What were our ancestors like before there was anything like religion? Were they like bands of chimpanzees? What, if anything, did they talk about, aside from food and predators and the mating game? Do the burial practices of Neanderthals show that they must have had fully articulate language?

Could an ape (without language) concoct the counter­intuitive combination of a walking tree or an invisible banana? Why don't other species have art? Why do we human beings so consis­tently focus our fantasies on our ancestors? Does impromptu hypnosis work as effectively when the hypnotist is not the parent? How well have nonliterate cultures preserved their rituals and creeds over the generations? How did healing rituals arise? Does there have to be someone to prime the pump? (What is the role of charis­matic innovators in the origin of religious groups?)

 For how long could folk religion be carried along by our ancestors before reflection began to transform it? How and why did folk religions metamorphose into organized religions?

 Why do people join groups? Is the robustness of a reli­gion like the robustness of an ant colony or a corporation? Is re­ligion the product of blind evolutionary instinct or rational choice? Or is there some other possibility? Are Stark and Finke right about the principal reason for the precipitous decline after Vatican II in Catholics seeking a vocation in the church?

Of all the people who believe in belief in God, what percentage (roughly) also actually believe in God? At first it looks as if we could simply give people a questionnaire with a multiple ­choice question on it:

 

I believe in God: __ Yes __ No __ I don't know

Or should the question be:

God exists:

__ Yes __ No __ I don't know

 

Would it make any difference how we framed the questions?

You will notice that hardly any of these questions deal even indirectly with either brains or genes. Why not? Because having religious convictions is not very much like having either epileptic seizures or blue eyes. We can already be quite sure there isn't going to be a "God gene," or even a "spirituality" gene, and there isn't going to be a Catholicism center in the brain of Catholics, or even a "religious experience" center. Yes, certainly, whenever you think of Jesus some parts of your brain are going to be more active than oth­ers, but whenever you think of anything this is going to be true. Be­fore we start coloring in your particular brain-maps for thinking about jesting and Jet Skis and jewels (and Jews), we should note the evidence that suggests that such hot spots are both mobile and multiple, heavily dependent on context-and of course not arrayed in alphabetical order across the cortex! In fact, the likelihood that the places that light up today when you think about Jesus are the same places that will light up next week when you think about Jesus is not very high. It is still possible that we will find dedicated neural mechanisms for some aspects of religious experience and con­viction, but the early forays into such research have not been persuasive)

Until we develop better general theories of cognitive architecture for the representation of content in the brain, using neuro-imaging to study religious beliefs is almost as hapless as using a voltmeter to study a chess-playing computer. In due course, we should be able to relate everything we discover by other means to what is going on among the billions of neurons in our brains, but the more fruitful paths emphasize the methods of psychology and the other social sciences.

Humans who developed a spiritual sense thrived and be­queathed that trait to their offspring. Those who didn't risked dying out in chaos and killing. The evolutionary equation is a simple but powerful one.

The idea that lurks in this bold passage is that religion is "good for you" because it was endorsed by evolution. This is just the sort of simpleminded Darwinism that rightly gives the subtle scholars and theorists of religion the heebie-jeebies. Actually, as we have seen, it isn't that simple, and there are more powerful evolutionary "equations." The hypothesis that there is a (genetically) heritable "spiritual sense" that boosts human genetic fitness is one of the less likely and less interesting of the evolutionary possibilities. In place of a single spiritual sense we have considered a convergence of several different overactive dispositions, sensitivities, and other coopted adaptations that have nothing to do with God or religion. We did consider one of the relatively straightforward genetic possi­bilities, a gene for heightened hypnotizability. This might have pro­vided major health benefits in earlier times, and would be one way of taking the "God gene" hypothesis seriously. Or we could put it together with William Tames's old speculation that there are two kinds of people, those who require "acute" religion and those whose needs are "chronic" and milder. We can try to discover if there really are substantial organic differences between those who are highly religious and those whose enthusiasm for religion is moderate to nonexistent.

