J.T. McDaniel's blog

Suspension of Disbelief, Where Fiction Meets Religion

When writing fiction I rely on what we call "a willing suspension of disbelief." It's a very simple concept. The reader knows that what he's reading isn't real, but in order to enjoy the story he convinces his brain that, for the moment, it should accept that this is real. Fiction isn't really enjoyable without being able to do this. Most of us have read books, or seen movies, where the plot was so obviously silly and unrealistic that it was impossible to enjoy them. If you can't believe it at least a little it's not fun.

I like to believe there are thousands of people in the United States who can do this when they read the Genesis creation stories, suspending their disbelief and thinking these things really happened. I like to believe there are thousands mostly because I know there are actually millions, and it's just too fucking depressing to think there are that many Americans who actually want to ignore reality.

Why is there this widespread suspension of disbelief about this particular myth? Anyone looking at the Genesis creation myths can see they don't fit in with accepted reality. Just the idea that the earth is older than the sun, and that the earth somehow was having normal night and day cycles before there was a light source, is clearly ridiculous. So is the idea of creating the human species by making a clay statue and bringing it to life. If nothing else throws that one out, we're a carbon based life form, and an animated statue would necessarily be silicon based.

Christians are particularly tenacious in their devotion to the literal truth of this myth. Jews seem to have less of a problem interpreting it as an allegory intended mostly to emphasize the interrelatedness of humanity. When you look at it that way, it doesn't matter that much if it really happened, because the point is still made. All people are related. It's even true, though that connection doesn't really trace back to a particular pair of "first humans," if only because there was no first human. Homo sapiens evolved from earlier human types through a slow process of evolution, and it would be close to impossible to state with certainty at what point the "modern" actually supplanted the "early" in the human line.

Creationists are quite right when they argue that one species doesn't suddenly turn into another, but if you look at enough generations you do find one species at the starting point and another species at the end, with probably thousands of intermediate forms that vary so slightly from one generation to the next that no one really notices one species turning into another over the course of perhaps several thousand years.

The thing is, Christians, unlike Jews, are vitally dependent upon the Genesis creation myths being literally true. For Christians, the important thing about these myths isn't that everyone is related to everyone else. That's just a bonus, and maybe useful for a sermon sidebar. What's important is that the serpent talked Eve into eating the forbidden fruit, and that Eve then talked Adam into trying it as well. This "fall of man" myth is as central to Christian theology as the myth of Jesus' resurrection. It was the "fall" that created original sin. This spiritual taint would be forever inborn, and inherited by all subsequent human beings. This would alienate humanity from god, and could only be removed through an atoning human sacrifice in the form of Jesus dying on the cross.

Without original sin as a reason for his "sacrifice," Jesus becomes just another in a long line of failed messianic pretenders.

When you look at the messianic prophecies believed in by the Jews of Jesus' time, the central theme was the relief of the land of Israel from foreign domination, not the remittance of original sin (which Jews never believed in anyway). Hezekiah, Josiah, Bar Kokhba, and even David Ben Gurion all came closer to fulfilling those prophecies than Jesus ever did.

The necessity for original sin goes a long way toward explaining the desperation exhibited by Christians in resisting objective reality. They want creationism taught in schools because accepting that Adam and Eve never existed means the central tenet of their belief system is meaningless. Without Adam and Eve they don't need to be "saved" because there's nothing to be saved from. If you're not born already doomed to an eternity of punishment in hell for the failings of a mythical ancestor, you're just not going to be as worried about that fate.

If you don't need saving, and you don't have to worry about eternal punishment in an imaginary hell (which, remember, apparently didn't exist until the New Testament writers dreamed it up), then you also don't need churches, or preachers, or any part of the multi-billion dollar industry that is Christianity in America.

You might even start doing really radical, dangerous things, such as thinking for yourself instead of just doing as you're told. And the churches certainly can't be having any of that!

