Magi Mike’s Blog

A M Girard at French Tribune says children “need to be taught about evolution of man and humanity, and they also need religion to grow”. Why do they need religion to grow? Is it possible to live in this world of continuous news without realizing that religious differences are perpetually causing trouble everywhere?

Our children do not need religion to grow, it has grown monstrous enough. Nor do we want our children, in imitation, to grow just as monstrous themselves. They need morality to grow. Religion and morality are not the same thing. Some of the most immoral people have been and are still religious, many of them calling themselves Christians. The morality of Christ is admirable, and can be taught as the expression of our social instincts. The religion built around him ignores his teaching almost completely.

Christianity became an imperial cult when the Roman state adopted it as the patriotic religion of Romans, and it has remained an imperial religion ever since. Let us teach our children what Christ believed, compassion, kindness and generosity, not selfishness, exploitation and greed.

The Rev Brenda Freije, Pastor for discipleship and formation, North United Methodist Church, Indianapolis

As a United Methodist pastor, I am part of a Christian tradition that looks to Scripture, church tradition, critical thinking and relevant experience to reflect on God and make decisions about life in relationship to our Scriptures. Within this framework, there is plenty of room for science, including the science of evolution. What can be measured and tested and studied through scientific methods informs my theology, and my theology informs how I understand the results of that scientific method. I am not an expert on other faith traditions, but I imagine that many of them could make similar claims.

The Scriptures are ancient writings crafted over centuries. The truths they contain are timeless and require attention and study to appreciate. One needs to be careful not to read the ancient writings as if reading a twentyfirst century newspaper article. The story of God is not so easily contained or summarized.

Problems arise when one confuses religion and science and tries to read the Bible as if it were a precise recounting of history. The two creation stories in Genesis at the very beginning of the Bible, which tell very different stories about how the world was formed, should be enough to give one pause. There is tremendous wisdom and sound advice in the Scriptures, and I believe the teachings in the Bible, if honestly followed, will be a source of joy, peace, love and life not only for the follower but also for the follower’s community.

Science and religion ask different questions and apply different methods of study. This doesn’t make them incompatible. It does make them distinct. Claims about God as the creator of life are claims of faith. Claims that there is no divine power behind the created order are claims of a different kind of faith. It is the role of parents and our communities of faith to teach about these claims and to help our children think critically about the science they are learning.

In the second century BC, residents on the Greek island of Delos saw nothing wrong with using others’ gods in their prayers. Caitlin Barrett, Cornell assistant professor of classics and author of Egyptianizing Figurines From Delos: A Study in Hellenistic Religion, examined terracotta figurines found on Delos to determine what influence Egypt’s religion had on the Hellenized inhabitants and their daily lives.

Terracotta figurines are potential evidence for the religious ideas of a wide swath of the population, not just the rich. Such inexpensive figurines were accessible to many because they could be made rapidly and in bulk. Figurines of Egyptian gods appear as offerings at Greek gods’ temples on Delos and vice versa. Barrett explains:

The fact that somebody’s dedicating a figurine of a Greek goddess like Aphrodite to an Egyptian goddess like Isis suggests that the two were associated, or at least that their worship wasn’t considered incompatible. Greeks saw these other gods not as alternatives to the Greek pantheon but as something compatible with their own traditions.

The religious wars raging around the globe today and ingrained religious intolerance attest to the current rigidity of religions, the consequence of the intolerant tradition of Judaism with its jealous god entering the west via Christianity—Judaism for goyim—and displacing the tolerance of Hellenism. At this earlier period the tendency in Egypt and Greece was the other way—towards toleration. Barrett notes:

What’s interesting is the degree to which these foreigners—Italians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Syrians and Jews—interacted with each other’s deities and the cross pollination among worshipers.

Although most of the figurines were produced by local craftspeople, many of them have iconography reminiscent of Egyptian deities. The Græco-Macedonian Ptolemies ruling Egypt at this time worshiped the Greek gods, while ceremonially serving the traditional Egyptian pantheon. Barrett says:

This led to the creation of syncretic imagery that combined aspects of both Greek and Egyptian traditions, and that could speak to members of this heterogeneous population. Some of that imagery wound up becoming hugely popular in the rest of the Mediterranean as well.

