Halo, Halo! (2025)

The Halo Halo Column from the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Camille Paglia is an American academic, brought up Catholic, later atheist. She described an early experience where she learnt the lesson which is one that all religions and cults teach – don’t ask questions, we know better, do as you’re told!

‘The Catholic Church in the Fifties was at its most dogmatic and censorious, and I struggled restlessly against its rules. As we were being drilled for Confirmation, I asked the nun in our catechism class, “If God is all-forgiving, will he ever forgive Satan?” This innocent and it seems to me, interesting question produced a violent response. The nun turned beet-red and began screaming at me – odd, I thought, since we were sitting in the pews of the church. My question, needless to say, was not answered. That was when I knew there was no place in the American Church of that time for an enquiring mind.’

The experience appears not to have dampened Paglia’s ardour for asking awkward questions. There are still no places within religion for enquiring minds.

* * *

Creationism adherents are throwing their toys out of their prams. Wikipedia is biased against religion, they cry. Wikipedia states that there are over ten thousand distinct religions in the world. Those seeking elucidation from within its pages shouldn’t take everything found there to be gospel. Creationists have taken umbrage with Wiki because it lists ‘Creationism,’ aka ‘intelligent design,’ as a pseudoscience. They’ve resorted to ‘statistics’ which allegedly show how many Creationists there are in the world. We all know what is said about statistics. We think Wikipedia is being overly generous in using even that term (World Religious News).

* * *

As if the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas don’t have enough to contend with, the BBC reported that criminal gangs had taken ‘control of a group of five favelas in the north of the city – now known as the Israel Complex – after one of their leaders had what he believed was a revelation from God . . . gangsters see themselves as “soldiers of crime”, with Jesus as “the owner” of the territory they dominate’. The report says that ‘the gang selling these branded drugs is the Pure Third Command, one of Rio’s most powerful criminal groups, with a reputation both for making its opponents disappear, and for fanatical evangelical Christianity. Controversially, some have dubbed them “Narco-Pentecostals”’.

* * *

What does a hundred thousand dollars buy you these days? Two tickets to the ‘One America, One Light Sunday Service’. This was an ‘interfaith prayer service’ which took place the day before Trump’s inauguration as US president. Seems like the only faith on display was that of devotion to the mighty buck rather than the Almighty. Whoever organised this is an amateur compared to the Evangelists who pull in millions of dollars yearly. Did the participants offer up prayers to the Omnipotent One? What are the chances He, or his team, answered them? A bargain though if they got to meet the Holy Trinity, Trump, Vance and Musk.

DC

Is anybody up there? (1982)

From the November 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last year the American government published the proceedings of a conference in California in June 1979 whose ostensible purpose was to explore the prospects for research into the nature and distribution of life in the universe (Life in the Universe, NASA Conference Publication 2156. US Government Printing Office). While the case for the establishment of a sane and harmonious society here on earth is obviously not dependent on such findings, the papers do contain much of interest to socialists.

The conference considered the origin of life, life supporting environments, the evolution of complex life, the detectability of technically advanced civilisations and the problem of locating extraterrestrial intelligence. Two different though complementary approaches are encompassed here. The first seeks to develop an understanding of life and the environments necessary to support it. Such research cannot, of course, uniquely determine the existence of life outside the planet earth, but will enable attention to be focused on the more promising candidates among the heavenly bodies. The second approach has already been christened SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), and involves listening for potential radio transmissions from intelligent life, and an examination of suitable stars for target. A research programme has been established to pursue these aims.

The advance in thinking in this branch of science since Darwin wrote The Origin of Species is as immense as that made in the same period in the design of weapons of war. The two are in fact linked, as illustrated by the development of nuclear bombs and the use of space-craft for reconnaissance and, potentially at least, for other military purposes. It is a mistake to think of this advance of science in terms of increasing the number of solved problems (with a corresponding reduction of those unsolved), although there is a sense in which this is a valid viewpoint. Attempts to attack one particular problem often lead to unexpected results which themselves cause new questions to be posed and fresh problems identified as requiring solutions. An example of this was the bringing back to earth for analysis of samples from the moon. The results have been somewhat misleadingly reported as having caused confusion among scientists. In fact the longterm result is an enlargement of horizons and an enrichment of understanding.

Certainly this aspect of scientific research can be irritating. It requires the modification of theories in the face of new evidence, often the abandonment of what had appeared to be promising lines of enquiry. Thus the appearance can easily be given that no progress is being made. It is here that the sniping movement calling itself Creation Science has found its opportunity. There have surely been few organisations to which the word reactionary can be more appropriately applied. Claiming that science has failed to provide the answers, it advocates a return to the old creation theories of religion. Its adherents focus on biological evolution and Darwin's work and pose the question, “Was Darwin right?”, as though they were continuing the famous debate between Bishop Wilberforce and T.H. Huxley. Their claim that the fossil record does not support Darwin is technically correct although rather impertinent. Darwin as was understandable in his time, saw evolution as proceeding at a much more constant rate than present-day evidence will support. In fact, as presented by Valentine [1], what now appears to have happened is lengthy periods of relative stability with small changes (microevolution) interspersed with intervals where more revolutionary events happened (macroevolution). Valentine writes: "A large mutation can produce a descendant which is infertile with members of its parental species, including its parents. If it can fertilise itself, however, it may propagate and thrive”. In the human species mutations are produced which differ considerably from their parents. This occurred with much greater frequency immediately following the atomic bombardment of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Like most mutations these were tragic, one-off cases and where they survived they did so only because human society can now prevent natural selection operating. The point is, however, that it was the normal human reproductive process which brought forth these ‘children’, and to claim that a ‘creator’ is at work here is worse than ridiculous.

The concept of concurrent micro and macroevolution appears to be well supported by the fossil record. Indeed in the last 20 years one of the main arguments used by “creationists' has disappeared. As reported by Margolis and Havelock [2], it used to be thought that the Precambrian rocks of the Ediacaran period (700 million to 570 million years ago approximately) did not contain a fossil record. The pioneering work of Elso Barghoorn and Stanley Tyler of Harvard University has shown that this is not the case, the difficulty having been related to detection techniques and scientific expectation. Margolis and Havelock put it thus: “These investigators realised that the conspicuous fossil record of large organisms must have been preceded by something smaller. Such ideas led them to microscopic studies of thin sections of unaltered sedimentary rocks”. Far from supporting biblical or neo-biblical viewpoint, modern science is dealing it ever more crushing blows. This message is forcefully conveyed in nearly all the papers presented at the conference. ‘Creation science', incorporating as it does a complete misunderstanding of modern scientific method, must be largely motivated by its own deadly fear of the consequences of driving God out of the heavens. The complexity of the universe, as it is now understood, shows more clearly than ever before that the idea that we can ‘know all the answers' is a religious and not a scientific one. How could the inert matter which preceded life on earth have left sign-points to show us how it came to be where it was?

When talking about the possibility of detecting the existence of life outside our own planet, we of course mean life as we know it’; that is. life that has evolved in much the same way from much the same material conditions and resources as has life here on earth. We cannot, of course, even begin to discuss any other possible method of life evolution as it would be totally outside our experience and knowledge. All that can be said is that while this possibility cannot be entirely ruled out, the chances do seem to be extremely small. The phrase ‘conditions which will support life’ must also be taken to mean ‘conditions similar to those on earth’.

