God Doesn’t Belong in the Pledge of Allegiance

The simple fact is that the phrase, “one nation under God” contained in America’s current pledge of allegiance was not written by the author of the pledge but rather was inserted into the pledge in 1954, during the McCarthy era. Most people believe the pledge is much older than it really is often thinking it goes back to revolutionary times but actually the pledge was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy. He wrote it to be used in public schools to highlight the unity of children across the nation. Bellamy was a Baptist minister who was removed from the pulpit for preaching against the evils of capitalism. Bellamy was in fact a member of the Christian Socialist movement, which did not exist long. Bellamy believed in the separation of church and State and never included the word God anywhere within the pledge. When he was finished it read, “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” No God was written no God was intended and no God should be there and there wasn't one until 1954. In 1954 the phrase “under God” was added due to the political workings of conservative religious groups most strongly the Catholic Church. The phrase quickly gained support from many religious denominations. It was accepted and approved in large part because it was seen as an important way to separate and distinguish ourselves from the “evil and godless” Soviet Union even if it meant moving away from the intent of the constitution by putting God where he did not belong, in the State. The church has always been good at rewriting history but hopefully we've come to a time where we can restore the original words of the pledge of allegiance and thereby restore what was originally intended by it, just a simple symbol of American unity, which all Americans can confirm and solidarity with one another not with any God or gods.

We should restore the pledge

Victor J. Stenger-Godless Cosmology

(information about the author is at the end of the piece)








Godless Cosmology

In recent years Christian apologists have blatantly misled the public in claiming that no conflict exists between science and religion and that modern science actually has dramatically confirmed biblical teachings. For example, in his recent book, What’s So Great About Christianity, Dinesh D’Souza says:

In a stunning conformation of the book of Genesis, modern scientists have discovered that the universe was created in a primordial explosion of energy and light. Not only did the universe have a beginning in space and time, but the origin of the universe was also the beginning for space and time. If you accept that everything that has a beginning has a cause, then the material universe has a nonmaterial or spiritual cause. (1)

Every culture has its creation myths and the Bible has no monopoly on those stories. Furthermore, the story in Genesis bears no resemblance to that of modern cosmology. It has the Earth created before the Sun, Moon, and stars. Actually, Earth formed eight billion years after the first stars. The Bible can hardly be credited with predicting the expanding universe described by the Big Bang when it depicts the universe as a firmament with Earth fixed and immobile at its center.

D’Souza’s main claim, however, is that the Big Bang showed that the universe, including space and time, began as a singularity of infinitesimal size and infinite density. For 30 years Christian apologist William Lane Craig has argued that everything that begins must have a cause and, since the universe had a beginning, it must have had an external cause. (2) Craig identifies that cause with the first cause or prime mover of Aristotle and Aquinas that they called God.

Craig bases his conclusions on the mathematical proof made by Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose in 1970 that the universe began as a singularity. (3) Hawking and Penrose’s conclusion followed from Einstein’s general theory of relativity. What D’Souza, Craig, and other theists ignore is that more than 20 years ago Hawking and Penrose withdrew their claim and agreed that no singularity occurs when you take into account quantum mechanics. D’Souza refers to page 53 of Hawking’s 1988 bestseller A Brief History of Time, where Hawking is supposed to say: “There must have been a Big Bang singularity.” (4) I have not been able to find this statement on that or any other page in Hawking’s book. In fact, a few pages earlier Hawking says just the opposite:

So in the end our [Hawking and Penrose] work became generally accepted and nowadays nearly everyone assumed that the universe started with a Big Bang singularity. It is perhaps ironic that, having changed my mind, I am now trying to convince other physicists that there was in fact no singularity at the beginning of the universe – as we shall see later, it can disappear once quantum effects are taken into account. (5)

When I debated with William Lane Craig in Hawaii in 2003, I carefully explained the fact that Penrose and Hawking had withdrawn their proposal. Nevertheless, when I heard him talk a few months later on the University of Colorado campus, he was still using the singularity argument to provide evidence for a creator. As of this writing, his website has not corrected his 1991 paper that once again says that the universe began with infinite density. (6)

There simply was no singularity at the start of the Big Bang, and there is no basis to the claim that the universe, much less space and time, began at that point by the act of a creator or outside force. Indeed, modern cosmology points to a limitless universe that has no beginning or end in space and time, with the Big Bang an episode within the larger universe that led to that subuniverse we call home.

But even if we grant that the universe had a beginning, this does not imply that it had a cause. D’Souza refers to me: “Physicist Victor Stenger says the universe may be ‘uncaused’ and may have ‘emerged from nothing.’” He scoffs: “Even David Hume, one of the most skeptical of all philosophers, regarded this position as ridiculous…Hume wrote in 1754, ‘I have never asserted so absurd a proposition as that anything might rise without cause.’” (7)

Hume can be excused for not knowing quantum physics in 1754, but D’Souza and Craig cannot today, more than a century since its discovery. They are wrong in their assertion that everything that begins must have a cause. According to conventional interpretations of quantum mechanics, nothing “causes” the atomic transitions that produce light or the nuclear decays that produce nuclear radiation. These happen spontaneously and only their probabilities are determined.

In 1983 Hawking and James Hartle produced a model for the natural origin of our universe that today remains fully consistent with all we know from physics and cosmology. (8) This is just one of a number of natural scenarios that have been published by reputable scientists in reputable scientific journals. (9) In one variation of the Hartle-Hawking model, following the review by David Atkatz, (10) our universe appeared by a process of quantum tunneling from an earlier universe that extended back into our past without limit. That tunneling passes through a region of total chaos. I have worked out this model in full mathematical detail and published it in both a book and an article in a philosophical journal. (11)

All the published scenarios for a natural origin of our universe are consistent with existing knowledge. However, none has been proven unique. So, while we cannot say this is exactly how our universe came to be, the fact that we have several completely worked out scenarios refutes any claim that a supernatural cause was required to produce the universe.

