The religion of false peace

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, religion, islam, muslims

A friend suggested that I read Muslim: What You Need to Know about the World's Fastest Growing Religion, by Hank Hanegraaf. It led to a shift in my attitude, in two directions. We'll get to that…

Muslim examines Islam from a Biblical Christian perspective, and a sympathetic treatment of Jewish concerns. I recommend that every Christian and Jew read it. For one thing, "The peoples of the Book" are stated targets for Muslim abuse, conquest, and annihilation. But even the more, you may not be a Christian or a Jew, but if you are not a Muslim, the intention of the Muslim world is to bring all the earth under Sharia law. (Note, I leave out the apostrophes in words derived from Arabic. I can seldom remember where most of them go). Thus I recommend this book to every non-Muslim.

The author discusses the person of Muhammad, his character, and his principal actions; the Quran and how it originated; Sharia law; the principle of the Caliphate; and how the beliefs and practices of Islam square with the Bible.

To me Chapter 3 is crucial, "Sharia is State, and State is Sharia". I confess that I had fallen prey to the misleading propaganda of Islamists, and of President Obama (whom I now consider to be much more a friend of Muhammad than a "Christian"). I thought that "radical Islam" was an aberration, not supported by the Quran. I thought that the things Muslims believed were comparatively innocuous, and no threat to the rest of the world. In each case I was wrong.

Mr. Hanegraaf presents extensive quotes from the Quran, backed up by many quotes from the hadith (historical writings about Muhammad and the Quran, with many interpretations of Quran passages).

• He shows that Islam is far from peaceable, that Jihad is definitely commanded against all non-Muslims. Contrary to many English-language apologetical articles stating that Jihad is primarily an "inner struggle", the great majority of jihadist texts in all Muslim literature, and particularly the Quran, explicitly demand the military subjugation of everyone, particularly Jews and Christians, and requires that any who will not submit by quoting "There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Prophet" and paying a poll tax must be killed.
• He shows that Islam is not just a religion, it is a political system that is entirely theocratic. The statement "Sharia is state and state is Sharia" encompasses it. No "right thinking" Muslim will submit to any other legal system except as a temporary measure to gain favor until that system can be overthrown.
• He presents several passages, and indicates that many more exist, in which Muhammad is given permission by Allah to engage in behaviors that other Muslims were forbidden, or that most people find abhorrent. Chief among these is his marriage, in his fifties, to a six-year-old girl, and his consummation of the relationship only three years later. Others permit slavery, particularly the taking of women as sex slaves.
• The Sunni-Shia schism is outlined in an Appendix. It is rooted in the murder of Muhammad by either one or two of his wives. It is known that Muhammad was poisoned. But who did it? According to Sunni tradition, it was a Jewish woman: Muhammad led the slaughter of some Jews, and he himself killed the husband of the most beautiful of the women. Then he raped the woman and later made her his wife. She poisoned a bowl of broth, after which Muhammad suffered greatly for about three years and then died. But according to Shia tradition, two wives conspired together, and one of them was Ashia, the "baby bride" mentioned above.
• He compares the compilation of Biblical books with that of the Quran. Thousands of early copies of Bible manuscripts exist, but none of the originals. The discipline of Literal Criticism compares all the copies of each passage so as to determine which variation is closest to the original. Interestingly, I have a book that details all the important variations in New Testament manuscripts, and none impinges on the meaning of critical doctrines of the Christian faith. As to the Quran, Caliph Uthman ordered a massive project to gather all copies of the Quran. Once his scholars had put together a definitive copy, he had all other manuscripts burned. All copies since then have been from this "official" document. This is behind the contention of Muslims that the Quran is pure, that no variations exist. Apparently, though, from other sources I've read, a number of manuscripts that were never sent to Uthman do exist. But there is no Literal Criticism for the Quran, nor could there be.

A second turn in my thinking was a welling up of enormous pity for Muslims. I think we all have heard stories of how safe it is to go about in Saudi Arabia or one of the Emirates, for example. This is generally true, though a colleague of mine was beheaded on the street in Riyadh because he wore shorts to exercise, running in public. The reason for such peacefulness is Sharia law, which is terrifying. The beheading just mentioned was carried out on the spot, by a Saudi who saw my friend running by; he just whipped out his sword and did the deed. The populace in these countries is totally subjugated by such draconian laws and practices.

In its way, Islam can be a paradise…for a man. It is much more likely to be a hell on earth for a woman. Women who want the high extremity of "protection" that Islam offers are OK with it. But the slightest infraction can be met with beating, by her husband, and if continued, her life is at risk.

I am reminded of Medieval Cathlocism, which was similarly totalitarian. In a similar fashion, the leaders lived in luxury and the populace was kept in utter subjection to their whims. The church leaders and the royalty cynically ignored the tenets of the religion that they used (and abused) to subjugate the population, but they delighted in the willing submission of many, who truly believed the religion. If anything, Islam is even more onerous, and their leaders, equally cynical.

These are just a few things I learned from reading Muslim. I suspect Muslims don't like any of them to be known by a non-Muslim. The matters discussed in the book are not hearsay. Every item is backed up by quotes from the Quran and the pertinent hadith. A few times there are citations from the biography by Sahih, but those are always backed up by references from the Quran.

What does all this mean to a non-Muslim? If you happen to live in an Islamic country, it means that, while your life may not be in danger today, one day when the political circumstances allow, your life may depend on your willingness to accept Sharia, say the "Muhammad prayer" and pay a poll tax for non-Muslims. Do or die. Countries that are currently non-Muslim may become so in the future. This is the intent of the leadership of every Islamic country, every mosque. They will not rest until no religion but Islam is to be found anywhere on Earth.

Don't take my word for it. Read Muslim for yourself.

The folly of evangelical anti-theism

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, polemics, science, religion, faith, pseudoscience

The human ape is a religious animal. It is part of our evolutionary heritage and we cannot escape it. Given that we must, by our nature, dedicate ourselves to something, what shall that something be?

To be religious does not require belief in God or a god or gods. Buddhism, for example, says nothing about the existence of any deity. Taoism at best only hints that some kind of god may be behind the scenes; that "Tao" might be personalized.

Mathematician Amir D. Aczel writes about a book a year, and his offering for 2014 is Why Science Does Not Disprove God. Several debates and discussions about science and religion in which he participated provided the initial fodder for writing the book. While he makes it clear he does not believe in the Lord God described by a literalist reading of the Bible, he is sympathetic to religion and even favorable.

The thesis of the book is simple: It is a misuse of science and scientific methods when the New Atheists use them to claim, not only that there is no God, but that there cannot be any kind of god. Who are the New Atheists? In order according to noise level, chiefly Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Lawrence M. Krauss, Christopher Hitchens (deceased), and Sam Harris. While atheism has long been with us, what is comparatively new is the evangelical tone of at least these five (although evangelical atheism is not particularly new, as an apparent conflict in the 1760's between Leonard Euler and Denis Diderot illustrates).

Even more to the point: The past couple of decades have been marred by increasingly shrill denouncements of Western and Judaeo-Christian institutions by extremist Islamic clerics. Over the same period, Dawkins and others have become equally shrill in their anti-religious campaign. The language of Dawkins in particular is just as inflammatory as any fatwa by a shrieking Imam. (BTW, this is me speaking; Dr. Aczel is too gentlemanly to point this out.)

Anti-theist claims are many and complex. The book tackles the most serious abuses of science by these "scientific" atheists in twelve chapters; three other chapters limn the history of the relationship of religion and science, and deal with more general matters. Along the way, Dr. Aczel shows how the New Atheists have grossly misused archaeology, cosmology, mathematics, probability, evolutionary theory, and the philosophy of science. Put it all together, and what do you have? A new religion based on pseudo-science, whose adherents are just as fervent, even rabid, as the most bigoted Bible-thumper (and, sad to say, there are all to many of those).

Scientists tend to overstate the power of science. The best scientists are humble and humbly grateful that science works as well as it does in so many realms. Unfortunately, they are a minority; most are simply "science workers", getting results and publishing as often as possible without giving much thought to the philosophy of science. Even more unfortunately, those "best" are outnumbered by those who arrogate divine powers to science, expecting all questions to be answered, if only we gather enough evidence, theorize deeply enough, and perhaps one day craft a "Theory of Everything."

Dr. Aczel demonstrates that such claims are overblown. He invokes the following:

• The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle demonstrates that it is impossible to know with perfect accuracy both the position and the energy of a particle. Accuracy can be very, very good, but there are limits beyond which it will forever be impossible to measure. Even more, the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics states that even in the absence of measurement, the precise path a particle will take has an irreducible amount of uncertainty. Diffraction in optical systems is evidence of this.
• Chaos Theory describes nonlinear systems (those in which the ongoing process influences itself) that are hypersensitive to initial conditions. In practical terms, when such systems are described mathematically, the equations cannot be solved in what we call "closed form". The simplest such system is the gravitational Three-Body Problem. Certain special cases have been mathematically solved, but it has been proven (in the mathematical sense) that the general case cannot be solved. Numerical (computer) simulations can be crafted over a limited span of time and space, but they are always dogged by the accumulation of rounding errors, until those dominate the result, and you are no longer simulating the system you began with. Even in "linear" systems (those with no feedback), successive iterations of a computer simulation still accumulate rounding errors, and special methods must be used if you need to test the magnitude of those accumulated errors. That greatly increases the computational cost of such simulations. And wouldn't you know it: Nature presents very few linear systems.
• The Schrödinger Wave Equation and other work by Edwin Schrödinger show that "things can go where you think they can't", and the poor cat of his paradox, being both dead and alive, actually illustrates our inability to know in detail the fate of any quantum event. By the way, I count the cat as an observer: it knows whether the cyanide got released, before the "official observer" opens the box to look.
• The Incompleteness Theorem of Kurt Gödel shows that it is possible to ask questions that cannot be answered using the mathematical (or "formal") system in which the question was asked. For example, formal logic is full of paradoxes that require one to step outside the system to elucidate. A famous example is the Barber of Seville: He shaves all men in Seville who do not shave themselves. Who shaves the Barber? Of course, the question has no answer in the system as set up. But if we bring the matter into the real world, we find that, of course, the Barber is bearded and is not shaved at all. The false premise of the paradox is that all men in Seville are clean-shaven.