Suppose we struck paydirt and found just such a pattern. What would be the implications-if any-for policy? We could consider the parallel with the genetic differences that help to account for some Asians' and some Native Americans' difficulty with alco­hol. As with variation in lactose tolerance, there is genetically trans­mitted variation in the ability to metabolize alcohol, due to variation in the presence of enzymes, mainly alcohol dehydrogenase and aldehyde dehydrogenase. (Troy Duster, "Race and Reification in Science." Science, vol. 307, 2005, pp. 105-51.)

Needless to say, since, through no fault of their own, alcohol is poisonous to people with these genes-or it turns them into alcoholics-they are well advised to forgo alcohol. A different parallel is with the genetically transmitted distaste for broccoli and cauliflower and cilantro that many people discover in themselves; they have no difficulty metabolizing these foods, but find them unpalatable, because of identifiable differences in the many genes that code for olfactory receptors. They don't have to be advised to avoid these foods. Might there be either "spiritual­ experience intolerance" or "spiritual-experience distaste"? There might be. There might be psychological features with genetic bases that are made manifest in different reactions by people to religious stimuli (however we find it useful to classify these). William James offers informal observations that give us some reason to suspect this. Some people seem impervious to religious ritual and all other manifestations of religion, whereas others-like me-are deeply moved by the ceremonies, the music, and the art-but utterly un­persuaded by the doctrines. It may be that still others hunger for these stimuli, and feel a deep need to integrate them into their lives, but would be well advised to steer clear of them, since they can't "metabolize" them the way other people can. (They become manic and out of control, or depressed, or hysterical, or confused, or addicted.)

These are hypotheses that are definitely worth formulating in de­tail and testing if we can identify patterns of individual variation, whether or not they are genetic (they might be culturally transmit­ted, after all). To take a fanciful example, it could turn out that peo­ple whose native language was Finnish (whatever their genetic heritage) were well advised to moderate their intake of religion.

A "spiritual sense" (whatever that is) might prove to be a genetic adaptation in the simplest sense, but more specific hypotheses about patterns in human tendencies to respond to religion are apt to be more plausible, more readily tested, and more likely to prove useful in disentangling some of the vexing policy questions that we have to face. For instance, it would be particularly useful to know more about how secular beliefs differ from religious beliefs, "belief" is a misnomer here; we might better call them religious convictions to mark the difference). How do reli­gious convictions differ from secular beliefs in the manner of their acquisition, persistence, and extinction, and in the roles they play in people's motivation and behavior? There has been a substantial the many genes that code for olfactory receptors. They don't have to be advised to avoid these foods. Might there be either "spiritual ­experience intolerance" or "spiritual-experience distaste"? There might be. There might be psychological features with genetic bases that are made manifest in different reactions by people to religious stimuli (however we find it useful to classify these). William James offers informal observations that give us some reason to suspect this. Some people seem impervious to religious ritual and all other manifestations of religion, whereas others-like me-are deeply moved by the ceremonies, the music, and the art-but utterly un­persuaded by the doctrines. It may be that still others hunger for these stimuli, and feel a deep need to integrate them into their lives, but would be well advised to steer clear of them, since they can't "metabolize" them the way other people can. (They become manic and out of control, or depressed, or hysterical, or confused, or addicted.)

We regularly see the highlights of the latest re­sults in the media, but the theoretical underpinnings and enabling assumptions of the survey methodologies are in need of careful analysis. Alan Wolfe, for one, thinks that the surveys are unreliable: "The results are inconsistent and puzzling, depend­ing, as is often the case with such research, on the wording of the questions in surveys or the samples chosen for analysis." But is Wolfe right? This should not just be a matter of personal opinion. We need to find out.

According to ARIS (American Religious Identification Survey) in 2001, the three categories with the largest gain in membership since the previous survey of 1990 were evangelical/born-again (42 percent), nonde­nominational (37 percent), and no religion (23 percent). These data support the view that evangelicalism is growing in the U.S.A., but they also support the view that secularism is on the rise. We are ap­parently becoming polarized, as many informal observers have re­cently maintained. Why? Is it because, as supply-siders such as Stark and Finke think, only the most costly religions can compete with no religion at all in the marketplace for our time and re­sources? Or is it that the more we learn about nature, the more science strikes many people as leaving something out, something that only an antiscience perspective can seem to supply? Or is there some other explanation?

