MY PROUSTIAN TRADITION WITH HOT CROSS BUNS

I ventured out in zero degree weather and put on gloves, a scarf, my Berlin fur hat, and overcoat. I got cash at the bank, computer ink at Staples, picked up our mail at the post office, and got food for the weekend – brisket of beef for an Irish corned beef and cabbage boiled meal.  I also got a box of six hot cross buns.  Every Lenten season I look forward to the appearance of hot cross buns.  As a child growing up in the Depression, I remember the occasions when my mother would stop at a Hanscom Bakery in Manhattan and my brother and I would each get a hot cross bun.  I thus pay tribute each year to my mother, not an easy person to love because of her paranoid schizophrenia, but a person with a generous heart, very caring and protective, who was my biggest fan. She encouraged my brother Roland and me to read a lot, paint a lot, and visit museums frequently. How I bless her vision of the free culture available in New York City that she found for us to enjoy – Central Park, Van Cortland Park, Crotona Park, Prospect Park, the Bronx  Zoo (free once a week for the public then). We enjoyed pizza on Mulberry street (five cents a slice).  I savored the beef pie in the Automat, slivers of roast pork from a Chinese food store on Mott Street, pastrami sandwiches on Delancy street washed down with Dr. Brown’s cream soda.  I think of my mother as possessed of the spirit of Io, the Greek cow that wandered from shore to shore always driven by an impulse to see something new.  We got to see the neighborhoods of Manhattan.  One weekend it would be Battery Park, another it would be Yorkville and treats from the German delicatessens. We would then go another week to Washington Market, then a huge collection of shops mostly Turkish, Syrian, Egyptian, and other Moslems making a living in what would become the future site of the World Trade Center. One of my favorite candies there was a bag of Turkish Delights a soft chewy candy like a gum drop but dusted with confectioner’s sugar and having a delicate exotic flavor.  On a hot day we would be treated to a Charlotte Rousse, a disk of sponge cake supporting a crown of whipped cream and a cherry on the top.  The circular small cake was enclosed in a white paper container. 

Each bite of my warmed hot cross bun serves as a touchstone to my childhood.  I find it ironic that in the season of Lenten sacrifice these buns appear not as a sacrifice or incentive for self-purification, but as a reminder of the goodness of life, the small pleasures that sustain us, and the persistence of memory. Nedra and I have sinfully eaten two.  The remaining two will greet us for breakfast.  I will then wait another year to break my fast of hot cross buns.  I do so not out of some spiritual or religious duty, but as a way to say “Thank you, Ma.”

IS THE GREENER GRASS THE HUMANITIES OR THE SCIENCES?

I am puzzled by the many people who believe that steeping oneself in the opposite of what you practice makes you a better person.  Scientists like C. P. Snow believed those in the humanities would be better off as persons, more informed, more nuanced in their thinking if only they had a whiff or two of the second law of thermodynamics.  I’ve also known scientists who felt that a course in the humanities added to the medical curriculum would make doctors with more empathy for their patients.  I read a blog site that used Jim Watson as an example of a scientist who epitomized to that writer the “it’s in your genes” interpretation from everything to voting Democratic or liking fat dripping hamburgers.

I happen to like the humanities and the arts. As a youth I considered becoming a portrait painter. I have read voraciously in the classics and among contemporary novels. For the past 55 years I have been reading a book every month to discuss in a book discussion group.  I do so not because it makes me a more moral person or augments my empathy for others but because I like to know as much about the universe as I can.  My moral practice comes from an oak tag motto in the Brooklyn middle school class I attended which read “Virtue is its own reward.”  It took me a long time to figure what it means. I find doing the right things sufficiently rewarding.  I don’t need fear of punishment or some reward in an afterlife to spur me to be as good as I can be, even if I fail to live up to perfection.

I prefer scientific explanations to supernatural explanations.  Evolution makes more sense than reading Genesis books 1 and 2.  You can make few predictions about the life sciences, astronomy or geology by reading Genesis.  You can make many testable predictions by studying rock formations, fossil remnants and traces of long dead plants and animals, or by studying the mutational histories of cognate species by sequencing and comparing their DNA. Geneticists are aware that character traits are expressed with different intensity in different environments. They are aware that some inherited traits involve the participation of chief genes and modifying genes. I am skeptical of genetic interpretations of complex behaviors like personality, intelligence, or creativity.  I am skeptical of claims that social failure is an outcome of defective heredity in the individual.  There are certainly some genetic conditions or syndromes that limit what a child or adult can do.  Persons with normal color vision will see a 28 on an Ishihara chart.  Those with red-green color deficiency will see the same chart as bearing the number 73.   It is less clear what a person with an IQ of 125 can do.  James Watson in one of his biographical works said his IQ was in the 120s.   If so he is a hell of a lot smarter than people with 160 IQs I’ve met.  High IQ correlates well with test-taking.  It does not correlate well with the creativity and imagination that make people eminent, like Watson.     

