Another Climate Report: The Prophet Effect

On November 26, the UN issued yet another climate report, indicating that we are further than ever from controlling carbon emissions within a limit that will prevent catastrophic climate effects in the near future (e.g. within Baron Trump’s lifetime).

This report will, like all the others before it, be ignored by American leadership, probably Russian leadership also, and maybe the Chinese leadership. It will be championed by poor countries who have the most to lose by climate change. Probably the only group of countries that will take it seriously and implement policy in response to it is the European Union.

We have been here before. A long time ago. The ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah, in the Old Testament of the Bible, endured a series of prophets who decried the kings and most of the people of their sins and predicted destruction for the Israelites. This went on for centuries. You have probably heard of the major prophets, such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Other important prophets are mentioned in the historical books of the Bible, such as Elijah and Elisha. But there were also minor prophets whose names are on Old Testament books: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. They all said the same things, and the kings and priests ignored them more and more with each new prophecy. Just as they prophesied, the kingdom of Israel fell, and later the kingdom of Judah.

The United States is ignoring its own climate prophets, as well as those of other countries, whether European scientists or African and South American environmentalist martyrs. In pursuit of greed, we are destroying what most Americans consider to be God’s creation. When Jeremiah said (in 16:18), “They have polluted my land with the carcasses of their detestable idols,” he might have just as easily been describing modern American garbage, of which Oklahoma has at least a hundred pieces per mile of roadway: the idolatrous junk food and cheap pleasures are quickly used up and the cup or packaging discarded.

We have been warned by our prophets. And soon we will suffer the same fate as the ancient Israelites, and for the same reason.

What Happens When a Bunch of Freethinkers Have a Convention?

Report from the 2015 Oklahoma Freethought Convention, June 20.

Let me guess what some very extreme religious people might think that humanists do when they get together. They might think that freethinkers—such as atheists and agnostics—start jumping on each other for a wild sex orgy. Such a person would be very, very wrong. Just looking around at the small crowd, one might think that (except for the occasional tattoos and green hair) that it was a church convention. This is because, of course, humanists have morals just like anyone else. They just have different reasons for their morals. Let me give you some reasons that freethinkers do not have. First, they will not say, “I have morals because God will send me to hell otherwise.” Second, they will not say, “I have morals because the Apostle Paul writes in the books of Contusions, Abrasions, and Concussions that God gets mad if you don’t have morals.” Third, they will not say, “I have morals because God wants me to love people.” When a Christian claims that “We love because He first loved us,” this may imply (though not necessarily) that love is a miracle and therefore cannot occur unless God makes it happen. Humanists know that love is part of instinctual human nature. And morals emerge from love: morals are how you treat other people right. God may indeed love us, but this is not a necessary precondition to human love and morality.

I can assure you, from this meeting, that humanists are quite capable of selfless love. One of the presentations was by Rebecca Vitsmun, who was herself a victim of the 2013 Moore (Oklahoma) tornado and who is now the development director for Foundation Beyond Belief, a humanist disaster relief organization. Her passion is helping people who suffer emergencies, and doing so without proselytizing them (for or against religion). I would put Rebecca up against any of the religious humanitarians, and compare her favorably with many.

What, you may ask, is a freethinker? I will venture my own discussion, although famous historical freethinkers like Ben Franklin and other founding fathers probably said it better. A freethinker examines Big Questions about God, nature, and the meaning of life. That is, freethinkers are first and foremost thinkers. If you don’t give a crap about the meaning of life and just want to have fun, or if you think “God is the meaning of life and I don’t care to think about it further,” then you are not a freethinker. You have to be a thinker first. Furthermore, freethinkers do not decide the conclusion in advance. Freethinkers do not use thinking as a tool either for or against religion. If I had suspected that the Freethinker’s Conference would just be a lineup of angry atheists, I would not have attended (I have other things to do). But there was no assumption that the attendees would be atheists or even agnostics. There was no altar call.

There was no question, however, that Freethinkers overwhelmingly consider organized and conventional religion to be negative and even dangerous. Here are examples from the lineup of speakers:

