Should We Thank God on Thanksgiving?

On Thanksgiving people often voice thanks for the many benefits of life. But whom do they thank? God? Should we really thank God for the good things in life, or should we condemn him for the horrors and terrors of life?

The primary reason for the existence of religion is to relieve people of fear. Marx called religion the “Opiate of the Masses.” This was a perfect explanation of the religious impulse. We live in a world filled with pain, sorrow, depression, and horror, but the religions tell us that there is a God out there who loves us and loves the world. This God will take care of us and, after death, will provide us with a paradise of joy and happiness.

I was speaking to someone and I proposed that if there really was a God, we should not worship or love or adore him, but rather, we should hate him. The person responded that we should worship him because “life is beautiful.” I replied that although life has moments of beauty and happiness, there is far too much sorrow and unhappiness to say that life is beautiful.

Consider the following: The great majority of people in the world live in abject poverty. Most of those people suffer from hunger, disease, famine, tsunamis, cyclones, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, plagues, infestations, and war. When one looks at the continents of Africa, Asia, and South America, one wonders how there could be a loving God looking over those people. Hundreds of millions of the people on those continents are subjected to widespread diseases such as cholera, malaria, sleeping sickness, AIDS, Dengue Fever, and Yellow Fever. They have insufficient clothing, shelter, and medical care. They are ruled-over by tyrants and dictators.

Millions of women throughout the world are treated as chattels without civil rights. They are beaten, raped, stoned, and subject to genital castration designed to eradicate their sexual pleasure. It is hard to imagine that such people are happy.

Hundreds of thousands of women, young girls, and boys are abducted each year by sex-crazed men who imprison and often torture them, using them as sexual toys for repeated rape. Many thousands of them are sold into sexual slavery, often to be bought by so-called upstanding members of the community.

What about the lucky people in America and the more affluent countries of Europe? One would think that they have many reasons to thank God. But we need to ask, are the lives of Americans so blessed and happy? Let’s start with health. Practically everybody in America has somebody in their family suffering from some serious illness. Millions of Americans have children with serious congenital diseases and infirmities such as autism, blindness, deafness, physical deformity, Down Syndrome, mental retardation, mental illnesses, muscular dystrophy, diabetes, epilepsy, cystic fibrosis, heart disease, cancer, and hundreds of other less common syndromes and disorders. The parents of such children often live lives of great sorrow.

Millions of adult Americans also suffer from terrible diseases. Heart disease, cancer, kidney disease, liver disease, Emphysema, Parkinson’s disease, Multiple Sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s Disease (ALS), AIDS, Crohn’s Disease, chronic pain, and hundreds of other conditions beset the happiness of their lives. Millions of Americans suffer from mental problems, depression, anxiety, fatigue, lonliness, phobias, panic attacks, disabling shyness, and stress throughout their lives. Millions of Americans suffer from the effects of terrible automobile accidents and other injuries. They go through life as cripples with disabled or missing limbs, internal organs, and other essential parts of their bodies, or suffering from terrible pain.

As people get older, they greet a host of problems afflicting older Americans such as strokes, heart disease, arthritis, diabetes, hearing and seeing defects, prostate problems, osteoporosis, erectile dysfunction, sleep disorders, Alzheimer’s and dementia, and hundreds of other medical and psychological problems that impair their happiness. As people age their bodies breaks-down, their skin wrinkles, their hair disappears or turns white, their energy fails, and they lose their sexual ability and attraction.

Millions of Americans are addicted to alcohol, pain medication, and illegal drugs. Almost all of them are living in terrible misery, unable to shake the imprisonment of their addictions. There are millions of homeless people living on the streets, in tents, under bridges, and in shelters. Millions of other Americans are addicted to behavior patterns such as gambling, fetishism, sexual addiction, frigidity, obsessive-compulsive behavior, dependency, and other forms of addiction. There are millions of people with sexual deviations including the need to molest children or rape women. Millions of people engage in abusive behavior, physically beating or verbally berating their spouses, companions, and children. Millions of spouses, companions, and children are victims of such abuse. Such people cannot possibly be happy.

Millions of Americans live in poverty surrounded by a land of plenty. They eke-out a living in slums, tenements, housing projects, trailer parks, and rural shacks. They often go hungry in this land of plenty. Many go without decent clothing, shelter, ordinary medical care, and live in places without heat, cooling, electricity, telephone service, computers, sanitation, or even running water.

Millions of Americans are the victims of discrimination. People of all minorities suffer from bigotry. Millions of homosexuals, transvestites, transsexuals, and other trans-gender people are the objects of prejudice and condemnation by millions of other people.

Every day one reads in the paper about people who commit crimes. There are thousands of kinds of crimes committed every day by millions of people. It is difficult to guess what percent of the populace is dishonest, violent, dangerous, fraudulent, and deceitful, but judging from the constant news of crimes, schemes, scams, and corruptions, the number must run well into the tens of millions. There are millions of people engaged in serious and not-so-serious crime, including robbery, larceny, drug offenses, burglary, mugging, assault and battery, murder, and thousands of other kinds of crime. One constantly hears about violent massacres by crazed gunmen in schools, theaters, and public places. In addition to the victims of such killings, the families, friends, and communities of the victims are also victims. Millions of Americans are incarcerated in prisons and jails. There are millions of wives, children, parents, and other close relatives of prison inmates. These people must suffer having their loved ones in jail. There are millions of victims of crimes whose lives have been ruined by the crimes of others.

Throughout the world there are fanatic terrorists driven by religious hatred who make it their business to kill others who do not share their beliefs. I cannot imagine how many people are killed each year by these zealots but it must be in the thousands. It seems that every day one reads about a bomb going off in the Middle East or some other place, killing innocent people. The fanatics of ISIS feel compelled by their hate to murder and behead their enemies. If we consider the minds of the terrorists, they must be angry, tormented, unhappy people who have a lust for blood.

Millions of Americans are in unhappy marriages or relationships. Millions of Americans are suffering from the breakdown of their marriages or the breakup of relationships in which they were very much in love. Half of all marriages end in divorce. A majority of those who do not get divorced go on living in unhappy marriages. Millions of people are engaged in illicit sexual entanglements that cause them emotional pain and guilt. Millions of people are almost suicidal because of the infidelity of a spouse or loved one. Millions of people suffer from feelings of inferiority or lack of self-worth. Millions of people suffer from the feeling that they are too fat, too thin, or unattractive.

Millions of Americans hate their jobs or suffer under cruel, tyrannical, or sadistic bosses. There are millions of people with sour, nasty, cruel, vicious, malicious, and evil personalities who make it their business in life to damage, spoil, and injure the lives of other people. Millions of people live lives consumed with envy, jealousy, and hatred of others whom they perceive to be more fortunate than they.

