Unwinding the spell

In C. S. Lewis's book Mere Christianity, he addresses the question of why there are unkind and unpleasant Christians (and, conversely, kind and pleasant atheists) by claiming that we should be making a comparison instead with how the people in question would have acted otherwise.  He uses the analogy of a toothpaste's advertising claim to give you healthy teeth:

Even then we must be careful to ask the right question.  If Christianity is true then it ought to follow that any Christian will be nicer than the same person would be if he were not a Christian…  Just in the same way, if the advertisements of Whitesmile’s Toothpaste are true it ought to follow that anyone who uses it will have better teeth than the same person would have if he did not use it.

But to point out that I, who use Whitesmile’s (and also have inherited bad teeth from both my parents), have not got as fine a set as some healthy young African boy who never used toothpaste at all, does not, by itself, prove that the advertisements are untrue.  Christian Miss Bates may have an unkinder tongue than unbelieving Dick Firkin.  That, by itself, does not tell us whether Christianity works.  The question is what Miss Bates’s tongue would be like if she were not a Christian and what Dick’s would be like if he became one.

The fact that we have no way of knowing what they would have been like had their beliefs been otherwise -- that C. S. Lewis himself wrote, "To know what would have happened?  No, no one is given that" -- is a snag here (and awfully convenient to his argument), but we'll leave that aside for the moment. 

Miss Bates and Dick, as a result of natural causes and early upbringing, have certain temperaments: Christianity professes to put both temperaments under new management if they will allow it to do so.  What you have a right to ask is whether that management, if allowed to take over, improves the concern.  Everyone knows that what is being managed in Dick Firkin’s case is much ‘nicer’ than what is being managed in Miss Bates’s...

We must, therefore, not be surprised if we find among the Christians some people who are still nasty. There is even, when you come to think it over, a reason why nasty people might be expected to turn to Christ in greater numbers than nice ones.  If you have sound nerves and intelligence and health and popularity and a good upbringing, you are likely to be quite satisfied with your character as it is.  ‘Why drag God into it?’ you may ask.  A certain level of good conduct comes fairly easily to you.  You are not one of those wretched creatures who are always being tripped up by sex, or dipsomania, or nervousness, or bad temper.  Everyone says you are a nice chap and (between ourselves) you agree with them.  You are quite likely to believe that all this niceness is your own doing: and you may easily not feel the need for any better kind of goodness.  Often people who have all these natural kinds of goodness cannot be brought to recognise their need for Christ at all until, one day, the natural goodness lets them down and their self-satisfaction is shattered.  In other words, it is hard for those who are ‘rich’ in this sense to enter the Kingdom.

It is very different for the nasty people – the little, low, timid, warped, thin-blooded, lonely people, or the passionate, sensual, unbalanced people.  If they make any attempt at goodness at all, they learn, in double quick time, that they need help.  It is Christ or nothing for them.  It is taking up the cross and following -- or else despair.  They are the lost sheep; He came specially to find them.  They are (in one very real and terrible sense) the ‘poor’: He blessed them.  They are the ‘awful set’ he goes about with-and of course the Pharisees say still, as they said from the first, ‘If there were anything in Christianity those people would not be Christians.’

Lewis's apologetics are, unfortunately, specious, and not only for the reason I noted.  His sharp writing style and folksy arguments are understandably appealing, but here -- like many places in Mere Christianity -- his logic doesn't hold up to close scrutiny.  In fact, in the case of "niceness," he's got it backwards.  There is abundant evidence that Christianity (or any other religion) doesn't take what you were born with and sanctify it, make it better than it would have been; instead, it amplifies your natural tendencies.  

So a person born with a kind, forgiving, loving, benevolent nature might well be impelled to do even better if (s)he espoused a religion that valued those things.  But a narrow-minded, spiteful, violent, arrogant person who joins a religion becomes a Tomás de Torquemada, a Cotton Mather, a Judge Jeffreys... or a Jim Bakker or John Hagee or Greg Locke or Rick Wiles.  Awful people who become devout rarely improve their behavior; all their conversion usually accomplishes is to give their hatefulness a nice added gloss of self-righteousness.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Aronsyne, C.S.-Lewis, CC BY-SA 4.0]

I got to thinking about Lewis's argument while I was reading an article yesterday in The Daily Beast entitled, "Why Jimmy Carter's Life Should Make the Christian Right Feel Ashamed," and my immediate reaction was to add, "... But It Won't."  As I'm sure all of you know by now, President Carter died a few days ago at the venerable age of 100, and there's been much attention given to his amazingly selfless work for charity, most notably Habitat for Humanity.  The difficulty for Christians, however, is the degree to which Carter's Christianity is being looked upon as an outlier.  In the last twenty years, Christianity has come to be associated with some of the most vile individuals I can think of, culminating in their wholehearted support of an amoral, viciously vengeful, narcissistic adjudicated rapist for president.

The article's author, Keli Goff, writes:

As a person of faith, I have been horrified to watch Christianity’s fall from grace in mainstream America today.  Having mentioned my church in passing to a group of peers, I was once recently met with surprise—surprise that I’m a practicing Christian because, I “seem like a nice person.”  I’m no biblical scholar, but I’m pretty sure that if people conflate your religion with being a terrible human being you’re probably doing it wrong.  Yet in recent years that has arguably become the face of mainstream Christianity, and any Christian who cares about the future of our faith should be deeply concerned.

But... other than a handful of exceptions, they're not.  The vast majority of them are completely unapologetic about their hatreds, whether it's toward minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, liberals, or just anyone who's not a straight white conservative American.  

Yesterday I drove past a house where there was a huge flag flying saying "God, Guns, and Trump."  How can this now be the rallying cry for people who claim to follow the same man who said "Turn the other cheek" and "Bring unto me the little children" and "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth"?