The anti-Theists have formed a new church. You could call it a religion without any of the benefits. Of course, I agree that religious motivations have led to great abuses. For political reasons, couched as religion but really in a land grab, a Medieval Pope wrote a death warrant for the entire population of a province (or was it 3 provinces?) in France. Some 3 million persons were to be slaughtered. This was not carried out. Anti-Theists invoke the Crusades. Again, the motives were a mixture of religion and politics; for political gain the leaders incited religious fervor in ignorant knights and peasants. In fact, the terrible abuses of the history of Christianity in Europe and the Near East can just as well be invoked to prove that politics are evil…and they are!

But let us not forget the greatest slaughters of history. Do the names Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong mean anything to you? Atheists one and all, responsible for the deaths of tens of millions or, in the case of Mao, more than 100 million. Compared to any of these four (and a couple of others), the Pope mentioned above was a piker, even had his order been carried out.

But we must remember that today's New Atheists claim the mantle science. Dr. Aczel has shown that at best they skew their science, and more frequently they abuse it all out of recognition. To put it baldly, the New Atheists, today's anti-Theists, are charlatans.

What does God think of this? The first six verses of Psalm 2 provide a clue:

¹ Why do the nations conspire
    and the peoples plot in vain?
² The kings of the earth rise up
    and the rulers band together
    against the Lord and against his anointed, saying,
³ “Let us break their chains
    and throw off their shackles.”

⁴ The One enthroned in heaven laughs;
    the Lord scoffs at them.
⁵ He rebukes them in his anger
    and terrifies them in his wrath, saying,
⁶ “I have installed my king
    on Zion, my holy mountain.”

More on the immense difference between religion and faith

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, religion, christology, catholic theology

There is a lovely video I saw earlier today in a FaceBook post: an elderly Jewish woman named Fell singing hymns ("Jesus Loves Me" for example) to a severely demented woman, and really, really connecting with her. How many Christians know a single Jewish song of the faith, and could connect with someone of a different faith so deeply and genuinely? Mrs. Fell truly embodies something Paul wrote to the Corinthians, "I have become all things to all people."

Many years ago I read The Man Nobody Knows by Bruce Barton, first published in 1924. As a young person searching for an identity, I found some insight in it, about the humanity of Jesus. But I was ultimately unsatisfied, and when I later found faith in Jesus Christ, I realized how shallow the presentation was, leaving the deity of Jesus almost unmentioned. One thing of value stayed with me: the understanding that Jesus was a Jew, and lived and worked almost entirely as a faithful Jew. His message, as he told a Lebanese (Syrophoenician) woman on a rare visit to Lebanon, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel." Yet, when she answered wisely, he granted her request (healing for her daughter), indicating that what those "sheep" discard could be obtained by others.

The passage just mentioned, found in Matthew 15, is one of several showing that Jesus knew His rejection by most Jews would be followed by a more successful spreading among non-Jews. This is largely played out in Acts of the Apostles. Before the time the Jewish-Christian testimony in Jerusalem and Judea was practically exterminated by the Romans after 68 AD, along with hundreds of thousands of Jews, the Jerusalem-centered branch of the church was a distinct minority.

I approached with only moderate expectation Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age by James Carroll. I did not expect it to be a work of profound faith, and that expectation was confirmed. It didn't take long to recognize that the viewpoint is Roman Catholic. Later it comes out that Mr. Carroll is a former priest, but is now married and a university professor. That is OK, I haven't found works of Catholic theology to be accessible to any but extremely over-educated readers, so I was glad to find a more readable presentation.

I am not sure the author's theological stance is so clearly within that of the Catholic Church. Where he goes to great lengths to explain away the so-called miracles in the New Testament (and he'd probably do so with Old Testament stories as well, were they in the purview of his writing), I am pretty sure the Church's more official position is that Jesus did indeed work miracles. He writes again and again of exploring and examining the divinity of Jesus; in the end, he takes the position, if I understand him aright, that Jesus is counted divine only in retrospect, and neither thought of himself as God nor said so to others. I wonder what he makes of  John 8:24, where Jesus, after being asked where his Father is, finishes a long reply by saying, "I told you that you would die in your sins; if you do not believe that I am he, you will indeed die in your sins." Or that, when he was speaking to the disciples before going to the Garden of Gethsemane (John 14:9), and Philip asked him to show them the Father: "Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father." (All quotes are from NIV)

One mystery of Christology is to understand when Jesus obtained what is called his "pre-Incarnation knowledge". In Mr. Carroll's view, there never was any. Instead, he speculates quite wildly about Jesus as a disaffected and unemployed young man of Galilee chafing under the economic strictures caused by Roman occupation and taxation, becoming a disciple of his cousin John (the baptist) and remaining so for perhaps a decade. Jesus eventually reacts against the asceticism of John and embraces a more public life, preaching to the dispossessed. I find that harder to believe than the goofy story "Bel and the Dragon", found in Catholic Bibles, but not Protestant ones. I guess if the Apocrypha have found their way into your world view, your imagination is rather unfettered. (For the uninitiated, the Dragon story is about Daniel in Babylon, defeating a fire-breathing dragon by throwing a helmet full of water into its mouth and down its throat, causing a steam explosion.)

While reading, I marked a couple dozen places on which I thought I ought to comment. But I have little taste for detailed debate. I will instead take up two important items.

Firstly, Mr. Carroll's fundamental premise is that the four Gospels are "wartime literature", with the three Synoptics (Matthew, Mark and Luke) written in the 70-80 AD time frame, and John written by 90 AD. I believe they were indeed produced during a period of growing warmaking and warmongering, but a decade or so earlier. He writes several times that "all scholars" agree on these late dates, but he overstates his case rather dramatically. Maybe all Catholic scholars late-date the Gospels, but I doubt it. And even some non-Catholic scholars do so, but primarily those who follow the "higher critics" whose fundamental premise is that the Scriptures are purely human products, and treat them as literature and literature only. Such "historical criticism" of Biblical texts was initially condemned by the Vatican (Leo XIII) in 1893, but later somewhat welcomed (Pius XII in 1943).

Those who don't have a hidden agenda to deny and denigrate the Bible's inspiration understand that the Synoptic Gospels were produced between about 55 and 65 AD; perhaps as late as 66 or 67. Certainly within the lifetimes of those we consider their authors. The late-dating historical critics simply cannot believe that Jesus foretold the fall of the Temple 35-40 years before the fact. Instead they posit that all the Gospel authors put these words in Jesus' mouth, even as they were writing about a Jerusalem that they saw being destroyed around them (or "just over there") in 70 AD. Historical critics go to great lengths to deny God's existence, and particularly Jesus's deity. I say "deity" rather than "divinity". Divinity is a quality; deity is the being of the Person.

So the fundamental issue is whether God inspired the writings we call the Bible, and how detailed His inspiration was. Paul wrote to the Corinthians (1 Cor 2:13), "This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words." He claims verbal inspiration for what he spoke and wrote. Later in the same book, he discusses marriage and differentiates between God's commands and his own opinion, then discusses the choice of lifelong chastity, beginning, "I give a judgment as one who by the Lord's mercy is trustworthy" (7:25), yet ending, "I think that I also have the Spirit of God." (7:40)

We know that there are all sorts of things in the Bible that we can't count as God's words, not directly at any rate. Certain words of Satan are recorded, such as his accusation of Job. One chapter of Daniel was the testimony of Nebuchadnezzar, and the entire book of Ecclesiastes is written from a despairing, depressed, fully human viewpoint. Yet Ecclesiastes is followed by Song of Songs. How amazing, an aging Solomon could write both "vanity of vanities" and "the song of songs". What happened in between? He got back into contact with God! Note: the Shulammite is Solomon writing in a female voice of his ecstatic experience of God as his lover. Guys out there, you think you are male? Maybe a real he-man?!? Wait until you meet the Source of Maleness, dude! ...and God is also the Source of Femaleness, as the title El-Shaddai attests ("shad" is Hebrew for breast). I state my understanding of inspiration thus: The Bible tells us what God wants it to tell us. How He accomplished its production is up to Him.

And, has the text of the Bible been edited? Boy, and how! So what? Cannot God inspire an editor just as effectively as an author? For example, where did the author of Genesis get his material? While I believe it really was Moses, he must have used source writings to compose the Torah. The beasts of burden used by Abraham and Jacob and their servants are called camels in Genesis, yet historically we know that camels were introduced much later, perhaps even after the time of Moses. Abraham and Jacob would have used donkeys. Clearly, either Moses or a later editor updated the text to use a desert beast that had become more familiar. Maybe it was Samuel.

Historical critics late-date the Old Testament books by centuries, not just a decade or two as they do with the Gospels and some Epistles. For a long time it was not known how to counter their arguments. No texts of Old Testament books were known older than Tenth Century AD. After 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls pushed the dates back to around 160 BC. Then, more recently, fragments dating back to the 700s and 800s BC have been found, mainly in ancient mezuzahs. Naturally, it would be helpful if larger texts were found dating to the times of David and before. If such materials exist, God is still keeping them hidden.