What I do believe about human abilities and behavior is that they are complex.  We respond to our genotypes, certainly.  But we also respond to circumstances that can push us beyond our predicted abilities. When I was Master of the Honors College at Stony Brook University, I ran a “My Beginnings” evening soiree for our students and invited a Nobel laureate [C N Yang], a Pulitzer Prize poet [Louis Simpson], and a MacArthur genius recipient [Paul Adams] who is a neurobiologist.  Yang described the hardship of retreating as the Japanese conquered China and how he learned his lessons dressed in rags sitting on floors of mud as the rain pounded on a tin roof near the Burma Road.  Simpson described the tension at home with his mother, a former actress recruited from a sweat shop and meeting her future British husband, a lawyer, in the island of Jamaica.  As his parents separated he suffered  the stultifying atmosphere of a boarding school.  Adams described how he disliked school which he found boring, and he preferred setting up his own worm races in cereal bowls using batteries and wire leads to goose the worms along.  All three had stressed or unconventional childhoods. 

For those who believe that a whiff of the humanities is needed for scientists to make them better people, remember that Hitler was an art student, Mussolini was a novelist, Stalin was a seminarian in the Russian Orthodox church, and Mao tse-Tung a celebrated poet.  I believe that reading is its own reward.  We do not read to improve our character.  If that happens fine, but it may not be a direct consequence of our reading any more than the outcomes of dictators are a consequence of their studying the arts and humanities as students.  One of the most depressing things I recall about the Watergate scandal was the conviction of Jeb Stuart Magruder in the cover up of the Nixon inspired Watergate break-in.  At the trial, ethicist and Chaplain William Sloan Coffin described Magruder as his most brilliant student at Yale.

BLOG -- GETTING OLD –PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

 All multicellular living things, plants and animals, have a life cycle.  The overwhelming number of species have sexual reproduction. Some organisms are relatively short lived.  A fruit fly lives about 55 days. Mice live about 2 years. Most organisms live about ten to twenty years. Humans are long lived and they live 70-100 years depending on where we live with outliers that reach 115 years. Galapagos tortoises live about 250 years.  Plants do better than animals.  Bristle cone pines live 4000 or more years.  Redwoods reach 3000 years.  There are cheater species like Norway pines that live at least 9000 years by sending out shoots from their roots to produce clones.  So the original tree might be long dead but its genotype keeps going through this budding and cloning process that supplements new offspring by the old fashioned way (fertilizing an ovule with a pollen grain in a flower).

The rule of life is that two gametes (for us, a sperm and an egg) unite to form a fertilized egg which forms an embryo which forms a newborn which matures through childhood to become a young adult, then a middle aged adult, and then a senescent adult who eventually dies. We know that as a life cycle. Humans are unusual among animals in having greater mobility (they spread around the world), an intelligence that aids their survival, and a culture that they can transmit orally, or in more recent times, by writing.

In the past 100,000 years of Homo sapiens as a species, half of that time we lived in Africa. About 50,000 years ago humans moved out of the Middle East and headed westward into Europe and eastward into Siberia  and what is mainland China and south east into what is now Indian and southeast Asia.  By 30,000 years they populated Australia and moved into the Pacific islands. By 15,000 years ago they crosses from Siberia into Alaska and moved south and East to populate the Americas. They still hadn't written anything.  They still hadn't built any cities.  They left their stone tools behind and occasional tools of bone and wood that lucked out and survived in caves and other debris relatively dry and free from decomposing bacteria.  By the time the first Americans were settling into the west coast of North America, the first farms were being developed in the middle east and Asia.  The first domesticated animals, especially cattle and sheep were being domesticated in the middle east.  The shift to agriculture led to unexpected outcomes.  It led to the birth of cities.  It led to the birth of written languages to allow trade to be recorded. It led to the development of scripture or religious writings about the gods they worshipped. It led to a rise in the world populations and humans could now be counted in a few millions around the world.

          That population size remained fairly stable with barely two children surviving to reproductive maturity in each family that began parenting. Births were numerous but survival was slim. Humans had not learned how to preserve food for lean seasons and years of extreme cold or heat or drought or floods.  They had not developed a system of waste disposal and hygiene to ward off infectious diseases. Few reached old age.  Most communities consisted of children and young adults. Imagine surviving today without sewage disposal, without antibiotics, without public health programs, without chlorination of water, without pasteurized milk, without immunizations against infectious diseases, without surgery, and without medications for failing organ systems. 

         The population of the world increased again as cities fused into nations.  The world population did not hit one billion until the industrial revolution when machinery improved farming, food processing allowed storage of foods, printed books on medicine and health informed physicians throughout Europe, and the rise of universities doing research allowed scholars to flourish. Even then, until the 1870s the chances of a newborn child living the first two years of its life, was only 50 percent.  Mean life expectancy was about 45. Two things happened in the last half of the nineteenth century that changed human population. The first was the germ theory that Pasteur, Koch, and Lister developed and promoted.  The second was the Public Health movement that Virchow initiated in Germany and exported to the industrialized world.  By the twentieth century a remarkable shift was occurring.  Children were almost guaranteed they would live to reproductive maturity. This in turn led to very large families of 5 or moiré children.  It led, in 1913, to the birth control movement through the efforts of Margaret Sanger. First the rich, then the middle class adopted it.  By the Great Depression of the 1930s the poor were also limiting family size to about two children. 

