Violence, Primate Psychology, Mass Movements in Religion and Politics

Violence is common to our species. We still follow alpha males (sometimes alpha females too) in religion and politics. And everyone wants to claim more for themselves or their beliefs, secure more territory. The poor many want something for nothing, but it seems the rich will stop at nothing till they get everything. And each group or mass movement desires more converts, more power and influence. Churches have continued to seek power in various ways from the time of Christian Roman Emperors and Medieval rulers to todayʼs Religious Right. But deistic rationalism and scientific advances dethroned the authority of certain biblical tales and helped defang religion in the West. Still we are primates who desire greater control to assuage our fears about lifeʼs uncertainties, and we are eager to join our egos to mass movements, political parties, or to become enthralled with nationalistic fervor, or racist fervor, or other kinds of fervor and lose ourselves in such fervor, a trait we should question if we want greater peace on earth.

Some mass movements claim to hold the key to paradise on earth or in heaven and seek to outlaw all the rest. Marx promised a workerʼs paradise on earth. Religions promise eternal paradise. One at least understands the attraction of grandiose promises—especially when they are accompanied by grandiose fears as well, like eternal hell.

Some apologists for Christianity fear competition from something they call ‘scientism.’ Science has at least greatly increased our food production, introduced vaccines and antibiotics, and along with health and safety and plumbing regulations, increased the average human lifespan by several decades in many countries. Can science create utopia? I doubt any scientist is liable to make such a promise as they are also aware of all the ways nature bites back and ways nature can kill us. Though there are some who promise a singularity is near. But most scientists admit they remain worried about how things can go wrong, how our future technologies can create problems, not only solve them. Science is generally humbler than say, Marxism.

I hold no grudge against any belief system that encourages acts of kindness toward others and eschews violence. But when speaking about the horrors of say, communism, itʼs good to at least level the playing field and also consider the long Criminal History of Christianity (a multi-volume set with that title is available but only in German).

Christians persecuted Hellenists, Jews and rival Christians for centuries.

And the one continent most heavily steeped in Christian churches and prayers for the most centuries was Europe, the same continent that proceeded to blow itself up with a Thirty Years War, and endless smaller wars before and after that one, wars between nations whose people agreed on such beliefs as the Trinity and even creationism. During the 20th century Europe also suffered two World Wars. Germany was still quite Christian at that time, maybe not in the cities as much as the countryside, but there was more countryside back then as well. The votes of Christians in the countryside put Hitler ahead of the rest of the other candidates who were all neck and neck in the cities. Christians elected Hitler to power. The Nazi party itself was founded in a heavily Catholic (and Jew-hating) city in Germany.

European nations have seen more relative peace in the seven or so decades after the second World War, i.e., after the average Europeanʼs religious faith had grown far weaker, than it ever saw during its previous centuries when its religious faith remained much stronger. Of course there has been more peace around the world in general after World War II, with the larger nations concentrating on business ventures rather than military ones.

As for the French Revolution, the Russian communist revolution, and the Chinese communist revolution, true they were all mega-bloody. And often took place in peasant economies where resentments had risen far past the boiling point such as in pre-industrial France, and nineteenth-century Russia and China.

In comparison the American Revolution was also bloody but benefited from the fact that Britain was so far away, and France and Britain had been fighting for centuries, so the revolutionaries in America were able to get France to help them. Also, after the revolutionaries won they were only able to throw out the British soldiers but could not then sail to Britain to overthrow that king and other royals. That is because our revolution did not take place on the same continent or inside the same country like in the French, Russian and Chinese Revolutions. Also keep in mind that America did suffer a bloody war insider her own borders, a Civil War, with Christian ministers being some of the loudest in favor of secession. And the toll of all the Americans killed in that conflict exceeded all the U.S. soldiers killed in both World Wars, Korea, Nam and the first Gulf War. And letʼs not forget all the natives of North and South America and all the African natives who were enslaved persecuted or killed by European colonists for centuries. Europeans who came from the continent with the most churches and most prayers echoed for the most centuries since the birth of Christianity has plenty of blood on its hands. And one can only wonder what the Thirty Years War would have been like if the Catholics and Protestants had had access to modern weapons communications and transportation and if the cities back then were just as populated as in the 20th century.

I suggest reading Eric Hoffer for more information on the similar psychological drives that animate adherents of mass movements be they Christian, Fascist or Communist.

