Two of the wisest people to have spoken through their writing are these:
Rita Mae Brown, writer, for:
Each of us, in Western Civilization, stands astride two horses galloping in opposite directions, the clear, hard thinking of the Greeks, and the mysticism of the Judeo-Christians.
The Art of Writing.
The example that comes to mind is the petroleum scientist I met in Greece who commented on how disappointed he was when, visiting Israel, the tour guide, upon visiting the scene of a miracle performed by Jesus, would tell the group that here tradition has it that Jesus performed this miracle or that.
"My wife and I are Baptists," the scientist said, "we wanted to see where Jesus performed the miracles, not where "tradition has it that here is where Jesus performed a miracle."
The man made his living rationally, as an oil scientist, using his brain. He lived, however, in his heart. He was a miracle of self-contradiction. His left brain and right brain lived side-by-side, each astride one of Rita Mae Brown's galloping horses, each traveling in opposite directions.
If Ms. Brown is correct, we're all a bit like my oil-scientist, the miracle-seeker.
We'd all like to be saved. That's why we invented God. The only question is whether God is going to save you. You can ask. You can pray. You can sacrifice. You can perform the rituals.
But as the soldiers in World War II used to say, "Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition." They made a song out of it.
The second wise person whose words I particularly admire is Richard Feynman, the scientist who, advising Caltech graduates in scientific investigation, said,
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, but remember, you are the easiest person to fool."
Why is that?
Because investigators in all fields from scientific, to medical, to criminal, to political, all go out on thin ice when seeking new knowledge. They trod a fragile area of the mind in which without realizing it, at some level they wish to believe that the outcome of their quest will be this instead of that.
In criminal investigation, this is expressed in the statement that in every investigation, there comes a point when it changes from an honest search for information into something entirely different, case-building.
When the police conclude too soon, in a rush-to-judgment, for the purpose of "solving" a case, that X did it, and begin interpreting all signs and statements, no matter from whom, against X, and discount or ignore all evidence in favor of innocence, you no longer have a true investigation but an inquisition, an exercise in case building.
Since this occurs inside the head of a government investigator, since in our system most criminal investigations are conducted by police, not private investigators, it is not always easy to detect.
Competent criminal defense attorneys know that they must try the investigation, through cross-examination of the investigator, to show the jury whether and when this transformation has occurred, when the true investigation at the beginning, presumably, morphed into case-building, for the latter has another accurate name, when it has gone wrong: railroading. The reference is to the idea that it is difficult to divert a railroad train once it has started down the track.
Police detectives may tell a suspect, or witness, that cooperating will produce benefits, and avoid a more terrible fate. They'll say that the time is limited in which to decide, usually before the subject has consulted counsel, and if they don't get on the bus (or train) now, they'll miss the bus (or train) and be left at the station to meet a worse fate than if they hop aboard, now.
Sam Harris has written a book called "Letter to a Christian Nation" pointing out the deficiencies of organized religion, how based on unreason, irrationality, how immoral it really is. All of the ones we're most familiar with, Jews, Christians, Muslims in chronological order. He points out how the dominant religious view in the West, Christianity, is immoral. It is based on other things than reducing human suffering, and has contributed to immense human suffering, despite whatever comfort.
Harris would, presumably, like to see organized religion such as we know it step aside or at least shape up to emphasize the moral component.
That may be a terrific goal, but the fact is that you and I have to deal with a certain amount of irrationality in the world. We didn't set up the system, we just have to deal with it.
Another friend, the psychologist Sheldon, tipped me to the idea of "paradoxical intervention." When dealing with a deranged patient, it's not the best idea to tell him he's crazy. The patient thinks that you are crazy, not him. But he's going to hurt himself, or you, or someone else, unless you can get him to take his medication, drop the knife, etc. What should you do?
Paradoxical intervention means playing to the madness. The staff in the mental ward tells the patient who thinks he's Napoleon and won't tidy up his room that good generals all have clean rooms.