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For more ramblings along these lines, be sure to pick up a copy of my latest book, More on Theistic Atheism & Other Essays, which is now available in trade paperback and on the Amazon Kindle reading device. In addition to the titular work, this little (160 pages) book includes essays on the afterlife (or the lack thereof), some reasons why I don't believe in debating creationists (it lets them claim there's actually something to debate, among other things), and the idea that not only is it not wrong to test god, it's actually long past due. If god is real, let it prove it.

Politics is rung in. Just imagine how tough it is to be a traditional Republican in a party currently dominated by, for want of a better term, a pack of fugitive Dixiecrats and religious nuts. The proper relationship between government and religion is discussed (essentially, government should offer zero support to religion, and religion needs to butt out of government), and between religion and science. I see science as mostly not caring that much about religion, and religion as an active enemy to science, unless they can find a way to pervert scientific findings into appearing to support religious dogma.

Modern myths are also brought up, particularly the rather silly notion that the world is going to end on December 21, 2012. How many times has the end been confidently predicted, and then not happened? Hell, if Jesus couldn't get it right (he was confident he'd be back no later than the early 2nd century), why would anyone think a bunch of so-called psychics and sensitives have got a lock on it? Getting one up on the Millerites, the 2012 doomsday types are already starting to fudge their predictions, without waiting for the end to not happen.

There's a little on gay marriage, my essential theme there being, "who cares?" After two marriages I'm personally more inclined to say, "Just go shack up," but if two people want to get married, why not let them? It isn't even a religious function in this country, though the state governments do allow clergy to act for them and sign the license. Marriage is really about property and inheritance, which is hardly an exclusively heterosexual concern.

I even talk about god. There's an essay on The Nature of God, and another called The Childish God, either of which will no doubt upset a few readers. Religious people don't like to be reminded that their deity frequently comes across like a self-centered two-year-old whose mother wouldn't give him the last cookie. Very close to the end we find Dissecting the Decalogue. It's just what it sounds like, a further look at the ten commandments (which were also discussed in This and That), this time the Deuteronomy version.

The book ends with Odd Animals and Space Aliens. I think there's probably something to cryptozoology as long as you're talking about insects and fish, but it's mostly a load of hooey when you start claiming that Bigfoot is really roaming the Pacific northwest, or the Florida Everglades. As for space aliens, I have to agree they almost certainly exist (even a very conservative estimate suggests quintillions of potentially inhabitable planets in the universe, so the probability there will be intelligent life on at least some of them is fairly high). I also argue that there is virtually no chance any of these aliens have ever visited earth, or would even be likely to know anyone was living here. The number of potential inhabited planets is vast, but so is the distance between them.

Anyway, if an alien civilization was able to build a starship and travel to a distant planet, don't you think their medical science would probably have advanced slightly beyond proctology?

Proof of Human-Dinosaur Contemporaneity

At Gen 6:4 it is stated, "There were giants in the earth in those day." What were these giants? It seems unlikely they were men, because all illustrated editions of Grimm show that giants are extremely large, something like 30 or 40 feet tall. Such heights are simply impossible in normal human beings, except when exposed to certain forms of radiation (see such documentary films as The Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, or The Amazing Colossal Man), or through the use of magic (Grimm, Harry Potter). Actual humans can't grow much taller than about eight feet and still support their own weight.

It follows, therefore, that these biblical giants can only have been dinosaurs. This follows from the most important precept of biblical interpretation, Scribere aliquid, ergo verum est (Someone wrote it, therefore it's true). We do, it must be noted, also have additional evidence.

Dinosaurs were contemporary with man at least into the 20th century. In 1914, Winsor McCay, undeniably a human being, was preserved on film riding on a large sauropod dinosaur apparently named Gertie. There was also the well known documentary, The Valley of Gwangi, in which several reasonably well known actors may be seen interacting with various dinosaurs. The important thing here is that these were wild dinosaurs, including a rare specimen of Tyranosaurus harryhousenus, unlike those in Jurassic Park, which were specially bred from ancient DNA fragments.

