Archive for the ‘religion’ Category
on religion, secularism, tolerance and women
Over the years, I’ve read, listened to and encountered non-religious people defending religions and the religious in the name of tolerance, decency, human rights and more. A non-religious philosophy tutor once told the discussion group that I was a member of that western morality was based on Christianity. This claim appeared to be made as a criticism of the ‘new atheist’ movement that was prevalent at the time (some 15 or so years ago). I found it to be highly dubious on its face, so I engaged in a ‘deep dive’ into the key texts of Christianity – the so-called gospels, the purported reportage of the life, actions and teachings of Jesus, the son of the Judeao-Christian or Abrahamic god. Did these most basic Christian texts provide a coherent moral system for the western world, or even the barest framework of such a system?
Needless to say, I found no such thing, nor did I find any evidence that the gospel authors had ever even met the central figure in Christianity, Jesus. Whether such a person ever existed is a question with no clear answer. Jesus was a relatively common name at the time, a period which provides no written records of the existence of individuals outside of monarchs, governors and the like. Much research has explored the production and dating of the gospels, which were not contemporaneous with the life of their subject, who was said to have been crucified sometime between 30 and 40 AD (it doesn’t help that our current dating system is based on his conjectured birth). My writings on the subject (about a dozen blog posts, referenced below) were, as with most of my writings, a kind of self-education project. Amongst my gleanings were that the different gospels were inconsistent, both internally and compared to each other, and included interpolations from as late as the third or fourth century AD.
Let me focus briefly on one gospel example, the so-called ‘woman taken in adultery’ in John 8 (3-11), since it’s all about a topic of interest, the treatment of women. It’s now generally accepted as a later interpolation, but it’s still useful in terms of its lack of context – a problem with most gospel anecdotes. In modern jurisprudence, and modern (WEIRD) morality, context is absolutely essential. This is explored in much detail in Joseph Henrich’s book The weirdest people in the world, in which motive, intention, effect and a host of other factors are included in our judgment and appraisal of others.
So here is the story, from the ‘New Revised Standard Version’ of the Bible:
The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them,4 they said to him [Jesus], “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery.5 Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?”6 They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 7 When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”8 And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. 9 When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him.10 Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”11 She said, “No one, sir.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”
So this is where we need to add, if we can, the context lacking in the story. For example, what does ‘caught in the act of adultery’ mean here? And indeed, what does ‘woman’ mean? It’s well established that, in this region, at this time, females were sold into marriage on a regular basis. Furthermore, these females were often – in fact customarily – children as young as ten, or younger, and once married, they were referred to as ‘women’.
But we hardly need to go into detail to recognise that adultery is here quite undefined, that stoning to death for this or any other crime is disproportionate to say the least, and that it’s highly unlikely that a man would be threatened with the same punishment as the ‘woman’ is in this case.
This of course isn’t an isolated anecdote – all of the parables, speeches and actions of Jesus, as described, lack the contextual elements we would need to arrive at the kinds of judgments expected of us in the WEIRD world.
Then again, it might be argued that the proscriptions enumerated in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20: 2-17) are a better starting point for western or WEIRD morality. Yet while it’s hardly surprising that lying, stealing and killing fellow humans would be offensive to an omnipotent god who wants to see his prize creations behaving nicely, it does seem odd that he should be so concerned about his own position in their lives that he must have their love more or less constantly (second commandment). It suggests a degree of insecurity not quite in keeping with omnipotence. The tenth commandment, too, strikes a flat note to a WEIRD individual keen to promote a bonobo humanity, as it speaks against coveting one’s neighbour’s wife along with other property items. It’s a bald reminder, as if one needed it after reading Genesis, etc, that this god is definitively male.
The whole point here is that, if western or WEIRD morality emerged from Christianity or the Bible, which to some extent is true, it needs to also be pointed out that the Bible and its ‘gospels’ are human documents. The Pentateuch was written five or six hundred years before the putative birth of Jesus, and was arguably the first successful creation of an omnipotent, controlling god, designed to unite a tribe or people as ‘special’ and chosen, while seeking to explain the origin of the world in which they lived (though of course its creation myths were derived from earlier versions). The god’s concern, through the commandments – or rather the concern of the Jewish leaders and authors who wrote them, was to unite and separate the Jewish people in the context of a multi-ethnic region with a bewildering array of gods, with ambiguous powers and rankings. Given the context, these commandments are bog-standard – don’t lie to, steal from or kill each other, don’t covet each others’ property (including women), treat your one and only god (creator of all things) with respect, treat marriage as sacred, honour your parents and kin, and follow the proper rituals. Basically, a recipe for the survival and thriving of the group, in what was, then and for a long time before and afterwards, a god-obsessed human world.
The interesting innovation of Christianity, of course, was that it dispensed with the chosen people concept, making it more universalisable, if that’s a word. The concept of Christ dying for our sins, or so that the rest of humanity might be ‘saved’, does seem rather obscure, but it has doubtless provided grounds for thousands of theological theses over the centuries.
I began this piece reflecting on those non-believers who look askance at other non-believers criticising religion and the religious. I understand full well that, had I been born many centuries ago, I too would have believed in the gods of my region. Galileo, the foremost mathematician and astronomer of his day, was a lifelong Catholic. Newton, born in the year of Galileo’s death, and the foremost scientist of his generation, was also a thorough if idiosyncratic Christian. Whatever one thinks of free will, we can’t escape the zeitgeist we’re born into. The thing is, today’s zeitgeist is more complex than anything that’s gone before, and will probably become more so, and the tensions between religious beliefs and secular, scientific explorations of every imaginable research field, including religion, its origins, modalities and effects, and why it is losing its grip on WEIRD humanity, will continue long into the foreseeable. I have no idea how it will all end, but I suspect that the feminine side of humanity will be an essential element in bringing about a best-case resolution, if such a resolution ever comes.
References
http://stewartsstruggles.blogspot.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novum_Testamentum_Graece
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world: how the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, 2020.
Bible: Child Marriage in Ancient Israelite times – Paedophilia?
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%2020%3A2-17&version=NIV
Dava Sobel, Galileo’s daughter: a drama of science, faith and love, 1999
why do fools fall in love, and bonobos not so much?
Animals don’t ‘fall in love’, right? Only humans do that sort of thing. But wait on – humans are animals. Darwin told me so. Funny how we keep forgetting that. Or, if we’re members of particular religions, we insist it just isn’t so. Simone de Beauvoir, in a section near the end of her monumental work The Second Sex, titled ‘The woman in love’, describes this rather mythologised experience from the second sex’s perspective:
The supreme aim of human love, like mystical love, is identification with the loved one. The measure of values and the truth of the world are in his own consciousness; that is why serving him is still not enough. The woman tries to see with his eyes; she reads the books he reads, prefers the paintings and music he prefers, she is only interested in the landscapes she sees with him, in the ideas that come from him; she adopts his friends, his enemies and his opinions; when she questions herself, she endeavours to hear the answers he gives; she wants the air he has already breathed in her lungs; the fruit and flowers she has not received from his hands have neither fragrance nor taste; even her hodological space is upset: the centre of the world is no longer where she is but where the beloved is; all roads leave from and lead to his house. She uses his words, she repeats his gestures, adopts his manias and tics. ‘I am Heathcliff,’ says Catherine in Wuthering Heights; this is the cry of all women in love; she is another incarnation of the beloved, his reflection, his double: she is he. She lets her own world founder in contingence: she lives in his universe.
I can hear plenty of women I know roaring with laughter at this description. It might seem dated and extreme, but Beauvoir directly quotes women of her time and earlier who give expression to this type of mindset, and a whole sub-genre of romantic literature is still devoted to it. And after all, humans are essentially monogamous, unlike any of the other great apes.
But how essential is our monogamy, really?