Cosmological models such as that of Hartle and Hawking and more general considerations indicate that our universe at the earliest moment was a black hole of maximum entropy – this is, total chaos and minimal or no coherent information. This means that they early universe contained no information from any prior state. If a creator existed, our universe has no memory of him.

Now, although the initial entropy of the universe was maximal, that maximum was still very low because the universe at the time was very small. As the volume of the universe increases, the maximum entropy increases. This leaves room for order to form without violation the second law of thermodynamics.

No input of special information was needed for the Big Bang and no laws of physics were violated when it appeared 13.7 billion years ago. Recent measurements of the average energy density of the universe give exactly the value it should have if the total energy at the beginning of the Big Bang were zero. That is, no outside energy was required to make our universe. The total energy of the universe is zero, with the positive energy of motion exactly canceled by the negative potential energy of gravity.

Theologians such as Alvin Plantinga have tried to make much of these kinds of close balance, claiming that they were “fine-tuned” by God to make humanity possible. Any slight energy imbalance in the early universe, as small as one part in ten to the sixtieth, and either the universe would have collapsed too fast for life to form, or it would have expanded so quickly that stars would not have had a chance to form. (12)

This is another example, in this case a highly ironic one, where theologians’ ignorance of physics leads them to mislead themselves and others. Indeed, the balance between positive and negative energy is highly precise because the universe was not created but came into being naturally from nothing with zero energy. Far from helping to prove that God exists, this example provides just one more reason to believe he does not.

Let us look further at the claim that the constants of physics are so finely tuned that, without that tuning, life as we know it would not exist. This argument is often called the anthropic principle. (13) The weak version of this principle is trivial. Of course we live in a universe in which the constants of nature are suited for us. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t be here.

In the stronger version of the anthropic principle, the constants somehow were chosen to produce us. Theists say it was God’s doing. Scientists have proposed an alternative in which there are multiple universes with different constants and so, by the weak anthropic principle, we are in the universe suited for us.

Many theists have ridiculed the idea of multiple universes, saying it is unscientific since we cannot observe the other universes. They also claim that the multi-universe hypothesis violates Occam’s razor by “multiplying entities beyond necessity.” However, science often deals with the directly unobservable, and multiple universes are suggested by modern cosmological theories that agree with all existing data.

Furthermore, Occam’s razor deals with hypotheses, not objects. The atomic model multiplied the number of objects we had to deal with by a trillion trillion, yet it was more parsimonious than the models that preceded it. Similarly, since we need to introduce an additional hypothesis to limit ourselves to a single universe, it is the single universe model that violates Occam’s razor.

But even in a single universe, the fine-tuning argument fails. It says nothing about life as we don’t know it. We have no way of estimating how many different forms of life might be possible with different constants and laws of physics.

What is more, our universe does not look at all finely tuned for human life. We can only exist on this tiny planet. The universe visible from Earth contains a hundred billion galaxies, each with a hundred billion stars. The distance between stars is so vast by human standards that we will never make a bodily appearance outside our own solar system. Furthermore, more universe – of at least 50 orders of magnitude – lies beyond our horizon. The universe we see with our most powerful telescopes, out to some 40 billion light years, is but a grain of sand in the Sahara. Yet we are supposed to think that a supreme being exists who follows the path of every particle, while listening to every human thought, guiding his favorite football teams to victory, and assuring that the specially chosen survive plane crashes.

Besides, why would a perfect, omnipotent God have to twiddle any knobs to fine-tune the universe for humanity? He’s God. He should have got it right in the first place. He could have made it possible for us to live anyplace, even in outer space.

Finally, let me address probably the most common question theists ask atheists, one they smugly think is the final clincher on the case for God: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” This is called the primordial existential question. The eminent philosopher Adolf Grunbaum has shown that the question is ill-conceived because it assumes that the natural state of affairs is “nothing” and that some cause was necessary to bring “something” into existence. (14)

That argument can be supplemented with a physics argument that something is more natural than nothing. Material systems in nature tend to change spontaneously from simpler and symmetric states to more complicated and asymmetric states. For example, in the absence of external energy (heat), water vapor will condense into liquid water, which will then freeze into ice. Since nothing is simpler than something, we expect it to change spontaneously into something. As the Nobel prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek said when he was asked why there is something rather than nothing: “Nothing is unstable.” (15)

We can also show that the laws of physics are just what they should be if the universe came from nothing. (16) The stars, planets, mountains, and your and I are simply frozen nothing.

Endnotes
1. Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great About Christianity? (Washington, DC: Regenery Publishing, Inc., 2007), p. 116
2. William Lane Craig, The Kalam Cosmological Argument. Library of Philosophy and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1979).
3. Stephen W. Hawking and Roger Penrose, “The Singularities of Gravitational Collapse and Cosmology,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, series A, 314, (1970): 529-48.
4. D’Souza, What’s So Great About Christianity?, pp. 121-2.
5. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time From the Big Bang to Black Holes (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), p. 50.
6. William Lane Craig, “The Existence of God and the Beginning of the Universe,” Truth: A Journal of Modern Thought 3 (1991): 85-96; available online at www.leaderu.com/truth/3thruth11.html (accessed July 31, 2008).
7. D’Souza, What’s So Great About Christianity? P. 125, citing Victor J. Stenger, “Has Science Found God?” Free Inquiry 19/1 (Winter 1998/1999): 56-8, and J.Y.T. Greid, ed., The Letters of David Hume (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), p. 187.
8. James B. Hartle and Stephen W. Hawking, “Wave Function of the Universe,” Physical Review D28 (1983): 2960-75.
9. Alexander Vilenkin, “boundary Conditions and Quantum Cosmology,” Physical Review D33 (1986): 3560-9.
10. David Atkatz, “Quantum Cosmology for Pedestrians,” American Journal of Physics 62 (1994): 619-27.
11. Victor J. Stenger, The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From? (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007), pp. 312-19. “A Scenario for a Natural Origin of Our Universe,” Philo 9/2 (2006): 93-102; available online at www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Godless/Origin.pdf (accessed August 8, 2008).
12. Alvin Plantinga, “The Dawkins Confusion: Naturalism ad absurdum,” Books and Culture 13/2 (March/April 2007): 21; available online at www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2007/002/1.21.html (accessed August 8, 2008).
13. John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
14. Adolf Grunbaum, “The Poverty of Theistic Cosmology,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 55 (2004): 561-614, axh401.
15. Frank Wilczek, “The Cosmic Asymmetry between Matter and Antimatter,” Scientific American 243/6 (1980): 82-90.
16. Stenger, The Comprehensible Cosmos.

