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The Massive Damage Done by Sunday School and Catechism
Here’s the link to this article by David Madison
03/17/2023
Indoctrination is not education
A careful reading of the New Testament reveals how much early Christians disagreed with each other, but even so it’s possible to create a profile of its weird cult beliefs.
The early Christians expected to meet Jesus in the sky—along with dead friends and family who had accepted Jesus—and to live with him forever (I Thessalonians 4). Those who qualified for this status said out loud that Jesus was lord, and believed in their hearts that god had raised him from the dead (Romans 10:9). He had died as a human sacrifice to a god, to enable this god to forgive sins—Jesus was the ransom (Mark 10:45). Belonging to Jesus meant that prayer requests were guaranteed (Mark 11:24), that sexual desires had been cancelled (Galatians 5:24, I Corinthians 7:1). Even if that were not entirely true, since the arrival of Jesus on the clouds would happen any day now, it is best to remain pure. The unmarried state is preferred (I Corinthians 7:32-34). In fact, families were a distraction, cult loyalty was the primary value—to the point of cutting off family relations (Luke 14:26, Matthew 8:21-22). In addition to believing that Jesus had been raised from the dead, ritually eating his flesh and drinking his blood were additional ways to guarantee eternal life (John 6:53-57).
So: a holy hero was expected to arrive from the sky to enforce strict rules of behavior, the reward for which was getting to live forever. Variations on this theme have been preached by cults over the centuries. Many modern Christians have managed to modify/soften this Bible-based version of how life is supposed to be lived. But all it takes to see these elements of cult fanaticism is a careful, eyes-wide-open reading of the New Testament. Which means that this ancient document is stunningly out of sync with our modern understanding of how the world and Cosmos works.
Hence, to the degree that Sunday Schools and Catechism teach any part of this cult fanaticism, they are doing damage. The world doesn’t need people who are hoping for/expecting a holy hero from the sky to make the world a better place—to guarantee they’ll get to live forever. A few years ago I was invited to attend the First Communion ceremony at a Catholic Church. Truly it was like stepping back into an ancient cultic ritual. Girls seven/eight years of age wore wedding dresses for the privilege of eating the flesh of their god for the first time—and in the Catholic church, the Miracle of the Mass means they are eating the real flesh of Jesus.
The ancient cult still has traction in the modern world because the mammoth Christian bureaucracy—even though splintered into thousands of different brands—keeps it going. The clergy, usually groomed themselves in Sunday School and Catechism, are fully committed to it. That is, the indoctrination worked exactly as it was supposed to: “Here is the truth as handed down to us. Believe it, take it on faith.” In some denominations, the more alarming elements of the original cult mindset are softened, e.g., the requirement that family be set aside; the famous Jesus-script about hating your family isn’t usually heard from the pulpit.
But the massive damage done by Sunday School and Catechism is the stunting of curiosity. If anyone is bold enough to ask, “Reverend, how do we know that this particular item of faith is true?” the response will be standard formulas, e.g., it’s in the Bible, it’s been part of our sacred tradition for centuries, the holy spirit guarantees it. And commonly the assumption will be that the good reverend has studied and/or prayed about it enough for everyone to trust him/her. It is not the obligation of the clergy to urge their parishioners to question, probe, or be skeptical. And that’s why religious indoctrination does massive damage.
Once that crucial question has been asked, “How do we know this is true?” full-throttle curiosity should be encouraged and rewarded. No matter what the item of faith may be, e.g., god is love, Jesus rose from the death, the holy spirit is there to guide us, prayer works—the best question to ask is:
Who was the first person to come up with the idea? Who said or wrote about it for the very first time?
Maybe it was the author of one of the gospels, or the apostle Paul in his letters. Then the crucial question must be:
Did this article of faith pop into the author’s mind because of revelation, imagination, or hallucination?
If the clergy are quick to answer revelation, we need to ask how they know this. How can this be verified? Obviously, “Please, just take it on faith,” means that curiosity really is not welcome or appreciated.
The laity commonly fail to realize that Christian origins—the thought-world in which the Christian cult arose—have been thoroughly, exhaustively studied for a long time now. And it is startling to realize how many ideas the early Jesus-cult borrowed from the other cults that had been up and running for a long time. It is naïve to assume that Jesus came along, preached his message, collected his followers—and had such an impact that Christianity sprang to life and spread dramatically after his death. The clergy and the church have thrived for a very long time on this “greatest story ever told.”
It’s bad enough that the laity are woefully ignorant of the gospels—I mean, being able to discuss these documents intelligently, aware of their differences, contradictions, and the theological problems they pose—but it would seem there is close to zero interest among the laity in serious study of Christian origins: let’s find out where our faith really came from. Come on, the resources are available to discover what many other ancient religions believed, and their impact on Christianity.
There’s an especially handy tool for exploring Christian origins. Richard Carrier’s 618-page book, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt, includes two chapters, 4 and 5 (pp. 56-234) that provide detailed descriptions of 48 elements that are crucial for understanding Christian origins. The book as a whole presents the issues that have prompted doubts that Jesus was a real person. I have urged laypeople to study the issues—rather than just being alarmed at the very idea—that is: do the homework. Carrier’s book, by the way, makes the scholarship easily accessible; early in the book he explains why he avoids a stuffy academic style.
But quite apart from the issue of Jesus-myth-or-real, the 48 elements that Carrier describes are basic for understanding how Christian beliefs were shaped by its context.
