Why is Creationism Wrong?
Creationism is wrong because it evades the rational for the irrational, simply. Not somewhat, not in order to think and not in order to suggest, but I believe outrightly, defiantly, deadeningly and aggressively. Faith ruptures the light of reason which permeates scientific and sociological findings, and faith in the form of creationism sets itself up beside scientific thought as a method by which you can ponder, consider and conclude. Faith is not a good thinking method, as we shall see. I think we need to ask 'Is rationality necessary for productive thought?". I think and know that it is. But Christians say that it is not, claiming god as their validator as opposed to their own brain, their own thoughts and rationalisations, or as opposed to other people’s thoughts and rationalisations. They're not able or content to be just understood or accepted by other people, their evocations and thoughts, however subliminally or outrightly it may be, but rather claim the existence of god as their rod of authority and their own faith as evidence of it. Creationists suggest that you can find reason in faith and not just in science, but it must be the case that reason can be found to be either good or bad, rational or irrational, righteous or unrighteous, because there is, after all, such a thing as criminal logic. However, science is definitely with rationality for thinking and creationism is definitely with faith. Reason just means explanation, cause or justification, according to my desktop dictionary, which can be anything. It could be criminal, psychiatric or good, for example, good reason being logical, rational or reasonable. And a rational approach is one that is 'logical, reasoned, sensible, intelligent, sound, commonsensical, practical or pragmatic', according to my desktop thesaurus.
Let’s remember the very well respected Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason, and remember that much of scientific and medical progress are made by the secular academia, by those who are in the camp of the evolutionists - you don't find many, or perhaps any, Christians that are Evolutionary Biologists by profession. The contemporary fundamentalist church enthuses teenage believers to accept both evolution and creationism as a rationality for the start of time and the origin of man, but I think they're attempting to sail a ship which has been sunk for decades. You won't save creationism by welcoming in evolution as evidence of god's work, and you certainly won't build upon today's evolution theory by augmenting it with creationism, by saying that it must be augmented with divine intervention at some points along the line. I believe very passionately that the two theories clash and conflict, and that those who believe in both confute their mind so as to lessen their mental capacities, and they dampen their spirits so as to make flimsy their characters causing enormous amounts of emotional to-ing and fro-ing or swaying, because they are standing on weak foundations. We shall ask if faith works out for the personality as a notable psychology for real life which can bring challenges such as illness, disability and death, but first let's ask what some creationists proffer as reasons to believe.
Creationism and Rationality
Prof Alister McGrath asks the question "Is there a reason for faith?" at the start of his God, Science and Faith lecture at Heriot-Watt University in February 2015. He attempts to say that the supplementation of humans with God is valid, but doesn't claim rational thinking as his supposition method. That there is reason for faith is what all fundamentalists are trying to convince us of, and what evangelism essentially is. I need to say again that reason can either be good or bad, since any conceptual model whatsoever will not do, as your rationale could be criminal, self-defeating, harmful to others psychologically, and neither self-fulfilling nor altruistic. A bad conceptual model or mind leads to behave badly, so the least we can do is make sure that we have a good one. To ensure ourselves of truth and goodness by rationality we need to see why creationism is able to be rejected and what it is that makes it so shallow. We shall examine it, what creationists say today about it and how they postulate it.
So what is it that needs supplemented, according to Prof McGrath, and what would this supplementation lead to if it were real? If something is rational, then it is based on logic. To be logical means to stick to the rules of logic, which gives 'a set of principles which have validity' (my desktop dictionary again). Logic is used in computers which work by a series of logic gates that send signals through to the interpreter and compiler where they can be translated into machine code, which is then translated into alpha-numerics - something we all understand if it is in our own language, like English. As people, we all rely on logic in some way along with computers, and the concern here is whether or not our logic is good.
To explain further, let me give you a personal illustration of what may be bad logic. I made my own word processor when I was at Uni which let you type a paragraph, however long it may be, but then when you hit the return key twice it immediately produced the same paragraph again but in a jumbled form, with exactly the same letters in it as what you typed but in a random order, using a random-generator algorithm which I programmed. And after that, when you typed your next paragraph and then pressed return twice again, it again reproduced your most recent paragraph again in a jumbled up form. I made this personal word processor because I had found my childhood too hard as I didn't understand the relationships in my life and felt not understood and very much left out. 'My Word Processor', which I called it, empathised with me to the extent that I was then able to open up to a real psychologist who was an interactive person who could interact with my problems. I was able move on from just playing with a reflexive computer system which couldn't speak back to me so as to help me with the bad logic I had found in my fundamentalist family, to talking to a real person.
So you can do anything with logic, but it's whether it's rational or reasonable or not that makes it a good system, fit for anyone and everyone to use. And I can assert from my long life relating to fundamentalists that none of them, not one, has ever claimed that rationality is the way they get to their faith. Even when they felt forced into a corner by this 'anti-rationality' argument, they never claimed the rationality supposition in any way.
However, Dr David Laurenson who teaches maths at Edinburgh University postulates a logical creator in his video lecture on Giants of Science as part of the Edinburgh Creation Group (http://edinburghcreationgroup.org). He doesn't offer a rational framework for creationism or theory for belief, but only uses the power of advocation of some past scientific greats who debated Darwinism as well as their thinkings and findings to justify a creator. He reminds us that some of the great scientists, like Kepler, Newton and Faraday, believed in God, and urges us to believe just because they did, simply because they proved themselves to be intelligent by questioning, examining and describing the given laws of physics and science of the day. What we must remember is that Dr Laurenson is not offering us an argument for creationism but is just saying that their belief (he talks about 13 different scientists from the past 200 years) advocates us to believe, which I feel is not any reason to believe it at all.
Just because other people believe something doesn't mean that you should. The engine of moral action is belief, and it is everybody's prerogative to take or leave and reject the beliefs of other people, in order to come up with their own beliefs themselves. Moreover, in my opinion the belief of Dr Laurenson's about his Giants of Science was they had a societal belief had for their own credibility, acceptability and popularity. They just went with what was happening at the time, because their scientific evidence and explanations were presumably too important to them to be questioned as a result of any overt atheism they may have wished to expose. When you discover a theory, think of of an idea or develop a concept that is not contemporary, you must expose initially some degree of sanity in order to be heard - otherwise you will simply be passed by and ignored. So many of the great scientists of the past accepted religion so as to caress people's view of life in order to the secure scientific progress which they had won as a result of their research, as this was undoubtedly more important to them than their social 'atheistic' image. Church in their time was like TV today - talked about, assumed and identified with. Even Darwin had to submit to religion at the end of his life because he was born into a fundamentalist family, and although he was opposed to faith, he agreed to marry a Christian woman who would let him do his PhD on The Origin of Species. But he nonetheless had to return to a minimalist form of religion when he was in old age. And no sane person would ever say that Darwin was ever a Christian.
Einstein's "God of the physicists", as Richard Dawkins put it when debating with Prof John Lennox at Oxford University's Museum of Natural History in a debate called Has Science Buried God: Dawkins Vs Lennox 2000 (DVD), speaks for most of the greats as he explains perhaps what they were all thinking while they were doing their investigations, experiments or equations. They were just thinking of physical laws existing, about relationships and equations being findable, and about the fact that there was logic and rationality behind the universe - a logic which they hoped to find.
