Tyranny: Muslim, Catholic and Anglican

Cal Thomas, an old-time conservative Californian, Oakland Tribune columnist, and Fox News Watch panelist, has sounded the alarm about Muslim immigration to Great Britain. Segregation, Muslim Style In an off-hand sort of way, he implies that the same warning may apply to the USA, but his main focus is on Britain. Thomas doesn't seem to have noticed, but his warning is eerily reminiscent of the propaganda that nativist Protestants directed against Roman Catholic immigrants, particularly 1830-1850. Anyone remember the Know-Nothing Party? Also known as the American Party? Abraham Lincoln remarked:

"Our progress in degeneracy appears to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.' "

But Thomas does have a point about the way Islam is being brought into Britain. And to the same extent that Thomas has a point, the Know-Nothings had a valid point about the potential danger from Roman Catholic immigration. Thomas quotes the Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester for the Church of England, that Muslims in England are segregating themselves into neighborhoods where non-Muslims "trespass" at risk of assault or harrassment. David Davis, the "shadow home secretary" accuses Muslim immigrants of shutting themselves off from the surrounding culture, and demanding immunity from criticism. (The shadow home secretary is a wanna-be, a member of the opposition Tory party who would become home secretary if his party wins a majority in the next election.)

Know-Nothings professed alarm that Roman Catholic immigrants were ignorant, illiterate peasants, kept by supersition and an authoritarian hierarchy under the strict supervision of their priests. If such people were allowed to become citizens and vote, the nativists warned, the Pope would dictate government policy and transform the cradle of liberty into a Roman despotism.

We all know that this did not happen in the United States of America. Why not? Because, over time, although most immigrants of whatever nationality and faith lived for a time in ethnic ghettoes, they all sought, absorbed, and embraced at least some of the better principles our nation has, in its brighter moments, tried to stand for. The recently deceased former governor of Wisconsin, Lee Sherman Dreyfus, told Cardinal Carol Wojtyla that the mind-set of Catholics in America was "They are good young Catholics, but they think like Protestants." How fortunate for American democracy.

The same was true for Muslim immigrants, and even the Mormons (many of them immigrants recruited by the LDS Church in Europe) accepted American citizenship, with a little prodding from the Seventh Cavalry. Most Americans whose faith is Islam are fifth or sixth generation descendants of naturalized citizens. Their mosques are generations old. Many recent Muslim immigrants follow their example. And those among the African American population, who have chosen Islam, were established here for many generations before converting.

Perhaps Muslims in Great Britain are not following the same path. It was not always certain that Roman Catholics in America would do so. In the powerful but mostly forgotten book American Freedom and Catholic Power, Paul Blanshard warned as recently as 1951 of genuine efforts by the church hierarchy to mobilize their parishioners for the transformation of church doctrine into government policy. In 1984, Michael Schwartz offered The Persistent Prejudice: Anti-Catholicism in America, which openly declared that it is the role of his church to "convert" America, and that any criticism of this mission is "anti-Catholic bias." (Shades of British immigrant Muslims demanding immunity from criticism).

Let us be clear: the segregation or self-segregation of any ethnic or religious community, by outside hostility and prejudice or by internal self-righteousness, is unacceptable in a pluralistic democratic republic. Religious association is one of the many freedoms we all enjoy, but it is unacceptable for residential, commercial, and political life to be segregated by religion, any more than by ethnicity.

We associate for worship with people who share our faith, we act out our respective faiths in our daily lives, as we encounter neighbors, customers, co-workers, political comrades, of many different faiths, who all share a common citizenship. We all have inherited recipes and family traditions, and generally, we all like going to restaurants offering cuisine from other traditions. Perhaps nothing unites Americans so much as the fact that we all like Chinese food.

The answer to what may be happening in Britain is not to affirm that nation's or any nation's "Christian identity." It is to affirm that no person and no group of persons may inflict their own faith upon another by physical, secular, coercive means. There are nations where religious doctrine is enforced by the police. Anyone who believes that is right should remove themselves to such a nation, only, be careful to find out which branch of what doctrine the police enforce before buying a plane ticket!

We should also keep in mind that immigration is seldom motivated by a desire to "take over" the land people move to. The last time that happened was when John Smith arrived in the Chesapeake Bay region, and the Separatists (Pilgrims) and Puritans landed in Massachusetts. Nobody has a better right to complain about ungrateful immigrants taking over from their hosts than the Powhattan, Pequot, the Narragansett, and the Mohegan.