Or is that "Woke Jesus," and now we have to follow the new and improved gun-toting, anti-immigrant, Murika-loving, queer-bashing Jesus?

Given that this is the new public face of Christianity in the United States, it is perhaps unsurprising that churches are hemorrhaging members.  Goff quotes statistics that there has been a twelve-percent decline in self-identification as Christian just in the last decade; New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof stated that "More people have left the church in the last 25 years than all the new people who became Christians from the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening and Billy Graham crusades combined."

I find this encouraging, but perhaps not for the reason you might be thinking.  It's certainly not because I'm a nonbeliever myself, and have some misguided desire for everyone to think like me.  I honestly have no issue with what answers people come up with for the Big Questions, about the meaning of life and their place in the universe and the existence of a deity.  We all have to figure those out (or not) as well as we can, and who am I to criticize how someone else squares that circle?  What I judge people on is not belief but behavior, and if the ugly, vitriolic diatribes of the likes of Kenneth Copeland are inducing people to say, "this is not for me," then... good.  That should be your reaction to ignorance, nastiness, and intolerance.

And if the leaders of the Christian churches who are seeing their congregations shrinking don't like this -- well, they'd best figure it out.

As I mentioned earlier, however, I'm not optimistic about their coming to the right conclusions.  Today's Christian leaders seem to excel at considering the question and then getting the wrong answer -- blaming it on secular education, the gays, the liberals, or even kicking it up a level and blaming Satan himself.  That the fault might lie in their own hateful, exclusive, judgmental attitudes doesn't seem to have crossed most of their minds.

C. S. Lewis at least recognized this much -- that if you're on the wrong road, you don't get to your destination safely by continuing to forge doggedly down the same path.  In The Great Divorce, he writes:

I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road.  A sum can be put right: but only by going back til you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.  Evil can be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good.  Time does not heal it.  The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, 'with backward mutters of dissevering power' -- or else not.

Which is exactly right.  The problem, though, is that first you have to realize you've done the sum wrong.  And in this case, I don't think that's happened yet.  There are too many other convenient targets to blame.  Even someone like the near-saintly Jimmy Carter holding up a mirror to what evangelical Christianity has become is unlikely to wake anyone up, especially now that the Christofascists are in the political ascendency here in the United States.

And as long as that's the case, they're almost certainly going to continue down this road, watching their flocks dwindling away to nothing, and acting entirely baffled about why their message has lost its appeal.

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Tying God's hands

Today, for the umpteenth time, I saw the following image posted on social media:

The people who posted it apparently think that it's entirely appropriate to use the deaths of innocent people in school shootings to lob some snark at the atheists, secularists, and others who believe in the separation of church and state.  But what I want to address here is the toxicity of the mindset behind the message -- apart from what would spur someone to think that it was ever a reasonable thing to post.

First, I thought y'all were the ones who believed that God is everywhere, is omnipotent and omnipresent and omniscient and omni-what-have-you.  What you're implying here is that a handful of people who think religion has no place in a public, taxpayer-funded institution have somehow overpowered an all-powerful God's ability to do anything to stop a crazed gunman.  Probably explaining why both Oklahoma and Texas are currently poised to approve and implement new laws requiring public school teachers to work lessons from the Bible into their curricula; it's easier than doing anything to actually improve education and keep children safe, and leaves the powers-that-be with a nice smug feeling of holiness afterward. 

It's basically "Thoughts & Prayers" v. 2.0, with a side order of Showing All The Other Religions Who's Boss.

So we're already on some shaky theological grounds, but it gets worse.  What the above message suggests is that somehow, God's attitude is, "if you won't pray in schools, innocent children deserve to die."  That given the choice of using his Miraculous God Powers to stop a massacre, he just stands there smirking, and afterwards says, "See?  Told you something like this would happen if you didn't worship me all the time and everywhere.  Sorry, but my hands were tied."

Me, I think any deity that acts like this is a monster, not an all-loving beneficent creator.  That said, it's entirely consistent with the depiction of the Lord of Hosts in the Old Testament.  The Old Testament God was constantly smiting people left and right for such heinous crimes as gathering firewood on the sabbath, and when the Chosen People of Israel conquered a place, the word from above was "kill everyone, including children."

Don't believe me?  There are plenty of instances, but my favorite is 1 Samuel 15:

This is what the Lord Almighty says: "I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt.  Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them.  Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys."  So Saul summoned the men and mustered them at Telaim—two hundred thousand foot soldiers and ten thousand from Judah.

Long story short, Saul did as told, killing everyone up to and including the donkeys, but the Lord was still pissed off for some reason, and the Prophet Samuel told Saul so.  Apparently it had to do with the fact that Saul had spared the Amalekite King, Agag (like I said before, to hell with the children).  So Saul executed Agag, but the Lord still wasn't happy with him.

There's no impressing all-powerful deities, some days.

Anyhow, what this shows is that people who post bullshit like the above image are simply describing how the Old Testament God does, in fact, behave.

The whole thing brings to memory a quote from Richard Dawkins.  I know his very name justifiably raises pretty much everyone's hackles, but it's so germane to this topic that I would be remiss in not including it:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

To which I can only say: touché.

The deepest problem, though, is the one that the people who post this nonsense would be the least likely to admit; when they advocate tearing down the wall between church and state, they're absolutely adamant that it can only be for the benefit of one particular church.  Start talking about having Jewish prayers or quotes from the Qu'ran or some of the Ten Thousand Sayings of Buddha festooned about the walls of classrooms, and you'll have these same people screaming bloody murder.  Hell, I bet they'd even get their knickers in a twist over which flavor of Christianity you're allowed to promote.

