creates a tad with available materials, the Designer’s Mind truly creates everything from nothing. There is no way we can possibly grasp the ultimate reality of the Primal Creator, the Prime Mover. All we can do is stand humbly in awe. We can know that the Designer is, even if we can never know exactly what or how the Designer is. Some Darwinians think that asking, Where did God come from, or Who created God, proves that God does not exist. But if God transcends space-time, which God necessarily must, then God is not bound by space-time categories or definitions. What but sheer hubris would lead one to think that the Big Bang’s transcendent Big Brain could be understood by our miniscule, finite-temporal mind? Just because we mortals aren’t privy to the details of God’s origin, just because God’s “substance” eludes our inspection, that’s no proof that God doesn’t exist. I don’t even fully know what I am, but I do know that I am. You can’t grasp the origin and essence of God? You can’t just joyfully celebrate the creative Mystery that’s greater than you? Instead of suffering the humiliation of not-knowing, why not try praising the inexplicable gift of your knowing this much? The tragic flaw of the atheist is ingratitude. Irreducibly Complex Life The enormously complicated DNA molecule is irreducibly complex in several ways. For example, as noted earlier, it excels at stockpiling and duplicating information but cannot build itself without the help of

proteins, but proteins are incapable of reproducing themselves without the information provided by DNA. A species type, too, is an irreducibly complex system. There could not possibly have been a sudden addition of one magical part that made it a new species type —its own discrete discontinuous container. Each new invention that magnifies our range of sight intensifies our awareness that existence is far more immensely elegantly complex than we had ever imagined. As our knowledge grows exponentially, so does our sense of smallness in the shadow of so vast a universe, but conversely so does our awareness that at least some structures of existence are clearly intelligently designed. The Deist’s sense of awe inspires profound gratitude tempered with responsibility that accompanies the privilege of discerning intelligence. Darwinists, however, present a different interpretation of the latest discoveries of microbiology. Richard Dawkins defines biology as “the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” The atheist’s experience is the anxiety of insignificance. Design is only an appearance, an illusion, because “the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design.” There is ample evidence of microevolution, but absolutely no evidence of macroevolution. But atheist Dawkins and peers misrepresent the facts—in other words, they lie—in order to uphold their theology. Which, to be honest, strikes me as a bit masochistic, if not dumb. Certainly their metaphysical bias keeps them from perceiving the obvious reality, the absolute necessity, of intelligent design. Naturalists in the era of Darwin assumed that cells were simple building blocks that evolved into progressively more elaborate structures, with primates, specifically Homo sapiens, being the most elaborate. Little did they know that the closer we would observe tiny structures like cells and their molecules and their atoms, the more mindboggling intricate and sophisticated the cellular world would prove to be. Darwin’s lack of “sight” could excuse his inaccurate insight. But today’s Darwinians maintain the traditional insight of the nineteenth century even though it is invalidated by the expanded sight of twenty-first century science.

Let’s see: “Throughout 150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another,” points out bacteriologist Alan Linton. “Since there is no evidence for species changes between the simplest forms of unicellular life, it is not surprising that there is no evidence for evolution from prokaryotic [bacterial] to eukaryotic [plant and animal] cells, let alone throughout the whole array of higher multicellular organisms.” Though molecular biology has rendered Darwinism obsolete, Darwinism still prevails, at least in academia and popular culture. Though it conflicts with the most basic intuitions of most of us, the people classified as most educated and smartest, or at least most knowledgeable, expect themselves and us to accept as fact the already disproven determinist Darwinian worldview. That worldview is a cultural construct, a meme, a zombie lie. We will never arrive at a point of ultimate, comprehensive scientific truth. The ancient axiom perpetually proves its truth: The more you know the more you know you don’t know. But we today do still know more. And now we know that the more closely we peer inward to subatomic structures and outward to the farthest reaches of space, the more intricately elegantly designed the universe appears. The more sophisticated our instruments and methods become, the more dishonestly we cling to obsolete beliefs and disbeliefs, be they fundamentalist or Darwinist. Genetics: Remapping the Landscape Scientists on the cutting edge of genetics have recently demonstrated that even on a small scale, evolutionary differentiation does not proceed as per the Darwinian roadmap. This discovery is immensely important, and not just for scientists. For starters, what if the worldview of life as cutthroat competition is patently inaccurate? Darwin assumed that when you’re threatened with diminishment of food supplies or with death, you struggle, and by struggling you become stronger, more fit. The fittest organism survives and mates with other fittest survivors within its own species, thus producing superfit offspring. Serious threats require drastic adaptation. Modifications—neo-Darwinians would say mutations—cause

changes that leap beyond mere strengthening. You’re not just buffed; you’ve sprouted wings. Darwin could see that life was a struggle for survival. We have been so conditioned to believe this as the overarching paradigm of existence that few would challenge its validity. History perennially chronicles humanity’s evolution as a series of eruptions between and within competing civilizations. At its best, religion, even if with inquisitional accusation sprinkled with conditional hope, perpetually fights humanity’s inherent selfishness, the root of all evil; at its worst, it fights to render extinct everything that sneezes. Every aspect of existence is a struggle of the fittest to survive: Darwinian natural selection confirms an ancient cultural meme: Weakness must be overcome: Use it or abuse it. But isn’t society more than a bloodlust crusade to exploit? Isn’t a person more than a blacklist of sin, more than a thorn in the powermonger’s skin? It could be argued that Darwin’s theory emerged from selective data interpreted by his individual mind—trained for the clergy at the height of the Industrial Revolution and British Imperialism—perverted by a cultural emphasis on the dark side. Consider again these questions from Chapter 1: How would it change the way you think and behave if scientists could document that life is not inherently a struggle for survival? Could it transform the way civilization functions if we ordinary citizens of Earth discovered, as scientists have discovered, that at the deep level of DNA, all living systems are inherently cooperative, that the molecular matter of life itself is composed of workers performing specific functions for the production of healthy growth within the whole system? What if it could be scientifically demonstrated that any living system at war with itself is destined for quick extinction? Darwinians argue that this proves that Darwinism is true: The ultimate goal of any species is to prevent its extinction. Even so, this new scientific perspective does negate the struggle for survival— power—within a species, and it nudges us dangerously close to classic religious morality. The basic structure even of amoral animals is thoroughly beneficial, so logically whatever designed and constructed that structure is likely beneficent.

Neo-Darwinians have had to explain this apparent negation of absolute survivalism just to stay in the metaphysical game. In order to kill any semblance of a beneficent creator God, they have postulated a “new” theory of evolution, the process of random mutation guided by natural selection. This incongruous theory has proven to be as mythical as Nietzsche’s dead God rotting in some parallel universe. It’s odd that as students of natural design, scientists would deny the existence or even possibility of a Designer. Even atheist scientists agree that nature is a structure in motion powered by a system. In fact, they agree that nature is an astoundingly immense, complex, and elegant structural system. Could so much something, so much organizational elegance that’s prewired to function beautifully, just happen to emerge—to be emerging—from nothing? Clearly a something (nature as a whole) of seemingly infinite somethings (nature’s myriad components) requires a transcendently intelligent, constantly creating meta-creator. Scientists are well aware of the exceptionalness of our universe. Fred Hoyle observed, for instance, that while explosions throw matter apart, the Big Bang explosion’s exquisite magnitude surprisingly produced the opposite effect: matter clumping together in the form of galaxies. Scientists have calculated that the rate of expansion was at the “critical value” at which the universe barely escaped its own gravity, allowing it to expand for billions of years. Had the rate been a bit slower—Stephen Hawking says by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, other scientists say in a trillion trillion trillion—the cosmos would have collapsed; a bit faster, by one part in a trillion trillion trillion, and the spewed material would have quickly dispersed. Scientists are fully cognizant of the rational, finely-tuned structural equilibrium of the universe that is hypersensitive to even minor alterations; none of them denies that “the seemingly miraculous concurrence of numerical values that nature has assigned to her fundamental constants must remain the most compelling evidence for an element of cosmic design,” as atheist Paul Davies put it. Scientists understand that the mindboggling exactitude of each calibration of every minute detail of the universe—from the precise

strength of gravity to the formation of the carbon atom, the essential ingredient for life, to the strong nuclear force with the exact strength to produce hydrogen (if the speed or mass of the electron had been anything but exactly what it is, there could be no life on Earth or anywhere in the universe), and on and on—all the billions and trillions and bazillions of minute constituents have led to life. The Big Bang revolution is as spiritually charged as the revolution ignited by Copernicus. The discovery that Earth is not the center of the universe or even of our galaxy forced humanity to rethink its worldview, the source of that worldview, and the authority of that source. In the 1940s science confirmed that the universe was not infinite and eternal as scientists and theologians had believed. About 13.7 billion years ago it exploded from a highly compressed state of extreme heat and density that existed in a single moment at a single point—in fact, the only moment at the only point, both of which had presumably spontaneously emerged simultaneously ex nihilo, out of nothing—nothing, because space and time came into existence at the exact moment that the space-time universe came into existence; that “place” and “time” is the Big Bang. The Big Bang model is based on two principles: Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which describes the fixed, perfectly calibrated gravitational interaction of all matter, and on the “cosmological principle,” which means that the observer’s view of the universe doesn’t depend on his location or on the direction in which he looks. Because the Big Bang blasted out in all directions, the universe has no edge because Creation is still in progress: it’s still blasting, spewing outward in all directions. In scientific terms, during the first few seconds of the Big Bang, there were already many types of elementary particles present, and processes that predict proton decay were already causing matter to overcome antimatter—itself a substance composed of subatomic particles that have the mass, electric charge, and magnetic moment of electrons, protons, and neutrons of ordinary matter but with negative electric charge and magnetic moment. Within a few seconds after the Big Bang, the universe cooled enough to form nuclei and to produce precise amounts of hydrogen, helium, and

lithium. After another million years, the universe had cooled enough to form atoms and to allow radiation, which already existed, to travel through space; the residue of that radiation still exists as microwave background radiation. It’s uncanny, if not miraculous, that we today can witness the Big Bang event 13.7 billion light years away, almost as if we’re supposed to “get” this moment of Creation as evidence of—well, Creation. What also existed at the moment of the Big Bang were all the precisely calibrated, perfectly interconnected and mutually facilitating laws of science, even laws that would not be needed for another dozen or so billion years when life would explode into the universe, and for the 3.8 billion years of biosphere expansion, including the accommodation of intelligent consciousness, here on our singularly remarkable planet. Science has helped us look inward as well as outward. And I mean inward in a purely material sense. The discovery of DNA is another cosmic revolution that has spun the chatting heads of science and theology. Really, the cell itself is a separate organism, its own universe. Scientists often liken it to a factory, which is a fair analogy for a universe, an organism, or a cell. But this factory builds, among other things, copies of itself. No other factory can do that. The cell’s nucleus runs like a human-built factory, except that it’s alive. Picture a huge metropolis of Detroit-type assembly lines producing unimaginatively innovative products using a massive multitude of molecular machines. The nucleus warehouses an astonishing assortment of raw materials and cranks out a dazzling array of intricately assembled goods. Parts are freighted to various outlying assembly lines along microtubule tracks using cables, ropes, and pulleys powered by batteries that harness and store particles of light. Like people, these machines literally flip electrical switches, run copy machines, even ingest and digest like workers at a lunch counter. There are machines for every imaginable task, and some of those machines act as managers making split-second decisions. Some are geeks performing feats of nanotechnology that make human devices look like Stone Age flints.

Taking inventory is like trying to count the stars. But all those parts are literally alive. DNA is a sophisticated living machine coded with genetic information. The organism-specific coding of a cell is as logical and patterned and wildly unique as Virginia Woolf’s unclassifiable book The Waves. “Glory be to God for dappled things,” poet Gerard Manley Hopkins hymned in “Pied Beauty,” and in another poem, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God” and “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” Most of us understand. Scientists have christened the inexorable movement from nothing to us the “anthropic principle,” which means that the laws of nature facilitate the appearance of intelligent life. But for most scientists, the leap from designer universe to Designer is a leap of blind faith into the scary abyss of mystery. Mystery makes a scientist sweat. It’s the terror of the small in the presence of enormity, the bravado of the self-aware finite-temporal at the mercy of its own necessary Creator which transcends even the space-time categories of infinite and eternal. But they’ve got the solution: The universe is self-created. DNA: The Impossible Possibility of Life Life comes only from life. Only once did life come from not-life. Mathematicians have demonstrated that it is all but impossible that life could happen at all, and that it is mathematically inconceivable that such a miracle could happen more than once. Furthermore, it is mathematically impossible for a system as intricate as a single organism to have not been intelligently designed. Despite what the mathematicians say, neo-Darwinian biologists insist that random variation, or chance, is natural—is part of the functional laws of nature. But the cohesive, supra-organized functional laws of nature are by definition anything but random. Nature is a complex system of intricate functions. And every biologist knows that. Neo-Darwinians argue that life evolved randomly via natural selection. One big problem here is that randomness and natural selection are contradictory. Selection is an act or process executed by will, a choice responding to a need. Selection is the effect, will the

cause. If you select, you choose. Only an intelligent will can choose. Only an intelligent will can choose intelligently. Only intelligence can say you (or I) need to choose this to become that. Intelligent choosing results in an intelligently constructed product. Inert matter and life are highly sophisticated products. The immensity of highly sophisticated products within highly sophisticated products within highly sophisticated products existing in perfect equilibrium necessitates a designer of even higher intelligence and sophistication designing by an act of will. The structural foundation of microevolution, indeed, of all change, consists of fixed laws (the bones of the universal house) and their adjacent wiggle rooms (the zones of chance, simple choice, and complex free will) that are both intelligently constructed. Intelligently constructed fixed laws and their complementary wiggle rooms are the mechanisms-by-which/tools-with-which life and inert matter are constructed. Construction is a creative process that increases the complexity of the product while amplifying symmetry. Creative use of fixed laws and bordered wiggle rooms as mechanisms/tools organizes and balances the constructed product. Any act or process of construction, certainly any act or process of intelligent construction, is executed by will. Fixed natural laws, including laws governing chance, choice (or “selection”), and free will, always perform a function. A function always serves a purpose. A purpose is a product of higher, willful, purposeful intelligence. The wiggle room where a human is free to exercise his or her will, that room of true freedom, is a reality that is probably harder to grasp than the existence of a huge complex universe emerging from “nothing.” It boggles the mind to contemplate that freedom is built right into immutable structures. The laws of nature, and even our DNA, for instance, seem fixed forever. We are what we were born to become. And that’s true, up to a point. What’s interesting, if not disconcerting especially for a Darwinist, is that our DNA appears to enfold wiggle room. Stephen Meyer notes that “Although the sequence of bases on one strand determines the sequence of bases on the second strand, no physical or chemical laws dictate what the sequence will be in an isolated strand of DNA.”

DNA sequences are like letters and words on a printed page. We have a limited alphabet and only so many dictionary words to relay information that conveys a message that far transcends ink and paper and letters and words and even language itself. DNA, functional proteins, and the cell as a whole all possess coding regions that must be programmed like the software of a computer. Only an intelligent agency can program information. Most of us assume that DNA can’t be changed once we’re born. But many things can change our specific DNA, both negatively, as with pollutants, and positively, as with certain nutrients. To some extent, even at the level of DNA we are self-created, whether we know it or not. Scientists now know that the complex, specific information needed to assemble complex protein machines that manufacture the most primitive one-celled organism is already stored in DNA or some equivalent molecule. The computer’s hardware and even a sizable package of software are preloaded so the computer is ready to boot and run right out of the box. But software is information, and information isn’t matter, even though the means of transmission of information is material. Brain, lips, vocal cords transmit information, but the information itself is none of these transmission apparatuses. Words on a page aren’t the message; words simply convey the message. Knowledge isn’t a “thing” the way a brain is a thing. DNA processes information that comes from beyond DNA itself. This isn’t simply mind/body dualism; this is material/spiritual dualism. (And dual does not mean duel.) Darwinians, of course, need to kill knowledge-as-language if they are to kill religion. Their agenda mirrors postmodern deconstruction, a term coined by Jacques Derrida, who deconstructs (so to speak) via a process of erasure, usually with a poem as its target. Derrida might tape a poem to the blackboard, and with a large black felt-tip pen mark a bold X through every word or phrase that signifies appeals to concealed or forgotten origins, such as tradition, authority (literary, religious, cultural, or any other), meaning, author intention, or anything else “centered.” Or a deconstructionist might simply mark the X through the whole poem, an invasive, violent, reactive gesture

of a wannabe that betrays, “Those who can, create; those who can’t, deconstruct.” The process is meant to demonstrate that a poem is not an individual creation, but is rather a collage of constructed conventions, cultural and/or collective. A poem, like any other language act, is merely text, and as such, does not belong to the poet but to us all; like the universe, it appears out of the nowhere that has always existed. Deconstructionists appropriate any or all of the text for their own use. Some postmodernists tweak famous poems slightly and called those poems their own to prove their point. The process of erasure derives from Martin Heidegger, who sometimes wrote out the poem in pencil and erased anything centered, but his erasures showed traces of the word. For him, traces of meaning and truth are truly recoverable. But for Derrida, erasure exposes all the non-present meanings of a word, and its possible differance, meaning anything goes. Derrida’s erasure places under suspicion Heidegger’s philosophy, which assumed a metaphysics of presence. Derrida’s ultra-relativism deconstructs presence down into non-metaphysical absence. In the most precise sense, deconstruction is commentary writings about other texts, usually literary, intent on turning those texts against themselves by showing that meaning is contradictory or “undecidable,” that the difference between literal and figurative is equivalent to appearance/essence, matter/spirit. The agenda of their work is anti-metaphysical, anti-essentialist, deconstructive. How startling different from the logos of DNA is deconstruction’s bold X’s of “erasure” that so desperately, violently need to decenter presence, need to reject the closures and foundations so obviously beautifully inherent in the rhythms of existence. Why this need to foreground absence, to focus on removing what things can have or be? Why this compulsion to prove differance, to prove absolutely an unbridgeable gap between any thing and its word, between words and words, things and things… Why this psychotic hatred of meaning, stability, connection? Why this murder of communication, community, communion? It’s no coincidence that so many deconstructionists commit suicide, when they’ve spent their lives X’ing out all possibility of meaning expressed by their own being. At

least Heidegger allowed for the recovery of concealed and forgotten being, and the Being of being, by recapturing traces on the page of what had been erased. DNA: The Word of God to Humanity Like many Deists, I believe that the thinking God communicates with us thinkers through Nature. I would go so far as to say that God is trying to tell us something right now via DNA that is crucial to our survival. Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and reportedly an atheist and believer in alien seeding, first observed that DNA is language. But then, even the ancients understood that matter is logos. Greek philosophers understood logos—from the Greek word for “word,” “reason,” or “plan”—to mean the divine reason organizing the universe by giving it form and meaning. By ancients I mean, for instance, Heraclitus (6th century B.C.E.); Plato (4th century B.C.E.), for whom logos was both immanent and transcendent; Zeno (4th-3rd century B.C.E.); and Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish contemporary of Jesus from whom the writer of John’s Gospel freely borrowed. Today we understand that the DNA in each human cell contains the equivalent of the information contained in 1,500 encyclopedia volumes. One human body contains 1,500 volumes times 100 thousand billion cells. The massive living library contained in DNA is the part of the “infinite” difference between life and inert matter. To put that difference in perspective, consider atheist Edmund O. Wilson’s point that there is more information in one handful of Earth’s living soil than there is on the surfaces of all other known planets combined. Or consider this: DNA is approximately 120 times narrower than the smallest wavelength of visible light, which means a thread of DNA is invisible to us without the help of our most powerful optical microscopes. We need to trust a device well beyond ourselves to see ourselves. Yet we know that the two ribbons of the DNA double helix wrap around each other 600 million times inside the nucleus of a human cell, each of which is about the size of two-millionths of a pinhead. If the DNA thread of one nucleus were stretched out, it

would be two yards long and only ten atoms wide—a billion times longer than wide. Again, that two-yards-long thread fits into a nucleus two millionths the size of a pinhead. By current estimates, the average human being is made up of 100 thousand billion cells. If the DNA from all the cells in one human body were stretched out, they would reach 125 billion miles, long enough to wrap around the earth 5 million times. Amazingly, the DNA molecule is the same in every species of life —all of which exist here on Earth. The genetic information in every life-form is coded in a universal language of four letters, A, G, C, and T (adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine), the four chemical compounds that comprise the DNA double helix. The living universe is coded like a cosmic Internet. Every living being contains DNA. As a substance, DNA does not vary among species; only the order of its letters changes. The individual letters are meaningless in themselves, but they combine into meaningful words and stanzas that build the poetry of species and individuals. Typed out on a page, the code of our particular DNA would look similar to code written by computer programmers. By definition, code is never random. The code of DNA is vastly more elaborate than computer code. Not to mention, it’s alive. Clearly that code was written by a cosmic super-genius. And if we are reading and understanding the code, we have been designed to read and understand the code, and the code has been designed to be read and understood by us. That’s the definition of information communication. Yet atheist scientists like Richard Dawkins say that living systems “give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose”—give the appearance, as if mindless living systems were intelligent enough, and willful enough, to mastermind a grand illusion of such mindboggling magnitude. The genome, or genetic information of a human being, is written as three billion letters along a single DNA filament. In some places, the filament winds around itself, forming twenty-three more segments, chromosomes. Since we each inherit a complete set of chromosomes from each of our parents, we each have twenty-three

pairs of chromosomes. Our genetic story is written in six billion pairs, or twelve billion letters (that we thus far know of). Although the DNA molecule excels at stockpiling and duplicating information, it cannot build itself without the help of proteins. But proteins are incapable of reproducing themselves without the information provided by DNA. No proteins could exist without DNA, no DNA could exist without proteins. They were created at the same time, as part of the same package. As mentioned before, the paradox of irreducible complexity is perhaps the ultimate negation of any Darwinian theory of evolution. Again quoting Michael Behe, an irreducibly complex system is “composed of several, well-matched interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.” Such a system must have been created as a fully functioning whole. These two separate languages—DNA constructed from a four letter alphabet, and proteins from a twenty letter alphabet (the twenty amino acids)—communicate via one translation mechanism to form the paragraphs of our bodies, our cells. Only the sections of the DNA text coded for construction of proteins and enzymes are read by the transcription enzymes. Only a small percent of a genome is included in these passages, or genes. Much of the genome serves other purposes, and much appears to be latent, waiting for an adaptive need—a need that does not yet exist but which might, or will. Within genes themselves, there are non-coding notations, called introns. Once transcription enzymes have translated a gene, editing enzymes delete the introns with atomic precision and splice together the correct coding segments, called exons. Some genes contain very little genetic information. The function of the remaining percent of introns is unknown. What is known, however, is that every aspect of every DNA molecule has a precise predetermined function. The most fundamental component of the simplest, most infinitesimal form of life is amazingly elegant in its structural complexity and efficiency. Life did not emerge out of nothing; the very first speck of life came fully equipped with a massive array of fully functioning bells and

whistles. Coded text, duplication, transcription, translation, editing— as a writer, I am awed by life’s eloquently “written” DNA. Darwinians argue that life evolved in the sea and that a sea creature crawled up on land to become us land animals. But just because every cell in the world is filled with salt water with the same salt concentration as the ocean doesn’t prove that we evolved from fish, just that we are all made of the same stuff. Even if we were evolved from fish, that wouldn’t prove that evolution was not by design. Whatever process led to our existence is the elegant design of a supra-intelligent Designer. By design, every cell is its own ocean filled with the same salt water. DNA’s four bases (A, G, C, and T) coil up from the center of the molecule to avoid contact with surrounding water molecules. Due to the arrangement of their atoms, the bases can only pair up A with T, and G with C, which gives rise to the spiral shape of the double helix. The spiral is made up of two ribbons—a main text, and its mirror image, which is usually not read by the transcription enzymes. The backup ribbon enables the repair enzymes to reconstruct the main text if it is “hacked,” and provides the mechanism for duplicating the genetic information. The repair enzymes make only one mistake for every ten billion letters they correct. Imagine human copy editors being that accurate! Enzymes are highly skilled at their jobs, and a really smart boss manages the factory. Enzymes transcribe DNA into RNA, edit out non-coding passages, splice together the final text, construct the machines that read the instructions, and manufacture other enzymes, all at astronomical speed. This profoundly complex orchestration is amazingly precise and efficient. Again: Every living being contains DNA. As a substance, DNA does not vary among species; only the order of its letters changes. This fact is nothing short of mind-boggling. As biologist Robert Pollack pointed out, “The planet’s surface has changed many times over, but DNA and the cellular machinery for its replication have remained constant…no stone, no mountain, no ocean, not even the sky above us, have been stable and constant for this long; nothing inanimate, no matter how complicated, has survived unchanged for a

fraction of the time that DNA and its machinery of replication have coexisted.” That much stability in a state of flux is almost a case for eternal life. Almost all the species that have ever lived are extinct. In four billion years, DNA has transformed itself into millions of species, yet it has remained exactly the same, down to the letter. Of course the master of metamorphosis has not bothered to explain to us the mechanism by which she creates her infinite variations out of the exact same four DNA letters, or proteins made of the exact same twenty amino acids. Computer coding is nothing compared to the dazzlingly intricate coding that spells out life. Life is the consummate miracle in progress. And by miracle I mean the opposite of generically random. Ironically, scientists themselves, often inadvertently, support the theory of miracle by arguing a good case for the impossibility of life. They explain that protein molecules are composed of amino acids linked together in very specific order and structure. Specific proteins can have as few as fifty amino acids, or tens of thousands, but each protein is uniquely itself because of the exact order of amino acids in its molecular chain. The specific gene of each specific protein is responsible for the correct ordering of the amino acids in each protein molecule. The gene, which is the length of DNA carrying the genetic code for that protein, is coded so that three DNA letters are needed for each amino acid. A DNA strand of three hundred letters would carry the genetic instructions for a protein of a hundred amino acids. This fundamental biochemical process is extraordinarily complex, and the mathematical possibility of it occurring by chance to give the first primitive protein has often been illustrated with the example of the so-called typing monkey, a clever visual aid created in 1913 by French mathematician Émile Borel. If the monkey tried to type out the 300-letter word of his single 300-letter gene with the four available letters, the odds against getting the first letter correct are 4-1. The odds against getting the first two letters correct are 16-1, the first three letters are 64-1, and

so on x 4 for the remaining 277 letters of the gene code. The odds against getting the gene-word correct are 1 in 10130 (10 followed by 130 zeros, a number many billions of times greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe). Even if there were a thousand million monkeys on each square inch of the Earth’s surface typing at a rate of a thousand million words per second for a thousand million years, the odds against the correct gene-sequence are still 1 in 1080. To put this in perspective, consider that there are only 1065 atoms in our galaxy. This is for just one gene with a 300-letter code. A simple virus has a 20,000-letter code, bacterium a 4.5 million-letter code, and a human being about a 5,000 million-letter code. The statistical chances of forming such complex genes are almost infinitely minute. Not only that, in this example for a relatively small protein of 100 amino acids, the chance selection of this correct sequence would have to be made from 10130 alternative choices. The organic molecules in the primordial soup would have to undergo 10130 trial assemblies over 500 million years to hit on the correct sequence. The probability of such a chance occurrence leading to the formation of just one of the smallest protein molecules is effectively zero. The chances of that happening twice, of life emerging elsewhere in the universe, is that same zero multiplied astronomically. And this doesn’t even take into consideration that the primordial soup exists, that the laws of nature exist to make “formations” possible, that one thing can give rise to another completely unique substance, and so on. And the emergence of every-thing results from this same kind of extraordinary process. And each and every result is utterly unique. Probability estimates of some mathematicians are even more mindboggling minute. As Stephen Meyer explains in his aptly titled Signature in the Cell, according to today’s calculations, the odds are 1 chance in 10164 of finding a functional protein among the possible 150-amino-acid compounds, the probability being 84 orders of magnitude (or powers of ten) smaller than the probability of finding a specific particle in the whole universe. In other words, the probability of finding a functional protein by chance is a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion times smaller than the odds of finding a single specified particle among all the particles in the universe.

But that’s not all. Typical proteins have hundreds of amino acids, many of which require close functional association with other protein chains. The probability of producing all the necessary associated proteins by chance would be far smaller than the odds of producing just the 150-amino-acid protein. Even a simple cell requires many proteins, not just one. Generating the necessary proteins by chance, not to mention the genetic information to produce them, is as close to impossible as it gets. But wait, it gets more impossible. One simple cell needs a minimum of 250 proteins made of approximately 150 amino acids. Now the probability of getting one simple cell with its necessary proteins by chance is 1 in 10164 multiplied by itself 250 times, or 1 in 1041,000. In the real world where most of us live, it’s impossible. Then there is us—all the almost infinite human sperms and eggs that did not result in life, all the chance meetings and matings, all the other factors, the what-if’s, the cancelled flights—and yet somehow each one of us human beings has come into existence. The impossible possibility of any two people being at the same place at the same time is incomprehensible and, despite any free decision by either or both parties to meet there, inconceivably outside our control. There should be a religious holiday dedicated to nothing more than the contemplation of this awesome miracle of knowing each other.



 

Chapter 7 Neo-Darwinism on Steroids Does Darwinian shape-shift shaman Richard Dawkins really offer anything new? You bet. He and his God-slayer peers are now seeking not just scientific knowledge but also the cutting-edge unification of all knowledge, the latest and greatest magical ax that will X God. Of course, this revolutionary mission dates back at least to the sixth century B.C.E. to the Ionian Thales of Miletus, the first Greek philosopher, and one of the legendary Seven Wise Men, or Sophoi, of antiquity. By offering the first not-mythic, nature-specific study of natural causes, Thales was the first naturalist; two centuries later Aristotle named him the founder of the physical sciences and the first philosopher. By disallowing mythological elements, Thales was the first demythologizer. By establishing rational simplification as the best means of explaining phenomena without X-ing First Cause, he was the first deist. Thales is often mocked for guessing that the essential ingredient of matter is water, but his theory, much like Darwin’s evolution, was based on the discovery of fossil sea animals far inland. Since life requires water, and since the universe itself is an organism, an assumption some scientists today claim is not entirely inaccurate, then the primal material substratum of the cosmos might well be water. Though perhaps wrong in positing water as the primal essence of nature, Thales’ conviction that existence is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws has funneled science ever since. Physicist Gerald Holton dubbed this core Greek principle the Ionian Enchantment. One person’s enchantment, of course, is another person’s common sense.

In the atheist-materialist brain, complete unification would miraculously prove that all the exquisite complexity of the universe is really just simple stuff tossed together into bigger simple stuff, and that all that stuff is the exact same stuff; therefore, the universe is self-contained and simple, a single dunce in a pointy paper hat perpetually constructing simple paper stuff from silly paper stuff he’s perpetually shredding: neo-Zeus in his pantheon of one. Shortly after Thales declared water to be the primordial unifying element of the cosmos, Heraclitus proposed that the original element was not water but fire. Other philosophers thought that air or earth was the primal element. All those ancient naturalists were an early version of monists, who assumed that there was a single essential cosmic element, the fundamental building block of which the universe was constructed. But they weren’t necessarily materialists. Only later did monists equate—unfairly—the primal element theory with X-God materialism. Empedocles, the first pluralist, suggested that rather than just one, there were four building blocks, the primal elements water, fire, earth, and air. Aristotle added that a constant, immutable fifth essence, the quintessence, was needed to cause the flux of the elements to gel. Because the courses of the constellations were constant, Aristotle thought that perhaps the unifying quintessence in some way consisted of star-stuff—a view remarkably modern considering Einstein’s discovery that the speed of light is an invariant, immutable number and that light in some way connects and/or explains the emergence of space, time, energy, and matter. Light, of course, emanates from stars. (Or are stars created by lightstuff?) Theories and perspectives like these are each era’s best guesses about the substance of intelligently designed Nature. Scientific interpretation is always metaphysical. Unification is recognition of integrated design. Recognition of design is intrinsic proof of a necessary Designer, a necessarily transcending Designer that by definition can’t be the design or an aspect, extension, or function of the design and that designed us capable of recognizing design and Designer as separate entities.

It’s worth noting that shortly after Thales disallowed mythological explanations for reality, Xenophanes observed that people made the gods in their own image and argued that there could be only one Creator God, the eternal ruler of the universe, a view shared by Deists today. A century later Empedocles claimed that the four elements, the “roots of everything,” were activated by two perpetual forces, love and hate, love constantly mixing the elements, hate forever separating them. Sometimes mixtures came together in a way that allowed the resulting creations to support and reproduce themselves; hence, species were produced and continued to exist by a simple unifying mechanism, which Darwinians assume is survival of the fittest, but could as justly be interpreted as yin-yang harmonization. Fast-forward to Einstein, who led the twentieth-century charge toward the unification of physics, specifically space with time with motion, and gravity with electromagnetism with cosmology. Edward O. Wilson pointed out that Einstein displayed signs of enchantment very early, for example when the alignment of the microscopic physics of capillaries with the macroscopic, universe-wide physics of gravity led Einstein to write to his friend Marcel Grossmann, “It is a wonderful feeling to recognize the unity of a complex of phenomena that to direct observation appear to be quite separate things.” Einstein whittled the Ionian sentiment to a sharp point when he remarked, “I want to know all God’s thoughts; all the rest are just details,” and when he even more pointedly remarked, “It was the experience of mystery—even if mixed with fear—that engendered religion.” Unlike atheists like Richard Dawkins, who think unification can kill religion, deists like Albert Einstein understood that exquisitely mysterious unity exposes a glimpse of its intelligent Designer. Wilson betrays his deistic leanings when he interprets the motivation of the Ionian Enchantment this way: “Preferring a search for objective reality over revelation is another way of satisfying religious hunger. It is an endeavor almost as old as civilization and intertwined with traditional religion, but it follows a very different course—a stoic’s creed, an acquired taste, a guidebook to adventure plotted across rough terrain. It aims to save the spirit, not by surrender but by liberation of the human mind. Its central tenet, as

Einstein knew, is the unification of knowledge. When we have unified enough certain knowledge, we will understand who we are and why we are here.” The Deist answers, “Been there, done that. Please catch up.” Trust in Nature’s coherence, or what Wilson calls its “consilience,” the same intuitive metaphysical faith in intelligent design that fertilized the flowering of Greco-Roman civilization, fueled the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Philosophically and practically, a scientific revolution had been steaming along for millennia. Today’s term “physics” derives from the Greek word physis, which means “nature.” Scientists are naturalists; Deists are naturalists who locate the originating “quintessence” of intelligently unified Nature in a unifying Originator of transcending intelligence: God. How can atheists today tout unification, which demonstrates consistent unity across domains of knowledge, as proof of the nonexistence of an intelligent Designer? How can they explain the recurrence of the exact same mathematical proportions of a spiral galaxy and a nautilus shell, or for that matter, explain a mind capable of working out their sequences, as Leonardo of Pisa, aka Fibonacci, did in 1202? How account for self-similarity of fractals, the reiterations of details or patterns at progressively smaller scales: how explain micro repetitions of the macro, such as cross-sections (and cross-sections of cross-sections) of component parts of a cauliflower or sunflower or snowflake or blood cell, that almost identically mirror the whole cauliflower or sunflower or snowflake or blood cell in an infinite regress? These kinds of major design elements, the very objects of scientific scrutiny, simply cannot be interpreted as random results of “just is” any more than can the intricacies of Reims Cathedral or Chantilly lacework, the subjects of aesthetic study, be they representations or “just beauty.” All designs in all fields reverberate as aspects of a larger aesthetic design. Unification doesn’t demote design, it promotes it. Neo-Darwinians offer neo-naturalism to support their metaphysical anti-God contention like pickpockets try to sell you your wallet. Biologists calling atheist-materialism “naturalism” is like the processed muffin mix trumpeting its “real artificial blueberries.” They select random chaos from their disordered bag of tricks and expect

you to accept it just magically changed into that beautiful woman brainchild Life conceived of smoke and mirrors. And there’s her man. Poof! Unity. A few hundred years before Jesus performed miracles, Aristotle and other philosophers systematically detailed their observations of an astonishingly ordered Nature as part of their quest to gain knowledge. Aristotle grouped animals into two categories, those with and those without blood, which corresponds closely to our classifications of vertebrate and invertebrate. Even Aristotle understood that each order of animal or plant was its own discrete order. At about the same time, Hippocrates advised his patients that their diseases and illnesses were due to diet and other physical causes rather than to the meddling of gods. In the second-century C.E., the Roman physician Galen began to use dissection to study the function of animal organs. In the seventeenth century, William Harvey finally theorized that blood flows throughout the body to and from the heart. From the Middle Ages onward, naturalists expanded Aristotle’s system of classification, adding class, order, genus, and species. And from their categorizations, the idea of common descent later codified by Darwin emerged like a leap of faith into the dark abyss of what scientists call a “black box,” which is any current object, be it structure or process, just beyond scientific perusal. Scientists in Darwin’s era couldn’t see the molecular innards of a cell. But it was no black box, but rather myopia that kept Darwinians from seeing intelligent design. Eyeglass lenses—spectacles—were in use by the fifteenth century, and the first microscope was constructed two centuries later. Galileo, an early owner of a microscope, was amazed by the compound eyes of insects looking back at him. The little world observed in his microscope and the vast cosmos viewed through his infamous telescope revealed both the intricate complexity of life and the majestic order of the astronomical heavens. In the early nineteenth century, cell theory established similarities between plant and animal cellular structures. But cells were tiny and almost impossible to discern. The nineteenth century’s snobbish bias

assumed that small meant simple, so cells were considered to be rather insignificant little gelatinous blobs that could have first arisen, in the view of Darwin and others, from “some warm little pond” somewhere, and from that primal life evolved all the life-forms on Earth. By 1885, scientists believed that chromosomes in the cell nucleus carried the information for cell heredity. What scientists at that time couldn’t tell was that chromosomes are extraordinarily complex structures composed of extraordinarily complex proteins and DNA. With the invention of the electron microscope in the late nineteenth century and X-ray crystallography during the early twentieth century, cells could be viewed more closely, albeit indirectly by their pattern of diffraction on photographic film. James Watson and Francis Crick proposed a structural model for DNA in 1953. In 1958, scientists were able to examine the detailed structure of a basic protein, and soon after that, nuclear magnetic resonance, computers, and other instruments made it possible to determine the structures of several proteins and nucleic acids. Those amazing structures impressed even the atheists. The Great Ziggurat: Unity in Diversity We now know that a person, society, or species microevolves in the post-Darwinian sense by the addition of complexity and sophistication within the parameters of given form. Complex creativity within stable form is a core tenet of Deistic intelligent design. For millennia scientists have known that existence consists of discrete wholes that exist unto themselves but also within other wholes, like nested dolls. Open the largest doll, and inside is a smaller doll; open that doll, and inside there is another even smaller doll, and so on, each doll, though distinctly a doll, being unique in design. The human species exists within the Earth world, which exists within a solar system, which exists within a universe, all of which—the whole and its parts—is made up of the same physical stuff. Over twenty centuries ago Aristotle realized that nature constitutes a hierarchy of discrete whole entities, with quantity being at the bottom and quality culminating at the top, a kind of ziggurat

configuration that was later called, among other things, the Great Chain of Being. Some prefer picturing a pyramid, but the ziggurat is a more precise representation, with each step up representing a higher level of quality that contains aspects of everything below it but in smaller quantity. The foundation of the ziggurat is made up of quarks and other particles; above quarks are suddenly atoms (there are more quarks than atoms); above atoms are molecules (there are more atoms than molecules). Quarks, atoms, and molecules constitute inert matter. That each step—quarks, atoms, molecules—is just that, a step, is a persuasive argument for intelligent design and against Darwinian evolution, as Darwin well knew. Rather than a smooth upward slope posited by Darwinians, Creation is actually composed of a series of discrete steps, or layers, each step up the ziggurat being its own discrete whole layer. The step itself can change somewhat—that’s microevolution within a species—but one step doesn’t morph into the next step. Not change, but each next step’s transcending—a province usually ascribed to Divine intervention—remains the quandary of Darwinism. But how does this fit with the top-down, blueprint version of evolution? Again, I have no bias for top-down over bottom-up; top-downfrom-blueprint currently makes the most sense, but any coming-to-be necessitates transcending intelligent first cause. Personally, I think scientists should be exploring a model of simultaneous top-down and bottom-up—or better yet, a model of simultaneous creations, some generated one way, some another, but all melding into one perfectly integrated whole of perfectly integrated wholes. Keep in mind that each step is a unique, discrete whole unto itself that is categorically different from all other steps. A molecule is a whole entity: a molecule. All molecules are a whole abstract entity: the category molecule. An atom is a whole entity; the category atom is a whole entity. A quark is a whole entity. Though a molecule contains atoms which contain quarks, a molecule is not an atom or a quark. You are not in essence the components of your material form. Your essence form/container and your material form/container are two different forms/containers. Does material contain essence, or vice versa?

A molecule is its own form/container which contains several instances of the atom form/container. Yet at the same time, each discrete step makes up the composition of the next step: quarks make up atoms make up molecules. But each step up possesses that something extra that makes it uniquely itself. Here’s the rub: That something extra must necessarily originate beyond the step itself; something uniquely “other” can’t be generated by something that doesn’t have within itself—within its reach, at its disposal— something that does not yet exist, like the “spark of life” that made the first life alive. At the same time, each discrete, unique step— quarks, atoms, and molecules—are made of the same space-time materials. And not only each step; each individual instance of each step—each quark, atom, molecule, and each absolutely unique human being is made of the same space-time materials. We are profoundly all in this together. But at the same time, humans are a quantum leap above anything else. In terms of essence, that huge extra something that transcends the mere animal/material is at least as “beyond” other life-forms as life is beyond inorganic matter. Using the model of the ancient Mesopotamian temple tower, the ziggurat, the shrine at the top represents humanity. (Mesopotamia, you’ll recall, was the “cradle of civilization,” the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers centered at the spot the Bible calls Eden, also known in antiquity as Babylon, today’s Baghdad, the city our military shocked and awed with bombs that ripped the temple curtain in half at the start of the Iraq War.) Again, from Aristotle to Newton to New Age philosophers, thinkers throughout the ages have noted that in every nook and cranny of the universe, reality is composed of wholes, and those wholes are composed of parts that are themselves wholes. Whole particles are part of whole atoms that are part of whole molecules that are part of whole cells that are part of whole organisms. (Have you ever wondered how the ancient Greeks could know about atoms?) But here’s a startling fact: A whole cannot exist without its wholeparts: Molecules cannot exist without atoms. But the whole-parts can exist without the larger wholes that contain them: Quarks can exist without atoms, atoms can exist without molecules. Quarks can exist

without atoms, but atoms cannot exist without quarks, and so on up the ladder, the Great Chain of Being, the Great Ziggurat. There’s a kind of anti-elitism, anti-hubris quality built right into Nature’s structure. Imagine how the world would change if humanity gave that fact its due regard. Each whole is built to maintain its own discrete wholeness, which includes individual parts, each of which maintains its own discrete wholeness. Furthermore, the universe isn’t just a container of parts but is those parts themselves coming into existence and being. If the parts began to cease to exist and no new parts were created to replace their space in time, the universe would shrink accordingly. Quarks, atoms, molecules—then suddenly a gigantic, inexplicable quantum leap to radically unique, self-replicating life: early cells, or prokaryotes (there are more molecules than prokaryotes); then advanced cells, or eukaryotes (there are more prokaryotes than eukaryotes); then simple organisms known as the neural net (there are more eukaryotes than simple organisms); simple organisms known as the neural cord; and so on up the ziggurat—reptiles, paleomammals, and—another gigantic quantum leap—conscious, self-conscious organisms: us humans with our complex brain capable of abstract logic, linguistics, and vision-logic. But even that amazing physical brain doesn’t explain our transcending propensity for art, morality, spirituality, self-consciousness, or a multitude of other uniquely human preoccupations. We truly have been endowed with a big dose of something “other.” That other is what we often call the human spirit. Wholes within wholes within wholes structurally “ziggurats” into a hierarchy of whole-parts. The “biggest” whole contains the most whole-parts; it’s the “fullest.” A single human contains a lot of cells; each of those cells contains an even greater number of molecules; each molecule contains even more atoms. Each successive whole up the Great Ziggurat is more complex, and that complexity means not only that it’s more individuated—meaning that in a sense it’s “smallest”—but also that it’s more dependent. Atoms contain quarks, but quarks do not contain atoms; atoms are not quarks, quarks are radically different from atoms. Something created atoms and quarks; one did not create the other. It’s

impossible to create a new step—something that does not yet exist at all in any form, something that is categorically greater and smarter and other than oneself. It’s equally impossible for the greater to create the lesser, because the greater is already composed of the lesser. All the whole parts must have been created by something with a transcending mind, a someone, the intelligent designer of all Nature, the Creator God. Such a God not only makes the stuff that exists; that God integrates all that stuff. And because all that stuff is constantly coming into being, changing, and ceasing to exist, that God orchestrates all that stuff. And because all that perpetual change occurs within unchanging forms that dance together in perfect concert, that God is actively engaged in meaningful aesthetic creation. And that God engages meaningfully with us, hence our ability to have this conversation. God is not part of Nature’s hierarchy, because God is not a whole or a part of or anything like space-time matter; God transcends us and the universe; therefore, God cannot be the universe, contrary to the view of pantheists and Christian polytheists. But as the active Creator of the universe, the transcendent God is also necessarily immanent in Creation (the way the author is “immanent” in her book but is not the book). Molecules contain atoms and quarks, but atoms and quarks do not contain molecules; and so on up the ever-increasingly complex, inclusive ziggurat. Human beings are members of the animal kingdom, the phylum of chordates, the subphylum of vertebrates, the order of mammals, the class of primates, the family of hominids, the genus of Homo, and the species sapiens. Remember that a system of classification is not a demonstration of evolution. It is, however, a revelation of organized, logical, perpetually creative intelligent design. Remarkably, each level—each layer, each step—embodies a synthesis of the lower parts that is greater than the sum of all its synthesized parts. That synthesis, that addition, that integration, that something extra, is Creation. Though we can imagine that social structures ziggurat upward— from family groups, to hunter-gatherer tribes, to self-sufficient domestic villages, to assimilating empires, to inter-dependent,

codependent industrial states, to Everyman’s communication network, the global commonwealth—these are changes within a discrete species (ours); they don’t change the species type into a different order. Darwinian macroevolution of one order into another doesn’t happen. Microevolution, on the other hand, does occur naturally within a discrete species. Our extraordinarily complex species is its own microevolution explosion that dwarfs the Cambrian; and our explosion blasts via innovations initiated via our own free will. Amazing! We humans are astonishingly odd, and perpetually so. Humanity is its own microcosmic Big Bang. A fetus develops into a newborn which develops into a child which develops into an adult. At our fortieth class reunion we say we’ve evolved. We casually call developmental growth evolution, but it’s not the same as the Darwinian premise that one species type becomes another. Even the class clown won’t evolve into a chimp. As the human body develops, other aspects like the mind and aesthetic microevolve from birth through childhood and on through adulthood, mirroring development of worldviews, from the primitive on up to the mystical. Self-realization comes through selftranscendence, which includes the lower as part of its “tradition,” but which goes beyond, thereby giving that tradition new meaning. Homo sapiens literally means “man the wise.” As always, though, a human can devolve, as witnessed by Darwin’s aesthetic atrophy (to use his word), or civilizations reverting to barbarianism. Every devolution of one or more of our faculties is regression into stupidity and therefore into not-truth. But difference does not equal devolution. As we age we ripen; even cessation and death, far from stupid, are part of the maturation process of spirit moving beyond restrictions of space and time. Perhaps at the moment of death, we’ll look back on this life as the placenta of our newborn Self. Though body development is an example of smooth transition, a quantum leap of creative emergence can occur, as when, say, you have a sudden aha moment, a radical paradigm shift in perspective or feeling. Those shifts are like steps in that they involve an addition of something completely new. In a way, something like macroevolution takes place, but only within the parameter of microevolution, within the means of potential already programmed in

your spiritual DNA, so to speak. You learn something that utterly changes you in some fundamental way, but you never cease being human. Your spirit is always a human spirit. Spiritual Patricide The simple solution to the conundrum of our origin, of course, is that the consistently surprisingly intricate universe, including life, was created by a transcending God. This God created space and time and space-time from a “place” and “time” beyond space-time. Being space-time bound, it’s hard for us to wrap our brains around the concept of an “existence” that isn’t anything like the universe where we live and think. But such a transcending God-Reality is the only smart conclusion we can reach. So why is acknowledging a Creator so difficult? Science is in the business of amassing facts. Facts are true, but facts are not truth. Facts are embodiments of truth, are representations of truth. But the older science becomes, the more aggressively it elbows its way into the sanctum of sage and saint, with the loudest prophets of science proclaiming the good news of atheism. We boomers, a large segment of the population and the segment currently controlling the Darwinian meme, tripped into adulthood on the heels of Carl Sagan, whose famous Cosmos series each week reminded us, “The Cosmos is all that there is, or ever was, or ever will be.” He punctuated his mantra with colorful examples of “all that there is,” like the 1953 Miller-Urey experiment, contrived by a couple grad students, that showed life created in a test tube—showed off, really, the gleeful castration of the already impotent omnipotent God. No one informed us that the experiment was fraught with fallacies (today it’s kaput). As I look back, I realize that a great many Cosmos facts were fraught with fallacies. But in those formative years, we trusted the great Carl Sagan, a regular guest on Johnny Carson and a name we read in the papers, to illuminate our savage brains with a radiance billions and billions of light years in the making. It’s funny how time often somersaults. For instance, only recently did I learn that way back in 1997, Harvard geneticist Richard C. Lewontin admitted that during a debate, he and Sagan argued for Darwinism

not because it was scientifically grounded. Rather, they would “take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs.” Their goal was not to defend truth, or even to present the facts. Today I don’t find their motive surprising: “We have a prior commitment,” Lewontin declared, “a commitment to materialism,” which “is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” That mini materialist manifesto appeared in the New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997, in his article, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” which reviewed Sagan’s book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Ponder the import of Lewontin’s full disclosure: Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. Indeed, accepting a Divine Foot or even a Toe in the door requires a hit of caffeinated humility. The next sentence in his review reads: “The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.” I believe in God, and I don’t believe in “anything”—for instance, the preposterous Darwinian claims of common ancestry and macroevolution via

random chance mutations guided by natural selection; and I don’t believe in natural-law-violating miracles. The ninety percent of us ordinary believers in a Whole Divinity wonder why on earth anyone, even a Harvard professor, A) would think picking the right answer violates the scientific method, and B) would assume that dishonest materialist bias trumps an honest, commonsense deduction that all the subtleties of this mindblowingly massively elegantly intricate universe, or even one of its complex components, like, say, a cell, necessitates an intelligent, transcending Designer. Isn’t God the materialist’s green Martian, the Darwinian’s Satan? It’s not debatable: It’s just plain common sense that the practically infinite ingredients of this deliciously exquisite space-time banquet called life are beyond a scientist’s brainpower. Well beyond. Amazingly, what’s not beyond our ken is the blatancy of design. Why not just say Thanks. Too many scientists sit at the table picking apart the baklava like they were pulling an engine. Carping is not your job, sirs. Your job is to eat well and appreciate. Table manners required. Why, I ask myself, are atheist scientists so aggressively unwilling to accept the most logical, the most obvious, solution to the “problem” of Creation? Why the stubborn ingratitude? Perhaps they simply hate the Father at the head of the table. Cultural patricide has long been considered one of the prime drivers of history. Each generation’s sons must “kill” their fathers, or at least everything their fathers have created and stood for. Sons must “evolve” beyond. They must seize their fathers’ property, intellectual and physical, and must convert that into a new form. War is assumed. Freud made it fashionable to seize even your own mother, or Mother Earth, it’s all yours; if “girls” balk at the rape, cultural or physical, they’re suffering from a common delusion called hysteria; the girls really want it. Perhaps the tamer atheist scientists simply hate their own biological fathers. Given the track record of fathers in our society and throughout history, the chances of a scientist having had an abusive or absent father are pretty high. It makes sense that a scientist might project his loathing for Dad onto God the Father, especially if Dad

made Son feel like the spawn of Satan. And isn’t that what the Father-God of traditional sin-mongering makes him feel like? Father = Father: A valid equation. But it’s not the truth. Religious representations of God do not equal or even necessarily accurately represent God. Some atheist scientists might have great dads. They might be rebelling against the representation of the warrior Father-God portrayed by the Judeo-Christian-Islamic-etc. tradition. It makes sense that they would want to kill the often unjust, violent, vicious, arrogant, jealous, selfish, fickle, slimy God of warrior tribes that created the serpent-spit Eden of the Bible. Even the softer side of God only insinuates himself in rare moments when the warriors are at peace or drunk. Even Jesus, they argue, exacerbates God’s violence with each eschatological ultimatum. But they’re rebelling against a myth of God, not against a possible real God. The God of the Big Bang is not the God of Genesis, not even the God of the New Testament. At least not exactly. But some scientists hate the exact equating of the God of the Big Bang with the Genesist (Old Testament) anthropomorphic (New Testament) God. God and the biblical God are simply not the same entity. One is the reality, the other, taken literally, is a juvenile representation that should have grown up a few thousand years ago. A critique of the biblical God is valid. But the spiritual patricide committed by contemporary atheists is misguided and harmful to the atheists, to culture, and to science. They’ve thrown out the baby with the bathwater. Have you ever noticed that atheists cry “Reality!” loudest when they’re jousting with windmills? The Pantheist God Because atheists doubt or deny the existence of a creator other than nature itself (sometimes referred to as herself, who guides natural selection), atheism is essentially closet pantheism rather than a flat denial of any creative force. Many scientists refer to the most primal component of existence—whatever that might be at the moment—as the mind of God, or to the universe as a whole as the body of God. Some assert that space-time existence itself is God evolving, learning, coming to be. We are nothing but sparks of the bonfire or

droplets in the ocean of consciousness, and ultimately we return to the source—which mixes the metaphor, but as science these days becomes more and more science fiction, its articulation becomes more and more loosely metaphoric and less and less lucid. The simple, literal, commonsense truth that most people know and have always known is that the source is God, that God is Creator, and that God is wholly other. God is not the universe, the process of the universe coming into being, or the most basic particle of the universe. We are not sparks in a universal bonfire or droplets in the ocean of divine consciousness. A learning, evolving God only restates all the problems. Because energy, like matter, is a component of space-time, not something that actually transcends it, science’s cutting-edge theology—energy equals consciousness equals spirit—is really retro spiritualized materialism à la the preSocratic Greeks; it’s materialism-lite. But surely even the staunchest materialist realizes that the information that drives the universe—the enormously sophisticated software driving DNA, for instance—must come from somewhere. Even they admit that information is neither matter nor energy and that info software must be coded somehow. Only stubbornness blocks them from grasping that neither energy nor consciousness nor information is God. The “I-am-ness” of a “Big Self” like, say, Ken Wilbur, who claims that when he looks at a river, he is the river, when hiking a mountain he is the mountain, and concludes that “I am God,” is the spiritual schizophrenia of hubris on steroids. Contrast that with a poet’s metaphoric “I am a river” which is not to be taken literally. These days, physics exists solely to perpetuate the Big Myth that there is no God. What else explains the ridiculous irrationality of its memes, not only the Me Meme of self-absorbed godlets, but also the meme of pure speculation parading as hard science. Many scientists still insist that science is by definition a process of establishing facts via observation and experimentation. But the grand conclusion of quantum mechanics, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, says that at the quantum level, nothing can actually be “observed” in the normal sense of the word. The scientist doesn’t see an object such as a quark; he only sees an energetic reaction to a procedure, the

experiment, and he can never be sure that even this is an accurate description of anything substantial relating to the object itself. Furthermore, not only can a quantum object not be observed, intercepted, monitored, passed along, copied, or cloned—all consequences of scientific observation and experimentation—the very act of “observation,” of setting up the experiment and measuring any action or reaction, disrupts the message, or flow of information from object to observer. Some interpret this to mean that the observer determines the outcome of the observation by becoming part of it—you don’t just “look at” an object, you create it to some extent by becoming part of its wave-flow. Scientists have gone so far as to assert that there are infinite Big Bangs firing up eternally; that there are many, perhaps even an infinite number of parallel multiverses where you are alive and where you are dead at the same time, where you are eating a ham sandwich and where you are not eating the ham sandwich; that due to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the observer actually creates the past, meaning all that happens in the present is in the future creating the past. And on and on it goes. All these theories are pure speculation conjured up to “explain” how existence came to be without resorting to a supernatural cause. It’s like leaving by the back door and traveling around the world and then to Mars and parachute landing on reentry to get to your job down the block without running into your girlfriend who lives across the street who is really only a fantasy girlfriend who resembles the girl across the street. Many scientists complain that much of New Age quantum physics, which can’t be seen, which can’t be tested, is a random ramble of equations that add up to nothing, not even good science fiction. It’s not that atheist scientists don’t appreciate the amazing interactive complexity of the universe. Cosmologist Paul Davies even provides us with a theory of a designer universe that he says appears to be following a script, a pattern, a plan—which he equates with the laws of physics, mechanics, information processing. He doesn’t speak for many of his fellow atheists, though, when he admits that the anthropic principle is valid: the universe seems carefully constructed according to a grand cosmic plan to culminate with the emergence of life on Earth. Like a biblical psalmist, he sings

praises for a universe filled with meaning and purpose. The world is beautiful, and its construction, deeply ingenious. Even the parameters of the laws of physics are just right for life, and those laws complement each other perfectly due to their exact “coincidences,” or “special factors.” Clearly, he argues, there’s a grand design to our bio-friendly universe. His songs sound a bit tinny, though, to those of us schooled in music. Like his peers, Davies is adamant that the universe is not at all like an organism but is really basically a huge computer. It’s an amazing machine, but it’s not alive or even natural in the usual sense of those terms. A living universe would point to a living God, and Davies intends to steer clear of any, as he puts it, “cosmic magician,” that dreaded Foot in the Door. But Davies has an alternative, an idol to take the place of God. Unlike physicist Steven Weinberg, who laments, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,” Davies wants to imbue the universe with meaning and purpose by brazenly creating God in his own image in a funhouse mirror. According to Davies’s creation myth, we human beings, through the sheer act of observation, helped shape the laws of physics that blasted into existence 13.7 billion years ago. You see, because the universe is a gigantic computer, we, like Neo in The Matrix, live in a fake, simulated virtual world of our own making. Of course this doesn’t solve the problem of where we, the makers, or the materials and laws of virtual nature come from. In Davies’ world, a human-generated simulated universe resolves hard scientific/theological questions, like how did the laws of physics come to be? Why those laws rather than some others? Why were those exact laws embodied by the universe at its conception? Why those perfectly complementary laws rather than some others? Why does everything in the universe have a common set of physical laws? Why are the laws and conditions of the universe consistent with life? “Because a transcending Creator made them” doesn’t satisfy Davies. If atheists don’t hate God outright, they certainly hate the God solution, as scientifically satisfying as it actually is. Raw materialism doesn’t work for a species that intuitively senses a

demand for a God; their best solution is to posit human consciousness as God. In Davies’ mind (which is God), this version of God corroborates the multiverse hypothesis, which, as he interprets it, means that our universe is just a bubble in a vaster, more elaborate system, the multiverse, which consists of many, possibly infinite, universes. Perhaps, he speculates (a bit out of character for a creator God), each universe is a huge bubble among other huge bubbles scattered throughout space (presumably a bigger space than any one universe), and each bubble comes with its own set of laws. I seem to recall some friends coming up with a similar theory years ago at a wedding reception overflowing with champagne. Although Davies assumes that his bubbly solves the problem of a transcending God, it only widens the field of creation with all the same conditions and questions that can only be resolved by a transcending God. Davies’s solution is called the “strong anthropic principle,” which places the observer—you and me—in the central creating position: We observers, who must inevitably arise due to the happy coincidence of fine tuning (the perfectly calibrated conditions required for existence as it is), are dictating how the universe is put together. In other words, the emergence of life and observers causes the “participatory universe,” as physicist John Wheeler called it, to have the laws that it does. The future present creates the past. This “final anthropic principle” links all moments together into one “moment.” Of course, one wonders how observers that don’t yet exist create a universe that only at its very final stage of coming-intoexistence creates observers. Scientists like Davies are obsessed with establishing the cause of Creation as something within Creation itself. The Deist would ask how life today could cause or in any way affect the Big Bang. Davies and crew argue that because of the hypothesized underlying time symmetry in the laws of physics, the laws work forward and backward. Of course, it would be impossible to observe or test this hypothesis. They base their theory on their interpretation of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which in its original form simply means that there’s uncertainty about how an atom is going to

behave, or has behaved in the past, so you can’t predict its in-themoment behavior with certainty. Furthermore, you can’t predict the past, present, or future behavior of anything you can’t directly observe. Determinists have a problem with Heisenberg’s principle. Uncertainty really means that there is some flexibility, some freedom, some room for chance, within some immutable natural structures. Think of the laws of nature as the structural walls, floor, and ceiling of a house. Those “bones” of the universe as a whole, as well as the bones of smaller structures within the larger structure of the universe, don’t change. But within the structure itself, as within the house itself, there is a lot of wiggle room for change. In fact, let’s call the rooms in the house wiggle rooms. You move in, you arrange your furniture, you rearrange your furniture to accommodate decisions about how you will arrange your stuff. A few years in, someone moves in with you. More stuff. Rearrangement takes place again. A few more years in and you start having kids. You paint rooms, lay new carpet in some rooms, rip carpet and lay hardwood in other rooms. You sing, fight, make love, read textbooks, watch TV, change your philosophy, entertain friends, decorate for the holidays, teach your kids more things than you can remember, reminisce, pray, grow old, sit grieving as your spouse dies. These examples of wiggle room—wiggle rooms—within the structural house barely scratch the surface. Within the immutable structures of existence there is room for change and freedom. You can predict events that conform to those structures. But you can’t predict how your dog is going to behave in the next second or how you will behave every split second of your life, or even any split second with perfect accuracy. Even atheist scientists know that this wiggle room exists even in atoms and molecules. Just at that fundamental level alone, uncertainty disproves determinism. Common sense alone shows us at least four determinate levels for what things are and how they happen. Level one is immutable structures, like the laws of gravity or 2+3=5. Materialists pile everything onto that level. The second level is wiggle room admitting chance; it’s the realm of heads or tails. If the atom must move, all options being equal, it “just” moves. This is the level where neo-

Darwinians live their flat, boring lives. The third level is a wiggle room where simple, two-dimensional choice can occur. A leaf scratches the window; your cat wakes, stares at the window, then either rouses enough to explore or yawns and falls back asleep: her choice. The fourth level is a wiggle room reserved for humans. This room is the same “size” as the cat’s room, but the human’s wiggle room is where complex, multi-dimensional choice can—not necessarily must, but can—occur. Humans can hang out in the other three rooms. But when someone—you, for instance—retreat to the human wiggle room, you can make sophisticated choices that are the result of what we all know as free will. We think, we deliberate, we weigh the possibilities, their implications in the moment, consequences in the future, even causes in the past. We engage many or all of our many inherent faculties, not just reason, but conscience, intuition, emotion, experience, aesthetic sensibility, the judgments and desires of our physical and spiritual aspects, and of course, our powerful, selfdefining will. Only in the human room does an organism experience true freedom. Natural selection has failed to explain the perpetual waterfall of organic change. The neo-Darwinian solution, random chance, can’t ever describe how anything random could contribute to the delicate, perfectly calibrated fine tuning of the universe. Random chance contradicts fine tuning, unless the fine tuning is tuned specifically to accommodate the wiggle room. Davies trumps crap-shoot random chance with a different theory, and it’s not Einstein’s God who “doesn’t play dice with the universe.” No, in Davies’ world (or worlds), atoms’ past lives, aka “past histories,” have led up to the present state of the universe. According to quantum mechanics—but contrary to science in general— because you can’t put the universe in a lab to experiment on later like you can an atom, you can only infer backward in time; therefore, “you can make observations now that will affect the nature of reality as it was in the past” because “the nature of the quantum state in the past can’t be separated from the nature of the quantum state in the present” because intelligent human beings are aware of the universe through the act of observation. This Matrix fantasy, Davies claims, is “just standard quantum physics.”