Millions of families have children with serious behavior problems. Many of these children may grow up in middle class homes with respectable parents, yet such children are constantly in trouble with school, neighbors, the police, and others. Thousands of such children run away every year only to wind-up on the streets caught-up in drug addiction, prostitution, and crime.

For every Bernard Madoff carrying-out a giant stock swindle, there are thousands of businessmen, brokers, hedge fund managers, and others engaged in insider trading and other blatant violations of the rules of business law and ethics. Millions of Americans cheat others in smaller ways for smaller amounts of money. If one were able to calculate the amount of money embezzled from businesses, organizations, and charities each year it would probably be up in the billions if not trillions. I have known several embezzlers in my lifetime. I’m sure everybody has.

Although one would expect great probity from the wealthiest and most successful people, it is simply not there. Doctors routinely over-bill for services. I have had personal experience with dishonest doctors. One doctor who came in and handed my wife a card while our son was being treated for a broken bone at the hospital, later billed for services even though he did not examine or treat my son at all. Doctors frequently bill for services never rendered. Medicare and Medicaid pay tens of billions for fraudulent claims by physicians who are wealthy by any standard.

Eventually, we die. Death is not a simple leaf dropping off a tree. Death is usually painful. Often, it is horrible. It is usually accompanied by the grief of loved ones.

Yes, life does have its moments of happiness and beauty. There are some wonderful things in life, and some people do live very happy, prosperous, safe, healthy lives. Those people can be thankful for all they have, but they probably represent a small fraction of the people on earth. If you stop and consider all of the unhappiness, pain, disease, grief, and guilt suffered by the vast majority of people in the world, it can hardly be said that life is beautiful.

While many people suffering from the terrible things listed here may not think life is bad, that is because of the human ability to cope with the things that make us unhappy. It is a wonderful thing that people going through the most extreme torments will often try to look on the bright side of life. But if we stop and look at all of the problems faced by humans and listed here, we can hardly say that life is beautiful. We can hardly find reason to thank that mythical being called God.

Surely, if there was a God, and he was a good and loving God like the one worshipped by most religions, life would not be filled with such misery. There would not be millions of starving, diseased, oppressed people in Africa and other parts of the world. There would not be so much tragedy, horror, injury, illness, poverty, hunger, anger, war, and death. We would not have to wait for some mythical afterlife to experience a better life. Life on earth would really be beautiful for everyone.

THE ELECTIONS

            Despite the fact that a majority of Americans indicate that they distrust and dislike Congress, and that they object to the obstructionist tactics of Republicans in Congress, polls say that they are likely to give control of Congress to the Republicans this year. Why? I would think that people would become so disgusted with Republican obstruction that they would vote Democratic so that Congress could finally do something about the nation’s problems.

            First and most important is the economy. Under President Obama and the Democrats the economy has been lifted out of the worst recession in modern times and is well on its way to a boom. One of the factors in the improvement of the economy has been the bond-buying program carried out by the Federal Reserve. In the past few years the Fed has bought over $4.5 trillion worth of bonds. The bond-buying program helped reduce long-term interest rates and stimulated bank-lending and other aspects of the economy. The Dayton Daily News reported that Doug Handler, chief economist at HIS Global Insight, has asserted that the greatest impact of the bond-buying program “was instilling confidence in consumers and the business community that Fed officials were determined to do everything they could to stimulate growth.”

            Most people do not realize that the Republicans opposed the Fed’s bond-buying program and opposed much else of the Obama Administration’s efforts to stimulate the economy. Mitch McConnell, Republican minority leader in the Senate, made it clear that the main Republican effort these past six years was to unseat President Obama, not to help improve the economy. He led the effort to block virtually all of the President’s programs to get the economy moving. As a result, Americans continued to suffer long after the actual recession was over. Now that the economy is recovering without Republican help, they want to take-over Congress and deal with the economic issues about which they were so wrong.

            Somehow, Republican leaders have succeeded in getting many people to dislike President Obama. One issue that they have seized upon is the Affordable Care Act (ACA). I admit that I do not understand their opposition to this law. Under it millions of people who did not have health insurance are now covered. By expanding Medicaid, the law makes it possible for poor people to have something which many consider a natural right. The law does not drive the nation into bankruptcy. It is financed by revenue provided for in the law and that revenue could actually lead to a governmental surplus.

Many other aspects of the ACA help people other than the poor, for example: it allows young people to remain covered under their parent’s insurance until age 26; it prohibits health insurance companies from denying coverage on account of pre-existing conditions; it provides for the elimination of the “Doughnut Hole”--That is the period during which seniors have to pay the full cost of their prescriptions; it eliminates co-payments for preventative services and exempts preventative services from deductibles under the Medicare program. It does many other things that benefit both the poor and the middle class. Yet, for some reason, Republican lies have succeeded in making the law unpopular.

            I think I understand some of the dynamics of Republican anger against President Obama and the Democrats. Let’s face it, Republicans despise and resent poor people, especially Black people. They feel that these people are a cause of too much crime in America and a drain on the public purse due to welfare programs and other programs that help the poor. They also resent Black demands for justice, particularly in cases such as those involving O.J. Simpson, Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown. They hate President Obama because they believe that as a Black man he will give-in to all of the demands of African Americans and empty the federal coffers to help them out.

            With all of these things in mind, people who vote Republican will ignore the actions of Republican Congressmen in obstructing legislation that would benefit all Americans, will ignore the improving economy, will ignore the benefits of the ACA to everybody, and will vote their prejudices.

            

THE LIFE OF THE MIND

People have often told me that I should not just sit around reading books. I should get out. My former wife used to criticize me for not having any outside activities. She said that I needed to get a life. I told her that I had a life of the mind. She would stare at me in mute incomprehension. My brother told me that I needed to join some outside organization. I asked, “should I become a member of the Kiwanis Club?”

When you immerse yourself in books, you go through a door into a different world. It not only gives a kind of pleasure, it gives a life. I cannot say that reading has brought me great happiness. By chemistry and disposition I am a less than cheerful person. I would like to be happier, but I would not give up reading to gain that end. Perhaps reading has deepened my melancholy. Profound research into the absence of God and the meaninglessness of life has not cheered my soul. But knowledge is its own reward.

Stanley Fish, a college professor, literary critic, and columnist for the New York Times, wrote a column on the question of whether the humanities do anything to help humanity. His conclusion was—“No.” He said: “To the question ‘of what use are the humanities?’ the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said ….diminishes the object of its supposed praise.”

I agree.

I have spent much of my life reading. It has given me knowledge of literature, history, philosophy, theology, psychology, art, science, and other fields of learning. I do not have a brilliant mind. What I have that the average person does not have is a passion for learning. Since I graduated from college I have never stopped reading books. I am not a fast reader, but I am a constant reader. I am an autodidact, a self-educated person. I spent most of my high school years studying the parabolas of girls’ chests and most of my college education studying the trajectories of basketballs. When I graduated, I realized that I did not know very much. For some reason, I wanted to learn, so that is when I started reading in earnest.