              In turn this shifted the world population.  In 1850 it looked like a pyramid with a base of lots of children and few old people at the top. At the close of the 20^th century it looked like a stele (think of Cleopatra’s Needle in Central park in New York City).  The number of children was barely more than replacement of those dying of old age.  That in turn had unanticipated outcomes.  The elderly depended on their children to support them. This did not change until the 20^th century when programs like social Security were introduced.  We pay taxes so that we will have a place live, food to eat, and medical costs taken care of as we get old.  Health care in the US was neglected until the late 20^th century when President Johnson got Medicare and Medicaid passed in Congress.  A more complete coverage of the poor and unemployed in the US was introduced by President Obama in this 21^st century.

              The trend to a shrinking base of young people will continue world wide.  It will lead to a world with more old people than young people.  In the US this will lead to the election of Representatives and Senators who will represent the interests of the old.  I predict this will happen about 2050.  I also predict that it will lead to a Department of Aging in the President’s cabinet.  I predict that this cabinet office will lead to more effective retirement investment.  It will lead to a change in health care delivery (salaried health workers instead of fee for service).  It will lead to the creation of a Domestic Peace Corps for and by the aged who will focus on the productive years of older citizens.  If the standard of the 20^th century was 65 at the time of retirement, today that means 25 more years of life after retirement.  How should one live?  What resources will there be for education, volunteer service to the neglected aspects of society, volunteer service to cut the costs of health, housing, infrastructure, and municipal; services.  That is where the pooled ideas and talents in a department of the Aging will be easily made known and many of them funded.

              In Biblical times 70 was the expected age of death for most people who survived childhood. There was no retirement.  In 1920 the expected age of death for most adults was 75 and retirement was about 65.  In 2015  it is still 65 for retirement but death is close to 90 in some industrialized nations.  Most of us will have 15 good years of those 25 years of retirement. It is those last ten years where the inevitable crumbling of our life cycle will take place.  Given our penchant for discontent, what would look like a fabulous blessing 200 years ago of human expectations will still be seen by many as not enough. Whether we master the tools to extend life expectancy farther, to slow down the aging process, or to fund our desires are beyond our capacities to predict accurately.  Fortunately, we can address the problems of our own generation and let us hope we will do so. 

BLOG -- THE PLEASURES OF A BOOK DISCUSSION GROUP --February 14 2015

One of the pleasures of conducting a monthly book discussion group is discovering books that I would never have read on my own. I first started going to a book club in 1961 when Nedra and I attended the Unitarian Fellowship in Westwood, California.  We met Peter Gary, a Holocaust survivor who had studied composition with Kodaly and Bartok in Budapest. After his liberation from Bergen-Belsen he helped as a translator for the US Army and was rewarded with a scholarship to Paris where he got his doctorate in composition.  In the US he did not like teaching music and he didn’t want to write music for Hollywood, so he became a businessman making art frames. He told me that he had a book discussion group and I started attending.  It was wonderful. I got to read occasional classics and new fiction and non-fiction recommended to Peter.  Discussing a book focuses attention on more than the plot and how to describe it. I learned that we interpret books differently and we bring as much to books as we take away from them. 

              When we moved to Stony Brook, NY, we attended the Unitarian Fellowship in that village and I joined the book discussion group led by a retired dentist, Ernie Kamperman.  We had wonderful discussions and when Ernie died, I took over the discussion group and kept it going until we retired and moved to Bloomington, Indiana. Now we are in our fifth year of the book discussion group at the Unitarian-Universalist Church in Bloomington.  What surprised me was that they didn’t have a book discussion group when we came so I started one. We alternate a book of fiction one month with a book of non-fiction the following month.  Books are suggested by the members and the person whose book is due to be discussed tells us why that book was chosen.  We then discuss it with everyone having an opportunity to enter as they desire.  We hold the discussion at our home because we have a large living room and one of the features of our book club is Nedra’s delightful cookies and cakes that she bakes and varies each month. 

              Our most recent book was chosen because it won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction.  Marilynne  Robinson is the author of Gilead (2004) a short novel discussing a town by that name in western Iowa.  It is a story of three generations of a family who lived there.  They are all named John Ames which makes it difficult sometimes to know who is being discussed, a problem my father and I had as I grew up because we both called ourselves Elof (my father did not use Axel, his first name).  The first John Ames was an abolitionist who went to Kansas in the 1850s and joined John Brown’s raiders attacking slaveholders and freeing their slaves and providing safe routes in the Underground Railroad that got them safely to Canada.  During the Civil War the older Ames had an eye shot out and he became a fearsome preacher, teaching the fear of God rather God’s love. He fought with neighbors and his relatives and wasn’t a good parent. Eventually he left his family and went back to Kansas to die.  The Civil War John Ames had a son who became a pacifist rejecting his father's militant outlook. He in turn had  two sons, Edward and John.  Edward Ames was a brilliant student in school and was sent to Germany to get a college education.  He came back as an atheist, enamored of the higher criticism of German scholarship that made it impossible for him to believe the bible was dictated by God and instead he believed it was cobbled together from isolated versions (that the German scholars saw as myths )and stories that became the Hebrew bible.  Edward’s brother, John Ames becomes a Congregational minister like his Civil War grandfather, but he is a pacifist and like his father he is turned off to violence even for a good cause. His doubts about his grandfather also lead to doubts about his vocation as a minister but no matter how many doubts he harbors about God, he refuses to adopt the atheism of his brother. 