Now it hardly needs mentioning that many hold dinosaurs to long predate human beings. This is in opposition to biblical chronology, which clearly establishes that the earth was created slightly less than 6,000 years ago. Some will naturally argue that the earth itself is somewhere between 3.5 to 4.5 billion years old, but why should we be swayed by this? It is perfectly reasonable to say that a 6,000 year old earth is composed of 4 billion year old material. No one can reasonably argue with the date of creation (1 Tishri, 1, or 5772 years ago Sept 28, 2011), as this is calculable from biblical genealogy tables (though Jewish authorities have discovered that Bishop Ussher miscalculated slightly). This date having been positively established by tradition, which all human beings recognize as superior to such questionable concepts as inductive reasoning, nuclear decay, and critical thinking (the latter defined by Christian authorities as "the process by which children are indoctrinated by evil educators to ignore inerrant biblical pronouncements in favor of contradictory propaganda supported only by evidence"), we can hardly produce any data in opposition.

This seeming discrepancy is, in any case, easily explained. The earth was created at a much later date than it was created. This can perhaps best be understood by referring to a long running series of BBC documentaries, which conclusively established that a container with an exterior footprint no greater than about 25 square feet is able to contain a portable dwelling consisting of several hundred rooms, including an Olympic size swimming pool. As this dimensionally ambiguous device is also able to travel in non-linear space-time, it naturally follows that the material of which a universe is composed may be older than the universe itself, or any planet contained therein.

This comes from another established biblical precept, which is, Testatus Deus, credo, si discordes interficiam te (God declared, I believe, if you disagree I'll kill you). This has worked extremely well for the religious for nearly 2,000 years, though for the last century or two being somewhat tempered by the interference of secular governments. Also noted is the principle, Seperatum quod probat (That which is unconnected proves it).

So we can see, upon consideration, that space-time itself, being non linear and essentially wadded up like a ball of string, whereby one may, at any time, move from one location on that string to another (Beckettian String Theory) dinosaurs and man are logically able to coexist.

Further documentary proof may be found in the collected works of Johnny Hart and V.T. Hamlin, which may be found cited in a large number of newspapers to this day. For those less inclined to mere reading, documentary producers Hanna and Barbera have contributed several decades of programs showing human-dinosaur interaction, including proving that dinosaurs were at one time used not only as companion animals, but as household appliances. H & B are also prominent in the documentation of animal language, and ursine culinary kleptomania.

Finally, the clincher, certain religious groups have built museums documenting not only human-dinosaur coexistence, but such phenomena as animal distribution by means of a large boat, with numerous supporting dioramas, along with a very clear explanation of why the failures of a single pair of apocryphal human beings require the wholesale, perpetual roasting of all human beings who fail to recognize the necessity of human sacrifice at the beginning of the common era. The eternal torture is for your own good, because the creator deity loves you, and expresses that love by torturing you for failing to respond to that love with a complete and willing suspension of disbelief. So, because we all know Exhibet nunquam mentiri (exhibits never lie), it is therefore proved that dinosaurs and humans lived together.

Not a Good Place to Learn Science

I know people who think Tennessee is a wonderful place. How much longer, though? Or is it a function of age? The Tennessee people I know are all older, with grown children. Would they be as fond of the place if they still had kids in school?

Tennessee is one of two states -- the other in Louisiana -- where there is a law allowing science teachers to throw actual science out the window and teach fairy tales instead. It may actually be the only state where an anti-bullying law makes bullying legal as long as the bully can claim that his religion says it's okay to persecute the victim.

In the science classroom, the idea is that teachers should be allowed to teach the "controversy" about evolution, climate change, and other subjects. So far as evolution is concerned, you'd have to ask why such a law would be needed. The only actual controversy about evolution is whether Gould's punctuated equilibrium idea or the older Darwinian gradualism is the correct mechanism. There's no controversy at all as to whether humans represent the current evolutionary level of our particular branch.

But the controversy that Tennessee and Louisiana want taught is the old argument between evolution and so-called Intelligent Design. It's a false controversy at best. Science supports evolution, and nothing at all supports ID, which is just the same old biblical creationism plastered over with a little new illogic, misinterpretations of legitimate science, and quite a lot of pseudo-science.

