Where Have All The Jobs Gone?

Where have all the jobs gone? Companies sent them to Asia and Mexico. No! Not General Motors and all those other mean corporations. You and Me. We sent them to other, cheaper countries. The trend started fifty, sixty years ago—back when nobody noticed.
Actually it started before World War II—when cheap, schlocky Japanese goods flooded our markets—and the Japanese even renamed a city USA so that they could proclaim the goods as being made in “USA”. Of course we did the same price undercutting to Europe in the 1800s when cheap, schlocky American goods flooded European stores.
I wrote yesterday that “cost” didn’t matter. Oh, but in one sense it did. We wanted to own more and more goods, clothes, toys and stuff at a price that could be afforded on declining middle class salaries. You couldn’t manufacture enough goods at such a low cost in the United States.
We insisted on having our cake and eating it too. So first one store started buying its toys, shoes, goods and merchandize from a foreign source that paid its workers between 60 cents a day and a buck an hour. That store started taking business away from stores that sold higher priced (American) goods.
Having a sound sense of self preservation, the next store started buying foreign stuff, and then the next and the next. Stores like Walmart cut their prices and bragged that they sold American merchandise. I talked to a truck driver once who explained to me that the goods were indeed “American”. “I drove truckloads of American cloth to the docks, where they were shipped abroad to be made into clothes,” told me. “Then I drove the clothes back from the docks to the store.”
By the 1960s you couldn’t buy a television made here—and it was hard to find a pair of shoes made here either. Nobody cared. TVs were cheap; shoes were cheap. WE—the American consumers—drove the economic mechanism that outsourced production.
The companies merely responded to the oldest economic law of all—make enough money to pay your corporate taxes and your workers or go out of business. In order to do that, to induce the American consumer to buy your goods, you had to outsource.
But no one really noticed. American auto companies were still pumping out cars and pickups, paying assembly line workers enough for them to go into Walmart and buys outfit after outfit of those “American” clothes. Everything is beautiful (as the song goes).
That lasts about as long as a Ponzi scheme. We began to reach a tipping point at which enough Americans no longer had high paying jobs that 1)the pressure to outsource grew even greater and 2) there eventually weren’t enough people with money to buy anything.
By this time the rows of factories along Muskegon Lake here in Michigan were torn down and out of business. The foundries that had built the engine blocks for our trucks and tanks in World War II were gone forever. Somebody in Asia was building them now.
A buyer explained to me why it was harder to buy shoes that fit. Shoe makers in Korea had a different notion of a size 10 than did a shoe making factory on Taiwan. “So,” he said, “the same brand will have size tens that fit differently, depending on which country they are made in.”
Of course the process goes on. Factories in Vietnam undercut the cost of manufacturing in China. One can only assume that manufacturers in Somalia will eventually undercut Vietnam. And desperate Americans—caught like gerbils on a treadmill—must keep buying cheaper and cheaper goods in order to have a whole new wardrobe every season.
The problem lies with you and me. I remember having an argument with a neighbor lady years ago. She bought a new coat every year from a discount store for a very low price. It needed to be replaced in a year. I pointed out to her that if she went to a higher end retail store (since out of business) she could buy an attractive coat for twice as much that lasted five or six times as long.
She was horrified. “I LIKE having a new coat every year!” (She also was of the opinion that buying store brand groceries told the world you couldn’t afford better—and you never, ever wanted anyone to think that!) So she went on forcing jobs offshore.
I recall going to a restaurant in New York with some friends years ago. The waitress was a monster out of urban legend. I’ve never had ruder, worse service. It was gratuitously insulting. At the end of the meal, I told my friends I was not going to tip.
They were aghast. “But she depends on our tips.” I suggested that if tips were important to her she might earn them with a touch more congeniality. In horror they left their own tips; I believe they even made up for mine. As I listened to them, it dawned on me that the real issue was that they did not want anyone—including that ghastly waitress—to think they were “cheap”.
The fear of looking “cheap” is one of the deadliest conditions a shopper can suffer from. (Trust me, the very rich have no such concerns—if they are going to spend a dime, they expect a dime’s worth of value in return.) It’s largely a middle class phenomenon. “I’m driving a Buick, but I wouldn’t want anyone to think I couldn’t afford a Cadillac”.
That’s why we need closets full of clothes so we don’t wear anything twice in a week—or in a couple of weeks. To afford that appearance, we have to buy lots and lots of outfits—at the lowest price we can possibly find. And so we drive jobs offshore.
I once a read an article comparing Parisian secretaries with New York secretaries. The French woman had two or three outfits that wore very well. She wore them twice a week as needed. The New Yorker had many (cheap) outfits that she staggered throughout the month.
Personally, I think the Parisian described in the article was more sane. But we, with our cars, our furniture (my davenport was bought in 1956—you simply couldn’t find a replacement of comparable quality today), our clothes and our goods have put ourselves on a treadmill at an unsustainable pace.
Don’t blame the corporations for driving jobs offshore. We taught them to do it with our insistence on quantity over quality. It’s just that we may be coming up on that magic moment in all Ponzi schemes where the stack of cards falls over on itself.

COST--A Truly Obscene Four Letter Word

Decades ago, I read an interview with the then Speaker of the House. (I believe it was Tip O’Neil, but I cannot swear to it.) There was some reference to the hundreds, thousands of bills that had passed his desk, but what struck the interviewer was his realization that the question of affordability (as in, “can we”?) or cost had never in all his years crossed the Speaker’s mind.
It was just never an issue. Not in my lifetime and before has it been an issue. Even in the Depression, cost was never an issue for the federal government. Our credit was good, we borrowed or printed money (in a time of serious deflation that wasn’t a problem). WPA, PWA, CCC—we created them all without worrying about cost.
Ditto World War II, the Cold War, building a national highway system, pouring billions into the educational system, Korea, the Gulf War, invading Afghanistan and Iraq, and on and on. (Have to admit that a major reason for stopping Vietnam was when Wall Street came down to Washington and pointed out that the war was hurting the economy. But we were already winding down.) By and large—going in to something—cost never needed to be a question.
The other day I went in for a substitute teaching job and got to chatting with the principal’s secretary. She told me, in an affluent suburban district, that if a computer broke down and needed a new part, there was absolutely no money to repair it. There was certainly no money for new technology.
Next year will be far worse if an election to maintain the present millage does not pass this spring. I wished her Good Luck in a neighborhood full of scared people. She was working on an election poster as we talked and kept repeating, “But this isn’t a new millage”.
It’s a neighborhood full of kids and new houses that happily supported millage to build an entire new high school ten years ago. (Already plans for further extensions have been shelved. For one thing, people are moving out—heading for new jobs or cheaper digs.)
In district after district I notice a lot of new, young faces among the faculty. Administrators are moving heaven and earth to get older, higher priced teachers to retire so they can be replaced with kids right out of college at the bottom of the pay scale. One older teacher told me, laughing, “Every time I step into the hall, the principal is there asking, ‘What can we do to get you to retire’”. He teaches advanced English and also adjuncts at the community college. He’s good.
I pointed out to the secretary that her entire district had been cobbled together out here in the ‘burbs when cost was no object. “No one,” I said, “in Lansing, Washington or the administration here has any real experience dealing with a situation in which the money simply isn’t THERE.
“They have no idea how to deal.”
My wife returned to the community college this winter to take courses in art and photography. She had gotten a degree there twenty years ago. The contrast startled her. Whole departments are now basically staffed by adjuncts—no benefits, a fraction of the pay.
The cafeteria is closed—replaced by a privatized “café” with an extremely limited menu and prices twice as high as you would pay two blocks away. The school bookstore is run by Barnes and Noble—it carries no art or photography supplies. The faculty can only suggest stores. The school plans to privatize maintenance.
A few years ago they could afford to build a whole new wing and a new library. Cost has now become a factor in their calculations. I might add that everybody is sitting waiting, breathlessly, for the new bailout money from Washington.
First of all, guys, it won’t be enough to meet all the needs. Second of all, it won’t go on forever. Then you’ll be back in the same leaky boat—with more stuff to maintain and support.
California is facing a deficit the size of most national economies. Unlike Washington, they don’t have a printing press for money in the basement. Many more states are in trouble—as is Michigan here.
Our whole economy has lost sight of the issue of cost. The other day I looked at one of my reasonably new (and expensive) pairs of shoes. It needs a minor repair. Twenty years ago I could have located someone to do it in an alcove of my grocery store. Today I cannot think of anywhere to take them—or even to buy the clips to do it myself.
People have stopped repairing things. Shoes, toasters, clothes—they have all become throw-away items. You don’t even try to fix them, you just toss them. What do you do when the cost of replacing them becomes an actual concern? When the money might not be there?
(When we go miniature golfing, we all carry our own putters. We’ve collected them over the years from neighbors who just put them in the trash. They weren’t the latest style? I have to say that over the last few months there has been nothing in anyone’s trash around here worth looking at. They may be hanging on to more things.)
The other day my wife took a trip to Chicago to visit some art museums. She had lunch in nice little restaurant in Greek Town. The food was still delicious; the price hadn’t gone up—but the portions were smaller. That’s all over. Cost suddenly matters—you can no longer just raise prices.
Cereal boxes are shrinking. Sam’s Club no longer carries the large bag of rice we’ve bought for years. It has a different supplier with a smaller bag. (Rice isn’t as good, either.) Have you checked the size of a yogurt cup lately?
It’s a dirty little word, cost is. For decades we haven’t worried about it. By and large, we haven’t needed to. But it seems to be becoming a problem—in our governments, our homes and our grocery budgets. Most of us have absolutely no idea how to deal.
The world around us offers so few repairmen—and so few things that even CAN be repaired.
That may be a change coming to a neighborhood near you. Or me. I really do hope so.

Run, Gerbil, Run--Faster!

