Another Man's Belly Laugh

I was raised a Christian. We said grace and we went to church and my parents raised us to be civilized human beings, and when I was five I believed it all unquestioningly, because that's what everyone told me.

By the time I was ten, I had come to the conclusion that the Bible - and all the stories in it - were like Aesop's fables. They were there to tell you how to behave, and they were fine for that, but they weren't true in the sense of having actually happened.

Over the next twenty or so years, I went through a whole series of positions between between my original belief and straight atheism. I never came back to any strong sense of faith, because I never saw anything to convince me. God doesn't talk to me, and the people who claim He does don't agree with each other. Creationism made me wonder if Christians were just ignorant idiots; and Christians I knew helped me remember that they were not.

But the thing that finally convinced me that Christianity was just a human invention was the Bible. I had seen all sorts of arguments about historical inaccuracies and contradictions and moral lapses, and I decided to read it and see for myself. I expected mostly that it would not provide me with anything new one way or the other, but I figured that I owed it to myself to read it.

I started at Genesis, and finished at Revelation. I couldn't stay awake for Proverbs and Psalms, but I went through everything else. I was astonished at what I found. I had expected more of what I had encountered in Sunday School; lots of stories where God tells men what to do, men behave well or badly, and God rewards the good and punishes the evil. I had expected to run into all the issues I had seen discussed on the internet; what I did not expect was that it would sound so unlikely in itself.

It sounded like an ordinary politicial history of any other country, with power struggles and propaganda and claims of mandates and legitimacy; and with other countries intervening periodically. The Israel of the Bible is clearly not a major player in the region, and is regularly invaded. Its rulers are often short-lived, and the succession is settled by armed conflict or even one-on-one fights (assuming it's all accurate). Famine and disease are important as well; the four horsemen get a real workout.

But in the Bible, the author regularly claims that things are happening because of the will of God, even when they sound exactly like ordinary human history. Probably the best example can be found in Judges 1:19:
"And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron."

Iron chariots are quite an advantage in the technology of the time, but we are supposed to be talking about the creator of the universe. I don't think there's much I can add to that.

Of course there are miracles described, but the people who see them are clearly a credulous bunch - not unlike people today. It is way too easy to imagine the tales getting bigger in the telling. Moses, in the book of Exodus, convinces the Israelites that he is sent by God with miracles that the Pharaoh is unconvinced by... because his magicians can do the same things. They even manage the plague of frogs before failing at the plague of lice.

When I got to the New Testament I found myself back in more familiar territory. But this means that I found it far from convincing, while not being able to dismiss it. It was completely inadequate to catch up the ground lost in the Old Testament.

I invite anyone who wonders why I am not a believer to read the OT. Don't follow it through a lesson plan, or pick out verses that cover a particular topic, or whatever - just read it. By all means read annotated versions, to make sure you understand the wording and the culture, but read it as a story in itself. If you still don't at least understand my skepticism, I probably wouldn't like you anyway.

I am convinced that if a larger Jewish rebellion against the Romans had resulted in the complete loss of the Old Testament, and a version were discovered today by archaelogists, it would be dismissed by the modern church as completely unrelated or faked. No-one would believe that this was the law and the prophets that Jesus claimed he had come to fulfill.

And neither do I.

Mathematics is out to get you

Yes, there really are a lot of idiots on the roads. There aren't as many as there appear to be, but you're more likely to meet them - at least the ones that drive too fast or too slow.

Driver speeds will typically be a curve that looks a bit like a normal curve. The tails will be a rather foreshortened, because most people do drive near the speed limit. The average is probably a little bit over the limit, at least on roads that are clear enough to do it.

But who are you going to meet? Suppose you drive for an hour on a freeway. Someone who drives exactly the same speed as you will stay exactly the same distance from you the whole trip. Someone who drives only 5km/h faster will need to start no more than 5km behind you, or you won't see them. But someone who drives 10km/h faster can start 10km behind. Result? You'll see twice as many of them as the 5km/h faster ones. The higher the speed, the more of them you see.