The book most enthusiastically late-dated is Daniel. The young Daniel is supposed to have been taken captive to Babylon in about 586 BC, and lived until the year before Cyrus allowed Jews to return to Jerusalem 70 years later. Many critics pooh-pooh this, and presume it was written during the time of the Maccabees, in about 160 BC. No matter when it was written, it contains a prophecy that is detailed enough to check. This was done by Sir Robert Anderson, who wrote The Coming Prince more than a century ago, in which he demonstrates that the period called "69 weeks" in Daniel began when a certain decree was issued in 445 BC and ended on Palm Sunday, the only day before the crucifixion that Jesus was proclaimed the Messiah. The length of that period comes to 69x7x360 days, or 173,880 days, exactly. If the book of Daniel predicted that period with such exactitude, then it is much more likely that it was written during and near the end of Daniel's life, in Babylon. Those who cannot believe God's word contains genuine predictions would have to late-date Daniel to some time after the year 32 AD to make their case convincing. They'd be laughed out of seminary!

Are the Gospels equally inspired? Faith says Yes. Mr. Carroll states at one point that what is most important is not faith but faithfulness. This is clearly in accord with Catholic teaching going back to the Fifth Century, that we are saved only by our own works. Jesus the Redeemer is never mentioned in Christ Actually. The title comes from something written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. While Bonhoeffer's beliefs stretch the faith of Jesus a little, those of Carroll stretch it beyond recognition. Aquinas wrote that we must imitate Christ, and this subject informs the last full chapter of the book. This is not Biblical faith. We are told repeatedly by the apostles, particularly Paul, that believers are indwelt by Christ. In his resurrected condition, this is possible. Carroll will admit no bodily resurrection, neither of Jesus nor of anyone else.

In spite of my deep disaffection, I find certain value in the book. We need to be reminded of the Jewishness of Jesus. He did not hate the Jewish leaders, but wept over their intransigence. Yet Mr. Carroll goes too far, proposing that the Gospels are anti-Jewish screeds written later in the Roman-Jewish wars. Anti-Jew they are not, but anti-false-religion they most certainly are, because Jesus was anti-false-religion.

The Gospel of Matthew has been said to have the subject, "Christ versus Religion", and that of John, "Religion versus Christ." Yet, these writers made clear repeatedly that the religion being promulgated by the Pharisees and scribes and other leaders of First-Century Israel was far, far from the religious practice taught by Moses and Samuel and Ezra. And those who are sometimes called "Jews" in Acts, who were following Paul around and trying to undo his work, were a rival faction of what I call "Judaizers" among the Christians, probably based in Jerusalem, where James later told Paul, "You see, brother, how many thousands of Jews have believed, and all of them are zealous for the law." So zealous for the law, they had nearly forgotten the freedom from over-interpretation of the law into which Jesus had called them. They occasioned the downfall of Paul, politically speaking. Let us remember, though, that the crowd that had been whipped up into crying, "Crucify him, crucify him!" was the same crowd that received the first gospel preached by Peter on the day of Pentecost, 7 weeks later, and 3,000 of them, now redeemed and forgiven and baptized, formed the nucleus of the church in Jerusalem. God first reached out to those who'd been duped into calling for His demise.

So here is the list, according to this former Catholic priest:

• No deity, just a kind of after-the-fact divinity conferred by our adoration.
• No miracles (a repeated statement: "He could not"!), which John called "signs".
• No resurrection.

Yet, as the writers of the New Testament make clear, without these there is no salvation. Jesus said to those who didn't believe in him, "You will indeed die in your sins."

The Jesus Christ that Mr. Carroll writes of is not the Jesus Christ in whom I believe. Not even close. If he is a Christian, then I'd be ashamed to call myself a Christian. But if I am a child of God, then unless he repents, Mr. Carroll is destined to perish.

Genetic religion?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, genetics, religion, faith, sociology

After reading Nicholas Wade's most recent book, A Troublesome Inheritance, two weeks ago, I decided to read a couple of his earlier books. The first to come to hand is The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why it Endures, published in 2009. I have quite mixed feelings about the former book, and as an ardent Christian, I find this book even more unsettling, but I expected that. Regardless, it discusses matters of which we dare not be ignorant.

When I was very young, I recall my mother saying that the beginning of the second verse in Genesis wasn't connected to the end of the first verse, leaving a gap for geology to happen. She was a rock hound, and knew enough geology to understand that the Earth must be much, much older than the 6,000 years deduced by Ussher and others from adding up the "begats" in the Old Testament. I've done a similar exercise out of curiosity, and it is rather tricky to string the right genealogies together. Interestingly, Paul wrote that we shouldn't waste time studying "endless genealogies" (1 Tim 1:4, and a similar statement in Titus 3:9). I reckon he was on to something.

Thus, I have long held that the Bible is not intended as a text in natural history. As Cardinal Baronius said to Galileo, "The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go." But even among Christians who accept the conclusions of science, and biology in particular, and even if they accept evolution, they are uncomfortable with human evolution. Even more so, that the brain continues to evolve, and rare is the scholar of Humanities or Anthropology who willingly accepts that some proportion of human behavior is genetic. Theist or atheist, scholars almost uniformly deny that any substantial level of evolution is now going on, particularly as relates to human behavior.

Our deepest and most powerful impulses are the spiritual. Gospel preachers sometimes say that no animal has religion, "only we do". They say you never find a dog worshiping—to which some wags respond, dogs don't believe in supernatural gods because they live with their gods: Us. Every culture and every civilization has a characteristic religious practice. In The Faith Instinct, Wade traces the genetic tendency to practice religion to something that must have developed prior to the expansion of physically modern humans out of Africa some 50,000 years ago (most anthropologists would say, 70,000). This is because religious practice is universal.

Sure, among the most affluent nations we find rising numbers of atheists and agnostics, and in the last 2-3 generations a growing level of "evangelical atheism" (I find it laughable that these "hot" atheists are so extremely religious in their atheism! They are as touchy and insecure as the most priggish Puritan.). Less affluent countries don't have atheists. If only for naturalistic reasons, when life is bad, people need something beyond themselves to keep going on going on.

The basic thesis is simple. Early human groups endured frequent warfare (there never were any "noble savages). Groups of early people who danced and sang together were more socially cohesive, and more likely to win the next battle. We see in tribal groups today pre-battle dances. I liken them to pre-game pep rallies at schools and colleges. People who think they are so sophisticated go to an arena for a ball game and behave like a warrior tribe roaring themselves into a frenzy. The post-game rioting and looting that sometimes occur stand in for the battles among tribal folk.

Social cohesion may not be enough to regulate an egalitarian hunter-gatherer society between battles. Revered ancestors that morphed over time into various kinds of gods provided a supernatural check on misbehavior. If you think a god is watching, you are less likely to sin. This instinct is so ingrained that many stores take advantage of it by having lots of mirrors on the walls, and pictures of smiling faces in places you might not expect, such as in or near changing rooms in the clothing department. Experiments have shown that just having pictures showing eyes near the communal coffee urn in an office break room reduces the amount of coffee taken without plunking the expected couple of quarters into the nearby jar. Such an instinct would favor a group that didn't have to kill so many miscreants, because most people were behaving well due to fear of the gods.

Where did the modern, more cerebral religions of the developed world come from? Wade writes that agriculture and village life, then city life, required something different from tribal dance- and song-fests. Just as an economic hierarchy developed to regulate trade and distribution of goods, so a religious hierarchy developed, a priesthood that gradually monopolized religious practice. The development of writing that paralleled agriculture also facilitated religion, allowing the commandments and rituals to be codified.

Near the end of the book, Wade discusses the work of Samuel Huntington, who wrote articles and a book titled The Clash of Civilizations. Huntington identifies seven world civilizations of the present day:

• Western, including Europe and the USA
• Confucian, in China
• Japanese, though some would argue Japan is merging into the West
• Islamic
• Hindu, in India primarily
• Slavic-Orthodox, in Russia and parts of former SSR's
• Latin America

Huntington wrote, "The next world war, if there is one, will be a war between civilizations." (I contend that WW3 began in 1992, and is sort of sputtering along at present.) Huntington analyzed these seven, and for Western civilization he lists eight defining characteristics:

• Greek and Roman legacy
• Western Christianity in two branches, Roman Catholic and Protestant
• Languages derived from Latin, German and Greek
• Separation of church and state
• Rule of law
• Social pluralism
• Representative governing bodies
• Tradition of individual rights and liberties

(These lists are on page 272) Why, in particular, do the Russians seem so similar to Westerners, yet are so at odds with the West (particularly with Putin in charge, but don't blame it all on him)? Of these 8, only a deep historical legacy is familiar, but theirs came through Byzantium, not Rome and Athens. Their Orthodox religion has been split, most vehemently, from Roman Catholicism for over 950 years. Then there is Islam, for which the church IS the state, and shar'ia law is considered divinely inspired, not legislated; they have none of the other 7 characteristics either.

Here Wade enters into deeper waters than just religions and their differences. To belong to a civilization is to have a certain kind of identity. One's comfort or discomfort with one's civilization affects one's progeny, and thus is a factor in natural selection. These matters led to the later book I refer to above.