Because there’s an uncertainty about what an atom is going to do in the future or what it has done in the past, Davies concludes that “that uncertainty means there’s a type of linkage,” called “quantum nonlocality,” by which two linked particles—think of them as codependently married—have separated and stand at opposite ends of the universe. Perform an experiment on one and the other instantaneously knows what the result is. “These experiments have been done many times,” Davies explains. What he (dishonestly) doesn’t mention is that there is no way to “see” particles even on a lab coat, much less at the other end of the universe. Undaunted by this problem, Davies asserts that as we work our way back into the past, there are multitudes of “quantum histories that could have led up to this point. And the existence of observers today will select a subset of those histories which will inevitably, by definition, lead to the existence of life.” He adds, “Now, I don’t think anybody would really dispute that fact.” In fact, almost everyone with a degree in science disputes it. Because Davies can’t stand the notion of a transcending God, he asserts that the immutable laws of physics—the Platonic-Newtonian universe governed by infinitely precise mathematical laws— themselves are subject to quantum uncertainty, “so that an observation performed today will select not only a number of histories from an infinite number of possible past histories, but will also select a subset of the laws of physics which are consistent with the emergence of life.” Davies has it all figured out: Mathematical and physical rules embodied by the active laws of nature are just information. The universe is a giant information processor, a finite-temporal computer —Wheeler’s “it from bit”—of finite-temporal accuracy, hence the possibility of error—even in the laws of nature—that leads to evolution, both material and organic. The laws of physics that randomly come into existence from a primordial state of “vague and fuzzy” not-yet-laws become more and more law-like as time goes on, he says. The laws of physics as we know them—the bones of the house—are just adolescent laws that will continue to evolve into something different.

On the other hand, Davies asserts, the big computer simulation, the universe that we create, is only possible because we can program—essentially clone—our consciousness, or at least a simulation thereof, because after all, consciousness is only another physical process. Probably the universe is already the simulation, he notes. And if we’re in the simulation, how would we know? (Author’s clue: Plato’s Cave.) This universe is a carnival funhouse of mirrors reflecting simulations of simulations of simulations…It can’t be infinite and eternal, though, because there was that darn Big Bang. Davies’s circular argument is that the universe we create creates us who create the universe. He does admit that there are fundamental limitations to our becoming the God of simulation due to the way our brains have been put together. “Ultimately,” he says, “it may not be living intelligence or embodied intelligence but some sort of intelligent information-processing system that could be omniscient and fill the entire universe.” He adds, “That’s a grand vision that I rather like.” A self-created simulated God is for Davies the only “logical” conclusion to an assertion made in his book, God and the New Physics: “It is hard to resist the impression that the present structure of the universe, apparently so sensitive to minor alterations in the numbers, has been rather carefully thought out…The seeming miraculous concurrence of numerical values that nature has organized to her fundamental constants must remain the most compelling evidence for an element of cosmic design.” In Superforce, Davies adds that “The big bang was not, evidently, any old bang, but an explosion of exquisitely arranged magnitude.” To X the magician God from his universe and from science, over the next few decades following the publication of those books, Davies constructed a lobotomized cosmic mechanical magician that has “thought out” the structure of the universe. To protect the scientific method of reason, deduction, and empirical study, he explodes it into a crazy kaleidoscope of science superstition. A new religious myth is born. Ironically, the magician God never left the scene, because even Davies’ explosion of the Big Bang explosion still needs a Fuse.

Science never has, never will, indeed can’t prove that there is no God. But everything proves that there is. One fundamental difference between “new science” and religion is that religion can imagine—not visually, but in an abstract, rational way—a Reality without space or time beyond space-time. Science tries. But religion knows better that human knowledge and understanding are extremely limited, and are most definitely finite and temporal. Standing amid the immensity of existence, registering the blatant lucidity of Nature, the spiritual person, humbled with awe, recognizes intellectually and/or spiritually the active Presence of its Creator. Religion has its myths and superstitions, and they must be re-viewed as representations rather than as literal facts. Both science and religion need to be critiqued. Truth must never be shunned. But religion trumps science with its ability to grasp transcendence as the necessary prerequisite of a rational universe. It’s odd that scientists of time and space are unable to imagine anything existing outside of time and space. They seem tangled in semantics. Yes, time and space came into existence at the moment of the Big Bang. But the Big Bang was a point in space and time even at the moment of space-time’s conception. It’s hard for atheist scientists to imagine something that’s not space or time, something not bound by space-time. It’s hard for their brains to imagine the possibility of Mind beyond anything we can know or experience. Space-time words representing space-time categories can’t fully convey a reality that is not bound by space or time. Scientists like Davies don’t get that “eternity” and “infinity” are not space-time concepts, they’re only space-time representations of something transcending the categories of space and time. Mind transcends brain; consciousness transcends the limitations of determinism. The spiritually inclined understand that there are realities that can be spiritually intuited that don’t require convoluted convulsions like simulated multiverses that we created before we were born. In all good conscience, should we be letting that kind of mythmaking pass for hard science? Most people agree that scientific concepts correspond to something that can be observed in the real world. We see gravity in the effects of gravity at work. We can attach things to concepts like

2+3=5. We observe very small and very large objects through microscopes and telescopes. We create devices that detect radiation, which is something we can’t see that can kill us. We know love because we experience it. We know about post traumatic stress syndrome through case studies of people suffering it, if not through our own experience. I know that God exists because the intelligent universe requires a transcending Creator. How is that more metaphysical, or less logical, than believing that a scientific experiment creates reality? When Einstein noticed that light could exist in the form of particles as well as waves, he wasn’t saying that a scientist setting up an experiment to measure light could somehow magically determine the light’s “response” to shape-shift into either particles or a wave. Whether you see particles or waves depends on how you look at the beam of light; your perception is determined by your position relative to the light beam. A train a mile off looks like a speck, but barreling past me a few feet away it looks massive. A solid red brick wall consisting of a bunch of not-red subatomic particles bouncing off one another (red being wavelengths not absorbed by the wall but reflected off it out to, among other places, human retinas) is still a solid red brick wall to the kid on a bike crashing into it. But scientists want to tell the kid that he (or they?) determines the wall’s being either particles or waves. Oh wait—this kind of appearance only happens during one of their scientific measuring experiments. Either way, it’s another way of saying that their abstract theory transcends the kid’s and even their own actual experience. Their theory is absolute; abstraction is their God. Being a meta-measurer, I’ve sized up the wave-particle measurers: they’re scientific fundamentalists. We can all play this game. What happens when the abstraction exists on its own, not just disconnected but in fact not at all connected to any concrete or even abstract reality? Take for instance M theory (M code for membrane, aka “brane”) and string theory. Branes and strings can’t be observed in any way, not even in terms of observing reactions, though theorists ask you to picture strings as rubber bands. String theory (which encompasses brane theory) consists of nothing but equations (for some of us,

that’s “Plato’s hell”). Even most scientists consider strings and branes to be fictions that only exist in the brains of their authors. Cleverly, one of those authors has transmuted fiction into “poetry” to win your respect. Because string theory is unobservable and irrational—but then it only exists to confirm that God does not exist—it must be “proven” with mathematical glossolalia (speaking in tongues). Consider, for instance, this excerpt from physicist Machio Kaku’s explanation of string theory circulated recently on Youtube: Subatomic particles we see in nature—the quarks, the electrons—are nothing but musical notes on a tiny vibrating string. What is physics? Physics is nothing but the laws of harmony that you can write on vibrating strings. What is chemistry? Chemistry is nothing but the melodies you can play on interacting vibrating strings. What is the universe? The universe is a symphony of vibrating strings. And then, What is the mind of God that Albert Einstein eloquently wrote about for the last thirty years of his life? We now for the first time in history have a candidate for the mind of God. It is cosmic music resonating through eleven dimensional hyperspace. So first of all we are nothing but melodies, we are nothing but cosmic music played out on vibrating strings and membranes. Obeying the laws of physics which is nothing but the laws of harmony of vibrating strings. Buy why eleven? It turns out that if you write a theory in fifteen, seventeen, eighteen dimensions, the theory is unstable. It has what are called anomalies, it has singularities. It turns out that mathematics alone prefers the universe be in eleven dimensions. Now some people have toyed with twelve dimensions…. Really, twelve? Impossible! Here we have an example of a writing professor’s worst nightmare: an essay that wants to be a poem and is neither. Kaku calls this mythological imagery “science.” First, he asserts that we “see” particles in nature; he says we “see” subatomic particles, specifically quarks and electrons, which we definitely can’t see, or even “see.”

Next, he sets up his first equation. I can’t help but wonder if Kaku, a physicist and a mathematician, is a product of the “new math.” He says that these subatomic particles equal nothing but musical notes on a tiny vibrating string. Particles = musical notes; particles = nothing but musical notes. If particles are nothing but musical notes, why isn’t MIT just teaching its physicists music? Please note (no pun) that Kaku isn’t saying that these particles are like musical notes. He says that they are musical notes. He doesn’t appear to mean this metaphorically. These notes are on a string. They aren’t produced by a string, which he can’t possible see (in any sense of the word). They are located on a string, a tiny vibrating string. Really? Prove it. Now he takes us beyond the subatomic realm of psychics. Whoops, did I say psychics? I meant physics. No wait, I did mean psychics. Because guess what? (And I do mean “guess.”) String theory is based on a science fiction magical realism that can’t be observed or subjected to experimentation at all. Now we’ve entered the realm of subatomic chemistry. How this chemistry differs from regular chemistry or from subatomic physics he doesn’t explain. But that doesn’t matter. According to Kaku, all chemistry is nothing but the melodies you play on interacting vibrating strings. I wasn’t aware that I was playing any strings. I do play several string instruments of the not quantum brand in the real world, though I’m not playing them now. Do I have a parallel life in another musical universe, perhaps? I didn’t know that chemicals weren’t the substances we put in test tubes in high school. They’re actually melodies. Literal melodies. If only I’d known that when I sweated through Chem 101. And to think that I got detention for humming! Melodies, eh? Hmm. I’d better get my ears checked, because I’m not hearing the symphony of vibrating strings I’m supposedly plucking into a universe, this universe. Am I a God anyway? A fraction of God? Am I the mind of God that Albert Einstein eloquently wrote about for the last thirty years of his life, the mind of the God that doesn’t play dice with the universe, the transcending God that has

established perpetually perfect order that can be observed and enjoyed? Is this the Albert Einstein that said, “My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind,” the Einstein who said, “That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God,” and “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind”? No, it seems, Einstein was wrong. He missed his entrance onto the stage where the symphony plays to a different violinist. The greatest scientist of our era missed a beat when he assumed, “One may say the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility,” then arrogantly shrugged at the conductor, “When the solution is simple, God is answering.” It takes a real, post-Einstein genius like Kaku to discover for the first time in history that the mind of God is cosmic music resonating through eleven dimensional hyperspace. How does he know this? He doesn’t, not in any normal, real-world sense of knowing. He knows this in another dimension of a parallel universe in a past that does not yet exist. Still, he knows that we are nothing—nothing but cosmic music played out (by us, he just said) on vibrating strings and membranes. Wait, where did the membranes come from? If the membranes are maybe the timpani, are they sitting out the symphony composed only of strings? I’m confused. Now the strings and membranes are obeying the laws of physics —where did the laws of physics come from? Is that the composer? Who is the composer? Am I the composer? part of the composer? one of those pre-Socratic flames or drops of water in the fire/ocean of consciousness? I thought the laws of physics consisted of things like, if you dropped a big ball from a roof, gravity would pull it down and knock your gym teacher unconscious. Now I’m being told that the laws of physics are nothing but laws of harmony that I can’t hear from vibrating strings that I can’t see. Does harmony encompass the response of the gym teacher regaining consciousness? What is consciousness anyway? How do we know there’s not a bigger consciousness out there stringing us along?

And what about that eleven dimensional hyperspace? Is that singular or plural? Hyperspace doesn’t sound good. In my universe, hyper anything isn’t a condition of harmony. Well, at least it’s mathematics alone that prefers the universe be in eleven dimensions. What/who is this math? Is math God? That’s a scary thought for a math-challenged person like me. Why would math prefer eleven? Why doesn’t math like the other numbers, presumably his/her/its brainchildren (branechildren?). We haven’t even gotten to the real math, and I’m already lost. I thought there were four dimensions, three dimensions of space and a fourth dimension of time. Are these other dimensions space or time? spaces-time? spaces-times? No, it’s eleven dimensions. It turns out (via what wild weekend of chalks and blackboards I can’t even imagine), if you write a theory in fifteen, seventeen, eighteen dimensions, the theory is unstable. In my opinion—and granted, I’m not a mathematician—eleven might also be unstable. Forgive me, oh Lord Math, but why should I venerate a bunch of equations on acid? Even Plato would balk. It’s hard to resist dubbing the M-string theory of God’s space-time mind the Kaku Cuckoo. Oh for the simpler days of Paley’s watch. What kind of scientist would really expect smart people like me and you to believe that M-string theory doesn’t have anomalous singularities appearing as traces of profound narcissism? If I’m nothing but a melody, he’s nothing but a wannabe rock star in his fantasy rubber band. He’s bandstanding: grandstanding. No, I just don’t buy that God lives in Kaku’s back pocket. I’m siding with Einstein. Suffice it to say regarding “the mind of God that Albert Einstein eloquently wrote about for the last thirty years of his life” that Kaku’s musical strings were neither plucked from Einstein’s practiced violin nor from the mind of the God who “doesn’t play dice with the universe.” I agree with Einstein that “The man of science is a poor philosopher,” and “There are two ways to live: You can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.” Einstein once quipped, “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.” The latter

perhaps deserves a qualifying antithesis: “Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.” I’m confused: the genius pop-mathematician Machio Kaku has certainly caused a big problem for me simply by violating the four Cartesian rules of mathematical procedure: accept nothing as true that is not self-evident; divide problems into their simplest parts; solve problems by proceeding from simple to complex; recheck the reasoning. Nor does Kaku clearly define all the key notions and limits of the problem he is supposedly solving. Clearly science has moved beyond this obsolete Cartesian requirement. Ironically, Descartes’ first surviving work is Compendium of Music, written in his early twenties. I doubt that he would approve of the math riffs of Kaku. Like other science fiction scientists, Kaku also disregards geologist Charles Lyell’s principle of uniformity first adopted back in Darwin’s day. Well, officially adopted by scientists; the rest of us had always already known this. Lyell’s principle remains unchallenged even by science contrarians because it’s just plain everyday common sense. Lyell’s definition is as elegantly simple as the concept: “By the principle of uniformity is meant that the kinds of causes we observe producing certain effects today can be counted on to have produced similar effects in the past.” If we drop a rock today, we assume it will fall to the ground because dropped rocks have always fallen to the ground. A volcanic eruption rather than an earthquake best explains a layer of ash in the rock strata. Based on our common experience that intelligent agents generate what has been clearly designed—the faces of Mount Rushmore, say, as opposed to a pile of rocks, or even the constant law of gravity—we can deduce that the clearly designed universe has been—well, clearly designed by an intelligent agent. God is the best—really the only—candidate for that agent. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that Darwinian biologists rattling their cages have necessitated the reanimation of life. And now their quantum cronies, brazenly violating the scientific method, concoct irrational, notprovable myths simply to delete God from the scientific method. It’s fashionable these days to hop on Dawkins’ kill-religion bandwagon. The new science is a new religion that just like the old religion it criticizes disregards that old Keatsian axiom that “axioms in

philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses.” Pulses not scored by Kaku. Atheism and pantheism illustrate just how far people will go to avoid the most logical solution to the problems of design and consciousness—a transcending Creator. How are their solutions less mythological than other creation myths or less superstitious than any of the other religious superstitions that have gotten them in such an intellectual tizzy? None of their solutions eliminate the same old need for First Cause. The only truly logical solution is a transcending God. The sooner they accept that, the sooner they can get back to practical applications like Green cars, advanced communications technology, and cures for cancer. Clearly they’re not up to the task of addressing ultimate concerns of meaning, purpose, value, or beauty. In fact, they waste precious time and grant money that should be spent solving real problems, like exploitation, poverty, violence, war, or just the basic rape and murder of Mother Earth. Kill the Father, kill the Mother. Freud must be rolling over in his grave. How does the atheist differ from the pantheist? An atheist scientist is someone who describes the absolutely stupendously brilliant designs of existence and its clearly orchestrated preordained drive toward increasingly sophisticated complexity as emerging from a process absolutely devoid of intelligence or purpose, then smiles as you gauge him a genius in comparison to the brain-dead universe. The pantheist shakes his head: he’s not just a genius, he is God. The pantheist “I am God” is a reductionist’s Holy Grail: I am part of the universe, which is God. The universe is one, and I am one with God, making me equal to God: I am God. Can’t reduce much lower than that. Who is the real genius here? The atheist? The pantheist? My candidate is Everyman. In a radio interview with Steve Paulson, atheist Richard Dawkins commented, “I think the most powerful reason for believing in a supreme being is the argument for design. Living things in particular look complicated, look beautiful, look elegant, look as though they’ve been designed. We are all accustomed to thinking that if something looks designed, it is designed. Therefore, it’s really no wonder that before Darwin came along, just about everybody was a theist.”

And just about everybody still is a theist. Just about everybody is smart enough to put two and two together to get four. Just about everybody is smart enough to get that cosmic design requires a Designer. Design and consciousness are only problems for X-God pedants too preoccupied with God-poison to grasp this fundamental fact. Hoaxing, Forging, Trimming, and Cooking As I mentioned in Chapter 3, academics politely disregard even the most preposterous theories put forth by their colleagues. Generally speaking, the ivory halls resound with wacky theories, as well they should. Toss creative ideas and critical thinking into the campus cauldron and you get civilization bubbling its best. Of course, every department has its cloak-and-dagger villain lurking in the wee-hour shadows with a vial of poison tucked in his vest. Though the line between preposterous theory and lie is thin, crossing that threshold jeopardizes the liar’s reputation and career. But despite this built-in deterrent, at times a lie explodes so shocking that some scandalized grad student squeals. But typically everyone just ignores the latest elephant stuffed in the file closet; even the snoopy poop scooper scoots. Creative ideas and critical thinking. Ah yes, critical thinking, that nasty nag. Critical thinking is the lie cop; on campus or in the adjunct lab, the lie cop polices responsible methodology, valid conclusions, and that testy intellectual rectitude. Even sneaky lies tend to be recklessly stupid as well as dishonest. Unfortunately, stupid and dishonest can easily hide behind field jargon and research red tape. But now and then, even professors whose busts have already been carved in marble get busted. Exhibit A: In the January 9/16, 2012 issue of The Nation, in his article “Disgrace,” Princeton professor Charles Gross relates how after a four-year investigation by Harvard University authorities, research scientist Marc Hauser, professor of psychology, organismic and evolutionary biology, and biological anthropology, and author of over two hundred papers and several books, resigned his professorship a few months following the psych department’s decision to not retain him as a teacher—in other words, after his being more-or-less fired. Already Harvard had

charged him with eight counts of “scientific misconduct,” academia’s polite euphemism for research fraud, aka lying, which typically involves fabrication, falsification, and/or plagiarism, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), the major funders of U.S. research. Hauser himself was originally outed by his own research assistant and subsequently investigated by three of his lab’s researchers, then by Harvard, then by the federal Office of Research Integrity. Many student assistants are paid for their lab time, and whistle blowing could easily result in the student being fired, and much worse could ruin his career; Hauser’s elephant must have been rank to rankle his brave student and researchers enough for them to jeopardize their futures. Though a whole circus of elephants stink up plenty of research closets, Hauser’s outing is not exceptional. During the last few decades numerous studies have documented rampant scientific misconduct in university-based research as witnessed or admitted by students and professors. The NIH very conservatively estimates that at an absolute minimum, 2,325 incidents of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism occur each year. A meta-analysis of eighteen studies found that over fifteen percent of scientists are known to have fabricated or falsified data. With so much blatant lying going on, who has time to police lapses in critical thinking, much less energy to pick apart the esoteric, like the musical score of Kaku’s Cuckoo or the strong anthropic principle of Davies’ simulated Matrix multiverses? Some academic crimes are easier to demonstrate. Hauser, who works primarily with rhesus monkeys, cotton-top tamarins, and human infants, stated on his website that his research focused on “understanding which mental capacities are shared with other nonhuman primates and which are uniquely human,” and on determining “the evolutionarily ancient building blocks of our capacity for language, mathematics, music and morality.” Gross points out that “A key motivation in Hauser’s work has been to demonstrate that monkeys have cognitive abilities previously thought to be present only in the great apes and humans.” He adds, “Darwin had tried to remove the human from the center of the biological universe, stressing its psychological and physical continuity with other living

beings. Hauser seems to want to put humans and other primates, even the cotton-top tamarin, on a cognitive plane above other animals, like dolphins and crows, that have sophisticated cognitive skills but are not in the primate lineage.” Hauser skewed his research and outright lied to further the cause of neo-Darwinism. In the study that led to the Harvard investigation, Hauser interpreted and documented the presence of sound pattern recognition thought to be a necessity in language acquisition in the monkeys he and his assistants observed. But his students asserted, and the investigation concurred, that the studied monkeys’ behavior displayed no sound pattern recognition at all. In a similar study in which a red dot was placed on the foreheads of study animals, Hauser declared that cotton-top tamarins could recognize themselves. But in fact, investigators concluded that Hauser’s research materials not only did not support, but actually contradicted Hauser’s claim. As it turns out, unlike Hauser’s monkeys, many animals, such as dolphins, orcas, magpies, and elephants, share with humans the ability to recognize themselves. Also flying in the face of Hauser’s evolutionary premise, research shows that jays and crows have cognitive abilities like tool use, foresight, and role-taking shared with great apes. In the scholarly journal Cognition, Hauser claimed that like human infants, cotton-top tamarins could rapidly generalize “patterns that have been characterized as abstract algebraic rules,” implying that monkeys could correspondingly process a similar symbolic system, language. As it turns out, even elderly tamarins will never be able to help me understand stings, branes, and strong anthropic multiverses. Following the Harvard investigation, Gerry Altmann, editor of Cognition, told the Boston Globe that the Hauser paper “reports data…but there was no such data existing on the videotape. These data are depicted in the paper in a graph. The graph is effectively a fiction and the statistic that is supplied in the main text is effectively a fiction.” And “if it’s the case the data have in fact been fabricated, which is what I as the editor infer, that is as serious as it gets.” Altmann later commented on his blog, “The information I have received, when taken at face value, leads me to maintain my belief that the data that had been published in the journal Cognition was

effectively a fiction—that is, there was no basis in the recorded data for those data. I concluded, and I continue to conclude, that the data were most likely fabricated (that is, after all, what a fiction is—a fabrication).” Scientists or any other academics that lie about the facts of their chosen field are—well, liars. Another of Hauser’s fabricated fictions is that chimps, rhesus monkeys, and cotton-top tamarins interpret human hand gestures and thereby understand the unspoken message, an ability possessed only by humans. But in fact dogs interpret human gestures better than chimps do. And no species but humans can understand complex meaning conveyed by a human being via physical gestures. Ideas Hauser presents in his book Moral Minds as his own original work and even some of their exact wording have been shown to have been plagiarized. Although Hauser does credit the work of some sources, for instance, John Mikhail, one of the accusing researchers from whom Hauser freely borrowed, writing presented as academic in the author’s field of academic expertise requires strict citation following specific rules, unlike freer rules governing synthesized concepts and loose paraphrase presented to substantiate the opinions of trade book authors. Hauser’s “proof” of moral evolution simply continued an esteemed tradition of the Darwinian Noble Lie established when scientists first applauded Darwin’s bogus “proof” of macroevolution. Ironically, Darwin’s buddy Charles Babbage presented the first analysis of scientific misconduct, “hoaxing, forging, trimming, and cooking,” in his 1830 book Reflections on the Decline of Science in England and on Some of Its Causes. Studies examining the kind of typical scientist guilty of misconduct reveal a portrait that strikingly resembles Darwin himself: a bright, ambitious young man working among and mentored by the scientific elite, competing for recognition and status within the elite. Of course, research funding provides the means for research to continue, so a researcher might be tempted to skew his research to favor his lab’s financial worth by presenting new information that profits the rewarding institution. Yes, scientists funded by a drug company say, your new drug works effectively with only a few small-print sideeffects (that could kill you). Yes, scientists paid by corporate polluters

claim, global warming is a myth (that could kill you). Sometimes, with one foot still firmly planted in the campus lab, a skewing scientist has already placed the other foot in the door of a lucrative corporate lobby. Corporations pump millions into universities to buy the right to skew; academic prostitution isn’t yet as rampant as political prostitution, but it is on the rise. But skewed research is probably most often the consequence of personal hubris fulfilling the universal university tenure requirement to publish work that contributes to one’s field. Gross notes that in one interview, Hauser observed that psychopaths “know right from wrong but just don’t care.” Interestingly, Gross only vaguely implies that perhaps Hauser fits the bill. Hauser and many other neoDarwinians and Darwinian science itself should really undergo psychological evaluation. (I am quite serious.) In a very real sense, neo-Darwinian science has boxed itself into a corner. Scientists in most fields admit the obvious facts. How else can science proceed? How else can science justify its existence? Yet neo-Darwinians won’t admit the truth—won’t admit they’re wrong— even to the point of looking ridiculous. Isn’t that a clinical symptom of psychopathy? What do neo-Darwinian scientists really know? How do they account for the perfectly calibrated complexity of our unfolding universe that, as one neo-Darwinian put it, looks as if it knew we were coming? How do they account for this tendency of the universe to go beyond itself, to transform, to transcend? How do they account for life? How do they account for intelligence, value, meaning, purpose; how do they account for consciousness and subjectivity? How do they account for our confidence in truth, goodness, beauty, God? How do they account for our talents, virtues, passions, quests? How do they account for our thirst for knowledge, our insistence for freedom, our demand for justice? How do they account for our sense of tragedy and ecstasy, our tears and jokes, our experiences of spiritual transcendence? How do they account for our persistent, even obsessive need to believe in something greater than ourselves? How do they account for our need to learn for its own sake, for our desire to codify unselfishness, for our drive to seek God? These are not tamarin tendencies.

Neo-Darwinian scientists appropriate the language and concepts of religion to explain natural phenomenon materialistically. Now they have an answer. But it’s wrong. Those scientists describe when they claim to explain. They know that when I’m thinking, my neurons are firing, the synapses are connecting, the lobes of my brain are activated, but they have no clue why I’m thinking what I’m thinking, or why I’m thinking at all. They don’t know why I want to think, or why I want to think what I think, or even why they want to think what they think. They don’t know what a thought is. They don’t know what mind is, or how mind differs from brain. All this per neo-Darwinian scientists themselves. Animals are conscious. Only humans are metaconscious. Only humans are self-aware in being aware that we are aware. We humans stand outside ourselves and look down on ourselves being aware. Only we humans are conscious of ourselves being more than material. We are aware of ourselves as beings in time, and can imagine ourselves as being outside of time. Each of us is the exact same being even while we are perpetually changing, growing, dying. Could we grow beyond death, we logically ask? We know intuitively that there is something about us that transcends the material. Nearly all of us know ourselves to be dual, mind more than body, spirit more than matter. How could we know this unless we had been created by something transcending body and matter, and even mind and spirit? I get the feeling that for neo-Darwinians like Davies, life is a series of pasts they wish they could fix. They can. Even they know that the universe moves as a process of perpetual self-transcendence: That’s simple growth; that’s basic microevolution. We can taste an afterlife emerging out of life each time a moment sprouts fresh moments. Life is perpetually refreshing like a cool drink, or if you prefer, like your computer. Life is consciousness moving toward another dimension of consciousness, infancy to adolescence to adulthood to the afterlife. Life reaches out for the “Thou” in, through, and beyond the “It.” Consciousness reaches to receive what the progress of the universe has promised. That’s the intelligently designed consciousness reached via human microevolution and personal growth that neoDarwinians despise.

Why do Dawkins &co hate God so much that they must kill him? Why is it so hard for them to believe in God’s existence? This selective blindness could simply be a negligible instance of son rebelling against Father. More likely, theirs is true blindness, an actual self-inflicted handicap tantamount to soul suicide. Snipers of their own spirit, they pick off those faculties that most make them human: reason, conscience, intuition, emotion, and perhaps most decisively, aesthetic, the classic Mother of Invention. What happens to a soul riddled with bullet-holes? The whole being bleeds; the psyche suffers, and starts to die. Now that they’re leaking life, they’re really mad; now they want to exterminate any trace of God in us all. I think Dawkins &co would concur that neo-Darwinians are on a metaphysical murder-suicide rampage intent on spiritual extinction—though they might prefer a whitewashed “educational book tour” to the more accurate metaphor “murder-suicide rampage.” Spiritual Aesthetic Perhaps most symptomatic of the soul’s sickness unto death is the assassination of one’s aesthetic, the faculty of aesthetic sensibility. Darwin confesses a diagnosis of his own impotence in his Autobiography, in the passage on his aesthetic atrophy that I quoted in Chapter 5: My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organized or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature. Darwin, you’ll recall, was tone deaf and had no sense of musical rhythm; his taste in art was not subjective but was rather an objective

reflex inculcated via friendly indoctrination; his love of poetry and metaphysical writings wilted in the jungle heat of his ambitious hubris. Yet Darwin suffered. At least he was that self-aware. He neither lied (about that) nor succumbed to pseudo-aesthetics a la Kaku or Davies. I think that here, as elsewhere, Darwin exposes, even if dryly (a form of bravado?), his worry for his soul. Surely neo-Darwinians suffer as well, though few seem self-aware enough to realize that they have killed not God, but only their own God-given faculties that make them fully human. They want to be apes? They are. Not via natural selection, but by the unnatural selection of their own free will. They must be blind to design to argue that the existence of a Creator God is not any more likely or provable than the justhappens-to-exist theory of Creation’s genesis. Even they know that nothing in the space-time universe is self-created or self-sustaining, that everything that exists in the space-time realm necessarily must derive from something else. It makes sense to most of us that spacetime itself must be created by a First Cause (but not cause in any space-time sense) that is “above” or “outside” space-time and that is likely of a “substance” so different from space-time that we spacetime citizens could not imagine it. Most people call this entity God. Neo-Darwinians counter that if there was no space or time before the creation of space and time, there was no space or time in which God could have created. Again, God necessarily transcends space, time, and space-time. If they can’t grasp this simple concept, how would they understand incorporeal soul or transcendent spirit? Just because aspects of the natural realm can be described scientifically doesn’t preclude the possibility that they were and are divinely generated. Just because God can’t be scientifically catalogued in humanity’s little Book of Space-Time doesn’t mean that a transcending God can’t exist. Try as the atheist might to starve God in the dungeon of his brain, God frolics in a Reality far beyond his control. Is it really such a quantum leap from faith in the awesomely exquisite “mindless” but rational laws of nature to the rational Mind who necessarily must create them? A primal particle just happened to explode out into this incomprehensibly diverse existence? Natural

laws just happened to exist to make that possible? We just happen to be capable of pondering this? It doesn’t take a genius to realize that there is no just happened; there’s an infinity of just happends. Maybe it takes an artist to recognize that only a wildly creative Artist would design over 100,000 species of butterflies, a quarter million species of beetles. To those who complain with Bertrand Russell (who called mind and matter “logical constructions”—“logical” “constructions”) that God hasn’t produced sufficient evidence of his existence, or with Darwin, who equivocates, “I cannot look to the universe as the result of blind chance, yet I can see no evidence of beneficent design, or indeed of design of any kind, in the details,” all I can say is, Wow. In faith, some scientists believe that in the beginning of space and time, the cosmos was so densely packed together that the entire content of the universe—everything that would become atoms and galaxies and conscious human beings and blue jeans and computer games and unrequited love and all that is still to become—was a tiny chaos of subatomic particles no bigger than a pinhead, that behaved, in effect, like a single particle. In the violent birthing of this everything everywhere, an explosive flash of primordial light flared out into an accelerating expansion that has been occurring ever since. “…and there was light.” Well, not visible light; gamma rays. But in a hundred thousand years, when things had cooled down a bit, there was visible light. And more light. Space and time themselves are manifestations of light, as Einstein eloquently demonstrated. And this light of Creation is understood by almost everyone to be both literal and figurative. According to the scientific experts, in the beginning, one collective point was all there was, is, and would become. All space and time in all its manifestations already existed at the Big Bang. But in the very beginning, before there was light, even before there were particular angels dancing on the pinhead beginning of the space-time realm of perpetual beginnings, there had to have been something—a creator of some sort, or many creators. Where else could that primal particle, the laws of physics, empty space itself have come from? From other universes, parallel universes, eleven

dimensional hyperspace? That is certainly not the shortest distance between two points. Where did those other universes come from? Again, nothing in the space-time realm is self-created or selfsustaining; the particular genesis of space-time could only have been conceived by something outside the space-time realm, by something not itself constrained by this universe’s odd symmetry of beginnings and endings. Poems do not write poems; poets write poems. Quantum physicists “watch” the sudden appearance and disappearance of subatomic particles such as electrons and quarks “out of nothing” that result in small but measurable effects in the energy levels of atoms. This “nothing,” quaintly called the vacuum, permits only certain entities to materialize. According to some interpretations of quantum theory, the nothing is a something where ghostlike potential universes wait to randomly leap into being. In other words, there are things—entire universes of things— which are really nothing because they do not yet exist, that spring from a place outside the universe that is really no place because it does not exist either. Existence springs from an existent nonexistence, or a nonexistent existence, take your pick. Oddly, there are many today who believe this who cannot believe in anything “transcendent.” Another current theory posits that a steady-state universe just happens to have always existed, steady and eternal, the big bangs being local galactic phenomenon. Based on this theory, some have inferred that the universe itself is God, self-conceived within a whirlwind of opposites, and that we are as divine as a speck of dust. Astronomers study photons that make up light that reaches the Earth from distant objects, analyzing the energy of individual photons and the direction from which they come. Photons carry very little information, yet almost everything scientists know about the distant universe is photon-inferences expressed as equations. Intriguing, those who revere these scientists of skimpy assumptions while ridiculing those of us who deduce, from the massive evidence of Creation, that there is a Creator. At an ever-increasing pace, radically new entities spring into existence. Spring how? Only God can bring forth a completely new

form, even form from a preexisting form. Again, the potential for change is a precondition already built into existence. Everything we humans create we create from preexisting potential. Potential itself is part of the blueprint drawn up by its Designer. Yet within that potential is free will, gift wrapped and tied with a big bow, which atheists, with the zeal of juvenile delinquents, rip to shreds. Though each species is distinct, each is composed of the same source material, from light-driven primordial chemicals to amphiphiles to vesicles. All life on earth carries within every cell the metabolism and molecular genetics of one species of vesicle. The essential chemical processes within us and within all forms of life have remained the same for four billion years. Vesicles, pyrophosphates, keto acids, amino acids, nucleic acids—all of which just happens to be the genetic code. Again, nature doesn’t create itself out of itself. A painting doesn’t generate itself out of its own canvas, paint, and concept. Nature is the artwork, not the artist. That we’re all built of the same building materials doesn’t prove that one species derived from another. God created the canvas and the palette of colors with which she perpetually paints the universe. The only thing new about neo-Darwinism is its religious conversion from destruction to self-destruction. Today’s worldviews are as entrenched in fallacies of scientific fundamentalism as in myths of other religious extremists. The neo-Darwinian holds that in the beginning, a simple living organism (simpler than a single cell) arose by chance out of inert matter, reproduced, and evolved through random variation shaped by natural selection. As blind chance replaces cutthroat competition as the origin and purpose of species, we moderns are left at the mercy of forces completely beyond our control. No longer do we trust that we can survive, even temporarily, by our own efforts. Anxious “be on alert” has shifted to passive “why bother.” Depression, suicide, drugs, mindless distractions from the pain of hopelessness and the stress of even more profound anxiety now define culture. The natural humanism of the Enlightenment, the force that drove our Deist Founders to create our democratic nation, has been subsumed by the new old natural: exploitation. People who have passively

given up are more vulnerable to exploitation than people still struggling to survive. Darwinism left us cutting each other’s throats. Neo-Darwinism has us cutting our own throats. Sounds like fundamentalist Armageddon to me. Sounds like extinction. Of course there’s a better way, the Golden Mean of Deism, which teases the keys to the kingdoms of heaven and hell from the hands of fools and gives them back to God. Humanity is an interconnected society, not a jungle of brutes jockeying for positions of superiority. If there’s one concept that can save the world, it’s that we’re all in this together. Humans are fundamentally and in a sense infinitely different from anything else in Nature, including apes (only humans grasp abstractions like fundamentals or infinity, or can compare and contrast humans and apes; even just show me an ape that lifts weights to gain strength).Yet we are completely natural, just like every other natural entity. Even so, we humans have always intuited that we aren’t just natural. We aren’t exactly other than natural; it’s more that there’s a part of us that is in addition to nature—some might even say in spite of nature. We intuit that there is something in us that is not quite natural in the space-time sense. Soul, spirit, afterlife are a few terms by which we, like our ancient ancestors, have tried to express this something “other,” this “in addition to” the tiny box we have crammed ourselves into. Humans experience in a way that transcends the practical. We don’t just seek to learn how to better reach the banana; we want to know the meaning of life. Our desire for meaning is one of our most distinguishing features. It is an attribute that is super-natural, and by that I don’t mean that it exists outside of nature; rather, it exists as a dimension of nature that transcends space-time nature-as-such: It is meta-natural, much like the symbolism of a poem or the quality of a painting transcends the sum of its material parts. To deny this transcendent dimension is to deny the distinctive humanity of humans. A scientist could no doubt delineate myriad ways that a human being is like an ape, or even a tree, a molecule, or a speck of stardust—or for that matter, a truck, a cell phone, or a garbage

disposal. A religionist, on the other hand, focuses on the ways humans are not animals, are not in fact like anything else in the material universe. Deism embraces the natural and the metanatural —the reality that humans are of this world but in ways that are different from the ways that other beings are of this world; in addition, we are not quite of this world. Though we can’t exactly define it, most of us understand the human spirit to be an aspect of Homo sapiens that exists beyond the merely primate. Our difference that makes us truly other is a quality of spirit. This intuition explains why some religions view human existence as a series of reincarnations that perhaps began as animal and transcended via a series of steps, or lifetimes, to the qualitatively different human, and then on up a series of qualitatively unique moral steps to enlightenment, and then ultimately to spirit transcendence into a qualitatively different life beyond space-time existence. (The evil, naturally, go the other way—eventually landing in hell, per religion, or perhaps worse, devolving toward ultimate death, extinction in the Darwinian sense.) It’s not unreasonable, by this view, to represent humans as self-creating gods. In a sense, this view argues a case for Darwin-esque evolution but on a grander spiritual scale within an intelligently designed preprogrammed universe of exquisitely balanced continuities and potentialities. One can almost hear the harmony of the spheres. The fact is that we now know that life does not emerge by chance, and species do not evolve due to survival of the fittest, though they might survive because they are in some way fittest or most suited. Surviving is one thing. Evolving is another animal altogether. If survival is not the sole purpose of an individual life, if evolution in the Darwinian sense is not the ultimate purpose of life, then what is the purpose of life—of all life, of any life? What is the purpose of distinctively human life in the vastness of an intelligently designed universe? Why couldn’t the human spirit in space-time simultaneously survive and evolve and transcend on a not-material plane, “in the world, but not of it,” as the proverb goes? Humans are uniquely human precisely because we are driven to understand how and why we exist. We need to understand the objective purpose of things for its own sake but also for the sake of

better understanding the subjective meaning of our lives. We understand the subjective by understanding the objective, and because we’re specifically human, we understand the objective via our own subjective means of understanding. The way we understand and therefore what we can and do understand are humanly possible. Apes and cobras do not understand the way we understand, nor do they comprehend the qualities of things that we do. Cartoon personifications like pontificating puppies and philosophizing pandas tickle our funny bone precisely because animals representing the human are patently preposterous. A human is animal but is also unique in being something radically more than animal. From this obvious fact comes our notion of mind/body dualism. Our vision of existence and of its various components assumes a quality and depth of understanding—and meta-understanding—that transcends that of any other animal. In a Disney moment, some scientist might chatter excitedly about talking apes, but I haven’t seen evidence that apes can lecture on Aristotle or speculate about the essence of God. In some ways, the difference between humans and apes is greater than the difference between humans and human-created computers. The classification Homo sapiens falls absurdly short of designating the quantitative and dramatic qualitative difference between humans and other animals. Humanity’s engagement with the meaning of existence is that transcending quality that definitively separates us from every other form of material existence as we know it. The human spirit is the faculty that seeks and apprehends meaning, and the spirit’s quest for meaning defines the most lofty aspirations and accomplishments of religion, philosophy, art, culture, civilization—in other words, humanity. Unlike any other creature on Earth, we are our meanings. And as the poets tell us, meaning is truth, and truth beauty. That’s the beautiful truth that entirely escapes the neo-Darwinian.



 

Chapter 8 The Tinkering Watchmaker: The Deology of Intelligent Design God Is Awesome is the perfect motto for Deism. What could be more awesome than a brilliant Designer who perpetually refreshes the free gift of an elegantly designed universe graced by our intelligent consciousness? It’s odd that scientists like Dawkins and Davies and Kaku, who revere science as absolute and even absolutely awesome, in a sense to the point of worship, deny intelligent design—or rather, an intelligent designer. They don’t seem to think that space-time existence is unintelligent. They don’t deny that the intricate structural integrity of the universe, the complex yet precise organization of all existence, or the defining laws of nature that can be rationally apprehended are rational, are intelligible. Surely something as smartly articulated as nature can’t be random. Surely there must be an intelligent designer that’s smarter than those who deny the obvious existence of intelligent design or the necessity of its transcending intelligent designer. Science and its inventions are simply descriptions of—and theories tentative guesses about—what things are and how things work. Even atheist scientists believe in their descriptions and theories via an act of faith. What is faith but allegiance to the best guess based on the best information? How is an atheist’s “scientific” faith superior to faith in scientifically verifiable, entirely logical intelligent design? At the very least scientists believe in their own inherent faculties of apprehension and reason and in the validity of the scientific method, which requires absolute trust in the eternal rational laws of nature. Their faith in the higher power of reason and the reasonable structure of space-time existence is a religious

conviction. By definition, reasonable structures are not random: They are purposely created by a transcending Creator. Scientific explanations of how Creation came into existence never really satisfy the fundamental question of how the facts and principles of science could even be possible. Among scientists of “just the facts,” why isn’t even mentioned; just-fact scientists are cataloguers rather than investigators. (List-maker Darwin even tallied the pros and cons of taking a wife before marrying his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, of the rich family marketers of famous products bearing the family name.) Cataloguers miss the clearly exuberant personality speaking through Creation. They’re the guys that squeeze the oranges but never taste the juice. Tasting Juice Neo-Darwinian theory rests upon five major assertions: 1) A simple living organism arose by chance out of inert matter, 2) the original organism reproduced, 3) the organism developed through random variation, meaning by chance, 4) random variation, or chance, is natural—is part of the functional laws of nature, 5) life evolved randomly via natural selection. The premise that a simple living organism arose out of inert matter can’t explain how organized complexity emerged from simple matter; it can’t explain how any greater arises from any lesser (logically, it can’t). The coming into being of any one thing must be generated by something. Generation implies desire to generate plus an act of will, both attributes of a “person” in a general, non-humanspecific sense. Any entity must be generated by something greater than the entity itself: A poem does not create a poet; a pigeon did not create the first pigeon. The greater must be a willing mind: A gear does not construct a watch, or vice versa. Once generated, the thing—the complex orchestration of its complementary components—must be sustained by something beyond and greater than itself. Nothing in our universe is self-created or self-sustaining. Even the profoundly simple, immensely complex, totally elegant laws of nature must have been designed by something of greater intelligence than the level of intelligence—much less intelligibility—of the laws

themselves. The elegant laws of nature must have been designed by an intelligence of transcending elegance. The fact that we can deduce this indicates that the laws of nature were intelligently designed to be deduced by our intelligence. Once the simple living organism just sort of leaked out of inert matter, the neo-Darwinian explains, it reproduced. But how would it know to do that? Why would it want to do that? How could it do that? According to geneticists, each organism comes fully equipped/ programmed with all the information/instructions needed to take it to the next step, which is to reproduce itself. The first organism didn’t just say to itself one day, hmm, I think I’ll reproduce myself. But something must have decided to make the organism reproduce. There must have been an impetus to take the next step; something must have wanted it to take the next step to reproduction, or motivated it to want to reproduce. The first organism didn’t just say, Wow, I’m gonna die, and to continue my line I need to reproduce myself, or at least something like myself. Something else made that rational decision. But how can/does it reproduce? Where do the instructions on how to “do it” come from? Darwin himself admitted in Origin of Species, Chapter 14, that life began with a being that already possessed reproductive powers. It’s absurd to think that the complicated, elegant, consistent principles of inheritance just appeared out of nowhere, as a blind, mindless “necessity,” as if necessity were not itself an intelligible component of the grand design of life perpetuating itself. Just like the first organism, each subsequent organism comes fully programmed with the info/instructions needed to take the next step, which is to reproduce. The organism comes equipped with the info/instructions needed at the next step. The organism comes equipped with the info/instructions needed to continue beyond the step; it has the info/instructions needed to reproduce. The info/instructions needed to reproduce are far greater than an organism needs to simply exist without reproducing, and the info/instructions needed to perform the process of reproduction are far more complex and sophisticated than the instructional information the organism needs to simply exist.

Furthermore, the field of existence already exists into which the organism will reproduce itself. Even potential existence already exists as a kind of latent existence awaiting actualization within the possible rules or limits of existence, the laws of nature that describe our universe. The immensely complex but highly organized information-rich instructions needed to pass on the information to another organism must have come from an informational programmer much smarter than the organism itself. Again, how would the organism know it needed to reproduce? Why would it need to reproduce? Why would it want to reproduce? How would it reproduce? Reproduction of even the simplest organism is an immensely complex process involving a multitude of sophisticated functions. (You got a whiff of that from Darwin’s description of orchids in Chapter 5.) Where did those functions come from? How do those functions work? Some functions are decisional. Who or what decided that a function should exist? Who or what then knew that the function needed to be activated. Who or what knew how to throw the switch so the function could and would—well, function, and function only when needed, another decision? Scientists now ask: How did the first eye—how does any eye— know how to see? How would an organism decide it needed to see if sight didn’t yet exist? How would the sudden emergence of a wing explain the understanding of a need for flight, or explain the knowledge of the complex mechanism of flying? How could a wing evolve from a foot, as Darwinians assume, when any of the many intermediary evolutionary steps would be, in effect, impossible because it would serve no biological purpose. In fact, biologically the actual evolution of a wing would diametrically oppose the purpose of evolution in the Darwinian sense, which is to insure our survival. A half-foot/half-wing that neither runs nor flies well, if at all, would not only not benefit the organism, it would make it instant brunch. How does life know how to live? Furthermore, what is the point of living for anything not yet living, or for anything already living? Why survive? And why survive comes before how survive. I Am That I Am, or, The Gene Pool In Which I Play

Have you ever doubted your own existence? Even if you have—say, in an intro philosophy class—you likely haven’t for very long. Like the rest of us, you “just know” that you exist. Not only do you know that you exist, you know that you exist as you, and that you couldn’t be, or become, other than you. Way back at your conception, you could only become you; you couldn’t become a duck or an oak tree. You had to become a human being, and a very specific human being determined largely—at least physically—by your DNA. Your coming into existence as you was far from random. As a human individual you have been shaped by environmental forces, whether accidental or chosen by you or someone else. But no force could cause you to suddenly morph into a duck or an oak tree. Should you have children, they will be human, just like you are human, although each child will be—must be—uniquely him/herself, not exactly you, not even half you. You know that you are human and that humans are not ducks or oak trees. You understand classifications, and you know the difference between a species and an individual. But how do you know this? How do “you” as a collision of sperm and egg know to become you? How does a duck know to become a duck? How does a duck know how to grow into a duck and not into an oak tree? How do you know how to be you? Contrary to what you might expect, your knowing the complicated process of how to exist comes before your knowing that you exist. That fundamental knowledge of how is not something you know via your conscious intelligence. There are things about you that you know only at a very primal level. You know to be. Your DNA knew how to make you you long before you knew about your DNA. Someone knew (can something be said to know?) how to orchestrate your astoundingly complex DNA into you before you even came into existence. Your ability to “just know” that you exist and even more fundamentally how to exist serves as evidence not only that you exist, but also that a designing someone exists—God, the God of Nature, meaning the universe, the entire natural realm.

If you stop to think about it, it’s clear that the fact of your existence is not imparted to you as knowledge via science, formal logic, or religion. Your own intrinsic common sense registers an awareness of you to yourself. By common sense I mean a consensus of your innate faculties, including reason, conscience, intuition, experience, emotion, physical sensation, instinct, desire, will, and aesthetic sensibility, which registers the holistic elegance of truth—the truth of truth in the Keatsian sense (beauty is truth, truth beauty). Even the various functions that make up your body constitute a faculty. Your faculties are what cause you to know. Spirit is the essential faculty, your core essence, the Self, the Boss, the fundamental, transcendental person you. Your spirit is that which directs you to manifest as the person you, to manifest you to yourself, to hold up the mirror. As with your built-in DNA, your spirit knows how to manifest you as you even before you know that spirit exists. Like your DNA, your spirit can adapt within a range of possibilities, but unlike DNA, your spirit can choose to adapt. Godgiven free will is no more impossible than—is just as miraculous as —life emerging from not-life. How do we know humans have the free will to really choose? Just ask any human. Any human not spellbound by the Darwinian meme, that is. Humans ask the question; machines and animals do not and cannot even think to ask the question because they have no awareness of free will or its absence. We self-aware humans intuitively “just know” we have free will; machines and animals (as far as we know) are not self-consciously aware of inherent free will. Humans can be aware of the limitations to our free will; our intellectual awareness and material experience of the absence of our free will is painful, sometimes so profoundly painful that the person limited will jump off a bridge; death is preferable to the (perceived) absolute shackling of free will, we are that aware of it. Do animals or machines choose suicide? No, only humans do that. Humans are so defensive of our freedom that the will must be murdered by ultimate programming, brainwashing, for freedom to be shackled. I Am Therefore I Think

In spite of multitudinous distractions, humanity is consistently selfaware to the extent that we all know that we exist—and that we exist in contrast to other entities that exist. It is at this point—a sharp point neither erased by Hume’s skepticism nor smudged by Spinoza’s pantheism—that any inference about the discrete existence of God or any other assumption (as opposed to any other assumption) must begin the case for its reality, its truth.  I think therefore I am is a truth so obvious to most of us that to challenge it is a ludicrous intellectual game. Postmodernism’s anxious fretting about the legitimacy of our assumptions about thinking itself, not to mention what constitutes our thoughts, has failed to shake our inherent faith in our own existence and in our ability to know that that existence is a fact. We all know that we exist, even if we disagree about what that existence actually is. Toy with Berkeley’s notion that all things are the mind of God contemplating itself and still that mind exists if one can think that; and really, would God’s mind mistake itself for you? The Taoist belief that ultimate reality is emptiness still assumes that that reality, that state of emptiness, exists, and exists in contrast to what is not emptiness; and really, is the ultimate you defined by what you are not? Despite Zeno’s conclusion that to get somewhere you have to get half way there, and half of that half, and half and a quarter and a sixteenth of that, and so on infinitely so that you get nowhere because you can’t traverse infinite subunits of space, we all know that we get there; we all know there’s a there there and that we are here and that here is not there. People fiddle with space/time paradoxes regarding existence and self, but no sane person slits a wrist over them. Faith in our existence in contrast to other existences —faith in our experience of our existence—is more constant than the speed of light. There are things we just know. The skeptic can argue till he’s blue in the chops, but no quality of analysis, no quantity of existential doubt can move us one micrometer from our unshakable faith in our being here. How do we know we exist? There is only one answer that makes sense: We are designed to exist and to know that we exist. And we are designed to exist as that which we are, within a specific range of

possibilities. Again, humans are not ducks, no matter how loudly your kids might quack. You are you and not something or someone else, although environmental forces can stimulate changes within the range of possibilities that constitute your human framework. And you can choose to be a certain version of you—a truly extraordinary ability we humans tend to take for granted. Because we understand that nothing in the universe is selfcreated or self-sustaining, common sense tells us that we mere mortals had to have been created by some force that transcends the myriad intricacies of our existence, which we have barely glimpsed, and of which we are scarcely conscious. Furthermore, that creating force by necessity must be more intelligent than the sum total of all the perfectly orchestrated forces of nature. And that creating force must necessarily be a sustaining force, since the universe is perpetually coming into existence as well as—well, existing. Something doesn’t just exist; it continues to exist. Even actualized existence is never static. You are constantly changing, yet you remain entirely you. Creation isn’t an act as much as a process. All things are perpetually being created according to specific design plans. Despite environmental forces shaping you, despite your choices to change yourself, you are perpetually absolutely you. The fundamental structures of you and all other entities exist according to pre-drafted specifications. And all existing entities fit perfectly together according to a grand blueprint of the universe as a whole. Deism posits this commonsense truth as its fundamental tenet: We are designed; there is a transcending designer, otherwise known as God. We can think this because we have been designed to think. Thinking is a profoundly sophisticated process created by an even more sophisticated thinker. Religion rests on this fundamental assumption: I am I because I think in the image of the Thinker, or at least in the image of the Thinker’s thought about me. To believe otherwise would be, quite literally, non-sense. Like Darwin, some scientists today seem dissociated from their aesthetic sensibility, that component of common sense that registers sublime elegance. How else could they miss all this beauty? Oh, they agree that beauty exists. They have opinions about what

constitutes the beautiful and might display beautiful objects in their glass cases. But they experience beauty objectively, coolly from a distance, not subjectively like someone who lives passionately in his own skin, because passionate oneness with one’s own being and with all life is an undeniably spiritual experience. Those who agree with Keats that beauty is truth, truth beauty, know that the beautiful exists as created form. And form exists as cohesion. It’s our aesthetic that viscerally spiritually grasps how amazing it is that all this beautiful flux gels, and continuously gels, so perfectly. Is it blind faith or simply common sense to assume that if the mindful Creator suddenly ceased perpetually actively creating us, the atoms of our material being would fly apart? How else do we, in spite of flux, remain whole? God’s Creation is, and the “is-ness” of Creation is impelled upon human consciousness, which is inescapably a fragment of that isness. Even scientists and philosophers who gripe that there is no evidence of God are spurred to discover what God creates, especially phenomena that are invisible or subtle, and are awed by what they discover even as they willfully refuse to acknowledge that what is created is created. That God creates is self-evident fact clearly revealed to anyone exercising common sense. For the Deist, “God” simply means the creating Someone (the Creator of persons could not be a something). How God creates is a grand mystery we mere mortals will never grasp. Why God creates, even just why God creates us humans, is of course debatable. Some people argue that we can never know why God does anything. But because why probes for the meaning at the core of our existence, if there is no answer to why, there is for us humans no objective meaning of life. Isn’t it amazing that we can ponder the meaning and purpose of our existence? The Darwinian has no reason why or explanation how that would be. What irony. Seeking unity, he locates in his own heart a great dichotomy—his own separation from God; mundane matter torn from meaning; Cartesian subjectivity of consciousness res cogitans (“in here”) forever estranged from objective existence res extensa (“out there”); even the Kantian hint of reality filtered through his senses and processed by his mind is deprived of direct

experience of Ding an sich (“the thing as such”), existence itself. Even logic can’t help him cross the bridge from “if” to “then.” Darwinian dualism is not the difference between contrasts, like hot and cold, good and evil, or even weak and strong; his dualism is existential schizophrenia of his own self from itself, that intellectual black hole of absolute negation into which all things perpetually tumble. There the observer observes himself finding the ultimate unification he seeks: Death. In this era of postmodern Darwinism, the ivory towers teem with nihilists telegraphing their incongruous belief that each person dwells alone on a tiny island map of himself that he himself has drawn— incongruous in that the nihilists, far from being alone (except in their own fantasy), form a tight-knit group whose collective concepts and jargon codify codependence among themselves and their acolytes. Their catechized theology is that meaning beyond survival and reproduction is a mere existential construct. Like the religious hypocrites they glibly disregard, they stop their ears to any hypothetical alternative to their privileged ennui that can only end in suicide or escapism, coercion being a genus of escapism (unless it’s psychopathic). Not exactly survival. Deism, however, assumes that no man is an island, that we humans are constructed to ask why for a reason (even existential constructs are only possible because humans are constructed to construct), and that objective Creation reveals nutritious answers and galvanic meanings that individuals and society need in this life. We even need for a reason. Life is meaningful because it is inherently purposeful. We need meaning because it fulfills a purpose, a uniquely human purpose built into us as part of the functional structure of our human being right down to our DNA, right down to our soul and spirit. If each of the myriad diverse components of existence exhibits its own discrete inherent perfection (an atom is perfectly an atom and is definitely not a molecule), and if those myriad components fit together in perfect natural symmetry—if each component serves its own discrete function, which manifests its own discrete coherence while contributing to the overall coherence of existence—isn’t it reasonable to presume that God has a purpose in creating such a

thoroughly exquisitely purposive universe, and that God perhaps even has a definite purpose for each of us conscious humans, and that the purpose involves individual growth within a growing cooperative community? Faith is Knowledge is Naturally Consistent Blind faith is no faith at all. Real faith is grounded in knowledge acquired in the pursuit of truth. Truth is; truth is reality. Knowledge is our interpretation and understanding of our perceptions of and reasoning about reality. You believe that the sun will rise at a specific time tomorrow morning based upon knowledge. Knowledge is knowledge because God created Nature to be consistent and therefore knowable. Although Creation is a perpetual process of change, the fundamental structure is consistently coherent. All structures are perpetually what they are; all structures perform in perfect concert with all other structures. Gravity always acts the same way everywhere in the universe; gravity, being gravity, cannot suddenly morph into light. Gravity is gravity because it is gravity. 2+2 always equals 4; this equation, being what it is, cannot mutate into 2+2 equals 5; and 2+2=4 performs consistently harmoniously with all other equations. We know this—we believe this—because we experience, understand, and trust the consistency of existence. Our thoughts, feelings, intuitions, expressions, and all our other inherent faculties perform according to these harmonious structures, which, as we discern them, we call the laws of nature. Natural law defines each structure. Abstractions express structural definitions. A four-legged table is not the same thing as a four-legged cow. We understand the difference because there is a difference. The concepts table, cow, and four-legged fit categories of many tables, cows, and four-legged things. From many examples of tables we derive the category table. Although no two tables are exactly alike, we know a table when we see one. The abstract category table is categorically different from tangible tables. Understanding is a category of knowledge that differs from recognition knowledge, or recognizing a specific thing when we see it, and differs even from abstract recognition, or recognizing the

category, such as table. Understanding is metaknowledge, and involves metathought, because it apprehends a thing in a way, or to a degree, that transcends the thing itself and even the abstract concept of the thing itself. We can imagine an ape recognizing a lion, any lion, both the individual thing and the category of the group, lions. But do apes understand the concept thing or the concept category? Do apes think about thinking? Do apes stand in awe of their own being? Do apes grasp the immensity of nature’s complexity? Do apes contemplate the existence of God, or of anything? Could an ape claim that all existence is itself miraculous? Even animal lovers would surely agree that only a human could understand that although it’s impossible that something came from nothing, here it is. Only humans deduce that the something that is Nature came, and continues to come, from God. Only humans then ask: But where did God come from? Where did whatever was truly first come from? The miracle of The First occurred. Only a human could conceive such a concept. As much as materialists deny it, metaknowledge and metathought can only be the province of that which transcends the material: the spiritual. The spiritual is simply that which transcends the material. Separating spiritual from not-spiritual is not as easy as it might seem. Is mind spiritual? Do humans have a spiritual nature, or a spiritual facet? If God is immanent in Creation, is the universe itself spiritual? We call Creation miraculous because we understand that it is beyond our understanding of how things come into existence. In a sense, we understand that which is beyond understanding—and again, that level of “transglobal” or “extraglobal” understanding is spiritual. Existence coming-to-be out of nothing is impossible yet here it is. We understand this. Creation out of nothing (nothing we know, nothing as we know it) is impossible and therefore (subjectively) “miraculous.” But what Christians and most other religionists call a miracle is not the same thing. That kind of miracle is impossible within a context of God-given absolute consistency. Magical miracle contradicts the authentic miracle of existence as such. Magical miracle makes for entertaining and sometimes symbolically profound

fiction, but again, representation is representation. Instantaneously changing water into wine transgresses the natural process of rain contributing to the natural growth of grapes that can be harvested by humans who then change them through a process of many specific steps over time into wine. The unnatural miracle of instant winemaking never happened. This is my opinion, but it is an opinion based on reason informed by experience. The opinion that the instant wine miracle occurred is based on far-fetched hearsay that originated in antiquity and was passed on by unknown people of unverifiable veracity. It is not only unreasonable, it is also unnatural and therefore, for a Deist like me, ungodly. When I look at Nature I see a perfect balance of coming-to-be within a fixed structure of natural laws. Babies don’t come from storks. Babies absolutely cannot come from storks, pray as you might that they can. Knowledge is based on our observation and experience of what can and cannot be. Babies coming from storks is as preposterous as the biblical Jesus being an actual person who was born of a virgin, performed miracles, and bodily rose from the dead. A miracle in the mythic sense is a violation of knowledge, a transgression of obvious God-established laws of Nature that constitute existence, reality, truth. A miracle in the Christian sense is God contradicting himself. If God as Creator contradicts himself, we have no firm basis for knowledge because there is no absolute truth, no trustworthy touchstone that we can depend on. If God contradicts himself, for our sake or for any other reason, God is contradictory, God is inconsistent, existence is not real in any definitive, absolute, or even concrete way. If we know that what we know could suddenly change, if 2+2 could suddenly equal 5, if the sun and moon could stop or move backward without any apparent natural cause and without any impact on the earth, if the very, very dead could resurrect a few days later and ascend into the clouds, if Jonah could live a few days underwater in the belly of a whale, if a man could break a single loaf of bread into the equivalent of dozens or hundreds of loaves, then anything could happen, and we could know nothing for sure. And if we can’t trust Creation—if we can’t trust the steadfast veracity of

Creation, if we can’t trust that Creation is what Creation is, if we can’t trust that a loaf of bread is a loaf of bread—how can we trust the Creator? A thing not being what it is, a thing being what it is not, disintegrates reality into absurdity beyond insanity. Chaos is perhaps the only thing more terrifying than extinction. Fortunately, chaos does not exist. In my view, it never has, it never will. Reality being what it is and not something else (and not “nothing”) is a beautifully selfexemplifying moral imperative: truth being true is truth being truth. For this reason, on old-world religious miracle presented as fact, especially in this day and age, is an unnatural, immoral lie. Doesn’t it seem that God indeed does want us to know something for sure, that God is allowing us to grasp something about his nature, that God wants us to learn to trust him as moral Creator by trusting the perfect stability of his Creation? Creation exists; and to exist, each component of Creation must be exactly what it is and only what it is. A loaf of bread cannot be a warehouse full of loaves of bread. If we can’t trust Creation to be consistently what it is, how can we trust the Creator to be consistently what he is? “Yes,” one might argue, “but God wants us to know his absolute power through those miraculous transgressions of natural law.” This reasoning doesn’t make sense, because what kind of tyrannical God would put us into a state of extreme anxiety, fear, paranoia that would be the consequence of not knowing anything for sure? Consistency without stagnation, consistency that includes variation, that in us humans encourages creative freedom, instills peace in us that encourages goodwill from us. Happiness requires a balanced harmony of consistency and freedom. It would only benefit inconsistent, illogical, and tyrannical priests (and priestly figures like abusive fathers and leaders) of any religion or denomination to perpetuate blind faith in an inconsistent, illogical, and tyrannical God. If miracles violate natural law, the God of antinatural miracles is the God of chaos. Isn’t Satan the supreme representation of the god of chaos? God’s Necessary Goodness At their primal core, most religions view God as good. A good God is consistent, like a good parent is consistent. If on Monday it’s wrong

to steal your dad’s wallet or slash your neighbor’s tires, consistent parents would let you know it’s wrong on Tuesday. If God said, “This is Creation as I have created it,” and then said, “Well, someday I might change my mind about gravity,” how would that impact your sense of security, and what would that say about God? If God is good, God is a consistent Creator. God consistently creates new things within a consistently fixed structure of natural laws. Nature, with all its new forms, its process of transformation, and its structure of laws—all of that is, in a sense, miraculous. But Nature is a consistent miracle, and is the only miracle. Violation of the miracle of nature, the nature that is what it is, could only be committed by a God that is not consistent, good, or loving. Of course, God could be morally mediocre, or could be evil. Don’t most of us instinctively believe that God is necessarily good? And because we believe that God is good, we believe that God is consistent. In fact, to some extent we believe that the Creator is good because he is consistent. God’s consistency is evidence of God’s goodness. God is good in being consistent; God is consistent because he is good. Therefore, miracles, in the sense of transgressions of natural law, are preposterous (i.e., impossible). People believe in miracles because they want to believe that miracles are possible, that they or their priestly proxies can snap their fingers and materialize a pot of gold. People rub their Bibles hard hoping the magic genie will pop out to grant their every wish. They turn God into a man-god messiah —a human of their own rank, who is easier to persuade. Some people believe in miracles because they’re naïve, some because they’re passive. No doubt some believe because they’re too tired or busy—or lazy or irresponsible—to think things through. When God has given you the whole universe, doesn’t begging for more, doesn’t trying to coerce God into giving you more stuff, or even more solutions to problems you should solve on your own, doesn’t treating God like your own personal gofer, or whining that God doesn’t love or respect you, display a grotesque absence of humility, not to mention profound ingratitude? At the very least, it’s childish. The God who created the universe shouldn’t need to perform magic tricks for inattentive humans to prove his existence.