Bonobos have been lightly referred to as the ‘make love not war’ apes, or our ‘hippy’ cousins. These are telling references, methinks. I have to say that when I was a young teen, and sometimes shell-shocked witness to a very unhappy parental marriage, I had high hopes that the hippy ‘love the one you’re with’ lifestyle (and revolution) was here to stay, and that marriage, the consecration of monogamy, was on its way out. I won’t say those hopes were entirely dashed, because over the past fifty years or so, with the introduction of no-fault divorce, the greater acceptance of same sex relations and non-marital partnerships, and the drop in religious belief, traditional marriage has certainly been tottering on its pedestal. But there are other barriers to our adopting a bonobo lifestyle of all-in, apparently indiscriminate frottage and sexual healing – including our ideas about ‘true love’.
One factor, surely, has ensured the continued supremacy of monogamy in our society – the production and maintenance of offspring. While it’s generally conservatives who maintain that ideally children need a father and a mother for a ‘balanced’ upbringing (in spite of many examples to the contrary), the idea, I’ve found, niggles at many a single parent I’ve encountered. My own mother – by far the dominant parent, the breadwinner, the rule-maker, the sometimes unnerving dictator – seemed obsessed that the weakness of my father was affecting my own masculinity. She sent information my way as I grew older, about a career in the military, or the police, and made the odd – indeed quite odd – remark about homosexuality as a disturbing and unhealthy condition. I wasn’t particularly inclined that way, though as a ten-year-old I definitely found some of the boys in my class as pretty (or ugly) as the girls. And later, my discovery of David Bowie, the most intense experience of my teenage life, had a clear sexual element.
The point here is that we’re plagued with traditional notions of masculinity, femininity and monogamy which will take time to break down. But changes are afoot, and the gradual fading of religion and the great work of pioneers like Beauvoir and many intellectual heroines before and after her are making for a much more female-friendly, not to say female dominant, political and social environment. Slowly slowly catchy monkey. Or in the case of bonobos, catchuppy monkey.
Bonobos don’t live in houses. They don’t have sex in bedrooms. And, like us, at least post-religion, they don’t have sex to produce offspring. It seems that, like dogs on their masters’ legs, they’ve learned about erogenous zones, but, being smarter than dogs, have taken that a step further in terms of bonding. Humans hide away to have sex, but consume ‘adult’ videos involving sex on beaches and other open air spaces, in bars, on stages, in public toilets, in palatial residences, in the best and worst of places. It’s as if we long to be open and brazen about our sexuality, but dare not.
I note that one of the biggest sex video industry in the world is in Japan, which is also, surely not coincidentally, the least religious country in the world. It’s also not exactly a haven of feminism, to be honest, and critics, including feminists, have often targeted the sex video world as, like prostitution, a haven of macho exploitation. I prefer to see it as, at least potentially, a haven of sex without love, but not without fellow-feeling. And certainly anyone familiar with the Japanese sex video industry would have to scoff at the characterisation I’ve heard, from conservative politicians among others, that a large proportion of the females employed in the industry, are entrapped and drug-addled (as is not infrequently the case, of course, with prostitution). Having said that, it’s still clearly an industry directed primarily at male consumers.
Feminists are generally divided about the industry, between those who want to kill it off and those who want, or hope, to transform it. In any case, one of the problems is that the industry compartmentalises sex. It becomes a product, most often accessed by men, alone, in their bedrooms, sometimes by couples or groups as an aid or an inspiration. It helps with fantasy and technique but has little if anything to do with fellow-feeling or – well, love.
And yet – what I note with Japanese sex videos is that they are more story-based than those of the Euro-American industry. Yes, the stories are often repetitive and predictable, and there’s too much ‘fake rape’, with the female invariably ending up ‘enjoying’ the experience, though it appears to be a fact that rape fantasies are common among women – an issue I feel way too squeamish to explore, at least for now. The point I’m trying to make is that many Japanese videos make the effort to place sex in a domestic or workplace context, to normalise it, even if in a somewhat ludicrous, and sometimes comical, way. I also note that sometimes they involve interviews with the performers before and after scenes, giving the impression of ‘happy families’, though there are definitely cases of coercion and the situation may be worsening. Again, more female empowerment is the key to changing this environment. The fact remains that both pornography and prostitution are signs of a culture that has never really come to terms with its sexual needs and its sexual nature. If we cannot accept that sex is healthy we will continue to pursue it in ways that are unhealthy – the drive will always be with us.
So what about love, again? And its relation to sex. As Beauvoir points out, the idea that two people will be able to satisfy each other sexually, exclusively, for decades, is ridiculous. Of course, many couples become increasingly comfortable with each other and co-dependent over the years – as do two dogs more or less forced to share the same home. This may be not so much a sign of love as of the standard living arrangements developed over the centuries in our civilised world – rows of few-bedroomed homes fit for maybe three to five people set out in grids of streets serviced with all the conveniences of modern life. We don’t build for anything like a bonobo world, understandably, and it’s hard to see beyond the reality that has shaped our whole lives. Still, I’m hearing a new term that might be worth clinging to – ‘ethical non-monogamy’. Something that might be worth considering once the hormones die down and the scales fall…
So that very bonoboesque idea I’ll endeavour to explore next time.
Australia, religion and the appeal of eternity
The latest Australian census figures are out, and as always I zoom in on religion and our quite rapid abandonment of….
It’s not that I’m against religion exactly, I recognise it as an attempt to understand our world, before science came along. Often to understand it as story. The story of how the world formed, and who formed it. Religions, I notice, are always about personae, doing Very Powerful things. Creating the heavens and the earth, plants and animals, and of course humans. For some kind of moral purpose, which we must constantly try to discern, from the signs and stories of the creators. And some humans are better at pinning down this purpose than others, and they become elevated as intermediaries between the creators, to whom we owe everything, and our benighted selves, tossed on the waves of godly caprice, which only seems like caprice, because the gods have a higher purpose which even the most blessed and spiritual of mortals can only partially comprehend.
Anyway, the census. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), ‘A question on religion has been included in all Australian censuses since 1911. Answering this question has always been optional but is answered by nearly all respondents’. In that first census, over 100 years ago, pretty close to 100% of Australians described themselves as religious – essentially meaning Christian. And things hadn’t changed that much by the 1971 census, when still a vast majority – 87 to 88 percent – described themselves as Christian, and the number of people who dared admit to any other religious belief was virtually zero. But by the seventies, the hodge-podge of regulations that made up the White Australia Policy had been dismantled, so that by this latest census (2021), religious beliefs other than Christianity were being admitted to by just over 10 percent of respondents.
But Christianity has fared particularly badly over the past fifty years, as the graph above shows. I first started paying serious attention to this trend away from Christianity after the 2006 census, and from memory, I gave a talk to the SA Humanist Society after the release of the 2011 census, noting the trend, particularly the fact that the abandonment of Christian belief was accelerating. However, I predicted, at least to myself, that this trend would soon start to ‘plateau’. My reasoning was partly based on the breakdown of Christianity into denominations. Not a complete breakdown, from my very basic research. The ABS broke it down into Catholicism, Anglicanism and Other Christian, and it was very clear that Anglicanism was fading most quickly, and Catholicism most slowly. It seemed to me that Anglicanism, which, unsurprisingly, had been the most practiced Christian religion in the early censuses, had suffered in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries due to its reforms and increasing liberalism (though of course it has its conservative faction). Considering that religion is supposed to be about the eternal values of the creator, unchanging since our creation, rather than about values that simply change with the times – what some call social evolution – it may have caused many Anglicans to lose faith in religion altogether, or even to switch to something more ‘eternal’, such as the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. My prediction was that Anglicanism would continue to lose support until it bottomed out, in the fairly near future, and that Catholicism would also start to level out, what with all those cultural Catholics who built their social lives around the Church. And there was also the popularity of those Big Church evangelicals and Pentecostals, the ‘Charismatics’ that I kept hearing about.
