On the Impoverished Worship of Evil Gods

The comments to this thought-provoking article (forwarded to me by a friend) included a statement that gives me pause:

Sadly, a great many people die feeling as Anne did, but without a voice, and without a suicide parlor. They simply abandon the will to live, and fade away. Maybe they still their inner voice with drugs or alcohol, and maybe it takes them a while to die, but they are suicides, as surely as I am sitting here typing this. Thus is the great service our godless society has done.

It strikes me that the problem I have with society is not its godlessness, its lack of things that might answer meaningfully to words like god, but the way in which it conceives and creates gods and then worships them.

We suffer not from atheism, on my view, as much as we do from lack of gods worth worshipping, and (perhaps even more important) lack of opportunity to offer meaningful worship.  What does it mean to respect something in modern society?  What do we hold sacred?  As a group, we have never held the same things sacred the same way, in all our history.  Unfortunately, many of us attempt to solve this dilemma by doing violence to worship, actively punishing those who worship gods as we would not.  We do not cultivate our own garden of service to God and fellowman because we are too busy burning down our neighbor's (who is gay or Muslim or Democrat or something else we are not that we loathe, for some reason: any reason will do).

Humanity needs the freedom to imagine gods it can believe in.  These will not all be the same, even to those who agree to share with one another--to imagine together some ideal of moral excellence that they can honor in community and alone with worship.  Likewise, human worship is not infinitely malleable or universally prescribable.  We will not all worship the same god the same way.  At some point, we need the freedom to separate our worship.  You need your sacred space apart from mine, your private life before God that does not include me as an active or intimate partner (even if we worship the same god in ways that are remarkably similar).

The great tragedy of many modern gods is that they are so universal as to become either impossibly bland (when we all try to get along without acknowledging our irreconcilable differences) or impossibly destructive (when we assert those differences with the intention of destroying anything or anyone that will not submit to worship our god the way we want him to be worshipped).  Really good gods are local gods, small gods, gods that individuals and communities create and respond to without aspiring to write large all over the world (as though we could all worship the same god the same way, speaking one language, eating one food, living one life, sharing one death).

We need ways to value gods that are not all-inclusive, that do not respond to other gods with jealousy, hatred, and war where these are not productive.  We cannot keep conquering one another for God without impoverishing him and ourselves, until we become so weak and incapable of meaningful personal worship that our only sacrament is to come together and celebrate how much better we are than others who refuse to worship with us, as we do, rendering homage to whatever idol we have decided must be adored as the One True God.

People will always fight for their gods, it seems to me.  But we need not make the fight more hostile than it must be.  We need not spend all our energy worshipping God with fear and hatred for others who worship him differently (and conceive him as some thing or things that we cannot recognize or worship for ourselves).  We need not actively embrace and love gods we cannot worship, either.  Ecumenism has its limits, too, I think, that wise people must learn to respect (as they move away from trying to create impossibly universal forms of religion and focus more on making small communities work better without growing too big or powerful to serve inherently limited human needs).

The worst gods are like the worst human beings.  They acknowledge no limit to the worship they are willing to receive.  They demand absolute obedience from all and sundry to standards that human beings must enforce with violence.  Such are the impoverished modern gods of the nation-state, the global corporation, and the mega-church (with hundreds or thousands or millions or billions of members actively trying to convert the world).  There is no such thing as worshipping safely or well with a nation, a corporation, or a worldwide religion.  Their gods are all predatory, as they are, built to suck the life right out of individuals and smaller communities that they parasitize (under the banner of heaven, which they erect to protect some sacred cow impossibly remote from most human experience--like Wall Street, which the American taxpayer must worship willy-nilly because "it is too big to fail").

From such demons masquerading as angels of light, deliver us, O Lord. 

Seeking Eden

A friend pointed me to this very interesting article discussing the role that the British played in turning modern Iraq into a terribly dangerous place.  In essence, the article argues that the Brits possessed an idea of their own history that they sought to make into Iraqi reality, at great expense (in terms of life wasted, in pretty much every sense of the word: the idea was so important and compelling that people failed--and continue to fail--to notice how its implementation caused more harm than good).

To me what matters is not so much what people see (a vision of primitive Eden) or even what they do (e.g. become bodybuilders or political propagandists) but how they treat others.

I don't care what crazy nonsense you want to believe in. Believe in anything you like (with or without something I would recognize as good reason). I don't care what you do to yourself as a result of your beliefs. Smoke dope. Do yoga. Build a tent and go into the wilderness, or start a multinational corporation dedicated to spreading the gospel of GMOs. As long as you don't coerce participation in whatever stupid scheme you may have (a scheme that might be "modern" or "ancient" in character, "progressive" or the opposite), I don't mind. I may disagree with you and even work against you (especially if you are into GMOs), but I respect your right to live just as I want you to respect mine.

My problem with the status quo is the recurring trope that demands all of us be on the same page, no matter what. I want the freedom to dissociate, to disavow, to work for Edens that are not yours using means that you despise (even as you despise my own view of Eden, with or without good reason). I don't want to force you into my Eden; to do so would be to invite you to do the same to me, and I would rather rot in hell (thanks, anyway). This means that I necessarily have to make my Eden small and non-threatening: I don't want to "assert myself" on Hegel's stage of history, inviting you to create WMDs and discharge them against the hell you see lurking somewhere in my Eden (just as surely as I see it all over yours: I know you think yours is pretty, that to see it must be to love it, but that just isn't true). I want to step away from "fixing the world permanently" and concentrate instead on doing whatever I can to fix my own little corner of it impermanently.

I cannot dictate to other people, especially not those with whom I must live and rub shoulders every day. Living with others means accommodating (changing my idea of Eden when it proves unexpectedly poisonous to my wife, my kids, my friends, my parents, my siblings, my students, my work colleagues, etc.). Accommodating means paying attention to data that move all the time, changing overnight in ways that are often wholly unpredictable. I cannot become so attached to today's Eden that I fail to allow for tomorrow's. And that is just within my own life--a ridiculously tiny piece of the gigantic throbbing mess that is humanity. Humbled by my own inability to deal perfectly with the impossible vastness of my own small humanity, how could I dare presume to deal with yours? How could I take that charge away from you--unasked, uncalled for, with no respect for the autonomy that Nature gave you (as she gave it to me)? I am not special. I don't know myself (except insofar as I know that the exercise of seeking such knowledge improves my experience). How could I presume to know you? The most I can do for both of us is graciously give you the space you need to meet Nature on your own terms. Make your own Eden. Until you come to blow mine up without noticing, I won't mind (not even if the world ends tomorrow, and it turns out to be all your fault--when God's angels fire up the celestial supercomputer and discover a butterfly effect emanating from something you did or failed to do).

Life is made out of death. I accept that--and live in a constant struggle to be ready to die. Enjoy the journey, and be mindful of others on it. That is really all I have to offer.

Enlightened Hedonism?

Some friends recently decided to end their marriage (amicably), after discussing (in a public forum) the paradox of choice (the more choices we have, the more dissatisfied we become with any single choice).  One of my friends remarked that for him this meant that marriage contracts might be better made for brief periods (e.g. five years) rather than for one's entire life.  This discussion and the events around it got me thinking about my own relationships, and what holds them (and me) together.

I see the paradox of choice, and I think it is part of human nature.  As with other aspects of human nature, it is better dealt with than ignored.  (To ignore it is to invite it to find you unprepared, leading you to make decisions that you are likely to regret later, with the benefit of hindsight.  Personally, I like to know my enemies, including the one who dwells between my ears, and keep them close when I cannot avoid them entirely.)