If people want to believe in Gods who don't help in the face of disaster, it makes little sense for a young scholar to point out the obvious, that God is a made up fantasy that satisfies certain needs. The more effective course would be to put the God idea to work to make the world a less dangerous place, in terms of human danger. We know He's not very effective against hurricanes and tsunamis. But He can be very effective to influence human behavior, as witness the suicide bombers who may believe that they will sit at the right hand of God in Paradise, along with the seventy-two virgins, source unknown.
Why not lobby the world's major religions to press for greater understanding of one another. Change the attributes of the god-head to make him sorrow at human injustice. Make unkindness to others the major sin, not the form of worship or the image, or name, of the deity.
This is all old news, of course.
The ancient Hebrews did this repeatedly, first eliminating golden calves, and then adopting one portable god, instead of various local objects of veneration. Those were advances for the day, and contributed to social cohesion, developing wandering desert tribes into a great people from whom further great peoples developed.
The problem that Harris points out is that we seem to be stuck on unreason and we downplay reason, another God-given attribute, presumably.
Lately I've been riding the San Francisco bus, as the automobile that I kept going for so long finally gave up the ghost, partly due to a mistake in judgment of my own. You know those little red, or orange warning lights that sometimes glow on the dash? Pull over and stop the car, immediately, and wait for the tow. Don't try to make it to the shop. You won't. The older the vehicle, the less forgiving it is, economically, of mistakes. It ain't worth it to correct your mistake.
But we were talking about people on the bus. San Francisco is a magnet for the homeless. Other cities may provide bus tickets to the end of the rainbow. San Francisco has a program in which the police refer the homeless to a social service agency on the promise of being given a free bus ticket home to whence they came.
But a lot of them get on the bus, people who talk to themselves out loud, much louder than I do, for example. Or who pick fights for no reason. I saw a black man get on the bus and in two seconds pick a quarrel with a younger white man who was seated silently. The other black people on the bus lit into the black man and cursed him out roundly as he exited the bus a few stops later. I moved when filthy derelict of an older man sat next to me, only to have him decide that my new seat was more to his liking.
Since I don't imagine that bus drivers can require proof of having taking ones medications before allowing passengers to enter, the message is clear. Not all of the irrational people live in locked wards.
Some of them run governments, or vote in elections, or influence policy.
The fact is that we live in a dualistic world, the sane and the insane. But if Rita Mae Brown is correct, the sane folks contain an element of irrationality, while the less sane folks may be able to respond to a form of reason, such as Napoleon above.
The greater fact is probably that between the more-or-less obviously sane, and the more-or-less obviously insane, there exists a broad middle range or people who will win no medals in the rationality contest, such as Mr. Harris, but who are not likely to be placed in a locked ward any time soon.
So we have to recognize and deal with irrationality on a case-by-case basis, and on a national basis as well, for nations can be as deranged as individuals. We see some of this in the war against terror, which might just as well be termed the war against Muslim fundamentalist irrationality.
According to Pres. Ahmedinejad of Iran, we're the ones who are nuts. Pres. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has called Pres. Bush a Devil. Both leaders seem to have doubts about each others sanity.
This is a helluva fix we're in. Who determines the outcome of a contest like this? The one willing to use force first? Iran is developing nuclear weapons. We have nuclear weapons. This is dangerous. Perhaps we both need a visit to the shrink. Unfortunately, we have no international shrinks.
We have to listen to our better angels, as Abraham Lincoln put it in his Second Inaugural.
We're back to listening to supernatural creatures of worst-fear fantasies.
And you were wondering why the world is such a dangerous place?
We're lucky we're as advanced as we are.
So what if we live in the Middle Ages.
So we have a ways to go.
Forward, I say, "Avanti, Sempre Avanti."
This is a saying from an Italian sage at the Buddy-Buddy Club at the foot of Emerson Hill, Staten Island, the location of Wagner College, where I obtained a part of my education, both places.
Let me know when we get there.
Meanwhile, my stop is coming up and I have to get off this bus.
Too many crazies.
Figuratively speaking.
***
One of our difficulties is that although America is admired more for her technological prowess in communication, transportation, and medicine, the science underlying this success relegated by a notable portion of the religious people, just as the rationalists among us disdain the people who, not being well-versed in science, place their hope in the Bible and the Lord.