Here I’ll focus on just a few, starting with Element 4:
“(a) Palestine in the early first century CE was experiencing a rash of messianism. There was an evident clamoring of sects and individuals to announce they had found the messiah. (b) It is therefore no oddity or accident that this is exactly when Christianity arose. It was yet another messiah cult in the midst of a fad for just such cults. (c) That it among them would alone survive and spread can therefore be the product of natural selection: so many variations of the same theme were being tried, odds are one of them would by chance be successful, hitting all the right notes and dodging all the right bullets. The lucky winner in that contest just happened to be Christianity.” (p. 67)
The mission of the gospel writers was to champion their candidate for messiah. The author of Mark’s gospel reports (1:11) that a voice from heaven declared Jesus to be god’s son. Of course, this is the focus of lessons taught by the church, but nothing is mentioned about the rash of messianism in the first century—and its implications for the bragging of the Jesus cult.
I recommend careful study Element 15 especially, pp. 124-137, which begins with this statement:
“Christianity began as a charismatic cult in which many of its leaders and members displayed evidence of schizotypal personalities. They naturally and regularly hallucinated (seeing visions and hearing voices), often believed their dreams were divine communications, achieved trance states, practiced glossolalia, and were (or so we’re told) highly susceptible to psychosomatic illnesses (like ‘possession’ and hysterical blindness, muteness and paralysis).” (p. 124)
So we wonder what was going on in the heads of those promoting the Jesus cult. This brings us back to that crucial question: did their ideas about god and Jesus come from revelation, imagination or hallucination? After providing details for ten pages, Carrier concludes:
“All of this provides considerable background support to what several scholars have already argued: that the origin of Christianity can be attributed to hallucinations (actual or pretended) of the risen Jesus. The prior probability of this conclusion is already extremely high, given the background evidence just surveyed; and the consequent probabilities strongly favor it as well, given the evidence we can find in the NT.” (p. 134)
We can safely assume that this hallucination factor isn’t covered in Sunday School and Catechism—oh wait: they get away with it by talking about visions. But, of course, overlooking the fact that religions generally won’t grant that the visions of other religions are authentic.
Element 31 delivers another blow:
“Incarnate sons (or daughters) of a god who died and then rose from their deaths to become living gods granting salvation to their worshipers were a common and peculiar feature of pagan religion when Christianity arose, so much so that influence from paganism is the only plausible explanation for how a Jewish sect such as Christianity came to adopt the idea.” (p. 168)
Carrier goes into considerable detail on this embarrassment in his article, Dying-and-Rising Gods: It’s Pagan, Guys. Get Over It.
Finally, I’ll mention Element 43:
“(a) Voluntary human sacrifice was widely regarded (by both pagans and Jews) as the most powerful salvation and atonement magic available. (b) Accordingly, any sacred story involving a voluntary human sacrifice would be readily understood and fit perfectly within both Jewish and pagan worldviews of the time.” (p. 209)
We wonder why Christians aren’t, in fact, horrified by this grotesque belief as the centerpiece of their faith. The clergy do a good job of making it look good.
Carrier offered a good summation of these data in John Loftus’ 2010 anthology, The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails:
“The New Testament is recognized by biblical scholars the world over as an arbitrary hodgepodge of dubious literature of uncertain origins and reliability. We have no reason to believe the authors of the New Testament documents were any more honest or critical or infallible than any other men of their time, and there’s plenty of evidence to suspect they were less so.” (p. 297-298)
How can the promotion of the ancient Jesus cult NOT involve massive damage?
There is one prominent example of the damage that comes to mind: Mike Pence, raised a Catholic, who has described himself as “a born-again, evangelical Catholic.” He does not believe in evolution. Chris Matthew, in an interview with Pence on MSNBC Hardball, pressed him on this. He responded:
“I believe with all my heart that God created the heavens and the earth, the seas and all that is in them. … How he did that, I’ll ask him about some day.”
This is a special brand of stupid, a symptom of a brain locked by cult belief. He doesn’t have to wait to ask god about it—and what arrogance, to assume that a creator with hundreds of billions of galaxies under management will sit down to have a chat with Mike Pence. That is cult craziness. Evolution is an established fact; just do the homework! Pick up a few books on the basics of biology and learn. The same holds true about Pence’s opposition to the rights of LGBTQ people; his mind is locked into the assumptions of the cult. Human sexuality has been studied in depth. Study the research, find the books. Learn.
And what one human out of eight billion believes with “all his heart” means nothing. Back up your claims with hard data: reliable, verifiable, objective evidence. Move beyond the mindset of Sunday School and Catechism.
David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of two books, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith (2016; 2018 Foreword by John Loftus) and Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also now available.
His YouTube channel is here. He has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.
The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here.
Why we need public school: Pluralism is how progress happens
Here’s the link to this article by Adam Lee.
MAR 02, 2023
Overview:
An openly white supremacist homeschooling network raises hard questions about how much control parents should have over their children’s education, and what public school offers that homeschooling can’t replace.
The battle over public schools is a clash of values.
There’s no such thing as neutral or value-free education. Every choice about what to present or what to omit from the classroom carries ideological weight.
That’s why red-state politicians want to present one version of the world, a version that’s scrubbed of references to racism, LGBTQ people, and non-Christians. They want to present their perspective to the exclusion of all others, and they demand that no white student should ever be exposed to facts that make them feel bad or that might cause them to question their parents’ worldview. They want public school to be (ahem) a safe space that doesn’t challenge their preconceptions.
On the other hand, liberals and progressives want an education that’s pluralistic and secular, one that presents a diversity of viewpoints without demanding that students adopt one of them in particular. We believe that this is the way for young people to mature into informed adults who have the power to choose for themselves. And if it stirs up some uncomfortable emotions along the way, that’s not a bad thing. Confronting facts that challenge what you believe is the only path to wisdom and personal growth.