To make a choice is necessarily to make oneself vulnerable (to disillusionment, disappointment, unexpected consequences, etc.), especially when the choice involves something truly momentous (as the choice to get married undoubtedly does).  But not choosing is also weak, since choices are a necessary part of life (much as intimacy is: as bad as a bad marriage is, no marriage at all might be just as bad).  How do we allow choice without letting it take us places where we do not want to go?  Historically, people create narratives that allow them to "have their cake and eat it too" -- narratives that promise future choices (maybe an eternity of them) in return for making a limiting choice here and now.  Oftentimes, these narratives seek to be prescriptive, telling people what choices are acceptable (e.g. monogamous heterosexual marriage) and what choices are not (e.g. homosexual marriage, serial monogamy facilitated by divorce, polygamy, polyamory).  These prescriptions can be helpful for folks, for reasons that I will get to in a moment, but as a result of my personal experience, I am hesitant to recommend any one of them to the entire human race as the only prescription for happiness.  To me, it seems that human happiness, generally speaking, is incoherent: different people have different ideas about happiness, such that there is no one way of life (or marriage) that guarantees it generally (for all that many different ways work with more or less success for larger or smaller groups of people: I would be miserable in a homosexual marriage, but a homosexual person wouldn't; the fact that there are more people like me and less like the homosexual does not mean that his experience is somehow "wrong" or invalid, or that he should not have the opportunity to marry his way, in my view).

Given this laissez-faire attitude toward human morality on my part, many friends wonder where my personal moral stability comes from.  How do I avoid giving in to the temptation to drop whatever I may have now and pursue more attractive options elsewhere?  Why don't I drop my allegiance to my wife the same way I dropped my allegiance to LDS church leaders?  (The short answer is that I have yet to catch her lying to me brazenly about matters of vital interest to me, but that is really just incidental.  There is a serious question here, one that deserves more than a glib answer, however en pointe.)

Confronting the collapse of my faith in men whose character supplied my (legitimate) need for moral authority as teenager was rather frightening.  As a kid, I made some moral choices because God (in the form of prophets ancient or modern) told me to, and that was the ultimate answer to all questions (the decision beyond which there was no appeal).  History shows that this kind of thinking has deep roots, with oaths before God featuring among the earliest binding contracts known to (civilized) man.  What happens when the God guaranteeing all these oaths is revealed to be a rhetorical fiction, a puppet played from the inside by some old duffers who wear the mantle of divinity with a good deal of humanity?  What happens when you realize that there is no man in the sky watching every move you make?  (Or as Plato would have Socrates ask in the Republic: what happens when you wear the ring of Gyges, a ring that makes you utterly invisible, allowing you to do anything you please without normal untoward consequences?)  In the narrative I grew up with, this event was a terrible disaster: without God as the real ground for morality, human life becomes "evil" animal hedonism.  (Remember the scripture in Mosiah 3:7, where "the natural man is an enemy to God, and is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father."  The good man must give himself up to the absolute moral authority of God or lose his goodness.)  My own descent into hedonism has not (yet) borne this narrative out, but I am constantly confronting it (in the assumptions religious believers make about me when I am indifferent toward theism, and/or in the stories I hear of and see in the lives of people around me who do value things differently as atheists than they did as religious believers).  In concrete terms, people wonder why I don't leave my wife (for example) or (at least) treat my relationship with her as casually as I do my relationship with (say) the LDS church.  Where does my moral foundation lie?  Why are promises sacred?  Are there any points at which a promise becomes non-binding, for me?  Where are those points?

It is fitting that I should answer these questions with a disquisition on pleasure, since pleasure and pain are really the heart of what they inquire about (how much pleasure are you willing to pass up to keep a promise? how much pain will you endure before breaking a promise?).  Here it is very useful to bring up the Buddhist teaching (confirmed by my personal experience) that pleasure and pain are really the same thing, a fleeting impression on the human psyche that brings mixed consequences (causing us to notice factors in our environment differently, with the result that we alter our behavior in a way loosely calculated to improve the chance that our genes survive, to add a modern biological garnish to the ancient dictum).  If I know that pleasure is pain, then I instinctively recoil from it at least as much as I spring toward it.  I love it and court it, as I must, but I also aim to keep it at a safe distance.  Rather than embrace it uncritically, drinking deep every time nature (or God or whatever is pulling the strings that make the universe dance) proffers the cup, I hang back, stealing in for a drink only when I think it is safe (judging from my own and others' experiences, in that order: my experience of myself trumps what other people tell me about themselves).  How does this kind of thinking look in real life?  How do I use it in real situations?  Let's see.

(1) How much pleasure am I willing to pass up to keep a promise?  Big pleasures come with big consequences.  Intimate relationships require time and commitment to work in a way that is sustainable and stable (as I like my pleasures to be).  When I enter into an intimate relationship with someone, a really pleasurable (and pleasant) relationship like marriage, I invest in that person.  I spend time with that person.  I talk to that person.  I think with that person.  I let that person shop for me, work for me, sign for me, even think for me (in situations where that is required).  Why would I throw that investment away merely because somebody else walks by one day with a cute rear-end (or whatever)?  That would not make sense.  It would not even be pleasurable (from my perspective: the pleasure of chasing a new romantic interest pales in comparison with the pain of losing my wife, to whom I have already devoted so much time and interest).

In my mind, the paradox of choice means that modern life is uniquely cruel to people who obsess over making the right choices (thinking that they have to find the right brand of shoes among 500, or the perfect wife or romantic partner among the population of co-eds at the local university or church or wherever).  Much of the time, the criteria we come up with to facilitate choice in situations of super-abundance are worse than useless.  We become obsessed with noise and ignore the really important information (the information that is actually relevant to our personal sense of pleasure).  Instead of taking five minutes to decide what shoes we need, going to the store, and buying those shoes, we walk into the store undecided, try on 30 pairs, buy 5, and then go home to wonder over and over again whether we should trade some of them in and/or buy some of the ones we rejected.  Instead of pursuing with gusto the romantic adventures that life thrusts upon us, we move obsessively from one partner to another, chasing our illusions of "the perfect mate" from one "failed" relationship to the next (and so on until we become Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer, Newt Gingrich, or Rush Limbaugh: these are not terrible men, but I would not want to marry them--in some bizarre world where I am a heterosexual woman). In marriage, from my perspective, the noise is other people (who seem better than your spouse when you don’t know them as well). The information that really matters is how your spouse is (am I abused? am I abusive? is there something that I really need that I cannot get, something that my spouse really needs that I cannot give?).  If my marriage became impossibly bland--empty, passionless, etc.--then I would consider ending it (as much for my wife's good/pleasure as for mine: why should she be trapped in a relationship that is merely a shell of what it should be, what it once was?).  But I would never end my marriage on a whim (merely because a lady with nice parts flirted with me).  That would be decidedly unpleasant (I think).

There is something really profound lurking here, a truth that is applicable all along the depth and breadth of human experience (my own and that of other people too, as near as I can tell).  Democritus expressed this truth by saying that “the sweetest pleasures are the rarest.” While the extreme version of this is untrue, there is something solid to the idea of limiting one’s exposure to certain pleasures more than one might instinctively want to. Take fasting for example. I stopped eating three square meals a day, and suddenly maintaining a healthy weight became effortless (calorie-restriction does still work, but it feels so much easier when instead of eating three small meals every day, I get to eat one or two huge ones). Consider sex. Every now and then, my wife and I are separated for environmental reasons (she has a period, I am sick, the kids are obnoxious), and whenever this happens, our next amorous encounter registers off the charts (not that we have a bad sex life meantime, but the difference between sated-sex and famine-sex is amazing). Work is the same. I get more done, I am more creative in the office, and my physical work-outs are much more productive, when I make the effort to stay away and avoid “punching the clock” just to convince myself that I am doing something. I think these empirical realities (in my life) are important, since they represent a reality that many modern men overlook entirely (coming from a background that takes scarcity for granted and works to cultivate abundance, which was foreign and desirable to my grandfathers as it is not to me).