The space exploration which has already taken place certainly appears to have ruled out any chance of life at the present time anywhere else in the solar system. No attempt was made by sensate beings to intercept or communicate with the spacecraft, and nowhere was a life supporting environment detected. However Chang [3] suggests that Venus and Mars may have supported some form of life in the past. As for the chances of life further afield, this appears to boil down to which is the greater of two very large numbers. The odds against all the requirements of organic life appearing on another plant, or perhaps a satellite, in much the same proportions as on earth, are obviously very great. Equally vast however is the number of heavenly bodies in the universe. The biblical writer who compared their abundance to that of sand on the seashore was considerably more right than he knew. He probably did not believe what he wrote, but he has proved not to be far out. There has even been speculation that the planet earth may not be unique — that is to say. there may be another bloke called Edge writing at this instant about life in the universe for another journal called Socialist Standard on an identical planet many light years away! Opinion at the conference was divided on this issue. Drake [4] states: “The current consensus concerning extraterrestrial life is that it exists in abundance in the universe". However in the present state of knowledge the opinion of Lovejoy [5] seems more realistic: “I think it quite reasonable to suppose that despite the immensity of the known universe, the specificity in the physiostructure of any organism is so great and its immensely complex pathway of progression so ancient that the probability of re-expression is simply infinitesimal". This, needless to say. has nothing in common with the religious view of man as the special creation of God. Lovejoy’s comments are the product of more than a century of dedicated scientific observation.

What is the real purpose of this conference? In his introductory remarks Frosch [6] said: "The ‘golden fleece' idea that searches, gropings for knowledge whose purpose we do not understand are silly and some kind of rip off, results from sheer lack of understanding, lack of imagination and lack of perception of the meaning of the history of the human race". As far as it went, this was very well said. However, it would be naive indeed to accept that the gathering was concerned with pure research for the long-term benefit of humanity. Under the present social system funds are not provided for such studies. Certain capitalist interests, of course, stand to benefit in the short term from the construction of the high technology instruments required to scan the universe for life. Spacecraft travelling up to the speed of light have been envisaged. Generally speaking, however, such interests, despite all their lobbying, are unlikely by themselves to generate enough pressure to force governments, considering the interests of the capitalist class as a whole, to provide them with the necessary finance. Not surprisingly, “earth politics" is ignored in all of the papers. This is an indication, however, that the participants implicitly accepted not only that there is no feasible alternative to the capitalist system here on earth, but that the advanced civilisations which they hope to find elsewhere will be capitalist in character also.

In discussing how such advanced civilisations may be detected, Braccwell [7] unwittingly and grimly admits this when he says, "incidental signals offer more interesting grounds for speculation. There is of course the possibility of emission from bomb explosions. Sustained nuclear reactions for the purpose of power generation do not seem a likely source because leakage would represent waste”. Unlike CND, it would appear that this author holds justifiably pessimistic views of the possibility of removing the threat of nuclear war while retaining the system that causes it. It can reasonably be assumed that the conference would have been no more optimistic about the prospect of tackling the problems of pollution and depletion of natural resources. These are also insoluble within capitalism, and are seriously worrying the more thinking among our rulers.

There are perhaps two obvious ways in which such people may see communication with other life-supporting planets as offering a way out. First, there is the hope that some "super intelligence” may be contacted who could point to solutions which have escaped dumb earthlings. However socialists see this as another form of the "great man" idea, and thus doomed to failure. Secondly, and perhaps the speculation on long-distance space travel is indicative, there is the possibility of transplanting earth capitalism to another site (and eventually wrecking this place in the way the earth is now being wrecked). This may prove to be a more practical proposition than trying to establish life support systems on other members of the solar system which are at present inimical to life. Such a migration could involve war. not only with existing inhabitants, but fierce conflict between the rival capitalist groups on earth as they try to extend their space colonies at each other's expense, just as happened here. This scepticism over motives however does not detract from the value of this publication as an abundant source of information and valuable insight into current scientific thinking.

E. C. Edge

References

(All references are taken from NASA Conference Publication 2156)

1. Emergence and Radiation of Multicellular Organisms; James W. Valentine (University of California)

2. Atmosphere and Evolution; Lynn Margolis (Boston University) and James E. Lovelock (Reading University, UK)

3. Organic Chemical Evolution; Sherwood Chang (Ames Research Centre. NASA)

4. Comments by Frank D. Drake (Professor of Astronomy. Cornell University) as session chairman for session 5.

5. Evolution of Man and its Implications for General Principles of the Evolution of Intelligent Life; C. Owen Lovejoy (Kent State University, Ohio)

6. Introductory remarks by Robert A. Frosch (President of the American Association of Engineering Societies)

7. Manifestations of Advanced Civilisations; Ronald N. Braccwell (Stanford University, California)

Halo, Halo! (2024)

The Halo Halo Column from the May 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Social media shorthand SMH means ‘shakes my head’. When the German Hindenburg airship caught fire landing in New Jersey in 1937 the radio commentator cried out, ‘oh, the humanity!’ The current seventh-century rulers of Afghanistan cause both of those reactions. The Telegraph, 25 March, reports that a Mullah there has declared, ‘we will soon implement the punishment for adultery. We will flog women in public. We will stone them to death in public.’ Words fail.

*****

Fulcrum7.com in a book review says the author posits the ridiculous theory that Noah carried dinosaurs onto the Ark as juveniles or even as eggs. Because obviously think of the space a pair of eighty-foot dinosaurs would take up! The reviewer says, rubbish! Well of course. That’s like the old comedy routine where someone claims to have two lions, a giraffe and an elephant in a shoebox they’re carrying. The reviewer then says, ‘I believe the dinosaurs were among the “confused species”, which were the result of genetic engineering and one of the reasons for the Flood was to destroy those animals’. Words fail.

*****

In June 1812 Napoleon Bonaparte and his French army invaded Russia. In 1812 Mary Anning and, initially, her brother dug the skeleton of an unknown seventeen-foot-long creature from the cliffs of Lyme Regis. Now it’s known that it was the skeleton of an ichthyosaur from the Jurassic period. Mary Anning was aged twelve when she discovered this.

With hindsight, which of those two events was the most important? It’s not known if this is one of the animals that the Flood failed to destroy.

Mary Anning and her family were avid fossil harvesters selling their finds to tourists. Oxford professor William Buckland teamed up with Mary. Peal writes that Buckland was a committed Christian who had difficulty in reconciling Mary’s finds with Bible stories. To maintain his delusion Buckland said that the skeleton must have come there as a result of the Flood.

Mary also discovered a plesiosaur and a pterodactyl. She is quoted as saying that, ‘great men of learning had taken advantage of her.’ ‘They ‘sucked her brains’ of her knowledge, and stole the glory of her discoveries for themselves’ (Meet the Georgians, Robert Peal, 2021,).

*****

The protagonist sees a group of flagellants in St James’s Park. He converses about it with his chauffeur who says; ‘I find it ridiculous. If God exists and He’s decided He’s had enough of us, He isn’t going to change his mind because a rabble of no-hopers dress up in yellow and go wailing through the park.’