Why is pluralism so important? To find out, let’s consider the opposite scenario: a disturbing case of anti-pluralistic education. What happens when education is purged of every viewpoint except one? When that desire is taken to an extreme, we end up in a dark and ugly place.
Unmasking “Dissident Homeschool”
“Dissident Homeschool” is a chat channel on the messenging service Telegram with several thousand subscribers. According to a report in the Huffington Post, it’s a haven for neo-Nazis and white supremacists seeking advice on how to raise and educate their children away from the “corrupting” influence of liberal, democratic society.
The owners of the channel, who went by the handles “Mr. Saxon” and “Mrs. Saxon”, created lesson plans steeped in their hateful ideology. They wrote about teaching their kids to celebrate Adolf Hitler’s birthday and copying out Hitler quotes as penmanship exercises. Their history curriculum pours hate on Martin Luther King and celebrates American racists like Robert E. Lee and George Lincoln Rockwell. Even math lessons are twisted into a tool to teach kids that non-white people are violent and dangerous.
This Nazi couple claimed to be proud of their beliefs, but their actions showed the opposite. They knew their racist ideas were evil, shameful and indefensible. That’s why they tried to keep their real identities secret. That’s also why they taught their children not to repeat these teachings where outsiders could hear:
We do not start teaching our children these things until we know they are able to *not* say certain things, and to keep things quiet around certain people. Also, when our children do have that “accidental racism”, we as parents can quickly step in and chuckle, and say “Oh kids! They say the darndest things!”
Despite these precautions, they weren’t careful enough. From clues they disclosed about themselves, an anti-fascist group called Anonymous Comrades Collective unmasked them as Katja and Logan Lawrence from Upper Sandusky, Ohio.
The Huffington Post followed up with additional confirmation, including relatives who recognized their voices when they were interviewed on a Nazi podcast, Achtung Amerikaner.
Because of the First Amendment, there aren’t legal consequences for teaching these ideas, abhorrent as they are. But the social consequences are very real. Shortly after being unmasked, Logan Lawrence was fired from his family’s insurance business. They’re now pariahs, as they should be.
The value of homeschooling
The idea of secret Nazis among us, taking their kids out of public school to teach them racism, sounds like a test case for why homeschooling should be banned. However, I wouldn’t go that far.
What I would say is that most kids are better off in public school. Most of us parents, even the best-educated and enthusiastic ones, aren’t qualified to teach every subject in a standard curriculum. It’s an incredible privilege to have an array of professionals working together to teach our kids.
However, homeschooling can be a vital safety valve. For kids who are suffering persistent bullying or harassment, or who have special needs the school can’t or won’t address, it’s valuable to have as an option. There are thousands of atheist, agnostic and secular families who homeschool for these reasons. Plus, especially since COVID, it can be a way to protect medically fragile kids from disease.
That said, homeschooling shouldn’t be a free-for-all. Society has a responsibility to ensure that everyone gets an education that meets basic standards. Ideally, homeschooling would be well-regulated. There should be a curriculum of topics that have to be taught, and at least occasional inspections or tests to ensure that homeschooled kids aren’t falling behind.
If homeschooling has a bad reputation, it’s because most homeschool families are religious fundamentalists, or belong to other ugly ideologies like this one, who want to raise their children in a bubble. They do it so they can control their kids’ access to information and prevent them from learning facts their parents don’t approve of.
Pluralism and progress
This story is a cautionary tale about the virtues of pluralism. Besides the other virtues of public education, it’s intrinsically good for young people to meet and get to know people whose beliefs and cultures are different from theirs. Public schools are better at offering that experience than either homeschooling or exclusive private schools.
It’s not proof against every evil ideology—I’m not claiming that no Nazi ever graduated from public school—but it makes it harder for the most hateful ideas to take root. When you get to know Black, or Jewish, or gay, or Latino, or atheist people, you can see that they’re human beings who are the same as you, with the same aspirations and the same struggles.
It’s through encounters with different cultures and different ideas that moral progress happens. In some right-wing visions for society, there would be no more public schools. Instead, every family would seek out a private school that taught dogmas they agreed with. Everyone would be sorted into ideological silos, never having to learn about or come into contact with anyone or anything that’s different, new, or challenging. That’s a recipe for stagnation and factionalism.
Pluralism opens up our intellectual horizons. It’s what leads us to see the world through other eyes. It’s what nudges us to consider perspectives other than the familiar. And, through hearing critiques and dissents from what we already believe, it’s what pushes us to reevaluate those ideas and see if they hold up. It’s the vital ingredient in people forming views that are truly their own, rather than just mindlessly regurgitating what they’ve been taught. It’s no surprise that it’s anathema to Nazis, white supremacists and other acolytes of hate. And, for the same reason, you should immediately be suspicious of any politician who proposes to limit pluralism by banning or burning books.
Adam Lee
DAYLIGHT ATHEISM
Adam Lee is an atheist author and speaker from New York City. His previously published books include “Daylight Atheism,” “Meta: On God, the Big Questions, and the Just City,” and most recently “Commonwealth: A Novel of Utopia.” He’s published editorials for NBC News, Political Research Associates, The Guardian, Salon, and AlterNet.
Sean Carroll Debunks the ‘Fine Tuning’ Argument
Review of Eternal Life
Here’s the link to this article written by Taylor Carr on October 31, 2022.
[This book review is a slightly modified version of a review originally published on the author’s Versteht blog.]