            The novel is written as a memoir, a sort of amalgam of diary, letter writing, and personal reflection without subdivisions into chapters.  The memoir is by the nephew  of the atheist, who becomes a minister with considerable doubts about his abilities to help others, about God’s existence, and about the human condition.  He writes the memoir for his young son who will still not be an adult when the memoir-writing John Ames dies of congestive heart failure.  I like this approach but it is unusual for a work of fiction.  Most novels I think of as tableaux where we are invisible witnesses and eavesdroppers on scenes and conversations in a narrative that is leading to some resolution or epiphany.  Robinson’s approach I have only encountered in a few books over my 65 years of reading fiction and non-fiction.  The third John Ames I find appealing because he reminds me of Horton Colbert, the agnostic minister of the Westwood Unitarian Fellowship whose sermons sometimes rambled but made me aware of the tiny surprises and events of life, like watching ants struggling with a heavy burden or being interrupted by a visit of a hummingbird by his kitchen window.  In Gilead, a dying farm village, life is largely composed of such tastes of life that take the edge off the insecurities, repetitive set-backs, and inevitable dissolution of our lives as we close out our life cycle. In its quirky way it celebrates life.  

BLOG – A Short Story Intended to Explore Why We Believe or Lose Our Belief in God

A CENTURY AFTER HIS DEATH, A NEW SHERLOCK HOLMES STORY IS RELEASED

FAUX NEWS RELEASE:  A restricted document by Dr. John H. Watson, MD (1859-1930) was made available today by the British Museum. It was written about January 1910 and donated to the Museum in 1915 shortly after Holmes’s death in August 1914. 

Of all the cases that I witnessed in Sherlock Holmes’s illustrious career, there is only one that I have penned that has been restricted and it resides in the vault of the British Museum.  Holmes’s cases involved clients and events between 1880 and 1914.  Soon after his death in August 1914, I placed this account in the British Museum and restricted access for 100 years.  I call this “The Curious Case of the Death of God.”  I think you will agree with me that publishing this then would have tarnished Holmes’s reputation and created considerable grief, especially if I had done so shortly after the Great War began, only a few days after Holmes’s passing.  As a military man myself, I recognize the importance of religion to those who enter battle and will certainly face death from an enemy of equal will and skill.  I personally share with Thomas Henry Huxley an agnostic’s attitude toward religion.  As a proper Victorian, however, I was raised to respect the Church of England even though not raised in that faith, so I kept those sentiments to myself.  Only Sherlock Holmes knew my religious feelings and those came out in 1900 when the world was welcoming a new twentieth century and saying its goodbyes to the nineteenth.

Holmes and I were relaxing at 221B  Baker Street after the conclusion of “The Case of the Six Napoleons” which won the plaudits of Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard.  Mrs. Hudson knocked at our study and introduced  our unexpected visitor.  “Mr. Holmes, may I introduce Reverend Earnest Thomas, who comes with some urgency and insists I allow him to plead his case to you”.  Holmes and I introduced ourselves and asked Reverend Thomas to sit down.  Thomas was about 40 years old, clean shaven, thin but not gaunt, with a worried look. He wore his clerical collar and conveyed to us the comfort of being seen as a minister.  His eyes, however, showed signs of sorrow and he fussed with some papers he held in his hands.

 “And what,” said Holmes, “is so urgent, that it requires our immediate attention?”

      “I am losing my faith in the existence of God.”   This struck Holmes and me as a curious conclusion for a man of faith.

        “Why do you come to me when faith is a matter of personal persuasion?”  Holmes continued.

      “Mr. Holmes, you have great powers of inference and your analytical mind is, I believe, unrivalled in British society today.”

        “I thank you for your kind words.  Why are you losing your faith?”

        Reverend Thomas shuffled his papers and held them in front of Holmes.  “These are notes I have taken from reading the new Biblical criticism from German scholars. If they are correct the scriptural basis for our Anglican faith is doubtful.” 

       “And if they are correct, what course of action will you take?” I asked.

       “Dr. Watson, I shall change my field, possibly becoming an alienist, like Dr. Sigmund Freud, and spend my life healing broken minds like mine.”

       Mrs. Hudson brought us some tea and scones and we let the topic percolate in our minds.  I suggested we begin by making a short statement of what we do believe.  I went first.  “I was raised in a non-conforming Church that had its roots in Joseph Priestley’s Unitarian ministry in Birmingham.  Priestley was sympathetic to the Deists of the French Enlightenment and he was a member of the Lunar Society with Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood.  Popular outcry over his views led to a mob action.  His home, church, and laboratory were burned to the ground and he and his family had to flee to the newly established United States of America where he encouraged his friend, Thomas Jefferson, to prepare The Jefferson Bible.   As you probably know, Jefferson’s Bible is stripped of the supernatural.  In my career as physician, I had many pious patients. If I had to listen to their relatives read from Scripture or pray, I never considered the King James Bible as the word of God.  I believe it was inspired by a deep faith of the Jews who wrote the Torah, the Jews who wrote the other books of the Hebrew Bible, and the dissident Jews who wrote the Gospels of our New Testament.  I consider Jesus to be human, and not divine, and a prophet like Isaiah. Like Thomas Huxley, I am inclined to be an agnostic when it comes to the God of most Christians and Jews.”