Every wave of immigration to the independent United States of America was inspired by the fact that American industry was looking for cheap labor to fill up their factories, mines and slaughterhouses. Captains of industry didn't really care what this might do to the religious character of a righteously Protestant nation, nor what kind of citizens and voters their new employees might make. There way money to be made. Great Britain's immigrants are a kind of reverse flow. Britain made itself a wealthy and powerful nation by going out and building a colonial empire. Now, some portion of the population of that empire is, quite naturally, gravitating to the center of all that wealth. How they are received has everything to do with what sort of "citizens" their children will become.

Thomas insinuates that multiculturalism is faithless, "because in this view, truth does not exist." Hmmm... I thought that is what he was criticizing Muslims for, insisting that truth exists, and they know what it is! I can see Thomas and a couple of mullah's trading accusations of "Infidel" until the end of time. Many who practice multiculturalism understand that there is an absolute truth, which does not depend on the vagaries of popular opinion or human will. We just have enough humility to recognize that God will judge, we are not called to impose our limited understanding of The Truth upon our neighbors.

I am a Christian, and a Protestant. I have found Roman Catholic mass a moving worship service, learned from the teachings of Orthodox rabbis, and understood God a little better by reading from the Qu'ran. (The opening verse is one of the most moving prayers ever written in any language). I am not moved to give obedience to the Bishop of Rome, to renounce Christianity, or to pray five times a day facing Mecca.

Thomas also throws up the tired lie that paganism, hedonism and greed undermined past empires, presumably the Roman and Greek empires. Nobody denounces hedonism more rigorously than al-Qaeda. The Roman Empire was quite intact and powerful when Constantine made his deal with the Christian bishops of the day. If anything, the fall of the Roman Empire would suggest that Christianity is what brought the empire to its doom. (No, not really, but empirically it is a more accurate statement.) And western civilization was built upon pure, unadulterated greed.

Right Reverend Nazir-Ali mixes apples and oranges when he writes, with Thomas's evident approval, "None of this will be of any avail if Britain does not recover that vision of its destiny which made it great. That has to do with the Bible's teaching that we have equal dignity and freedom because we are all made in God's image." No it doesn't.

Those are beautiful principles, well worth teaching. One could even make them the foundation of a rapprochement between Christianity and Islam, to the extent that the foundation for them can be found in the Torah, the first five books of what Christians call the Old Testament, which are also sacred to Muslims. However, they have little to do with what made Britain "great."

Nazir-Ali is the bishop of an Established Church. Less than 200 years ago, membership in this church was required in order to vote, hold public office, or serve in many professions. Noncomformists were explicitly denied "equal dignity and freedom." England didn't fully embrace such principles until well after World War II. The aristocracy which built the British Empire begrudgingly gave in, kicking and screaming, when they needed their former colonies' aid to recover from the devastation of the last war.

Perhaps Britain's problem is that Muslim immigrants still feel that they are NOT welcome to participate in the larger culture, with equal dignity and freedom. Perhaps they feel that retreating into their own little ghettoes is a natural survival reflex. Maybe what the British need to do is "take a Muslim to lunch." (And accept a return invitation, even if the food is new and different.) Welcome wagons are more effective than mandatory indoctrination. There is no need to glorify old tyrannies in order to reject new ones.

Halloween

Don't Take The Devil Seriously

Among the many tracts urging Christians to boycott Halloween is one being passed around this year by one D.A. Waite, Th.D, Ph.D, (no information available what school awarded either degree). Waite is Pastor at Bible for Today Baptist Church, in Collingswood, NJ.

I appreciate the Baptist faith. Baptists added many dimensions to the Protestant Reformation lacking in the work of Martin Luther or John Calvin. Roger Williams, the apostle of religious freedom and the separation of church and state, was a Baptist. But today, there are so many doctrines presented to the world as Baptist that it is hard to know what the name means. (I highly recommend the Wittenburg Door's 2006 interview with Will D. Campbell, a native of Kentucky who understands the historic legacy of the Baptist faith better than most, although the interview unfortunately is NOT among the on-line archives.)

Waite begins by referring to October 31 as The Devil's Birthday, which is odd, since by any Christian theology concerning Satan, or The Devil, it would appear his creation came before there were such things as years, months, and dates, and dubious that he had any "birth" at all. Wasn't he created an angel? Who was his mother? Did Anton LaVey ever pick a day to serve birthday cake to his "god"?

Waite then headlines the occasion as "A Satanic Druid Holiday." Stranger still, because Satan and Druids have nothing to do with each other. Druids were pagan, heathen, practiced the abomination of human sacrifice, may not exactly have been idol-worshippers in the sense that the Babylonians, Greeks and Romans worshipped elaborate statues of their pantheon of gods and goddesses... but Druids certainly worshipped at sacred rocks, wells, and trees. However, Satanic worship is different.