Times have changed interestingly since Thomas Jefferson suggested we should be predominantly a nation of yeoman farmers. That meant, as the Bible puts it, that each man would till his own piece of land, have his own spring or cistern, sit under his own fig tree and raise his own grapes for wine.
It was a busy, hard life—both in ancient Israel and in colonial America, but there was an element of freedom to it. If you needed to go relieve yourself, you didn’t have to check with the foreman. Had you used up the seven minutes of toilet break provided by your union contract?
The work didn’t keep coming at you on a mechanized line over which you had no control. You didn’t keep welding the same spot over and over, hurrying to get it done before the line moved it past you. Your foreman was the weather and your own inclination.
Get firewood chopped by winter—or be very chilly. Get the cow milked by six o’clock or risk a serious injury. Even here there was always a bit of leeway, a bit of your own control in play. Not so any more. The assembly line brooks no independent thought or desire. Neither does the modern office.
The office at least tried to give you the illusion of personal freedom. Up until now you pretty much chose when to use the toilet, get a drink, or stop for some idle gossip. But the office had its own mechanical lines—projects and reports that were due with the same pitiless regularity of another car coming down the line.
Unlike the factory worker you could take them home and do them there or come in extra days, take them with you on vacation or stay late. And, unlike the yeoman farmer, it was never your choice which to do when. You did whatever the assembly line demanded be done first.
You never wanted to admit it, but management’s view of you—on an assembly line or in an office—was essentially that you were a gerbil on a treadmill. There was always the tension, in management’s view, of how fast you could make the gerbil run and how little you could feed him to keep him going.
I got my first real insight into that when I found myself responsible for the three small offices of a temporary jobs agency. One office manager had been with the company for years. She knew every employer in her small town, what they wanted in a worker, whom they wanted, the days when they would most likely need our help. The companies knew and trusted her.
I give her considerable latitude because she always got her work done, always kept the customers happy. The bean counter in the company suddenly realized that she had been around enough years to get enough raises to be making more money than other managers.
I argued that her proven capabilities and her profound knowledge of the market made her valuable enough to be worth the money. The president of the company sneered, “We can replace her with somebody else who makes a fraction of her salary.” That was all that mattered to him. He saw no other use for her than as a replaceable desk warmer. I was ordered to get rid of her. (Retail management is notorious for the same attitude. So is General Motors.)
Too much food for that gerbil. Or maybe she wasn’t running fast enough? In any case the trend has been going on ever since people were pulled off their own farms or village shops to work away from home in factories and office buildings.
The creation of factories—where you worked to make profits for stockholders rather than yourself—made a vast difference in working life. This became especially true when engineers and managers decided to get “scientific” about work and how it was done.
Frederick Winslow Taylor, one of the first management consultants (born 1856), introduced the idea of using a stopwatch to reduce the amount of time taken for each industrial operation. He wrote very candidly, “Only through ENFORCED standardization of methods, ENFORCED adoption of the best implements…, and ENFORCED cooperation” could true efficiency be achieved.
He added that anyone “stupid” enough to choose hard manual labor is “unable to comprehend the science” of it—thus the need for enforcement. He called this “scientific management”.
Frank Gilbreth (“Cheaper by the Dozen”, born 1868)) used a camera to show how the number of movements could be reduced for each job. Another scientific advancement.
Gone was the time when sunup was the only foreman on the job—when you could choose which task to do when, choose the tools to do it with, choose which motions to use. Now science—and the relentless mechanical assembly line were masters of a worker’s fate.
Now scientific management is coming to your office. “BusinessWeek Magazine” ran an interesting article last week. “How much is that worker worth? (p.46) ” Now that there is a computer at nearly every work station, notes BW, “…employees leave a digital trail detailing behavior, their schedule, their interests, and their expertise.”
This can be used to calculate “the return on investment for each worker”. (How fast or long does this gerbil run?) Human Resources has to be taught “number crunching skills”. Soon they will be “doing the numbers on ‘human capital’”.
In some tests, after the numbers are crunched, each employee is assigned a colored circle on a chart. In a downturn, “small and pale circles might be a good place to start cutting.” (Could make you think twice before using more than seven minutes a day on potty stops.) Sort of like a farmer figuring out which member of the herd to cull—based strictly on milk production. Perfectly Darwinian.
Neither the Bible nor Mr. Jefferson foresaw the day of cubicles and evaluation by numbers. Even Mr. Jefferson’s slaves were permitted to fish and grow the vegetables of their own choice. All you can say now is, Run Gerbil, Run!
What did Satchel Paige, the great Negro League pitcher say? “Don’t look back; something might be gaining.”

Darwin's Gift To Mankind (4)

“Survival of the Fittest”—when the phrase was coined by Herbert Spencer, he had very much in mind the CEO (the fittest) and the (less fit) employees under him. The notion that the captain (CEO) had so much responsibility for the ship that he might go down with it went out the window. Now, perhaps, only the captain was FIT to survive—thus the golden parachute at the top.
Some folk still express outrage at million dollar bonuses at companies dependent on tax-payer money just to go on breathing. President Obama says he’s appalled. They don’t fully understand the true nature of the Darwinian world we live in. The fit get bonuses; the unfit get pink slips.
Spencer, a British philosopher, wrote many books that preached his doctrine. He called it Social Darwinism. We can call Spencer, after Nietzsche, Marx and Huxley, the fourth great apostle of Darwinism. In the United States his ideas were taken up by Yale Professor William Graham Sumner.
Sumner and his (Spencer’s) ideas were well received by the new class of American plutocrats—John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, Leland Stanford, and we could go on. These were men who had accumulated incalculable fortunes while the thousand who worked for them, did so six days a week at a dollar a day.
(Women worked for $1.75 a week. Children, as young as eight, worked for as much as $1.25 a week.) There were no benefits, no unemployment checks, no insurance—if your twelve and fourteen hour days left you so exhausted that you cut off your hand, you and your family were on your own. Needless to say no one wasted money on guards for the machinery.
Union recruiters were repelled with gunfire and, where needed, United States troops joined in. Millions of poor European immigrants from Italy, Russia, Poland and the Balkans were recruited to guarantee that an excess of labor kept wages low. (They called it “The Iron Law of Wages.)
What teensy pricklings of conscience the incredibly rich owners may have felt were nicely assuaged by Sumner’s assurance that a new morality had evolved, that the rich need feel no guilt—they were the “ubermensch”, the most fit of all in a Darwinian world.
It hardly needs saying that when Sumner lectured, the halls were filled with the rich and the wannabe rich. Here was moral reassurance (the new morality) that whatever they did to get more wealth could be justified under Darwin’s theory of the development of man.
The ravaged, half sick and dispirited workers were, after all, not as fit as the men whose cunning and wisdom had led them to huge fortunes. It was nature’s law, nature’s immutable law. (It is interesting to note that these laissez-faire capitalists were the first to line up for government aid. Government money built railroads and created U.S.Steel. It’s just that government was not supposed to regulate anything! Does this sound familiar?)
Senators were elected by poorly paid state legislatures. It was easy for the very wealthy to bribe a majority of a legislature to elect senators sympathetic to the rich. Rockefeller might own the legislature in this state; Carnegie of that state. They cooperated in making sure captive senators behaved.
(How come do you think the “Progressives” passed the Seventeenth Amendment, calling for the direct election of senators in 1913? Pet senators were a little much even for Darwinians to accept.)
We should just quote a few lines from Herbert Spencer—on “The Principles of Biology”, volumes one and two, published by 1867, seven years after the Oxford Debate. “It cannot but happen that those individuals whose functions are most out of equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces [a fancy way to say those who aren’t fully evolved, fit, in other words], will be those to die … .
“But this survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest. …” He adds that, “With a higher moral nature will come a restriction on the multiplication of the inferior.” The latter statement is found in chapter XIII of volume two: “Human Population in the Future”.
Could Adolph Hitler have said it better?
In a creatorless world, with no imposed morality from an external source like a deity, we must live with whatever new morality has evolved to fit our present situation. The executives at AIG and several other banks and corporations were acting according to the best principles of the new morality laid down by men like Darwin, Spencer and Sumner.
How can we fault them for adhering to the moral and business principles implicitly taught in all of our schools? The church, which once might have challenged this cruel new morality, has lost its credibility in speaking to matters scientific—and even social. No one listens if it does.
Christians picked the wrong fields to fight on at Oxford. The Darwinians—“Survival of the Fittest” types—won. (Christians handed them their victory.) I’m sure the men who took the bonuses at AIG are both puzzled and disdainful of the outcry of the unfit beneath them.
There are many folk in our society today that fervently wish to rid themselves of the last vestiges of restrictive Christian morality. All I can say is, be careful what you wish for.