About the Author
Victor J. Stenger received a bachelor's of science degree in electrical engineering from Newark College of Engineering (now New Jersey Institute of Technology) in 1956. He then received a master's of science degree in physics from UCLA in 1959 and a PhD in physics in 1963. He then took a position on the faculty of the University of Hawaii, retiring to Colorado in 2000. He currently is emeritus professor of physics at the University of Hawaii and adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. Dr. Stenger is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a research fellow of the Center for Inquiry. Dr. Stenger has also held visiting positions on the faculties of the University of Heidelberg in Germany, Oxford in England (twice), and has been a visiting researcher at Rutherford Laboratory in England, the National Nuclear Physics Laboratory in Frascati, Italy, and the University of Florence in Italy.

His research career spanned the period of great progress in elementary particle physics that ultimately led to the current standard model. He participated in experiments that helped establish the properties of strange particles, quarks, gluons, and neutrinos. He also helped pioneer the emerging fields of very high-energy gamma-ray and neutrino astronomy. In his last project before retiring, Dr. Stenger collaborated on the underground experiment in Japan that in 1998 showed for the first time that the neutrino has mass. The Japanese leader of this experiment shared the 2002 Nobel Prize for this work.

Victor Stenger has had a parallel career as an author of critically well-received popular-level books that interface between physics and cosmology and philosophy, religion, and pseudoscience. These include: Not by Design: The Origin of the Universe (1988); Physics and Psychics: The Search for a World beyond the Senses (1990); The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology (1995); Timeless Reality: Symmetry, Simplicity, and Multiple Universes (2000); Has Science Found God? The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe (2003); The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From? (2006); God: The Failed Hypothesis--How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist (2007); Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness (2009); The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason (2009). God: The Failed Hypothesis made the New York Times Best Seller List in March 2007.

Dr. Stenger maintains a popular Web site (a thousand hits per month), where much of his writing can be found, at http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger.

Salman Rushdie-Imagine There's No Heaven

This is an essay by Salman Rushdie titled-Imagine There’s No Heaven: A Letter to the Six Billionth World Citizen, which can be found in the book The Portable Atheist ed. by Christopher Hitchens. Rushdie is truly a great writer and offers the valuable perspective of a person raised in the Muslim minority of India. But I will Rushdie speak for himself and add a few minor thoughts of my own at the end.

Christopher Hitchens introduces this essay saying:

Born a Muslim in the year that his Indian homeland was fatally sundered by religious partition and war, Salman Rushdie has achieved global renown for his novels and for the way in which they illuminate cross-cultural migrations. In 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini publicly offered money in his own name to suborn his murder, adding the inducement of a ticket to paradise for anyone willing to take the bribe. Ever since, Rushdie has come to symbolize the defense of free expression and unfettered literary activity (it was his novel The Satanic Verses that was also the object of Khomeini’s mad rage) as well as the right of any person to apostatize from religion. In 1997, Rushdie contributed a letter to a UN-sponsored anthology, addressed to the six-billionth human child who was expected to be born that year. In consequence of Rushdie’s contribution, the ever-courageous Kofi Annan, who was at the time Secretary-General, withdrew his own introduction to the volume. Mr. Rushdie very handsomely agreed to update and expand his letter for this collection.

Dear Little Six Billionth Living Person,

As the newest member of a notoriously inquisitive species, it probably won’t be too long before you start asking the two sixty-four thousand dollar questions with which the other 5,999,999,999 of us have been wrestling for some time: How did we get here? And, now that we are here, how shall we live?

Oddly—as if six billion of us weren’t enough to be going on with—it will almost certainly be suggested to you that the answer to the question of origins requires you to believe in the existence of a further, invisible, ineffable Being “somewhere up there,” an omnipotent creator whom we poor limited creatures are unable even to perceive, much less to understand. That is, you will be strongly encouraged to imagine a heaven with a least one god in residence. This sky-god, it’s said, made the universe by churning its matter in a giant pot. Or he danced. Or he vomited Creation out of himself. Or he simply called it into being, and lo, it Was. In some of the more interesting creation stories, the single mighty sky-god is subdivided into many lesser forces—junior deities, avatars, gigantic metamorphic “ancestors” whose adventures create the landscape, or the whimsical, wanton, meddling, cruel pantheons of the great polytheisms, whose wild doings will convince you that the real engine of creation was lust: for infinite power, for too-easily-broken human bodies, for clouds of glory. But it’s only fair to add that there are also stories which offer the message that the primary creative impulse was, and is, love.

Many of these stories will strike you as extremely beautiful and, therefore, seductive. Unfortunately, however, you will not be required to make a purely literary response to them. Only the stories of “dead” religions can be appreciated for their beauty. Living religions require much more of you. So you will be told that belief in “your” stories and adherence to the rituals of worship that have grown up around them must become a vital part of your life in the crowded world. They will be called the heart of your culture, even of your individual identity. It is possible that they may, at some point, come to feel inescapable, not in the way that the truth is inescapable, but in the way that a jail is. They may at some point cease to feel like the texts in which human beings have tried to solve a great mystery, and feel, instead, like the pretexts for other properly anointed human beings to order you around. And it’s true that human history is full of the public oppression wrought by the charioteers of the gods. In the opinion of religious people, however, the private comfort that religion brings more than compensates for the evil done in its name.