Laurenson prides himself when he says that Kepler (1571-1630), for instance, said something like "If God is a logical God, then what are the mathematical laws?" But I think that this question could be simply restated by asking "If there is logic to the universe, what is it?" To me God is just an extra cogwheel which exists on its own albeit alongside the other cogwheels which make the something function, and is not pertinent to the other cogwheels at all. For example, if there's two people talking, having a conversation, either one can think of God when chatting, because we do live in a free society. Or they could have God in their minds abstractly before the dialogue as an abstraction for 'good conversation' or 'thoughtful conversation' or 'I'm interested in you' so as to direct his/her replies and questions effectively. But it is still just a dialogue between two physical people, whether one or other or both have an imaginary, invisible friend called god or not.
Next Dr Laurenson brings us Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), an anatomist and palaeontologist who developed the principle of the correlation of bodily parts, which stated you could work out what most of the other body parts were just from 2 or 3. So he said that if you change one part, or have one part undergoing evolutionary change, you'd have to change all the other parts since he concluded that they were all connected. He contradicted evolution on that basis, but I believe that all he was rejecting, which is also the only thing he could reject, was the evolution theory of the time which emphasised sex and genetics as the cogwheels of speciation and the mechanism of the origin of mankind, in order to offset the church's belief in god which so permeated society. The evolution theory of Cuvier's time was not Darwin's description of evolution, but the societal belief of the time, since all books exist within the time frame of any society which interprets them and chooses some themes as dominant and others as subsidiary. Sex and genetics offset the prevailing church faith and creationist dogma, and so were emphasised to elevate Darwinism into a position of contemporary analyses which would allow individual and group development and behaviour to be included in the evolutionary theory of future societies.
Today, developmental plasticity (or responsiveness to the environment) and evolution is definitely a fluid relationship under intense examination, with traits and behaviour playing a major role in the evolution of species. Developmental responsiveness to the environment in the evolution of species occurs through somatic, epigenetic or developmental selection (bodily selection) which determines a large part of evolution's process (Developmental Plasticity and Evolution by Mary-Jane West Eberhard 2001). She says "The universal environmental responsiveness of organisms, alongside genes, influences individual development and organic evolution," (Preface, p vii). This new behavioural thinking behind evolution which occurs as a result of the genes is by no means rejected by Darwin who firmly believed that free will and the individual's life choices and habits were central to natural selection.
Dr Laurenson says that Couvier was also resigned to the belief that he had found that there was a need for intermediary forms in order to have evolution only by genetics. But we must remember again that he didn't foresee our theory of developmental plasticity. Today's evolutionary theory would indeed have upheld him as an evolutionist. He explained that the existence of residual organs didn't matter but that you should be content not to know why they exist and rest in the superior mind of the creator. I need to say that for a scientist, this ignorance condition was an abysmal debunkery of residual organs which stand as an incredibly a vocal piece of evidence for evolution.
Dr Laurenson next gives us Philip Henry Gosse (1810-1888) who was a Zoologist and contemporary of Darwin that demanded in debates with him that god had created the universe by explaining away its age. Gosse said that:
1) god created a young earth but made it look old by, for example, deliberately creating rings around trees 6000 years ago
2) geological dating is wrong and the earth is young really
3) the is old and only man originated around 6000 years ago.
I need to reply that if 1 is true then god is deceitful to man, if 2 is true then all scientists must be irrational and stupid - science fails and is not built upon and modified by future generations of scientists but is contradictable, and if 3 is true then the laws of physics shouldn't remind us at all of medical laws, and likewise vice versa, medical laws shouldn't remind us of physics. However, David Laurenson persists that the strengths or weaknesses of Gosse's arguments don't matter, all that's important according to him is the question, "Did God create?" He says, "Whether we believe a young earth or not, it doesn't invalidate the belief that God created all we observe." I've said that you can't really believe in a young earth, and here I feel that Dr Laurenson just ignores any counter-arguments to his proposition which spring into mind.
Dr Laurenson then discusses yet another supporter of creationism in Asa Gray (1810-1888), a botanist. He was a contemporary of Darwin and Wallace who rejected speciation, that evolution created new species. He said that adaptation definitely occurred - "I observe what I observe, and what I observe is adaptation. I do not observe changes in species", and said, "I do not hold to the dogmatic view of the creationists, and I do not hold to the dogmatic view of the evolutionists. I hold the view based upon what I see. What I see is adaptation." I think everybody admits and believes that animals adapt to their environment, but Gray was attempting to say this for the first time in the academic world after the publication of The Origin of Species when society had generated a very sexual, gene-oriented view of the book. Gray retorted that because animals are free to behave in any way they want and indeed succeed in living in their environment by adapting to it, evolution does not occur as living had nothing to do with sex. He claimed that evolution was a false theory since it doesn't render such individuals as 'free' with their everyday behaviour affecting the evolutionary process and not just the gene.
Today, evolution is an ethnologists concern rather than a prostitute's delight. Development and behaviour most certainly are said to partly determine evolution by influencing it through somatic, epigenetic or developmental selection, as was said before. Gray was saying 'because we are free and adapt to the environment, evolution cannot be true,' since the evolution theory was at the time very much sexually driven or gene determined, not seeming to account for the basic quality everybody has and every animal has, which is freedom. The freedom to act and behave, to think, to choose your life partner, to develop in the way that you want to - righteously or unrighteously, to fight for your territory, and the freedom to protect your young or offspring, this freedom is the pride of evolution. Darwin believed all individuals to be free, not sexually determined, and Richard Dawkins is a staunch advocate of freedom through evolution. We are guilty of letting creationists run with the freedom concept and we should demand, since it is beyond question, that freedom is inherent in and intrinsic to the evolutionary process and not the creation process. We should claim freedom as ours and not the creationists.
Dr Laurenson then goes onto discuss what Lord Kelvin (William Thomson, 1824-1907), a mathematical physicist and engineer, found. He was interested in Thermodynamics and found its 1st and 2nd laws, the law of conservation and the law of entropy. He contradicted Darwin's theory of evolution and said "The commencement of life on earth certainly did not take place by any action of chemistry or electricity or crystaling grouping of molecules. We must pause, face to face with the mystery, and miracle of the creation of living creatures." This was a contradiction of the big bang, which scientists accept but often augment with something else or other things, for example, Stephen Hawking's original Theory of Everything (Hawking now doesn't believe it, as don’t most physicists and scientists). However, such origin of life theories are by no means rejected by me as an explanation of the life of the universe and the life of this planet, although some atheists still do object to such completeness as ever possible as an explanation. They say that since we have logic and rationality in life, we must at some point concede that one irrational occurrence may have occurred to set the whole thing off, to get the whole of life going. However, we must remember that it's people that believe in evolution, because the apes didn't and don't think of it and birds are unaware of it, so we must at least try to understand or origins. We think, and we know, so any unified equation of life is one formulation nearer to the truth. Whilst we can't explain other universes and galaxies, we can account for our world and our universe by negative logic.
We know from philosophers like Jean-Paul Satre (1905-1980) from his thinking on existentialism that the 'not' of oneself, 'for-itself' qualifies and is interactive with the positive 'in-itself' of us. Structuration (and its child post-structuration which says that all things are linguistic) is a reality, and all things can be reduced to simpler things - for example, a square can be reduced to 4 lines. Can you flit from structuration theory and post structuralism, social theories, to reductionism? Well I think so. But this reductionist argument must come from somewhere and we can reason that logic could come from something out with logic, something that is not logic, like negative logic, which was perhaps conceived of by the big bang. Some would say we won't completely understand this, the necessary start of life or the necessary original negative logic, but the fact that is that Stephen Hawking claimed to have found it in black holes and Hawking Radiation. He claims to have described the start of time because he found this negative logic in black holes, which are inverse pockets of space-time that travel backwards rather than forwards, as they are collapsing space rather than expanding space. Expanding space is what prevails in our universe and galaxy, is what is apparent to us, is natural and for us is the norm - it just means life. He set out to find:
"One single unified equation that explains everything in the universe."
Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking in the film The Theory of Everything
And he found it in black holes which eventually disappear because they are continually collapsing but, before they collapse and after much time, in a centre point or singularity explain the mega-contradiction of the two positives, space and time, when both positives collapse into one causing a massive explosion. Such an explosion at the start of time could have been the big bang. (Physicists today realise that there is very minute ring singularity in collapsing black holes rather than centre point singularity, which is a view that I very much prefer.) This bud of inception allowed them to emit very small particles of light, now called Hawking Radiation, over their boundaries or event horizons. Black holes today are just collapsing stars, but the first, original black hole could’ve had initial flammability and thus made life from such a big bang. Einstein showed that the universe is expanding, or going forward, so Hawking showed that the origin of life must’ve been with matter which collapsed, contracted or went backward, as black holes do. I believe in this physical theory and it is fine for me, as it comes from an observation of the life of black holes in our actual universe and galaxy. Hawking was first to ever find a black hole, after which, many more were found.
Some like Richard Dawkins need more explanation than things like Hawking Radiation - black holes eventually disappear and so don't affect further or future life, and this could be found in the big bang which could suggest for us the start of the first black hole at the origin of time, the conception of the universe, if we combine the two theories. Hawking Radiation is something that we can accept and believe in, exactly because if we don't completely understand it, we can augment it with the big bang and/or other theories, or just sit back in contentment with non-explanation. But the origin of life should be hard to explain. Kelvin was gassy when he deflated the chemical or electric reaction to being active in life and not in life's origin, as not part of the negative (flammable) inception of space and time.
The Anthropic Principle only states that you cannot go out with human logic to explain logic. Wikipedia states that "the anthropic principle (from Greek anthropos, meaning "human") is the philosophical consideration that observations of the physical Universe must be compatible with the conscious and sapient life that observes it." Logic is to do with what you know, so we have seen that negative logic is required to explain why it exists. Those who claim that to conceive of its conception you'd have to describe another life form entirely, not within logical explanation, since it won't be within reason, rationality or understanding, are wrong. We are not apes, lions or giraffes, and we are certainly not plants, and can very well conceive of negativity or negative logic. The evidence of it is black holes. The big bang is one possible explanation, in conjunction with black holes, of the origin of life, the time when negative forces were made into a positive.
At the end of his lecture David Laurenson asks 'Where does value come from?' We can reply that it obviously comes from freedom, which we have shown to be intrinsic to evolution. By 'chance' of course evolutionists don’t mean random accident, we just mean to evoke what normal, everyday life is really like. You meet people that you haven't seen for ages accidentally, you hit off with a stranger and swear that it was meant to be and you meet the people that you like the most on the way in to a lecture and insist on calling it complete coincidence when it is probably not, as friends may be friends by time choices as well as by things like fashion.
David puts age and geological decay back to man rebelling against god in the beginning when Adam and Eve existed, but think that geological age really is not our fault. The earth is our cradle and the universe our environment, and we mustn't damage them because the age is our pride as it's what makes the earth look beautiful in its beauty spots. The planets sound with majesty in their grandeur, which cannot ever in any way be said to be man-made. It is deceitful to say such a thing, and deprives man of his youthful nature which always gives him/her a new life, a chance at new identity and at making yourself what you wish to become rather than what you are. It steals the opportunity that comes from regeneration, and the freedom to think and behave so as to love, a freedom which must be unconnected to and independent of any geological time wave.
So what is our knowing sphere if it is not god and a creator? Ontology, the study of what is (being, becoming, existence, or reality) says that you must start with what you have rather than what you don't have. It divides realities into physical objects or beings, like tables and people, and abstract entities, like numbers, but abstract entities are said by some ontologists only to be denoted by its physical objects. The observable is precious as a pointer to why and how things exist and function, and when you observe something for reasons of science, interest, happiness or mind sanity, you are considered to be intelligent or sane. Evolution theory is simple observation and not transcendence or speedy conclusion, and so can be given with confidence to all people in any way.
You can postulate something because you have observed it or because you have evidence for a it, but you can't postulate something because you make a (sometimes given) irrational jump between your own existence and the existence of a creator God. I say sometimes given because the God meme and the Jesus meme mean that there is thought in our society to be something graspable out with the mind, which there is not. Just because your hear about something on TV, read it, or hear something from other people doesn't mean that it is a true idea, belief, a good principle, value or fashion.
C S Lewis put forward the argument from desire, saying that because we can conceive of god, he must be there. However all we have is our minds which produce feelings for behaviour, which is very intelligent for the intelligent and really quite small for others, and of course I am including the very severely disabled in this, like the late Ivan Cameron who was intelligent because he had behaviour to his family and to his carers. I don't mean that he had bad behaviour but that any sort of behaviour because that is valid, expressive of our inner beings and selves. Any ethologist would say that an ant has walking behaviour on 6 legs as well as flying behaviour, and that a lion has roaring behaviour. A baby who lives only for 70 minutes has leg and hand behaviour, mouth movements and crying behaviour to the parents, nurses and doctors. The conception of god doesn't come from innateness, as Lewis believed but from those around us (who were so forceful towards me about god in my childhood and even later), societal images from the media, and school educators and role models. So we must figure out why there is such a thing as god in our society and world, and seek to position ourselves towards it as best we know how.
We must decide on what we believe ourselves since it is the nature of societal progress to have thinkings and theories that blossom at one stage but die in another, where beliefs are springboards into how and why we behave in the way that we do and are about contemporary reality. Most scientific theories begin as ideas to become philosophies which make scientific investigations that form theories. Scientific inquiry must not be rejected or squashed for irrational belief, but must be seen as the truth as well as a feature of societal progress. You can go with what you know, not with what you don't. As I said before our philosophical way of thinking to assert what you can reasonably believe is ontology which lets you put everything back to the physical if you want, since it states arguments that both go towards a necessary or prerequisite belief in physical objects or organisms as well as ones stating that abstract entities, like numbers are necessary for existence.
Evolution I think is a physical theory, even though it is becoming more and more social, to do with ethology and animal behaviour by social functions. Tribalism is built into animal life, and mating behaviour is forthright in evolutionary explanations. I know I get myself from other individual organisms that function in the same way as me, in a process that took time an effort, because action technically always demands some effort, even when it feels effortless. That is just how we achieve a goal, implement a function or behave in a certain way. Creationists demand that from irrationality or faith - a God, comes logic or rationality, and demand that the logic, the goodness and happiness that we have in our lives, is from God. They demand that blind faith implies something good, something reasonable, something positive and something true. Evolution says exactly what matter makes - more matter, and more plants, animals and beings, and does not claim to explain the origin of life, although some sort of evolutionary process must have come into it. It accounts for truth, goodness and love by using what most of us have - reason, rationality and thought, by the freedom to love. The Christian claim is oppositely - a blind jump for beings who go from being able to reason to beings who believe in the a ferocious supernature of unleashed, insuppressible power that doesn't strictly demand to have a possible physical form. I must insist that whether god exists or not is fathomable, and ontology says quite clearly that god does not exist. Creationists have us believe that there is some essential uncertainty about the question, but there is not.