This leads me to an interesting dichotomy between my ideas of (i) general human happiness and (ii) particular human happiness. (i) Generally speaking, I think human happiness is better served when there are many options available for people to try.  Marry a woman (or several).  Marry a man.  Marry your dog.  The market should be as free as possible. (ii) Speaking particularly, however, I think happiness is all about eliminating options.  People generally should be maximally free to pursue their own happiness; that said, pursuing one's own happiness requires cultivating one's own garden without being too concerned about anybody else's.  Pick the method(s) that work for you, and ignore everything else.  When I examine my personal morality carefully, I am all about taking away my own choices. In a culture defined by glut, I deliberately cultivate famine (spending hours without food, days without sex, and as much time as possible not working). I do this because I find that constant glut (which my environment recommends reflexively) is not pleasant: who wants to binge all the time on endless food, sex, or work?   Not me.  Confronting my morality with complete honesty (as I wear the ring of Gyges) has taught me this lesson about myself.

(2) How much pain will I endure before breaking a promise?  Periodically, people talk about certain emotions being unlimited, invoking words like "divine love" or "compassion" or "grace" to point to the idea that the universe always gives you another chance (even if that comes only in another life).  While I see some utility in this idea, I confess I am not really convinced.  If you rape me, I might forgive you, but I am never going to put myself deliberately in your company again.  I am not going to make myself vulnerable (no matter what some god says).  Our relationship is (for this life at least) permanently altered.  If you lie to me about things that are vitally important to me, then I am never going to trust you with my dearest secrets.  Not because I don't love you.  Not because I don't believe that you might still have some good qualities.  Not because I think you should die horribly in some tragic accident.  I just don't have the stomach for making myself deliberately vulnerable to somebody I have good reason not to trust.  I don't set myself up to fail.  If a relationship is not working, then I think the understanding on which that relationship exists needs to be re-examined, and it may end up needing to change.  That is acceptable.  Change happens.

My wife has discussed behavior that might lead her to end our relationship.  If I were abusive or sexually promiscuous (chasing skirts like better men before me), then she would step out of the marriage without any guilt.  I think this is wise.  Cultivating a good marriage is the right thing to do (because it is most pleasant, in my experience), and ditching a bad marriage is the right thing to do (because it is most unpleasant, in my vicarious experience).  The reality that the healthiness of my relationships depends on constant care becomes very obvious in this paradigm, which will not let me off the hook with the specious plea: "Well, you signed up for this crap when you took me at the altar, so take it--the good along with the bad!"  Instead of settling down to this sort of complacency, I am expected to court my wife every day, reminding her that I am really a pleasant person to have around.  She could end our involvement at any moment, and my awareness of that fact keeps me from taking her utterly for granted.

In summary, I have found that hedonism is not altogether dehumanizing (in the bad sense).  Now that I look back, it seems to me that I was always a hedonist, even when I was religious.  The difference between me as I am and me as I was is that I now understand my relationship to pleasure much better.  I see how I react to pleasure, how I value it, and I have learned to minimize the sorts of behavior associated with it that tend to bring unpleasant consequences (as I perceive them: others are welcome to decide differently, provided that they do not dictate to me unilaterally from their experience just as I would never presume to dictate to them).  This does not mean that I value pleasure perfectly now, that I never make mistakes, but I do like to think (and it seems true) that I learn better from my mistakes now than I did five years ago.  One benefit that comes from partaking of the forbidden fruit is that you really do become wise. 

God or No God?

A (comparatively) brief response to this debate. 

Contrary to Christopher Hitchens, I don't believe that religion poisons everything.  I am more cynical.  I think humanity poisons everything -- human stupidity, if you want to be more precise.  D'Souza is right to point out that we keep religion(s) around for a reason: they let us do our human thing better, a thing which has historically involved lots of lying, manipulating, prostitution, and murder.  Religion helps us do these things better, just as it helps us express our good side, too.  (We do have one, and it does turn up in religion, pace Hitchens.)  Get rid of a handful of stupid religions today, and you would have a bunch more cropping up to replace them tomorrow.  The bloodthirsty devotees of Thor or Shiva become bloodthirsty devotees of Christ or Allah.  People eager to spend lots of money can choose between Mormonism, Scientology, and evangelical megachurches (or pay a top-notch astrologer: if they want to seem scientific, they might consider hiring an economist like Paul Krugman). 

Skepticism is no safe haven: falling for one scam doesn't make you immune to the rest of them (not even if you go around calling yourself an atheist).  Marxism is as much a religion as any other -ism, as far as I can tell, and its record is about par for the course.  (People are Marxists, so Marxism accomodates their human needs, including the ever-present need for stupidity.)  The heaven-on-earth-without-religion that Hitchens dreams of is in some sense most definitely a hopeless fantasy: it ain't happening, as far as I can tell.  And yet I remain convinced that Hitchens has some important things to say.  Question your stupid ideas.  Doubt them.  Do what seems morally right, even when you don't have a Bronze Age myth handy to justify yourself (or especially when the myth tells you to do something that historical experience proves to be completely idiotic, like steal other men's wives and then lie to them about it).

Contrary to Dinesh D'Souza, I am not convinced at all of any kind of intelligent design in the universe that atheism cannot accomodate.  Part of this comes from my personal form of atheism, which is much less "muscular" than Hitchens' (for what it is worth, note that atheists are even less correlated than the LDS: we don't have a Sunday School, and there is no standard curriculum or doctrinal confession; this is one of the nice things about being atheist, in my view).  I am quite comfortable admitting ignorance, and stupidity.  I am not invested in one stupid idea being better than another stupid idea.  When the earth ends as another race of life watches, it won't bother me if they understand physics (and literature and the rest of it) very differently than I do.  Why should my words be the last words on the universe?  Why should the "right" answer to life, the universe, and everything be hiding somewhere in a labyrinth of after-dinner ramblings by a couple of well-dressed primates?  I don't know.  I don't really think that there is a compelling reason that human reason must yield easy objective truth about the nature of the universe.  I am too much of an empiricist to find logic terribly compelling, particularly the kind of logic that demands my acquiescence to propositions I am never really in a good position to test empirically.

The argument for intelligent design (ID) falls apart for me on the fact that it deconstructs itself.  What does intelligent design look like in the human world that we experience every day?  Contrary to popular myth, it is not true that all modern machines leaped full-grown from the notebooks of Da Vinci.  They evolved, with one engineer contributing this and another one offering that, and another two or three cobbling something together that sort-of half-way worked (until it didn't: all machines break down).  To coin a phrase, the Platonic demiurge never even made shoes ex nihilo, let alone the whole cosmos.  I honestly cannot believe that I ever found ID folks credible, even as a kid, and I don't see how I am ever going to again.  When confronted with inexplicable phenomena, I am much more comfortable saying "I don't know" than coming up with elaborate theoretical explanations (whether these latter involve molecules or gods or God or magic tarot cards or pixie dust or whatever -- I doubt the whole lot, equally: my answer to those who claim explicit knowledge about how the world works is and will always be, "Let's wait and see!").

