Addresses

My fellow Americans. I did not write these words. They were written for me by a team of professional speech-writers. They were tested before small focus groups ahead of time in order to determine their likely impact on the polls. The speech you are about to hear will be devoid of substantive content. Nothing that I will say will be surprising. Ninety percent of what I say could have been said by any of my predecessors in the past forty years. The speech will contain at least two dozen tiresome political cliches. I will pause for just a moment after delivering each of these so that members of Congress and others in attendance will know when to rise and applaud. You will notice that the Justices of the Supreme Court and the Joints Chiefs of Staff seldom will clap. This is their way of maintaining the ridiculous pretense that they are somehow apolitical, when in fact they are some of the most ideologically zealous people you will ever meet, and have been chosen in part precisely because of their ideological zealotry.

I will now insert a word of thanks to the brave men and women of our armed forces. Members of Congress, you will wish to be first on your feet to applaud for them. If you believe that it is not merely absurd but actually insidious and indeed even fascistic to valorize martial virtues over civilian ones, or if you think that it impedes badly needed argument about the conduct of America’s foreign and military policy, you should rise and applaud anyway. To do otherwise would be to commit an immediate act of political suicide, with implications not only for your own career but for your party.

In addition to offering a succession of banal statements written at approximately an eighth-grade reading level, I will also deploy a number of rhetorical cliches. These ring familiar to the ear, like a repetitious hit song, or the formula that drives your favourite Hollywood movies. They have been shown by the marketing and public relations firms that drive so much of our political culture to produce the most statistically favourable poll results. To that end, I will not and shall not just say “will not.”  I can not and will not just say “can not.”  I will also be referring to Americans as “folks” and will never say “taxpayers” without inserting “harding working” in front of it. I promise to make no literary references except to the Bible. My only historical references will be to the Founding Fathers, though I have been advised to downplay Thomas Jefferson.

I have invited guests today to hear the State of the Union Address. They are good people who have done good things for their communities. Some of them have saved peoples’ lives. You will be comforted to know that they have been carefully vetted to ensure that they haven’t done anything in the past that might embarrass me; they have also been selected in a precisely calculated manner so as ensure that their selection plays out favourably in terms of likely and probable voter support.

I wish to stress again that this speech will include no substantive content. For instance, I will not and shall not mention that we borrow money China in order to pay for ridiculously bloated armed forces that irrationally regard China as their greatest foe. And I can not and will not mention that a powerful lobby has somehow convinced millions of Americans that gun crime is unrelated to guns. Or that we alone do not use the metric system. Or that forty percent of you think the world is less than 10,000 years old and that this in turn explains why we are falling behind in scientific achievement relative to the rest of the world. 

Nonetheless, this content-free speech will be analyzed down to the last word by journalists, a very special breed of people paid to write and speak at great length on matters about which they have no professional expertise. They will judge the value of speech – and note once again, that it has none in particular – based on their pre-existing ideological predispositions. They will pay particular attention to the one or two times in this speech when I make a gracious remark about a member of Congress from another political party, like the guy sitting behind me. I can not – and shall not – reveal just how much I hate that guy’s guts. Instead, I will make a point about how great America is by observing that he came from humble origins. You may now applaud.  

Once again I’d like to thank the brave men and women of our armed forces for protecting our freedoms, even if it demonstrably true that our government in the conduct of its foreign and military policy has provided vital political, economic, and military aid to a litany of dictatorships while progressively encroaching on individual liberties at home. I’d also like to thank the hardworking taxpayers who make it possible for us to spend $1.5 trillion on a jet that we don't need and that doesn’t work while our urban infrastructure crumbles.

I do not believe in God but am required by poll evidence to conclude this speech by asking God to bless America, because despite the widely held view amongst the religious that their faith is under attack and in retreat, they constitute an overwhelming majority of the population.  So, God Bless the United States of America. He didn’t stop the Holocaust but maybe he’ll intervene on our behalf in this particular instance, and straighten out a health care system that costs two or three times as much per capita as ones that we deride as being "socialist."  Thank you and goodnight. Especially if you're one of the brave men and women of our armed forces.

#JeSuisCharlie

Feeling more aggrieved than usual, your unbending author interrupts regularly scheduled programing to clear his throat in defense of civilization. 

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Yes, I tweeted #JeSuisCharlie. Yes, I put the hashtag on Facebook. Yes, I even put it on the wipe board on my office door, which isn’t really my office door, hence the “even.”  #JeSuisCharlie is a small thing, but not meaningless, a gesture of solidarity with victims of religious fascism. As someone who makes his living in the world of thought and ideas and written expression, I found the murders at Charlie Hebdo particularly poignant even though far worse acts of violence against innocents were committed elsewhere in the world that week.  Boko Haram murdered several hundred people in the town of Baga around the same time as the Paris shootings, and despite what some people seem to think, I am not ignorant of the one if I care about the other. 

The very minute I saw the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag, I knew that the backlash against it would begin with a couple of days or so. Sniping of the kind I just described was inevitable. Even before the Ice Bucket Challenge (remember that?) reached its zenith last summer people started saying, “Why all the attention about ALS? Don’t people know that heart disease kills more people?” And so on.  If you’re ever giving a eulogy, try that line of reasoning out. “Well, sure, this guy is dead. But, come on. A lot more people than him died this week. Don’t you people care about them? What kind of monsters are you?”  See how that goes over. 

So the backlash against #JeSuisCharlie has taken on a perfectly predictable form and has come from perfectly predictable people, including a number of journalists who make a living writing Op-Eds that wouldn’t make the cut for emergency backup columns on Measure of Doubt.  To those people, I say: just how stupid do you think I am?  Did I anywhere claim that posting #JeSuisCharlie is an act of bravery? That it constitutes a serious blow against religious fascism? That it mitigates the need for vigilance about freedom of expression in my own country? Does it mean that I am unaware or uncaring about other acts of violence, including some committed by the government of France in the past? Does it mean I am not aware of the complexities and nuances of the political, economic, and cultural conflicts that underpin the attacks? Does it mean any of those things about anyone who posted it?  To listen to and read many cranks you’d think so.

There’s another distressing side to this, too, even though it was equally predictable. You wouldn’t think you’d have to defend the idea that people ought not to be murdered for hurting the feelings of the kinds of people who murder people for hurting their feelings, but you do. There are hordes of people saying right now, “Well you poke the bear…” or “I’m against murder, but…” and so forth. We've been listening to that noise since The Satanic Verses pissed off people who never read it. So, here’s the thing. Am I committed to freedom of expression? Yes. Do I understand the nuances and complexities of the statement I just made? Yup, some of them. You can explain the rest to me if you feel the need. But will I post any of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons here? No. Why not? I already told you, and it’s not because I’m afraid of terrorists. 

Remembering

I don’t want to trust a seventeen year old memory very far, but I think it went something like this. I was watching a debate on CBC or CTV about Canada’s involvement in Kosovo. They assembled a panel: a journalist, somebody from a peace group, an RCAF veteran from the Legion (for some reason), and finally a political scientist, because in a debate it’s a good idea to have one person who might know what the hell is going on. I don’t recall much about the debate, but one thing is lodged in my memory. In rebuttal to the one panelist’s opposition to Canada’s participation in the air campaign, the veteran  said, “This young lady should go watch the first twenty minutes of the movie Saving Private Ryan to learn what soldiers sacrifice for freedom.” 

