THE PRICE OF DOING GOOD

I was prompted to write this blog by the ads I see asking for donations for aid to Gaza.

We keep hearing about the impending famine in Gaza, or lack of medicaI treatment, but I’m not hearing anything about famine among the Hamas soldiers. They are receiving food and medical treatment. It’s pretty clear that Hamas is getting first dibs on aid coming into Gaza. If you are contributing to Gaza aid, you should not forget that the first priority of disbursing your aid is to Hamas fighters.

But the theme of this blog is not Hamas or Gaza. It is about the fact that in order to do good, you usually pay a price. I remember back in the days of the Ethiopian famine, when Band Aid and other humanitarian groups were trying to send food to the starving. Ethiopian officials basically asked, “What’s it worth to you to help these starving people? We want our cut.”  Negotiations followed and some kind of percentage was agreed upon, but in fact the officials had the power, and could have demanded 99% if they had wanted. At least 1% would get through to the starving.

When I was in Mozambique, I saw government officials actually holding people hostage. They would prevent food from entering a region, then say to the donor agencies, we’ll allow food in, at a price. If you don’t pay, we’ll let the people starve.

This scene has haunted me for years, especially since I live in Cambodia, where I have seen this scenario played out in many forms. For example, a charity NGO wants to bring in food for hungry villagers, but are forced to negotiate the cut given to officials for the right to help the villagers. What makes me angry is that everyone is happy with the situation: the NGO gets its glossy photographs for its marketing campaigns, the local officials get their cut, but most importantly, the villagers at least get something, so they won’t complain. In fact, the villagers are never told how much they’re supposed to receive.

However, this phenomenon occurs in much more subtle ways, especially when a do-gooder wants to be ‘the adult in the room’.  Suppose you get a job in an aid agency, ostensibly devoted to helping people, where you have a direct influence in delivering that aid. But suppose, further, that the powers-that-be ask you to compromise, and to do something unethical, such as to remain silent in the face of child abuse or other evil doings. You find yourself negotiating with yourself, asking yourself, “How much abuse must I tolerate in order to continue helping the children?”  That is a tough question, to which each individual has a different answer.

For example, consider the team of advisers that Trump assembled as President. They could see his madness, but feared he might do something really insane, like pulling the nuclear trigger. They remained with Trump, trying to modify his stances, but found that they were becoming, more and more, slaves to the Trump cult. A few of these people opted out early, or were fired for speaking out too loudly against the Trump madness. Others, like Rudi Giuliani, who no doubt saw himself at first as the ‘adult in the room’, persisted and dug themselves deeper and deeper into the Trump assault on democracy, and in the end, they lost everything.

Here’s another phenomenon I observed here in Cambodia among the NGOs. An international donor agency entrusts a local NGO with implementing a project, say, to distribute food to poor people. I have seen corrupt local NGOs find ways to steal over 80% of the money, but to send the donors heart-warming photos of distribution of food to villagers. The donor agencies are happy, and show the wonderful photos to potential individual contributors.  Also, the villagers are happy. They don’t know how much was stolen, and they are receiving something rather than nothing. Everyone is happy.

The issue is further clouded by adding to the ethical mix the ambition for self-advancement. The aid worker wants to move up the administrative ladder and become vice-director, then director of some NGO. That ambition also leads to more subservient compromises, so that pleasing the powers-that-be and submitting good reports and heart-warming photos becomes more important than helping people. It’s easy to convince yourself that you are doing good. Trump’s team saw themselves in the national limelight with important titles and positions, which they were loath to give up.

In the Cambodian NGO world, I have seen many good-hearted foreigners, who, seeing the dire need of poor rural Cambodians and wishing to help, set up their NGOs, but gradually become trapped in the expansion of their empire. Raising money and expanding their system becomes more important than actually helping the children.

So what’s the answer? If  you want to do good, where do you draw the line on how much bad stuff you accept in order to keep the right to help others?

I really don’t know, but in my experience, I’d draw that line closer to zero than to one, that is, I’d lean towards saying, “No, I’m not going to play that game, even at the risk of letting people starve.” It’s too easy to get into the game and to go down that slippery slope towards evil, always convincing yourself that you are helping people. It’s the ‘road to hell, paved with good intentions.’