‘Do you believe He exists?

‘Perhaps His experiment went spectacularly wrong. Perhaps He’s just baffled. Seeing the mess, not knowing how to put it right. Perhaps not wanting to put it right. Perhaps He only had enough power for one intervention. So He made it. Whoever he is, whatever He is, I hope He burns in His own Hell’ (The Children of Men, P.D. James, 1992).

DC

Halo, Halo! (2024)

The Halo Halo Column from the April 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nautilus, 28 February, reviews a book by a Professor of Psychiatry at the American University of Yale. The article is titled Evolution Is Going According to God’s Plan. The reviewer says its author believes ‘evolutionary theory is, in fact, theologically reaffirming; natural selection is purposeful and guided, and provides both evidence for a creator.’ Double quelle surprise! The Prof is a lifelong Mormon and is now a Latter Day Saints Bishop.

It seems it’s not only Christian evangelicals who have problems with reality, other religions do too. The Yetkin Report, 23 February, notes that those in charge of education in Turkey, having their country’s children’s best interests at heart, banned Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution from being taught in schools several years ago. Now ‘The Ministry of (Turkey’s) National Education, under the title of the biology curriculum, has introduced the notion of creationism into the 2024-25 schedule’.

Atlantic Council, 16 February, reports an elderly Iranian gentleman has seriously upset the Iranian authorities and has quite rightly (ahem) been taken into custody to undergo rehabilitation. George Orwell’s 1984 wasn’t just a work of fiction but a manual used by totalitarian regimes for the suppression of dissent. Totalitarian? Did someone mention Julian Assange? The heinous crime of this individual? Posting himself singing and dancing on social media. ‘The hardline Islamist world-view of the Islamic Republic, and its small but powerful constituency, subscribes to outlawing public dancing and singing as “un-Islamic” practices.’

American politician Mike Johnson again. Windytimes (14 February) notes that he flies three flags outside his office. The national flag, the State flag and ‘a white flag with a green tree in the centre and the words “An Appeal to Heaven”. This flag, which originated in the American Revolution, today is associated with a religious movement, New Apostolic Reformation, a rapidly growing force among various evangelical and charismatic groups that seeks to conform society’s seven spheres—education, religion, family, business, government, arts, and entertainment—with their interpretations of Christian scriptures and history’.

Any extraterrestrials who arrive to check out the third rock from the Sun would, if they have any sense, turn right around and avoid it like the proverbial. It is to be sincerely hoped that such visitors are not Vogons intent on demolishing the planet to provide an interplanetary space by-pass. Douglas Adams in his series of books beginning with Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was using his imagination. There have been many who have insisted that they have indeed been abducted by aliens or who have been taken up into a UFO and had unspeakable things happen to them.

A Frenchman named Claude Maurice Marcel Vorilhon claimed to have met with ETs and, in December 1973, formed the Raëlian Movement and changed his name to Raël. Perhaps these alien visitors possess a twisted sense of humour because the number of times that various religious/cult founders have had revelations conveyed to them through hearing or meeting with ‘other worldly’ beings is quite a coincidence.

DC

Halo Halo! (2024)

The Halo Halo Column from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Sun, 28 January, had American Christians seeking both to propagate creationism and coin a few dollars – more than a few as two million visitors a year at fifty quid a throw for adults were expected to visit a creationist museum in Kentucky which features a five-hundred-foot-plus model of an Ark based upon the ‘Noah and the flood’ fairy tale. A hundred million dollars to build allegedly. Sure they could have got some cheaper wood from somewhere. It doesn’t say whether that figure is inflation-adjusted from the time of the event which supposedly took place a few thousand years ago. In the real world it’s generally agreed that dinosaurs became extinct sixty- five million years ago. Inside there are models of dinosaurs because dinosaurs and humans apparently existed side by side.

If you can believe that someone in the sky was responsible for making the Universe and everything in it then you can believe any old twaddle.

#    #    #    #

Another American group of similar ilk aims to ‘open people to the gospel by revealing God in science’. ‘Do Extinctions in the Fossil Record Undermine Creation?’ (Reasons to Believe, 31 January). Guess what their ‘scientific’ conclusion is. They conclude, ‘It means that mass extinctions and mass originations were part of a divinely orchestrated natural history.’ It’s a heads I win, tails you lose sort of thing. Can’t argue with the ‘science’!

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There’s a painting in a church in the ex-Soviet Republic of Georgia, of Lenin being cast down into ‘hell’. A futile gesture but given its history under the Soviets it’s probably the equivalent of a traditional British ‘up yours’. Whatever makes you happy. Have the Georgians consigned Stalin to the same ‘fate’ or are they still proud of one of their own?

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James Joyce’s 1916 novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, contains a sermon, delivered by a Catholic priest, on the subject of hellfire and damnation. It’s a powerful piece of writing and may have come from Joyce’s own experiences within the Catholic church. Is hellfire still a tool to keep the sheep under control? Perfectly normal to have depictions of the savage Roman method of execution, crucifixion, looming over them?

#    #    #    #

‘You couldn’t make it up’ news that a man in Iowa, USA, is facing criminal charges for beheading a statue. Where was it? In a Satanic Temple. Apparently, Satanism is designated an ‘official religion’ which makes the vandalism a ‘hate crime’.

#    #    #    #

‘Liberation Tarot seeks to serve as a tool for those inspired towards revolution in the face of the able-centered, capitalist, hetero-cis-normative, white-supremacist patriarchy. Tarot helps us rewrite the vocabulary of power, and with it, to strengthen our muscles of radical, revolutionary, and abolitionist dreaming. The deck eschews conventional tarot cards. Figures in the deck have bodies of all shapes and sizes, colors, genders, ages, and abilities—together, elaborating a vision of collective liberation and co-resistance.’ Whatever. Bargain at fifty dollars. Sarcasm redundant…

DC

Halo Halo! (2024)

The Halo Halo Column from the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Religions, well some anyway, amongst other things, preach tolerance don’t they? Not in Kansas, USA, apparently. A new after-school club is causing such a kerfuffle that a petition has been raised against it. The petition says: ‘Satanism has a strong history of persecution and violence towards the church and those who believe in God.’ And goes on ‘Whether you believe in God, are a Christian, Catholic, Mormon, Hindu, Buddhist or even atheist you should see that ending this club is not just because it opposes Christianity but because what they stand for and the actions they will make are wrong and immoral. This isn’t an argument over religion and Christianity but of right and wrong.’ (Newsweek 27 December). It’s a Satan Club. Are young folk setting out to wind up their parents and authority?

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In Iowa, ‘the Satanic Temple of Iowa placed with state permission a small altar on the first floor of the Iowa State Capitol. It displays what are described online as the seven fundamental tenets” of Satanism, including the statement that “the freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend”’ (YahooNews 13 December). The incensed State Representative wants to bring in a law to display ‘the Ten Commandments in all state buildings, including the Capitol, and in Iowa public schools’, but admits ‘few people think there is much that can be legally done about it because of free speech and freedom of religion.’