This might seem like a non-sequitur and a particularly incoherent one at that, but au contraire. Have Canadians had any societal debate in the past century that hasn’t witnessed an effort by one side or another to imbue their position with the sanctified suffering of The Fallen? Back in the day, when I read actual newspapers (and worked for one) I used to keep a clip file. In it were examples of people deploying mawkish memories of our own “Greatest Generation(s)” into debates over everything from multiculturalism to same sex marriage to educational reform to indoor smoking bans, as if the worldview of the dead – and especially the war dead – were entitled to hold dominion over the living forever. And it happens in debates over history, too. We needn’t look far for examples of historians or historical institutions who have been bullied into silence by people that Paul Fussell called “the loony patriotic.” 

I’ve written before about my growing unease with Remembrance Day, and especially about the day’s tendency to blur the distinction between commemoration and historiography. Historiography is evidence based, skeptical, and provisional in its conclusions; commemoration is subjective and emotional. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t mind so much, if it were only for a single ceremony and for an hour. One doesn’t go to a funeral and expect to hear the unmitigated truth about the departed, after all.  But when have our circumstances ever been normal? Not since September 2001, to be sure, fourteen years in which we’ve seen the Western powers engaged in perpetual low-level war, turning the world upside down and killing – even if not intentionally – far greater numbers of innocent people than ever were killed on 9/11. 

“Oh, stop,” I’m told. “The day’s not about that. The day is simply about remembrance, not politics.”  Oh, please, I reply. What does that even mean? Remembering is not simple – not cognitively, not socially, not historically, and remembering for commemorative purposes complicates it still further. It is most decidedly not apolitical. Commemorate what? Those who fought for freedom? Tread lightly, friends, around so subjective a term: not many of those who went to war in 1914 or 1939 shared your conception of freedom. Victory, then? So am I to exclude the enemy, many of whom were, to quote Bertrand Russell, “fellow sufferers in the same tragedy as our own”?  Commemorate all combatants, then? But that would include perpetrators of hideous war crimes, and you’ll forgive me if I choose not to spare a moment to reflect on those who served that the Holocaust might continue. For starters. 

Okay. Maybe you need a moment to “just remember” (whatever that means) and you can cut through the cognitive dissonance. Maybe you don’t cringe when you hear “fought for our country” when you know damn well that sometimes they fought for our government; maybe you don’t clench your teeth when you hear “fought for our freedom” when you know that sometimes they categorically did not.  So, do what you need to on November 11th. Commemoration, like funerals, are about the living, after all, and the stories we tell ourselves so that we can carry on.  I’ll go, and reflect on victims of war and especially on those who died to defeat enemies for whom martial virtues were the only ones worth having. But I’ll also reflect that, too often, our own commemorations tread too close to that terrain, terrain where there is an implicit contempt for civilian life; terrain where there is no distinction between serving one’s country and serving one’s government; terrain where it is assumed that there is an inherent nobility in military service, regardless of the cause in which one served; terrain where, as C.P. Stacey put it in a different context, the golden haze of historical romance combines with the fog of war to reduce visibility to zero.

 “Support our troops” doesn’t mean support every stupid and immoral thing that our government wishes to do with them, and people who can’t understand the difference shouldn’t be allowed to play with soldiers.

Overlord

Note: this is a heavily edited version of a column that first appeared on Measure of Doubt five years ago.

 "War is Not the Answer" says a poster on a bulletin board where I work. Well, it depends on the question, doesn't it? The problem in the 1930s was not that peaceful negotiation failed, it was that peaceful negotiation was attempted for far too long. Negotiation is not possible when confronted with an ideology that regards peace only as a pause in the preparation for war, and war as the desired outcome of politics, an instrument for imposing "racial purity" on a vast scale. Nazism could not be appeased, contained, or co-existed with: it could only be destroyed, and its destruction was, as the late Stephen Ambrose put it, "the supreme accomplishment of the first half of the 20th century." 

Seventy years ago today, a combined Anglo-Canadian-American force fought its way, inch by bloody inch, up the beaches of Normandy in what was probably the single most complex military operation in history: Overlord. In the following ten weeks, they would utterly destroy two German field armies in the Battle of Normandy, decisively proving that the Nazis and their subsequent admirers were wrong to believe that totalitarian societies are better at war than democracies. Sufficiently aroused, the power of free people and capitalist economies to wage war proved to be far greater than that of the dictatorships. While fighting in Normandy, the Allies simultaneously conducted vast campaigns on land, sea, and air on many fronts across two major theatres of war, while all the while supplying — crucially, as we now know — logistical support to the Red Army through the auspices of the Lend-Lease  program. As the civilians of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were to learn, the fury of democratic societies, aroused to what was for them the very unnatural state of war, was both awesome and terrible. Allied bombers had reduced nearly every major Germany city to rubble and ash before the Red Army — carried, incidentally, on American trucks — set foot on Germany soil, while the Japanese were to suffer the immolation of dozens of their towns and cities, acts of vengeance culminating in the atomic incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

All those who fought and died in that terrible war deserve to be remembered, but historians have to remember them for what they actually did. This October will mark the 70th anniversary of a large-scale prisoner uprising at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but no moral person will spend that day in somber commemoration of those Germans who gave their lives that the Holocaust go on. Their uniforms are not totems that protect them from moral scrutiny. Their sacrifice is rendered worthless by the hideousness of their cause. The fact that they may have thought they were in the right is of historical interest but morally irrelevant, because they were objectively wrong. If this raises uncomfortable questions about the commemoration of Allied soldiers who may also have been complicit in atrocities, so be it. Uncritical veneration belongs to the realm of evangelical religion, not history.  Some historians will reply that we cannot make moral judgments about the past in the first place. That being the case, I can only assume that such people are indifferent about the outcome of D-Day, and indeed about the whole Second World War. Axis victory or defeat, Holocaust or no, in fact every atrocity in the history of the world: all must be met with shrugging indifference. Who am I to judge? Just report what happened and move on: the historian as glorified clerical worker. But nobody really believes that, so their position is incoherent.

So it is with the position that "war is not the answer." War is a dreadful thing. But it is not always to be avoided nor at all costs, nor is it true that there are no winners in war or that nothing good ever comes from it. Pacifism is morally defensible only when it is a choice you make for yourself. The pacifist who allows himself to be beaten has made one kind of moral choice; if he allows someone else to be beaten, he has made another one entirely. Sometimes we must fight. The destruction of National Socialism and of Japanese militarism was necessary for the safety and survival of free societies throughout the world. For all their faults and foibles — and these are, as we all know, numerous — the liberal democracies were and are clearly better than the monstrous regimes they fought. Today, we are the healthiest, wealthiest, safest, and most culturally prosperous people in the history of the world, and in large measure because a previous generation had thrust upon them the dreadful duty to fight those who would have enslaved us all.

Earth

(Speaker Crackles) Uhhh...good morning, on behalf of myself and the flight crew I’d like to welcome you to day 1.6 trillion aboard planet Earth. Our current cruising speed relative to the sun is 100,000 kilometres per hour. We’re expecting a smooth flight today with occasional bumps along the way. Temperatures will reach a high of +44 celsius and a low of -62, and we’re currently experiencing periods of sun, rain, flurries, cloudiness, and periodic nighttime. Special welcome to passengers Broad and Hunter, celebrating the anniversary of their inaugural circumnavigation of the solar system today along with 20 million others. I’ll turn things over now to the flight attendants and thank you once again for flying planet Earth. 