Before we jump in to explain the data, we should ask how sure we are of the assumptions used in gathering them. Just how reli­able are the data, and how were they gathered? (Telephone inquiry, in the case of ARIS, not written questionnaire.) What checks were used to avoid biasing context? What other questions were people asked? How long did it take to conduct the interview?

And then there are offbeat questions that might have answers that mattered:

What had happened in the news on the day the poll was conducted? Did the interviewer have an accent? And so on.7 Large-scale surveys are expensive to conduct, and nobody spends thousands of dollars gathering data using a casually designed "instrument" (question­naire). Much research has been devoted to identifying the sources of bias and artifact in survey research. When should you use a simple yes/no question (and don't forget to include the important "I don't know" option), and when should you use a five-point Likert scale (such as the familiar strongly agree, tend to agree, uncertain, tend to disagree, strongly disagree)? When ARIS did its survey in 1990, the first question was: "What is your religion?" In 2001, the question was amended: "What is your religion, if any?" How much of the in­crease in Non-denominational and No religion was due to the change in wording? Why was the "if any" phrase added?

In the course of writing How We Believe: Science, Skepticism and the Search for God (2nd ed., 2003), Michael Shermer, the director of the Skeptic Society, conducted an ambitious survey of religious convictions. The results are fascinating, in part because they differ so strikingly from the results found in other, similar surveys. Most recent surveys find approximately 90 percent of Americans believe in God-and not just an "essence" God, but a God who answers prayers. In Shermer's survey, only 64 percent said they believed in God-and 25 percent said they disbelieved in God (p. 79). That's a huge discrepancy, and it is not due to any simple sampling error (such as sending the questionnaires to known skeptics!). Shermer speculates that education is the key. His survey asked people to respond in their own words to "an open-ended essay question" explaining why they believed in God:

As it turns out, the people who completed our survey were sig­nificantly more educated than the average American, and higher education is associated with lower religiosity. According to the V.S. Census Bureau for 1998, one-quarter of Americans over twenty-five years old have completed their bachelor's degree, whereas in our sample the corresponding rate was almost two­thirds. (It is hard to say why this was the case, but one possibility is that educated people are more likely to complete a moderately complicated survey.) [P.79]

But as David Polk pointed out, once self-selection is acknowledged as a serious factor, we should ask the further ques­tion: who would take time to fill out such a questionnaire? Probably only those with the strongest beliefs. People who just don't think religion is important are unlikely to fill out a questionnaire that in­volves composing answers to questions. Only one out of ten of the people who received the mailed-out survey returned it, a relatively low rate of return, so we can't draw any interesting conclusions from his 64 percent figure, as he acknowledges.

 

Children

A research topic of particular urgency, but also particular ethical and political sensitivity, is the effect of religious upbringing and education on young children. There is an ocean of research, some good, some bad, on early-childhood development, on language learning and nutrition and parental behavior and the effect of peers and just about every other imaginable variable that can be measured in the first dozen years of a person's life, but almost all of this-so far as I can determine-carefully sidesteps religion, which is still largely terra incognita. Sometimes there are very good ­indeed, unimpeachable-ethical reasons for this. All the carefully erected and protected barriers to injurious medical research with human subjects apply with equal force to any research we might imagine conducting on variations in religious upbringing. We aren't going to do placebo studies in which group A memorizes one catechism while group B memorizes a different catechism and group C memorizes nonsense syllables. We aren't going to do cross-fostering studies in which babies of Islamic parents are switched with babies of Catholic parents. These are clearly off limits, and should remain so. But what are the limits? The question is important, because, as we try to design indirect and noninvasive ways of getting at the evidence we seek, we will confront the sort of trade-offs that regularly confront researchers looking for medical cures. Perfectly risk-free research on these topics is probably im­possible. What counts as informed consent, and how much risk may even those who consent be permitted to tolerate? And whose consent? The parents' or the children's?