ARE MEN SMARTER THAN WOMEN?

This blog is essentially a lesson in Statistics 101 — one that you won’t see in any Statistics textbook.  Lesson One in most statistics courses starts with means and medians, while Lesson Two moves on to standard deviations.  This blog does almost the same, but starts with a question that many people are asking: “Are men smarter than women?”

Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that women have slightly higher IQs than men, say 102 to 98 on average. The bell-shaped curves might look like this, with the women’s curve slightly to the right of the men’s.

But then next, suppose that men’s IQs are more variable that women’s, that is, they are spread out among a wider range than women’s, which are more concentrated around the average. Here’s what that graphs would look like:

The interesting thing about this graph is the fact that the average woman is higher than the average man, still 102 to 98. However, the variability puts just a few men on the far right in the genius category, while there are fewer genius women. The great geniuses in history –Einstein, Mozart, etc. — have mostly been men.

At the same time, there are a lot more men on the extreme left end of the graph. This means that there are a lot more morons and extremely stupid men than women.

This ‘variability hypothesis’, first proposed by Charles Darwin himself, followed by many educational researchers like Havelock Ellis and Edward Thorndike, has been tested over and over during the past century or so, with mixed results. The variability may depend on the trait (like IQ) being tested, and a host of other variables. At least one can say that in some areas, men have shown a higher variability (even with the same mean) as women. So the statistical model I have outlined may be true in measuring some traits, such as some types of intelligence (assuming that we have multiple intelligences).

For this next example, I find it easier to talk about financial income rather than IQ. So, using the same graph as we started with, assume that 50% of women make 102 K or more, while 50% of men make 98 K or more. That’s the definition of median; a median of 98 tells you that 50% of men make 98K or more.

In real life, however, there are just a few people — almost all men —  whose billion-dollar incomes distort the graph. Suppose that we add several billion dollars to the very richest men, while the lower 50% remain the same. [That is precisely what has happened over the past decade.]  That is, the left side of the male graph doesn’t change, but the right side extends much farther to the right, to reflect those few billionaires.

The new dotted line shows the left side of the graph unchanged, as 50% of men still make under 98 K. The median income for men is still 98 K.

However, adding a lot of money to a few billionaire men skews the right half of the graph further to the right. That means that the total amount of money made by men may have increased to the point where it is greater than the total for women.

The mean (per capita) income is the total income divided by the number of people (assuming an equal number of men and women), so if men make a greater total income, then the mean per capita income for men has surpassed that of women.

Therefore, while the median income remains greater for women (102 K > 98 K), the mean income is now greater for men.

This could happen to IQ scores as well, if just a few ultra-genius men skewed the graph so that women have a higher median IQ, while the men have a higher mean IQ. You could still have median IQs of 98 and 102, but the few male ultra-geniuses could raise the mean male IQ above women’s 102.

In summary, differing types of statistical analysis may show that most women are as smart or smarter than most men, but that there might still be a lot more male geniuses and/or morons than women.

PEAK EXPERIENCES AND GROKKING

Have you had a peak experience? Peak experiences have been described by many authors, for example, Kendra Cherry in Verywellmind.com (2023).

Fulfillment: Peak experiences generate positive emotions and are intreinsically rewarding.

Significance: Peak experiences lead to an increase in personal awareness and understanding and can serve as a turning point in a person’s life.

Spiritual: During a peak experience, people feel one with the world and often experience a sense of losing track of time

This feeling of being one with the world, along with the sense of timelessness, was also described by the science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein, back in 1961, in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land, which described a person born and raised on Mars, where he learned to ‘grok’ or understand things in a different way from Earthlings. Part of his description of grokking was to  “understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you.”

So Sixties people like myself went around trying to grok things. A common expression, instead of ‘Do you understand?”, was “You grok?” Are you old enough to remember those days?

A lot of people, myself included, have had peak experiences at Angkor Wat, that marvelous temple rising out of the jungle. That combination allows the viewer to merge (i.e. grok) with nature (the forest) and human spirituality (the temples) at the same time.