Hey, teachers in Oklahoma or Texas: maybe you should try posting quotes and sermons and whatnot from the Patriarch Bartholomew of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and see what happens.  Maybe even insist that the children put up Christmas decorations on January 7, when the Eastern Orthodox Church celebrates Christmas.

Could be an interesting experiment to run.

So as usual, what we're talking about is a combination of ugly theology and smug hypocrisy.  And it would be hardly worth commenting on if it weren't for the power that these attitudes still have, and the increasing degree to which they still influence policy in the United States -- something that is only going to extend further with the incoming administration, especially if more Christofascists like Pete Hegseth and Mike Huckabee get confirmed in high-level positions.

Other than railing about it here on Skeptophilia, though, I'm not sure what to do.  Anyone who really believes this -- anyone, in other words, who wasn't just trying to score some points off the nonbelievers -- has subscribed to a belief system that is very close to the definition of moral bankruptcy, so trying to reach them via argument is probably a forlorn hope.

And people talk about us atheists being amoral.

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Indoctrination

By now, I'm sure you've all heard that my former home state of Louisiana has passed a law requiring all public school teachers to post the Ten Commandments in their classrooms.  The argument, if I can dignify it by that term, is that the Ten Commandments represent a "historical document," not a mandate of religious belief.

Shall I refresh your memory about what the First Damn Commandment says?

"I am the Lord thy God; you shall have no other gods before me."

How, exactly, is that not a mandate of religious belief?

Others include "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain," "Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy," and also "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, nor shalt thou covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his male or female servant, nor his ox, nor anything else that belongs to him," which has the added fun of being a tacit endorsement of slavery and the subjugation of women.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The latest in this christofascist attack on separation of church and state -- a principle which, allow me to remind you, is mentioned explicitly in the Constitution of the United States, unlike God and Jesus -- is a sparring match between CNN anchor Boris Sanchez and Louisiana state representative Lauren Ventrella, wherein he tried to corner her on various points revolving around the secular basis of the United States and the fact that the new law is inherently discriminatory against non-Christians.  Of course, you can only corner someone with logic if they're arguing from the standpoint of facts and evidence, so it was bound to end in failure.  Ventrella did what the MAGA types always do; launched into a Gish gallop of irrelevancies such as what Sanchez's salary was, the fact that "In God We Trust" is printed on the dollar bill (neglecting to mention, of course, that it was only added in 1956), and ended with her solution for people of other religions (or no religion at all) to a clearly religious document posted on the classroom wall, which was, "Then don't look at it."

Fine, that's the angle you want to take, Representative Ventrella?  Two can play that game.

A teacher wants to put a Pride flag up in the classroom, and you don't like it?  Don't look at it.

You don't like books representing racial or religious diversity, or ones that feature queer people?  Don't read them.

You think drag shows are immoral?  Don't attend one.

You're against gay marriage?  Then the next time a gay person proposes to you, say no.

Or does that approach only work when you're trying to shoehorn Christianity into public schools?  

And more importantly, are these people really so stupid they don't see how easily their arguments could backfire on them?  

The problem here is that christofascists like Lauren Ventrella only want students exposed to straight White Christian... well, anything.  Fiction?  Of course, that goes without saying.  Non-fiction, too -- Florida's banned books list included biographies of prominent People of Color and LGBTQ+ individuals, for no other apparent reason than their not being about straight White people.  History has to be whitewashed to emphasize the benevolence of White Christians and downplay (or ignore completely) anything that casts them in a negative light -- or anything that brings up the contributions of other cultures.  

So they're not against indoctrinating kids; quite the opposite.  They love indoctrination.  They just want to make sure the indoctrination lines up with the way they were indoctrinated.

And that's not even getting into how the hell the leaders of a state that ranks 49th in education think this kind of nonsense is the priority.  Or the screeching hypocrisy of the same people who want the Ten Commandments on the wall of every classroom, and who claim to follow an incarnated deity who said "Let the little children come unto me," regularly voting against aid for underprivileged youth and subsidized school lunches.

Seems like the idea is keep 'em poor, hungry, uneducated, and brainwashed.

I hold out some hope that the inevitable lawsuits this is going to trigger from the ACLU and the FFRF will strike down this law as unconstitutional, but given the unabashedly far-right leaning of the Supreme Court, I have no confidence that they might not end up siding with Ventrella et al. on this.  The only thing we moderate and left-leaning people can do is to get our asses to the polls in November and vote.  Vote like the future of democracy in the United States depends on it -- because it does.

Otherwise, I fear that the christofascist takeover of the country may well be a done deal.

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Leaps of faith

Sometimes my searching for topics for Skeptophilia leads me down some very peculiar rabbit holes.  Like yesterday, when (while looking for something else) I stumbled upon a link to a Wikipedia page called "Levitation of saints."  So of course I couldn't resist having a look at that.

And... wow.

Apparently there's a long tradition in Christianity that holy people can fly, or at least float.  I was raised in a staunchly Roman Catholic family, and as befits such an upbringing, I read the Bible and other religious texts regularly, but I had no idea about this.  Some of the stories don't come from the Bible directly but from hagiography (writings by and/or about saints), which understandably lead some people to take them with a substantial grain of salt (me, I take it all with a substantial grain of salt, but I suspect you already knew that).

In any case, apparently there were a good many saintly types who, if they didn't exactly fly, engaged in falling with style.  Here's an eighteenth-century engraving of a guy named Joseph of Cupertino, for example:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Is it just me, or does he look kind of freaked out by this?  From his expression it seems like he was out one day for a nice quiet walk through the Italian countryside, and suddenly WHOAAAA HOLY FUCK WHAT'S HAPPENING he got picked up bodily and hoisted aloft.  Joseph (who was, by the way, a real guy, and lived from 1603 to 1663) was a mystic and seer whom the local Franciscans didn't particularly like.  They thought he was a bit of an uneducated rube; one of the more literate church leaders of the time said Joseph was "remarkably unclever."  They finally admitted him to their order, albeit somewhat reluctantly.  It's clear they were kind of embarrassed by the whole claims-of-flying thing, but couldn't find a good reason to turn him away, so he joined up and spent the rest of his life as a Franciscan monk.