Devotion to Satan is impossible without Christianity. Satanic worship is a mockery, a parody, a perversion, of the Christian faith. Satan, as Christians know him, has no precedent prior to the teachings of the Christian church. Certainly the Jewish understanding of Satan, which applies to the entire Old Testament, is not that of God's enemy, but God's tester, a role exemplified in the book of Job, and even in the Temptation of Jesus. The Druids had no notion of Satan's existence, any more than King Nebuchadnezzar did. They didn't read the Bible.

Unreal Mockery, Hence!

Then, Waite gives The Devil far more credibility than such a malicious creature deserves. "There are real witches, real spells, real rituals." REAL? Unreal mockery, hence! What power do spells have, except in the mind of those who cast them, and those who tremble at them? Does anyone believe that a modern self-styled witch, or more likely, a practitioner of Wicca, has any REAL power over anything in God's creation? Oh ye of little faith!

Remember that the most potent argument against the Salem witchcraft trials was simply that such superstitious beliefs had no real power at all. When fearful villagers blamed unknown witches for an epidemic of debilitating illness, it was in reality typhoid, or malaria, or dysentery, which have causes modern medicine has swept away, not by spells, but by hygiene and vaccination.

Wicca is not worship of Satan, any more than Druidic rituals were. But Wicca is also not a continuation of some ancient rituals or lore. Wicca was more or less invented from whole cloth by bored 19th century intellectuals, and magnified by alienated 20th century intellectuals, who wanted a romantic, nature-centered alternative to the stuffiness of post-revival established churches. Most Wiccans would cringe at the notion of human sacrifice, which is pathetic for people who think of themselves as a Druid revival.

The formal existence of the laughable nonsense that passes as "Satanic worship" is also a 20th century invention. It has no centuries of history behind it. Worship Satan? Pagans had their own gods, so they had no need to borrow devils from their Christian neighbors. Odin perhaps, but not Satan. An entirely different evil.

As to the possibility that Satanists sacrifice cats, dogs and other animals, or even their own children, let us remember that Christians were once thought to drink the blood of ritually sacrificed babies in the catacombs of Rome. No doubt there have been people who deluded themselves that they were witches or worshippers of Satan. A few have even indulged in human sacrifice. Some are serving life sentences in prison as a result. But their own delusion was a hollow one. There is no reason we should give it any credit. They were not serving a real god. Remember how Elijah mocked the priests of Baal? "You'll have to shout louder, for surely he is a god." He was no god at all. Baal did not exist.

Co-opted Christian Festivals

It is true, as Waite says, that the Celtic festival of Samhuinn (pronounced Sam-Hayne) was co-opted by the Christian church and changed to All Saints Day. (In Celtic tradition, as in Jewish tradition, a "day" begins at sunset and ends the following sunset. So the daytime of Samhuinn became All Saints Day, and the previous night became All Hallows Eve, or Halloween.) Most Christian holidays are co-opted pagan festivals.

We have no knowledge, by history or by revelation, that baby Jesus was born December 25. This was however a popular holiday season for Christian converts from various pagan cultures. For the Romans, it was Saturnalia; for the Celts, the season of the Yule celebration. The Christian Church co-opted nearly all its holidays from pagan celebrations, and that includes Easter. Some modern Christians refuse to celebrate any of them. Halloween is no better and no worse.

If we really want to throw out all traditions tainted by pagan origins, the theme of the Divine Son of the Virgin Mother is an ancient pagan icon, known to the Egyptians, the Sumerians, and the Celts (Mabon ab Modron). Perhaps the worship of Jesus as the Son of God is "a very serious Satanic practice"? As a matter of fact, Orthodox Jewish scholars have long criticized Christian worship as a pagan syncretism precisely because it conforms to a pagan image. OK, we are not about to take the baby Jesus and the ultimate sacrifice reconciling humanity to our Creator, and throw them out with the pagan bathwater. And Halloween isn't nearly so precious. But let's lighten up a little.

Waite quotes from the World Book Encyclopedia. If he quotes accurately, the source is a very unreliable one. "The custom of using leaves, pumpkins, and cornstalks as Halloween decorations comes from the Druids." Huh? Pumpkins were unknown in Europe until well after Columbus tripped over America trying to find his was to India. Same with what we now call corn (maize) with its distinctive leaves and stalks. There were jack-o-lanterns of a sort in medieval Europe, carved out of turnips, but the Druids were entirely unfamiliar with pumpkins.