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Richard Dawkins in his 2009 book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, notes that in 2008, a Gallup poll, in response to three questions regarding the origin and development of humans on this planet, found that 36 percent of Americans thought that evolution had taken place over millions of years but that God had kick-started it; 14 percent thought yes, millions of years of evolution but definitely no god: and a staggering 44 per cent thought (rather believed because thought implies rationality) that God was responsible for the creation of humans within the last ten thousand years. The percentage of the latter who favoured October or some other month is not known.

A Gallup poll along similar lines in 2019 appears to show that the 44 percent is down to 40; the 36 is down to 33, and the 14 has seen a large jump to 22 percent. A 2021 Pew Research Center survey found that 60 percent of Protestants consider themselves ‘born-again or evangelical Christian.’ Opiates are hard to kick.

#    #    #    #

Now the stepmother of US House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson has called out his extremist Christian beliefs (LBTQNation 13 December, quoting a Guardian interview). She says that Johnson, who is a creationist, has an indifference to environmental issues because he believes that ‘God will take care of you.’ So stuff the environment. An ideal capitalist politician given the damage capitalism causes.

Besides refusing to fight climate change, Johnson’s religion has fuelled his virulent anti-LGBTQ+ beliefs.

DC

Tiny (URL) Tips (2009)

The Tiny Tips column from the November 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

 Who would have thought a wee little packet of fake blood could threaten to unravel an entire culture. But so great is the threat of the “Artificial Virginity Hymen” — a kit that helps women fake their virginity — that prominent Egyptian conservatives are calling for an all-out ban. Not only that, they are also demanding the exile of anyone who traffics it.

[Link.]

  

“What creationists believe about human origins we get from the Bible,” said David Menton an acclaimed anatomist and also a creationist. “The creation of the world takes place on page one of the Bible. If you throw out the first page of the Bible you might as well throw out the whole thing. If you can’t live with the first page then pitch out the remaining thousand pages.”

[Link.]

  

The gap between wealthiest 10 percent and the rest of America is worse than at any time on record. Two thirds of all income gains from 2002-7 went to the top 1 percent. The Walton family alone is worth more than the bottom 100 million Americans combined. Wal-Mart is a major player in the “dead peasants insurance” game; it’s alleged that dead peasant insurance payouts are used for executive bonuses:

[Dead Link.]

  

Amnesty International has highlighted a case of a man facing execution in Texas. The human rights group has revealed a Texas man faces execution after jurors at his trial consulted the Bible when deliberating his fate:

[Dead Link.]

  Israel is making preparations to carry out military attacks in Iran after December, a French magazine reported overnight Wednesday:

[Dead Link.]

  

That Haiti needs the attention cannot be overstated. Unemployment hovers at around 70 percent, experts

say, and over half of the population lives in extreme poverty. Violence broke out in June as students demanded an increase in the minimum wage to $5 from $1.75 — which were daily rates, not hourly ones. Haiti’s extremely low labor costs, comparable to those in Bangladesh, make it so appealing:

[Link.]

  

When the Berlin Wall crumbled, East Germans imagined a life of freedom where consumer goods were abundant and hardships would fade. Ten years later, a remarkable 51% say they were happier with communism. About the same time a new Russian proverb was born: “Everything the Communists said about Communism was a lie, but everything they said about Capitalism turned out to be the truth.”

[Dead Link.]

  

We are fast approaching the time of the next great battle over evolution. The Neo-creationists will be corporations, and they will argue that they could not possibly be descended from human beings…The rape case of Jamie Leigh Jones was just a logical step forward in the long-standing Republican effort to lock Americans out of the nation’s courthouses, an effort undertaken on behalf of corporate supremacy. A woman is gang-raped by her fellow employees at government contractor KBR. The company says her contract prohibits her from seeking justice in court.

[Dead Link.]

Pathfinders: Digging Up Old Bones (2007)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Politics and ideologies are in reality best understood not as imponderable excursions into the deeper truths of society but as products mass-produced off a production line and sitting on ideological supermarket shelves with brightly coloured labels, often red, blue, yellow or green or some novel mix thereof. One thing which you cannot fail to have noticed about commodities generally, and which these ‘soft’ commodities share with ‘hard goods’ like washing machines, cleaning products and tinned spaghetti is the inane compulsion to keep rebranding themselves with the legend NEW! in a big starburst banner just next to the price. As with NEW! pasta shapes, so with NEW! Labour. As with NEW! blue-whiteness, so with NEW! blue sky thinking. As with ‘revolutionary’ NEW! hair colour, or our special NEW! improved recipe, the manufacturers are challenging you to do what is probably impossible, and spot a difference that doesn’t exist, due to a change they didn’t make on a formula they didn’t modify. Why the manufacturers do this, in a fast-changing world where novelty has a short shelf-life, is too obvious to need spelling out, but one has a deep-rooted suspicion that many consumers too are so accustomed to these everyday revolutions that they would manage to find a difference between ‘old’ cola and ‘new’ cola even if there wasn’t one. This may be because they desire to see themselves as sophisticated and discerning customers with subtle palates that can detect changes at homeopathic levels, and thus they delude themselves and their peers, and in so doing become accessories to the grand illusion, perfectly trained pavlovian customers of capitalism.

Anyone who remembers, say, the adverts of the 1970s will have a strange feeling of detached deja-vu when seeing modern commercials for ‘revolutionary new products’ such as sunglasses that react to light (aka ‘reactolites’ in the 1970s ), but the feeling is somehow detached because nobody seems to remark on the fact that this is yesterday’s leftovers being served up as fresh. Perhaps to the extent that we stop bothering to protest, we join those consumers who can detect non-existent changes to recipes and in our own way become complicit in the grand illusion, finally for the sake of a quiet life pretending we don’t remember or don’t care. Meanwhile those who don’t remember previous incarnations will of course be under the happy impression that they are getting the newest and the brightest and the best of everything.

So it is part of the heavy labour of any forward-looking revolutionary to be backward-looking as well, in order to recall all the previous times society, debates, ideas and individuals have trod the same paths and been down the same blind alleys, and to remind those who are listening that the most heavily signposted routes are usually the ones that don’t go anywhere. And where politics, or its twisted and malicious great-aunt, religion, impact on the one truly novel field of human endeavour, science, the same dead hands of bigotry beckon us down the same old cul-de-sacs, winding along scenic back roads that skirt the evidence and obscure the real lay of the land.

So it is with the ‘controversy’ over Darwinian evolution. Just when you think, after the recent court judgments in America against it, that creationism is becoming a laughing stock and the American public are finally becoming tired of being caricatured as vegetable-brained hicks who praise the Lord and marry their sisters, the debate convulses once again, a bubble emerges from the fetid swamp, and a NEW! argument explodes over the scenery. Neoconservatives, it seems, are now at war with the religious right in an attempt to reclaim Darwin as the ideological figurehead, not of the scientific liberal progressive agenda, but of red-blooded two-fisted Republican screw-the-other-guy frontier capitalist values (‘A Split Emerges as Conservatives Discuss Darwin’, New York Times, May 5). The argument of the neo-cons is of course that evolution, being ‘red in tooth and claw’, and involving the ‘survival of the fittest’, is perfectly suited to the conservative view of capitalism. Never mind that the first of these phrases was coined by T H Huxley and the second by Herbert Spencer, Darwin is held up as the perfect justification for any amount of callous disregard by the rich of the vast majority of the world’s poor population, and the only people persistently getting in the way of this wonderful ‘proof’ of capitalism’s natural and therefore inevitable provenance are those silly religious evangelists who don’t seem to understand how to intelligently design capitalism’s propaganda machine.