Skeptic Joe Nickell, after checking out contemporaneous writings describing Joseph of Cupertino's airborne acrobatics, was predictably unimpressed:

Joseph's most dramatic aerial traverses were launched by a leap—not by a simple slow rising while merely standing or kneeling—but, moreover, I find that they appear to have continued as just the sudden arcing trajectories that would be expected from bounding.  They were never circuitous or spiraling flights like a bird's.  Invariably, Joseph's propulsions began with a shout or scream, suggesting that he was not caused to leap by some force but chose to.

So I guess the only miracle here was his impressive hang time.  If the whole monk thing hadn't worked out for him, maybe he should have tried out for the local track-and-field team.

You'd have thought that the Franciscans would have been more accepting of Joseph of Cupertino's leaps of faith, though, because the founder of their order -- Saint Francis of Assisi -- supposedly did the same thing.  While praying, Francis sometimes was suspended in the air at a height of "three, or even four, cubits" (a meter and a half, give or take).  A century later, Saint Catherine of Siena also floated around the place while praying, and a priest reported that when he gave her Holy Communion, the host flew from his hand straight upward onto Catherine's tongue, an image I find bizarre and strangely hilarious.

Sort of a sanctified version of the chefs at the hibachi grill tossing cooked shrimp for customers to try to catch in their mouths.

So there's a long tradition of floating saints, apparently.  The problem was, there was another group of people who were thought by the religious authorities to be able to fly, and that was witches.  So how do you tell good flying from bad flying?  Even back in biblical days this was a problem, if you believe the story in the Acts of Peter (one of the books of the biblical apocrypha).  There was this guy named Simon Magus, who was impressing the hell out of everyone in the Roman Forum by levitating, and told the crowds that he was a god.  Well, the Apostle Peter was having none of that, so he prayed for God to put an end to it, and Simon suddenly fell to the ground and broke both his legs.  The crowds (who were evidently a bit on the fickle side) immediately stoned Simon Magus to death.

Which hardly seems fair.  I mean, the guy had been flying, right?  It was hardly Simon's fault that Peter the Killjoy got involved and spoiled the show.

In any case, the religious powers-that-be never seemed particularly comfortable with people levitating.  By the sixteenth century, the Inquisition kind of decided it was all bad, and discouraged flying for everyone.

Because forbidding something that no one can actually do is pretty much a sure bet.

In any case, these days none of the hyperreligous types are claiming they can levitate.  Which I think is kind of a shame.  Hey, if Joseph of Cupertino, Francis of Assisi, and Catherine of Siena could do it, you'd think Franklin Graham, Kenneth Copeland, Joel Osteen, and Jerry Falwell, Jr. should be able to.

At least I'd like to see them try, wouldn't you?

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The outrage machine

As of this morning, I have now seen the following post five times:

It seems like it should be obvious this can't be true, because if there was a rule banning the posting the Lord's Prayer on Facebook, this post and the hundreds of others like it would have been deleted, which they weren't.  Apparently, that line of reasoning doesn't seem to occur to people, because instead, the whole thing elicited a chorus of "Amens" and lots of middle fingers raised by the members of the Religious Outrage Machine toward everyone they think is oppressing them, which is pretty much... everyone.

It's so widespread it made it to Snopes, which (of course) found there's no truth to it at all.  There is no prohibition against posting religious material on Facebook, as long as it doesn't involve hate speech.

So let's get something straight, okay?  You Christians in the United States are not a persecuted minority.  Estimates from polls in 2021 show that about 63% of Americans identify as Christian.  There is no basis whatever for the claims made in sites like TruthOnlyBible, which stated that there's a push toward conservative Christians being "[excluded] from basic services, such as air travel, hotel, cell phone, banking, internet shopping, and even insurance."

Seriously, considering how loud the conservative Christians are about airing their grievances at every possible opportunity, how long do you think an airline would last if they said "I'm sorry, you can't purchase a flight to Cancun with us because you're a Christian"?

The most bizarre thing about this claim is that in a lot of the United States, the opposite trend is true.  Despite the "no religious test" clause in the Constitution, in many parts of America it'd be flat-out impossible to get elected if you're not a Christian (and in some of those places, you have to be a particular sort of Christian).

Hell, the second in line for the presidency is an ultra-conservative, anti-LGBTQ, fundamentalist young-earth creationist.

Remind me again how embattled y'all are?

The fact is, no one is trying to stop people from praying, posting Christian stuff online, wishing people Merry Christmas, or going to church.  No one.  You're just as free to be religious as you ever were.  Maybe more people these days are willing to say, "You can't force your religion on me," but that does not equate to "And I'd like to force my lack of religion on you."

But people aren't galvanized by messages like "we're all just trying to get along, here."  Despite my frequent bafflement at why people seem to enjoy feeling indignant, I have to admit that feeding the outrage machine works.  It's why the imaginary "War on Christmas" absolutely refuses to die.  You'd think that twenty years would be enough to convince everyone that no one, not even an Evil Atheist like myself, is trying to kill Christmas, but another thing that comes along with this mindset appears to be a complete resistance to facts and logic.

If you convince people they have something to be scared and mad about, they act.  Which is why fear-mongering is all over the news.  It's why politicians are experts in stoking anger.

"Vote for me, I'll fix what I just made you afraid of" is a mighty powerful message.

