No Wonder Why...

So I've been crazy busy lately, and part of the reason is a repair three-man contractor crew I am working with.

I've gone into some large machinery, inspected it, and marked with paint marker all of the areas which need to be addressed; putting instruction repair codes by arrows pointing to what needs to be repaired.  So I've made it about as obvious as it can be, aside from me pointing out each repair spot with my own finger in front of their eyeballs.  What could be more simple, right?

Well, one of the guys is too big to fit into the machines, so he can only do cleaning on the outside.

The other two have now been in three different machines and have missed multiple repair locations in each one, and made repairs that were not necessary in other locations.

How is this relevant to my normal Foolish jive?  These guys are fairly religious, and of the Christian variety.  The leader of the crew has an "I don't need to be here" attitude.  The second man, whose name is Israel, is a decent worker, but obviously lacks in attention to detail.  The big guy has tattoos including praying hands, a large cross, and the Lord's Prayer; and, as I learned soon after his arrival, has been permanently banned from his hometown bar for brawling.

If these guys can't even pay enough attention to look at an arrow pointing them to an area of interest, when they are being paid to do so, what's the likelihood that they are actually going to sit down and really figure out the truth (or lack thereof) of the Bible?  With believers like this, it's no wonder why Christianity will persist for many, many decades beyond now.  I just hope the numbers will continue to wane.

No Rest for the Wicked

13-14 hour days, seven days a week, doesn't really seem to be conducive to making blog posts...  I wonder why that is?  :-)

The Revolution Will Not Be Biblicized

I'm still here, but work is chaotic to say the least.  I'll be struggling to get my weekly post done for The Wise Fool.  But I'll pass on this info...

The May 2, 2012 USA Today had a pie chart on belief strength in the USA.  40% claimed to be strongly religious.  Get this: 32% percent claimed to be non-religious.  The 40% obviously could be a blend of all religions based on the framing of the question, so it could be Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, etc.  The remainder 28% were "moderately religious."  The times are changing.

Also, I heard a stat on NPR's All Things Considered(?) today... non-religious is the fastest growing category of religious status.

My friends, the revolution will not be Biblicized....

A Vision of the Future

This post is part of the History of the Devil series from Chapter 1: Good and Evil as Religious Ideas.

Now, over one hundred and ten years since Paul Carus wrote his book, with advancements in linguistics, archeology, genetics, cosmology, etc., it seems that we have metaphorically eaten the forbidden fruit of knowledge, and our eternal expulsion from the Garden of Eden of naivety, with its selfish love affair of personal deities, is only a matter of time.  What will remain?  Carus' vision still saw a place for religion:

"...there are freethinkers who declare that Atheism will supersede all the different conceptions of God. But this is not probable.  The Monistic tendencies of the age will not destroy, but purify and elevate religion. ... the religious ideas of the present time are symbols.  Taken in their literal meaning, they are untenable, but understood in their symbolical nature they are seeds from which a purer conception of the truth will grow."  HOD, P2, Paul Carus

Carus prophesied the emergence of a new type of religion, a better religion, which would grow out of the body of faith, once it had shed the chaff of its dogmatic, literal constraints.  To him, wide scale Atheism was not feasible, as he explained:

A state of irreligion in which mankind would adopt and publicly teach a doctrine of Atheism is an impossibility.  Atheism is a negation, and negations cannot stand, for they have sense only as confronted with the positive issues which they reject.  HOD, P3, Paul Carus

In a sense, Carus' words are right.  Atheism is really just a negation.  However, there are definitely anecdotes of public teaching of an Atheist doctrine, if you can use the term "Atheist doctrine" in any kind of meaningful way.  For example, I had a physics professor who wouldn't hesitate to mock the concept of God in front of the whole class if she was given a cue.

So unlike Carus, I do think that an Atheist doctrine could be part of the standardized school curriculum, but I would never endorse it, because if that were to happen, Atheism would truly become just like the religions it was denying validity.

In some sense, I think protagonists/antagonists, like my professor, play their little roles in changing the culture, but this kind of challenge and change should not be done on a mandate basis.  For starters, such a mandate would be unconstitutional, akin to the government sponsoring a national religion, even if it is more of an anti-religion.  Beyond that, I feel that spirituality is something to be worked out on a personal level, and any spoon-fed source of it, be it the classroom or the clergy, should be highly scrutinized.  Rather, the job of educators in that arena should be to enhance critical thinking skills, to present the facts, and to present the unknowns.

Besides, we shouldn't have to teach Atheism, any more than we have to teach that there is not a magical, pink, glittery, rocket-propelled hedgehog in orbit around Neptune.  Atheism comes from our understanding and perception of the world.  As such, in our modern era with our level of scientific understanding, some people will naturally choose Atheism.