How is a Christian to think of all this? Is there a genuine God? Is the Old Testament really the cobbled-together scheming of a self-appointed priesthood among the Hebrews in Babylon? Wade refers to this conclusion of the "higher critics" of the early 1800s rather uncritically. Most of their "findings" have since been discredited. For example, in the 1820s they could disparage references to the Hittites, but a generation later, the Hittites were found to be real. These critics claimed that the Hebrews didn't conquer Canaan, but were home-grown in Canaan. Yet there are historical records of somebody coming to Egypt for a couple of generations, then leaving under mysterious circumstances. The Egyptians themselves destroyed most records of the matter, possibly from embarrassment.

And is the New Testament as late-dated as higher critics suppose? For example, were the first 3 Gospels written before or after 70AD? Christian scholarship places Mark first, as a collection of Peter's sermons, released before 60AD, then both Matthew and Luke just a few years later. Only John came after 70AD, possibly as late as 95AD. And was the theology attributed to Paul a distortion of the message of Jesus? He could not have been warmly received by the church in Jerusalem if that were so. His differences with James were not about Jesus's message, but about whether a Jew should continue to practice the Jewish religion after converting to Christ.

To a Christian, the choice is stark. Either the Bible is divinely inspired, or it is nonsense. Evidence of editing is no problem: copyists make errors, and God can guide a later scribe to reverse the error. The Spirit's inspiration took place at many levels. Certain sentences uttered by Satan are included, one chapter of Daniel was written by Nebuchadnezzar, and the whole book of Ecclesiastes is the maundering of an aging Solomon in a time of deep depression. In particular, it is not wise to use any verse of Ecclesiastes as a proof text. You have to compare it to Song of Songs to see why God allowed it into His Word.

To a Christian who understands and accepts evolution, human life and nature show traces of divine intervention, even in our genetics. Why should God not intervene in a delicate way, to steer human development towards His own ends? No matter how many books are written on the subject, atheists will say man created gods in our image, and theists will say the gods or God made us in the divine image. Faith is deeper than just religious practice. It really depends, do you believe what you believe because of what you were taught to practice, or do you do what you do because of your faith?

Nicholas Wade takes a relentlessly biological view of human affairs. For that, he does a great service. Like it or not, he reaches logical conclusions from the available evidence.

Small book on a large subject

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, essays, memoirs, religion, philosophy of science

He claims to be an agnostic, one who prays and studies the Talmud daily and keeps kosher. Now age 98, Herman Wouk has written novels that span three generations of readers. While he still can, he has written of his exploration of the boundaries of science and religion, based in part on three conversations with Richard Feynman, and a great deal of his own experience. In their first conversation, Feynman asked him in parting if he knew calculus. He confessed he didn't, and Feynman responded, "You had better learn it. It is the language God talks."

The Language God Talks: on Science and Religion is Herman Wouk's memoir of how his stories developed in the context of his own religious convictions, and the people whose influence meant so much to the way they came together. He confesses that all attempts to learn calculus defeated him. Yet he has persisted nearly a full century in learning the original language God talks, the Hebrew of the Torah and its ongoing commentary, the Talmud.

The Hebrew itself is not really the language of which he speaks, but rather the incisive reasoning behind these great books. As he imagines himself saying to Feynman in a fourth conversation that he wished had happened, study of the Talmud, and earlier the debates and reasoning that produced it, represent the mental recreation of generations of thoughtful Jews during centuries with no technology of entertainment, no telephones or TVs or iPods (I wonder what the great sages would make of Wikipedia, whether they would contribute to it enthusiastically, or shun it. Probably the former!).

There is more insight into what it means to be Jewish in this little book than in any other I have read, of any size. I look upon the continued existence of the Jews as the foundational proof of God's existence. As a prophet wrote (here I paraphrase), God chose Israel not because they were greater or stronger or better or more numerous than the nations around them, but because He desired them for a testimony to His name. While He promised repeatedly to bless Israel, this "blessing" has been rather backhanded: they have endured continual attempts to exterminate them, for more than 3,000 years. Indeed, the first mention of Israel outside the Torah is an inscription in Egypt, dated about 1210 BCE, announcing that Israel had been "totally defeated". That long-dead pharaoh Merneptah spoke too soon.

But Wouk is the great writer here, not this poor scribbler, and dwells for a third of the book on his fictional character Aaron Jastrow, whose sermon "Heroes of the Iliad" is included as a coda to the book. That sermon, which morphed into a meditation on the meaning of Job's suffering, is the core of Wouk's belief and a most powerful statement of the Jewish understanding of the delicate choreography of God and His people.

What Wouk says indirectly I will state more frankly. God's own writing, His Bible, states that humans, "male and female", are in God's image and after His likeness. And just as we begin as infants and grow through a long process, so does God! If you read through the Torah, the Songs and the Prophets with a view to God as a juvenile, growing to maturity, you can reliably sort the books in time. The great figures of Genesis, particularly Abraham and Moses, sometimes had to talk God out of doing something rash. The man for whom the nation is named, Israel, formerly Jacob, was so named because he "wrestled with God, and prevailed". This view will be seen as rank heresy by my Christian colleagues, but I think a Talmud scholar would understand.

When the church replaces God

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, religion, cults, brainwashing

About 11:00 PM last evening, I finished reading the saddest, most disturbing book I've encountered this year. After six hours of tossing and turning, I realized I need to review it and get a few things off my chest so I can put it behind me. The book, written by Lauren Drain with the help of Lisa Pulitzer, is Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church.

Lauren didn't want to leave WBC. She was 14 when her father, who had been making a film documentary about Fred Phelps and his little congregation, became a convert and moved the family to Topeka, Kansas to live on "the block", as the collection of houses surrounding the sanctuary building is known. It was a rough transition, but over time she devoted herself wholeheartedly to WBC and its ways. Hers was the first family to join since the 1970s.

WBC consists mostly of descendants of the pastor, Fred Phelps, and their spouses and children. He started the congregation as a young man, and there were lean years, but he put himself through law school, and later many of his extended family became lawyers also. They became Phelps Chartered and got rich litigating civil rights cases. Although tithing is expected (demanded and enforced) of all members, the church is awash with money from the PC firm members' tithes.

Although in most ways Lauren was warmly accepted by a number of Phelps girls her age, she learned that she would never quite match up or catch up to them. They had been raised in the WBC way, which means doing every single little thing the pastor's way, as enforced by his leading daughter Shirley Phelps-Roper (Phelps females don't give up their names upon marriage, but hyphenate or simply keep their name). To a member of WBC the pastor's word is law, and Shirley is considered the spokesperson of the Holy Ghost. It seems there is no Son of God in their theology, perhaps because the pastor's sons are all rather passive, and those who aren't have left the congregation.

Most of the book details Lauren's struggles to fit in and to comply with the extreme demands of WBC and even more extreme demands of her father. Steve Drain comes across as a real nutcase. He is highly intelligent and creative, but he is clearly so emotionally insecure he has to rigidly enforce his control over every aspect of his family members' lives. In that he resembles his mentor, the pastor.

Lauren loved picketing, and felt a thrill of self-righteousness whenever she and her fellow picketers were scolded or reviled by passers-by or counter-protesters. Of course, she didn't think of it as self-righteousness at the time. She had been taught that only WBC members, in good standing, who had a near-perfect and sinless life had any chance of going to heaven. Perhaps a few others might be among God's chosen, but only if they were actively speaking out against America's corruption and tolerance of homosexuality.

Ah, the "fag" issue. The church's web site is titled God Hates Fags. Fred Phelps is a high-performing person, a real straight arrow, an Eagle Scout, admitted to West Point at age 17. He visited the campus once, then almost immediately rejected the notion of attending and managed to struggle through two or three lesser schools to complete a degree. His extreme anti-gay activism dates from this time, though it became even more extreme when the Gay Rights movement got under way in the 1970s. Lauren reports the known facts, including that if "that weekend at West Point" is ever mentioned by an interviewer, Phelps reacts violently and terminates the interview.

I have read items by a few folks who speculate that he had some kind of homosexual encounter at West Point, and most think he is secretly gay. I think it more likely that he became the "designated victim", to use a term familiar to boys who attended a boarding school. He probably got a thorough reaming out. And it is likely that he became terrified by his own reaction to the activity. Maybe and maybe not. The fact remains that he is emotionally insecure, and in recent years he has become frankly insane.

By the age of 21, after seven years in Topeka, Lauren was working as a nurse. She could see a strong double standard of performance, depending on whether you were a Phelps. But she kept that to herself. However, at church Bible studies, she wanted to know what various Bible verses meant. Not only the tiny collection of verses on which WBC activities and attitudes are based, but all of them. At first Shirley and others might try to explain, but at one point she began asking question like this: "Why do we tell people to repent, when we know it won't do them any good? They are already destined to hell." She was scolded and intimidated for asking such questions, and they intimated that she might go to hell for being "divisive".

The WBC heaven is going to be populated by Phelpses, and hardly anyone else. Sounds like a lonely place. Lauren had already seen several banishments, and then she experienced it herself. WBC cannot tolerate independent thinking, and she was out. Her parents disowned her. After work one day at her nursing job, her father gave her 3 hours to pack, then drove her to a hotel where he'd booked her a room for a couple days. That was that. It was near the end of 2007. In the years since, she has had to learn life skills that are denied to those "on the block". She tried to stay in some kind of contact with her parents, but now hasn't spoken to them for a few years.

Amazingly, she remains a spiritual person. Many would reject God along with the church. She has not. Helped at first by a boyfriend's mother, she learned a new way to understand the Bible and God's ways. Lauren is in the early stages of building a new life with a new understanding of herself, society, and God. Her closing words are, "I don't believe that God rejoices in tragedies, calamities, disease, pain and grief. In my faith, He has better things to do."