I went there shortly after the coup d’état in 1997, when Angkor was closed to tourists. I scored a pass from a friend who had been working there, so I had the entire park virtually to myself. I even went swimming in the lake in front of the main temple at sunset. That was a peak experience.

On another occasion, I simply walked back into the forest surrounding Angkor Wat and came across a small, moss-covered temple, where I sat for… hours(?) as I lost track of time feeling at one with the forest, the birds singing, and the ancient history of the temple.

Many tourists experience the magic of the Angkor temples, and assume that the feeling comes from the temples. But maybe not. Just maybe the place itself was magical, and the Khmers recognized this and built the temples there. New-Agers will recognize this idea from the books of James Redfield, like The Celestine Prophecy (1993). There are simply places of magical spiritual energy that we must train ourselves to locate.

I experienced this phenomenon when visiting the ruins of Carthage in Tunisia in the early morning. I felt a wave of history that gave me a peak experience there. But I wonder whether my feelings would have been any different if I had not known about the historical significance of Carthage. Was the site magical in and of itself?

Carlos Casteneda, another Sixties favorite, was into these sorts of ideas. In one of his books, Don Juan instructs the novitiate to ‘find’ his spot in a room, that is, the place with the magical energy that is in tune with the person’s own wavelengths.

Another good description of the phenomenon is that of  Vincent Guerry, a French monk in the Ivory Coast in the 1960s and 70s, who wrote La Vie Quotidienne dans un Village Baoulé. Guerry described the Baoulé tribe of central Ivory Coast as ‘knowing’ things in a different way from Westerners. It could almost be a definition of grokking. The Baoulé  ‘know’ something by entering into its spirit. That’s just the opposite of Western analytical knowledge, whereby to know something is to describe from outside its color, shape, and external properties. You might say that the Baoulé are more right-brained than the left-brained Westerners.

Small wonder that ‘primitive’ or animist societies worship the spirit in each living thing, or even non-living things. This is an art that we moderns have lost. That is also why I have been attracted to animist societies in Africa or Papua New Guinea. I feel they have a way of thinking that they can teach me.

I used to criticize the missionaries with whom I worked in Africa, because they were there to ‘teach’ their wonderful knowledge to the benighted heathens who lived in spiritual darkness. The missionaries had nothing to learn from the Africans because they had all the answers. [I admit that I knew a few missionaries who got the hint that these primitives might have something to teach them.]

Sadly, grokking is out of fashion these days. However, the poet William Wordsworth understood this dual way of thinking way back in 1807, when he wrote:

  The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.

.… Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan in a creed outworn….

THE PROTESTANT ETHIC AND KARMA

“Power is perceived as a reward for high stocks of merit rather than an outgrowth of a popular mandate.”

This quote comes from Sebastian Strangio’s Hun Sen’s Cambodia, in his description of the age-old power structure in Cambodia. A well-connected Cambodian billionaire may have become rich on the back of all sorts of ill-gotten gains, but he can then build a stupa to himself or contribute to the construction of a pagoda, in order to accumulate ‘merit’. By a circular logic, he can then claim that he is rich and famous as a reward for his contributions.

More than this, the tycoon is rich and famous for his acts of merit in previous lives. He is the beneficiary of his karma. Who are we to question why he is rich, if his karma has already pre-ordained his wealth and power?

This description of Buddhism sounds strangely similar to Max Weber’s famous analysis of Calvinism and Protestant Capitalism. In this theory of predestination, God pre-ordained that only a certain elite would go to heaven. One could recognize the elite by their success in society, either in wealth or in power. A capitalist might resort to all sorts of illegalities to become rich, but once rich, he could claim that he was one of the elite and would go to heaven. It was predestination, so you can’t question it.

American billionaires are treated like gods, without questions about how they may have obtained their billions. The rich tycoons appear daily on talking head TV shows with their pronouncements on morality, economics, and any other topic of their choosing. They are rich; therefore they are always right.

And at the top of this hierarchy, of course, is Donald Trump. Because he is rich and because he became President, he is regarded by many (especially Protestant Evangelicals) as “sent by God”, regardless of his many moral vicissitudes. They can easily believe that God would not allow him — God’s chosen one —  to lose an election, regardless of what the facts tell us, so of course he must have won.