Delian craftsmen used techniques of figurine manufacture and conventions of artistic style that derive from Greek traditions, while conveying concepts that are fundamentally Egyptian. Barrett explains that Egyptians depicted children like adults with a finger to their mouth—because babies put their fingers in their mouths—rather than smaller and with the features of a child. However, in truth, Later Greek writers misinterpreted figurines of Harpocrates as a child to mean, from the characteristic gesture of his forefinger to his lips, that he was silencing people, and he became thought of as the god of silence and secrecy. To the Egyptians he was the symbol of the reborn sun and early vegetation, whence the upturned torch in the illustration (not a figurine from Delos), and his being a child (in the illustration having childish features and an Egyptian side lock of hair).

To pretend that Christianity avoided any trace of syncretism, as fundamentalists argue, is quite absurd. Many, perhaps most, Christian traditions and calendar dates copied ones already in use by older religions. Christmas is merely the most obvious example. It is a massive shame Christianity did not adopt and practice Hellenistic toleration too.

A study, coauthored by Notre Dame social scientists, Darren W Davis and Donald B Pope-Davis, focusing on African American Catholics, challenges common assumptions about one of the Black community’s less popular Christian churches. Commissioned by the National Black Catholic Congress and the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Church Life and Office of the President, it tested whether anecdotal accounts that Black Catholics were becoming increasingly disengaged from their religion were true. It is historic in that it is the largest sample of African American Catholics ever surveyed on their faith. Although the focus of the survey is on African American Catholics, a comparison is made with white Catholics, yielding notable findings about them too. Among the findings of the survey are:

• On almost every measure of religious engagement, African American Catholics are considered stronger in their faith than white Catholics:
  • 78 percent of Black Catholics report that their parish meets their spiritual needs compared to only 69 percent of white Catholics.
  • 76 percent of African American Catholics say their parish meets their emotional needs, compared to 60 percent of white Catholics.
  • 48 percent of African Americans attend church at least once per week, compared to only 30 percent of white Catholics.
• A major difference in the religious engagement between African American Catholics and white Catholics is the importance each group attaches to social networks in the parish.
  • 29 percent of African Americans considered it was important that friends attended their church, while only eight percent of white Catholics considered it important.

African American’s increased appreciation of religious social interactions and tendency to attend all Black parishes contributes to their satisfaction. Davis commented:

This finding also shows up among African American Catholics who attend predominantly black parishes. A greater sense of community that comes from worshipping with others who share cultural heritage heightens religious engagement. Whatever forces are working against white Catholics’ religious identity and engagement were set in motion decades ago and those forces do not appear to be working against African American Catholics. Thus, it is quite possible that understanding African American Catholicity may inform us about the religious challenges of white Catholics. Too often we approach questions of religiosity in a vacuum. Comparable studies of religiosity are critical.

While there is generally high satisfaction with various aspects of Mass and church service, such as preaching, music, readings and prayers, Catholics’—both white and black Americans—level of satisfaction with these aspects of Mass are noticeably lower than Protestants. Pope-Davis noted:

This finding is interesting because we often hear anecdotal complaints about the Catholic Mass as quiescent, but most Catholics do not share this view. But, relative to the components of Protestant church service, Catholics are not as satisfied.

Racial Discontent

Despite their high level of religious engagement, African American Catholics are not completely satisfied with the scope of racial inclusiveness in the Church:

• About one in four African American Catholics perceive racism in their parish:
  • 32 percent say they are uncomfortable because they are the only person of color in their parish
  • 26 percent say that fellow parishioners avoid them because of their race,
  • 24 percent say that fellow parishioners reluctantly shake their hands
  • 25 percent say they have experienced racial insensitivity toward African Americans from their priest.
• African American Catholics see room for growth in the racial positions of the Catholic Church:
  • 37 percent are satisfied with the targeting of black vocations
  • 38 percent are satisfied with the Church’s emphasis on black saints
  • 40 percent are satisfied with promoting black bishops
  • 40 percent are satisfied with the Church’s support for issues like affirmative action
  • 44 percent are satisfied with the Church’s position on problems in Africa
  • 45 percent are satisfied with the promotion of racial integration in the Church.
• But 23 percent of African Americans consider the Catholic Church racist against African Americans.