One should also read about Christianityʼs past, because it was Christian rulers who instituted the idea of thought control, who attempted to force specific theological beliefs upon the whole populace, and who claimed that denying such specific theological beliefs was tantamount not just to heresy but to treason. Right at the beginning of the Roman Emperor Justinianʼs famed book of Laws are his declarations concerning religion and how non-Trinitarian Christians must be judged demented and insane and worthy of the Emperorʼs temporal punishment. Theologians for their part pointed out that spreading heretical views was tantamount not just to murdering childrenʼs bodies, but murdering their souls eternally. And a father had a biblical right to protect his child against murder, even the right to kill anyone who dared attack his child. And the ruler was the father figure for his people. Christian popes, as well as the great Reformers Luther and Calvin agreed that magistrates MUST persecute heretics. Click on the highlighted words at the beginning of this list.

See also these declarations by theologians.

Also see, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade (received Christianity Todayʼs Book Award of Merit for 2015).

And see, Is Religion Connected to Violence?

Also check out, The Uniqueness of the Christian Experience?

Expel the Lies (or, “Win Ben Stein's Career!”) : Selections from recent reviews of the movie Expelled, starring Ben Stein

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, opens with Ben Stein addressing a packed audience of adoring students at Pepperdine University. The biology professors at Pepperdine assure me that their mostly Christian students fully accept the theory of evolution. So who were these people embracing Steinʼs screed against science? Extras. According to Lee Kats, associate provost for research and chair of natural science at Pepperdine, ‘the production company paid for the use of the facility just as all other companies do that film on our campus’ but that ‘the company was nervous that they would not have enough people in the audience so they brought in extras. Members of the audience had to sign in and a staff member reports that no more than two to three Pepperdine students were in attendance. Mr. Steinʼs lecture on that topic was not an event sponsored by the university.’

Expelled trots out some of the people whom it claims have been persecuted. First among them is Robert Sternberg, former editor of the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, who published an article on ID by Stephen C. Meyer of the Discovery Institute. Sternberg tells Stein that he subsequently lost his editorship, his old position at the Smithsonian Institutionʼs National Museum of Natural History and his original office.

What most viewers of Expelled may not realize—because the film doesnʼt even hint at it—is that Sternbergʼs case is not quite what it sounds. Biologists criticized Sternbergʼs choice to publish the paper not only because it supported ID but also because Sternberg approved it by himself rather than sending it out for independent expert review. He didnʼt lose his editorship; he published the paper in what was already scheduled to be his last issue as editor. He didnʼt lose his job at the Smithsonian; his appointment there as an unpaid research associate had a limited term, and when it was over he was given a new one. His office move was scheduled before the paper ever appeared. [For more details see Ben Stein Launches a Science-free Attack on Darwin by Michael Shermer.]

Steinʼs case for conspiracy centers on a journal article written by Stephen Meyer, a senior fellow at the intelligent design think tank Discovery Institute and professor at the theologically conservative Christian Palm Beach Atlantic University. Meyerʼs article, ‘The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories,’ was published in the June 2004 Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, the voice of the Biological Society with a circulation of less than 300 people. In other words, from the get-go this was much ado about nothing.

Nevertheless, some members of the organization voiced their displeasure, so the societyʼs governing council released a statement explaining, ‘Contrary to typical editorial practices, the paper was published without review by any associate editor; Sternberg handled the entire review process. The council, which includes officers, elected councilors and past presidents, and the associate editors would have deemed the paper inappropriate for the pages of the Proceedings.’ So how did it get published? In the words of journalʼs managing editor at the time, Richard Sternberg, ‘it was my prerogative to choose the editor who would work directly on the paper, and as I was best qualified among the editors, I chose myself.’ And what qualified Sternberg to choose himself? Perhaps it was his position as a fellow of the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design, which promotes intelligent design, along with being on the editorial board of the Occasional Papers of the Baraminology Study Group, a creationism journal committed to the literal interpretation of Genesis. Or perhaps it was the fact that he is a signatory of the Discovery Instituteʼs ‘100 Scientists who Doubt Darwinism’ statement.

Meyerʼs article is the first intelligent design paper ever published in a peer-reviewed journal, but it deals less with systematics (or taxonomy, Sternbergʼs specialty) than it does paleontology, for which many members of the society would have been better qualified than he to peer-review the paper. (In fact, at least three members were experts on the Cambrian invertebrates discussed in Meyerʼs paper).

Meyer claims that the ‘Cambrian explosion’ of complex hard-bodied life forms over 500 million years ago could not have come about through Darwinian gradualism. The fact that geologists call it an ‘explosion’ leads creationists to glom onto the word as a synonym for ‘sudden creation.’ After four billion years of an empty Earth, God reached down from the heavens and willed trilobites into existence ex nihilo. In reality, according to paleontologist Donald Prothero, in his 2007 magisterial book Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters (Columbia University Press): ‘The major groups of invertebrate fossils do not all appear suddenly at the base of the Cambrian but are spaced out over strata spanning 80 million years—hardly an instantaneous ‘explosion’! Some groups appear tens of millions of years earlier than others. And preceding the Cambrian explosion was a long slow buildup to the first appearance of typical Cambrian shelled invertebrates.’ If an intelligent designer did create the Cambrian life forms, it took 80 million years of gradual evolution to do it.