Otological inquiry is an inquiry into existence and behaviour, having credibility and rigorous foundations. I can assert that a person's subjective sense shouldn't be ignored for objective rationality but that both come into play and are connected to one another in the pursuit of knowledge, and indeed happiness. Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence, or reality, and says that there are beings like Michael and objects, like tables, which have properties, like age 54 and blue respectively. It talks about virtues and says that they will be of consequence in terms of actions. There's no point in going out with our thoughts, whether they be objective, everyday, normal, occasional or subliminal for an explanation of being, existence, becoming or reality - of behaviour. Ontological inquiry is valid, because whereas faith is just believing something that you don't understand or know, until you prove it to be a thought mechanism used by yourself until you're brainwashed and your irrational processes become second nature or natural to you, ontology lets you see what exists and what does not exist. And it certainly does not say that God exists. From what I can remember from my talks with the church, no-one has ever argued back to me regarding faith being 'not rational', although they have upheld faith as a thought process, which makes a path and makes intentions. Existentialism speaks of essence as central to being, but that depends on thinking, the brain and neurology. I therefore think the reason for faith is irrationality and a lack of understanding of science and evolution.
Evolution theory is essentially a deductive argument having the person as its premise, which is something from which you can make a conclusion. Darwin saw a correspondence between man's behaviour and apes behaviour, and deduced that we are related to them. You can deduce something, really straight, by hypothesis and evaluation, because deduction, induction and abduction are not like the act of pondering upon whether or not God exists or created, or contemplating self-divinity so as to reason with it. To find out how people came into being, you have to start with people, or persons and analyse and describe them in order to decompose where they come from or originated. As I said, there seems to be a relationship there between other living organisms, animals and plants, and people, so Darwin concluded that we had evolved through a process of natural selection. An ape exposes a small amount of human behaviour, so you can conclude that he/she is a simpler form of the human. Obviously you can use induction too by moving from the ape to the human, but the human being is the qualifier of the hypothesis, its proof. Growth, which is intrinsic to humans is an argument for growth and development forming a major part of any theory of origin.
The problem is that creationism doesn't assert that belief in God is just a societal trait which comes from a societal concept or idea and is not a handle on absolute truth derived from rational inquiry and experimentation. It doesn't assert that god is just a meme - the god meme - there's other memes like Santa, fashion and disability. As I have said, just because you wish something to be true doesn't mean that it is true - that is indeed the whole point of rational inquiry and hypothesis evaluation, to conclude deductively, inductively or by abduction, the validity of a premise or argument.
Memes
A meme, as above, is a societal concept, idea, catchphrase, fashion or way of building or making something, that you can easily remember, like God, Jesus, Santa Claus, baby, man, woman, mental illness, disability, René Macintosh design, denim jeans and long-sleeved tops. The Santa Clause meme became known with the newspaper publication of the poem, A Visit from St Nicholas, which specified an old, grandfather-like figure as the giver of one toy to every child in the world who was good, and was used as a catalyst for getting more and more people to buy toys as parents were to become the secret buyers of this extra gift. It came at a time when the superstore was being born, and ensured its growth. You can see that Santa Claus is just a meme or idea because there's no way that any man or grandfather can fly. The disability meme was cruel and unkind before WW II, as you were just to do with home life if you were disabled. In WW II many were made disabled through bombing and attacks which meant that thereafter, there was a correspondence in society between the normal and disabled people, giving them a way to start Stoke Mandeville's Paralympics which exposed them as determined fighters (not war fighters but people with guts), with personal goals and ambitions. So, because of disability's change in meme semantics, it became easier, for example, for disabled people to get jobs. And now that there's physically disabled / mentally retarded disabled people, it's so much easier for those of us who only have a physical disability to interact since we don't initially need to prove ourselves worthy by using our intelligence levels or face - our relationships aren't dependent on, for example, our intelligent looks. And inclusion is just so much better for everyone anyway.
Meme comes from the Greek word for 'imitation'. Richard Dawkins suggests in The Selfish Gene (1976, Chapter 11, p193) that the survival of the god meme over generations implies that there is "biological advantage" in believing in god, since that is the qualification for there being great psychological appeal to a meme, when he explains why the god meme has survived thousands of years. Just because it is old, doesn't mean that it is good (or true). When my dad was 71 he was the conductor of the Billy Graham Choir when Billy Graham was at Murryfield rugby stadium in Edinburgh, Celtic Park football stadium, Glasgow, and when he was in Aberdeen! An old meme pertains to our brains, and the word meme comes from the greek and means "that which imitated," according to Susan Blackmore in a TED Talk on Memes and "temes" in February 2008. She says that a meme is passed from person to person via ourselves, meme machines, which comes back to genetics, by natural interaction and by technology. She says, "For those of you who aren't aware of memetics, a meme has been defined as an idea that replicates in the human brain and moves from brain to brain like a virus." I think C S Lewis mistook his desire for god for god and Jesus memes and temes. He said:
"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy,
the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."
C S Lewis
So why is the god meme so old and where does it come from? To answer this we need to ask, "What exactly is the history of God?"
The History of God
A 2.5cm tall statue of a man's upper body with a lion's head was the first idol that we, people, have found that was called 'god' (Matthew Kneale in An Atheist's History of Belief, Chapter 1). It was found in Baden-Wurttenberg in south-west Germany where there was lots of ice to walk on, and it was 33000 years old. It would have been used to encourage the inhabitants to be strong and use their muscles when walking across the ice since a lion is symbolic of strength, encouraging them to think about how to become and keep strong, and it would have affected their eating choices when they remembered it. In later societies it may have been used to still people in trances after they smoked who could focus on what they should be and aim at being by thinking of the statue - strong. Various similar statues, half man, half animal, were the idol of certain men in later centuries, who were hunter-gatherers and needed to enthuse themselves so that they would successfully defeat the lion which could kill, maim or stop men in their hunting of other animals.
So Hegel's conclusion is true in all societies - that societal progress happens in all societies and that what inspires you will take in your society if other people are likewise inspired. In early societies god pertained to walking on ice and then getting out of trances, whereas in later societies it pertained to how to behave when hunting food. So you can see how people today have a contemporary version of idolatry, which was a rather good way to remember what to do and how to gather up your mind when a lion is hovering around you for the attack. Creationism is a contemporary version of that ancient industry which man showed when seeking food since it says something about identity which posits a major aspect of our psychologies, by using the simple message you can get from evolution which says that we are all purposed, every one of us. We are all either a result, or the result of the evolutionary process.
When Moses carved in stone the 10 commandment in about the 6th or 5th centuries BCE, he was attempting to replace the bronze and golden idols which symbolised things like male power, the strength needed to harvest wheat and sticking to your guns (if the idol was a bull). He wanted to stop people killing one another, theft, adultery, disrespect to parents and lying since communities were forming making small villages and towns, and the realisation of order in living became important. So as he was a good stone mason he just went somewhere out of the way of people, up a mountain, set two large stones alight, and carved out laws to say what good behaviour was for the people to obey. Since he saw his dictum as right and the right thing for his society, he just said that God had dictated his 10 commandments to him, so that the people could move on from having idols that fostered machoism to having a leader for community living, a leader for morality, which was the thing that they lacked. God was after all the thing that they believed in, and Moses just took advantage of that. So god moved instantly from being many gods by way of many idols, to being one god supposedly represented by one person and backed up by another.