All these policy questions lie unexamined in the shadows cast by the first spell, the one that says that religion is out of bounds, pe­riod. We should not pretend that this is benign neglect on our part, since we know full well that under the protective umbrellas of per­sonal privacy and religious freedom there are widespread practices in which parents subject their own children to treatments that would send any researcher, clinical or otherwise, to jail. What are the rights of parents in such circumstances, and "where do we draw the line"? This is a political question that can be settled not by discovering "the answer" but by working out an answer that is ac­ceptable to as many informed people as possible.

It will not please everybody, any more than our current laws and practices regarding the consumption of alcoholic beverages please everybody. Prohibition was tried, and by general consensus-far from unanimous-it was determined to be a failure. The current understanding is quite stable; we are unlikely to go back to Prohibi­tion anytime soon. But there are still laws forbidding the sale of al­coholic beverages to minors (with age varying by country). And there are plenty of gray areas: what should we do if we find parents giving alcohol to their children? At the ball game, the parents may get in trouble, but what about in the privacy of their own homes? And there is a difference between a glass of champagne at big sister's wedding, and a six-pack of beer every evening while trying to do homework. When do the authorities have not just the right but the obligation to step in and prevent abuse? Tough questions, and they don't get easier when the topic is religion, not alcohol. In the case of alcohol, our political wisdom is importantly informed by what we have learned about the short-term and long-term effects of imbibing it, but in the case of religion we're still flying blind.

We'd be aghast to be told of a Leninist child or a neo-conservative child or a Hayekian monetarist child. So isn't it a kind of child abuse to speak of a Catholic child or a Protestant child? Especially in Northern Ireland and Glasgow where such labels, handed down over generations, have divided neighbourhoods for cen­turies and can even amount to a death warrant?  Or imagine if we identified children from birth as young smokers or drinking children because their parents smoked or drank.

 In mammals and birds who must care for their offspring the instinct to protect one's young from all out­side interference is universal and extremely potent; we will risk our lives unhesitatingly-unthinkingly-to fend off threats, real or imagined. It's like a reflex. And in this case, we can "feel in our bones" that parents do have the right to raise their children the way they see fit. Never make the mistake of wandering in between a mother bear and her cub, and nothing should come between par­ents and their children. That's the core of "family values." At the same time, we do have to admit that parents don't literally own their children (the way slave owners once owned slaves), but are, rather, their stewards or guardians and ought to be held accountable by outsiders for their guardianship, which does imply that outsiders have a right to interfere-which sets off that adrenaline alarm again. When we find that what we feel in our bones is hard to de­fend in the court of reason, we get defensive and testy, and start looking around for something to hide behind. How about a sacred and (hence) unquestionable bond? Ah, that's the ticket!

There is an obvious (but seldom discussed) tension between the supposedly sacred principles invoked at this point. On the one hand, many declare, there is the sacred and inviolable right to life: every unborn child has a right to life, and no prospective parent has the right to terminate a pregnancy (except maybe if the mother's life is itself in jeopardy). On the other hand, many of the same peo­ple declare that, once born, the child loses its right not to be indoctrinated or brainwashed or otherwise psychologically abused by those parents, who have the right to raise the child with any up­bringing they choose, short of physical torture. Let us spread the value of freedom throughout the world-but not to children, apparently. No child has a right to freedom from indoctrination. Shouldn't we change that? What, and let outsiders have a say in how I raise my kids?

While we wrestle with the questions about the Andaman Islanders, we can see that we are laying the political foundations for similar questions about religious upbringing in general. We shouldn't assume, while worrying over the likely effects, that the seductions of Wester culture will automatically swamp all the fragile treasures of other cultures. It is worth noting that many Muslim women, raised under conditions that many non-Muslim women would consider intolerable, when given informed opportunities to abandon their veils and many of their other traditions, choose in­stead to maintain them.