As human knowledge has grown, it has also become plain that every religious story ever told about how we got here is quite simply wrong. This, finally, is what all religions have in common. They didn’t get it right. There was no celestial churning, no maker’s dance, no vomiting of galaxies, no snake or kangaroo ancestors, no Valhalla, no Olympus, no six-day conjuring trick followed by a day of rest. Wrong, wrong, wrong. But here’s something genuinely odd. The wrongness of the scared tales hasn’t lessened the zeal of the devout. If anything, the sheer out-of-step zaniness of religion leads the religious to insist ever more stridently on the importance of blind faith.

As a result of this faith, by the way, it has proved impossible in many parts of the world to prevent the human race’s numbers from swelling alarmingly. Blame the overcrowded planet at least partly on the misguidedness of the race’s spiritual guides. In your own lifetime, you may well witness the arrival of the nine billionth world citizen. If you’re Indian (and there’s a one-in-six chance that you are) you will be alive when, thanks to the failure of family planning schemes in that poor, God-ridden land, its population surges past China’s. And if too many people are being born as a result, in part, of religious strictures against birth control, then too many people are also dying because religious culture, by refusing to face the facts of human sexuality, also refuses to fight against the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

There are those who say that the great wars of the new century will once again be wars of religion, jihads, and crusades, as they were in the Middle Ages. Even though, for years now, the air has been full of the battle-cries of the faithful as they turn their bodies into God’s bombs, and the screams of their victims too, I have not wanted to believe this theory, or not in the way most people mean it.

I have long argued that Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” theory is an oversimplification: that most Muslims have no interest in taking part in religious wars, that the divisions in the Muslim world run as deep as the things it has in common (just take a look at the Sunni-Shia conflict in Iraq if you doubt the truth of this). There’s very little resembling a common Islamic purpose to be found. Even after the non-Islamic Nato fought a war for the Muslim Kosovar Albanians, the Muslim world was slow in coming forward with much-needed humanitarian aid.

The real wars of religion, I have argued, are the wars religions unleash against ordinary citizens within their “sphere of influence.” They are wars of the godly against the largely defenseless: American fundamentalists against pro-choice doctors, Iranian mullahs against their country’s Jewish minority, the Taliban against the people of Afghanistan, Hindu fundamentalists in Bombay against that city’s increasingly fearful Muslims.

And the real wars of religion are also the wars religions unleash against unbelievers, whose unbearable unbelief is re-characterized as an offense, as a sufficient reason for their eradication.

But as time has passed I have been obliged to recognize a hard truth: that the mass of so-called ordinary Muslims seems to have bought into the paranoid fantasies of the extremists and seems to spend more of its energy in mobilizing against cartoonists, novelists, or the Pope than in condemning, disenfranchising, and expelling the fascistic murderers in their midst. If this silent majority allows a war to be waged in its name, then it does, finally, become complicit in that war.

So perhaps a war of religion is beginning, after all, because the worst of us are being allowed to dictate the agenda to the rest of us, and because the fanatics, who really mean business, are not being opposed strongly enough be “their own people.”

And if that is so, then the victors in such a war must not be the closed-minded, marching into battle with, as ever, God on their side. To choose unbelief is to choose mind over dogma, to trust in our humanity instead of all these dangerous divinities. So, how did we get here? Don’t look for the answer in “sacred” storybooks. Imperfect human knowledge may be a bumpy, pot-holed street, but it’s the only road to wisdom worth taking. Virgil, who believed that the apiarist Aristaeus could spontaneously generate new bees from the rotting carcass of a cow, was closer to a truth about origins than all the revered old books.

The ancient wisdoms are modern nonsenses. Live in your own time, use what we know, and as you grow up, perhaps the human race will finally grow up with you and put aside childish things.

As the song says, It’s easy if you try.

As for morality, the second great question—how to live? What is right action, and what wrong?—it comes down to your willingness to think for yourself. Only you can decide if you want to be handed down the law by priests and accept that good and evil are somehow external to ourselves. To my mind religion, even at its most sophisticated, essentially infantilizes our ethical selves by setting infallible moral Arbiters and irredeemably immoral Tempters above us: the eternal parents, good and bad, light and dark, of the supernatural realm.

How, then, are we to make ethical choices without a divine rulebook or judge? Is unbelief just the first step on the long slide into the brain-death of cultural relativism, according to which many unbearable things—female circumcision, to name just one—can be excused on culturally specific grounds, and the universality of human rights, too, can be ignored? (This last piece of moral unmaking finds supporters in some of the world’s most authoritarian regimes, and also, unnervingly, on the op-ed pages of the Daily Telegraphy.)

Well, no, it isn’t, but the reasons for saying so aren’t clear cut. Only hard-line ideology is clear cut. Freedom, which is the word I use for the secular-ethical position, is inevitable fuzzier. Yes, freedom is that space in which contradiction can reign; it is a never-ending debate. It is not in itself the answer to the question of morals but the conversation about that question.

And it is much more than mere relativism because it is not merely a never-ending talk-shop but a place in which choices are made, values defined and defended. Intellectual freedom, in European history, has mostly meant freedom from the restraints of the Church, not the state. This is the battle Voltaire was fighting, and it’s also what all six billion of us could do for ourselves, the revolution in which each of us could play our small, six-billionth part: once and for all, we could refuse to allow priests, and the fictions on whose behalf they claim to speak, to be the policemen of our liberties and behavior. Once and for all, we could put the stories back into the books, put the books back on the shelves, and see the world undogmatized and plain.

Imagine there’s no heaven, my dear Six Billionth, and at once the sky’s the limit.