Open your eyes; use your brains. Miracles in the mythic sense are impossible because God is consistent, good, loving, and here—right here creating and sustaining the true miracle, the natural realm. Nature is that it is because it is what it is. The ancients wrote that God created the universe and saw that it was good. Unfortunately, most humans neglect to notice the goodness of existence because they’re too busy complaining about what they don’t have. But the poets of the world sing psalms that ground us in gratitude. True poets are deist to the core. They appreciate the sensuous taste of Nature, the truly miraculous transfiguration of pollen into honey. Imagine: A hive of bees flies 60,000 miles to tap the two million flowers that make a pound of honey. In her whole lifetime, one bee makes 1/12 teaspoon of honey, less than what you have stirred in the cup of tea you hold warming your hands in your imagination as I suggest this moment which does not yet exist except in my imagination in this moment that I am writing this to you. Imagine: Standing perfectly still on a mountain of snow on a clear, moonless night, you are standing in the gravity of a planet moving 66,000 mph in orbit around the sun, and 45,000 mph through space with the rest of the Milky Way. The seasons change in your body. The snow melts, and life resurrects, burgeoning, drinking the water of life. You eat and drink that life, and it becomes your life; all around you this communion of transmutation called reading a book. The Milky Way alone contains 250 billion stars, each a sun like our sun with its constellating planets. Earth is a million times smaller than the sun. 100 million other galaxies of hundreds of billions of stars burn above us, trillions of zodiacs under which we were born, galaxies upon galaxies of stars, stars mapped out overhead, searing seasons across your imagination. One dynamic Big Bang—Boom! this hydrogen/helium universe of voids and superclusters of matter expanding even as gravity pulls stars in on themselves until they’ve consumed their own hydrogen, then helium ashes—all that nuclear fusion energy released as starlight. Is it so irrational to divine from their poetry the essence of your existence? When the fuel runs out, gravity kills the stars, but their fusion reactions produce all other chemical elements, the calcium in your bones, iron in your blood,

carbon and nitrogen in your tissues: Every atom of your being is composed of stardust—the dust of all that fire. Purposive Creation Nature’s consistency is itself good and indicates benevolence on the part of Nature’s Creator. If God is consistent, and if existence is consistent, it seems reasonable to believe that because each and every component of the universe has a function, existence as a whole has a purpose. It’s fair to assume that a human being conscious of purpose likewise has a purpose. This can’t be proven. Neither can it be disproven. Most of us trust this (sometimes without consciously realizing it) based on a keen awareness of the inherent functional consistency of Nature. If existence has a purpose, if life, if my life, if your life, has a purpose, the careful intricacy of the design suggests that it must be a good purpose. And a good purpose is designed and directed by a good designer—good both in the sense of skilled and moral. But how can I know this? Self-evident truths can be deduced from Creation—noun and verb: Massive, elegant, perpetual coming-into-being held in perfect equilibrium within massive, elegant, perpetual structure serves as powerful evidence that God is good. Beauty is truth and truth beauty, and beautiful truth is good. Some might argue that design does not prove good. But design does not suggest evil intent; it does not prove the absence of goodness. The case for design as good, first conceived well over a couple dozen centuries ago, when framed within the context of what’s good for humans and other living beings, is inherently stronger than any case against it. But of course you may disagree. For instance: Doesn’t the fact that any life-form must eat—kill, destroy—another life-form to live argue against the designer’s goodness, or at least the transcending goodness of the design? First of all, you don’t have to kill the cow to drink its milk. But yes, point taken. And it is a good one. But it hinges on the assumption that the manifestation of goodness cannot include its contrast.

Yes, as animals, humans must kill to eat (though we don’t have to kill and eat other animals; we could eat plants). But as a spiritual being, certainly as a Deist, I rationally conclude that humans are also more than animals. We Deists believe that humans experience the spiritual dimension of Nature. God, as Spirit, both transcends Creation and is immanent in Creation (which is not the same as being Creation) as its active Creator. Humans have that spiritual spark that ignites spiritual growth in those who willingly pursue that growth. Humans perceive life as an amalgam of what many call blessings and curses. If God is good, the curse aspect of life, the kill to eat or be eaten animality, for instance, often becomes problematic. Centuries of great minds have concluded: Can we humans know what good is without experiencing both good and its absence? In this world, at least, evidently not. Whatever the reason, it appears that we’re here to learn the difference, to see the contrast, to experience the profound consequence of the absence of the good and of the ultimate good that (in this life, at least) is life itself. Can we appreciate life without the perpetual possibility of our own demise, or the extinction of all life? Again, in this world, at least, evidently not. I’ve seen people freak out contemplating their ceasing to exist, or more weird, their never having existed. There’s a reason why our desire to live is so intense. All animals share this instinct for life. But whereas other animals want to live, we humans want to live forever. We are programmed to want, to deeply need, to live perpetually. For us humans, we also need quality of life—a good life. Suicide is an indication that the need for the good in life is for us humans more profound than the need for life itself deprived of that good. We are here to freely, by choice, engage in a process of understanding and transcending—evolving, not in a Darwinian sense of morphing into another species type, but in the spiritual sense of growing into the highest version of ourselves. It’s interesting, isn’t it, that both religionists and Darwinians passionately assert the necessity of change, growth, evolution, transformation. Call it what you will, the deep intuitive, instinctual drive to transcend is inherent

in us all, whether we choose to follow the call to transcendence or not. Why would a good God cause, or even allow, good people to suffer? Why assume that the good should not suffer, that allowing the good to suffer is a breach of justice, if not downright evil? You could argue that good people don’t allow suffering, therefore why would God, who is presumably more good than we are. But good people do allow suffering. Parents allow their dependent children to suffer through the process of becoming independent. A teacher allows her student to suffer when he fails to turn in homework and receives an F and is turned down for college admission or scholarships. A doctor’s patients suffer during and after the surgeries that save their lives. Yes. But why do the innocent suffer? Of course, I don’t know the answer. How could I? But I can guess, and my guess is a rational consensus of all my innate faculties: The good and the innocent suffer for two reasons. One is that a person is truly free only when he has the option to choose evil by victimizing the good and the innocent. The other is that we must see the consequences of harm, whether it be harm freely chosen or just seemingly random harm. This world wasn’t meant to be the Hotel Paradise where your only purpose is to sit around the pool eating bonbons. Your task is (among other things) to do good, in spite of: Good tested proves to be ultimately good when it is painfully good in spite of. All suffering ends, even if it ends in death—and why assume that death is a bad thing? It isn’t a bad thing if some form of life—really, some form of our individual self as a person—continues after our material demise. Being comfortable with one’s self simply dissolving into material dust is, in my view, a suicidal tendency that perhaps warrants professional psychological intervention. Most of us, though, want to survive our material demise. We accept the spirit/body dichotomy and are willing to let go of the body if our self can continue. I don’t believe this is just wishful thinking or a purely animal instinct for physical survival. As a Deist who believes that purposive existence naturally extends beyond the material universe, my view is that our intense desire for the continuance of our self-as-person

suggests that God is a Self-as-Person, though the form of that Person-Self is different than our own. We can’t possibly know much about that Divine form; all we can surmise from our finite-temporal vantage is that such a “higher” Person-Self exists. We call our person-self spirit; God’s Person-Self is Spirit, the originating Spirit of all spirits. The Good and Free Will But why suffer at all? Deists don’t believe that we’re here to be punished. I don’t know why animals suffer. But the Deist answer for human suffering begins with the limitations of human knowledge and value judgments about something as monumental and inscrutable as Creation; it leads to the necessity of both good and evil for the true exercise of free will; it ends with the free, conscious transcending of spirit beyond the animal and the material as we experience them in this life. Freeing the spirit involves freeing the soul. I view soul as the immanent, “in-nature” experience of transcendent (be-ing), or perhaps transcending (coming to be), spirit. For us Deists, liberty in this life is a moral imperative. Freedom is right for its own sake. And for free will to be truly free to do and to be good, it must be free to do and to be good in spite of—in spite of all obstacles to and all obstructions of that freedom. Some argue that free will and the charge of liberty naively put humanity at the center of the cosmos, and we have evolved beyond that belief. But really, have we? Even Galileo, telescope in hand, inquisitors at his back, believed that humanity will always stand at the center of the cosmos as experienced by humanity. We can’t know much if anything about the experiences of other living creatures. We infer that most fear, suffer, procreate, enjoy a good meal. They, too, want to live and to be free of suffering. But what we truly know, we know as humans. Many great souls have intuited that we are not here to just hang out with friends sipping martinis. We have a job to do. Within Creation, souls are fashioned, the self is manifested, and impossible though it seems, each of us is responsible for the final product that we ourselves co-design. We are accountable for what we are

becoming. God has vested us with this godlike power. In this and (it seems) in only this way we are created in the image of God. Of course, comparing ourselves, who create with pre-created materials, with God, who creates everything from nothing, might seem a bit absurd. Still, at the lowly human level, we have the God-given, godlike free will to participate in our own creation. This right, this responsibility, is mindboggling. Yet I think it’s fair to suggest that the vast majority of humans take this gift completely for granted. Ingratitude plus lack of insight equals our classic tragic flaw: hubris. The Function of Free Will Humans are free to not choose preprogrammed options and to create bizarrely unexpected new options. Humans seek deep truth, as demonstrated by sleuthing scientists, probing poets, and fretting philosophers. Humans engage in exploration for its own sake; machines can’t and animals aren’t interested in investigation beyond the exploitable given. Machines and animals exist on the plane of predictable bits and beeps, and so, to some extent, does the human animal, with its herd mobs and manias. But humans want to penetrate beyond the absolute depths of the given, which is one reason we relish creativity, intellectual prowess, and passion, and the primary reason we engender religion. Our emotional fervor corresponds to our sensation of freedom; whether we are actually free or not doesn’t negate the point of sensate response to freedom. Nations are toppled with great sacrifice of human blood for the sake of freedom. Our inherent conscience registers the protection of our own freedom and the freedom of others as a moral imperative; slavery and exploitation are just known to be morally reprehensive, even evil. Humans have created a huge library of symbols representing protectors and destroyers of freedom. Humans revere the Programmer of freedom. Humans seek spiritual union with that Creator who creates our freedom to create. Humans seek freedom from that ultimate shackle: Death. Yes, we “just know” we are free. Yes, we “just know.” We can demonstrate that 135+140=275. Information could make a human, an animal, or a machine mimic or even compute the right (or wrong) answer. But really knowing, really

understanding the informational answer, transcends just registering the informational answer. Only humans can understand Hamlet or a Bach fugue. Human reason is entwined with other faculties, including intuition, conscience, aesthetic sensibility, and spirit. Spirit is that faculty that transcends and enlivens all the others. Spirit correlates with the Programmer, the true Creator. The core essence explicated through fundamental freedom, spirit registers understanding, meaning, purpose, and essential being that transcends material manifestation. Darwinians fail to grasp that spirit is a material necessity. Without God-spirit, even the material could not materialize. The material is necessarily programmed. Spirit corresponds with programmer which correlates with meaning. Programmers code in order for the code to mean something. Code is meaning, represented via symbols, the code. The material manifestation of you represents your essence, your spiritual meaning. Perhaps your spirit partially preexists at conception and takes further shape as your live your material life, like a thought somewhat formed takes shape in the expressing of it in words. Reason and other faculties transport—translate—information into meaning, the realm of highest spiritual understanding, in the sense that every faculty engages in its own form of “thinking” for the purpose of understanding. When it’s working properly, every faculty, not just reason, in its own way thinks, realizes, and understands. Although it appears to some that the mechanical universe is a meaningless machine, in truth the machine, like a computer, is the not-aware vehicle of its own transcendent meaningful message. But only humans can know this. Only humans are created in the image of the self-aware Programmer. Only meta-aware consciousness is aware that it’s aware. Human understanding programs computers and builds the internet. Humans tinker with symbols. Poets create religion. Only creators both transcend and are immanent in creation. What amazes me is that there are scientists who “just know” that the material is necessarily programmed who nonetheless deny this. Where I come from, that’s called “lying.” Meaning embodies information; mind embodies brain; spirit embodies flesh. This is ancient, universal wisdom. And yes, wisdom

places humans once again at the center of existence as we know it. With meaning as pinnacle and core of all that is uniquely human, wisdom embraces its awesome responsibility as protector of the Program. Hence, Deism. As humans, we have the amazing capacity to understand. Even more remarkably, we have the freedom to understand or to not understand. Some fundamentalists don’t believe in free will— predestined Calvinists, for instance, or determinists like Rev. Fred Phelps, who yells at gays through his megaphone, “God doesn’t hate you because you’re homosexual. You’re homosexual because God hates you.” Personally, I have never doubted my own free will or the free will of other humans. I feel sorry for people who do. Not every aspect of our being or our life is free, of course. Nobody asserts that. The question is whether humans are free at all, ever. The answer is —and you know this is true—Yes! I can almost hear some stuffy Darwinian materialist sniffling that nobody is free. He wants us all to be as conflicted and miserable as he is. The Grand Scheme of the Universe, he snaps, and the smaller and smaller systems contained within it are so entwined and codependent that a sneeze in Alaska caused the hurricane in Florida on the day you chose to arrive there for vacation. Your choice to cancel your flight was not your choice at all. Even your choice to vacation in Florida was caused by your need for relaxation and your usual goose-stepping, in this case into a Disney/tropical paradise meme constructed by habits mimicking the habits of others whose “choice,” like yours, was determined by advertising, fond childhood vacation memories, pressure from the kids, and a host of other forces and temptations. Cause and effect. You aren’t choosing at all. It’s called the butterfly effect. Get used to it. Thus saith the scientist. Animals are “free” too, the shuffling, snuff-snorting scientist sneezes, if by free you mean that given the choice between banana A and banana B, both appearing equal, the chimp will “choose” one rather than the other. But that’s just the random “freedom” of a coin toss, he sneers, and remember, you’re just a chimp in a chair. Even perfect Newtonian mechanical deterministic mindless material processes have the “freedom” to randomly “pick” heads or tails when the “choices” are equal and don’t matter. Of course, all

matter matters. So really it was some atom on Mars farting (tails won the coin toss) that caused the sneeze in Alaska that caused the hurricane in Florida that caused you to choose to cancel your flight to paradise. Ah, but what if you had three equal choices, not just this or that, not just yes or no? What if you could get creative? Even some neo-Darwinians realize that determinism that factors chance into the equation opens Pandora’s Box of erasers and chalks of different colors. Physicists and mathematicians have recently proved that potentiality exists as an aspect of material existence. Potentiality trumps determinism. Determinism that is not absolutely deterministic is not determinism. Yep, you’re not a machine, and I don’t think I’ve taken a huge leap here to state this as a valid claim. Well, you are, if you want to get technical. But you’re a machine embodied with spirit, a machine with free will. You’re not just a machine. And that zombie demon, Richard Dawkins’ so-called “selfish gene” that survives generation after generation possessing host after passive host just to replicate itself exponentially forever like a circus clown in a funhouse of mirrors, like a serial rapist? Exorcised by the power of common sense. And what is common sense? If you have to ask, you will probably never know (or won’t admit you know). Consistency, Common Sense, and Spiritual Freedom All your eloquent faculties work amazingly well at communicating to you the truth of you and your world because they are designed to work well, individually and in concert. Common sense tells us humans that it would be mathematically impossible for all our elaborately interconnected faculties to come into existence fully functioning through random chance, as today’s Darwinians assert. But information is more than bits and beeps. Information contains meaning, value, and purpose, and we’re the only creature to know this. We’re self-aware machines, self-conscious animals. We humans and only we humans. You know this.

You are self-aware, and both self and awareness necessitate composite integration of your parts. All the faculties that make you a self and that make your discrete self aware are in agreement. If one of your faculties disagrees with the rest about any truth claim, you can no longer honestly trust the validity of that particular truth. I say “honestly,” because often people bow to contradictions promoted by outside authority even when that authority’s claims rub against innate common sense. One thing you realize, perhaps without realizing that you realize it, is that truth is consistent. 2+2=4 is perpetually true for everyone. The force of gravity operates exactly the same way everywhere in the universe. There’s a lot of comfort in knowing that the fundamental you are the same you that you were at your conception and will be at your death. Science has recently confirmed that the genetic message cannot be altered by information coming from events outside it. Evidently, whoever is designing the universe is eager to— perhaps even must (for the sake of honest truth)—maintain natural consistency among both discrete existences and their collective functions. (Might there be a reason why you were constructed to know this? Clearly, God is communicating with you. Why is it that scientists who have all the technological advantages for hearing seem to be the last to hear?) But within the consistent structure of the universe that we register as the laws of nature, there’s a lot of wiggle room. The chimp can pick banana A or banana B, but that’s not a lot of choice. The wiggle room is much bigger. How big? And how do we know? Our inherent common sense “just knows” we often have free will to choose from among many different choices. Recently, scientists have surmised this ancient truth, announcing it as a new scientific discovery. They have puzzled out conclusions of non-determinism based on several key concepts centered on randomness. Chaos theory is its latest baby. The trajectory includes Gödel’s incompleteness, Heisenberg’s uncertainty, Turing’s uncomputability, Shannon and Weaver’s entropy as disorder, Chaitin’s randomness and chaos, and

now we’re in the throes of the information theory revolution, which has led to a fattening smorgasbord of random chatter breeding a dearth of trifling tattle scattering over airwaves like weed seeds settling on neighborhood lawns. The Big Conclusion? The universe is a cosmic computer existing as information in a perpetual flux of processing. Ancient concept, updated analogy: an old meme in a new shirt. But unlike the heap of junk information churned out by humans, the natural universe only produces informational riches. Comparing the two, humans should be humbled. MIT scientist Seth Lloyd calculates that given “every degree of freedom [his word] of every particle,” the universe has already performed maybe 10120 “ops” and holds maybe 1090 bits of info. Not only is the universe humongous, so is its elegance. Recent scientific discoveries simply restate ancient wisdom: The universe is elegantly structured; the laws of nature embody the essence of its consistency; within “absolute” structure is immeasurable potential: The pool contains water in which I can play. No human genius programmer could accomplish such feats of computer wizardry even on a small scale. Human programmers simply cherry-pick from among the awesome array of the universe’s predesigned, prepackaged hardware and software at their disposal. In other words, they learn. Personally, I think that if scientists would factor in the obvious reality of a Creator, they could do the math a lot quicker. Like the rest of us, scientists learn by playing as they learn to play. Human creativity is a free play of imagination within consistent structure. Life is a sonnet, fourteen lines in rhymed iambic pentameter with a particular sequencing, but the choice of content is practically infinite. Some scientists point out that individuals, human or otherwise, are temporal but that the animal form, human or otherwise, continues on due to perennial replication of the form’s genetic information. Therefore, eat, drink, and be merry, because tomorrow you and every other poor sucker will be sucked down the cosmic Memory Hole.

In fact, do whatever you want. Determinist-Darwinist atheism justifies exploitation of expendable human beings, animals, and other living things. Don’t worry; the form Bos taurus continues on no matter how many steaks you grill, no matter how you fatten and butcher the cows. The human form continues on no matter how many people you enslave, no matter how many children you molest, no matter how many throats you slit. Life continues on no matter how many pesticides you dump on the land, no matter how much water you slick with oil, no matter how many “foods” you lace with carcinogens. Determinist-Darwinist atheists don’t answer to any god but their own genetic propensity to survive well. Every lie, every selfish gesture, every act of violence is justifiable in the name of conquest, because nothing ultimately matters but the eternal life of the gene. Survive, spawn: That’s the meaning of life as spawned by Darwin. Therefore, why should atheist scientists themselves be above lying? All scientists, including Richard Dawkins, agree that a fact is a theory that is supported by all the evidence. After centuries of artificial breeding and lab experiments, nobody has ever observed type-jumping speciation through variation and selection. Not a single type has been demonstrated to have evolved according to Darwin’s theory that all species evolved from a single ancestor via smooth transitional variation and selection, random or otherwise. Dawkins lies when he asserts that “the sheer weight of evidence, totally and utterly, sledgehammeringly, overwhelmingly strongly supports the conclusion that evolution is true.” He not only means that “a tiny bacterium who lived in the sea was the ancestor of us all,” but also that “macroevolution is nothing more than microevolution stretched out over a much greater time span.” Even though he’s been proven to be totally and utterly, sledgehammeringly, overwhelmingly wrong, Dawkins perpetuates the meme of natural selection in order to “kill religion.” He said so himself. He is as guilty of lying as the dishonest fundamentalism he wants to destroy. X-God hit men can be stubborn. But why? Absolute skeptic David Hume, who hanged epistemology in a tangled noose of impossible causation back in the sixteenth century, admitted that “since reason is incapable of dispelling these [philosophical] clouds, nature herself

suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium…and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I wou’d return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.” Yet enter he always would. Is the perennial entering anyway of atheistic philosopher and scientist the bravado of the intellectual sportsman or a symptom of psychosis? What irrational rationale drives a person ostensibly pursuing truth to shun obvious truth in order to—what? Enter an Inferno of absolute meaninglessness, absolute hopelessness with no Virgil or Beatrice to guide toward some sensible light? “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” (“But here let poetry rise again from the dead.”) Rather than accept the Darwinian, Dawkins-ian view of a selfish, parasitic gene-machine ruthlessly cloning itself via stupid, worthless human hosts, most of us prefer to interpret the latest data as proof of a benevolent Creator who has built hopeful, meaningful choice into the universe for the benefit of our built-in free will. Fundamentalists who subdue their wills and sacrifice their “natural man” and humble themselves into passive, submissive, unthinking puppets think they’re honoring the God who blessed them with free will, the ultimate gesture of love. When they “crucify” their natural humanity, when they return unopened the gift of themselves that God has given them, aren’t they in essence spitting in God’s face? It’s cause-and-effect that people who forfeit their free will are most easily deluded by predators. Spiritual freedom is transgressed when common sense is not consulted. Consulting or not consulting common sense is a choice. Rubberstamp Darwinians and cookie-cutter Christians alike choose to contradict their own innate common sense. Not just a truth but truth itself must be chosen. A truth is a fact, a bit of information. Truth is the higher field of reality in which a truth is true and known to be true. Plato called this realm abstract Ideas, or Ideals. Aristotle considered Ideals to be simply generalizations of concrete things. Truth was something else. No philosopher, no Plato or Kant or Berkeley or Russell, could describe or define truth itself in terms that didn’t include the concrete examples. They all failed.

Ironically, we all know what this truth is, just like, as Augustine noted, we can’t really describe or define time but we know what it is. We know thanks to our common sense. And this commonsense knowing is part of our consistent nature that makes it possible for us to maintain the integrity of our freedom. Our common sense and our freedom are aspects of our nature, which are part of Nature. Common sense and freedom are qualities that make us not automatons. They are transcendental features that make us more than matter, more than animal. They are human aspects that are simultaneously immanent and transcendent. What those dusty philosophers half-intuited and poets knew quite well was that humans are standing with one foot in this world and the other foot in another, the world of before- and afterlife that temporarily infuses this world like a taste of John Lennon’s Strawberry Fields Forever. We know this because we know how to know—know how to know both directly and indirectly, concretely and abstractly, literally and metaphorically—though how we know how to know we don’t know. What can we know? Some truth is self-evident, like 2+2=4; this is evident at all because existence has been structured in such a way that 2+2 does =4 and because our minds have been structured to register this fact. Truth is a creation that we apprehend. We can apprehend truth because it is consistently what it is. Obvious truth is registered almost instantaneously with little effort. But some truth must be learned. Learning involves absorption, interpretation, and revision. Learning requires the interaction with other humans that makes us consciously aware and self-aware. Most learning requires willful engagement. We all know (but sometimes forget) that the process of adding new information often requires unlearning, or correction. It once made sense that the world was flat, but new information changed our vision of our world and its place in the cosmos. We took a quantum leap forward into a higher version of ourselves, our epiphany causing a major paradigm shift in consciousness. Even “small” personal leaps can be as earth-shattering for the individual as the Copernican worldview has been for our species. Whether personal or collective, these shifts define our growth as humans.

We evolve (i.e., microevolve) via natural revelations in much the same way that species evolve—by intelligent design and direction. Higher and higher dimensions of truth always add sophistication and clarity, which are aspects of intelligent design being manifested to intelligent minds. It’s absurd to assert that consistent, sophisticated truth and the elegant functions of mind capable of apprehending that truth could possibly have arisen by chance via mindless, accidental forces of nature. As amazing as it is that humans can know, we thoughtlessly take that ability for granted. Concentrated awareness is the prerequisite for knowledge, but we often passively sabotage our own consciousness with monotonous jobs, trivial TV shows, and repetitive activities like computer games, shopping, or idle chatter. Some sacrifice consciousness to an imposing meme, like Darwinism or fundamentalism. Often consciousness is sabotaged by propaganda or violence. All willful destruction of consciousness involves dissolution of the Self for the purpose of exploitation. Free will is the power to make choices that equip us to resist, but it is also that faculty that chooses to exploit. Darwinian “survival of the fittest” and fundamentalist “it’s God’s will” justify and sanctify exploitation with equal vehemence. Concentrated awareness and critical thinking lead to the active participation in one’s own evolution, personal and collective, which builds up the resilience to survive exploitation and to establish a humanist society that benefits all. How the universe and life and humans came to be remains a mystery. Darwinism has failed to provide new answers to validate the atheists. Once again it appears that evolution only occurs within an organism type; thus far, there is no evidence that Darwinian evolution ever creates new types or orders. Of course, the connectedness among the remarkable diversity of living beings—and for that matter, non-living—leads us to suspect that some kind of evolution is taking place. We know that biologically, evolution is almost always adaptation triggered by environmental cues; nonliving things, too, are altered by their environment because that’s the way the universe is constructed. The organism can adapt because the means of adaptation is built-in, meaning it comes equipped with

the information needed to change in a specific way. But how a completely new life-form type comes into being is as yet far beyond our ken. Even saying that a new species variety comes about due to adaptation or any other means of change doesn’t really explain how or why those processes, those changes, would work. Zeno’s paradox can never cease applying to biology as well as geometry. Scientists will never find the smallest indivisible unit of life or space. Yet life exists; the arrow hits the target. That’s the miracle. Not just first cause but cause itself, which exists in a realm beyond human comprehension, services proof of God and intelligent design. The Tinkering Watchmaker Winds a New Watch Existence perpetually increases. New things are perpetually created. Newness emerges within preexisting systems. New attributes are added to organisms that already exist; the new emerges out of pregiven potential latent in the organism’s molecular DNA/RNA structure. This is perfectly natural. Even so, there is a massive amount of addition during any adaptive moment. Addition is that impossible “going beyond” that only the reality of an active—I would go so far as to say immanent—Creator can explain. Not an absent Watchmaker who left the universe to tick on its own, the Watchmaker God perpetually tinkers at his workbench. The Creator not only creates; the Creator perpetually creates, meaning perpetually creates newness. Addition is creation itself. Every split nanosecond a unique human or animal child is conceived out of the vast wealth of its inherited genetic raw materials. Every split nanosecond there’s an almost infinite splurge of unique newborn—somethings. And all those somethings exist within consistent form, so we can feel safe while we’re being dazzled. Already the largest of four families of orchids consists of about 1,000 genre and 20,000 species of absolutely unique discrete orchids. (I can see three awesomely perfect orchids right now from the corner of my eye.) Something can’t come from nothing. So-called natural selection would prune away information to make a change. It would never add to, because a thing that exists can’t create something beyond (greater than) what it is. A computer can’t generate a human; a

poem can’t create a poet. But God can program human DNA with immense potentiality to create new details of itself within the parameters of human. A new form must be an addition, a something from nothing that signals true transcending creation. A new order of species is an entirely new computer built and loaded up by a transcending geek. Even a new variety of species. Even a new version of a particular instance of a specific species at a specific moment contains that addition of something from nothing. The process of Creation, including the wiggle rooms where chance and freedom can occur, is the work-in-progress of an immanent transcendent Other. The fundamental point deduced from recent genetics is that new information can’t just “emerge” from lesser information. Truly new information must be pre-planted by a means or mechanism that transcends the previous information package. The process of increase, including the laws of nature that direct the increase, must be derived from a source that is greater than the process itself or the thing increasing. We do evolve, but only within the parameters of the given—pregiven and being-given. There are latent potentials within all living things, but those potentials are latent in the sense of being present but not yet called upon. We evolve by calling up inner pre-given resources, inner pre-given information—installed software we haven’t before used. Being used is a process being able to be used activated in the moment by the activating presence of God: Immanence Plants and animals respond to needs created by the environment. Humans also respond to those needs. But humans also respond to needs and possibilities that far transcend material environmental cues. As an act of will, we humans probe deeply into the myriad types of possibilities that are latent within us. Humans search for meaning, truth, divine connection—profound interactions with the depths of soul and spirit. We search our own DNA even as we stretch for the farthest reaches of the cosmos. We search not just with our hands or eyes, but with imaginations and hearts spurred by our souls and spirits. Humans strive to create the new in order to enter the creative life-force inherent in all things, even things

inanimate. The universe is infused with information. Existence overflows with the gift of tangible, not-yet-awakened possibilities. And then—awakened. Existence is, meaningful and purposeful. It is in being that we evolve. But haven’t we always known this? The universe fine-tuned for life; life fine-tuned for human life; human life fine-tuned for human understanding; human understanding finetuned to anticipate afterlife: Even atheist scientists admit that each fact statement is an interpretation of data, data fine-tuned for interpretative understanding. Life doesn’t disprove God; life doesn’t prove random chance mutation driven by natural selection. Aristotle claimed that knowledge—the “wisdom of the wisest of the wise”— gives the liveliest pleasure. Nature’s pleasure principle—pleasure as cause—steers the purposive, directed, eschatological drive toward self-transcendence that is human evolution. A paradigm shifts to a heliocentric solar system, to intelligent design, to Deism. We become as we probe, as we create, as we contemplate existence and its possibilities, as we appreciate the exquisite beauty of each unique hexagonal ice crystal, commonly known as a snowflake, while someone we love pins a florists’ orchid to our lapel.



 

PART III Slouching Towards Deism THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? —William Butler Yeats, 1921



 

Chapter 9 Hogtied Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer . . . “The devil made me do it,” the world’s second most perennial excuse for bad behavior (first being “I wanted to”), could be truer than the perpetrator suspects. A classic character in literature—usually antagonist, sometimes protagonist (as in Paradise Lost)—the devil represents human evil we fear in others and in ourselves. For people who accept religious literature as literal fact, the devil also serves as a projection. In the minds of naïve fundamentalists like your cousin’s wife and the guy at work, the devil really does make them do it—it being whatever they want to believe (or want you to believe) they couldn’t possibly do on their own. Whether a representation or a projection, the devil is symbolic; yet even though the symbol always stands for evil, it can embody opposite meanings. The fundamentalist’s “literal” devil often symbolizes the absence of choice; demonic possession negates freedom, responsibility, and inadvertently the God that designed humans with built-in free will as a given; needless to say, it demotes the human to a groveling moral wimp or predestined prey mesmerized by the almighty tempter, which gives the devil power to deposit both victimizer and victim in the same account, a devaluing, anti-humanist position closer to random-chance neo-Darwinism than to intelligently designed Creation. The literary devil, on the other hand, symbolizes the choice of evil; the symbol functions as a warning that affirms human decision and personal accountability that God-given free will commands.

Ironically, the literary devil of Deists and other humanists, not the literal devil of fundamentalists, facilitates contemplation of the spiritual reality of evil. People like your cousin’s wife and the guy at work tend to glare suspiciously at literature, if not all the arts and humanities, swayed no doubt by prominent evangelists like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who a few years ago ranted against the demonism of fantasies like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings—an interesting detour from the evils of Harlequin romance Playboy sex and other immoralities. Like the devil himself, prominent evangelists, inspired by the high priests of antiquity, insist on controlling the initiate’s grasp of the dark arts. As always, religion presents spiritual evil as a spiritincarnate not-human devil packaged as historical fact. Literature, though, assumes that spiritual evil is spiritual and evil and human, and its devil is a representation of human spiritual evil. By spiritual I don’t mean otherworldly; I mean evil emanating from the individual’s core spiritual essence, the Self. Religion assumes that there is a separate evil spiritual presence in the world not only tempting a human spirit to the dark side, but also possessing the spirit and controlling human destiny. To be fair, given the amount of wickedness in the world and the degree of its sophistication, it is reasonable to wonder whether pure evil as it actually exists, from atrocious butchery of a solo psychopath like Ed Gein (who ate people he didn’t make into furniture) to the collective carnage of fascists, could possibly not be demonic. The high priests of organized religion, who assume they must wield authority over a demonic archenemy to stay in business, have always erred on the side of the literal devil, unwittingly granting projected evil, real or fictional, more clout than it deserves. Religion even names its cloven-hoofed fiends and sometimes invests them with power equal to God’s. The biblical Satan, for instance, made regular visits to heaven and tricked God into inflicting evil upon Job. And Jesus is portrayed as exorcising demons from the possessed when he isn’t telling the tempter Satan to “get behind” him. The devil symbol becomes particularly convoluted when Jesus “makes” Satan possess Judas when he gives Judas the bread dipped in wine at the Last Supper, which gives Satan the green light to drive Judas to

betray Jesus, by which Satan assumes superior strength by enabling Jesus’ suicidal crucifixion for a purpose that, as many have shown (myself included, in Born-Again Deist), makes no sense. How would psychology interpret this biblical scene? Pretty much every religion except Deism includes in its repertoire a pantheon of demons. Deism asks directly (as literature asks indirectly) how the world might benefit if religion set aside its devil myths and superstitions and instead assigned responsibility for the evils of the world to their actual perpetrators. Even when they know better, high priests, including religious scholars, refuse to relinquish their faith in demons. The devil slayers scoffed when Darwin’s ape traded confession for psychoanalysis, which rendered Satan and his cohorts impotent and absurd. They gasped aloud when Carl Jung documented that the shadow, another version of the dark side, isn’t necessarily evil, being simply a repressed content of the Self, appearing a bit darker when wearing a scary mask in nightmares, or in broad daylight acting out in tactless garb to grab the collar of consciousness. The Church is still sparring with the shadow, especially its own. The shadow wants to tell the truth of itself, of its Self; the shadow wants to exit the dark and enter the light; it wants transformation. Though society has learned to differentiate motives of pure psychopathic evil from shadow neurosis and psychosis, popular culture still often paints evil as a devil figure. Unlike a Texas chainsaw psychopath or a maniacal Joker—evildoers who destroy the outward person—the devil possesses the person within, whether via a classic demonic spirit or an alien force or a Voodoo spell. The devil that possesses in essence becomes the person, becomes you: The devil makes you do it; you are the devil doing it. This is a representation, of course, but it exposes the shadow’s truth: Your own evil projected outward onto the devil is projected back into you via possession. Wouldn’t therapy be easier? Or even confession? Literature, even pop-lit, performs those functions in mainstream culture. Literature wants to expose repressed evil whitewashed as projecting-religion—religion that projects its own evil onto others. Instead of healing our ailing soul—specifically, the moral faculty—

religion further sickens us into spiritual schizophrenia: our own good side vs. our own bad side projected as us vs. them, them being gays, feminazis, Muslims, liberals—anyone excluded from the religious in-group. Meanwhile, the Church tries to reconcile its promotion of devil fear plus special role as exorcist with the biblical “Love casts out all fear”; in text, that’s your love, not the Church’s, but the Church has deemed all “real” love under its jurisdiction: In effect, religion has (in more senses than one) possessed love. Luckily, mainstream culture is in the repo business. Evil, really, is superlative harm, but “harm” is too tame a term in a culture that consumes more drama than popcorn. We grown-up children like our antagonists demon-possessed. Even scarier than the murderer outside your window is the invisible, omniscient presence of evil chasing and attacking you inside, the evil that drags you to hell. Yes, we often represent that evil in bodily form, often a human already possessed, so the audience can see the spirit in the zombie-like, emotionless, soulless not-quite-person with an axe. For a moment we suspend our disbelief and think we fear evil spirits, but what really scares us witless is the relentless psychopathic stalker so cold, so intent on devouring the soul of us that there’s nothing human about that human: We fear this spiritual evil in ourselves, we fear it in others as representatives of us collectively. The worst case scenario is everyone possessed except you and you being pursued by them. The most horrific monsters signify the terrifying presence of a quasi-human being devoid of even the semblance of anything humane: the devil: the deranged psychopath completely out of control yet utterly in control of our fate. Even in the real world outside the theatre, our deepest fear is of monstrous out-of-control control: slasher, child molester, rapist, Ponzi scheme accountant, public servant dutifully pushing the red button that blows up the world. Culture likes to scream. Psychologically, this makes sense. Drama helps us feel when we recognize our true self in the mirror, be it victimizer or victim or the potential for either. Fear serves as a spiritual siren; fear spurs us to fix ourselves and our world. Empathy calls us to share in the feelings of others; empathy orchestrates the intimate oneness of humanity. In Aristotle’s dramatic schema, fear plus pathos equals catharsis. At the very least it must be healthy to

feel the safety in numbers. True fear isolates the one from everyone else but the predatory devil. The devil is the spiritual predator—the human predator. The worst in us is the devil—and by worst I mean most harmful. The human drama and the literary drama of books, plays, and movies inform one another. When we write or view literary drama, we’re examining ourselves under an aesthetic microscope. Because the aesthetic peers down to the core of our being, the lens is also spiritual. But we can also use literary tools and techniques to analyze our actual lives. If you are the protagonist of your life story, who or what is your antagonist? I don’t really think that any individual who survives into childhood has only one antagonist. On the other hand, I do believe that all of us have one grand perennial antagonist: Ourselves. Collectively, humanity is its own perennial antagonist. As an individual, your perennial antagonist, the one that likely causes you the most trouble and heartache and fear, is you yourself. You are victimizer of you; you are the victim of you. This doesn’t mean that you can’t also be the victim of other people or circumstances; if you haven’t been, you will be. But in all likelihood your grand perennial antagonist, the one that shapes you, the one that stays with you, the demon that possesses you, is you yourself—your weaknesses, your attitudes, your beliefs, your obsessive memories. The process of self-victimization, the condition of you beating yourself up, the habit of you picking open your scabs, even your propensity for projection, is your life drama, the story of your life that you yourself create. But only until the protagonist—also you— musters the guts to save the day. Cape and laser-shield optional. It might seem odd to think that you are making yourself your own victim (and potentially later your own savior), especially given the gift of psychopaths to victimize us—though really, they’re just as adept in exploiting our proclivity for self-victimization. The truth is that the devil that made you do it is one of your own faculties taking the steering wheel and driving the rest of your faculties (including the body, which I consider a faculty) over a cliff. You pig out on potato chips that make you fat while your mind yells No! and your conscience weeps and your arteries collapse. Collectively, the rich

one percent pigs out on the fat of the land while the rest of us weep and the economy collapses and society cries out for help from under the weight of irrational injustice. The whole world is a neurotic mess. We’ve all heard the ancient proverb that a house divided against itself cannot stand. If your faculties are not in harmony, if you are divided into competing fragments, the harm (evil) in you (your “evil spirit”) will plot to dominate (possess) the rest of you. Ditto us collectively. A little leaven leavens the whole loaf. You can make yourself thoroughly self-harming (evil). You can even leaven—make that fatten—your family, your church, your nation, the whole world. And you can frighten yourself into a frenzy, a group into a mob, and the planet into nuclear pandemonium. Of course, you could resist evil. When you do resist, what in you is resisting? You might think your will. But why do you will to be or do something? (Isn’t it amazing how little we really know of ourselves? Hence literature.) Why does America will itself fatter than a fatted calf slaughtered on an ancient altar of sacrifice? Is our fat fetish some atavistic ritual? An archetype of self-destruction? Spiritual laziness? Only the shadow knows. In my view, the faculty ultimately in charge, the director, the boss, is spirit. You’ve heard the saying, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Usually we think flesh means body; traditionally “flesh” has included pretty much everything that isn’t spirit, everything considered to be “of this world.” Of course, there’s never been a consensus about what aspects of us are of this world. Is mind the same as spirit, or part of the flesh, the brain, for instance? Opinions vary. It’s complicated. But most of us do understand that good and evil, benefit and harm, are driven by the spirit. The spirit, our core Self, directs our other faculties, including conscience and will. Although the boss, your spirit, ultimately calls the shots regarding who and what you are, like many bosses, your boss might be a bit incompetent; your boss might have over-delegated to the point that a particularly bossy employee has assumed the responsibilities of running the business while the real you, the Self, the exec with the fancy title and corporate name and big pay check, snoozes in the lounge.

The spirit ultimately chooses good or evil, even if it sometimes chooses to vacation while the bossy body or mind or will moves into the front office (though will is usually just the dutiful gofer that gets blamed for whatever goes wrong). Sin, crime, despotism, psychopathy all name the same symptom; the cause is evil spirit, or Self, asserting itself through free will. If you’re reading this book, you probably assume that your spirit isn’t evil. But remember that evil simply means harmful. Pure evil, the ultimate harm, is predatory and devoid of conscience; the shadow, on the other hand, can commit atrocities even if the innermost spirit isn’t purely evil. A psychopath is purely evil, as far as the experts can tell. A psychopath might not be committing evil deeds at every moment, but he is capable of doing so, and he is incapable of authentically doing good. How and why this is so, nobody knows. The important point here is that you are not a psychopath. (I’m assuming, given Dr. Hare’s description of psychopathy, that a psychopath would not have read this far into this book.) You in a moment of weakness are not purely evil, even though those potato chips might be evil enough to kill you. Evil is like trans fats: the more you indulge in evil, the more you saturate yourself with evil. The more capitalists exploit and then lie about their motives, the more exploitive and dishonest they become, and the easier it is then to take a few more steps into the underworld. The more you shoplift, the easier it becomes to steal cash from your grandmother. The more you lie to yourself about being gay, the more aggressively your repressed shadow lashes out to proclaim its truth. The shadow often projects its repressed content onto others, which is why many people suspect that aggressive homophobes like thou-protesteth-too-much “god hates fags” Fred Phelps and “man on dog” Rick Santorum might well be repressed homosexuals (or worse; then gay-bashing serves as a red herring). Evil manifests itself as itself; evil is what evil does. We represent this understanding all the time in literature. In Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, devils manifest Faustus’ evil self, which Faustus creates as he conjures them, knowing full well he destroys his own morality the way, say, a rapist imagines, commits, enjoys,

and cultivates the habit of rape. In the Bible, the devil enters Judas, which is to say that at a particular moment, Judas resolves to make some big bucks busting the hideout of the man claiming to be God’s Chosen. (In the Matthew version of the story, Judas then returns the thirty pieces of silver and commits suicide; in the Acts account, he buys some property and basically explodes there. You are free to choose the moral of the story.) Humans bind themselves with and to their choices; the evil addict themselves to themselves. The gofer-will, then, intoxicated and perverted, assumes the role of boss until it is the boss: the spirit is gobbled by the will; the two have become one. In the many incarnations of the Faust myth, Faust’s will repeatedly summons his inner demon. Dr. Jekyll drug-conjures his Mr. Hyde. Dr. Frankenstein constructs a high-tech simulation of his arcane “wisdom.” Humanity’s most tragic flaw transcends Greek fate and Elizabethan hubris. Literature is steeped with shadowy protagonists warning us via their grand gestures of spiritual suicide. Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a classic case study of demonic will-totragedy. Victimizers are victims of their own tragically flawed free will. Not just human individuals but also humanity as a whole willfully shackles itself to its pacts with the devil. Nazism and the Inquisition serve as a couple reminders. Or we can lay our path on higher ground. The alternative, the subtext, the deep point of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Macbeth and Frankenstein and every version of the Faust tale and even the lighter Pride and Prejudice and a whole host of literary dramatic and narrative texts is simply “Choose the Good.” Without the Good, the Greeks persuaded us, there is no choice; without choice there is no Good. Surpassing antiquated religious literature promoting hierarchies of control and submission (i.e., relinquishment of will) by exploiting projection, the perennial literary bottom line endorses individual integrity and societal liberation: Heroes choose the better angels of themselves; antiheroes choose the devil. The insight of the Renaissance was that tragedy equaled the free choice of evil. The nineteenth century, deflated by Darwin and “death of God,” realized that the greater tragedy equaled eradication of

choice, not by fate or the gods or even oneself, but by other evil humans and their institutions. With a nod to the Greeks, the tragedy of protagonist choosing evil was consigned to an inferior margin beneath the true tragedy of the victim. Even so, the devil was still human, not some cosmic “fate.” Victimizers—psychopaths, the vampires of vulture culture—still stand in the literary spotlight, cloaked though they might be. Society today still suffers from acute victimization, which perhaps explains why popular culture craves Hollywood endings, complete with superheroes restoring justice and “real life” TV cops nailing the bad guys. Literary art gives us a powerful voice through which we vicariously shout down (or gun down) the devil. Even when it teaches utopia by analyzing dystopia, or heaven-on-earth by scrutinizing hell, great literature is a moral instructor, teaching as it delights. Even Hollywood happily-ever-after gives us hope that love —the ultimate Good—will prevail. Morally, we are all free to choose good or evil. We are not tainted in our DNA by sins committed in some mythic Eden, human life is not a tangled jungle of selfish genes. Sometimes evil deeds are reenactments of evil deeds inflicted upon the perpetrator. Evil can breed evil. But not all victims of child molestation become child molesters; rape and battery victims do not typically become rapists or batterers or otherwise bad people. Good people choose to not succumb to evil. Accepting the reality of our own free will (really, spirit acting through will) in this age of absolute determinism is a spiritual feat in itself. We are indeed the product of our environment. We are to a very large extent at the mercy of the material make-up of existence, including our very material selves. But we aren’t just material any more than a symphony is just notes. Within the constraints of the given, perhaps even because of those constraints, we have tremendous creative freedom, like a great poet working within a rigid sonnet form can produce a great sonnet whose connotations far transcend the flat denotations of individual words or the form’s tight structure. Unlike some Deists who privilege reason as the core human faculty, I think the will is at least as close to spirit as reason is. We

can know truth but choose to not do or be truth. We can be unclear about the conscious, intellectual reasons why and how something is good and true and still choose to side with the good and true. Reason is important because it helps us know; will helps us do and be. Yes, knowledge is part of being. But will is responsible for doing, for enacting what one knows and thereby making us become and be a certain person. A person can know that diet and exercise are essential to good health, but knowing this doesn’t miraculously change him into a person with a level of health derived only via diet and exercise. Macbeth knew that to murder would be to forfeit his soul. Jekyll knew the drug he took was converting him into Hyde. Faust knew his pact with Lucifer was a one-way ticket to hell. One must do to be, physically and morally. Some people choose to commit evil acts, some choose to do good, some prefer to passively sway to and fro with every passing breeze. Each act reveals and creates the person himself, be that Ted Bundy, Gandhi, or Mr. and Mrs. Couch Potato. Hog Heaven The “devil” that made you do it is you yourself, or rather the inner devil that you yourself nurtured into existence. Devil and angel are both present within you as potentials. You choose to be; then to manifest your being, you choose to do good or evil. I don’t mean “good,” the manufactured mask of good; I mean authentic good. In my view, the root of all evil, the essence of evil itself, is selfishness. In any spiritual tragedy, the devil selfishness stands center stage. I think of evil as the Unholy Trinity: Selfishness is the father, greed the son, and hubris the unholy spirit. This of course is a representation. So is Hog, the name I’ve given to the triune god of selfish evil. I prefer Hog, because the devil is fraught with horns and tails and other clichéd connotations I’d like to avoid. In the real world of Hog, Eve wasn’t fashioned from the rib of Adam; Adam was carved from the rib of Hog. Too often in the world today, Hog worshippers, or Hogs, as I call them, excuse their harmful behavior with some version of the devil made me do it, which casts the blame out into a demonic Legion of swine they can push off a cliff. Classic projection. A Hog should say,

“Hog made me do it,” which is to confess the truth that the selfish god of himself, created in his own image, is his own narcissistic snout in the mirror. Hog is representation. But Hog represents a real Hog, real human evil, freely chosen. Hog makes the psychopath rape and murder. Hog makes the terrorist blow himself up for revenge and a heavenly harem of virgins. Hog makes your ego smile at your sexy smile in the photograph. Hog makes you fire loyal employees to profit rich stockholders. Hog makes you call your lies “just part of the game of politics.” Hog makes you strip children in your imagination. Hog makes you laugh when your rivals get the punishment you deserve. Hog makes you a thief, a hypocrite, a drug dealer, a porn addict, a fake, a murderer, a hedge fund con artist, a mega-church TV prosperity-evangelist. Hog helps you justify, sanctify, and glorify Hog. Hog guides you to pray in the spirit of Hog. God is good. Hog is sometimes evil, sometimes just not currently actively good. Always, though, Hog self-righteously claims to be good, even if just good at being evil. God is a moral God. Hog is at times immoral, at times amoral, at times beyond good and evil. God had and still has a reason for creating our universe. Hog, too, has his reasons: In the beginning Hog created the heavens and the earth to fall down and worship Hog. God infused existence with meaning that can be mined by humans. Hog infused existence with commodities like oil and diamonds and gold to be mined by Hog’s slaves. In God’s universe, all and every human life has a purpose. In Hog’s universe, the meaning and purpose of life is Hog. God’s motive is love. Hog’s obsession is selfishness. God’s essence is truth. Hog’s obsession is selfishness. What sin or crime isn’t driven by Hog’s obsessive snatching for himself something that doesn’t belong to him? From pollution to plunder of nature’s resources, from gang rape to tax breaks for the rich, from manipulative advertising to vicious imperialism, from misogyny to homophobia, from rudeness to ingratitude, from tyranny to fraud, from child molestation to nuclear holocaust, Hog stops at nothing to get what he wants. Think of all the great literature focused on Hog stopping at nothing to get what he wants, or on a hero preventing some Hog from

succeeding. Our very survival depends upon our rehashing these same significant themes. Beware of Hog’s masks, in life as in literature. The all-American selfish who target money (the biblical “mammon,” or wealth) and everything money can buy—I call them mammonites—are just as rapacious as serial rapists and just as eager to excuse their goals. The most cleverly costumed mammonites attribute their selfishness to God’s will: God wanted them to act selfishly, or they acted selfishly on their own to please and glorify God. Really? Hog, not God, wants you to be rich when people are starving. Oh wait—God wants everybody to be rich. Okay, but what are you doing to equalize the world’s wealth, to make the poor not poor? Oh wait, make that God wants every Christian to be rich. Okay, what are you doing to make every Christian not poor. Oh wait—that’s not your job; that’s God’s job. Which makes God just as Hoggish as you are. And just as boorish. Listening to the wisest of the wise, the “goodest” of the good among us humans, one would think that God doesn’t want us to be rich; God wants us to be unselfish. Every religion agrees that you cannot serve God and mammon. Oh wait—you don’t really serve mammon; mammon serves you, and you are a child of God, God the creator of everything, including mammon, to which you are entitled as “the King’s kid,” to quote a few pop-Christian authors. Great; but the wisest and goodest don’t agree with you. Go ahead and take your chance; believe you’re special. Move ahead with your plans to amass wealth and to keep the better portion for yourself. The wisest and goodest call that greed, call that selfishness. Hog calls that a luau. Hog wallows boldly in his pig-out. Hog gorges proudly, while priggish piglets prance preciously in the palace of Pretend. Many of the wisest and goodest don’t think that God wants anyone to be poor any more than she wants anyone to be rich. Many of those wise and good prophets believe that life just might be a test of your fiscal integrity. Are you benevolent? How benevolent? Just enough so you can classify yourself as benevolent for your own sake, to make it easier to sleep at night or to chalk up brownie points

for the Judgment Day or to impress cronies and minions? Some of those wise, good teachers do think that poverty has a redemptive quality, but most only believe this because one doesn’t have the ability to equalize world wealth and therefore one should place oneself on a par with the least wealthy, or at least the less wealthy. Middle class would probably be okay for most of the wise good ones. Middle class piglets and upper class Hogs excuse their mammonism on the same need for security. Darwinist and fundamentalist alike fear being trampled like pearls cast before swine. Any Hog worth his salt would tear you to ham hocks, would flip you like pork chops on the barbeque. Fight Hog with Hog, you think. Fear of losing your hide forces you to hoard everything, including the hides of your competitors. You’ve been Hogtied against your will; you’ve become your fear. What else can you do? You’ve seen the light. You’re a worshipper of Hog now, and Hog wants you to stay strong; the worker is worthy of his hire; it’s the free gift of Hog and it would be rude to just rewrap the Christmas present and put it under somebody else’s tree. In Hog’s little ears, “prosperity” is a word uttered sweetly. Even Jesus wants us to be rich. That’s right: Jesus died for our sins. The poor are still poor because they’re sinners. TV evangelists, however, have been saved and therefore are prosperous. Send them money, and you too can be prosperous. Think positive; think prosperous. Prosper in Spirit means prosper in pocketbook for the rich saved from original sin by the power of Hog’s re-mix of Jesus. Hog knows perfectly well that Jesus himself, real or myth, never preached prosperity. Hog represses that knowledge. “Prosperity gospel,” a classic oxymoron, is Jesus perversion perpetuated by Hogtied mammonites who call themselves Christians. Some of them run for President: The so-called Religious Right is a self-righteous front for obscenely rich predatory capitalists. In the actual Gospel, Jesus proposes a divine purpose for poverty: a test for both the poor and the rich that to pass with an A requires unselfish giving. The Gospel, you’ll recall, is love—love God first, your neighbor and yourself second. That’s the Good News meaning of life in a nutshell, according to that nutty pauper, Jesus. “But but but…” the put-put mammonites stutter.

Let’s just look at a few facts. The Gospel of Jesus According to Hog Ironically, prosperity evangelists who legitimize their mammonism via Bible thumping don’t know their Bibles very well. Either that or they’re lying. The gospel literature depicts a Socratic protagonist, Jesus, who teaches against the evils of selfish greed and its worldly manifestations—money, riches, possessions, mammon, call it what you will. Nothing that Jesus said or did suggests that having wealth is okay, much less righteous. Many prosperity evangelists, who supposedly accept the Jesus literature as literal fact, have dispensed with the embarrassingly archaic Jesus to run simplified positivethought workshops billed as church in order to avoid paying taxes. Like the mythic Jesus—a literary motif that represents “light” foiled against the devil’s (Hog’s) “dark”—in arguing against obscene affluence I’m not arguing a case for poverty, I’m arguing against it. It’s common knowledge that if the world’s wealth were redistributed equally and wisely managed, every single person on earth would be rich for life by American standards. Wealth per se isn’t the problem; the problem is Hogging wealth via exploitation. I’m arguing here against poverty, but more to the point, I’m arguing against the blatant hypocrisy of prosperity fundamentalists and the rightwing politicians who pretend to be fundamentalist to protect mega-rich churches’ tax-free status in exchange for votes. The obscenely rich can only be so by forcing the rest of us into lower classes, the lower the better. Getting filthy rich Americans and their filthy rich corporations to contribute their fair share of taxes would greatly enrich this nation’s lower, middle, and lower-upper classes. End government handouts for the rich, including rich churches that have benefitted the most from the Bush-instituted Faith-Based Initiative, which brazenly (still) violates the Constitution by handing out subsidies to rightwing “charities” paid for with taxpayer dollars. End corporate welfare. Poverty would disappear. Yes, corporate welfare. For example, consider these facts about ten corporations highlighted by Vermont Senator Bernie Saunders in 2011: 1) Exxon Mobile’s 2009 profits totaled $19 billion, yet according to its SEC filings, the company received a $126 million

rebate from the IRS plus it did not pay any federal taxes. 2) Bank of America made $4.4 billion in profits last year after receiving a $1 trillion bailout from the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department and a $1.9 billion tax refund from the IRS. 3) Though General Electric made $26 billion in profits in the United States over the past five years and received a $4.1 billion tax refund from the IRS, GE has cut a fifth of its American jobs in the past nine years and is boosting jobs overseas where tax rates are lower. 4) Chevron got an IRS refund last year totaled $19 million, but its 2009 profits came to a whopping $10 billion. 5) Boeing received a $30 billion contract from the Pentagon to build 179 airborne tankers; it also received a $124 million refund from the IRS. 6) Valero Energy had $68 billion in sales and received a $157 million tax refund check from the IRS; over the past three years, it has received a $134 million tax break thanks to the oil and gas manufacturing tax reduction. 7) Goldman Sachs paid 1.1% of its 2008 income in taxes, and though it made a profit of $2.9 billion, it got an $800 billion bailout from the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department. 8) Citigroup profits last year totaled more than $4 billion, but it paid zero dollars in federal income tax and received a $2.5 trillion bailout from the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department. 9) From 2007 through 2009 ConocoPhillips profits totaled $16 billion, but it was still awarded $451 million in tax breaks because of the oil and gas manufacturing deduction. 10) Carnival Cruise Lines profits over the past five years totaled more than $11 billion, but its federal income tax rate came to just 1.1% Why stop with corporate welfare. Why not end welfare for filthy rich individuals, too. We could start by getting rid of the $42 billion per year tax cuts for the already mega-rich, for instance, and the $2.3 billion in tax loopholes for managers of hedge funds and private equity funds, the $11.5 billion per year tax cuts for millionaires’ estates, the $6.7 billion in upper-class estate planning loopholes. The rich think—or want the rest of us to think—that we 99%ers are responsible for our, and their, economic woes. Unfortunately, many 99%ers don’t know the facts: for instance, that Bush wiped out Clinton’s $5.6 trillion surplus in two years, or that the national debt hit $10 trillion during his presidency; that 82% of our current national debt (2012) was spent by Republicans; that the ratio of CEO pay

compared to that of the average worker is 475 to 1 (Japan 11:1, France 15:1, Germany 12:1, Canada 20:1, Britain 22:1); that Cigna health insurance’s CEO makes $19 million compared to the average Afghanistan deployed soldier’s $38,000 a year, or seniors’ $12,000 in Social Security; minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, while the average CEO makes $20,160 per hour. Republican politicians today are corporate gofers because they’re owned and operated by the Tea Party, which is owned and operated by the corporate rich (like the Koch brothers). Of course politicians don’t mind prostituting themselves because even if they lose the next election, they continue making their $174,000 salary for the rest of their lives, unless they’re a majority or minority leader, in which case make that $194,000, or Speaker of the House, 223,500, or President, $450,000. Imagine, almost half a million a year to not work. Or those guys could keep on working as corporate lobbyists, in which case they’d get on average a 1,452% raise. The rich think they’re entitled to all that cash flow because they earned it, but their ability to earn anything is absolutely dependent upon an immense infrastructure—it’s called society—paid for by the rest of us—it’s called social-ism, a positive slurred into a negative by the hell-bent. It’s only right that the clever, aggressive, ruthless, or lucky rich should pay much more tax than those of us who made wealth generation possible with our taxes and sweat, with our dutiful educating and protecting. The rich don’t become rich in a vacuum, but isn’t it true that most rich folk in their gated communities and their bullet-proof stretch Limos think their money is all about them and not about the bounteous gifts of opportunity provided by society as a whole? Hog isn’t aware of the human community; the world of Hog is Hog. People who are smart and talented and make lots of money producing goods or services have every right to accept the money people will pay for what they offer. Those people produce value for themselves and their consumers. But from him who has been given much, much is expected in return—isn’t that a basic principle of reciprocity avowed by every mainstream religion? Isn’t that just common sense? Isn’t that good? Smart, talented people must also produce value for the social infrastructure that nurtures them, and

that means, among other things, paying taxes—fair taxes, a higher tax the higher up the economic ladder you go. Even at the highest tax level, you’ll still be filthy rich. You’re able to be filthy rich because of the society you help sustain with your taxes. Of course, there’s a right and a wrong way to produce goods and services. Exploiting people, of course, is evil, right? You’d never know it, listening to TV prosperity evangelists or rightwing politicians. Isn’t exploiting religion to make money an example of the spirit of antichrist that they throw in the faces of “socialists”? Besides enriching themselves, religionists and politicians provide a valuable service shrouding mega-rich corporate Hogs in smokescreens. Poverty exists because of aristocratic selfishness. Poverty will persist until the unholy triune Hog is deconstructed abstractly and concretely dismantled. And that can only be accomplished via education, which the Right wants to control—to “privatize,” meaning corporatize—to promote its Hoggish agenda. Better yet, home school the piglets. Too late. Some doggone Deist opens the book and reads the words right off the page where Jesus, some author’s or authors’ vision of the Good personified as a perfect human being, the literary antithesis of Hog, said, “You cannot serve God and wealth,” aka “mammon” (Luke 16:13). Then she leafs to the page where Jesus instructed point-blank, “Sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor” (Matt. 19:21). (And all the piglets squeal, “But, but, but, oink.”) When Jesus sent his disciples out as missionaries, he told them to wear sandals and only one tunic and to take nothing on their journey except a staff, not even bread, a bag, or a little money in their belts (Mark 6:8-9). (The prosperity evangelist explains, “What he really meant was…”) The directives of Jesus to his followers were not negotiable. “Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Luke 12:33-34). (Of course, this doesn’t apply to post-resurrection Hogs.)