Amen. The two Testaments contain more than 30,000 verses. Most Christian traditions emphasize a message that is backed up by 2,000 to 3,000 verses. The strict WBC theology relies heavily on about 100 verses, and twists another thousand or so to fit, while ignoring the rest. The god of WBC is not the God I believe in, not the God that Christians and Jews know from our Bible.

OK it is full already - now what?

kw: population, religion, demographics

From time to time I read that this or that international body "expects" human population to peak at some number, such as nine or ten or eleven billions. I wonder if those respected experts have consulted with people in sub-Saharan Africa or in the Middle East, or with the strongly religious of every culture, whether Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Christian (and others): all are trying to out-breed the competition.

I can't speak for any of the world religions, but I do know Christianity, particularly the strongly Biblical variety such as Evangelicals. In the U.S. as a whole, the rate of population increase is just over 1%. Among Evangelicals it is much, much higher. A great many families in the churches I know have 3-5 children. Most of them think they have a divine mandate to have many children. Halfway through the first chapter of the Bible we find God's command to Adam: "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground." (Genesis 1:28, NIV).

I have never heard a sermon on Revelation 11:18, "The nations were angry, / and your wrath has come. / The time has come for judging the dead, / and for rewarding your servants the prophets / and your people who revere your name, / both great and small— / and for destroying those who destroy the earth." (NIV, emphasis supplied). So here is a mini-sermon: Listen up, people, are you among those who destroy the earth? If so, you are NOT among His servants the prophets, nor those who revere His name. That verse about multiplying until you fill the earth? It has been more than fulfilled. It is time to stop!

The earth is groaning under seven billions of us, even though half of them are in poverty. By far most of the burden on the earth is the top two billions. The "green revolution" is pretty much over, and nearly all fisheries are decreasing. If another two or four billions are added, nearly all of them will be miserably poor. And many of the 3-4 billion who are not poor today, will become poor. That doesn't sound like what God wanted in Genesis chapter 1!

So, Evangelicals, if you truly believe in God, stop trying to outbreed the Muslims and Catholics and everyone else. Do whatever you can to improve worldwide education! The birth rate drops, the more educated the population is. There is a young Pakistani girl, recovering from being shot by the Taliban for promoting education for girls. Support her cause! The best kind of missionary is an international teacher. Do you want to serve God? Raise up a giant outcry for better education everywhere, and prepare your kids to teach everywhere!

You'd think they forgot the TV cameras were on

kw: politics, religion, current events

I hardly saw any of the Democratic Convention, but I did catch the odd "Booing God" moment. Here is how it was reported by Josh Lederman and Julie Pace of the Associated Press, as reported on Yahoo News:

Needled by Mitt Romney and other Republicans, Democrats hurriedly rewrote their convention platform Wednesday to add a mention of God and declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel after President Barack Obama intervened to order the changes.

The embarrassing reversal was compounded by chaos and uncertainty on the convention floor. Three times Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the convention chairman, called for a voice vote on the changes and each time the yes and no votes seemed to balance each other out. On the third attempt, Villaraigosa ruled the amendments were approved — triggering boos from many in the audience.

I give credit to the President for requesting the changes, even though it has the flavor of too little, too late. Dear party leaders: when you detect you are in the hole, at least stop digging!

Commentators favorable to the Democrats have been scrambling ever since, stating that the ones who'd voted No were booing Mayor Villaraigosa, not God or Jerusalem. It doesn't matter. They were against the changes, some perhaps for good reason, and some for no good reason.

It is well known that militant atheists are a vocal constituency of the Democratic party. They are tentatively supported by a larger, less vocal number who believe religion has no place in politics. I tend to sympathize with this latter bunch, though I disagree. It is also well known that a constituency of anti-Zionists (some of them Jews) has also found a home among the Democrats. Some of these, probably a minority (and certainly none of the Jews), are also anti-semitic, though they've learned to keep that rather quiet. It appears that it was largely due to these folks' influence that administration officials recently met with representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Whether a party platform mentions reliance on God, doesn't concern me much. It does concern me that the status of Jerusalem was initially left out, and had to be reinstated by Presidential request.

Rethinking Rev. Wright

kw: sociology, religion, race

A few years ago, I heard the sound clips on the radio, of Rev. Jeremiah Wright saying "God damn America!". Naturally, I had a very negative reaction. Since that time, I have reflected a time or two about it, and I finally decided to get off my duff and learn more. After reading transcripts of some of his sermons, including "that one", I think I have a better handle where he is coming from.

On March 19, 2003, the invasion of Iraq began. Nearly four weeks later, on April 13, 2003, Rev. Wright spoke on the text Luke 19:37-44, where Jesus on Palm Sunday wept over Jerusalem, "…because you did not recognize the time of your visitation." The sermon is titled, "Confusing God and Government". His initial goal was to decry the Iraq invasion and the trumped-up reasons for it.

The sermon has three sections: "Governments Lie", "Governments Change", and "Where Governments Fail, God Never Fails". It was at the end of the second section that he said,

God Damn America!—That's in the Bible—for killing innocent people. God Damn America for treating her citizens as less than human. God Damn America as long as she keeps trying to act like she is God and she is supreme!

He had led up to this, and I think it was spontaneous, by recounting the failures of the U.S. Government, particularly regarding race, and beginning with the Constitution and its provision that a slave was counted as 3/5 of a person (The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments of 1865 and 1868 annulled this provision). He believes that HIV was created by government "as a means of genocide against people of color" (Which is strange; in the U.S. the majority of victims are not black).

I now look at his "Damn" statement as an example of preacher's hyperbole, and not entirely out of line. In the past, the U.S. government has killed citizens (look up "WWI bonus army"), and has treated some as less than human. The question is, to what extent are these things still true? Because Rev. Wright is a bit older than I and even more because he is black, he lived through the Civil Rights era with much keener sensibilities than I did, and it had a powerful effect on me. To him, the Jim Crow provisions we all once lived under are a living memory, and a painful one.

Someone once said, "The universal bank of Trust accepts deposits, but if you make a single withdrawal, the account is closed." Trust once lost may never be regained. Considering the extent to which most government leaders lie, quite by habit it seems!, how far can we trust them? That is what the Rev. is asking. I would answer with him, not so very far!!

I began to rethink the "Damn" statement after a conversation with my aunt. She is a dear Christian lady aged 92. She does not agree with anything President Obama has done, and she thinks he is bad for this country. But, she said, "I think he will be re-elected, mainly because God wants to punish America." I don't know if God is still in the nation-punishing business. If he is, the U.S. is an easy target, but not the easiest.

Religious people often point out that at least half of Americans commit adultery, but this is true everywhere; the whole world fits that target profile! And among the rich and powerful, worldwide, it is nearly 100%. Could it be gambling and casinos? If so, Monte Carlo and Monaco would be the first targets of divine lightning. No, God's primary issue is oppression. The Bible has many expressions of God's displeasure with the rich who withhold a worker's pay, or who foreclose a widow's dwelling. And even though God permitted the Assyrians and the Babylonians to chastise Israel (the northern kingdom) and Judah (the southern kingdom), when they enthusiastically oppressed the captives, going beyond the chastisement God had in mind, God punished them even more severely; Assyria and Babylonia are gone, but Israel remains.

So I can see where Rev. Wright is coming from. His teaching has been called "Black Liberation Theology." Well, there is a spectrum of this "theology", and he is actually rather moderate. I dug out one salient societal indicator: the unemployment rate for those 20 and older:

• White: 6.6%
• Asian: 6.3%
• Latino: 10.3%
• Black: 14.1%

For teens, 16-19, the rate is about 22% for non-Blacks, and 38% for Blacks. To compare with a decade ago, just divide all these numbers by two, across the board. You can look up more accurate numbers, but half of today's rates are pretty close. Contemporary American life is hard on blacks.

It is clear, America has a ways to go to become race-blind. This is just one item that underlies black liberation theology. Nonetheless, it is not a Christian theology. Jesus had a lot bigger purpose than liberating people from government excesses. He worked to free us all from indwelling Sin! Rev. Wright does teach this, so I cannot say that his theology is non-Christian, nor anti-Christian as I once thought; yet it does have a theological element that is not Christian, but political.

We Whites also need liberation, though, from stereotypes, from our cultural and ethnic ignorance, from our assumed entitlement. But that is not an onus I place on Jeremiah Wright and his ilk. As a Christian leader among a congregation of my own (one of mixed races, though mainly Asian), that is my job.

She cannot leave well enough alone

kw: books, religion, false prophets

A friend loaned me a book asking for my opinion: Mary K. Baxter's A Divine Revelation of Hell, originally published in 1993; this was a recent paperback edition.

I read the book through very quickly. There was no need to peruse it in detail. This is not a review, but an assessment: The book is false. Period. The author is a false prophet. She has ten titles in print, most beginning with A Divine Revelation… All are products of an overactive imagination.

The book about hell owes more to Dante Alighieri and John Milton than to the Bible. A majority of those individuals that the author "interviewed" (actually, what she recorded are imagined dialogs between various lost souls and Jesus), are backslidden Christians of various kinds. Nobody depicted in the book seems to come from a non-Christian tradition or religion.

There is a simple matter of faith being attacked here: whether a genuine child of God could perish. Jesus declared not so, "Nobody can take them out of My hands." A disobedient child is still a child. Nobody who has been born again can become "unborn". God has a way to deal with disobedient children, and it is not Hell. Warning passages about God's discipline of His children are frequently mis-applied; none of them actually refers to Hell. Hell is for Satan and his angels; any human souls who wind up there chose to follow sin and Satan and reject God.