Significant components of our nation are galloping on tethered horses past each other in opposite directions.
Perhaps it would be useful to see whether we couldn't manage to re-position our horses so that they pulled in the same direction for a change.
Science itself has no morality. It is not a moral exercise. It is a rational, technical exercise. The folks who gave us fire, the arrowhead, the wheel, the airplane, high explosive, and nuclear weapons were solving problems with which they had to deal. What use others later made of their innovations was up to them.
Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segue scooter, remarked at the Cal Berkeley graduation of my son, Ted, that the goal of engineers should not be that expressed by Werner Von Braun, the German U-2 rocket designer during WWII, who we took over to develop our rocket and space program after the war. Asked how he felt about designing rockets that could be used to destroy cities, Von Braun is reported to have said that his job as an engineer was to make them go up. It was up to the politicians to say where they exploded.
After we dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan to end World War II, a number of the scientists who had helped design the nuclear device felt that they had unleashed on the world a diabolical machine which in the wrong hands could destroy the world with radioactive fallout. The moral aspect of their effort came to the forefront. We spent decades locked in a deadly nuclear embrace with the former (it still seems strange to refer to our lifelong enemy as "the former") enemy to avoid actual destruction through mutual assured destruction (MAD).
Both scientists and religionists need a better handle on the moral aspect of their work. Scientists, I suspect, may have an easier time of this, since they know that morality is not necessarily their forte and the spend time thinking and talking about it.
The religious folk, by contrast, may believe that they already have a monopoly on morality, since, after all, that's what their god is, a paragon of morality. But as Mr. Harris takes the trouble to point out, God has a poor track record over a Morality Downs. He smites the innocent along with the guilty, if you believe the Bible.
So we need to shape God up.
Which of you would like to undertake this task?
Too daunting? Too big a task for you, you think?
Look at it this way: How badly could you screw it up?
You've been hearing about morality all of your life.
Do unto others...
Slit no throats...
Harm not your fellow creatures, especially the ones you don't like, the ones who hate you.
You can defend yourself.
Try to avoid pre-emptive self-defense, as it opens an awful lot of doors.
You could start here and see how you do. There is little likelihood that you will do worse than those who have tried this before you.
You have the means of finding out what has worked and what has not.
They didn't.
You have all the advantages.
All you have to do is to figure out how you will deal with all the irrationality in the world.
You'll have to be inventive, creative, to turn the irrational horse in the direction of the rational horse towards a worthwhile goal.
What is our collective goal?
Is it rational?
Or are we just rain-dancing?
***
One of the features of our country, of our Constitution, is that they are supposed to be rational.
The minimal test for the validity of a law, before any of the others are reached, is the requirement that it be rational in purpose and effect.
If Congress passed a law making it a crime to criticize the morality of God because this was bad for the country, the law would be struck down as unconstitutional on the ground it was irrational before it was struck down as a violation of the separation of church and state as guaranteed by the Establishment Clause, or I so expect, at least. Since the case hasn't arisen, this is speculative as to which would take precedence, and the vote lineup could be based on either or both.
There's a trucking case in which a state claims to be protecting truck safety by requiring the use of special mudguards. The truckers object to having to stop to replace mudguards when entering this state, which I think was Kansas. The alternative is to drive around Kansas when truckers cross the country.
The Supreme Court found the Kansas law unconstitutional as an undue burden on interstate commerce (we have an open market inside the United States and don't want a patchwork quilt of conflicting regulations slowing down the freight).
But more interestingly, the Court found the law unconstitutional on the basis of its being irrational.
Why?
Because the measure of highway safety is the number of miles traveled per vehicle. Inducing truckers to drive around Kansas would increase the number of highway miles driven, and thus the chances of having a breakdown, collision, or other mishap. So the law was counterproductive to its stated or presumed goals.
Do we apply the same logic to religious precepts such as abortion, birth control, and stem cell research?
Hardly.
Yet, as Mr. Harris points out, our religiously motivated folk are concerned lest young people enjoy sex. If they suffer the consequences of pregnancy or STD, well, that's God's way of letting them know that he is displeased. Whoa! Religion is getting in the way of morality. The "do no harm, inflict no suffering" precept has been supplanted by the feelings of the ministers and priests, attributed to God's wishes, that premarital sex is somehow bad or immoral.