Review: John Shelby Spong. 2010. Eternal Life: A New Vision. New York, NY: HarperOne. 288 pp.
The fear of death has been a major struggle for human beings all throughout history, and we have found a variety of ways to cope with this uncomfortable fact. Religion is perhaps one of the most intricate and potent of these ways. Our world religions are man-made institutions designed to give comfort from this fear in the form of purpose, meaning, and life that transcend death. Embracing these realizations, Eternal Life: A New Vision argues for the necessity of abandoning traditional theistic religion for the adoption of a more humanist, life-centered perspective. Moving beyond religion, beyond theism, and beyond Heaven and Hell, a new paradigm is proposed for understanding death, life after death, and eternity.
John Shelby Spong is the retired Episcopal Bishop of Newark and one of the leading voices in progressive Christianity. He has been a visiting lecturer at many churches and universities throughout the English-speaking world, a frequent critic of fundamentalist doctrines like those of literalism and inerrancy, and he is a strong proponent of equality in gender, race, and orientation as well. Eternal Life: A New Vision is Spong’s 20th book, published in 2009, and some of his other writings are Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism (1991), Why Christianity Must Change or Die (1999), The Sins of Scripture (2005), and Jesus for the Non-Religious (2007).
I. The Foundations of Religion
Throughout the book we are given Spong’s thoughts and observations amidst the narratives of his personal journey and the greater journey of the human species. Spong identifies self-consciousness as the primary struggle that has led us into religious explanations. Although we do not (or cannot) know for certain what the evolution of self-consciousness was like for our distant ancestors, it was likely a confusing and perhaps even disturbing experience. Prior to such an awareness, we operated exclusively by instinct—a “survival mentality,” as Spong calls it. We had no conception of time, space, or mortality, so when our ancestors developed self-consciousness, they were thrown headfirst into a strange alien world of feelings and experiences they had never had before. Suddenly they were able to have memories, to anticipate the future, to feel loneliness, and much more.
With this newfound perception came new questions. Conceiving of mortality, we began to ask, what am I? What happens when I die? Conceiving of space, we began to ask, where am I? Why am I here? Conceiving of time, we began to ask, where did I come from? Where am I going? These are questions of no small significance, capable of producing enough anxiety in us that we have even coined a term for this inner battle: an existential crisis. To manage our anxiety, we developed ways of coping with our new sensation of self-consciousness. The most powerful of these ways was religion, which claimed to offer answers for all of our existential questions. Anything we did not understand was explained by positing the involvement of other self-conscious beings—ones more mighty than ourselves—the gods.
Religion, Spong contends, is nothing more than a human construct. We designed the gods to explain what we could not understand. We created them in our image, accounting for the wide variety of deities in their different habitats today. Our systems of religion are an attempt at manipulating the divine to achieve what we could not understand and could not achieve ourselves. This traditional theistic brand of religion is dead, according to Spong:
There is no supernatural God who lives above the sky or beyond the universe. There is no supernatural God who can be understood as animating spirit, Earth Mother, masculine tribal deity or external monotheistic being. There is no deity whom we can flatter into acting favorably or manipulate by being good. There are no record books and no heavenly judge keeping them to serve as the basis on which human beings will be rewarded or punished.[1]
II. Out With the Old
Spong pronounces the death of traditional theism on the grounds of the discoveries of science, the insight of Nietzsche, and the revelations of higher criticism. While most Christians today do not hold to the idea of God as being literally above the sky, a strong case can be made that this is nonetheless what the god of the Bible is. What sense does it make, our author asks, for Jesus to descend from the sky to give the Great Commission? How could one build a tower tall enough to reach God in Heaven except under the old three-tiered cosmological model? How could God pour down manna on the Israelites unless he existed just above the sky? What was the point of Jesus’ ascension aside from returning to the God beyond the clouds?
First in the scientific discoveries to undermine this was Galileo’s theory of heliocentrism. With only empty space surrounding our planet, not even located at the center of the universe, there was no longer an ‘up there’ where God could be. Believers reinterpreted their scripture, however, changing their tune to declare that God is not ‘up there,’ but still ‘out there’ somewhere, wherever there may be. The next blow came from Newton, Spong states, who explained all the operations of the universe as natural laws, leaving God with nothing to do. Once again, though, some believers reinterpreted their views to say that God governs the natural laws by which things operate, even if he does allow for miracles to interrupt those laws from time to time. Here the author makes a great point in noting that a God who governs the laws of the universe cannot rightly be discharged from responsibility for the natural disasters those laws often entail. Finally, Spong argues that Darwin disrupted the view of humans as exalted creations of an external God. As just another species in the animal kingdom, questions of souls and sinful behavior would become troubling topics.
Nietzsche declared the death of God as a way of expressing the collapse of Christian values and theistic absolutes. Spong also takes this to imply that an external, supernatural and intervening deity does not exist. As a result, he believes we must find a new approach to purpose, meaning, and eternity that is divorced from traditional religion and the theistic paradigm. All of this would be further solidified with the rise of higher criticism, as the scriptures themselves came to be revealed not as the infallible and inspired word of God, but as the work of human authors prone to human errors.