              Reverend Thomas spoke next.  “I was raised Anglican.  It is our state religion.  My parents were faithful and took me to church each Sunday. We enjoyed the holidays and I felt both comfort and pleasure seeing our minister and his family helping others in times of grief and struggle.  They were role models for me and I chose a career in the ministry to be like them.  I accepted all 39 of our articles of faith.  When I turned thirty I began to develop doubts.  They came from reading magazines, books, and newspaper articles.  I read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and found his arguments overwhelming that the earth is far older than most of my fellow clergy believe.  I was much disturbed by his account of evolution by natural selection leading to the millions of species, including ours, which inhabit the earth.  I cannot dispute its scientific validity.  The German “higher criticism” as it is sometimes called also made me doubt the Bible as a dictated set of books put on paper and collated by inspired Jewish scribes.” 

              Holmes listened to our views.  His remarks were brief.  “My brother Mycroft and I were raised in the Anglican faith and both of us dropped an interest in religion when we hit our teens. It added nothing to our values or the careers we entered.  Despite this absence of feeling for religion, I chose to read widely in it, especially when I saw how analytic approaches could be used to solve crimes. Knowing the religious practices and motivations of those who commit crimes (sometimes justifying them on religious grounds) greatly assists my investigations.”

              After a short pause, Holmes resumed his opening line of inquiry.  “I would like to ask you several questions, Reverend Thomas.  May I have your permission to begin?”

              Thomas was happy to do so.

              “Let us begin with the creation of the universe as given in the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis.  You say you have read German higher criticism.  What is their consensus on who wrote these two opening chapters?”

              “They claim that there were two versions about six or seven thousand years before the start of the Christian era.  One version they call the Priestly version and the other they call the Jahwist version.”

              “How do they differ?” Holmes asked.

              “The Priestly version gives the six days of creation with the seventh day as one of rest although why a God of infinite power needs rest is an inconsistency to me.   The Jahwist version gives the Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden episdoe.  German scholars believe the Jahwist version is older and based on Mesopotamian polytheistic accounts, such as the Gilgamesh epic, of the creation of the universe that were modified for the monotheistic religion of the early Jews. The Priestly account is believed to be a more rational account stripped of Babylonian myths.”   

Holmes suggested we begin with the Priestly version and follow it day by day.

       “What happened on the first day?”

       Thomas did not need to pull out a Bible.  He was familiar with much of its text.  “There is a general statement that the heavens and earth are created but the earth is described as formless and empty except for a “surface on the deep” and it is not clear what that deep refers to.  It could be water or it could be like a deep hole in an abyss.  But the major creation is stressed as the formation of light (called day) and darkness (called night).  The full day is described as a night time followed by a day time, which is still the Jewish way to describe a day.

          Holmes asked Thomas, “Does it say anything about the sun, moon, planets, or stars on day one?”

              “No.” 

             “Then let us see what day two provides.”

            “Yes.  Day two describes the formation of a vault or firmament between two masses of water --  the water above the vault and water below the vault.” The firmament is also described as Heaven or the heavens. Biblical writing can appear muddled when it comes to using single or plural descriptions or names.

           “Please note,” said Holmes, “that on day two, Jews some 9, 000 years believed there were waters above and below the ‘firmament.’   I can see why.  When I was visiting Salvador, in Brazil, which is near the equator, it used to rain about noon each day.  The downpour was impressive and people stood in doorways or under awnings of shops to stay dry.  The shower lasted about five minutes and then abruptly stopped.  If we went back to the Middle East some 9,000 years ago this might have been a daily occurrence, too.  In the absence of science one would wonder where the waters above came from. There was no science of thermodynamics to argue that warm moist air near the land encounters dry cold air above and clouds form as the moisture chills and droplets of rain begin to merge and fall.  In the absence of science is it not plausible that there is a reserve of water that dribbles down from the skies?  In the absence of science, is it not plausible that those events we cannot explain we would attribute to supernatural agents?” 

       Day three was plausible to Holmes.  Reverend Thomas told us that dry land was separated from the waters which were gathered into seas. The land was described as bearing grasses and fruit trees with seeds.  For Holmes this meant that the early Jews were trying to work out a sequence of creations that was logical.  So far there was a chaos or void that became the barren earth followed by light and day followed by the sky between the waters above and below. Now on Day three there is dry land and seas with fruit trees and vegetation as the first life mentioned.