The cited article also informs Waite that "Samhain, lord of death, called together the wicked spirits..." Sorry, there was no Druid tradition of a "Lord of Death" called "Samhain." Traditions concerning the dead were more akin to modern customs in Mexico, the Dia de los Muertes. The dead might be restless, might need to be propitiated, but they were not looking around for animal bodies to inhabit, they were, on the contrary, seeking to return to their living relatives. They were fearsome, because they were dead, but not wicked. They were grandmas and uncles and aunties.

Laughing at Superstition

Christian faith is in essence the enemy of superstition. Various superstitions have been tagged onto Christianity by Greek philosophers, German tribal kings, Roman emperors and Celtic peasants. Taking these superstitions seriously has always resulted in shame for the Church. There is only one God. The others, pagan or satanic, worshipped by whole peoples or by a handful of misfits, are "silver and gold, the work of men's hands." Our God is The God, there is no other.

Martin Luther wrote "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." Thomas More said in the same spirit that the devil "the proud spirit... cannot endure to be mocked." That was the original meaning of Halloween. For a more detailed historical background, check out Biblical Horizons: Concerning Halloween. All the dressing up as ghosts and witches and goblins and devils was to mock, jeer, laugh at, the powers of evil conjured up by the human mind, not to celebrate them or give credence to them. That is the spirit of Halloween we must recapture.

Hollywood horror films, and tracts denouncing Halloween as "the devil's birthday" are flip sides of the same coin: both take the powers of evil seriously. Certainly fall festivals of corn shocks, pumpkin faces, cider, donuts, apple bobbing and trick-or-treat pose no evil. Fall is a beautiful season, October is a beautiful month. Before it gives way to cold, grey November, it is an innocent past-time to enjoy the bounty of the harvest and the beauty of empty fields. Dressing up children as ghosts, witches, goblins, devils, is just fine also, as long as they understand, we are scorning these images with our laughter, playing with their hollow identies because we are not afraid of them. We are free to make them the butt of our jests, because they have no power over us.

Chris Redford left the comment below. Blogger doesn't seem to be set up for me to post a direct response to her comment, but she has an interesting article at Secular Evangelism, and I posted a brief reply there. It is good that we can all think, and all talk to each other.

The Genetic Self

Observations on Richard Dawkins's Speculative Fantasy

Richard Dawkins's published and quoted public statements have never impressed me. They certainly don't inspire me to buy his books. He comes across in print like a juvenile who makes provocative statements just to enjoy the anger of those who find him disagreeable. He is probably nothing like that in person. In any case, it is less than credible to make critical remarks about a published author, without actually reading any of his books. So when I saw a copy of The Selfish Gene on sale for 50 cents, about the value of a used-up rapper, I snapped it up.

His Introduction actually suggested some common ground for dialog with Christians, or with Jews or Muslims or any other monotheists. He does not, of course, opine that "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Nor does he say that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the Living God, or that there is no God but The God, and Mohammed is his prophet. But he does say "Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly toward a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something which no other species has ever aspired to." Not exactly Original Sin, but a bit of convergence among different philosophies toward the same limited physical truth.

The weakness of his book is that it is entirely speculative, and not very well informed speculation either. The book's Preface announces that this is "not science fiction," and that is true, because good science fiction, unlike fantasy novels set on another planet, contains some sound application of scientific fact and method to create the story line. Then he announces that his book "is science," and this is pompous nonsense. Science is generally absent from the main theme of the book, although there is some sound science in various sideshows offered as examples or analogies.

The entire story rests on Chapter 2, "The Replicators." Dawkins begins with a fairly well established line of research, that if electricity is sparked through a mix of chemicals likely to have been present in the early eons of our planet, complex amino acids will result. Water, carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia are all compounds used in such experiments, and all are present on some of the other planets in our solar system. From this beginning, Dawkins jumps to the idea that free-floating amino acids learned to copy themselves, and filled up the oceans with a soup of mindless strings of complex compounds. New varieties developed due to errors in replication. Then they started eating each other, because there were no more free atoms in the ocean to build copies from.

What led to cells and and complex plant and animal bodies? Oh, these mindless strings of replicating amino acids somehow surrounded themselves with cell walls to protect themselves from each other. They didn't plan to mind you. They had and have no minds. They just did it, blindly and spontaneously. There is, of course, no evidence at all for this vicious amino acid soup, or the spontaneous replication of amino acids floating freely in the ocean. Nor is there any attempt at explanation of how these complex proteins assembled themselves into the much more complex DNA molecule.