How many possessions are enough? None, according to Matthew’s version. “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matt. 6:19-21). (“Let me repeat,” Hog assures his piglets, “This does not apply to us, the blessed ones, the faithful ones chosen to be prosperous.”) In Luke 16:10-13, Jesus claimed, “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other.” Again, “You cannot serve God and wealth.” (A piglet nods all-knowingly, light glinting from her gold tooth and diamond-studded nails, “We don’t serve wealth. Wealth serves us.”) When Jesus was ridiculed by the Pharisees, “who were lovers of money,” he responded, “You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of others; but God knows your hearts; for what is prized by human beings is an abomination in the sight of God” (Luke 16:1415). Not gay lovers or women lovers packing contraceptives, but money lovers commit the great abomination. But, reader, be warned: Call a rich sexist homophobe a Hog to his face and he might just boot you. All good Christians know that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God (Matt. 19:23; Mark 10:25, 27). (Yes, Hog counters, but with God all things are possible.) Hog’s point being that it’s possible for God to encourage selfishness. But Jesus wasn’t saying that. Given that the “eye of the needle” was the name for the opening in the Jerusalem Wall where caravans entered, so named because it was so narrow that the camels had to be unloaded outside and the goods schlepped in later by hand, the parable doesn’t mean that the rich can slip through

without divesting themselves of their riches. Therefore, many who are “first” will be “last” (Mark 10:31). Certainly “none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions” (Luke 14:33). (Of course, Hog notes, blessings are not possessions. All I possess belongs to Hog. I mean God.) Once, a rich man said to Jesus, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus answered, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” Jesus, being a man and not God, is not good like God is good. But he is nonetheless well-versed enough to give authoritative advice: don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, don’t bear false witness, don’t defraud, and honor your father and mother. The rich man had done all that. Jesus advised him, “Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.” The rich man “was shocked and went away,” Hogtied and “grieving” (Mark 10:17-22). Jesus said that when we give a luncheon or a dinner, we should not invite our friends or brothers or relatives or rich neighbors; rather, when we give a banquet, we should invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind (Luke 14:12-14). Not just once with the cameras rolling, not just a few times as a guilt offering. Always. He warned rich TV evangelists and talk-show hostesses just like the rest of us, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven. So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matt. 6:1-4). Jesus never said that gays would go to hell, or even thought it necessary to mention homosexuality at all. Jesus never said that women were doormats or that they should stay barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. But he did illustrate the important point that rich believers who leave the poor lying outside their gates will not enter heaven (Luke 16:19-31). No wonder Hogs keep harping on

“terrorist agendas” instituting perversions of homosexuals, feminazis, and socialists. Red herring. Hog is perverted. In the parable of the sower (Luke 8:14), the seed that falls among the thorns signifies “the ones who hear; but as they go on their way, they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature.” Piglets abound in the pigpens of spiritual infertility. Luke 6:20-26 is Jesus’ short list of blessings vs. woes. “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.” Prosperity fundamentalists try to wiggle out of this veritable truth about charitable unselfishness by arguing that this blessed/woe polarity is pre-resurrection. The future of blessing is already here, they assure themselves; just like the Pharisees, they are entitled to riches because they are divine-right children of the divine-right King, Almighty Hog. Jesus himself responded to such faulty reasoning (Luke 6:29-31). “From anyone who takes away your coat, do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.” Now! Twenty centuries later, post-resurrection, the poor are still among us. Jesus warned, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions” (Luke 12:15). Corporate dominionists should remember the parable of the rich man whose land “produced abundantly” (16), who said, “I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things

you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are [therefore] not rich toward God” (18-21). “You cannot serve God and wealth” (Matt. 6:24). Judas betrayed Jesus for a mere thirty pieces of silver. The chief priests who had bribed him took the returned money back, of course, but they didn’t want to break any laws by restoring it to the treasury, where it could have been spent on things like food for the poor. Instead, they bought a field for burying foreigners, henceforth called the Field of Blood. Meanwhile, the chief priests gave the soldiers guarding the tomb of Jesus a large sum of money to tell people that the disciples stole Jesus while the guard was asleep. It’s all right there in the Bible. According to Jesus, a day of judgment will come when the goats on his left hand will be separated from the sheep on his right hand. Then he will say to those at his left hand, “You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.” Then they also will answer, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?” Then he will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life. (Matt 23: 41-46). What dominionist Hog today really believes this? By its very nature, Hog dominionism contradicts the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). Jesus wasn’t impressed by rich disciples tossing twenties into the collection plate. He was moved by the poor widow who put in two small copper coins worth a penny, which was “everything she had, all she had to live on” (Mark 12:41-44). Hers was an act of authentic charity. Imagine Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey

and Congress and the whole world’s one-percenters tossing all their pennies into the collection plate. Charity is perverted today by rich evangelists and their political Hogwash just as it was when the great teacher of unselfishness aggressively drove from the temple all those who by their selling and buying were converting a house of prayer into a den of robbers (Matt. 21:12-13; John 2:13-16). Why is it that many of us who read Jesus as literary symbol honor his theology more than those claiming faith in the Bible as Godbreathed literal truth? Only the shadow knows. Good News: Mercy, Not Sacrifice Just like fat people know they have to forgo their daily pig-out to lose weight and get healthy, even atheists know they need to relinquish their money-grubbing to be emotionally happy and healthy. But there’s good sacrifice and bad sacrifice. Replacing your quarterpounders with Oreos is not going to work. Spiritually, sacrifice of selfishness is really all that’s needed. Most people, though, have been led to believe that to get something you want, even something spiritual, you have to sacrifice something material, like say those collection plate dollars. In fundamentalist circles, the principle of primitive sacrifice perverts charity by twisting it into an investment scheme requiring divine repayment with interest. Prosperity Christians today still tithe ten percent to temple robbers to bribe God for increased prosperity. It’s tradition. Petitions to God became bribes and then “reminders” that God must “honor” his “promises.” In effect, God was given orders to obey manmade directives masquerading as God’s own Word. When God didn’t obey the petitions, bribes, or orders, they were reissued toward humans, but only in distant myths could priests and tribal leaders miraculously erase calamity. The immediate cause and effect of sacrifice lost all credibility; sacrifice itself had lost its inherent efficacy. But humans continued to sacrifice in the name of tradition. The Law had become the means to its own end, like the yearly stoning of townsfolk in Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, or contributing to the “ministry” of prosperity evangelists like the charlatans I’ve deconstructed in BornAgain Deist.

Superstitious rituals of legalistic “sacrifice” are as hypocritical as they are fruitless, as Jesus eloquently exemplified (Matt. 12:1-8) in an encounter with some Pharisees who criticized him and his disciples for illegally breaking the sabbath by eating grain in the section of grainfield set aside by law for the poor, as per Leviticus 19:9. Jesus pointed out that there was nothing inherently evil about eating on the sabbath if the priests eating on the sabbath were guiltless. Jesus and his friends were just eating grain in a grainfield. David, he noted, wasn’t held guilty when he and his comrades ate the forbidden temple bread of the Presence, which only priests were allowed to eat. The Pharisees were condemning the guiltless, Jesus argued, because they took exception to the principle of love superseding primitive legalism. They didn’t understand love’s fundamental rule, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice,” as he paraphrased Hosea 6:6: “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” David himself understood this: “Sacrifice and meal offering Thou hast not desired; my ears Thou hast opened; burnt offering and sin offering Thou hast not required.” David had changed his mind about sacrifice. He had been enlightened. “Then I said, ‘Behold, I come; in the scroll of the book it is written of me: I delight to do Thy will, O my God; thy law is within my heart” (Psalm 40:6-8). Moral law isn’t a divinely dictated scroll of thou shalt, thou shalt not; the Bible isn’t a book of magic spells; religion isn’t ritual abracadabras. The higher law of love is articulated as moral principles registered by any human’s inherent conscience, and moral religion embodies a group’s effort toward enactment. In Psalm 51, David added, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise.” Contrary to the elaborate system of sacrifices established by exploiting high priests of church and state, all you have to sacrifice is your arrogance and your lack of steadfast love and mercy. Butcher and burn the unholy Hog trinity on an altar of love in the temple of your heart. There’s something greater here than the religious institution (“temple”) of antiquated legalism. It’s the good news of lovingkindness embodied by the good teacher Jesus, who, as the

nonstop ambassador of the law of love, thereby proclaimed anything good on any other day to be good on the sabbath. No doubt feeding the poor would be a more legitimate use of the sabbath than, say, the Sunday morning money-groveling three-ring circus of TV evangelism. Dominionists like, say, Pat Robertson or Rick Santorum or Ann Coulter who “strain out a gnat but swallow a camel” might be enlightened enough by perusing Matthew 23:12-28 to lighten up their bashing of everyone outside their country club. The opposite of greed and aristocratic arrogance is unselfish love. If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful (Luke 6:32-36). Every major religion posits love and truth as fundamental tenets, but all versions of fundamentalism controvert love and contradict truth. Millions of Americans are exploited, preyed upon, and even left to die by policies implemented socially and politically by the so-called “Religious” Right. In contrast to the flag-desecrating, pseudo-righteous Tea Party, Deism defines democracy as a society in which each and every person has the God-given freedom to do whatever he or she chooses as long as it does not directly harm another person, like say an exploited employee, or a victim of pollution or bankster greed. Cutthroat capitalism shows no mercy, hence regulation. Deism confutes the spiritual and practical lies of corporate-gofer politicians. In other words, in contrast to elitists, we Deists endorse the principles of Jeffersonian democracy preserved by government of, by, and for the people, not of, by, and for certain special people, or of, by, and for a corporate/religious oligarchy.

We believe that the role of government is to provide national security, to protect each and every citizen from harm, to preserve all civil and other natural rights, and to promote the public good, not to kowtow to the corporate elite sacralized by the religious elite. We believe that the government does not have the right to impose laws or restrictions or to favor values that deny freedom and civil liberties of individuals, hence separation of church and state, hence corporate regulation, hence laws that protect us from each other. Society does not have the right, either, to dictate values that deny individual freedoms and rights. Behavior that doesn’t directly harm another should be allowed and legally protected, and any laws forbidding behavior harmless to others should be immediately overturned. We Deists seek to uphold the spirit of our Constitution, as created by the genius of our Deist Founders. Hypocrites have the right to be hypocritical; the stupid have the right to be stupid; psychopaths have the right to be evil. But the hypocritical, stupid, or evil person, alone or in a group, has no right to harm any other person. He can be whatever he chooses; but he cannot do whatever he chooses if he chooses to harm someone else. It’s a Deist’s duty to expose the profound hypocrisy of Tea Party Christian-America control freaks whose pseudo righteousness smokescreens harm so severe it qualifies as evil even by their standards. Deist righteousness couples beneficence with justice; that’s what we mean by love. Our only sacrifice is to the cause of that love. Our mercy is egalitarian and just, even toward Hogs. When Hog Brings Home the Bacon In Criminology: Crime and Criminal Justice, Criminologists D. Stanley Eitzen and Doug A. Timmer point out (quoting E. Currie’s “Fighting Crime”), “Contemporary conservatives like those conservatives before them who ‘have successfully posed as the guardians of domestic tranquility for decades’ typically promote social and economic policies ‘that bear a large part of the responsibility for the level of crime and violence we suffer today.’” Let me offer Exhibit A: The pork pie known quaintly as America’s economic meltdown gone global.

You’ve heard of America’s economic meltdown, right? Do you know what that means? Sort of? Me, too. Oh, I knew bits and pieces picked up from snippets and snatches pitched by the news media. Of course, the big news, the facts, the truth about Wall Street corruption, was withheld from us for a long time because the mainstream “liberal” media was owned and operated by corrupt “conservative” Wall Street: Hog himself. I had to work hard to understand the basics, because much of what it’s important to know has been shrouded in secrecy. Much is opaque; it’s not transparent. Let me share with you what I think I understand. I’ll start with the house you or your neighbor recently lost to foreclosure. In the old days before banks were deregulated in 1999-2000, you applied for a loan to buy a house; the bank checked your creditworthiness to make sure that you had a job and a good payback record (credit score) and that the house you wanted to buy was within your means; and the bank loaned you the money to buy the house, which you would pay back in installments over, say, twenty years, plus interest. In the old days, the bank made money on the interest and simple investments it made with your monthly payments spread out over the twenty years. At any given time, you only owned the portion of your house you had thus far paid for. You and the bank were co-owners of your house until it was paid off at the end of the twenty years (or earlier, if you won the lotto or were otherwise able to pay off the rest of your mortgage ahead of schedule). If you defaulted on your mortgage loan, if you couldn’t pay the mortgage plus interest on schedule, the bank still had your house as collateral. If you couldn’t pay for an extended period, the bank foreclosed on your house. Your house could be sold and the bank paid the remainder owed on its remaining share in the house. In the old days, foreclosure was a rare event. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insured the bank so it wouldn’t take a loss on its mortgaged houses and other loans and so money held in checking and savings accounts would be safe. The Fed insured loans to make sure that a good flow of capital funds were available to you and the rest of us to borrow,

which kept your community and the rest of the country running. When you put money in a savings account, you got interest on some of that money, which the bank had invested in mortgages and other loans or in securities (stocks, bonds, and commodities). Local businesses could borrow bank money to start up, operate, and expand, and you got a job in one of those businesses or in an infrastructure institution (school, police department, post office, etc.) that supported the society within which those businesses could be grown. Successful businesses paying back their loans made it possible for you to spend your paycheck on products and services provided by those businesses and to take out loans for large purchases like your house, car, boat, etc. In other words, all the money you borrowed from the bank made money for the bank, which paid bankers’ salaries and allowed the bank to loan us all money to buy big purchases and pay for them over time, with interest, and even our small purchases at stores benefitted the banks that had loaned those stores money. The pool of cash, or capital, was continuously available to you and your neighborhood businesses. The federal government, consisting of trusted people we elected to represent our best interests plus their trusted assistants and appointees, facilitated the smooth operation of this system of reciprocal benefit, collected taxes to fund itself and its agencies, aka the Fed (think of the Fed as the head of our household), and to provide a federal pool of money (the US Treasury, i.e., our tax dollars) available for infrastructure like roads and bridges and for services like schools, police departments, and post offices. In the old days, you didn’t drive on potholes and collapsing bridges, and your kids learned the facts and the cops threw the bad guys in jail. But after deregulation, especially after the capitulating deregulation of 2000, all that changed. A tumor began to bubble into the cancer that would eat away the body of America. In the old days, if you personally wanted to invest money, you had to go through a broker, a special kind of banker who sold you a share, or stock, in a company; if the company did well, you got a piece of its profits, a dividend, a return. Bonds were sold to raise money for government projects, often local or state, but the yield, the

amount of your profit, though guaranteed by the government, took longer to mature. Bonds were considered a safer risk, but the return was smaller and took time to mature. By investing in government bonds you were investing in America. You the buyer didn’t really have any way to know the actual worth of an investment. The broker sold you, say, a stock in IBM, jacked up the price to you a bit, then paid himself a commission plus the jackup he skimmed from the actual price, which you weren’t allowed to see; you only got to see the price you were charged, or maybe the jacked-up price plus the commission. Once computers hit the scene, all the pricing and other data once only available to Wall Street brokers now became available to you. The information was now transparent. Not only could you see the actual value of an investment, making it harder and harder for brokers to skim from a jacked-up price, you could also buy from online companies that let you pay far less for your transaction. The middle man, the traditional broker, either made far less on transactions or was cut out of the process altogether. It also got easier to shop around for better deals on loans. Leftbehind traditional bankers suddenly needed to invent a new product. Voilá: the digital bond, aka blended bond, aka consolidated debt obligation (CDO), or what I call a glob. Banks bundled together lots of individual mortgages into a huge mortgage-bond glob, which they offered for sale to investment banks—big banks that invested in bigger, often riskier investments. An investment bank that bought a mortgage bond would now receive your and your neighbors’ mortgage payments including interest. The investment bank gave the traditional bank, say, $800,000 for a million dollar mortgage. The traditional bank got instant cash and the investment bank got the payments plus interest over twenty or thirty years. You might think the traditional bank got shorted, but remember that the actual house is only the means to an end; for the banker, your house’s value is the money loaned and the return on the money plus interest. The traditional bank could now invest that immediate $800,000 and potentially make a profit that exceeded the $200,000 difference on the house. In effect, the bank took out a loan on your original loan for the purpose of its own investing. Because mortgage

bonds were designer brands just getting hot, more and more banks began investing in them, driving demand and costs up even higher. Banks started lending money to just about anybody wanting to buy a house, because if you defaulted, your house would be worth more by then and they could resell your house for more than they would have collected from you. In other words, in that kind of housing bubble, investment banks could potentially make more if you foreclosed. That kind of rotten dealing could not have thrived had the process been transparent. Here’s where the devil made you do it. If you, an investor (or the manager who handled your investments, including your pension funds), bought a mortgage-bond glob, you owned a share in the individual mortgages, meaning payback of various people’s mortgages. Essentially, a “glob” of strangers from all over the world, strangers to you, strangers to each other, owned (and probably still own) your house until the final payoff date. No longer was your house owned by your neighborhood bank, which was owned by neighborhood bankers you could look in the eye. Banking, and home ownership, had become surreally global. Ownership was now super opaque. So opaque that you, via your investment manager (say, of your 401k), could participate in ownership of a bond glob without even knowing it. By the end of 2000, lenders had realized that if they could sell bundled mortgage globs, why not bundle other kinds of loans? A second type of glob bond was created, the “asset-backed security” bond, allowing investors to buy into ownership of payments on credit cards, college loans, car loans, and any other kind of membership or commitment to scheduled payments. The glob thickened. Bankers thought, why not combine bundled mortgage bonds and bundled asset-backed security bonds into an even bigger bond? Enter the mondo-glob bond: A mondo-bond glob plus a mondo-bond glob equals a much larger mondo-glob bond—a glob bomb with its fuse already lit. Remember that in the old days, investment banks and brokers were able to skim and make deals because people couldn’t really know what the stock or other investment was actually worth. People had to trust the brokers. Computers changed that. Now people could “see.” But because banks and brokers thrived on secrecy, on your

not being able to “see,” they decided to exploit those same computers to create a new level of secrecy. They blended together bunches of those existing mortgage bonds and asset-backed security bonds into mondo-glob bombs that were so humungous and complex that only the well-trained and very patient eye could “see,” and they broke up those mondo-glob bonds into pieces to sell. Because there were so many obligations—potentially millions of individual mortgages, credit card accounts, loans, etc.—thrown into the mondo-glob pot, individual investors and even most brokers really couldn’t “see” anything but a blur of miscellaneous data: Even they didn’t know what the mondo-globs consisted of. They certainly didn’t understand its risk—the probability of the glob losing money. Secret, super opaque, risky mondo-glob bond bombs were a leading cause of the socio-economic meltdown that exploded into the Occupy Wall Street Revolt that flashed out into the current Occupy Revolution. The mondo-glob bond controllers, the bank higher-ups who bundled and controlled and managed the whole mondo-glob bond, could easily skim and take commissions on all its thousands and even potentially millions of smaller pieces. If the pieces were sold and resold, and then repackaged and re-repackaged and then sold and resold again and again, the trader could make an even bigger killing than in the old days. The mondo-glob bond controllers were fast becoming the real owners of pretty much everything—our houses, our cars, our health care providers, our pensions, the businesses where we worked. They were intentionally buying up America. They, not we. We part owners, we owners of what we thought was our own stuff, we invested owners of the minute pieces of the mondo-glob pie, we had no clue what was happening. Oink: It Gets Worse Opaque overly-blended mondo-glob bonds muddied the transparency ushered in by computers. The digital revolution morphed into digital convolution, and then convulsion. Psychopathic predators shot us a toothy grin. They were poised to lure us through limbo into hell: They invented deceptive blending. The Hog predators

didn’t call it that; it got called that after they got caught. Deceptive blending is the glob gone viral. The viral glob, investment banks’ latest designer product to sell, was a bond consisting of blended high- and low-risk loans. And there were lots of high-risk loans to juggle. This fusion of high-low risk generated the nuclear blended-bond bomb. Because banks were insured by the Fed, i.e. FDIC, i.e. the Treasury, i.e. our tax dollars— because defaults were covered by our tax dollars, banks no longer had any motivation to be safe in their loans. In essence, they were gambling using our money. Risk became more lucrative than responsible loaning, because instant payback by the Fed on bad loans equaled more ready cash to invest right now on investments that could potentially yield much more than paltry sums collected on the loans over time. But there was yet another level to scam for profit. Statistically, the blended bonds appeared to be medium-risk, making them attractive to potential investors and driving up their price, but in fact the high-risk loans made the blend far more risky than the viral blended-glob’s statistical average. One reason is that statistics were based on the average credit scores of recipients of the loans, and those scores couldn’t accurately predict real-life circumstances like deflated housing prices following a real estate bubble burst or growing unemployment and shrinking salaries due to off-shoring or any number of other factors. Another reason that the statistics were skewed was that the banks themselves hired the ratings agencies that rated the credit of the individuals whose debt was part of the blended bonds, and thus they (the banks) themselves rated the bonds. Plus those ratings agencies, like Standard & Poor’s, including their guidelines and rules, were overseen by the banks themselves. Then Hog belched. Picture a suit named John Paulson of the hedge fund Paulson & Co. holding a viral blended-glob. You might not have heard of hedge-Hog Paulson, but you’ve probably heard of Goldman Sachs and AIG. These three are an unholy trinity of deception; they are Hog on acid. One of Paulson’s sins against humanity was to create Abacus, a blended-glob consisting of 123 securities backed by mortgages in

the overheated real estate bubbles of Arizona, California, Florida, and Nevada. In other words, Paulson’s blended-glob bonds consisted of soon-to-be mortgage defaults; but because of his wizardry in deceptive blending, his glob was rated AAA, and because deceptive blends are opaque, investors couldn’t “see” that this glob-bomb was ticking. Paulson hitched up with Goldman Sachs, which created a blended, synthetic CDO mondo-glob bond. Because Paulson knew the synthetic glob was explosive, in other words, because he knew the bond would go bust like a balloon filled with dynamite, he bought credit insurance from AIG. Once the mondoglob bond failed, investors lost over a billion dollars, the same amount Paulson made in profit by collecting on the insurance from AIG. Goldman Sachs made around $25 million in fees. AIG was paid back the billion it paid to Paulson with your tax dollars in the bailout of 2008, because the mondo bank industry, the mondo-glob market, was “too big to fail”—meaning if one bank failed, a cascade of entities dependent on that bank would also fail. Your tax dollars bailed out all the other big-shot mondo-glob marketers luring investors like your pension manager into buying the $600 trillion in toxic, explosive bonds. Many deceptive-blended-mondo-glob marketers, devoid of conscience—psychopaths, in other words; in other words, the devil Hog—just reinvested the bailout money—your money—in more toxic bonds and offshore investments, which of course robbed you of your job, or it will. To help cover the $600 trillion, the government printed more money, which devalued the dollar along with all the stuff you had planned to buy with yours. Insurance like that bought by Paulson used to be illegal. Well, it’s still illegal. That’s why the transaction is called by the whitewashed “derivatives,” or credit default “swaps.” You’ve heard of swaps, right? Swaps are deceptive insurance like that Paulson bought from AIG— shh, they don’t call it insurance, because insurance is regulated by the government. (See why Hoggish politicians keep pushing deregulation and “free” market?) They call it swaps in order to pull the wool over the eyes of American taxpayers whose mortgages, credit accounts, pensions, etc. are used to make money for psychopathic predatory Hogs like Paulson, Goldman Sachs, and AIG —American taxpayers who foot the bill for a bailout of demonic

companies who screw American taxpayers out of all this money and out of jobs, not only the actual jobs but the value of any existing jobs, meaning jobs still here in the U.S. bond-bomb nuclear winter of our discontent. Shakespeare couldn’t have written a greater tragedy. In the old days following the stock market crash and the Great Depression, regulations kept predator bankers and brokers under control. Some perfectly good people worked at some of those banks and brokerages. But mixed among those good people were selfish closet Hogs greedy for mega-mammon. The gluttons hired lobbyists to pay legislators to deregulate. And so it came to pass, beginning with deregulation of savings and loans in the 1980s followed by massive deregulation enacted by the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. Following deregulation, regulators no longer regulate. After 2000, being out of the loop, regulators couldn’t “see” the Great Bank Robbery going on—couldn’t see, for instance, the $600 trillion-plus in over-the-counter derivatives contracts by 2007—and therefore had no sense of the magnitude of risk metastasizing throughout the entire financial system, even though having a total sense was their job. Following deregulation, the derivatives market, the swaps, the otherwise illegal insurance of defaulting mondo-glob bonds, was legal, sort of. Banks made more money on failed bonds than on those that succeeded, because bankers now sold insurance against our failure and even their own, the loss of our homes, the loss of our jobs, the loss of our credit, security, and happiness. Swaps markets —banks selling insurance against default—have devalued people, businesses, communities, and America. Greedy Hogs have transformed our fairly functional democracy into our present plutocracy ruled by the richest one percent. They cast an evil spell, putting the princess to sleep and turning the prince into a toad. The greedy traitors created the magical bubble of 2000-07, then made a killing when it popped. Dylan Ratigan calls these “bankster” Hogs “greedy bastards”; I read into that a bit more symbolism than he perhaps intended: The greedy bastards are not legitimate children of America. Maybe the Obama citizenship bigot bash is psychotic projection. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Chair Phil Angelides

calls the driving force of our nation a sand castle economy. Because there have as yet been no prosecutions of greedy bastards, no deterrents put in place, no real payments of penalties to compensate for all the blatant instances of ethical irresponsibility, Angelides complains that Wall Street has escaped like a greased pig. Oink. To put this in perspective, hold these facts in your hat: 1) In 2011, banks made record profits; 2) The ten biggest banks now control 77% of the country’s banking assets; 3) The ten biggest banks made $62 billion in profits last year, thanks to the TARP bailout initiated during the Bush administration; 4) Wall Street compensation in 2010 rose to record levels—$135 billion to the rich hired hands employed by publically traded Wall Street firms; 5) 30 million people need fulltime jobs; 6) nine trillion dollars in wealth of American families has been vaporized; 7) four million families have lost their homes to foreclosure, and experts project that 8-13 million will have lost their homes before the current crisis is over. Too bad, the Hogs snort. They just gave themselves millions in bonuses because their banks “turned a profit.” In their dreams. Just a couple years ago they were teetering on the edge of the abyss. As a tax payer who contributed to the Treasury that gave these greasy Hogs the handouts that saved their bacon, am I and all my other taxpaying comrades not collectively those fat Hogs’ employer? As their employer, I, on behalf of my fellow citizens, demand repayment of all that Hog stole from us. And I demand that all guilty Hogs get a sentence of life in prison—a real prison with bread and water, not the Gothic dungeon where they’ve dumped us. But alas, Hogs sit poolside at their multimillion-dollar mansions sipping martinis and writing checks adding up to hundreds of millions —really, by now it’s billions—to lobbyists and politicians to make sure their little crap shoot stays unregulated. Even the conservative Supreme Court Justices voted to keep it that way by ruling that banks and corporations are “people” who can give unlimited money to political campaigns supporting the special interests of banks and corporations. Screw “we, the people.” Real people. Oink, Oink: It Gets Even Worse

Wait, there’s more. The Wall Street trader traitors have done far more damage than screwing us out of our cash and our homes. To make even more money, the so-called “American” corporations, backed by Wall Street, subsidized by our tax dollars, have shipped our jobs overseas to places like communist China. “American” corporations aren’t really American anymore. Mondo multinational corporations and the Wall Street banksters that stoke them and profit from them have become a separate nation unto itself. This Corporate Nation has successfully completed a covert coup d’état. The Corporate Nation now owns and operates the United States of America. The Corporate Nation is Hog, self-righteous, arrogant, psychopathic worshipper of Almighty Hog. Hog, groveling lustfully before his own image (for that is what Almighty Hog is), grunts and squeals in the stench of his own mammon. That’s right, piglets: Mammon is Hog poop, i.e., dinner. Thanks to Hog, here in America more than one in four houses are underwater. Thanks to Hog, thirty million people need jobs, and laidoff workers who recently found new jobs have taken pay cuts of over twenty percent, the deepest cuts since the Great Depression. Thanks to Hog, almost half the population now lives in poverty. No generation alive has ever before seen that level of poverty in the United States of America. But the wealth of the Hoggish rich has exploded astronomically at the expense of the rest of us. In 2010, in the midst of economic catastrophe, CEOs paid themselves on average $10.8 million a year, a scandalous 23 percent more than the previous year. They gave themselves and their squires outrageously huge bonuses for successfully screwing us 99% of Americans out of our homes, our pensions, our health care, our industrial infrastructure, our tax dollars, and perhaps worst of all, our government. The government of, by, and for the people has been supplanted by a government of, by, and for “Wall Street,” the Corporate Nation. It’s disgraceful. It’s terrifying. Wall Street isn’t just banks and their bonds pimps. Wall Street deals in bonds, commodities, and stocks, the paraphernalia of the corporate addict. Sweat shops, no longer legal in America, move the cogs and wheels of the Corporate Nation. Parading as “patriots,”

citizens of a Corporate Nation at war with the real America are moving offshore because they can make more money ripping off even more citizens of other countries, especially communist China. The so-called “American” elite colluding with the so-called “Chinese” elite have built a subsidiary of the global Corporate Nation made up of elites of many nations, including those that are technically enemies of the real America. Isn’t that treason? In the early 90s, China devalued its currency by about sixty percent, and other Asian countries followed China’s lead. That meant we could get China’s goods at bargain basement prices, but American goods now seemed twice as expensive. China imposed tariffs—the taxes countries charge on imports—of 25 percent, compared to America’s 2.5 percent. That meant in China it was suddenly very expensive to buy American goods and much cheaper for the Chinese to buy their own goods. Because workers in China were basically slaves to the communist corporate elites, American companies could move to China or outsource to partner companies in China to produce their goods at a huge savings. At that point, over sixty percent of China’s exports to the U.S. are actually goods produced in China by non-Chinese global corporations—the Corporate Nation. Yes, we Americans could buy Chinese-made goods cheaper. But we did so by losing our jobs, because industries that had employed us were now largely or entirely based in China. The truth that WalMart doesn’t want you to know is that buying “cheaper” is very, very expensive. Low-paid Americans are manning the registers, but the products they ring up are not American-made, despite their “American” labels. Even products made in the U.S. are largely made of parts not made in the U.S. Thanks to corporate deregulation, unemployment in this country has soared, people have lost their houses, loans have defaulted, and the Wall Street and communist China elite—the Corporate Nation— have gotten filthy rich. Surely this constitutes both an economic and a political partnership that by American standards constitutes high treason. To make matters worse, so-called American corporations have so many tax loopholes, most amassed during the reign of “Dubya”

Bush, that most multinationals pay little or no tax. Worst of all, several of those multinationals, even those making billions in profits, get subsidies. Let’s be clear: A subsidy is government money, aka a handout, aka corporate welfare. That money is our tax dollars. Rich corporations and their rich owners and managers pay little or no taxes, they ship our jobs to someplace like China, they sell us cheap Chinese crap, take away our houses, put us in debt through no fault of our own, then steal from the US Treasury the tax dollars the 99% rest of us earned with our own sweat labor. On top of that, they have driven down the value of the American dollar while at the same time driving down worker pay, and then they have the Hog-balls to try to destroy unions. That’s what I call a covert coup d’état. That’s treason, people; let’s take them to trial. Well, right, they didn’t technically steal our tax dollars from the Treasury. It was handed to them by politicians that they had bought. So basically they were just paying themselves back. A coup of collusion. This shouldn’t have happened. It did happen because in the era of deregulation, Wall Street lobbyists, squires in the Corporate Kingdom, swarmed to Washington to purchase one of their most valuable commodities: Congress. The majority of senators and house representatives we voted into office were candidates picked by their respective bought-off parties whose campaigns were fueled by Wall Street money, i.e., money controlled entirely by the Corporate Nation. There’s now a population explosion of lobbyists, the corporate henchmen who tell our elected officials what to do. Shouldn’t it be our job to support representatives who don’t let the devil make them do it? Shouldn’t we root out the bacon bits and toss them to the gutter? Instead we’re stuck on an animal farm in nineteen eighty-four. It could be worse. You could live in China, maybe in a labor camp like that run by Apple’s partner corporation, Foxconn, aka “iPod City,” an underworld that would have made Dickens balk. Here young people work twelve hours a day, six or seven days a week, doing the same task over and over all day long for seventy-five cents an hour. The workers live in “dormitories” no frat boy could imagine in conditions so horrible that workers kill themselves. One time, when

Apple executives were touring the plant, yet another iSlave attempted suicide. Apple generously responded by increasing average wage to about a buck an hour and installed suicide-nets to catch jumpers. Remember that the next time you pull out your Americanese-made iPad or iPhone or iPod. Yes, we’re better off than Chinese slaves. But even here workers get screwed due to what has been dubbed “our shrinking economy.” For instance, as Ratigan points out in Dirty Bastards, the Swedish company IKEA has a plant in Danville, Virginia, that makes furniture just like its plants in Sweden. Their minimum wage is about $19 an hour, and they get a government-mandated five weeks of paid vacation. But here, full-time workers start at $8 an hour and get twelve vacation days, eight of which are predetermined by the company. A third of the workers are temps whose wages are even lower; like most temps, they get no paid days off, no insurance, no benefits at all. Here in Florida our illustrious governor, Rick Scott, wants our state and the whole country to compete with China by deregulating altogether and creating our own labor camps. Oink, oink. For those of you who have lived under a rock, it’s us versus Wall Street, Hog incarnate. We the people are we the 99%. We the people are unions and workers and people who know that this nation is a society, not a jungle playground for ruthless psychopathic Hogs and their corporate toys. It’s the United States of America vs. the Corporate Nation. God vs. Hog. American corporations are not just shipping our jobs overseas; “American” corporations themselves are not just relocating to China. They are investing in China, merging with the communist elite, selling American technology to our enemies. They are becoming Chinese. And they want us to build an electric fence in Arizona? (Projection? Red herring?) Corporate industrialists in China. Wall Street bondsmen. Political gofers. Don’t even get me started on America’s anti-American corporate health insurance/drug fraud. These predators aren’t just greedy. Their agenda is to form a Corporate Nation that can take over the world. Think of it: Hog will

rule the Earth, with 99% of Earth’s population as its personal slaves. Why wouldn’t they? That’s where we’re headed. The colossal coup d’état is underway. Hog squeals and grunts. Hogtied, Or Bondage, In Layman’s Terms At the heart of the financial crisis is a fundamentally flawed worldview that is based on several fallacies: 1) the world is a jungle; 2) the fittest will survive; 3) as the survivor fittest thrive, the species evolves; 4) a nation is its economy; 5) only an unregulated economy thrives. As demonstrated in previous chapters, the human world is a society, not a jungle. The predatory elite has made it appear like a jungle. The jungle food chain consists of the rich 1% exploiting the 99%. Jungle exploitation takes many forms, including underpaying labor, overburdening the 99% taxpayers, off-shoring jobs, looting the Treasury via bailouts and subsidies (the whitewashed term for corporate Welfare), and buying-off politicians. The jungle fauna consists of predators and prey. Psychologists tell us that approximately 1% of people are psychopaths; economic sociologists tell us that approximately 1% of people constitute the predatory financial elite. True, not all financial predators are psychopaths, and not all psychopaths are financial predators. You might think, then, that not all rich people are predatory. But all who derive great wealth from ownership of or investment in today’s version of Wall Street and the corporations and banks of which it consists are guilty of fomenting predation. Some rich predators are not clinically psychopathic, they’re just sociopathic. They’re indirect predators. They’re vultures that scavenge the carcasses left by the lions. They’re the little Hogs following the crumb trail of the big Hogs. The 1%, the big Hogs of the jungle, the economic psychopathic predators, insist that they and they alone be totally unregulated. They say it’s good for the country because they have confused an economy for a nation. For them the nation is the playground of the 1%. The laws exist to benefit them. The 99% are their personal slaves—they wish; for now, the 99% are their personal servants. The

Darwinian-libertarian Hogs want to be totally free to do whatever they want. Of course they want the 99% to be highly regulated, and the 1% to be entirely unregulated for the benefit of the 1% squealing about the absolute control that their jungle-pimp status demands. Laissez-faire libertarians assert that the market will correct itself. Right. Just leave rapists alone and they’ll do the right thing. That’s the mental bubble that just popped. The financial crisis is a spiritual cataclysm, a catastrophic tragedy in which the hero is carried off by headhunters into the tangled undergrowth of nationalized greed. Organized religion is no help. Fundamentalist Hogs live in the same jungle worldview as their Darwinian brothers, except the saints’ jungle is a fallen world inhabited by wild animals and demons. Representing the devil as the Edenic serpent conflates the animal and demon into one convenient bugaboo. Like corporate Darwinians, fundamentalist high priests want absolute control to hyper-regulate others and to completely deregulate themselves. Their successes included the absence of court and law enforcement monitoring of priest child molesters, and zero-tax status for religious corporations, including mega-churches that pull in millions and even billions, and not for charitable purposes. It’s time to bust too-big-to-fail monopolies. It’s time for restitution. I suggest starting with subsidized energy self-sufficiency—and by that I mean every house would be weatherized and retrofitted with madein-America no-grid solar panels and windmills, paid for by housing meltdown banksters. And every other building would be likewise equipped, compliments of corporate suppliers of non-renewable energy. Meanwhile, the government would offer a large cash award to the automaker that could produce the first inexpensive energy self-sufficient car—and not a plug-in: a car that generates its own energy: a car that is a solar-wind generator. These three steps would reduce or eliminate pollution, global warming, pollution-related sickness and death, wars for oil, dependence on corporate energy providers, grids and their outages, and corporate control over politics. New jobs would be created to accommodate set-up and maintenance—jobs that would remain in America. And it’s time to transcend this absurd worship of jobs, jobs, jobs. Nobody wants a job. A job is something you don’t want to do that

you do anyway to survive. A career is a step closer to what you do want to do, or at least toward greater security, ideally in the form of more buck for your bang. Simple redistribution of wealth would allow every person on the planet to work far fewer hours for far bigger paychecks. Equalization would vastly reduce collateral damages like crime, war, neuroses, and laziness, and would grant people precious time to pursue their passions, which would add significant value to individual lives and to society. Eliminate elitist entitlement and we’d all take a quantum leap closer to Paradise. And it’s time to stop the poisoning of our food supply all the way up the chain, from GMO to pesticides to hormones to preservatives to sugar loading and nutrient stripping. Not only do we allow these practices, we subsidize them. An individual can be prosecuted for murder for poisoning another person, but a corporation can legally poison us sick or dead and lie about it via FDA pseudo-regulation and deceptive labeling, just for starters. In a true democracy, the people would vote to end such perverted transgressions against our intelligently designed bodies and Earth’s body. And politicians: If we must allow legal lying in order to protect freedom of speech, we should at least make it illegal for politicians to knowingly lie to the public, since by taking an oath of office our elected officials are technically under oath for the duration of their tenure in office. Though they seem to have forgotten it, politicians are the people’s employees. If we the people can’t fire them for lying, surely we could file class-action lawsuits for breach of contract or fraud or negligence or something. Surely a smart lawyer could prove that lying and other D.C. double-dealing violates the Constitution, i.e., us. And violates the liar’s constitution. Ah, of course; but he’s untouchable; immortal, even. His flesh shall not corrupt nor his soul corrode nor his colossal stature crumble to dust like a statue of some mythic Ozymandias, he assures us, lighting up another fat cigar. (…Fade to smoke.) When Hog Has Had Enough Then Adam awoke from his nightmare and found it truth: The meltdown was breakdown: his, his country’s, his world’s. Not just a

mental breakdown; mental, moral, emotional, spiritual. How our protagonist longed for the community of humans! He aspired to humanness like theirs. No more the cloven hoof of a devil, no more the horns—how he had longed for horns, symbol of the alpha male. Now he recoiled from the adolescent lusts of Hogs. Revolted by his old taste for bacon, all he wanted now was one crumb of manna, even just a glimpse of the spiritual God. He loathed the word “dominance.” He longed to read Keats. Adam realized he couldn’t just cash in his mondo bonds and give the money to the poor. Then he would be among those needy poor, he would be a burden to other people and to society. And what is society, he wondered, if not other people? How blind he had been, how foolish. His society was the jungle, his home the pen refuge where he plotted hunts of other beasts much like himself. No, not like himself: The old goat munching tin cans was his beloved uncle Joe. The lamb was Aunt Tina. The elephant and the tiger were neighbors just as sociable as the sparrow and the squirrel. They weren’t even really animals; they were people. They weren’t competitors, they were relatives, they were friends. Adam straightened his tie. He took off his tie. He put on his blue jeans and took a walk in the park. A park paid for by the city, the community of “social-ists” who enjoy sharing nature. He walked past the county “social-ist” library—tempting, but it was such a beautiful day he hiked to the “social-ist” beach. How long it had been since he really looked at those waves. He couldn’t remember the last time he stopped to listen, to smell, to feel the spot he once considered the most sacred place on Earth. Now he felt nothing but nostalgia. Not just for the past. He felt a longing to regain the paradise he had lost living in the kingdom of Hog. He watched the buoys and gulls, embarrassed by the stupid Hog he had left sleeping in the body that had only last night been his. No, he wasn’t dead. Well, maybe he was. But this was a good death, good like a shot of penicillin to stave off pneumonia delirium; yes, he thought, a tear slipping past his grimace—breathe, breathe—this was his last chance to slough the vulture culture, to drive a stake through his vampire heart, to recover the good health of just being human.

What to do? Nothing. Pray. Read Shakespeare, read Frost and Thoreau and Alice Walker. Give money to a worthy cause. Vote for humanity, for human values embodied by a government for the people. Vote against the corporate agenda that had made him rich, made him famous in the realm of pigpens. Listen to Bach; study jazz. Discuss the latest films with people who think. Care. He had almost forgotten how. Had forgotten how. How he hated his past! How he wanted out! But there was no escape from memories, only correction, only apologies and major changes of clothes and values. He could do this. He had once been a good student, had played George in Our Town, had sung in Glee Club. His class, he remembered, had pondered Macbeth pondering the hellish consequences of enacting his “vaulting ambition.” Lady Macbeth and the three Witches, he had argued, represent projections— prophesies—of his success, i.e., his failure as a human being and the loss of his soul. At the beginning, he had said, Macbeth carefully weighs every action in the spiritual balance. But Macbeth deteriorates into madness, finally losing his… Eyes. Oedipus too had caused his own “fate.” Oedipus the King gouged out his eyes to no longer “see” the world through the eyes of hubris, but like the blind prophet who had brought him knowledge of himself, his life, his choices at the crossroads, his true family, the king too would see by the light of the real world within. The dark without, the light within. Opaque, transparent. Like Oedipus, he would be Teiresias. He would turn himself inside out and expose the inner truth, the truth that sets you free. Like Oedipus he had acted blindly, had plagued his own country, had sullied his own mother, not knowing who or what he truly was. Oedipus received mercy: blindness instead of death, “blindness” that was insight, for enlightenment transcends punishment. Love your neighbor as yourself. He had once loved. In college he had kissed an innocent princess awake. A few years later, he was a toad, and another princess kissed him into a prince. Then a great voice, a powerful brutish grunt, shattered the illusion: Realism was saved by the grace of Hog. Riches followed him like toilet paper stuck to the heel of the first princess’ flip-flop. Prestige was granted him as booty of the

conquest. Nature sprouted computers and cubicles, offices and skyscrapers, private jets and gated pens in a magical kingdom devoid of oceans and humans and indigenous trees. Life distilled to its essence—a good deed, deed as in proof of ownership of property. The voice of the third princess blared in his brain: What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world but forfeit his soul? She was quoting a teacher he had once admired. But that teacher was a myth, the heady illusion of youth. Adam the Boss had gained a wealth of reality. That was all he wanted, all he needed following the divorce. Hog heaven. Then he awoke and saw that it was a dream. A nightmare. A terrifying sweaty nightmare of suffocating, drowning, pursued by a zombie psychopath, skewered on the witchdoctor’s spit, a child in flames on the altar of Hog. Adam, literally “first man.” The first great man frightened by his own shadow, the first great serpent. Blake’s Adam reaching through the cosmos. What rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.



 

Chapter 10 Logos Lost Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world… In the beginning people created Creation myths. The world teemed with ancestors longing to grasp the origin of humanity, the earth, life, and the cosmos. The wise-ones looked, really looked, listened, smelled, tasted, touched; they approached nature with respect and wonder, sensing the presence of something transcendent. In time they learned to navigate by the star gods, and erected stone calendars to honor each goddess turning her pages of hours or seasons. Paying attention, the ancients distilled medicines from herbs, fashioned jewelry from smelted ores, sang and piped in caverns beneath portraits of neighborhood beasts. They mused and debated, they reckoned and rhymed. Being rational, the clever-ones concocted names as best they could to catch each glimpse of the essence lying (or was it moving) under the surface-flash of reality, and with special sacred words guessed at the rest. Thus were born concrete and abstract, literal and metaphoric, palpable and symbolic. In the beginning humans were born loving stories and art, and with great aesthetic flair gave shape to the formless void of the earth and dispelled its darkness with haunting music and dazzling light painted over the surface of the deep. And because some nights were cold and some days dreary, the master wordsmiths, the shamans, the prophets, gift-boxed their glimpses and guesses in colorful narrations. Intuited understandings, articulated symbolically, translated into stories spiced with action heroes, divinities, dangerous adventures, cosmic romances, and gory battles, all laced

with flasks-full of magical realism. Short stories evolved into epics. Over and over their tales, sprinkled with fairy dust, symbolized through monsters and champions and objects and creatures the human condition, the joy of passion, outrage toward injustice, and cathartic pathos toward suffering. If they could display their predicaments, perhaps they could fix them; if they could articulate the riddles of existence, maybe they could solve them. Why couldn’t they see more, or understand all things? Were they unworthy, evil; demonic, fallen? Maybe they just needed to try harder, to learn more. At least they could cry and laugh together. Myths bound people together into societies sitting around the fire munching popcorn. And here we sit still, dissecting nature, dancing and drumming, praying to grasp the meaning of life. Creation myths represent our intuited understanding of the nature of Nature. Operative word, represent. Early on the philosophers among us noted that existence is coherent and logical. The word logos, meaning among other things the rational principle that generates, develops, and governs the universe, was a technical philosophical term already employed by the pre-Socratic Greeks. In the sixth century B.C.E, Heraclitus complained that most people live like dreamers with a false view of the world because they fail to understand the universal logos, or “reason,” the source of all natural occurrences and the glue by which are things are interrelated. Heraclitus surmised that existence gels by means of an underlying tension between opposites. Binaries like good and evil, hot and cold, or sickness and health could only be grasped as relations of opposites. The universe is not-chaos because it is bound together— interconnected and organized—by the dynamic equilibrium of divergent elements. All things are both harmful and beneficial, Heraclitus believed. Seawater, for instance, is harmful to humans but beneficial for fish. It’s not surprising that the philosopher who observed the persistence of unity despite change would emphasize the need for social harmony. No doubt today he would stress the benefits of diversity. Heraclitus considered fire to be the primal element, perpetually kindling and burning out. “Fire” included fuel, flame, smoke, heat, eventually becoming air, and air becoming clouds of rain turning into

ocean. Though philosophers today take his “fire” literally, perhaps more likely he used the image metaphorically. If so, what would fire represent? Life is a river, Heraclitus said. “Upon those who step into the same rivers, different and ever different waters flow down.” A few centuries later Plato interpreted this analogy to mean that all things are in constant flux. The dreamers Heraclitus complained about lived now in Plato’s Cave, mistaking shadows of things, cast by firelight onto the cave wall, for the things themselves. They disbelieved even a peer who had escaped to observe the real world in pure sunlight outside the cave and had returned to proclaim the joyous tidings of reality beyond the darkened appearances of the senses. Plato’s light and darkness were clearly metaphoric. But what exactly does the myth represent? The myth represents myth itself. The Greek term mythos, from which the word myth derives, means word, saying, story, and fiction. Mythos, meaning “word,” contrasts with logos, also meaning “word.” Unlike myth, which is assumed to be true “just because,” as when we suspend our disbelief while watching a movie and momentarily accept the fiction as “true,” logos is valid truth that can be argued and demonstrated through inductive and deductive proofs and physical evidence. Religious narrative is myth believers have forgotten is myth; religious faith is like walking out of the movie theatre believing that the reality represented in the movie continues to be reality in the real world. Religious representation is perfectly valid if the believer remembers that the representation is representation. Superman and Harry Potter and King Arthur and Zeus and vampires are only true as fiction, and perhaps as symbolic representations. Like Heraclitus, Plato complained that far too many people live in a movie world of consecrated myth. Aristotle first pointed out that the ability to make metaphor is the surest sign of genius. Many geniuses of his era and earlier— Aeschylus, Sappho, and Plato to name but a few—were generating many great literary representations in drama, poetry, and prose. Ancient geniuses generated many Creation myths that metaphorically personify the logos as God. In Genesis, God separates the light from the darkness, as do the Creators in other myths (mythmakers constantly borrow from each other). Because

humanity is the genius species, light and darkness can be taken literally or symbolically. All religious motifs, being artistic literary representations, can be taken literally or symbolically. Personifying the logos as God turns God into a metaphor that can be contemplated in order to better understand the transcending, ineffable reality of God. Some people do this instinctively, without consciously interpreting the metaphor. (Similarly, people often don’t bother to interpret their dreams.) But the creators among us consciously construct specific meanings via metaphoric representations; they represent meanings symbolically; they make literature. Unfortunately, sometimes even the literati among us run into trouble when they forget that the metaphor is a metaphor. Representation is representation, not literally the thing represented. A painting of Queen Elizabeth is not Queen Elizabeth. The anthropomorphic “God the Father” is not God, and God is not a father in the animal, human sense. The biblical Creation myth, like most Creation myths, evolved over time. The Bible’s Old Testament opens, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.” In the New Testament, the Gospel of John opens, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him; and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life; and the life was the light of men.” Christians equate the logos with Christ, which doesn’t make sense, given that the logos event (Creation) is in past tense, when his life “was” the light of men. But did the writer of John mean for the word “word,” or logos, to be taken literally? Rather than Jesus embodying logos, perhaps Jesus was meant as a metaphor for logos. After all, a human being can’t be the logos. Not literally. Christians think that Jesus is God, and God is the logos. If God is logos, then Christianity is pantheism; if Jesus is God, then Christianity is polytheistic pantheism. Neither is monotheism.

If God is “other,” then God is not logos. God employs logos; or God employs reason (logos) to produce the resulting reasonable order of existence (logos). But God isn’t logos any more than mind is brain. In John, the Greek word logos is rendered capitalized “Word” in English. The passage actually reads, “In the beginning was the logos…” The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, and The HarperCollins Bible Dictionary all define the Greek logos as “word,” but they include other meanings such as statement, speech, discourse, thesis, argument, reason, reasoning, the rational faculty (Plato’s logos as the intellectual aspect of the soul), abstract theory, discursive reasoning, explanation, reckoning, accounting, measure, relation, proportion, ration (Aristotle’s logoi of musical scales), value, worth (Heraclitus’s logos of humans being greater than that of other beings). In Stocism logos indicates divine order; Neoplatonism designates logos as the intelligible regulating forces displayed in the sensible world. Logos forms the suffix of names of disciplines such as biology, psychology, and theology. All these disciplines rationally explore natural occurrences, origins, and interrelationships. All assume the necessity of reason. Webster’s notes that the Greek lógos is akin to légein, to choose, gather, recount, tell over, speak. Reason distinguishes this from that, and necessitates the choice of this not that. By all definitions, divine logos separates the light from the dark. Heraclitus would approve. The HarperCollins Bible Dictionary notes that the term logos “was taken over by Philo, the Alexandrian philosophical theologian of Judaism, who was roughly a contemporary of the apostle Paul.” It’s important to note that scholars date the writings of Paul as earlier than the Gospels, including John. “By means of the logos, Philo sought to reconcile Greek philosophical theories about the universe (cosmology) with the biblical accounts of God’s creating the world by his spoken word. God’s logos became a clearly identifiable entity, mediating between God and the world, the mode of the divine creativity and revelation.” An equally important point is that the complex Greek term was used in John to translate the equally

complex Hebrew word, which could mean, among other things, “word,” “thing,” or “event,” and that the English translation “word,” especially capitalized, brought its own connotations. For Christians, logos is the divine word or reason incarnate in Jesus Christ, “the Word” who “became flesh” in the moment of Creation. In a brilliant stroke of genius, the author of John conflates mythos, i.e., “word,” with logos, i.e., “word,” and personifies the conflation as a human version of God. Jesus could well represent the intelligence of God displayed through intelligently designed Nature. The author of John (who might well have been Philo) seems to try to bridge the archaic tendency of religion to make gods human (or at least in the image of humans) and the modern inclination of philosophy to demarcate the distinction and the connection between God and rational Creation: Nature. It’s interesting that Paul, the author of most of the books of the New Testament, doesn’t discuss the historical life, works, or teachings of Jesus at all; Jesus is all mythologized logos. In addition to logos, “wisdom,” the Greek sophia, which Aristotle considered the highest knowledge of the wisest of the wise, also played a mediatorial role between God and creation. In The Symposium Plato addresses mediation as the province of those in spiritual pursuit of Beauty. Here Plato’s character, Socrates, patterned after the actual person Socrates, quotes another character, Diotima, who expresses the view of the character Socrates who expresses the view of Plato (which itself represents the process of mythmaking). Diotima traces the interconnection of spiritual love, beauty, creativity, immortality, wisdom, truth, and virtue. “God is love” and Jesus as “the word of life” and “the word of God” are not original Christian concepts. These phrases are literary devices, specifically metaphor and personification, employed to represent an idea—opinion, guess—about the connection between God and Creation, and between Creation and us. The authors of John (the gospel) and I John (the letter) undoubtedly knew this passage from Plato in which Socrates recounts asking Diotima, “What could Love be?” She answers: A great spirit; for all the spiritual is between divine and mortal… power…to interpret and to ferry across to the gods things given

by humans, and to humans things from the gods, from humans petitions and sacrifices, from the gods commands and requitals in return; and being in the middle, Love completes them and binds all together into a whole. Through this intermediary moves all art of divination, and the art of priests, and all concerned with sacrifice and mysteries and incantations, and all sorcery and witchcraft. For God mingles not with humanity, but through this comes all the communion and conversation of gods with people and people with gods, both awake and asleep; and she who is expert in this is a spiritual person, but the expert in something other than this, such as common arts or crafts, is vulgar. These spirits are many and of all sorts and kinds, and one of them is Love...Immortality is what all this earnestness to procreate and love pursue…for the immortal is what they love…those who are pregnant in soul—for there are some who conceive in soul still more than in body what is proper for the soul to conceive and bear. And what is proper? Wisdom and virtue in general—to this class belong all creative poets, and those artists and craftsmen who are said to be inventive…A person with divinity in him, whose soul from his youth is pregnant with these things, desires when he grows up to beget and procreate…for by attaching himself to a person of [soul] beauty and keeping company with her, he begets and procreates what he has long been pregnant with; present and absent he remembers her, and with her he fosters what is begotten, so that as a result these people maintain a much closer communion together and a firmer friendship…by contemplating beautiful things rightly in due order…suddenly she will behold a beauty marvelous in its nature, that very Beauty for the sake of which all the earlier hardships had been borne: in the first place, everlasting, and never being born nor perishing, neither increasing nor diminishing…being by itself with itself always in simplicity…she sees the beautiful with the mind, which alone can see it, to give birth not to likenesses of virtue, since she touches no likeness, but to realities, since she touches reality; and when she has given birth to real virtue and

brought it up, will it not be granted her to be the friend of God, and immortal if anyone ever is? Socrates (i.e., Plato), of course, employs the literary device of metaphoric personification to represent his idea—his opinion, his guess—about the connection between two distinct entities: between God and everything else; between God and Nature. The intelligibility (rational logos) of Creation (manifest logos) and our ability to perceive and understand the Creation-logos themselves express God’s love for us and for Creation. In natural religion, logos indicates the immanence of God. Put another way, the transcendent Creator perpetually actively creates Creation. Creation isn’t static; Creation perpetually comes into being, just as Heraclitus and Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and a host of other ancient philosophers assumed. Did God wind it all up just to walk away as the tension wound down? Or is God an artist perpetually creating art as an expression of love? If God is an artist, an artist representing something to us, then religion might best serve to explore aesthetically the interrelationship between God and us. Religious art and ritual serve this function, but only when their objects aren’t deified; but usually they are, as is the case with religious elements ranging from magic potions to talismans to spells to baptisms. The Bible itself displays how Christian communion evolved from symbolic to literal body and blood (see especially John 6; in fact, try reading the entire Gospel of John as symbolic). If God’s artwork is a manifestation of love, then religious people should probably think twice about defacing Creation for mindless pleasure and profit, and instead focus on honoring the delicate, sacred interrelationship, both material and spiritual, between us and Creation. How would the authentically spiritual person respond to the logos, to Creation? Darwinians and atheists can justify dishonoring and desacralizing nature with anti-environmental agendas. But given that “religious” rightwingers are among the worst offenders, doesn’t that suggest that their religion isn’t an authentic religion of logos? Aren’t anti-environmental fundamentalists, who advocate exploitation of nature as their special right, the heretics of natural religion honoring the Creator of Nature?

In the last chapter I quoted Eitzen and Timmer, who quote Currie: “Contemporary conservatives like those conservatives before them who ‘have successfully posed as the guardians of domestic tranquility for decades’ typically promote social and economic policies ‘that bear a large part of the responsibility for the level of crime and violence we suffer today’.” By supporting politicians that favor the rich and wealth-generating banks and corporations, the religious Right participates in the economic meltdown and the social ills that corrode the America envisioned by our Founders. For the typical Genesist today, even though Nature is Creation created by a more-or-less benevolent Creator, even the post-Flood natural realm, including one’s own body, is an evil enemy to be subdued, and once subjugated, it becomes a slave subject to exploitation by the high priests, the chosen ones. As ultra-rightwinger Ann Coulter put it a few years back, “God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, ‘Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.’” (Updated, there’s the equally fashionably phallic, “Drill, baby, drill.”) The image of rape, hypocritically ironic because it is anti-Christ (antithetical to the ethics of Christ) and anti-women (also antithetical to the ethics of Christ), corresponds to the male-dominated, women-as-property tradition of elitist religion and the desacralization not only of human equality and freedom but also of sexuality per se. Snotty Coulter’s snobbish myth is decidedly Darwinian pretending to be Christian. Interestingly, Deism, which values all humans equally and accepts stewardship of the Earth as a sacred duty, has more in common with the “love God, love your neighbor as yourself” theology of Christ (actual or fictional) than with the elitism of either Darwinism or rightwing Christianity. My calling Christianity “rightwing,” a political term, needs no clarification. But many people don’t realize that the corporate aristocracy, most notably corporate polluters, long ago appropriated religious fundamentalism for its own sinister purposes. Grating FOX News pundits like Coulter serve as lobbying gophers for corporate raptor CEOs. Ordinary fundamentalists, indoctrinated by pundits and preachers, have been shepherded into political serfdom. Groups like the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, and the Tea Party were

created to rake in big bucks for their anointed chieftains and for pockets of politicians promoting cutthroat capitalism as an American ideal and to thwart environmentalism’s efforts to protect real American values, like truth, justice, equality, security, and the wellbeing that constitutes happiness—in other words, freedom from poisoning tyrants. As kickback, even mega-churches raking in megamillions (in some cases, billions) retain their tax-free status. Pollution is a literal poisoning of our literal Earth. But pollution also symbolically represents the poisoning of the human body, soul, and spirit—human meaning collective humanity and the human individual. In spite of steps taken to regulate pollution thus far during President Obama’s tenure, the corporate polluter cartel continues to threaten our society and government. Occupy Wall Street and the broader Occupy and Get Money Out movements have targeted the global problem of corporate oligarchy. Corporate polluters are just one slice of the Wall Street pie. But looking closely at the process of religious appropriation by one class of corporate exploiters might help some trusting sheep grasp the magnitude of corporate-church collusion underlying the current crisis threatening America and the world. Revolution can potentially establish the true democracy envisioned by our Founders. But to succeed, it must expose how organized religion is exploited to smokescreen corporate crimes. Much darker than a marriage of Church and State is its spawn: Hog. Democracy is really in trouble when religion is annexed by the mondo Corporate Nation. The Rape and Murder of Mother Earth Environmentalism is in many ways the poster child for old-fashioned American democracy. Everyone has the constitutional right to own property. Nature should not be the property of the aristocracy. The commons—land, air, water, crops, seeds, etc.—should not fall into the exclusive grip of the 1%, it should remain the trust of the whole society. The most anti-humane segment of that 1% has managed to meddle its way into the Christian psyche via TV evangelists and their

political patsies. Over the past few decades, millions of gullible Christians have absorbed the God’s-elite Earth-raping perspective doled out by mean-spirited, unchristlike dominionists. Dominionists— Christian elitists who deem themselves the chosen elect who should rule the world—enjoy ridiculing those of us who care for the Earth and all God’s creatures. Jerry Falwell, for example, once scoffed, “We’re going to invite PETA [to “Wild Game Night”] as our special guest, P-E-T-A—People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. We want you to come, we’re going to give you a top seat there, so you can sit there and suffer. This is one of my special groups. Another one’s the ACLU, another is the NOW—the National Order of Witches. We’ve got—I’ve got a lot of special groups.” And right on cue, the grazing sheep bleated, “Amen.” Anti-environmentalism is a decidedly far-right Republican agenda. Former state representative Casey Emerson of Bozeman, Montana, commented during a panel discussion regarding the Endangered Species Act, “I think there are some species that ought to be killed off to subdue the Earth.” According to Florida’s Gainesville Humanists, “He wondered aloud whether ‘so-called environmentalists’ had read the Bible passage stating that people must subdue the Earth. It should be like getting rid of weeds in a wheat field, he said.” In January 2006, twenty evangelical leaders wrote a letter to the National Association of Evangelicals’ President, Reverend Ted Haggard (who you’ll recall was later outed as gay by male prostitute Mike Jones), asking him to not recommend any official policy on global warming. According to the New York Times, one signer argued that “It is bad...that so many ‘evangelical’ environmental extremists have infected our churches, colleges, universities and evangelicalism with their liberal brand of Christianity but now they want to damage America’s free enterprise system by making it difficult for business to compete in the world market place.” Today Foxy fundamentalists swear that global warming is a myth even though October 2012 was the 332nd consecutive month with above average global temperatures thanks to big oil, big coal, and other pig polluters.

Is environmentalism anti-Christian? No, it’s anti-pollutingcorporate oligarchy, which is anti-Christian according to dominionist citizens of the Corporate Nation. The corporate oligarchy has so successfully exploited religion and programmed the sheep to regurgitate its sacred message of “free enterprise” that free enterprise now means the Corporate Nation’s right to fleece the sheep who unwittingly ask and even pay to be fleeced. Remember why your teacher made you read Animal Farm and Nineteen EightyFour? Those sheep also collude in their own poisoning. To get around this problem, some evangelicals maintain the biblical belief that the poisoning destruction of the Earth does not affect them directly. Abstract spiritual doctrine transcends actual physical being. If your kids drink the poison your company dumps in the water, it won’t harm them, because you’re special, you live in a bubble of God’s care. Never mind that your company’s poison is killing the rest of us (and your kids). Polluters long ago realized, no doubt with a sadistic chuckle, that they could flaunt their Earth-raping. Fundamentalist nothing-canhurt-me (because my God won’t let it) blind faith quickly led to political snake-handling. Denigration of nature and Earth science that leads to harmful exploitation of our physical Earth has been sanctified biblically and presented so positively, so self-righteously, that for decades the Religious Right has used it as a core political platform. “We don’t have to protect the environment, the Second Coming is at hand,” proclaimed James Watt, President Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior. “My responsibility is to follow the Scriptures which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns.” “Don’t let anything like trees in the Clearwater National Forest get in the way of providing jobs and fueling the economy, even if that means cutting down every last tree in the state,” warned Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth (R-ID) during her 1994 campaign. Representative Don Young (R-AK) stated on Alaska Public Radio, “Environmentalists are a socialist group of individuals that are the tool of the Democrat Party. I’m proud to say that they are my enemy.

They are not Americans, never have been Americans, never will be Americans.” “Why is Earth Day, today, also Lenin’s birthday?” insinuated Alan Caruba, former Bush-era public relations advisor for corporate and political anti-environmentalists. “Coincidence? Or does it signal the true intent of the national and worldwide environmental movement?” Using tactics of deceit that range from sublime to outrageous, evangelical Republicans still work hard to eradicate church-state separation in order to benefit the Corporate Nation, which they claim is threatened by environmentalists. The abstract “religious” perspective justifies the irresponsible exploitation of the planet, though there is nothing authentically Christian about the exploitative, anti-environmental worldview. Exploitative, anti-environmental dominionism masquerading as Christianity is the epitome of unnatural. If God is immanent, then what we do to Creation, what we do to one of the least of these His creatures, we do to Him, the Word, the Logos, according biblical Christian principles. Although we Deists reject the mythic notion of Jesus-equalsCreation, we agree that protecting the environment created by God is a sacred responsibility. In our view, there is nothing more unnatural, nothing more perverted than the selfish, ruthless rape and murder of Mother Earth and her children in the name of the God who created them. Toxic pollution, one of the primary human rights violations in the United States, has caused hundreds of thousands of unnatural deaths and perversely diminished the health of millions of Americans. Pollution doesn’t rise naturally from nature. Pollution is the unnatural refuse of unnatural processes instigated by unnatural organizations of people with unnatural desires. Corporate polluters, master con artists, have successfully exploited religion as their smokescreen and brainwashed their religious minions to constantly throw out red herrings like “unnatural” homosexuals, feminazis, socialists, illegals, Muslim terrorists, etc. to keep even the smart media off the toxic trail. But of course, even the smart media is owned by the corporate oligarchy.