The book of Leviticus reveals that the people then needed to be taught how to cook, and so were told that you give burnt food to god and eat properly cooked meat yourself:
"If the offering is a Whole-Burnt-Offering from the herd,
present a male without a defect at the entrance to the
Tent of Meeting that it may be accepted by God."
Leviticus Chapter 1, verse 3, The Message (the Bible in
Contemporary Language)
And later they were taught about diet when they were required at some points throughout the year to eat bread without yeast, a recipe to relieve constipation or to cause you to have softer stools:
If you bring a Grain-Offering cooked on a griddle, use
fine flour mixed with oil but without yeast.
Leviticus Chapter 2, verse 5, The Message (the Bible in
Contemporary Language)
Later still, when people had become subjective about how they were to live in terms of personal behaviour, poetry became quite a popular linguistic form (for example, the psalms of David), changing the focus about what it meant to believe in god from the head to the heart with your feelings as an important requisite for a successful life.
From then on, according to the book of Hosea, written after the 8th century BC, god became a social advisor, aiming at explaining and including society's misfits and bystanders such as prostitutes, the poor, the ill and the disabled:
Find a whore and marry her.
Make this whore the mother of your children.
Hosea Chapter 1, verse 2, The Message (the Bible in
Contemporary Language)
So when Jesus came, the people were ready to be guided about the poor, the very rich, the ill and the disabled. They became aware of the social self and could be challenged to stand up for those who were not as fortunate as themselves, and to stand up to those who were behaving unfairly to others, like the very, very rich. So, who was Jesus? Was he a 'representative' of god and how did he come to be called god? Most Christians claim him to be the creator god as well as the one revelation of god by god, and it's certainly what most ministers are today attempting to get their congregations to take on board.
The Truth about Jesus
Did Jesus exist in some, or even in any form - historically? It is obvious to me that Jesus as god never existed at all, in any way whatsoever. It is clear that there certainly was a Christ, or a saviour from medical selfishness as in a first century saviour, from what could have been called that day’s BUPA, where only the rich received medical care. After all, we can assert the existence of the disability meme as the way people look at and deal with disability has changed over the centuries, so this process must have had an initial supporter, an initial freedom fighter. It is clear that there probably were many Christs, but it is absolutely obvious that there probably was never any person called Jesus Christ, although I’m prepared to say that your actual name can be a major influence in your life. It's extremely immature to think that the first Jesus, if we are calling those initial freedom fighter doctors ‘the Jesuses’, never had friends in the form of colleagues because that's exactly what most gifted people have - good friends and worthy colleagues.
Indeed, I can't over and get away from the historical nature of the Bible, which counteracts the inerrancy view that says it was written by god. It relieved my mind when I was 5, and I am eternally grateful for it for doing that. The Bible is made of many, 65, historical books and it should be read as such, not as a golden letter forged by the hand of god - the chief of goldsmiths. When you read the Bible, you can suffer much from intimidation just because it is said to be written by god. If any reader of any book is initially intimidated by it’s author, then it is by definition not a good book and not worth even a glance, never mind a look. You can only truly get the gist of the Bible when you approach it as just a normal book which has authors and editors with mind and purpose. However, I am more than happy to say that I totally agree with Richard Dawkins when he said in the debate with John Lennox that "I don't think it's a very important question whether Jesus existed." Christians are frustrating, rude, belittling and insane as Christianity is full of falsehood, thinking that Jesus is alive when the least that can be said about him is that he’s most well and truly dead. The Christian story is not credible, and we must not be indifferent to such an insidious fallacy. However, let us go on by referring to these Jesuses as just Jesus.
Jesus was a medical doctor essentially, and so of course he had other talents as well, like child education and counselling criminals. The miracles that he was said to do were not really miracles at all but the practising medical techniques.
He rehabilitated a paralytic who was lying on his back at a pool-side who lay with many other disabled people who would ask pool-users, or swimmers, who were close at hand, to help them get into the pool, where it is likely that they would force themselves to move as much as they could so as to improve their muscles and conditions. This man never managed to be quick enough to ask someone to do this for him, so he only ever knew that exercises, or hydrotherapy, worked for greater mobility as they were therapeutic. So when Jesus came to him asked him if he wanted to get well, he said yes. The question was so important because rehabilitation is a two person activity, and is never one-sided either way (Jesus says about this, "So Jesus explained himself at length, "I'm telling you this straight. The Son can't independently do a thing, only what he sees the Father doing. What the Father does, the Son does." John Chapter 5, verse 19). When Jesus said to him "Get up, take your bedroll, start walking," (John Chapter 5, verse 8) he did, because the rehabilitator in the relationship is the one who always knows when the patient is ready to walk or move. So the man walked, and was said to be healed because he was. Jesus only referred to 'the Father' so as to calm the potential hysteria that could've erupted, to reassure the people that although something new was happening in that Jesus was showing off a new medical technique, he was under the religious authorities of the time, who were in turn governed by the Roman government. He wished to convince them that his actions were blessed or validated by a loving father, who knew what the medical methods were. In my mind the gospels are written in medical language, which means that much time can pass between each or any verses:
6 When Jesus saw him stretched out by the pool and knew
how long he had been there, he said, "Do you want to |
get well?"
7 The sick man said, "Sir, when the water is stirred, I
don't have anybody to put me in the pool. By the time
I get there, somebody else is already in."
8 Jesus said, "Get up, take your bedroll, start walking."
9 The man was healed on the spot. He picked up his
bedroll and walked off.
John Chapter 5, verses 6-9, The Message (the Bible in
Contemporary Language)
So it is obvious to me that some time, perhaps approximately half an hour or maybe more, passed between verses 7 and 8. Also, it says in John that Jesus was followed because the people saw what he did, not because they heard about it:
A large crowd followed Him, because they saw the signs
which He was performing on those who were sick.
John Chapter 6, verse 2, New American Standard Version
So you can get from that that those who physically so him treat people believed in him differently
from those who did not. If you just heard about an interaction, you would've believed in god, but if you'd seen him interact then you would've believed in Jesus. That was precisely the difference. To know Jesus meant that you were either a doctor or a friend or acquaintance of one.
And besides, such an intimate relationship shouldn't be public, the relationship between a rehabilitator and his/her patient. That time is personal between you and him, and although it is now often in a physiotherapy room which is for 2, 3 or 4 patients, as in a hospital, it is not shouted about or explicated by patients today to disclose how it feels to undergo rehab. The jump from saying that you'll make someone well to curing them is definitely valid, there for a good reason. If there wasn't so much hype around the Bible and gospels we would all be able to read them sanely, understanding them in the way that they were intended to be understood. When the gospels were written, it would've been obvious to their readers that it was rehabilitation that occurred at the pool, and not a miracle through Jesus. All books and documents are written to an audience, and that facts needs to be noted when reading the Bible.
The raising of Lazarus from the dead is often cited as reason to believe in God. Jesus was busy promoting himself, but says that he determinedly retraced his steps and came back to interact with him so that his illness would not be "fatal" (John 11, verse 4, The Message). This admittance of his profession as a doctor is crucial to our understanding of Jesus life and what he is today, the Jesus meme. Jesus told his disciples that Lazarus had "fallen asleep" (John 11, verse 11, New International Version Bible), saying "Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep; but I am going there to wake him up." So to do the 'miracle', Jesus had to be there, suggesting that he was a practising doctor, because in reply to his disciples view, "Master, if he's gone to sleep, he'll get a good rest and wake up feeling fine" (John 11, verse 12, The Message), he replies that his presence or attendance with Lazarus would make the difference to whether or not he lives or dies:
"Then Jesus became explicit: Lazarus died. And I am glad
for your sakes that I wasn't there. You're about to be given
new grounds for believing. Now lets go to him."