Maybe people everywhere can be trusted, and hence allowed to make their own informed choices. Informed choice! What an amazing and revolutionary idea! Maybe people should be trusted to make choices, not necessarily the choices we would recommend to them, but the choices that have the best chance of satisfying their considered goals. But what do we teach them until they are in­formed enough and mature enough to decide for themselves? We teach them about all the world's religions, in a matter-of-fact, historically and biologically informed way, the same way we teach them about geography and history and arithmetic. Let's get more education about religion into our schools, not less. We should teach our children creeds and customs, prohibitions and rituals, texts and music, and when we cover the history of religion, we should in­clude both the positive-the role of the churches in the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, the flourishing of science and the arts in early Islam, and the role of the Black Muslims in bringing hope, honor, and self-respect to the otherwise shattered lives of many in­mates in our prisons, for instance-and the negative-the Inquisi­tion, anti-Semitism over the ages, the role of the Catholic Church in spreading AIDS in Africa through its opposition to condoms. No religion should be favored, and none ignored. And as we discover more and more about the biological and psychological bases of reli­gious practices and attitudes, these discoveries should be added to the curriculum, the same way we update our education about science, health, and current events. This should all be part of the mandated curriculum for both public schools and home-schooling.

Here's a proposal, then: as long as parents don't teach their chil­dren anything that is likely to close their minds

1. through fear or hatred or

2. by disabling them from inquiry (by denying them an education, for instance, or keeping them entirely isolated from the world)

then they may teach their children whatever religious doctrines they like. It's just an idea, and perhaps there are better ones to consider, but it should appeal to freedom lovers everywhere: the idea of insisting that the devout of all faiths should face the challenge of making sure their creed is worthy enough, attractive and plausible and meaningful enough, to withstand the temptations of its competitors. If you have to hoodwink-or blindfold-your children to ensure that they confirm their faith when they are adults, your faith ought to go extinct.

 

Toxic memes?

Consider the selfobservation of Raja Shedadeh, writing about the grip of modern Palestine: "Most of your energy is spent extending feelers to detect public perception of your actions, because your survival is contin­gent on remaining on good terms with your society."

 When we can share similar observations about the problems in our own soci­ety, we will be on a good path to mutual understanding. Palestinian society, if Shehadeh is right, is beset with a virulent case of the "pun­ish those who won't punish" idea, for which there are models that predict other prop­erties we should look for. It may be that this particular feature would foil well-intentioned projects that would work in societies that lack it. In particular, we mustn't assume that policies that are benign in our own culture will not be malignant in others. As Jes­sica Stern puts it:

I have come to see terrorism as a kind of virus, which spreads as a result of risk factors at various levels: global, interstate, na­tional, and personal. But identifying these factors precisely is dif­ficult. The same variables (political, religious, social, or all of the above) that seem to have caused one person to become a terrorist might cause another to become a saint. [Terror in the Name of God, 2003, p.283]

As communications technology makes it harder and harder for leaders to shield their people from outside information, and as the economic realities of the twenty-first century make it clearer and clearer that education is the most important investment any parent can make in a child, the floodgates will open all over the world, with tumultuous effects. All the flotsam and jetsam of popular culture, all the trash and scum that accumulates in the corners of a free so­ciety, will inundate these relatively pristine regions along with the treasures of modern education, equal rights for women, better health care, workers' rights, democratic ideals, and openness to the cultures of others. As the experience in the former Soviet Union shows only too clearly, the worst features of capitalism and high tech are among the most robust replicators in this population explosion of memes, and there will be plenty of grounds for xenophobia, Luddism, and the tempting "hygiene" of backward-looking fundamentalism. At the same time, we shouldn't rush to be apologetic about American pop culture. It has its excesses, but in many instances it is not the excesses that offend so much as the egalitari­anism and tolerance. The hatred of this potent American export is often driven by racism-because of the strong Afro-American presence in American pop culture-and sexism-because of the status of women we celebrate and our (relatively) benign treatment of ho­mosexuality.