In his book, Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush & His Corporate Pals are Plundering the Country & Hijacking Our Democracy, environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. chronicles the ascendancy of corporate polluters to positions of unprecedented power. Back in the seventies, when the Right as we know it was solidifying its power, the major corporate polluters formed a coalition that would offer hundreds of millions in campaign contributions to politicians who would overturn environmental regulations and thwart law enforcement and litigation against the politicians’ corporate sponsors, the big polluters. They wanted to pollute and they wanted the citizens to foot the bill for cleanup. Things really got organized and nasty when Joe Coors (as in beer) founded the Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF) to file suits against environmentalists, unions, and minorities—any category of Americans that could disrupt the flow of corporate profits. Multinational polluters such as Chevron, Exxon, Texaco Shell, Amoco, Phillips Petroleum, and Ford Motor Company kicked in the needed funds to fuel MSLF. Out of MSLF evolved the bigger rightwing Heritage Foundation, which stated its intention “to strangle the environmental movement… the greatest single threat to the American economy.” Heritage Foundation was the waterhole where industrialists, joined by politicians, and later by evangelists, met to plot their mutual prosperity via the exploitation of the other 99% of us. The biggest polluters kicked in the biggest bucks—tens of millions—to support Heritage. The top five donors, five major polluters representing the automobile, coal, oil, and chemical companies—the “Gang of Five”— were the John M. Olin Foundation, maker of ammunition and toxic chemicals; Sarah Scaife Foundation, funded by arch-conservative Richard Mellon Scaife’s industrial, oil, and banking fortune; Castle Rock Foundation, funded by Joe Coors; Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, funded by Koch, chairman of Koch Industries, the country’s largest independent oil company and a mega-polluter; and Bradley Foundation, funded by electronics fortunes. Other corporate polluters such as ExxonMobile, Chevron, and DuPont added to Gang of Five contributions to maintain Heritage’s $34 million annual budget. Heritage spawned numerous facsimiles

that piled up their own bankrolls for funding legal political bribes known as campaign contributions and lobbying. Groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Reason Foundation, Federalist Society, Marshall Institute, Mercatus Center, and several other so-called “think tanks” were all greased by filthy rich industrialists. Around 1980, the Coors cult staged the Sagebrush Rebellion to unite corporate and fundamentalist forces into a machine intent on taking control of the government. Ronald Reagan was its first willing victim. Heritage became Reagan’s shadow government, conveniently housed in the Executive Office Building across from the White House. With Coors at the helm of a cabal of rightwing millionaires, Heritage deployed its 2,000 page manifesto, Mandate for Change, intended to dictate administration policy. Coors picked several of Reagan’s top administrators, for instance Anne Gorsuch for EPA. Gorsuch promptly slashed EPA’s budget by 30 percent, demolished the Superfund, and appointed lobbyists from polluting industries to positions intended to protect the environment and its citizens from polluters. A timber industry lawyer became her chief of staff; Exxon provided her enforcement chief. Robert Buford, who vowed to destroy the Bureau of Land Management, became head of the Bureau of Land Management. James Watt, president of MSLF, the archenemy of the Department of the Interior, was appointed Secretary of the Department of the Interior. A lot of people back then were laughing at “Lightbulb” Watt, so named for his bald head and long skinny neck. Probably most of us boomers remember his being unscrewed and canned. James Watt became synonymous for a classic religious nut, voltage one watt, as the joke went, one of those kinky apocalyptic fundamentalist dominionists so called for their insistence on man’s metamisogynist duty to “subdue,” i.e. exploit/rape, Mother Earth. He fulfilled this charge by relinquishing all notions of Christian stewardship and selling public lands to his rich industrialist cronies for next to nothing. Environmentalists, he warned, were “a left-wing cult which seeks to bring down the type of government I believe in.” Which was dominionism, i.e., dominance of the Corporate Nation, the antithesis of democracy. Forced out of office in 1981, after 1.1 million

Americans signed a petition calling for his removal, Watt was indicted on twenty-five counts of perjury, unlawful concealment, and obstruction of justice. Following closely in his wake, EPA’s Gorsuch and twenty-three of her appointees faced congressional investigations of deals with Coors and other big polluters, forcing her resignation, along with that of her first deputy, Rita LaVelle, who was jailed for perjury and obstruction of justice. Expedient sacrifices. Besides raking in billions, the big guys taught Reagan the meaning of deregulation. Big corporations grabbed at everything, including the press. Eradicating the Fairness Doctrine that had assured a balanced presentation of the news was a Sagebrush mission accomplished. Fat corporations got fatter gobbling up the media. Horrified Democrats and Republicans alike tried to preserve the Fairness Doctrine via legislation but were thwarted by Reagan’s persistent vetoes. Deflated by the numerous indictments and resignations, the Sagebrush Rebels pasted on a smiley face and in a flourish of Orwellian newspeak, renamed themselves “Wise Use.” Timber industry press agent Ron Arnold, the official founder of Wise Use, reiterated, “Our goal is to destroy, to eradicate the environmental movement. We want you to be able to exploit the environment for private gain, absolutely.” Hog squealed. Naming themselves “Wise Use,” the masked antithesis of themselves, deceived so well that other polluter front groups adopted their own antithetical disguises, their own “conterms,” the term I use to mean a con word or concept or entity deceptively named to mean the exact opposite of what it actually is. Citizens For the Environment had no citizen membership, for instance; it represented corporate sponsors by lobbying against environmental regulations like the Clean Air Act. The Environmental Conservation Organization represented land developers and businesses opposed to conservation of wetlands. The Evergreen Foundation, representing the timber industry, advocated clear-cutting as pro-environment. The energy industry’s Citizens for Sensible Control of Acid Rain opposed all controls of acid rain. Wise Use did make wise use of one valuable American commodity: Religion. Ron Arnold headed up the Washington State

chapter of the American Freedom Coalition, a political arm of Sun Myung Moon’s heretical Unification Church (remember the Moonies?), which strove for anything but American freedom. It’s fair to say that Wise Use itself was an arm of Reverend Moon’s Church. Robert Grant’s fundamentalist American Christian Cause in California had helped elect Reagan. He and others recruited Jerry Falwell to form the Moral Majority, which was neither moral nor a majority. When Wise Use later recruited Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition to the dominionist cause, the Right took a giant stride closer to their goal to control and exploit the American people. Robertson, the grand master of purposive deception, labeled environmentalists “communists,” the evil priests of a New World Order of state mandated paganism intent on destroying Christianity and democracy. According to Robertson’s paranoid worldview, the U.S. government was an alien nation, a kind of internal terrorist cult working to disarm citizens through gun control laws so they couldn’t fight the alien government’s insidious war against the family. The Corporate Nation, of course, was the real “government” doing that, so reeling in Robertson was a stroke of psychopathic genius. In 1994, Robertson’s Christian Coalition was fined for improperly funding then Representative Newt Gingrich (despite his muchpublicized unchristian adulteries) and Republican Senate nominee Oliver North of Virginia. In 1995, the Christian Coalition formed an alliance with the National Beer Wholesalers to pass a Republican initiative that would restrict lobbying by nonprofit groups that get federal grants. Back then, nonprofits tended to be humanitarian and progressive rather than “Christian” like the tax-free mega-churches. Despite public exposure of his criminal activities and sophomoric grasp of American jurisprudence, Robertson shamelessly created Regent University, funded by Coors beer via the Coors Foundation, much to the chagrin of MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving). In addition to its thriving ultra-right journalism department, Regent University houses The American Center for Law and Justice, a nonprofit public-interest law firm that aggressively promotes the extreme Christian Right reconstructionist agenda demanding total integration of biblical law into society, the abolition of public schools, and “bringing the local media under the influence of a biblical world view.”

Robertson named his university Regent because a regent is someone “who governs in the absence of a sovereign.” Regent university’s purpose is to prepare its students to rule the millennial Kingdom. Needless to say, the reconstructionist agenda paved the way for a takeover by the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the Hog Messiah, the Corporate Nation. It’s no surprise that the Christian Coalition’s executive director, Ralph Reed, its aggressive and successful Wise Use greenwasher and media spokesperson/personnel trainer, became a Bush II campaign official. Reed symbolizes the merging of polluter industries, politics, and religion. Wise Use elevated mega-antienvironmentalist family values poster child Newt Gingrich, and later his ditto, Tom DeLay, to the influential position of Speaker of the House, where together they gutted environmental law by slyly attaching riders to must-pass budget bills and promoting supermandates with conterm names. In 1995, as part of Gingrich’s effort to enact Wise Use’s anti-environmental manifesto, “Contract With America,” DeLay asked 350 lobbyists for the biggest polluters to assist in drafting legislation that would dismantle federal health, safety, and environmental laws. That same year, President Clinton shut down the government rather than pass a rider-riddled budget bill. Public outcry resulted with first Gingrich, then later DeLay being forced to resign and eventually indicted for their many crimes against nature. Is it any wonder that faux family values Gingrich and DeLay led the ClintonLewinsky lynch mob? Their version of revenge is yet another, almost humorous form of conterm. Gingrich was himself such a notorious adulterer that during his presidential campaign, his entire core staff resigned because of it. Gingrich and DeLay were each indicted for serious crimes committed against the American people and their laws, and both lost their jobs because of some of them. Some of the worst of those crimes were committed with the active support of prominent fundamentalists. Long live family values. By the time Bush II ascended to the presidency, dominionists had germinated special interest domination into a seedling oligarchy. Dominionists upped the dirty politics ante by coordinating the new

tactic of purposeful lying. Conterm became an important strategy to dupe the citizens who believed that America was still a democracy. Wise Use dominionists were of course delighted when Bush picked as his running mate Dick Cheney, CEO and Chairman of Halliburton, the world’s second-largest oil-drilling services company. Or perhaps, when Dick Cheney picked Bush. Between 1997 and 2002, Halliburton contributed over a million and a half purposeful dollars to the Republicans, primarily Bush. The energy industry kicked in over a hundred million and in turn reaped billions from Bush’s handouts and axing of regulations and enforcement positions. Bush-era taxpayers shelled out over $65 billion a year in big oil subsidies, and another $35 billion-plus in subsidies to other energy big guys, subsidies given to corporations that were already making billions in profits at citizens’ expense, subsidies, as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. put it, that “helped create the billionaires who financed the right-wing revolution on Capitol Hill and put George W. Bush in the White House. And now they have indentured servants in Washington demanding that we have capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich…The free market has been all but eliminated in an energy sector dominated by cartels and monopolies and distorted by obscene subsidies to the filthiest polluters.” Subsidies, remember, come from the Treasury, i.e., our tax dollars. When those subsidized corporations move their headquarters to Bermuda and their operations to Taiwan, how does that benefit America? Isn’t it treason to exploit one’s own country by taking its tax dollars while inflating the cost of its products, cutting American jobs, and dumping toxic pollution that the American taxpayer has to clean up? Bush’s “tax cuts” were cuts for the upper class at the expense of the rest of us, yet the FTC disclosed in March 2001 that tax-bled consumers had paid billions for gasoline those undertaxed and taxexempt companies had hoarded to drive up prices. Each year companies violating environmental and labor safety statutes are awarded hundreds of billions in federal contracts. Thanks to Bush, big polluters saved hundreds of billions of dollars, and the public, not the polluters, must pay for the cleanup. Dick Cheney facilitated the exchange of huge industrialist campaign contributions for much huger paybacks in the form of

government appointments and government subsidies and tax breaks. Of Bush’s forty-eight member transition team, thirty-one— including the six most powerful White House officials—had intimate professional ties to the energy industry. With Cheney’s guidance, Bush stuffed his cabinet with top officials and lobbyists from major polluting corporations, especially from the energy sector. Condoleezza Rice was a long-time board member of Chevron. Karl Rove was deeply invested in Enron, BP Amoco, and Royal Dutch Shell. Clay Johnson, director of presidential personnel, was heavily invested in El Paso Energy Partners; Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff, Samuel Bodman, Kathleen Cooper, and many others were all deeply attached to corporate polluters. The energy industries had gained control of the government via a legally bribed—“lobbied”—elected official, the President. That’s right: An enemy nation, the Corporate Nation, had elected one of its own as President to assist them in their covert coup d’état. In a grand gesture of conterm, almost a fuck-you to the American people, the second Bush one-upped Reagan in the sheer number of top officials and lobbyists from the biggest polluters he appointed to top positions in government agencies that were supposed to oversee and protect America’s environment and natural resources. Like Reagan, Bush filled specific agency positions with polluter advocates from the very corporate segments that were specific agencies’ biggest violators. For head of the Department of Interior (which protects our natural resources) he picked Gale Norton, former attorney for Coors’ MSLF under its director, James Watt. Norton not only expressly hates government and EPA regulations, she also opposes wheelchair ramps, asbestos removal from schools, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and the Violence Against Women Act. Norton advocates strip mining, clear-cut logging, and “raping the earth” by polluting industries. She allowed opening nine million acres of Alaska’s North Slope to oil and gas developers, just for starters. She founded her own conterm pro-earth-rape organization, the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, which really means Advocacy for Mega-rich Earth-raping Industrialists Against Americans.

Mining lobbyist J. Steven Griles became Norton’s second in command. Griles immediately arranged that the federal government would pay Chevron $46 million to not drill off the coast of Florida, to help Jeb Bush, the President’s brother, get reelected governor. It didn’t hurt veteran Chevron board member Condoleezza Rice, either. It was no surprise that near the end of Jeb’s term, local news here in Florida reported that he now favored drilling. Griles has since been the focus of a criminal investigation for perjury and ethics laws violations, and for helping former clients secure government contracts. The Interior Department refused to release documents regarding a $1.1 million payment to Griles that were requested under the Freedom of Information Act. Griles was also implicated in federal payoffs to Shell and Chevron. For EPA Director, Bush picked one of the nation’s leading advocates of pollution-based prosperity, Christine Todd Whitman, who slashed EPA’s budget, fired nearly all EPA’s enforcement attorneys, and instituted “voluntary compliance” to replace enforcement of pollution laws. To head EPA’s Superfund, Bush appointed Marianne Horinko, a lobbyist and consultant to polluters, including mega-polluters Koch Petroleum and Koch Industries, the country’s largest privately held oil company, owned by Wise Use funder and Bush megadonor, Charles Koch. Bush installed former Alcoa CEO Paul O’Neill at the Treasury Department (who later quit, dismayed with obese Bush spending). Timber lobbyist Mark Rey became head of the Department of Agriculture. Mining lobbyist Thomas Sansonetti became Assistant Attorney General of Environmental and Natural Resources in the Justice Department. Linda Fisher, a lobbyist for Monsanto, one of the nation’s largest polluters, became EPA Deputy Administrator. Jeffrey Holmstead, a utilities lobbyist and leader of a Wise Use front group, became Assistant Administrator of Air and Radiation. As Director of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, Bush appointed James Connaughton, a lawyer for asbestos polluters. And on and on. Bush had a penchant for hiring just the right toadies to implement his agenda. He had a special mission for John Graham, director of

the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a nondescript agency within the Office of Management and Budget. Graham’s costbenefit analysis favoring Wise Use and his “long track record of ideological scorn for the public welfare,” as Kennedy put it, made him the perfect gofer to make sure Bush’s anti-environmental fiddling remained both secretive and, when outed, justified. Perhaps his most significant contribution was to fund media quack scientists who were industry insiders eager to contradict all the hard scientific environmental data documented by the very long list of real scientists and prestigious scientific organizations. Bush continued the tradition of conterm naming. His “Healthy Forests,” for instance, promoted destructive logging, and “Clear Skies” muddied the Clean Air Act. Exit the Swamp, Enter the Quicksand Given Dick Cheney’s deep involvement in Wise Use, it’s not surprising that when he and Bush took office, the Justice Department kicked in its part of the $325,000 grant to study and report on environmental terrorism awarded to Wise Use founder Ron Arnold. Evidently, Arnold made no recommendations. Even though Attorney General John Ashcroft ranked environmental terrorism as the nation’s top domestic terrorist threat, the Bush administration did nothing to secure the viable targets, such as chemical plants, nuclear power plants, or oil processing facilities. Even I can easily purchase at the local feed store enough ammonium nitrate to blow up the Capitol. But then, should we trust Ashcroft? You might recall that Bush snatched up Ashcroft for his cabinet right after Ashcroft lost his Senate seat. The good citizens of conservative Missouri voted for his deceased opponent, who had died the month before the election, rather than vote for Ashcroft. Ashcroft became even more infamous for ignoring critical information from U.S. intelligence sources warning that bin Laden was planning an attack on American soil using hijacked American planes. Ashcroft even refused to receive intelligence terrorist information; he said he was tired of getting it. In the Bush White House, Church and State were sleeping together. Ashcroft resigned after Bush’s first term and accepted a

teaching position at Pat Robertson’s Regent University. In January 2001, Bush issued an executive order establishing The White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. John DiIulio, who was recruited to run the operation, quit in August, blaming the administration for caring more about politics than policy. According to former director Jim Towey, only Christian religious groups received funding. In 2005, more than $2.1 billion in grants were awarded. In effect, Bush illegally violated church-state separation by giving citizens’ tax dollars to potential Bush supporters who could turn out Bush voters. It’s like they stole money from your checking account to spend on scams that further ripped you off. Faith-Based Initiatives director Jay Hein was VP and CEO of the Foundation for American Renewal, whose stated goal includes: “America can be renewed only by returning to the nation’s founding Biblical principles,” which presumably includes raping the Earth, exploiting her children, and lying. The Bush administration wasn’t just the vector of Republican, corporate, and fundamentalist dominionists. There was a fourth player: neoconservatives, aka the “neocon.” But the “new con” was the same old same old. The nonprofit Project for the New American Century (PNAC), funded by the Sarah Scaife Foundation, John M. Olin Foundation, and Bradley Foundation (the same foundations that funded Heritage/Sagebrush/Wise Use), is perhaps the most prominent neocon think tank. Established in 1997, PNAC advocates U.S. global domination in all areas, including military, economics, space, and the new “international commons,” cyberspace. When it suits them, PNAC neocons subscribe to the Kirkpatrick Doctrine, which originated as an anti-communist agenda that allowed for support of rightwing dictatorships that opposed liberalism but that has evolved into the super-inflated, mostly bogus “war against terror.” Neocons are credited with pressing for the Gulf War as an opportunity to rid oil-rich Iraq and neighboring Kuwait of Saddam Hussein’s hold and to establish the U.S. military throughout the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, ostensibly to “protect” our “ally,” which happens to sit on the world’s largest oil reserves but which lacks a strong military. Neocons, noted for their aristocratic

disparagement of the United Nations, criticized Bush I for adhering to the U.N. agreement that the U.S. would simply oust Hussein from Kuwait rather than remove the dictator from the region altogether. The neocons pressed Clinton to finish the job; dictators got in the way of their plans to “extract,” i.e. steal, Middle East oil and to assume domination of that strategic corporate/political market/territory—in other words, domination by the Corporate Nation. In previous decades, the neocon Corporate Nation advocated a confrontational stance toward China and strong military support for Taiwan. More recently, money-grubby neocons seem only concerned with the oil-rich Middle East and decidedly unconcerned with China, Russia, or the North Korean nuclear crisis. PNAC cofounder Donald Rumsfeld compared Hussein with Stalin and Hitler. Hussein, of course, was sitting on oil. Demonize Hussein, “secure” his oil. As payback for the enormous campaign donations that helped secure his election, Bush II appointed many PNAC members to key positions in his administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney; Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense; Elliott Abrams, National Security Council; I. Lewis Libby, Chief of Staff for Cheney (resigned October 2005; indicted by a grand jury on charges of obstruction of justice, false statements, and perjury in the Plame CIA leak controversy); Richard Armitage, Deputy Secretary of State (also implicated in Plame); John Bolton, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations; Paul Wolfowitz, President of the World Bank; Peter Rodman, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security; Doy Zakheim, Department of Defense; Robert Zoellick, Deputy Secretary of State; Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq; Seth Cropsey, Director of the International Broadcasting Bureau; Paula Dobriansky, Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs; Bruce Jackson (former Lockheed Martin VP for Strategy & Planning), President of U.S. Committee on NATO; Randy Scheunemann, U.S. Committee on NATO; and Francis Fukuyama, President’s Council on Bioethics. Other members include Jeb Bush, Gary Bauer, William Bennett, Ellen Bork, Dan Quayle, Richard Perle, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, to name but a few.

Extensive evidence has been surfacing that 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq could well have been orchestrated by PNAC members to further their stated and unstated goals (the subtext, of course, being expansionist/imperialist business opportunities). It has been suggested that Bush himself might have been exploited by PNAC. Though Governor Bush’s tax cuts proved him to be pro-business, candidate Bush opposed military confrontation and the neocon’s “nation-building” agenda, and early in his presidency, he lacked interest in supporting Israel and followed policies that neocon critics claimed were essentially the same as Clinton’s. Then came 9/11. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 suggests that Bush’s lack of response to news of the attacks indicated not just his lack of decisive leadership; perhaps he had foreknowledge. But there’s another possibility: Bush didn’t know in advance but was processing the probability that PNAC could well have been involved. Maybe he was considering the possibility that he might be a target of assassination by one or more of them. They did, after all, blame 9/11 on Clinton’s and Bush’s lack of “ambition,” meaning lack of aggressive involvement in neocon targets for exploitation. It seems awfully convenient that right when Bush was being buried under domestic pressures like accusations of voter fraud on his behalf and record unemployment, a deus ex machina dropped from the rafters. Of course, Al-Qaeda also had its reasons for terrorist attacks. Of particular offense was U.S. support for “Muslim tyrannies” such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan, unqualified support for Israel, and manipulation of oil prices favoring Western consumers. Regardless of who instigated and/or enabled 9/11, Bush’s agenda took an instant about-face. The “threat of Communism” resurrected as immediate, graphic fear of “Islamic terrorism.” Oil-ripe Afghanistan and Iraq were easily demonized as the source of terrorists and origin of terrorist attacks. The neocon-crafted Bush Doctrine that nations harboring terrorists were enemies of the United States, and then at war with the United States, furthered the neocon agenda and allowed them to repackage the puppet Bush as a skillful, heroic leader that would do their bidding and inspire every citizen to likewise obey. Now neocon expansive geopolitical avarice could run

rampant. Their goal was in sight. PNAC aristocrats—the Corporate Nation—would rule the world. Connect the dots and a frightening picture comes into focus. It’s that same old agenda of domination via fear. In some circles, it’s called playing God. In his September 11, 2006, address to the nation, Bush asserted that the war on terror “will set the course for this new century and determine the destiny of millions across the world.” Many throughout the world, certain that the terror has been staged by PNAC to justify a deceptive “war on terror,” cite the organization’s 90-page report, Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century, Chapter V, “Creating Tomorrow’s Dominant Force,” which discusses the Defense Department’s need to aggressively upgrade the military with new technologies and operational concepts, while noting that the change they wanted would be a long, slow process “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” The 9/11-justified Iraq War would fulfill PNAC’s strategy that America become the only world superpower, ensuring military-protected U.S. corporate expansionism and dominance, especially the mega-elite corporations and nations that make up the enormously wealthy Carlyle Group, a coalition of investors that includes Bush and his top cabinet members and associates and many of the world’s richest oil barons, including Saudi royalty, including the bin Ladens. Weigh both PNAC’s desire to upgrade the military through significant increases in military spending and Carlyle’s heavy investment not only in oil but also in defense. Neocons had everything to gain. Citizens, however, had thousands of lives (not counting tens of thousands of Iraqi lives) and billions of dollars to lose. Billions to lose immediately, directly in the war; trillions if the war dragged on (and it has), trillions more if you throw in all the ways Bush’s war and other PNAC policies have enriched his neocon/corporate-welfare cronies. The scam is so blatant it smacks of the spoiled, conniving, historically classic aristocracy that it is. Spoiled nouveau riche Dick Cheney granted Halliburton multi-billion no-bid contracts for services that even his own government considered, in so many words, a rip-off. Prior to the invasion of Iraq,

Halliburton was selling millions of dollars of supplies to Iraq for its oil industry via old subsidiaries of Dresser Industries under the corrupt UN Oil for Food Program. Former CEO and Chairman Cheney reportedly owned 433,333 Halliburton stock options worth about $8 million in addition to his enormous deferred compensation. In 2005, the Cheneys’ gross income was about $8.82 million. Dick’s net worth, derived mainly from his position at Halliburton, was between $30 million and $100 million. Such blatant conflict of interest could only be orchestrated by the VP himself. To spin a comment by the late Molly Ivans, electing puppet-king Bush was setting the fox to guard the hen house, but puppeteer Cheney as vice-president was a raccoon already in the hen house wrecking havoc. Hussein’s harboring of Al-Qaeda and development of weapons of mass destruction provided the concrete excuse to invade Iraq, but both excuses have proven to be blatant deceptions of enormous consequence. Many former Bush administrators, high-ranking military commanders, and CIA and FBI operatives have testified that the Bush team knew well in advance that a 9/11-type attack using hijacked planes was imminent yet the administration did nothing to secure the nation. Even after 9/11 they did nothing to secure the nation (they never did). But they did everything to scare the nation into backing their unwarranted overkill bombing of Baghdad, after warning Hussein to escape and despite the average Baghdad citizen’s inability to flee. (And of course, the expended military firepower would need to be replenished, benefiting the Carlyle investors and fulfilling the neocon’s demand for an upgraded military.) They did everything to terrify the nation into relinquishing its rights—rights that define us as Americans—under the conterms “Patriot” Act and “Homeland” “Security.” Many critics believe that Cheney authorized the Valerie Plame CIA leak (which some point out could have led to her assassination) as revenge against her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who refused to substantiate Cheney’s false claim that Niger was supplying Hussein with uraniumenriched yellowcake used to make nuclear weapons. Benjamin Ferencz, a chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, has argued that both Hussein and Bush should be tried for war crimes for starting aggressive wars. Under the Nuremberg Principles, because

the U.S. was not defending against an imminent threat, its invasion of Iraq constituted the supreme international crime superseding all other war crimes. The world community agrees that the invasion, in the absence of authorization from the U.N. Security Council, is a crime against international peace in an era when cooperation is paramount. One wonders why so many Americans have forgotten that when the first George Bush was head of the CIA, he gave weapons and billions of American taxpayer dollars to religious fundamentalists known as Taliban under the leadership of Osama bin Laden so they could ward off the Russians and thereby protect Afghan oil for rich Carlyle Group oil barons and their expensive pipelines. Though it was compliments of American taxpayers, this wasn’t American oil. No, this was privately owned oil that “American” oil barons would sell to Americans and the rest of the world at hugely inflated prices. When Bush I staged the Gulf War in 1991 as an excuse to invade Iraq, the price of oil soared from $13 to $40 dollars a barrel. Bush II invaded Iraq to finish the job of securing its oil for rich oil barons, many of whom just happened to be American, a few of them Bushes. Oil soared again. So did other commodities, and so did the hopes of venture capitalists like the Carlyle investors. It was all part of the Corporate Nation’s coup of America. Bush ties to bin Laden went way back. Even before Bush I reneged on his promise that Osama would rule Afghanistan, James Bath, a buddy of Bush II (they had been discharged from the Texas National Guard together for failing to appear for a medical exam), became the Texas money manager for the bin Ladens while Bush I was head of the CIA. Bath started his own aviation company after selling a plane to bin Laden. Bush II started a couple oil companies, distinguishing himself as a dry hole driller. An utter failure, Bush still had substantial cash flow, thanks to Bath investments in him. In other words, as Michael Moore points out, Bath used Saudi money to invest in Bush II. Which made sense, given that Bush II was the son of then-President Bush I, commander-in-chief of the military forces holding down the fort in Saudi Arabia. It didn’t hurt that the President’s son was on the board of directors of Harken when it came under investigation in 1990. Robert Jordon, attorney with

James Baker’s law firm, got Bush off and was subsequently appointed ambassador to Saudi Arabia. It didn’t surprise me when I learned that during his first year in office, President Bush spent President Clinton’s entire surplus—$5.6 trillion when Clinton left office, the largest surplus in American history. It didn’t surprise me to learn that all that money, plus another $5 trillion, had been shifted from America’s Treasury into the coffers of Bush’s rich cronies. Stealing American money to fund an enemy nation, the Corporate Nation, is treason by American standards. Given all this, it was perfectly natural that I, no doubt like many other informed Americans, blurted “Bush” when we witnessed with horror the collapse of the first Trade Tower. It’s significant that the Saudis had given $1.4 billion to the Bush family during the three decades preceding the election of Bush II. It’s significant that the Saudis had invested $860 billion in America, making them the owners of 6-7% of America. It’s significant that the Saudis had over a trillion dollars in our banks, which made our economy look “stronger.” They had power over us, or rather, they had equalized “our” (Bush cartel’s) power over them. Shortly before 9/11, Bush had welcomed Taliban visitors, even though the Taliban had bombed the USS Cole and our African embassies. Bush had installed Afghanistan’s new president, Harmid Karsi, a former advisor to Unicol—Unicol, as in big oil. Immediately after 9/11, when all Americans (even Bush I) were grounded and stranded in airports, six private jets and two dozen commercial aircraft escorted 142 bin Ladens and other Saudis out of the country. Why was Bush II doling out “we’ll smoke out bin Laden” rhetoric at the same time he was protecting the bin Ladens, even preventing FBI and other investigators from questioning them? Bush tried to stop Congress from setting up its own 9/11 investigation, and he halted independent investigations. When Congress proceeded anyway with its investigation, the Bush administration censored twenty-eight pages of its report, most of it relating to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Prince Bandar, a bin Laden family member fondly called by the Bush family “Bandar Bush,” was the most highly protected ambassador in American history, even though Al-Qaeda had been

funded by Saudi money, even though most of the highjackers were Saudis. When 9/11 victims, ignored by Bush, filed a lawsuit against the Saudis, the Saudis hired Bush crony James Baker as their lawyer. Of course the Bush cartel would blame Iraq, the second largest oil reserve in the world. They wanted to get at Iraq’s oil. Ken Lay, CEO and Chairman of Enron, Bush’s number one campaign contributor and part of Cheney’s infamous insider “Energy Commission,” would make a killing. (Before he could cash in, a grand jury convicted Lay of ten counts of securities fraud and other charges when Enron declared the largest bankruptcy thus far in U.S. history.) Unocal could get its pipeline through Iraq from Afghanistan. Informed Americans were outraged when Bush handed Cheney’s Halliburton contracts to provide our armed forces’ meals, clothing, communications, and other services at grotesquely inflated prices. And Cheney made sure that taxpayer-supported American troops provided guard services for private oil drillers even while Bush pushed for 33% pay cuts for soldiers and 60% cuts in assistance to their families, opposed veterans benefits, and supported closing Veterans hospitals. And American taxpayers (not the upper classes; they get all the tax breaks) would foot the bill for reconstruction. “Dick Cheney!” my mind cried out as the second Tower collapsed. Was that cry a premonition? After we bombed Iraq, it seemed logical to ask: If the CheneyBush administration could sacrifice the lives of thousands of Americans in Iraq—the largest number of military deaths since Vietnam—not to mention thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, if they financially supported pollution that was known to kill tens of thousands of Americans each year, would they balk at sacrificing 2,973 American lives to a staged terrorist attack? It’s not “liberal” but rather simply logical to consider Bush, Cheney, Carlyle, or other Bush-Cheney-Carlyle entities (neocon Rumsfeld, for instance) as possible suspects in the case. Who really instigated the 9/11 attacks? What’s utterly shocking is that it’s not farfetched to think that high-ranking Americans could conceivably have been involved. “Nation building” is just a conterm for government subsidized infrastructure instituting corporate

exploitation of foreign countries—and subsidized, of course, literally means at American taxpayers’ expense. America’s wars are corporate wars—wars advancing corporate interests. Wars are the Corporate Nation’s most lucrative component of nation building. And soldiers naïvely die to advance this cause. Meanwhile, the poor get poorer, the Hog rich, richer. Meanwhile, Back in the Fertile Fields of Hog Shit In January 2005, United Nations Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix announced that global warming dwarfs both war and terror as an international security risk. A multitude of the world’s most prestigious scientists and scientific organizations concurred. The scientifically challenged Bush cartel disagreed. The Wise Use Bush cartel has always denigrated science, because science said there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that corporate pollution is destroying the world. Blix hit a nerve. That corporate pollution causes global warming was something the Bush cartel didn’t want gullible sheep known as Americans to ponder. Bush—who rejected evolution and stem cell research—evidently didn’t care that the energy cartel jeopardizes the lives, health, well-being, and security of their own children and grandchildren. Even according to Bush’s own hand-picked EPA, Bush’s abolishment of key components of the Clean Air Act alone would result in the loss of 18,000 American lives each year—six times more than the 2,973 who died 9/11. Of course, air polluter industries contributed more than $100 million to Bush’s campaign. Most voting Americans don’t know this. Thanks to Reagan’s murder of the Fairness Doctrine and blanket deregulation, those same mega-rich polluting industries also own the media, whether outright or via advertising. When I last checked, NBC, for instance, was owned by the world’s biggest polluter, General Electric, which held the world record with 86 Superfund sites. Until recently, CBS was owned by Westinghouse, the world’s largest owner of nuclear power plants and third-largest manufacturer of nuclear weapons, besides having 39 Superfund sites. CNN belonged to AOL Time Warner, a major ultra-right dominionist campaign contributor. And the

networks bring in over $15 billion a year in advertising from auto industry, auto as in oil, as in pollution. You won’t hear from the rightwing controlled media that in nineteen states, all fish are now unsafe to eat, or that one in six Americans have dangerous levels of mercury in their bodies. You won’t hear that when Bush was governor of Texas, his antienvironmental policies allowed Houston to overtake Los Angeles as America’s smoggiest city. Or that a quarter of Texas streams and rivers are so polluted that they aren’t even safe for recreational use. Or that pollution-related health care costs of Houston residents range between $2.9 and $3.1 billion. Or that air pollution kills approximately 435 Houston residents each year. If you got your news from mainstream sources, you probably didn’t know that for the first time since the Clean Water Act was passed over thirty years ago, America’s waters got dirtier under Bush, according to Bush’s own EPA officials. Corporations are still strip-mining, logging, dumping toxins, waging war, and in every conceivable way raping and robbing America, but the wimp media would rather deaden your brain with movie star gossip and sensationalized crime sagas and political bickering than give you the real scoop, the real crime. You did, however, hear the media blare in graphic detail the threat of the famous anthrax attacks, which killed a total of six people. The Wise Use dominionist-owned media used bullshit bullying to instill a home-front fear that could rally Americans around its war. Blind sheep that we are, we relinquished our rights to their cartel via the McCarthy wannabes’ Patriot Act—yet another stroke of conterm genius. Even though the Patriot Act bill was submitted the night before the vote so no one had time to read it, the trembling Senate blindly voted overwhelmingly to pass it. The Senate voted like traitors of American democracy out of blatantly orchestrated fear. If you knew that, you likely got it from Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 or some online liberal media; you certainly didn’t hear it from the mainstream press. Times had certainly changed. Back in 1979, you might well have heard about “corporate average fuel economy,” or CAFE standards, established by President Carter to challenge the auto industry to

design more fuel-efficient cars. I remember. Fuel economy rose 7.5 miles per gallon, turning an oil shortage into a surplus. Isn’t fuelefficiency a wise course of action? After all, the U.S. uses 25 percent of the world’s oil but only houses three percent of global oil. 65 percent of global oil sits in the Persian Gulf states. In Crimes Against Nature, Robert Kennedy reminds us of this startling fact: “A 1-mileper-gallon improvement would yield double the oil that could ever be extracted from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge…A 2.6-mpg increase would eliminate the need for all Persian Gulf imports.” But in 1987, in order to benefit big oil and Detroit, President Reagan rolled back Carter’s standards. Keep in mind that Joe Coors and his Sagebrush Rebels were calling the shots. Economist Amory Lovins reported that had the U.S. continued to conserve at the rate it did during the Carter era, we would have no longer needed Persian Gulf oil after 1986. But rightwing Republicans “are” big corporations, especially big oil. Like psychopaths, so classified not just for the absence of good but for the presence of evil, these Republicans encourage polluter industries by deregulating, handing the already rich corporations giant subsidies, and giving them tax breaks (at the time Kennedy wrote his book a few years back, 61 percent of the largest corporations paid zero taxes on their huge profits). Thanks to Cheney-Bush, who rejected the tax deduction for gas-saving hybrid cars and implemented an obese $100,000 tax break for Hummers and the other thirty-eight thirstiest gas guzzlers, America had the worst energy efficiency in twenty years, which of course guaranteed huge profits for Cheney-Bush and friends. Little has changed, even with a Democratic president, thanks to Republican filibuster wartactics. Why can’t we just say no to the oil pushers? Even now they’re hoarding oil to drive up prices. They don’t even care about polluting their own children’s air and water, or fomenting terrorism, or waging wars that their grandchildren will pay for with their cash and their lives. Blatant lying is one thing. But what psychopathic Faustian antichrist would commit the murder-suicide of his own species for momentary monetary gain?

Pollution and war are two faces of the same devil: Hog. Dominionists have not secured ports and power facilities because they want to be able to take them over. To control the country they need to take over our entire infrastructure. The quickest way to take them over is to make us first feel vulnerable, then threatened, then attacked by terrorists or assailed by catastrophe, such as a nuclear power plant meltdown or meltdown of arctic ice due to global warming. Dominionists realizing the importance of instigating fear would have realized the value of allowing terrorism. They might even have grasped the importance of appropriating terror. So-called conspiracy theories posit that dominionists fomented terrorism and orchestrated 9/11 to frighten us into sacrificing our rights and relinquishing our power to the Homeland Security Gestapo created by “our elected officials” to “protect” us. The Iraq War gave them increased control over the military. Cheney economic policies transferred the people’s money, jobs, and well-being to dominionist corporations—the Corporate Nation—eradicating economic rights and creating an unbridgeable gap between the upper and middle classes. Threats, catastrophes, wars, and economic devastation escalate fear, and fear makes people reach frantically for rescue. People in need of rescue will grab any lifeline, whatever the cost. Dominionism becomes the religion of salvation and dominionists our saviors. Because of the failures represented by Iraq and Katrina, we see that these dominionist high priests are incompetent charlatans. Even so, most Americans haven’t even glimpsed the sinister underbelly of the dominionist leviathan, the Corporate Nation: Almighty Hog. United We Stand Up To Our Necks In Poison What I’ve outlined above only scratches the surface. The BushCheney era has ended. But the economic fallout from their reign will stoop our backs for many decades, and their greed will continue to literally poison the cells our bodies and their children’s bodies are made of. The psychotic Earth-rape epidemic can’t be easily controlled. We the people voted in President Obama, who promised change. We even gave him a Democrat Congress—sort of. Republican obstructionists kept Congress from doing its job. Change

came, in miniscule doses. Pollution continued. So did other forms of exploitation and victimization. We the people voted again, retaliated, really, on Obama’s reneged promise. The Republican-controlled House just made things worse. And of course, there was the big BP oil spill—a media blitz that ranted and raved against BP while ignoring its multitude of typical smaller oil spills taking place at the same time. Given who owns the press, it makes sense that its reporters ignore polluters’ massive crimes against nature committed every day. Nor do they report on, oh, the billions in tax breaks for offshore operations of U.S. financial companies, the billions in tax write-offs for oil companies’ drilling and well costs, the hundreds of millions in special tax breaks for the timber industry, just for starters. But those media channels do subject us to commercials by the big polluter companies telling us about all the great Green-energy products and services they’re providing to and for us. Ah yes, the Green smokescreen. Maybe pollution seems too abstract, too remote from your own skin to scare you into action. But what if you were being secretly poisoned each and every day of your life? What if big agri-polluters that sicken Mother Earth to put bread on your table for a hefty profit sicken to death people like you with that bread? Ah, you say, not all bread is created equal. You, a health nut, only eat old-fashioned good wholesome fiber-rich whole wheat bread, usually organic brands sold in your neighborhood health food store. What if I told you that medical doctors like William Davis, author of Wheat Belly, and Mark Hyman, author of The Blood Sugar Solution, point out that a slice of your good wholesome fiber-rich whole wheat bread, organic or otherwise, increases blood sugar as much as or more than table sugar? In fact, its glycemic index is higher than that for white bread and much higher than that of a Snickers bar. Chowing down on whole grain foods results in higher levels of glucose and therefore insulin. Just eliminating wheat from your diet can cure your diabetes, acid reflux, irritable bowel syndrome, brain fog, insomnia, rashes, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, and of course obesity. Before you argue that you don’t have any of these conditions, keep in mind that most people have some stage of at least some of these ailments that left untreated can become life-

threatening. The gluten from wheat has been linked to heart disease, cancer, and of course celiac disease, among other conditions that make most of us shudder. Always the skeptic you ask, if whole wheat bread is unhealthy, why is it being pushed as healthy? I’ll give you a clue: Oink. (And “pushed” is exactly the right word.) Hog agribusiness is as unregulated—i.e., as free to rape and plunder—as any other corporate colossus, thanks to gofer politicians that we ourselves vote into power. So agri-scientists dutifully customize wheat with even more mutant forms of even more addictive gluten so that you can get even fatter and sicker, which drives you to buy even more wheat products, including brands pretending to make you thinner and healthier. Needless to say, the big drug cartel, HMOs, and health insurance racket in which they’re heavily invested love your inability to just say no. You’ve heard of GMO, of course, but what you aren’t being told by the government or big media is that GMO Frankenfoods such as real artificial wheat, corn, and soy are wreaking havoc on your carcass even as you’re being sold that old snake-oil line: “healthy.” Starting out in the mid-‘40s as a noble agenda to reduce world hunger, hybridization and later genetic engineering metamorphosed into Dr. Frankenstein shoving monster after even scarier monster down an ever-accelerating assembly line that leads to your front door. But here’s what’s really scary: Frankenstein’s monster isn’t just Frankenfurters (processed with gluten) on your plate. That’s just the means to an end. The real monster is you, the gluten glutton. And you don’t even know it, because your psyche has been possessed by cutthroat corporate-owned advertisers, and those advertisers own the media and the government. Clearly conglomerate busting must be part of any fiscal diet plan for obese Hogs. The neo-Darwinian might view conglomeration positively, as evolutionary transition of the super-fittest to survive. No more tame Mendelian breeding. In the mid-twentieth century, Dr. Frankenstein arrived, MBA in hand, to devise increasingly sophisticated ways to exploit the new science of heterozygosity and gene dominance. The staff of life harvested around 8500 B.C. by the semi-nomadic Natufians of the Fertile Crescent, the bread broken by Jesus and his

disciples, the amber waves of grain sustaining America’s proud heartland, the toast hugging the ham in grandpa’s ham sandwich— that bread of life no longer exists except on a few radically organic small preserves. Wheat that had naturally evolved very little over the centuries suddenly morphed in the hands of the gene gods into more than 25,000 freak-show varieties. Interesting that the religious right yelling about stem cell researchers playing God subsidizes hybridizing, crossbreeding, and truly grotesque genetic tampering that have given us the synthetic wheat, corn, and soy that are “strong” like a muscle-builder must have steroids and Viagra constantly administered by human hands, that are “potent” in that they genetically damage humans and their animals. Damaged meat on damaged bread spread with synthetic-laced condiments peddled as unprocessed are the health nut’s ticket to blight in a land flowing with poisoned milk and funny money. As if that level of perversion were not kinky enough, new strains of wheat, corn, and soy are bred to be part of a genetic package that includes specific fertilizers or pesticides with well-documented health risks. Mondo corporations like Monsanto, Cargill, and ADM patent their designer seeds to drive up their cost and the price of their brands of essential fertilizers and pesticides. Roundup Ready soybeans, for instance, bred so they won’t be harmed when sprayed with the weed killer Roundup are special seeds sold with their complementing pesticide. It’s bad enough that the mutant plants can’t survive without constant human intervention; but they’re also causing mutations in the animals and people who ingest them. No wonder folks think they’ve been alien abducted. Even those corporate CEOs and their kids eat the same damaged food harvested from the same poisoned soil. Let’s rename Dr. Frankenstein Dr. Jekyll and reinterpret the story. The heart of the problem isn’t really government, as rotten and impotent as it can be. The problem isn’t a puppet media. The source of the problem isn’t even the corporate oligarchy, the Corporate Nation—it’s even bigger than that: It’s the Corporate Nation disguised as God claiming to be a person. Perhaps the revolution begun by our Deist Founders can still institute a real “change we can depend on.” Perhaps the current

Occupy Movement will “occupy God” so that natural democracy can prevail over aristocratic, dominionist perversion. But it won’t happen without a concerted revolution against Hog Almighty. The exploiter thinks that exploiting others makes him a superior person, but it only makes him a superior exploiter. A person is a member of a society. A person’s innate faculties, his soul and physical self, his experiences, knowledge, loves, and dreams— everything that makes a person a person is the direct result of his living in a society. A person thrives by receiving the nurturance of a free society, not by imposing its enslavement, not by poisoning it. Dominionists don’t understand that “dominion” domination is unnatural. Lording it over others violates natural personhood. A highly-functioning society is free of overlords. Aristocrats and other dictators are the real perverts of a democracy. Mother Love This is a test: Why are we here in this life, in these bodies in this world? Answer: This is a test. The natural state of life is health and well-being. The body gets sick, yes, but then gets well, all by itself; the body’s wounds heal without our intervention. But there are boundaries beyond which sickness and injury demand our attention; it is built into the natural scheme of life that sometimes health and well-being require our active participation. How and why we participate is the test. The ancient query “Why would a good God permit evil?” or the more perplexing “Why would a good God cause evil?” deserves an answer. In fact it’s one of the test’s big-point questions. Unlike religions that assume we suffer as punishment to purge our inherent or fallen evil nature, Deism posits a different drama: We’re here to prove our worth, to participate in our own self-creation, to become what we truly are. Unlike a butterfly pushing its way out of its cocoon, we unwrap a uniquely discrete self we ourselves shape with every choice we make. Life tests our mettle with a multitude of questions. How we answer defines who we have chosen to be. In order for the victimizer to become what he truly is, he must have the freedom to victimize the innocent. Justice isn’t always served in this life. But if

it’s true that there’s a God and that God is good, then the notion of a Judgment Day the day your leave this life makes perfect sense. It makes sense, too, that the victimizing Right labels environmentalism “socialism,” and socialism “sissy.” Socialism protects society the way environmentalism protects the environment, and for the same fundamental reason: Benefit, i.e., health and wellbeing. Benefit is a pragmatic synonym for philos, meaning friendship, or brotherly love. Socialists and environmentalists are stewards of God’s Creation. Stewardship protects and benefits Earth and humans. The Corporate Right with its predatory Earth-rape-andmurder agenda that includes pollution poison necessarily transgresses every version of authentic stewardship. Jungle brutes exercise their God-given right to kill us along with themselves. Destruction is ultimately self-destruction. The shadow knows this, which is why it belches and bellows its rhetoric of Armageddon and bribes universities with million-dollar grants in exchange for their hiring bogus scientists to promote among their students right-wing corporate lies like healthy gluten and harmlessly natural global warming. Rape your Mother, upper class clown Ann Coulter proclaims. Rape your Mother: One wonders what bleeding past Coulter’s shadow is pleading that she heal. Symbolically, rape your Mother exposes the shadowy misogynist pollution in which Hog gleefully wallows. Hog lusts for pollution. Pollution is the effect, the smoke spewed into the atmosphere. The cause is psychopathic evil, the great spiritual hunter, the classic devil, pitchfork in hand, stirring his smoldering little coals flaring into flames flashing high above the soot-swallowed roofs. Psychopaths are marked not by the mere absence of good but by the transcending presence of evil. Pollution, which of course includes food poison, is not the absence of benefit but is willful predation that destroys the existing benefits that constitute God-given nature’s nurturing bounty. Rape is not the absence of nurturing benefits of love but is a willful performance of pure selfish lust further perverted by hate. Again, the natural state of life is health and well-being. The body of Earth and the human body are plagued with manmade sickness

and injury of such catastrophic degree that survival requires our active doctoring. The bell tolls for thee, my friend. We must all become the Good Samaritan surgeon saving each other. Love thy neighbor. Bah humbug, the Corporate Right grumbles. You vulgar liberals read too-earthy subtext into our godly text. It’s just about money. No harm intended. Really? What is your heavenly Mother’s message to you if pollution, which violates her sacred Word of intelligently designed Nature, poisons you right down to the logos programmed in your DNA?



 

Chapter 11 Soror Mystica The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned… Why has humanity failed to establish the peaceable kingdom? Hog, of course. But what if Hog is a tiny minority; what if selfishness isn’t inherent but is a defense mechanism; what if the hogwash could be hosed off? What if humanity could be deprogrammed, or if a simple paradigm shift could change the course of history away from oppression and toward utopia? What if the fruit of this shift could be instantly enjoyed? The fact is, it can. The problem is simple and the solution just as simple—which doesn’t mean it’s easy. The Hog problem began as an elementary mistake: Even before Heraclitus described logos as the interplay of opposites six centuries B.C.E., humanity had already recognized contrast and defined difference in terms of conflict. Sounds a bit Darwinian, doesn’t it? Although statistically most people probably in principle agreed with Heraclitus that an ideal society harmonizes diverse elements, rather than get along with each other humanity chose to define itself in terms of oppositional dominance and submission: male vs. female; rich vs. poor; master vs. slave; young vs. old; white vs. not-white; victimizer vs. victim, etc. ad nauseam. Well, okay, it likely wasn’t humanity as a whole that made that choice. No doubt it was the predators—statistically about one percent of us, a very small minority—that recognized in polarities opportunities for exploitation. If young, rich males could naturally rule, then old, poor, and female described ideal victims. The

“weaker” could only be defended by people in-between the oppositional extremes, or by people who chose to reject the masterslave categories as invalid. Assertions of superiority provoked resistance, revolt, revolution. Then superiors challenged each other, giving birth to war. All this occurred “naturally” only in the sense that humans had the natural facility to choose this rather than that: exploitation and conflict rather than harmony. But who really was choosing? Even today “humanity” as a whole is largely defined by choices imposed by a predatory minority. Are you happy with that? I know I’m not. Isn’t it time for majority rule of harmony to unseat elite rule of conflict? Early on humans understood that binaries themselves fall into different categories. As Heraclitus noted, there is nothing inherently superior about hot over cold, light rather than dark, sweet instead of sour. Seawater is a good environment for fish but not for humans. Both day and night dazzle in every season, and each segment of time serves its own specific purpose. Some binaries complement each other, like male and female. Those contrasts are neutral, and only become good or bad in specific contexts. Superiority, in the sense of competition and conflict, is irrelevant. Some binaries, however, are not neutral. For instance, snooty superiority defaces and perverts equality, freedom, justice, and truth, the cornerstones of any authentically harmonious society. The “superior” create conflict in order to challenge and conquer; the elite transgress against natural humanity by enforcing power-over. A repressed slave caste unable to revolt is not “harmonious.” Deep down most people have always condemned assertions of superiority manifested as elite entitlement that includes ownership of people. Even pre-Civil War, most Americans considered slavery to be evil, or at least a grave social injustice. But though most people even in antiquity understood that superior does not equal good, sometime in the Stone Age the superior decreed that it does. Eventually murder, rape, plunder, and every other form of power-over, legitimized as the necessary means to the end of superiority, sanctified evil as the just reward for achieving that end. Religion, too, was exploited to glorify the god-ordained rank and title and even supposed divinity of the elite. It’s quite likely that the

exploiting elite elevated religious myth to God-breathed fact in order to supervise the maintenance of elitist superiority. But the human species was divinely programmed with an inherent conscience by which to distinguish between truth and fabrication, justice and injustice, good and evil. Human values emerged as a response to behaviors that struck the conscience as appropriate or inappropriate, as beneficial or harmful. Humans naturally understood that moral binaries were categorically different from neutral ones, and considered evil to be unnatural. Women were not naturally inferior to men, and the unnatural imposition of inferiority upon women by the cult of uppity men was unnatural and evil. Religions controlled by men codified misogyny. Women became property. “Inferior” men were reduced to the role of women; male slaves and serfs and hired hands and every other male in the rank of the ninetynine or so percent were essentially property of the elite. Religions— or cultic subsets of most religions, the subsets that tended to become “organized”—further reduced women and everything womanly to the sub-status of evil: Eve was a mere rib of Adam consorting with the devil. Classic projection, contorted though the image might be. Morality has always been deemed by almost everyone to be an inherent aspect of human nature, which is an aspect of truth— natural truth, truth embodied by Nature. If Nature embodies truth even by lowly human standards, and if Nature must be rational and therefore intelligently designed, then morality is rational by design, and the highest moral touchstone is truth rather than opinion. Regardless what the atheist Darwinians assert, good and evil are not human “constructs” but are values (like numerical values) in a natural ethical dimension of human existence. Religion concerns itself with what makes us not-just-animal. Morality, along with creativity, free will, and reason, are qualities that distinguish humans from other animals. Humans know, evaluate, and choose in a way that is categorically, qualitatively “other.” Even atheist scientists keep exploring Nature, for some to the point of passionate obsession. What are they trying to discover? Cures for cancer, sure. But aren’t they really looking for the sheer pleasure of looking? But why? Like many other ponderers, Aristotle

believed that the knowledge of the “wisest of the wise,” or what today we call philosophical, spiritual knowledge, “gives the liveliest pleasure.” Aren’t scientists and philosophers alike really seeking some quasi-conscious holy grail, the ultimate answer to some paramount question they don’t even know they ask? Science is practical. But it isn’t just practical. Fundamentally, science is metaphysically motivated. Scientists, like the rest of us, seek meaning. Deep meaning. Meaning that penetrates into and through and beyond space-time, meaning that touches the transcendent realm of eternity: Michelangelo’s finger touching the finger of God. And like many statements about meaning, that’s a representation used here as a metaphor. Today, two thousand years C.E., the richly complex definitions of logos once again intersect at the core understanding that intelligently designed Nature embodies the Word of God to humanity. But even in our progressive era, exploration of sacred Logos is greeted with disdain by proponents of organized religious mythos on one side and scientific materialist mythos on the other. At least in a progressive nation like America, scientists and philosophers are free to express and publish their views. Even so, the metaphysical investigations into what is now popularly called intelligent design are oddly reminiscent of the situation of alchemists during the Inquisition, not because scientists and philosophers are overtly persecuted (at least not in America), but because they seek fundamental facts about reality that are steeped in levels of meaning that humanity seems only vaguely aware of, and because the facts they’ve discovered are taboo to both the religious and scientific establishments. Chemists today, like their forerunners centuries ago, stand at the crossroads where science and religion, philosophy and theology, knowledge and meaning intersect. Alchemy: Metaphor of Transformation During the Inquisition many alchemists were burned at the stake, along with witches and other folk doctors and herbalists (pharmacists) who were forbidden to compete with churchsponsored guilds, which paid the Church dues and kickbacks. Though most European alchemists were Christians, alchemy was

considered suspect by Church officials, partly because it was a secret society, partly because alchemists were early chemists working on, among other things, processes that would turn lead to gold, a commodity the Church wanted for itself. Not only was alchemy science, it had the audacity to be symbolic, creative, and mystical—all aspects of “mystery” the elite clergy controlled, interpreted, and exploited. Similar to early Christians who used X and the rebus ICHTUS and the sketched fish as secret signs of their presence in the Roman Empire, medieval alchemists, the new Christian underground, shrouded “the word” with hermetic definitions to protect it from the Church. Alchemists viewed the Church as corrupt and heretical, and because it elevated symbols like Pope, Bible, and Holy Emperor to that status of God, it was guilty of idolatry. The great error of the Church was that it lifted up representations of God as God himself; believers had forgotten that the metaphors were metaphors. By transmuting the symbols back into symbols, the alchemists ritually enacted a radically subversive trans-figuration. These symbols located the fusion of science and art, and in a sense logos and mythos, in a transcendent, mystical synthesis. Alchemy symbolizes that same kind of fusion taking place today. Religious heretics past and present have been involved in spiritual alchemy, in striving to transmute the lead of dead tradition into precious gold—a change as radically natural as life emerging from inert matter. If Aristotle was right that the surest sign of genius is the ability to make metaphor/symbol, and if geniuses from Shakespeare to Jung are right that many of our symbols represent unconscious contents, and if unconscious contents unattended often emerge as a shadow (the shadow itself being a metaphor), and if life in all its richness is at least as deeply meaningful as a great literary work (subject to interpretation of its meaning), and if the meaningful life has a transcending purpose (like the meaning of a symbol), then it might be worth examining the work of alchemists as metaphorically representing the spiritual work we are currently engaged in as we pursue our passions in the sciences and arts. Certainly alchemy mirrors today’s exploration of intelligent design.

Al-chemistry The opus, or life work, of medieval and pre-medieval alchemists was transmuting baser into more valuable elements, like lead to gold, or weak materials into the philosopher’s stone, the lapis lazuli, or mundane chemicals into the highly refined universal elixir of life. The soror mystica, “mystical sister,” was the alchemist’s assistant in her/his life opus of transmutation. An alchemist could be male or female, and the assistant, though referred to as the mystical sister, could also be male or female. Regardless of the gender of the players, the alchemist was symbolically male and the assistant female. The assistant was not a convenient gofer, but the essential provider of impetus and inspiration for the work at hand. “She” was the alchemist’s best friend, confidant, provider of insight and moral support; “she” represented the feminine aspect of the “he” performing the work. Figuratively, alchemist represented the soul (immanence), soror mystica the spirit (transcendence). Although in an “inferior” position as assistant, the mystical sister was in essence the alchemist’s spirit guide. Put another way, your spirit life in this world assists your soul in the process of transcendence. Designating spirit as female and soul as male is a cultural construct, a metaphor. Neither spirit nor soul is female or male or even a synthesis of the two. But that enlightened understanding, according to alchemy, only comes after the separation and reuniting marriage of soul and spirit during this life in the natural realm. The prima materia, the original elements in the state of chaos, chosen from a schema organized in terms of opposites, were combined in the vas, the belief being that the attraction of opposites led to a conjunction giving rise to a new substance greater than the sum of original materials. After combining and regenerating these new substances many times in many ways, the final elements would be pure. The coniunctio, or mating in the vas, was hierosgamos, the sacred marriage linking bodily and spiritual, which led to impregnatio, freeing of the soul from the material, which sounds pleasant enough. But the process of transformation involved fermentatio, nigredo, mortificatio, and putrifactio, moral struggle, psychic purges, wrestling

with angels, dark nights of the soul. The alchemist’s opus consisted of combining the separated elements to purify them so that a higher synthesis would emerge. The well-initiated adept was always conscious that his goal was transforming base matter into spirit and that he was working with the elements of his own being. Since the alchemical mysteries were represented hermetically, or symbolically, to protect them from the exploitation of the selfish, one could learn alchemy only from another alchemist. The key to the symbols’ meanings was only passed among fellow alchemists and soror mysticas who had proven trustworthy. Trust was an absolute essential aspect of alchemical relationships. A soror mystica could assist the alchemist only if she knew what the alchemist knew and kept her knowledge safe from outsiders. The spirit guarded and guided the soul during the process of transmutation. The alchemists used artistic representations to depict every aspect of the alchemical process. The opus itself was represented by the androgyny, the synthesis of male and female, as opposed to their status-quo dichotomy. The opus was performed with material elements, but the goal was always spiritual—in Aquinas’s view, mystical, in Jung’s view, psychological (in a profound archetypal sense). The gender split represented a higher rift between matter and spirit. Symbolically the rift was synthesized through the alchemical process. It might appear as if the soror mystica was an inferior in the alchemical hierarchy. But the soror mystica, who helped the alchemist in his work, could herself be an alchemist with a soror mystica, who might well be the other alchemist. The gender of the players could be either male or female, but the gender of the roles was clear-cut: alchemist male, soror mystica female. This represented the reality of the gender power dichotomy as it existed then, and which still exists today. The opus itself strove to transcend the limitations of the material with a genderless, or androgynous, transcendent spirit. If this still sounds like hierarchical gender roles, keep in mind that the alchemist and “his” soror mystica could be two men, or two women. The point is that one person was working on “his” life and the other was there as close, nurturing friend/helper. In an ideal

scenario, both would be alchemists also being each other’s soror mystica, an arrangement that would embody the ultimate expression of androgyny and spiritual friendship. In an ideal relationship, the alchemist and soror mystica were in communion; they were one in the sense of being a complementary unity with each part retaining its differentiated integrity. When an individual’s animus and anima, soul and spirit, are integrated into one, the person is in an ideal relationship (communion) with him/herself. Only then can the person find peace—because the opposite of peace is war, the conflict between the male/female (soul/spirit) binaries. The alchemical opus brought to light the urgent need of our species to transcend the alienating male/female gender split that had ripped our civilization to shreds at every level: body, soul, and spirit. But the split between genders represented a psychological split within each of us as individuals. The opus completed through the ideal relationship between alchemist and soror mystica symbolized by the androgyny symbolizes the two aspects of an individual person working together to complete the integrated, unified opus of his/her transcending life. The alchemical relationship could in fact represent any symbiotic relationship, including harmonious society, or the process of human evolution and individual maturation. In Jungian terms, the individual’s desire for the unity of anima/animus into wholeness, represented by the androgyny, is repressed and therefore emerges as the shadow—i.e., neurosis, or worse, psychosis—meaning that the macho male or passive female is unwilling or unable to integrate anima and animus. Keep in mind that macho male characteristics are occasionally present in females, and passive female characteristics can be present in males. Played out in the socio-political arena, the psychological neurosis/psychosis of alienating gender polarization is at its core a spiritual infectious disease—an acute dis-ease. The need to harmonize the binary male/female gender split remains today. The gender gap is narrowing, albeit in slow motion, but not without repercussions via threatened males. This contagion requires potent medicine. Soror Mystica: The Healer

The elitist thinks his superiority is dependent upon the inferiority of his subjects. But in fact, the opposite is true. Friendly cooperation has been critical to our evolution and enlightenment. In The Stone Age Present, William Allman points out that “The way we behave today has its roots in the lives of our ancestors in the Stone Age; our large brains arose primarily to cope with the enormous complexity of dealing with each other; the primary adaptation of our species is not hunting, toolmaking, or language, but our ability to cooperate. Ultimately, my research revealed that our species’ remarkable evolutionary success is due to a trait that most of us take for granted, but that is rare among other animals on the planet: We make friends.” Elites would argue that they have friends: other elites. But in a society constructed of manmade binaries, in a Darwinian world of cutthroat competition, how can the elitist know who his friends really are? At any moment he could be his best friend’s next target. Even casual conversations would surely consist of little more than one-up bragging and cocky but very guarded revelations of each male’s latest conquests. Fat egos are more dangerous than—well, fat. A plastic soul could never be authentically spiritual (unless evil could be considered spiritual) or genuinely friendly. Though secretive, alchemical purification was not about elitist superiority. Hermetic isolation resulted from the need to protect the Self from predation and contamination. “Do not give dogs what is holy; do not throw your pearls to the pigs: they will only trample on them, and turn and tear you to pieces,” as alchemists echoed Jesus’ graphic warning. The Inquisition is a case in point. Good relationships draw good boundaries around themselves to protect what is holy. When elites are brought down from their pedestals to live among us mortals, doors unlock and fling wide open to welcome a whole new world of friends. It’s naïve to think that the new world will be perfect. As long as one percent of humans are clinically psychopathic, vigilance will remain a necessity. But wouldn’t the world be ninety-nine percent perfect if we could know who our friends are and could be free of Hoggish selfishness, conflict, and

exploitation that destroy every version of genuine friendship? Courage is the solution. Today alchemy reminds us of the need to bridge the degrading “isms” in our culture—sexism, racism, classism, homophobe-ism, looks-ism, ageism—all of which represent the higher rift between our transcendent being and our present material being. Other kinds of rifts exist, but the ism rifts are human, personal, and impossible to ignore because they are a part of what we are as human beings. Each ism places one in a relative category: I am a particular sex, race, class, sexual orientation, look, or age; and even though some of these are subject to change, the point is that I am different than someone else, and that difference makes me conscious of what I lack or do not lack. Youth is coveted in our culture (as opposed to cultures that respect their elders), and when one grows old one becomes keenly aware of the lack of youth that one had and that now others have. The isms point to our separation, difference, and alienation, but more importantly they are humanly cultivated attitudes of inferiority and superiority; they are our choices to be separated, to not be one, and to dishonor difference. Isms foment conflict. Not all isms degrade; some defend against degrading isms. Feminism, for example, defends against sexism. If there were no sexism, feminism would not exist. Androgyny is the symbolic, feminist expression of the need to reconcile the split between male and female by defying gender-specific roles/identities in order to deconstruct the male myth of “superiority.” This is not an urge to create a gray from black and white; it is the demand that each aspect/individual be respected as an equal, not relegated to a position of inferior to be exploited. Mutual respect will give rise to a higher synthesized whole: a unifying Golden Mean represented by the androgyny. In today’s terms, the goal of alchemy is to overcome oppression and exploitation, the expressions of selfishness, with equality and mutuality, the expressions of transcendent friendship and love—in other words, communion. Clearly that includes making friends with the various aspects of ourselves. “Love your neighbor as yourself” includes “love yourself.” Not Hoggishly. Love yourself as a person, not as a Hog. Communion with yourself is as critical as communion

with friends, as communion with the society of humanity, as communion with Nature and with the God of Nature. Alchemist and soror mystica work together much like the left and right brain. Because our mind (via body: brain) is the soul aspect that grasps and articulates spiritual truth, communion must involve the integration of what we have come to understand as the right and left hemispheres. The right hemisphere processes images, generates and integrates feeling states such as love, humor, and aesthetic appreciation, and grasps the input of all our senses simultaneously, giving consciousness its field of awareness. The left brain discriminates, analyzes, and dissects the world into pieces, objects, and categories through the symbolic linear expressions of language. Women’s corpus callosum, the bridge of neuronal fibers that connects and synthesizes communication between the two hemispheres, contains ten to thirty-three percent more neuronal fibers than the corpus callosum of men. The unifying structure of the female brain is one reason women tend to be more nurturing than men. The alchemist can’t achieve transformational wholeness without the unifying nurturance of the soror mystica. Though polarization allowed our ancestors to successfully specialize as gatherers and hunters, our era requires a more mature, feminine paradigm. In the same way that we live not only in space and time but also in space-time, we are fulfilling the natural prepotency of integrating the feminine and masculine functions into a more unified surpassing whole. Every newborn brain is completely equipped for the full functioning of both modes of thought, the feminine (holistic, simultaneous, synthetic, concrete) and masculine (linear, sequential, reductionist, abstract). Our brain-sculpting necessarily involves creating a culture that is more androgynous, egalitarian, accepting rather than marginalizing, scapegoating, raping. Whole-brain experience is like the complex music that arose from two traditions of instrumentation in ancient Greece. The kithara, a plucked string instrument used by the cult of Apollo, was characterized by clarity and simplicity of form and emotional restraint. A double-pipe reed instrument, the aulos, used by the cult of Dionysus, expressed emotional subjectivity. The integration of

Apollonian and Dionysian experiences of music has given birth to symphony, jazz, and soul. In the same way that we need to integrate right and left brain, we must integrate the hemispheres of our planet. Two hundred million years ago, Panegaea (“all earth”) split into two smaller masses, Gondwanaland and Laurasia, then split further into our current continental masses. The splitting continues today. If the emergence of different continents had simply led us to develop a rich variety of races and cultures, that would have benefited us. But instead, our differences have also resulted in self-interested nationalism (which includes the mega-self-interested nationalism of the global Corporate Nation) and its fallout: competition, conflict and destructive, selfdestructive war. Today, for the first time ever, the continents are truly “one” via communications technology and high-speed modes of travel. We take this new reality for granted, but it truly is a mindboggling evolutionary revolution unleashing tremendous potential for holistic integration—for communing community communication via high-tech commuting. Unity of Mind Whole-brain thinking isn’t just a matter of utilizing the whole organ. Mind isn’t just brain. Engaging the whole mind in balanced, eclectic thought that is both logical and creative is the primary objective of employing the whole brain. But can there ever really be an absolute “unity of mind” when we are constantly shifting our focus from one state of mind to another, not just between the male and female aspects? In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf helps us notice that just maintaining a male or female perspective, that just thinking of one sex as distinct from the other, is an effort that requires a great exertion to keep unconsciously repressing the other; but a “unity of mind” can “continue without effort because nothing is required to be held back.” Once Woolf realized that the two sexes were designed to cooperate, she went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in

the man’s brain, the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman’s brain, the woman predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually co-operating. If one is a man, still the woman part of the brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties. Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine. Woolf was quick to note that she was not privileging the female half of the mind. Coleridge certainly did not mean, when he said that a great mind is androgynous, that it is a mind that has any special sympathy with women; a mind that takes up their cause or devotes itself to their interpretation. Perhaps the androgynous mind is less apt to make these distinctions than the singlesexed mind. He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided. In fact one goes back to Shakespeare’s mind as the type of the androgynous, of the man-womanly mind, though it would be impossible to say what Shakespeare thought of women. In fact, when she turned from women’s writing, Indeed, it was delightful to read a man’s writing again. It was so direct, so straightforward after the writing of women. It indicated such freedom of mind, such liberty of person, such confidence in himself. One had a sense of physical well-being in the presence of this well-nourished, well-educated, free mind, which had never been thwarted or opposed, but had had full liberty from birth to stretch itself in whatever way it liked. And this was admirable. But after reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark

bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter “I.” One began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it. Whether that was indeed a tree or a woman walking I was not quite sure. Back one was always hailed to the letter “I.” One began to be tired of “I.” Not but what this “I” was a most respectable “I”; honest and logical; as hard as a nut, and polished for centuries by good teaching and good feeding. Ah, yes, the male ego, which, she says, is “impeded and inhibited and self-conscious.” It seems, she notes, that “virility has now become self-conscious—men, that is to say, are now writing only with the male side of their brains.” But the female has an ego, too, and Woolf warns women of the risks of reading men’s writing in order to find a true picture of themselves there, for no picture of woman objectified is ever true. “It is the power of suggestion that one most misses” in most male writing. It’s true that the centuries have rolled out a large number of very able male writers, “acute and full of learning; but the trouble was, that his feelings no longer communicated; his mind seemed separated into different chambers; not a sound carried from one to the other. Thus, when one takes a sentence of Mr. B [a hypothetical male-minded writer] into the mind it falls plump to the ground—dead; but when one takes a sentence of Coleridge into the mind, it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas, and that is the only sort of writing of which one can say that it has the secret of perpetual life.” Woolf’s complaint is a profound spiritual concern: “Do what she will a woman cannot find in them that fountain of perpetual life which the critics assure her is there. It is not only that they celebrate male virtues, enforce male values and describe the world of men; it is that the emotion with which these books are permeated is to a woman incomprehensible. [They] lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.” Some male writers, though, are safe for women to read— Shakespeare, for instance, “for Shakespeare was androgynous; and so was Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb and Coleridge. Shelley perhaps was sexless. Milton and Ben Johnson had a dash too much of the male in them. So had Wordsworth and Tolstoi. In our

time Proust was wholly androgynous, if not perhaps a little too much of a woman. But that failing is too rare for one to complain of it, since without some mixture of the kind the intellect seems to predominate and the other faculties of the mind harden and become barren.” Woolf’s advice to writers applies to us all: “It is fatal for any one who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.” Woolf is not arguing that a man should cease being a man or a woman a woman; she isn’t arguing a case for hermaphroditism. She simply stresses that “Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the act of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness. There must be freedom and there must be peace. Not a wheel must grate, not a light glimmer. The curtains must be close drawn.” Her critique of male domination extends even to academia, which in the 1920s was entirely male-privileged. “I do not believe that gifts, whether of mind or character, can be weighed like sugar and butter, not even in Cambridge, where they are so adept at putting people into classes and fixing caps on their heads and letters after their names.” Male privilege justified and sanctified by the power of the scientific method rests upon a fundamental fallacy: “All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school state of human existence where there are ‘sides,’ and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the upmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot. As people mature they cease to believe in sides or in Headmasters or in highly ornamental pots.” Yes, yes, this is all very quaintly observed, the average halfbrained citizen of the world sighs. Now let’s just get back to men being men and women being their men’s women. Or they argue that half-brained life doesn’t exist anymore, now that feminism has elevated womanly-women to an equal status with manly-men.