My Thoughts
Rushdie’s observations ring very true to me though I know just from my own personal journey how horribly misguided they would have sounded not too long ago. But as one takes the time to study world history, religious theologies, ethics, literary criticism, and modern science it is hard not to see the strength of Rushdie’s critiques.

Rushdie believes that it is the internal conflict being battled within each of the “live religions” of today that often affects how each religion ultimately interacts with the rest of the world. And as is often the case it tends to be the extremist and fanatics that speak the loudest on behalf of their religions causing all others who share their name to be lumped in with them. I spent much of my youth trying to separate and explain my version of Christianity from Christian “fundamentalists.” Looking back it is scary to see how fundamental I was. But thankfully I was never the fanatic necessary to seek to gain power (by any means necessary) so as to dictate to the rest of the world how they must live, according to God of course. Whether for good or bad, it really is those people, which stand for a more modern, intelligent and respectful version of their religions who have to do the heavy lifting when it comes to protecting the rest of us from the twisted views and perverted goals of their extremists. Sadly unbelievers (really just believers of different things) will never be trusted enough to be truly listened to on matters of faith.

Fundamentalism is on the rise. When looking at what we know about the world and universe we live in today compared to just a hundred years ago the difference is staggering yet Rushdie fittingly notes, “But here’s something genuinely odd. The wrongness of the scared tales hasn’t lessened the zeal of the devout. If anything, the sheer out-of-step zaniness of religion leads the religious to insist ever more stridently on the importance of blind faith.” This concept of blind faith is truly interesting for I believe Rushdie is right, in light of human knowledge today, to call the faith it takes to maintain so many of the clearly false teachings of religion, blind. If one goes back in history faith was not nearly as blind as it is today because quite simply the faith that was taught and required of people matched up with what they knew of the world and how it worked. Biblical cosmology worked when the world was flat and the earth was the unmoving center of the universe. Biblical history provided a clear picture of the past because it was simply accepted as accurate. No analysis or dating of the texts mattered nor did historical records and information from non-biblical sources rather everything happened as the text said. Biblical laws and ethics were accepted as divine and therefore good before any concept of human rights and equality existed to challenge them. But as our knowledge has grown exposing more and more religious beliefs as fallacious faith had to become more extreme, more hardened and ultimately more blind. It really is an oddity worth noting; it takes more faith to be a religious believer today then it did previously in history. Modern faith must manipulate and ignore so much information that it truly must be “praised” as blind.

What Took God So Long?

I can't help but ask anyone who believes in any form of the Abrahamic God what took God so long to show up and do anything for humanity?

The earth is around 4.5 billion years old and human beings, in their current form, have been around at least 200,000 years but the God of Abraham (the God of the Jews, Christians and Muslims) doesn't show up until 4 or 5 thousand years ago. Abraham and his covenant with God is roughly 4,000 years ago, Moses supposedly the author of the Pentateuch is only 3500 years ago, Jesus who Christians claim is God who had to become a human to save us, doesn't bother to show up until only 2,000 years ago then finally Muhammad the seal of the prophets doesn't come onto the scene until about 1400 years ago. That's at least 195,000 years without the God of Abraham and even since then that God has been involved with far fewer people on this planet than have existed during that time. So if humanity is truly the crown of creation, made in the image of God whom God loves and wanted to be in a relationship with, where was God during all that time? Quite simply, what took so long?



Please know this isn't meant to be a rhetorical question. Any and all thoughts are welcome.

A Friendly Exchange Concerning Cherry-Picking

I recently wrote a blog entry called "Cherry-Picking Sacred Texts: An Obvious Double Standard" (For those who have not read it check it out here ) Among those who read it I got one response from a friend of a friend whose name is Nate Sauve. We had a long exchange on Facebook over the course of a week that began with his response to my blog but then veered into various other topics. It was clear both of us spent time on our responses to one another. Nate was gracious and thoughtful and the exchanges never turned into angry diatribes or needless name calling. I found the exchange valuable and informative and so wanted to share it.

Nate Sauve
I've often thought about this myself, as I have come to learn the misogynistic aspects of Muslim teaching come from similar logical positions as the Christian idea that there are distinct roles for men and women. I've also wanted Muslims to acknowledge where their philosophical system breaks down, but been at ease with the paradox's of the Christian faith. Other than some of the largely misleading historical broad strokes and obviously the overall conclusion, I think the post raises good questions that more believers need to deal with more honestly.

Zach Dills
I want to thank you for taking the time to look at my piece and sharing your thoughts. I just had one question. You say there are "largely misleading historical broad strokes" used and I just wanted to ask you where you see that? I don't believe I spoke of any historical situations (specific or general) and in fact I intentionally sought not to, to avoid getting away from my main point so I was just curious what you saw that led you to say that? I ask because I'm always trying to be aware of my own generalizations and not make too many over blown proclamations in particular when it comes to history.

The only spot I can see is perhaps you are referring to Mark Twain's writing? In which case I agree he uses a few very broad stokes, particularly in the beginning of the piece when he speaks of what the Church taught for 1800 years, which I do not agree with though I think he was intentionally using a bit of hyperbole to make a point. Either way I love his writing and believe his specific examples concerning slavery and witchcraft are right on and even his broad strokes are not that misleading.

anyway thanks again for reading and providing feedback it's very helpful as I seek to be aware of my own biases and since I know that my own search for truth is not done.


Nate Sauve
Yeah, my beef is only with Twain, heh. Whereas the Catholic church position was that slavery was wrong in that it denied the humanity of Africans (officially in 1839)It was actually the broader Church that was at the forefront of the emancipation movement. (To be fair, there were denominational splits North v. South in every major denomination as there were many "establishment" churches that cowed to the economic interests of their parishioners.) I guess being a Southern boy he only saw the dark side. Interestingly, the Catholic Church came out against slavery long before Twain did.