Last of all, D'Souza's simile comparing God to the guy everybody in the village knows is totally lame: history debunks it completely.  Forgive me for quoting myself:

Let's say my friends tell me that there is this guy named Pete. Pete wants me to be nice, they say, and he will make things go my way if I send money regularly to a certain PO box. I am intrigued, so I start being nice and making payments. Then, my friends come and tell me that Pete wants me to rob a bank. I protest that this is not nice. My friends come up with all kinds of arguments showing me that robbing the bank is necessary: the clincher is that Pete cannot make things go my way if I don't trust him absolutely. I inform my friends that I am not willing to become a bank robber for a man I have never met. They ask me if I am willing to give up all the blessings I have incurred sending money to Pete. I ask them, "What blessings? You mean the same ones I used to get before you even told me Pete existed?" (Being nice is a good idea, even if you don't have an imaginary overlord recommending it to you.) And our conversation is over, unless and until Pete deigns to reveal himself and give me convincing reasons why the bank must be robbed. My friends can strike me dumb as a sign-seeker if they want, but that just proves that they are thugs (the same way Pete would be if that were his only response to my inquiry about the bank job). To make the analogy complete, imagine that I make some new friends who tell me that Pete's real name is Bob, and he wants me to move to LA and take up surfing. Then, other people tell me that my friend is a woman named Chris, and I should be selling Mary Kay products door-to-door. Everyone knows (passionately) that Pete, Bob, and Chris exist, and that they care (passionately) about banks, surfing, and Mary Kay. But I cannot ever meet them face to face. Until I do, our relationship is going nowhere: I cannot have a relationship with someone who cannot talk to me more clearly (and kindly, not to mention coherently) than God does.

I grew up believing in angels, gold plates, and prophets who spoke face to face with God.  But I have never seen an angel.  I have never hefted gold plates.  I have never heard anything more than ordinary human speech from any mouthpiece of the Lord (in my own faith tradition or any other).  If God is so obvious, then why do people see him (her, it, them!) so differently?  From a historical perspective, God is all over the map.  He is human, or not -- or worse, both human and not human.  (How is that even possible?  Many dusty books confirm that God's servants have labored long over this paradox, while nations of unwashed masses festered around them in squalor and ignorance. Was God more interested in hiding his nature than helping those nations with some basic hygiene?)  He is male, or female, or both.  (He is a singularity!  He is a plurality!  He is a singularity indwelling in plurality, and if you say the hocus-pocus wrong, then he will smite you!)  He loves people.  He hates people.  He is all-powerful: nothing can touch him.  Or he can be bound by arcane rituals.  He needs nothing.  He needs more money, now!  He wants us to be skeptics.  He wants the skeptics to burn in hell.  You can follow this chain of non-sequiturs (or paradoxes, if you prefer) all through history, where God is now this, now that -- now the most moral being you can imagine (in the Gospels), now the most immoral (in Joshua or Job).  There is no intelligent design there that I can see, and I spent many years looking.  Even if I were to bump my head really hard and believe in ID again, I would still have to become a Deist (with Thomas Jefferson) rather than find myself arguing that the Holy Inquisition was a necessary part of some greater good that an omnipotent and benevolent Father wanted for his children.  If God exists and that is how he blesses his children, then the real question I should be asking is who's the Devil?  Are you sure he's a really bad guy?  Why? 

At the end of the day, I think deity and religion are here to stay among humans (for the immediate future, certainly).  They are natural, evolved outgrowths of our condition as social primates with very large brains -- an accidental side-effect of matter existing, just as we are.  I don't buy all the arguments D'Souza makes about its being unlikely that conditions would just exist such that life appears.  When you think about it, I could be so many different places in the world right now (Paris, Madrid, Tokyo, Chicago, Salt Lake City, my apartment, my office, a cafe), and yet I am right here in the library basement, typing.  It must be a sign (that the invisible pink unicorn who lives on the dark side of the moon really is pulling on my marionette strings!  I knew it!).  Life is mysterious.  The mystery doesn't suddenly become wholly explicable when you call it God, any more than it does when you call it a pink unicorn or a Big Bang or any other word in any language you care to pick (or invent for the purpose).  Personally, I don't mind people referring to the mystery of life as God.  I don't mind them referring to it as a pink unicorn, either.  I have recently taken to speaking of it as Dame Fortune.  The number of names you could come up with is infinite.  But they are just words.  They don't necessarily give you any useful insight into the vast unknown, the Cause(s) behind all causes (assuming such a thing even exists: why should our primate brains contain real windows onto that impossible vista, that we are forever seeking and never finding? what if the brain asks bigger questions than it can ever answer?). 

People can and will tell whatever stories they want about life, the universe, and the meaning(s) of it all.  I find that fascinating.  I sure as heck don't understand it all.  I don't think I ever will.  And I don't think there is a magic key to the whole riddle buried in ancient mythology.  The myths might have some useful things to say about how to live well as a human, but they aren't the final word even there (as we continuously acknowledge every time we tell a new story instead of repeating an old one).  Why try to make the myths more definitive and authoritative than they really are, especially when we see how badly this has worked in recent history?  What makes us think we are any better than the story-tellers who gave us the religious past that some of us are ashamed of?  The Deuteronomists really screwed it up, but we're going to get it right?  The early Christians went off the deep-end, but we won't?  The Muslims are deluded fanatics, but we are dedicated freedom fighters?  The Soviets were deluded fanatics disguised as rational atheists, but we aren't?  The Founding Fathers were pro-slavery bigots who compromised to get what they wanted, but we are incorruptible?  Give me a break, people.  You are all full of it, every mother's son of you, and if you go out and found another church today, I guarantee it will soon be full of it too.  In the real world, honest truth does not come in the form of a convenient narrative (the tidy sort of narrative that orders all the causes with their proper effects and lays out how they all work together in perfect harmony, for all time).  The narratives themselves belie our constant attempts to misread them this way, as they persist in evolving and leaving evidence of that evolution (as new readers take old texts and make them mean things that their original authors never dreamed of: this happens all the time in every religion; when people say that you are not being true to the founding text, what they really mean is that you read it differently than they do).

Ah well.  I didn't sleep enough last night, and it shows.  Forgive this long, rambling post, gods of the Internet, and help me stay awake for class today.

Mormon Antichrist 2.0

S. Michael Wilcox.  Walking on Water.  Deseret, 2011.  ASIN: B004ZLFOZ6.

Recently, a friend shared with me a story from this book, a story that I have heard elsewhere before.  In the words of my friend:

[Wilcox] shares an experience that one of his daughters had with a college professor who was always challenging his students' faith in God.  Brother Wilcox told his daughter to challenge the professor back by using Alma's statement to Korihor (Alma 30:40):  "And now what evidence have ye that there is no God, or that Christ cometh not? I say unto you that ye have none, save it be your word only."  Well, one day the professor said, "We don't know that there are moral absolutes.  There is no proof that there are moral, ethical absolutes.  Society makes the rules and they can change what is right and what is wrong."  Brother Wilcox asked his daughter if she was able to say anything to counter that statement.  She was!  She told him that she had raised her hand and asked, "What evidence do you have that there are no moral absolutes? You don't have any evidence. It's just your word." Brother Wilcox told her how proud he was of her and asked what happened then.  She said, "It was wonderful.  The kids all got into it and they kept saying, 'Yeah, what evidence do your have?  And finally he had to admit that there was no evidence for his point either."

