Dislike of Guns

In the wake of the Colorado theater shootings, I posted a Facebook link to an article about gun control, quoting a comment from Anne Lamott that such disasters are never stopped by citizens carrying guns. I was surprised when I received many comments on my posting--even some from people I didn't know--mostly opposing gun control. I added this comment:

It seems that many people have much stronger feelings on the subject than I do.

This isn't a subject I've researched, because it isn't of primary importance to me, but my impression is that many of the countries with the lowest crime rates have much stricter gun control than ours. Maybe I'm terribly naive, but I like to see the signs (like those on the doors to the building where I work) forbidding weapons on the property.

I think my attitude comes from the fact that guns have never been a visible part of the social circles I've lived in. If any of my family or friends had a gun, it was for hunting, and I thought of that as a strange, unpleasant, and dangerous hobby. My father served in the Army as a conscientious objector during World War II, and I did the same during the Viet Nam war. I no longer have religious scruples about possibly killing someone, but with no expectation of an afterlife, I value life very highly. I think shooting someone would be a terrible last resort for defending someone's life--certainly not something to do to protect property. Maybe I've lived a sheltered life, but I've never felt that I needed to have a gun to protect myself or my family.

I doubt that the intent of the second amendment was to deter oppressive state or U.S. governments. As I understand it, the militia was intended as a defense against foreign governments, outlaw gangs, and native Americans. I don't think we'd stand a chance against the U.S. military, but I think our government, as foolish as it often is, is far from what I would call oppressive.

Not to say it could never happen, but in our current situation I can't imagine that any law enforcement officer or military unit would attack my family. I know that innocent people have been killed by law officers, but I doubt that there are many situations in which it would be wise to use a gun to protect someone from a police officer.

I can understand that people who live in areas where violent crime is common might feel it worthwhile to carry a gun for self-defense, but that isn't true for me. In my situation, I feel safer without one.

Favorite Bible Translation

My favorite bible for my last couple of decades as a Christian was the Good News Bible, aka Today's English Version. I liked it because it's a good translation, not a paraphrase like The Message. I appreciated its modern, idiomatic English, which avoids the sometimes awkward phrasing of other translations.

I found that the readability of the GNB made it a good choice for reading aloud, and its clear, contemporary phrasing helped me read with a more open mind because it didn't trigger the pre-digested interpretations that I associated with the wording of more literal translations. I was often asked what version I was reading from, but few other people seemed to appreciate it like I did.

At the time, I wondered why it wasn't more popular. Now I think that may be because it makes the text so clear that people find it unsupportive of their preferred interpretations.

The Good News Bible is now on-line.

Evolution Denial

An article in this month's Christianity Today reported on the resignation of a respected theology professor brought about by his acceptance of evolution. It reminded me of the many years during which I was a Christian embarrassed by the common evangelical denial of evolution. I had trouble understanding why God didn't teach these obviously committed believers that their dogma was wrong.

I left this comment on the CT article:

When Christians insist that the beliefs of other Christians must match their own, they put themselves the head of the church. When Christians deny evolution, they declare that their understanding of nature (based on their understanding of the Bible) is better than that of people who have spent their lives studying nature. Such arrogance is strong evidence that it is human nature, not the Holy Spirit, that guided these people to their "truth."

Why People Matter

Recently I made a comment in an e-mail note expressing my concern about how people are treated. My correspondent responded with some interesting questions:

Why would it matter how people are treated in a universe without God?
Why should we help other human beings at all if there is no God?

I think the key question underlying both of these is, “Why do you care?”

I can think of three reasons why it matters to me how other people are treated: it is part of human nature, my training reinforced it, and my own self-interest requires it.

Nature

My concern for other people is natural—instinctive.

Like all other humans, I am a social animal. I am by nature inclined to enjoy the companionship and society of other people. There is a wide spectrum of extroversion and introversion, and I'm very much an introvert, but I still have a very strong desire to have close relationships, and I even enjoy meeting new people.