Darwin's Gift To Mankind (3)

We’ve already talked about how Darwin’s theory removed the annoying and very restrictive need for a creator/controller when doing science or lots of other things. We’ve also talked about how the Christian Church lost its credibility by getting into a fight it didn’t need to.
Now it’s time to talk about how pervasive Darwin’s theory has become in our daily lives. Eventually we’ll get to the impact “Social Darwinism” has had on American economic life—and your IRA. But first we’ll deal with science and politics.
Within ten years of publishing “On The Origin of Species”, Darwin had acquired four extremely influential followers. First, and obviously, there was the famous British scientist, Thomas Henry Huxley (grandfather of Aldous Huxley who wrote “Brave New World”).
Huxley was an Englishman covered with international honors as a scientist. He was hugely influential in bringing science into the curriculum of schools in the English speaking world. He had taken trips and studied fossils just as Darwin had, and when Darwin finally published, he became his champion.
Those who opposed Darwin called for a debate at Oxford University on June 30, 1860—seven months after “Origin” was published. Facing Huxley and two other scientists would be the finest speaker in all England, Sam Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford. His best line in the debate would come when he sneered at Huxley whether he was descended from on ape on his mother’s or his father’s side.
Huxley merely murmured that he would rather be descended from an ape than from someone who worked so hard to suppress truth. Supporting the bishop (called “unctuous” by those who knew him) would be two men of considerable scientific renown. The first was Robert Fitz Roy, who had captained the Beagle on Darwin’s voyage.
(He had asked for a gentleman companion on the voyage and young Darwin had been selected. Fitz Roy was scientist from a family prone to suicide, and he had a violent temper. After the voyage he came to believe Darwin had betrayed him in some particulars and opposed him vigorously. Five years after the debate, Fitz Roy followed family tradition and killed himself by slashing his own throat.)
The second was a much more talented scientist, Richard Owen—a famed biologist and paleontologist who unfortunately earned quite a reputation as a liar. Eventually the Royal Society’s Zoological Council expelled him for plagiarism.
Huxley won the debate. Overwhelmingly. It was a landslide. From that day the Church has had almost no scientific credibility in challenging any part of Darwinism or any other science. It had picked the wrong fight. Even in moral areas where the church had a right and duty to challenge Darwin’s theory, public opinion has allowed it no standing to do so.
Huxley’s written comment (1900) that, “Of moral purpose, I see not a trace in nature” stands intact, very much because the Church chose to oppose Darwin on grounds where it had no need to—and where all the evidence was against it.
It reminds one of a Biblical story. A Jewish king, Josiah (600BC) went out to fight an Egyptian king who was marching along the coast, far from Jerusalem, to go north and fight the Babylonians. Josiah mustered his tiny army. Pharaoh Neco pleaded with Josiah just to let him pass in peace. Josiah attacked. Tradition says they counted 300 arrow wounds in his corpse alone.
The Church might also have done better to reserve its moral ammunition against two other champions of Darwin—one) Karl Marx, whose theories led to the horrors of Soviet Communism (where just one of Stalin’s henchmen may well have killed more men than Heinrich Himmler.
Two) Fredrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher, who already two years after the Oxford Debate published a book proclaiming that the core beliefs of Christianity were discredited. He went on to publish more books against Christian theology and philosophy, especially its morality—suited only for the weak. He wrote at length on the “Will To Power” and became very influential in Adolf Hitler’s belief system.
Twentieth Century Science and Politics were overwhelming affected by Darwin. In neither, after the debate at Oxford, was there any need to consider any form of morality. Scientists and their governments claimed the right to be free to experiment at will.
Can you build a bomb that will incinerate the populace of an entire city at a single flash? Build it. There is no moral imperative to stop you. Can you clone a human being? The question of morality has no basis here. Can you conceive and destroy human infants to use their cells for scientific research? There is no morality to give you pause.
The purported champions of morality who might raise such issues—and get scientists to consider them with at least some respect—lost their credibility at a debate on ill-chosen grounds long ago. No matter how heinous the scientific experiment might be, its perpetrators can cover themselves with the mantle of Galileo and Darwin. Christians handed them that right, foolishly.
It is almost hypocritical of a society that renounced Christian morality and embraced Darwinism to condemn men like Mengale and Hitler who carry scientific experimentation and theory (Eugenics) to their logical extreme. The moral handcuffs were removed before Hitler was born.
Next time let’s look at how Social Darwinism affects our everyday lives.

Darwin's Gift To Mankind (2)

Christianity lost its credibility as an arbiter over scientific research two hundred years before Charles Darwin sailed on the Beagle. It got its nose bloodied—as so many of us do—by getting involved in a very old controversy that it didn’t need to mix into.
Since long before the Christianity existed, scientists had argued over whether the earth moves around the sun or the sun moves around the earth. Ancient Greek scientists (Aristotle 300BC and Ptolemy AD150) had argued for a stable earth and a moving sun. Ancient scientists from India, Greece (Aristarcus of Samos 230BC) and later Muslim scientists had insisted that the earth moves around the sun.
Then a trio of Hollanders came along and invented the telescope (AD 1608). This meant you could actually look up and see what might or might not be moving up there. Galileo did. He improved the telescope so you could see even more, and he decided to weigh in on the controversy by backing a Polish (or German? No one knows) scientist named Copernicus.
Copernicus had the luck of living far from Rome in Poland. His uncle and protector was a powerful prince of the Church. He had the good sense not to publish his findings until after he was dead. But a lot of people read his interpretation of the theory that the sun is the center of our solar system.
Galileo took it and ran with it. He even used his new telescope to prove it. He made the horrendous mistake of living near Rome. And he was living in a time when the Catholic Church was feeling very pugnacious about Protestants and even Catholics who disagreed with official church positions.
Immediately people from the Holy Office (Rome’s official censors) started pointing to passages in the Bible that talk about “ends of the earth” or the “sun rising and setting”, or even the sun “crossing the heavens”. There was very little tolerance for the notion that the Bible might on occasion use poetic language or language that matched the common understanding of its time—having been written, conservatively, between 2000BC and AD95.
No. People who got promoted to the Holy Office tended to be literalists. There is no evidence they ever had any use for poetry—or that they gave much attention to verses like the one in Proverbs that says “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing and the glory of kings (scientists) to find it out”. There’ll be no “finding out” around here.
Galileo was summoned before church authorities in 1633 and made to recant. He had to get down on his knees and promise that he believed, had always believed and would always believe that the earth does not move. Faced with a nasty death as the alternative, he did so.
There are those who suggest he muttered, “Yes it does” as he walked out. But the church had the victory. The notion, adopted from Aristotle, that the earth is stationary won the day. Until, of course, hundreds, then thousands and finally millions of scientists proved it wrong.
The Church had made the mistake that many experts do. It had stepped out of its sphere of expertise. (John Calvin pointed out, a century before Galileo, that the Bible does not pretend to be a scientific text.) Christianity had egg all over its face.
But it hadn’t yet learned its lesson when Darwin published “On the Origins of Species” in 1859. This time it would be English Protestant divines who led the charge. “There is no reference in scripture that species change!” “Everything was begun and done six thousand years ago”.
Darwin, who had actually written nothing to refute Christian doctrine, was deemed to have struck at the foundations of Christianity. The good divines brought their Biblical texts to the fight; Darwin’s supporters brought their volumes of physical observation and evidence.
The playbook read like it had been plagiarized from the trial of Galileo. Except this time the Church lost its fight right on the spot. Scientists made fools of conservative clerics—and this time there were no flaming faggots and stakes to back up churchly claims to scientific infallibility.
The truly tragic thing—from a Christian point of view, which is mine—is that the clerics had misread their own Bible. One of things they clung to most avidly is the notion that the entire universe was made in six days. They get this from Genesis one. They should have asked a knowledgeable rabbi—it’s their book.
Rabbis have known for centuries that there is a TIME GAP of undetermined length between Genesis 1:1 “In the Beginning God created the heavens and the earth” AND Genesis 1:2 “The Earth was without form and void. …” There is no definition of that gap—it could easily be billions of years.
From Genesis 1:2 on the writer is talking about the preparation (recreation, if you will) of a post cataclysmic earth in preparation for humans made in God’s likeness (with an unkillable, everlasting spirit). Unlike the pre-humans found all over the planet, the Genesis 1 and 2 humans are essentially spirit beings who inhabit a body. (That’s basic Judeo-Christian theology Genesis 2:6.)
So if scientists find reasonable proof that the earth has been around for five or eight billion years, that doesn’t affect Christianity at all—any more than finding out that the earth spins around the sun.
A second problem Christians had with Darwin was the merest hint that the physique of man may have been adapted (evolved?) from earlier, more apelike forms. The Bible doesn’t say one way or the other—its primary concern is God’s relationship with mankind.
It leaves us with a tantalizing hint in Genesis 4. Cain, after murdering his brother, moved “east of Eden”—far away from Adam and Eve and married a wife. Where did he find her? Among the Neanderthals? And who was he afraid might kill him if he wandered far from home?
Darwinism has no real affect on the message of the Bible—that God is reaching out to man. All the angst over scientific interpretations of how long the planet has been around serve only to act as red herrings, obscuring that message.
Christians should give amoral Darwinian science as much latitude as it affords amoral capitalism or amoral politics. It really has little to do with their main business. The distractions caused by trying to refute Galileo or Darwin have done more to damage the credibility of Christianity—in all areas—than any other single thing in history.
Next time, let’s look at some of Darwin’s most important apostles.