Many years ago I wanted to understand the reason why civilizations, nations, and cultures developed the way they did. I decided to read history and other subjects in the humanities. I read many multi-volume books on the history of civilization. After a lifetime of reading, I still do not have the answers. But I do have some ideas, and I can converse about them. I have tried to learn about subjects beyond literature, history, philosophy, and theology; subjects like music, art, and science. I have only a layman’s knowledge of these fields, but I probably know more than most people. As I’ve gotten older I find that I love listening to beautiful classical music. I also love reading books about art and looking up artists’ works on the computer.

I discovered early in my marriage that my wife did not appreciate it if I went into the bedroom in the evening and started reading. She wanted me to watch television with her. This bothered me and probably contributed to the eventual downfall of our marriage. I looked upon the watching of television as a waste of time. We sat and stared blankly at the screen without engaging in any conversation. The material on television was pathetic. I hated watching, but felt that it was the only way to appease my wife. Now that I am older, I like looking at some of the shows on television. But I still read a lot.

When children came along, they wanted their daddy to play with them. I loved playing with my children but it was impossible to read after coming home from work. In addition, my work was demanding and I often did not get home until later. By the time I got home I would be tired, too tired to read.

I started getting up very early in the morning. I discovered that if I arose around 5:30 a.m. I would be able to read for several hours without interference. Moreover, I would be awake and alert. I could read and understand the more difficult books without developing that sleepiness that accompanies most attempts to read recondite material.

Each morning I would get up and go make coffee. I would sit and luxuriate over the coffee while I began reading some book of history, philosophy, theology, literature or such. Sometimes I could not understand a word of what I was reading, but I did not give up. I would read and reread pages until I began to comprehend what the writer was saying. As I read more and more books, I understood more and more.

Sometimes I would be struck by what I was reading. Some writer would connect with my mind so deeply that chills would run down my spine. I have had the same experience with music and art.  When I first saw Velazquez’s painting, the “Water Seller of Seville,” I was deeply moved and tears came to my eyes. I couldn’t comprehend the genius it must have taken to paint such a masterpiece! I have had the same experience when hearing some pieces of music. I was almost moved to tears when I first heard the slow movement of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto. 

I would have liked to have had a consistently happy life. But I realize that for some people, like me, happiness consists of fleeting moments when we are somehow introduced to something sublime. Sometimes it is just a beautiful day, or beautiful scenery, or magnificent music, or wonderful art, or a glorious poem, or a penetrating thought. It is through such things that I have experienced much of the happiness in my life.

FERGUSON AND THE RACIAL DIVIDE

            One of the tragic results of the incidents in Ferguson Missouri is that more of the White People of America have turned against African Americans. I am not speaking only of right-wing people who never liked Blacks.  I’m talking about all whites, including White liberals who always thought of themselves as civil rights advocates.

            Black people might say that white liberals never really supported them, and that they never needed the support of white liberals. But they would be very wrong. In a nation where white people are a majority of the population, and where whites represent an overwhelming majority of the political and business power structure, African Americans simply cannot progress and succeed if the white people are hostile to them.

            White liberals have spent many decades fighting for civil rights. Many white liberals went South during the civil rights struggles where they were freedom riders, and where they conducted voter registration drives and other activities in support of civil rights. Now, after the O.J. Simpson case, the Trayvon Martin case, and the Michael Brown fiasco, a large proportion of the white liberals are alienated and disgusted. I would wager that today Blacks have very few friends left among white liberals. I believe that this is a real tragedy for African Americans.

            It is not the dispute about the circumstances surrounding the shooting of Michael Brown that have alienated the white people. It is the subsequent rioting and looting. White people cannot understand how Blacks can protest the Brown shooting by rioting and looting. It is very upsetting for people who have spent their lives fighting for the rights of Blacks to see them turn this protest into an ugly circus.

            The decline in white liberal support for African American aspirations began with the O.J. Simpson murder trial in 1994-1995. Whites had greatly admired Simpson for his heroics on the football field and his humorous movie rolls. Nevertheless, when they heard the evidence for Simpson’s murder of his wife and her lover, they were convinced that he was guilty. Whites were astonished to find that Black people did not share this view. Virtually all African Americans wanted Simpson to be acquitted and, despite all of the evidence, insisted that Simpson was innocent. Moreover, even high level Black commentators joined in the collective Black denial of Simpson’s guilt. When Simpson was acquitted by a largely Black jury, the media showed Blacks at an elite collage cheering. Whites had never realized how different Black attitudes were from those of white people.

            Nevertheless, by 2008 the Simpson case had been virtually forgotten and many whites were able to vote for Barack Obama for president. Then came the Trayvon Martin case. When a community watch volunteer, George Zimmerman, shot Martin, whites saw this as a legitimate use of self-defense against a young man who had attacked the Zimmerman. African Americans had a totally different view. They were incensed that a white man would profile and follow a Black youth walking through a private community. Blacks believed that regardless of whether or not Zimmerman shot Martin in self –defense, he should be convicted of murder on account of his racial profiling. Again, as in the O.J. Simpson case, the Black view was adopted by all of the Black commentators. Whites were very disturbed by the fact that Blacks saw something so differently from them.

            The final straw was the Michael Brown killing in Ferguson Missouri. Whites had no shared opinion about the circumstances of Brown’s death, but were horrified that Black people engaged in rioting and looting of stores. Police put forth an explanation of the shooting which Blacks refused to accept. Some people who claimed to be witnesses said that there was no justification for the killing. Whites were alarmed to see that Black people would loot stores in their own community to express their outrage at the killing. Whites pointed out that they never rioted or looted in any similar circumstances.

            Now, as a result of Whites’ disillusion there is a greater racial divide in America than there has been in a long time. Ultimately, this will hurt the fortunes of African Americans. They will find it harder to get jobs, harder to earn money, harder to get into good collages, and harder to get along with the whites who represent the power structure. The disparities that now place Blacks at the bottom of the social scale will be exacerbated and extended.

ISRAEL AND HAMAS

             It is disheartening to hear of large crowds of people demonstrating in Washington against Israel on account of its incursion into Gaza in search of the rockets and tunnels of the Hamas terrorists. One also hears of much larger and more vociferous mobs demonstrating in European cities against Israel. While such demonstrations may have a humanitarian component—concern for the lost lives of Palestinians, particularly children--there is also a large element of anti-Semitism.  As various American writers have shown, the Israeli invasion was a justified response to multiple rocket attacks by Hamas and the building of tunnels by Hamas under the border between Israel and Gaza.

            Joe Klein, in Time Magazine, put his finger on the problem: “Hamas, which was in an existential jam this spring, needed a new strategy. It had lost its prime ally in the region when the Egyptian army overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood.  (Hamas is the official Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood.) It also alienated another of its supporters, Iran, when it sided with the Brotherhood against Bashar Assad in Syria. Opposition within Gaza to Hamas’ corruption and misrule was also on the rise. What to do? Provoke Israel. It had worked in the past.”