This story bugs me, just like the stories of Antichrists in the Book of Mormon (including the one about Korihor that it alludes to) have always bugged me.  In the Book of Mormon, the Antichrists (Sherem, Nehor, Zeezrom, Korihor) are invariably presented as dolts.  Nehor is a transparent thug (who flies off the handle and kills Gideon when the latter ventures to disagree with him in public debate).  Zeezrom is introduced as this cunning lawyer, an expert debater out to trap the righteous missionaries Alma and Amulek in their words, and then his only debating tactic worth noticing is to ask Amulek how much money he will take to deny the existence of God.  Even as a kid, I found this really lame: "Well, Zeezrom, I know I just put my reputation on the line in front of the whole community watching us here, but when you mention money I get so weak in the knees: I'd be happy to out myself as a liar for the big wad of cash that you're not going to give me anyway (since you are only bringing it up to discredit me)."  Finally, the only two Antichrists with anything worth saying, Sherem and Korihor, are dismissed without argument, really: God intervenes and kills them (striking Korihor dumb first) without effectively refuting anything that they say.  The closest thing to a really useful discussion of atheism that readers of the Book of Mormon get is the debate between Alma and Korihor, which follows the script of the discussion between Wilcox's daughter and her professor.  Forgive me for pointing this out, but either that professor was an idiot or God intervened and shut him up prematurely (like Korihor).  Since God has not yet bothered to shut me up, I am going to come to the rescue of the atheists, who are not all stupid (or thugs, or even Antichrist, at least not any more than they are anti-Thor).

In the Book of Mormon, Korihor comes along offering a familiar atheist message: God is just an old tradition that priests invoke to gull people out of their time and talents.  Alma offers a standard defense to this schtick: "Thou knowest we do not glut ourselves upon the labors of this people" (Alma 30:32) -- at least not compared to those other guys (the whore of all the earth); our pet projects are modest and beneficial, so "Let's go shopping at City Creek!"  Blah, blah.  Let's skip to the important part, Alma's only argument (apart from reading Korihor's mind and then invoking the power of God to strike him dumb):

And now what evidence have ye that there is no God, or that Christ cometh not? I say unto you that ye have none, save it be your word only.  But, behold, I have all things as a testimony that these things are true; and ye also have all things as a testimony unto you that they are true; and will ye deny them? (Alma 30:40-41)

Voila!  The seminary teacher working with S. Michael Wilcox's daughter must be proud: she knows her Book of Mormon, and can put "rational" atheists like Korihor in their place.  Unfortunately, this argument is actually quite lame, particularly when it is offered the way Alma (and the young Wilcox) offer it, i.e. as an end to discussion instead of a beginning.  From my own personal experience with atheists (as an LDS missionary and one of those eternal college students), I am going to tell you what really happens when you uncork Alma's argument in live debate.  In my experience, real atheists don't role over and take it the way Korihor does, and believers like Alma are not typically able to invoke the magic power of God to make their rivals shut up (unless they happen to be living in an area where rabid fanaticism predominates).

Alma and the younger Wilcox do have a point: in debate, the only things actively shared are words -- mine against yours.  But not all words are created equal.  Some map reality better than others.  Some correspond to things in the real world.  Some are just hot air.  How does one tell the difference?  Well, you have to put them to some kind of test (as Alma himself admits somewhere else).  You have to live with them a bit.  If you live with your eyes open you will notice several things that cast serious doubts on the efficacy of the argument that Alma and Wilcox use to dismiss atheists like Korihor.

(1) People actually do have different ideas about God, the world over.  The fact that people have different ideas about what is important should be totally obvious today.  Some people think that drawing a picture of the prophet Muhammad (or representing his figure in any kind of art) is an offense worthy of death.  Others condemn these pious followers of the prophet as murderous terrorists.  Some people think that monogamy is divine.  Others (including a number of early Mormon leaders) think that the supreme being prefers polygamy.  God himself is no better: in every religious tradition whose history I have examined closely, he contradicts himself, telling people to be nice and commanding them to slaughter one another ruthlessly.  (I have already blogged about the schizophrenic God of history here.)  What are we supposed to make of God's inscrutability?  How can everyone be right, when we all contradict one another (and ourselves)?  Mormons should be familiar with this theme, since it is prominent in the canonical version of the First Vision.  We should know that rational people really do wonder how the heck it makes sense for God to tell people all over the world to care passionately about things that other people find completely uncompelling (like whether Muhammad gets a posthumous portrait done).  Which leads us to another problem.

(2) God doesn't strike the right people dumb.  In the Book of Mormon story, Korihor is never refuted.  Alma accuses him of secretly believing and then strikes him dumb when the poor fool wants a sign that God exists.  Here I think Korihor gets a bad rap.  After all, if we think back to the First Vision, Joseph Smith went into the Sacred Grove to get a sign.  That was the whole point.  "Hey, God!  People have no clue what you value.  All your preachers contradict one another.  I would like some personal direction, yo!"  Why didn't young Joseph get stricken dumb?  Maybe for the same reason so many of my Spanish "investigators" couldn't get a personal witness that God wanted them to drop everything and become Latter-day Saints?  Maybe for the same reason I don't get an urgent desire to become a Scientologist every time I see Tom Cruise?  Is it conceivable that people believe different things about the nature of ultimate reality, and that whatever divinity there is doesn't see fit to change that?  I think it is.  As I look at history, it seems to me that God is very hands-off.  He lets people do their own thing.  He lets them attribute anything to him, no matter what it is.  Across the world, people build churches to him.  They give food to the hungry in his name.  And in his name, they blow up churches, take food from the hungry, and beat up homosexuals.  They call God all kinds of names, say all sorts of contradictory things about his nature, and he is perfectly cool with it.  He lets the Holy Inquisition do its thing with the same nonchalance that he shows toward the Salvation Army: the sun riseth upon the just and the unjust.  The prosperity gospel found in Deuteronomy (and the Book of Mormon) is a steaming pile of crap (as Christians should know: Jesus was the best God had, and look what happened to him; no tradition that I am aware of has him "prospering in the land").

(3) No matter what anyone says, we don't know squat about God.  The upshot of points (1) and (2) above is that we don't really know (a) if God exists or (b) what his nature is (what he wants from us).  Let's say my friends tell me that there is this guy named Pete.  Pete wants me to be nice, they say, and he will make things go my way if I send money regularly to a certain PO box.  I am intrigued, so I start being nice and making payments.  Then, my friends come and tell me that Pete wants me to rob a bank.  I protest that this is not nice.  My friends come up with all kinds of arguments showing me that robbing the bank is necessary: the clincher is that Pete cannot make things go my way if I don't trust him absolutely.  I inform my friends that I am not willing to become a bank robber for a man I have never met.  They ask me if I am willing to give up all the blessings I have incurred sending money to Pete.  I ask them, "What blessings? You mean the same ones I used to get before you even told me Pete existed?"  (Being nice is a good idea, even if you don't have an imaginary overlord recommending it to you.)  And our conversation is over, unless and until Pete deigns to reveal himself and give me convincing reasons why the bank must be robbed.  My friends can strike me dumb as a sign-seeker if they want, but that just proves that they are thugs (the same way Pete would be if that were his only response to my inquiry about the bank job).  To make the analogy complete, imagine that I make some new friends who tell me that Pete's real name is Bob, and he wants me to move to LA and take up surfing.  Then, other people tell me that my friend is a woman named Chris, and I should be selling Mary Kay products door-to-door.  Everyone knows (passionately) that Pete, Bob, and Chris exist, and that they care (passionately) about banks, surfing, and Mary Kay.  But I cannot ever meet them face to face.  Until I do, our relationship is going nowhere: I cannot have a relationship with someone who cannot talk to me more clearly (and kindly, not to mention coherently) than God does.