Davis points out:

Asking questions about abstract racism in the Church breaks down somewhat when asked about specific elements of the Church. This is not that unusual in survey research. But, it is clear that while there are still challenges for many African American Catholics in their parishes, the views of the institutional Church are more jaundiced or jaded.

The survey also uncovered notable national demographic trends that are evident within religious denominations that have great consequences for the future church:

• 53 percent of African American Catholics and 53 percent of African American Protestants are at least 45 years old, compared to 63 percent of white Catholics and 62 percent of white Protestants
• 33 percent of African American Catholics and 35 percent of African American Protestants are married, compared to 21 percent of white Catholics and 14 percent of white Protestants.
• A larger percentage of African American Catholics have college degrees than African American Protestants, but a larger percentage of Catholics are college educated.

Summary

The US’s estimated three million Black Catholics are highly educated and deeply engaged in the church. They value the social and communal aspects of religious worship and some are concerned about the status of racism within the church—some are discontent about racial inclusiveness in the church. Nearly one in four respondents felt that the Catholic Church is racist against African Americans. More than 31 percent say they are uncomfortable because they are the only person of color in their parish, and about a quarter say that fellow parishioners avoid them because of their race, that fellow parishioners reluctantly shake their hands and that they have experienced racial insensitivity from their priest.

The research team hopes that the information gathered in the survey will help the Catholic church respond more efficiently to the needs of parishioners. Pope-Davis observed:

The forces that shape white Catholicity are different from the forces that shape African American Catholicity.

The Bible is in two parts, one is the Old Testament and is Jewish—the Jewish scriptures—the other is the New Testament and is Christian. Just what is the point of the New Testament for Christians when they incessantly cite the Jewish scriptures? If they prefer the Old Testament, why not become a Jew?

The point of the New Testament for Christians is that it refined the Old Testament. The Old Testament had become bloated with ordinances that allowed the temple priests to screw the ordinary Jew, and the original law had become mixed, confused and too complicated. Jesus was a Jew and did not reject Judaism, but he said he came to fulfil the law by advocating the law of love your neighbor. Whatever in the Jewish scriptures contradicts Christ’s law is not Christianity, for the Christian must prefer Christ’s new formulation of the law to the old Jewish one, or they might as well, indeed, become a Jew!

Nor is it enough to claim, as Christians do, that the Old Testament is also God’s word. Christians, as I understand it, consider Christ to be God incarnated—Christ is God—so the law of Christ is the law expressed by God Himself. Jews consider the Mosaic law to have been passed to them via Moses, a man.

The New Testament has God Himself, Christians tell us, speaking from his own lips, telling his followers how they must behave to be Christians. It follows that the New Testament takes primacy over the Old Testament, and Christians, to be Christians, ought to prefer the New Testament to the Old Testament, especially where the sentiments differ greatly. Love is meant to be the Christian criterion of moral rectitude, not ancient and primitive Iron Age sentiments like many of those in the Jewish scriptures… Killing people suspected of witchcraft is primitive, and certainly cannot be considered to be love at all. Leaving the poor to scrabble around in fields for a grain of barley is scarcely loving them either.

“Love” in our English gospels, as any Christian will know, translates the Greek word “agape“, which in turn equates with several words in Hebrew, mainly “aheb“. These words are not related to passionate love generally, but more to “liking”, “respecting”, “being content with”, “being kind towards”, and “caring for” and being willing to help them when they are in need. To repeat, it is being the Good Samaritan! It is being social, being the good neighbor, being kind.

It has been amusing over the last few days reading, and even participating in, the debate in The Washington Post on whether Christianity should favor socialism or capitalism. The leading article From Jesus’ Socialism to Capitalistic Christianity was written by Gregory Paul who argued in favor of Socialism but offered several hostages to fortune in introducing Ayn Rand into the debate, and implying that socialism was necessarily coercive. Two other articles followed refuting Gregory Paul’s argument. One was worthless, written by some Catholic member of the Discovery Institute, and another one, almost as bad but written I believe by a pair of evangelical lawyers, David French and Jordan Sekulow, was titled The Impossibility of a Socialist Jesus.