Why allow religion to die? As previously explained, religion is constructed on gaps in our understanding, it’s constructed on fear, and it is used for control. Nothing about the common theisms like Christianity, Islam, or Judaism is life-affirming, as they all endorse some degree of denial of our human nature in favor of conformity with an external, non-natural being. Religion cannot be the truth if enough of the edifice crumbles and several of its claims are found untrue. We must move beyond the God of theism because, as Spong explains,
Religion in the past was a search for security…. I must seek to embrace insecurity as one of the essential marks of our humanity and strive to help people understand that it is no longer a vice, but a doorway into a new understanding of our humanity. The religion of the past sought to locate meaning and purpose in an external deity. That effort succeeded only in robbing life here and now of its own intrinsic worth, meaning and purpose. The religion of the past sought an answer to the unique human awareness of death by postulating a realm in which death is overcome. I seek to find a doorway into the eternal by going deeply into this life. (p. 143)
Spong does not declare that the end of religion spells the end of meaning or purpose. The reality of a religionless world, he states, is to conclude “that purpose is what we give to life, meaning is what we invest in life and the hope of something beyond the grave is only the pious dream of the childhood of our humanity, a dream that we must now abandon in our new maturity.” However, our author does not seem content to leave things here, but pursues a “new possibility” instead.
III. In With the New
The first twelve chapters of Eternal Life I did not find disagreeable practically at all. There is much to relate to, even for an atheist, in Spong’s telling of his own life experiences, as well as his paraphrasing of the human journey. He appears to know a great deal of science, theology, philosophy, and history, and his discussion of the evolution of self-consciousness, its probable impact on our ancestors, and the role this played in the formation of religion is quite insightful. I find myself sympathetic even to his interpretations of scripture and his deep desire to gather something meaningful from the ashes of religion. Even so, what Spong proposes in place of theism is not nearly as strong as his initial arguments and conclusions.
Chapter thirteen begins with a description of the unity in our universe. We are all stardust, as Spong points out, made up of elements forged from the explosions of stars. DNA is common to all living things. From such realizations, he asks, “is it not possible to postulate that consciousness is also a single whole, which emerged within the universe, and which can be accessed on a variety of levels by creatures of varying capacities?” (p. 146) Spong does go on to postulate this ten pages later, where he surmises, “‘God’ is more a glimpse into the meaning of the totality of human experiences, where we recognize that we are part of an ultimate grasping after a universal consciousness with which we are one and in which we are whole.”
Spong’s new vision of God sounds a bit like the description of The Force in the Star Wars movies. “It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.” Where Jesus fits into this is also somewhat obtuse: “Jesus was a human being who was so whole, so free and so loving that he transcended all human limits, and that transcendence helped us to understand and even to declare that we had met God in him.” (p. 208) In other words, God may be thought of as transcendent universal consciousness, and Jesus is responsible for showing us this path to God.
Firstly, I have to take issue with Spong’s comments leading up to his question of a single and whole consciousness. In neither example is there evidence of a real connection between beings. We may have all began as stardust, loosely speaking, but evolution gradually produced very different and distinctive beings from that stardust. Spong accepts so much of what science tells us about ourselves, except for what it tells us of consciousness. He seems to hold a dualistic position, that mind (consciousness) and brain are separate, yet I believe this is like suggesting that one can run a computer program without the use of any hardware. We have all heard of how physical trauma to the brain can cause a person to lose consciousness, and neuroscience has revealed how certain emotions and thoughts correlate to certain regions of the brain, thus it is likely that consciousness is a product of the brain, confined to the brain.
Secondly, I find it interesting that Spong spends an entire chapter arguing for the meaning of Jesus and the resurrection under his new vision, after going through various criticisms of the New Testament passages that cast Christ in a supernatural light. If the miracle stories are all hogwash, what makes Spong so sure that his interpretation is the accurate reading of the New Testament? It seems that he simply wants to view Jesus as a peaceful and loving liberator of sorts, which is supported by the Bible about as much as the Bible supports the opposite view.
In the final chapter, Spong discusses life beyond death. Eternity is reimagined into “embracing the finite” and being “held in the bonds of love” with family, friends, and others. Intriguingly, Spong professes a belief that this life is not the end of life, but expresses an inability to articulate the concept, leaving it at that. The book concludes with a wonderful benediction to “live fully, to love wastefully, to be all that you can be and to dedicate yourselves to building a world in which everyone has a better opportunity to do the same.”
IV. Afterthoughts
There is a lot I admire in Eternal Life, and many sentiments I share with Spong. His understanding of faith as “the task of living, loving and being” (p. 203) is something I cannot and would not argue with in principle. However, I believe that the labels applied by Spong to numerous concepts are often pointless and sometimes even confused. If the divine is fully experiencing the human, why call it the divine in the first place? What stands to be gained from calling the totality of human experience, and the sense of transcendent unity, God? Of course, Spong’s goal is to radically change Christianity, which will mean radically changing Christianity’s core concepts, yet I see this merely as an attempt to ease the transition out of a system which is already in the process of collapsing—to salvage something of worth from a long devotion to it, if only as a memento. As Spong notes of religion, “It becomes clear that we believe these things not because we are convinced that they are true, but because we have a deep need for them to be true.” The same might be said for his new vision.
Eternal Life is an eloquent and interesting read, though not likely to persuade atheists or committed fundamentalists.
Note
[1] John Shelby Spong, Eternal Life: A New Vision (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2010), pp. 121-122.
Dinosaurs of the Sky: Consummate 19th-Century Scottish Natural History Illustrations of Birds
Here’s the link to this article.
From pigeons to parakeets, an uncommonly beautiful celebration of biodiversity.
BY MARIA POPOVA
Birds populate our metaphors, our poems, and our children’s books, entrance our imagination with their song and their chromatically ecstatic plumage, transport us on their tender wings back to the time of the dinosaurs they evolved from. But birds are a time machine in another way, too — not only evolutionarily but culturally: While the birth of photography revolutionized many sciences, birds remained as elusive as ever, difficult to capture with lens and shutter, so that natural history illustration has remained the most expressive medium for their study and celebration.
