GETTING PERSPECTIVE

I am now (in 2023) 76 years old - elderly by anyone's standards.  Statistics predict I could live till 2041, when I would be 94, but in reality, I will be lucky to live another decade.  I'm fine with this, but having already had such a long life gives me a perspective on time, on the human scale, that younger people are unlikely to have.  Specifically, major events in history continue to get further away.  I think that as we learn history in school, we build a rough mental framework of how long ago things happened.  I started learning about American history around 1955 when I was in third grade and formed this framework then.  The wars serve as convenient mileposts.

                                                                THEN

In 1955, the American Revolution had ended 172 years before, considerably less than two centuries.  The Civil War was about half that old, ending 90 years before, when a few Revolutionary War veterans were still alive.  In the 1950s there was a handful of centenarian Civil War veterans still alive.  The Spanish-American war had ended 57 years before - my paternal grandfather, whom I knew well, was born in 1874 and served in it, so in that time it was still in living memory.

WWI had ended 47 years before, and many veterans were still alive and marched in parades on Armistice Day.  My parents were 8 and 9 when the war ended, so although they were not much affected by it, they remembered it well and all the adults in their day had lived through its terrors.

Then WWII started just twenty years later, ending only ten years before.  My parents were in their 30s during the war, and my brother Gary, five years older, was conceived before Pearl Harbor and the US entry into the war.   I myself was born in March 1947, only 19 months after Hiroshima and the end of the war.  Most adult men I knew had fought in the war.  Since my mother's family was German, many of her relatives fought on the other side and were now living in an occupied country.  It was all current history and still very much a part of our cultural environment.

In 1955 the Korean War had just ended in a stalemate two years earlier and was still filling the newspapers,  Though I was only six when it ended and don't remember it, my brother told me about reports on the radio of dogfights between MiGs and Sabrejets and giving the daily death tolls.  I found it amazing that my own brother remembered a war.  At the time I assumed that wars were things of the barbaric past and I would never see such horrific events in our safe modern world. 

I remember doing some calculations around that time and figured that I would be 29 when the country turned 200 years old, certainly a major landmark.  And way off in the misty future, if I somehow survived until I was 53, I might celebrate the Millennium.  I remember thinking that only very old people like my grandparents still remembered the 19th century.  Almost everyone alive had always written years starting with 19, and would continue to do so for several more decades.  I wondered if we would call the year of the Millenium "twenty hundred," as the previous centenary year had been nineteen hundred.  Little did I dream that I would spend years of my programming career preparing for Y2K (yes, it was a real thing and would have been a disaster but for thousands of people like me).

Of course, the Bicentennial came and went, and wars continued to occur.  Vietnam came along about the time I reached draft age and it profoundly affected my young adult years, coloring my politics, opinions, and expectations for the rest of my life.  Eventually, even the Millennium came to pass and was celebrated around the planet, though I was on call that night and couldn't get too drunk.

                                                        NOW

Now, 68 years later, that framework of American history has aged considerably, as have I.  The same milestones still exist, but they are much further back in time.  The Revolution ended 240 years ago, and the country is fast approaching another birthday.  Forget the Bicentennial, in just three years we will be celebrating its Semiquincentennial, or 250th birthday.  I have been alive for almost a third (31%) of the history of the United States.

The Civil War ended 158 years ago, getting into the ancient history range.  WWI is now more than a century old.  Even WWII, which still seems like recent history to me, started 84 years ago, and its veterans are quickly disappearing.  "Remember Pearl Harbor!"  Not many people do.

And "my war," Vietnam?  It ended in a whimper 48 years ago, the same interval as WWI was when I was a child.  All the events that occupied the news throughout my life - the countercultural revolution, peace marches, civil rights, the Cold War, the space race - all are just paragraphs in the history books, and not even very close to the back of the book, with plenty of newer wars to fill later chapters,

Assuming one has to be at least six years old to remember a current event, no one under 53 remembers the Bicentennial; no one under 35 remembers Nixon; no one under 30 remembers the Millenium; and no one under 28 remembers 9/11.  Kids under 13 won't remember Trump stealing the 2016 election.  And kids now in third grade, as I was back in 1955, won't remember the start of the COVID lockdown. 

I remember talking to my father's dad David Crawford in 1969, when I was 22 and he was 95 and in his last year.  He said, "You know, I grew up in the 1880s, driving buggies and wagons until I was a middle-aged man.  But I saw the beginnings of cars, airplanes, telephones, two World Wars, and now I've just seen men land on the moon.  Isn't that remarkable?"  And it assuredly is.  Few generations in human history have experienced so much change.

But in my own life, I've seen the moon landings, the advent of computers, the Internet, and spaceships taking off almost every day.  I survived Y2K and a worldwide pandemic.  I have seen close-up photographs of all the planets and some of the asteroids and moons in our solar system, and even some outside it.  During my lifetime we've learned about continental drift, DNA, the size and age of the universe, the accelerated expansion of space, extrasolar planets, the structure of the atom, and scores of subatomic particles.  We've learned that human history goes back many times farther than we ever imagined.  We've learned the molecular details of how living things function and interact.  We have telescopes in space and probes traveling toward other stars.  We can detect the vibrations when black holes collide billions of lightyears away.  We have affordable handheld devices that can take pictures, make calls, tell exactly where we are, and answer any question. That's quite a lot for one lifetime, too.

It's all just a matter of living long enough to get some perspective.

Ah, Sweet Mysteries of Life

Okay, here we are on this planet, living our lives, wondering what it all means - you know: birth, death, life, eternity, good, evil - all of that.  The answers to these questions are important.  They determine our worldview, which guides our behavior, our relationship to the world around us, what we strive to accomplish, what we teach our children.