(Pleasant Female Voice Begins) Welcome to planet Earth. At this time we would like to draw your attention to absence of emergency exits. Please refrain from destroying the biosphere. Ride bicycles, carpool, or take public transportation wherever practicable. Pick up after yourself. And please do not adjust the cabin temperature.

Passengers are reminded that killing one another, especially over matters of faith, is expressly prohibited. We ask that you be courteous to your fellow passengers at all times, even if they look different than you. A further reminder that all human passengers are born equal, regardless of sex or race, and that nonhuman species and should be treated respectfully as well. Local administrators are required to abide by these regulations.

For your comfort, food, shelter, and clothing are provided. First class passengers are encouraged to share with passengers in economy class.

Earth is pleased to offer a variety of recreational activities including art, literature, film, music, and sport, and encourages local administrators to extend public funding to such activities.

Employers are required to pay their employees decent wages and to provide safe working conditions. Employees should refrain from being smug, self-satisfied, passive-aggressive know-it-all jerks in department meetings.

Please do not play your headphones so loud that everyone else can hear your music, too. The same goes for music in your car or back yard. Avoid participating in sports-related rioting. Young human passengers are encouraged to keep their sticky fingers off of things that do not belong to them and to attempt to behave like rational people when in public. Teenagers are reminded that everything will work out okay and he/she wasn’t right for you anyway. 

If you choose to procreate, please avoid taking babies to weddings, funerals, nice restaurants, the opera, theatre, or the movies. 
 
Please do not date someone who has seen all of the Fast and Furious movies.

Passengers are asked to avoid texting while driving. In addition, do not text while on a date or while out with friends. Do not text when your teacher is talking to you. In fact, just put the goddamn phone away and have a look around because the world is pretty freaking fantastic if you’d bother to check it out for the six or seven seconds that you’ve reduced your attention span to. You’re the product of millions of years of accumulated adaptive advantages and this is what you do with your time? Why don’t you just move into your parents’ basement, learn Klingon, and play World of Warcraft for the rest of your life?

(Pause). 

Ahem.

At this time, the flight crew would like to reiterate that persistent rumours of another world on standby after the completion of this trip are not verifiable and must therefore be treated with the utmost of suspicion. In consideration of other passengers, please desist from spreading such rumours.

For the comfort of your fellow passengers, a reminder that Earth is a smoke-free environment. For the convenience of passengers wishing to shorten the duration of their trip by approximately a decade, a smoking section is provided on the dark side of the moon.

Finally, would passengers Coulter, Ford, Palin, Putin, McCarthy, and O’Reilly please report to the shuttle bay for immediate deportation?

Thank you, and we hope you enjoy your flight on planet Earth.

Smallpox

In 1967, the year Sgt. Pepper came out, it killed two million people, more than were killed in the entire eighteen years of the Vietnam War.   

In 1948, the year it was founded, the World Health Organization estimated that smallpox was infecting fifty million people per year, and in some regions killing as many as a third of them, and leaving millions of survivors blind.
 
So smallpox killed more people in the twentieth century than the World Wars put together, two or three times over.

It had been with us since the beginning of civilization and perhaps longer. It made no distinction for rank or social station. It killed Ramses V, Pharaoh of ancient Egypt.  It may have killed Marcus Aurelius, the great Roman Emperor. It nearly killed Elizabeth I of England, fourteen hundred years later. It did kill Tsar Peter II of Russia in 1730, and the Emperor Komei of Japan in 1867, and the Emperor T’ung Chih of China in 1875. Abraham Lincoln contracted an unusually mild case after giving his famous Gettysburg Address. He survived, but not before passing it on to a White House servant, who did not.

The infected suffered fever, damage to their internal organs, and above all the hideous eruptions – the pox – that covered the body and burst. For hundreds of generations, millions were powerless before it. They prayed and died; died wondering why their gods had abandoned them and were punishing them.  When Europeans introduced it to the New World at the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th century it tore through the indigenous people. Thousands of years of isolation from the rest of the human race had left them without so much as a shred of resistance to it; it shattered their social cohesion at exactly the historical moment when they needed it most to resist the invaders. They prayed and they died.

It killed and it killed, for ten thousand years or more. And then it was gone. Two million people in 1967. None at all ten years later, and not a single solitary human being since. Not one. It had been in decline in parts of the world for nearly two centuries, but had persisted in spite of progress for a long time, mainly because people – who are by nature not rational – superstitiously and irrationally feared the cure more than the disease. But in the end reason triumphed. And how was this ancient scourge, this killer among killers, this dread disease that the Aztecs called the Great Fire, finally overcome?

Not with prayer. Not by strengthening our immune system in "natural" ways with herbs or homeopathy. Not with chiropractics or chi kung.

No, they wiped it out, eradicated it from the face of the Earth, the good old-fashioned way.

With vaccination.

Ascension

Last term during a break in my historical theory and methods course a student hit me with a question that set me back on my heels a bit. It was a doozy: “Professor Broad, do you, as an historian, believe in Jesus?”

I was slightly irritated by the imprecision of the question, like that time a pollster on the phone asked me if I believed that 9/11 conspiracy theories exist. Yes. I believe that 9/11 conspiracy theories exist. So there I am in a poll somewhere, recorded as one of the weirdos who think that Bush planned the whole thing, when in fact I doubt very much that the former President had the intellectual acuity to plan a BBQ.

“Do you, as an historian, believe in Jesus?” My response was that I believed that one Yeshua of Nazareth, a Jewish rabbi, executed by the Romans, whose immediate followers established a rather significant sect within Judaism, certainly existed. I braced myself for what I knew was coming. “But as a historian do you believe He was God?”  My initial inclination was to throw myself out the window. But I considered that, actually, it was a perfectly fair question and deserving of a fair answer. I said that I considered the evidence insufficient to establish the validity of that hypothesis, but observed that this wasn’t necessarily my belief “as an historian”, because I know better historians, more accomplished and smarter than me, who think otherwise. I did, however, observe that modern history is an empirical discipline: we deal in what’s probable, and that miracles are highly improbable by definition: if people went around resurrecting all the time there wouldn’t be any particular reason to get all excited about it. And so I felt that history, as a profession, might be mute where such things are concerned, for the same reason that the field of geography doesn’t have much to say about musical appreciation.

I had the feeling that the student felt this was a cop-out, but it really wasn’t intended to be. In the historio-critical tradition that is the dominant mode of investigating and understanding scripture in academe, and indeed in most mainline protestant and Catholic seminaries these days, scripture is understood as a testament of faith and theology, never intended – not even by its anonymous authors – to be understood as “history” in the way we understand history today.

But there’s a problem. There are indeed some denominations that regard scripture as a literal and inerrant account of the past. And polls show that, in the United States in particular, such people aren’t a small minority. There are tens of millions who think like that, although polls also show that such people usually know very little about what’s actually in scripture. But to such people, let me pose a question of my own, in the form of an extended observation.

For Christians, the Ascension is an important milestone in the life of Jesus, the moment when He, in the presence of His apostles, was taken up into Heaven.

I’ll leave aside the fact that I remain mute on whether or not this actually occurred as an historical event (i.e.: an historical event in the way that, say, Lincoln delivered a speech at Gettysburg) because I don’t understand what “Ascension” means. I literally have no idea what is meant by “taken up into Heaven” so I can hardly be expected to decide whether or not it actually happened. But I do want to point out something interesting.