This sort of law is wasteful on several levels. It wastes the legislature's time, it wastes the state's money, and it wastes the time and efforts of students when it would be far better employed learning something useful. In the monetary area, it not only wastes money paying the salaries of the people who came up with this nonsense, but it also wastes the money that will be spent in a pointless effort to defend the law itself. ID is religious doctrine, with no science in it, so teaching it violates the establishment clause of the Bill of Rights. Several other states have already wasted a lot of taxpayer money defending this sort of nonsense. People were designed by an omniscient, omnipotent creator. If we were, obviously, we'd all remain young, vigorous, and completely healthy until we were about 95, then die painlessly in our sleep. Anyone claiming there was a designer is also going to have to  admit that the designer was an incompetent boob.

The anti-bullying law is even stranger. I doubt you'll get anyone in the legislature to admit it, but the intent seems to be to insure that it remains legal for high school students to torture gay classmates by reminding them that they're going to spend eternity in a very unpleasant imaginary afterlife (as opposed to the much more pleasant imaginary afterlife the bully is expecting). I can see the law having unintended effects, for while Christians may be the majority, they're not the only religious nuts in Tennessee. How will the cheerleaders feel after being repeatedly harrassed and called prostitutes because they're not covering themselves with burkas? That would be legal, too.

And speaking of harrassment, Jessica Ahlquist is still getting death threats because she had the nerve to force her high school to remove an illegal banner from the auditorium. Or, more precisely, because she wanted them to remove the line that designated it a prayer, and a benedictary line at the end. Most of it was just a collection of non-religious, positive thinking platitudes that no one would have cared about. The letter that was released a couple days ago has the appearance of having been composed by a particularly nasty middle school student, but the content violates any number of criminal statutes. It also provides a good reminder that the only reason Christians stopped killing anyone who disagreed with them is because they now live under secular governments that won't let them. Otherwise, you'd just have the Pilgrim Fathers, whose idea of religious liberty included the persecution and murder of anyone who didn't believe in their particular Calvinistic interpretation of Christianity.

My Next New House?

With all the tornadoes over the last couple days, and the way that it seems the non-violent rainstorms of my youth have utterly vanished from nature, I was thinking about what my next house should look like. I figured that I needed to take the weather into consideration, because it's likely to get worse before it gets better. Energy efficiency was another factor. The weather is getting worse, and nothing is getting cheaper.

What I came up with was something like this. Not an entirely new idea, but one we may want to start thinking about as a serious contender for riding out the bad weather.

The house is constructed of poured, reinforced concrete. After the house is completed, the whole structure is thoroughly waterproofed, then covered with maybe six to eight feet of dirt, with grass planted over the whole area. This does, of course, mean that the homeowner will have to add "mow the roof" to his chores list, but I think I could live with that.

I just couldn't resist the round windows and (rounded) doors. If I ever build this thing, I supposed I'd end up settling for the usual types instead. If you don't get the joke, just ask someone about round windows and underground houses. It won't take long to find someone who can enlighten you.

The storm resistance factor is obvious. With the doors and window back under a ten foot overhang, and provided with functional (instead of decorative) storm shutters, instead of having to run to the storm cellar in the event of a tornado, you're already living in it. A tornado has a much harder time tearing up a low hill than a free standing house.

Keeping with the theme, I'd want to use geothermal heating and cooling. Probably a lot of solar panels, too, stuck out behind the house out of sight from the road. Those would obviously be vulnerable in a storm, but they can be replaced easier than people or the decades of personal items you'll have accumulated  inside the house.

I do want a fireplace in the living room. One with high end electric logs. Want to keep that carbon footprint down. The whole design of this place emphasizes that. Dirt isn't a great insulator, but eight feet of it is sufficient that, in most parts of the country, the actual concrete outer shell of the structure will never reach the freezing point in winter. It should also help keep things cool in the summer.

People like straight walls, and the most structurally sound form for this sort of house in more dome-like, so the one thing that shouldn't be lacking is storage space. There would be all sorts of room to tuck things away in the big cavities behind the exterior walls. On the inside, I doubt you would even be able to tell you were living in what amounts to a three bedroom bunker.