John 11, verses 14-15, The Message
I can suggest that Jesus was exposing medicine as it never had been seen before, and one of his disciples jeered him and replied, "Come along, we might as well die with him," (John 11, verse 16, The Message). We should interpret from this is that he was unconscious, and Jesus had to ask Lazarus family for permission to treat him since it seems that Jesus was the first to offer medical treatments as we know them today and such treatment was not assumed to be right. They tell Jesus that Lazarus had been dead for 4 days, and by that they may have meant that he'd been unconscious for such a long time, if he was to be resuscitated, which I believe he was. After resuscitation, Jesus shouts to Lazarus to come out of the tomb, as he wants to denote the effort which went into him coming round. It was appropriate for Lazarus, and it was appropriate for the watching crowd, as it dealt with society's apprehension of medicine at the time.
Likewise, because a blind man's eyes were dirty, he couldn't see, and so Jesus denoted this by putting mud on his eyes and insisting that he washed them every day. Hygiene was bad at the time and caused blindness at times. And Jesus turns an epileptic onto her side to stop her from fitting, since when he enters her bedroom she is ill, and when he leaves it she's well. I rather think the obvious must have occurred - that he turned her on her side! Also, he turns the water into wine by convincing the food and drinks manager of the wedding to change from offering water to offering wine, as it can be conceded that managers 2000 years ago were authoritarian, hard-headed and not swayed by anyone else: so Jesus 'turned' the water into wine.
So Jesus was a very successful doctor who got up the backs of the Roman authorities who thought they knew what power was. It was becoming evident to people in Jesus time, from the minor prophets like Hosea, that people had a social-self, and should do rightly in that arena. Jesus showed them what the ill and disabled should get, but it had to be validated by the doctors themselves, who had friends required to keep their friendships up themselves, since the authorities were so threatened by him. They were called 'followers', and that is what they were.
He was definitely put to death by the government for competing with them for power and respect, and was certainly not boldly killed by god. The god meme had just turned social, being concerned with prostitutes and outcasts, as I have said above. So Jesus came and just ramified the social as an aim and concern, with an extended focus on the ill and disabled. The god meme came to mean 'healing the sick', 'raising the dead to life' (it is said that way because people had to get used to people who were considered dead just being unconscious, in need of resuscitation), and 'empowering disabled people to be normal'.
I try not to disclose my thinking to friends, acquaintances and carers that Jesus may have existed as a man because I feel it may deter us from sheltering from the force of Christianity. Its sheer magnitude can be overcoming. But here, having a look at who he was, may help us explain the sheer magnitude of Christianity. I only needed to explain Jesus to myself because I was suicidal at the age of 5, when such a predicament was unheard of (in the 70s), and had to reason with the man Jesus to understand the meme Jesus that was so putrid to me. I certainly don’t need to know about Jesus now, today, as my explanation of him explained my parents behaviour to me when I was a child.
The Bible is just various historical documents which were put together by a committee, so as to continue the help, aid and medical assistance that was being given to the sick and disabled a few hundred years after Jesus came. You were protesting against your contemporary culture and government or various governments, and this was done firstly by Jesus disciples, then by his followers and then by the church. The Bible, as I have just said, was compiled a few centuries after the Christian church was born, and was published by King James I to allow everyone and anyone to read it. This wrought the Protestant church into existence as it was not the exclusive privilege of the priests to read it. So ministers became caring towards their congregations rather than being just knowledgeable about the Bible. Churches became communities and their congregations are now referred to as 'families' by staunch believers.
The god meme progressed from just being to do with the prostitute to being about the health of the sick, and then to being a community function with insiders as believers rather than doctors and their acquaintances. Jesus was initially called god by Mary to the wise men, and it was up to every individual person to call him good themselves, such that medicine was propagated and promoted and not left as just a craze which had a leader. For its continuation to be maintained the Jesus meme changed from being 'Jesus spirit lives in you because you're doing his work' to 'Jesus is alive'. Although this seems like a subtle difference, it is not because the latter claims a dead man to be living whilst the former claims Jesus as the leader of a christian movement. So who Jesus was to you became an entirely personal thing, embedded in your own personal events and feelings - today it is a mentality whereas in the past it was a social movement. Today, are considered as 'psychological' or a freak or just strange if you are a Christian, whereas before you were saying something about others, something social, something political. Religion took off with John Calvin and the reformers and with John Wesley who attached political meaning to belief: Methodists were socialists who were Labour party voters.
So we can clearly see that Jesus is not god but became god by meme via what Mary said about him, by the early followers, by the church and later by believers. Knowing how he became god gives you sanity and sets you free to function in today's pluralistic world. And of course, it must be remembered that God is not physically real and so is merely an invention of man. We must reign the god and Jesus memes in and endeavour to interact with restraint and hesitation with believers or Jesus people. God is just in their heads and so is real to them, very real often, but remember that the psychiatric fights very real things in their heads as well. Indeed Richard Dawkins called believers 'mentally ill' according to Prof Alister McGrath (God, Science and Faith lecture at Heriot-Watt University) In one of my poems I wrote:
We can only go on what has been said about God,
To describe this societal construct,
Which is crafted by those who are religious,
In a guilting, emotional act.
Does Belief Matter?
What you believe in matters - evolution or creationism, one of them is right and one of them is wrong because I don’t believe you can uphold both. Evolution helps you think and helps you with your life, whereas creationism stifles the rhythmic mind which interacts with and reacts to others. As I have said before, just because you wish something to be true doesn't at all mean that it is true - validation is indeed the whole point of rational inquiry and hypothesis evaluation, to conclude inductively, deductively or by abduction the validity of a premise or argument. A meme comes from somewhere - a person or people, and we must watch that we don't allow the god and Jesus memes to go out of control and become part of us. They are dangerous to most people: disabled people, the terminally ill, the normal person who just goes about their everyday life, high-achievers, the many of us who set goals of whatever size to achieve, their very dangerous to the mentally ill who have to try and concentrate to regain mind control, and their dangerous to those undergoing rehabilitation who need to give their rehabilitator complete respect and trust. To say that god or Jesus is involved in any of these relationships is fraud, insolence and gives a false picture of what is really going on. Religion can't deal with disability or ill people when it comes down to it, as we shall see, and teachers and medical professionals must become aware of kids from Christian fundamentalist households as well as those from Islamic fundamentalist households.
I think god is rather like a lifelong school headmaster who you're under without having to be at school for reasons of age: I am not talking about a bad headmaster, I'm talking about having a good one. One that has you in just to see how you are, one that you can go to at any time, one that sees through you when you're just being polite or lying, one that gives you friendly, humanistic advice about your life in general as well as about specific situations, one that is discursive rather than didactic with you, one that teaches you how to converse just by talking to you, one that reprimands you when you've done wrong, and lastly but not least, one that says that you don't have to believe in god if you don't want to even though he gives birth to him in every assembly because belief is, indeed, the very ethos and heart of the school. I am privileged to have such a headmaster that told me I didn't need to listen to what was said about god in assembly when I attended a nursery and the assemblies were forced on us as rather important as it was part of a private school in Edinburgh. He said to me quite firmly, "Yes, Rhoda, you don't have to believe in God if you don't want to," and I owe much of my childhood sanity to him, as well as much of my personality when I was at a disabled state school which forced upon us that we should believe in god when we were having physiotherapy or occupational therapy. So of course I didn't get on with many of the medical staff at Graysmill! But I only got the love of the headmasters because I was a child, and it is only at school that we can enjoy supervision or have an invigilator. If we expect an invisible, imaginary supervisor to exist thereafter we become psychiatric cases with something to say to anyone and everyone before we even meet them. So, does it matter what you believe about the origin of humanity in that will it affect your behaviour? Of course it will. Is the important thing not just to be a good person? I’m afraid kindness is natural, from the mind and from the heart and is unable to be supplemented in any way by god or by a superior entity, being or supernature since such supplementation always affects you in some way as it is never aesthetic or purely visual, purely for presentation. And we shall soon see that good, kind and genuine behaviour is indeed very considerably impeded by a creationist mindset.