       “Day four turns out to be very disturbing to reason.” Holmes said.  “Reverend Thomas tells us that on day four two special lights are introduced.  A greater light (presumably the sun) is placed during the day and a lesser light (presumably the moon) is placed for the night time. Then God sprinkles the vault or sky between the waters with the stars and planets.  God also tells the Jews that he is giving signs (presumable to mark the seasons or calendar and to enable astrologers to interpret signs from the heavens)”.

I saw where Holmes was going.  “The Priestly version is shifting from interpretations based on plausibility to supernatural explanations or wild guesses. Is that what you fear Reverend Thomas?”

“Exactly so.  I have read a lot of science.  It is difficult for me to believe that the myriad of stars, the planets, the sun and the moon were all placed in the sky or firmament between the waters on the fourth day.”

Holmes agreed.  “It implies that the Jews did not know the light they saw was caused by the sun.  One can see daylight without the sun appearing on a cloudy day.  One can see the night sky with or without the moon, but when the moon is present we today would say it reflects the sun’s light.  To the Jews some 9,000 years ago that thought is absent. They see the sun assigned by God to rule or reside in the daytime and the moon to reside in the night sky.  They have no idea that the sun is a star.  They have a false impression that the “waters above” are above the earth’s atmosphere and an equally false impression that the stars are in the earth’s atmosphere.  Even more appalling they have the stars and planets appearing in the skies after the formation of plant life! That plant life consists of angiosperms or flowering plants and I am sure Dr. Watson would agree that angiosperms are much younger than other plant life on an evolutionary scale and yet they are the first life to be described appearing on day three!”

“It is preposterous to both astronomers and biologists.” I concurred.

“That leaves us with two more days of biblical creation,” Holmes noted.  “What happens, Reverend Thomas on those two days?”

“On the fifth day the seas teem with life and skies fill with birds.” 

Holmes paused a moment to think.  “Does it say what type of life was in the seas?   It only mentions by name whales which are mammals.  And for the skies it does not mention bats which are not birds but which do fly in large numbers.  Please note, Reverend Thomas, that whales are mammals and mammals in evolutionary studies appeared long after amphibians, reptiles, and fish were abundant on earth.”

When Reverend Thomas acknowledged that bats are not specified and that whales were created before land animals of all types, Holmes commented on the inconsistencies.   “It suggests that the ancient Jews of that era were selective in choosing the most well known or familiar examples”.  

“What is introduced on day six?” I asked.

“Livestock and land animals are stressed.  Humans, male and female, are described as being created in God’s image.  They are told to rule the earth and use the rest of life for what they can eat or use for their needs”.  

Holmes hastened to add his comments.  “Note once again what is absent in the Priestly version of creation. There is no Garden of Eden.  There is no making of Adam from dust.  There is no making of Eve from Adam’s rib.  There is no tree of life or tree of moral knowledge. Note also that God says his creations of the first six days are ‘good’ and the life he creates he blesses or urges to be fruitful and multiply. There is no mention of God forming parasites, microbial diseases, or suffering on a vast scale as predators eat prey.  There is no mention of natural disasters – earthquakes, floods, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, or long term climate change. Humans are just urged to rule and to use the earth for its wants.  God also does not specifically tell humans to have a stewardship or concern for the resources or living creatures on earth”.  I told Holmes he was being harsh on the Jews who wrote down what they believed was God’s version of creation. “After all, this isn’t a text book or an encyclopedia.  It’s just a brief account.”

“I agree, Watson.  But shouldn’t we expect some sort of consistency or timeless interpretation if God is the author of the first two chapters of Genesis?  Instead we get contradictions.  Flowering plants created before the sun, moon, planets, and stars?  How can that interpretation be taken seriously today? "

Reverend Thomas spoke out.  “Let me try to defend God despite the weight of scientific evidence against the chronological view given in Genesis.   I would say that only a minority of my fellow clerics would describe the Bible as a literal view of history or scientific chronology.  In seminary we had many discussions and most of our teachers felt that the Bible is an inspired document that uses allegory, metaphor, and storytelling to guide humans to better behavior. It uses an indirect path to get us to feel holy.   That is what I now lean on because I cannot defend Genesis chapters one and two as a scientific account or historical account of creation.   What is wrong with that?”

Holmes stood up and paced the floor in his reply.  He was not agitated, but felt more comfortable thinking on his feet as he spoke.  “The Priestly account for days one through five omits moral judgment.  God likes what he has done but remember he created but does not mention ascaris worms and other parasites that can infest vital organs.  He created bacteria and other pathogens. He gave poisonous toxins to some spiders, scorpions, snakes, and lizards. He made poison ivy and poisonous mushrooms. He made volcanoes and fault lines in earthquake regions.  Is he blessing these harmful agents as well?  If so, God is a Darwinist and believes in natural selection as his mode of life evolving.  If not, what is the source of creation for these harmful things and events in the living world?   He does not mention Satan in Genesis one.  If we are to infer that Satan made these bad things, why does God say it is ‘Good’ each day of creation?  Are we to infer that Satan too can create living organisms and bring about earthquakes and other natural disasters?  Nor do the Jews who recorded this Priestly account of creation reflect on this problem.  We can assume, I believe, that it just did not occur to them that there were inconsistencies in their account.”