One of the points Gregory Paul made was that of the sharing of possessions in the first Christian community described in Acts. The act of sharing was so important to them that Luke, if he is the author, described how two supposed recruits, Ananias and his wife, Saphira, are struck dead for not sharing fully. They held back some of their wealth. The Christian lawyers claim the God killed the wicked pair for lying not for failing to share all of the money with the community. They say the notion of an honest lawyer is an oxymoron. It seems it is when it is a right wing preaching lawyer!

The ordinary US Christian is not noted for reading the book they value so highly, so they are easily fooled by right wing pastors and lawyers who cite things selectively. The full story of Ananias and Saphira starts at Acts 4:32, as follows:

And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own, but they had all things common. Neither was there any among them that lacked, for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles’ feet. And distribution was made unto every man according as he had need. And Joses, who by the apostles was surnamed Barnabas, (which is, being interpreted, The son of consolation,) a Levite, and of the country of Cyprus, Having land, sold it, and brought the money, and laid it at the apostles’ feet.

Acts 4:32; 34-37

It says they all had their things in common. The apostles’ community had set its rules, and Ananias and Saphira broke the rules by trying to deceive the community. People joined voluntarily, but once they had, they had to follow the rules. That is true of any just society, surely. As Gregory Paul had said, these early Christians in Acts held everything in common, so Ananias and Saphira were holding from the group some of their wealth, thereby breaking the community’s rules. They need not have become Christians so could have kept their house as their own, or sold it and disposed of their money just how they liked, but they had joined the community of Christians and so were obliged to give up all their wealth. It is justice.

Capitalist societies are not just. In the UK a lot of unemployed young people have been rioting, and not a few employed people too. Why? They have no prospects, and they have just seen politicians and bankers robbing the public purse by billions without being severely punished, or even being properly regulated. When cheating is so transparent in society people get angry. It seems that Peter got angry with Ananias and Saphira, and as the group’s enforcer, dealt with them.

Desperate to avoid the obvious crime, breaking the socialistic rules of the apostles’ community, Christians like to emphasize that Peter in quizzing Ananias wanted to know why he had lied that they had given all the proceeds of their sale when they had not. The crime was lying, they say, not the deed of withholding. Well naturally withholding necessitated lying but breaking the community’s rule was the primary crime and the reason for the consequent lying. But Peter does not ask Saphira why she lied when she arrived a while later. He says:

Tell me whether ye sold the land for so much? And she said, Yea, for so much.

The Christian lawyers justify capitalism by justifying cheating, though lying is a capital crime in God’s eyes, it seems. Well capitalism depends on both for one necessitates the other. It is quite true that many people have tried to be honest dealers while practising capitalism, but ultimately it is impossible. Christian bankers, politicians and lawyers prove it, all too transparently, and, in the end, the oppressed masses will not put up with it.

The political idea of socialism might not have arisen until the nineteenth century, but it is an ancient economic system, and unarguably the one that the first Christians adopted!

Ancient

For most of the dark ages, so called because of the absence of learning brought about by the victory of Christianity, people lived in misery largely because of their poverty, not because they had ideas beyond their station. Peasants knew their place in the social system, and even in the nineteenth century, the wife of the Bishop of Armagh was going to make sure the little scallywags at Sunday school knew it:

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.

All things bright and beautiful, Mrs C F Alexander

Most people were effectively slaves throughout the time of the Feudal system. They had a notional freedom, but in practice were tied to their lord and master and the bit of his land he allotted to the peasant to pay him for his otherwise corvée service to the manor. As Mrs Alexander wrote, God had “ordered their estate”, and few villeins entertained any idea of getting on in the world.