And it is at this point that the reactolite factor sets in. People new to this debate might screw up their eyes, dazzled by the spectacle of conservatives being pro-Darwin and fighting their own religious brethren. But there’s more. What would they make of the logical extension to this scenario, which is the emergence of a liberal progressive element opposed to evolution? Yet the world has seen it all before, where the conservatives championed Darwin and the liberal progressives championed creationism. It was a sell-out gig, it was a set-up, it ruined careers, and it made history. It was the Scopes Monkey trial of 1925, a trial so bizarre that the defendant deliberately got himself accused as a teacher of evolution even though he was actually a football coach, where his friends were on the prosecution counsel, and where the jury was instructed by the defence not to find him innocent. The story of this world-famous publicity stunt, engineered entirely by the defendant and his team of bible-baiters, is hugely entertaining and too long to indulge here (but look it up in Wikipedia).

Why the pro-evolution lobby, and people like Clarence Darrow and H L Mencken, would want to crucify the religious right in public is not difficult for any scientifically-minded progressive to comprehend, especially one with a sense of humour. But, asked Stephen Jay Gould, in his perceptive article on the subject, what on earth possessed a liberal and progressive, three-times Presidential candidate like William Jennings Bryan, a man who had devoted his life to social reform, to lead the prosecution, in what he must have known was an ambush (see Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, 1999)? Bryan, ever since lampooned as the villain of the piece, was according to Gould motivated not so much by any fondness for the theory of creationism or its adherents as by a truly messianic hatred of the iniquitous implications of what had already by then become known as Social Darwinism, a vicious ideology of social callousness which owed more to Spencer than Darwin and whose consequences in social inequality and poverty Bryan had spent his life trying to battle. Gould, himself a lifelong bitter opponent of creationists, nevertheless manages to paint a sympathetic portrait of a decent man consigned to history as a buffoon, who found himself on the wrong side for the right reasons.

To socialists this is all old hat now, and they won’t be tempted into the debate between neo-cons and evangelists in the neo-neo-Darwin saga. They know that Darwin wasn’t a social Darwinist, that capitalism doesn’t show the survival of the fittest but in fact destroys the healthy host and preserves the degenerate and useless parasite, and also that the enemy of your religious enemy is not necessarily your friend. Those addicted to the NEW! however might end up scratching their heads over this one.

Paddy Shannon

Evolution explained (2021)

Book Review from the April 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Blind Watchmaker. Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. By Richard Dawkins. Audiobook narrated by: Richard Dawkins and Lalla Ward.

This is an audio version of Dawkins’s well-known book, narrated by Dawkins and his wife, actor Lalla Ward. The watchmaker idea belongs to the 18th-century theologian William Paley, who argued that just as a watch is too complicated and functional to have sprung into existence by accident, so too does this apply to all living things with their far greater complexity. Charles Darwin’s discovery that challenged the creationist argument through natural selection – the unconscious, automatic, blind, yet essentially non-random process Darwin discovered – is brought to life in this book.

Dawkins and Ward provide a highly engaging read of Dawkins’s critique of creationism. The audiobook follows an updated edition of the book from 2006 and provides intricate explanations, by way of witty examples, of why random, infinitesimal gene changes over millions of years have produced us and the world we live in. Dawkins’s writing contains a self-deprecating, dry sense of humour that comes to life as he reads the book aloud. Alternating voices between Dawkins and Ward provides a nice listening contrast while also setting apart examples, clarifications, and segments of greater detail. Dawkins and his wife live in a world that is perhaps more scientific on a daily basis than most of us, so the book takes great care to vary the delivery of information for greater emphasis and easy understanding.

Dawkins’s goal in The Blind Watchmaker was to remove any doubt that anything but scientific fact is behind the origin of the universe. Just because something – like human beings or the universe – is complex does not mean that it cannot be explained. Dawkins works hard to help listeners understand the smaller-than-microscopic changes that evolved through staggering amounts of time. To paraphrase the author, do not draw conclusions from your own inability to understand something. The truth of Darwinism comes in its acceptance of physics, probability, and the unending march of time. The author (and speaker) helps listeners out by using examples that are easy to grasp: for example, the evolution from wolves to domesticated dogs. Or how echolocation in bats clearly shows the evolution of a trait necessary for survival of a species.

It is an altogether interesting read that particularly comes to life when listened to in audio format. Highly recommended for anyone who would like to learn more about the origins of the universe and the existence of life on Earth.

Paul Edwards

Pathfinders: Darwin in the pink (2009)

The Pathfinders Column from the February 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Darwin in the pink

It seems fitting, in the year of Darwinius Laudatus, that the new incumbent of the White House is stuffing his team with scientists and proclaiming that science is top of the agenda again. Well, it won’t bring on socialism, but at least those who seemed obsessed with visions of a new religious Inquisition in the West can stop worrying for the moment. Nature too is sticking two fingers up at creationists who have problems struggling with the facts of life, by recently producing two entirely new species that, as they say, you couldn’t even make up. One, a bizarre pink iguana, happens to live on the one Galapagos island Darwin didn’t manage to visit  The other is a mirror-eyed spook-fish in the deep ocean with an entirely novel means of discerning sharp images using light reflector arrays (New Scientist, 10 January). Advocates of Intelligent Design will easily explain pink iguanas (God was having a camp day) but in the case of the highly complex mirror mechanism, the obvious question would be: why did our Intelligent Designer not do things the easy way and just have the fish live somewhere it could see by normal means? Recent footage has also emerged of a unique venomous mammal, the Hispaniolan solenodon, suspected of being the last surviving relic of a branch of mammalia with a very uncuddly characteristic. Will ID supporters kindly explain why The Creator can’t seem to make up his mind, and keeps producing hybrid experiments that look suspiciously random and unplanned? Whatever next, a mammal that lays eggs?

Biofuels at bedrock in ratings

Speaking of random and unplanned, capitalism can usually be relied on to filter out all the smart solutions and pick the dumbest, amid a fanfare of speeches about innovation and progress. It seems hardly a moment since biofuels were the ingenious answer to everyone’s oil crisis. Now a new study suggests that they are the worst possible way of dealing with the problem, even taking coal or nuclear power into account (SciDev, Biofuels bottom of the heap in impact study, 7 January)

Why so popular a solution then?  Because it was cheap, the land was already in cultivation for something else, and it was a zero-tech, zero investment changeover. Wind power comes out best, which is perhaps no surprise. If we were to plant wind turbines in every government meeting room in the world, we could probably get all our energy for free.