To my eye, the most consummate drawings of birds in the history of natural history date back to the 1830s, but they are not Audubon’s Birds of America — rather, they appeared on the other side of the Atlantic, in the first volume of The Edinburgh Journal of Natural History and of the Physical Sciences, with the Animal Kingdom of the Baron Cuvier, published in the wake of the pioneering paleontologist Georges Cuvier’s death.
Hundreds of different species of birds — some of them now endangered, some on the brink of extinction — populate the lavishly illustrated pages, clustered in kinship groups as living visual lists of dazzling biodiversity.
Owls. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)
Among the cornucopia of species depicted — pigeons and parakeets, warblers and jays, woodpeckers and owls, sunbirds and sugarbirds — none occupy more space than hummingbirds, perhaps due to their enduring enchantment partway between science and magic.
Couple with some stunning 19th-century ink illustrations of owls, dial back a century with the trailblazing 18th-century artist Sarah Stone’s paintings of exotic, endangered, and extinct species, and dive into the fascinating science of feathers.
Nick Cave on the Art of Growing Older
Here’s the link to this article.
“We’re often led to believe that getting older is in itself somehow a betrayal of our idealistic younger self, but sometimes I think it might be the other way around.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“The perilous time for the most highly gifted is not youth,” the visionary Elizabeth Peabody, who coined the term transcendentalism, wrote in her timeless admonition against the trap of complacency. “The perilous season is middle age, when a false wisdom tempts them to doubt the divine origin of the dreams of their youth.”
A century and a half after her, contemplating how to keep life from becoming a parody of itself, Simone de Beauvoir observed: “In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves.”
Moving through the stages of life and meeting each on its own terms is the supreme art of living — the ultimate test of self-respect and self-love. Often, what most blunts our vitality is the tendency for the momentum of a past stage to steer the present one, even though our priorities and passions have changed beyond recognition.
How to honor the unfolding of life without a punitive clinging to past selves is what Nick Cave explores in a passage from Faith, Hope and Carnage — one of my favorite books of 2022.
At sixty-five, he reflects:
We’re often led to believe that getting older is in itself somehow a betrayal of our idealistic younger self, but sometimes I think it might be the other way around. Maybe the younger self finds it difficult to inhabit its true potential because it has no idea what that potential is. It is a kind of unformed thing running scared most of the time, frantically trying to build its sense of self — This is me! Here I am! — in any way that it can. But then time and life come along, and smash that sense of self into a million pieces.
In consonance with the great Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön’s insight that “only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us,” he considers what is found on the other side of that self-shattering:
Then comes the reassembled self, the self you have to put back together. You no longer have to devote time to finding out what you are, you are just free to be whatever you want to be, unimpeded by the incessant needs of others. You somehow grow into the fullness of your humanity, form your own character, become a proper person — I don’t know, someone who has become a part of things, not someone separated from or at odds with the world.
A generation earlier, Bertrand Russell touched on this in his astute observation that growing older contentedly is matter of being able to “make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.”
Complement with Grace Paley on the art of growing older, then revisit Nick Cave on self-forgiveness, the relationship between vulnerability and freedom, and the antidote to our existential helplessness.
The Beginning and the End: Robinson Jeffers’s Epic Poem About the Interwoven Mystery of Mind and Universe
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“Pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration, hatred and terror: how do these thing grow from a chemical reaction?”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“We forget that nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness,” the anthropologist and philosopher of science Loren Eiseley wrote in his poetic meditation on life in 1960. “We forget that each one of us in his personal life repeats that miracle.”
The history of our species is the history of forgetting. Our deepest existential longing is the longing for remembering this cosmic belonging, and the work of creativity is the work of reminding us. We may give the tendrils of our creative longing different names — poetry or physics, music or mathematics, astronomy or art — but they all give us one thing: an antidote to forgetting, so that we may live, even for a little while, wonder-smitten by reality.
In the same era, the science-inspired poet Robinson Jeffers (January 10, 1887–January 20, 1962) took up this reckoning in the final years of his life in an immense and ravishing poem that became the title of his collection The Beginning and the End (public library | free ebook), published the year after his death.
Jeffers was not only an exquisite literary artist, but a visionary who bent his sight and insight far past the horizon of his time — he wrote about climate change long before it was even a tremor of a worry in the common mind, even though he died months before Rachel Carson published her epoch-making Silent Spring, which awakened the human mind from its ecological somnolence and seeded the environmental movement. But although he is celebrated as one of the great environmental poets, he was as enchanted by the wonders of nature on Earth as beyond it, for he understood better than any artist since Whitman that these are parts of a single and awesome reality, and we are part of it too — not as spectators, not as explorers, but as living stardust.
Born into an era when the atom was still an exotic notion for the average person and molecules a mystifying abstraction, Jeffers drew richly on the fundamental realities of nature — in no small part because his brother, Hamilton Jeffers, was one of the era’s most esteemed astronomers, having gotten his start at the Lick Observatory — the world’s first real mountaintop observatory, where the first new moon of Jupiter since the Galilean four had been discovered months before Hamilton was born.
Jeffers wrote about black holes and the Big Bang, about amino acids and novae, about the indivisibility of it all — nowhere more beautifully than in “The Beginning and the End.”
Sixty springs after he returned his borrowed stardust to the universe, his eternal poem came alive in a redwood-nested amphitheater down the mountain from the Lick Observatory, as the opening poem of the fifth annual Universe in Verse, read by my darling astronomer friend Natalie Batalha, who led the epoch-making discovery of more than 4,000 potential cradles for life by NASA’s Kepler mission and now continues her work on the search for life beyond our solar system with the astrobiology program at UC Santa Cruz.