Researchers don't have to be believers to be understanders, and we had better hope I was right, since we want our researchers to understand Islamic terrorism from the inside without having to become Muslims-and certainly not terrorists-in the process. But we also won't understand Islamic terrorism unless we can see how it is like and unlike other brands of terrorism, including Hindu and Christian terrorism, ecoterrorism, and antiglobalist terrorism, to round up the usual suspects. And we won't understand Islamic and Hindu and Christian terror­ism without understanding the dynamics of the transitions that lead from benign sect to cult to the sort of disastrous phenomenon we witnessed in Jonestown, Guyana, in Waco, Texas, and in the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan.

One of the most tempting hypotheses is that these particularly toxic mutations tend to arise when charismatic leaders miscalculate in their attempts to be memetic engineers, unleashing memetic adaptations that they find, like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, they can no longer control. They then become somewhat desperate, and keep reinventing the same bad wheels to carry them over their excesses. The anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse (1995) offers an account of the debacle that overtook the leaders of Pomio Kivung, the new religion in Papua New Guinea, that suggests (to me) that something like runaway sexual selection took over. The leaders responded to the pressure from the people-Prove that you mean itt-with ever-inflated versions of the claims and promises that had brought them to power, leading inevitably to a crash. It's reminiscent of the accelerated burst of crea­tivity you see in pathological liars when they can sense that their exposure is imminent. Once you've talked the people into killing all the pigs in anticipation of the great Period of the Companies, you have nowhere to go but down. Or out: It's them-the infidels-who are the cause of all our misery!

There are so many complexities, so many variables-can we ever hope to make predictions that we can act on? Yes, in fact, we can. Here is just one: in every place where terrorism has blossomed, those it has attracted are almost all young men who have learned enough about the world to see that their futures look otherwise bleak and uninspiring (like the futures of those who were preyed upon by Marjoe Gortner).

What seems to be most appealing about militant religious groups-whatever combination of reasons an individual may cite for joining-is the way life is simplified. Good and evil are brought out in stark relief. Life is transformed through action. Martyrdom-the supreme act of heroism and worship-provides the ultimate escape from life's dilemmas, especially for indivi­duals who feel deeply alienated and confused, humiliated or desperate.

Where are we going to find an overabundance of such young men in the very near future? In many countries, but especially in China, where the draconian one-child-per-family measures that have slowed the population explosion so dramatically (and turned China into a blooming economic force of unsettling magnitude) have had the side effect of creating a massive imbalance between male and female children. Everybody wanted to have a son (a superannuated meme that had evolved to thrive in an earlier economic environ­ment), so daughters have been aborted (or killed at birth) in huge numbers, so now there are not going to be anywhere near enough wives to go around. What are all those young men going to do with themselves? We have a few years to figure out benign channels into which their hormone-soaked energies can be directed.

Instead of trying to destroy the madrassahs that close the minds of thousands of young Muslim boys, we should create alternative schools-for Muslim boys and girls-that will better serve their real and pressing needs, and let these schools compete openly with the madrassahs for clientele. And how can we hope to compete with the promise of salvation and the glories of martyrdom? We could lie, and make promises of our own that could never be ful­filled in this life or anywhere else, or we could try something more honest: we could suggest to them that the claims of any religion should, of course, be taken with a grain of salt. We could start to change the climate of opinion that holds religion to be above discussion, above criticism, above challenge. False advertising is false advertising, and if we start holding religious organizations account­able for their claims-not by taking them to court but just by point­ing out, often and in a matter-of-fact tone of voice, that of course these claims are ludicrous-perhaps we can slowly get the culture of credulity to evaporate. We have mastered the technology for cre­ating doubt through the mass media ("Are you sure your breath is sweet?" "Are you getting enough iron?" "What has your insurance company done for you lately?"), and now we can think about apply­ing it, gently but firmly, to topics that have heretofore been off lim­its. Let the honest religions thrive because their members are getting what they want, as informed choosers.