A book like this works against those who teach an accurate understanding of Hell. There really is a Satan, and there really is a Hell, but neither the devil, nor demons, nor Hell are anything like the gross distortions found in this book. The best course of action for God's people is still the old formula: teach what the Bible teaches, and where the Bible is silent, be silent.

Looking for trouble, he found it

kw: religion, biblical interpretation

A pastor named Mack Wolford died Wednesday after a snake bit him on his thigh. He'd been "handling" the timber rattler, a practice he claims proves your faith in a passage in the Gospel of Mark that reads, 

"And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover." (Mk 16:17-18, KJV)

The central phrase is often misquoted as, "They shall take up serpents, and suffer no harm." It doesn't say that. People also point to the case of Paul, when he was shipwrecked on Malta. While gathering wood for a fire, he was bitten by a viper. He suffered no ill effects.


No passage of Scripture stands alone. We find in Luke 4 the story of Jesus, tempted by the devil, being challenged to throw himself down from the top of the temple, because Psalm 91:11-12 declares that the angels would bear him up and prevent any harm. Jesus answered with Isaiah 7:12, "You shall not tempt the Lord your God."


This shows the difference between what happened to Paul and what happened, not only to Mack Wolford, but also to his father 29 years ago, and to quite a number of other "snake handlers". Paul didn't seek out the snake, and would not have picked it up if he had seen it beforehand. He almost certainly knew what Jesus had said about snakes, and poisoned drinks, and so forth. But he also knew, if you put God to the test, God may just leave you to suffer the consequences of your folly.


It occurs to me that the passage in Mark is much stronger regarding drinking poison. It does indeed declare, "If they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them." Where is the church of the rat-poison drinkers? Care for a battery acid cocktail? Any takers?

A nine by any other name

kw: words, religion, meanings, origins

I have had nearly no contact with monasticism, so it is only recently that I learned to what extent Catholic piety is tied to the old Roman concept of time. In the daily discipline of many monastic orders, there is a round of eight sets of prayers. With their approximate time of day they are

• Vigil – pre-dawn
• Laud – sunrise
• Prime – early morning
• Terce – midmorning
• Sext – noon
• None – midafternoon
• Vesper – early evening
• Compline – sunset or late evening

For a monk, you could say that "prime time" is about the time the rest of us are just getting up. But let us focus on the fourth, fifth and sixth: terce, sext and none. These words, compensating for two millennia of phonetic drift, are from the Latin words for 3, 6 and 9. In Roman Europe, sunrise marked the start of the day, and was "zero hour". A timekeeper would note when the Sun crossed the meridian, that is, when it was due south, and signal noon, or six hours into the day. Sunset was hour twelve, but was also zero hour for the night watches.

In the monastic orders that keep the old way, one or more timekeepers have the job to ring signal bells when these standard hours occur, so the monks can all pray the office of each hour. This is immortalized in a children's song:

Are you sleeping, are you sleeping,
Brother John, Brother John?
Morning bells are ringing, morning bells are ringing:
Ding, ding, dong. Ding ding dong.

In French it is more revealing:

Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques,
Dormez vouz, dormez vouz?
Sonnez les matines, Sonnez les matines!
Din, dan, don. Din, dan, don.

In the third line, the sleeping brother, who is late with his signal, is exhorted to ring the bells! (or else!!) Poor Brother John. The ninth hour of the night, or three AM, it is tough to keep watch for the rising of a certain star that informs him it is time to ring the Vigil bells. Three other astronomical phenomena, sunrise, Noon, and sunset, are at least easier to anticipate.

I haven't learned how they determined, in any accurate way, the other times. An hour glass would only work for part of the year, because in early days, the lengths of the hours were variable, tied to the interval between sunrise and sunset, and for night watches, the opposite interval. Of course, computers can keep accurate track of any time scheme they like, for more modern monks!

Now I turn to the word that started all this investigation: None. This is not the pronoun "none", an Old English word that means "not one" and rhymes with "fun" or "done". Instead, this word rhymes with "phone" or "stone", and originates from Latin "nonus" meaning nine. Sometimes written "nones", it initially referred to the ninth day of some sequence, such as the ninth day of the month, or of a long celebration. Only in the Sixteenth century was it added to the Divine Office as a prayer-time at three PM or thereabouts.

I find it an amusing coincidence that the pronoun "none", meaning "not one", rhymes also with "nun". Thus in spelling "none" (the pronoun) matches "none" (prayer time at the ninth hour), while in pronunciation "none" (the pronoun) rhymes with "nun" (a woman with a religious vocation).

Christ finds an Amish heart

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, autobiographies, memoirs, christian faith, religion

Ira Wagler was not a bad boy; neither was he an exceptionally good boy. He was an ordinary boy. If he was different in any way, it was that his heart was larger than the box of his upbringing, and that he longed to believe, but not blindly or unthinkingly. He has something of the soul of a Renaissance man, a keenly inquiring mind, and it is hard to keep such a person bound to unthinking tradition for long.

In Ira's case, it was impossible. Born and raised Old Order Amish, the culture to which he became accustomed is one of the most traditional, conservative and restrictive that Western life has to offer. His Amish community was not the tightest of the tight, not quite. The Amish that moved to Aylmer, Ontario, his parents among them, were seeking to found a colony that would be more pure, more tradition-bound than where they had been. Curiously, there are Amish who think the Aylmer community is too "loose" and "worldly", and will not take the bread and wine of communion with them. I wonder what Ira's life would have been like among them. Likely even shorter than his 26 years among his family's church in Aylmer, and later in Bloomfield, Iowa, and still later in other places.

Ira's book Growing Up Amish: A Memoir is a chronicle that begins in Ira's seventeenth year, when he first left to live among "the English", and ends in his twenty-sixth year, when he left for the fourth and last time, no longer to be an Amishman. You could call it a "life and hard times" book, and it surely is. You could call it a Quest, and it surely was. I find it most akin to The Girl Nobody Loved by Dorie Van Stone or The Woman at the Well by Dale Evans. It is a story of a lost soul being watched over by a loving God, finally to find God in grateful acceptance of His sacrifice for sins and His grace to live in His presence.

The book also provides a much-needed window into the lifestyle and ways of the Amish, which are a great mystery to most Americans, even those who live among them. I confess, though I live just over an hour from the "Amish capitol" of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and buy produce from Amish people at a local farmer's market; even though I have sat and talked with a few now and then, I have known little but that they were an ultra-conservative splinter from the Anabaptists known as Mennonites.

Because of their ultra-traditional way of life, I find in the Amish an exaggerated reflection of the experiences of my own, quite conservative Christian congregation. Christian communities everywhere that attempt to maintain a standard of purity while surrounded by "people of lower standards" experience quite a bit of contrarian activity among their children as they grow towards adulthood. The impulse to test boundaries is built into the human character, as illustrated by the story of Adam and Eve in the garden: There was but one rule, and only one, to not eat the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Of course, Genesis 3 begins with Eve hanging around near that tree, wondering why. The serpent is simply allegorical; she needed no prompting other than her own (slightly) rebellious thoughts. How bad could "just a taste" really be, after all? The rest of the Bible provides the answer: tragically bad, but God has a way of redemption.

How do we keep the youngsters from "impurity" and "worldliness"? One way is to eschew contact with that world. The communal Hutterites try to do so. But in some parts of Western North America, there are lots of ex-Hutterites. The Amish at least engage with the English, trading with us, getting jobs among us (if you want a deck built quickly and well, hire an Amish crew. Just be sure to provide transportation!). In the same way, I know quite a few folks who formerly followed a church life such as mine, that they have now left, either for a different "Christian brand" (denomination) or for a non-church kind of Christianity.

An old 1960s byword says it well: Different strokes for different folks. Or the French proverb: Chacun à son goût – each to his own taste. As much as any portion the "body of Christ" may attempt to be all-inclusive, it is not possible. What is liberating to some is stifling to others. Some are quite bored with others' greatest and most precious experiences. And sometimes, when a religious husk has replaced spiritual experience with mindless adherence to tradition, only the most mindless and dull folk will tolerate it. This is what Ira found.

Curiously, although the Amish are considered a Christian sect, the name Jesus never appears in the book, and it is only in the closing chapters that the title Christ is used in a personal way. In 25 years among Amish folk in several localities, Ira Wagler never heard anything remotely close to the Christian Gospel of salvation by receiving Jesus Christ's sacrifice for our sins. He was confronted, again and again, thousands of times, with rigid demands to conform, to perform, to, effectively, save himself by his own efforts. The only time he heard the Christian Gospel was from a friend he calls Sam, whom he met in the last Amish community in which he dwelt. And Sam was not born Amish.

The Amish do not take converts. They prefer to outbreed everyone else (Ira has ten siblings). If a person insists on joining them, they make it hard, very hard, almost damnably hard. You have to learn their dialect of German, memorize tons of their prayers, and go through a process that strongly resembles hazing. It takes years, before one is considered eligible for baptism. Sam had done so. It is obvious that he knew Christ beforehand. He sure didn't attain Christian faith among the Indiana Amish he had joined.

He was exactly what Ira needed. Why did Ira leave, and then return, three times? Primarily, though he wanted greater freedom, he did not want to be a lost soul. He was convinced that only the Amish could be saved. One who left after being baptized was excommunicated, consigned to the Devil, and bound for Hell. During his third return, Ira went through a process almost as tough as Sam's had been, to be reinstated a "member" of the Amish church. Yet he still felt lost, until Sam showed him the way of God's forgiveness in Christ. Only once Ira knew Christ for himself, and knew that it is God who forgives and God alone, did he leave his Amish past behind, his heart at peace.