You should apply rationality to thinking, because obviously we don't want to apply faith to thinking or reason. Evolution comes from rational thinking, whereas creationism comes from irrational supposition. I don't think you can believe in both, and that’s something which is valid by Richard Dawkins, amongst many. If you put creationism alongside evolution it dilutes evolution until it cracks it's conscience. Dan Dennett says in a TED Talk, Dangerous memes, in February 2002, that a huge biological fact or 'effect',as he calls it, is "the subordination of genetic interest to other interests." He says memes are words, and if words exist then memes exist. A meme can live on when people die. For problems such as illness, ecology and poverty you need scientific inquiry. He says, "If you've had a friend who has died of AIDS, then you hate the HIV Virus, but the way to deal with that is to do science and understand how it spreads and why, in a morally neutral perspective. Get the facts, work out the implications. There's plenty of room for moral passion once we've got the facts and can figure out the best thing to do."
Fundamentalists seem to make rational thought and contemplation a privilege when it is a commonality, as we have discovered above. Everybody can know, for example, why their medical care was a success - it was because of the nurses and doctors, not god or spirituality. Everybody can know rationality and keep their minds and senses when things and procedures are being explained to them as well as in medical treatment itself, and everybody can have confidence in the nurses and doctors as opposed to just sitting in flimsy, hopeful divine expectation. The only angle is medical, and you should appreciate the doctors truly, as best you can. There's no agent in the NHS, it’s not a transition, it's not inspired by God, and neither is it subsidiary to God. A vicar's prayers won't make the surgeon more effective and elders or the prayers of friends won’t wangle a productive time in physiotherapy. You will yourself by listening to the therapist in order to obey her or him. People say that there is a risk to not believing in god, but I think there's a bigger risk to not believing in people, in humanism, because people are real, physical: you can touch them, not god. You shouldn't take away from someone the respect which is theirs: what they've done they've done themselves with their own will and understanding, likewise for yourself. Here's some verses from a poem I wrote called Disability, Illness and Fundamentalism:
NHS doctors are real to me,
Because they helped my brother get better,
Fight bacteria and mucus build-up,
With operations and drugs - bread-and-butter.
The NHS is a societal structure most formal,
Built into our culture unquestioned,
Not like belief in God or Jesus -
Which is somewhat reluctantly pardoned.
There is no God,
And he’s certainly got nothing to do with the NHS,
In any way whatsoever!
Because that would make a great big mess!
The NHS is not attached to divinity,
Dependent on it at all,
Not a sidekick nor an offspring,
Not a development from God, a call.
It’s not above God,
Beside him or below,
Not secondary,
Not a third party to know.
Ministers are not reasonable overseers,
Nor elders, laymen or vicars,
The rector does not interject epiphanies,
Into the surgeon’s ears.
The NHS is not an agent of the divine one,
And it is not an agent of earthly representatives,
It’s not assigned to Jesus for productivity,
And in any medical need, God is not active.
It is the mind of the doctor which I love so much,
Astute, intelligent, insightful and aware,
Of the patient’s incapacities,
Giving life, functionality and care.
My brother James and I were very close at times since we both had a condition - his was Cystic Fibrosis and mine is Cerebral Palsy. So when we were young children we would have long talks about mathematics, science, creationism, evolution, politics and modern history, and of course aeroplanes. I left him to develop in the faith from when he was 7, but when he was 12 he came back to me and we started talking again as he was diagnosed with CF and so needed to adjust to it, which I helped him do (I knew from when I started going to the disabled state school at the age of 4 and a half that he had CF because he was exactly the same as the boys with CF at the school). I was deeply atheistic and humanistic in my outlook, so I knew exactly what to say, how to deal with him and how to behave towards him. He needed the death talk somewhat early on for a fundamentalist Christian child, so when he threw me a hook one day for a conversation about death, I took it.
It was me who taught James about death and dying, and about how to suffer, and it was me that answered all his questions, and not mum and dad. Our Christian neighbour wrote a book about him called Goodnight James, which I vehemently hated, because it was me and not god that gave him his basic level of sanity. It is available on Amazon Goodnight James: the Moving Story of a Young Boy's Struggle Against Cystic Fibrosis. I felt responsible for his personality, when I was sure that it should've been partly a parent thing, as we had more talks than just one death talk to tell about. I encouraged him to trust the doctors and nurses and by explaining that disabled people and ill people are the pride of evolution as those of our ancestors who had CF or CP made future ancestors stronger by fighting their conditions as hard as they could by accepting all the drugs and treatments offered by their doctors. The death age had gone up every year, albeit slightly, such that when James was diagnosed at 12 the death age was 14. The problem was that he had been assured by mum and dad that god may cure him of CF if he believed and asked god to cure him. As he was at real risk of a 'hypo', as I called it (I wasn't using medical language, and James was neither diabetic nor hyperactive), he needed to be 'let into' the sane view of life and suffering which I had, so as to restrain his fundamentalist mind from divine healing and divine interaction.
He said to me a few minutes into the death conversation, "Rhoda, I need my mind restrained." It was his way of saying that he needed me to be his psychologist/counsellor/guidance officer. After we talked he was at peace and much calmer, but mum and dad claimed the next evening at tea that he must have committed his CF to god as he they could sense that he was different. He didn't let on what had happened, a wake-up call from his faith. He became brave because of me, as a result of our talk, I knew that if it weren't for me, the family would need a psychologist for the thoughts they were thinking about how god pertains to illness. And yes, I just want to say that when it comes down to it, Christianity doesn't stand, and that humanism and atheism stands. And can I just restate that it stands tall with pride with respect to suffering, and is not effortful or straining in any way, as many people think that it is.
Also, it is not good to claim that Jesus is alive when he has been dead for just under 2000 years since it similarly makes you unstable. My parents couldn't cope with me as a teenager because I had grieved for James appropriately when he died and for some time after, when they rather arrogantly presumed that I put James' life into gods hands the night he took ill with a cardiac. Our parents were going out for the night, so me and James had a baby-sitter called Ann Cantley, another extreme fundamentalist Christian. So when James 'took ill' (I immediately knew it was a heart attack as that was what kids with CF often died of, and I knew from how he was that he was in his last week), mum and dad went with the ambulance to the hospital and Ann, who was a nurse, stayed in with me. I cried and cried and held Ann's hand sometimes, being for the first time in my life dissonant from my computer which I was sat at, trying to play a game. After a bit I asked Ann to leave me on my own for a bit, during which I cried even harder and more meaningfully. I knew at 8:41 that James was dead because I felt it in my spirit. Ann told me off a few times for crying, presumably because she felt that sort of crying came at a later stage as you should give times like that over to god until you know either way what's happening with your loved one. So she never told my parents when they returned from the hospital with such bad news that I had been crying, absolutely sobbing, and instead said "She was a bit upset."