So I was taken by surprise by the 2016 census, which saw the biggest drop in the Anglican religion of any previous census, as well as a more substantial drop in Catholicism than anticipated. The ‘other Christian’ category had also dropped, and the no religion category had risen to just over 30%. These figures upended my expectations completely, so I was more open to what the 2021 census would bring. Even so, a jump from 30% non-religious to 39% in five years is pretty amazing – but rapid change has been the norm in modern times, at least in the WEIRD world. Today we talk in terms of generations – the baby boomers, the millennials, generations X,Y and Z, and it’s all a bit hard to parse. I don’t think the generation of the 1740s would have had much difficulty in dealing with gen 1760, except of course to complain about their youthful foolishness, as Aristotle was wont to do.
So, as you can see from the graph, ‘no religion’ is pretty well certain to replace Christianity as the largest religious category in the next census, while owing to our increasingly multicultural mix, other religions will continue to rise, though not substantially. Interestingly the largest jump in religious presence since the 2016 census is that of the Yazidis, a largely Kurdish-speaking religious group from northern Iraq and surrounding regions, fleeing from persecution by the so-called Islamic State. Though it only ‘took off’ in the 12th century, its origins are apparently pre-Islamic and pre-Zoroastrian, later tinged with Sufi and Islamic influences. So, I learn something new every day.
Of course, the cultural make-up of Australia is changing, but slowly. We could do with expanding our immigration program, and behaving in a less hostile and cruel way towards refugees. I’m not religious of course, but bringing into the country a wider variety of religio-cultural groups might tend to water down the influence of the very male Judeo-Christian god that has been worshipped in this country for so long. Even if these new religions have their own patriarchal features, as most do, the divisions between them might tend to dilute the patriarchy of Catholicism, the Christian religion that has always most concerned me. Catholicism began to challenge Anglicanism as the most practiced, or at least believed in, denomination in Australia in the post-war period, though there was always a large Catholic presence, particularly Irish-Catholic, before that. It continues to be the most persistent denomination, but it will clearly never be the politically dominant influence it was in the 1950s. Even so, it’s noticeable that the religiosity of our political leaders, our parliamentarians, in terms of numbers, is greater than the general population – just as the average age of parliamentarians is greater than the general population.
As mentioned, the above graph clearly shows that the biggest religious category in the next census will be ‘no religion’. And that category will continue to grow over the next decades, and even the immigrants with their different religious varieties may go the way of the majority.
But us oldies may not, or will not be here to witness what happens. What will these developments mean for the nation? How will it have changed our politico-social landscape after we have passed? That’s the sad thing, life is very addictive, and we don’t want it to stop. We always want to know what happens. No wonder eternal life is so profoundly appealing.
on the origin of the god called God, part 2: the first writings, the curse on women, the jealous god
2500 years of this BS? Time for a change
So now we come to the writings on the god we’ve come to call God, and his supposed activities, nature and purpose.
I’m no biblical scholar, and this is a daunting prospect, but here are some questions I need to ask myself. When? What language? Who? How many authors? Is ‘the Torah’ the same as ‘the Pentateuch’? Don’t look for too many answers here.
The first five books of the Bible, and presumably all of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, was written in Biblical Hebrew, and this is important to always keep in mind for English readers, who so often fail to realise they’re reading translations of translations. The first traces of Biblical texts discovered, the Ketef Hinnom scrolls, date back about 2600 years. They are fragments from Numbers, the fourth book. Of course we may never know if these are the oldest texts, but it’s unlikely they’ll find anything too much older. They date, therefore, from a little before the Babylonian exile, written up in various books (Jeremiah, 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, Ezra and Daniel). According to Wikipedia and its sources:
The final redaction of the Pentateuch took place in the Persian period following the exile, and the Priestly source, one of its main sources, is primarily a product of the post-exilic period when the former Kingdom of Judah had become the Persian province of Yehud.
There were multiple authors, it seems. Famously, there were two origin stories, written presumably by separate persons. They’re designated as Gen 1 and Gen 2, and they each use a different name for the creator. The first, starting at Genesis 1:1, uses the Hebrew word Elohim, whereas the second, starting at Genesis 2:4, uses a tetragrammaton, YHWH, for Yahweh. Stylistically, they’re also very different. The first is fairly tightly organised and brief. Importantly from my perspective, the god, though male, is described as creating ‘man’ in its two forms, male and female, together. Here’s the the King James English version:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepers upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them (Genesis 1:26-27).
The second story begins immediately after the first story ends, and it is more detailed and lyrical, describing the garden of Eden, the river out of it, the tree of life, the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and the lands fed by the rivers, divided from the original, flowing from the garden. God spends a lot of time chatting with Adam (the name suddenly pops up), getting him to name all the beasts of the fields and the fowl of the air that he, the god, conjures up. He also tells him that he will create a help-meet for him, but Adam has to remind him of this later. So, the great moment arrives:
And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man (Genesis 2:21-23).
So the male has the naming rights, and the woman provides unspecified help, and they quickly notice that they’re both ‘naked’ – though what might that mean? – but it didn’t apparently bother them – because, it seems, they hadn’t eaten from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (TKGE), a useful tree for any garden. Clearly, none of this makes sense from a modern perspective, but the story goes on, with a talking serpent, who addresses the as-yet unnamed woman, convincing her that she should eat from the TKGE, to become wise. This sounds like good advice, and the woman judges the fruit of the tree to be good, and so she eats, and gets the man to eat, and they’re ashamed, and they hide from the god, who, being omniscient, eventually finds them. He asks why they’re hiding and Adam explains that they’re naked – sophisticated language already! – to which the god asks the very interesting question, Who told you you were naked? There’s no answer, and the god assumes that they’ve eaten from the TKGE. But he doesn’t appear to be sure, he has to ask them. So Adam blames the woman, who blames the serpent, though of course there’s no explanation as to why ignorance is bliss and devouring knowledge is bad.
Most important for my purposes here is the god’s treatment of the woman:
Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee (Genesis 3:16)
So that sets the pattern of male-female inequality in Judaism. Pretty flimsy, needless to say.
Now to turn to the warrior god, who is also a jealous god (which is certainly not the same thing). The god of the Israelites, essentially YHWH, is deliberately mysterious, and amorphous. He must not be represented (this is called aniconism, against icons), to make a graven image is toto forbidden. The religious historian Christophe Lemardelé, in an essay of great complexity, finds that the tension between a jealous god, who seems in some kind of marital relation with his people, and a warrior-god seeking to save his people and fight for them, as in the books of Exodus and Judges, can best be resolved by examining the anthropology of the peoples who created this god:
The figure of the patriarch Abraham echoes a pastoral population located in Hebron and therefore leads to suggesting that the patriarchal ideology of Genesis—a book of Judean and rather late origin (Persian period, around the 5th century)—would have its background in the family and kinship structures of these nomadic groups. It seems difficult to us to envisage, without any migration, a late Iron age diffusion, however slow, of the Yahweh’s religion from south to north through these groups. The divine covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is not at the origin of God’s privileged relationship with Israel but rather one of its final elaborations.
It seems the god evolved with an increasing patriarchy – the origin stories were by no means the first written, and their misogyny, such as it is, is partial witness to an increasingly endogamous patrilineal society. This god, through the stories of Judges, Deuteronomy and Exodus, becomes more tightly bound to his chosen people, increasingly jealous of other gods, and increasingly demanding and unforgiving. Such is the legacy of the Abrahamic religions, if you want it.