But we can also start campaigns to adjust specific aspects of the landscape in which this competition takes place. A bottomless pit in that landscape that strikes me as particularly deserving of paving over is the tradition of "holy soil." Here is Yoel Lerner, an Israeli and a former terrorist, quoted by Stern:
"There are six hundred thirteen commandments in the Torah. The temple service accounts for about two hundred and forty of these. For nearly two millennia, since the destruction of the Temple, the Jewish people, contrary to their wishes, have been unable to maintain the temple service. They've been unable to comply with those commandments. The Temple constituted a kind of telephone line to God," Lerner summarizes. "That link has been destroyed. We want to rebuild it."

Nonsense, say I. Here is an imaginary case: Suppose it turned out that Liberty Island (formerly Bedloe's Island, on which the Statue of Liberty stands) was once a burial ground of the Mohawks-say the Matinecock Tribe of nearby Long Island. And suppose the Mohawks came forward with the claim that it should be restored to pristine purity (no gambling casinos, but also no Statue of Liberty, just one big holy cemetery). Nonsense. And shame on any Mo­hawks who had the chutzpah to rile up their fellow braves on the issue. This would be ancient history-a lot less ancient than the his­tory of the Temple-and it should be allowed to recede gracefully into the past.

We don't let religions declare that their holy traditions require that left-handed people be enslaved, or that people who live in Nor­way should be killed. We similarly cannot let religions declare that "infidels" who have been innocently living on their "holy" turf for generations have no right to live there. There is also, of course, cul­pable hypocrisy in the policy of deliberately building new settle­ments in order to create just such "innocent" dwellers and foreclose the claims of the previous dwellers on that land. This is a practice that goes back centuries; the Spaniards who conquered most of the Western Hemisphere often took care to build their Christian churches on the destroyed foundations of the temples of the indige­nous people. Out of sight, out of mind. Neither side of these dis­putes is above criticism. If we could just devalue the whole tradition of holy soil, and its occupation, we could address the residual injus­tices with clearer heads.

Perhaps you disagree with me about this. Fine. Let's discuss it calmly and openly, with no untmmpable appeals to the sacred, which have no place in such a discussion. If we should continue to honor claims about holy soil, it will be because, all things consid­ered, this is the course of action that is just, and life-enabling, and a better path to peace than any other we can find. Any policy that can­not pass that test doesn't deserve respect.

Such open discussions are underwritten by the security of a free society, and if they are to continue unmolested, we must be vigilant in protecting the institutions and principles of democracy from subversion. Remember Marxism? It used to be a sour sort of fun to tease Marxists about the contradictions in some of their pet ideas. The revolution of the proletariat was inevitable, good Marxists be­lieved, but if so, why were they so eager to enlist us in their cause? If it was going to happen anyway, it was going to happen with or without our help. But of course the inevitability that Marxists be­lieve in is one that depends on the growth of the movement and all its political action. There were Marxists working very hard to bring about the revolution, and it was comforting to them to believe that their success was guaranteed in the long run. And some of them, the only ones that were really dangerous, believed so firmly in the rightness of their cause that they believed it was permissible to lie and deceive in order to further it. They even taught this to their children, from infancy. These are the "red-diaper babies," children of hardline members of the Communist Party of for example America, and some of them can still be found infecting the atmosphere of politi­cal action in left-wing circles, to the extreme frustration and annoy­ance of honest socialists and others on the left.

Today we have a similar phenomenon brewing on the religious right: the inevitability of the End Days, or the Rapture, the coming Armageddon that will separate the blessed from the damned in the final Day of Judgment. Cults and prophets proclaiming the immi­nent end of the world have been with us for several millennia, and it has been another sour sort of fun to ridicule them the morn­ing after, when they discover that their calculations were a little off But, just as with the Marxists, there are some among them who are honor claims about holy soil, it will be because, all things considered, this is the course of action that is just, and life-enabling, and a better path to peace than any other we can find. Any policy that can­not pass that test doesn't deserve respect.