It is useful to understand that the war between Israel and Hamas is not simply a war between two competing religions or political ideologies. It is a war between civilization and darkness. There are many in the world who would paint Hamas as a group of devout Muslims who provide extensive social programs for their people. This portrait ignores the fact that Hamas represents the vanguard of a form of nasty fascism.

The recent hostilities were started by Hamas when it began raining rockets on Israel without provocation. What was Israel supposed to do? Sit by and complain without doing anything? Israel is not that kind of country. They did what the U.S. would do if Mexico started bombarding our cities with explosives. They retaliated.

Hamas is the extreme branch of Fatah. Unlike the Fatah movement on the West Bank, Hamas refuses to negotiate a permanent peace with Israel or to recognize the right of Israel to exist. The United States has designated Hamas as a terrorist organization.

Israel is not just another Middle Eastern country. It is the one true democracy in the Middle East and the one country that reflects the kind of freedom and culture embraced by America. This is why it is hated so much by the most radical and uncivilized Muslim people of the region. Although it is a haven for Jews the world over, Israel is an open society in which more than half of the population is non-religious. There are large numbers of Muslims and Christians living in Israel with complete freedom of religion. Many Americans have gone to live in Israel.

Some people believe that Israel has no right to exist because it has set itself up as a Jewish state and occupied what was formerly a Muslim land under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. I’m sorry, but I think that the case of Israel is special. It is not just that the Jews of Europe needed a place to live after the Holocaust, but that the vast history of pogroms, hatred, and discrimination of Jews left them with no option but to set-up a state where they could live in peace and defend themselves from their enemies. There may be some discrimination against Muslems in Israel, but Israel has created a democracy—yes, a messy and contentious democracy—in the middle of a land ruled by angry and violent people.

The Israelis, many of whom are descended from European, Russian, and Polish Jews who were almost completely exterminated in the Nazi holocaust, have created a powerful military with the vow “Never Again!” They have also created a thriving economy in the midst of the wasteland that Muslim nations have allowed to develop in the deserts of the Middle East despite the existence of oil. They have preserved and expanded the great European culture from which they are descended.

The strong culture of Israel should be contrasted with that of the Islamic world. As George Will once wrote, the Middle East “festers with forces that menace elevated societies everywhere.” I believe that the root cause of radical Muslims’ hatred of Israel is Muslims’ lack of self-confidence. Israel was able to take land in the desert and make it bloom. Many Middle Eastern Muslims see Israel as a Western colony in Arabia and look upon it as a thumb in their eyes.

Some Muslims turned to fanatic religion as an answer to their feelings of inferiority. This is a common historical fact. People of lower economic, social, and intellectual classes envy and resent the more fortunate people of the world. They need to believe that they are among the elect few who practice the correct religion and that however lucky other people may seem, those others are condemned to religious error on earth and to hell upon death. Fanatic forms of Islam, such as Khomeini’s Shi’a revolution, the Salafism of the Moslem Brotherhood, the worldwide jihad of Osama bin Laden, and the fanaticism of the Iraqi ISIS fighters, is the answer for such Muslims.

The U.S. should not presume to dictate to the Israelis what they should do in the face of rockets falling on Israeli cities. It is important that any truce and settlement of the dispute between Israel and Hamas include protection of Israel and restriction of Hamas’ ability to attack Israel.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POVERTY, IGNORANCE, AND RELIGION

        The Science Channel recently aired a controversial and surprising new television program entitled Through the Wormhole. It is a discussion of current scientific issues with the actor, Morgan Freeman, as its host. In one episode entitled “Did we invent God or did God invent us?” Freeman explores the question of whether the concept of God is purely a product of our brains. As part of the discussion, Freeman tells about the ideas of a University of Texas psychologist named Jennifer Whitson. Through experiment, Whitson illustrates how people who feel that they have no control over their lives and surroundings are more likely to look for explanations in something mystical. On the other hand, people who feel well in control of their lives are less likely to believe in mystical or  spiritual beings controlling their destinies.

            One of Whitson’s experiments involved having people try to solve random problems. There were no right or wrong answers to the problems, but Whitson designed the experiment so that some people would feel that they were solving all of the problems while others were made to feel that they were failing to solve any of the problems. As a final part of the experiment she gave each of the people a picture of random static noise such as appears on a television screen. There were no pictures in the static, but the people who had been made to feel that they had failed to solve any of the problems, and who were discouraged with the feeling that they had no control, regularly claimed that they saw a picture of something in the static. Those who thought they had done well with the problems and felt in control said that they did not see anything in the static.

            The conclusion drawn by Whitson was that people tend to look to mystical and spiritual things for help when they feel that they have no control. People who feel totally in control are far less likely to adopt spiritual and mystical explanations. Morgan Freeman said that this might explain why the most religious and superstitious people in the world are in the poor and ignorant populations.

            Poor and ignorant people seem to be far more religious and superstitious than rich and educated people. Religion is basically a form of encouragement, support, and reinforcement. It is a crutch for people who feel they have no control over the world and need something to back them up. Poor and ignorant people want to believe that this is not all there is to life. They want to believe that there is a life after death that is much better than this one and is the best of all possible worlds.

            According to Gallup polls, there is a direct relationship between poverty and the religiosity of countries around the world. In the world's poorest countries -- those with average per-capita incomes of $2,000 or lower -- the median percentage of people who say religion is important in their daily lives is 95%. In contrast, the median for the richest countries -- those with average per-capita incomes higher than $25,000 -- is 47%.

Highly educated people tend to be less religious than people with little education. A poll of those distinguished scientists who are members of The National Academy of Sciences disclosed that 93% are atheists or agnostics.

            The anthropologist Scott Atran says: “In Britain and the United States, the highest measures of religious commitment and the most radical forms of religious affiliation (Pentecostal, Baptist, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists etc.) are registered among the most marginal or underprivileged social groups, especially minorities and persons at the bottom of the socioeconomic totem pole.”

            When you look at it from the point of view of very poor people the world over, belief in God has a rational basis. We are all born with a natural inclination to assume that everything in the world should make sense. Very poor people cannot accept that their lives of want, hunger, crime, infirmity, discrimination, and disrespect, are all there is or will ever be for them. They believe that life should be fair, and that there must be something to balance their hardships.  If you wander in the worst ghettos of American cities, or the teeming, indigent barrios of Latin American cities, or the fetid warrens of India’s slums, you will find people with nothing in the way of material goods, but a great deal of hope for a better life after death.