Free is cheaper

Now where have we heard that one before? It’s nice to see that the digerati are still plugging the idea that because costs are heading towards zero soon everything will be free, citing such free services as Google by way of example. Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, is the latest to put this no-longer-very-revolutionary idea in his new book Free: the Future of a Radical Price (BBC Radio 4, In Business, 8 January). Of course, he means everything digital will be free. About the real world of food, clothing and heating he has no comment to make. No doubt it will comfort the refugees of Darfur that they can access free pictures of food whenever they like.  What Anderson and his colleagues could usefully do is extrapolate from their own cosily self-absorbed cyberworld to ask what socialists ask – couldn’t we do the same thing for tins of beans as terabytes? After all, production costs in material goods also have a tendency to fall over time. Besides, there is also the question of what you mean by free. Users don’t pay to use Google, but two Google searches are as carbon heavy as boiling a kettle, and the global IT industry produces as much greenhouse gas as the global airline industry (BBC Online,  ‘Carbon cost’ of Google revealed, 12 January).

PC I-Plod

One thing which is patently becoming less rather than more free is the matter of civil liberties, with police being encouraged by a new European directive to spend more time hacking into the public’s private computers (BBC Online, Police ‘encouraged’ to hack more, 5 January). Not that it will do them much good. Even if your firewall doesn’t keep them out, they probably couldn’t use the information anyway because they have no way to prove they didn’t put it there themselves. That’s if they don’t lose the information first. Anyone paranoid enough to believe that Big Brother has already arrived will feel a heartwarming glow at the latest in a long line of government security boobs. When the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit was shut down and replaced by the Serious Organised Crime Agency in 2006, the government did not bother to keep the old NHTCU webname and it was bought by a German company. However, the government forgot to mention this to anyone, so whenever any agency including the BBC attempted to tip off the government about suspected cyber-fraud or other criminal japes, they were in fact sending this potentially explosive information to a private commercial enterprise (New Scientist, 3 January).

Paddy Shannon

Darwin and the Intelligent Design Brigade (2009)

From the February 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Evolution is perhaps the strongest theory in modern science, but still the most controversial. Why after all this time does it still generate such ferocious opposition?

“Christian Right Lobbies To Overturn Second Law Of Thermodynamics"

The second law of thermodynamics, a fundamental scientific principle stating that entropy increases over time as organized forms decay into greater states of randomness, has come under fire from conservative Christian groups, who are demanding that the law be repealed.

 Calling the second law of thermodynamics “a deeply disturbing scientific principle that threatens our children’s understanding of God’s universe as a benevolent and loving place,” they are spearheading a nationwide grassroots campaign to have the law removed from high-school physics textbooks. The plan has already met with significant support in the state legislatures of Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Tennessee, Georgia, and Mississippi.”

 Before you start worrying, this was a satirical item from The Onion, back in 2000, aimed at religious people who reject Darwinian evolution. However it’s not really an exaggeration. Religious fundamentalists who reject evolutionary theory are also rejecting geology, astronomy, Einsteinian and Newtonian physics, in fact the whole body of scientific knowledge going back to first principles, and replacing it with a couple of anonymous books and a God who, as Bill Hicks pointed out in relation to dinosaur fossils, must be a liar and a practical joker.

 Yet these religious people don’t choose to attack Newton, or the theory of gravity, or light, or quantum physics. Why evolution specifically? If you haven’t already seen it, try watching Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial (2007), which is freely available online. This is an award-winning documentary describing the headline-grabbing court case between parents and the School Governors in Dover, Pennsylvania in which the governors were trying to force creationist ideas into biology classes and the parents were trying to stop them.

 In the end the parents won, and the creationists were humiliated. But as you follow the interviews with protagonists on both sides of this celebrated case,  you begin to see what it is that motivates those on the religious side of the debate. It is fear.

 They are afraid that without God as first cause there really is no relevance to life. They fear that science is taking the heart out of the human experience and replacing it with numbers. They fear that a world with no meaning is a world with no mercy.

 It was fear that originally incited the famous campaigning reformer William Jennings Bryan to take the prosecution case in the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, fear that naked social darwinism would rampage across any possibility of social justice, would justify the worst excesses of unrestrained capitalism. This was the fear – and the profound misunderstanding of Darwinism – which drove Christians to break themselves against the juggernaut of science, and continues to drive them today.

 It would be, from a scientific or a socialist perspective, so easy to laugh at these people as superstitious children. After all, they cannot win. Despite the recent avalanche of anti-religious books from the likes of Dawkins, Michael Shermer, Christopher Hitchens and others, there is no real danger of a return to a religious Dark Age. Of course they are wrong. Of course their arguments are ludicrous.

 At the same time it is possible to feel some compassion for the fear and the desperation these, mostly ignorant and uninformed, people have, confronted with a world they don’t understand and in which they feel utterly helpless. Science to them is gas chambers, nuclear bombs, death rays, spy satellites and mind control. Wild stories about Earth-eating black holes and ‘strangelets’ guaranteed front-page coverage worldwide for the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider, an event only normally of interest to particle physicists.

 People fear what they don’t understand, and in general society is scientifically illiterate, a situation many scientists find worrying. In public surveys on the supposedly dangerous substance Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO), which can corrode iron and kill humans if inhaled, up to 90% of respondents voted that it should be banned (DHMO = H20).  (Source: New Scientist, 27 Sept 2008, p.76).

 Socialists should care about the religion versus science debate because the theory of socialism is built on scientific principles, and anything which threatens rationality and evidence-based thinking must be anathema. However we should also be capable of seeing the larger picture. This isn’t really about Darwin, or the laws of physics.

 This is about people who need to have a reason to go on living, which capitalism isn’t giving them. It’s about people’s need to believe in something, which capitalism doesn’t supply or has taken away. And it’s about having some hope for the future, of which capitalism has none. The world really does need some intelligent design, but in its business of living, not in its biology.

 Socialists, as atheists, have to understand what some scientists seem unable to grasp, that the battle of ideas is not just a battle of the mind, it’s a battle for the heart. We can no more win hearts with economic methodology than scientists can with peer-reviewed research. If we scoff at notions of ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ because these things are not measurable in laboratory experiments, we utterly miss the point. The desperate argument of creationism is at one level a comedy of human stupidity. But at a deeper level it is a tragedy, the pathos of a human condition adrift and desolate in a world which cares only about money and believes in nothing at all. This is what Moslems and Christians despair about, and this is something with which we can surely empathise. This is the ‘sigh of the oppressed’ in the heartless world of the 21st century. Despite appearances to the contrary, capitalism is slowly and methodically destroying religion. What we need to do, as socialists, is recognise the emotional vacuum this is creating, and strive to fill it, before something infinitely worse does.

Paddy Shannon

Tiny Tips (2011)

The Tiny Tips column from the June 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

The African nation of Congo has been called the worst place on earth to be a woman. A new study released Wednesday shows that it’s even worse than previously thought: 1,152 women are raped every day, a rate equal to 48 per hour. That rate is 26 times more than the previous estimate of 16,000 rapes reported in one year by the United Nations:

[Dead Link.]

The textbook’s “Origin of Life” chapter details lab experiments that have failed to create life from inorganic materials, concluding that there is a huge gap between “life” and “non-life”. But from there it makes the considerable leap that biological explanations for the origin of life are discredited.

“[T]he legitimate scientific hypothesis,” it argues, is that “life on Earth is the result of intelligent causes.”