Some however, did, and especially after the millennium year (1000 AD) when the parousia did not happen and Christ failed to appear as the bishops had been promising for centuries. Thereafter, some people objected to their propaganda (Catholic lies—the original meaning of the word), many of them in the south of France, in Languedoc. They were Cathars and Vaudois, and preached spontaneously against Catholicism as being a Satanic plot. The Church organized a crusade against them, massacring and scattering them, then set up the Inquisition to pursue the scattered remains throughout Europe, calling them witches, and projecting on to them the accusation of being Satanic that the witches had originally pinned on the Catholic clergy. As the Church won, it is witches who are now remembered as Satanic.

The Cathars and Waldenses were the first Protestants and the first capitalists, for many had to travel around earning what living they could as craftsmen and tinkers. Their preaching against Catholicism inspired people like Wycliffe and Tyndall, and the Lollards. They also motivated the peasantry to think strange thoughts, thoughts that God had not ordered everyone’s place, and that human beings need not be tied to the land. In England in 1381, the peasants revolted. A Lollard preacher, John Ball, taught quite a different message from that which the serfs held habitually and unquestioningly until then:

When Adam delved, and Eve span, who was then a gentleman? From the beginning all men were created equal by nature, and servitude had been introduced by the unjust and evil oppression of men, against the will of God, who, if it had pleased Him to create serfs, surely in the beginning of the world would have appointed who should be a serf and who a lord.

These dissenting Christians were reading the bible for themselves, and Ball plainly meant that God had not made any such prescription in Genesis, so the presumed order of society had been arranged by the nobility and the clergy hand in hand for their own benefit, and contrary to God’s intention.

Primeval Human Groups

Adam and Eve in the bible had willingly chosen to disobey God, but the notion of God had sociologically come from the interpretation of their societies that early humans, just awakening into consciousness, found themselves living in. These small human groups were essentially classless. Leaders were treated with somewhat greater respect than ordinary members of the group, because they had to take decisions on the group’s behalf, but otherwise they barely differed from the others, living, sharing and caring equally with them.

A child was born into the group, and knew nothing else. When they were ill or hungry, it was the group that looked after them. The purpose of the leader was to keep them united when they were attacked by a predator or a rival group, so every member looked to others for defense and security too. And that was just how they saw it as they died. The group always provided for them and protected them from birth until death. It was, to them, as much part of Nature as the rising of the sun. It seemed eternal because it was in existence when they were born, it still was when they were dying, and so it had always been. The group was led by one member, the most competent of them to do it, and particularly good leaders were remembered, and became identified with the group first as a totem, then an ancestor or a father. In time the benefits of the tribe transferred to a mythical founding leader, who thereby became a god.

So the imagined benefits of the supernatural god or God were inherited from the benefits of the primitive tribe. God is a supernaturalized society, but the society he represents was the egalitarian society of early human beings, a society that made everyone feel secure and safe, and was ever present.

Freedom in Paradise

We can see now, that there was no way that this early simple society could have sustained a division into “haves” and “have nots”. Had it done so, the “have nots” would have upped and left—there could have been nothing in it for them, and the “haves” would have had to become “have nots” to survive. They would have had to do their own delving and spinning. This is the stage when the original hypothetical social contract that founded the original group could have been abandoned, had the social contract been violated.

Were the people in this early human group free? They were and they were not! They benefitted from the help offered by others in the group, and they in turn had to help the others. So they were not free to do as they liked. They had a social duty to perform in return for the social benefits they received. But all of them could rely on the others, for any rogue or antisocial member would have been disciplined by the rest, perhaps even being killed in extreme cases, as chimpanzees do, but also being driven out where they were likely to die unless a nearby group took them in. Members of the groups felt secure, and could participate in evicting a poor or old leader who was no longer effective, thereby participating in a rough and ready democracy—but they were obligated to the group by duty.

Here is the natural source of the ideas of positive and negative freedom. Negative freedom meant that none of the group members felt enslaved or confined. None could be made to do more than their fair share for the group, and could withdraw from the group if they felt some caucus in it was asking too much of them. But they were able to make their own contribution to the group, just the same as the others did, and also could help in replacing an ineffective leader. So, they had positive freedom. True freedom is the right balance of the two of them, and that is what the primitive human group had.