I tried to tell them in the days after that I had cried, but they disbelieved me somewhat, maybe completely, and so to this day think and thought that I haven't got over James' death yet as I haven't grieved properly. So in the months and years after that, they just annoyed me and sometimes made me angry by referring to James as often as 10 times a day. They also left massive photos up of him in places that they should never have been for a smooth, fluid experience of daily life. I appreciate James' life and understand his death, but mum and dad never got over it, and mum still becomes emotional sometimes. That kind of attitude and behaviour is just not right for anybody, themselves included. They're the ones that haven't got over it, not me, is what I've always thought.
The creationists have a very serious problem with sentimentality. When James died, I was up to get his bedroom which was bigger than mine. I knew the time span variable between his death and to when I moved into it would be a sticking point between me and my mum, so I let her raise it first. She said about 3 weeks after he'd died, with that look in her eye which meant she didn't mean it, "Rhoda, do you want to move into James's room today?" So with a high voice I said "Yes," and she took offence, replying, "You are insane!" So I left it until 3 weeks later, after much tugging, callous remarks from them and after being told a few times how disappointed they were in me, when I insisted on moving rooms. I had grieved for James properly, and although I had not finished the process, felt able to live in James's room and make it mine, since not only did he tell me I could have it but I also knew that he would want me to enjoy using it and forget that it was ever his! I stamped my own identity on it, desecrating it with pop idol posters and science and philosophy books and books like Darwin's and Adam Smith's. My mum hated me for my sanity in that room, declaring on the day I moved into it that they would never talk to me in the same interested way again, but that they would never say to anyone, "not a soul," that they had changed. Not fair and not on! Their sentimentality was hurtful to me, and still is to this day. That's why creationism is wrong. Christianity is sentimentality, since Jesus is dead. You shouldn't accept things which are just not true because they affect your daily life in a deep, insidious, underhanded way.
Creationists can't seem to deal with disability properly as they more often than not require input from medical people. They ask god, whether it be personally, with family, friends or ministers, to intervene in their conditions to make them better and sometimes cure them of them. This makes them unstable psychologically and renders them distant from those that can really help them, like medical professionals and other people they meet or pass by in their journey of life who can cheer them up, perhaps even just with a smile. For example, Joni Eareckson Tada (www.joniandfriends.org) is an American creationist/evangelical Christian who had a diving accident that made her into a quadriplegic. She had to be set straight by her physical therapist some time into her rehab that she wasn't going to use her fingers again, as she was asking god to make her well, when she’d been told just after she had the accident that she would only had limited arm movement. At the end of the conversation with her therapist who'd been with her since the accident, she admits, "No miracles, huh?", and the therapist confirms "Nope" (the film Joni). She says that god helps her live with her disability, which is fine, but I don't see why she has to promote it as a psychology to all the world because it causes distrust between you and your doctor, which is a bad thing.
And Christians indeed often think they can get away with playing quite a strong emotional card when promoting the faith. But they can't come to terms with death acceptably very often and require to be stabilised by sane atheists and humanists. Their sentimentality for their dead loved one can be perturbing, as they talk about him/her when they don't need to which prohibits them from grieving well at the time and remembering fondly thereafter. Faith plays with feelings and emotions, and also farces science, because faith conflicts with science. Faith farces the necessary, and Richard Dawkins says that you don't need an agent for an action or interaction or thought, for example, for driving a car and he says we know from biology we don't need an agent for cell division, etc. (Has Science Buried God: Dawkins Vs Lennox). Atom combustion is called such because another atom or 'thing' interacting with it changes the type of atom it is. It is called a reaction, a chemical reaction. To put an agent in there is to be wrong, and if you are wrong it is likely that you will do wrong. The god meme is wrong and dangerous to believe in, not placid or ineffective, as we often think it is.
So what would David Laurenson's logical god mean for the disabled and those who suffer? I think it is implied that he gives the condition or illness to the person just so that you can react to him. That is wrong, making those with a disability and people who suffer inherently not equal with others. That's a sin. The claims of omnipotence along with a personal interest in every individual person conjunctively demand that god bestows illness to propagate goodness in ourselves. No creationist would ever admit this to the public, but I can assert that it is most certainly said inside the family and at church bible studies or fellowship groups. The implication is insidious and should not be tolerated. What you believe most certainly does matter. There’s no supernature or being that’s above either us or reality, nothing that wants to interact with every one of us such that we need to make a decision about it. There’s no logical god, and to put the two words together is only to hope in linguistic cleverness. There’s no good reason for faith, only bad ones that cause much distress and make you unbearably uncomfortable.
Conclusion
I believe in evolution in the same way as I believe that I breathe. I know I evolved and I know I am part of an ineffably long evolutionary process. I believe that evolution theory and creationism are at odds with one another, at loggerheads, unable to form the bond of cohesion you so need in order to think clearly. If you have never found evolution to be a reasonable theory before, I hope you'll look into it, and if you're an evolutionist already, I hope you will further inquire into it to find out what the theory has become and is becoming. Evolutionary thinking sees evolutionary change occurring through speciation (large-scale genetic modification) by development and behaviour, through environmental plasticity, or responsiveness, and not just through genetic mutation. Somatic selection, or bodily selection, which is sometimes referred to as epigenetic or developmental selection matters ineffably, and is where an individual develops by traits, phenotypes and behaviour rather than being pre-programmed. I think Darwin did see an individual’s development and behaviour as determining their genetic line, but because sex was a no-go area in his time, not being talked about openly at all, he was picked upon as openly claiming sex to be the mechanism of natural selection rather than the evolutionary mechanism to be a combination of development, behaviour and genetic modification through sex, since he sent seismic shock waves through the land by deriding people's trust in God as Creator, shock waves which so took.
I find amazing purpose in evolution theory because it gives me contentment, sometimes joy, and hope in loving, liking or just getting on with other people when I interact with them. And sometimes working things out and being corrected in whatever way if need be by other people is the most frequent type of interaction, and natural selection which happens through individual organisms working things out by tribal calls and group behaviour describes very aptly what life is like. I know we are getting onto humanism here, but humanism must come from somewhere, and that somewhere is evolution by natural selection. The evolution of humankind is something which we can celebrate, understand, and respect, because all people are included in its journey. Especially disabled people who are often discriminated against, particularly by creationism which implies that god made us disabled.
The origins of physically superior individuals like athletes exist often through their disabled descendants, and evolution holds difference at its heart by way of mutation and identity making through things like tribal calls. For example, a goat born with no front legs will pass on its compensatory, tremendous back-leg strength to their descendants, who will nevertheless be normal, which translates to the reality that a leg-amputee's greater arm strength, got by greater arm use, will mean that their descendants will have stronger upper bodies than they otherwise would have had. Medical conditions and illness are not a problem for evolution, and race is its pride. Evolution says that normality begins in abnormality and exclusion by adjusting to and coping with them, and it says that abnormality works its way into the mainstream through identity by strength of body and/or character, and so abnormality is sometimes understood by the individual organism as 'coincidence' or ‘just life’. We all act under free choice, and because life is a positivity then good things will inevitably come along, but we may of course call this coincidence. With evolution I feel free to live and express myself unquestioned, and find reason from the rationality of my life choices. I hope you will be set free and emancipated similarly by evolutionary thinking. I read Darwin when I was 13 and have never been the same again. I've never regretted it and never looked back, ever.
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