Darwin's Gift To Mankind

In times of crisis, the matter of morality often comes back to the fore. It is usually conveniently forgotten during the good times, when profit is there for the taking so long as one doesn’t ask too many questions—at such times morality is largely seen as negativity.
But when a bubble goes to smash and we find we simply cannot “make a dollar out of sixty-five cents” or pay a huge mortgage on a tiny salary, then we raise the moral standard. “They” gypped us. “They” succumbed to the deadly sin of greed. “They” were IMMORAL.
I am usually not impressed by these post facto condemnations—which largely serve merely to point blame away from ourselves. We all cheered, didn’t we, when constraints were taken away from banks, regulations away from business, and we were given the opportunity to make millions in the market to cover our retirement, rather than rely on stodgy old fixed pensions?
Only after the fact—when we realize sixty five cents is only sixty five cents—do we start ascribing moral failings to our erstwhile heroes. To me it is interesting that this should be happening on an anniversary year of one of the most important publications of the last few centuries.
November 24, this year, will mark the 150th anniversary of one of the most significant MORAL treatises ever written—Charles Darwin’s “On The Origin of Species.” Moral treatise? you ask. I thought the book was about science.
Oh, it was. Pages and pages. But its impact on human morality was far greater than its impact on science. The “Theory of Evolution”, which is usually ascribed to Darwin, was well underway before he wrote a line.
The French Revolutionaries who marched on the Church of Notre Dame (it’s not the cathedral) to dethrone God in 1794 really began it. They put Human Reason at the altar in place of deity—and declared they would worship nothing else.
Up until that time you simply could not do respectable science—whether you were Copernicus or an alchemist—without positing the existence of a creator. Even Aristotle thought it absurd to think of a universe without an intelligent designer.
But that philosophical position came with a lot of theological baggage that was unacceptable to scientists, politicians and businessmen. You see if an intelligent being created the universe, he then might claim the right to say something about how it is run. He might even impose rules of conduct for beings he created. These would be called morality.
As I said before, during good times, morality is a negativistic pain. Politicians can’t live with it; business men reject it out of hand; scientists complain that it unnecessarily ties their hands while doing beneficial research. To make things work more smoothly, one MUST eliminate unnecessary restrictions. As I said, we feel this way when times are good.
“My God, John,” old Commodore VanderBilt is said to snapped at an aide, “do you think you can run a railroad according to the laws of the State of New York?” After dynamiting the competition and giving himself a monopoly of the ferries in New York harbor, he proceeded to help build a railroad complex that very much created the modern United States. With the same ruthlessness.
Think how a pedestrian religious morality would have limited him. VanderBilt, Rockefeller, Morgan, Gould and Fisk were all devotees of Darwinian morality. The fit survive and thrive. The dollar-a-day working stiff goes to well deserved extinction. Darwinian business and nature are equally ruthless.
By 1796 a French scientist, Georges Cuvier, proved that species become extinct. Darwin’s own grand-father propounded the notion of common ancestry for warm blooded species before Charles was born. Charles Lyells wrote a book in the 1830s on geology in which he suggested gradual change over millions of years. Jean Baptiste Lamarck published a book with a complete theory of evolution in 1809.
But morality, buttressed by conservative theologians held on. Darwin’s book would finally toss it all out and leave us free to enjoy the benefits of unregulated markets, science and politics (Nazism, Communism, or laissez faire capitalism, for instance).
When Christ spelled out his moral theology two thousand years ago, he employed only one top-notch evangelist to sell it to the Roman Empire, St. Paul. Within a decade of publishing “Origin”, four terribly effective evangelists for Evolution had taken up the cudgels on its behalf.
It took Christian preachers three hundred years to change the Roman world. Darwin’s apostles would change the world in a few decades. They left us with no legitimate appeal to morality or any other restraining set of rules of conduct. That’s Darwin’s gift to us.
But before the moralizers go up in arms, let’s take a look at all the reasons why Christianity made it so easy for Darwin’s followers to pitch its preachments on the scrap heap of history. Much of the fault, does indeed lie with Christianity.
Let’s look at that—and Darwin’s chief followers and boosters tomorrow.

Left Face! About Face! Right Face!--Think!

My dad read “Time”. My maternal aunt, who didn’t get along with him terribly well, began a subscription to “Newsweek” the year I was born. Both are dead, but I’ve maintained the 1939 subscription to “Newsweek”. You have to read “Newsweek”, I am told. It’s one of the chief opinion makers in the United States.
So I read it. After all, how else could I know what to think? Or, more to the point, how else could I know what I am supposed to think? This week’s issue had an interesting array of stories. After reading them, I really don’t know what to think. So I’ll pass a few of them on to you.
First, there’s the cover. It’s a take-off on a World War I British recruiting poster that we used in World War II. A grim visaged Uncle Sam points at the reader, saying, “I WANT YOU—to start spending!” Below this, in much smaller type it says, “Invest in America – Before it’s too late”.
What stands out is, “Start Spending”. As I recall that was exactly what President Bush asked of America after Nine-one-one and the Tech bubble burst of 2001. Start Spending! (Different man, same policy?) We’re a nation of spendaholics. Is it really best for a reformed alcoholic that he go back into the bar and have another drink? “Before it’s too late”?
I showed this cover to several people. They shook their heads in disbelief. (On page 10 there’s short squib telling us that it’s back to the Cold War between us and the Chinese Navy off China’s coast. The White House says they are “militarily more aggressive”. Aren’t these the people we’ve invested so much in—and we’re depending on to fund our bailout plans?)
The cover story starts on page 27. “STOP SAVING NOW!” the headline takes up half the page. “This new age of thrift is understandable. But for a recovery to take hold, Americans will need to start taking risks again.” The article admits that, most of the risk taking during the past few years was bad.
It was, says “Newsweek”, “simply debt layered on top of debt for the purpose of generating fees and trading profits.” My credit card issuers and the AIG executives don’t seem to have gotten past that state of mind yet. Isn’t it dangerously early to pour more booze down the throats of people who haven’t recovered from their last decade long toot?
But who am I and who are the people I showed this magazine to? What do we know? On page 30, there’s an article on four ways Obama might react to the banking crisis. The thrust of the article is that the big banks MUST be saved. Not to rescue them, we are assured, is just “not smart”.
Who’s really writing this article? A banker? (Jonathan Alter is listed.) They screw up big time; we (that’s you and me) bail them out without undue injury or pain—what’s to stop them from going ahead and “taking risks”, as “Newsweek” advises, and screwing up again so that we can rescue them again?
We took the paddle out of school, and now we’re taking it out of banking and investing. Is this called “No Bank Left Behind?” Is this really like school—the only way we can punish a naughty bank is to send it home for a few days and make it watch TV and play video games?
The only people who’ve been punished so far are stockholders, employees at the layoff level, and suckers who believed an IRA was as good as a guaranteed pension. We’re telling those folks to start taking risks again? With what’s left?
(Has anyone considered Madison’s idea of a National Bank? To replace the others as they collapse? The Fed is already there. Madison’s other idea—something he wrote, the Constitution—worked out pretty well. “Newsweek” doesn’t mention his idea.)
On page 36, an article brings us the encouraging thought that Mexican drug cartel violence is reaching deep into this country. There’s an apparently honest citizen in Phoenix who has been sleeping with two machine guns under his bed for two years. If I lived next door, that would not comfort me.
The next article tells us that fleeing Afghans have brought “Jahid chic” to the Arabic slums of London. One twenty-five year old immigrant is quoted as saying, “The West is destroying the spirit, soul and values of Islam. Muslims should avoid contact with and coming to the West.” Another wonders how immigrants “can wear western clothes, dance and drink, … and see the Taliban as their heroes.”
A column on page 43 tells us that the 9/11 Commission report was based almost entirely on testimony by victims of torture. On page 46, we are told that Kurdistan—long considered the most stable and pro-western part of Iraq—has now gone to blazes, riven with sectarian violence. (One end of the teeter totter goes up; the other goes down.)
A column on page 48 concludes that there is no possible way all the existing green technologies can possibly meet our energy needs. “Hence the need for Nobel-caliber discoveries.” “We need breakthroughs … [but] we are spending only a fifth on energy research that we spent in the 1970s and 1980s.”
After we save all the big banks, get people spending and taking risks again—our troubles still won’t be over. Not by a long shot. Now I know what I SHOULD think. Let me sit down and figure out what I actually DO think.
One thing I wonder: do they really have a clue in Washington? A White House aide (Axelrod) was quoted yesterday as sneering that the American people really aren’t sitting around their kitchen tables and giving any thought to AIG bonuses (after billions in bailout money).
We know HE doesn’t have a clue.

No Child Left Behind--If You Trip The Leaders

“No Child Left Behind” is coming under some very negative scrutiny these days. George Wills, in this week’s “Newsweek”, quotes the new Secretary of Education (Arne Duncan) as saying, “We have been lying to students and their parents”.
Secretary Duncan cites the fact that we have been dumbing down our educational requirements in order to be sure that everyone passes—that no one is left behind. I’m inclined to agree—after eight years of substitute teaching and, before that, several years teaching at a junior college.
What comes to mind is Emily—my seventeen-year-old neighbor. I met her four years ago, right after she moved in. She had been homeschooled up to that point by a mother who has successfully gone back to medical school. I first noticed how polite Emily was—astonishing in a teenager today.
We got to talking and I learned she was reading through the works of Shakespeare just for fun. Her parents put her in a decent suburban high school after eighth grade. I often substitute in that school so I kept track of her. She, of course, went on to Advanced Placement (AP) English. That’s where you get college credit for high school courses. They are supposed to be rigorous.
One day I asked her what books she was reading in her AP class. I was astounded at how short the list was. She was at that moment reading Orwell’s “Animal Farm”. It’s a very short book. Based on my high school experience in English (1950s), I expected that her class would be given the book on Friday and be expected to have read all or most of it by Monday.
To my increasing astonishment, she reported week after week that they were still plowing through “Animal Farm”. (She had finished it and had moved on to other reading—she’s a weird kid who likes to read. Believe me, in today’s schools, that IS weird!)
We didn’t have AP courses in my high school, but we did one whale of a lot more reading, wrote more and longer papers, did more research and, I believe, learned a lot more. Kids today are losing the vast heritage of their English language. That is tragic—and very, very dumbed down.
When I have taught elementary math, I have discovered that most kids have never learned their “times tables” (memorization of rote facts is out of favor I’m told). I don’t care if they’re learning Chicago Math or some other new variety—they become totally lost when trying to do a difficult problem like seven times eight without a calculator. Whoa. I was memorizing times tables by age six.
Then there are the “teacher qualification” provisions of “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB). I know a teacher who began teaching video production twenty-five years ago. There were no courses for him then. He did his own reading, bought a lot of his own equipment and got the school to set up a large, well-equipped lab. The class was hugely popular, with people lining up to take it.
Then came NCLB. What?!? No courses in video production?!? He was reassigned to teach math in Middle School—for which he had once taken the proper college courses. They hired a very recent art school graduate who had taken an actual course in video production. I had the opportunity to sub for him and, next year, for her. I got a pretty good eye view of what both knew.
When she discovered that she was expected to teach video production at an advanced level (and that her processor had taken his own equipment home with him) she got sick a lot. (I subbed, remember?) Next year she fled back to Detroit to teach art—which she did know about.
Today, the class as the first man taught it, is neither offered nor mentioned. His former lab is broken up into two standard classrooms. I’ve seen it happen to history teachers who had done lots and lots of their own reading and who knew their history—but had neglected to major in it. One man I’m thinking of is teaching something else, replaced by a younger person who knows half as much.
Then there’s the requirement under NCLB that the learning challenged (we used to say “retarded” and we recognized that they really could NOT do advanced math or standard academic courses) must be given the same tests as students with no special difficulties.
Two results. One, the requirements for “normal” students have to be dumbed down for the challenged kids to have any chance at all. Two, the low scores of the challenged students can absolutely kill test results for an entire district. That can inflict further monetary pain on districts that already do not have enough resources.
Okay, so send in the State to take it over. You haven’t changed the kids or their problems.
The whole law has turned out to be a well-intentioned mess—the kind the road to Hell is paved with. We may have to break down and admit to ourselves that some kids are actually smarter, have better backgrounds, have more motivating parents and homes. And some do not.
We may not be able to make up for every lack in school. (SOME amount of time has to be left to encourage the really bright kids to go on and make the most of themselves—for all our sakes.) Vocational training shouldn’t be seen as a defeat.
There are people out there who make very good livings repairing cars, plumbing and doing all manner of manual work—especially if they have the opportunity to be trained for it. If my car runs well when he’s through, I really don’t care if the mechanic took four years of math and read “To Kill A Mockingbird.”
Some kids can’t do it. More of them don’t WANT to—and they’ll fight so hard not to that they will make your life as a teacher sheer hell if you try to force them (listen to the chatter in a teacher’s lunch room).
We have to find something productive in life for them to do. We’ll all benefit.
But Emily, who has spent three years in class with kids who can’t and won’t isn’t the same Emily she used to be—or could have been. THAT is a real tragedy.