As usual, Natalie prefaced her reading with a poignant reflection that is itself nothing less than a prose poem about the nature of life and its responsibility to nature — that is, to itself:
We are Earth. We are the planet. We are the biosphere. We are not distinct from nature.
Yet, at the same time, we are, as life — as living things: ourselves, the redwoods, the birds overhead — we are the pinnacle of complexity in the universe, from the Big Bang until now. It took 13.7 billion years for the atoms to come together to form this portal of self-awareness that is you.
[…]
Given this ephemeral existence that we have, of self-awareness, what are you going to do with your moment? What are we, as a species, going to do with our moment?
Excerpts from “THE BEGINNING AND THE END”
by Robinson JeffersThe unformed volcanic earth, a female thing,
Furiously following with the other planets
Their lord the sun: her body is molten metal pressed rigid
By its own mass; her beautiful skin, basalt and granite and the lighter elements,
Swam to the top. She was like a mare in her heat eyeing the stallion,
Screaming for life in the womb; her atmosphere
Was the breath of her passion: not the blithe air
Men breathe and live, but marsh-gas, ammonia, sulphured hydrogen,
Such poison as our remembering bodies return to
When they die and decay and the end of life
Meets its beginning. The sun heard her and stirred
Her thick air with fierce lightnings and flagellations
Of germinal power, building impossible molecules, amino-acids
And flashy unstable proteins: thence life was born,
Its nitrogen from ammonia, carbon from methane,
Water from the cloud and salts from the young seas,
It dribbled down into the primal ocean like a babe’s urine
Soaking the cloth: heavily built protein molecules
Chemically growing, bursting apart as the tensions
In the inordinate molecule become unbearable —
That is to say, growing and reproducing themselves, a virus
On the warm ocean.Time and the world changed,
The proteins were no longer created, the ammoniac atmosphere
And the great storms no more. This virus now
Must labor to maintain itself. It clung together
Into bundles of life, which we call cells,
With microscopic walls enclosing themselves
Against the world. But why would life maintain itself,
Being nothing but a dirty scum on the sea
Dropped from foul air? Could it perhaps perceive
Glories to come? Could it foresee that cellular life
Would make the mountain forest and the eagle dawning,
Monstrously beautiful, wings, eyes and claws, dawning
Over the rock-ridge? And the passionate human intelligence
Straining its limits, striving to understand itself and the universe to the last galaxy.[…]
What is this thing called life? — But I believe
That the earth and stars too, and the whole glittering universe, and rocks on the mountain have life,
Only we do not call it so — I speak of the life
That oxydizes fats and proteins and carbo-
Hydrates to live on, and from that chemical energy
Makes pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration, hatred and terror: how do these thing grow
From a chemical reaction?I think they were here already. I think the rocks
And the earth and the other planets, and the stars and galaxies
Have their various consciousness, all things are conscious;
But the nerves of an animal, the nerves and brain
Bring it to focus[…]
The human soul.
The mind of man…
Slowly, perhaps, man may grow into it —
Do you think so? This villainous king of beasts, this deformed ape? — He has mind
And imagination, he might go far
And end in honor. The hawks are more heroic but man has a steeper mind,
Huge pits of darkness, high peaks of light,
You may calculate a comet’s orbit or the dive of a hawk, not a man’s mind.
Complement with other highlights from The Universe in Verse — including readings and reflections by Rebecca Solnit, Yo-Yo Ma, Patti Smith, and more — then savor Jeffers’s breathtaking letter to the principal of an all-girls Catholic school about moral beauty and the interconnectedness of the universe.
The Ants, the Bees, and the Blind Spots of the Human Mind: How Entomologist Charles Henry Turner Revolutionized Our Understanding of the Evolution of Intelligence and Emotion
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“The handicaps under which Dr. Turner’s work was accomplished were many, and were modestly and bravely met.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
The son of a nurse and a church janitor, entomologist Charles Henry Turner (February 3, 1867–February 14, 1923) died with a personal library of a thousand books, having published more than fifty scientific papers, having named his youngest son Darwin, and having revolutionized our understanding of the most abundant non-human animals on Earth by pioneering a psychological approach to insect learning, devoting his life to discovering “stubborn facts that should not be ignored.”
Without a proper laboratory, without access to research libraries and university facilities, he became the first human being to prove that insects can hear and distinguish pitch, and the first scientist to achieve Pavlovian conditioning in insects, training moths to beat their wings whenever they heard his whistle and concluding that “there is much evidence that the responses of moths to stimuli are expressions of emotion.”
He studied the brains of birds, the web-making habits of spiders, the growth of grape-vine leaves, and why antlions feign death. He volunteered at the Cincinnati Observatory. He discovered new species of aquatic invertebrates. But insects were his great love. He constructed elaborate apparatuses and painstakingly painted tiny cardboard discs to conduct the first controlled studies of color vision and pattern recognition in honeybees, dismantling the scientific dogma of his day by proving that bees see color and create “memory pictures” of their environment. He illuminated sex differences in ant intelligence, musing that “the males seem unable to solve even the simplest problems.” Kneeling patiently for hours, he built intricate obstacle courses and mazes to study how twelve different species of ants navigate space. Two generations before E.O. Wilson, he concluded:
Ants are much more than mere reflex machines; they are self-acting creatures guided by memories of past individual (ontogenetic) experience.