As a part of my innate sociability, my emotions resonate with those of other people. I care about how they feel, because I experience some of what they feel. Knowing how various situations affect me, I experience empathy with people who are in similar circumstances. I sympathize with people who are suffering.

Only sociopathic people lack empathy. It is a part of mental health, unrelated to religion or lack of religion. Mothers love their children and everyone cares about their friends, regardless of their worldview or the kind of gods they worship. Many psychologists have studied caring relationships, and some intriguing studies have found that a number of primate species demonstrate compassion, indicating that the capacity for empathy evolved even before our species did.

The fact that empathy is natural doesn't imply that people will never mistreat each other. Anger and the desire for revenge are emotions as natural as love and compassion. People who harm others often regret doing so, however, because mistreating other people is contrary to the kinder aspects of our nature.

Why does it matter how other people are treated? Because we relate to other people and share their emotions. Why should we help other people? Because we know how it feels to receive help when we need it.

Nurture

I was trained to care.

I grew up in a family that valued compassion. Before I was born, my parents chose to serve as houseparents in a home for orphans. Seeing the needs of the children they cared for, my father made a career in social work, in the field of child welfare.

I absorbed the concern for others that my parents taught and demonstrated. I took seriously the teaching of the Bible and my church that love for others—even enemies—is the greatest virtue. My family, my friends, my teachers, and the books I read all reinforced my innate tendency to care about other people.

Self-interest

I know that it benefits me to love other people.

As a Christian, I often heard teachers say that we love because God loved us first. With a long background of teachings like that, I was a little surprised to discover how much I still loved and cared for people when I found myself no longer believing in God.

As I pondered this discovery, I realized not only that my concern for others is natural, but that it benefits me in many ways. I depend on other people for most of my needs. I don't think I would survive for very long if there were no other people around—nor would I enjoy surviving alone. I am not an island—either physically or emotionally.

Because of my dependence on other people and my friendships with them, I care about their welfare. I want their lives to be secure and enjoyable, and I want to contribute to their happiness. I want to treat them in the ways I want to be treated.

I want everyone to be treated well—not just my friends and family. People who are treated badly behave badly. When people suffer extreme injustice, they grow desperate for revenge. In their anger, they often strike out at anyone and everyone, with little regard for whether or not their victims are actually responsible for their suffering. If everyone were happy, no one would be a terrorist.

Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama said,

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion; if you want to be happy, practice compassion.

I agree.


Influence of religion

I have heard people suggest that former Christians care for other people primarily because of their religious background. Although I don't deny that I was influenced by my training, the idea that it is responsible for my humanitarian values is not supported by my observations.

First, I found that some of my values changed dramatically when I left religion, while others remained very much the same. This indicates to me that I'm not merely a product of my upbringing or my religious traditions.

Second, my Christian teachers and role models taught me to love everyone, but I find that the strength of my passion for the welfare of other people varies, depending on the level of my relationship with those people. The people I know the best and spend the most time with—my family and friends—are the ones I love the most. As I observe my reactions to news stories and e-mails, I see that I tend to care more about acquaintances and even strangers I encounter than I do about people I have no direct contact with at all. I care more about Americans than I do about Asians.

This spectrum of concern is not what my religious teachers promoted, but is consistent with the idea that empathy evolved as a result of the benefits of empathetic behavior. Caring for one's own family and tribe is likely to have been much more beneficial than caring for strangers who had different languages and customs.

I see plenty of evidence that other people, religious or not, share this pattern of caring for others.

What matters most

Nature, nurture, and self-interest all factor into my concern for other people. Those explanations of my motivation for that concern may not be the whole story, but the completeness of my understanding isn't essential to the truth of my feelings. In the end, it doesn't really matter much why I care about other people. I do care, and that's what matters.

Scientific Study of the Supernatural

This morning I found an excellent paper by Dr. Yonatan Fishman, an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York, titled “Can Science Test Supernatural Worldviews?”. Fishman argues that no field of knowledge is inaccessible to scientific study. He points out that this contradicts the idea of "non-overlapping magesteria" that is often used to exempt supernatural concepts from rational analysis, as well as to exclude Intelligent Design and other religious ideas from science curricula.