There is a flip side to this coin. If rich people are rich because of their karma or because of predestination, then poor people are poor for the same reasons. This idea translates to right-wing resistance to social programs. Those people deserve to be poor, or are predestined to be poor, so society has no obligation to help them. As Jesus himself said, “The poor ye have always with you.”

After the Pol Pot auto-genocide of 2 million Cambodians, many survivors attributed a lot of the problems to karma. What had Cambodia as a country done to deserve such calamity? Maybe we weren’t devout enough as Buddhists, in this generation or in previous generations.  A result has been, strangely, a devout return to Buddhist blessings and rituals. The well-heeled perpetuate this view by contributing to pagodas in order to demonstrate their good karma. They can grab land with impunity from poor people and throw them into destitution and homelessness because, of course, the poor have bad karma and their poverty is a fixed given.

To make a long story short, in both Buddhist Cambodia and Protestant America, do whatever it takes to get rich — murder, rape, steal — but then claim that it was God’s will, or your karma, or Buddha, or whatever or whoever that justifies your wealth and power.

AVOIDING THE NATURE-NURTURE MINDSET

Identical twins have different fingerprints.  Let that sink in. They have identical genes and DNA, and yet their bodies are different. Fingerprints are therefore not entirely determined by genes. On the other hand, those twins didn’t learn from society to have different fingerprints.

Neither a ‘nature’ theory (i.e. genes) nor a ‘nurture’ theory (i.e. learning) can adequately explain the difference in fingerprints. There must be something else.

This argument comes up again and again in explaining homosexuality. The nurturist may even believe that gay people choose to be that way, and so they advocate that gays be punished. Uganda and some other countries have made laws putting gays in prison for life, or even giving them the death penalty. In perhaps less extreme America, many people are advocating Gay Conversion Therapy, on the theory that gay behavior, learned from society, can be un-learned as well. Conversion therapy often has disastrous consequence for the victims of such thinking.

On the other hand, almost all gay people will say, “I didn’t choose to be gay; I’ve been that way since birth.” That suggests a ‘nature’ argument. For years, researchers tried to find a ‘gay gene’. At one point, scientists thought that they had identified an Xq28 gene that predicted homosexuality, but that was later proven insignificant.

There is clear evidence that heredity plays some role. One estimate is that one’s genetic make-up constitutes at most 25% of one’s gender identity. But that leaves another 75% attributable to other factors. However, the most recent and comprehensive study of gay genetics (Science magazine, reported by Public Broadcasting Service) concluded that the genetic contribution must be ‘polygenetic’, that is,

“…meaning hundreds or even thousands of genes make tiny contributions to the trait. That pattern is similar to other heritable (but complex) characteristics like height or a proclivity toward trying new things….” 

In other words, a combination of genes may increase the probability of a tendency towards some behavior, in the same way that your genes may predict a vulnerability towards a disease like cancer, but the environment is still important in giving you cancer. Some combination of nature and nurture is responsible. Even in these cases, we are still relying on a nature-nurture mindset, only using a linear continuum between the two.

Still, twins’ fingerprints are not a combination of nature and nurture, since the fingerprints are ‘hard-wired’ without any learning in the sense of Pavlov’s dogs or B.F.Skinner’s Walden Two. Similarly, the gay person’s claim that he has been that way from birth suggests that he had no choice in the matter and did not change from straight to gay at any point after a learning experience.

The way to avoid this nature-nurture mindset is to introduce a third determinant of personality: what happens in the womb. Something has clearly happened within the womb to change the twins’ fingerprints. There is nothing revolutionary about this idea; think of crack cocaine babies, whose health is undermined by the mother’s chemistry due to cocaine use.

There are cases where one identical twin is straight and the other gay. Note that each fetus is encased in its own placenta, so there can be differences between the two placenta, such as chemistry, but also position, movement, and other variables. A lot can happen within those nine months of pregnancy, about which we still know very little.