With regard to Witches. There are today an estimated 700-800,000 self proclaimed witches (wiccans). Based on some pretty sketchy numbers at wikipedia and Adherents.com

Christian teaching is different from Muslim teaching in this regard (ie: we shouldn't kill them accordnig to some ancient code) whereas Islamic teaching seeks to implement sharia law wherever it can, Christians are expected to uphold the laws of the government that they live under. Romans 13. This distinction helps us understand which aspects of the OT were civil laws (for ancient Israel, not to be implemented today) and which provide timeless guidance. Helps, but doesn't make things perfectly clear as we then disagree on which laws fall into which category.

Thanks for making me think and reminding me of this lesson. Its some good reading.

Zach Dills
Thanks for the response Nate. This of course could turn into a whole other paper but I disagree with you about the church being at the forefront of the emancipation movement. Most of the headliners in the emancipation movement, while they believe in some form of the Christian God, get pushed out of their churches as a threat to clerical and biblical authority both in the North and the South and the emancipation movement becomes one that is heavily filled with those who become (somewhat out of necessity ) anti-authoritarian towards conservative Christian churches. Many important emancipation leaders get labeled as atheists or infidels (not in the current sense but just its literal meaning 'unfaithful') Plus at the end of the day the fact that it took over 1800 years for any Christians to stand up against slavery says more against the Church then it does for it. I agree with what Twain notes, the Church (Protestant and Catholic) only changes when it has too.

As far as Romans 13 goes after the 4th century and the fall of Rome the Church was the government. It made and enforced all the laws it wanted which included killing or punishing any seen threat to the Church (witch, Jew, homosexual, Sabbath breakers and many others) The idea that the Old Testament is an ancient code applicable only to Israel and not to today is again a fairly new development in history and only occurs after power is taken away from the Church by secular governments. The Church had it's own Sharia law but was forced to give it up so the terrible laws of the Old and New Testament stopped being used (not all of them) because they had to not because it wanted to or believe God no longer willed it.

Again this could go on for a long time but it is fun.

Oh one more thing. I was a Jewish Studies major for my undergrad and one thing that has always stuck with me and cut at me as a Christian and was an important part of leading me to ultimately reject the Church is the clear anti-Semitic tradition of the Christianity and the New Testament. I can say easily that Islam has always been better then Christianity when it came how they treated Jews and tolerated Judaism and generally speaking Muslims have been better about tolerating Christians than the other way around. Obviously a lot has changed in the past 100 to 200 years but I again I wouldn't give the Church a ton of credit for the positive changes.

thanks again

Nate Sauve
Zach, Can you provide more support for that first paragraph? As I look around it seems to me that the primary movers in the emancipation movement were deeply entrenched in mainline Northern Christianity, as well as those in the British movement. Harriot Beecher Stowe was from a long line of Prominent New England pastors including Lyman Beecher. Frederick Douglass taught Sunday School, The Second Great Awakening had a profound impact on the abolitionist movement. It was the evangelical church pushing this agenda forward in the North even as in the South the same denominations were fighting for the status quo. Which led to the denominational splits as I said before. Again I think it's financial motivation at the expense of the truth, which is (interestingly enough) the same thing that made the church so corrupt once it came to power in Constantine's day. I don't think the evil performed by the Catholic church of the Middle ages was application of Biblical teaching, but rather abuse of biblical teaching to retain and manipulate the poor for the sake of the powerful elite. I don't think the church has a unique claim to that human abuse of power. They just happened to be in power for a long time and got quite good at throwing their weight around.

Historically, slavery was weeded out of the Midieval church as a social institution, replaced by not too much better models of feudalism, which in turn is replaced by not much better models of today...especially internationally for the sake of cheap products in the US.

Anyway, the church in line with Paul's teaching went to feudalism with the belief that slavery of a fellow Christian was wrong, seeing as all questions that were considered were in the realm of Christendom at the time. It wasn't really until the colonialism of the European nations that the question of, "Is slavery justifiable?" was broached again. One way the Biblical mandates were worked around was by devaluing the ones to be enslaved, the "savages" were deemed less then human and the issue was effectively worked around. Primarily by those with financial incentives...

Again, this is my rendition of the history, of course it is through my rose colored glasses hoping to see the church for what it should have been, rather than what it always was. As I said, more support for that first paragraph would help me see that the establishment church pushed them out, or that the ones leading the charge were primarily of a more deistic bent than not.

one more thing. I did a paper on Luther and the Jews once. Basically, his early writings hit the note of "no wonder the Jews aren't converting, look at how the Catholics treat them.' Then when they didn't accept his understanding of the Gospel he began to rail against them and practice a form of anti semitism himself. It's sad how Germany had such a large population of Jews do to their overall tolerance (compared to European nations which performed inquisitions). This same tolerance provided Jews an opportunity to work and trade and flourish in Germany only to be violently reacted against by the humanistic world-view of the Nazi's, supported by Luther's angry and evil words and the Catholic church's silence. Thankfully there was the Bonhoeffer confessing church, true believers among the only ones standing against the atrocities of the powerful.

Zach Dills
Concerning the abolitionist movement it is important to see that it isn’t a unified movement and become divided into various groups. The two biggest dividing factors were first, the issue of gradual verses immediate emancipation and second, the role of women in the movement and women’s rights as a whole. The connection between abolitionism and early feminism is very important. Now concerning the two issues the greater number of orthodox evangelicals supported both gradual emancipation and a rejection of women’s individual rights while those that supported immediate emancipation along with women’s individual rights were considered radicals and often labeled as atheists or infedals, though very few of them were.

William Lloyd Garrison is one of the best and clearest examples of fighting for equality as we now think about it. He called not just for the emancipation of slaves but also equal social rights for the slaves and women, which was not supported by any of the orthodox evangelical abolitionists. Garrison was the founder and editor of the Liberator which he started in 1831. He was raised in an evangelical Baptist setting which rejected his views. More than most Garrison was in the Enlightenment tradition of Jefferson and Paine believing the bible should be judged by reason and science and not seen as literally true. He said, “Truth is older then any parchment.” He also rejected belief in miracles and the idea of ecclesiastical hierarchies. All these ideas (immediate emancipation, equal rights for women, and unorthodox religious views) led to him being rejected by evangelical churches as a whole.