The Ascension is described in the Acts of the Apostles and in two of the four canonical Gospels. It’s in Mark 16:19 and Luke 24:50-53.

Well, sort of.  Today there is a virtual consensus of scholars in the field of exegesis that verses 9-20 of Mark 16 were later additions to the original and rather dark ending of Mark in verse 8, where the “Three Marys” open Jesus’ tomb, find it empty, and run away afraid. Some scholars therefore regard 9-20, with its accounts of the resurrected Jesus and His Ascension to be “inauthentic”, and you can find Bibles where it is relegated to a footnote. As for Luke 24:50-53, have a look at the photo, top left. What don’t you notice? Ascension. I own three Bibles, which is pretty good for a guy like me. And my Revised Standard Version King James doesn’t mention the Ascension in 50-53, although it includes the following footnote: “Other ancient authorities add and was carried up into Heaven” after verse 51. By contrast, my Oxford Annotated RSV includes the phrase but with an opposite footnote: “Other ancient authorities omit and was carried up into Heaven.”

Now, look. There are some atheists out there who make great sport out of this sort of thing, but I have little patience for those kinds of narrow strawman attacks. But I do have a question for those of you who regard the Bible as literally true and inerrant: which Bible?

Re-runs

Author's note: our regularly scheduled blog post has been replaced in our programming lineup by a special repeat broadcast of Measure of Doubt's most read and most requested column, Hell, a 666 word rumination of the topic of damnation from 2011.

Hell

A parable.

So, there ’s Gordon. In Hell. His crime? Religious dissent. On Earth, we call governments that punish religious dissenters totalitarian, but he has long since learned to let that go — eons of torture and burning tend to take your mind off of things.

Gordon is holding a tray and is in a long, long line in Hell’s Cafeteria. The air conditioning is on the fritz again, and it's hot as Hell. Over the speakers, they're playing Muzak arrangements of Barry Manilow ("Mandy", 24/7, for eternity) and they're serving fish-sticks, again, for the hundred-trillionth day in a row. As he approaches the counter Gordon notices a small sign, written in blood. His blood. "Tomorrow’s special: fish sticks." Bastards: they think of everything.

Time has no meaning here, but Gordon keeps a day-planner anyway, because he’s always been a planner sort of guy. For today, it says:

8 AM burning
9 AM drawing-and-quartering
10 AM hanging
11 AM dismemberment
12 PM lunch (poisoned)
1 PM the rack
2 PM root canal
3 PM drowning
4 PM re-runs of The Golden Girls
5 PM buried alive
6 PM beating
6:30 PM dinner (fish sticks - poisoned)
etc.

He flips forward a few pages. More of the same, although on Thursday he has an hour of cardio-kickboxing. He makes a mental note to get that changed to burning.

Gordon looks up. Ahead of and behind him, queuing with their trays, are the teeming billions of the damned. They are of every race, ethnicity, social station, and period in human history. Some are warlords, murders, rapists, and thieves; some are adulterers, some are liars, some liked the new Star Wars movies better than the old ones. But the majority are quite ordinary people who never hurt anybody. The ones from Gordon’s time lived their lives, went to school, read a few books, watched TV, cooked meals, raised their families, drove their kids to soccer practice, gave some bucks to charity, some even went to church now and again, but, wouldn’t you know it, they were improperly religious and consigned to Hellfire for eternity. There are also countless millions of truly, deeply, sincerely devout followers of literally thousands of different faiths that turned out to be false, and even devout followers of the Right Religion who were guilty of theological or liturgical misconduct.

Gordon hears different things about what the Right Religion is, about what he should have believed or how he should have behaved. Some say faith in a certain prophet alone. Some say sacraments. Some say accepting that a particular iron-age book was the final and perfect revelation. Some say that there are four truths and an eightfold noble path, and they can’t quite figure out what this eternal damnation business has to do with them. Some even say there was nothing to be done – that the game was rigged from the get-go. There are all sorts of ideas. He even heard that the correct answer was a life led in conformance to the will of the Goddess Maat, which would explain why pretty much everybody except ancient Egyptians seem well represented here. Who knows? Inwardly, Gordon shrugs. What does it matter now? There’s no reprieve. There are billions of people here who knew in their hearts that they were right and then — poof — fire, brimstone, perpetual torture, fish sticks, and Barry Manilow. Sucks to be you. Forever and ever. Amen.

Anyway, directly ahead of Gordon in line is Adolf Hitler. But Gordon has been in hell for a million trillion billion years already— that’s zero percent of his sentence, incidentally — and his memories of Earth mostly have faded. So while Hitler seems somehow familiar, especially with his postage stamp of a moustache and swastika armband, Gordon can’t quite place him. He’s about to ask him if they’ve ever met when Hitler looks over his shoulder and decides to strike up a conversation first.

"Gootentag," Hitler says. "So: what are you in for?"
"Skepticism," Gordon replies. "And you?"

Desecration

I used to teach Kurt Vonnegut’s funny, sad, and important novel Slaughterhouse Five in my American history classes, but gave up after being met by seas of incomprehension and even outright hostility. Why was I teaching a novel in a history class, they wondered, as if novels weren’t written in the past or in historical contexts. In this, the most expansive of disciplines, students too often have been straightjacketed into thinking that history is merely a bill of facts about war and politics to be committed to memory. And there is no shortage of historians who want it that way.

Above all, I was distressed by the inability of history students to think coherently about the very thing that almost invariably is most important to the people we study – morality. Slaughterhouse is about an American POW, Billy Pilgrim, who in 1945 witnesses the firebombing of Dresden only to be abducted by time-travelling extraterrestrials called Tralfamadorians, beings whose response to every moral catastrophe in the history of the universe — including the entire universe’s eventual destruction at their own hands — is the same: they intone the phrase, “So it goes.”

Unwittingly, I had handed my students what many of them thought was an ideal philosophy of ethics. “So it goes.” A way to shrug and say, “Oh, well. Can I get back to Facebook now?”  Vonnegut himself later said he was distressed by the ease with which so many readers accepted the legitimacy of what is self-evidently a hideously immoral proposition. “So it goes” – not stoicism in the face of history’s cruelties, but indifference; not acceptance, but apathy; “so it goes” – the proposition that we are not moral agents, that we make no choices, that we bear no responsibility for the consequences of our actions, whether it’s firebombing Dresden or blowing up the universe, or, at the very time Vonnegut was writing, waging war in Vietnam. 

On Measure of Doubt and its briefly extant sister blog, Suspended Judgment, I wrote on several occasions that the biggest problem with our education system is that we’re good at getting students to memorize facts but not good at getting them to think about facts. Despite all our protestations to the contrary, most of our education system consists of telling students stuff and getting them to regurgitate it, what one colleague of mine inelegantly calls the "binge and purge model of education." Even in universities the lecture – a tool for conveying facts – remains at the core of our methodology, although students who steadfastly refuse to read anything are partly to blame for this. 