By considering that a lot of behaviors and ‘hard-wired’ characteristics might result from intra-uterus conditions, we can free ourselves from the prison of nature-nurture thinking. We can now consider three contributors to future behavior, rather than just the two.

‘INTERNATIONAL’ HIGHER EDUCATION

A friend of mine once told me, “If a school calls itself an International School, it isn’t.”

Developing countries around the world have imitated the Western model of higher education. This imitation can go to extremes, such as the graduation procession of the professors in their caps and gowns (even accompanied by Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance”), or the curricula full of Western history, art, and culture.

In some respects, this imitation is desirable, especially when students want to continue their higher education abroad, where they must transfer local credits and majors that mesh with the Western programs. Even if a student wants to transfer from one African university to another, the Western system of credits, used by most African universities, provides a consistent framework for the transfer.

However, maintaining the illusion of internationalization can get downright silly. Most of the universities in my country spend a lot of money and effort visiting foreign universities, where they can sign a meaningless Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), which they can then post on their campus entrances, websites, and social media pages as “Our Partners”. Many universities post dozens of these official-looking documents, although none of them have ever resulted in any exchange of programs.

Let me describe some of the lengths to which one university, with which I am quite familiar, has gone to promote a false image of internationalization. ‘International Students’ (but all local students) are admitted into a program, ostensibly English-medium, which can lead to transfer to an American university. Applying students must take an English test, but no one ever fails, and about half of the students are at beginner level of English and cannot understand an English lecture or read an English text.

To maintain the international image, all courses require texts and syllabi officially used in American universities, usually 600-800 pages in length and in an academic English incomprehensible to the students. At present, the university described has no international lecturers, so that all courses are taught in the local language, even for TESOL and English Literature majors. Students emerge with a bachelor’s degree in TESOL without a knowledge of English.

Recently, this same university is promoting, with great fanfare and hoopla, an MOU promising transfer into an American university after year II. One problem: students must achieve a certain TOEFL score to study in English in America, but those students are not properly informed of this requirement, and will be unable to pass the TOEFL. Hence, there will probably be zero students in the program (well, maybe 1 or 2), but the CEO has stated publicly, “It doesn’t matter whether there are any students; this is good for our international image.”  There you have it: it’s all about image, not about education.

In order to facilitate the above agreement, the university had to revamp its entire curriculum to dovetail with that of the American university. All students (perhaps none of whom will actually go the the US) are now required to take an Art History course (purportedly in English, but not really), with the usual 600-page unreadable American textbook. In order to introduce this course into the curriculum, some other course had to go. They chose to omit a really useful course in Critical Thinking to be replaced by the Art History.

This kind of fakery is going on all over the developing world. The result is selling students the dream of international education while providing little education useful to most students.

UPDATE ON HAMAS April 23, 2024

I wrote the blog about Hamas’ objectives almost two months ago. In light of recent events, I want to examine how it is turning out. The recent Iranian attempt to bombard Israel is evidence that Hamas is succeeding in its mission to draw the international players into the anti-Israel fight.

But maybe Hamas is failing. Some pundits are suggesting that the Iranian strike was just staged theatre, and that they knew the missiles would be intercepted. That’s very debatable: sending 350 missiles is no joke, and at the very least, is expensive. And suppose just a few of those missiles had hit their target. A major war might have ensued.

I think that Israel made a major mistake by bombing the Iranians in Syria. That was a clear escalation of the conflict to the international arena, and it invited the Iranians to retaliate. UNLESS….. it was all worked out in advance. Israel would bomb Damascus, then Iran would send a message that it is not afraid to attack Israeli soil, to which Israel would send a message that it is not afraid to attack Iranian soil. Messages sent, no damage done.

Whichever scenario is true — fake attacks or real assaults — it would appear that Hamas has lost this round. There has been no all-out war against the cursed Zionists. Moreover, Israel is now seen as the proud defender of its soil against Iran, the primary backer of Hamas. Public opinion — at least partially and temporarily — has shifted to anti-Iran sentiment.