Some other good examples are Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Angelina and Sarah Grimke (usually referred to just as the Grimke sisters). The Grimke sisters began speaking in public against slavery in 1830. They were from South Carolina and spoke openly in both the North and South about the harsh treatment of slaves including rape. Soon they were drawing an audience that included both men and women, which was a huge deal at the time. And the more men came to listen to them the more of a threat they were seen to orthodox churches. In 1837 the Congregationalist churches of Massachusetts publicly condemned the sisters and circulated a letter instructing all the Congregationalist ministers in Massachusetts that the topic of slavery was not to be discussed in their churches and that it was against the Church to allow outside speakers into their churches.

Some clear ways the importance of the women’s rights issue displays itself can be seen in 1840 at the annual American Anti-Slavery Society meeting in New York (Garrison was a founding member) were Garrison appointed a woman, Abby Kelley, to the committee and several hundred members of the group called it a violation of scripture and walked out and stated their plans to form a different antislavery organization. Another example is at what was called the first “world” (really just the US and England) antislavery convention held in England where after listening to various male speakers it was voted that there was not to be any women delegates. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had made the long journey from America to be there but were then denied any role in the convention. That turned out to be a key event that would later lead to the Seneca Falls Convention. So while Stanton, Mott and the Grimke sisters were all Christians (of different denominations) they all became very antiauthoritarian and attacked many of the orthodox Christian doctrines held in both the North and the South. Mott always believe in, “Truth for authority, not authority for truth.”

There is also the work of Robert Dale Owen, Frances Wright and Ernestine L. Rose. These activists actually labeled themselves as freethinkers and atheists. All of them fought for the immediate emancipation of slaves, women’s rights and even social equality. Rose believed all religious belief was a product of indoctrination rather then a natural impulse and was constantly berated for her views. Rose was Jewish so that alone led to her being attacked by all orthodox churches.

Now it is important to realize that this split between radical and conservative abolitionists only covers some Christians whereas the majority of them both in North and South did not support either type of abolitionism. There is a reason something is called the status quo, it’s because the majority of people support and accept it.

You brought up Lyman Beecher who, I believe, is the perfect example of how so many orthodox, evangelical churches were a detriment to the abolitionist movement. In the 1830s Beecher said openly that the most important moral issue facing America was not slavery or women’s rights but rather it was America’s general disregard for the Sabbath. He said the Sabbath was, “the great sun of the moral world”. In 1828 Beecher founded the General Union for the Promotion of the Christian Sabbath (GUPCS). His main goal was to end postal services on Sundays. He had further hopes of adding more restrictions on the Sabbath and I would point out all these ideas came from the “Old” Testament laws that they believed should still be applied in many areas. Further in many of his speeches he attacked antislavery, women’s rights and labor reform advocates saying that their disregard of the Sabbath would lead to the downfall of America. He labeled many who disagreed with him as atheists and infidels. He is an important example because he was and still is considered one of the most important ministers of the 19th century.

Please know I am not pretending to know everything about this topic, people write whole books about this stuff and things can never be obvious or clear once historians are trying to examine people’s personal beliefs or motives still I have written papers supporting the churches involvement in the abolitionist and women’s movements but I have since changed my mind based on my continued studies. A book I really enjoy and actually am currently finishing is called “Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism” by Susan Jacoby. Most of the examples I used came from this book since it was the freshest in my head.

Now the more important thing I would want to say is that it doesn’t really matter if we end up agreeing about the abolitionist movement or any other historical issue we’ve touched on because what our discussion has shown is how any attempt to “disprove” Christianity using individual historical examples or certain bible verses will be met by a strong, often well-thought out argument by most Christians defending their faith through the use of certain kinds of biblical interpretation, theological ideas and historical points of view. But I would then point out that based on the way you are defending both Christianity’s scriptures and history that a Muslim could do exactly the same thing. A Muslim could explain to us how we do not understand the true meaning of the Quran, how certain verses are more important then others and that various events in history cannot disprove Islam because many self proclaimed Muslims simply did not understand what it meant to be a true Muslim.

The problem I see in both cases is the methodology. The believer begins with the conclusion (my beliefs are true) and then finds the evidence it needs to support it. Like in our discussion you used the Catholic Church as a positive example for Christianity when it rejected slavery in 1839 but then when the Catholic Church’s obvious moral failings in the middle ages were discussed the Church had to be described as a corrupted version of Christianity that misused the bible and therefore rejected as evidence that can be used against Christianity. Another example would be viewing the Christian abolitionists as fighting for God’s true will as opposed to those Christians who supported slavery. Basically when the evidence is good for proving the already determined conclusion it its accepted while any evidence that argues against the already determined conclusion it is rejected or explained away. But often once a believer (Christian, Muslim, etc) moves from defending their position to examining and attacking another system they change their methodology trying to use the evidence to lead to the conclusion. They then accuse the believers of the system they are arguing against of being blind to obvious contradictions in their scriptures, theologies and versions of history. Anyone who calls themselves a Muslim and does something bad becomes evidence for a Christian who then scoffs at any attempt to explain away or reinterpret this person’s actions but then once the tables are turned and people who call themselves Christians do evil things they are judged, usually by those later in history, as not being true Christians or misunderstanding what the bible really means.

Basically this all goes back to my critique against those who cherry pick from another religion’s sacred texts, philosophies or histories to try and disprove them. Now while I hate cherry picking I do believe one should allow the evidence to lead to the conclusions and so I support the scientific method over what I see as the self-affirming methods of each religion.

Okay I’ve been going on way to long so I’ll stop. I really meant for this to be shorter but I really do love history so once I get going I tend to be long winded.