• According to Jason Heap, who hopes to be the first humanist chaplain in the history of the U.S. armed forces, conservative religion perpetuates the belief that America was settled by Europeans who wanted religious liberty. Rather, history is very clear (and Jason announced some new documentary evidence from the Bodleian Library at Oxford) that the European settlers wanted a chance to establish their own theocracies. The Pilgrims already had religious liberty in the Netherlands; they came to America to establish a society without religious liberty for anyone who disagreed with them.
• According to Vyckie Garrison, who has emerged from the Quiverfull movement of Christians, conservative religion can trap a woman into being nothing but a baby-making machine. In this movement, there is no limit whatsoever to how many children a father can sire or a mother can bear. They think that “be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth” means to have so many kids that the Earth is overfilled; if they stopped to think, they would realize that we have already filled the Earth and it’s time to do something else now already. They also seem to think that the psalm that said a man is happy if his quiver is full of sons must have meant an infinitely large quiver that the man has to drag along the ground or mount on a semi-truck. Vyckie expressed no bitterness, but rather gratitude that her freethinker uncle encouraged her simply to think about what she was saying and doing.
• Dr. Darrel Ray, a psychologist, explained that some conservative religious “counselors” (many with certification from Brigham Young University or Pat Robertson’s Regent University) have invented a false disorder called sex addiction, from which they are happy to (for a fee) release the purported addicts. Some even use what I would consider fraud. The Mormon-associated Oxbow Academy in Utah, according to Ray, encourages parents to send their boys as young as twelve to them for treatment for “sex addiction.” But the DSM-V (the psychologists’ Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) does not recognize sex addiction, therefore insurance companies will not pay for its treatment. But, says Ray, the Academy tells the insurance companies that the treatments are for disorders such as depression. Sure, says Ray, sexual behaviors can cause big problems, and need to be dealt with, but the industry of “treating sex addiction” is a fraud. I had a little problem with this concept. My understanding is that addiction is not qualitatively different from habit; both can be enhanced by the dopamine pathway in the brain. According to this article in Science, dopamine deficiency can lead to a craving for high-fat and high-sugar diets. Interference with dopamine processing is the basis of nicotine and cocaine addiction. If hamburgers can be literally addictive, why can’t sex? But religion offers the perfect opportunity for fraud, in this particular case.
• The most astonishing presentation was by independent “autodidact” Aron Ra, who presented abundant Biblical references to show how barbaric the Old Testament is. I most remember Numbers 5, which prescribes an ordeal to which a wife, if her husband merely suspects her of having sex with another man but has not gotten pregnant or has not yet shown signs of pregnancy, must undergo. Note: many parts of the Old Testament are very grim, but not prescriptive. The book of Judges is overwhelmingly gruesome, something you do not want to use in Sunday school, but the last sentence in the book indicates that these acts were evil. But Numbers 5 is prescriptive. The accused wife is supposed to have a curse laid upon her by a priest, then ingest a concoction of dust and bitter water. If the woman is guilty, her belly will swell and her thighs will wither. Otherwise, she will be declared innocent. This is clearly a barbaric practice on a par with dunking witches. Oh, incidentally, Numbers indicates that the man will be free of guilt. If modern conservative Christians knew as much about the Bible as Aron Ra does, and his knowledge is formidable, they would not be so quick to call for Old Testament standards for modern jurisprudence.

The main part of the meeting ended with a magic show by Matt Dillahunty, who seemed able to know which word or number someone was thinking, or which card they had chosen, but who was actually using perfectly materialistic means of figuring these things out. Of course, he did not tell us what these were. He did a great job, especially considering that he got sick right before his performance.

I left the meeting feeling very enlightened and excited. I’m not sure if freethinkers are completely free in their thinking—they would not have looked kindly on a speaker who said the Bible was at least true in a figurative sense—but their thoughts were freer than any religious convention you have probably ever encountered.

Unlearning War

The vision of the Peaceable Kingdom was a popular one among the Old Testament prophets. They probably all knew it, and two of them (or their followers) incorporated it into their writings: the first Isaiah (chapter 2) and Micah (chapter 4). The prophets envisioned a time when armies would stop fighting wars and instead raise food for their people: “Beat your swords into plowshares.” This image is just as powerful today as it was thousands of years ago, as depicted in a statue at the United Nations.

But this vision is not something that we can all of a sudden decide to do. We cannot go directly from a war mindset to an attitude of peace. We have to learn to think in a new way. Both Isaiah and Micah say, “Nation will not lift up sword against nation, neither will they learn war anymore.” Soldiers cannot create an effective agricultural economy by poking holes in the ground with their swords to plant seeds. It takes a wholesale economic restructuring, in which industry produces plowshares instead of swords, or better yet, recycles the now-useless implements of war into the equipment of peace.

Unfortunately, we can go the other way also. Because of our violent human nature, bequeathed to us by evolution, we can easily slip back into a mindset of war, without having to retrain our brains. The Old Testament prophet Joel did this (chapter 3), when he envisioned a time when people would beat their plowshares into swords.

Why Creationists and Other Conservatives Reject Global Climate Disruption

Many of us have wondered why the same people who attack evolution also attack human-caused global climate disruption. Many evolution education organizations, from the National Center for Science Education to Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education, now address both issues. Many of us have assumed that the two issues are connected by a general conservative attack on science, and perhaps by the fact that the Republican Party happens to reject both.