The Battle of Al Shifa Hospital

Next, what about the battle of Al Shifa hospital? It was indeed a major battle for over three days. Who was doing the shooting at the IDF from inside the hospital? The doctors? The patients? No, the battle of Al Shifa proved to the world that Hamas was indeed using the hospital as its military base. Even the official Hamas statement was that “civilians, patients, and displaced people were among the fatalities”.  ‘Among’? So they admit that were militants there?  

As I had suggested in my February blog, using the hospital for military purposes is an open invitation to Israel to attack the hospital. Hamas once again appears to have won the propaganda battle, as the world is now decrying the deaths of hospital patients, etc.  World media is now conveniently forgetting that Al Shifa hospital (and presumably many others) are being used as military centers of operation. Also conveniently forgotten are the facts that the holding of hostages, as well as the use of hospitals for military purposes, are very much against international law.

Rafah

And what about Rafah? Israel promised to launch its offensive before Ramadan, two months ago. Pressure from Biden and from within Israel appear to have forestalled the invasion, but it still might happen. I hope not, for everyone’s sake. Israel could cordon off Rafah and consolidate its gains to the north. Maybe even build a wall, a la Trump, and claim Hamas was paying for it. [All the tunnels under the wall would show how ridiculous it would be, and would also show how the Trump border wall is just as useless at keeping people out.] Hamas controlled territory would be reduced to Rafah, although its tunnels into northern Gaza would remain. If Hamas started firing missiles at Israel from Rafah, then Israel would go in and wipe them out, civilians be damned.

I follow the theatrics of the ‘negotiations’, which are going nowhere. As I pointed out in my first blog, ‘victory’ for Hamas consists only of continuing the war, to show the world that they can hold out against the armed strength of the Israelis. The Hamas ‘proposals’ basically boil down to saying, “OK, Israel, you withdraw all your troops from all of Gaza, allowing Hamas to win the war, in return for which we’ll release some hostages, although we can’t even find most of the ones who are still alive. Meanwhile, we’ll rebuild our tunnels and military to prepare for our next raid into Israel.” That’s not a serious proposal. On the other hand, Israel is saying, “OK Hamas. You release the hostages and we’ll stop the war for a while. Then we’ll start up again, with the added advantage that there will be no more hostages.” That’s not very serious, either.

I’d say that Hamas is on the back foot. If they can’t provoke an international war against Israel, they can either continue fighting or negotiate. They can continue the war in Rafah, at the expense of perhaps 100,000 Palestinian lives, or they can negotiate a settlement in which there will be no more Hamas. Maybe the Palestinian Authority will be allowed to govern, or maybe Israel will occupy Gaza, or maybe there will be a UN Peacekeeping force. Any of these options would be preferable to sacrificing the lives of 100,000 Palestinians, just so Hamas can continue the war.

HAMAS’ OBJECTIVES Feb. 27, 2024

Why did Hamas invade Israel? Surely they didn’t hope to take any territory, and even more surely, they didn’t hope to defeat Israel. After raping women and causing mayhem and as much Israel outrage as possible, they went back into Gaza. What did they hope to gain by that? Did anyone think that Israel would just let them go without any response? I’m not hearing anyone in the media discussing Hamas’ motives.

Clearly, the intent was to provoke Israel into a full scale invasion of Gaza. No one can deny that Hamas brought this on themselves. They knew that Israel would strike back with all their fury. One could then criticize Israel for the inevitable ‘disproportionate response.’ Hamas invited Israel to destroy Gaza.

Also, most people accept that Hamas embeds itself inside and under schools and hospitals. Again, did anyone think that Israel would just leave these embedded military operations alone? No, Hamas invited Israel, and counted on Israel, to attack the schools and hospitals. One must conclude that Hamas wanted the thousands of dead children and civilians.

Hamas had no hope of actually winning this war. Rather, the hope was that film footage of dead children and maimed civilians would provoke such international rage against Israel, that the wider Palestinian communities and even the Arab and Islamic nations would finally gang up on Israel and put an end to the Zionist regime.

Hamas has truly succeeded in bringing about their desired thousands of dead children and maimed civilians, thereby bringing rage against Israel, but they have failed to bring in other nations to destroy Israel. Other than some Houthi strikes on ships, the international community has stayed out of the fray. True, Hamas and their Iranian backers have succeeded in preventing any normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. There is still hope that the war with Hezbollah in Lebanon will explode, but the West Bank appears to want to stay out of this.