The vast majority of people turn to religion to answer questions like these, but I have a problem with that approach.  Whatever you may believe about the validity of the thousands of holy scriptures, not one was actually directly written by a God.  Every single one of them was written by one or more people.  Most of these authors claim (or it is claimed for them) that they were divinely inspired.  But what evidence is there for that?  Not. A. Shred.  If I told you that God dictated to me the words I am typing right now, that they are direct from His divine mind, you would reply, quite rightly, "Bullshit.  How do I know you're not lying, or deluded, or just crazy?"  My words could be wise or foolish, true or false; you could agree with them or not.  But divinely inspired?  I can't prove it.  There's nothing I could say that would convince you.  And yet the world is full of scriptures, each making exactly the same claim.

Most people believe in one out of these thousands of books, believe it is the word of God, passed down to a prophet or scribe who wrote it down.  The ideas in these books are almost entirely mutually exclusive.  If you believe in one, the others are self-evidently fraudulent and the millions who believe in them are in error.  But I see no criteria for selecting which one is right.  Almost no one ever reads and compares the various scriptures and chooses the one they believe is true - they simply accept the one taught by the community into which they were born.  This seems like a totally arbitrary way to find the truth about the meaning of life.  If you had been born in the house next door, you would have an entirely different worldview and believe in it just as fervently.

So until someone can convince me that their book can be proven to be correct, I reject them all.  I believe they are all some other fallible human's attempt to formulate a worldview.  I'm not saying that every word in those books is false, but I don't think any of them can be taken as the true word of God.

So if we reject the multitudinous scriptures, with what are we left?  We do have some tools - our reasoning minds, the accumulated knowledge of millennia, our ineffable consciousness, and our subjective experience.  These are not inconsiderable.  Let us then make a start.

What do we know?  First, all things seem to have a beginning and an end.  For things like stars and planets, even the universe itself, their period of existence is immense, measured in billions of years; for mountains and continents, millions of years; for living things, anything from seconds to centuries.  This all-encompassing truth certainly applies to us animals.  Each organism had an origin, and each one will die, or has already.  We see this on every hand.  Like it or not, each one of us will soon cease to exist.  Life is a temporary organization, a momentary back-current or eddy in the stream toward entropy.  Many believe that something survives after death - a soul possessed by all living things (or perhaps just humans, or maybe just my coreligionists, or people of my race, or maybe just the people I like).  This is a matter of faith (magical thinking) alone, as no experiment has ever found evidence of a soul.  In spite of anecdotal stories, no trace has been found of a person (or anything else) surviving its own death.

Science and our own experience tell us that all living organisms are temporary things, momentary back-eddies in the inexorable flow of entropy.  When they die, their components lose their organization and are recycled back into the environment, to be later reused by another organism.  We die, but life endures.  It is a comforting thought and requires no magical thinking.  Some religions embrace it as the goal of life - to rejoin the great universal and eternal pool, though they think of it as a pool of sentience, not of organic chemicals.  My own feeling is that even that pool is not eternal.  One day the Earth will cease to exist, and that pool of organic material with it.  Still, that's a long time off, and I'm fine with that.  Perhaps by then, we'll be seeding the stars with our colonies. Until the stars die, of course.

So that's one great mystery of life cleared up.  What's next? 

Well, to my mind, it's the question of why.  Why are we here, and what should we be doing with our brief lives?  Again, I think science has a clear answer.  We should be having sex - again, a conclusion I am fine with.  The one activity that separates living organisms from the inorganic world is that we can reproduce.  Crystals are highly organized, can grow, and can influence their neighboring molecules to follow suit.  But they cannot reproduce.  That's a trick only life can do.  [Brief digression - some scientists believe universes can and do reproduce through producing black holes that generate new universes.  But even if true, their reproduction isn't as much fun as ours.]

Reproduction is not only a cool trick; it's what life is all about.  Not all organisms use sex, of course, but every one, from the tiniest microbe to the largest blue whale, strives to reproduce others like itself.  The old chicken-and-egg conundrum applies to everything living. Many insects survive in their adult form for only a day.  A mayfly is not really a fly at all - it's a larva for years, going about its business (which is solely eating).  Then, when it's about to die, it transforms into a flying thing to mate, lay eggs, and die, all in a day.   It is just as valid to say that the human race is a bunch of sperms and eggs trying to make more sperms and eggs, and occasionally they generate these large complex bodies for the sole purpose of achieving that.  That is why we exist, not just how we exist.  Like the hokey-pokey, reproduction is what it's all about.

If a mayfly is eaten by a trout before it can lay eggs, it is a dead-end for the eggs and sperm that went to so much trouble to produce it.  Every one of its parents, on both sides, through all the generations, going back three billion years to the first living cell on Earth, succeeded in reproducing just to make that single mayfly, and it ended up in a trout.  Biologically speaking (and what else matters for a biological organism?), it was a failure.

That said, of course, many people lead productive, fulfilling lives and never have children.  Just because you don't have kids doesn't mean your life is meaningless.  But in the larger sense, you have failed to fulfill your purpose.  If everyone did that, the human race would cease to exist in a few decades.  Fortunately, most people love sex (evolution has seen to that), so we continue to roll along.

So what does all this mean?  What guidance does it give us for leading our lives?  Well, not a lot.  For most animals, they go about acquiring food, avoiding becoming food, and if lucky, mating and making more animals to do the same thing.  We humans make it all infinitely more complicated and interesting, but in the end, that's what we do as well.

We, like everything else on the planet, got here by an infinite series of incredibly unlikely events - the right chemicals, the right distance from the sun, asteroid impacts at just the right time, etc.  We weren't put here for a purpose, and we aren't advancing toward any goal.  Like the grass, we just are.  Evolution doesn't necessarily drive life toward increasing complexity or intelligence or anything else.  If an adaptation allows us to reproduce, we do; if not, we don't.  Our intelligence, like a tiger's claws, allowed us to compete and survive.  It has no other function or purpose.