The same argument applies in reverse for slow drivers; you will catch up with more of them the slower they are. So people who drive at silly speeds will be over-represented in the drivers you see.

But it gets worse than that for those who are non-average - that is, hoons and hat-wearing Volvo drivers. Consider a line far enough from your speed to be "too fast". If you are on the average, there will be few drivers above it. You'll see them more often than other drivers, but the numbers will still be small. However, if you buy a Volvo and a hat and start driving slowly, the line will shift down, and the numbers above it will increase rapidly. The normal curve, and those like it, typically look exponential as you come in from each end, and only flatten out at the middle.

So hat-wearers will tend to encounter a great many people exceeding the speed limit - much more than they remember from their youth. And hoons will find the roads infested with slowpokes.

So remember - the more you drive at the same speed as everyone else, the fewer idiots you will encounter. And the more you drive like one kind of idiot, the more of the other sort you will have to deal with. It's just mathematics.

Absolute Power

One of the things which I have become aware of through my interest in the debate over Creationism is the large body of right-wing Christians who think it is their right to run society. These are the people who want the Ten Commandments in courtrooms, the Bible in science class, and Christianity as the official religion of the country.

It occurred to me to wonder why it was that I would be so viscerally against a takeover by these right-wing Christians, apart from their planned gutting of science. After all, I am not one of their targets - I am straight, married and faithful; I don't drink or smoke or gamble; and I work at a perfectly respectable job as a software engineer. I swear more than I should, but I am not Robinson Crusoe there.

It took me a while to put my finger on it. Christianity in government creates a pervasive power structure that emphasizes faith, and discourages questioning of authority. Intellectual stifling aside, this is ripe for exploitation by the people that absolute power corrupts; and ripe for misdirection by plain human wrong-headedness. It is an amplifier, and although it talks publically about amplifying the good, it is not adept at determining what actually *is* good.

Its past is littered with holy wars, inquisitions, witch-trials; and at a smaller scale bizarre cults and even sexual abuse scandals that have stayed hidden because of the authority of the perpetrators or the risk of discredit for the authority structure. Faced with these a Christian will tell you that they aren't really caused by the religion, and perhaps show you a verse of the Bible that forbids whatever it was. But while that may be true, the fact is that large numbers of Christians have been swept up in these movements. And not just despite their Christianity, but because they thought they were furthering the cause.

A classic conflict between theory and practice; theoretically religion is on the side of good, but experimentally it is ineffective. Or as a well-known theologian once said: "Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them."

The instant you mention holy wars, of course, Christians will tell you about the atheist Communists and how many people they killed. Communism is also an amplifier, and it also claims to represent the good, and it also clearly fails to do so. And just as I would be prepared to fight to stop a Christian takeover, so I would be prepared to fight a Communist takeover. Or in fact a takeover by any group that wants to tell you how to think.

The particular problem with holy wars is caused by the fact that while lots of people want "Christianity" in government, they all want their own brand and are prepared to fight for it. Western democracy has learned the long and painful way that the competing demands cannot be satisfied. My own family history includes a tale of narrow escape from such religious persecution, and it is just one among countless others.

The irony of US Christians pushing for influence is that many of the colonists that came to North America were fleeing the results of their faction losing a European fight; and the founding fathers recognized this and deliberately sought to stop it happening in their new country.
Christian campaigners should think about how much their PR resembles that of the Taliban, and how undesirable the results of that have been.

I don't want Christianity in government because sooner or later it will come and demand that I choose sides on some question I have no interest in and do not think worth a fist-fight, never mind a real one. And then I will either have to kill or be killed, because all of these religious questions are life and death matters. Or it will demand that I ignore (or even support) some flagrant injustice.

I would rather fight for freedom. For myself, and for those around me. And I am immensely grateful to my ancestors, of all religions and none, who have created a society where I have not had to.