There is of course a great deal more to say and learn, but the WEIRD world continues to move away from these tales and life examples, into hopefully something more bonoboesque, something more in keeping with our actual and potential human nature. The religion that reinforced over a millennium of misogyny is failing, all too slowly, in its Western European heartland, and it would be nice if we could speed that up. We understand our world now well enough to know that keeping women out of positions of power, demeaning them, pretending that they are inferior, or that their roles should be circumscribed, has been disastrous. Nothing short of disastrous. I want to argue for a worldwide release of female power, and a promotion of female dominance. It’s happening slowly, but I’m impatient. I want to present the evidence and I want to continue to see changes bearing fruit. There are parts of the world that are going backwards, certainly – in Afghanistan, in Burma, in China and many other regions. We need to show them by example how good it can be. We need to work to reduce the macho thugocracies (the majority of the world’s nations), and find ourselves in a less brutal, more collaborative, more caring, inclusive and thoughtful world. The rise of female power, I believe, is absolutely central to that transition. Without which not.
References
https://www.bibleodyssey.org/en/passages/related-articles/two-creations-in-genesis
a bonobo world: the ascent and fall of man
devil woman, with evil on her mind
Bonobos obviously evolved from some earlier type, along with chimps, but we’re not as interested in their evolution as we are in ours, understandably enough. What wouldn’t we give to fill in the gaps in our rise – the where and when of the first use of fire, the first spoken language, the beginnings of religious practice and so on? And of course none of us will live long enough to find out if bonobos, left alone (which they won’t be), become more gynocratic or less in the distant future, let alone whether we humans will eventually manage to live for as long as some tortoises I’ve heard about.
We human apes, of course, have socially evolved, especially over the past few thousand years, as Jacob Bronowski pointed out regularly in the series so admired by Deutsch. Yet interestingly, there was a kind of evolution that Bronowski himself, and the producers of The Ascent of Man, seemed not to have arrived at by 1971. I haven’t watched the entire series, only the two episodes and other bits and pieces I’ve found on YouTube, because I’m too poor to pay for the entire series, but having watched the first episode more than once, I felt bugged by all this ‘man’ stuff. So I did a count. Bronowski utters the word ‘man’ 70 times, together with the pronouns ‘he’ (29 times), ‘his’ (23) and ‘him’ (12). The words ‘woman’ ‘she’ and ‘her’ are uttered zero times in toto by my count. In terms of imagery, only two human figures are focussed on apart from Bronowski, a male child learning to stand on two feet, and a male athlete running and pole vaulting. But of course, by ‘man’ he means ‘human’, right? And, hey, this was the beginning of the seventies, right? Which was almost the sixties, really quite close to the fifties…
I’m not even a woman but I felt like I was having my female irrelevance bashed into my face in listening to all this – a bit like a sleeping woman who only realises she’s being clouted when she wakes up. And all this man stuff didn’t suddenly end with the seventies – I’m reminded of a book, God, actually, which I read at the tail end of the New Atheism flare-up a few years ago. It was a dreadful piece of drivel seeking to prove the existence of the Judaeo-Christian god and to debunk evolution, which, against the advice of my betters, I managed to read to the end. Yet nothing in the male author’s specious arguments irritated me more than his deliberate use of ‘man’ as a generic term (though I was more irritated at the publisher, ABC books of all people). At one point, after reading the ‘man’ word about fifteen times in a couple of pages, I threw the book across the room in disgust. It seemed far more of an attack on women than on atheists.
But perhaps the title ‘The Ascent of Man’ was meant as a clever science-and-human development counterpoint to the religious ‘Fall of Man’ trope? Or at least, let’s pretend. The fall of man really was male, of course, and it was caused by woman. Or, if you like, by god, who should’ve left that spare rib alone. Not that this little fable was necessary to create a viciously misogynistic society, as witness the ancient Greeks (with apologies to the Spartans). Still it did a fine job of making life hot for women, long before the witch-burning frenzy of the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (to be precise, the last woman known to have been burnt to death as a witch was Barbara Zdunk in Poland in 1811, and the first known execution of a witch, recorded by Demosthenes, was of Theoris of Lemnos, and her family, some time before 323 BCE, though it’s likely that witch-hunting, torture and execution predates this). Since all the early Christian writers and power-wielders were men with natural sexual desires, and since they’d gotten into their collective heads a fear and hatred of sexual desire as a straying from the endless and more or less brainless contemplation of the divine, women, the ‘daughters of Eve’ (though women were generally supposed, at least by the elites who pretended to understand such things, to be the carriers of the human seed without contributing to it) became the collective scapegoat. Basically, women were encouraged to be the objects of men’s desires, and exploited as such, and then blamed for it. Here’s the early Christian writer Tertullian, as memorably quoted by Beauvoir in The Second Sex:
And do you not know that you are (each) an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert — that is, death — even the Son of God had to die. And do you think about adorning yourself over and above your tunics of skins?
As many feminist writers have pointed out, the exploitation of, and the ill-treatment, murder and general public opprobrium of sex workers of all varieties has never really abated, despite the so-called sexual liberation that began decades ago. What these religious and conservative types would think of bonobo shenanigans is an interesting question, but not particularly relevant for the future of humanity, whether it’s headed upwards or down. For the future lies with those who are open and attentive to the behaviour of our relatives. Bonobos’ use of sex isn’t obsessive, or particularly excessive. What is excessive and obsessive is our fear of sex, and our need to control it, to hide it, to wrap it in bonds of ownership, to weaponise it. We’re so absurdly uptight about it, so incapable of normalising it as a need, a feeling, an appetite, a social bond, a pleasure.
The fall, indeed. We’ve fallen for so many myths about sex. When will be able to rise above all that, and be kinder to each other? Not until women are on top, I’m pretty sure.
References
The Ascent of Man, Ep. 01 “Lower Than the Angels” (YouTube video)
Roy Williams, God, actually, 2010, ABC Books & HarperCollins
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theoris_of_Lemnos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Zdunk
bonobos, religion and feminism
bonobos, promoting the common good
Yuval Noah Harari argues in Homo Deus that religion has lost, or is losing, its political clout, and is largely a force of the past with little impact on the future. This is largely true, but more so in WEIRD countries. Catholicism still has a firm grip on many South American and African countries, and I don’t see any Islamic nations Enlightenment in the offing – but you never know.
During the ‘New Atheism’ fervency of a decade and more ago, I became quite engaged in the issues. I’ve never believed in any gods, but I’d avoided really thinking about Christianity’s ascendancy in the UK and Australia (I have dual nationality). The decline of the religion even before New Atheism had made it all quite easy to ignore, but the new polemics excited me enough to read the new texts – The God Delusion, God is Not Great, Breaking the Spell and assorted others. Perhaps more importantly, I actually read the Bible, and, through my blog, wrote my own exegesis of the gospels and other New Testament writings, compared Jesus to Socrates, and other fun things. It passed the time. And I’m sure the movement hastened the drift away from religion in the WEIRD world.
For these essays, though, I’m thinking of how religions have impacted on the females of our species. Catholicism, Islam and Hinduism, in particular, have had a congealing affect on male and female social roles, especially, it seems, among the poorer classes in the cultures those religions dominate.
There’s a lot that I could say about religions, but in a nutshell they grew, initially, out of a desire to understand and control the world as humans saw it. That’s why, in my view, they’re in competition with science, which grew out of exactly the same desire, but which has turned out to be phenomenally more successful in fulfilling that desire. So religions are in wholesale retreat, especially in the WEIRD world.
Let me elaborate. The world to early human apes was full of mysteries, as it is to bonobos, chimps and other smart creatures, who might take note of such sights as waterfalls, volcanic eruptions, lightning fires, and even, perhaps, slow changes like the growth of a tree from a seedling. Also regular occurrences such as the change from day to night, seasons, the movements of the sun, moon and stars. But human apes would likely go further than a sense of wonder and awe. They would come to wonder what, and why. And lacking any handy explanations they would turn to inventing them – and those whose inventions seemed most convincing, and who seemed most familiar with the forces at play, either through delusion, calculation or conviction, might attain a power of sorts over the group, something seen as innate and special, and perhaps passed down to offspring. The forces and vagaries of wind and water, heat and cold, of food abundance and scarcity, might seem to be manipulable by the powers and spirit of these chosen few, the adumbrations of religious figures, shamans, a priestly caste. And given that, apart from a few notable exceptions – some ancient Greeks and the odd Egyptian and Chinese – science as we know it is a very recent phenomenon, religions held sway for ages, not only explaining and ‘controlling’ the powers of nature, but inventing plausible enough stories for how it all began and who to thank or blame for it all.