Through a multitude of exquisitely designed experiments, he discovered that ants, bees, and wasps learn, remember, and recognize landmarks to get home rather than move by mindless instinct as previously thought. Observing and testing how gallery spiders weave and reweave their webs when destroyed, he challenged centuries of assumption about instinct versus intelligence by concluding that “an instinctive impulse prompts gallery spiders to weave gallery webs, but details of construction are the products of intelligent action.”Spiders by the trailblazing 18th-century artist Sarah Stone. (Available as a print.)
Radiating from his vast body of work is revolutionary evidence against the prior belief that insects are insentient machines operating solely by kinesis and reflex — evidence that these simple-seeming animals are endowed with memory, problem-solving ability, learning, and even feeling, intimating a whole new way of thinking about the evolution of intelligence, emotion, and cognition.
Between experiments and observations, Turner became a prominent Civil Rights leader in St. Louis, developing the first social services for African Americans in the area. Bridging his scientific and humanistic work, he wrote:
Prejudice is older than this age. A comparative study of animal psychology teaches that all animals are prejudiced against animals unlike themselves, and the more unlike they are the greater the prejudice… Among men, however, dissimilarity of minds is a more potent factor in causing prejudice than unlikeness in physiognomy.
Dr. Turner in his later years.
Despite his groundbreaking research, despite being the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and to publish a paper in the esteemed journal Science, Turner was turned away from every university post he applied to on account of his race. With the bittersweet recognition that his life was at the mercy of his time, he decided to shape the landscape of possibility for the next generation and became a science teacher in the first black high school west of Mississippi, all the while continuing his rigorous independent research. Upon his death in 1923, a colleague reflected:
The handicaps under which Dr. Turner’s work was accomplished were many, and were modestly and bravely met.
Complement with the kindred story of how Turner’s contemporary Edmonia Lewis blazed the way for women of color in art, then revisit the fascinating science of how nonhuman animals perceive and navigate the world.
Do Not Despise Your Inner World: Advice on a Full Life from Philosopher Martha Nussbaum
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“Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger.”
Martha Nussbaum
BY MARIA POPOVA
When he was twenty-one, artist and writer James Harmon stumbled into a bookstore and found himself mesmerized by a copy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, the central concerns in which — love, fear, art, doubt, sex — resonated powerfully with his restless young mind and inspired him to envision what advice to young people might look like a century after Rilke. So he set out to create an antidote to the “toxic cloud of tepid-broth wisdom” found in books “with the shelf life of a banana” that the contemporary publishing world peddled and reached out to some of the most “outspoken provocateurs, funky philosophers, cunning cultural critics, social gadflies, cyberpunks, raconteurs, radical academics, literary outlaws, and obscure but wildly talented poets. The result, a decade in the making and the stubborn survivor of ample publishing pressure to grind it into precisely the kind of mush Harmon was determined to avoid, is Take My Advice: Letters to the Next Generation from People Who Know a Thing or Two (public library) — an anthology of thoughtful, honest, brave, unfluffed advice from 79 cultural icons, including Mark Helprin, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, and William S. Burroughs.
One of the most poignant letters comes from philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who makes an eloquent case for the importance of cultivating a rich inner life by celebrating emotional excess as a generative force, embracing vulnerability, not fearing feelings, and harnessing the empathic power of storytelling.
Do not despise your inner world. That is the first and most general piece of advice I would offer… Our society is very outward-looking, very taken up with the latest new object, the latest piece of gossip, the latest opportunity for self-assertion and status. But we all begin our lives as helpless babies, dependent on others for comfort, food, and survival itself. And even though we develop a degree of mastery and independence, we always remain alarmingly weak and incomplete, dependent on others and on an uncertain world for whatever we are able to achieve. As we grow, we all develop a wide range of emotions responding to this predicament: fear that bad things will happen and that we will be powerless to ward them off; love for those who help and support us; grief when a loved one is lost; hope for good things in the future; anger when someone else damages something we care about. Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger. But for that very reason we are often ashamed of our emotions, and of the relations of need and dependency bound up with them. Perhaps males, in our society, are especially likely to be ashamed of being incomplete and dependent, because a dominant image of masculinity tells them that they should be self-sufficient and dominant. So people flee from their inner world of feeling, and from articulate mastery of their own emotional experiences. The current psychological literature on the life of boys in America indicates that a large proportion of boys are quite unable to talk about how they feel and how others feel — because they have learned to be ashamed of feelings and needs, and to push them underground. But that means that they don’t know how to deal with their own emotions, or to communicate them to others. When they are frightened, they don’t know how to say it, or even to become fully aware of it. Often they turn their own fear into aggression. Often, too, this lack of a rich inner life catapults them into depression in later life. We are all going to encounter illness, loss, and aging, and we’re not well prepared for these inevitable events by a culture that directs us to think of externals only, and to measure ourselves in terms of our possessions of externals.
What is the remedy of these ills? A kind of self-love that does not shrink from the needy and incomplete parts of the self, but accepts those with interest and curiosity, and tries to develop a language with which to talk about needs and feelings. Storytelling plays a big role in the process of development. As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves. As we grow older, we encounter more and more complex stories — in literature, film, visual art, music — that give us a richer and more subtle grasp of human emotions and of our own inner world. So my second piece of advice, closely related to the first, is: Read a lot of stories, listen to a lot of music, and think about what the stories you encounter mean for your own life and lives of those you love. In that way, you will not be alone with an empty self; you will have a newly rich life with yourself, and enhanced possibilities of real communication with others.
Complement with some timeless meditations on the meaning of life from other cultural icons, then revisit Nussbaum on how to live with our human fragility and the intelligence of the emotions.
Richard L. Fricks 