It's Got To Get Better--Right?

The other night I took a walk and encountered a neighbor of mine walking his dog. We’re not great friends, but we always greet cordially. I hadn’t seen him for months. In fact the last time we really talked was in 2006 when I wanted some work done on the house.
He’s a contractor who builds houses and does occasional remodeling. I just wanted to explore putting a small addition on my house. When I came to him to ask if he would consider the job, he apologized and explained that he was so busy building he didn’t even have time to look at what I needed.
A year or so later he was still busy. Last summer someone told me that he was staying busy by doing mostly remodeling. The other day he seemed very willing to stop and chat. I asked how things were going, and he quickly jumped into a long, rather sad explanation.
This year he’s down to doing remodeling jobs for friends and relatives. The problem here, of course, is that they expect a bargain (translation: he gets to pay for materials used and skip eating). And then, when the work is done, they either cannot pay or don’t feel they need to any time soon.
“It must be like loaning money to relatives,” I suggested. He agreed heartily. As we turned to walk on he suddenly said, with a pathos I’d never before heard in his voice or associated with his family in all the years I’ve known them:
“It’s got to get better—don’t you think?”
I wanted to comfort him and say, “Yes”. I suppose at some time in the future it will get better. All wars end; all depressions do. (There was a war between France and England that lasted a century in the 1300s. A depression in Germany in the 1400s lasted a hundred years or so. But they ended.)
Bernanke suggests this downturn might be over by the end of this year. Others say not until the next year or the next. In any case it’s liable to be a long, chilly summer for a lot of people. I even saw in the news that Disney is thinking of shuttering its Hong Kong Disneyland, and it’s laying off lots of people in Orlando.
Twenty-five years ago we had a recession around here that put a lot of small contractors into another line of work. On my street—which at that time had been a fast and high growth area—things got silent and I didn’t hear another hammer for four years or so. I can point out the last house built in 1982 and the first house to go up in 1986.
Contractors went to work in places like the local utilities, and there was a huge paper mill down along the waterfront. It stunk (they would give you a token for a free car wash if you lived in the immediate neighborhood), but it hired.
For decades it was one the bastions of the area economy. High wages, lots of hours. Any trees you wanted to chop down, they would come, pick up and turn into pulp. Two weeks ago the paper mill announced it was shutting down for a “six month trial”.
If business improves, we are promised, they will “consider” reopening next fall. No one around here is holding his or her breath waiting for that to happen. So my friend doesn’t even have the paper mill to fall back on—and the utilities have been paring staff for decades.
Another huge brick and mortar industrial corpse dotting our landscape. When the mill closed it was already down to a tiny workforce of 190 people. Just another one of many, many manufacturing plants to wind down over the last half century.
People keep telling high school students around here, “You have to go on and get some kind of college degree so you are qualified to do something beside factory work”—or construction.
What? I keep asking myself. My sons haven’t really nailed down any firm plans for the future—but they both know one thing for sure: it won’t be anything around here. That’s a shame, actually. It can be a beautiful area if you like lakes, boating, fishing, hunting, just sitting on your rear watching nature. Traffic isn’t too bad, public parks are plentiful.
But when the hammers stop and the mills and factories shut, what do you do? A recession like this just makes bad things happen faster. And, please, dear reader, do not delude yourself into thinking ANYBODY is going to put a large “high tech” facility anywhere near here. Or in most of the industrial mid-west. Weather, transportation, unions—all are major negatives.
Even the medical field doesn’t look so rosy. They’re laying off. Talk to your doctor about what happens to his income when patients have no more insurance. My physician told me that his income has gone down 40% in just the past few years. Schools and colleges are outsourcing everything they can; administrators visibly shudder when they consider the next few budgets.
I mouthed a pleasant nothing to my neighbor and we walked our separate ways.

Of Orange Men and Green Beer

I wore orange today because it was St. Patrick’s Day. That’s the proper color for an ethnic Hollander to wear in celebration of King William’s (of Holland and England) defeat of James the Second of England and James the Seventh of Scotland in Ireland (same chap).
After all, King William belonged to the Dutch House of Orange (whose actual color is the white carnation, but no matter that; it was still the House of Orange). Pro-English, Protestant Northern Irish still call themselves “Orangemen”.
Oh yes, let’s make it even simpler. James II, the Catholic champion, was allied with France against the Pope, and William, the Protestant challenger, was allied with the Pope against France. A good part of William’s army consisted of Catholic Hollanders carrying a Papal banner.
It gets even more fun when you remember that about a thousand years before this fight, an Irish tribe called the “Scots” invaded the land of the Picts—that part of Great Britain north of Hadrian’s Wall. These Irishmen conquered it so thoroughly that they gave it their own name—and we call it Scotland to this day.
That’s a good part of the fun of history. Everything eventually turns inside out and upside down. Of course I have to protest that, while they dye rivers and beer green—and even fast food places serve green milkshakes—no one serves orange shakes or beer.
The fuss all started in 1603 when the first Queen Elizabeth died without bothering to leave an heir. The best claim anyone had to the throne of England was the King of Scotland, James VI. There was a problem: James’ mom—Mary Queen of Scots.
She was a pretty lady—stood 5’ll”, an appalling female height in those days—who had become queen of Scotland at 9 months old, been spirited to France to escape an English invasion where she briefly became Queen Consort of France at seventeen.
France was England oldest and most deadly enemy. When Mary was widowed, she returned to Scotland and married a second time—giving birth to James, who never saw his mother again after he was one—who, because Mary was descended from a close cousin of Henry VIII, had the best claim to England’s throne.
(Is this all clear?) Elizabeth cut off Mary’s head and, fifteen years later, proclaimed Mary’s son as King of England. James didn’t do so badly in England but his son, Charles 1 got his head cut off, too. A dozen years later HIS son, Charles II was restored to the British throne.
Charles was suspected of being a Catholic—unacceptable in a politically protestant nation—and his brother who succeeded him was in fact Catholic. In 1688, after a three year rule, the English threw him out and he ran for France. The French sent him to Ireland to raise a pro-French, nominally pro-Catholic revolt among the Catholic Irish against England.
The English had meanwhile picked a new king—William of Holland whose wife Mary was a descendent of Henry VIII—and he took a Dutch and English army to Ireland in 1689 to defeat James and his Irish followers. Even with this defeat, the French continued to support James and his son (the “Old Pretender” and the “Young Pretender) for another seventy years.
And Ireland always remained a threat—leaning toward whatever enemy England had at the moment. When France was the danger, Ireland (and Scotland, for that matter) allied with France. Later as Germany became the foe to watch, Ireland rioted against England in 1916 and, as an independent nation, became a tacit ally of Nazi Germany in 1940.
If you’ve followed me this far, you’re probably saying that was a very long time ago—who cares? The Irish and the pro-English Protestant Northern Irish who killed each other with a jolly good will for the last three decades of the Twentieth Century seem to. (And they just had a murder or two the other day.)
The ill-will actually goes back to the 1200s. We Americans, who by and large began our cultural memories when we landed at Ellis Island, miss a lot of nuances in other lands. Many European Americans I ask can’t begin tell me where their families came from in Europe. Very few blacks know what part of Africa they came from. They often got off the boat not wanting to remember their history.
But people who live in places like Bosnia, Iraq, Pakistan, Darfur, Nigeria, Vietnam (fearing the ancient Chinese enemy more than they resent the Americans), Basque Country, the Walloons and Flemings—the Quebecois and the English Canadians, they don’t forget what happened centuries ago.
I admit I remember the Spanish rape of Holland (1580s), and on St. Patrick’s Day—even though I dated an Irish-American girl for years and have had friends from Ireland—I can’t help but avoid the green on March 17 and let slip the ancient cant, “King Billy was OURS”.
Half of our problems in places like Iraq and Afghanistan stem from the simple fact that our thoroughly Americanized policy makers in Washington have forgotten that other tribesmen remember. Then it takes us awhile to figure out why “friends” are shooting at us.
Recently we have accidentally stepped into ancient quarrels—ones we may never even have heard of. We have to learn that sometimes the wearing of an “orange shirt” means more than a color preference. We may even have to stop to figure out who the local “King Billy” was back a few hundred years.

Are We Looking Up Or Just Upside Down?