At the same time, other people will understand or perceive some invisible agent, and will choose religion and/or spirituality, regardless of what is taught in our classrooms.  Spirituality will persist, even when all formal, doctrinized religions are proven wrong, or proven to be valid only metaphorically.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, if we can harness our spiritual side for creativity, mutual understanding, and a greater moral impetus.

As opposed to indoctrinating the negation of Atheism, Carus had a different concept of where our spirituality would turn...

Yet our present anthropomorphic view of God, briefly called Anthropotheism, which as a rule conceives him as an infinitely big individual being, will have to yield to a higher view in which we shall understand that the idea of a personal God is a mere simile.  God is much more than a person.  When we speak of God as a person, we ought to be conscious of the fact that we use an allegory which, if it were taken literally, can only belittle him.  The God of the future will not be personal, but superpersonal.  HOD, P3, Paul Carus

A superpersonal God?  What does that even mean?  We'll explore that next time...

Where We Were, and Are

This post is part of the History of the Devil series from Chapter 1: Good and Evil as Religious Ideas.

Reading an old book is often like being an archeologist; digging into a layer of time buried by the sediment of past eras, and discovering a little about the way people lived back then.  While real archeology offers mainly views of where people lived, what they ate, and other factors which are inferred from the physical remains, old books offer an explicit peek at what people actually thought in the days gone by.  Those ideas can be peculiar to that era based on the culture, or they can be transcendent of that era based on the common experiences which are replicated today in one form or another.  The theology/philosophy of Paul Carus has both of these aspects.

Will Monism eliminate the idea of the Devil in order to make God the One and All? Or will it abolish both God and the Devil, to leave room only for a world of matter in motion? Will the future of mankind be, as M. Guyau prophesies, a period in which religion will disappear and give way to irreligion?  HOD, P2, Paul Carus

It is easy to imagine how someone today could be asking the same questions, but Carus was writing back 1900 C.E., in a time which is considered to be the "Golden Age of Freethought."  By then, Bible and comparative religion studies had rendered Christianity to be of questionable veracity, the theory of evolution had presented a conceptually feasible origin of our species, and astronomy was revealing our true place in the universe.  While most of the public was still religious, there was a buzz, a growing excitement among those bold enough to ponder the ramifications of this relatively new information, and they figured that the world was on the cusp of developing a new paradigm; but exactly what that would be was still unknown.

Now, over a hundred and ten years later, I think we are where Carus thought we would be within a few decades of the questions he had posed.  Our theological future is still unknown, but there is an accelerating decay from the Biblical dualism of the old era.

Atheism is gaining momentum.  Many decades ago, atheists were largely "unnatural," because faith was still so ubiquitous among the population that it took individual reasoning to overcome the mass cultural perspective of religion.  Now, atheism is a sizable enough minority that there are many atheists who were brought up without the trappings of faith, or who found that Christianity simply did not "work" for them and so they have dropped it for what seemed to be another viable option: no faith at all.

Others who are disenfranchised with divine duality delve into different formats of spirituality. Some define their own paths.  Some have become enchanted with Eastern-influenced versions Monism; either that there is but one God (who is more of the deist persuasion) or, more usually, that God is in everything and/or is everything.

Today, within some mainstream denominations of Christianity, while God persists, Satan has become a figurative or metaphorical character representing our reprobate desires within (as is possibly suggested in Peter's episode of rejecting Jesus' plans in Matthew 16:22-23 and Mark 8:32-33).  In some denominations, while Heaven persists, Hell is no longer a physical place with perpetually burning fires of torture, but has morphed into either a place of eternal separation from God or a state of annihilation.  O divine wrath, where is thy sting? (Matthew 3:7-10, Luke 3:7-9)

Of course, any time traditional ideas are challenged, there will be a faction which digs in, conservatively clinging to the past, willfully oblivious of the evidence against them.  We see this in the resurgence of Christian Fundamentalism.  I wager that we still have about a decade, maybe even two, before Fundy-lunacy reaches its peak and begins its painfully slow decline.  The shift will come primarily from the younger generations, who will be less willing to take such hard line stances against reality, or will be lured by more-tolerant, more-metaphorical denominations of the faith, or by the charismatic mega-churches with better religi-tainment, if they remain "Christian" at all.

Restriction of knowledge and cultural isolation are the strongest forces to abate the inclination toward Christian apostasy.  These strategies are increasingly difficult to execute in our modern world.  That is why I predict that within three decades, Christian Fundamentalism in the United States will become highly regional; down to specific smaller cities and towns, like Decatur, Alabama, as well as certain rural swaths, like the Appalachian Mountains.

I'll go into some of Carus' answers to those questions next time...

A Dance with Duality

This post is part of the History of the Devil series from Chapter 1: Good and Evil as Religious Ideas.

Carus begins with this:

THIS WORLD OF OURS is a world of opposites. There is light and shade, there is heat and cold, there is good and evil, there is God and the Devil.