Stein, however, is uninterested in paleontology, or any other science for that matter. His focus is on what happened to Sternberg, who is portrayed in the film as a martyr to the cause of free speech. ‘As a result of publishing the Meyer article,’ Stein intones in his inimitably droll voice, ‘Dr. Sternberg found himself the object of a massive campaign that smeared his reputation and came close to destroying his career.’ According to Sternberg, ‘after the publication of the Meyer article the climate changed from being chilly to being outright hostile. Shunned, yes, and discredited.’ As a result, Sternberg filed a claim against the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) for being ‘targeted for retaliation and harassment’ for his religious beliefs. ‘I was viewed as an intellectual terrorist,’ he tells Stein. In August 2005 his claim was rejected. According to Jonathan Coddington, his supervisor at the NMNH, Sternberg was not discriminated against, was never dismissed, and in fact was not even a paid employee, but just an unpaid research associate who had completed his three-year term!

The rest of the martyrdom stories in Expelled have similar, albeit less menacing explanations, detailed at www.expelledexposed.com, where physical anthropologist Eugenie Scott and her tireless crew at the National Center for Science Education have tracked down the specifics of each case. Astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, for example, did not get tenure at Iowa State University in Ames and is portrayed in the film as sacrificed on the alter of tenure denial because of his authorship of a pro—intelligent design book entitled The Privileged Planet (Regnery Publishing, 2004). As Scott told me, ‘Tenure is based on the evaluation of academic performance at oneʼs current institution for the previous seven years.’ Although Gonzales was apparently a productive scientist before he moved to Iowa State, Scott says that ‘while there, his publication record tanked, he brought in only a couple of grants—one of which was from the [John] Templeton Foundation to write The Privileged Planet—didnʼt have very many graduate students, and those he had never completed their degrees. Lots of people donʼt get tenure, for the same legitimate reasons that Gonzalez didnʼt get tenure.’

Tenure in any department is serious business, because it means, essentially, employment for life. Tenure decisions for astronomers are based on the number and quality of scientific papers published, the prestige of the journal in which they are published, the number of grants funded (universities are ranked, in part, by the grant-productivity of their faculties), the number of graduate students who completed their program, the amount of telescope time allocated as well as the trends in each of these categories, indicating whether or not the candidate shows potential for continued productivity. In point of fact, according to Gregory Geoffroy, president of Iowa State, ‘Over the past 10 years, four of the 12 candidates who came up for review in the physics and astronomy department were not granted tenure.’ Gonzales was one of them, and for good reasons, despite Steinʼs claim of his ‘stellar academic record.’

The most deplorable dishonesty of Expelled, however, is that it says evolution was one influence on the Holocaust without acknowledging any of the other major ones for context. Rankings of races and ethnic groups into a hierarchy long preceded Darwin and the theory of evolution, and were usually tied to the Christian philosophical notion of a ‘great chain of being.’ The economic ruin of the Weimar Republic left many Germans itching to find someone to blame for their misfortune, and the Jews and other ethnic groups were convenient scapegoats. The roots of European anti-Semitism go back to the end of the Roman Empire. Organized attacks and local exterminations of the Jews were perpetrated during the Crusades and the Black Plague. The Russian empire committed many attacks on the Jews in the 19th and early 20th century, giving rise to the word ‘pogrom.’ Profound anti-Semitism even pollutes the works of the father of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther, who reviled them in On the Jews and Their Lies and wrote, ‘We are at fault in not slaying them.’ I donʼt think Protestantism is accountable for the Holocaust, either, but the focus on ‘the Jews’ as scapegoats, and the added idea that their ‘bad non-Aryan blood’ had to be eliminated by killing them, were not Darwinʼs ideas.

The weakness of the logic of Expelled is beside the point, however. No one who is familiar with the evidence for evolution is likely to leave the theater shaken. Some people with looser understandings of the science or the legal issues might buy into its arguments about ‘fairness’ and protecting religion against science. Expelled is nonetheless mostly a film for ID creationismʼs religious base. That audience has seen one setback after the next in recent years, with science rejecting ID as useless and the courts rebuffing it as for a constitutional violation in public education. For them, Expelled is a rallying point to revive their morale.