They need to believe that somehow in the afterlife God will level the playing field and that they are not condemned for all eternity to being poor, backward, inferior, or ignorant. They need to believe that in eternal life there will be no aristocrats and peasants, no intellectuals and simple minds. The poor of America need to believe that in the afterlife they will have everything they want and will get as much respect as if they were millionaires. The poor of the arid deserts of Arabia need to believe that in the afterlife there will be cool rivers flowing through green pastures with plentiful flowers and fruit.

            Religion is not nearly as important to middle and upper class Americans as it is for the poor. For many of the comfortable and educated, there is considerable doubt and lax adherence to required church-going expectations. I have known many middle class people who say that they believe in God but who go to church only once or twice a year. I have found that of those middle and upper class people who are deeply religious, many tend to be less educated or intelligent than others. The more educated and intelligent one is, the more such a person has a curious mind. People with great curiosity tend to be more skeptical. People with great skepticism are more likely to be atheists.

PUTIN AND UKRAINE

      It was distressing and scary to see Russian military forces move into and take-over the Crimea in southern Ukraine. It is even more distressing and depressing to see American conservatives blaming our president for these dangerous events and showing admiration for Vladimir Putin, the man behind this aggression.

            Anyone who has read history will be aware that World War I was started with the same kind of occurrences as are happening now in Ukraine. Back then, the assassination of a Grand Duke, followed by a series of demands, confrontations, and clashes, led to greatest bloodletting the world had ever known. World War II was preceded by Hitler’s claims that he needed to invade neighboring countries in order to protect the German populations therein. Putin has made similar claims about the Crimea, and has hinted that he feels the same about other areas in nations surrounding Russia.

I believe that what happened before World Wars I and II could happen in Ukraine. If the Russian army were to move into eastern Ukraine, and the Ukrainian Army were to confront the Russian invaders, and if European nations were to come to the aid of Ukraine, and the United States was to fulfill its treaty obligations with NATO, we could be in a bloody world of trouble—all caused by the insecurities of Vladimir Putin. Contrary to the image he likes to project, I believe that Putin is a terribly insecure man.

            Let’s not forget that Putin is a former KGB officer. After the fall of the Soviet Union he was in charge of the Federal Security Service which was the successor to the KGB and which retained many of the old KGB thugs. He has said that the fall of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Putin has never denounced the police state that existed under Communism. The Soviet Union may have been powerful, but it existed on the basis of a harsh, ruthless, violent tyranny that denied its people most of the freedoms we experience in the United States and confronted the United States and Europe with brutal hostility. Putin may not want a return of Soviet Communism, but he would surely like to reestablish Russian homogeny over the states that were formerly part of the USSR.

Under Putin’s dictatorial rule the democratic freedoms that arose in Russia after the fall of Communism have gradually eroded, and opposition groups have come in for serious attacks. In 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, a reporter who was critical of the Putin regime, was murdered outside her Moscow apartment. In the U.K., Alexander Litvinenko, a noted Putin critic, was poisoned with a lethal dose of polonium 210. The chess master, Gary Kasparov, was thrown into jail for campaigning for justice and civil rights. Other opponents of Putin have incurred similar attacks.  The Russian media has seen its freedoms of speech and the press eliminated.

            Putin has made it clear that he desires to restore the influence and power of the Soviet Union. In 2008, when the President of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, sent troops into the rebellious Georgian republic of South Ossetia , Putin sent tank units of the Russian Army into Georgia and crushed the Georgian forces. Putin has succeeded in intimidating Russia’s former republics, and dissuaded them from becoming members of NATO.

            In July 2007, Putin suspended Russian observance of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE). This treaty established limits on key categories of conventional military equipment in Europe and mandated the destruction of excess weaponry. It restricted Russian freedom to expand its military might.

            Perhaps those conservatives who seem to admire Putin so much should consider whether they want a return of the Soviet Union. The Russian Federation has a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons. Putin has enlarged the Russian armed forces. We could easily return to a Cold War status.

            It used to be a rule between the major political parties in America that whatever domestic disagreements we had, we came together as a nation on foreign policy. The reason for this was obvious. Internal disputes over foreign policy make a nation appear confused and weak. When dealing with other nations, especially potential enemies, we should speak with one voice. For some reason, conservatives have depicted President Obama’s efforts to bring-about peace in the world as weakness. They show admiration for a macho thug like Putin. They ignore the likelihood that the reason for Putin’s tough-guy stand, and for his international defiance and aggression, are insecurities about himself and his country.

            President Obama is obviously not a weak man. He is a decent man who has no need to prove his masculinity. He shows his deep strength and humanity by working for peace and understanding. I wish that his conservative critics had the courage to do the same.

THE HOLOCAUST

 Today is the last day of Shavuot, the Festival of Weeks. Lately, I have been reading spy novels about World War II Germany and I have been thinking a lot about the mammoth slaughter of the Jews during the Holocaust. Thinking about the Holocaust always makes me very emotional. I do not know why. I am not Jewish, but the very thought of this atrocity moves me deeply. As a gentile, the Holocaust has always presented a serious problem for me. How could a modern, culturally rich, Christian nation, carry-out such a monstrous act of evil? With all of the crimes of man, including the genocides committed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and other places, and the atrocities committed in every war, I still see the Holocaust as a horror unmatched in the history of human evil. It should never be compared to other acts of evil.

Emil L. Fackenheim, in his book, To Mend the World, said: “To link Auschwitz with Hiroshima is not to deepen or widen one’s concern with humanity and its future. It is to evade the import of Auschwitz and Hiroshima alike.” The same can be said of all of the other cataclysms suffered by humanity. Each is a separate occurrence of evil.

The history of the Jews, beginning with the conquest of Israel and banishment of Jews by the Romans, is one long sorrowful testament to man’s inhumanity. The Nazis did not invent the genocide of the Jews. They merely took it to new depths of horrendous magnitude. Over the centuries before the Holocaust the Jews experienced many genocides and pogroms. Around the time when Columbus was sailing to America, the rulers of Spain were expelling all of the Jews from their realm. Many reasons are given for this massive persecution, but no explanation can begin to justify such evil.

One frequently hears people compare things to the Holocaust. The right-wing anti-abortionists like to say that abortion is the same as the Holocaust. Such unthinking speech is morally abhorrent. How can any person compare the elimination of a microscopic, not-yet-conscious, not-yet-thinking, not-yet-feeling unborn embryo to the deliberate murder of grown, thinking, feeling human beings? At Auschwitz and other camps, the Nazis starved millions of Jews. They raped the women, shot families in front of huge ditches, tortured millions, and, ultimately, gassed the remainder. They used to save time and trouble by throwing live babies and small children into the ovens without gassing them first. If you cannot identify the distinction between that and abortion, you are morally numb.

The excuse given by the Christian Nazis and Fascists for persecution of the Jews was usually that they were: “Christ Killers.” It is a revoltingly stupid claim. Jesus of Nazareth was killed by the Romans, yet nobody has ever wanted to exterminate the Italians. Even if it had been the Jews who killed Jesus (himself a Jew), why blame it on Jewish descendants living thousands of years later?