I haven’t written much about politics in the past few weeks. It’s because I don’t have any real take on what’s going on and, unlike newspaper commentators, I am under no obligation to come up with an opinion when there is no good basis for an opinion.
It’s been interesting to watch various columnists go back and forth lately. One day the world is headed to Hades in a hand basket; the next day there are glimmers of light ahead. As Yoda (the tiny Jedi from Star Wars) might say, “The future, clouded it is.”
Bernanke, head of the Federal Reserve said this weekend that the recession might end by the end of this year—and then he appended enough “if’s” to sink any prognosis. The market was so excited by his comment that it rose twenty-eight whole points today—still down about 50% from a year ago.
I’m not really happy about this administration (not terribly surprising since I still identify myself as a moderate Republican). I don’t know what to make of it. I’m not moved to paroxysms of joy at seeing some of the same people who got us into this mess entrusted with getting us out.
As I’ve written before, something inside me keeps insisting that we might be better off in the long run if we stepped back and let this economic collapse reach its real bottom and THEN stepped in with all of our bailout money. That might be a better point to kick start the economy.
Asking if Obama—or anyone in Washington now—really knows what he’s doing is a valid question. The game plans I’ve heard so far have very nebulous goals as they are currently articulated. Where are we really going? What will all this bailout (and attendant pork) actually get us?
We are still dependent on China to fund our debt, and the Chinese are beginning to mumble in a manner not at all inscrutable about the safety of investing hundreds of billions in federal treasury bills. Hillary recently made a special stop to encourage them to keep loaning to us.
I just have a funny feeling. It’s the sort of feeling that—if I had it while out walking at night—would keep me going up a dark alley or walking into a dark and silent woods. I’m not alone in having the “willies”—all sorts of rumors are beginning to circulate about Obama and company.
Most of these don’t really bother me. Take, for example, the one linking his administration to the supposedly arcane and anti-American policies of The Council on Foreign Affairs. This is a group of scholars and business people that meets in New York to discuss and write memos on American foreign policy. Sometimes these memos are quite influential.
But to suggest that such past and present members as Walter Lippmann, Bill Moyer, David Rockefeller, Allen Dulles, Paul Volker, Zbigniew Brezinski, George H.W.Bush, Madeleine Albright, Dwight Eisenhower and Angelina Jolie are all consciously working against American interests leaves me gasping.
My mentor at Georgetown returned from a year working at the council just before I started my Masters program. He didn’t strike me as a dangerous radical. (In fact, years before, he was asked by Kennedy to write large sections of “Profiles in Courage”—at Jackie’s recommendation.)
Then there’s the deep dark suspicion evoked by the presence of so many attendees of past Bilderberg Conferences in this administration. The conferences have been going on since 1954. Each year 130 powerful people from here and West Europe get together to talk out mutual problems.
Much as this may sound terrifying to fervent American isolationists, it doesn’t scare me too much. Back when he was a congressman from West Michigan, Gerald Ford attended several of these conferences. We were rather proud of him for that. He showed no signs of anti-Americanism or any desire to end American sovereignty while he was president.
But, many people worry, these are SECRET meetings. (Remember how paranoid you got in high school when a group of girls were looking at you and whispering?) As the founding fathers who wrote the Constitution well understood, there is a good reason for secret meetings.
A participant can go ahead and air a harebrained notion, have it emended or shot down—without looking a fool in the papers next day. It frees people to come up with ideas. They are free to change them later. Most useful ideas only come out when people feel free to bring them up in private.
If you’re going to ask intelligent people who have ideas to join your administration, Republican or Democratic, you’re likely to land a few Bilderbergers or CFA types.
No—these rumors aren’t what bother me about the current administration. I cannot put my finger on exactly what concerns me. Something does. Years of experience have taught me to pay attention to itches that won’t go away.
This one won’t. I’ll just sit quietly by and scratch it until something happens. Until something is there that I can wrap an opinion around. When some break in the clouds occurs and the future—less clouded it is. There’s plenty other things to write about meanwhile.

When God SAYS Something

The word “Gospel” simply means “good news”. The good news of Christianity is that the God we betrayed back in Genesis no longer sees us as a bit of offal he cannot abide having around. He, not us, has found a way to restore friendship and communication between us.
That is the meaning behind the song the angels sang on Christmas Eve—peace on Earth and good will to men. That is the meaning of the Easter Holiday when Christ is sacrificed himself to pay for our treachery (Think Aslan, again). He then rises to proclaim the debt is paid, that our enemy into whose slavery we sold ourselves is defeated, and that we can live again.
When we accept this, God is ready to listen to us again. He is willing to answer us—to talk back to us. We, however, must be prepared to listen. We must also be prepared to accept something that on first hearing may sound a whole lot spooky.
It always fascinates me that many people who will spend hours on the Science Fiction Channel, who will buy their children the complete Harry Potter series, who love Star Trek and Star Wars, who watch “Ghost Hunters”, who just live for the next “horror” movie, and who are absolutely sure aliens landed at Area 51 in Roswell, New Mexico reject anything in Christianity that sounds the least bit supernatural.
If as many hours had been spent on finding a cure for cancer and AIDs as have been spent on disproving anything out of the natural in the Bible, those diseases would be like Small Pox today. Christianity reserves its right to be supernatural—it claims to worship a most supernatural God.
He, in turn, reserves the right to both speak and act in the natural AND the supernatural. Judeo-Christianity has a rock that follows Israel through the desert and spews water as needed. It has metal axes that float, blind men who can suddenly see, deaf people who can hear, lame people who jump up and down, dead men who stand up and walk.
Christ offers as his credentials to his cousin, John the Baptist, the fact that lame walk, dumb speak and blind see and, just incidentally, the fact that the Good News is preached to the poor. He didn’t come to judge—he came to tell us that God has found a way to restore our relationship.
So, how do we hear God through the cacophony of temporal worries and fears, the static of an enemy who will do anything to keep us from listening to God? (The “devil”—the accuser; the prosecuting attorney charging us—the liar and deceiver who tricks us into hurting ourselves and each other—is another nice bit of Christian supernaturalism.
We cannot get away with blaming him for our poor choices [“The Devil made me do it”}; he merely is able to suggest. We always have the ability to say no. His chief skill is that he makes evil sound so good, so useful, so fun, or so necessary that we choose to think we have no other choice.)
We’d prefer not to think about that; it’s much too spooky. But it is his voice and his suggestions that often drown out the true vox Dei. We must tell him to go away, to Shut Up, before we can hear the “still, small voice of God”. We literally must do that to hear God.
“Resist the devil and he will flee from you,” we are promised. So resist. Tell him to take his ideas, his worries and fears, his urgencies and his concerns out of your head. This will help you to hear much, much better. You will need help to do this.
That involves one more spooky thing—before he left earth to return to his heavenly throne, Christ promised that we would be sent a “comforter”, someone to lead us into all truth. That, of course, is the Holy Spirit, the Third Person the kid from Notre Dame invokes before he shoots a free throw—The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit.
Having destroyed our natural “receivers” during chapters 3-11 of Genesis, the Holy Spirit becomes the new way of hearing and reaching God. He prays for us. He interprets to God what we really mean and should be saying. He interprets God back to us.
All he asks is that we believe (specifically that we believe he is here to help us), that we are not hanging onto a pet sin or nasty impulse that offends God (and man), that we have forgiven and, thus, been forgiven, that we love and accept the fact that he loves us, and that we are quiet and patient.
That’s all.
Sometimes he will speak through a passage in the Bible. I myself have had a question answered that way. (Once, a question about American history of all things.) Sometimes you will feel a “knowing”—knowing that this is what he wants you to do. An idea or a new thought will come to you.
If it does not violate morality or Godliness, such an impulse comes from the Holy Spirit (check to be sure whose voice is speaking—the enemy is always hovering, waiting to pick off a pass if you let him). Wait, then, do you feel an inner sense of quiet and peace about what is being suggested?
That inner sense of peace ALWAYS comes with the voice of God. You are free to quote scripture to God—he likes to be reminded of the promises he has made. Find a verse that backs up what you want (a useful check against greed and covetousness).
He promises that if you ask for wisdom you will surely be given it. Wisdom alone can make a lot of answers clear. He also reminds you that “You have not because you ask not” and he warns that you can ask and not receive because you ask for wrong things. Out of greed or lust or hatred. These will not get you an answer.
There’s a right way to ask. If you ask out of greed or if you doubt while you ask, “you must not expect to receive anything”. Rules, caveats and exceptions. You can’t just sit down and ask for a yacht or a Rolls Royce. Just as you wouldn’t let your young child play with a sharp knife, he won’t give you something he knows would be ultimately harmful to you. (Or cause you to forget him.)
He loves us, but he doesn’t have a high degree of respect for our maturity. (A vast number of recent mortgage agreements in this country would not have been signed if the borrowers—or lenders—had talked to God first. Such trouble we can get into when we fail to ask for wisdom or to check greed.)
That’s how you begin to talk to God. As with any friendship, it gets deeper and easier as you move on in the relationship. It becomes like a long married couple who can almost automatically finish each other’s sentences. The knowing is that deep. Communication is restored.
One or two more points to be dealt with later … .

Why Does God SPEAK To Us Now?