On the First Amendment

Why does the Bill of Rights begin with the First Amendment? It has to, of course, but why is this particular amendment first and not one of the others? It's first because the men who created the  Constitution and Bill of Rights--in particular, James Madison--recognized that it was the most important.

We need to remember that the Bill of Rights was never intended to grant rights. Madison and the others worked from the premise that these rights were innate. The Bill of Rights didn't give you these rights, it stated in no uncertain terms that these were rights you already had, and the government was never to be allowed to take them away.

Recently, the First Amendment has come under attack yet again. The most vocal of its enemies are often those who most loudly claim to be defending it, and this time is no different.

When it comes to religion, the First Amendment contains two equally important, but to some minds conflicting clauses. First there is the establishment clause, immediately followed by the free exercise clause. Both are frequently misinterpreted or ignored, but the establishment clause is probably attacked more often.Usually by those who feel that the free exercise clause is the only one that counts (as long as it's their religion being exercised).

The most literal meaning of the establishment clause is that Congress is forbidden to establish an official religion for the United States. A lot of very loud fundamentalist Christians think it should be limited to precisely that and nothing more. They feel that religious involvement in government is just fine, as long as no one is trying to declare the United States as officially Baptist, or Methodist, or Catholic, or whatever. They have no trouble at all with the idea that there should be no official Church of the United States, not least because  you'd never get them to agree on which denomination should get the franchise.

Madison, who would certainly be the expert on original intent, had a much broader idea in mind. His actions as President, as well as his writings when out of office, make it quite clear that the intent of the First Amendment is that there should be no government support of religion, nor of anything that might create the impression of such support. Religion wasn't to be harmed or hindered, but it was to be left to thrive or whither on its own. Madison vetoed measures that would have given government money to churches for the purpose of poor relief (he would certainly have vetoed the current faith base initiatives), and another measure that would have spent government money printing copies of scripture. After leaving the White House, he also expressed the opinion that paying chaplains for the legislature out of government funds was certainly unconstitutional, though he was willing to allow the chaplains as long as the legislators paid them out of their own pockets.

One  could easily say the same for military chaplains. There's no good reason for the government to pay them when they could just as easily be paid by their denominations, or out of the collection plate. There are probably some television evangelists who could provide the entire military chaplaincy budget for a year by donating their take for a couple months. True, the chaplains would no longer be military officers, but most of them don't act like officers anyway, and they've never been allowed to command troops or carry weapons.

Well, that's not going to change. Congress and the military will continue to have chaplains based on nothing more than precedent. Madison himself recognized that the legislative chaplains would probably get to keep their jobs simply because they were already established (and even then you couldn't expect legislators to pay for things themselves).

The real First Amendment battleground is in the schools. In Rhode Island recently a student went to court to remove a prayer banner from the auditorium. The school had an easy compromise offered, simply remove the word "prayer" from the title, the invocation "Our Heavenly Father," and the "amen" at the end. The rest of the prayer was a simple collection of platitudes to which there could be no objection.

But rather than compromise, the school decided to fight it out in court where, predictably, they lost. Official school prayers, whether led by faculty members, or just presented silently to the students, have been illegal since 1962. The result is that the banner remains in the auditorium, covered over pending an appeal, and the student has to be accompanied to school by police to insure her safety. The death threats were probably as predictable as the court decision. The church has always simply killed its enemies whenever it had the power, and many school kids are barely civilized to begin with. Still, much as some would like to limit the scope of the First Amendment, Madison's view continues to prevail. Government cannot be seen as supporting religion.The Founding Fathers had recently fought a war to escape from an oppressive government with an official religion, and they weren't about to allow the same sort of theological tyranny to compromise their vision of a secular nation.