[Link.]

A United Nations report on the cholera outbreak that has sickened 300,000 Haitians since last fall, killing nearly 5,000, finds evidence to suggest that the disease may have originated at a United Nations military camp north of the capital, which spilled raw sewage into a tributary of the Artibonite River.

[Link.]

Indian environmentalist-philosopher Vandana Shiva has said for years that microfinance is only a solution in a particular context. “But credit, loans and money circulation cannot solve the problems of alienation,” she stressed. “Privatisation of water leading to a high cost of water could be financed by flows of credit, but the solution to access is really about the basic right to water.”

[Dead Link.]

Migrants are crammed into catastrophically damaged vessels that would normally end up as scrap. Few have radios and GPS is non-existent. If the weather turns without warning, as it so often does in the Mediterranean at this time of year, a crammed and barely stable craft quickly becomes a sinking coffin. The result is a weekly litany of deaths on a scale that would lead the front pages of every European newspaper were the victims white…

[Dead Link.]

Despite growing controversy about the cost and relevance of aircraft carriers, navies around the world are adding new ones to their inventories at a pace unseen since World War II. The U.S. — with more carriers than all other nations combined — and established naval powers such as Britain, France and Russia are doing it. So are Brazil, India and China — which with Russia form the BRIC grouping of emerging economic giants.

[Dead Link.]

Doomsday predictor Robert Fitzpatrick remains in Times Sq. facing the reality of his false claims of apocalypse. He said: “I don’t know what happened. I don’t understand. I did what I had to do. I’m just surprised – I obviously haven’t understood it properly because we’re still here,” he said. “Let’s just say I’m surprised that nothing has happened – everything in the bible indicated it.”

[Dead Link.]

Tiny Tips (2011)

The Tiny Tips column from the May 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ever wonder what $60,000 jeans feel like? You’ll never know. Because you didn’t buy that $60,000 pair of Levis 501s from 1890 — the most paid for a pair of jeans, ever. Here are the most expensive items ever sold — the record-setting car, baseball card, toy, and even tooth:

(Dead Link)

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UK Uncut doesn’t have leaders, hierarchy, a PR firm or funders, yet in six months it has changed the face of British politics:

(Dead Link)

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"The state that infamously hosted the Scopes Monkey Trial more than 85 years ago is at it again. Yesterday Tennessee’s General Assembly overwhelmingly passed a bill that would make it easier for public schools to teach creationism. The bill would require educators to “assist teachers to find effective ways to present the science curriculum as it addresses scientific controversies.”

It lists four “controversies” ripe for pedagogical tinkering: biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning. “This is part of a long held creationist strategy,” says Steven Newton, policy director for the National Center for Science Education. “By doing everything except mention the Bible, they are attacking evolution without the theology.”

(Link)

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In a PPP poll released Thursday, a 46% plurality of registered Republican voters said they thought interracial marriage was not just wrong, but that it should be illegal. 40% said interracial marriage should be legal:

(Link)

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A 14-year-old Bangladeshi girl, Hena, allegedly was ambushed when she went to an outdoor toilet, gagged, beaten and raped by an older man in her village (who was actually her cousin). They were caught by the wife of the alleged rapist, and the wife then beat Hena up. An imam at a local mosque issued a fatwa saying that Hena was guilty of adultery and must be punished, and a village makeshift court sentenced Hena to 100  lashes in a public whipping:

Her last words were protestations of innocence. An excellent CNN blog post, based on interviews with family members, says that the parents “had no choice but to mind the imam’s order. They watched as the whip broke the skin of their youngest child and she fell unconscious to the ground.” Hena collapsed after 70 lashes and was taken to the hospital. She died a week later, by some accounts because of internal bleeding and a general loss of blood. The doctors recorded her death as a suicide. (Women and girls who are raped are typically expected to commit suicide, to spare everyone the embarrassment of an honor crime)

(Dead Link)

Beyond Belief (2012)

The Halo Halo! column from the July 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to a Gallup Poll announced in June, forty-six percent of Americans believe that “God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years”. Only fifteen percent accepted that humans had evolved without God’s intervention.  On the face of it these are alarming statistics, particularly since on the 11 occasions the polls have dealt with this subject since 1982 the results appear to have been remarkably consistent. The 1982 figure for the creationist view was forty-four percent.

This prompted an article in the New Yorker (7 June, 2012) asking, or rather telling us, ‘Why We Don’t Believe in Science’ and suggesting that “we come equipped with all sorts of naïve intuitions about the world”. That we have to “unlearn” our “instincts” and that “primal belief lingers in the mind”.

It’s true of course that from an early age we are bombarded with false values, not just religious ideas but, about our place in a class-divided society. And that we have to ‘unlearn’ this nonsense before we can understand our true potential as human beings. But there is nothing natural about holding these views. We believe in them because that is what we are taught. They are the dominant ideas in capitalist society.

The title of the article too, ‘Why We Don’t Believe in Science,’ is confusing. Science is not about ‘belief’. Unlike religion, science concerns itself with provable, tried and tested data and facts.

The statements the poll asked its participants to choose from were loaded. It asked:

“Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings?”

1. Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided the process.
2.  Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in the process.
3. God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.

Although statement 2 leaves God out of human evolution, it doesn’t discount him altogether. It suggests that he may be lurking in the background, waiting to perform his latest miracle perhaps, or maybe still resting after his six days of creation.

The Rev Michael Dowd who rather confusingly describes himself as a ‘religious naturalist’, an ‘evidential mystic’ and a ‘big history evangelist’ doesn’t like the three choices on offer either. Trying to square his religious confusion with reality he would like to see a fourth choice.

“Human beings emerged naturally from a long process of physical and biological creativity that can be spoken of religiously as ‘God’s creation’ or scientifically as ‘evolution’.”

Well no. Ideas about the “physical and biological creativity” of a supernatural being should only be spoken of as religious nonsense. And if there’s one thing we don’t need in the twenty-first century it’s yet more mythological mumbo jumbo or ‘evidential mysticism’, whatever that is, trying to pass itself off as science.

NW

Proper Gander: The Magic and History Tour (2012)

The Proper Gander Column from the November 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Five creationists must have thought their prayers had been answered when they were offered a free holiday – a road trip across the west coast of America, from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The catch was that on the way they would meet with heathen scientists to dispute their wacky views, and that they would risk humiliation by a BBC3 camera crew. Creationism: Conspiracy Road Trip began with the five fundamentalists being taken ‘on a wing and a prayer’ in a plane above the Grand Canyon. There, they met with a geologist who explained how the canyon was carved out over millions of years, and not a mere 4,000 years ago when ‘the Great Flood’ receded. Next, their coach took them to Lake Powell in Utah, where another scientist described how it would be impossible to squeeze 16,000 animals (presumably including dinosaurs) on Noah’s Ark and still make it float. Driving on to the University of California in Berkeley, the prickly question of incest in Adam and Eve’s immediate family was met with blank looks and feeble responses.