Essentially, I don't think life has meaning.  That will shock many people, and most will find it existentially depressing, but I don't see it as a downer.  We are an accidental, ephemeral, manifestation of the forces of nature.  Our species, like our individuals, will one day cease to exist.  No one will cry over us.  The world will not miss us.  Millions of species have gone extinct before us.  Few exist for more than a few million years, and we're getting to that age now.

As for good and evil, I think they are purely human inventions.  The other animals don't waste a second on such nonsense.  To them, good is getting what they want and evil is not getting it.  And I think, buried beneath miles of cultural detritus, it is the same for us.  We call actions good if they result in benefit to us and evil if they result in our harm.  If we are wise, we extend those values to others.  Actions that benefit others are good; actions that harm others are evil.  We make our laws and social mores to conform to that basic metric.  There is no need for commandments or divine laws.  It's all summed up in the Golden Rule, the only rule we really need.

So that covers life, death, good and evil.  That should be enough mysteries of life for one brief essay.

In spite of being mayflies without a purpose, we have achieved much.  Our achievements - our art and science and music and architecture and literature, our thoughts and languages and cultures and religions - are great achievements.  We are just animals - meat machines - yet we have walked on the moon and written books and symphonies that bring generations to tears.  And although our lives are brief, they are important to us as we go through them.

I am old now and will be gone in the next few years, but I look back on a long life of adventures and loves and beauty and experience, and I am thankful for it.  No, I don't thank God because I don't believe in gods, but I thank the non-sentient, uncaring, totally indifferent universe for letting me have this life and these experiences.  I've enjoyed the ride.

In The Beginning - My questions about Genesis 1

In The Beginning

 

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

 

“The heavens and the earth” was all that the people who wrote the text knew about.  There was the earth with its seas and lands and winds, and then there were the heavens – all those lights in the sky that no one could understand.  Clearly this phrase is meant to include everything – both in this world and outside it.  They meant the universe.  But this statement does not explain anything.  They’ve introduced a new character into the story without explaining who He is, what manner of being He is, or where He came from (the rest of the Bible is also strangely mute on these issues).  If God was present at the beginning, he must have been created in that same instant, as part of the heavens and the earth, because if He existed before that point, then it clearly wasn’t the beginning.  And if He did exist before Creation, what did He do with no universe around Him to govern?

 

 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.

 

So He created the earth, but it had no form.  How could a solid body like the earth have no form?  It either exists or it does not.  And what does the phrase “without form and void” mean?  Does it mean “the earth had neither form nor void”?  A void is nothing.  It makes no sense for something to “have” a void or not have one.  Or does it mean “The earth was without form and the earth was void”?  But God had created the earth in the first line, so saying it is void is nonsensical any way you interpret it.

 

  And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”

 

What is the Spirit of God?  Isn’t He already a spirit?  Is there any difference between God and the Spirit of God?  How can we say that God “hovers” over the ocean?  Is He not omnipresent?  Was He not present everywhere?  And since when did the waters have a face?

 

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 

 

Why did God speak at all?  Does He have a tongue, lips, and teeth to make speech?  There was no one to hear Him.  And he had just created the entire universe without uttering a word, so it was clearly not necessary for him to speak in order to create.  Was he mumbling to Himself?

 

And God saw that the light was good. 

 

What does it mean that the light was good?  How does light have a moral value?  He had just created it.  It has whatever qualities that He imbued it with.  If it is good, He was fully aware of that before He created it.  And does that therefore imply that dark is bad?  If so, why did He make so much of it?  Only a tiny fraction of the universe’s matter gives any light at all – not to mention the 78% of the universe that isn’t even matter.  [This is part of another crucial question the Bible never addresses – if it’s bad, why did He create it at all?]

 

And God separated the light from the darkness.

 

What can this mean?  Where did the darkness come from?  He hasn’t created any darkness yet.  Was it there from before the beginning?  How can one create light and not have it be “separate from the darkness?”  They can’t be blended.

 

God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.

 

This is mere nomenclature, but if He’s using words, what language does He speak?  This is before the creation of humans, so no languages yet exist.  The Bible was written in Greek, so can we assume that God called the light iméra?  Or was it the Hebrew word yom?  And if God gave this name to light, why do humans contradict Him and insist on calling it other names, like light?

 

And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

 

Well, to be precise, from evening to morning is actually the first night.  Evening implies that the sun went down, but the sun doesn’t exist yet.  What then is the source of the light?  Let’s assume it’s just God’s holy radiance.  Still, it wouldn’t have an evening unless His light goes out every few hours.  Incidentally, this implies the pre-existence of time from before “The Beginning.”  Or He created time at the same time (whatever that even means) and didn’t think to mention it.  Give Him a break, it’s been a busy Monday, and everybody hates Mondays.

 

 And God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.”  And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so.

 

This is meaningless.  An expanse of what?  There is no land yet.  Are we to visualize two bodies of water stacked vertically with a space between them?

 

And God called the expanse Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.

 

Okay, this is really unclear about Tuesday’s work.  In the first verse it said He created the heavens and the earth.  So isn’t this part of the job already done?  Or maybe the first verse was an introductory summary – a preview of upcoming attractions.  Now we’re into the detail work, where He actually creates heaven, apparently the space above the ocean and below some other bunch of water.  This mass of water is never mentioned again, left hanging over our heads (and His, since He resides in heaven). 

 

And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so.  God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.