This is something I’ve thought about many times and wanted to write about, but Fishman’s paper covers the subject with much more rigor and detail than I’d have been able to supply. Here are some quotes (with page numbers):

9 The findings of modern neuroscience strongly support the dependence of perception, cognition, emotion, memory, decision making, and personality on the function of the physical brain.

11 In general, most believers hold that gods, spirits, and paranormal phenomena have real effects on the world and on their lives. These effects should be testable by the methods of science.

12 The history of science has been characterized by the progressive ‘naturalization of the world’, providing non-supernatural alternative explanations for phenomena that were once thought to be explicable only by appeal to supernatural agents.

17 Demarcating ‘science’ from ‘pseudoscience’ or ‘natural’ from ‘supernatural’ is not only problematic but unnecessary. The crucial question is not, Is it science? or Is it supernatural?, but rather, Is there any good reason to believe that claim X is true?

17 If the fundamental aim of science is the pursuit of truth - to uncover, to the extent that humans are capable, the nature of reality - then science should go wherever the evidence leads. If the evidence were to strongly suggest the existence of supernatural phenomena, then so be it.

17 Naturalism is not a premise or presupposition of science - it is a conclusion of science, albeit a tentative one, based upon the available evidence to date.

18 The best explanation for why there has been so far no convincing, independently verifiable evidence for supernatural phenomena, despite honest and methodologically sound attempts to verify them, is that these phenomena probably do not exist. Indeed, as discussed earlier, absence of evidence, where such evidence is expected to be found after extensive searching, is evidence of absence.

18 Contrary to the positions expressed [in the 2005 Dover Pennsylvania school district trial] by Judge Jones, the AAAS, and the NAS, the reason why supernatural or religious claims, such as those of ID/Creationism, do not belong in science classes is not because they have supernatural or religious content, but rather because there is either no convincing evidence to support them or science has debunked them.

Having Opinions

Another day, another blog. Today's find is Massimo Pigliucci's Rationally Speaking. In his January 8, 2008 posting on Neil Postman's recommendations for how to watch TV news, he mentions something I've often thought about and never heard anyone say before:

“Reduce by one third the number of opinions you feel obligated to have.” What they mean here is that it is better to have fewer, but better informed, opinions, and that it is simply ridiculous to expect to have an informed opinion on every major political or social issue.

I'm often disgusted by on-line opinion polls that ask questions of fact, like "What caused Benazir Bhutto's death?" My mental response is "Who cares what I think? Who cares what anyone thinks? What matters is the truth!"

For many years, I've been reluctant to support political candidates or express my thoughts on public issues because I felt that I knew far too little about the person or issue to be able to make an informed judgment. In my mind, some of the most important issues are also among the most complex. Immigration policy and health care financing come to mind. Many very intelligent and knowledgeable people have struggled with these things, without producing clear solutions. How can I presume to have the answers?

I'm understandably skeptical of people who express strong opinions on issues that are far outside their field of expertise. I think Bertrand Russell said it well:

The scepticism that I advocate amounts only to this: (1) that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain; (2) that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and (3) that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment.

Thinking about Heaven

Scott Carson makes some thoughtful comments in his blog about a recent Time Magazine interview with Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright on the subject of concepts of heaven.

I was interested in Bishop Wright's comments because they were much like what I believed about heaven when I was a Christian. (I once shocked a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses by agreeing with them that Jesus will rule on the earth.)

As I read Wright's interview, it occurred to me that ruling the new earth sounds like a recipe for an eternal Excedrin headache. It makes Scott's facetious remark about eternally milking the cows sound idyllic.

Scott's suggestion is "Don't worry about what it's like; it just is."

I think the point he's making is to not try to project too much of what this life is like into the next one. If we weren't at all concerned about what heaven is like, we couldn't say anything about it at all. After all, it would certainly be a bummer if heaven turned out to be like the popular image of hell.

So what can we say about heaven? To me, that's the tough question. I can't come up with a plausible description. What that says to me is that I can't conceive of an afterlife.