According to the Bible, Jesus had brothers and sisters. We must assume that many of the descendants of these brothers and sisters were Jews, and that millions of Twentieth Century Jews in Europe had the blood of Jesus’ family in them. The Christians who marched Jews into the gas chambers of Auschwitz and other camps were actually murdering the descendants of Joseph, Mary, and the family of Jesus.

As a gentile, I am able to find something valuable in the teaching of the great Jewish philosopher, Emile Fackenheim. He said “To grasp the Holocaust whole-of-horror is not to comprehend or transcend it, but rather, to say no to it, or resist it.” Fackenheim said that 613 commandments were given on Mt. Sinai. He offered a 614^th commandment. In effect, he said that if we forget, or minimize, or diminish the importance of the Holocaust, if gentiles engage in anti-Semitism, if Jews give-up their beliefs and culture because of the Holocaust, they will be letting Hitler gain a form of victory. He said that we must not let Hitler win.

I may not share the beliefs of religious Jews, but by dedicating my life to tolerance and brotherhood, I can join in the crusade to defeat Hitler and his progeny.

EASTER AND THE HOLY EUCHARIST

It is Christian doctrine that Jesus died as a sacrifice for man. The idea is that “Original Sin” was committed by Adam and Eve, and that the stain of that sin was upon every human being born thereafter. Thus, even though subsequent humans did not commit the original sin, they were guilty of it as well as other sins. Christ came to save man from original sin and all other sin, and to provide a means for man to achieve everlasting life in heaven. In order to save man, Christ had to perform a sacrifice. Jesus was God, so he performed a sacrifice to himself. The sacrifice was a human sacrifice of the most bestial and agonizing kind, a painfully slow death by suffocation on a cross. 

One has to wonder why this omnipotent, all-loving, almighty God couldn’t have simply forgiven all men of sin without this orgy of torment? Why did he have to be the scapegoat for all human beings and go through this horrendous nightmare of torture in order to provide salvation? The answer is that the writers of the Bible lived in a benighted and barbaric time when this was thought to be the right way for the gods to behave.

The resurrection of Jesus from the dead has been called the basis for all Christianity. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:13-14: “But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.” The celebration of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is the most important date on the Catholics’ liturgical calendar. It is also the concoction of Paul and other writers who came long after Jesus died.

Scholars use various methods of textual criticism, including language and style, to determine if text is authentic or was added to the original gospel at a later time. There are many things on which they agree. Scholars agree that Jesus did not predict his own resurrection from the dead or his second coming. The quotations in the Bible in which he makes such a prediction (e.g. Mark 8:31) are considered to be later additions.

Moreover, the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection are so contradictory and improbable that the whole story has to be dismissed as fiction. Matthew says that the day following Jesus crucifixion Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to the tomb (Matt 28:2), but Mark says that the two Marys and Salome went (Mark 16:1). Luke writes that Mary Magdalene went with Mary the mother of James, Joanna, and other women (Luke 24:10). Matthew says that the stone was removed by an angel at the time the women arrived at Jesus’ tomb (Matt. 28:2), but Mark and Luke say it had already been removed (Mark 16:2-4, Luke 24:1-2). Matthew says that when the women arrived, the angel was outside the tomb (Matt 28:2), but Mark says the angel was inside the tomb (Mark 16:5) and Luke says there were two men inside the tomb (Luke 24:4).

In Matthew the two women rush from the tomb to tell the disciples (Matt 28:8-9), but Mark says that they said nothing to anyone (Mark 16:8). Luke says that they reported the story to the disciples (Luke 24:9-11). John tells a very different story from the others (John 20:1-18). Later post-resurrection stories are also in conflict (compare Matt 28:16-20 with Luke 24:13-53, and John 20:19).

The first Gospel written was the Gospel of Mark. Scholars can tell that the whole story of the resurrection of Jesus in Mark was added to the Gospel by somebody else long after the original version was written. Originally, the Gospel of Mark ended at Chapter 16:8. That is the part where the women find the empty tomb and are told by a “young man” that Jesus has risen. The part of the Gospel after that, in which Jesus appears to various people, was added by later writers who wanted to supply authenticity to the myth of Jesus’ resurrection. As Professor Bart D. Ehrman of the University of North Carolina says: “These verses [Mark 16:9-20] are absent from our two oldest and best manuscripts of Mark’s Gospel, along with other important witnesses; the transition between this passage and the one preceding it is hard to understand….and there are a large number of words and phrases in the passage that are not found elsewhere in Mark.”

If you consider the fact that the Gospels of Mathew and Luke were based on the gospel of Mark, then it becomes clear that the Gospels’ story of Jesus’ resurrection is pure myth that was made-up long after the Gospels were written. The earliest Christian scriptures were the Epistles of Paul, yet Paul does not give any details about Jesus’ resurrection other than referring to it (See Rom. 6:5, 1 Cor. 15:13).

The idea of resurrection by a god did not begin with Jesus. Lots of gods arose from the dead in ancient times. Among them are Mithra, Attis, Dionysus, Osiris, Tammuz, Ishtar, Adonis, Persephone, Semele, Heracles (or Herakles), and Melqart. Some claim Buddah was resurrected from the dead.

Roman Catholics around the world celebrate Easter by partaking of the Holy Eucharist. It is a wafer of unleavened bread and liturgical wine. The wafer is placed in the recipient’s hand or mouth, and the wine is usually sipped out of a common chalice ( a somewhat unsanitary practice). According to Church dogma, the bread and wine are not just symbolic commemoration of the body and blood of Jesus. They are the actual body and blood of Jesus. It is believed that by consuming the body and blood of Jesus you take into your body part of his divine grace.

It seems that for thousands of years nobody has ever stepped back and examined this holy practice. A little thinking about it should, however, make us wonder where it came from and why we do it. Why eat a human body and drink human blood. Isn’t that a little cannibalistic? How did the Catholic Church ever decide to ordain this as the most profound way of worshipping Jesus. Obviously, it is taken from an ancient time when men performed human sacrifice. It is well known that following a human sacrifice, ancient men frequently ate the body and drank the blood of the sacrificial victim. The sacrificial victim was often an enemy defeated in battle. It was believed that by doing so the eater took into himself the courage and strength of the victim. Even in more modern times headhunters would eat the bodies of their victims in the belief that the valor and fighting ability of the victim would come into the victor. Thus, as the practice of human sacrifice and cannibalism decreased, religions continued the practice by substituting bread, wine, and other food for the bodies of sacrificial victims.