 

Now wait.  He’s already created the ocean, and clearly it must have a planet underneath it to hold it up, to provide gravity so the deep has a face, and to provide a frame of reference so He can hover over it.  So what’s happening in this verse?  How does moving all the water to one place create dry land?  Either it formerly covered all the land and He’ll have to un-create a bunch of it to lower the water level, or He has to make a big pile of water somewhere that we haven’t noticed yet.  But He’s omnipotent, so He can do what He likes.  Again with the good.  It sounds like He stands back and snaps His holy suspenders in satisfaction at what a good job He’s done.  But He’s infallible, so by definition everything He does or makes is good – even the evil bits.

 

Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so.  The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.   And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day.

 

This is more or less acceptable, ignoring the needless repetition (“seed-bearing plants” and “trees that bear fruit with seeds in it” being the same thing).  It does leave out all the plants in the ocean, and all the non-seed-bearing plants like conifers and ferns and mosses and lichens (and of course all the plankton and fungi and the bacteria and viruses the authors hadn’t discovered yet).  I guess He’s okay with creating a lot of plants before He creates a sun so they can grow.  And where do they get organic nutrients to consume?  There wasn’t any soil yet.  Not to mention no pollinators so the plants can reproduce.  And what did the poor carnivorous plants eat?  It must have been a hungry Wednesday all around.

 

And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. 

 

Now this can only refer to the stars, right?  But He already separated the light from the darkness (somehow) on Monday.  And since there was no sun or moon yet, the lights He placed in the sky did nothing to separate the day from the night, and the stars do next to nothing to give light on the earth.  He must have been stumbling around in the darkness, bouncing off the brand-new trees.

 

God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.  God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good.  And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.

 

We’ve already had day and night for three days now, but okay, finally on Thursday we’ve got a sun to create evening and morning – again.  But how does the moon govern the night?  Half the time there is no moon at night because it’s up in the daytime with the sun.  We notice it more when it’s up at night, so that’s probably what God meant – it governs some nights each month.  I guess that's good.

 

And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.”  So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.  God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.”   And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day.

 

So far, so good.  Now we’ve got zooplankton to feed on the phytoplankton He forgot to create yesterday.  I worry that the flightless birds have been left out – where did the poor kiwis, ostriches, and penguins come from?  But things are picking up now – it’s now Friday, the day God created weekends.

 

And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so.

God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

 

Whoa, whoa.  What livestock?  There can’t be any domesticated animals yet because God hasn’t made anybody to domesticate them.

 

Then God said, “Let Us make mankind in Our image, in Our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

So God created mankind in His own image, in the image of God He created them;
male and female He created them.

 

This verse makes no sense at all.  First, what does He mean by “us” and “our?”  Other Gods?  Mrs. God?  I can only assume He means the “royal we,” though up to now he's always used the singular - which makes sense since he's the only sentient being in the universe.  But now he's plural, or at least royal.  But my real problem with this is that the authors emphasize that man looks just like God (and thus vice versa).  Why then do we look so different?  Even if God was only talking about Jews (who invented the stories for the Bible), there is a huge variety in the appearance of Jews.  Is God short or tall, dark or light, thin or fat?  He can’t look like all of us.  We are all different.  Which one of us looks like God?

And how did He create women in His image too?  Does He look like a man or a woman?  Does that mean God is large-breasted or small?  How can both genders be in His image?  But this verse is clear in one thing – the men He created look just like Him.  Therefore, God looks Jewish, which might be a problem for Christians who despise Jews even though they worship one.

This clearly says that God looks just like us men.  He must have a penis then.  Whatever for?  For the nubile Goddesses?  Nope, not in this religion.  There is only one God.  Then God is forever a virgin and floats around with a useless penis waving in the celestial breeze.  It’s also hard to imagine Him using it to urinate.  Are there even restrooms in heaven?  And is the Holy Penis circumcised as all good Jews should be?  Who performed the bris?  The same holds true for the Holy Navel.  He must have one, because He looks just like us, but it’s as meaningless as the Holy Anus, and all the other organs He has no need for.

But back to Saturday afternoon’s work.  God gives us dominion over the fish of the sea – but not mollusks, crustaceans, echinoderms, or marine mammals.  But at least the animals that don’t move along the ground, such as arboreal, sessile, and subterranean animals – they’re safe from us.  And “birds of the air” lets insects and bats off the hook, as well as flightless birds.  Tell the dodo it doesn’t have to worry about us.  Oops, too late.

 

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.  And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.

God saw all that He had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.

 

 Again, God is being very careless with His lists.  He gives us every green plant for food, but doesn't mention that a good proportion of it them are inedible or poisonous.  And what about non-green plant food - bananas and tomatoes and whatnot?  Then there are the millions of species of animals that don't eat plants, green or otherwise.  They have to eat each other, making this paradisiacal garden less than Elysian for the vast numbers of prey species, of which we are one.  He is leaving out vast parts of “creation” and leaving much open to later interpretation and litigation.  Maybe that was intentional - remember, He presumably created lawyers, too (again, one has to ask why).

 

Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array.

By the seventh day God had finished the work He had been doing; so on the seventh day He rested from all his work.  Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it He rested from all the work of creating that He had done.

 

I don’t know about you, but I've always had a problem with an omnipotent God who can create an entire universe, but then gets tired and has to rest.  I mean, c’mon.  He can create billions of galaxies and quadrillions of habitable planets and all their infinitely varied biota, but then He’s pooped and needs a lie-down?  How can we worship an all-powerful being who needs naps?  I’d like a God with a little more staying power.

 

The Bible doesn’t go into it, but maybe there was a reason God was so pooped out by the weekend.  In addition to the listed labors, He was busy with a lot of details He didn’t tell us about and let us discover for ourselves.