Over the years, I have attempted on many occasions to initiate conversations in class concerning the great moral questions of the Second World War: the Holocaust, Japanese atrocities in occupied China, Allied area bombing, and so forth.  Year after year, these discussions take on a predictable and depressing sameness. They run the usual gamut from soft moral relativism and all its attendant confusion (“our side was just as bad”, they would say, as if this empirically false claim were somehow relevant even if true) through to the positively fascistic view that military service must automatically be accorded the deepest reverence, regardless of the cause in which one served. But at least those students articulated a coherent worldview. The relativists basically said: “Who am I to judge? Not for me to say what’s right or wrong. Everyone has their own way of looking at things. We shouldn’t be biased.” Blah dee blah blah blah. So it goes. Generation meh. 

All this brings me to the case of the German cemetery at La Cambe, in Normandy, France.  It is the resting place of many young men who were caught up in the lunatic asylum we call the Third Reich, teenagers forced to fight for a totalitarian regime that sought to redraw the racial map of Europe through war. Their graves are important reminders that few countries suffered so much because of Adolf Hitler as Germany itself.  But La Cambe is also the burial place of a large number of straightforwardly wicked men who were enthusiastic supporters of the Nazi program. Among them is Sturmbannführer Adolf “Otto” Diekmann, an SS officer who ordered a hideous crime against humanity at Oradour, France. Diekmann’s troops massacred 642 men, women, and children – the men were shot in the legs and then burned alive – for no military purpose whatsoever a few days after D-Day in the summer of 1944.

In early June, I visited La Cambe, not certain if I should. I’m not sure what possessed me, on that cold and damp morning, to venture off, alone, into the far corners of the cemetery in search of Diekmann’s grave. It might have been morbid curiosity. Or perhaps it was a desire to gloat slightly over another exemplar of the absolute failure of the worst system of governance ever devised. Anxious and distinctly unsure of myself, I stumbled about for ten minutes, looking for the marker, half-hoping not to find it, when suddenly it seemed to appear before me, flat and rather disappointingly innocuous against the ground. 

I reflected at once on the words of A.J.P. Taylor: “I come to history not as a judge, but to say what happened and why” – outright hypocrisy from one of the 20th century’s most judgmental historians. What do historians do except judge? The whole enterprise is a process of gathering, evaluating, weighing, assessing, in short, judging evidence for one position or another. Above all, to say “I cannot judge” is itself a moral judgment of the very strongest kind. Not one moral relativist, while themselves being murdered, would calmly accept death with a shrug and say, “Who am I to judge this murderer?” but they will do it when other people are being or were murdered. Appalling. Appalling.

I reflected, too, that historians are wary travelers in the realm of moral philosophy, not because they know it to be dangerous, but because they’re lost.  We pass our moral confusion onto our students. The problem isn’t that most historians are abstaining from engaging their moral sensibilities – that would be a considered position. The problem is that their training has left them unprepared to assess moral issues at all, even from the perspective of the period they’re studying. With nearly three thousand years of moral philosophy before them, the best most of them can do is shrug and mouth, “Well, who’s to say?”  So it goes. 

I also found myself thinking about the firmest conviction I have as a teacher: that education, like physical exercise, should hurt a bit. It should destabilize the intellect and force it to adjust to new demands. It’s not a teacher’s job, of course, to tell students what to think – even if the teacher actually knows what to think. But it is a teacher’s job to get students to think. This involves more than just holding up a mirror to youthful vanity and awarding gold stars for sharing. Good teachers make students understand that extracting knowledge from information takes serious effort. 

Here was a teachable moment, but there was no one teach. So I must have stood there for five minutes or so, above Deikmann's little plot, wondering what to do or say. I do not believe that the dead are conscious of the living, so having words with the man seemed rather pointless. It was, moreover, getting on, and there was a schedule to keep. I walked off, briskly, troubled by all this. Then I surprised myself.  Well, hell, I thought. Why am I debating historical theory with myself? I’m an historian for maybe forty hours a week. The rest of the time I’m a human being. And my human obligations come first.

So I stopped. Turned around. Returned to Deikmann’s marker.

And spat on his grave.

May he not rest in peace.

Anniversaries

Do you hear that? That ticking sound? Of course you do. That’s the sound of the clock running out on the human race, and it began winding down 69 years ago today.  On the 16th of July, 1945, at 05:29 local time, the world’s first nuclear weapons test occurred in the New Mexico desert. They called it “Trinity". That’s it there, in the corner, a few milliseconds after detonation. It’s probably the most written about of all the 2,084 or so known nuclear tests, and there are breathless descriptions all over the place about the size and power of the explosion, invariably capped off with Robert Oppenheimer’s now quite cliched reminiscence of how a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” occurred to him at that moment.

In fact, the bomb was a baby as nuclear weapons went, and less than ten years later the Americans were testing nuclear weapons with quite literally a thousand times the explosive power. In the early 1960s the Soviets tested ones with two or three thousand times the power. For a couple of decades, in the 50s and 60s, both countries were popping them off in the atmosphere like kids with fireworks. In the early 1960s, a study found trace levels of Strontium-90, a rather nasty radioactive isotope that affixes itself to bones in the human body, in the teeth of every baby they could find who was born in 1963. Babies born in 1950 didn’t have that. That was one reason why some protesters gently suggested that if the superpowers wanted to screw with a planet maybe they should get their own. 
 
Admittedly, the Americans built the bomb in the first place for a good reason – they were afraid that Hitler’s Germany was building one, too (it was) and they dropped it on Japan to end a terrible war that the Japanese started and refused to end. But the nuclear arms race that followed the Soviet Union's first test in 1949 demonstrates the normalization of a genocidal mentality that gripped the leaders of the great powers in the postwar period. Around the time that I was contemplating just how much hair gel would be required to produce a satisfactory mullet every day (a lot, so I never did it), global nuclear arsenals peaked at around 60,000 deployed weapons, which was enough to kill, well, everybody. They called this “national defense”, but really it was a suicide pact that great powers made with their enemies. And everybody else, whether they wanted in on it or not.

Every culture has had apocalyptic myths, stories about the end of the world and how it will happen. But the nuclear age is different, in that we possess a certain means of making it happen, so over the years we have vested control of apocalyptic weaponry in the hands of wise men like Leonid Brezhnev and George W. Bush. The good news is that there are far fewer nuclear weapons in the world today than thirty years ago, and fewer still actively deployed. Serious strides towards nuclear disarmament in the great powers has taken place, despite the best efforts of Republicans. But there are still a lot left. Even a small, regional nuclear war would have devastating global consequences. Just a few hundred would probably suffice to kill a billion people or so, and their continued existence makes a mockery of so much intellectual activity in the community of military theorists and civilian defense experts. By all means, have your wargasm about your F-35s, protecting Canada’s high arctic from the incursion of obsolete Russian bombers. And if the war comes, they can knock those bombers down and then fly back to the radioactive pile of rubble left by ballistic missiles.

We’ll probably never go to war with Russia, of course. But the basic problem isn’t Russia, or China, or North Korea. The problem is that the nuclear genie can’t be put back in the bottle. Nuclear weapons are the technology of the mid-40s and early 50s, older than colour TVs and Elvis records. Sooner or later, any country that wants them can have them, so trying to enforce non-proliferation is a pipe-dream in the long term. Arms control can only delay their eventual use, while deterrence is just an utterly absurd delusion that strong countries are left at peace.   We were lucky to avoid a nuclear war in the 20th century. What will happen in the 21st? The 22nd? The 23rd? It is incredible to think that we can avoid eventual nuclear armageddon by the present means of trying to do so.  But there is a solution. It’s one everyone has to agree to, so people will say that it’s a phantasm. Well, okay: enjoy the fallout. It will be pretty, like snow at Christmas. Anyway, here’s the solution. You won’t like it, but I think it’s the only way we’re getting out of here alive. 