Even for nontheistic theories of the origins of matter and of life, this is a very long stretch. Genes do not exist as the code for reproducing life, life exists for the purpose of providing security to our genes... There is a test for this kind of speculation, called Occam's Razor. The test is, the more simply a theory explains the known facts, the more likely it is to be true. Dawkins's speculation on the origin of life fails Occam's Razor miserably.

As it happens, there are other, better supported theories, and not coincidentally, these pose no conflict to the notion that "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth," or that "God said, let the waters bring forth the living thing that hath life." No theory proves or depends upon the existence of God. Those who "live by faith and not by sight" would be profoundly disturbed if sight could provide proof positive of an omnipresent, omnipotent God. What experiment could test for whether God is a reasonable hypothesis? That is why "Intelligent Design" borders on blasphemy, and certainly lacks intelligence. Actually, there is no particular reason that God could not have done things the way Dawkins says they happened, but there is no good reason to think he did. "Let the waters bring forth the self-replicating amino acid" is a long way around when a simpler, better understood, more subtle, but more direct sequence of more likely events is clearly available.

A good alternative scenario was presented in American Scientist, Volume 94, page 32, by Michael Russell, a research fellow at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Center, and at the time of publication, a visiting scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. No doubt this article only scratches the surface of available research and publication. But for the general reader, trying to keep up with what science has to offer, while lacking time to become an expert, it's a good article to check out.

The author may be personally acquainted with Dawkins, or not, may be his close personal friend, or caustic rival. Russell may be a devout Christian, like Cambridge University biologist Simon Conway Morris, or a convinced atheist, like astronomer Fred Hoyle. That really doesn't matter. Science is not a competition between political orthodoxies, although, unfortunately, scientists do engage in political competition. Russell builds his analysis on the previous work of many others, who each have their own beliefs and disbeliefs. Whatever these are, the truth is the truth, however dimly understood. What matters is that "First Life" offers a simpler and more plausible speculation, a more factually-grounded speculation, about the origin of life, than Dawkins's Selfish Gene.

"First Life" begins with the basic chemistry of respiration, not complex genes seeking a fortress to dwell within. At the bottom of every food chain, hydrogen and carbon dioxide are used to synthesize organic compounds. All more complex life depends on it. Organic molecules require other materials: nitrogen, sulfides, phosphates, metals such as iron, nicket, manganese, cobalt and zinc. Where were these found on the newly formed earth? Around deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Deep in the sea was the only place fragile potential for life could have survived in those early times: the oceans were a sterile desert, vaporized frequently by the impact of meteorites, the moon was much closer, causing frequent tides and storms. Dawkins's replicators would have been smashed, physically and chemically, faster than they could form. A warm spring, on the deep ocean floor, protected from raw ultraviolet radiation, never dry, never too hot or too cold, never too acid or too alkaline, was the place for life to survive.

Before life was truly life at all, iron sulfide precipitate naturally formed a gel with pores and bubbles, providing enclosed sites for chemical reactions. This may have been the beginning of the membranes that today surround all living cells. But the first chemical reactions needed a catalyst, and the availability of a mineral called greigite, an iron-nickel sulfide, provided one. There is even a plausible explanation for the emergence of the proteins that contain the genetic codes of all life today, RNA and DNA. The raw materials were freely available in this nurturing environment, but how did molecules so complicated happen to form? What came first? Perhaps adenosine triphosphate, still the engine of every living cell today. It would have played a role in respiration before genetic codes even existed.

For all the details, the article is highly recommended. The plausible scenario of raw materials, sources of energy, increasingly complex chemical reactions started by conveniently available catalysts, could be wrong in one or many details. It probably comes closer to how life began than a soup of selfish genes with no will to be selfish which just happened to surround themselves with living bodies. Either scenario is statistically improbable, but the hydrothermal vent theory corresponds to actual chemistry and real conditions that probably existed. It offers a precise series of chemical reactions. And if a reader happens to have faith that there was a divine purpose, intent, and initative behind it all... it calls to mind the recent worship song "Where would I be, you only know... an empty space, a hopeless place, if not for grace."

Grace is not a necessary hypothesis for this theory to be plausible, but it may be a necessary precondition for all the right materials to be in just the right place, and move through just the right set of opportunities in the face of so many hazards. Perhaps there was a certain grace which provided that a sterile desert of ocean, irradiated by ultraviolet, could bring forth the living thing that has life, from which a God who, as Einstein said, is "subtle, but malicious he is not" could make great fish and every living creature that moves.. .But whether there is a God or no, this is sound science, and Dawkins's fantasy is wishful thinking, conforming a vision of the past to his own didactic polemics in the present.