If this just-so story about the origins and purpose of religion has some truth to it, then it follows that religion has a conservative element. This is how the world began, these are the forces that created it, and this, that and this is what they want from us, in payment for the life they’ve given us. It’s unchanging, and we need to maintain our roles, eternally. For example, the Judea-Christian origin story has woman as almost an afterthought, man’s helpmeet, shaped from a supernumerary rib. The Islamic creation story is altogether more vague, but both myths took shape within highly patriarchal societies, and served to maintain those societies largely unchanged for centuries, until we began to find better explanations, at an accelerating rate.
Still, we’re left with the legacy of those religions and, for example, their views on leadership. It strikes me that some of the Catholic hierarchy would rather be burned at the stake than allow women to become priests, and I doubt that there are too many female Imams. There are debates of course, about whether restrictions on female leadership roles are cultural or religious, or indeed about whether culture and religion can be separated, but they often work together to maintain a perennial status quo.
Until, of course, they don’t. Modern science has knocked us off our pedestal as the darlings of the gods, and has reframed what used to be our whole world as a tiny planet revolving around a bog-standard star on the outskirts of a fairly nondescript spiral galaxy in one of possibly countless universes. It’s been a bit of a downward spiral for our sense of specialness, and it’s all been quite sudden. We can pat ourselves on the back, though, for having brought ourselves to our senses, and even for launching ourselves into the infinity of progress – a world of particle colliders, tokamaks, theory-of-mind-AI, quantum computers and space tourism and much else beyond the horizon. And yet, the old patriarchy is still largely with us. Men in suits, or in uniforms, leading the military, dominating the business world and manipulating the political arena. There’s no good reason for it – it’s simply tradition, going back to early culture and religion. Some of these cultures seem incorrigible in spite of their new-found WEIRDness. Will Japan, for example, ever transform its male business and political culture? When will we see another Chinese woman in the Politburo? As to Russia’s Putin and his strong man allies – when will this kindergarten club grow up?
With the success and growth of modern science has come great international, and inter-gender, collaboration. I can think of no greater model for our future development. With the current pandemic, too, we’ve seen follow-the-science politicians, many of them women, emerging with the greatest credit. Co-operation among women has always been powerful, but too little recognised. I would like to see more of this co-operation, especially in the service of keeping men in their place. It works for bonobos. I truly feel that a bonobo culture, but with human brainpower, would make the human world more exhilarating, in its compassion, in its sexiness, in its sense of connection with the biosphere and all its delicate mechanisms, than any other cultural change we can make. I actually think it will happen – though sadly not in my lifetime.
on religion and explanation
it’s true
Jacinta: I’ve been thinking about religion as the earliest form of explanation for a while, and about when we – our species, or our ancestors – began to feel the need for explanations, about everyday regularities and irregularities, such as why the blinding white disc travels across the sky, disappears, plunging the world into darkness, then reappears on the opposite side and retraverses the sky again. And again and again. Or why these periods of light are sometimes warmer, sometimes cooler. Or why water pours from the sky from time to time. Or why, in the darkness, there are patterns of tiny white lights in the sky, together with a much larger pale white disc that seems to be slowly eaten away to nothing then replenished over a period of many ‘days’ and ‘nights’. What were these things, and why did the ‘air’ around us whizz by, sometimes with such force as to blow the trees down and blow our children off their feet and make them cry.
Canto: Hmm. Dogs and cats certainly don’t seem to wonder about such things. What about bonobos? They certainly display curiosity. I’ve seen monkeys crowd around an exotic animal, poking and prodding and jumping away when they get a reaction, just as I’ve seen the forest people of the Congo crowding around a white man, something completely new in their lives.
Jacinta: Yes isn’t the internet a grand thing for the armchair-bound. That sort of curiosity, as you say, is for new things, and it is on display in cats and dogs. And the questions for them are – can I eat it? Is it dangerous? But the queer regularities that have been with all these creatures from the beginning – night and day, warmth and cold, rain and shine, earth and sky – it seems unlikely that any dog or cat has felt curious about such things. Bonobos I’m not so sure about, but I’m doubtful. At some stage in our ancestry, and it would be obviously linked to neural development, we started asking ourselves – why is this happening?
Canto: Language. To ask these questions, even of ourselves, wouldn’t we need language?
Jacinta: Hmmm. Maybe. But imagine some highly irregular natural event, like a solar eclipse, being experienced by our pre-lingual ancestors, whether Homo erectus or an Australopithecine. They’d be shocked, scared, and they’d be hanging together, maybe huddling together, communicating their fear, and maybe their wonder.
Canto: Thinking mostly, is it dangerous? Should we hide? And even with language, with a singular event like that, they wouldn’t have an explanation.
Jacinta: Well, they might have a go at an explanation – okay, maybe you’re right, maybe some kind of language would be necessary, which is kind of the same thing as neural development. I mean, language clearly didn’t just come about, it evolved, over who knows how long. And we still don’t know if Neanderthals had it, or some rudimentary version of it, like us, 100,000 years ago or whatever. Think of fire. Once someone learned how to create and control it, and utilise it for warmth and to ward off predators, and, presumably later, to transform our food, they needed to communicate these skills. And from there, or somewhere, they might go on to communicate other things, like navigating by the stars, or how those stars crossed the sky, like human travellers crossing the land in search of food. Stories, of a kind.
Canto: So, I’ve been investigating a bit more, and there’s been some observed behaviours in chimps – and clearly they don’t have language, unless you define language very widely – that some have described as proto-ritual, such as slow-dancing in the face of fires. Fires caused by thunderstorms would be a highly irregular feature of life for chimps, living half in savannah grasslands, half in forests. And ‘dancing’, or ritual movements, might be a way of trying to placate or somehow communicate with this apparently living, dangerous force. And they’ve also been observed performing such ‘dances’ when the rain pours down.
Jacinta: Hmmm, and those movements might be meant to convey something to the fire or rain, or some other phenomenon, but also to other chimps. Something about communicating to others that there’s maybe a way to deal with these phenomena. This might hardly be in the realm of proto-proto religion, but surely the first religions were animistic – according significance and even some kind of intention to the wind and rain, thunder and lightning, lakes and streams, hills and valleys, specific trees and so on.
Canto: Yes, much fuss has been made of a tree hollow in which chimps were found placing stones, for no non-ritualistic purpose human observers could think of. If nothing else, it indicates that the more we observe other species, the more complex and multi-faceted they tend to become. Remember when we used to talk about bird-brains?
Jacinta: I also saw, on a video, that during a firestorm one of the chimps, apparently a king-pin, appeared to be raging at the fire, seeming to suggest that he – it would surely be a male, given chimp society – could, or thought he could, tame the beast, like old George slaying the dragon. Intimations of future shamanism?
Canto: Yes, or maybe he was just pissed off after a fight with the missus. Jane Goodall, on noting chimpanzees sitting for a long time staring ‘dreamily’ at a waterfall, used the term spirituality, which she roughly described as ‘the experience of appreciating magnificent, unknowable powers at work in the world beyond ourselves’. I believe Franz de Waal has used the term, in a different context, for bonobos too, but I’m not so comfortable with the term, it’s way too vague, and it drags religion behind it too emphatically. A feeling of awe, or wonder, of being overwhelmed, etc, can be described as just that.
Jacinta: And yet. A noisy, crushing, powerful waterfall, a raging, dangerous, painful fire – attributing something like intention to these things seems like a step forward. And also the desire for mastery of these forces, by somehow understanding and manipulating their intentions, that might seem an advance. But it’s hard to tell, with our smug hindsight.