The dualistic conception of nature has been a necessary phase in the evolution of human thought.  HOD, P1, Paul Carus

Dualism, in a nutshell, is the concept of a world of opposites, and usually implies or explicitly states that when you have one option, there will be opposite option.  A Christian trite and weak explanation for the evil in this world is the dualist concept that freewill requires both the ability to do good and to do evil.  Don't worry.  Carus is no believer of dualism

Upon close inspection, it is clear that the concept of Dualism does not actually line up reality, at least not most of it.  Physicists will tell you that there is not light and dark, but light and the absence of light, and there is not heat and cold, but heat and the absence of heat.

What is the opposite of green?  You may think back to the color wheel for a conceptual understanding, but "green" is really nothing more than electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths of around 520–570 nanometers.  So what is the opposite of 520–570 nanometers?

What is the opposite of God?  Certainly, one could say that Satan opposes God, at least in the way that Christianity often frames the relationship, but Satan is far from being God's opposite.  For example, let's take God's alleged characteristic of omnipresence and consider its true opposite.  The opposite being present everywhere is being present nowhere.  While I don't believe Satan to be present anywhere, the common Christian thought is that there is nowhere where Satan isn't trying to ensnare souls.  Christianity has an omnipresent concept of Satan, at least for the realm of earth.

Dualism fails in our reality of continuous, and sometimes discontinuous (quantum), spectrums of manifested matter and energy.  Not every relationship is polar.  In fact, very few are.  Dualism only works as a metaphor, an extremely simplified model.  That said, even primitive models can be useful, as long as we never forget that they are just tools.

Unfortunately, when religions get to the stage of conceptualizing dualism, it is not considered a model, but rather an actuality.  Carus goes on to explain the "necessary phase" in our development coming to be like so:

But the principle of unity dominates the development of thought. Man tries to unify his conceptions in a consistent and harmonious Monism. Accordingly, while the belief in good spirits tended towards the formation of the doctrine of Monotheism, the belief in evil spirits led naturally to the acceptance of a single supreme evil deity, conceived as embodying all that is bad, destructive, and immoral.  HOD, P1, Paul Carus

Interestingly enough, the Judeo-Christian faith is an example where we can see this evolution to dualism in action.  The God of the Old Testament originally wielded the forces of both good and evil, ultimately for His conception of the greater good, but the New Testament largely purges God of those evil roles, making Satan their supreme owner instead.

Christianity usually holds that the Serpent in the Garden of Eden was Satan, despite the obvious clues to the contrary.  With that perspective, they miss the evolution completely, even though the Scripture is often explicitly contrary to a dualist interpretation.

There are several incidents which come to mind to support this evolution to Christian dualism, but for the sake of brevity, I'll leave you with one potent example.  In Deuteronomy 13:1-3, we find:

If a prophet, or one who foretells by dreams, appears among you and announces to you a sign or wonder, and if the sign or wonder spoken of takes place, and the prophet says, “Let us follow other gods” (gods you have not known) “and let us worship them,” you must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer. The LORD your God is testing you to find out whether you love him with all your heart and with all your soul. NIV

Right there, in black and white (wink), in the Old Testament God tells us that He will send false prophets to lure the Israelites away from worshiping Him; tempting them to sin and testing their faithfulness to Him.

Now, in the New Testament, in James 1:13-14 we find:

When tempted, no one should say, "God is tempting me." For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He tempt anyone; but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. NIV

So instead of God tempting people in the New Testament, Satan gets that job, as we see in 1 Corinthians 7:5:

Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. NIV

The History of the Devil - Post Index

This is the index post for the History of the Devil series. I'll put my posts under the appropriate chapter headings.


The History of the Devil
and the Idea of Evil
from the Earliest Times to the Present Day

By Paul Carus
1900 C.E.

About the author.

Chapter 1: Good and Evil as Religious Ideas

• A Dance with Duality
• Where We Were, and Are
• A Vision of the Future
• The Superpersonal God

Chapter 2: Devil Worship

• The Origin of Religion
• Functional Gods of the Natives
• Human Sacrifice and the Gods That Call for It

Chapter 3: Ancient Egypt

Chapter 4: Accad and the Early Semites

Chapter 5: Persian Dualism

Chapter 6: Israel

Chapter 7: Brahmanism and Hinduism

Chapter 8: Buddhism

Chapter 9: The Dawn of a New Era

Chapter 10: Early Christianity

Chapter 11: The Idea of Salvation in Greece and Italy

Chapter 12: The Demonology of Northern Europe

Chapter 13: The Devil's Prime

Chapter 14: The Inquisition

Chapter 15: The Age of the Reformation

Chapter 16: The Abolition of Witch-Prosecution

Chapter 17: In Verse and Fable

Chapter 18: The Philosophical Problem of Good and Evil