This does not mean that one must leave the Amish to be saved. Far from it. They do have the Bible, and they do read it, though there is no mention in Ira's experiences of Bible reading for oneself. The Bible alone can lead a person to God. But Ira's experiences limn for us most clearly the difference between faith and religion. He was raised in the bosom of one of the most restrictive and traditional religions found on American soil. It was primarily fear that drove him back to it again and again. Once he attained faith, he was free of religion. He could have remained an Amishman, but the scars were too deep for that. He is a man in Christ now. He lives in Lancaster, a Mennonite, but not an Amishman.

If the best books make us think deeply about ourselves and our experiences, this may just be the best book I have read all year.

Barriers to communication

kw: social trends, religion

A couple days ago I had a mini-rant about atheism and theism, and since then I've been thinking about it from another angle. Any spectrum of opinion or attitude typically has about seven "positions", which represent "mental distance" and express the ranges over which communication is possible. My classic example is the abortion scale, or the "choice-versus-life axis". The great majority of people (at least in the West) fall into one of these groups:

1. "Abortion for any reason is a right that must be protected."
2. "Abortion is allowable under most circumstances, and such choices should be protected."
3. "What's the big deal?"
4. "Life should be protected from conception on, except under certain circumstances."
5. "All abortion is murder."
   

People in a two-position range (such as from 1 to 3) can communicate, though they may not agree on much. Two people who differ by more than two positions are not likely to understand one another at all, and groups 1 and 5 cannot communicate at all. Above I mentioned seven positions. Position 0 is "I'd kill to defend the right to choose" and position 6 is "I'd kill to prevent an abortion." Both kinds of killings have occurred, so these are not just theoretical.

Now to the religious divide. As a prelude, take a look at this Google Ngram that shows published accounts in English containing the words atheism, theism and deism, in order. Click on the chart to see it more clearly. You can see that atheism in its modern sense was practically invented about 1790, and the other two terms, now having a reason for being, came along for the ride. The heyday of atheism lasted until about 1900. These terms have a suspicious synchrony with a signal political event, the adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1789. People had no option to be openly atheistic in America prior to that date.

I deliberately left out the word Christian because it completely swamps all the others. In literature and much philosophy, "Christian" became synonymous with "human" by the end of the Enlightenment in Europe, so it is meaningless to pull statistics on it.

Like any new thing, atheism spiked to its greatest popularity in about a decade, then slowly waned for a half century, leaving a small, vocal group who are also the ones that most frequently use either "theism" or "deism" in their writings. Committed believers in a God or gods may use the term atheism, but very seldom the other two.

What then are the seven positions along the religion axis?

1. Evangelical theist: "I really believe in God, and I'd like to tell you about it."
2. Lukewarm theist: "Sure, I believe in God. I even go to church … usually."
3. Deist: "Yeah, there's a god out there, but we don't interfere with each other."
4. Agnostic: "I don't know (and I don't care)".
5. Nontheist or Atheist: "There are no supreme beings."

Again, I left off 0 and 6. These are the murderous ends of the spectrum. Let us take note, however, that historical slaughter in the name of religion was primarily political in nature; the perpetrators were typically entirely cynical about religion (that is a different axis, which crosses this one at position 3.5). In modern times, I would place those rare folks who call themselves "evangelical atheists" at about 5.5; not murderous, but more radical than the non-angry non-theists. Position 0 is possible (as is 6) but is much less commonly seen, at least outside China, than murderous pro-choice. I would then place the most extreme theists, those who want laws passed hindering atheistic practice, at 0.5; not murderous yet, but not far from it.

Where should governments stand? American experience has shown that the government is least damaging when it is slightly deist, in the 3.5 range, but not cynical. Rather, indifference is best.

The strongly theistic and the strongly atheistic among us cannot communicate meaningfully. Both can (barely) communicate with those in the middle, and they look to them for converts. The murderous extremes along any social spectrum need to be controlled by government. Otherwise, it is best to let folks argue it out their own way.

The newest evangelical religion

kw: religion, atheism, popular culture

It is all over the news today, locally at least, that the city authorities in West Chester, Pennsylvania are under pressure by atheists, nontheists and humanists to restore the display of a "Tree of Knowledge" along with other "holiday greetings" on city property. It seems the City had been allowing all faiths and non-faiths to put up displays on city property, but in 2010 banned them all in favor of a few banners with neutral slogans, such as "Happy Holidays", that had been deemed non-confrontational by the Supreme Court. Now the anti-religion folks plan a rally/protest in hopes of convincing the city otherwise.

Of course, they don't want "Merry Christmas" banners or nativity scenes restored, just their tree of knowledge display. This demonstrates they are not just pro-nontheism, but anti-theism. That is, evangelical atheists are actually anti-theist. They don't disbelieve in God, they hate God or any idea of any god.

There are two partially conflicting principles that underlie democratic institutions, at least in the US. One is to do the greatest good for the greatest number. The other is to protect the rights of minorities. On the first principle, the greatest number of Americans are either Christian or sympathetic to Christian principles, and the next largest group is Jewish or sympathetic to them. On the other principle, the First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees us the right to practice our various religions according to our conscience. It does not guarantee the right of anybody to oppose another's religion, or the lack thereof.

The First Amendment actually contains the "Establishment Clause", which prohibits the Federal Government from establishing a religion to be the nationally practiced standard excluding all others. Thus the intimate relationship between the English government and the Anglican Church, or the German government and the Lutheran Church, are disallowed for the U.S. government. On this basis, I agree that specifically religious displays on government owned properties should not be allowed. If a business permits a religious display on its premises, that is OK, and the government has no right to an opinion about such things.

Is the "Tree of Knowledge" a specifically religious display? I say that it is. In particular, it is an anti-reaction to the story in Genesis in which God requires Adam and his wife to refrain from eating the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil". Note that the tree's designation is not pertaining to all knowledge, but to knowledge of moral issues. God wanted them to ask Him about moral issues instead; this is the basic Christian interpretation of this passage, and I think most Jews agree.

Let the City of West Chester regulate its own public spaces without regard to religion. If the atheists and their friends can persuade a business to display their Tree, fine and dandy. I wonder what the upshot will be…

Intolerant religion

kw: religion, north american history

I have been reading about the three religious groups that founded Colonial America because among my ancestors I have immigrants of all three stripes: Puritans, Pilgrims, and Quakers. Some of what I have read is quite disturbing. Religious extremism, once it gains civil power, is trouble every time it is tried.

All three of these groups are well known in history as seekers of religious freedom. It is less well known that all three tried to establish theocracies in the New World, with differing levels of success, or rather, of un-success. A theocracy is by its nature intolerant, and the level of intolerance undermines its roots.

The least intolerant (I hesitate to say "most tolerant") were the Quakers. This is partly because they were the most persecuted, by not only the Catholics and Anglicans in England, but by the Puritans and Pilgrims of North America once they began to migrate to the Colonies. They learned about the dangers of intolerance and somehow became more tolerant themselves. This is not to say that they weren't intolerant, just less so by contrast, and they soon passed laws allowing most other groups to practice their religions unmolested. But they expected fellow Quakers to adhere to certain standards, and they had sanctions against those who failed to do so. Old Quaker meeting records are full of disciplinary notes, and many violations of "discipline", meaning their rules for conduct, were followed by a person or couple being disowned. Being disowned was a kind of excommunication, and was severe. No Quaker would trade with them any more and to make a living they had to go into exile.

The Puritans were, for a century, the most successful at forming a theocracy and making it stick. They became legendary for intolerance, and dissenters, including a number of Quakers, were hanged over the years. There was a long list of religious infractions for which a person could be fined, such as a few pence for missing Sabbath services, or jailed for varying lengths of time, or have property confiscated, and right up to hanging for serious heresy. The most infamous hangings were the 1692-3 killings of seventeen purported witches in Salem, Massachusetts.

The Pilgrims were in a middle ground. Religiously distinct from the Puritans, they avoided contact whenever possible, and there was little trade between Plymouth Colony (Pilgrims) and the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Puritans) until the two were politically merged in 1691. This followed a decree in 1689 from England mandating religious tolerance and an end to political sanctions against people for religious reasons. The Pilgrims of Plymouth had a list of infractions that they punished in various ways, just as extensive as the Puritans'. I don't read where they hanged anybody, but they were definitely hostile to Quakers, and suffered the hostility of the Puritans.

I find it ironic that all three groups fled intolerance in England, but it took the English Parliament's decree to force them to tolerate one another. It required a few centuries for this toleration to become enshrined as a kind of American virtue!

When Franklin blew it

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, medicine, vaccination, variolation, religion

Before the discovery of vaccination, there was variolation. The Variola virus causes smallpox, the most dreaded disease of antiquity. The Vaccinia virus causes the related zoonosis cowpox. Someone who survives infection by either virus is thereafter immune to both.

Centuries before Edward Jenner observed that milkmaids were immune to smallpox, it had been observed in Asia that people who caught smallpox by direct contact with someone who was mildly infected were much more likely to survive their infection. They also became immune to future infection. Asians developed the practice of infecting people with smallpox and caring for them during their illness. By 1700 the practice had spread to Africa and the Mideast. In 1716 in England and America, this became known to two people with the intelligence to understand its implications, and the influence to initiate the practice. In England, the proponent was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and in America, specifically Boston, it was Cotton Mather.