But it’s not that simple. The consequence of deeply-entrenched half-brained social organization is that when androgyny is shot, both man and woman are killed, and ultimately, civilization is destroyed. This is no slippery slope. This is the real world—a profoundly misogynist world. Rape and Murder of the Soror Mystica The opposite of communion is war. The actual war isn’t the literal battles that butcher human bodies, nations, and cultures and could blow up the planet, triggering the extinction of all life in the known universe. The actual war is spiritual, and the battleground is each human spirit, each individual soul, each person with the free will to push the red button. What happens when an individual refuses or simply doesn’t know how to integrate the anima and animus into a unified whole? The person remains fragmented, spiritually schizophrenic. Families, institutions, nations, and cultures embody the fragmentation and operate schizophrenically. In a fragmented, schizophrenic world in which “other” is deemed the enemy, destruction of “other” justifies the red button and its thousands of manmade weapons of mass destruction and millions of subsets from switchblades to drones. Conflict, or the split of isms, takes many forms. But misogyny is probably the original ism, likely going back at least to the bifurcating specialization of hunting vs. gathering/producing. Because men are physically larger and in some ways stronger than women, men could bodily overpower women to get her food, to get sex, to get her free labor. Overpower equaled hunt. Little has changed. Once bodily power was equated with strength, and strength proven with violence, men assumed power over women and children, then over weaker men. Once a class controls power-over, it demeans and demonizes the “underlings.” Might makes right continues as the prevailing attitude of the misogynist elite. The rest of us are the “women.” Women and “womanized” men are different in one critical fundamental way: women internalize their oppression; men externalize it. Women suffer; men take revenge. Unfortunately,

exploited men take revenge not on oppressing superior males, who are beyond their reach, but on their inferiors, women and children. Though perhaps physically smaller and less muscled, women are not naturally inferior to men; their inferiority is a male-generated construct based on physical prowess that has been internalized and over-generalized by both men and women. Millennia ago, religion proved most powerful in codifying demonization of women. Christian men still often quote the biblical Letter to Ephesians, in which its author, Paul, makes sure women know their place: “Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the Savior. Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands.” Women are to men as men are to Christ, meaning women are to men as men are to God; the huge distance between God and men is equal to the huge distance between men and women; calculated, men are highly evolved and women are the equivalent of a single-cell organism in need of a humanizing savior husband. By the time of the Inquisition, women, called Eve, the mere rib of Adam, needed savior husbands because they were witches conjuring devils, as Eve had conjured the Edenic serpent (clearly a phallic-symbol projection), which made them responsible for all the evils of the Earth and therefore deserving of all the punishing violence, especially torture and rape, that men in their infinite strength could muster. And that goes for “women” as well: gays, slaves, hired hands, children, everyone beneath the chosen elite. It was a few small steps from Jesus to a Holy Roman Empire to modern dominionism and its gospel of elite prosperity. Should a woman call the misogynist “Hog,” a squeal of protest would rise as potent as the stench from a pigpen: a woman is a witch, a bitch, a feminazi. Female misogynist Ann Coulter calls women who use contraception physically ugly (not Aryan blonde like she is) and “communists.” What is true is that “misogynist” means, literally, a “woman-hater.” Men will argue that most men aren’t misogynist. Okay. Who exactly, then, is this man (or “man”) who hates women? What would a typical misogynist mug shot look like hanging from a post office wall?

Though many a woman has fingered a real live misogynist in a line-up, “misogynist” as a category is harder to pin down. Let’s start with an obvious forensic indicator of misogyny: rape. And I mean that literally. According to government statistics compiled by the United Nations, over a quarter million cases of rape are recorded worldwide by police annually. Given that not all reported cases of rape are “recorded,” given that according to official estimates between 75 and 95 percent of rapes are never even reported, and given that in some countries rape isn’t recorded at all, that’s a lot of women being raped every year. Using the ultra-conservative number of a quarter million, that means that over three million women are recorded as raped every dozen years. If even only twenty percent are reported, meaning eighty percent are not, that means that the number of women actually being raped annually is a million and a quarter, or fifteen million every dozen or so years. Remember that each number from one to fifteen million represents an actual human being. Number 14,670,952 might be your mom, or your sister, or maybe your wife or Sunday school teacher or the person who bags your groceries. Maybe it’s you. Maybe it will be you. After all, the Department of Justice reports, even here in civilized America a woman is raped every two minutes. That’s literal women, which doesn’t include men or children. Let’s add another statistic to the mix, just to help us see more clearly this single breed of havoc wrecked by the misogynist: rape of children, commonly referred to as the neutralized “molestation.” Here in civilized America, one out of every three to four girls and one out of every six boys is sexually molested—raped—by the age of eighteen (though most molestations occur between ages seven and thirteen). It’s important to note that one-half of child rapes and one-fifth of rapes of adult women are committed by adolescent males, only a very small percentage of whom have been molested themselves. As with adult rape, victims of child rape rarely report the assault to police. In fact, only about one to ten percent of raped children tell anyone that they were abused; often someone else finds out and tells. Some victims only “confess” to the crime much later in life. And

yes, many victims have been made to feel not just shame but also guilt, as if the assault were somehow their fault—one more level of internalized misogyny. Often we learn of a child’s abuse via the abuser, once he’s been caught. Statistically, the average molester of girls will rape 50 girls and the average molester of boys will rape 150 boys before being caught and convicted. As with other rapists, almost all molesters continue raping once they’re released from prison. Of the nearly half a million registered sex offenders in the U.S., nearly a quarter of them are “missing,” meaning law enforcement and parole officers don’t know where they live and haven’t bothered or been able to track them down. Some rapists of women and children film their assaults and circulate them over the internet. There are millions of men—maybe your husband or preacher or son or senator—who are clinically addicted to watching porn that includes real or dramatized rape and molestation. This doesn’t mean that all men are rapists, or fantasize about being rapists, or enjoy watching other men rape or pretend to rape. Not all men are misogynist, nor are most “normal” men “just” voyeurs of other men’s misogyny. In fact, some men are as horrified and disgusted with the misogynist rape mentality as women are. And some men, of course, have been rape victims themselves. But how many women commit this kind of evil against other women or children, or for that matter against men? Statistically, very few; so few it’s pretty close to none. We know the name Lizzie Borden because she’s an exception to the rule: unlike men, women almost never commit acts of horrific violence. Even today many men complain that military women don’t have the balls for war—which perhaps explains why so many women are raped by their fellow soldiers: to prove that point. Although it’s true that a minority of men are committing rape and child molestation, overt physical rape isn’t the only form of misogyny. Any attitude or gesture of male dominance, including voyeurism and objectification, is misogynist. Historically there have always been anti-misogynist men; but only recently has the issue of misogyny as a social evil been culturally normalized to include male feminists. Still, feminist males are probably a minority of men. They certainly don’t protest when they get paid far more for doing the exact same

job as a woman of equal or even superior skills, education, expertise, and experience. Even in progressive fields like academia, where male feminists are common, women are hired, paid, and treated inequitably, and I have personally never heard a male professor complain. Along with male dominance in general, rape has been codified by male society—or rather, by the clique of dominant predatory males, many of whom are psychopathic. Scary, isn’t it, to think that society might be controlled by an evil minority. If misogynists really are a minority, why has misogyny become entrenched in every nation on earth? How could minority misogyny dominate every society? It’s also critical to ask: Why does the predator always select a “womanly” other? Women are often not weaker or inferior. It’s common knowledge that women are in some ways stronger and superior to men. Their perceived weakness has always been first on the physical plane. But today many women work out and some are faster and in some ways stronger than most men; and women can pull a trigger. Women are certainly not intellectually or in any other way inferior. Other kinds of weakness are sometimes but not always present in individual females (and males), though they are always deemed to be present in all females. In some eras, men have gone to great lengths to scientifically and religiously prove that women are morons, for instance, but today only an ignoramus in denial would believe that. Yet despite all the research, many men do believe that —or at least behave as if they believe that. Men have centuries of enculturation and practice at bravado. Misogyny is psychic murder of the anima projected onto women. Fear, Cowardice, Gang Rape It’s not rapacious males but fear of rapacious males that drives human civilization. Perhaps the best way to understand how this functions is to analyze how rape functions. Rape is a literal truth; it is also a metaphor for the cause and consequence of spiritual schizophrenia. Rape is the shadow manifesting the unresolved war between the individual male’s anima and animus. (Women typically manifest this war as self-destruction. Even misogynist women like Ann Coulter are, obviously, woman-self destructive).

In one study cited by expert forensic psychologist Karen Franklin, women and men were asked what they most feared. Women feared being raped and murdered (hence, perhaps, misogynist women siding with misogynist men for protection), but men’s greatest fear was being laughed at. Supposedly this “fear” explains why some men go along with gang rapes. When a dozen Cincinnati Bengals were indicted in 1990 on a gang rape charge, for instance, one implicated player whined that he went along because the alternative was to get ragged and teased about backing down. A man who goes along with the vicious crime of gang rape because he doesn’t want to get teased is backing down—from his morals. His going along, his backing down from doing the right thing, proves his passive weakness, not some manly strength. Centuries of chest pounding have turned men like that into spiritual wimps. Oddly, fear of being a coward motivates the most aggressive form of cowardice. Typically, it is a more delinquent leader with previous convictions for solo rapes who concocts the plan to gang-bang a woman, or just any available target who happens to be vulnerable. For example, the mentally retarded girl who was lured to the basement hangout of a group of teenage athletes from Glen Ridge, New Jersey. As cited by Franklin, this young old-boys’ club forced the girl to give them oral sex and then raped her with a broom handle and a bat. This kind of assault happens more often than moms bake apple pie. Rape is not about sex. Rape is not even about domination. It’s about domination for the sake of sadistic pleasure. Sadism is a spiritual crime against nature, spiritual in that it attacks the core being of someone who is absolutely innocent but who is fraudulently recast as a worthy victim in need of punishment, preferably in an arena where all the world can see, the world being the small sphere of comrades the sadist wants to impress. Staged sadism is the ultimate narcissism and the ultimate evil, indicating its motivation as psychopathic. Experts like Franklin maintain that male sports stars are more likely to commit sexual assaults because of their sense of entitlement and superiority. But why would someone who already feels entitled and superior resort to the extreme act of rape to prove

what needed no proving? Either participants in gang rape are cowards or they are sadists. What other fundamental reason could there be? Homophobia Forensic and psychological experts have a theory: The fear of being teased is really fear of being gay. If you can’t prove your masculinity, i.e. heterosexuality, you must be gay, the most extreme womanized male. It’s easy to see how homophobic fear could motivate the male hysteria over contraception and abortion: Babies prove hetero-male potency. Just the homo insinuation is enough to push the “prove I’m a man” button—or in a few cases, to pull the avenging trigger. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the boys responsible for the Columbine High School shooting that killed thirteen and wounded twenty-one, took out their revenge not by raping women or otherwise proving their masculinity within the macho group, but by targeting the Columbine athletes who controlled it. Franklin cites a 1999 report by Adams and Russakoff: The state wrestling champion, the leader of a clique of athlete bullies and the symbol of injustice for the school shooters, was allowed to park his $100,000 Hummer all day in a 15-minute parking space. The school indulged athletes’ rampant sexual and racial bullying and physical abuse of others, including Harris and Klebold. For example, a sports coach did nothing when the athletes targeted a Jewish boy in gym class, singing songs about Hitler when he made a basket, pinning him to the ground and doing “body twisters” that left him bruised all over, and threatening to set him on fire. Like at Glen Ridge, the abuse was so severe that some students feared going to school…Where there is rampant sexual harassment of girls and women, there is usually antigay harassment as well. This was true at Columbine High School, where Harris and Klebold had endured repeated antigay harassment by the jocks, and persistent rumors that they were a gay couple. It was also true at many of the other schools where shootings erupted in the past decade.

Gays are targeted as “others” to be victimized like women because bullies need the womanized “other” to be their victims. Specific in and out groups are created to maintain a pool of victims and to justify victimization to others to alleviate their fear of being victimized. Bullies only need to justify victimization because the rest of us have set up structures to protect us from each other. The legal system, for instance. Educational and medical institutions, too, police victimization. The only way to bypass these structures is to create rationalizations for victimization, preferably with the sanction of the law and otherwise helping institutions, especially religion. “Gay” does the trick, just like “uppity woman.” Why does fear of being gay drive men to such extreme and violent overcompensation that they rape and murder to prove their manliness? Is being gay worse than the most heinous sins they commit against other human beings to prove they’re not gay? Why does homosexuality offend some people to such a deep level? One, the disgust for difference, i.e. weakness, is an unconscious excuse to be sadistic. Two, the person is afraid of actually being homosexual. Three, the person is afraid of being accused of being gay. Often the person’s violent, physical fearresponse is a primal reflex against potential physical violence against him. If he’s mistaken for gay, someone might bash him, he might be the victim of a sadist. Better to be a faux-sadist than a victim. Better to send the message that you’re a sadist, not a victim. Kids especially would often rather be dead than be victims of physical sadism, so many commit suicide when others taunt them with accusations of gay or threaten violence. Or they choose to participate in the sadistic drama. Gang rapes by macho athletes don’t have to involve a female or gay victim outside the macho group. Often athletes prove their superiority within their own pack. Weaker males, who represent the “womanly” other, serve the purpose. Franklin describes an example that involved three older players on the football team at Mepham High School in Long Island, New York, who repeatedly raped younger players during a weeklong training camp while other players watched. The sixteen-year-old leader had a long disciplinary record of assaulting schoolmates and threatening teachers. All three

players were used to their entitled status as athletes. Franklin reports that Mepham teachers and administrators did not even intervene “against their rampant sexual harassment, which included pinning girls against lockers and grinding their bodies against them, or pulling out their penises and masturbating at girls in class (Lefkowitz, 1997). One of the group’s favorite activities was so-called voyeuring, in which one boy would stage a sexual act with a girl while the other boys covertly watched; the boys bragged at school about these activities, and even passed around a videotape of one such dramatic production.” Franklin’s account of the training camp rapes (following Henican, 2003) opens on the first night of camp when one of the young victims was taped to his bed…The next day, two assailants held down a boy while a third assailant sodomized him with a broomstick. This was done in front of other players, who laughed and joked about it. The broomstick assault was repeated the day after that…This time, the assailants applied duct tape to the victim’s pubic area, buttocks, legs, and eyebrows, inflicting severe pain by pulling off the hair on these parts of his body. Again, other players witnessed the assault. In all, three younger players were sodomized with objects, including broomsticks, pinecones, and —in one case—a golf ball that was inserted into a boy’s anus and rammed in further with a broomstick. Two players endured these assaults on multiple occasions, and were also forced to assault each other in front of the other players. For example, they were forced to put Mineral Ice on their testicles and then alternately kick each other in the groin. Another time, an assailant made one victim place a banana in his boxer shorts, after which the boy’s friend was forced to eat the banana out of the shorts. Following this, a player was forced to lie naked with a potato chip on his buttocks, while another player ate the chip from that location. A victim was forced to make “degrading racial epithets” to an African American player. The younger players were also beaten with plastic bags of ice on their bare backs. Two of the victims later

required medical treatment, including rectal surgery in one case…This case is an example of a not-unusual phenomenon in which the bullying of younger, weaker boys takes on a sexualized and/or antigay flavor; indeed, there is significant overlap among so-called hazings, group rapes, and antigay assaults. Franklin further notes that The Mepham case bears resemblance to both antigay assault and group rape in its ritualized enactment of masculine power. Older, physically stronger, and more prestigious players engaged in a public display of masculinity, celebrating their strength by violently emasculating their weaker—that is, less manly—teammates. The theatrical element is evident in the requirement of an audience; the laughing approval of this audience provided visible endorsement of the upperclassmen’s gendered entitlement. That vilification of the feminine was a core component is illustrated by the emasculation of the victims, through forcing them to assume the female role in simulated sexual acts as well as through the depilation ritual in which one boy was feminized through painful removal of his body hair. This case illustrates both the heterosexist and misogynistic components of masculinity ideology. The boys were younger and weaker; therefore, they were treated like women or gay men. Masculinity ideology requires boys to be strong and tough, lest they be reduced to the status of women and dominated by other men. Thus, other players did nothing to intervene or to inform their coaches of what was transpiring in the cabins, either out of a belief that the victims deserved punishment for being weak, or out of fear of the consequences to themselves. Far better to be a ringside spectator than to play the role of victim in this drama. A rapist pumping himself up to look strong among peers merely dons a costume that allows him to play the role of the sadist. Many

gang rapes aren’t even sexual. Often objects are used rather than the penis. The theory is that the play is about asserting male power dominance. But why invest and risk so much to prove dominance when your status is not even being challenged? Gang rape transcends competition for dominance; it’s a ritualized proclamation of dominance that merely sets a stage for the enactment of sadism. Showing off to an audience, or persuading others to participate, as in college hazing, increases the victim’s experience of torture. Sexual violation tortures the victim’s core being. It’s not only physically painful; it’s psychically/spiritually painful. It’s an attempt to strip away some fundamental aspect of the other person’s core being. It’s spiritual rape, spiritual murder, committed slowly, painfully, via torture. It’s not about sex; it’s not about male domination or misogyny or enforcement of gender norms or ideology or power or survival of the fittest. It’s about sadism—in gang rape, sadism assisted by cowardice, which displays yet another level of sadistic domination: power-over the coward. All the other conditions, including guys’ “going along” (as the instigator’s “soft victims”), simply describe a constructed stage upon which the psychopathic sadist plays out his desires. This dynamic of sadist assisted by cowards is the converse of alchemist and soror mystica. Instead of nurturing the process of individual transcendence, cowardly participants collude in conflicted destruction. Rape is a black-sabbath perversion of sacred alchemical transmutation. Instead of integrating anima and animus into the androgyny, rape sadistically drives the wedge in deeper, separating man from woman (or “woman”) and sadistic rape instigator from cowardly “go alongs,” as well as each individual from aspects of himself. Sometimes the rapist asks the victim to evaluate his performance. Although this gesture is intended to prolong and “rub in” the victim’s experience, it is also the case that the narcissistic rapist unconsciously lowers himself to the role of a stripper performing for an audience. He becomes the “she” he hates. Ultimately, then, the sadist is sadomasochistic. Only a sadist could rape and/or murder a woman, a gay man, a black person, anyone at all. Bigotry exists not just to bolster a sense

of entitlement to superiority. A person needs to be superior for two reasons: to guard against someone else’s superiority, or to obtain “inferior” victims. Bigotry exists primarily as a source of victims, and secondarily as a justification for victimization. Sadism—which is malicious power-over, which is pumped-up elitism—is the core motivation of sexual violence. Secondary motivations—cowardice, revenge—derive from and partake in that primary cause. Although all rape, physical or otherwise, is an enactment of sadism, certain catalysts can activate potential sadistic tendencies. Repressed homosexuality, for instance, can trigger sadistic shadow versions of denial, projection, and overcompensation, which many believe motivated sadosexual serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, and some claim motivates verbal gay banger Reverend Fred Phelps (who famously said, “God doesn’t hate you because you’re homosexual. You’re homosexual because God hates you.”) While it’s true that Dahmer’s sadistic streak was evident during early childhood—he tortured animals, for example—later his sadism targeted young gay men, the repressed “female” other within himself projected outward. Dahmer drilled holes in his victims’ heads and administered acid as “an experiment,” to make them “zombies,” as Dahmer put it, to prolong his absolute power-over. Eventually, he brutally tortured and murdered them while raping them, then cut them in pieces, some of which he hid in a cellar, some of which he kept in his freezer for future fondling or feeding. Dahmer’s cannibalism symbolically represents in concrete terms the sadist’s destructive, self-destructive subduing and obliteration of the anima. His consuming, all-consuming obsession was symbolically selfconsuming. He displayed mementos of his power-over, like skulls and penises, on an altar he constructed to honor Satan, the symbol onto which he projected his sadism. Jeffrey Dahmer was likely gay. Ironically, experts point out that heterosexual rape, murder, and other forms of violence against women and children are motivated by what they call a perverse “negative homoeroticism.” Think about it: Surely it seems odd that the person a macho heterosexual man would most want to impress sexually, a woman, is exactly the person he treats like dirt. He makes himself out to be a dickhead to impress other dickheads (pardon me,

but “dickhead” is really accurate). For what purpose? Why are they impressed? Most likely, they aren’t impressed; they are simply caught up in shared sadomasochistic self-loathing that can only be kept alive by feeding the greedy animus the anima. Misogynist men can only relate to men, which explains why antigay violence and gang rape of women take place within male-exclusive groups like fraternities, military forces, street gangs, police departments, rock groups, and sports teams, according to forensic experts. Negative homoeroticism explains several attributes common among group rapists. The drug-like high during the assault is experienced as a shared emotional orgasm. The sense of closeness, camaraderie, and bonding have nothing to do with the victim and everything to do with having “performed” sexually for the guys. It’s that feeling commonly felt after having sex with an intimate, not a stranger, which is what the woman is to a rapist. The guys now know they would do anything and everything for each other. Oh, if only they could bang each other. But they must content themselves with discharging their pent-up frustrations in another dramatic performance. They are each other’s voyeurs. The irony of male-on-male rape of homosexuals to demonstrate heterosexual prowess is that it’s a classic case of “thou protesteth too much.” As psychologist Peggy Reeves Sanday points out, “The reframing of a homoerotic activity as a demonstration of heterosexuality is doubly ironic in that men who do not participate [in raping a man] are accused of being gay.” The woman the hyper-hetero male is jealous of is the woman he fears. The fearful, jealous male must destroy the “woman.” The fearful, jealous animus must destroy the anima—a condition only possible in a narcissistic sadomasochist. Rapists tend to engage in heterosexual sex without intimacy. That’s because they don’t love the woman (or even know her), they “love” other men and exclusively the male in themselves. Their pervasive cultural practices of misogyny and homophobia are additional examples of protesting too much. As psychologists point out, the sense of entitlement is bravado overcompensating for their fear of women. Their cooperation combined with risk-taking

competition is homoerotic push-pull. They certainly aren’t showing off for the women. Sexual violence is itself glorified, because the glorified animus that destroys the anima and the love of the anima has nothing but violence and self-violence left. Sharing sexuality by the common practice of reporting their experiences to each other is the equivalent of phone sex with each other. Likewise the practice of voyeuring, or watching each other have sex. Hazing is a way to prove you’re worthy of being in the man’s man world of men, men, men by being, temporarily, a “woman” who takes it. All the dulling behavior, like drinking, drug use, and blasting music, and other behaviors like crudeness, sexual innuendos, cursing, and general uncleanliness (reported by Sanday and others) help put men in a state of “slipping into something more comfortable” and “letting go” with one another. They “share the girl” for the sake of circling up around their little campfire of burning dicks and savagely stimulating each other together as a group. According to researchers, including Sanday, the actual rape itself is strikingly nonerotic. Group rapists frequently don’t ejaculate, and they often use objects in place of the penis. The simulated sexual acts are used to further emasculate and degrade. Sanday suggests that “pulling train” is overtly homoerotic: “A group of men watch each other having sex with a woman who may be unconscious. One might well ask why the woman is even necessary for the sexual acts these men stage for one another.” Sanday’s study of fraternity gang rape noted a common ritual among the “brothers”—the “circle dance,” described here by Franklin: “The ‘brothers’ circle around, arm in arm and sometimes naked, going faster and faster until they lose control and fall down atop each other; brothers periodically step into the middle of the circle and mime sexual and/or lewd acts, including homosexual intercourse. Similarly, she [Sanday] found the brothers to be preoccupied with oral sex, which one fraternity man acknowledged as containing ‘more homoerotic potential’ than heterosexual intercourse.” Franklin cites researchers (Mosher and Anderson, Scully, Sanday, Greenfeld, and others) who view male sexual performance as just that: a performance. Gay bashing and gang rape of women are both dramatic productions performed usually by young men for each

other. The weakness of “female” victims is the symbolic prop used as the foil for demonstrations of masculine prowess. A study by Mosher and Anderson found that 10% of college men reported “ritualistically” watching each other rape a “party girl” while waiting in line for their turn. Studies by Sanday, Scully, and others have revealed a recurrent theme of revenge-punishment with deployment of the penis symbolizing dominance, power, and social control over those who violate hierarchal rules. These days that list includes any successful college student who is not a white male. Franklin reports that recent intensified aggression of group rape and gay bashing indicates an intensifying “expression of male contempt for women and femininity. The current popularity of bukkake, a symbolic group rape in which multiple men—up to 75 at a time—degrade a woman by squirting semen on her face, attests to the prevalence of such contempt. A Google search for this term in March 2004 met with 3.4 million hits, with web sites that glory in the degradation and objectification of women.” Today there are millions of websites dedicated to obese women eating themselves to death for the erotic gratification of their male viewers; millions of sites devoted to “pro-ana” (pro-anorexia), where men can “get off” on women starving themselves to death; millions of sites glorifying titillating fetishes like chastity belts, foot-binding (and the modern version, stilettos), and S/M (sadomasochistic) sex toys like whips and chains and dog collars and far more sophisticated instruments of torture, not to mention the millions of digital peep shows starring clitoridectomies, forced prostitution, and the global sex slave market. And don’t forget snuff films. A: Who are these Hogs who so hate women? B: Who are these women who so hate themselves? A: victimizers; B: victims. There’s a difference. Although many psychologists argue that gang rapes are homoerotic displays, the homoerotic contents could as likely be shadow expressions of repressed sadomasochism—not only the desire to participate in sadomasochism, but also the self-destructive annihilation of the rapist’s anima by his animus. According to Jung’s theory of anima/animus, psychological health requires equilibrium of feminine and masculine aspects. The ultramasculine male’s misogynist behavior is intent on murdering—snuffing—his own anima: half his

own self, the “woman” viewed as a threatening “other.” Rape-murder, then, is a projection of what he is doing psychically to himself. This is at least as psychologically sick as it would be physically to cut off an arm and a leg and gouge a few organs. It’s psychic castration: Murdering the androgyny, the misogynist renders himself a deformed androgyny. That’s unnatural. That’s evil. According to this model, the sadistic bigot is actually projecting his own self-loathing onto another. In victimizing the other, he both symbolically and literally damages himself. His is a classic example of a person unable to love another because he does not love himself. Sex for this man is “homo-erotic” not because he desires men but because he hates women because he hates the anima in himself. He is a negative homosexual. Let me repeat: This is evil. This is not an excuse for rape or sadomasochism; it’s an explanation. And the condition of the individual male represents the condition of male-dominated culture: evil freely chosen. The Pitiful Irony of Misogyny If ultramasculine displays of superiority, like rape, battery, molestation, and murder, indicate weakness, not strength; if such performances flag vulnerability; if assertions of “superiority” inspire fear in the very people who can truly benefit the predator—wives, children, peers, members of one’s own species; if the “superior” predator’s allies—other aggressive males—are his strongest potential enemies; if the predator’s greatest threat comes from other “equal” men, not from inferiors; if it’s counterintuitive that males attack the weak to prove strength; if attacking those who could benefit him and would not harm him even contradicts the principle of survival of the fittest, then misogyny makes no sense. Or to put in the everyday vernacular, misogyny is stupid. Humans are at the top of the food chain. There is no reason to assert superiority to survive. Cooperation contributes to survival better than competition does. The only time a person needs to make claims to superiority is when another person claiming superiority tries to make others look inferior and to prove it poses a genuine threat. Proving one’s superiority means proving another’s inferiority. But there’s no compelling biological reason to do that, except in self-

defense. Take away another’s claim to superiority and there is no reason to make the claim oneself. Not even in our primitive past would it make sense for us to compete against ourselves. Proving another’s inferiority for its own sake is a form of cruelty. Even proving inferiority for its own sake in a nonviolent arena like business or politics involves a cruel measure of callousness. If misogynist violence is not sadistic, why all the hatred of “women”? Why this hatred of “other”? Dominance? Strength? Gang rape doesn’t prove strength. There is nothing impressive about a group attacking a single weaker person. Solo rapists choose someone weaker and strike unexpectedly when the victim is vulnerable. If this is a contest of strength, attacking a weaker contestant off guard would be cowardly cheating. The use of weapons makes an assault even less impressive. Your penis can’t do it, so you have to use a phallic symbol, a mere prop. A man or a group of men raping a woman with a broom handle are not strong; they’re socially and spiritually crippled. Raping at gunpoint is ludicrous. Even a four-year-old can pull a trigger. No proof of strength there. There’s nothing impressive about a bully bellowing orders from a wagon train of “brothers,” or hiding behind bushes, peeking in women’s windows, shoving women around, forcing women to get in their place like a terrible-two kicking mommy’s shin. And they wonder why women aren’t interested. Macho men like to pose as the great protectors of women. But what are they protecting women from besides other macho men? “Protecting” macho men have generated a self-fulfilling racket that has made women more vulnerable, more in need of protection—a lot like lawsuit lawyers have turned states like Florida into lawsuit hell that exists solely to make money for lawsuit lawyers, whose ads feature them acting like movie stars in a commercial for a TV show: “Reality” TV at its best, i.e., worst. “The world is a dangerous place to live,” Einstein reminded us, “not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.” People who do nothing are culpable vultures who feed on the carcasses of victims. As more and more feminist men join feminist women in their global battle against

misogyny, something will be done. It’s the job of macho men to change. It’s the job of feminist men to change them. Rectitude, Reconciliation, Reciprocity, Revolution The times they are a’changin’. But though gender equality might be an ideal mainstreamed in America and abroad, true equality has yet to be accomplished. The age of male dominance is ending, but misogyny still rules much of the world and certainly most worldviews. But as the world progresses beyond attitudes of elitist superiority, sexism will cease along with other forms of bigotry. Ending sexist mindsets is a spiritual agenda that starts by correcting antiquated text-based faith in the inherent superiority of the male. Many men will resist relinquishing power over women, but the time has already come when those men, who for millennia have objectified women, are themselves observed objectively through the lens of truth, and are found to be embarrassingly primitive life-forms parading in very expensive contemporary hats. The misogynist struts around in an aura of the past so dusty it makes the rest of us sneeze. There’s nothing more embarrassing than a shriveled old (or young old) patriarch in a toupee barking commands. People scurry when he pulls out his popgun; people duck when he phones in the heavy artillery. Even so, he’s an embarrassing fool even to women in burkes obsequiously bowing as his henchmen march by. What choice do they have? Little do misogynists know that the burke often masks a woman laughing at the macho ass who makes her wear it, which perhaps ironically symbolizes poetic justice still to come for all women oppressed by religion—any religion, for what religion is not misogynist, despite “liberal” attempts to castigate its worst offenders? What better way to castrate the misogynist than to laugh at him? Every religious text is misogynist, despite liberal or progressive or “neo-orthodox” attempts to mask its misogyny with rationalizations and ridiculous revisionist reassurance that what the Bible (or Koran, or other absolutely perfect text) really means is… The cost is not just a misogynist’s dignity. What’s ultimately at stake is the fate of his soul. What would he think would be the destiny of one who willfully

relinquishes the power of his spirit to transcend? Could he figure out that the most powerful macho man is the most spiritually impotent? Enforced forced power-over necessarily supplants true spiritual power—the power that ultimately matters. I’m speaking as a Deist, of course, for whom male and female are equally human in the sight of the Natural God of truth and love. Today some men and many women are exploring the female attributes of God, calling God Goddess to compensate for the entrenched macho fantasy of a bearded God with a huge rapacious penis swathed in holy garments of the purist white. Up close one can see through the priest’s holey garments the God created in his own image. Of course God is neither male nor female, being not-physical Spirit. That’s why male high priests must make their God-image part human: in order to make God male in order to elevate the status of the high priest’ maleness to a rank equivalent with God’s. It can be culturally and psychologically useful to exclude the machismo of our representation of God by including the feminine, as long as we don’t forget that goddess is a representation of a non-material being that is neither male nor female. Deism views God as most logically a unified whole that from a human perspective includes perfectly integrated attributes that people have traditionally interpreted as male-ish and female-ish. And despite what fundamentalists and (ironically) atheists screech, God, the actual Creator God of the universe, isn’t the sadistic, commandeering male “Father” of antiquated religions. The image of humanity created in the image of God was shattered long ago by religion. We might see in a “glass darkly” a dim, dusty mirror image of our own faulty perception; we might see our shadows cast on Plato’s cave wall. But humanity is not a shattered mirror image of God. Reality is a perfectly good mirror reflecting a fragmented human being whose vision of reality is as fragmented as he is. Really, any human being is more cubist than a Picasso portrait. But unlike other religions, Deism doesn’t accept that fractured humanity is “shattered” or that the world is “fallen.” We live in a perfectly good world that exists in its present state for a perfectly good reason. Fragmented does not mean shattered. Picture a human being—you, for instance—as a work-in-progress, not the

shattered, fallen wretch of religion. Your basic human form is given, right out of the box: The specific form of you yourself is the you of you. Many components are included in the package of your life. Some components, like the mother or mother-figure who nurtures your vulnerable baby-life, need to be activated immediately. Some are just there, like the time and space environment into which you are born. Many components are available like ripe fruit on a tree; you get to choose which fruit to pick and eat; you might climb high in the tree to pick the sweetest, juiciest fruit ripening in the sun closest to the top, for you a climb well worth the sweat and scratches. Misogyny exists because misogynists choose to be misogynist and choose to perpetuate misogynist theology. People are born with free will and with tremendously multitudinous choices from which to choose this rather than that. The next time you feel inclined to complain, “Why did God let this happen to me?”, or the more generalized, “How could a good God permit evil?”, remember that God has given us all amazing faculties, including the awesome gift of free will. How much bad in your life is the fallout of your bad choices, or the evil choices of your victimizers? Some people choose evil which harms (possibly you, directly or indirectly), rather than good which benefits. Sometimes the evil choice seems “good” because it benefits the choosing individual. Misogynists “benefit” pragmatically by owning women. The inherent faculty of conscience makes the misogynist individual aware that a choice that benefits him in some way harms someone else, making that choice a bad one. Ultimately, the most pragmatic choice is one that benefits the chooser but harms no one. What goes around comes around to bite the bad-doer in the butt, a bite that could prove practically and spiritually fatal. (Witness the dictators dethroned in recent months. “Where is the spirit of a dead dictator?” one who believes in God might wonder.) Humans are not born “fallen.” A person “falls” when he decides to choose a course of action that he knows will hurt another person. To justify his course, he must fabricate a rationalization. (I’m using the formal, grammatically correct “he” to represent “he” and “she.” “He” is grammatically correct because he dominates grammar rules, language, cultural norms, and civilization. That some people use the updated “he or she” demonstrates some progress. To use “his and

hers” still sounds patronizing, given that men still own/possess practically everything.) Men (or whites, or straights, or Christians, or Americans) fabricate rationalizations for why they “had to” or why it was okay to exploit another person or a situation that harms another person. Men have relegated “weak,” “needy” women to a position of property, which gives men the right to “take care of” women, i.e., to dominate and control them. “Women,” of course, is a symbol that stands for any “inferior” other. Deism transcends all other religions in being the only religion that seeks to reconcile differences like masculine and feminine into a harmonious whole. American democracy is an example of that desire to reconcile differences; the Declaration of Independence is a decidedly deistic document, and the Constitution reflects a deistic demand for equality and justice that thus far has been only partially fulfilled. I would remind the reader that the Declaration of Independence states up front that America was asserting its Godgiven right “to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them,” and that Americans “hold these truths to be selfevident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The grammatically formal term “men,” of course, like “he,” refers to all people, including members of both genders. Furthermore, Jefferson explained in his letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, dated Jan. 1, 1802, “Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared [in the Constitution] that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.” The whole American people, of course, includes women and men, blacks and whites, Muslims and atheists and Christians. “Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of

conscience,” Jefferson politely cautions, “I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.” Critics might accuse Deists like Thomas Jefferson of promoting Deism as an other above all other others. True, we Deists today would promote Deist democracy above dictatorship, oligarchy, and rule of the Corporate Nation. And yes, I’m arguing that Deism is a better religion—more ethically honorable, more beneficial—than other religions, just like I would argue that a better answer to 2+3 is 5 rather than 7 or 9. Look at it this way: If feuding members of two gangs were sent to a detention center where a teacher would teach them how to overcome their gang mentality and to get along with each other in society, you wouldn’t accuse the teacher of trying to recruit the gang members into his own gang, would you? Deism is that teacher; society is not a gang. Nor would you allow evil to be “reconciled” with good. You don’t try to “reconcile” cancer and health, allowing both to exist; you try to entirely rid the body of cancer. By definition health means absence of disease. You don’t try to “reconcile” dictatorships with democracies, you try to purge dictators from the international community. You can’t “reconcile” lies with truth; by definition, truth is the absence of lies, fallacies, and fictions presented as facts. Promotion of the good includes elimination of evil—evil, not “evil.” Deists, being invested in rational truth rather than promotion of one’s otherness for its own sake, are perhaps the best judges and teachers of what constitutes authentic good and evil. Certainly Deism is the religion most invested in seeking the actual truth about what constitutes good and evil. It’s absurd to accuse Deists of elitism because we seek to establish and maintain maximum benefit for everyone—and maximum benefit by definition includes eradication of harm. Our MO is truth and love. And really, truth is the soul of love. Deists are many, many different kinds of teachers all teaching the Good News of the one Creator God, the God of Nature, i.e., Creation. We Deists agree about that: that God is the Creator of Nature. Though we agree to disagree about many points, we don’t usually disagree about very much, because Deism always relies on

reason and common sense to guide us to the truth. This book presents aspects of my current version of Deism, but all Deists would agree with me about most of my points, because my points are rational, and many of my positions have been circulating without complaint among Deists for centuries. My personal definition of reason and common sense includes the inherently truth-focused functions of all our God-given faculties, including conscience, intuition, aesthetic, experience, free will, and spirit—spirit being the boss. This perspective perhaps expands the usual Deist conception of reason, but I don’t think many Deists would quibble with adding species to the genus that most Deists call “reason.” As I see it, learning to use all our faculties well is an alchemical opus, and the integration of our highly functioning faculties into a synthesized consensus is the alchemical androgyny. Of course, like anyone, I could be wrong on some points. Deists don’t mind being wrong. Because we trust each other to help us on our collective journey toward truth, because we are all alchemists undergoing transmutation and are all each others’ soror mysticas, we willingly, even joyously, adjust to more rational positions. Education in truth, not ego, not indoctrinated tradition, drives our religion. My understanding of truth, my reason informed by my conscience, would never reconcile misogyny, or any other version of elitism that constitutes Hog selfishness or psychopathic evil. The alchemical soror mystica of this chapter is a symbol pointing to the profound problem of misogyny (and by extension, any bigotry) and to its solution. Reconciling male and female into a higher, more beneficial whole is one step that must be taken immediately. That step represents other steps that are just as time-critical. The goal is never elimination of difference for its own sake. Nor is the goal inclusion of every difference. The goal is inclusion of any difference that is beneficial or that does no malevolent harm; the goal necessitates exclusion of every form of malevolent harm. I’m contrasting malevolent with benevolent. Not every choice is a utilitarian addition of benefit; some choices just are, like the choice to paint your living room blue instead of white. If there is any benefit it is to your sense of well-being. But no one is helped or hurt by your selection of this rather than that. Furthermore, some benevolent

choices include some harmful aspects, like surgery that “hurts” the body to get at the cancer, and hurts even after it’s over, hence painkillers; and like chemo that causes you to throw up and lose all your hair, just for starters, but that thoroughly rids the body of cancer. The rich might experience their own special kind of pain when they have to cough up a little more tax on their billions, but the tax benefits society, which ultimately benefits the rich. If the rich Scrooge cares about his spiritual wellbeing, he could also benefit from a diet that lightens the flab of his Hog selfishness. Throughout this book I’ve discussed some of the many specific beneficial choices that must be made if we humans are to heal our dis-eased species. So yes, Deism transcends other religions in being the only religion (that I know of) that seeks to reconcile beneficial differences into a harmonious whole while surgically removing the cancerous malevolent other like misogyny that harms the whole. I realize how dangerous this perspective could be in the distorting hands of a TV evangelist or any other Hog or psychopath. High priests have already used perverted versions of the moral scalpel to persecute its enemies. The difference is that Deism and only Deism is focused absolutely on authentic truth and love. Deism does not seek to exploit others; it seeks eradication of all exploitation, and that means removing exploiters from their pedestals of power-over. Deism does not seek to destroy any beneficial other; it seeks eradication of all forms of malevolent harm, secular and religious. Religion tries to paint worldviews like Deism as human-centered opposed to God-centered. Deism’s perspective is that it is absolutely God-centered and therefore absolutely human-centered. Deist humanism is God-ism; it honors humans as creations of our intelligent Designer. Deism is the sacred marriage of alchemist and soror mystica, of male and female, into one unified humanist religion that honors God as Creator of us all. Male and female, of course, represent other others, like black and white, rich and poor, Christian and Muslim and atheist. (Isn’t Woody Allen a truth-seeker when he claims, “To you I’m an atheist. To God I’m the loyal opposition”?) Deism excludes atheism that willfully distorts or omits truth to falsely verify its perspective.

Besides male vs. female, and human-centered vs. God-centered, other dichotomies that the world needs to reconcile include: reason vs. mysticism; utilitarian/pragmatic vs. compassionate/ethical; intellectual vs. spiritual; common sense vs. education via book learning and trained interpretation. But some dichotomies must not and cannot be reconciled. Comprehensive study must always supersede indoctrination; literary study of the spiritual meaning of mythic texts always supersedes indoctrinated faith in the literal truth of myths. Nationalism, or love of country, must never be nationalism that exalts one’s own nation above other nations or that denigrates, exploits, or seeks to destroy other countries to benefit itself; cultivation of an integrated, mutually benefiting global village must replace self-aggrandizing nationalism. Religious war must give way to religious pluralism, and all religions must foster truth rather than mythic tradition, fact rather than pretext. Alchemy symbolizes the transformational process of integration we need to undertake together. We are all alchemists and each other’s soror mysticas. Nature has built into us a pleasure principle that if functioning properly ensures that our loving our neighbors as ourselves is a joyous process. If the pleasure principle is diseased, love is perverted into Hoggish selfishness or psychopathic loathing of the other—other people, the other gender, even an “other” aspect of one’s own self. In a healthy human being, all her faculties are functioning to benefit the whole person. When a faculty isn’t functioning well or at all, when an aspect of the person is diseased, the whole person suffers, degenerates, and ultimately dies. Ditto a healthy society, a healthy world. Ditto a healthy religion. Many prominent Christian scholars are beginning to understand the need for religion to address problems within its own domain. In his book The Remaking of Evangelical Theology, religious scholar Gary Dorrien points out that “Evangelical theology is a product of the Protestant house of authority and is thus prone to biblicism. It is also prone to produce mean-spirited social movements that sacralize religious authoritarianism and male chauvinism.” It is at this juncture of self-awareness and self-correction that Deism can join hands with Christianity: “In their resolve to rethink the basis and character of

Christian faithfulness,” Dorrien notes, “evangelical theologians such as William J. Abraham, Rodney Clapp, Stanley Grenz, Rebecca M. Groothuis, Henry H. Knight III, J. Richard Middleton, Nancey Murphy, Clark Pinnock, Miroslov Volf, and Brian J. Walsh are developing compelling understandings of the gospel as an open-ended communal message of saving grace, conveyed through the freedom of God’s Spirit.” While Deism does not accept the notion of the superior power of Christianity to bring about or administer saving grace, it could agree with an agenda of conscience correction and with a pluralistic theology of truth-based worship through the freedom of God’s Spirit. The chauvinist needs to be taught that free will is a gift for a purpose that is not selfish self-indulgence, is not power-over, is not the destruction of the other that culminates in self-destruction. And by chauvinist I mean by extension, of course, any aggressive elitist individual or group, including a church or other religious body, exercising malevolent power-over, even seemingly “harmless” malevolence touted as militant loyalty to infallible Scriptures of a religion or sect. We’re all in this together—in this extraordinary world in this astonishing universe. Being alive together on the same planet at the same time truly is coincidence of astronomical improbability. We’re family. If everyone would share, there would plenty of everything for everyone. So why are certain people driven by a perverse obsession to enforce their mastery over others, when Earth is our shared home? Habitat selection, aka home-making, is a behavior universal among all known organisms in the universe, all of whom happen to live here on Earth. A human home is a sacred place within a neighborhood of other homes of friends. The biophilia hypothesis posits that healthy human beings have a profound innate desire to enjoy affiliations with a wide diversity of life-forms. These are not master/slave affiliations but cohabitation. Biodiversity is not a liberal concept; it’s tangible reality without which we would cease to exist. Physical spiritual well-being is rooted in this earthy planet’s loamy, fecund nurturance. As a little leaven leavens the loaf, a little pollution

pollutes the whole neighborhood, a little poison eats up one’s whole being. A master/serf hierarchy defaces a world where all of us are created equal in the sight of God. The American corporate pseudolibertarian exploitation of women and “women” is treasonous travesty. Capitalist “free” enterprise is a conterm promoted to justify unregulated exploitation. Women have always been relegated to the role of brainless servant. But Mother Earth’s genius can never be quashed. And she is teaching her daughters her ways lest life perish in a puff of misogynist hubris. Earth’s fragile biosphere is less than ten miles from ocean bottom to mountaintop. Trillions of lives in a wondrous multitude of life-forms swarm within this protective womb of blue amniotic fluid, thriving because of the mutual biological harmony of all our intricate collective variety. Our astronauts have brought home the vision that our bristling planet is floating alone in the forbidding black frigidity of outer space. We want to believe that somewhere in the vastness of the universe there’s a global village alive like ours. But our probes have not found a single habitable planet. Most of the universe is made of hydrogen and to a lesser extent helium, elements not abundant on Earth, which is largely carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, silicon, iron, and other heavy elements that were forged in the interior of stars. Though space itself is not a rigid system of fixed stars but is a dynamic, expanding membrane hosting a vast archipelago of multitudinous galactic islands, our speck of a planet is alchemically peculiar, and our unique life we share here together in all its rich diversity, nothing short of miraculous. Yet we are, like everything else, temporal forms of congealed energy. When our universe was one second old, its temperature was about 10 billion degrees. Today it has cooled to about 450 degrees below zero, about 3 degrees above absolute zero, the lowest temperature possible. Eventually the combined gravitational pull of all this cosmic material will slow the expansion of the universe until all its stars burn out, and the universe will collapse back into nothing, or the radiation background will grow colder and darker forever. The reintegration of our fragmented Self by the freely willed power of our own spirit could well be life’s greatest purpose for the

individual and for the whole of humanity. It takes sperm and egg to make a human life. But the world isn’t just half male, half female; humanity is a birthday party of balloons and presents, an alchemist’s lab bubbling with chemicals all equally real and meaningful. The world is just now realizing that unity of diversity is the ruling principle of life. Love is the spiritual paragon—all love, not just love between a man and a woman, not just physical love. Holistic integration of our diverse parts is the path of love to peace, health, and survival for individuals and our species. What is the Golden Mean between male and female? The alchemical androgyny? Is it not rather the transcending perspective of metagender? In an era when bombs proliferate recipes for extinction the high ground above us-vs.-them is the only path of survival. Throughout history among all peoples everywhere certain spiritual values have been cherished as sacred. In spite of norms imposed by the ruling class, values of truth, justice, benevolence, and yes, equality have prevailed. Misogyny represents any form of inequality, and every ruler enforcing subjugation deserves to be deposed with the fervor of revolution. A new metagender meme could right now abolish the rule of the male. The spirit of fairness, freedom, and reciprocity always trumps chauvinistic, misogynist domination. Unity, union, oneness, communion—these are the ancient avant-garde ideals of the future shaping the present. The misogynist who refuses to grow up, to evolve, to transcend is already a relic of the past, a corpse an hour from complete rigor mortis. To resurrect, the aggressive misogynist male and his passive misogynist female must undergo a process of enlightenment that for some of them will require an alchemical trial through fire. But for many the paradigm shift entails nothing more than a sudden revelation of truth and subsequent adjustment of attitude. Obviously, spiritual survival is not an attribute of spiritual extinction; it’s a quality of progress, evolution, burgeoning life-force itself. After centuries, after eons of oppression, the smothered can breathe. The meaning of life always has been, always will be: We’re all in this together; love your neighbor as yourself. It’s really just that simple.

 



 

Chapter 12 Aesthetic Transfiguration The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand... When I was a kid, for some years I had the annoying habit of saying about pretty much everything, “It’s all symbolic.” A dented stop sign, my mom dusting a rose bush with fungicide, a squirrel burying and reburying and re-reburying the same acorn under every tree in the yard. I learned early that a whole neighborhood tangle of humor and tragedy could be encompassed in one consistently wry, “It’s all symbolic.” The mental tic of seeing everything as symbolic emerges naturally in most of us because everything is symbolic. We are all born with minds that soak up symbolism like a black hole sucks in light. It doesn’t take much for us to spew it out the back door into a new universe—a new image. If you doubt this “urge to symbolism,” listen to kids name-calling with metaphors sharper than switchblades. And note how kids’ metaphors evolve over time, sometimes into surprises. That car is cool became that car is hot, neither cool nor hot referring to the literal temperature of that car. When kids call another kid a turkey, that’s metaphor; when they call the other kid a pig, metaphor takes a step closer to symbol (the kid is a pig: eats like a pig: is fat). Symbol is typically far more incisive than metaphor. Metaphor implies that there’s an intimate correlation; symbol suggests that the correlation is comprehensive and of consequence. In literature, metaphor isolates an instance of comparison; symbol displays a

universe of interconnected meanings cohering as one grand unified purpose—ultimately, the complete work, the play, novel, or poem. Of all the arts, literature most thoroughly symbolizes life-as-such. A clock is a metaphor of time; but then the clock is a sign—a representation of itself, of an aspect or function that belongs to itself —rather than a symbol—an image that stands for something other than or in addition to what it is. A stop sign is as a stop sign does— tells us to stop. A stop sign symbolizes more than itself in a poem in the voice of a mother whose drug-addicted teenager fails to stop and is killed when a Mack truck collides with his Beetle. (Maybe your mind associated Beetle with beetle with squashed bug, or maybe with drugs, 60s, Beatles?) A clock shifts closer to symbol when we analyze the gears and springs that make the clock tick and explain how the functional parts of the clock are like the functional parts of something else. The clock becomes symbolic when the image represents an important complex of meaning that functions within a larger complex of meaning. Representation demonstrates analogy; it displays how one thing corresponds to another. Metaphor and symbol are both comparisons. Both metaphor and symbol are embodied by an image or image cluster, but symbol carries a bigger charge because it stands for a larger complex meaning of significance. Symbol, then, can be a microcosm of a macrocosm. (Perhaps Paley’s clock mentioned here and there throughout this book symbolizes my deconstruction of Darwinism and fundamentalism and my affirmation of intelligent design: I’m pulling the gears and springs out of an old rusted clock and reassembling them into a new clock. I might pun—puns can be symbolic, too—that some people will be “ticked-off” by my new clock. Perhaps the clock represents space-time; perhaps it represents the directional, though seemingly circular, passage of historical time. Perhaps the hands of the clock are wiping the sweat from its brow. Perhaps my clock has gotten a facelift and is now digital. You really have to stop a poet once she gets started.) Symbol helps us contain complex meaning in a single image that stands for a complex whole. Literary symbol distills a whole complexity to its essence; in a literary work, symbolic images relate

organically to each other as well as to the whole work. Though Dali’s image of Melting Time might work conceptually in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, it wouldn’t organically fit the overall style, tone, or meaning. Literary symbol helps convey the deep meaning of the whole work. Meaning is deep when it explores profound dimensions where we face the meaning of life, of God, of existence, of humanity in a way that matters to us personally. Symbol can hurt (the kid called a pig), but its prick can be tipped with medicine no less potent than poison. Deep symbol, the variety employed by the arts, in particular literature (which includes religion), couples profound thought and emotion. Well-developed literary symbol is something the spirit feels, a timelessness, a sense of immortal essence. As great artists have asserted, life is art, art is life. Through symbol a great artist teaches, at the very least, tangible salvation from the mundane. Have you ever felt, like Vladimir Nabokov: Through the smells of the bog, I caught the subtle perfume of butterfly wings on my fingers, a perfume which varies with the species—vanilla, or lemon, or musk, or a musty, sweetish odor difficult to define. Still unsated, I pressed forward…I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness—in a landscape selected at random—is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern—to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal. Of course you have. You feel this all the time, though you might squelch the feeling because you’re not a child. Pity. Perhaps you remember Augustine’s query: “What is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain what it is to him who asks me, I do

not know.” Such is life. Unlike children, though, adults get stuck in the “I do not know,” which is why Jesus told the grown-ups, “You must remain as children” to maintain your natural propensity not only for authentic goodness, but also for the sense of oneness with that extra something of spiritual presence so exquisite it ignites the thrill of gratitude. It’s odd that so many well-meaning religionists believe that their myths are literal fact rather than symbols awaiting participatory interpretation. Could it be that religious literature is so potent that people are stunned into forgetting that the symbolic, the metaphoric, the mythic, the aesthetic is representation? That doesn’t mean it’s not real. It is real, but in a way that’s more like reality TV in those moments when the protagonist is caught on tape blurting, whoops!, the truth. Truth that emerges from religion in spite of its staging is like, say, a Freudian slip that pokes its head out almost unnoticed from an otherwise well-zippered speech. (Once noticed, though, a wry chuckle flutters across the stage.) Or is it that the religious learn their myths by rote and recite their flat “factual” lines like parrot puppets sputtering first-grade equations? The habit of regurgitating catechism trains the mind to bow to the habit of scripted life. Symbol, on the other hand, engages the participant in the deep experience of interpretation. The dimension of symbolism infuses reality as actually as symbolism embodies alchemy or a great play. What’s Love Got To Do With It? In the symbolic Old World of Hog, the soror mystica serves as the alchemist’s guide to the Promise Land of self-transcendence (which I’ve translated from the Middle Ages via Aquinas and Jung into this present book). To get to the Promise Land the alchemist has to escape the temptations and assaults of Hog. In effect, alchemy is that escape. The sacred marriage between alchemist and soror mystica concludes at the terminus where myth ends and the journey toward truth begins. Truth is found in myth when myth is recognized as myth aesthetically representing truth. As per the last few chapters, for the alchemist (the “alchemist”), the myth left behind is that Hog is God; the truth approached is that

God is God. How does something so simple become so complicated? The most accurate answer, it seems, is volition, the faculty most in need of a jump start if not thorough transmutation. The problem is that the dead-battery will must freely choose to start in order to start choosing, and must have already chosen in order to be able to choose to accomplish transmutation. The sticky point is that the will most in need of transmutation needs to undergo transmutation in order to be able to will transmutation. It’s not (as we often assume) spiritual inertia that keeps us from driving on. It’s a dead battery or misguided GPS—it’s a malfunctioning will: “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” Enter the soror mystica to assist, first and foremost by helping to ward off the temptations and assaults of Hog. Beyond the Old World of Hog, in the New World of God, specifically the Creator God of an intelligently designed universe, sacred marriage itself is undergoing the alchemical process of reinterpretation. People have begun to realize the benefit of unloading their baggage and resolving their neuroses together in an intelligently designed relationship before deciding to exchange rings in marriage. A ring symbolizes unity, love, and eternity, qualities that can only be truly attained and appreciated once the alchemical process has been completed. Religion wants you to tie the knot before you’ve really grown up, deeming it a sin to get seriously intimate before the wedding day. Ideally, though, there should be no “knot”; marriage should be a nurturing, creative union of two people who truly know and love the essence of each other, and essence takes awhile to manifest and love takes time to mature. Maybe marriage itself, or rather the institution of marriage, has become obsolete. Maybe the wedding should take place years or decades into the marriage. Marriage is only one kind of union. Any close relationship involves a similar psychological and spiritual dynamic and produces the same kind of effect. The primary adult relationship is always with oneself. It’s tragic how few people really get to know themselves. Besides the primary relationship to Self, most adults have important secondary relationships with partner, friends, relatives, coworkers, neighbors, and even pets and online acquaintances. It’s tragic how few people

really get to know others. Unfortunately, even among enlightened progressives, our most fundamental relationship—with God—is usually filed in an envelope labeled abstraction stuffed at the very back of the drawer. Many people feel uneasy even mentioning the word God. This doesn’t mean, though, that people are “lost souls” destined for the fiery pit of losers. Most people commune with God without even realizing she’s there. It’s tragic how few people really get to know God. But then, God is subtle. God is mysterious. God is hidden. You’ve heard all these somewhat accusatory, somewhat excusing descriptions before. Sometimes, though, creators who spend a lot of time “in flow” eventually realize they’ve been floating on their magic carpet in the Presence of a subtle, mysterious, hidden “something” that is in fact God. In a way that’s remarkably humble, God has assumed the role of our soror mystica. (Once upon a time I thought: If Jesus had been born a woman, it wouldn’t have been a miracle.) Communing with God via whatever medium—love, service, poetry, watercolor, the subtle perfume of butterfly wings on our fingers— engages the essential creative spirit within us. Which makes sense: God is the Creator of Creation; Creation is the manifestation of a perpetual process of Creation. If there’s one thing we know for sure about the Creator it’s that she’s creative. It makes sense, then, that communion with God might be effectively facilitated through use of our creativity. Like any relationship, alchemy (literal and figurative) is a creative process. The alchemist’s goal of integration, resolution, and holistic transformation makes alchemy an art as well as science. The scientifically creative alchemical process represents a narrative of psychological spiritual progress. (The psychological is but one facet of spiritual transcending, i.e., growth, i.e., evolution.) Narrative is literary; meaning that transcends the material must be represented symbolically. Creators articulate essence via representation and meaning via symbol. So does God. Creators utilize materials like paint and words and musical notes; God uses Nature, including human nature. Poets especially understand that stars and spider webs and chrysanthemums and diamonds and grains of sand are symbolic, that each and every star

and spider web and chrysanthemum and diamond and grain of sand resonates with profound poetic truth. Poets intuit that poetic truth is spiritual truth because it distills essence and synthesizes both concrete and spiritual reality. Poetry’s gift of incorporating micro and macro, and concrete (material) and spiritual, makes it prophetic in the old-fashioned literal sense—prophet meaning literally teacher, or spiritual guide. Many agree with Wordsworth that “Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge.” No wonder so many religious texts are written in poetic forms. In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge maintains that Wordsworth’s poetry creates a feeling analogous to the supernatural by directing our attention to the wonders of the natural world and imparting a kind of mystical union with nature. The religious sensibility of Wordsworth and Coleridge, like that of many poets before and after them, is essentially Deist. Coleridge considers the primary imagination of the poet to be “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and a repetition in the infinite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am.” What makes poetry poetry, he says, is the reader’s delight in the unified whole and his distinct gratification with each harmonizing part—not the parts in and of themselves but their harmonization, like notes in a concerto or lines in a painting. The poet brings the whole soul into activity by diffusing a tone and spirit of unity that fuses the realms of all our faculties by the “synthetic and magical power” of imagination, which reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities. For Keats, “The excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth.” Keats’s beauty and truth exist in the realm of the soul, while the philosopher’s thoughts remain stuck in the realm of mind, which Keats sees as a means to the soul and not an end in itself. The world, he said, is the place where the mind and heart act on each other to form the “soul or intelligence destined to possess the sense of identity.” This, he believes, is a vision of salvation that does not affront our reason and humanity. A poem provides a lesson via an experience of sensate intelligence—a process antithetical to the flattened didactic. Rather

than being “above” a subject kept under control, poetry resonates with the same animating nature-force that it describes. Poetry translates nature’s intelligent design—itself a volume of poetry—by building connections in the brain that convey to the mind an experience of the network of subjective meaning emanating from (through) objective data. Perhaps you’ve seen the famous side-byside photos of a brain cell and a galaxy. What does it mean that they look almost identical? Poetry is composed of correlations because poets excavate correlations that compose the universe. The connections transported from the brain to the mind are translated into mental meaning, which can then be transported to the spirit for transformation into transcending spiritual meaning. To then be transported on the magic carpet of spiritual meaning, the person must not simply “get” the concept but must also be “moved” spiritually, the destination being a change in the innermost Self, the spirit. That’s alchemy. (“It’s all symbolic.”) The difference between soul change and spirit change is like the difference between being intellectually moved by a tragedy like Antigone or Hamlet and being so emotionally moved that you must do something, must change, must help, must get therapy or volunteer for a hotline. A changed soul might feel more compassion towards another or himself; a changed spirit must transcend: it’s that classic relentless cathartic drive toward self-fulfillment coupled with empathy. But there’s another level of difference, the difference between changed and charged. A charged soul feels one with Nature or an aspect of her; a charged spirit feels one with the Creator of Nature, or feels a profound longing for that level of transcending oneness. A charged soul stands in a resonant Presence in this life; a charged spirit floats in an essential Presence that exists fully in the world but not quite of it. A charged life is a life of “oneness” accompanied by a profound sense of reverent awe and ecstatic gratitude, Nabokov’s “thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern.” Hog religion—religion shackled to its own mythic texts and self-righteous dogmas, to its selfish hubris and greed—fails to facilitate this shift to Presence, because Hog is only about Hog.