Modern

Overdoing negative freedom breaks down the cohesiveness of the group. People may be able to do a lot of things they could not do while they felt more obligated to the group, but they also feel that the help of others was waning, leading to their growing anxiety and insecurity.

For long periods in the dark and middle ages, though their lords could be oppressive, people could not imagine what freedom was. Equally, though poor, and liable to have hard times in bad seasons through cold, drought or flood, the normal working year was short, and people had a lot of free time waiting for crops to grow, and saints days for merriment. They also had the same strong feeling of community that the primitive group had. In short, the anxiety they felt was real, through poverty and providence, but was not generally social. Social anguish has grown steadily in the twentieth century along with the collapse of caring society into greed and exploitation.

People are feeling the absence of the kindness that close groups always had as a compensation for the random hardships of living—positive freedom. Instead they want more negative freedom—with its attendant failing cohesion of society.

Therefore, no longer love this world or its military service, for Scripture’s authority declares that “whoever is a friend of this world is an enemy of God”. Whoever serves as a soldier with the sword is the servant of death, and whenever he sheds his own blood or that of another, this will be his reward—he will be regarded as guilty either because he caused his own death or because of his sin.

S Paulinus of Nola (c 355-431 AD)

Paulinus was a very rich man, of the Senatorial class with large latifundia in Southern Italy, Gaul and Spain, who quite unlike most modern rich Christians, did what Christ told the rich they had to do to be saved, gave away his vast fortune when he converted to Christianity, except for enough to start an ascetic community. He was made Bishop of Nola (409-431 AD) in Campagna, Italy, becoming a senior bishop of the Church responsible for several important synods.

Clint Witchalls writes in the UK Independent that a woman and author of two books on childcare, made two girls and a 21 year old woman, whom she had brought from Nigeria, toil for 21 hours a day in her London home and tortured them when their work did not satisfy her. The were her slaves. The youngest girl was 11 years old. She was Lucy Adeniji, an evangelical Christian. The judge sentenced her to eleven years in jail, describing her as…

…an evil woman. I have no doubt you have ruined these two girls’ lives. They will suffer from the consequences of the behaviour you meted out to them for the rest of their lives.

Evil is a loaded word whether used as a noun or an adjective. It relates to the work of the Devil, implying wickedness beyond redemption. In modern American usage it implies that nothing less than death is a suitable punishment. For Bush, the Evil Empire had to be bombed into submission. Its evilness justified the killing and destruction, and so it was that a million or so, mainly innocent Iraqis died. The Taliban in Afghanistan are evil, so they can be bombed in the same way, and pilotless drones can penetrate into Pakistan—another evil place for many Americans—killing innocents, and sometimes an intended target, if we believe that the innocents are not intended as targets.

Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, argues in Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty, that the term evil is unscientific and unhelpful. “Evil” is not an explanation of wrongdoing. Science provides a more satisfactory explanation for evil and that explanation is lack of empathy. Evil is “empathy erosion”. People who lack empathy see others as mere objects. Baron-Cohen writes:

Empathy is our ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling, and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion.

Baron-Cohen has found that empathy, like IQ, is normally distributed in human populations—that is, it is a bell curve. Most people have a typically human level of empathy—the peak of the bell shape, and less have greater and lesser levels of it. At the extremes, few people have none or excessive amounts of it. Using standard deviation from the mean, the curve can be split into six sections, and these Baron-Cohen lists as the degrees of empathy. Using a questionnaire, everyone can be classified on the EC (Empathy Coefficient) scale. People with zero degrees of empathy will be at one end of the bell curve and those with six degrees of empathy at the other end.

Being at the ends of the curve—extremely high or extremely low empathy scores—does not have to be pathological. Someone with zero degrees of empathy may not be a murderer, torturer or rapist:

Someone who’s very gifted at physics and focused on doing physics might not be interacting much with other people, but they are interacting with the world of objects. They might have low empathy but it’s not interfering. In that respect it’s not pathological and they don’t need a diagnosis. They have found a perfect fit between their mind and the lifestyle that they have.