Canto: And talking about hindsight, many of us consider, from the pinnacles of science, that religion is just a hangover from the days of pre-scientific explanations. Why are we here? Because the god called God created us to have dominion over the birds and bees and beasts of the field, and after a female was built from a male rib (which must’ve contained some pretty impressive pluripotent cells), and after some snakey female behaviour, we were sent forth out of Eden to multiply, and the god left us to our own devices, but when he came back from wheeling and dealing in foreign parts, he found we were wrecking everything – female trouble again, doubtless. And so he decided to drown us all, so as to Make his Arcadia Great Again, but, presumably feeling a bit tired of the creation process, he chose a human family and unspecified number of species to float about in a boat for a while, watching their friends and neighbours drowning, so as to begin it all again, but definitely for the last time, because, having discovered golf, he’d really lost interest.
Jacinta: Yes, that’s one variant, perhaps not the orthodox one, but as Mary Midgley used to say, these sorts of stories provide a far richer account of our origins than anything scientism has to offer. I mean, life from non-life in a warm puddle? Boring.
Canto: But seriously, these creation stories, and ancilllary stories of the fruitful, deadly forests and the deserts and their oases, and the wind and the rain and storms and fevers and the patterned, watching stars and the smiling, burning sun, and the cool steadfast moon, these were as rich and comprehensive as they could possibly be, and those who remembered and told these stories best, and had the most intimate relations with all these insidious, ineluctable forces, would be precious persons indeed.
Jacinta: Mmmm. It’s a beginning.
References
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/03/chimpanzee-spirituality/475731/
clothing: when a solution becomes a problem
Canto: So we talked previously about the horror of stilettos, which was all about the absurdity of fashion, and the sad fate of fashion victims, sigh, but fashion, and the clothing industry in general has lots of problems at the production end as well as for the end-users.
Jacinta: Yes – of course at the user end there’s the huge problem of waste. I walked past a nearby Salvos shop on the weekend, and their donation bins were overflowing to a ridiculous degree, piled up in the doorway, and neighbouring doorways, extending a long way down the street.
Canto: At least people are trying to recycle, but I wouldn’t like the job of sorting that stuff out. And of course the people who do that job are volunteers, though living in a country with a reasonable safety net and a minimum wage which is one of the highest in the world according to this Australian Industry Group website. But wages and conditions, as well as our buying habits, especially those of your fellow female primates, are what I want to focus on today.
Jacinta: So women, especially teens, buy these cheap foreign-made clothes from overseas sweat-shops, wear them once or twice and chuck them out – they call it ‘fast fashion’ – and the cycle continues. A handful at the top are making tons of money, while others are getting sick from overwork or from ingesting toxic chemicals. Petrochemical-based textiles now make up 10% of the world’s carbon emissions and rising. They also add to the biosphere’s growing microplastics problem. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), 35% of microplastics come from these textiles.
Canto: I should point out another issue with ‘fast fashion’. When the fashion changes, which it does on an almost weekly basis, the brand names, such as H&M, Topshop, PrettyLittleThing and please don’t make me name any more, they just dump them.
Jacinta: Yes, but not in recycling bins. Only about 1% of textile waste is currently recycled, for all sorts of reasons, such as the technology required to separate blended chemical textiles. They can be shipped to India or African countries, but that just delays the problem briefly.
Canto: It’s kind of fascinating how many problems we make for ourselves by becoming supposedly more sophisticated, manufacturing and then dumping all these techno-solutions. We’re the only mammals that wear clothes, and as with footwear, it’s hard to say exactly when all that began, never mind when it all morphed into competitive fashion shite.
Jacinta: Actually we can only say that we’re the only extant mammals to wear clothes. An associated question is, when did we start, and finish, losing our body hair? Here’s an interesting quote from one Charles Darwin:
No one supposes that the nakedness of the skin is any direct advantage to man; his body, therefore, cannot have been divested of hair through natural selection.
He thought it was a matter of sexual selection. Do we find hairless bodies more attractive? Maybe, but probably not universally. Today we undoubtedly find bonobo/chimp/gorilla-type hair unattractive, but that’s surely because we associate it with non-human primates. Many women I know find men with hairy legs quite the turn-on.
Canto: But not furry legs. They have to be humanly hairy. So maybe there was a natural advantage to being less hairy. The move into open, sunlit spaces seems to have been key. If you’re covered in hair, it reduces heat loss through the skin. Also, being upright exposed less of the body surface to the sun. Probably explains why we keep the hair on our heads, to protect those heads, and the ever-expanding brains inside them, from getting fried.
Jacinta: And in the cooler regions, and during cooler eras, and at night, we could supplement our hair with artificial coverings, proto-clothing. But in those regions and times, plenty of hair would be an advantage. But anyway, for some reason, our ancestors started losing their body hair. I wonder when, exactly.
Canto: There’s probably no exactly. But upright stature helped in hunting, allowing us to run long distances, in which case losing heat through sweating would’ve been advantageous. Remember, it would’ve been easier to keep warm, through covering, than to cool down, with all that hair.
Jacinta: They could stay in the shade, like bonobos do.
Canto: Big-brained humans require too much energy for their owners to spend time under yum-yum trees. We have lots of sweat glands compared to other primates. It helps us to run fast and long. Those monkeys that have more sweat glands than others are also fast movers. There are some puzzles about all this, though, about what came first and why – reduced hair, bipedalism, larger brain.
Jacinta: But getting back to modern clothing and fast fashion and the like – or maybe not modern clothing. I’m thinking, when did clothing become mandatory. Maybe it’s not manatory in all cultures, but among our European forebears, how did it manage to become grossly offensive to go about naked like our bonobo cousins? It seems to have happened very recently in paleontological terms. I mean it’s associated with civilised behaviour somehow.
Canto: Only ‘savages’ went about in the altogether. Or ancient Greek actors and athletes. Of course, clothing quickly became a hierarchical thing – the higher-ups dressed more elaborately, and the proles weren’t allowed to, and so were despised for their shabbiness. Being completely naked was real low-life stuff, and a sexual element evolved alongside all of that. And a gender element.
Jacinta: That’s going a bit fast, perhaps, but I’m sure it’s on the right track. So I’ve found various sites discussing this issue of hiding our genitals. John Romero provides a pretty comprehensive account, of clothing in general as well as our new age modesty. He reminds us, for example, that nakedness among the Greeks wasn’t confined to performers and athletes. Public baths were communal, as were Roman toilets – they didn’t blush when they flushed. Actually, they didn’t flush, at least not the way we do. Of course the creation myth of Judeo-Christianity, which had small beginnings but soon spread throughout Europe and the globe, had Adam and Eve feel ashamed when they realised they were naked, but it doesn’t explain the realisation, since they were the only humans on the planet at the time apparently. Nevertheless, this association with nakedness and shame was hammered home by church authorities, and has much to do with current attitudes.
Canto: But the association between nudity and shame was clearly felt by those early biblical writers. That dates it to around 2,600 years ago at most, though religious biblical scholars generally prefer an older date.
Jacinta: We just don’t have any way of dating the origin of nudity as shameful. Clothing is only the most obvious way of concealing nudity, but the origin of clothing surely has nothing to do with shame. And nobody really knows when clothing originated, or when we lost our body hair, which was clearly a gradual process. But to return to our arguably over-dressed, throwaway modern society – which often plays with modesty in a titillating way…
Canto: Modesty’s a tricky word though. Isn’t wearing showy expensive clothing a kind of immodesty?
Jacinta: I was thinking of the skin-tight fashion of young women – I don’t know about the price. Not that I disapprove, I’m only concerned with the waste.
Canto: Better for the environment if they go about naked, you’re right.
Jacinta: Hmmm…
References
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160801-our-weird-lack-of-hair-may-be-the-key-to-our-success
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-humans-initially-start-to-hide-their-privates-from-other-humans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothing
the strange concept of faith and the basic concept of morality
when did Jesus become so Western European?