He created trillions of fossils of millions of different kinds of plants and animals that never lived and buried them in the rocks.  The ones that were simpler and less diversified He always put lower down so it looked like they were older.  Then He created more complex and more diversified fossils of more plants and animals that never lived so they would look younger, and buried them above the ones that looked older.  He was careful to never once put the younger-looking ones below the older-looking ones.  Some of the fossils were very detailed, with scales and feathers and internal organs and eggs and nests and footprints that all looked incredibly real and would convince even the dullest that they had once lived and breathed, but God was doing it all to fool us into thinking the earth was billions of years old.  Actually, all these fossils were exactly the same age because they were all created on the same day.  God is really tricky.

He also made the rocks in layers and put sand and shale and volcanic ash in different layers, so it looks like they were deposited over millions of years, although He made them all in one day.  He also knew (He’s omniscient) that one day we would develop advanced technology for dating the fossils, so He made each one with just the right amount of each isotope so each layer appeared to be younger than the one below it.  In fact, He put radioactive isotopes everywhere.  He knew that someday we’d be able to measure how long it took for each isotope to decay into another, so He carefully put just the right amounts into every rock and even every meteorite, and of course on the moon, so that every measurement would reveal the exact same age of 4.54 billion years.  He put magnetic stripes on the floor of the oceans so it would look like the continents had been drifting apart for millions of years.  He also put just the right amounts of hydrogen and helium into the sun so it would look the same age.  He wanted everything we looked at to give exactly the same wrong answer.  It seems cruel and meaningless, but He works in mysterious ways.

He then made phony ruins and carvings and tools and weapons and cave paintings and hid them all over the world and carefully made each one so it would look thousands or millions of years old.  He put the wrong amounts of carbon-12 and carbon-14 into every fossil and piece of wood, so it would look like they were old.  He went into the DNA of every living thing and left traces of ancient ancestors and evolution that all made a coherent picture of life changing over billions of years.  He made the DNA of similar species similar so it would appear that they were genetically related, even though He’d made each one separately.  He made our fetuses look like those of other animals so it would look like we used to be like those animals.  He gave us organs (appendices) and structures in our bodies (tail bones) that no longer have a function and made it look like we used to be different.  He hid whale leg bones inside their bodies.  He put sea shell fossils high on the mountains to make us think the earth had been changing for millions of years.  That was all fake too. 

It is quite an elaborate hoax.  He knew we’d figure out how far away the stars are and that the speed of light is a constant, so He had to adjust the spectra of all the stars and galaxies so it would look to us like they were thousands or millions of light years away and billions of years old, when actually they were all created on Thursday and none could be more than 6,019 light years away or we wouldn’t be able to see them yet.

He didn’t make a single mistake – not one fossil in the wrong layer, not one isotope ratio out of synch, not one star out of position or with the wrong spectrum.  He ensured that every device and test, every technology we developed would yield exactly the same results and come to the same conclusions – and every one would be completely wrong.  Every time we developed a new kind of telescope and thought we were looking farther out into space and the past, He was there before us, setting everything up to fool us again.  Now we’ve detected galaxies that appear to be twelve billion light years away, and still we haven’t seen behind God’s little trick.  Or his motive for trying so hard to fool us.

What a joker.

There’s also all that water he left hanging up there above the heavens.   I still worry about it.

It's About Time

Did you ever have one of those "lost" nightmares in which you find yourself having no idea where you are?  You're wandering through an unfamiliar landscape, with no memory of how you got there.  You may be trying to find something - your car, your home, a loved one - but nothing is familiar and you have no way to learn where you are or where to go.  It's a terrifying and helpless feeling.

It might happen when you're awake.  You wake up in a strange room and for a moment you don't know where you are.  It's dizzying, disorienting.  When you remember you're in a hotel or guest room and the mystery is explained, it comes as a huge relief.  We have a very deep-rooted need to know where we are and how we got there - without it we are literally lost.

For most of the major passages of our lives - going to school, our relationships, our careers - we remember how it started, the decisions we made, the events that occurred.  Everyday activities - cooking a meal, going to the bathroom - have an inception, an idea, a decision, a series of activities, and a conclusion.  How could it be otherwise?

How strange then that our experience of life is just like those nightmares.  We don't remember being born, or meeting the members of our family, or our first meal or our first sleep.  We find ourselves in the midst of activities we don't remember starting.  We just gradually came awake already alive, interacting with our environment, playing a game at the same time we're learning the rules.  It's not that we "hit the ground running" - we were running before we can remember.  We have some memories of early childhood - a few disjointed images like snapshots in an album - but our personal origins rely entirely on hearsay: our parents or older siblings tell us there was a time when we didn't exist and then we were born.  But we have no memories of those events.  We're also told that at some point we're going to die - everyone and everything - and nothing can be done to avert it.  Mostly we just try not to think about that.

Similarly, we humans as a species have no memories of our origins.  Today we have books and electronic records of the past; before that were epic poems and oral histories; and before that, superstition and creation myths.  Just as we each know, intellectually, that we were once infants, we know that once we were not yet human.  We find ourselves in the midst of a society we did not create, following the arc of a history we did not plan, playing our part, great or small, in the history of humanity.  To what end?

And no one seems to think it odd that we should all find ourselves in this position, like waking up to find ourselves running in the middle of a race, passing people, others passing us, runners dropping out, others appearing.  No one knows where or when the race started, how long it is, or where it ends.  Is there a prize, a goal to be achieved?  Are there rules no one told us?  Are we close to the front of the pack, or nearing the back?  And why are we all running?

Is this another one of those "lost" nightmares?

The Climate Change Conspiracy

The news and social media are constantly buzzing about the so-called climate change conspiracy.  By climate change, I mean anthropogenic, or human-caused, climate change, because no one can doubt that the climate is actually changing.  Glaciers are melting around the world, the Arctic Sea no longer freezes over, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are retreating and thinning, the permafrost is melting.  These facts cannot be denied.  But deniers claim that humans are not causing it; that it is part of the normal climate fluctuations the Earth is constantly undergoing.