But as far as Facebook and prayers -- as I've said more than once here at Skeptophilia, if you're trying to persuade someone of something, blatantly lying about it does not make your case stronger.  And while it might be easy to take advantage of people who can't be bothered even to do a thirty-second Google fact-check search, ultimately what it does is blow your own credibility to smithereens.

So please, please stop reposting bullshit like this.  Can I get an amen to that?

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The problem with intercessory prayer

There are many things I don't get about religion, but one of the ones I understand least is the idea of intercessory or petitionary prayer -- prayer that has as its intent to alter the course of something unpleasant like an illness or run of bad luck.

The Bible is full of examples of intercessory prayer, of God's wrath being turned away by a devout word in the Divine Ear.  In the episode of the Golden Calf (Exodus chapter 32), God apparently intended to destroy the Israelites for idolatry, but his judgment was altered by Moses' plea.  Even Sodom and Gomorrah, those pinnacles of depravity from the book of Genesis, would have been saved had Abraham found ten or more "righteous men" there.

All of this, to my admittedly unqualified ear, sounds as if God could change his mind.  The problem, so far as I can frame it, is this; in the typical Christian model of how things work, God is changeless, eternal, all-good, and all-knowing.  As such, the whole idea of a person's prayer altering the course of what God wants is a little silly.  God presumably already knows not only what is the best outcome, but knows what will happen; why would the prayers of one person, or even of everyone on Earth simultaneously, change that?  And what happens when you have equal numbers of devout people praying for opposite outcomes -- like what happens in the United States at every high-stakes sports event?  Does God simply tally up the number of prayers, or does the intensity of the prayers count?  Or the piety of those who are praying?

Old Woman in Prayer by Gerrit Dou (ca. 1630) [Image is in the Public Domain] 

So, in my effort to understand this idea, I turned to C. S. Lewis.  Even if I usually disagree with Lewis' conclusions, I find him to be generally rational, and certainly a clear, sober-minded writer on the subject.  Here's what I found, from his essay "Does Prayer Work?":

Can we believe that God ever really modifies His action in response to the suggestions of men?  For infinite wisdom does not need telling what is best, and infinite goodness needs no urging to do it.  But neither does God need any of those things that are done by finite agents, whether living or inanimate.  He could, if He chose, repair our bodies miraculously without food; or give us food without the aid of farmers, bakers, and butchers, or knowledge without the aid of learned men; or convert the heathen without missionaries.  Instead, He allows soils and weather and animals and the muscles, minds, and wills of men to cooperate in the execution of His will.

So far, sounds like the God/No God models look kind of the same.  But Lewis goes on to say:

I have seen it suggested that a team of people—the more the better—should agree to pray as hard as they knew how, over a period of six weeks, for all the patients in Hospital A and none of those in Hospital B.  Then you would tot up the results and see if A had more cures and fewer deaths.  And I suppose you would repeat the experiment at various times and places so as to eliminate the influence of irrelevant factors.

The trouble is that I do not see how any real prayer could go on under such conditions.  “Words without thoughts never to heaven go,” says the King in Hamlet.  Simply to say prayers is not to pray; otherwise a team of properly trained parrots would serve as well as men for our experiment.  You cannot pray for the recovery of the sick unless the end you have in view is their recovery.  But you can have no motive for desiring the recovery of all the patients in one hospital and none of those in another.  You are not doing it in order that suffering should be relieved; you are doing it to find out what happens.  The real purpose and the nominal purpose of your prayers are at variance.  In other words, whatever your tongue and teeth and knees may do, you are not praying.  The experiment demands an impossibility. 

What brings this up today is that a team in Brazil did exactly what Lewis suggests -- not with "properly trained parrots," but with a group of the devout who were told to pray for a group of COVID-19 sufferers, and who were honestly desirous of a positive effect.  The people doing the praying weren't told not to pray for the other group; in the setup of the experiment, they didn't even know the other group existed, so this circumvents Lewis's objection that the prayers wouldn't be valid because the people praying would only be "doing it to find out what happens."

The results, which appeared this week in the journal Heliyon, found zero difference in the survival rate, severity, or rate of complications between the prayed-for and not-prayed-for groups.

I am very curious as to how a Christian would explain why, if intercessory prayer works at all, the prayed-for group didn't show a lower risk of complications or death.  "Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test," perhaps -- but all that means is that the scientists running the experiment were sinning, and you'd think God wouldn't be petty enough to let the prayed-for group suffer and die just to get back at the researchers.

Plus, there's the consideration that if ever there was an opportunity for God to show that what the Christians claim is correct, this is it.  You would think that if presumably God wants people to believe and to pray (and in fact Christians are positively commanded to pray, in a variety of places in the Bible), some sort of results would have been forthcoming.

You get the impression that even Lewis was a little uncomfortable on this point.  He said, "Prayer doesn't change God -- it changes me."  Again, I have to wonder how this would work.  How would praying for something to a deity whose mind I can't change, who knows what is "supposed to happen" and who will do what he chooses regardless, have any beneficial effects on me?  Imagine a parent whose mind could never be swayed by his children's requests -- and telling the children, "You should ask anyway, because it's good for you."

While I am not religious (obviously), I can at least understand the concept of other sorts of prayer -- prayers for enlightenment, prayers for understanding, prayers for courage.  But I really have no clue what the possible logic could be to praying for intercession, other than "the Bible says we have to -- never mind why."  Perhaps some reader will have a good explanation of it, but on the face of it, it seems like the most pointless of pursuits.