Static religion dies; creative religion thrives. Religious rituals that facilitate Presence are actually works of spiritual performance art. Many today sidestep religion altogether, claiming that art is the new (and true) religion. Certainly religion must be creative. One reason Deism is so appealing is that its focus is intrinsically creative, selfevolving, and Creator-honoring. Deism is an aesthetic work-inprogress, like Creation itself. All the World’s a Stage All the world’s a stage of development. Life evolves; humanity evolves; you evolve. A play represents a life—and by extension, your life—and the principles that make a life dramatic are paralleled by those that propel the dramatic representation. Do we create meaning or discover it? Clearly both, but where do you draw the line? It’s odd how mysterious one’s own life really is. What’s particularly interesting is that we seek the meaning of our discrete self along with the shared meaning of our species. One informs the other. It’s hard to argue that human life isn’t innately meaningful. Humans seem peculiarly equipped to spot interconnections. Drama, for instance, parallels the process of alchemy; my life parallels your life. Why we bother to find ourselves, to work on ourselves, to seek religion and a good therapist and a life partner and a meaningful career expresses the same impulse that drives us to the movies and art festivals and bookstores and feasts. Humans have always been attracted to dramatic representations of our quest for meaning. Then again, some people are just attracted to drama. Average people are so hungry for meaning they latch onto any cupcake of gossip as if it were manna. Drama queens are so desperate they whip up their own frothy soap operas; then when they’re tired they plop on the couch and peep through the keyhole at reality TV. Pathetically fake, perhaps, but even the popularity of trivial sitcoms demonstrates how seductive meaningful—or “meaningful”— narratives can be. We’re literally starving for significance, even by the thimbleful. So we shuffle the remotes controlling remote, vicarious “life” when we should really pull out our journals.

Aristotle understood this. He knew that people need drama and that the human drama needs to be understood. We create art to articulate “out there” the world “in here.” Art is the mirror of the soul. What’s amazing is that you can look in my mirror and see your soul. Every soul is on the same quest for meaning. Even Hog is on this quest, but Hog is penned-in by his pigheaded insistence that the quest is for Hog. In a way he’s right. But instead of finding the truth of himself as a creation in need of a hose-down, he falls down and worships himself as God. Aristotle understood both the frustration and the nobility of the quest away from Hog. The fragment of his Poetics that has survived and come down to us, which is specifically an analysis of tragedy (lost to us are the sections on comedy, epic, and lyric), explains dramatic principles that mirror our existential predicament. Art, including dramatic art, reflects life and is life, an aspect of life. An artwork of the highest quality and magnitude expresses the greatest universality through the most refined, particularized example. In other words, we need a very sharp, very high-resolution lens to see clearly and deeply. Think of it this way: A pivotal event in your life, the kind that really shows your true metal in the moment, manifests your essence. At the same time, your life experience is an example of a more universal human condition. You’re an individual but you’re also part of the human family; you’re a microcosm of the macrocosm. So, too, art. Aristotle, the first person to really analyze/delineate/codify aesthetics, defines tragedy as “an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of appropriate magnitude.” By imitation he means representation, not superficial copying. Any old snowflake is not any old snowflake when viewed through a microscope; art gives us the snowflake through a very special lens that allows us to actually see the snowflake in all its concrete glory and thereby to join in its resonating essence. At the very least you suspend your disbelief when you enter into a good movie’s plot: You are “one” with that life portrayed on the screen. The play’s plot is not action, but the representation of an action, by which Aristotle means not bodily movement on stage, but, as Dante explained it, “movement-of-spirit,”

or what we might call personal growth. Art mirrors life mirrors transcending spiritual life. Thought and character, Aristotle says, are the two natural causes of action. Thought he identifies with reason, which is the active, conscious perception. Thought in this sense is the analytic, which involves 1) a process of discovery (empirical investigation and data collection) and 2) the demonstration (the proof; the correctness of this stage of the thought sequence being essential to the syllogism’s validity). There’s an objective reason (logos) for the plot. There’s a reason for your life, and yes, your tragedies, even your fake ones, which are simply shadows of your real ones. There’s a reason for humanity’s existence and struggles in this space-time universe. We discover our meaning as it is demonstrated through our life. Our life is its own logos. Our life is a work of art representing our core spiritual logos. Character—the moral motivation, the unconscious and undefined feelings and emotions of pathos/passion—is embodied by the protagonist (the main character) and the antagonist (any character pitted against the protagonist). The antagonist in a narrative (play, movie, opera, novel, short story, narrative or epic poem) is typically a person, but could be a force (the sea in Old Man and the Sea), a creature (the whale in Moby Dick), or even the protagonist himself (Dr. Jekyll’s Mr. Hyde). The juxtaposed antagonist provides a background foil against which the protagonist emerges in sharp relief. But the purpose goes beyond display; the protagonist manifests his true colors through his interactions—conflict—with the antagonist. The truth of our life is as much about what it is not as what it is. We are the product of our choices to be no more than not to be. Character employs the dialectic, which involves talking around a subject, approaching it from every angle until its intrinsic characteristic (general meaning) becomes manifest. Your essence, your core meaning, reveals itself through the myriad details of your life sculpted by your choices. The complete action of a play has a beginning (or objective, conscious purpose, identified with thought), a middle (manifesting subjective, unconscious pathos), and an end (final perception: knowledge). Just like alchemy. Just like life.

All plot involves change, which is creation in action. Aristotle claims that the most important element of a play is the structure of incidents, and that the plot is “the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of tragedy.” A good plot consists of acts that succeed one another in their probable and necessary sequence. The structure should be so tight that one event could not be interchanged with another; and anything that could be left out, should be. A good healthy plot evolves, a boring plot stagnates. Ditto your life. Good structure depends not only on sequence but on unity. A beautiful object, like a living organism, must not only have an orderly arrangement of parts but must also have magnitude: “Beauty depends on magnitude and order.” Magnitude must be that “which may be easily embraced in one view…easily embraced by memory.” The longer the better, provided the whole be perspicuous. Magnitude is the opposite of boring, which leaves us mumbling, So what? Does your life have good structure, or does it seem random? Does your life have unity, or does it seem fragmented, devoid of overall meaning and any sense of wholeness or feeling of oneness? Does your life have meaning of magnitude, or does it feel trivial, insignificant, boring? To find the meaning of life you must first find the meaning of yourself. Magnitude doesn’t mean “big” like winning the Lotto. Magnitude consists of standing in a random landscape among rare butterflies and their food plants in a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that you love, of sensing oneness with sun and stone, of experiencing the ecstasy of Nature and the thrill of gratitude for your extraordinary luck in having been born. The change of the best plots arises from their internal structure (following cause and effect) and is accompanied by reversal and recognition. Reversal means the action veers round to its opposite, and recognition is the change from ignorance to knowledge, which in the audience produces pity or fear that leads to a catharsis of those emotions; pity and fear then give way to “a sense of wonder” (Aristotle) and “thrill of gratitude” (Nabokov). If the universe is intelligently designed, if your life has been purposely created—Why? Everybody experiences setbacks and disappointments, irritating obstacles and tragic loss. Everybody has the freedom to learn from those experiences—or to not learn. What

is learned? A sense of wonder? Is that it? Gratitude? What if it is? What if the meaning of life is simply standing fully alive in the midst of existence, filled with awe and gratitude? Embracing just that as your religion would certainly be cathartic, would it not? And isn’t catharsis what religion calls redemption? Unlike the protagonist who for the Greeks is at the mercy of fate and for the Elizabethans is possessed by his tragic flaw, we have the power to create out of the tragedy of our fall a life that is dramatic but not tragic. Tragedy warns us against taking the road of tragedy. Instead, we could follow Nabokov’s “contrapuntal genius of human fate…to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.” Life in our intelligently designed universe is rational, and so is the play mirroring life. The traditional five acts of a play follow our life’s underlying pattern: thought, character, reversal, recognition, catharsis. In a broad sense, the play’s unified structure embodying the protagonist’s journey mirrors similar processes facilitated by alchemy, therapy, education, religion, and Kubler-Ross’s stages of dying and grief. “It’s all symbolic”: Picture symbol as an image between two facing mirrors receding into infinite depths that give the image a sense of process of both going and being within and beyond while making us aware of the interconnectedness of all things. Art and life embody each other in a state of perpetual communion. Finite/temporal material form expresses spiritual content; our particular life expresses the meaning of universal human life and existence. We contemplate, we create, we contemplate what we create and create ever new meaning. Aristotle identifies two motivations for art: 1) the instinct for harmony and rhythm, or form, and 2) the instinct of imitation/representation, which is the work’s intellectual and moral content. Central to Aristotle’s philosophy is his belief in our capacity to know. The first principle or fundamental fact of the universe is “motion,” or change, which today we call process, the fundamental structural juice of Creation. Aristotle views process in terms of each thing’s internal function rather than, as materialists tend to view it, external mechanistic forces. Environment doesn’t make an acorn become an oak, though it may inhibit or promote the process.

An acorn’s becoming an oak is that thing’s intrinsic function, and the process, or movement, is toward a particular end (oak tree). An acorn does not become a garbage can, gorilla, or grassland. But how different an acorn is from an oak tree! Who would have guessed they were the same thing? Oaks, grasshoppers, meteors, the universe—we all are evolving and sometimes taking broad-jumps of creative emergence into the better angels of ourselves. Reality is a system of interrelated functionings culminating for us humans in the function of consciousness. Our pleasure in harmony and rhythm (and just think how many pleasures involve harmony and rhythm) stems from our intuitive recognition of patterns repeating throughout the structure of the universe which makes us feel linked to all things. How miraculous that we are self-aware! I know I am standing in this material be-ing, expressing myself to myself and to you like a rose opening petal by petal on a rose bush in a garden in a galaxy in a universe. To know this spiritually is to love all roses, vegetation, stars, existence—which is to love “to whom it may concern” whom most of us call God. Conscious knowing leads to the desire to create—to express, to rejoice, to shout from the rooftops the logos of our being. A higher pleasure than recognizing the repeating patterns of nature, says Aristotle, comes through our instinct for creative representation—a spiritual quantum leap beyond primitive imitation. To learn gives the liveliest pleasure, he argues, and knowledge (wisdom/enlightenment), the end of learning, comes via contemplation, which requires language, which requires “society” (an audience). To say exactly what a thing is, is to know. Defining (saying exactly what a thing is) is the bridge between the world of particular/concrete things and the realm of universal concepts realized by reason. From the beginning is the Word that is spiritual articulation. The quest for meaning is the motive of Greek tragedy. Aristotle believed motive is the impetus of function (self-manifestation). Meaning is revealed through subject (like the subject/noun in a sentence, so is the tragic hero), which is manifested through structure. The plot’s essential structure—complication and

denouement (unraveling) separated by a turning point—is echoed in all structures, even the most elemental: coming into existence, turning, ceasing to exist. As with all things in nature, the end of a great tragedy is tied back into its beginning. All things ultimately are whole. “All the world’s a stage,” Shakespeare put it in As You Like It, “And all the men and women merely players; / They have their exits and their entrances; / And one man in his time plays many parts… / Last scene of all, / That ends this strange eventful history, / Is second childishness and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” The uroborus swallows its tail. “Mere oblivion” need not be tragic extinction. For some, it might mean transcending space-time constriction; it might mean waking up and walking out of the theatre. Human beings, being rational and conscious, can know and can find meaning. Meaning includes beginning, middle, end; meaning is comprehensive; meaning is whole. Like the playwright’s drama, any human life has meaning and an end purpose. We are motivated to express our core truth, which is revealed through our material self manifesting through our life. To borrow the religious paradigm, some macrocosmic fall from grace, played out in the myriad microcosms that constitute existence, unravels as our complicated predicament. We reach a crisis, which, if our life has quality and magnitude, becomes the turning point onto the narrow road back to transcendence. In this life we need to make choices to be manifested, we need to freely prune away our own dead wood, we need to say No, not this for Yes, this to make sense. Creating art or life or anything demands that we make choices based on an evaluation of quality. The protagonist is like religion’s fallen spirit wrestling with his angel; that dark angel represents the shadow aspects of our individual and collective material self; we are protagonist and antagonist. Becoming a unified whole involves winnowing away the antagonistic Hog. The protagonist performs the alchemy of life. Tragedy gives us a model of human life as it is lived. But alchemy’s soror mystica demonstrates that life need not be tragic. Rather than confrontation and conflict, life can be a serious, but not tragic, process of transmutation. Today, tragedy in life tends to play

out as a war of “us” vs. “them.” We can take the higher path by trading conflict with the “other,” the antagonist, for a more mature and certainly more peaceful and mutually-benefiting process of spiritual self-fulfillment. It’s called Love. Alchemy as Spiritual Performance Art In ancient Greek drama the tragic hero is, Aristotle observes, “better than ourselves” yet is our highest self, our core essence. Art should “preserve the type yet ennoble it.” Through contemplation of art we glimpse our core being, through creation of art we manifest it. The process of distillation and synthesis is simultaneously a process of understanding and of articulating understanding. Human creation, like Creation itself, is a process. The alchemist uses chemicals the way the poet uses words to process/produce a product that is both literally true and symbolically meaningful. Similarly, I’m using the images of alchemist and poet to represent the alchemical and poetic processes, each and both of which represent any person’s quest for spiritual truth; and one point I make throughout this book is that spiritual truth is embedded in Nature. Can you see how everything is connected, both concretely and symbolically? Deism considers the massive network of intercorrelation a powerful proof of intelligent design and testimony of the Creator’s aesthetic engagement in human understanding. Poets grasp the profound spiritual truth that everything, the whole of existence and its myriad particulars, all and each, is symbolically meaningful, and poets understand the connection between meaning and purpose. Poets use words to represent meaning; other artists are poets to the extent that they use their mediums to represent symbolic meaning. Art is literary when it refers to a myth or historical event; it is poetic when its references contain additional metaphoric meaning, when it connotes as well as denotes. Humans’ most fundamental materials are God-made; God’s materials, Nature, are also God-made. Only God creates the fundamentals. The tendency of some humans to forget that they and all their raw materials are God-made is perhaps the great tragic flaw, and like all hubris, cosmic amnesia, really a snubbing of God, is the

most absurd tragic flaw, a profoundly silly form of ingratitude. Tragedy is comedy without the laughs. The levels of alchemical knowledge, the levels of understanding and meaning played out through the alchemical drama, are represented as symbols in drawings and other artistic renderings. The final knowledge, the embodiment of integrated anima and animus signified by the androgyny, uncovers the even deeper meaning of that knowledge: Love. Creation is an act of love in the book of alchemy. The good chemistry of love between animus and anima (and alchemist and soror mystica, and scientific/aesthetic process and product) represented by sacred marriage, flies in the face of traditional Pauline wife subject (subjected, subjugated) to husband, and husband as head of the wife, and it defies the raping attitude of elitism, specifically as it foments gender schizophrenia and literal rape. On the one hand, sacred marriage frees men and women as groups (male and female), allowing them to commune as equals outside the jurisdiction of person- and relationship-as-property. On the other hand, it frees each individual man and woman by integrating anima and animus, allowing the person to resolve his or her neurotic inner conflict and to reside with him/herself in peaceful friendship. Now that the alchemist unselfishly, not-narcissistically loves himself, he can love his neighbor as himself. Once Hog has been banished from the soul, the denigrated “feminine” faculties, such as emotion, intuition, and aesthetic, are released from the stranglehold of the privileged masculine “head” of reason, and all the faculties are unified into a healthy whole person. Ultimately, from all this healing flows a huge spiritual sigh of relief, both personal and collective. Then follows the drawing in of a deep breath of euphoria—exactly that classic “born-again” sense of Presence and feeling of joy to the world, peace on Earth, goodwill toward men and women, except that it’s holistic, not specifically Christian (or Jewish, or Muslim, or…). The process of arriving at love and the expression of love both employ the faculty of aesthetic sensibility. The union of anima and animus gives birth to art, art born free from the constraints of heterosexist traditions. The urge to art is the urge to religion—primal

religion free from elitist encrustations. Art and religion are both narratives of spiritual quest. In contrast, the rapist perpetually performs his nightmare role of Hog with the same musty props that have always represented the ultimate perversion of androgyny and love. Hog mates with hate to engender destruction. Art creates, Hog destroys. As the misogynist erases meaning, his final constricted knowledge emerges: destruction ending in self-destruction, a true spiritual murder-suicide. Love benefits and burgeons naturally: Love’s spiritual life-force results in new life. Rape harms and self-destructs naturally: Rape’s spiritual impotence results in death. The end of rape is extinction, its zombie marker, absolute alienation and loneliness. The rapist drifts off into empty space like an astronaut who cuts the umbilical cord connecting him to the spaceship that can transport him home. One might pity a merely sociopathic rapist driven by tormenting shadows of cowardice rather than by psychopathic sadism—pity, perhaps, but not with the deep compassionate pathos reserved for his victims. The hoggish rapist can only be saved by the grace of his own alchemical work. And of course I mean that symbolically. Put more directly, the repentant hoggish rapist can only be saved through the freely chosen work of alchemy facilitated by the grace of the soror mystica. And by soror mystica I don’t mean necessarily women; perhaps the most effective soror mystica for the hoggish rapist is a former hoggish rapist saved by the grace of alchemy. Alchemy is an art; metaphorically, alchemy is art. Alchemy is also science—the science of combining chemicals to discover their properties (truths) and to generate reactions (meaningful applications)—just like painters and poets and composers combine paint and words and notes to discover their properties (truths) and to generate reactions (meanings). The goal is the harmony of elements, even if that includes meaningful dissonance. Alchemy integrates the functions of art and science; the alchemist treats Nature, including human nature, with the respect one naturally affords to God, the Creator, the Great Mother, Mother Nature, Mother Earth. Alchemy honors the feminine creative spirit that permeates Nature and her creative children: life, humanity. Science or art that

treats Nature as an object to be raped (possessed, exploited) will not be effective science or art. Science and art of value express with exuberance the wonder of miraculous Nature. The presence of the soror mystica puts a different spin on the usual image of alchemists and other artists (including scientists) working alone. Humans are social beings. The rugged individualist may have an advantage over being one of the herd, but no one was created to be alone. Even “without deep reflection,” Einstein reminded us, “one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.” Even when Thoreau was at Walden, his mother brought him cookies every day (his cabin being a short stroll from the main road). Picasso held some macho views, but during his formative decades he had dinner—respectfully—almost every night at the home of the famously androgynous couple, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, whose friendship and Parisian home—a kind of wall-to-wall, floor-toceiling gallery of revolutionary friends’ original art—and their expert art criticism, not to mention five-star culinary concoctions, made them jointly the perfect soror mystica to support Picasso’s and many other artists’ and writers’ alchemical opuses. Love that is not self-love requires an other to love. Lover requires lover, art requires audience. God, too, seems interested in getting our attention via awesomely aesthetic Nature in order to nurture some kind of relationship with the creature she created uniquely rational and conscious. Above all else, religion is about relationships, with oneself, with God, with one another. In a community of communicating communion, each communer is an alchemist and a soror mystica, and each opus is part of the larger opus: transcendence, or love-embodied truth. An actual utopia would be the representational paradigm of transcendent communion. The ultimate state of being is not all things equaling God, is not an isolated “God” narcissistically making love to himself, but all discrete beings, including God, loving one another. Art articulates the meaning of something not just observed but actually seen. Unlike the rapist, who superficially observes a victim as an object to be manipulated, the artist is Nature’s lover exploring her essence in order to know her. The more intimately he knows her, the better he knows himself. I’m using gendered pronouns, but the

artist (and scientist), like the alchemist and soror mystica, can of course be male or female. Buddha said, “The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.” Until you actually touch, until you truly feel another person, you can’t be in touch with yourself. Similarly, you have to step barefoot through the layers of natural existence to really feel the essence within— within it and within yourself. As Heraclitus reminded us, “The hidden harmony is stronger than the visible.” And because, as Heinrich Heine put it, “Nature is visible thought,” we see that harmony is the product of thought, i.e., intelligent design. Ironically, as we really come to see the hidden harmony and exquisite thought behind it, we also begin to really see the layers that constitute the visible. Art helps us see multi-dimensionally. Many consider art to be the new religion because it helps us also feel the divine Presence and thereby experience the reality of existence—the kind of seeing that any religion should nurture. Necessary Aesthetic Poet William Carlos Williams gave twentieth century aesthetics its most famous slogan: “Make it new.” Already in the nineteenth century poets, composers, and especially Impressionist and Modern artists were exploding history into a kaleidoscope of new forms that created the world anew. It’s no surprise that periods of spiritual renaissance accompany blasts of creative innovation in the arts: The gesture of authentic art itself symbolizes spiritual quest. The Greeks understood art to be representation, but what art represents, or what the best art should represent—or even if art should represent at all— has never ceased being debated, and the Modernists argued their new positions with passion. Plato believed that reality consists of archetypal forms—Ideas, Ideals—beyond human sensation, and that the artist merely copies an experienced object, which represents the form (Idea), thus art can only be an imitation of an imitation. A sandaled elitist who busied himself classifying Nature objectively rather than subjectively experiencing her barefooted, Plato constructed the theoretical framework upon which Darwinism and religious fundamentalism have propped up their theologies. Darwinism is an abstract construct

that supposedly represents concrete natural reality, but Darwinians have faith in Darwinism as if it were the concrete reality, not a theoretical representation. Fundamentalism is an abstract construct that supposedly represents concrete historical reality, but fundamentalists have faith in fundamentalism as if it were religion, not religious representation. The authority of Darwinism and fundamentalism are written texts that have been proven beyond any shadow of a doubt to be erroneous. Yet Darwinians and fundamentalists continue to revere their texts as absolute fact. Their authority has been debunked, so they are forced to dishonestly distort the text in order to maintain their meaning. Natural truth has been perverted into elitist dogma grounded in myth. Artists, however, really see Nature concretely. They derive abstractions from concrete reality, and strive to represent her essential forms and symbolic meanings concretely via art. The artist looks into Nature, and through art makes the invisible visible. The Darwinian myth and the fundamentalist myth and the misogynist myth are all equally myths upheld by mythic authority. A union of art and science that replaces conflict with cooperation, with working in concert like alchemist and soror mystica, helps us replace myths with reality and schizophrenia with sensible meaning. Myths converted into abstract truths assumed to be literal fact clog the arteries of ape men and godlets. The problem is that they don’t see what they’re looking at. William James pointed out that “The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.” Darwinians and fundamentalists refuse to acknowledge that their “truths” have been thoroughly deconstructed by much more definitive truths. They refuse to see. In other words, they lie to themselves; they’re self-blinded. At their best, art and science help us really look to really see. Most artists, the ones actually doing the work of actually seeing, disagree with Plato’s privileged Ideal; reality and meaning are equally real, and artistic creations serve a purpose and achieve a level of quality unmatched by the imitating capability of a photocopy machine. Artists tend to use the term form to refer to the material art object, or to a class of productions, such as poem or picture, or more specifically, Italian sonnet or watercolor, with the emphasis on the

group of concrete objects, not their abstract classification. Form represents form, becoming itself another form: A cubist rendering of the spatial forms of Nature becomes a painting; many such paintings become Cubism. Certainly the flux of the material realm, even if “immortalized” in art, is very much like shadows on Plato’s cave wall. But Aristotle was right that abstract generalization is not ultimate reality; his theory of reality and art grounded form in the material realm. Instead of Nature representing form, form represents aspects of Nature. But “art partly completes what Nature cannot finish,” per Aristotle, by representing —not merely imitating—“things as they ought to be.” By suggesting that what we create transcends Nature—but as a category of reality, not an abstract reference to it—Aristotle began to explain the impetus of art, which is the desire to transcend the material realm by manifesting its depth, the deep spiritual truth immanent in reality, especially human existence. The artist starts by separating form from one material object, such as a horse, and imposing it on another form, such as marble. Though the living horse is very different from the marble horse, both could be called a horse. What is often overlooked is that the movement of form from one state to an entirely different state is not the natural result of evolution or growth. Art, like alchemy, willfully enacts genuine transmutation. For Aristotle, representation does not merely copy, nor does it produce a symbol or analogy of the original. Like Plato, Aristotle intuited that reality transcends nature. Art represents a particular aspect that represents the essence of that thing, and by extension, the ground of essence binding together the universal whole. In Aristotle’s view, the portrait of a great statesman could only represent his nobility and skills if it omitted the wart on the side of his nose, because the wart might make schoolchildren laugh —obviously not the response you’d want for a painting of a great statesman. Although modern art might sometimes privilege stark realism, photoshop still proves that everyday portraiture remains Aristotelian. Which leads one to ask: Is it real? Aristotle would argue that what a person should be embodies what a person truly is within, or ultimately could be; the portrait of that person also should be what the person truly is within. Art gives

both the artist and the viewer of art the potential to see and feel one’s transcendent Self. Tragedy, for instance, provides catharsis by purging the viewer of pity (pathos) and fear (or awe), and it does so only by establishing a direct empathetic connection with the hero, who, Aristotle assures us, is ourselves though greater than ourselves. All great art, by giving us a taste of the sublime, enlivens within us a momentary intimation of our own transcendence. But the experience of “what we ought to be” goes beyond the nobility of the tragic hero; it transcends even human nature. Great art provides those able to receive it a momentary experience of transfiguration. Plotinus thought that art manifests an object’s form more clearly than common experience because it inspires the soul to contemplate the universal, and by losing oneself in aesthetic contemplation, one is led to a mystical union with the divine. Leonardo thought that “Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.” And Michelangelo claimed, “My soul can find no staircase to heaven unless it be through earth’s loveliness.” These claims are decidedly deistic. Anyone can experience spiritual union simply by really seeing, whether the vehicle is art, religion, love, nature, another person—any number of sources. Mystical connection, activated by the felt experience of depth, and by implication, the Mind that creates and beckons toward that depth, is available even to those who deny the existence of anything mystical. The Creator really is a generous and nurturing God. It’s one thing to be deeply aware to the point of feeling “one” with an other. It’s quite a different thing to be changed as radically as inert matter into life. But it’s that magnitude of cathartic change— transfiguration—that is any human being’s deepest calling and desire. Such a charge can only be enacted freely by a true creator with true free will: a god. Seeing ourselves as gods in the process of becoming the gods we already (potentially) are through our own godlike will is outside the conscious scope of possibility for many, though it’s no more impossible than anything else we deny unconsciously because it contradicts our prefab worldview or identity. The greatest tension in art and life is between our unconscious faith in our godness and our conscious hostility to faith.

Godness is the term of choice rather than divinity, which is reserved for God. Being a god does not make us God. (Christians might best understand that here god is used the way Jesus meant it, quoting David in John, chapter 10.) In a sense, transfiguration is becoming spiritually un-repressed. The spirit rises to the surface and into focus while the finite/temporal aspects of the self, having assumed their secondary role, are quickened with the spirit’s numinous charge. Art inspires the soul through contemplation beyond the universal, beyond the inevitable constricted by the preexistent. By trans-form-ation, one enters the dimension of transpossibility. We are translated out of our material self into a deeper version of our self never before manifested. Like baptism of fire (lightning) and water evoked life from inert matter. Longinus believed that the sublime in art participates in the “grand and harmonious structure” that constitutes existence, because in our souls is an unconquerable passion for all that is great and for all that is more divine than ourselves. “For this reason the entire universe does not satisfy the contemplation and thought that lie within the scope of human endeavor; our ideas often go beyond the boundaries by which we are circumscribed, and if we look at life from all sides, observing how in everything that concerns us the extraordinary, the great, and the beautiful play the leading part, we shall soon realize the purpose of our creativity.” Impressionists like Monet complained that most “art” didn’t represent the nature an artist actually sees—surfaces of myriad colors and wavering shapes caused by the distorting play of light and shadow as the sun moves—but rather a Platonic idealization—Idea, Ideal—that the artist thought he should—ought to—see. But by truthfully seeing the outside, one could then look deeper, through the outside that represents, or masks, essence. By observing the flux of reality, the artist glimpses the truth of things. At the turn of the twentieth century, artists anticipated scientific discoveries that would revolutionize our way of seeing Nature. Our looking via powerful optics allowed us to peer back through time to the Big Bang, and inward to subatomic particles and our own DNA. Scientists like Einstein expressed amazement that artists and poets always seemed to be at least one step ahead of scientists. Freud,

too, commented, “Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.” Critics have claimed that Postimpressionists, Cubists, Expressionists, Fauves, and other movements of the early twentieth century were less interested in representing nature “out there” than in self-expression and the “at hand” structure of their painting. But the painters themselves disagreed. Their goal was to paint the essence of nature, really the obvious aspects that the eye has been trained to deny, a goal that could only be reached through many years of intense study of nature and practice of art. Their painting was an attempt to articulate their vision—vision both optical and mystical. They saw themselves as engaged in the profound alchemy of self-transformation, and they described the process in terms such as mysticism, spirit, spiritual vibration, rising toward God. Even their descriptions of principles of art became themselves representations of their own mystical creative process. For instance, Cezanne claimed, “To achieve progress nature alone counts, and the eye is trained through contact with her. It becomes concentric by looking and working. I mean to say that in an orange, an apple, a bowl, a head, there is a culminating point; and this point is always— in spite of the tremendous effect of light and shade and colorful sensations—the closest to our eye; the edges of the objects recede to a center on our horizon.” In its long journey through a curved universe, the soul conforms to its purpose, its own and nature’s convergence at a culminating point; the soul’s journey has a point, one’s “obvious” self, and reaches that point of no return, or there would be no need for art, no need to create or consider or discuss art or even look at those things that inspire art. Even art for art’s sake doesn’t mean art for no reason; it suggests that really looking includes really looking at one’s own imagination, one’s own creativity. Art always exists for our sake, for the sake of our transfiguration. Some people might laugh to think of the artist’s process as a spiritual quest or an act of love. The relentlessness of the true artist’s love makes it appear selfish and strange. Not everyone understands an Indian miniature painter of the Kangra school who could apprentice for ten years before picking up a brush, then (at last)

paints with a brush constructed of a single hair with colors concocted from crushed beetles, ground lapis lazuli, and blood. The true creator’s love mines the deeper purposes of the self. Fulfilling the deepest self isn’t selfishness; it’s noble love for one’s self as an essential part of the whole one/existence being actualized. The artist experiences the amazing grace of godlike participation in the creation of Creation. Far from being mere copying, representation articulates deep concerns. “Art is the compulsion of man towards crystallization,” as Edvard Munch put it. “Nature is the unique great realm upon which art feeds. Nature is not only what is visible to the eye—it also shows the inner images of the soul—the images on the back side of the eyes. A work of art is like a crystal—like the crystal it must also possess a soul and a power to shine forth.” Emil Nolde spoke of trying “to grasp the very essence of things.” Describing a turning point in his approach to painting, he wrote,” I doubt that I could have painted with so much power the Last Supper and the Pentecost, both so deeply fraught with feeling, had I been bound by a rigid dogma and the letter of the Bible. I had to be artistically free, not confronted by a God hard as steel like an Assyrian king, but with God inside of me, glowing and holy like the love of Christ. The Last Supper and The Pentecost marked the change from optical, external stimuli to values of inner conviction.” Kandinsky referred to creative necessity as the white, fertilizing ray that “leads to evolution, to elevation. Thus behind matter the creative spirit is concealed within matter. The veiling of the spirit in the material is often so dense that there are generally few people who can see through to the spirit,” but when they do, the necessity to articulate the vision lends to the spirit “a new value…We are beginning to feel the spirit, the inner resonance, in everything,” he claimed, but still lamented, “How many, who sought God, finally remained standing before a carved figure!” How many, who sought God, rejected the natural Creator proclaimed by Deism and instead worshipped the graven idol of religion. Kandinsky echoed many others in claiming that freedom is needed to clear the path for further revelations. “Contemporary art,

which…is to be correctly designated as anarchistic, reflects not only the spiritual standpoint which has already been won, but it embodies the spiritual which is ripe for disclosure as a materializing force.” Oskar Kokoschka spoke of visions that “seem actually to modify one’s consciousness…This change in oneself, which follows on the vision’s penetration of one’s very soul, produces the state of awareness, of expectancy. At the same time there is an outpouring of feeling into the image which becomes, as it were, the soul’s plastic embodiment. This state of alertness of the mind or consciousness has, then, a waiting, a receptive quality.” A writer as well as a painter, Kokoschka added, “We must harken closely to our inner voice. We must strive through the penumbra of words to the core within…One’s soul is a reverberation of the universe. Then too, as I believe, one’s perception reaches out towards the Word, towards awareness of the vision…Whatever the orientation of a life, its significance will depend on this ability to conceive the vision…It is the psyche which speaks…I myself become part of the world’s imaginings. Thus in everything imagination is simply that which is natural. It is nature, vision, life.” Franz Marc commented that “the object is a negligible echo…The art to come will be…profound enough and substantial enough to generate the greatest form, the greatest transformation the world has ever seen.” Paul Klee believed, “Today we reveal the reality that is behind visible things, thus expressing the belief that the visible world is merely an isolated case in relation to the universe and that there are many more other, latent realities. Things appear to assume a broader and more diversified meaning, often seemingly contradicting the rational experience of yesterday…Art is a simile of the Creation.” But even art does not exist in the highest circle of being or consciousness. “In the highest circle an ultimate mystery lurks behind the mystery, and the wretched light of the intellect is of no avail.” Even so, “Art plays an unknowing game with ultimate things, and yet achieves them!” Max Beckmann explained, “What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality. I am seeking for the bridge which leads from the visible to the invisible…to make the

invisible visible through reality…all important things in art since Ur of the Chaldees, since Tel Halaf and Crete, have always originated from the deepest feeling about the mystery of Being. Self-realization is the urge of all objective spirits. It is this self which I am searching for in my life and in my art. Art is creative for the sake of realization...for transfiguration…it is the quest of our self that drives us along the eternal and never-ending journey we must all make.” Artists creating in the controversial new genre of photography— art photography, photography that sees—also laid claim to the deeper experience of vision. Ansel Adams echoes the sentiment of many painters: “The only things in my life that compatibly exist with this grand universe are the creative works of the human spirit…Deep resonances of spirit exist, giving us glimpses of a reality far beyond our general appreciation and knowledge…The subtle changes of light across a waterfall moved me as did a singular vista of a far-off mountain under a leaden sky. Others might well have not responded at all…The relatively few authentic creators of our time possess a resonance with eternity.” Van Gogh, a deeply religious man who before he embraced his calling as an artist had wanted to be a minister, claimed an ultimate need for art. “We artists, who love order and symmetry, isolate ourselves and are working to define only one thing [italics his]. Sometimes I know so well what I want. I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, ill as I am, do without something which is greater than I, which is my life—the power to create…I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize, and which we seek to convey by the actual radiance and vibration of our coloring…representing the real man…portraiture with the thoughts, the soul of the model in it.” Creativity allows us to transcend ourselves by representing ourselves by representing each other (human or object). This is no more impossible than the sum of the universe still coming into being already existing in a few subatomic particles at the Big Bang, which scientists tell us was and is the case. To say that is rhetoric. To believe that is religion.

Cubism showed us blatantly what art of the past had implied—that there are facets or planes of being that can be uncommonly represented. Art gives us a glimpse of the potent potential of mystical transfiguration, of being utterly changed from one form “of this world” to another “not of this world,” or at least not commonly apprehended within this world. Pure geometry as art seemed radically new, but really cubism was a continuation of the ancient problem of representing dimension and depth, in this case, in terms of volume. Even the modernist avoidance of “realism” was nothing new. Realism has always been a depiction (of inner truth) conjured through illusion. A real landscape or human being is not exactly equivalent to the image presented on the small, flat, painted canvas or photographic paper. By trying to render an accurate representation, we learned ways that other dimensions besides the spatial could be represented via the spatial. In effect, artists have always been discovering that spirit could be manifested through flesh. Cubism, so radically new, reached back toward Euclid and the primitives in its quest for meaning. All artists of every age engage in the same agenda: to penetrate, to manifest, the mystery. Limiting awareness to classic form and visible matter constrains even artists within the spatial dimension, whether the space is actual or abstract (extracting the form of a horse and imposing it on marble involves the same process of transmutation as classifying all marble horses as marble horses). This spatial bias explains why aesthetics until the last century focused on visual arts. Cezanne was perhaps the first artist to attempt to incorporate the dimension of time, and with it the possibility of eternity, directly into painting, though many had painted time indirectly through suggestive narrative. By juxtaposing different planes, or views of a scene, in theory the viewer took in several moments from several places simultaneously. The painting represented—or ideally presented— space-time rather than simply space. The simultaneous view of several space-time planes was necessarily from a distance—above, beyond, transcendent. Though the painting represented the potential for a transcendent birds’-eye view, in actuality the viewer must take

in the planes gradually, over time, as the eye moves over the spatial surface of the canvas. In novels like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and James Joyce’s Ulysses, the indefinite nature of space and time, embodied by individual experience and life, are demonstrated by juxtaposed, overlapping, colliding, and enmeshing scenes—a plot structure similar to Cezanne’s arrangement of planes, though conveying more emotion due to the drawn-out descriptiveness of the literary facets or planes. (Despite efforts to represent a single, unified whole moment by presenting scenes nonlinearly, the linear nature of language syntax itself imposes time sequence that causes unfolding of characters’ emotions and predicaments that evoke parallel emotional responses in the reader. Even so, the effect of scenes presented out of sequence registers wholeness intellectually.) While modernist artists claimed to “make it new,” their projects represented re-visions of Plato’s archetypal forms and Aristotle’s transcendent “ought to be” even as they rebelled against them. Impressionists challenged the academic version of what painting ought to be with their own version of ought, Cubists explored form as geometric Ideas, Fauves and other Expressionists uncovered the “greater than ourselves” unmanifested self and Dadaists, Surrealists, and Abstract Expressionists the “greater than our consciousness” unconscious and even willful-accidental and serendipitous. What modern artists have done is expand the scope of aesthetic perception by legitimizing gauges such as intuition, emotion, individual vision, direct sensuous experience, psychic archetypes, dreams, will, imagination, and mysticism, dethroning the privileged gauge of reason and giving it a seat in the house of commons. After all, “A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts,” as Paul Valéry reminded us. French surrealist poets performed experiments to tap the individual’s infinite complication; theater of the absurd exposed it. But really, all great artists have relied upon these same gauges, as modern artists have been quick to point out. Emphasis on relied upon, subjectively, concretely, as opposed to thought about, impersonally, abstractly. Art honors the essence of Nature instead of exploiting it superficially for the sake of validating a constricted

theory. Throughout the ages, the greatest artists’ concern has been the mystical process of self-creation via creation. The history of art and aesthetics is no exception in demonstrating the persistent balancing act that attempts to reconcile transcendental tensions that occupy so much human activity—tensions and activity that have not fundamentally changed since the Greeks. At the same time that critics and philosophers were busy limiting gauges to realms legitimized by their respective PhDs, modern artists, writers, and composers were blasting apart conventional definitions of aesthetic by admitting any and every gauge imaginable, redefining the parameters of aesthetics by producing an explosion of statements, manifestoes, credos, criticism, and eloquent essays, not to mention lively discussions in cafes and salons and living rooms, about everything from art’s living spirit to the mystical power of the line to the artist’s status as true prophet. In an era moving progressively toward absolute Darwinian materialism, creators reacted with violent affirmations and impassioned justifications of their mystical process of creation. “Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon,” as Picasso put it. And his friend and fellow cubist Georges Braque famously added, “One must not imitate what one wants to create.” It’s no wonder the high priests of organized religion shuddered in the presence of this renewed ancient religion, art. Darwin’s anxious lamenting of his aesthetic “atrophy” perhaps served as a confession of doubt concerning his theory: the new religion Darwinism. While modernist artists were pouring out writings about creative process, their suspicion of philosophers of aesthetics, now collectively called critics, was growing hostile. Many echoed Keats, claiming that all we know and need to know is that beauty is truth and truth beauty. Unlike the critics, the artists didn’t try to describe or define beauty, they were creating it, and instead of discussing beauty or art objectively, they rendered their experience of the profoundly subjective process of creation. This was a province the critics had no right to violate. Freud’s insistence that creative eros is simply sublimation of the sex drive betrayed his impotence in the presence of artistic creativity. A frustrated writer (he claimed that he wanted to

be a great writer, not a psychologist), he couldn’t, i.e., wouldn’t, penetrate beneath the superficial material level. Anything deeper than matter was fantasy, illusion—a view that still attracts an entourage of fellow atheist impotents. Ironically, until postmodernism, artists continued to be less concerned with how we create than why we create. They continually tried to articulate art’s deep spiritual motivations, to explain the sense of movement toward another level of being, to convey their experience of Presence both in and beyond this world. Philosophy tries to understand creative process indirectly, from the outside, through analysis of art’s productions; it wants to stand outside the holiest of holies and report on what takes place within by examining scriptures that the prophets themselves admit can never truly convey a sense of the ecstatic experience of living Presence encountered within. Just as literature, too, was becoming more experimental and radical in its attempt to represent Presence (what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being”), T.S. Eliot, feeling the dis-ease of the modern world, reached back toward the comfort of the Greeks, returning to the notion that poetry must be as impersonal as Plato’s Ideal/Idea, and that criticism must grow within meaningful, purposeful tradition rooted in Aristotle’s organic unity and catharsis. Ezra Pound, Eliot’s mentor, took revolution and revolt to the extreme, spending a good part of his life in prison because of his political alliances. The crux, the “culminating point,” of these two lives locates the synthesis of order and freedom, stability and free will, past and future, animus and anima. The resolution is transfiguration of the self into the integrated dramatic hero god who is ourselves yet greater than ourselves (which literature often represents negatively, through the absence of transfiguration in the antihero). Round and round it goes, this need to come to grips with ourselves via one of our most fundamental instincts—the drive to create. But creating is not enough. We must know why, and how, and how best, and why not. Knowing is not enough. We must recreate ourselves. Recreating is not enough. The impetus of art is an eschatological drive toward self-fulfillment—transcendence out of ourselves, into ourselves, our deepest, truest a priori Self.

Sloughing Old Skin Our knowledge, including our experience of beauty, is limited by our apparatus of detection and measurement. Philosophy’s apparatus, as opposed to art’s, is reason as philosophy currently understands it. If reason denies the existence of spirit, “its person” will deny spiritual experience even if he has it. The “objective” perception and apprehension of experts is confined within the scope of their given field. This privileging of specialized knowledge results in grand scale distortion. Experts cannibalize truth and give us one “authoritative” interpretation of one specialized facet of knowledge. This leads to perverted assumptions: You cannot think rationally unless you have a PhD in philosophy; you cannot understand art unless you specialize in aesthetics; you cannot properly feel unless you have a degreed therapist fixing you; you cannot obey your conscience unless it corresponds to manmade law; you cannot have an experience that cannot be corroborated by scientific consensus; you cannot intuit a truth that contradicts academic definitions of “reality,” you cannot possess a thriving spirit unless it has been justified and sanctified within a recognized religion under the guidance of a legitimate priest. Our way of “seeing” has been limited by our “vision” of the material, spatial universe afforded by our material eyes. Not unlike in other eras, today we live and create in an age in which the ultimate authority defining reality is inexact natural science positing hypotheses as facts, which are constantly bombarded by new data rendering them obsolete, or else we bow to religious fundamentalism, which demands allegiance to its facts even if they contradict common sense. This leads to conscious or unconscious skepticism about the “nature,” or even the possibility, of truth. Faith is limited to belief that the material realm exists, but what we know about it is subject to momentary expert interpretations subject to revision. Even aware of this, we still assert “known facts” as facts. The universe has become so large, the data so immense, we fear thinking for ourselves; we stand on expert facts to feel solidly grounded. Imagination is an anarchist in this unstable world of flux we are struggling to control. Though the great artists within every genre have stood outside the box—in that chiaroscuro surrounding finite/temporal “reality”—those

artists complained that few others have the greatness of spirit to stand there with them. Vision for most people is reducible to objects subjected to the ordinary workings of the optic nerve limited by habitual excesses of tradition. Rationalists fear new ways of thinking, but really, what’s to fear? The conclusions based on other “detections” such as those employed by artists do not contradict reason, they expand its playground. Intuition is not really unreasonable. It only appears to be to those whose scope of reason is limited to what has traditionally been called reason. If you believe the world is flat, your scope of reason will have trouble “seeing” otherwise. If you know that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, you will not accept the possibility that at the macro level, according to Einstein’s relativity, the shortest distance between two points is a curve. In the realm of curved space, straight lines do not exist except as constructs in the mind—similar to Plato’s forms, except that they do not refer to actual things but only to possibilities. By now we are quite aware that material things are not as solid as we had thought. But then, the Greeks knew that. To conclude with postmodernism that because nothing is definite nothing exists is just reworking a common fallacy—which is not unexpected when scope and gauges are limited. Art is definite content represented through definite form. Great art brings us awareness, or better yet, experience, of spiritual Presence immanent in the material realm. Paul Gauguin called this sense of Presence sensation. “For a long time the philosophers have considered the phenomena which seem to us supernatural and yet of which we have the sensation [italics his]. Everything is in that word. Raphael and the others were men in whom the sensation was formulated before thought, which allowed them, when studying, never to destroy the sensation and to remain artists. For me, the great artist is the formulary of the greatest intelligence; he receives the most delicate perceptions, and thus the most invisible translations of the brain.” Rather than talk about Presence, the best we can do, as Baudelaire understood, is create a correspondence, an analogy, a symbol—Eliot’s objective correlative—of that Presence that will

resonate for anyone who has had that experience or is sensitive to that potential within himself. The Symbolists attempted to represent the correspondence directly by bypassing “reality” (realism) that stalled one outside the door to deeper resonance. Their paintings attempted to stimulate mystical Presence directly, aggressively. At the same time, they acknowledged that the great masters had always done likewise. The consensus among artists was not that art should simply make something new, but that it should resonate, deeply, from the sensuous down through the symbolic down into the spiritual ground of being—a process as ancient as Creation itself. In the intelligently designed New World of God, each great artist looks through the past into the future with the eyes of a prophet: He is Christ transfigured in the presence of his masters, who by surpassing them, fulfills his mission and theirs.



 

Chapter 13 The Big Other: Sex, Diversity, and the Meaning of Life And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? One might think that psychopaths or Hogs are the biggest problem in the world. Together they do stir up a pretty big thick cauldron of poison. But in terms of sheer volume, the big problem award should really go to ordinary good people: The biggest problem in the world is perfectly good people doing bad things to other perfectly good people. Perfectly good parents ostracize their perfectly good gay kids. Perfectly good young sons in gray uniforms kill perfectly good young sons in blue uniforms. Perfectly good white citizens suspect their perfectly good black neighbors of every crime in the neighborhood. Perfectly good German Christian Nazis gassed their perfectly good German Jewish friends and relatives. A perfectly good Baptist explains to his perfectly good Muslim colleague why all Muslims are going to hell. A perfectly good American guy pulled the lever that dropped an atomic bomb on tens of thousands of perfectly good residents of Hiroshima, as millions of perfectly good Americans cheered. The world swarms with perfectly good people judging each other quicker and more often than their remotes flip channels. What the world needs now, as the song goes, is love, sweet love. What the world also needs now is truth, joy, security, happiness, freedom, creativity, opportunity—the list of basic human needs, codified in our country as natural God-given rights, goes on and on. What’s really quite fascinating yet often entirely overlooked is the extent to which all these other needs are intimately conjoined with

the love need. It could even be argued that love engenders all our needs and their genuine fulfillment. The universe has been constructed in such a way that we need in order that the need can be fulfilled. No need can be fulfilled in absolute isolation. We need the world just to exist, and we need each other to be available to fulfill our basic human needs and to help us fulfill those needs by ourselves: We need Nature, and we need society, which is a natural aspect of Nature. If love engenders and fulfills our needs, Nature could be viewed as an expression of God’s love that not only engenders and fulfills our needs directly in a multitude of ways both obvious and hidden, but that also gifts us with the freedom to love by fulfilling our own needs and the needs of others. Isn’t the freedom to love one of life’s great miracles, not to mention, if that love is authentic, one of life’s consummate pleasures? What most prevents fulfillment of our needs, what most destroys life’s basic benefits to us, is a function of faulty morals of ordinary people no less insidious than the evils perpetrated by selfish Hogs and psychopaths. We would expect morally faulty Hogs and psychopaths to thwart the basic human rights of the rest of us to serve their own evil purposes. But we usually don’t think it worth noting that denials of rights, and therefore suffering, can far more often be traced to ethics scratched and dented by the rest of us. Our other faculties serve as mere accessories to our crimes of defective conscience—conscience, of course, being the faculty responsible for checking our motives for doing bad things to perfectly good people. What would be the incentive for depriving others of love, truth, joy, security, happiness, freedom, creativity, opportunity, etc.? Hog selfishness? Of course. But if everyone on Earth possessed all of life’s so-called intangibles, if each person had all those basic needs met, it wouldn’t deprive anyone, not even a Hog, of anything. Love isn’t like money: You can’t bank it; you can’t steal it. If other people have a million dollars, that’s a million you don’t have. But if other people are rich in love, you are no less rich in love; potentially you could be even richer in love by being loved more and being part of a loving society that nurtures love, even yours. Why, then, are so many perfectly good people intent on depriving other good people of

intangible benefits like love, truth, joy, security, happiness, freedom, creativity, opportunity, etc., that if allowed, deprive no one and even potentially add benefit for everyone else? It makes no sense. Even so, it’s not faulty reasoning as much as misfiring conscience that squelches benefit and squashes potential benefiters. Isn’t it clear that the squelch-and-squash MO of civilization or even a hamlet necessarily backfires? Still we drive that old tin can down the same old potholed freeway. Consider how often in history or just your average workday Hogs and psychopaths frighten, threaten, intimidate, tempt, seduce, and confuse perfectly good people into executing some very dark deeds. Good people fold when the king trumps conscience. But good people also willfully succumb to bad behavior as a way to get back power robbed from them by victimizers. Good people resort to sins and crimes to survive. Good people sometimes just can’t say no. Quite often perfectly good people commit profound evil believing it to be a sacred duty, and perfectly good people invent emblems like uniforms and holy books to prove that their duty to damage and destroy is sacred. Selfish Hogs and psychopaths have taught even very good people how to rationalize bad behavior quicker than you can say, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Often good people justify doing bad towards other perfectly good people because they perceive those “others” to be bad people: They have learned to perceive those others as bad: They have learned to be bigots. But to accept that lesson, reason has to wobble with its twin, conscience, hobbling on flimsy crutches, even when it knows better. Let’s admit the truth: The infectious spiritual disease bigotry perpetrated by otherwise perfectly good people has destroyed more bodies and souls and civilizations than bubonic plague or even Hogs and psychopaths. Bigotry, though, is curable. But first the disease must be understood. Then we must take our medicine. Disease manifests not just the presence of something harmful; harm thrives in the absence of something beneficial. We grow up taking our vitamins because nutritional deficiencies can lead to health deterioration resulting in sickness. Bigotry is the presence of hate (or one of its whitewashed permutations like disgust or self-

righteous superiority or “love”) cultivated in the absence of love and truth. Bigotry often grows like a cancer due to a misunderstanding of the facts. All bigotry, from Zionism to racism to sexism to redneckism, rests upon untruth, whether lie or fallacy; all bigotry contradicts love. Deism is a spiritually nutritional solution to any form of bigotry, including religious bigotry, because Deism is absolutely committed to authentic love and truth, the foundation of its worship of the Creator whose love and truth manifest through miraculous Nature, including human nature. (It should be noted here that for a Deist like me, love does not include obligatory forgiveness. Victims never have the responsibility or even the right to forgive the victimizer. The moral foundation of Deism is truth, and for the sake of truth, the victimizer must assume accountability for his victimization. Because only God is privy to the innermost truth and motives of another human being, only God can forgive. But because love does not equal forgiveness, God can love even when she doesn’t forgive. We, too, can love.) Religious bigotry expresses hate, the antithesis of love posited as a core value of every religion. All religious people and even most not-religious people believe in the fundamental value of love. Why, then, do religious bigots focus on hate—on judgment, condemnation, rejection, persecution, “correction,” and even eradication of people of other religions, or at least of the religions themselves? Because people’s beliefs are not truly grounded in truth and love. People all over the world have powerful spiritual experiences. People sense the numinous in places of worship within all religious traditions. People experience God’s Presence outside the halls of worship, in spots grand and humble. People despair when they think God has abandoned them, or when they have abandoned God. People rejoice when this, too, has passed. People everywhere sacralize love and its meaning in marriage, birth, death, and many other of life’s momentous moments, through ceremonies like weddings, baptisms, circumcisions, and funerals. But rather than celebrate that commonality among all human beings, religions isolate their differences (we pray in churches not temples, the ring goes on the left hand not the right, the deceased is buried not burned), elevate themselves to categories of superiority codified by

myths and magical texts (my myth not yours is real, my text not yours is divinely revealed), and ostracize and at times even attempt to exterminate all others. More wars have been waged for ideological/religious reasons than for natural resources or political gain or any other reason. Even today all major religions and their multitudinous subsets engage in “spiritual” wars against all the other “infidels.” Even on a small scale, Christians and Muslims, Jews and Buddhists, Catholics and Protestants forbid their children to marry or even to live peacefully together. What On Earth is Spirit? Millions of us recognize God’s immanent Spirit in Nature—not just what we usually call “nature,” but manmade aspects of nature as well, like particular places, music and literature, rituals and important events, etc. Many of us believe that in some way we can’t really understand, God is Present in this space-time realm. Many of us realize that religion and spirituality are two very different things, and that actual spiritual experience is represented through many and possibly all religions but that representation is representation. Spiritual experience, independent of religion, can manifest through religion. Religion can facilitate spirituality; it can serve as a door to spirituality. But religion is not spirituality itself. In my view, what is often interpreted as a “visitation” of Jesus or Mohammad or Buddha or a guardian spirit is actually an experience of God’s Presence or Spirit—what Christianity calls the Holy Spirit and other religions call by their own designators. A born-again Christian interprets his initial “saving” experience as Jesus because he has been indoctrinated to believe that. A person of another faith has been indoctrinated to interpret his sense of God’s Presence differently. We all translate our experiences using the conceptual language of the religion or philosophy in which we are currently saturated. Though nobody really knows exactly what that Spirit is, nearly every faith agrees that people can experience some tangible, nothuman manifestation of Spirit, and that that Spirit is God (by whatever name). Yet many religious people call the exact same Spirit experienced in any other religion the devil. Ironically, according to

Christianity, calling the Spirit the devil is blasphemy, the one and only unforgivable sin. What motivates the claim that your Spirit is the devil but mine is God, or at least that your experience of Spirit is wrong and mine is right? Ignorant possessiveness. Just like love, there’s plenty of Spirit to go around. People don’t know that, because they neither think this through nor trust the Spirit. Their so-called faith displays an absence of faith in the God that loves all communers and that transcends manmade religion. We’re all groping in the dark, but some people have bigger flashlights than others. But even those bigger flashlights come in various colors, shapes, and sizes. When you’re groping in the dark, you’re going to follow the biggest flashlight on hand. No matter where you are or which biggest flashlight you follow, your tunnel ends in the same light of day as every other tunnel. We’re all in this together, and we’ll probably all be as wonderfully surprised as Plato’s caveman by what the light of day reveals just beyond the tunnel of this life. Like me, many people have experienced a classic spiritual high, often within the context of a religious fellowship. In my early twenties, not long after my Christian born-again experience at age nineteen, I realized that fellowship is not religion, at least not in the sense of any organized religion. Fellowship exists outside the religion, not within it, not because of it—at least not directly. Fellowship does, however, utilize the props of religion to set the stage for spiritual encounter. Anything that symbolizes the spiritual, anything that focuses attention on Spirit, becomes, in the most accurate sense, religion. The true religion of Spirit can be entered via props of a specific religion, like Christianity or Buddhism or Islam—which in my fellowship included “breaking bread” (wine often included, which made it “communion”), reading the Bible, praying, discussion, and occasionally singing and washing feet, all often by candlelight. I joined and unjoined other Bible studies that used their own props. I explored many nontraditional Christian groups, events, and meetings —which sounds quaint, but they included things like psychic readings, “confessing miracles,” praying in tongues—and an entire church singing acappella in tongues, randomly modulating in and out of keys in perfect harmonies for three-plus hours and doing

absolutely nothing else, no preacher, no choir director, no nothing but people from many denominations singing together in tongues with fans whirring and nighthawks squawking along into the night out the open windows. Though I maintained my skeptical squint when perusing the fringe, at that early stage I brushed aside my doubts about the Bible and dove in gleefully, splashing like a baby seal in the graces “the Word” offered me. I had already learned about the “problems” with biblical authenticity and infallibility, a sticking point that would later jolt me out of “born-again Christian,” drag me through hell, and then gently deposit me back in the peaceful light of Deism. But at that born-again starting point I did what many people do: I fit the Spirit into my current indoctrination, like a lightning bug captured in a jar. At one point I went to an Inter Varsity Christian Fellowship youth conference at UI Urbana to investigate becoming a missionary, but was disillusioned by conference leaders that came across as arrogant, know-it-all money-grubbers and spiritual charlatans. At another point, a friend and I decided to quit college and hit the road with our witness—a plan short-circuited by a concerned professor; at another I gave away all my belongings and embarked on a disciple/Walden experience, a trip cancelled when I learned the cabin I was to occupy was infested with snakes (okay, occasionally visited by snakes). What I’ve noted here is a short list of the multitude of engaging props supplied to me by my religion of choice that during my early twenties facilitated my settling down eventually in the true religion of Spirit. What I realized was that organized religion itself is a prop contained within the broader religion that is fellowship, and fellowship is contained within the even broader, more universal spirituality that is being “in the Spirit.” Being in the Spirit—being in communion with God, each other, and oneself—is perhaps the one true ultimate universal religion, which embodies all real truth and love. Not that anyone ever knows all truth or loves perfectly. Even so, the communion itself is perfect in being perfectly what it needs to be in the moment. Everyone who has been in such a fellowship knows what I’m talking about. Being one in the Spirit is an

experience common across religions across eras across the globe, even though it is not an experience common to all or even necessarily most people within any religion. If all those communing people would find that common ground and commune as one, surely the whole universe would let out a huge sigh of relief. The Thick Wall of Indoctrination It should be noted that Darwinism is also a religion of indoctrination. Because Darwinian atheism precludes any possibility of experiencing God’s spiritual Presence because God does not exist, atheists don’t, won’t, and can’t believe in such an experience even when it happens to them personally. I myself have witnessed that exact kind of denial in friends of mine. It might seem unfair to accuse a thoroughly brainwashed Darwinian of spiritual laziness, though spiritual inertia seems reasonable. I think of atheists as spiritual couch potatoes. Atheism is like physical deterioration of a body whose only form of exercise is moving to and from the refrigerator and whose diet not only doesn’t add nutrients, it does add harmful substances like trans fats, sugar, preservatives, additives, and residual pesticides and other toxins and carcinogens; like mental deterioration and fuzziness of a brain that has stopped being exercised through new experiences, education, and challenges; like an atrophied aesthetic that views the world as a flat gray object instead of a living, pulsating organism that is a work of art in the process of being created Creation; like a conscience that grows lax and flabby through “exceptions” to what’s right and true, and that ignores what’s good and spouts off excuses while turning a blind eye to what’s harmful, damaging, even violently destructive evil; like the intuition naturally mined by children squelched by an adult “impossible” staring right through creative solutions offered by insight staring him in the face; like widget makers living in prefab ticky-tacky houses all lined up in neat rows who move into ticky-tacky graves all lined up in neat rows somewhere on the flat plains of spiritual mediocrity. But couldn’t as much be said of fundamentalism? Aren’t fundamentalists, too, guilty of spiritual inertia? Many prominent religious scholars believe so. In his book The Scandal of the

Evangelical Mind, scholar Mark A. Noll analyzes the works of some of those scholars. He quotes Charles Malik’s The Two Tasks: “The greatest danger besetting American Evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism,” and Canadian scholar N. K. Clifford: “The Evangelical Protestant mind has never relished complexity. Indeed its crusading genius, whether in religion or politics, has always tended toward an over-simplification of issues and the substitution of inspiration and zeal for critical analysis and serious reflection.” In his discussion of the works of scholars Ronald Numbers and Paul Boyers, Noll notes, “As the authors describe them, evangelicals—bereft of self-criticism, intellectual subtlety, or an awareness of complexity—are blown about by every wind of apocalyptic speculation and enslaved to the cruder spirits of populist science.” The central problem, really, is elitism. Every religion, every denomination, every sect within every denomination, every clique within every sect believes that its position and only its position is right and therefore divinely ordained. Yet all those contrary, competing sets of believers call themselves Christian, as if “Christian” had any specific meaning at all. As Gary Dorrien remarks in his book The Remaking of Evangelical Theology, “The evangelical impulse is to insist that only one religious tradition can be true, but evangelicalism itself contains several disparate traditions.” One immediately thinks Protestant and Catholic—two very different Christianities. But within those Churches there are a multitude of subcategories: Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox, for instance; Lutheran and Baptist and their subcategories, such as the Lutheran Wisconsin and Missouri Synod churches and the Southern Baptist Convention. There are born-again Baptists, Holiness-Pentecostals, Anabaptists, and Reformational-Confessionals. There are within denominations liberal, orthodox, and neoorthodox theologies and believers. There are Mennonites, Amish, and Church of the Brethren. There are Quakers and Puritans. There are Presbyterians, Methodists, Mormons, Christian Scientists. And so on. This list barely scratches the surface of the huge crucible of subsets of subsets of various Christianities.