Such open discussions are underwritten by the security of a free society, and if they are to continue unmolested, we must be vigilant in protecting the institutions and principles of democracy from subversion. Remember Marxism? It used to be a sour sort of fun to tease Marxists about the contradictions in some of their pet ideas. The revolution of the proletariat was inevitable, good Marxists believed, but if so, why were they so eager to enlist us in their cause? If it was going to happen anyway, it was going to happen with or without our help. But of course the inevitability that Marxists be­lieve in is one that depends on the growth of the movement and all its political action. There were Marxists working very hard to bring about the revolution, and it was comforting to them to believe that their success was guaranteed in the long run. And some of them, the only ones that were really dangerous, believed so firmly in the rightness of their cause that they believed it was permissible to lie and deceive in order to further it. They even taught this to their children, from infancy. These are the "red-diaper babies," children of hardline members of the Communist Party of America, and some of them can still be found infecting the atmosphere of politi­cal action in left-wing circles, to the extreme frustration and annoy­ance of honest socialists and others on the left.

Today we have a similar phenomenon brewing on the religious right: the inevitability of the End Days, or the Rapture, the coming Armageddon that will separate the blessed from the damned in the final Day of Judgment. Cults and prophets proclaiming the immi­nent end of the world have been with us for several millennia, and it has been another sour sort of fun to ridicule them the morn­ing after, when they discover that their calculations were a little off But, just as with the Marxists, there are some among them who are working hard to "hasten the inevitable," not merely anticipating the End Days with joy in their hearts, but taking political action to bring about the conditions they think are the prerequisites for that occasion. And these people are not funny at all. They are danger­ous, for the same reason that red-diaper babies are dangerous: they put their allegiance to their creed ahead of their commitment to de­mocracy, to peace, to (earthly) justice-and to truth. If push comes to shove, some of them are prepared to lie and even to kill, to do whatever it takes to help bring what they consider celestial justice to those they consider the sinners. Are they a lunatic fringe? They are certainly dangerously out of touch with reality, but it is hard to know how many they are. Are their numbers growing? Appar­ently. Are they attempting to gain positions of power and influence in the governments of the world? Apparently. Should we know all about this phenomenon? We certainly should. A  poll in Newsweek (May 24, 2004) claimed that 55 percent of Americans  think that the faithful will be taken up to heaven in the Rapture and 17 percent believe the world will end in their lifetimes. If this is even close to being accurate, it suggests that End Timers in the first decade of the twenty­ first century outnumber the Marxists of the I930’s through the I950’s by a wide margin.

Hundreds of Web sites purport to deal with this phenomenon, but I am not in a position to endorse any of them as accurate, so I will not list any. This in itself is worrisome, and constitutes an ex­cellent reason to conduct an objective investigation of the whole End Times movement, and particularly the possible presence of fanatical adherents in positions of power in the government and the military. What can we do about this? I suggest that the political leaders who are in the best position to call for a full exposure of this disturbing trend are those whose credentials could hardly be im­pugned by those who are fearful of atheists or brights: the eleven senators and congressmen who are members of the "Family" (or the "Fellowship Foundation"), a secretive Christian organization that has been influential in Washington, D.C., for decades: Sena­tors Charles Grassley (R., Iowa), Pete Domenici (R., N.Mex.), John Ensign (R., Nev.), James Inhofe (R., Okla.), Bill Nelson (D., Fla.), Conrad Bums (R., Mont.), and Representatives Jim DeMint (R., S.e.), Frank Wolf (R., Va.), Joseph Pitts (R., Pa.), Zach Wamp (R., Tenn.), and Bart Stupak (D., Mich.). Its current leader, Douglas Coe, is described by Time magazine (February 7, 2005, p. 41) as "the Stealth Persuader."

But, in the end, would it not be better to educate the people of the world, so that they can make truly informed choices about their lives? Ignorance is nothing shameful; imposing ignorance is shameful. Most people are not to blame for their own ignorance, but if they willfully pass it on, they are to blame. One might think this is so obvious that it hardly needs proposing, but in many quarters there is substantial resistance to it. People are afraid of being more ignorant than their children ­especially, apparently, their daughters. We are going to have to persuade them that there are few pleasures more honorable and joyful than being instructed by your own children. It will be fascinating to see what institutions and projects our children will devise, building on the foundations earlier generations have built and preserved for them, to carry us all safely into the future.

For my earlier article about the involvement of Christianity with WWI click:

 

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