I can see why priests and ministers may so think, but why is it immoral? Harming people is immoral. Not loving them
This is why I'd be drummed out of any church which would have me, and I'll have to start my own, if I want one. I don't mind having one, provided the music is good and the other amenities acceptable. But I would seek a better sense of morality, based on avoiding as much harm as possible, than what I've been seeing so far. After that, you can believe what you want.
What I don't wish to see is where you seek to impose your religious beliefs on my country by seeking to influence public policy that, outside of your closed circle of religious reasoning, is irrational from the standpoint of the do-no-harm principle, hard as that may be to enunciate or implement.
When the religious right succeeds in preventing the government from expending funds that will contribute to the support of birth control in Africa, or to combat AIDS by distributing condoms, or to prohibit Army and Navy doctors from performing abortions on service members, we have a problem.
The problem is that religious morality is making its weight felt on public policy.
Here we run into a related problem. Many religions look down on murder. We look down on murder. Does that make our policy a religious policy?
It is difficult indeed to attribute motives, such as religious, to persons professing moral or political views. The decision to attribute motives may itself be a product of religious or political partisanship.
Well, I'm glad we're talking about such things, anyway.
I'll be sure to let you know when I've got it all figured out, and you can do the same.
***
Meanwhile, in a fast-moving development on the religious front, a car dealer in the midwest, Dennis Mitsubishi, has come up with a sales program featuring a jihad on selling cars, with buyers in burkas, and rubber swords for the kids. Don't miss their Fatwa Friday sales!
American Muslims are upset and want the ad campaign quashed. Hard to blame them. According to the news report, a spokesman for an American-Muslim anti-defamation group says that it is likely it will offer sensitivity training to the car dealer.
That bright illumination you see all around you is the light going on around here.
Why don't we take this sensitivity training idea and make it large, such as for the whole country, indeed the whole world. We could start with the Pope and wind up with you'n'me. It could be fun. Meetings, food, drinks, members of the opposite sex seeking enlightenment which you are willing to supply. Heaven on Earth, and all for a good cause.
I've seen worse ideas, such as in church.
Yes, I've been in church, and synagogue. Maybe I'll try a mosque.
***
Speaking of Fatwa Fridays, and the need to pull offensive ad campaigns that treat religion irreverently, there goes Christmas. Imagine using the birthday of a god, Jesus, to sell toys, clothing, cars, you-name-it, using the medium of a saint (Claus) to believers and nonbelievers alike.
Actually, perhaps we should have more of this. We could have Yom Kippur Blockbuster Specials for all sorts of things.
And Suicide Bomber Blow-out Deals for big ticket items.
How better to make people think and wonder about the role of religion in modern life, or any sort of life for that matter.
But we want toleration in matters of religion, don't we?
Maybe not. In Letter to a Christian Nation, Mr. Sam Harris reserves some of his greatest scorn for religious toleration of ideas that kill innocent people. Why should we be tolerant of bad ideas that harm people he wonders out loud. This IS radical.
Well, our discussion is timely, at least. On Meet the Press today, Sen. John Danforth (R-MO), a Protestant minister, is being interviewed about a book he's written called "Faith and Politics." He says his message is that faith has been used as a wedge to drive people apart in American politics, which he decries. He seeks a common ground somewhere in a middle way, and makes far more sense than a lot of political figures in the news recently. The idea of people killing each other in the name of God, such as in Iraq, is especially discouraging, leading him to call for greater dialog among religions. This may be an idea whose time has come, but why would any religion want to open its collective mind? To avoid getting slaughtered, perhaps, by like-minded individuals in other religious camps? Let us pray.
The column below by Marianne Meed Ward in the Toronto Sun (via CNEWS) on the Pope's comments on: Islamic violence as causing a violent backlash from Islam, notes that Christianity is no slouch in the violence begets violence department. Also noted are a number of ideas, rooted in religion, on which our society is based.
We must be careful, Mr. Harris, not to throw out the baby with the bath water, not that you said that we should.