Reverend Thomas also got up as Holmes resumed his seat.  “Please, Mr. Holmes, the real value of the Bible isn’t how accurate the creation stories are in Genesis.  It is the moral lessons, the spiritual uplift as we reflect on the characters of Biblical heroes, prophets, and God’s gift of the ten commandments and his protection of the Jews from the tyrannies of their enemies.  Isn’t that worthy of worship or at least respect for those who embrace God?”

   

“No,” Holmes responded. “The biblical God is not worthy of devotion because he responds irrationally to Adam and Eve in the second creation account.  This is the Jahwist version. We are told that God creates a world teeming with life and decides to make Adam from dust.  For an unspecified period of time Adam is allowed to roam the Garden of Eden.  We are led to infer that there are no pathogens, no parasites, no poisons, or other dangers in this perfect world.  But Adam feels lonesome and lacks companionship.  God then takes a rib and makes Eve.  How strange. We are just learning that male and female insects differ by sex chromosomes. Why was this clonal origin different? Why didn’t Adam have a twin brother from his twin?  Where did the Y chromosome go?  Where did the second X come from?  No doubt one could make a tortuous explanation for such an origin. But one way or the other we have the first act of incest in the works because unlike the other living creations who are told to be fruitful, Adam and Eve are not.  Instead they are deliberately tempted by both the presence of the trees of knowledge and life but also by the snake who appears (presumably one of God’s creations) and tells Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge and in turn she tells Adam to eat it too.    It’s both bad science and bad moral instruction. Adam is doomed to hard work and difficult circumstance not only for himself but for all his sons and male descendants in perpetuity.  Eve is doomed to painful labor in child birth and submission to male brutality not only for herself but for all her daughters and female descendants in perpetuity.  This is a cruel God and not worthy of veneration.”

I was stunned. I could see by the twitching of Reverend Thomas’s lips that he was feeling defeated and his faith eroding.  I tried to blunt Holmes’s attack.  “Surely, Holmes, God was testing Adam and Eve.  He created them in his image.  Isn’t it reasonable that he also created Satan and his angels in his image?  He created Satan specifically for testing humans.  God provided a paradise on earth and there was a rent to pay. The rent was obedience to God. Every parent feels this need for gratitude from their children.  One doesn’t become a parent to have children who are disobedient on matters of survival.  You punish them if they don’t abide by rules. Stealing is wrong.  Hurting others is wrong. Telling lies is wrong. The only moral issue for Adam and Eve at that time was obedience to their maker.  He made the request and they were to abide by it.”

“Fair enough, Watson.  But would you punish your children, their children, and all their descendants for eternity for one bite of the fruit of knowledge?  Isn’t that petulant or excessive? They are not even born and they are doomed to sin, pain, and suffering?  Women are to be bonded in perpetuity to the whims of their husbands?  No that goes beyond ‘hastening and chastening His will to be done.’  And if Eve did not take that first bite, would there have been sex and children and civilizations? Would not every day be alike in a Garden in which Adam and Eve lived and never thought of sex?  What sort of God is that?  He is certainly different from the God of the Priestly version of creation where humans are produced and given opportunities to use and rule the resources of the world.”  

“Halt this line of questioning, Mr. Holmes,” pleaded Reverend Thomas.  “I concede that the Old Testament God can be angry, vengeful, spiteful, and inconsistent. I can rationalize that this is what he really meant when he wanted humans to be in his image!   Tell me why an inscrutable God should not be worthy of worship?  Did not Job grovel before God when he was innocent of wrongdoing?” 

“Very well,” said Holmes.  “One can obey a God out of fear and not love or admiration.  That is also true for deities who competed for the same Jews and their neighbors some 9,000 years ago. Those gods could be monstrous in their demands for human sacrifice, their genocidal armies, and their spite when they felt disobeyed.  Ministers who preach hellfire sermons use fear as a way to sway their congregations.  Obeying the God of the Old Testament is thus arbitrary when it is based on fear. Either you favor a god who deserves respect or you submit to a god out of fear.  It is difficult to know which of many gods who use fear is the one you should worship. It is much easier to worship a god whose message is one of love, justice, and opportunity.  Isn’t that the reason for the success of Christianity?”

Holmes paused a moment as he readied a different view to conclude his remarks.  “If the God of the Old Testament is the same God as the triune God of Christians, then that God has some sort of split personality.  The Christ aspect of the Trinity is a loving one; the Old Testament God is inscrutable; and the Holy Ghost is a philosophic puzzle too distant from human needs to be worshipped.   I can see, Watson, why your forbears chose to be Unitarian and demoted Jesus to a human prophet and shifted his personality into the Old Testament God.  Christians are stuck with a wish to be monotheistic when their God is really an oscillating threesome.  I can see, Reverend Thomas, why your faith is collapsing.  Among possible choices, you will run into lots of contradictions.  You could choose to be a Universalist.  They have virtually disappeared in Great Britain but they are reasonably successful in North America.  They believe in a loving God and reject the idea of a Hell or eternal damnation.  But they still use the Old Testament and New Testament as their scriptural source for their faith. There’s a lot of meanness of God they have to gloss over.  God was genocidal against numerous tribes competing with Jews for land in the Middle East. He told the Jews to kill their Amalekite enemies, even their women and children. God was homicidal against humanity allowing only Noah and a handful of others to survive his mass murder of humans and nearly all life on earth.  If you believe God is all powerful or all merciful, how then do we explain his hands off policy for evil and disasters that have cost the lives of thousands or millions of those who worship him.  To avoid confronting that realization, we rationalize that God is inscrutable.  Once again we go back to fear as the reason for worshipping him.  It’s not an uplifting message. We are sometimes taught that virtue is its own reward.  I too share that view.  Seeking rewards for good behavior is selfish and shallow. Avoiding punishment as a basis for good behavior is also shallow.”