Pacifism. 

Violence

A true story. On the 24th of November, 1326, four horses entered the marketplace at Hereford, England, dragging behind them Hugh Despenser the Younger, recently convicted of treason, while the Queen, Isabella, and the assembled crowd of courtiers and commoners hooted and jeered. Already wearing a crown of nettles and disfigured by crude tattoos of verses concerning matters of retribution from the Old Testament, Despenser was stripped naked and “half-hanged” — that is, hoisted by a noose until semi-conscious — at which point they cut his genitals off. This was considered very fitting by all assembled since Despenser was known to have been the lover of the King, Edward II (himself to die the following year by means of a red-hot “trumpet” thrust into his anus, according to at least some accounts.) 

The writer Alison Weir recounts that Despenser then emitted a “ghastly, inhuman howl”, but his punishment was very far from over. Weir then picks up the account of a contemporary chronicler who wrote, “Then his belly was split open” – this while he remained conscious — “and his heart and entrials cut out...when the other parts of his body had been disposed of, Sir Hugh’s head was cut off and sent to London. His body was then hewn into quarters, which were sent to the four next largest cities in England.” You can see the event depicted, above. I bet nobody accused Isabella of being soft on crime.

Despenser was no saint. Weir speculates he may have raped the Queen. Certainly he had tried to bribe the French into killing her, as she was herself plotting against the King. All this is part of the point I'm trying to make, so bear with me.

Grisly though it was, Despenser's execution was kid’s stuff by Medieval standards. Consider, if you will, the words of the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas who recounted that Spanish conquistadors in the New World would “hang 13 natives at a time in honor of Christ Our Saviour and the 12 Apostles.  Straw was wrapped around their torn bodies and they were burned alive.  They took babies from their mothers’ breasts, grabbing them by their feet and smashing them against rocks.  They would cut an Indian’s hands and leave them dangling by a shred of skin and threw others to the dogs and thus were torn to pieces.”

Well, that’s (late) Medieval justice for you, a fact that Shakespeare was very much aware of when he had his hero Henry lay the following threat onto the governor of the French town of Harfleur in his great play Henry V.

    Therefore, you men of Harfleur,
    Take pity of your town and of your people,
    Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command;
    Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace
    O'erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
    Of heady murder, spoil and villany.
    If not, why, in a moment look to see
    The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
    Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
    Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
    And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls,
    Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
    Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
    Do break the clouds

It’s Shakespeare, yes, but historically accurate: Henry really did make a threat like this and the actual execution of such threats was commonplace throughout the Middle Ages. Indeed, the people of innumerable towns and cities have suffered similar fates from ancient times through to Nagasaki and beyond.  But this particular passage was excised in the 1944 Olivier film version: it wouldn’t do in 1944 to have a Shakespearean hero employing Gestapo methods against England's enemies even though at that very moment, the planes of Bomber Command were burning German cities and the people in them to the ground, night after night.

And what do all these people have in common? These crowds who cheered for the drawing and quartering of a homosexual? The medieval kings who ordered their men remorselessly to rape and murder their way through towns and villages? The conquistadors who actually did spit naked infants upon pikes?  Well, for one thing, they were all Christians, devout believers of utterly unshakable convictions. And, why not, really? In the Old Testament, Mr. Tough-on-Crime himself orders all manner of massacres and whatnot.  Yahweh is not merely vengeful and jealous but is also fiendishly diabolical in the manner of a James Bond villain. In 2 Kings 2, verses 23-24, He sends a couple of “she bears” to rip apart forty-two children for making fun of Elijah’s baldness. Do not mess with this cat. Seriously.

Am I saying that religion is the problem, that it “poisons everything” as a recent book put it? Certainly not. The claim that “religion poisons everything” is an empirical one, and until such time as we have studied religion in relation to, well, everything, we can’t possibly reach that conclusion. And there is, moreover, the undeniable fact that, in absolute terms, the secular (and in some cases aggressively irreligious) dictatorships of the 20th century: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Mao’s China, killed perhaps 100 million people between them. Indeed, Stalin, the foremost mass murderer in history, studied for the priesthood for only about four or five years so.

Here’s the catch, though. In absolute terms, the 20th century was undeniably the most violent in history. But there were also a lot more people to kill, and I am very far from convinced that, in relative terms, the 20th century was necessarily more violent than any of a number of centuries that preceded it.  For Americans, the death rate from their Civil War, fought amongst themselves in the 1860s, was about six times greater than World War Two; a Frenchman was more likely to die in the wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars than during the World Wars;  the average person living in early 16th century “Germany” during the Thirty Years War, was almost certainly more likely to die from violence than the average German living in the first half of the 20th century, and all these wars were fought amongst Christians. We could go on and on. Need I even begin to enumerate the catastrophic death toll of the Atlantic Slave trade?

Anyone who studies military history long enough eventually reaches the conclusion that there is basically nothing that people won’t do to one another. There is no act of betrayal or violence or cruelty so profane that people will not do it to their fellows in order to impose their will, and every human religion, doctrine, or philosophy can be and has been utilized to sanctify acts of unfathomable cruelty. But history also shows that people are often selfless, will sacrifice themselves for one another, and will die to defend the lives of otherwise defenseless people who they have never met and from whom they can earn no reward. As historians, we need to devote greater efforts to understanding what motivates actions such as these, in addition to understanding the everyday kindnesses, of which there are a multitude, that go unrecorded and unnoticed in the annals of history.

Apocalypse

Okay, everybody good? Whew. Dodged that one.

Well, in fairness, it wasn’t supposed to be the End of the World per se. According to Harold Camping and his followers, about 200 million people were supposed to have been saved, and the rest of us left to await the actual end of the world, which will occur in October. But there was supposed to have been a monumental earthquake. And 200 million people disappearing. And all manner of apocalyptic whatnot.

Okay. Avoid cliches, students. But sometimes they’re inevitable. This is shooting fish in a barrel. But there is a larger point that this minor, media-inflated incident raises. Predictions of apocalypse come and go. Many authorities in the field of Biblical Exegesis agree that Jesus himself was (historically) an apocalyptic preacher who (scripturally) predicted that the End would occur within the lifetime of his own followers. We could go on and on, covering a truly staggering number of failed predictions, from those made by some very noble Roman Christians trying to understand the catastrophes of the world around them in a pre-scientific age, to the seediest of money-grubbing American evangelicals such as the late Jerry Falwell, who in 1999 predicted that the Big Wrap Party would occur “within a decade” based upon his “reading” of recent events in the Middle East.

I’m an historian. Reflecting upon the past and attempting to rescue wisdom from it is the essence of what I do. Just yesterday, I bought new translations of Herodotus and Thucydides in preparation for an academic suicide mission I'm embarking on this fall, and last week I turned the last page on Karen Armstrong’s engaging The Bible: A Biography, part of the excellent “Books That Shook the World” series. But it’s one thing to search for meaning, guidance, and wisdom in old books (or very old bronze-age books).  It’s another to thing to organize one’s life around one particular reading of them. Camping, his followers, and people of their ilk live in a small, shriveled, self-centered, mean, miserly, intellectually constipated world.  In a world full of causes worthy of pursuing, they decided to devote their lives to preparing for an apocalypse that didn’t even happen.