What is really wrong with Alma's argument against Korihor, and Wilcox's argument against her professor, is that we are all using the same evidence.  We all have opinions.  All of our opinions are based in facts (i.e. they derive from our personal encounters with an objective reality "out there" in the world).  So, Korihor has "all things as a testimony" that his opinions are true, the same way Alma does (in the passage quoted above).  If Alma wants to change the game, he needs to introduce Korihor to God.  (If my friends want me to rob the bank for Pete's sake, then they need to put me in touch with the guy.)  In real life, you cannot simply introduce people to God.  Wilcox does not convince her professor by calling down an angel.  She cannot even strike her professor magically dumb (without some apparatus like the Holy Inquisition: what a marvel of divine engineering that was! was God pleased with it? why wouldn't he be, assuming he approved of the way Alma handled Korihor?).  So she is left stating the obvious: "Well, you have your opinion, and I have mine."  OK.  Where do our respective opinions come from?  She leaves the really interesting question unasked.  She doesn't talk about human psychology, the nature of myth, or even her own personal experience.  But let's assume she does.

Let's assume she is an LDS missionary like I was, and she tells her professor (who is supposed to be inquisitive, investigative, interested) the story of her personal relationship with God. 

"I was born into a family where we prayed regularly to God.  I prayed.  I read some holy books.  It felt really good.  I grew up and came to the realization that I could be a moral, ethical person." 

"Fascinating!" the professor might say.  "I have a history too.  I have experiences.  I have meditated.  I have read books that I consider holy, after a fashion.  I too have learned the value of being a moral person."

"No," the missionary says, "you cannot be really, authentically moral unless you join my church, which is the only true church."

"But I like my church," the professor objects.

"You are misguided!  Your church is really just an abomination, honestly.  I mean, you believe all kinds of incomprehensible crap about God, whom you don't even worship consistently over time -- some of you don't even think of him as a real person -- and you drink coffee.  How can you possibly be a decent human being, with these attitudes?"

"Well," the professor says, "I guess we have different ideas about what constitutes decency (but we agree on the big stuff, right?  I mean, we're sitting here talking politely: we haven't gone berserk on one another yet).  And everyone has different ideas about God.  That is for the best, I suppose."

"No way!  Everyone should know how God really is.  Everyone should be a member of my church (the only true one).  Everyone should see God the way I see him.  Everyone should avoid coffee the way I do."

"Really?  Why do you think the world would be a better place if everyone agreed with you?"

Here I will leave the conversation, since this is something I could not get over on my LDS mission.  Shortly after my arrival in Spain (where I served), I realized that I did not want everyone to believe precisely what I believed.  I did not want everyone to drop their personal religion to come join mine.  I did not want all the old Catholic churches (some of them quite beautiful) to be abandoned so that we could all gather in strip malls (where most of the LDS meetinghouses were) or other drab, modern buildings.  I did not want the Latin chants to cease.  I did not want the incense to stop burning.  I did not want people to stop making pilgrimages to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.  I did not want everyone to think the same way I did about God, the universe, and everything.  I liked it when people were honest with me.  I liked it when we shared real conversations, in which both of us spoke our truth and nobody felt pressured to deny the reality he was living in (whether that reality was Mormon, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, pagan, or atheist).  It seemed to me that converting the whole country to Mormonism would be a shame: think how much culture would be lost.  It would be like replacing every restaurant in New York with a McDonald's.  Why would anyone want to do that? 

I guess if all the restaurants but McDonald's were serving poisonous food it might make some sense, but they aren't.  I have encountered many people outside Mormonism as happy and "spiritual" as any Saint I ever met.  The fact that they are not precisely like me does not make them "anti-me" -- we are different, but we are not enemies, and neither one of us is better than the other (even when one of us happens to be atheist).  Behind all the posturing -- the culture, the different ideas about God -- we are both human.  We are all human: it doesn't matter what religion you happen to belong to; what really matters is what kind of person you are.  This truth hit me like a ton of bricks in the mission field, and I have not been able to get rid of it since.  I don't really want to: I think it is one of the most valuable insights I have ever had.

In conclusion, I would like to refer my readers to two contemporary atheists explaining their beliefs.  One gives the answer that Wilcox's professor should have given.  (If all we have are opinions, which opinions matter most to you: those that are rational, arguable, and open-ended, or the ones that you accept untested from men who claim obscure magical powers and think that winning an argument means doing whatever it takes to shut the other guy up?  Most professors will pick Socratic logos over tyrannical ethos every time, whether they are atheist or not, and rightly so.  That is what civilized people do, even in antiquity.)  The other reminds us, in a very personal way, that atheists are people just like everybody else: they have personal testimonies, too.

Humor and Integrity

I recently listened to the first half of this interview again, and I was impressed (moved).  Brian Dalton has some good things to say, things that have crossed my mind several times as well (more and more over the past few years).

Pilgrim's Prayer

Paulo Coelho. The Pilgrimage: A Contemporary Quest for Ancient Wisdom. Trans. Alan R. Clarke. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. ISBN: 006251279X.

Coelho's book tells the story of a fictional pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela (a journey which I really want to complete for myself one day in real time: I have already lived in several cities along the Camino for extended periods of time, working as an LDS missionary, and Spain will always be a part of me).  The chapter on "personal vices" includes a prayer by the pilgrim guide (Petrus), which really speaks to me.  I will quote it here (pp. 150-154):

Pity us, O Lord, for we are pilgrims on the road to Compostela, and our being here may be a vice. In your infinite pity, help us never to turn our knowledge against ourselves.

(1)  Have pity on those who pity themselves and who see themselves as good people treated unfairly by life--who feel that they do not deserve what has happened to them. Such people will never be able to fight the good fight. And pity those who are cruel to themselves and who see only evil in their own actions, feeling that they are to blame for the injustice in the world. Because neither of these kinds of people know thy law that says, 'But the very hairs of your head are numbered.'

(2) Have pity on those who command and those who serve during long hours of work, and who sacrifice themselves in exchange merely for a Sunday off, only to find that there is nowhere to go, and everything is closed. But also have pity on those who sanctify their efforts, and who are able to go beyond the bounds of their own madness, winding up indebted, or nailed to the cross by their very brothers. Because neither of these kinds of people know thy law that says, 'Be ye therefore as wise as serpents and as harmless as the doves.'

(3) Have pity on those who may conquer the world but never join the good fight within themselves. But pity also those who have won the good fight within themselves, and now find themselves in the streets and the bars of life because they are unable to conquer the world. Because neither of these kinds of people know thy law that says, 'He who heeds my words will I liken to a wise man who built his house on rock.'

(4) Have pity on those who are fearful of taking up a pen, or a paintbrush, or an instrument, or a tool because they are afraid that someone has already done so much better than they could, and who feel themselves to be unworthy to enter the marvelous mansion of art. But have even more pity on those who, having taken up the pen, or the paintbrush, or the instrument, or the tool, have turned inspiration into a paltry thing, and yet feel themselves to be better than others. Neither of these kinds of people know thy law that says, 'For there is nothing covered that will not be revealed, nor hidden that will not be known.'