People with autism or Asperger’s syndrome are zero-positive in Baron-Cohen’s terminology—there is something positive in their lack of empathy. They have zero empathy but are drawn to patterns, regularity and consistency, and so follow rules and regulations like the patterns of civic life. Others are called “zero-negative” because they have no such positive aspects. Zero-negative people are the pathological group—people with borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder (psychopaths) and narcissistic personality disorder. They are capable of inflicting physical and psychological harm on others and are unmoved by the plight of those they hurt.

Zero degrees of empathy means you have no awareness of how you come across to others, how to interact with others, or how to anticipate their feelings or reactions. It leaves you feeling mystified by why relationships don’t work out, and it creates a deep-seated self-centredness. Other people’s thoughts and feelings are just off your radar. It leaves you doomed to do your own thing, in your own little bubble, not just oblivious of other people’s feelings and thoughts but oblivious to the idea that there might even be other points of view. The consequence is that you believe 100% in the rightness of your own ideas and beliefs, and judge anyone who does not hold your beliefs as wrong, or stupid.

Did people with these personality disorders lose their empathy or were they born that way? There is a hormonal link to empathy. One of Baron-Cohen’s studies showed that the more testosterone a foetus has in the womb, the less empathy the child will have when born. Excess testosterone correlates negatively with empathy, and testosterone is obviously more common in men than women. Men therefore score lower on empathy than women. Moreover, another study revealed four genes associated with empathy—one sex steroid gene, one gene related to social emotional behaviour and two associated with neural growth.

Even so, John Bowlby, the British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, showed that children with “insecure attachment”—a lack of opportunity to form a strong bond with a caregiver—are more at risk of delinquency, personality disorders related to lack of empathy leading to an excessive self centeredness.

Psychopaths and narcissists each are less than one per cent of the population, but many people, close to the majority, supported or at least did not oppose the big atrocities of history like the Spanish Inquisition, the Holocaust, the slave trade, Stalin’s purges, Rwandan genocide, apartheid, and so on. Beliefs seem to be a bigger cause of evil than biology. Negative propaganda spread by church or state about an outgroup thoroughly dehumanises them, leaving them open to inhuman violence. Baron-Cohen says;

Whatever your causes of loss of empathy, it’s the very same empathy circuit that would be involved when you show empathy or fail to show empathy.

So, not everyone who has low empathy will act cruelly. There is more to behavior considered as evil than a zero degree of empathy, and improving empathy by treatment does not seem to have much effect. Psychopaths are notoriously untreatable, as are children who have callousness/unemotional (CU) trait. Increasing the empathy of sex offenders is also difficult. Although zero degrees of empathy seems necessary for callousness, several additional factors and experiences also may lead to cruel or callous acts.

Nevertheless, science is beginning to unravel the mystery of why some people have less empathy than others and the implications are potentially far reaching, not least for the criminal justice system:

Empathy itself is the most valuable resource in our world. It might even have relevance for politics and politicians, so that when we try and resolve conflict, whether it’s domestic conflict or international conflict, issues about empathy might actually be useful. Given this assertion, it is puzzling that in the school curriculum empathy figures hardly at all, and in politics, business, the courts or policing it is rarely if ever on the agenda. We can see examples among our political leaders of the value of empathy, as when Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk sought to understand and befriend each other, crossing the divide in Apartheid South Africa, but the same has not yet been achieved between Israel and Palestine, or between Washington and Iraq or Afghanistan. And, for every day that empathy is not employed in such corners of the world, more lives are lost.

Simon Baron-Cohen

Baron-Cohen adds:

The hallmark of a compassionate and civilised society is that we try to understand other people’s actions, we don’t try to simply condemn them. There is even a question about whether a person that commits an awful crime should be in a prison as opposed to a hospital. When people commit crimes, there may be determinants of their behaviour which are outside their control. No one is responsible for their own genes.

The punitive right wing Christian will argue that God gave us free will, and so we are all able to make moral choices. Lack of any sense of empathy is no excuse. But it is rather like expecting someone who is red-green color blind to press the red alert button when danger threatens. There is indeed a choice, but they cannot distinguish the right one. Of course, most neocon Christians are so lacking in empathy themselves that they cannot comprehend that their perpetual habit of attacking foreign people shows their utter lack of empathetic feeling of any kind. They are zero negative—psychopaths—but think they are quite normal, even special in God’s eyes!