It is now 12:02 AM in Apia, Samoa, which means it’s May 22nd everywhere, and not everybody is good. Yesterday, about 20,000 people starved to death. Some people console themselves by believing that they are in a “better place” now. Harold Camping and people like him believe they are in Hell, eternally to be punished unless they died in a (proper) state of grace. Am I mocking Camping and his ilk for their religious beliefs? To quote one of the great figures of American politics of the modern era, you betcha.  Me, I’m always willing to listen, at least for a while, to what people have to say. But there must be fairness in any such relationship. Proselytize, and I should be permitted to argue without fear. Threaten, and I will defend myself.  And if you tell me that I’m going to Hell, I get to tell you to precede me there. 

Update: May 24th:  Harold Camping has emerged unraptured. To his thousands of followers who quit their jobs and spent their life savings spreading his message, he offered the following: God has decided to do the rapture and the end-of-the-world thing in one fell swoop, October 21st. The remarkable thing is how many of his followers are standing by him. As always, the problem isn't the ability to absorb information. It's the ability to think.

Arguments

Ne nuntium necare.

The Ontological Argument.  Famously associated with Anselm of Cantebury. The argument holds that the existence of God follows from the concept of God in language. It works like this: God is the most perfect thing that can be conceived of. But if He didn’t exist, He wouldn’t be perfect. So He exists.  Rejected by intellectuals ranging from Thomas Aquinas to Bertrand Russell (who admitted that he had a fifteen-minute flirtation with it in his youth.) Currently returning to fashion in a modified form, the argument basically contends that if you write a good enough job description, the ideal employee must exist.

The Cosmological Argument.  Holds that all things must have a first cause, and that the first cause of all things is God. Dates from antiquity, but is hoisted by its own petard, as the ancients well realized. Complicates rather than simplifies the problem, thus answering nothing. Why is there something instead of nothing? Because of the Creator. Why is there a Creator instead of no Creator? Let’s change the subject. Implies nothing about the correctness of any particular religion, let alone denomination. Implies almost nothing about the nature of any alleged creator or creators - neither omnipotence, nor omniscience, nor omnibenevolence, and certainly not gender. At best an argument for a highly conditional Deism.

Argument from Miracles. Holds that the existence of various miracles proves the existence of God. Four problems. First, evidence for the supernatural origins of miracles doesn't pass peer review, except where vested interests are involved. Second, even if the miracles had supernatural origins, this doesn’t imply any particular supernatural origin. Third, if God is the cause of all things, it makes no sense to make a big deal about miracles, which would be just another thing he caused. Four, for alleged “signs from God”,  the miracles are often extraordinarily unimpressive: bleeding statues, low-probability recoveries from illness, bell-shaped watermarks that look like Renaissance portraits of Christ or the Virgin. Statues wandering about churches, getting their pictures taken with parishioners; prayer regenerating amputated limbs; full-colour, 3-D talking images of the Virgin giving interviews on CNN. This would be impressive.

Argument from Design.  Similar to the Cosmological Argument, but focuses on the remarkable complexity of life as opposed to the curious existence of the cosmos itself. See Darwin, Charles.

Gender. The belief that God must be a man runs contrary to claims of omnipotence. 

Deism. The belief that God is essentially indistinguishable from the physical laws of the universe. The default position of most of America's Founding Fathers. They would not be elected two-and-a-half centuries later. 

The Mysterious. Can be appealed to in place of making embarrassing concessions such as, "You've got a point there."

Pascal’s Wager. Famous argument that contends it’s the best bet to believe in God. Maybe. But Pascal left the problem of which God to worship and how unresolved. Rather more critically, he failed to distinguish between the beneficence of belief and actually believing. Belief follows from persuasive evidence; Pascal’s Wager offers none.

Argument from Personal Faith. Simultaneously unconvincing but irrefutable. “I know in my heart that I’m right.” But every devout believer in every god in every society in the history of the world has said the same thing, including many today who are convinced that everyone else, including you, is going to Hell.

Agnosticism. A cancellationist position which holds that the evidence for and against the existence of God is about equal. Good for fence-sitters who don’t like to commit. Agnostics are often found attending United Church services "for the music" and like to recite tautological banalities such as, “Everything happens for a reason.” Intolerable people. 

Russell's Teacup.  Russell once argued that while he couldn't prove that a teacup is not orbiting a distant planet, that was insufficient reason to be agnostic about the issue. This is important.

Suburban Protestants and Cafeteria Catholics.  Polls show that something on the order of 90 or 95 percent of people believe in God. Polls also show that the great majority of ostensibly religious people have no idea why they believe and very little idea about what they’re supposed to believe. A recent poll found that the overwhelming majority of alleged Christians could not name the four canonical gospels. Curiously, such people often get a free pass from the devout on the grounds that, “At least they believe in something.” Non-believers whose atheism is a consequence of sincere, daily, and lifelong study don't stand a chance of getting elected to political office.

Oprah. The dominant religion of our era is a belief in an immensely gregarious God who wants us to be comfortably middle-class and soothingly middle-brow; a celestial Oprah who will one day welcome all of us onto her living room set in the sky and let us jump on the sofa for all eternity.

Impossibility Arguments. Highly sophisticated evolution of ancient arguments that explored the paradoxes of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence and which conclude that God, like a square circle or an honest lawyer, is a logical impossibility. Fascinating, but they do not preclude the possibility of an extraordinarily powerful but less-than-perfect God. Human beings went from stone tools to the surface of the moon in 5,000 years.  Imagine a race 5 million years old. Or 5 billion. We build skyscrapers. Could they build universes?

Theological non-cognitivism. The position that all God-talk is cognitively meaningless. Stems from the impossibility arguments. Some theological non-cognitivists are therefore hard atheists; others contend that no discussion about the matter is possible until theists can arrive at a cognitively meaningful definition of what it is that we're supposed to be talking about.

Einstein, Albert.  At a public debate, I sat, jaw dropping, as an atheist and theist argued over whether or not Einstein was religious. Did they think that the existence or non-existence of God was somehow contingent on what Einstein believed? A particularly dangerous argument for Christians to make, because if Einstein was anything, he was a Jew. Similar arguments are deployed for a pantheon of historical giants, good and evil, from Plato to Jefferson to Hitler.  Historically interesting but, as a point of logic, utterly irrelevant in terms of the argument over the existence of God.

Atheism, hard. The position that there is no God. Generally held to be logically untenable, but adherents of impossibility arguments say otherwise.

Atheism, soft. The position that there is insufficient evidence to believe in God. An important distinction. 

Atheists. Very rare. A rigorous philosophical position: not something soft that one can fall into. Atheists are also not to be confused with secular liberals who are mad about organized religion.


New Atheists. A recent breed of aggressively irreligious nonbelievers who hold that a general critique of the beneficence of faith follows from their disbelief. But whatever else they may be, religions are social institutions of enormous importance and cannot uniformly and universally be deprecated for "poisoning everything."

Prayer.  Fortifying for millions, but removed from schools. The worst prayers are the begging kind: the belief that maybe this time God will intercede on your behalf. (“Please let my team win the Superbowl”, etc.) Convincing to some people because of an inability to separate correlation from causation.  “I prayed and somebody found Fluffy, who was lost for three days.” Wow. Now, about that Holocaust...