Well, that's a valid argument.  If we are not causing it, all we can do is to try to prepare for the effects - sea level rise, desertification of the Midwest, crop failures, more extreme storms, mass migrations of dispossessed people, etc.  The future is a daunting challenge, but we will face it because we have no choice - nature is foisting these changes upon us.

But if it is true that this devastation is directly the result of our policies, are we not morally required to change those policies, in order to mitigate damage and reduce suffering?  So determining whether or not we are causing climate change is of primary importance.

How can we do that?  No amount of debate will resolve the issue; no political pundits pontificating will reach the truth.  The only solution is to put people to investigating the issue.  This is the role of science - come up with a theory, devise tests and experiments and measurements that will unequivocally prove or disprove those theories, and publish the results openly to the whole world.  Then other scientists read those papers, repeat the tests or measurements, and confirm or deny the results.  If several of these peers show that the initial paper was incorrect, the originating scientist must either prove that the reviews were inaccurate or admit his error and retract his results.  No scientist can publish a paper that is incorrect or merely his opinions or beliefs, because he knows he will be challenged.  Anyone can make a mistake, but science is self-correcting.  A scientist who willfully or repeatedly publishes false information is shamed and driven from the ranks.  Charlatans and liars cannot survive.

Science has been applied to the question of climate change.  Because it has such an immense impact on our lives, every country in the world put its best scientists to studying the problem.  These scientists are from nearly every country on Earth, of every political party, economic system, and religion.  They studied all the evidence of current climate change.  They studied evidence of previous climate changes in ice cores, lake sediments, and ocean bottom sediments.  They analyzed the gases that are causing the rises in temperature to determine their origins.  They searched for other possible causes of global warming, such as fluctuations in the sun's output, volcanic eruptions, changes in ocean currents, and everything else anyone could propose.

The results are in.  97% of the tens of thousands of scientists, including hundreds of Nobel laureates, who studied the problem say that the climate is changing, that it is changing faster than at any time since humans have lived on the planet, and that it corresponds exactly with the increase in carbon dioxide emissions due to our burning of fossil fuels.  Yes, humans are definitely causing the global climate to change.  We need to get off fossil fuels and onto renewable energy as quickly as possible.  But that just makes sense, because by definition fossil fuels are not renewable.  Their quantity is finite and we can foresee that we will be running out of them within this century.  We'll need all those complex hydrocarbons for making plastics and medicines and fertilizers anyway, and it's just short-sighted to burn them for fuel.  It's like castaways setting their lifeboat on fire to keep warm.

So that should be the end of the story, right?  We need to convert our power plants and vehicles to use one of the several proven sources of renewable energy and the problem is solved.  In the meantime, we need to capture the greenhouse gasses being emitted and sequester them.  Science has saved us again.  We have identified an immense threat to our well-being, determined what's causing it, and identified a solution.  But science has also found that the problem is accelerating, and that many of the effects of climate change cause others.  Melting permafrost, for instance, releases methane, an even more effective greenhouse gas.  Melting ice caps reflect less solar energy into space, further warming the planet.  Carbon dioxide absorbed into the ocean makes the water more acidic, killing corals and disrupting the basis of food chains on which half the Earth's human population depends.  So the longer we wait to start correcting the problem, the worse it becomes.  Moreover, science warns us that the Earth is approaching a tipping point beyond which reducing our burning of fossil fuels will not save us from ecological collapse.  And whether or not you consider yourself an environmentalist or care about spotted owls or desert pupfish, ecological collapse means the end of our food supply.  This is not a liberal or conservative issue or a philosophical debate.  It threatens our survival as a species.  Yes, the Earth is resilient and has survived thousands of shocks much greater than this one, but most species did not survive those shocks.  No, it is not the end of the world.  But it could well be the end of our species.  

But we have known the results of the science for decades now.  Competing conclusions (the ice is actually increasing in Antarctica, this is just a normal fluctuation like others we've survived, the sun's energy output has increased, etc.) have all been conclusively disproven.  And still very little is being done and efforts to control greenhouse gases have consistently met with stiff resistance, even ridicule, from the public, industry, and some government officials.

Why?  Because fossil fuels have been essential to our economy for nearly two centuries.  Oil and gas have fueled our industries, technological development, and travel to the extent that they are embedded in our culture.  It is hard for most people to imagine an advanced technological society like our own that is not powered by fossil fuel.  Also, an immense infrastructure has grown up around them.  Millions of people earn their livings in the fuel industry or in dependent industries like transportation and automobile manufacture.  Those companies and their boards and employees see any effort to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels as an assault on their well-being.  The energy industry has poured billions into campaigns of misinformation, asserting that the case for anthropogenic climate change has not been proven, establishing and funding their own "institutions" to publish unsubstantiated claims against climate change, and poured more billions into getting candidates elected who will consistently vote against any measures to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.  They push for decisions like Citizens United, which posits that corporations are people and are free to influence elections and government policies in secret, an idea antithetical to everything Americans hold dear.

So I understand why oil companies are resisting the change.  The conversion to renewable energy will be immensely expensive and disruptive to their status quo.  I can understand why employees of oil companies might feel threatened by the change as well, even though renewable energy is one of the greatest sources of new jobs throughout the world.  I understand why some car companies are slow to develop cost-effective electric cars.

But why are so many citizens still convinced that the threat isn't real?  The social media are a-buzz with conspiracy theories - that the whole issue is a liberal plot.  For one thing, I don't understand why they perceive it as a liberal-conservative issue.  Don't we all want to keep a healthy productive world for ourselves and our children?  Do liberals care more about the planet than conservatives?  I don't get it.

I repeat: all the science comes down on the same side - our activities have already caused the global temperature to rise two degrees Centigrade.  The rise is increasing, and if it goes up another two degrees, there will be massive disruptions - extinctions, desertification of farmlands, droughts, much more extreme storms, etc.  No one wants this to happen.  So if all the facts point to just one conclusion, why do so many people refuse to accept it?