Nate Sauve
Hey Zach, I was away for the weekend, so return apologies for the delay.

With regard to the second post, that's exactly what I said I appreciated about your post. And I guess it was only twain that I disagreed with so thank you and no thanks to Mr Twain. I spent a year reading the Qu'ran, attending Surah Studies and talking with some very devout Muslims and saw how they and we tend to do the same thing, take the good explain away the bad. (I don't think this is only a problem for religious communities). I still talk with a few muslim friends but not in the same probing, challenging way as those people have moved on from Chicago. In that year I was challenged in my thinking and changed. I think we all need to have those interactions to keep us honest and truly seeking rather than just blindly defending ideology.

With regard to the abolitionist movements ties to the women's rights movement they are also very closely tied to the temperance movement...

Regardless, I think you are making some distinctions that are hard to condemn people for. The thing about gradual and immediate emancipation being distinct movements doesn't recognize that philosophically they believed slavery was wrong, blacks were people and they deserved equal rights. They said there is a problem and we need to do something about it. The disagreement was on tactics and what the remedy should be. That might piss you off. and I think looking back it definitely pisses people off. Now here is where that part about slave's rights and women's rights issues come into play. In the women's rights movement there was a split in the movement as well. The AWSA and NWSA, the reason for the split was that some felt that they should insist upon adding the right for women to vote to the 15th amendment and other felt it would jeopardize the chance of the newly freed slaves to win the right to vote, so they decided to take a more gradual approach. Same endgame, different tactics. Will people years from now decry our lack of involvement in freeing the 27 million slaves worldwide? (only 13 million at the height of the African Slave trade) Will they condemn our ability to avoid demanding the end to human rights abuses in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Sub Saharan Africa, in this new global economy? Probably.

Or if not a different critique will be heard, ones coming from the emergent cultures of India and China, as Europe and the USA fade into the sunset. The claims of a new western imperialism raised by non-western voices already condemns the secularizing and humanistic ideology stemming from Europe and America, but we don't hear. Daniel Jeyaraj in his Article "Can Edinburgh 1910 speak? A voice from the silent majority" says this: A vast majority of Euro-American people remain indifferent and therefore ignorant of multi-cultural and multi-religious realities of there neighborhoods, some of them do not even know the difference between Buddhism and Hinduism....They naively believe that religions are the sole causes of brutal wars....Therefore they seek to promote a-religious societies and realize they don't make any remarkable headway. Their anti-religious or a-religious persuasions do not commend them among people for whom religion cements the very fabric of their existence."

His main point is America and Europe are still playing the same game, always imposing what is right and good on the rest of the world, and take advantage of countries that can't stand up to us.

Zach Dills
Nate thanks again. I really liked hearing about some of your background with Quranic and Surah studies and of course just talking to Muslims. I love listening to people who have done things like that. Please know even as we have been exchanging ideas I've appreciated your honesty but also kindness with which you speak. These are obviously emotional issues for many of us and can lead to a lot of sharpness but I appreciate that it hasn't with you.

As far as the US history stuff goes I will continue to stand opposite of you on that. I believe the distinctions I made (the historians I have read made) could in fact be taken further. If we look at the wonderful Mr. Beecher again he said that if everyone would stop arousing public passions on the slavery question, white Christian benevolence would ensure that the system would disappear of its own accord--in another two centuries. How benevolent of him. Clearly that is towards one extreme but that's a distinction worth making to me. And again there is a huge difference between blacks are people and so slavery should end and blacks are people and so deserve equal rights. There is a reason the civil right movement happened in the 1960s and not the 1860s it's because clearly most people did not believe blacks deserved equal rights. And with the women's rights movement I am aware of the split over the 15 Amendment and I would say that your are right that they had different tactics but again disagree that they had the same endgame. One's endgame was for both women and men , black and white to vote the others was to ensure that black men got a vote. The 15th amendment was ratified in 1870 and it wasn't until 1920 when the 19th comes along and gives women the right to vote. Again the gradualists are well behind those calling for immediate rights. But again I don't expect us to agree on that and that's okay. To me more often then not conservative religion serves to maintain and even strengthen the social evil of its day (slavery, women's oppression, labor oppression, segregation and racism, etc) because they are the status quo and in general religion is not a big fan of change.

I definitely do not believe America will last forever and I do hope that people in the future will have made social progress and be able to look back at us and laugh at our small mindedness the way we do to so many who came before us. I just hope they don't continue to whitewash religions involvement in creating that small mindedness in the first place.

And at least in America, definitely not Europe, I see more hostility towards those who are anti-religious or a-religious then the other way around. We are God's country and so of course we like to tell other people what to do.

anyway thanks again. I'll probably call this quits for me but please share any more thoughts you have.

Nate Sauve
Zach, it's probably good that we are writing so that my tone can be free of the emotion that does come along in some of these conversations. For some people it's easier to spew hate online. For me, writing is a chance to think before I speak.

I remember one conversation with some of the Muslim brothers. Someone who was listening in asked why all of these guys were so mad and kept yelling at me. I was able to say, that I'm fine with it, I've done the same and that we are all passionate about what we believe and that passion is going to come out, but at the end of the day we care about each other more than simply being "right" and winning an argument.

Yeah, Beecher's gradual tactic put into an actual timeframe is a problem for me.

one thing about the women's rights split. Both were in favor of the right to vote being made available to men and women, one group just saw the right for black men to vote as a winnable victory at the time and didn't want to risk that victory by adding another obstacle. I don't see it as a bad choice, but rather as one that was self sacrificial to see one injustice overturned "now" rather than both being addressed at some unknown point in the future. Had they not acted at that time, would it have taken until 1920? 1960? Who knows...

And I agree that the church (or any organization with substantial power) fights against helpful social change. See gov't. The church should be an agent of change, but here in the states and throughout this history of "Christendom" it's interests have gotten too tied into politics and power.