But I think there is a more direct reason. It is that conservatives believe that God designed the Earth so that we humans could live in technological comfort, raise lots of grain to feed to cattle, drive big fast pickup trucks, use water for private swimming pools, and have unlimited reproduction. The fact that God did not do so is deeply disturbing to them, and they reject this fact vigorously.

The early Old Testament writings assumed that God had designed the world, and designed it for man. These Biblical writers, however, assumed that big cities, based on massive agricultural production, were evil. Their ideal was wandering shepherds like Abel and Abraham and young David, not agriculturalists like Cain and big technologically-advanced cities like Babel (Babylon), Sodom, and Gomorrah. These early writers might have agreed that God did not design the world for the kinds of things we are now doing in it.

Religion vs. Science, the Vast Gulf Part Four: You Are What You Eat

I continue the series of posts about the many ways religion, especially Christianity, differs from science. The first entry was about the scientific method. The second was about the sky. I posted part two before I had heard about Bill Nye and the creationists in 2006. Bill was giving a lecture in Waco, Texas, in which he mentioned that the moon does not create its own light, but reflects the light of the sun. Some creationists walked out, since Genesis describes the moon as “the lesser light,” which to them meant that it emits its own light. My guess is that this viewpoint does not represent most creationists.

In the previous essay, I wrote about how carbon-based life forms cannot be made from the dust of the Earth, taken literally. But there is a temporal dimension to this also. Your atoms are in a state of continual turnover. You are losing some, and gaining some, from the food that you eat, which is carbon-based. There is a reason Captain Kirk did not share a sandwich with the silicon-based Horta.

Which brings up the important subject of what we should eat. While Jesus considered it to be of secondary importance (It is what comes out of a man, not what goes into a man, which defiles him, he said), there are nevertheless laws of food and health. And the Biblical dietary laws contrast with the scientific dietary laws. The U.S. government guidelines for nutrition look pretty different from Leviticus 11.

The Old Testament Jews were very concerned about clean vs. unclean foods. Leviticus has quite a list of unclean foods. Many of them seem arbitrary. But modern scientists have figured out some likely reasons for some of these laws. For example, why did Jews hate pigs so much? And they have hated pigs for a long time. Archaeologist Israel Finkelstein has unearthed evidence that the Jews were not very different from surrounding tribes even during the heyday of Solomon, and that Jerusalem of Solomon was not the glorious city that the Old Testament describes. But even in the sites of their earliest villages was the remarkable absence of pig bones. We all know pigs are dirty. Of course, the reason they are dirty is we keep them dirty. Wild pigs are no dirtier than other wild animals. Pigs spread parasites, but so do cows. Smallpox apparently evolved from cowpox early in human village life.

One possible reason that the Jews proscribed pork is one I heard from José Lutzenberger, former Secretary of the Environment in Brazil. He spoke at the Prairie Festival at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. (He didn’t keep his job too long. As someone pointed out, he was serious about environmentalism, and appointing “Lutz” as Secretary of the Environment in Brazil was like appointing Wes Jackson as Secretary of Agriculture in the USA.) He said that cows, horses, sheep, and goats did not compete with humans for food; they ate grass and other things that humans cannot digest. But pigs eat some of the same things we do, and therefore may compete with humans for food. A rich man could fatten his pigs while poor people starve in the ancient, or not so ancient, world. Pigs were, to Lutz, a symbol of poor environmental stewardship in ancient times. I’m not sure if he had any scientific evidence, but his statement has stayed with me for many years.

The Old Testament laws also proscribe shellfish. The reason was obvious: spoiled shellfish can make you very sick. They knew this back in ancient times. There was a good chance that any shellfish, by the time it reached the hills of central Judah, would be spoiled. A more recent custom is to eat shellfish that have been harvested only in the months with the letter R in them (that is, not May, June, July, or August). Today we know that shellfish that have fed upon dinoflagellates (“red tide”) can have neurotoxin. So this made sense.

But the modern view of nutrition is totally unlike that of the Old Testament (and New). We can eat fat foods, but only a little bit, and most of our fats should be unsaturated, e.g. from olives and nuts. We need to eat a lot of vegetables and fruits, and get lots of exercise during the ordinary course of a day. This was not so important in the old days when food was often scarce, and when people walked everywhere—there was no stair-vs.-elevator decision for them to make. Their laws worked for them, imperfectly, and our laws work for us. (I’m about to eat some chicken thigh meat, because my cravings are prehistoric in origin.)

This may seem like a small matter, and Biblical literalists do not, to my knowledge, attack nutritionists. I have not heard creationists say, while engulfing fat steaks, “God guarantees my health because I avoid pork and shellfish.” But modern nutrition science does show, just as clearly as modern evolutionary science, that our scriptures were the products of their time, reflecting the best understanding that people had back then, rather than inspired and infallible scientific truths.