The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention – distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and the paucity of its evidence – is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory.
Sam Harris, The end of faith
Canto: Writing about religion and atheism, belief and unbelief, appears to have become unfashionable recently, after a spate of atheist tomes in the early-mid 2000s, which certainly had an impact. Christianity continues to decline, and we try to ignore the other religions as best we can. But with the current kerfuffle about Amy Coney Barrett, a woman described as being ‘of deep faith’ possibly being raised to the US Supreme Court, it seems to me that religion still has the power to shape the law in some countries that we would hope should know better.
Jacinta: Yes, we’ve long expressed the view that this term ‘faith’ has a strange cachet about it that doesn’t really stand up well to scrutiny – to put it mildly. Just considering the judeo-christian version, the claims, as Sam Harris wrote, are extravagant indeed. That the world – rarely very clearly defined – was made by a single god, of whose essence and world-creating abilities we can have no understanding. We can only speculate, haplessly and hopelessly, as to why he created this world (he isn’t really male but we have to use some pronoun after all), and what his purpose is for us, though there are supposedly clues in a collection of writings over many centuries, which are said to have been inspired by him. Apparently, though, we are his special creation, ordered to go forth, multiply and subdue the earth and all that crawls upon it, presumably for our needs and purposes (Genesis 1:28). This set of beliefs, and of course there are many more, though they may vary between individuals, doesn’t fit well with what we know about the formation of this planet, its relation to the universe, and the story of human evolution, so thoroughly verified by genetics, which we learned about as a result of Darwin and Wallace’s theory of natural selection from random variation.
Canto: Yes, the story of this creator-god and the creation story supposedly written by the god’s human agents some 2,600 years ago or so, is in no way compatible with what we’ve learned about the 3 billion-plus years of life on this planet and the few hundred thousand years of existence of our Homo sapiens ancestors. And yet belief in the existence of this creator-god still persists in the minds of otherwise highly intelligent people, including many of our primary makers and interpreters of law.
Jacinta: Especially in the USA – exceptional, as we’ve often complained, only in its religiosity and its jingoism. Which brings us back to Amy Coney Barrett, who is a ‘devout Catholic’. I think the word ‘devout’, like ‘faith’ and ‘sacred’, deserves scrutiny. An article in The Nation about her carries this sub-heading: ‘Her Catholicism is irrelevant. The worldview of the fringe right-wing sect she has grown up in definitely isn’t.’ This raises my ire. I know nothing of this fringe right-wing sect but I know plenty about Catholicism. The Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church is, in its hierarchy, the most profoundly patriarchal, misogynistic and homophobic organisation in the ‘western world’ – the world outside Islam and Hinduism.
Canto: Well this fringe sect might be even worse, but granted the Catholic church has far greater reach. And Barrett will be the fifth Catholic on the court if promoted. Catholics represent about 22% of the US population. Interestingly, according to recent Pew Research, some 65% of Americans describe themselves as Christian, down from 77% only ten years ago, so we’re seeing big changes in our lifetime, though the political and judicial powers are at least a generation behind the trend.
Jacinta: So let’s talk about faith and its untouchable nature. In some respects it’s like loyalty, as in keeping faith with the church, or our ancestors. The first type of religion was undoubtedly a form of animism – the wind, the sun, the rain, the ocean, these were moving, changeable elements which moved in mysterious ways, sometimes destructively, sometimes beneficially for humans. In our need to control our world we decided we needed to be on the side of these forces, to be loyal to them, bestowing gifts, sacrifices, bowing down. And when the sun shone mildly upon us, when the rain nourished our crops, it was because we were keeping faith with these godlike forces. But perhaps other less visible forces were operating, spreading sicknesses, killing our newborns – and so we created more abstract deities or forces, perhaps associated with places of danger or disease – the forest, the mountains, perhaps a particular lake or swamp.
Canto: Yes, you’re talking about a pre-scientific era. Gods or supernatural entities – sprites or goblins – a thousand different terms used in a thousand different languages – these were explanations for unforeseen and unexpected events. And so you had to keep in with them, keep faith with them, through obeisance, sacrifices and the like.
Jacinta: Gods and spirits as explanations – bad explanations. I believe that was what David Deutsch was on about in The beginning of infinity. I also like the idea of gods as memes. For example, I was sent to Sunday School at about 7 or 8 where I learned about the judeo-christian god from a guy in a Salvation Army uniform. He stood out the front and passed this story, this version of a god – a meme, essentially – to me and others. I was hearing it for the first time, and of course it passed, like any other meme, though my ‘interpretive apparatus’, my 7-year-old brain, and that’s how religion spreads, it seems to me. A universal message of sorts, individually interpreted, like many memes. But when this meme of a single god who made the world specially for us, etc etc, starts to fall apart as an explanation of anything – and this has been happening since the spread of far better explanations from at least the 17th century’s scientific enlightenment – the importance of faith has been emphasised to keep it all together. I think you’ll find that ‘faith’ was a very rare term in the millenium or so of medieval Christendom. It wasn’t faith, then, it was just the truth. Faith is like an enfeebled offspring of that truth.
Canto: And what about ‘deep faith’, is that just more enfeebled?
Jacinta: Stubbornly enfeebled perhaps. Actually, it’s probably more recent than the 17th or 18th centuries – it’s more of a 20th century concept, and it has gathered around it a kind of sacred aura, almost as a bulwark against the scientific age – which of course is ‘spiritually empty’.
Canto: Thank god. But I think that even believers are cognisant that ‘faith’ has a dodginess about it. I recall years ago John Polkinghorne, the British physicist and theologian, expressing uneasiness with the word, and suggesting maybe ‘hope’ should be substituted. I suspect he regretted saying that – it surely weakens the religious position quite a bit. Then again, it seems more honest.
Jacinta: Yes, and somehow more human. Many of us have hoped that this earthly existence isn’t all there is – this brief candle. And some, like the late George Harrison, have been entirely matter-of-fact about death being part of the eternal journey, though whether this was bravado or not we’ll never know.
Canto: We can also put our faith in the multiverse – an infinite series of universes in which we live longer, have better sex, make far more money…
Jacinta: Or die of an excruciatingly painful wasting disease… I’m not convinced by that one, whatever the maths says. Though it certainly is fascinating where current problems in physical theory can lead us. But to return to faith – it is what religion is about. The faith, or hope, that human life is special, that we are being looked after, watched over, judged. Gods are, I believe, integral to religion. It could be one, or many. They could be omnipotent, or fallible. They could be benevolent, or vindictive. But they must be interested, even obsessed, by us. That’s why I don’t think ancient philosophies like Buddhism, Taoism or Confucianism are religions, however ‘spiritual’ their teachings seem to be. Religions are unthinkable without gods.
Canto: Yes, and religion doesn’t deal with the moral sphere, as Stephen Jay Gould used to think. Or rather, it might be moral, but it’s really about the morality of the god, or gods, and trying to second-guess it. Why have we been punished by bad weather? Because the god disapproves of something we’ve done. We need to change our behaviour as well as heaping praise upon the god for telling us about our wrong-doing and trying to correct us. So we obsess over the gods’ obsession with us, and round and round it goes, never getting to an answer about these inscrutable beings. Meanwhile real morality is about how we can thrive as the most socially complex, socially constructed mammalian species on the planet, and we’ve been engaging in that quest and that process since our beginnings. Trying to shed these imaginary gods and our notion of our specialness in their eyes is an important part of the process, I think. Science has discovered, really quite recently, our relatedness to every other species on the planet – and even more recently, how our behaviour is threatening so many of those species, as well as the less lucky members of our own species. That’s where we should be focussing our moral lens.
gods, science and explanation
If you think that it would be impossible to improve upon the Ten Commandments as a statement of morality, you really owe it to yourself to read some other scriptures. Once again, we need look no further than the Jains: Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: ‘Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.’ Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept.