Praying. It is disrespectful for non-believers to lower their heads, as if in prayer, while others are praying. Listen attentively, instead: you might learn something. But do not disrespect the devout by pretending to be something you are not. In the 7th grade, a nasty old crone who was our substitute teacher for the day made the whole class re-do the Lord’s Prayer, saying the words. Even then I wondered, “What is the point?”  If the words meant nothing to us, did she think we would be fooling God?

Comparative Religion. Should be mandatory in schools. Until 1988, students in Ontario public schools rose diurnally for the immensely symbolic pairing of “Oh, Canada” and the Lord’s Prayer, understanding neither. Nor did most of their teachers, and discussion of religion was verboten anyway. Further proof that the real agenda of the Ministry of Education is to impose ignorance, and for obvious reasons. Educated people would abolish the Ministry of Education.

Darwin, Charles. A visionary genius who both demonstrated the fact of biological evolution’s existence and offered a theory – natural selection – to explain the mechanism by which it operates.  Also, and this is critically important, dead since 1882. He lacked a proper understanding of heredity and did not know about genes. Today, most competent undergraduates in biology know more about evolution than did either of its co-discoverers. School-boards in Texas and Kansas can deny the existence of biological evolution all they want, but what they think doesn’t really matter. Darwin gathered a few pebbles of evidence that subsequently have become mountains. “It’s only a theory,” they say. So is gravitation. They lose. Period.

Evolution, biological. Change in the inherited characteristics of populations over time. As factually established as anything can be science. Has implications for most creation myths and for the Argument from Design, but otherwise has no bearing on the argument over the existence of God.

Catholicism. A favourite target of liberals who are at once relativists but also moralizing crusaders. In other contexts, the same people gleefully will report you to a Human Rights Commission for criticizing a religion or religious group.

Argument from Beauty. Similar to the Argument from Design. Holds that such-and-such a cultural object is “too beautiful” to have been created by a species that emerged solely as a consequence of random mutation followed by non-random natural selection. Bad thinking for obvious reasons. “How do you explain Mozart?” they say. Okay, how do you explain Michael Bolton?

Doubt. Malcolm Muggeridge said that doubt is like a pillar at the center of faith, because no one who is sincere in his or her beliefs need fear argument and disputation about them.

Death

I'm thinking about death because today is my birthday, and birthdays are days for reflection. I have now undeniably used more than half of the upper extremity of years granted me by the 90th Psalm and must face the real prospect that, by the pure mathematical progress of years, there are fewer ahead of me than behind.

Death. It happens to the best of us. I’m not particularly afraid of it — the prospect is more disappointing than anything else — but most deaths these days are drawn out, painful, and personally degrading. Consequently, I want the event to be as brief and trouble-free for me and everyone else when the moment comes, and indeed I’m trying to avoid it, if at all possible. Douglas Adams wrote that the “trick” to flying is to throw yourself at the ground and miss. When the moment comes, I intend to hurl myself, unflinching, at death. And hope to miss.


Many Christians say that life must be considered sacred from “conception to natural death”, although polls show that most of them are willing to make exceptions in cases where they have something personally invested in the matter. I’ll leave the argument about my views on fetal life for another time. Let me instead observe that in our society there is very rarely such a thing as “natural death.”  Most dying patients receive highly unnatural forms of palliative care, which often involves essentially stupefying them for their last few days. But there is far more to it than that, even. In the modern western world, even before we are born, we begin to receive the most radical and decidedly unnatural forms of medical treatment and intervention to extend our lives for as long as possible. Any pregnant woman who has had an ultrasound, teenager who has had symptomatic wisdom teeth removed, middle-aged man who has a prescription for blood-pressure; anyone at all who has had antibiotics for a serious infection, stitches to close a wound, a suspicious mole removed, or his tonsils taken out, simply cannot believe in the concept of a “natural death.”  If we allowed “nature” to take its course the majority of us would have gone down to the same fate as the majority of people throughout history: we would have died in childhood.

Now, to the moment of death.  If we are of sound mind we have a right, of course, to refuse treatment, and when we are incapable of making it for ourselves our family usually is permitted to make it for us. The decision to “pull the plug” is made by thousands of people every day when it is a clear that their brain-dead loved ones are being kept alive only in the sense of having a machine respirate for them. No one serious denies this right, as theoretically machines could keep us all respirating indefinitely, long after the brain has ceased to function. This is non-controversial.

Now, let me put another case to you. Supposing I have been diagnosed with a terminal disease and, at some late point in the disease’s progress, only pain, misery, and total loss of dignity lies ahead.  I have an undeniable right to refuse treatment, of course, but with the consequent and probably quite unbearable pain that would accompany such a decision; I have the right to receive large doses of painkillers and spend my last days or weeks in a narcotic haze, which is the standard method of passing for most people nowadays.  However, I do not have the right, not even in the clearest of mental states, to ask a physician to give me a lethal dose of drugs to end my life as quickly as possible.

Well, not quite. I can ask, but as matters stand no physician in Canada legally can fulfill my request. He or she can leave me dead to the world but not actually dead. But why not? There are, of course, serious concerns about the administration of such treatments, were they to be legal. There would have to be careful safeguards to ensure that people with reasonable prospects for recovery don’t end their lives prematurely. We mustn’t have angst-ridden teenagers showing up at our hospitals, asking for lethal injections because they can’t go on after their most recent breakup. But if I am in the later phases of a terminal illness, with no reasonable prospect of recovery and – most crucially – I have been professionally determined to be of sound mind, I see no grounds on which I ought not be permitted to choose to dispossess myself of the one thing that is most my own: my life. The easiest method for doing so would be to ask for the assistance of a willing physician to administer a lethal dose of painkillers.

And why can’t I? There is one answer. Because of opposition on religious grounds, by those who maintain that even fully consensual, physician-assisted suicide that meets precise criteria is a violation of the principle that life is sacred until “natural” death, even though very few of them really believe in the concept of “natural death” at all. In this regard, the only people who are being consistent are those members of certain religious minorities who refuse nearly all medical treatments on the grounds that it is a violation of God’s will. I regard this as perverse, but at least it has the virtue of consistency.

Canada’s constitution guarantees me religious freedom — a freedom which must necessarily include the freedom to be free from the religiously motivated dictates of others. I therefore regard my inability to secure a physician assisted suicide as a violation of my constitutional rights. Some will attempt to make the argument that all of our laws have religious antecedents, and that therefore my argument applies equally to laws against murder, rape, theft, and the like.  But there are many grounds for opposing such crimes quite apart from the fact that there are religious proscriptions against them. The conditions of human solidarity and of maintaining human society require them whether your particular god wants them or not. By contrast, secular objections to fulfilling the wish of a terminally ill and clear-minded individual to expedite the process are harder to locate. 
 
It goes without saying, of course, that no physician should ever be forced against his or her conscience or under threat of professional sanction to terminate someone’s life; we all recognize that the decision to end a life is, from both sacred and secular perspectives, a momentous one. The suggestion will be made, of course, that to permit physician assisted suicide will serve to further the secular society’s cruelest failing of all: the supposed devaluation of human existence.  But as a historian of war and conflict, I am not at all convinced that, in proportional terms, the century recently concluded was any more violent than others that preceded it nor indeed that it valued life less.   Indeed, allow me to suggest that it is possible that from a secular perspective the value of life is even greater – it has an inherent and intrinsic value, because it is the only life that we will ever have.