The rite of the Last Supper, which the early Christian Church adopted as its Holy Eucharist, clearly was borrowed from the ritual meal practiced by more ancient religions. In The Roman Cult of Mithras, Manfred Clauss says: “The offering of bread and wine is known in virtually all ancient cultures, and the meal as a means of binding the faithful together and uniting them to the deity was a feature common to many religions. It represented one of the oldest means of manifesting unification with the spiritual, and the appropriation of spiritual qualities.” Claus describes how the worshippers of the god Mithra engaged in a ritual meal similar to the Christian Eucharist.

In the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), the Last Supper is a Passover meal. In the Gospel of John, it takes place the day before Passover. It is possible that Jesus asked his followers to eat bread and drink wine in his memory. It is highly unlikely that he horrified his disciples by recommending anything so cannibalistic as having bread and wine represent his body and blood. Such ideas were abhorrent to the Jews. Even the blood of an animal was forbidden at a Jewish meal by biblical law (Leviticus 7:26). Geza Vermes, Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies at Oxford University, in The Religion of Jesus the Jew, says, “...the imagery of eating a man’s body, and especially drinking his blood...even after allowance is made for metaphorical language, strikes a totally foreign note in a Palestinian Jewish cultural setting...With their profoundly rooted blood taboo, Jesus’ listeners would have been overcome with nausea at hearing such words.” The idea that the eating of bread and wine was a consumption of the body and blood of Jesus is a later Greek development, taken from the Mystery Religions such as the cult of Mithra. The biblical version of the Last Supper was obviously added long after the original gospels were written.

In the Mystery Religions, the cult “agapes” were “love feasts” in which the communicants achieved “mystical identification with the divinity.” The cults of Mithra and Attis had sacramental use of bread and wine as a means of communing with the gods. The early Eucharistic feasts of the Christians came to be called “agapes” by the Greeks. It was the Greeks who substituted bread and wine for the body and blood of sacrificial victims. If one goes back far enough, one can see the history of human sacrifice in Greece and how it affected the liturgy of the modern Church.

NOAH’S ARK AND HUMAN STUPIDITY

           Today, March 28, 2014, Hollywood will release a film called “Noah” starring Russell Crowe. While Christian groups will nit-pick the biblical accuracy of the film, I want to discuss the total absurdity of the biblical story and the stupidity of the people who believe in it. My point was made very well by Bill Maher in a recent television show where he said:

“No one can blame me when I say this is a stupid country when 60 percent of the adults in it think the Noah's Ark story is literally true--which is why I'm already sick of the ads for this floating piece of giraffe crap. You believe a man, Noah, lived to be 900 years old, that's what the Bible said, and when he was 500, he decided to have three kids just like Clint Eastwood. And when he was 600, he and his three 100-year-old sons built a boat unto which, in one day, they loaded over 3 million animals, all of which were apparently indigenous to within five miles of the boat.

"The thing that's really disturbing about Noah isn't that it’s silly, it's that it's immoral. It's about a psychotic mass murderer who gets away with it--and his name is God. Genesis says God was so angry with Himself for screwing up when he made mankind so flawed, that he sent the flood to kill everyone--men, women, children, babies. What kind of tyrant punishes everyone just to get back at the few he's mad at? I mean besides Chris Christie.

"You know conservatives are always going on about how Americans are losing their values and their morality. Well maybe it's because you worship a guy who drowns babies. And then God's genius plan after he kills everyone is to repopulate the world with a new crop of the same ass-holes who pissed him off the first time with predictable results. He kills millions more. If we were a dog and God owned us, the cops would come and take us away. Why are we getting our morals out of this book? Why are people following any of it?"

I can cite many reasons why the Noah story in the Bible is simply a fairy tale, but that should be obvious to ordinarily rational people. Nevertheless, for some reason, many people believe this garbage, so I must point-out several things:

In the first place, there are two flood stories in Genesis.  In one, God tells Noah that he is going to destroy sinful mankind with a flood and that Noah is to take his family and two of every kind of animal on board the Ark (Genesis 6:19).  In the other, God directs Noah to take seven pairs of clean animals, of every type, and one pair of the unclean (Genesis 7:2). The reason that there are two stories is because there were different people who wrote different stories at different times which were later stitched together into what we now call Genesis. It was not written by Moses as is claimed in the Bible.

According to the Bible, the Ark was 300 cubits (about 450 feet) long. Try to imagine fitting all those millions of animals onto the Ark. There are currently 5,488 species of mammals on earth. There would be two (or seven) of every kind of elephant, rhinoceros, hippo, gorilla, ox, bull, cow, horse, pony, lion, tiger, Komodo Dragon, zebra, bear, giraffe, wildabeeste, elk, moose, pandas, buffalo, Llama, panther, pigs, dogs, racoons, etc. Because of the extinction of species in the past few thousand years, there no doubt were thousands more species at the time that Noah was supposed to have lived. However, the Bible says that Noah took two (or seven) of every kind of “animal” on board the ark, so this includes all species in addition to mammals, including amphibians, birds, reptiles, and insects, which in today’s world would account for over 2.4 million animals. It would have been impossible for many of the animals to come from distant parts of the world. How could kangaroos and koalas get from Australia to the Middle East? How did Noah keep lions, tigers, bears, panthers, and hyenas from attacking deer, elk, antelope, sheep and other kinds of natural prey? How did Noah feed all those animals? Many of these animals constituted the primary source of food for other animals. How did he and his family clean-up after the animals?

Some time ago ABC News did a story about some Christian archeologists from Texas who claimed to have found the remnants of Noah’s Ark. They apparently found something that looked to them like the Ark on Mount Suleiman in Iran's Elburz mountain range rather than on Mount Ararat in Turkey, the site identified in Genesis 8:4. Nevertheless, they believed it was the Ark. "I can't imagine what it could be if it is not the Ark," said Arch Bonnema of the Bible Archaeology Search and Exploration Institute--a Christian archeology organization dedicated to looking for biblical artifacts.

We have to wonder at the pathetic spectacle of “scientific” teams of grown people going out and climbing mountains to find the remains of Noah’s Ark. It is a little sad. Serious archeologists, geologists, historians, and theologians know that the story of Noah’s Ark is an ancient myth, a fairy tale, not history. It never happened. Fundamentalist Christians and Jews might argue that the building of the Ark was a miracle and that the whole story must be taken as miraculous. Why then do they go out on safaris trying to find the actual Ark? Surely if it was a miraculous vessel that God created only for that one period of time, it would not still survive today.

Anthropoligists and paleoanthropoligists have used fossils and DNA to trace the history of man. They know that our species originated in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago. They recognize that man evolved from lower animals over a period of millions of years. There has been no worldwide flood interfering with human history. Moreover, geologists are unable to find any physical evidence of the kind of worldwide flood spoken about in the Bible.

The story of Noah and the Flood did not originate with the writers of the Hebrew Bible. It was borrowed from ancient Mesopotamian myths that precede the writing of the Bible by thousands of years. The Mesopotamian myths were written about different gods and different people.