(5) Pity those who eat and drink and sate themselves, but are unhappy and alone in their satiety. But pity even more those who fast, and who censure and prohibit, and who thereby see themselves as saints, preaching your name in the streets. For neither of these types of people know thy law that says, 'If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true.'

(6) Pity those who fear death, and are unaware of the many kingdoms through which they have already passed, and the many deaths that they have already suffered, and who are unhappy because they think that one day their world will end. But have even more pity for those who already know their many deaths, and today think of themselves as immortal. Neither of these kinds of people know thy law that says, 'Except that one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.'

(7) Have pity on those who bind themselves with the silken ties of love, and think of themselves as masters of others, and who feel envy, and poison themselves, and who torture themselves because they cannot see that love and all things change like the wind. But pity even more those who die of their fear of loving and who reject love in the name of a greater love that they know not. Neither of these kinds of people know thy law that says, 'Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst.'

(8) Pity those who reduce the cosmos to an explanation, God to a magic potion, and humanity to beings with basic needs that must be satisfied, because they never hear the music of the spheres. But have even more pity on those who have blind faith, and who in their laboratories transform mercury into gold, and who are surrounded by their books about the secrets of the Tarot and the power of the pyramids. Neither of these kinds of people know thy law that says, 'Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will by no means enter it.'

(9) Pity those who see no one but themselves, and for whom others are a blurred and distant scenario as they pass through the streets in their limousines and lock themselves in their air-conditioned penthouse offices, as they suffer in silence the solitude of power. But pity even more those who will do anything for anybody, and are charitable, and seek to win out over evil only through love. For neither of these kinds of people know thy law that says, 'Let him who has no sword sell his garment and buy one.'

(10) Have pity, Lord, on we who seek out and dare to take up the sword that you have promised, and who are a saintly and sinful lot scattered throughout the world. Because we do not recognize even ourselves, and often think that we are dressed, but we are nude; we believe that we have committed a crime, when in reality we have saved someone's life. And do not forget in your pity for all of us that we hold the sword with the hand of an angel and the hand of a devil, and that they are both the same hand. Because we are all of the world, and we continue to be of the world, and we have need of thee. We will always be in need of thy law that says, 'When I sent you without money bag, knapsack, and sandals, you lacked nothing.'

These days I find myself often in a strange position: on the one hand, my religious friends see me as secular apostate; on the other hand, my secular friends recognize that I am still very deeply religious (if anything, my real religious faith, a faith in humanity that I have always had, has become stronger).  Intellectually, I am keenly aware now of the difference between history (what happened) and myth (what we say about what happened).  I am also very keenly aware that I cannot ignore my own myths and blithely follow someone else's (even if that person claims a divine revelation, popular support, or a Nobel Prize).  I see all people as human beings: most of us want good things, for ourselves and others, good things that we often fail to achieve.  Failure would not be such a problem if it came alone: more damaging is the illusion of success.  Some of us stumble upon happiness (historical fact), and promptly concoct some absurd story (myth) explaining (1) how we did it and (2) how you can do it too (often this involves paying the myth-maker).  There is nothing terribly wrong with this universal tendency (even down to paying for myths that won't always pan out), until we insist on ignoring the fact that we are just playing (pretending to understand things that have actually eluded us).  Life is a game--a deadly game: our existence is on the line all the time.  But it is still a game, a farce, a joke.  It is meant to be laughed at (after the tears: they have their place, and I would never deny that).  If we pretend that the game is serious (i.e. that it has regular rules that make some kind of continuous sense that we or someone smarter understands), we lose the chance to live for real.  We become focused on the myth more than the reality that it describes (but does not and cannot contain).  We avoid some small tragedies (facing the realities of unfairness and death), but at what cost?  What profiteth it a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?  I want to suffer my own life.  I don't want to lose my experiences.  I don't want the edge of my suffering dulled by long drafts of intoxicating myth lying to me, telling me that all is well, that the ruin I see around me is unreal, just a bad moment in kindergarten before an eternity in heaven (with mansions and virgins and gold and whatever else the fashionable prophet du jour promises).  The only thing worse than suffering terribly in life is failing to suffer what one actually suffers.  The only thing worse than being crucified myself is letting Jesus be crucified in my place.

There are few things we can actually do in life.  One of the most precious of these things, in my experience, is to be present in the moment, especially those moments that are emotionally charged (whether with joy or sorrow).  I cannot determine the circumstances of my birth or death, but (as it happens) I have some control over the dance that I execute between entrance and exit.  I can strike a heroic pose, embracing the truth that I find (whatever it is), or I can worry about what someone else thinks the whole time (and pass him all the panache of living my life: the risks, the fear, the elation, the sorrow, the anticipation).  I choose to live my life myself: ultimately, I think this will make me a better person, my associates better people, and the world a better place (no matter what happens: some of it is always going to be awful).

What is Intelligent Design?

This screed came out of my pen in reaction to an article on Intelligent Design theory, which was sent to me by a very good friend.

I have believed both sides of this argument: I started out believing in Darwinian evolution, converted to ID, and have re-converted to belief in evolution.  To me, it seems abundantly clear (1) that change happens all the time, (2) that there is a significant degree of randomness involved in change, and (3) that people systematically underestimate the randomness (or overestimate their ability to understand it).  This does not mean that I think that everything Darwin said is true: it isn't, and current ideas about biological evolution look significantly different from what he put forward in On the Origin of Species.  In the future, theories will continue to evolve: it is not in the nature of things for permanent knowledge to exist.  Real knowledge depends on context, which is constantly changing.  Useful knowledge does not assert itself as something absolute, unchanging, non-evolving.

One problem that people on the ID side have (from my perspective) is that they fail to understand how design really works.  Take Paley's analogy: you find a watch on the beach (watch = universe) and presume that some watchmaker (= God) made it.  In real life, however, watchmakers don't make watches on their own, with untutored intelligence!  The original watch was a clock, which came into existence at multiple times in history in various formats: engineers took those formats and tweaked them, and tweaked them, and tweaked them, and continue to tweak them, creating all kinds of different watches.  No one individual ever invented a Platonic form of the watch ("one watch to time them all").  Someone came up with a gizmo that gave someone else an idea for another gizmo, and so on.  The watch is evolving as I write this.  Watchmakers are noticing random things in their old blueprints, in their customer base, in the work of other watchmakers, and they are building new watches (including some very different from an early Benedictine clock).  The original watchmakers did not come up with their watch out of thin air: the gizmos they built were likewise inspired by earlier gizmos (and a crowd of engineering ideas that no single historical individual is responsible for).  The way that "intelligent design" actually works in human terms is actually very much like the way modern biologists imagine biological evolution taking place.  Engineers share ideas and create multiple gizmos (which become prototypes for more gizmos) just as organisms share DNA and create multiple offspring (which become prototypes for more organisms).  One person is not responsible for creating watches (which are a collective phenomenon).  One thing is not responsible for creating biological life (which is a collective phenomenon).