Empathy is like a universal solvent. Any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble. It is effective as a way of anticipating and resolving interpersonal problems, whether this is a marital conflict, an international conflict, a problem at work, difficulties in a friendship, political deadlocks, a family dispute, or a problem with the neighbour. Unlike the arms industry that costs trillions of dollars to maintain, or the prison service and legal system that cost millions of dollars to keep oiled, empathy is free. And, unlike religion, empathy cannot, by definition, oppress anyone.

Simon Baron-Cohen

Sources: the Independent and the Observer.

12 February is Darwin Day, the day when Charles Darwin was born in 1809. It commemorates Darwin, his remarkable scholarship and science in general, the methodical application of human curiosity and ingenuity to benefit us all.

Charles Darwin published his seminal book, On the Origin of Species in 1859. In it he laid out the evidence for natural selection as the mechanism behind biological evolution. The idea of evolution was already in the air. It was not evolution that Darwin discovered, but a feasible mechanism by which it could occur.

It was similar to the way even schoolchildren a hundred years ago could wonder at the way the South American and African continents seemed to fit each other like jigsaw puzzle pieces, as if the two continents had split apart and separated. It looked obvious, and geological features fitted too. But no one could figure out how massive volumes of rock—whole continents—could move. So, the theory of continental drift was pooh-poohed by many who discarded any notion that could not be explained.

Now it is accepted, just as evolution is, unless you are a Christian fundamentalist, because it has an explanation—plate tectonics, the fact that the continents are floating on molten masma. Darwin similarly allowed evolution to be accepted because he had an explanation for it.

Darwin proposed that all living beings—including humans—were related! Life is one enormous family—a kinunity! It means we are all descended from a common ancestor, far back in time. Though the idea that all of life are linked by family bonds sounds very spiritual or religious to some, the Christian fundamentalists want to be personally created by God, and not be in a mighty living family, even though they could continue to believe that this familial arrangement of life was God’s own doing! It does not actually match what their real God, the inerrant bible, says.

Religious fundamentalists believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis, so they oppose evolution. Genesis has God specifically making Adam out of earth and Eve out of Adam, and it must be so, even though it is manifestly a myth, because the inerrant bible is… well, inerrant! However absurd the myths in it, like the three mile deep flood, the talking ass, the star that moves and stops and starts and ends over a stable, the earth stopping from rotating, the contradictions, etc, etc, it is inerrant, full stop. Humans were specially created out of red mud, and evolution must be wrong—not just wrong, evil! Yet a silent majority of Christians find nothing in evolution to object to. A Chicago Lutheran pastor, the Rev Steve Swanson, says:

It’s hard to believe that fundamentalism has taken such deep roots in our culture, but it has.

A Presbyterian pastor adds that religious believers think science will destroy their faith, but that scientists think religious belief interferes with the teaching and practice of science:

It’s important to have a dialogue and show these fears aren’t necessary.

Sadly, the religious opposition to evolution shows that it is indeed impeding the teaching of it, and even some pastors are alarmed by that. The consequences of turning away from science could be disastrous to the future of our civilization. The Rev Swanson thought it was important to confront the impression that creationism is necessary for Christian belief, and that all pastors believe in it. Christians had to be loud and clear in pronouncing that creationism is not science and also that it is bad religion. Unless they do, people will think creationism is necessary for Christian belief.

It ought to be plain that, given that God meant to transmit into human minds the reality of creation 2500 years ago, it could not be done. If it were done, it had to be in terms that people this long ago could comprehend. It had to be done in myths, for that is how people thought at that time. Now the believer can call them allegories or metaphors, if they think the word “myth” is demeaning.

Christians who remain puzzled, can look up Michael Zimmerman’s the Clergy Letter Project, which has collected 12,000 signatures of vicars who oppose creationism. They think intelligent design or creationism is not science and cannot be taught as science in public schools, as American creationists want.