Unfortunately, the debate between creationism and science isn’t about objectively weighing-up the evidence for opposing beliefs. As some of the less blinkered creationists recognised, having faith is usually like holding up a ‘no entry’ sign to scientific evidence, however persuasive. One of the programme’s own ‘experts’ – a Christian palaeontologist – realised that you can’t reconcile the view that humans co-existed with dinosaurs with the fact that their fossilised remains have never been found together. Believing in creationism is like believing that The Flintstones was a fly-on-the-wall documentary. So, many creationists hang on to their views by just refusing to accept the evidence.

Being confronted by this caused one or two of those on the road trip to be driven up the wall. This made for an increasingly bumpy ride, with TV-friendly tears and awkward accusations of bullying. Suspecting a set-up, steely-faced participant Phil challenged the director, engineered a split among the others and became paranoid about the motives of even the Christians they met on the journey. As a reasonable discussion of differing views, this road trip stalled and then spluttered to a halt.

Mike Foster

Would You Believe it? (2014)

The Halo Halo! Column from the December 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

A word of advice to those who are in the habit of talking to God; don’t bother. You can’t believe a word he says and half the time he hasn’t a clue what he’s talking about.

Back in July he informed a group of 100 Liberian bishops, pastors, prophets and other assorted God-botherers that the Ebola outbreak was sent because of their corruption and immorality. Well, presumably, because of the corruption and immorality of the people generally. Not of the bishops, pastors and prophets, obviously.

He then had them running around like headless chickens demanding that the country be ‘locked up for three days of silence, fasting and prayer’ because he was ‘angry with Liberia’ and that ‘Liberians have to pray and seek God’s forgiveness over the corruption and immoral acts such as homosexualism’ (sic) and that ‘As Christians we must repent and seek God’s forgiveness’ (Liberian Daily Observer 31 July 2014).

Yet here we are several months later, and after much devout ‘fasting and prayer’ in Liberia and other affected areas, the Ebola outbreak continues.

Here too, back in February when much of the country was being flooded out God informed UKIP’s David Silvester (now ex-UKIP since his expulsion) that the floods had been sent in revenge for the newly-passed legislation allowing gays to get married. ‘This is not new, this happened in the Old Testament – they were warned if they turned against God there would be pestilence, there would be war, there would be disasters’ Silvester told us.

God must be reasonably happy with our corruption and immorality though. Even without the silence, fasting and prayers he eventually changed his mind and called off the flooding.

OK, he’s probably only having a joke and winding us up, but these occasional messages from God do become a bit irritating after a while. And now he’s at it again. Not threats this time, no, this time he’s decided to help the Pope get his head around the ideas of evolution and the Big Bang.

Unfortunately God doesn’t seem to have a very good grasp of these issues himself, or maybe the Pope wasn’t paying attention, but according to his latest thinking on the laws of physics (given via the Pope) ‘The Big Bang does not contradict the divine act of creation’. And even more puzzling, ‘Evolution of nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation’ (Guardian 29 October).

Bearing in mind that without any assistance from God we now know that evolution takes place very gradually, over millions of years, God’s latest views on the subject are not much better than his previous message in Genesis; that the act of creation took just six days, and with both the animals and mankind being created on the final, sixth day. And although he omitted to give us the exact date for it, one of his previous spokesmen, the 17th century Bishop James Ussher, did. Creation took place, apparently, on 23rd October 4004 BC. Not to be outdone, another religious scholar, one Dr John Lightfoot, calculated that it occurred at 9 o’clock in the morning.

Modern science, meanwhile, tells us that the Big Bang occurred about 13.8 billion years ago. So in spite of God’s and the Pope’s efforts to take us back to the middle ages, and to square bronze-age mythology with reality, there is still a slight discrepancy between science and religion.

What we need, perhaps, is a new version of the bible to clarify God’s latest views. – ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was BOOM!’ But until we get that who should we believe?

NW

Rear View: No gods! No masters! (2017)

The Rear View Column from the February 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

No gods! No masters!

‘Creationist Ken Ham is very angry at the Washington Post for incorrectly reporting that he believes dinosaurs were wiped out by the biblical flood described in the story of Noah’ (rawstory.com, 1 January). According to Ham, they joined Noah on his ark and the Post should get their facts right! The standard atheist approach to such nonsense is to use real facts. Against the belief in an all-knowing/loving/powerful god/s, an atheist is right to wield facts such as humans are 90 percent bacteria, see less than 1 percent of the light spectrum , have sub-optimal plumbing (breathing, eating, excretory and reproductive) and are programmed to die. The atheist could reasonably add that at least 40 percent of animal species are parasites, and over 99 percent of all species that ever lived are extinct. Socialists, unlike atheists, fight against Creationists like Ham and clerics in general not because of their belief in God but because priests of all religions have been, in all phases of history, the allies of the ruling classes in keeping the masses bent under the yoke. Churches have crowned the peoples’ oppressors, and crucified our forebears. New Age religion is merely the old repackaged in a new, modern form. Rather than obeying a priest, they choose the form of our own mental domination and the flight from reality into a magical world.

Universal Freedom

The concluding paragraph of Money for nothing: What universal basic income means for you reads: ‘I realize that to some, basic income sounds like a Black Mirror episode with millions of people sitting on their couches all day, bored, listless, and up to no good. But based on what I’ve read so far, I believe that if it’s handled correctly, it could be a positive step forward in the age-old journey to realize our true human potential’ (mashable.com, 4 January). But, of course, the capitalist class have enjoyed for centuries an unearned income – money for nothing! – that is anything but basic. For the 99 percent UBI is nothing more than a redistribution of crumbs, promoted by reformists of the left and right.

Looking backwards

When it comes to predicting the future, economists are marginally better than clairvoyants but far worse than meteorologists. ‘It is official. Figures for the past six months show that the forecasts of instant Brexit catastrophe from the Treasury and the Bank of England were garbage. The Bank’s economist, Andrew Haldane, admitted yesterday that it was a repeat of the failure to predict the 2008 crash. It was another ‘Michael Fish moment’, when meteorologists failed to forecast the 1987 hurricane’ (theguardian.com,6 January). 85 years ago we published the pamphlet Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse. The economic outlook back then appeared even worse than it is today: ‘We are in the midst of a crisis that is world-wide. Every country feels its ravages. Millions and millions of workers are unemployed and in acute poverty. Everywhere there is discontent and a feeling of insecurity, and the prestige of even the strongest of governments has been shaken. All sorts of emergency measures have been hastily adopted, but the depression still continues. Working men and women who normally ignore such questions, are now asking why the crisis has occurred, what will be its outcome, and whether it could have been avoided. In some minds there is a fear, and in others a hope, that the industrial crisis may bring the present system of society down in ruins, and make way for another.’ We warned those who said that capitalism would imminently collapse that their claim was groundless. History has vindicated this position. There will be no need for economists in a socialist world where production is for use not profit and distribution according to self-defined need rather than having sufficient money. They along with former bankers, expropriated capitalists and tax consultants will join clairvoyants, homeopaths, lawyers and priests looking for something more meaningful to do with their lives.

Dustbin of history

‘One Nation candidate Shan Ju Lin has labelled gay people ‘abnormal’, saying that they ‘should be treated as patients’ and ‘need to receive treatments” (news.com.au, 7 January). Unscientific prejudice like this serves the interests of the status quo by dividing our class and delaying the socialist revolution.