That question might, quite sensibly, arise in someone’s mind. If we betrayed God’s trust and shattered the lines of communication way back—uncounted years ago—in Genesis 3, why might we be able to hear him now? The original communication lines have not yet been restored.
That question is uniquely answered by Christianity. As a faith, it stands absolutely unique among all other religions for this reason alone. Only in Christianity does God decide that is up to HIM to reach out to man (think of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel) and restore some form of communication unilaterally.
In any other faith you can think of, man reaches up to, appeals to and propitiates God. Humans make the overture. Only in Christianity does God reach down to helpless humans, appeal to them, and make the propitiation (pay the damages) FOR them.
In other words, God, the injured party in Adam’s original betrayal, takes the responsibility upon himself to pay the legal penalties for the broken contract. He reaches out and offers peace to fractious, confused and defiantly unapologetic mankind completely on his own.
This view of God—and his relationship with men and women—can be found in no other religion. It is unique in that it makes no sense. The victor doesn’t plead for terms; the offended doesn’t apologize; the injured party doesn’t make restitution. That’s nuts.
But in Christianity that is precisely what happens. St. Paul writes of “the foolishness of God,” (which turns out to be “wiser than men”). He writes again, “The Gospel (the story of Christianity) is something religious folk find offensive, and the educated see as utter foolishness”.
Christianity makes no sense. If offends religious people. It is a joke to the educated. The Christian God, if we evaluate him from a rational point of view, appears to be a fool. No other faith has ever portrayed its deity as what appears, at first blush, to be a complete sucker.
C.S.Lewis makes this vividly clear in his children’s book, “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Aslan (Christ, if any one missed the point) offers himself to be humiliated, tormented by the enemy and killed for the sake of a whiney traitor who has earned nothing of it.
That sums up the whole point of the Christian faith. People generally dislike Christianity—at least initially—because it portrays a God who seems to act out of irrational caring and it portrays us in a most insulting fashion. We are depicted as treacherous, ungrateful, whiney, helpless, powerless and most unlovable.
Is that how you see yourself? We are told that it is how God sees us. We are “sheep without a shepherd”—befuddled and confused (sheep are not too bright—they don’t do well alone). We are, as St. Paul puts it graphically, people “whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things”. Not at all flattering. Many who reject Christianity simply will not accept this view of us as people.
It is possible that such people need to take a second look at the Nazi death camps, the Soviet gulags, the corpses of children after a drive by shooting in America, or what’s left after a bomb hits a house full of civilians. Or just the fear on the faces of people who based their entire future on an investment guru who turns out to have been a fraud.
In Christianity, all the initiative lies on God’s side. He is the one St. John describes as loving us so much “he sent his only son (to die) for us”—and ALL THAT WE CAN DO to help ourselves is “BELIEVE in him.” That is absolutely all Christianity sees us capable of doing for ourselves.
We can do nothing, earn nothing, accomplish nothing ourselves. As Christ says to his apostles, “Without me you can do nothing”. That’s not a flattering summation.
That leaves Christianity as 1) making no sense and 2) being very insulting. No wonder lots of people either don’t like it or choose to water it way down as they present it in their Sunday morning sermons.
But that is Christianity in its simplest, rawest and truest form. (As raw as Auschwitz.) When we finally get past this initial reality—that we are traitors incapable of pleasing or communicating with God in any form—then we become what St. Paul calls “the righteousness of God in Christ”.
After we have apologized and believed we become as virtuous and as pure as God himself—as he sees us (another icky part of Christianity) cleaned up by Christ’s blood. (Think again of Aslan and Edward in “Lion, Witch and Wardrobe”.) We come out the other side of Easter Sunday forgiven and on our way to being restored to the kind of friendship and communication man had before Genesis 3. God has no more gag reflex when he comes near us. The ugliness is gone.
Now God can begin to speak to us—and we can begin to hear and understand. It’s not easy. This is still an occupied world (think France in World War II). After all we gave it to the enemy. That was our treachery. This foe is still killing, stealing and destroying—whether it’s your IRA or your very life.
We hear God through enemy generated static like people in France listening to the BBC or VOA during World War II. It’s not as easy as chatting on one’s cell phone. But it is now possible.
Next time let’s see how.

Impediments To HEARING God

In the last blog, I suggested that various things we do can block us from hearing God—or keep him from talking to us at all. One thing, for example, believe he’s there or he isn’t likely to waste time trying to communicate with you. There are still other factors in play here.
The Judeo-Christian Bible suggests that, for one thing, God has what might be called an allergic reaction to evil—or, to use the theological term, sin. He can’t stand it. Anthropomorphically, one could suggest that the presence of evil, of sin, provokes a gag reflex in him.
When someone is gagging over something he usually doesn’t communicate all that well with another person. In fact his greatest desire is to get away from whatever is sickening him—especially if it is something about that other person.
So, before we talk to God and expect to hear back from him, we need to do what I shall call a Ten Commandments check. To run through very quickly: Is there something we place a higher value on than we do him? He created us to have friendship with beings outside of himself. And, we are told, he is a very, very jealous God.
Oh, oops. Is there anyone among the human population that hasn’t had—or doesn’t have now—something he or she honestly wants more than fellowship with God. How about money? How about another person, someone we desire? How about success? How about promotion and power? Any of the above is classified as “idolatry”—a worship of something created rather than the creator.
If this doesn’t totally kill communication, it messes it up badly. How about the desire to do someone real harm—someone who did us a real wrong? That qualifies as the equivalent of murder. How about fudging a bit on taxes or the expense account—or taking a few office supplies home? Qualifies as stealing under the Ten Commandments, as interpreted by Christ.
How about wanting the job someone else has—that’s covetousness. How about cursing someone, someone who did us a serious wrong? “Damning” is taking God’s name in vain. How about stretching the truth a tad when we talk about someone no one in the group can stand? That’s “bearing false witness”—or lying.
All of these will block communication with God. If we stand before God deliberately hanging on to our rage, refusing to admit error, making excuses for our little white lies and tiny little thefts, we are a stench in his nostrils.
You have to be forgiven before the nasty odor goes away. And remember, as Christ said, if you haven’t forgiven all the wretched folk who have done you so much harm, you yourself will not be forgiven. As you can see, talking to God—hearing God—as a Christian is not an easy thing. Christianity is not an easy faith to follow. Christ suggests that anyone should first sit down and decide if he wants to pay the cost before he professes Christianity. It’s a high cost. It can be a real pain.
Then there’s another major problem that prevents communication with God. Time. Not taking it. Ever rush up to your boss or your mate, rattle off a request and rush away—and then wonder why you never got an answer?
God likes you to spend a little quality time with him—especially if you’re asking for something. Sometimes you have to actually sit down and talk with your boss or your wife before you can get the answer or favor you want. You have to show a little patience. Ditto God.
It’s a good idea to clear your mind of other thoughts and busy-nesses. It says in the Bible that the “sons of darkness are wiser in their generation than the sons of the light.” An example of that might be the Buddhist monk who is willing to sit, clear his mind and meditate. Very few Christians will show their God that much respect.
A Christian “mantra” might be a biblical verse, a refrain from a hymn or simply a phrase like “Thank you”. Such can clear the mind of many things that otherwise clog communication. You can’t be thinking about the budget shortfall or tomorrow’s presentation and concentrate on God—or your wife.
Lastly—in this very short list—you have to shut up and listen. (Ever have a boss, a teacher or a mate tell you to pipe down so that you can hear him or her speak?) The Hebrew Psalm 46 ends with the directive: “Be still and know that I am God.”
Be still. God doesn’t shout at you or use an earthquake to get your attention. If you insist on talking right through him, he’ll be the polite one and fall silent.
You can see that there might be all sorts of reasons why you could just be perfectly correct when you say, “God never says anything to me”.
That doesn’t mean he doesn’t try. But sometimes we make it impossible for him. (Yes, there are things God cannot do. The Bible expressly states that there were situations in which God could work no miracles because those who needed them refused to believe. We can limit the Omnipotent. He has given us that much power. Too many of us use it too often.)
So, if we tell him we’re sorry for the nastiness we’ve done (and mean it), if we spend time with him, if we are quietly listening—how do we hear him speak? We’ll get into that next.

When Did We Stop HEARING God?