“Stop, stop.”  I cut Holmes short in his blast at organized religion.  If we reject God as a failed concept, how should we live?  What ideals and values do we choose?  How do they differ from those given to us by the best of what religion has to offer?”

“Here, here!” Thomas echoed my sentiment.  “What do you believe Mr. Holmes?”

“I am not a nihilist.  Life is worth living. Whatever may motivate people who harm others, I feel society has a duty to seek some type of justice.  It may be fines, disgrace, imprisonment, and shunning for those who lie, injure others, steal, cheat, or deceive.  I have dedicated my career to finding wrongdoers, preventing evil acts from being realized, and restoring honor, belongings, or even trust in my clients who come to me in times of need.  I do not blame God for many calamities that we cannot avoid like floods, droughts, earthquakes, or monstrous storms.  Nor do I blame a devil who manipulates nature.  Nature is uncertain and science can protect us sometimes but not always from its disasters.  I would rather seek public health measures and immunizations against infectious diseases than pray to God to spare my neighborhood from pestilence.  I prefer science to work its way into the regulation of society so we can trust the foods we eat, the air we breathe and the water we drink.  I believe we should atone for our errors and wrongdoing if not to the person we harmed then to others who are in need. I believe in teaching compassion to our children.  We humans are very dependent on each other. We may never imitate those we think of as saints but there are many good people who have lived and who have inspired and helped others.  We can learn from them how to live.”

We went out to dinner and spoke some more on our return.  Holmes was concerned about the direction of Reverend Thomas’s career.  Holmes asked, “Are you sure you want to become an alienist if you abandon the clergy?  Why can’t you continue your ministry without voicing your skepticism about the existence of God?”

“It would be living a lie.  I know that is often the case with those who pour out their sorrows to me.  It is sad to listen to stories of guilt, wrong-doing, failure, insecurity, betrayal, loss of confidence, fear, worry, and hopelessness.  Some of my parishioners are suicidal.  Some are terrible parents. Some have lost the capacity to love, forgive, or rebound from adversity.  They see me as a comfort.  They believe my prayers are worth more than theirs. Can you imagine how they would feel if I told them I was an agnostic or an atheist?  How in good conscience could I pretend to be the minister they think I am?”

Holmes was very moved by Reverend Thomas’s assessment.

“My world shares some of the disturbing encounters that you describe. I see the deceived, the fearful, the vengeful, the greedy, the victims and the perpetrators of monstrous acts. What little pleasure I get from my work is in the semblance of justice when the innocent are released from suspicion and when the criminals and the insensitive or unthinking persons I encounter are unmasked. I admire you for your integrity and wish that you could find a ministry that does not rely on a conflicted or contradictory God."

I endorsed Holmes remarks.  “I also deal with unhappy people.  The sick and the dying are often in denial or feel cheated by fate.   I comfort them as well as I can.  My life is one of small victories and inevitable defeat because we all die.  But it is wonderful to bring a baby into the world, to see a sick child return to good health, to mend broken bones, to staunch the bleeding and bind the wounds of the injured.  I hope, Reverend Thomas, that in your new career you will make use of your ministerial skills of empathy and insight to heal the troubled minds you will encounter.”

Reverend Thomas felt more enlightened when he left than when he came.  He told us that his belief in God died that night, but he felt reborn as a human who would seek to help others, especially those with what he still called troubled souls.  It would not be by citing God but by citing good people, good deeds, and encouraging others that he will work.  “I will leave the clergy,” he said, “I will use my ministerial skills in this new field of counseling others.” 

I asked him if Holmes killed his belief in God.  “No, I did it,” he said with an expression that seemed half smile and half regret. “I demoted my God.  Old Gods never die, they become myths.”  

Submitted by Dr Watson’s admirer, Elof Axel Carlson

I wrote this story after attending a somewhat spiritual sermon on the theme of faith at the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Bloomington, Indiana, followed by a Freethinkers discussion in that same church that included a reaction to the spirituality stress of contemporary Unitarian-Universalist congregations (or their ministers).  I have read the history of Unitarian and Universalist history in some detail and its views oscillate from the Deism, agnosticism, atheism, justice seeking,  Humanism of the mid 20th century to a spirituality, New Age, inward-reflecting, neo-Transcendentalism that appeals to a younger more contemporary culture. These shifts in emphasis seem to involve 50 year swings.  I thought a Sherlock Holmes type of reflection on this tension and shifting of belief might be useful.