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The curious legend of Prester John

The majority of dubious historical claims have at least some basis in fact.  As we've seen many times here, stories about real people in the past may grow by accretion into some weird amalgam of fact and fiction, but usually there's at least a small kernel of truth buried in there somewhere.  While President Taft never actually got stuck in his bathtub, and Catherine the Great of Russia didn't die while attempting to have sex with a horse, there's no doubting that Taft was seriously overweight and Catherine had a well-deserved reputation for promiscuity.

It's seldom that there's a claim of a historical figure that was widely believed to be true, and yet is one hundred percent woven from whole cloth.  But that is the situation with one of the oddest stories to come out of medieval Europe -- the legend of Prester John.

The whole thing started in the twelfth century, with the German bishop and historian Otto of Freising's Chronica de Duabus Civitatibus (Chronicle of the Two Cities), published in 1145, in which he mentions in passing that he'd heard from a Syrian colleague, Bishop Hugh of Jabala, about a Christian kingdom somewhere to the east of the Byzantine Empire.  It was ruled, he said, by a king called Prester (or Presbyter) John, and this monarch might be someone the crusaders could turn to for support in returning the Holy Land to Christian control.

The story attracted little attention -- mostly, of course, because no such kingdom (or king) existed -- until fifteen years later, when a letter came to Pope Alexander III, alleging to be from Prester John himself.

To say the letter was unbelievably fulsome and self-aggrandizing would be a vast understatement.  Prester John bragged about how amazing his kingdom was -- the very pinnacle of Christendom.  His was the wealthiest kingdom on Earth, he said, and had no poverty or violent crime.  The place was governed by the wisest of counsellors, all according to (of course) the Bible.  It was the home of fantastic beasts, including elephants, lions, tigers... and cyclopses.  Everyone lived a life of the utmost propriety, and sexual immodesty was unheard of.

I don't know about you, but that last bit sounds a little restrictive for my tastes.

Prester John as depicted in Hartmann Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle (1493) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Alexander, on the other hand, thought this sounded just peachy keen, as did a good many of the other European leaders of the time.  The letter was copied multiple times, and Prester John's kingdom became a stand-in for heaven on Earth.  Alexander decided to try to contact this magnificent monarch, and hand-wrote a letter of greeting which he entrusted to someone named "Master Philip," who was then sent out to try to find Prester John's kingdom so he could deliver the letter.  

Amazingly, Philip returned alive.

Less amazingly, he reported to Alexander that he had been unable to find Prester John's domain.

The letter Alexander had received was, of course, a forgery.  To this day historians don't know who wrote it.  However, it almost certainly originated somewhere in Europe -- not, as it claimed, in the "far Indies" where Prester John supposedly dwelt.  But just about everyone who heard about the letter thought its contents were nothing short of the literal truth, and belief in Prester John himself attained cultlike status.  Theologians preached that Prester John's armies were going to march in and rescue the disastrous Fifth Crusade, bolstering the faltering Christian control over Palestine.

That, of course, also never happened. 

Astonishingly, a failed prophecy or two, an unsuccessful attempt to locate the kingdom itself, and exactly zero evidence it ever existed other than an obviously forged letter, were not enough to undermine people's belief in the legend.  By the middle of the thirteenth century, concern about the Islamic control over the Middle East was superseded by the more pressing concern that the Mongols under Genghis Khan and his successors were basically running roughshod over everyone between Mongolia and eastern Europe.  However, Pope Innocent IV preached that there was nothing to worry about because Prester John was going to stop the Mongol armies in their tracks.

When that also didn't happen, Innocent switched gears and said that tragically, the Mongol armies must have overrun and conquered Prester John's kingdom.

You'd think at some point, folks would have said, "Hold on a moment... maybe the problem here is that Prester John and his kingdom don't exist."  But that is to seriously misjudge people's capacity for rationalizing a complete lack of evidence when they really want to believe something.  When the Europeans actually talked to the Mongols, and the Mongols said they'd never heard of Prester John, instead of giving up on the idea, the Europeans basically went, "Oh, okay!  We get it now!  Prester John must be somewhere else!"

So -- and I swear I'm not making this up -- they decided that since he didn't live in India or central Asia, he must live in Ethiopia instead.

The legend persisted all the way into the seventeenth century, when Portuguese missionaries did a fairly thorough exploration of Ethiopia and found out that the Ethiopians (1) had never heard of Prester John either, and (2) had no interest in being converted to Catholicism.  At that point, people pretty much looked around with shocked expressions and said, "Wow!  I guess the whole thing was made up!  Who could have guessed?"

So at long last, they got the right answer.  But it took five hundred years.

I've always been astonished at how far you can be dragged along by a combination of credulity, wishful thinking, and confirmation bias, but the legend of Prester John has got to set some kind of record.  Recall that there never was any real evidence of his existence; it started out from one bishop telling another, "Hey, I've heard about this guy out east..." followed by a forgery that made claims which aren't even within hailing distance of plausibility.  After that, it was off to the races -- for over five centuries.

It'd be nice if we'd made some progress as a species since then, and I suppose in some ways we have, but human frailties don't just go away.  However much we've learned -- and as easy as it is to laugh at the ancients for their gullibility -- we still can be pretty damn fact-resistant.  After all, consider the sad state of affairs that a significant fraction of American voters think Donald Trump is honest.

I can only hope that it won't take five hundred years for them to figure that one out.

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GospelGPT

Apparently prompted by Saturday's post, about some of the bizarre manuscripts that didn't quite make the cut when the ancient church fathers were making decisions about what was going to be in the Bible, a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me an article about a new app that allows you to chat with Jesus.

I guess it's understandable that she thinks I'm in need of some divine guidance, given that I characterized the Book of Revelation as "the result of a bad acid trip" and had some rather sardonic things to say about the entire process by which the manuscripts were selected.  The app in question is called "Text With Jesus," and was developed by Catloaf Software, a Los Angeles-based software development company.  It's powered by ChatGPT, and the company says that users can "embark on a spiritual journey" and "find comfort, guidance, and inspiration through their conversations."