First, they follow media that are paid for by the energy companies - Fox News has been proven to be lying in 80% of what they report.  The titans of the energy industry also control many media outlets and their money pays for advertising and news reports casting doubt and ridicule on the science.  They cherry-pick news items and contend that debates among scientists about the results of climate change mean that the issue is still not decided.  No doubt many right-wing people simply fear and distrust government interference.  But regulations would not be necessary if the oil companies acknowledged the problem and got behind the solution.  But they have not and there is no sign they are willing to.  So, like it or not, only government regulations can address the problem.  

So if all the world's scientists and all the facts are on one side of the argument, what is on the other?  What do climate deniers give as evidence for their case?  That it's a liberal conspiracy.  Let's look at this idea.

First, I see no motive for it.  Why would anyone make up such a frightening idea and try to foist it on the world?  As a way of justifying more regulations?  But what do liberals gain by imposing limits on carbon emissions?  Where is the political or economic gain?

Second, how would they go about this conspiracy?  Supposedly agents of the liberal conspiracy would have to secretly approach the leading scientists and either convince, threaten, or bribe them to start falsifying their results.  Many scientists are not liberals - in fact, many are conservative Evangelical Christians or devout Muslims.  Science is a method, not a religion or political party.  But somehow these agents convince every scientist in the world to go along with their nefarious plot.  Even though there is no evidence of climate change, they would have to make up facts and figures to indicate that there was.  The scientists would have to concoct false data, with convincing graphs and data sets.  They would have to force everyone in their labs to support it without question although they knew it was false.  And then they would publish their paper, knowing that if even one other scientist tried to reproduce the data (as they are required to do), they would be shown to be frauds and lose their positions, their reputation, and their funding. 

When the false papers were published, other scientists would review them and try to reproduce the results.  Many of those reviewing scientists would be competitors of the original authors, and would love nothing more than to prove their rival mistaken.  But everyone would suppress this urge to advance their careers.  They would instead instruct their teams to repeat the experiments, then falsify their own results in exactly the same way.  They would then publish their own papers, exonerating their rivals and putting their own careers at risk.

This plot couldn't succeed if even one scientist broke ranks.  If there were even one honest, conscientious scientist in the world; if even one paper were published pointing out the false data, the whole thing would collapse.  The liberal agents must have secretly visited every lab in the world, met with every employee, and convinced them to further the plot, all before the first false paper was published.  They got the Russians and the North Koreans and the Muslim scientists in Iran to further the secret agenda of the Democratic Party.  And everyone is so great about keeping such a secret.  Not one has broken the biggest story of the century.  Not one scientifically-trained reporter or journal reviewer has noticed the false data in all the hundreds of thousands of papers published; not one investigative reporter has broken the story; not one climate scientist has been forced to retire in disgrace; not one of the scientists has ever gotten drunk and blabbed the story.  No disgruntled grad student has gone to the newspapers.  Those liberal conspirators sure have done a great job.

So who is telling the truth - the tens of thousands of scientists who investigated the facts and who have nothing to gain and everything to lose by lying; or a dozen oil companies who could lose a lot of money if the world knew they were killing the human race?

Why Believe in God?

Why Believe in God?

    Many of my cousins, nieces, and nephews have friended me on Facebook, so I see snippets of their lives - in many cases stunningly uninteresting, as I'm sure my posts are to them.  But most of them are Christians, and all too often their posts are religious, asking me to pray for someone or praise Jesus for something.  Hundreds of these go by, and usually I just scroll past them with a mild sadness that my relatives - who are very nice people - not only believe this silliness, but want to tell me about it.  But often I feel a compulsion to reply - to point out how absurd their ideas really are.  I usually resist, for I know I won't convince them and will only get the whole family mad at me.
    But I feel sorry for them.  Of course we disagree on many points, but most don't matter.  Blood is thicker even than politics.  But religion is the defining principle of their lives.  They're proud of their beliefs.  They make big life decisions and political choices based on it.  They spend a large percentage of their lives involved in it - going to services, holiday activities, church social events, etc., as well as praying and talking and thinking about it.  Religion dominates their lives and colors and filters their view of the world and their place in it.
    I always come back to the same question: why do they believe in it so strongly?  How can they be so certain of a set of ideas that can never be proven or disproven?  What is the immense motivational force that makes them cling so tenaciously to this particular set of ideas, without an iota of hard evidence?
    And the answer seems so blindingly obvious: they want these beliefs to be true because they make them feel good.  There's a God who watches over you and loves you.  If you're a good person, He'll protect you and keep you safe.  He's even given you instructions that explain everything.  He tells you how to live and how to know what's right and wrong.  And best of all, you won't have to die and will live forever in some kind of perfect paradise with all your lost loved ones.
    What a wonderful thing to believe.  All the terrible things that happen - accidents, disease, war, cruelty, death - it's all part of God's plan.  It seems terrible, but it must be for a good end - to teach us, or to make us stronger, or as some kind of karmic payment for some wonderful result.  Who wouldn't want to believe in that?
   I would want to believe in that.  I don't want bad things to happen to me and mine; I don't want to die; I want to know why there's so much pain and suffering in the world.  But the fact that it would be nice if it were true is totally irrelevant to whether or not it is true.  I'd like to believe unicorns were real and magic existed, too.  I'd love to think that we could travel through time and voyage across the galaxy.  But no one's ever provided evidence for unicorns or magic, and the mathematics of physics say such travel is impossible.  Bummer.  And for me, that's the end of it.  Fun to think about that stuff, but it's just plain not true.
    But for believers, they somehow ignore the fact that the only reason to believe in religion is because it feels good.  My Christian relatives believe Jehovah is the only true God, although they know that if they'd been born in a Muslim country they would believe just as passionately in Allah.  There are thousands of religions in the world today, and no doubt millions more that have gone extinct.  They are mutually exclusive - if one is right, all the others must be wrong.  Believers think every single one of them is mere superstitious nonsense - every one but theirs.  Isn't it much more logical to not make that exception?  Isn't it infinitely more likely that people all over the world are confused about life and afraid of death and they've made up stories to help them face it?  Why believe, as Mark Twain put it, in something you know just ain't so?
    It's not just a philosophical issue.  People are using these myths as a basis for decisions and opinions.  They depend on these beliefs to determine their duties and responsibilities, their morals, their sense of right and wrong.  It determines their relations to other people, other species, and the larger world.  They judge others by their beliefs, and support or oppose those others based solely on those beliefs.  The world is all "us" and "them"; those who agree with our beliefs and those who oppose them.  This is a terribly simplistic and unrealistic view of the world, and an immensely dangerous one.  If we align ourselves with bigots and zealots of our religion and despise the good, kind, moral people of other religions, we are on the wrong side.
    If my Christian relatives are right, there's nothing to worry about - we're all God's children and He will take care of us.  But what if they're wrong?  If they're wrong, all the choices they make throughout their lives, everything they think and do, is based on false information.  To my mind, religion is just too dangerous an idea to believe in.