Another problem with ID is that it does not really say anything about how we are to understand things.  The modern biologist's story of evolution doesn't just give you a fun myth for science class: it explains how diseases happen (as bacteria and viruses evolve to become better predators), how speciation happens (as isolated pockets of organisms develop apart from their parent populations), how ecosystems exist (as multiple populations of living things evolve together) -- and thus how our actions as human beings influence the prevalence of disease and living species.  It gives practical answers (that actually work sometimes!) to practical questions (should I build a house here? what kind of house? should I have a pet? what kind? what should I eat? what medicine should I take for a particular illness or infection?).  ID, on the other hand, just points out that the whole thing is a mystery.  "The universe is the product of an otherwise unknown and perhaps unknowable intelligent designer" (who for some reason left no business card on the beach with Paley's watch).  Can I ask the designer what to do when I am sick, when I want to build a house?  I can.  What does he say?  Nothing at all, until I remember that he is also known as God.  Then he says all kinds of stuff: 

"You are sick?  Sacrifice a lamb, or a goat, or two turtle doves, and leave an offering of incense with the priest (who must be paid handsomely to officiate).  That didn't work?  Well, maybe you can try dedicating a small statue of me (complete with thunderbolts in hand) at your local temple?  That didn't work?  How about a cast of the affected body part?  Still no dice?  Well, I suppose you could try burning or cutting yourself: remember that weird dream you had about being on fire the other night?  I sometimes talk to people in dreams.  Maybe you should ask the local madman what he thinks; I love schizophrenics: they always hear me so loud and clear!"  

Historically speaking, God has many conflicting faces (all of them suspiciously human, to my eye), and he offers all kinds of contradictory prescriptions for human life, contradictory prescriptions that are about as reliable as medicine before germ theory.  (By saying all kinds of different things over time, God occasionally offered somebody something that worked, much as some pre-modern doctors occasionally cured people with panaceas like quinine.  If I give quinine to every sick person I meet, the malaria patients will be cured; some people will get better on their own; and everyone else will die.  Old time medicine, like old time religion, worked, but it was not really reliable.  Sometimes, avoiding the consumption of pig meat may help society prosper; other times, not so much.  God is either really bad at seeing the difference or really bad at communicating it to his acolytes.)  The ID people have no practical advice to offer except the outworn ideas presented by God: some of these ideas work (perhaps even very well), and others don't, but it takes an evolutionist to see the difference.  The evolutionist may give you some of God's medicine, but he will follow up with you when it doesn't work, and will even invent new medicine (which won't always work, either).  The ID guy just hands you over to the priest, who gives you the divine panacea du jour and then lets you survive or die without bothering to think of anything new (and heretical: we have to stick to the tried and true, even when history shows us that it doesn't really work). 

Evolution is practical because it changes (mimicking the growth we see in life, and in God, for that matter).  ID is impractical because it does not change (mimicking the stagnation we see in death, and in many churches).  The people who believe in evolution are engaging in useful thought whenever they ask how changes occur.  The people who believe in ID are not, since they have no positive theory of change.  I reconverted to belief in evolution when I realized that in my experience (1) change is real, and (2) engaging it practically requires something more than uncritical acceptance of ancient mythology.  This is not because the mythology is worthless, but because it contains a lot of chaff mixed in with the wheat, chaff that needs to be sifted out if I am to avoid poisoning myself every time I take something from God's medicine cabinet (which we all do at some point: no one claims to know everything, except for some crazy fanatics, and we all fall back on "common sense" whose usefulness is open to question).        

The Dark Side of Religious Fervor

A friend brought these clips to my attention.  While I don't endorse Christopher Hitchens without qualification (since I have my own opinions), here he summarizes an insight that was crucial to me as I came to doubt my old, naive faith in religion (leaving God out of it for the moment).  Religion doesn't make people better.  I am not certain (as Hitchens is) that it makes them worse, but it certainly can countenance bad things, including some things so bad that they take my breath away.

In at least some cases, religion seems to exacerbate human situations that are already suboptimal, taking something bad and making it truly rotten.  My faith crisis involved seeing this on a small scale in my own life (as I recognized toxic ideas I was clinging to because I had religious faith in them), and on a large scale in the world (where I awoke slowly in the wake of 9/11 to the fact that religion kills as much as it creates, that it is at least as cruel as it is kind, that I was ignoring the vast potential for ruthless destruction that lurked under my innocent willingness to do without question whatever a particular group of older men might tell me to do).  This was something horrible to contemplate, but I am honestly more scared of the results had I not dared to look into the abyss and ask myself, "Do I really want to pledge my soul to somebody else? Can I live with faith in an institution that demands unqualified, uncritical obedience?"

Penn Jillette's Take on Atheism, Libertarianism, Terrorism

I was getting ready to write something like this for my next essay on terrorism.   Like Jillette, I too believe that I do not know what is best for other people, and that it is categorically wrong for me to dictate to them (unless I am telling them to please avoid blowing my head off, vel sim).  I also really like what he said about reserving the right to change his mind about something as his experience with it evolves.  For me, that is what good faith is (and always has been)--not accepting a single answer as true no matter what, but remaining open to new truth (even when it destroys the old).

Atheist Agnostic Believer

Chuck Borough has produced a great podcast over at Mormon Expression.  I agree with just about everything the man said, and have repeatedly reflected that my own status as a Mormon is best described with the adjectives atheist (since I doubt the existence of a personal deity), agnostic (since I don't know for a fact), and believer (since I believe in community, including family and friends and the values that sustain these relationships).

Contrary to what someone prominent implied recently in a large gathering of LDS, I am not some kind of fascist who wants to force others to deny God so that we can all go on a wild crime spree together.  Borough's Santa Claus analogy is perfect.  When I realized that the jolly old gent was not a real person residing on the North Pole, I did not suddenly lose all respect for Christmas: I still like gathering with family and friends, singing, sharing food, and even exchanging gifts (though I am sometimes embarrassed that my offerings are a little meager).  Christmas is still Christmas for me, even if I don't anticipate flying reindeer on my roof come Christmas Eve.  Just so, Mormonism did not lose all its meaning for me when I realized that I have serious doubts about the existence of a personal God and the moral authority of those who represent him (whether gods incarnate like Christ or inspired prophets like Joseph Smith).  I still believe in the importance of being a moral person.  I believe in community, including the community of believers.  Unfortunately, they seem not to believe in me.  Judging from Elder Christofferson's recent talk, LDS church leaders think I am a fascist, a nihilist, and (to sum it up) a pretty rotten excuse for a human being.  While I can sort of understand where they are coming from, having spent a little time in that place myself, I cannot accept their caricature of me.  It is wrong, and I resent it.  If anybody asks, then yes, it offends me.  But I can be offended safely: I am not going to drop my morals and lash out at them violently (as Nehor did to Gideon).  Instead I am going to reach out and ask them to realize that many of us "atheists" are people too, that we love our families, that we read scripture, that we believe in and desire many of the same good things that they do.

Sometimes I probably speak too harshly against religion.  That is just the pain of my subjective personal betrayal speaking.  It is not objective reality.  Many religious people are absolutely fine.  Their faith nourishes them in what I would call (in my saner moments) a perfectly fulfilled human life.  But the same is also true of many "secular" people, i.e. people whose religion certain sects (not just the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) fear and seek to denigrate.  Why deny this?  Why pretend that happy and fulfilled atheists don't exist?  Why make us all out to be Satan?  Why drive a wedge between us and our believing friends and family?  Are you really willing to make a man an offender for a word?  Do you think the fate of the universe really hangs on accepting a certain narrow construction of reality, a construction that has no room for doubts about things which are (to be frank) easy to doubt?  Why would a loving God do that?  I wouldn't do it.  I refuse to write all believers off as fanatic members of the Inquisition: I know too many who aren't that way at all, and I am not committed to a worldview that makes it necessary for me to deny their reality to have mine.

Anyway, back to work I go.  Thanks for listening to the rant, Internet world.

Deconversion Story

Evid3nc3. "Why I Am No Longer a Christian." Youtube, 2011.

This series of videos is a very interesting look at deconversion from Christianity.  I really enjoyed it, and I can personally identify with many of the experiences the author documents (both good and bad).