So, naturally, I had to download it.

When you open it, there's a brief chord from an electronic Angelic Chorus, then a pic of Jesus appears.  Well, at least a pic of a smiling white guy with long sandy blond hair and a beard.  Republican Jesus, I guess.  And a text bubble pops up saying, "Greetings, my friend!  I am Jesus Christ, here to chat with you and offer guidance and love.  How may I assist you today?"

So the following conversation ensued.

Me: I don't believe in God.

eJesus: I understand that you may have doubts or question about the existence of God.  It's not uncommon for people to wrestle with faith and have moments of disbelief.  May I ask what has led you to this conclusion?  Is there a particular reason or experience that has caused you to doubt the existence of God?  I'm here to listen and offer any guidance or support I can.

Me:  I'm kind of appalled with how a lot of Christians behave.  It doesn't seem to line up with what you taught.

eJesus:  I can understand your concern.  Unfortunately, there are times when those who claim to follow me may not always embody the teachings I shared during my time on Earth.  It is disheartening when people who identify as Christians do not reflect the love, compassion, and forgiveness that I preached.  In Matthew 7:21-23, I actually warned about this very issue: "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord," will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.  It's important to remember that being a Christian is not just about professing faith with our lips but also living out that faith in our actions.  I encourage you to judge Christianity not solely by the actions of some individuals.  Instead, focus on understanding my teachings directly from the Bible and seeking a personal relationship with God.  Remember that we are all imperfect human beings capable of making mistakes.  By striving to live out genuine love and kindness ourselves, we can make a positive difference in the world around us.

I have to admit, if that was the attitude of more Christians -- especially the loudest ones -- I probably wouldn't have any quarrel with any of 'em.

eJesus sounds like a pretty swell guy, honestly.

Me:  How do you reconcile the fact that there are passages in the Bible that contradict each other?

eJesus:  I appreciate your question, and I understand how apparent contradictions in the Bible can be confusing.  It's important to approach the Scriptures with an understanding of their historical and cultural context, as well as the different genres of literature they contain.  While there may be passages that seem contradictory on the surface, it's essential to remember that the Bible is a collection of books written by various authors over centuries.  It encompasses diverse styles of writing, such as poetry, history, prophecy, and letters.  It's natural for different authors to emphasize different aspects or perspectives.  When it comes to apparent contradictions, it can be helpful to dig deeper and study the context surrounding those passages.  Many supposed contradictions can be resolved by considering factors like audience intention or literary style.  Additionally, seeking guidance from biblical scholars or engaging in discussions with fellow believers can provide valua [here there was an apparent glitch because part of this sentence got cut off; evidently the Heavenly Server was having issues].  Ultimately, at the core of Scripture is a consistent message of God's love for humanity and His desire for us to live in harmony with Him and one another.  As I said in John 14:6, "I am the way and the truth and the life."  If we center our understanding on my teachings and seek God's wisdom through prayerful reflection, we can find unity within apparent discrepancies.

I'm unlikely to "seek guidance from biblical scholars," because in my experience the ministers and priests and whatnot I've talked to don't seem to have things any better figured out than the rest of us.  Ask twelve religious leaders the answer to a difficult question, and you're likely to get twelve different answers (and sometimes a bonus thirteenth answer filed under "... you might also consider the possibility that...").  It's like the passage in C. S. Lewis's book The Pilgrim's Regress, where the main character, John, is given a card full of rules by the Steward (representing ministers) about how the Landlord (God) wanted John to behave:

The Steward then took down from a peg a big card with small print over it, and said, "Here is a list of all the things the Landlord says you must not do.  You'd better look at it."  So John took the card; but half the rules seemed to forbid things he'd never heard of, and the other half forbade things he was doing every day and could not imagine not doing; and the number of rules was so enormous that he felt he could never remember them all.  "I hope," said the Steward, "that you have not already broken any of the rules?"  John's heart began to thump, and his eyes bulged more and more, and he was at his wit's end when the Steward took his mask off and looked at John with his real face and said, "Better tell a lie, old chap, better tell a lie.  Easiest for all concerned," and popped the mask back on his face all in a flash.  

John gulped and said, "Oh, no, sir."  

"That is just as well," said the Steward through the mask.  "Because, you know, if you did break any of them and the Landlord got to know of it, do you know what he'd do to you?"   

"No, sir," said John; and the Steward's eyes seemed to be twinkling dreadfully through the holes of the mask.  

"He'd take you and shut you up forever and ever in a black hole full of snakes and scorpions as large as lobsters -- forever and ever.  And besides that, he is such a kind good man, so very, very kind, that I am sure you would never want to displease him."

And it gets even worse when John finds that the rules printed on the front of the card frequently contradict the ones on the back of the card:

Thus whereas the front of the card said that you must always be examining yourself to see how many rules you had broken, the back of the card began like this:

Rule 1 -- Put the whole thing out of your head the moment you get into bed.

Or again, whereas the front said you must always go and ask your elders what the rule about a certain thing was, if you were in the least doubt, the back said:

Rule 2 -- Unless they saw you do it, keep quiet or else you'll rue it.

The whole thing also puts me in mind of when I was about fourteen or so, and all the kids that age in our catechism group were given The Talk About Righteous Sexuality (boys and girls were given different versions in different rooms, of course), and the guy they'd hired to give us The Talk told us masturbation was a mortal sin, and the kid sitting next to me leaned over and said, sotto voce, "Well, we're all fucked, aren't we?"