Witchcraft

I was just watching a TV show, Mysteries at the Museum, which tells the stories of little-known artifacts at museums around America.  The format is very annoying, with the exact same presentation every time and the identical dramatic music and camera pans in every story.  They are introduced by Don Wildman, who seems to add no value whatsoever to the show as the voice-over narrator actually tells the story.  Wildman reappears after each commercial break, trying to look intense and dramatic with little success as he tells us what we just watched two minutes ago.  But the stories are often interesting to an amateur mystery buff, so I record them and watch them when there's nothing better on.

Tonight's episode had a story about a witch's ball, an ornate blown glass ball with a tab to hang it by.  They were used in Colonial times as protection against witches  I had never heard of these things, and I've done quite a bit of reading about witchcraft lately as part of my genealogical research.  I kept stumbling upon a notorious trial and execution for witchcraft of one Goodwife Knapp in Fairfield Connecticut in 1653.  The magistrate, the accuser, and a witness for the defense were all ancestors of mine.  Fascinated, I read several accounts of the case.  As in Arthur Miller's The Crucible, a roughly historical play about another witchcraft trial, the accused women seemed to have just been too uppity for their neighbors and they were hanged for it (no witches were burned in America - though one was ironed flat).

So I was very interested in the TV story about the last witch convicted in Virginia.  She was 46-year-old Grace Sherwood of Pungo, Virginia.  When her husband Jim died in 1701, leaving her with a farm and three young sons, she resolved to run the farm herself.  To work in the fields, she wore her husband's trousers.  She also made money on the side as an herbalist and midwife.  She was said to love animals and kept a pet raccoon.  The ideal model of a tough pioneer woman, right?  But apparently she had too much land and she was too pretty, so the neighboring wives accused her of witchcraft and she was brought to trial.  They searched her house and could find no evidence of witchcraft.  But they also found no witch's ball, and who but a witch would have no ball to protect her home?  But they didn't want to judge her hastily for a capital crime.  They wanted proof.

Everyone knew that if a person were tied up and thrown in a river, they would drown.  Only witchcraft could save such an unfortunate.  So they essayed the experiment - they stripped her naked, tied her thumbs to her toes and tied a bag over her head.  They rowed her out into the middle of the river and threw her in.  She floated.  The sheriff rowed over and helpfully tied a 13-pound Bible around her neck, which dragged her to the bottom.  But plucky Grace pulled off a Houdini stunt.  She untied herself underwater, removed the bag, and came to the surface.  Heroine's courage hailed as she survives superstitious nonsense, right?  No, they dragged her to shore and a group of impartial women (the prosecution witnesses and her accuser) examined her naked body minutely.  They found two moles on her private parts, which could only be explained as witch's teats, which she uses to nurse her familiars and stray demons that drop by for a tipple.  Well, with this overwhelming evidence, who wouldn't convict her?

I'll say this for the good people of Princess Anne County.  They didn't hang her - they were civilized people.  Her children were taken away to be raised by strangers, her land was seized by the county, and she was imprisoned for eight years.  She didn't pine and die, though.  Grace was made of sterner stuff.  She survived her prison sentence, fought for years to regain her property, and was at last successful.  She lived there to the age of eighty, a reclusive widow.  The taint of witchcraft hung about her the rest of her life though, and it was said that after she died black cats frequently came to visit her grave.  The townspeople, fearing that her spirit would raise the cats against them, killed every cat in the village.  I am happy to report that Princess Anne County was subsequently overrun with an infestation of rats and mice.

The TV show ended with Wildman looking sententiously into the camera and telling us that 300 years later the Governor of Virginia pardoned her.  And that was that: another tale about those funny Colonial ancestors of ours.

I was struck by the horror of the story.  Here's this brave widow, living on her own on the edge of Indian country, managing a frontier farm, raising three children, healing her neighbors, and taking care of animals.  And these superstitious idiots put this woman through this torture and humiliation, try to kill her, then take away her family, farm, livelihood, and freedom.  So the governor pardoned her posthumously for a crime that never existed.  What about those responsible?  Shouldn't the churches admit their blame?  The Bible says that witches exist and a believer should kill them.  And the churchgoers followed their scriptures and did just that.   Those who believe in the Bible, who claim it is the word of God, implicitly support these kinds of superstitious cruelty and ignorance.

If the Bible is your scripture, your guide to ethics and morality, then you are responsible for what happened to Grace Sherwood and hundreds more like her.