Lady Montagu's story is told elsewhere. The Pox and the Covenant: Mather, Franklin, and the Epidemic That Changed America's Destiny by Tony Williams tells of Cotton Mather and the "inoculation" controversy that sundered the Boston polity in 1721, created a turning point in the acceptance of the scientific method, and broke the power of the century-old Puritan Covenant.

Early in 1621, Cotton Mather had just turned 58 years old, and was at the peak of his powers as a Puritan preacher of great influence, both civil and religious, and also as a scientist—he was elected to the British Royal Society in 1713. He is often considered the finest mind of his generation in colonial America. He had been told by an African slave boy about the African method of preventing smallpox by making cuts in the skin and rubbing in pus from the pustules of a smallpox victim. The person thus inoculated would suffer a fever and break out with a relatively small number of pustules, and recover, now immune to smallpox infection.

Mather searched for earlier accounts of this practice, and soon found them. He might have saved himself a world of trouble by immediately discussing this with his British colleagues and the local physicians and scientists and fellow-ministers, but he kept the matter close for five years, expecting a smallpox epidemic to occur, as they did about once per generation; then he could reveal the matter and instigate a program to save the population from a severe plague.

There was a bit of vanity in this view, and he was blinded by simplistic thinking. When a smallpox epidemic began early in 1721, brought by the ship Seahorse from Barbados, Mather wrote a letter to all the local doctors explaining inoculation and referencing the literature (he knew better than to quote a slave). There was no reply. He waited, prayed, waited, and finally wrote again, and this time there was a response. One doctor, Zabdiel Boylston, responded favorably, by beginning to perform inoculations. He experimented with a small number and saw how they were only mildly affected, in contrast to longer fevers, greater pains, and a 30% death rate among those who acquired smallpox the ordinary way.

Shortly after this, the other doctors responded, with fierce opposition. They stirred the Selectmen to prohibit inoculation. Mather and Boylston took the fateful decision to quietly defy the authorities. Possibly due to the stature of Mather and Boylston, the authorities did not arrest them, but dithered. A withering flurry of publications ensued, primarily of the doctors of Boston against inoculation. Soon another pair of actors entered the fray. James Franklin and his young apprentice, his 16-year-old brother Benjamin, began to print the New England Courant, a weekly paper in which they pushed the limits of attacking convention, authority, and religion in particular. This paper quickly became the focus of anti-inoculation fervor.

The drama took months to play out, and in the main, the disease ran its course until it had infected nearly everyone who was not already immune. Among the immune were those who were inoculated. By the end of the epidemic, it was found that nearly 900 Bostonians had died of smallpox, of about 5,000 who were infected. This doesn't quite square with the 25% and 30% death rates quoted throughout the book, but 18% is still terrifying odds. By contrast, of 242 persons inoculated, only six died, a death rate of 2½%. This was enough for Mather and others to publish a tract showing statistically that inoculation was superior to letting nature run its course.

Curiously, within nine years, Benjamin Franklin became a proponent of inoculation. After the epidemic burned itself out, in 1722 Mather had extended an invitation to young Franklin, author of so many diatribes against him, to visit him at his home. It is not known what they discussed, but Franklin subsequently became, scientifically at least, a man much like Cotton Mather: very well-read, with wide scientific interests, and a keen desire not just to win an argument but to win over an opponent. Though Franklin as a youth was on the wrong side of history, as he matured he had the flexibility of mind to learn where he had been wrong and correct his course.

While science took a great step in the West at this time, the change in religious polity was equally profound. From 1630 to 1721 the Puritan Covenant in Boston and the Massachusetts Bay Colony had prevailed, and the people were generally in agreement with the spiritual rigors it entailed, and with the hegemony of religion in civil affairs. Dissension and heresy were censured, and in a few cases, dissidents were hanged. By the early 1700s this Covenant seemed to be weakening as "worldly" influences became stronger, but the intense opposition directed primarily at Mather in 1721 broke the back of the Covenant.

Some years earlier the Crown had mandated religious tolerance in the Colonies, in the wake of the Glorious Revolution in England in 1688. This hardly weakened the committed Puritans, and their ministers continued to be held in very high esteem, much the way Catholics today esteem Archbishops and Cardinals. This was shaken in 1721-1722, and came to an end by the time of the American Revolution. The powerful sermons of Jonathan Edwards in the 1740s were pretty much the last gasp of Puritan influence, although even in the mid-20^th Century "banned in Boston" was a common joke.

There is something we can learn from Cotton Mather, however. He risked everything for a scientific principle, as all his life he had risked everything for the sake of his faith. He saw "natural philosophy" and "natural theology" as handmaidens to one another. He understood the scientific method as well as any of his day, and believed that understanding the glories of nature and the worship of God went hand-in-hand. In contrast to the modern view of science and faith, best expressed by Steven Jay Gould as "non-overlapping magisteria", the Puritans embraced both. Without this embrace of science by the chief Puritan of his day, among those 242 inoculated Bostonians, another forty might have died.

Cotton Mather had dreams of saving the whole of Boston from the epidemic. He could save only a handful, but to that handful, that made all the difference. And indirectly, he brought in a turn toward a better attitude toward the men and women of God among us; that they are after all human, and deserve common respect, but are much better served by that alone than by the inflated esteem the "clergy" are often accorded. We would do well today to learn this of the Puritans: science and faith can work together. For myself and many others who are both scientists and people of faith, the "magisteria" overlap quite a bit.

Animals above

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, religion, animals, spirituality

"And to every animal of the earth and to every bird of heaven and to everything that creeps upon the earth, in which is a living soul,..." Genesis 1:30a (KJV has "breath of life" for "living soul", which isn't too bad, but the correspondence with the next quote is lost.)

"Jehovah God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul." Genesis 2:7

"For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the coming glory to be revealed upon us. For the anxious watching of the creation eagerly awaits the revelation of the sons of God. For the creation was made subject go vanity, not of its own will, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will also be freed from the slavery of corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans together and travails in pain together until now." Romans 8:18-22

Do animals have a place in the eternal plan of God? Or, if you prefer, in the "Summerland" and higher spiritual realms? When a pet rabbit died, Ptolemy Tompkins decided to find out, as he writes in The Divine Life of Animals: One Man's Quest to Discover Whether the Souls of Animals Live On. If he had a better translation of the Bible than the KJV with which he is almost certainly the most familiar, and if that familiarity were a bit deeper, his quest might have been shorter. The "groaning creation" mentioned by Paul in the Romans quote refers to animals, for it is unlikely that rocks or plants suffer.

In five longish chapters the author tours through twenty millennia of human (and animal) history, searching for the roots of modern attitudes in the beliefs of early societies and their remnants among peoples often called "primitive." While more "animistic" cultures imputed soul and intelligence to all things, even those we might call "inanimate," by some 2,500 years ago both Eastern and Western cultural traditions had evolved a rather bleak view of the afterlife. Traditions that believed in reincarnation or metempsychosis sought eventual escape from the endless round of incarnations, while both Greek and earlier Hebrew traditions had settled on the notion of a "shade," in which a departed soul did not enjoy the afterlife so much as endure it with a fading stoicism, tending to mindlessness.

While the much earlier traditions posited a rich interplay of humans with animal spirits, those cultures that began to think of animals as property gradually lost all thought of nonhuman animals as active agents or spiritual beings. Particularly with the rise of first Aristotelian materialism and then classical and modern science, the animals were thought of as instinct-driven robots that neither thought nor suffered. Just as a more cheerful view of the afterlife became common in the West, no place was imagined in it for animals.

But a more modern trend has restored a sense of spirituality to animals, at least in some circles. Tompkins found it among readers of the semi-Christian publication Guideposts, and when he wrote an article "Will My Pet go to Heaven?", he triggered a wave of correspondence that went on for years, and yielded a rich harvest of animal stories: stories of visions of departed pets running in an ever-green land of sunshine; of warnings of danger; and of dreams of communication with a loved animal that promised to wait at a Rainbow Bridge.

In his final chapter he concludes that we are the Rainbow Bridge and that our animals need us to cross over to the even better place that awaits us both. This somewhat echoes the Romans quote above, though Paul did not really have "heaven" in mind, as he also averred that God would bring his heavenly kingdom to Earth, a restored Earth with "corruption" banished.

There is further evidence in the Bible that God's kingdom has a place for animals, found in those mysterious passages about Cherubim in Ezekiel and The Revelation. In one passage, each of these has four faces on one head, the face of a lion, of an ox, of an eagle, and of a man. In the other, each of four creatures has one face of these four. Regardless, they represent before God, the human realm, two orders of the mammal realm, and one for birds. Then there are various passages about God's kingdom that speak of lions lying down with lambs, and the serpents losing their venom and becoming harmless. It's a pity Tompkins doesn't mention them. However, he tries to give more-or-less equal space to a number of religious traditions, so perhaps there simply wasn't room.

But let us think practically on one point. "Heaven" or whatever must be quite a bit larger than Earth. In human history, the number who have died probably amounts to between fifty and one hundred billion souls. Nearly all animals live shorter lives than we do, so the number of departed cats and dogs could outnumber departed humans by ten to one. The rats and mice and canaries and hummingbirds would outnumber those even further. Where does the admission ticket stop? With insects? With bacteria? God has to have some way to balance the heavenly kingdom, or the comparatively few humans present (!) will be lost amongst the animal denizens. If I am to be reunited with every cat I've ever owned, I think there will be more than forty. I also had three dogs, but none of them lived very long (cars got them all).

He concludes that at least the animals people have loved will be found in the afterlife. Perhaps. Let us then remember to keep our accounts short with our God, to make sure we don't "go elsewhere" and stand up our beloved pets where they wait for us!