The other area where fundamentalists continue to attack the First Amendment is school biology classes. The Indiana senate yesterday passed a bill that would "allow" teachers to introduce religious explanations whenever they discuss the origins of life. Creationists are as relentless as they are wrong. Despite the minor detail that the development of life, and even the existence of the universe, can now be explained without the requirement of supernatural input, the fundamentalists aren't about to give up the struggle. Particularly, their clergy aren't about to give up. After all, they recognize that reducing the supernatural to coincidence, misapprehension, and myth also means they'll have to go out and start earning an honest living.

Get a free book

Starting at midnight tonight, and for the next 24 hours, Kindle owners can get a free copy of my new book, This and That. If you love it, feel free to write a glowing review. If you hate it, well, it was free, so just keep it to yourself and go complain about something you actually had to pay for.

Up to this point, I have mostly written novels and edited history books. With this one you get a short story collection, followed by autobiography, and finishing up with all sorts of stuff ranging from the silly to the infuriating. I suppose some would be well advised to just quit reading when they get to the religion section, as I don't want anyone showing up in my front yard with a stake and firewood.

I had fun with the stories. As you might expect, I started out with a submarine story. Then I let the subjects range a bit, so besides the Navy, you get some mystery, some horror, a bit from the Army Air Forces, and baseball. I happen to like baseball, particularly if it's the Indians or, at the AAA level, the Clippers. What's not to like about the Clippers? They've only won the AAA championship two years in a row now, even with the Indians calling up their best players late in the season.

There's a certain amount of childhood in the autobiography. Not a lot of it. Every time I watch Glee I find myself thinking it's nice we didn't have any dumpsters handy. I was actually pretty good at getting out of a locker from the inside. There's a lot more about New York and Cleveland theater in the early 1970s. You'll also find some stuff about Viet Nam. Not my favorite place, all things considered, though you do get to hear about Sebastian Cabot's arse. I liked Japan a lot better.

The Real Problem with Climate Change

The real problem with global warming, or with the more generic term climate change, isn't the science. Even the most skeptical religious fundamentalist—yes, I realize skeptical fundamentalist is a bit of an oxymoron—is certainly capable of recognizing reality. Climates do change, and sometimes man is responsible.

The generally arid condition of Israel at the time national sovereignty was restored in 1948 was almost entirely due to human action. Specifically, to the presence of numerous Arabs and their even more numerous goats. Overgrazing had stripped most of the vegetation, allowing the topsoil to erode. In Roman time Israel was noted for its fertility, and was a net exporter of grain and other agricultural products. Goats have been responsible for creating a lot of barren land over the centuries.

The real problem with climate change is the inate skepticism of the American people when it comes to politicians. It's difficult for most of us not to recognize that the political "solution" will be exactly the same as it always is. Congress will raise taxes—or, more likely, create new taxes—to address the problem, and then use the money for something else. Most likely either raising their own pay and benefits, or funding some project that doesn't do a thing for the environment, but stands a good chance of helping them get re-elected.

Government naturally tends to think in terms of motivating change through methods that benefit the government in the short term. Voters are presumed to have no long term memories. So it makes more sense to a politician to impose penalties for failing to meet an arbitrary limit, rather than provide an incentive for meeting it. Penalties work, but the customers end up footing the bill through higher prices. It's similar to corporate income tax, which is actually a sales tax on the consumer disguised in the price of the product, and doesn't cost the company anything unless they've been saddled with an incompetent accounting department.

It makes a lot more sense to create incentives, but politicians tend to see these as a cost to government or, at least, not producing any government income. I think we need to provide some incentive to convert most transportation to hydrogen over the next decade or two. I've already suggested reactivating some of the older hydro powerplants as hydrogen production facilities, as locating such plants at dams provides both of the things needed for hydrogen production—lots of electricity, and a supply of water. The carbon footprint of a hydrogen powered car is, after all, essentially zero. You can easily make hydrogen from water, and when you burn it you get the water back (or some of it, anyway, the larger portion being converted to heat/energy).

But we also know that's not how government likes to work. Governments always prefer to tax rather than not tax. Most Conservatives wouldn't have that much of a problem with the concept of climate change if they didn't know it would be used mostly as an excuse to separate the taxpayers from their money, and that no one would actually do very much to fix the problem in return.