Sam Harris, Letter to a christian nation
Reading David Deutsch’s The beginning of infinity, together with a collection of Stephen Jay Gould’s essays, Dinosaur in a haystack, has reminded me of my critique of Gould’s bad NOMA argument, which I reread lately. So here’s a revisiting and a development of that critique.
Put very simply, Gould argued that religion was about moral and spiritual matters, and that science was about causes and effects in the natural world, and that these spheres of interest didn’t overlap, so co-existence was not only entirely possible but mutually beneficial.
In his argument, I noted, Gould generally avoided mentioning gods, or God. It seems to me now, that this is more of a problem than I thought at the time, because religions are all about gods. While I don’t want to be hard and fast about this, religions really don’t exist without gods. In that sense, you might call Buddhism a spiritual belief system or worldview or discipline, but it isn’t a religion. It doesn’t use gods to explain stuff. And Confucianism even less so. Certainly in earlier times, in a more god-besotted world, Buddhism and even Confucianism were associated with or could be easily assimilated with local deities in China, Korea and Japan, and the world of morality was generally associated with portents and god-induced ‘disasters’, but that was to be expected in a pre-scientific climate, which prevailed globally for most of human history.
This is the point. For century upon century, gods, their behaviour, powers and attitudes or natures, were the explanations for war, famine, disease and the everyday accidents that humans suffered from. Even as some medical and other knowledge developed, the will of the gods was always there as a background explanation for the otherwise inexplicable. And so it shouldn’t be surprising, in a world teeming with god-explanations, that the pioneers of more earthly, measurable and testable explanations for phenomena still clung to this background of god-explanations for so much of what they saw around them – the birds in the sky, the food that sprang from the ground or hung from the trees, the life-giving rain, the failed harvests, the floods, the plagues, the invasions and so on.
Nowadays, what we call science can provide better explanations in every area we can think of than do god-explanations, and this is a major blow to religion and its relevance in the modern world. I would describe it as a death-blow. Indeed gods aren’t just bad explanations, they’re not really explanations at all. Why gods, after all? What are they, and where do they come from? No coherent explanation can be offered for them. Of course the obvious answer is that they come from the human imagination, as is evidenced by the human qualities they display – the beauty of the love-goddess, the long-bearded father-god, the thunderous dyspepsia of the war-god and so forth – but such an explanation is anathema to religion, as it collapses the house of cards. So an attempt is made to divert attention from inquiring into the ineluctable mystery of the god’s existence – sometimes by making such inquiries a kind of sacrilegious abomination – and to focus more on the god’s commandments. This is a move made by many a staunch Catholic.
I’ve heard such people say that the ten commandments of the Old Testament are clearly the basis of all our laws and morality. I’d like to have a look at them, particularly in terms of explanation. As young children, we’re often given commands – do this, don’t do that – by our parents. These commands generally have an explanation supporting them, which we learn later. But the explanations are essential, and commands without effective explanations to support them are surely a form of tyranny – at least that’s how I see it.
So let’s have a look at these commandments, which are so essential to ‘western’ or ‘civilised’ morality, according to some. I’ve put them in my own words.
- 1. I’m your god, you mustn’t have other gods before me.
This has nothing whatever to do with morality as far as I can see. This god says elsewhere that he’s a jealous god, and this is further proof. Catholics gloss this commandment as a commandment against idolatry, but that’s highly problematic because it makes the enormous assumption that the god called God is not an idol. If he’s saying ‘I’m the true god, all the others are fake’, he needs to provide proof. He doesn’t – and presumably makes the arrogant claim that he doesn’t need to. - 2. You mustn’t take my name in vain.
So what is this god’s name? God, apparently. It’s like a marketing ploy, as if MacDonalds got to change their name to Hamburger and could take action against anyone else who used the name. In reality the god now called God was an amalgam of Hittite and Armenian gods, forged into a monotheistic being by elites of the region somewhere around the 7th century BCE. The idea of the commandment is that you should speak his name respectfully. Why? Because he’s God. The only way to avoid a circular argument here is to provide proof of this god’s existence, which hasn’t been done and can’t be done. There’s no morality on display here. - 3. The sabbath day should be kept holy.
- This is fairly arbitrary, the word coming from the Hebrew sabbat, meaning rest, and it’s based on God’s rest day, as he created the universe or multiverse or whatever in six days and rested on the Saturday, according to Judaic tradition, but Christians arbitrarily changed the day to Sunday. Of course no educated person today thinks the world, universe, or whatever, was created in a week, whatever you define a week as, by an ethereal being. Again, this could only have moral effect if you believe in this creation story and the god at the centre of it (and if you believe the god is egotistical enough to want to be eternally remembered and acknowledged in this way).
- 4. Honour your parents.
- As a heuristic, this makes sense, but it is not a given. Some parents kill their children, others do irreparable damage to them. The vast majority, of course, don’t. This is a matter of individual cases and analyses. The complexity of parent-child relations is dealt with most profoundly by Andrew Solomon in his great book Far from the tree. I would refer everyone to that book as a response to the fourth commandment.
- 5. You mustn’t kill.
- This again is too vague, as it doesn’t deal with self-defence and other exculpating circumstances. It’s also fairly commonplace, and common-sense. It’s easy to find supporting explanations. Nobody needed this commandment to create laws regarding murder and unlawful death.
- 6. You mustn’t commit adultery.
- A lot can be said here. At the time that these commandments first appeared, and for a long time afterwards, women and girls were treated as chattels and very often married off against their will, sometimes as children, to men twice or thrice their age. Considering such a context, and considering that contraception was essentially non-existent in those days, adultery was generally treated differently depending on wealth, social status and gender. There might have been an explanation for the law of adultery, but it probably had more to do with property and the status of offspring than morality per se.
- 7. Don’t steal
- The concept of private property would have emerged slowly, and would have been interdependent on other cultural developments in the move from horizontally to more vertically based cultural systems. Even so, it’s unlikely that a prohibition on stealing would’ve been novel when this commandment was formulated.
- 8. Don’t lie
- the telling of lies to advantage oneself and disadvantage others would have been a problem at least since effective languages developed, and we have little evidence as to how long ago that happened. We certainly know it was long before the 6th or 7th centuries BCE, so there’s nothing new here. Again, though, the commandment is too vague to be particularly effective.
- 9. Don’t covet (lust after) your neighbour’s wife
- These last two commandments are about thoughts, which makes them particularly ineffectual. They might be interpreted as advice, which would leave us with fewer commandments to criticise, but even as advice they seem like so much pissing into the wind. And of course the fact that wives and not husbands are singled out is an indication of the particularism of the patriarchal society this commandment addresses.
- 10. Don’t covet (hanker after) your neighbour’s goods.
- Again, hardly a profound or memorable commandment, and barely relevant to today’s society. If you’re impressed by your neighbour’s car, for example, you might ask her about it, check out its performance and decide to get something similar yourself. What’s the big deal?
I’ve spent too much time on this, but I simply wanted to point out that, while gods are what religion is all about, they are, or were, also used as explanations. That’s in fact what they were for. And a ‘commandment’ is simply an explanation once removed, because they represent the god’s will. The explanation, therefore, for bad tidings or bad karma or whatever, becomes failure to follow the will and the commandments of some particular god or other.
Nowadays we have better explanations, based on what we know of human psychology and neurophysiology, and of how we work together in societies, as the most socially constructed mammals on the planet. We also know much more about how the physical world works, which has resulted in technological developments of increasing reach and sophistication. The idea that knowing so much more about what we are has no relationship to what we should do – the moral sphere – has always struck me as preposterous. This old is-ought separation was key to Gould’s NOMA thesis. But it’s not only that science’s increasingly far-reaching accounts of ourselves and the universe we live in is essential to our decisions about what we should do. It’s also true that religion keeps trying to tell us what we are. And its account s just don’t stack up, from the broadest scientific perspective. It just fails comprehensively as an explanation.