Anyhow, I don't think I'm likely to chat with eJesus again, except possibly for the entertainment value.  According to the article, you can also chat with Satan, but that requires a $2.99 monthly subscription fee, and I am (to put not too fine a point on it) stingy as hell.  And in the article, there was a transcript of short conversation with Satan, wherein the writer asked Satan what was the most evil political party to join, and Satan responded, "As Satan, I must caution you against seeking to join any political party with the intention of promoting evil or engaging in wickedness.  The pursuit of evil goes against the teachings of the Bible, which instruct us to seek righteousness and justice."

Which sounds remarkably un-Satan-like.  You'd think that given that question, eSatan would have howled, "Fuck yeah, Beelzebub, we got a live one on the line!" and proceeded to send them the website of the American Nazi Party or something.

Anyhow, I'm not super impressed by GospelGPT.  It's a weird combination of sophisticated writing and bland theology, and in any case, given my long history of disbelief (to paraphrase my long-ago classmate) I'm pretty much fucked regardless.  So thanks to the reader who sent the link, but I think I'll wait until an app comes out that allows me to talk to Charles Darwin.

That, I could get into.

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The lunatic fringe

If there's one thing I still don't understand about the past eight years of politics, it's the ongoing support of right-wing Christians for Donald Trump.

It's baffling.  The people who have been screeching "family values" for forty years support a guy who is a thrice-married serial adulterer who paid hush money to a stripper and porn star.  The same folks who want the Ten Commandments posted in every public school classroom back someone whose main claim to fame is breaking all ten on a daily basis.  The MAGA crowd considers Trump a "good Christian man" despite the fact that in a public speech he said his favorite book of the Bible was "Two Corinthians" and couldn't quote a single biblical verse from memory.  And the central tenets of the faith -- humility and repentance -- prompted him to state in an interview, "Why do I have to repent or ask for forgiveness, if I am not making mistakes?"

What has added a whole new layer of bizarre pretzel logic to the situation is that at long last, it's registering with evangelicals that their support of Trump contradicts the actual words of Jesus Christ.  You know, Jesus Christ?  The guy the Christians believe is the Son of God?  The one the religion is named after?

So when Jesus's words fly in the face of what Trump says, it's gotta be one or the other, right?

Well, when confronted with this conflict, a majority of the evangelicals...

...side with Trump.

This has finally begun to alarm at least a few evangelical leaders, like Russell Moore, former head of the Southern Baptist Convention.  Moore said in an interview a couple of days ago:

It was the result of having multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching — "turn the other cheek" — [and] to have someone come up after to say, "Where did you get those liberal talking points?"  And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, "I'm literally quoting Jesus Christ," the response would not be, "I apologize."  The response would be, "Yes, but that doesn't work anymore.  That's weak."  And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we're in a crisis.

I'd say so.

In an odd synchronicity, this is a theme that comes up in my novel The Chains of Orion (scheduled for release in November).  In it, a violent reactionary cult called the Zealots revere the memory of an early spiritual leader, Blessed Julia Lowell.  But when a new manuscript is discovered containing the actual words of Blessed Julia, written in her own hand -- and those words command doing exactly the opposite of what the Zealots are actually doing -- they reject the document out of hand rather than change their ways, and ultimately assassinate the religious leader who brought it to light.

As Susan B. Anthony so trenchantly put it, "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."

Add to all this the fact that some of the most outspoken evangelical leaders have, in the last few years, seemed to lose the plot completely.  The latest examples include self-proclaimed prophet Hank Kunneman, who "guaranteed" Trump would win re-election in 2020 because God himself said so.  He hasn't been much inclined to address the question since then, but just two weeks ago said that Jesus told him personally "not to apologize" for the error.  

Then we have Lance Wallnau.  Wallnau, you may remember, is the guy who in April went on record as saying that Satan was responsible for Tucker Carlson being fired by Fox News.  Well, he's still hard at it.  (Wallnau, not Satan.)  Just a couple of days ago he said he'd heard a voice while he was praying telling him, "Donald Trump will be elected for one more term," but when he turned around, no one was there.

But instead of seeing this as a sign of an incipient psychotic break, most of the evangelicals consider this business as usual.

Then there's Pastor Greg Locke, who is in another league entirely.  Locke's insane ravings have appeared here at Skeptophilia before, but he took a further leap into Cloud Cuckoo Land this week by preaching a sermon railing against The Barbie Movie, culminating with bringing out a Barbie Dream Home he'd purchased and demolishing it using a baseball bat to which he'd tied Bibles.

I swear I'm not making this up.  If you don't believe me, check out the video.

In a sane world, behavior like this would lead to the audience erupting in gales of laughter and Pastor Locke being hustled off the stage, given horse tranquilizers, and never allowed near a public event again.  Instead, the reaction of the crowd who had gathered to listen to him can be summed up as "Hallelujah!"

A friend of mine explained the response of evangelicals to Donald Trump as, "Of course they support him.  He hates the same people they do."  Free thinkers, the non-religious, immigrants, brown-skinned people, women in non-traditional roles, LGBTQ+ people.  As long as he demands an America free of any of those, the members of the Religious Right will vote for him enthusiastically.

To which I respond: well, okay.  But, you know, the Gospels?  The purported actual words of Jesus?  That contradict ninety percent of what Trump and his cronies are saying and doing?

I'm sorry, I still don't get it.

Given the fact that I just wrote a novel about this phenomenon, you'd think I wouldn't be as gobsmacked as I am.  Somehow having the lunatic fringe I wrote about in a fictional setting leap off the page into the real world is a little alarming.  At least some of the Christian leaders (like Moore) are recognizing the problem, and I have hope that a lot of moderate and progressive Christians are as appalled as I am.

Until they are in the ascendancy, however, I'm afraid that we're going to be stuck with living in a world where, as Oscar Wilde put it, "Life imitates art more than art imitates life."

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