So, if God regularly speaks and the problem actually is that our receiver doesn’t pick him up, when and how did this problem occur? Judeo-Christian tradition offers us some interesting answers. Most people don’t pick up on these because they get hung up on peripheral issues.
For instance when they read the first eleven chapters of Genesis (the first book of the Torah and of the Hebrew/Christian Bible), they get hung up on questions like, how big was Noah’s flood (did it ever actually occur), which animals and how many could fit on the ark? What language did they originally speak at Babel? When did this all occur? And so forth.
They miss the real thrust of chapters 3 through 11 of Genesis. These chapters are essentially a study in LOSS OF COMMUNICATION, a step by step analysis of how men lost the ability to communicate—with God, with nature and with each other.
Read as such, they become a fascinating study in downward mobility. In evaluating these chapters, one must remember a key psychological fact: what you cannot communicate with or understand becomes immediately frightening. Think of how you react when a parent, a boss or a mate says NOTHING, and you have no idea what they are thinking or what’s going on.
If they would just say something! But if we are left without a clue, most of us will assume the worst and become frustrated and, if only secretly, scared. Let’s watch this happen in Genesis. Start with chapter 3—Adam violates a direct order. He hears God coming toward him. He and Eve hide (v.8). He admits that he did so because he was afraid (v.10).
You don’t hide from—avoid—people you are in good rapport with. Communication has been lost. Adam has violated orders and is too busy blaming Eve to make the situation better. The receiver is broken at this point. The breakdown goes on.
Adam has been tending the “Garden of God” for what may have been a considerable period of time. We gather that this was a “no sweat” operation because in verse 17 he is told that he will hereafter get food from it “by the sweat of his brow,” “with toil”, and even the earth will seem “cursed” as he struggles to get his food.
I used to wonder how on earth Adam kept weeds and crabgrass out of his garden spaces without arduous work with rake and hoe. Or without poisonous chemicals. It struck me suddenly that the only possible way was with some kind of very basic communication. He could literally tell the weed to grow here—not there.
(We have discovered that plants will react positively to being spoken to. I remember a friend telling me how a large plant she had on an end table fell over for no apparent reason on a guest she did not like. It is not inconceivable that rudimentary communication was once possible.)
That communication was also lost. Now gardening and farming become hard labor. Man is tossed out of the Garden and no further reference is made to Adam ever again hearing the voice of God. A descendent named Enoch did, but that was considered highly unusual already then.
Next he loses the ability to communicate with beasts. In chapter 7, Noah is able to gather a great variety of animals together to load them on his boat. He is able to walk them aboard and keep order among them throughout the flood period. He is able to lead them off the boat.
Verse 2 of chapter 9 tells us that, after the flood, “from now on the animals with go in fear and dread of man.” (This morning a squirrel climbed up my slider frame after some bird suet. I tried gently to tell him to go back down—he didn’t understand me a bit and ran for hundreds of feet.) Even lions and tigers fear us—they just tend to kill what they fear. There’s no way to communicate.
In chapter 11, at Babel, the final nail is driven into the coffin of communication. One day as I was reading the passage, it suddenly struck me that the issue here isn’t that everybody went in speaking, let’s say, Sanscrit—and they all came out jabbering away in French, Italian or Swahili.
That’s not the point here. Not at all. As a kid I worked for weeks with a volatile Puerto Rican chap who spoke no English and I spoke no Spanish. Most English speakers were afraid to work with him; he could get violent. I went in patient (a bit nervous) and made extensive use of the four or five word we did share. We got along very well as long as I worked with him. The mere differences in external speech did not keep us from working together perfectly easily.
The issue of Babel isn’t DIFFERENT languages. Verse 7 says God “confused their languages.” That very thing happens between husbands and wives today—even when, ostensibly, they both speak English. Ever have your mate yell, “I’m NOT a mind reader!”?
That’s what went down at Babel. A confusion of speech—so that even though you heard the words you didn’t get the other person’s point. Nothing produces more anger or suspicion than the feeling that the other person is saying one thing while he or she insists they are saying something else. Or if you aren’t sure at all what they are saying.
I’m not immediately suspicious, doubtful or suspicious of someone who speaks Italian, Arabic or Chinese. But I can become paranoid over someone who speaks in English words but I don’t have any idea what he’s thinking or what he really means.
Without knowing what the other person is thinking, real communication is impossible. For thousands of years, men have lived in a world where the only people they felt they could trust were the family and villagers with whom they were raised—and even then, one could never be totally certain.
The receiver is broken. Genesis 3 through 11 tells us we have lost the ability to understand God, to make plants hear us, to understand the beasts and have them understand us, or to communicate in any deep way with our fellows.
We are isolated atoms for whom, essentially the only truth is the one spoken so despairingly by Descarte—“I know I think, therefore I know I exist”—but I cannot know the reality of anything else. The “Cogito Ergo Sum” is a cry of utter loneliness.
Descarte, to assuage his despair, turned to the notion of a God who affirmed his existence outside of the narrow reality Descarte could apprehend. We are all in his situation. But most of us are never able to hear the affirmation. The receiver is broken.
That is why God offers us a way to hear him—and hear his proof that we not only exist, but that there is a reality outside of ourselves that can be trusted. Tomorrow we’ll talk about how we can do that.

Does God SAY Anything?

The fastest way to guarantee yourself a visit to a psychotherapist is to tell people that God spoke to you. Assassins, babbling bag ladies, strange looking men at the automat and residents of some of our most secure institutions all make the claim.
Judeo-Christian tradition tells us that very, very few human beings have ever heard the actual voice of God. (Moses, St. John of Patmos, St. Paul and Isaiah are among the few.) The rest of us are left to discern the will of God by other means, according to Christian tradition.
In fact it can be dangerous to get hung up on actually hearing the vox Dei. As one evangelist put it, if you insist on hearing actual voices, there are diabolical spirits out there who will make sure you hear voices. These are no doubt the voices madmen and killers claim to have heard.
The first, very logical question to ask is: If God is really concerned about our lives and how we live them—why doesn’t he come right out and say what he wants so we can hear it? That’s a question I’ve heard many practicing Christians and former Christians ask.
There are two factors here. One—do you really believe he exists? Many people who have attended divine services all their lives aren’t really sure. They’ll pray—but is there really someone there listening? That’s what “faith” is all about. Without it, nothing works—neither a miracle nor a marriage.
Let’s use the example of a human relationship. Try acting like and believing that your wife or girlfriend doesn’t really exist. See how long she goes on talking to you. Many a young lady (or young man) has stopped even trying to communicate because the partner was treating her (or him) as if they didn’t really exist. No one stays around for that.
If you want to hear from God, settle in your mind and heart whether or not you believe he is actually there. Does he exist? Who is he? What do you know about him? What do you BELIEVE about him? Then, as “Portnoy’s Complaint” ends, “Perhaps ve may begin”.
“Faith”, says the Biblical writer of the Book of Hebrews, “is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.” Well, you snort, how can you believe in something you cannot see? After all, this is the scientific age! True enough.
You believe in Dark Matter, don’t you? Ever seen any? You believe in atoms—that they have protons, neutrons and electrons, don’t you. Ever seen one? Yes, you immediately retort, because we can see what they DO—how they interact on other things.
Okay. Ever see a person clean up his act after he “gets religion”? Ever ask yourself just how a Union cavalryman would pick a spot in the dark and put his sleeping bag on top of a bump that turned out to be the marching orders for Lee’s entire army—thus leading directly to the victory that made possible the Emancipation Proclamation?
Ever look at the complexity and orderliness of nature and wonder if it really all fell into place by some cosmic accident? There is proof there if you can accept the possibility. Aristotle—far, far from being a Christian—saw it. Or you can choose to deny that any kind of “Dark Matter” exists.
But that’s your choice—it’s not necessarily reality. You have to decide. If in your deepest being, you doubt he’s there, he will not necessarily disabuse you. Humans are given their choice. God is unlikely to answer the prayers of a man who doesn’t really think he exists.
Then there’s a second factor. People talk about the story of Adam and Eve with smirks and snide references to the “apple”. They miss the point entirely. At that point in human history, by human choice, the “receiver” that made it possible to hear God plainly was broken.
We have a “radio” in us that no longer works. There was a time—however many thousands or millions of years ago—when man could communicate face to face with God, as clearly as you and I can speak. Man chose to shatter than connection.
He broke it for himself. He broke it for his children. He broke it for all of us who come after.
It will not be restored—to use a Tolkien phrase—in “this age of men”. Some things have perpetual consequences. Ending that connection between God and man is certainly one of them. It’s not his fault our receiver is broken—he’s still broadcasting. It’s just that our set remains dark.
So he has chosen other ways to communicate with us. He can still be understood—if you choose to believe he’s there and if you know how to listen. And what to listen for. Let’s talk about how the connection was broken and how we can hear (our reserve chute, so to speak) tomorrow.

Does God DO Anything?

The latest survey of American religious attitudes is out. The number of people who profess no religion at all is up—to 15% of all Americans. The number of people who identify themselves as “Christian” has dropped a point or two to just above three quarters of the population.
These figures may upset conservative and religious Americans, but they can hardly come as a surprise. Why shouldn’t the number of believers go down? Why shouldn’t the number of Americans who’ve said, “A plague on all your houses” go up?
Of what practical use IS American Christianity? Yes, I said “practical”. The church is tax free. That status is, in effect, a government subsidy. The theory behind every government subsidy is that the people are supposed to get something tangible in return for the extra taxes they pay to cover the subsidy.
So—what are we getting back for allowing churches, synagogues and mosques to occupy some of the most valuable real estate in America for free? Look, for instance, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, St Thomas’s Episcopal Church and Fifth Avenue Presbyterian in midtown Manhattan.
Think of how much tax revenue is lost to New York City as they sit there. What do they give the city back? More than twenty years ago, during a terribly cold night in New York, then-Mayor Koch begged the local churches to allow the homeless to come in and spend the night on the pews.
You don’t even have to raise the heat, he said. Fifty-five degrees beats subzero outside. In all of New York City, with its uncountable hundreds of houses of worship, only two opened their doors. What could possibly motivate a homeless person in New York to look to a church for help?
The churches of the mainline denominations have often become elitist social clubs. Those with cheap suits aren’t really welcome. And they are the denominations that are losing the most members. I wonder why? For one thing, most have those pallid excuses for churches don’t have decent golf courses or heated swimming pools. What’s to go for?
I’ve listened to pastors in some of those churches tell us off the pulpit that much of the Bible is myth, that God is not to be taken too seriously. After all, what does he DO?
I asked that question for the first time when I was twenty. I had been raised in what is now called an “evangelical church”. There was some tension between members who said the stories in scripture were real and those who felt that there was a lot of figurative language there.
One day I went to see the pastor of our church privately. I was questioning. After he sat me down in his office, I asked a question that best translates as, “Does God DO anything?” At first he seemed unable to grasp what I was actually asking. I kept coming back to it.
Comprehension dawned on his face. With it came anger. Life, his voice rising as he said, is what YOU make of it. I, he said, got the GI Bill and worked my way through college and seminary—all by myself! It’s all up to you. Nothing, no one else, figures into the equation.
When I protested that God ought to be of some use in this life, the pastor got really angry. (Remember Soviet leader Khrushchev’s taunt that religion is nothing more than “pie in the sky” after a miserable life on Earth. This, he said, was why he was an atheist.)
“You,” the pastor snarled, “are nothing but a mystic.” To him that word was obviously as close to a curse as he allowed himself to get. He put me out of his office and refused to speak further.
To this day, if all I had to choose from was a denomination that believed in a God who does nothing useful for anyone on earth, I wouldn’t bother to attend.
I’ve better to do—especially on a beautiful Sunday morning. There’s sleeping late. There’s the Sunday paper to peruse. You could make a really nice breakfast. There are beaches. You could even clean the garage. Any of the above beats sitting on a hard pew listening to a vapid bit of moral uplift.
If God doesn’t care about me on this earth; why should I care about him?
That is why I am now an adherent of fundamental Pentecostalism. We believe in a God who acts, here and now, in this life—and cares what happens to us, and makes good things happen to those who are willing and obedient. Such a God DOES things.
Since my God is active in my life, I have no incentive to join the 15% who adhere to no religion at all. Oh yes, if you want to call me a “mystic”, go right ahead. It seems to me to be foolishness to waste any time at all on a faith that does not involve the mystical.