I agree with Bill Maher that in order to believe in the story of Noah’s Ark one has to be stupid. Not just uninformed, not just religious or reverant, but downright stupid. There is no basis in history, science, or even theology to believe in this silly story. Some people think that Americans are smarter than people in other parts of the world. The fact that so many Americans believe in the Noah’s Ark myth indicates to me that we are really no smarter than most of the other people in the world.

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CHRISTIANS, THE TEA PARTY, AND THE POOR

            The Tea Party movement arose out of anger at the use of taxpayer money to help the poor during the recession. In February 2009, the day after President Obama announced his Making Homes Affordable plan to help people facing mortgage foreclosures, a reporter for CNBC named Rick Santelli went on a rant at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange against the proposal and announced that: “We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All of you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m going to start organizing.”

            The Chicago rant went viral and immediately attracted millions of right-wingers who were enraged that the government was going to spend billions of dollars to help poor people, particularly African Americans, whom they deemed to be lazy, shiftless, and undeserving. Said Santelli: “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills.” There was not a word of sympathy for the families undergoing the agonizing trial of losing their homes, often because they had lost their jobs. While President Obama showed deep empathy for the misery and distress of these people, Tea Partiers all over the country organized and struck out against those suffering terrible hardship from the effects of the great recession.

            Naturally, the mass of adherents to this newly named right-wing movement were people who call themselves “Christians.” Those ultra-conservatives use their religion not only as a comfort and consolation, but also as a weapon to bludgeon those with different theologies and values. Their so-called Christian pastors can drive their congregations into frenzies of hatred merely by attacking abortionists, gays, liberals, Hollywood types, the ACLU, atheists, Moslems and Jews.

            It is the belief of these “Christians” that Almighty God came down to earth in the form of a wandering Jewish preacher named Jesus of Nazareth. They assert that unless you believe that Jesus was the eternal creator of the universe and the “Son” of God, you are doomed to spend eternity in Hell or in the outer darkness.

            Nevertheless, they do not seem to pay any attention to the teachings or example of Jesus. They are wildly antagonistic to the idea of government helping the poor even though helping the poor was the cornerstone of the life of Jesus. Surely Jesus did not mean that although we should all help the poor, government should do no such thing. I doubt that Jesus would have agreed with the anti-poor fury of today’s right-wingers. It is surprising that so many of these Christians can quote the Bible, yet seem indifferent to the message that Jesus left with us.

            One of the finest modern books about Jesus is Thomas Cahill’s Desire Of The Everlasting Hills. In his book, Cahill zeroes-in on the great moral teachings of Jesus, and movingly describes that part of the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus tells of the second coming and tells the story of the King who says, “...for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was naked and you clothed me…I was sick and you visited me ...as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:35-40). Says Cahill:

It is ironic that some Christians …

have never bothered to heed

these solemn words about the presence of

Christ in every individual who is in need.

Jesus told us only once (at the Last Supper)

that he would be present in the Bread and

Wine, but he tells us repeatedly in the

gospels that he is always present in the

Poor and Afflicted---to whom we should

all bow and kneel.

            It is plain from reading the many passages of the Bible where Jesus spoke about the poor that he did not believe that they were worthless and undeserving leeches on society. He favored the poor. He even counseled some to sell everything they had and give to the poor (Matt. 19.21). He wanted his followers to see him in the faces of the poor and afflicted. How would he have felt to be spit upon and despised by the Tea Party people of today.

WHERE IS GOD

            In recent weeks I have seen many postings by Christian believers who affirm their strong belief in God despite facts which you would expect to have caused them to be disillusioned. The local paper asked people’s opinion about the debate between the “Science Guy,” Bill Nye, and the director of the “Creation Museum,” Ken Ham. Numerous people made it clear that regardless of science, they believe that the Bible is right and the Earth is only six thousand years old.

            In other places I saw the same kind of mindset. To these people, it does not matter what facts you show them, they are compelled to believe in God. For them, without God life is meaningless. They are not bothered by the fact that they have never seen God, never talked to him, never seen a picture of him, never heard of anybody on Earth who ever saw or talked to him. Many of them believe that he came to earth in the form of an ancient wandering preacher named Jesus of Nazareth. They are convinced that he exists. They believe that God does act in our lives, and that we should pray to him. It matters not that such prayers never seem to be answered. They are unaffected by the thousands of terrible things that happen every day. They do not blame God for the tsunamis that kill millions of people or the massive loss of life from diseases, earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, wars, and other disasters. They give God credit for good things that happen, even though there is never any evidence that God is responsible for them, but never blame him for the bad things of life.

            It is interesting to me that people claim to have a warm, close relationship with God, when, in fact, they have never seen or heard or touched him. Despite the fact that God is a nonexistent being, people act as if they are able to get very close and personal with him. It is interesting to me that our brains are able to perform this trick.
            The other day I was watching a documentary about the large scaffold that collapsed at the State Fair in Indiana killing several people and injuring others. One woman, whose child was caught in the wreck, said she was praying. She said: "Prayer is very powerful." I had to ask myself, "Where did she get that?" How could she say prayer is powerful when in real life it seems to have no power, no strength, no effectiveness at all. I doubt that she felt assured that once she prayed everything would be all right. She said other people were praying. She seemed to believe that with more prayers God would be more likely to take notice of the problem and help. Am I not seeing something, or isn't this pathetic?

              In my book, The Case Against God, A Lawyer Looks at the Evidence, I describe the phenomenon of people being able to read a book or go to a movie and be caught-up in the story. If it is well done, the story has us believing that it is actually happening. Our brain plays a trick on us. I believe that that is similar to what happens to us with God. We let our minds suspend disbelief so that we can have some meaning in life and some hope that we will live on after we die. Perhaps the thought that we die to eternal oblivion is just too much for the human mind to accept.

You hear preachers say that “God told me…” That would seem to be a kind of fraud on his congregation. God does not exist, and therefore he could not tell the preacher or anybody else anything. But we do have ideas pop into our heads, and I believe that most preachers honestly believe that some of these ideas are communications from God. We are often surprised by the ideas that pop into our heads. They may be very good ideas, sometimes brilliant, seemingly inspired. To the preacher, even though he did not speak directly with God, the inspiration seems to have been a message directly from God. Thus, without describing what actually happened, he feels truthful when he says “God talked to me last night.”

There are times when we have powerful feelings of warmth and happiness. When people pray they sometimes are able to go into that state which is experienced by people who meditate. It is a form of total relaxation. No doubt they feel that it is a communication with God. Other people believe that they have seen God because they have had dreams in which they experience his presence. People who have received anesthesia for surgical operations sometimes claim that they died and met God. They deny that it was simply the effect of the anesthesia. Similarly, people who use drugs often claim that they have met God. In every such case, it is the effect of the praying, meditation, dreams, anesthesia, or drugs that have caused the feeling of God’s presence. There simply is no God. We do not ever meet or see or hear him. He does not exist.