Certainly the most contentious debate within the churches themselves is over biblical infallibility. Protestantism began when Luther elevated the authority of the Bible over that of the Pope. Once the Bible, closely scrutinized, was found to lack any definitive authority, by the late nineteenth century the Protestant Bible, which differed somewhat from the Catholic version (which included the Apocrypha), had to be elevated to its present status of a “Godbreathed” book inspired by the Holy Spirit, making it, as scholar Charles Hodge put it, “infallible, and of divine authority in all things pertaining to faith and practice, and consequently free from all error whether of doctrine, fact, or precept.” Charles’s son A. A. Hodge, realizing that infallibility had already been publically disproven, taught that the original autographs of scripture—the books in their original form—were “absolutely infallible when interpreted in the sense intended, and hence are clothed with absolute divine authority.” But a few decades later, in 1881, A. A. Hodge and his Princeton Seminary colleague Benjamin B. Warfield conceded that the biblical writers “were in large measure dependent for their knowledge upon sources and methods in themselves fallible,” and that textual variations “embarrass the interpretation of many details.” Since then, many theologians have adopted an “infallible teaching” model, which Gary Dorrian calls the neoevangelical position, “in which scripture is held to be infallible only in the affirmation of its message. This infallible message is variously construed as all matters of faith and practice, or all matters pertaining to salvation, or the overall message of scripture, or the essential message of scripture,” depending on your religion, denomination, sect, and clique. The same kinds of religious debates and factions exist within all religions. All have painted themselves into a corner with the bright color of divine authority resting in their religion’s respective infallible texts. This is a corner from which there is no escape other than leaving footprints through the wet paint on your way out the door. It makes sense, then, that another experience common across religions would be a spiritual dry spell, a classic “desert experience,” a falling away from the faith. Doubt is an often excruciating symptom of false belief; truth can be as painful as surgery and chemo. But in

the end, spiritual health is restored. In fact, truth brings with it new ways to believe that give the thinking doubter deeper insights about how to better take care of ourselves that lead us to even higher levels of spiritual health. A different dis-ease results from experiences that make us doubt the truth and love of God. We rant at God, but really our negative emotions eat away at us from the inside out. Even more destructive in terms of sheer numbers of people affected are negative emotions projected onto others: I’m mad at God; therefore, I will hurt someone. The most common symptom of unhealthy religion is that perennial trickster elitism—in the Jungian sense, where trickster takes on a life of its own. Serious problems arise when religious people try to protect their spiritual within their religion by excluding other spiritual people within other religions. That’s perfectly natural; I myself have been there, done that. But now we need to learn to share our toys. Then we need to grow up and fix the planet. In my view, religion isn’t really myths and doctrines and hierarchies and man-made texts. Religion—authentic religion—is the sum of all that directly evokes, nurtures, and maintains God-centered spirituality. If true religion pivots on the core reality of God’s Spirit, it might make sense to throw out the Bible and every other religious text; throw out Jesus, Mohammad, and every other guru; throw out religious institutions; throw out the high priests and all their games and tricks; throw out delusion and illusion: In other words, throw out organized religion and create a new religion focused on the truth of the Creator Spirit. Then go back and excavate from all you threw out whatever still rings true within this new religious context of Spirit. Throw out “religion”; focus on Spirit. This straightforward paradigm shift could transform the world. Problem: Solution It’s really quite amazing how many problems can be solved with truth. Facts are one form of truth, 2+2=4, for instance. Facts led us to understand that smoking causes cancer; facts built upon facts will lead to an understanding of cancer that will provide a cure, or better yet, prevention. If some or even one of the facts is invalid, meaning not-true, if we have misunderstood the cause of cancer in smokers

or some mechanism in the production of cancer cells, we will likely not find the cure. A cure depends upon our understanding all the pertinent facts—all the truth. If somebody asserted that 2+2=6, and really meant it, we might respond, “That’s crazy,” or even “You’re crazy.” Craziness is a state of not-truth. If three people—say, a psychologist, a cop, and an official from the Health Department—walked into the room and told you that you were a Martian because your skin was as dark green as a pine tree and you assumed they weren’t kidding or “pulling something,” and if you looked in the mirror and your skin was not dark green, you would assume that either you or they were crazy. At the very least you would think that the situation was crazy, that there was something fishy going on that had a perfectly sane explanation. Mental illness consists in large part of not-truths. Even a chemical imbalance indicates chaotic and crazy misalignment of mechanisms that maintain neurological health. Psychological imbalance reflects crazy chaos often resulting from distress or accident or violation no less deranging than a Mack truck crashing into a house. A mentally ill person emotionally believes something to be true that is to the rest of us clearly not true: All is not lost. Even moods can reveal an unconscious truth, or can manifest a not-truth. For instance, you might think you feel blue because you didn’t get enough sleep last night, when really you miss your mother, who passed away six years ago; you might not know why you feel blue at that exact moment because you don’t remember the dream you had last night about your mother, and don’t recall the smell of fresh-baked bread you passed a few minutes ago at the grocery that at some semiconscious level reminded you of your mother teaching you to bake bread. Or you might feel blue because you got fired from your job and you think you’re a loser, when your being fired had nothing at all to do with your job performance or your character; your being a “loser” is a gross misrepresentation of the truth of you and of the situation. People kill themselves because of such momentary nottruths. Most of us have had our mental-illness moments. Tragically, one quick glitch in truth, one fleeting misinterpretation or brief miscalculation meltdown can kill.

People often cling to their invalid cherished assumptions—their “truths” that are not-true—because they are sewn into a fabric that is precious to them. A fundamentalist who refuses to give up his belief in an infallible Bible or historical Jesus when a multitude of contradicting facts have been laid out for him is “crazy,” is he not? Yet because society has been thoroughly indoctrinated to believe that one’s religious belief is sacred, and because freedom of religion has been codified by the Constitution, we Americans shut our eyes to religious craziness because the not-truths are threads in the fabric of their own, and by extension our own, lives. Your personal fabric’s religious threads might include beneficial social relationships with fellow believers, pleasant church gatherings, a relationship with a mentor that transformed your life, religious holidays during which the whole family gathers for warm exchanges, and habits that help give your time coherence and meaning, like going to church each Sunday and saying prayers every night. Those practices are the opposite of crazy: They provide stability, focus, and order; they often provide love, and they can embody elements of truth. The problem is that people keep the threads of not-truth for the sake of the overall fabric, even though the not-truths lower the overall quality of the fabric. What people like me are asking you to do is to tease from the fabric all the threads of not-truth and to replace them with truth. Is that such a bad idea? Society as a whole needs to do the same thing. One Difference Is Like Any Other Perhaps like me you’ve come to appreciate the differences in people. But wouldn’t you agree that many religious people ostracize others even as they smile and lovingly assert “Thou shalt not judge”? Some believers have a knack for finding reasons to judge others who have the same experiences as theirs but who read their thoushalt-nots from a different book of myths, or even from the true Logos of God’s natural Creation revealed through anyone’s common sense. Shouldn’t truth be the core value and reality in any religion? Isn’t it crazy when people assert as truth what clearly is not truth? Doesn’t

lying contradict the Creator of ordered truth? Isn’t a lot of not-truth crazy chaos; isn’t chaos the opposite of intelligent design? Judgment passed by fundamentalists is often really indoctrinated prejudgment packaged as fact. In some cases it’s easy for people to cling to not-truths as if they were truth because all their lives they’ve been hiding the truth, or hiding from the truth. Millions of people who were molested as children have been hiding that fact. Why? Victimizers often “train” victims via threats: If you tell, I will… Fill in the blank with your worst nightmare. Religion threatens with punishment and hell. Fear becomes a habit that becomes a way of life. Some molestation victims are persuaded that they are to blame. Most feel ashamed. All feel dirty, defiled, violated. Religion, too, often plays the blame-‘n-shame game. Whatever the brainwash, the consequence for the victim is a learned skill at not-truth, especially hide-truth. Rape victims can experience this same process of denial. So can children and adult children of substance abusers. So can battered wives. So can many other categories of victims. Millions of victims suffer the shadowy pang of not-truth that is really not their fault. Victimization that leads to denial in the lives of many individuals leads to incorporation of not-truth into the fabric of society. Ingrained denial explains why some people judge others: It’s a projection of the shadow, the hidden; it’s also a red herring tossed out to deflect attention away from one’s own faults (perceived or actual) toward someone else’s. Any form of bigotry that’s not psychopathic sadism or elitist exploitation (sadism-lite) is projection rooted in denial. Truth sets us free of all bigotry. Bigotry is big-box judgment. That entire group of people over there is other, which means inferior, which mean bad. Hell is the garbage can for inferiors invented by inferiors pretending to be superior. Infidel Muslims, unnatural gays, blacks not born into the Chosen Race are all hell-bound according to some born-again Christian. How can good people be bigots? How can your friends and relatives who aren’t in denial, who aren’t projecting, cast other perfectly good people into hell? Fallacies and lies. Even clean-cut camaraderie with religious peers can rest upon not-truths fostered by

the clique. Bigotry is tolerated when people won’t or can’t see their own not-truths. They don’t see because there’s a glitch in one of their faculties, often reason, often conscience, often aesthetic. It might seem odd to blame the aesthetic faculty for the not-truth of bigotry. But misinterpretation of life can stem from the same aesthetic illogic as misinterpretation of literature. When a student misinterprets a symbol in literature, other students shake their heads and mumble, “That makes no sense,” or “That’s crazy.” The symbolism in Macbeth has definite meaning. Though ferreting out all the meaning of a complex image might be difficult and even impossible, most of the meaning intended by Shakespeare is easily grasped by any literate reader. The literate are trained to recognize correspondences, and interpretation of symbolism is a skill as precise as interpretation of everyday speech. We easily understand even complicated sentences and paragraphs once we’re trained to understand the language. Bigots, and many anti-intellectual religious people in general, demonstrate an inability to grasp correspondences. This inability is perhaps the primary root of hypocrisy, which is two-way not-truth: the sum of the hypocrite’s not-truth about himself and not-truth about the other. The bigot relegates a group of people to a position of not-true inferiority, but even the bigot could be relegated to an inferior position by another bigot. Christian bigots denigrate Muslims; Muslim bigots denigrate Christians. There are women bigots who denigrate blacks, and vice versa. There are bigots in every category: gays who denigrate blacks or women or Muslims; Hispanics who denigrate women or gays or Muslims; whites who denigrate blacks or women or blue-collar workers. What would the world look like if all the threads of bigotry were pulled out of the fabric of our lives and swept away? When a bigot can’t recognize a correspondence between himself and an ostracized other, he can’t empathize with that other. Love is preached loudly to smokescreen his bigotry, which is a form of loathing, a version of hate. Every bigot loathes an other. Everybody is other. The problem is that some others only see the other others as other; the problem is correspondence blindness that results in unfair—not-truthful—judgment. Many straight people who judge gays

for their gayness can’t see the similarity between the otherness of being gay and the otherness of being female, or black, or old, or Baptist, or poor, or Southern, or uneducated, or spiritual, or straight. Okay, let’s face it, gays are different, as different as Neptune’s moons, Triton and Nereid, which turn clockwise when the other planets and moons in our Solar System turn counterclockwise; one might say they turn forward rather than backward. Clearly human beings are not ticky-tacky automatons rolled off some lazy god’s assembly line. Human differences are as relative as our perception of a rainbow’s refraction, are as natural as the fireworks of burning chemical elements giving off their characteristic spectra of light. Scientist Hans Christian von Baeyer commented, “It is the business of physics to find unity in the diversity of natural phenomena—and to discover analogies between the inaccessible realms of the universe and the immediate world of human experience.” This is the business not only of science, but also of philosophy, theology, art, and every other activity of human consciousness. We are beginning to understand what many great minds of the past already knew: Survival, physical and spiritual, depends on unity in diversity rather than on inquisitions intent on destruction of difference. Corresponding Differences Gay, a symbol for difference, could stand for any other, be it women, blacks, Sufis, old people, or kids with autism. Any of those others could represent all the other others. Because everybody is other to somebody, everybody corresponds to every other. When will we realize that other is just us? Not while the diehard antisocial elitists, not while Darwinians and fundamentalists, reject the concept of strength in unity. Hog elitists want “others” to exploit; that’s their means of survival. Darwinians want a world where only the strongest survive. Fundamentalists want a world where only they survive. What’s their contribution to the survival of our species? War and all its concentric permutations: Attacks against the other. The world has all the talents and resources needed to provide every person on earth with everything he or she needs. What we don’t need is nuclear fallout, blown-out brains, or rat-race heart

attacks. Isn’t peace preferable to red alerts? Not for those who exploit war for power and profit. The goal of all their wars, battles, arguments, competitions is, of course, superiority. Elitists need war, and because they need bodies to fight their wars—they’re certainly not going to do it themselves—they need to kick up some fear—fear of some other. There’s war and there’s “war.” Big literal wars, like corporate wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, like the corporate war on the middle class, blend fear of change with fear of difference. If the world embraced the radical concept of equality, there would be no exploitation, no power-lust, no war. Libertarians like Ron Paul toss around “liberty” like a beach ball, but once you catch it, you realize it’s filled with hot air. By “liberty” they mean an elitist’s “freedom” to screw thy neighbor without consequence, which makes libertarianism another permutation of Darwinian/fundamentalist elitism sanctifying exploitation. Libertarians, like other Darwinian fundamentalists, think they live in a jungle, not in a society that survives because united we stand. True liberty is the freedom to do as you chose as long as you don’t hurt others. For liberty to be upheld, society does its best to protect its citizens from hurtful choices of others. Our legal system specifies behavior considered hurtful and assigns penalties for those crimes; though the legal system isn’t perfect and needs tweaking, it’s a principled necessity providing great benefit to a thriving democracy. Society also provides services for victims of victimizers, as well as services and aid for victims of harsh and destructive circumstances like poverty, sickness, fires, and natural disasters. Society provides public services that contribute to its own health and well-being, like government, education, libraries, the criminal justice system, and the military. The problem is not that these services exist, as libertarians assert, but that they are sometimes, but certainly not always or even often, misused and poorly administered. Libertarians —and Patriots, who are Libertarians dressed in eighteenth-century costumes—think these services should be privatized, meaning corporatized, meaning owned and operated by the Corporate Nation. Libertarianism is a conterm meant to smokescreen the Corporate Nation’s agenda to trick America into trading its liberty for serfdom

and slavery at the hands of multinational CEOs, the up-and-coming slave-drivers of the twenty-first century. In-house distortions of reality threaten liberty more than any terrorist threat. Reality-torquing Citizens United, the conterm for corporate CEOs united to bribe politicians and the Supreme Court into allowing unlimited anonymous campaign contributions to politicians, further the Tea Party libertarian agenda of unregulated cutthroat capitalism. In the eighteenth century, American democracy radically departed from classist hierarchy and rule of the elite. We’re still working on equality. Only recently have women and blacks attained equal status, at least theoretically. Like aristocrats of the Colonies, elites today fear departures from the status quo because it means they might lose their elite status, meaning their money and position and the power that comes with it. Their minions fear departures from the status quo because elites cunningly instill in them a fear of change, which is fear of difference, difference caused by others who are different, who want everybody else to change to be different the way they are different, like straights who want everybody to be straight and fear that gays want everybody to be gay. Regardless of the concrete object of fear—gays, blacks, commies, terrorists, feminists—the abstract bottom line is always fabricated fear of difference. Fear of difference is the cause of intolerance, the source of a multitude of our sins and the majority of our problems. Brutes create fear of other to create intolerance, to exploit intolerance, to justify predation of both the feared other and of the fearful intolerant, who pay the brutes for protection from the terrifying other under the bed. Fear creates intolerance, which creates more fear, which creates more intolerance. It’s a brilliant Ponzi scheme that lands Armageddon. Suit-and-tie brutes today diversify, maintaining a thick portfolio of prejudices to choose from, an entire bigot bank ripe for investment. The homophobic war against the social “gay menace” and political “gay agenda,” for instance, has become a cottage industry. Gays are perverted; gays are unnatural; gays are evil. Homosexuals are so loathsome that Reverend Fred Phelps of the God Hates Fags Church proclaims on his website, “God doesn’t hate you because you’re homosexual. You’re homosexual because God hates you.”

The God of love in the hands of too many Christians is the God of hate. Oh, some of those Christians will say they love you, they just hate your sin, as if your “sin” is somehow removed from “you.” Their hate takes the deceptive form of judgment passed down from on high, which of course places them atop the same pedestal of superior elitism they share with their “chosen” brother in Christ, Reverend Phelps. Self-righteous judgment is just a not-physical form of violence against an actual person being treated like an abstraction. Objectification of gays is just as prevalent as objectification of women. Christians often murder other and rarely embrace correspondence. Not-truth always eventually sacrifices love. Not-truth even sacrifices love of oneself in the guise of “saved by grace” (Lord knows it’s not by good works). Any degree of hate is covered up by the vicarious love of Jesus. Classic rationalized projection in action. Repression aggression unites strange bedfellows praying under the same steeple: rightwinger goodygoodies and bad boys—you know, the NRA boys with the facsimile balls dangling below their tailgates who smack girls on the fanny with their Bibles on their way out from church on their way to chase blacks and Muslims back past the tracks. These are righteous acts, according to real-men interpretations of the Bible, which real-men haven’t actually read, at least not in detail. I’ve met many of these guys. Some of them are quite nice. And quite repressed. I’m not saying they’re all gay, there are other ways to be repressed, though perhaps you, too, have thought at least once: Thou dost protest too much. Macho is fast becoming threadbare even in their neck of the woods. It’s starting to look downright suspicious. At the very least a queer-fear bully bash is as juvenile as red-faced Rush bouncing on his heels like a terrible-two in a highchair. Roles are not people. Though some people are donuts—all white flour and lard and sugar with a big hole in the center. Fresh baked: tempting. But not good for you. The ultimate sacrifice of not-truth is hate. For instance (to stick with gay as symbol of other), as we saw in earlier chapters, criminal psychologists point out that early ultramasculine socialization and rigid enforcement of gender norms result in a propensity toward

aggression that can lead to violent crimes against gays, for predators the male version of women. Hate crimes against gays tend to be committed by males with violent tendencies who have been influenced by an anti-gay ideology, which could consist of religious or moral values, or beliefs that gay people spread AIDS or are sexual predators. Society’s cultural message that gays are second-class citizens because they’re deviant makes legalized discrimination acceptable. Perpetrators of gay violence feel entitled to punish gay men and women who do not adhere to their respective gender roles. They appoint themselves judges and cast others into hell, literal hell if they’re fundamentalist, figurative hell if they’re not. Though the need to control difference, or deviance from the norm, is rooted in brute self-righteousness, psychological and social motivations don’t explain violence and aggression, they merely describe the way violence and aggression function. Underlying violence and aggression are more profound motivations of elitism on the one hand and psychopathic sadism on the other—sadism bashes, elitism judges: judging is sadism-lite. To suggest that enculturation engenders homophobia puts the cart before the horse. The cultural message doesn’t cause homophobia. Homophobia causes the cultural message, which gives the sadist an excuse to gay bash. Homophobia is simply one of many sadistic props, like misogyny, like any version of bigotry. It gives the elitist the right to exploit, and the victim the means to blame someone, anyone other than him- or herself, in order to take back power. In every case, homophobia, like any other brand of bigotry, unjustly executes power-over. People gay bash because it’s socially acceptable? Perhaps. But more to the point, it’s socially acceptable because people do it and get away with it. Some people do it because there has to be a plot for the sadistic play. Sadists group together to enslave “weaker” groups of people they can mutually exploit. Throughout the ages, grand coliseums, literal and figurative, have staged great public displays for sadistic voyeurs. Hands-on sadists prefer do-it-yourself. Nazis, inquisitors, even just your average rapist all want a more immediate experience of sadistic pleasure.

According to many fundamentalists, it’s not sadists, it’s not even terrorists, but the well-planned and executed homosexual agenda that is responsible for the destruction of the nation, terrorist bombs, earthquakes, tornadoes, meteors, the destruction of the elements, the devastation of war, economic disaster, totalitarianism, Nazism, communism, the decay of the family, and the collapse of civilization (Pat Robertson alone has made all those specific accusations). The solution? Send the fear-mongers money to hire an exorcist. Covering all the fear bases has made Robertson a billionaire. Remember, gay here is a symbol for other. If it’s not the gay threat, it’s the black threat, the feminazi threat, the Muslim terrorist threat, the Hispanic (“immigrant”) threat, the liberal socialist threat. Though this moronic attitude is fading, every five seconds a far-right fundraising plea shrieks like a terrible-ten trick-or-treater. This, too, shall pass. Humanity is stumbling into adulthood. Meanwhile, among adults, understanding of nature, including human nature, has evolved dramatically over the last century. Because of this expanding consciousness, our species is being transformed—I say “is being transformed” rather than “is transforming” because the transformation process takes a huge effort of will by those who care. As we microevolve, we enlarge our universe of discourse. Nature never lies, but humans must seek in order to find—and then interpret—her truths. Facts are not simply facts; they are jets of meaning. Our means of getting at the truth, our very definitions of what we mean by truth, are maturing, as they must, now that we’ve reached the age of realizing that more than 99% of the mass of the universe is invisible to our telescopes and is a type of matter “different” from anything on Earth. New, more inclusive definitions of our human family to include, for instance, biracial and gay families are no more radical than warped space or the constant of gravitation that modern science discovered by noticing they manifest in a multitude of different ways. Closedmindedness lessens our chances of survival. We need one another no less than the equal and opposite forces of each unique planet and the Sun dancing by mutual gravitational attraction around the barycenter of the Solar System. Sexual Taboo

What is it about gay that is so unacceptable? For the average good religionist, isn’t sex really the problem? Sex has always been part of our world’s survival tradition. Sex that expresses more than the animal instinct to procreate is a fairly new adaptation, possibly uniquely human. Sex that expresses genuine spiritual love that transcends the constraints of the material realm is so new-fangled that many members of the herd are mooing against it. Even for most Christians, the modern view is that at its best, physical intimacy expresses spiritual communion, or at least passionate emotional oneness. To deny this is to say that we are nothing more than animals that only have sex to conceive progeny, and that the foundation of marriage boils down to the Darwinistsanctioned insertion of the male sex organ into female sex organ. And this is exactly the view of Christians insisting that the sole purpose of sex is to procreate. It is interesting that the more puritanical the worldview, the more focused it is on sex, zooming in on “doing it” the right way. Some web sites of fundamentalist organizations like the Family Research Council (FRC) describe homosexual sex in graphic detail (public outrage convinced FRC to remove its oblique porn). Such constricted peering seems downright voyeuristic. One wonders if the authors and readers of these articles are themselves repressed homosexuals. That might explain their frenzied condemnation of contraception, too: it’s a way to avoid having sex with a member of one’s own gender, who might get pregnant. If they’re not repressed homosexuals, maybe they’re victims of rape who find the whole idea of sex distasteful. Or maybe they’re trying to hide the fact that they’re just poor performers. Ironically, many Christians call interracial or homosexual or female-generated love unnatural when all occur naturally and all benefit the lovers and harm no one. Yet those same Christians never consider that what they call “miracles” are perversions of God’s natural law and that “sacred duties” can lead to tragedies, for instance when believers pray for miracles instead of seeking critical medical attention, or “rely on God” instead of paying their bills, or “bear their cross” instead of blowing the whistle on good-Christian Dad’s child molesting.

Some old-timers still insist that homosexuality is wrong because it never results in producing a child. If procreation were our sole, ultimate purpose in life, then those with other ultimate purposes who did not produce offspring, among them priests, nuns, and the infertile, as well as those who died young or whose children died young, and those who prioritize career or relationship over childrearing, could be viewed as biological failures. Jesus himself would be a failure. If procreation were the sole, ultimate purpose of marriage, then failures would include those who marry late in life, those who will not bear children for medical reasons, and those who responsibly choose not to add to the population explosion and instead adopt. Heterosexual love can give rise to life, an actual physical life to be loved, but rape can give rise to that same life. Is that natural? Is that good? Everybody knows that sex can be anything from rape to transcendent passion. What makes it one or the other or anything in between has nothing to do with the gender of the people involved or the begetting of children. What makes it transcendent is the connection, the spiritual communion between the two persons. Most of us understand that there are other purposes than babymaking for living, loving, having sex, and getting married. Ironically, squeamish fundamentalists are manifesting their under-evolved animal/material priorities. Their vision of fulfillment consists of a nest with a male, a female, and a brood of chicks. But this arrangement is not the absolute transcendent reality. Nor is it the practical reality of daily life—even a good daily life. We are more than noble savages. We are not just animals. It’s a crazy contradiction that the religious who have sacrificed their humanity to abstract “transcendence” are satisfied to lower themselves to be just animals. Though conservative Christians seem peculiarly unnaturally hungup over anything having to do with sex, including gender issues, our whole civilization is hung-up with sex. One reason sex is supercharged is that biologically it is equated with our species’ survival. Food, shelter, sex—there is nothing more charged for us. No doubt our insatiable lust for money is obscenely intense because it is the modern means of obtaining this trinity of basic survival needs— troglodyte survival needs embedded in the primitive limbic regions of

the brain. Sex is the most charged of the primal big three because it involves not just material/physical needs, but deeper/higher emotional, psychological, and spiritual needs as well. And those higher concerns all involve love—eros, philos, agape. Love is the essence of life, the deeper spiritual life and the material life. For humans, love is life-force. Perhaps what most opposes life-force and love is fear of death. It’s fair to argue that much evil is life-force perverted by the fear of death. Perhaps homophobia is nothing more than overzealous “basic biology” enforcing mandatory propagation so that everyone procreates to insure the survival of our species. Again, it’s ironic that those prescribing spiritual transcendence and trust in God are so anxious about physical perpetuation. Homophobia is motivated by fear of death and extinction, not by love as expressed in the Christian text, I John: “Perfect love casts out all fear.” Equally ironic is the fact that this overzealous basic biology has led to a population explosion that actually threatens rather than promotes the survival of our species. Way back in 1797, Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison: In truth, I do not recollect in all the animal kingdom a single species but man which is eternally and systematically engaged in the destruction of its own species. What is called civilization seems to have no other effect on him than to teach him to pursue the principle of bellum omnium in omnia [war of all against all] on a larger scale, and in place of the little contests of tribe against tribe, to engage all the quarters of the earth in the same work of destruction. When we add to this that as to the other species of animals, the lions and tigers are mere lambs compared with man as a destroyer, we must conclude that it is in man alone that nature has been able to find a sufficient barrier against the too great multiplication of other animals and of man himself, an equilibrating power against the fecundity of generation. Many argue that homosexuality is one of nature’s peaceful equilibrating powers against the overzealous fecundity of generation. Make love, not war; and not babies. Certainly homosexuality is the

most foolproof birth control. Many people, including many psychologists, think that except for the one percent of misogynist sadists, most aggressive homophobes and heterosexist opponents of women’s reproductive rights are likely repressed homosexuals. The Darwin Factor Less than a century after the ratification of the Constitution (1788) and certification of the Bill of Rights (1791), and in the midst of the Civil War era, culminating in the slavery-ending Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments and Lincoln’s edict, the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1871) came to the rescue of the average white male by offering a scientifically proven worldview that effectively erased every vestige of noble equality and responsible free will as envisioned by our Founders. According to Darwin, humans are not motivated by sacred moral imperatives bestowed by the Creator but are impelled by blind mechanisms of natural selection. Even while denigrating apish atheism, Christians appropriated Darwinian survival-or-the-fittest elitism by proclaiming Christian dominion. Other religions also proclaimed dominion, and wars among those competing religions still claiming to own God will quite possibly end in our extinction. By the end of his life, Darwin placed sex—sexual selection—at the top of the survival hierarchy; food was still a close second, and anything else that allowed one to survive came in third. Competition replaced humanist cooperation as the impetus of civilization. It’s easy to see how we evolved into a physically and psychologically dis-eased world of sex and food and gadget addictions, chased with a few drugs, exploited for corporate profits. Wasn’t that inevitable? But Darwin’s view wasn’t really new, it simply codified what we already knew existed just under the surface-flash of civilization: Sex makes the world go round. If sex equals survival, the aristocracy mused, we must control sex. And for at least two-plus millennia they have, whips and chains optional. Every aspect of sexuality that ensures white male dominance is still corralled and packaged today like merchandise displayed in a sex emporium.

Feminism, reproduction rights, gay rights, racial equality, labor equity, and all social institutions and programs have been labeled with the warning “cooties” because they threaten aristocratic entitlement. Inferior is equated with womanly. Real men transcend sissy socialism, the cootie catchphrase of the hour. Real men are proud to be predators in pinstripes puffing Cuban cigars in boardrooms controlling the Corporate Nation. Real men are sons of God. Women and “women” were shaped from Adam’s rib as an afterthought to service the needs of real men. Power-lust is as ancient as leprosy, greed as archaic as the Flood. For the America of our Founders to be truly established, power-lust must be cured and greed swept away. Wealth is a good thing that needs to be shared by the hands that create it. Hubris can only be checked by a universal spirit of cooperation. Unions, collectives, cooperatives, equal pay for equal work—these aren’t radical constructs but are practical moral imperatives that ensure economic growth. Do elitists really not know that justice and equality issued not from Adam or apes but from the Creator of intelligently designed and enormously diverse Nature? Our Founders made concessions to elitists to get their signatures on the Constitution. Slavery usually comes to mind first. And although white women had had an equal right to citizenship from the moment the Constitution was ratified, they were nonetheless deprived of many of their just rights and in effect remained slaves even after slavery had officially ended. In many states, women had little or no property rights and were deprived of any rights over their own children. Only in 1920 did the Nineteenth Amendment grant women the right to vote. In Darwinian terms, this is not surprising. Although according to Darwin the female generally controlled the salient mating ritual, men needed to believe that the weaker sex could not survive without them, and women fulfilled their subservient role of providing sustenance to men by being owned and controlled by men. Perhaps more importantly, by subjugating women, men could confirm that their offspring were really their own. This ancient male-dominated weaker-sex worldview survived the rancorous debates of Independence Hall and still dictates fundamental social norms today.

In reality, the weaker sex has always been stronger in determining male heirs, the ultimate form of survival for chest-pounding brutes. Therefore, warped though the logic might be, brutes force women to be sex slaves, to wear chastity belts, to fill in for a blow-up doll by having forced clitoridectomies, to name a few of their solutions. Much of the world’s violence reflects the elitist’s refusal to grant equality and freedom to those who serve him. Ironically, this refusal displays the elitist’s weakness—his inability to do things for himself— rather than strength. He flaunts his greed and hubris as if they were virtues rather than self-indulgent addictions. He never realizes that his destructive exploitation is spiritually self-destructive, if the Creator is mindful and just. Even practically, cooperation produces greater benefits than does anti-social competition. In the reactionary Darwinian world of the late nineteenth century, when superiority among competitors defined human values as it defined values of all organisms, if organisms could be said to have values at all, moral values were nothing more than lines drawn in the sand demarcating one person’s power from another’s. The deepest sand lines were property lines. Humans’ obsession with kinship was nothing more than a kind of natural system of property bookkeeping without which we would kill off everybody, everybody being everyone not holding the banana (euphemism intended, since after all, we are discussing Darwinism). By the twentieth century, values—the kind of values that emerged from our God-given conscience—had been relegated to the last chapter in the chronicle of debunked myths. New values had to be— indeed, could only be—constructed. Existential angst replaced any version of moral certainty. Darwinian obsession with sexual selection morphed into a collective Freudian psychosis exhibited especially by the explosion of sexual and sexualized violence. Of course, many religionists and just as many humanists fought the good fight for moral decency as a defining quality of humanity. Many thinkers argued that humans are the apex of the animal kingdom because of intangible qualities like rectitude, justice, and compassion. Other thinkers begged to differ. But it wasn’t really the monkey mind as much as human frailty that allowed Darwinian kill-or-be-

killed look-out-for-number-one incentives to annex society. Masters of Orwellian doublethink, Americans can claim to value liberty for all even while valuing cutthroat capitalism, obscene materialism, and prosperity-fundamentalist dominionism. Very few apple-pie Americans balk at selfishness, narcissism, hubris, and greed marketed by corporations and their political spawn as fulfillment of the American Dream. Yet even many mom-and-pops hoping to make it big decry these vices of sanctified power-mongering, and enlightened religionists condemn the rich-and-famous operating as a whitewashed socio-political version of sadomasochism. Slavery is a hiccup in today’s dominionist boardrooms. Some of those boardrooms seat uppity broads. New inferiors must take their place. Practically, serfs have replaced slaves. And though many good wives still pander to their husbands, these days a real man needs a whipping boy to confirm his masculinity. Corporate real men also need red herrings to deflect attention from their whipping, and scapegoats to raise money to bribe politicians. Gays. Though the stereotype is not the reality, it’s close enough. Gays are the last great hope for male domination. Gays equal womanly men and manly women. Perfect. Gays embody perversion of the superior male role and the inferior female role, all wrapped up in one: Ideal target. Gays are the ultimate challenge to masculinity, and that makes them intimidating, evil, and frightfully weird. Mardi Gras is downtime when guys get wasted with hookers, but a gay parade strikes terror in the loins of real men. A fundamentalist arguing that gays are children of the devil asks, “Why would God create gays?” Well, why would God create anything? Not to mention everything! Shifting Gears Even when a paradigm shift is a matter of free choice, the shift is ignited by an addition of new knowledge and understanding building up new meaning and purpose. What if the tooth fairy was really your dad? What if Santa Claus was actually your mom, and the Easter Bunny your godparents? What if they were simply roles in elaborate games of myth and ritual

designed for the pleasure and edification of children? But of course you know that already: You learned that as a child. What if the numinous sense of Presence you thought was Jesus or Mohammad or Krishna was really God? What if members of other religions have experienced the same Presence of God but attribute it to their own messiah or god? What if challenges to your primitive beliefs are really your own growing pains? What if what you perceived to be macroevolution is the creative flourish of an intelligent Artist? If you got new information that contradicted your cherished assumptions, would you stubbornly clutch your juvenile catechism, or would you willingly embrace the new knowledge as a step toward broader truth? Human life is full of choices, and full of paradoxes. It’s interesting, isn’t it, that we can only see a whole person when that person’s whole life has ended, a bit like when we haven’t really heard a whole symphony until it’s over. Yet we do see the actual person even as the person is evolving. We hear the symphony as it’s playing, as it’s being played. Yet, we haven’t really heard the symphony in its entirety, we haven’t heard “the symphony,” until it’s completed: we’ve heard the symphony when it’s over. Yet we don’t hear the symphony when it’s over; we hear it as it’s being played, in progress. Yet—and what a mystery—we haven’t entirely heard it until we stop hearing it. Perhaps death is that moment when the music stops and something in you lets out a huge sigh, wipes a tear, and lifts you to your feet applauding. All the way home the music stays with you. The essence of that symphony, composed by an other, performed by other others, is now a part of you. Even when you can’t consciously remember it, it’s still filed in the database of your brain. Who says you can’t take it with you—not only your life, but the lives of others. Reading a book, really looking at paintings, listening to a close friend or birdsong, every taste of chocolate mousse, every time you took the time to smell the gardenias—every minute aspect of your life all incorporate a part of the other into you—the entire, integrated Self that is the final whole you. If the parts of our life did not exist, if our DNA and our social diplomas and our brain libraries did not exist, we would not exist. Surely this is the awareness that leads people to create representations of oneness like communion, marriage, and

other religious rituals. Really, religion itself: At its best, organized religion is, more than anything else, spiritual performance art representing socio-spiritual unity, or fellowship. But it needs to be better, to incorporate corresponding others into its communion. Humans are profoundly dependent creatures. What would we be without each other? If humans vanished from existence, cells, molecules, and atoms would continue to exist just fine. But if those components vanished, humans would vanish, too. Those parts are not dependent upon us; but we kings of the jungle are utterly dependent upon them. Even selfish narcissists understand the necessity of protecting our diverse environments—not just land, air, and water, but emotional, intellectual, social, and all our other notphysical environments as well. Wholes are dependent upon parts, but the existence of parts is not dependent upon wholes. Even if we blew up the Earth, atoms would continue rocking out to their favorite drummer as if nothing had happened. But within wholes, parts need other parts. Life needs other life to thrive and reproduce. When a family member suffers, the family unit suffers as well. Everything is exactly what it is: A tree is a tree, a star is a star. Yet within this constant, change perpetually dazzles our consciousness. Difference abounds: blue eyes and brown eyes (and contact lenses), red hair and blonde (and purple and green), harpsichord and saxophone, prose and poetry, plastic Barbie and plaster Madonna, stone tablets and the Web. Human inventions evolving naturally in Nature’s wiggle rooms are often called “co-creation”: Divine generosity created our creation to be part of a shared Creation, where weird becomes the new familiar, subatomic particle becomes explosion becomes universe, then becomes oddly unique now. Queer is the stuff of life. Indeed, queer is the miracle of all existence. Difference Equals Creation So yes, homosexuals are different. But homosexuality is unnatural because it’s an aberration? Nature is aberration. Creation is, after all, creation, the perpetual process of coming into existence and of change from one form to another form of itself within the parameter of its own form’s continuity. A fetus changes into a baby that changes into an adult; each form of that person is the same person;

that change of form proceeds naturally within the constant parameter of the overarching form. But sometimes change is for its own sake, for the sake of being creative. We can’t really say that primitive art was less advanced than the primitive-inspired artworks of Picasso, or that Baroque art was less sophisticated than Abstract Impressionism. It’s all equally creative, for the sake of creating a creation, i.e., just ‘cuz. Difference means change. A computer geek rock star could not have been imagined by Caesar. Adaptation isn’t the only thing that keeps any species evolving and surviving. So does creativity. Whether adaptive or creative, nature is change—an infinite variety of having-changed in a state of still-changing. Survival is microevolution via adaptation and replication of beneficial changes. Our species is adjusting to the new truth that our democracy ideally embodies: Harmony, not war, ensures survival. Harmony embraces burgeoning difference that is life-force itself; war imposes uniformity deformity that begets the stasis of a corpse. Different does not mean unnatural. Homosexuality is the perfect symbol of natural human difference. On this point, old-world religion got it wrong. Considering how many people (not to mention how many animals and other organisms) are homosexual or bi-sexual, considering how persistently homosexuality has existed throughout the ages, considering how adamantly honest people refuse to give up the behavior even when threatened with death, one thing we cannot say about it is that it is unnatural. It is more natural than genius, mysticism, or perfect love, and far more natural than any nature-violating miracles ascribed to Jesus or Mohammad or Moses or Krishna. Followers of the biblical evangelist Paul who insist that homosexuality is evil because it’s unnatural should ask themselves: What does the natural world look like? Clearly all homosexual human beings are not inherently evil except in the minds of those who don’t really look with their God-given eyes but instead judge on the basis of prior indoctrination. Many homosexuals are warm and loving; many are good Christians, Jews, Buddhists, or Muslims. Statistically, the accomplishments of homosexuals have contributed

just as much good to civilization as accomplishments of heterosexuals. True, natural does not necessarily mean good. The millions of psychopaths in North America occur naturally within the big pool of humanity, but their psychopathic deeds are never good, not even ultimately for the psychopath. Psychopaths are driven to do evil. Gays are no more driven to do evil than are straight people. I like a little straight. Every time I’m at the beach I see the straight line of the horizon, I assume the sunlight striking my sunscreen is actually beaming down in straight lines from the sun. But scientists tell me that a straight line doesn’t exist anywhere in nature. Almost nothing in nature is straight; almost everything, if not everything, is naturally curved, curled, coiled, twisted, arched, rounded, warped. Look at nature’s kaleidoscopic arabesques, its art nouveau embellishments, its salads of surprising greens and reds and fragrances of wildly exotic petals along intricate honeyed pathways of butterflies and bees. Now look at everything manmade. Squares, rectangles, cubes— straight lines everywhere. Walk around your house; look at its floors and walls, floorboards and tiling and pictures and their frames; the furniture and cabinets and their arrangements; the TV and stereo components and their remotes; the rooms; their doors and windows; rugs and closets and bookcases and their books. Even the boards behind the walls, the pipes and electrical wires and nails and staples. Straight edges everywhere. Bricks, stones, shingles, shutters. Your yard; your garden; your neighborhood and its sidewalks. The grid of city streets. Cars, trucks, buildings, city blocks, football fields, hot dog stands, newspapers, briefcases, graph paper, dollar bills, billboards. In the white male universe, it’s straight lines, straight edges, straight. One could argue that it’s unnatural, even perverted, certainly as boring as the control-freak’s closet of white shirts and black ties neatly lined up by the butler. Created In the Image of the Creator But the rich diversity of natural life is intelligently created by a far more creative intelligence. Even Darwinian evolution, could it exist, would be necessarily far more creative that the Darwinian creator,

natural selection. Even if by some mysterious micro-evolutionary process, ancient apes led to man-apes, Australopithecus, who gave rise to Homo habilis, supposedly the first man-ape to use stone tools, who became Homo erectus (no pun intended), supposedly the first to use clubs, stone blades, and fire; even if by some microevolutionary mechanism the first fully modern tribe, Qafzeh Hominid 9, who lived (depending on which expert you consult) 90,000 or 115,000 years ago just south of Nazareth, gave rise to Neanderthals, Peking man, and Homo sapiens (“man the wise”), all that painting of forms on the canvas of life must still exemplify a process of pure creation, a going beyond, that could only be accomplished by a transcending Artist. Creation is by definition creation of difference. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth.” In the beginning, God created differences, one thing differing from another ad infinitum. If species creation cannot be explained by minute mutations in DNA, and even if it can, if it is the coming into existence of a unique form that has never before existed, if even the existence of a wing or an eye or life itself or all matter represents a creative quantum leap ex nihilo, out of nothing-as-yet, whose meaning transcends quaint definitions, then this much is true: Due less to adaptive or random mutations in DNA than to the aesthetic intentions of the Creator, we are here. All of us, each and every one. No matter how you look at it, the universe was created by a transcendently intelligent Creator. Operative words: Intelligent; Creator. How can we not be awed by the sheer immensity? The star Alpha Herculis is twenty-five times larger than the circumference of the earth’s revolution around the sun, and the diameter of the star Betelgeuse is more than a quarter the size of our entire solar system. One single quasar emits more light than a thousand galaxies, 100 trillion stars; and its light illuminating our telescopes left its source billions of years ago; the quasar is extinct, but its light still radiates, like the spirit-energy said to leave the human body at the moment of death. And our tiny brain contains awareness of it all. For that matter, what is space when the faster an object moves the shorter it becomes? The speed of light is the maximum speed

that matter, energy, or information can be transferred from one place to another. If an object could be accelerated to the speed of light, its length along the direction of its motion would collapse to zero. It would vanish; one might even say it would “transcend.” This the scientists have witnessed, even though they “know” that nothing made of matter can exceed the speed of light—as certainly as they know that if the universe does not reach the speed of light it will collapse back into its original generative particle. Self-conscious civilizations of minds asking ourselves about the meaning of life—that’s not a product or function of random chance or adaptation. It doesn’t really matter to me or probably to most people whether we’re descended from apes or not. Humans are not apes, regardless of where we come from. Like many people, I don’t accept Darwinian evolution because science has persuaded me that there is no definitive proof that the random-mutation natural-selection version of evolution is a fact, and plenty of data that suggests that it is not. The Darwinist is persuaded by similarities between humans and apes; proponents of intelligent design are just as persuaded by the differences between the species. Are we really that different from apes, the Darwinist asks? Well yes, we are. Humans ask why. All of us—gay, female, black, uneducated, poor: Humans seek truth for its own sake. Humans desire transcendence, not just in terms of evolving, but in the sense of transmuting into a completely different form of existence beyond space-time. We contemplate; we conceive possibilities based on intuition; we imagine. We laugh and cry. We are passionate in our aesthetic engagements. We agonize over our own existence; we suffer through identity crises and self-consciousness. We crave knowledge of God. We crave knowledge of each other, ourselves, all existence. We seek wisdom. We understand the concept truth and grasp the connections between and among seemingly disparate things. We feel guilt and shame. We experience ecstatic love. We hate. We feel joy, depression, compassion, righteous anger. We ponder our experiences, and we carry our cherished memories with us into the present and on into the future. Our complex language, our poetry of metaphors, expresses such a high degree of depth and complexity that to compare it to the mutterings of a “schooled” ape is ridiculous.

Why some people seem eager to equate the elegance of literature or music or even everyday speech to the level of chattering chimps is frankly beyond me. But it’s even worse to cast a fellow human being into hell for being different, meaning inferior, less than human, evil. If you listed in column A the ways we are like apes, and in column B the ways we are different, the vast gulf between the family of apes and the family of man would impress even the apes. Column A would consist almost exclusively of physical characteristics. Column B would begin with differentiating physical features but would then tumble down the page, down pages and pages and volumes of pages logging our unique qualities and accomplishments. All humans share the multitude of characteristics unique to the human species. Some people define that mass of marvels as extensions of physical attributes. Is mind the same as brain? Is spirit the same as mind? Is it possible to prove that mind or spirit exists? Far from being not-derivative like God the Creator who necessarily exists outside Creation, we humans have been placed in a position of needing to nurture and sustain Nature, because Nature isn’t just our environment “out there,” it also constitutes the very fabric of our being. Nature includes environments in addition to natural resources, such as home and school spaces, emotional and psychological situations, spiritual settings, and cultural atmosphere. It is ancient wisdom that at the practical level, human survival and compassion seem to be oddly one and the same thing. But compassion appears to include a purpose that leads beyond mere survival toward a higher, transcending goal. What’s really strange, especially for a Darwinian, is that the direction of Creation is toward increasing complexity plus greater vulnerability (which counteracts survival), toward increasing autonomy plus greater dependency (remember the ziggurat: humans need molecules, but molecules wouldn’t be fazed if we ceased to exist), toward increasing differentiation plus greater integration, toward increasing individuality plus greater unity. The movement of the cosmos is toward simultaneous differentiation and unification. God, of course, is not undergoing this process; God, the Creator of process and of this process of space-time, transcends this or any

process we could conceive. As distasteful as it might be to the human ego, the universe is not God, and we are not God or a drop in the ocean of God. God is wholly other—which doesn’t mean we can’t commune with that Other. Even though we can’t fully comprehend God’s transcendence, being ourselves space-time bound, we can grasp the conceptual reality. There’s a fundamental difference between the historical details and the essence of a person. Even though we can’t fully know about another person, we can know that person, even to the point of feeling “one” with that wholly other person. In a similar way, we can know—feel one with—God. This doesn’t mean that you are God, but that you are intimately connected with God. You can know this by experiencing spiritual oneness. Metaphysically, the telos of Creation moves toward love, creativity, morality, and spiritual communion with the Creator. This is the Deism that I ascribe to: theism with a conscience, theism with soul and spirit, theism of, by, and for creative freedom. Love is the creative impetus of existence: Creators love to create and love what they create. Love experienced as affectionate loving-kindness for our fellow human beings—eros, philos, or agape—is the felt and fully articulated ethic of supreme mutual benefit. The structure of existence, the very essence of reality, embodies and emanates an overarching transcending principle of movement toward mature autonomous beings united in love. No doubt Darwinians would balk at this interpretation—a leap of faith almost as far as the leap from inert matter to life. But even they know that humanity is a wondrous diversity of unique individuals contributing a multitude of useful, meaningful functions. Our diversity defines our unity. Adaptive steps are instinctively chosen from a menu of preprogrammed options, like a bird’s choice of larger or harder seeds cause its beak to become stronger with use. Humans are notoriously odd in their preference to freely innovate in ways that aren’t just adaptive. Exhibits A through D, museums and retail malls, thesauruses and libraries, illustrate that humans are outrageously creative. Creative are the minds that made up quarks and the lyrics

of Sappho burned into hides of crocodiles. We’ve been created in the image of God’s creativity. Creation seems constructed with a kind of egalitarian poetic justice in mind. Humans need particles, but particles exist happily without humans. Our survival depends on the survival of other creatures lower down on the food chain. Ironically, it’s our big dependence that inspires our big responsibility that ignites the revelation of big gratitude and its progeny, big love. Despite this ancient wisdom, we moderns, who take such pride in being so advanced, actively destroy the very means of our survival—not only the world “out there,” but our inner resources as well. We are what we eat, be that apples or doctrines or sitcoms. Our very being is composed of the beings “beneath” us, all the way down to our DNA. Even for the Darwinian, this would be analogous to all we have been. But we “rational” humans have no problem exterminating aspects of nature that remain the original, continuing means of our existence. Destruction then is ultimately self-destruction. Humanity is surely mentally deranged if we destroy each other and thereby ourselves. What’s more insane than bigoted destruction of difference that for the sake of “survival” of “one’s own” begets human extinction? Sanity is natural progress: creation, change, transcendence. We live to die. When we die, our material being will de-compose downward through the levels. Picture an imploding ziggurat. What starts out as the body of a highly functioning beautiful brainy human being disintegrates down to atoms and quarks. Yet the thrust of creative development advances upward toward adulthood, literally and figuratively. When even the moment it takes to read a book is a mini transfiguration, could it not be, as many have believed, that the spirit, too, self-transcends? Perhaps some people disintegrate into oblivion. But the deep intuition of most of us is that disintegration can be an alchemical process of distillation, and that the distilled elements are reintegrated in a new way into a new form. Death is present with us every moment of our lives. In its fiery kiln, death distills life to its essence, finally reintegrating the clarified spirit in a refined realm of existence, the natural light at the end of the tunnel, the fresh light outside the cave. The symphony is heard; the

translated text is understood and loved. Being unfolds meaning. Meaning divulges purpose. The Creator loves us! Isn’t it a sign of God’s love and evidence of afterlife that having had existence—a kind of transcending cosmic memory—is a condition of the present reality even of something that no longer exists? Divine intervention isn’t a series of discrete creative acts that transgress the jurisdiction of nature. Creation (noun) embodies an ongoing process of Creation (verb) within a set of stable, permanent natural boundaries, the so-called laws of nature, the expanding borders of space-time created “in the beginning.” Divine intervention locates the process of not-yet-existing coming into existence: Creation, the marriage of noun-verb, space-time. God isn’t Creation itself. God is other: the Creator creating Creation. Though transcendent in being Creator, God is immanent in being perpetually actively engaged in creating Creation, which includes both creating newness and sustaining its existence. We are created in the image of the Creator in that we, too, can choose to freely create newness—can co-create, can “intervene”— within the natural boundaries. And this zone of freedom where creation can take place is the realm where God can intervene to guide us and to answer prayers. Creation is, in more ways than one, an intervention. Obsolete Darwinist and creationist conceptions shrivel in this green age of the consciousness of eternally unfolding miracle. What, then, is time? What is space? The means of the miracle of existence remains a Divine mystery unraveling its denouement. But despite what we don’t and can’t know, we immortal mortals have inched closer to what it means to be: To be, that is the miracle. Even death, natural and smart, is part of that miracle of be-ing. Meanwhile, as you’ve read this book, as you’ve lived your life, time has passed, the space of each moment that constitutes the universe has come and gone. Yet here it is, the same universe, full and concrete. A little transformed. And it’s expanding.



 

Selected Bibliography Omission of footnotes and citations is an aesthetic choice. This book is not a research work but rather a presentation of some of my ideas and experiences that might be useful or of interest to Deists and to others exploring Deism. When referencing critical sources, I have tried to distinguish between my own ideas and information I obtained from others. Most current information mentioned is common knowledge to those who keep up with the news and popular culture, and quotes and data not cited have circulated widely on the internet and can be accessed via a simple online search; some concepts and examples cited in this book have been used by other writers. This bibliography is by no means a complete record of all the works and sources I have quoted or consulted; it indicates the substance and range of reading upon which I have formed the ideas put forward in this book, and I intend it to serve as a convenience for those who wish to pursue further study. Achbar, Mark and Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan. The Corporation. DVD. 2005. Allen, Col. Ethan. Reason, the Only Oracle of Man; or a Compendius System of Natural Religion. Kindle edition. Boston: J. P. Mendum, Cornhill, 1854. Allen, Brooke. Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006. Allman, William. The Stone Age Present: How Evolution Has Shaped Modern Life—From Sex, Violence, and Language to Emotions, Morals, and Communities. New York: Touchstone, 1995. Anderson, J. N. D. Christianity and Comparative Religion. Downers Grove: Inter-Varsity, 1971. Aristotle. Aristotle’s Poetics. Edited by Francis Fergusson. New York: Macmillan, 1961.

——. Introduction to Aristotle. Edited by Richard McKeon. New York: Random House, 1947. ——. Metaphysics. New York: Columbia, 1952. Aristotle, Horace, and Longinus. Aristotle, Horace, and Longinus. Translated by T. S. Dorsch. Baltimore: Penguin, 1965. Armstrong, Karen. The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism. New York: Random House, 2000. Art After Modernism. Edited by Brian Wallis. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984, 1992. Art and its Significance: An Anthology of Aesthetic Theory. Edited by David Stephen Ross. Albany: State University, 1987. Bambrough, Renford. The Philosophy of Aristotle. New York: Penguin, 1963. Barnes, Jonathan, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1995. Behe, Michael J. Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. New York: Free Press, 1996/2006. ——. The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism. New York: Free Press, 2008. Behe, Michael J., William A. Dembski, and Stephen C. Meyer. Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2000. Berlinski, David. The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions. New York: Basic Books, 2009. Berlinski, David. The Deniable Darwin. Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2009. Bernstein, Jeremy. Cranks, Quarks, and the Cosmos: Writings on Science. New York: Basic, 1993. Blaker, Kimberly. The Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America. New Boston, MI: New Boston Books, 2003. The Book of the Goddess Past and Present: An Introduction to Her Religion. Edited by Carl Olson. New York: Crossroad, 1992.

Boorstin, Daniel J. The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination. Toronto: Vintage, 1992. Borg, Marcus J. Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary. New York: HarperOne, 2006. Bosanquet, Bernard. A History of Aesthetic From the Greeks to the 20th Century. New York: Meridian, 1957. Boston, Rob. The Most Dangerous Man in America: Pat Robertson and the Rise of the Christian Coalition. New York: Prometheus, 1996. Bowker, John. World Religions: The Great Faiths Explored & Explained. London: Dorling Kindersley, 1997. Brooks, Jim. Origins of life: From the First Moments of the Universe to the Beginning of Life on Earth. England: Lion, 1985. Bulfinch, Thomas. Mythology: The Age of Fable, The Legends of Charlemagne, The Age of Chivalry. New York: Dell, 1959. Bush’s Brain. Directed by Michael Shoob. Based on the book by James C. Moore and James Slater. DVD. Tartan, 2004. Butcher, S. H. Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art. New York: Dover,1951. Callahan, Tim. Secret Origins of the Bible. Altadena: Millennium, 2002. Campbell, Joseph with Bill Moyers. The Power of Myth. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Charlesworth, James H. The Historical Jesus: An Essential Guide. Nashville: Abingdon, 2008. Chipp, Herschel B. with Peter Selz and Joshua C. Taylor. Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics. Berkeley: University of California, 1968. Colenso, John William. The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua Critically Examined [1870]. Cornell University Library Digital Collections. Originally published: London: Longsmans, Green, and Co., 1870.

Conway, Flo and Jim Siegelman. Holy Terror: The Fundamentalist War on America’s Freedoms in Religion, Politics and Our Private Lives. Garden City: Doubleday, 1982. Croce, Benedetto. Aesthetic: As Science of Expression and General Linguistic. Boston: Nonpareil, 1909, 1983. Crossan, John Dominic. The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus. New York: HarperOne, 1998. ——. God & Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now. New York: HarperOne, 2007. ——. The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. New York: HarperOne, 1991. ——. Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. New York: HarperOne, 1995. Crossan, John Dominic and Jonathan L. Reed. In Search of Paul: How Jesus’s Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom. New York: HarperOne, 2004. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Daly, Mary. Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation. Boston: Beacon, 1973, 1985. Darwin, Charles. Autobiography (1887). Project Gutenberg, 1999. www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/adrwn10.txt. ——. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin: 1809-1882. New York: Classic Books International, 2009. ——. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin: 1809-1882. Edited by Nora Barlow. New York: Norton, 1958/2005. ——. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: Penguin, 2004. ——. The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection of the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. New York: Signet, 1958.

Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record. DVD. Illustra Media Presents, 2010. Davies, Paul. The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Davis, William. Wheat Belly. New York: Rodale, 2011. Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996. ——. The God Delusion. New York: Mariner, 2006/2008. The Dead Sea Scriptures. Translated by Theodor H. Gaster. New York: Anchor, 1956. Dembski, William A. The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2004. ——. Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1999. Dembski, William A. and Jonathan Witt. Intelligent Design Uncensored: An Easy-to-Understand Guide to the Controversy. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2010. Dembski, William A. and Michael Ruse. Intelligent Design. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007. Dembski, William A. and Sean McDowell. Understanding Intelligent Design: Everything You Need to Know in Plain Language. Eugene: Harvest House, 2008. Denton, Michael. Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Bethesda: Adler & Adler, 1985. Denton, Michael. Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe. New York: Free Press, 1998. Dorrien, Gary. The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion 1805-1900. Louisville: Westminster, 2001. ——. The Remaking of Evangelical Theology. Louisville: Westminster, 1998.

Dourley, John P. The Psyche as Sacrament: A Comparative Study of C.G. Jung and Paul Tillich. Toronto: Inner City, 1981. Edinger, Edward F. Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche. Boston: Shambhala, 1992. Ehrman, Bart D. Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them). New York: HarperOne, 2009. ——. Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005. Einstein, Albert. Ideas and Opinions. New York: Crown, 1954, 1981. ——. Relativity: The Special and the General Theory: A Popular Exposition. New York: Crown, 1961. Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. New York, Ballantine, 1992. Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. DVD. Starring Ben Stein. Premise, 2008. Fabricius, Johannes. Alchemy: The Medieval Alchemists and their Royal Art. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1976, London: Diamond, 1994. Franklin, Benjamin. Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography and Other Writings. Edited by Ormond Seavey. Oxford: Oxford University, 2008. Franklin, Karen. “Enacting Masculinity: Antigay Violence and Group Rape as Participatory Theater.” Sexuality Research & Social Policy 1, no. 2 (2004). Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough. New York: Macmillan, 1922, 1963. Freeman, Charles. The Greek Achievement: The Foundation of the Western World. New York: Viking, 1999. Freud, Sigmund. New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. New York: W. W. Norton, 1965. Originally published in 1933. ——. An Outline of Psycho-Analysis. New York: W. W. Norton, 1949, 1969.

Fromm, Erich. The Art of Loving. New York: Bantam, 1956, 1967. ——. Psychoanalysis and Religion. Clinton, Mass: Yale, 1950, 1958. Frontline. WGBH. “Money, Power, and Wall Street.” April 24, May 1. Galileo. Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo. Translated by Stillman Drake. New York: Anchor, 1957. Gardner, Howard. Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Ghandi. New York: Basic, 1993. Gaustad, Edwin S. Benjamin Franklin. Oxford: Oxford University, 2006. Gay, Peter. Deism: An Anthology. Princeton, N. J.: Van Nostrand, 1968. Gitt, Werner. In the Beginning was Information: A Scientist Explains the Incredible Design in Nature. Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2006. Gleick, James. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon, 2011. Goleman, Daniel. Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. New York: Bantam, 1995. Gross, Charles. “Disgrace.” The Nation, January 9/16. Hamilton, Edith. Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes. New York: Warner, 1942. Hare, Robert D. Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. New York: Guilford, 1999. HarperCollins Bible Commentary. Edited by James L. Mayes. With the Society of Biblical Literature. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. HarperCollins Bible Dictionary. Edited by Paul J. Achtemeier. With The Society of Biblical Literature. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Haught, James A. Holy Horrors: An Illustrated History of Religious Murder and Madness. New York: Prometheus, 1990. Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. New York: Bantam, 1990.

Helminiak, Daniel A. What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality. San Francisco: Alamo Square, 1994. Hill, Jim and Rand Cheadle. The Bible Tells Me So: Uses and Abuses of Holy Scripture. New York: Doubleday, 1996. Hillman, James. The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling. New York: Random House, 1996. The Historical Jesus: Five Views. Edited by James K. Beilby and Paul Rhodes. Downers Grove: Intervarsity, 2009. Holmes, David L. The Faiths of the Founding Fathers. Oxford: Oxford University, 2006. Homosexuality and Christian Faith: Questions of Conscience for the Churches. Edited by Walter Wink. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999. Hordern, William E. A Layman’s Guide to Protestant Theology. New York: Macmillan, 1955, 1972. House, H. Wayne, ed. Intelligent Design 101. Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2008. Houston, Beth. Born-Again Deist. Bradenton, FL: New Deism Press, 2009. Huberman, Jack. The Bush-Hater’s Handbook: A Guide to the Most Appalling Presidency of the Past 100 Years. New York: Nation Books, 2003. Hyde, Lewis. Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Vintage, 1983. Hyman, Mark. The Blood Sugar Solution. New York: Little, Brown, 2012. The I Hate Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity…Reader. Edited by Clint Willis. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2004. The I Hate Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice…Reader: Behind the Bush Cabal’s War on America. Edited by Clint Willis. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2004. Isaacson, Walter. Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003.

In Our Own Voices: Four Centuries of American Women’s Religious Writing. Edited by Rosemary Skinner Keller and Rosemary Radford Ruether. Louisville: Westminster, 1995. Ingersoll, Robert. The Best of Robert Ingersoll: Selections from his Writings and Speeches. Edited by Roger Greeley. New York: Prometheus, 1977, 1993. Isaacson, Walter. Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. Ivans, Molly. Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush’s America. New York:Vintage, 2003. Jacobi, Jolande and R.F.C. Hull. Jung, C.G: Psychological Reflections: A New Anthology of His Writings 1905-1961. Princeton: Princeton University, 1953, 1978. Jaffé, Aneila. The Myth of Meaning in the Work of C. G. Jung. Zürich: Daimon Verlag, 1984. James, William. The Variety of Religious Experience. Middlesex: Penguin, 1987. Originally published: U.S.: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902. Jefferson, Thomas. The Quotable Jefferson. Edited by John P. Kaminski. Princeton: Princeton University, 2006. ——. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh. 20 vols. Memorial Edition. Washington, D. C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 190304. Also available: Project Gutenberg, 2007. www.gutenberg.org/ etext/21002. ——. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Edited by Paul Leicester Ford. 10 vols. Ford Edition. New York, 1892-99. Etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/. Johnson, Donald D. Probability’s Nature and Nature’s Probability: A Call to Scientific Integrity. Charleston: Booksurge, 2009. Jung, C.G. Aspects of the Feminine. Princeton: Princeton University, 1982. ——. Man and His Symbols. New York: Dell, 1964.

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nearly three hundred works in literary and professional journals. She is a member of PEN America-Professional and the Academy of American Poets. Please visit www.bethhouston.com.