For Hamas, what would winning even mean? Driving the IDF out of Gaza? Of course not. The best they can hope for is to prolong the slaughter as long as possible, so that they can maintain the image to the world of the brave Palestinians holding out against the evil Jews. The international community is trying to press Israel for a ceasefire. Why don’t they press Hamas for a ceasefire? Hamas has lost the war, especially if one considers Hamas to be synonymous with Gaza.  Hamas, by their own count, has brought about the deaths of some 30,000 civilians. A ceasefire should therefore include the end of Hamas, along with the destruction of the tunnels under Gaza. The international community, including the US, is eager to reconstruct Gaza, once the war is over. Hamas could end the war in a second, but they clearly don’t want this carnage to end.

Perhaps a temporary solution would be the neutralization of just Rafah under international supervision, even if the war in the rest of Gaza goes on. However, Hamas wants only the escalation of the war to the wider community, and so still clings to the hope of provoking Israel to kill more civilians in Rafah. If this happens, the blood of all those Palestinans (Sunnis, as opposed to Hamas Shias) will be as much on Hamas’ hands as on Israel’s.

DO EVANGELICALS HATE JESUS?

In recent years, the evangelical right wing has embraced attitudes and behaviors 180 degrees antithetical to the teachings of Jesus. Where Jesus taught people to ‘love their neighbor’, evangelicals hate blacks, Hispanics, Jews, LGBTQs, immigrants, and anyone who does not look or think exactly like them. This behavior is pointed out and condemned a lot in the media, but I’m not hearing any cogent explanations as to WHY this is happening.

Let’s start by citing study after study showing that religious people do not behave more or less morally than non-religious people. This is quite startling, since religion is all about morality. We can only conclude that religion has little or no relationship with actual behavior, but somehow is closely tied to perceived goodness and morality.

Let’s also rule out the Bible as a source of morality. People cherry-pick the Bible to justify or to mean anything they want. This is especially true because of the black-and-white difference between the eye-for-an-eye morality of the Old Testament and the love-thy-neighbor morality of the New Testament. Even Jesus’ saying, “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword,” is twisted by Christian theologians as meaning the precise opposite, i.e. it really means he came to bring peace.

I see several possibilities for Christians and other religious people:

  1. God forgives our sins. Jesus died to save me. I may commit all sorts of evil deeds, but God will forgive me and everything will be just fine. This thinking is related to the doctrine of original sin; we are all born sinners, so I commit sins all the time, but God always forgives me. (This possibility applies to Christians but not to most other religions.
  2. I am religious; I pray and go to church; therefore, I am a good person; therefore what I do is good.

Let me explore this second option in more historical detail. Consider the Inquisition, in which thousands of normal people were tortured on the rack or burned at the stake. The perpetrators of this atrocities were often cardinals and bishops. By destroying these heretics, they were doing God’s will. After all, cardinals and bishops are men of God, so in their own minds they must be doing good. (This possibility applies to all religions.)

There is a possibility that the pedophile priest understands that he is doing wrong, but that his other priestly acts more than compensate for his bad behavior. On the whole, he is good: “I’m helping so many people in good ways, that I can be allowed this slip-up in morality.”

3. There is a third category of perceived moral/immoral behavior — tribal thinking. Sociologists like Emile Durkheim saw religion as the embodiment of the tribe. He saw morality as the collective adherence to tribal values. In today’s world, ‘tribe’ can apply not just to ethnic groups, but to groups who share a common ideology or social status. Vance Packard, in The Status Seekers, saw the various sects of American religion as reflective of social class values. Thus, Baptists, Methodists, and Episcopalians, reflected the class thinking of lower, middle, and upper classes of society.

In Durkheim’s view, ‘God’ is just a symbol of the tribe. Idols and totem poles are just symbols of the tribal values. For Christians, the Cross is just a totem of Christian society.

In this view, moral behavior is simply behavior that reflects the tribal values of some group, be it an ethnic group or a social class. The phrase “God tells me that homosexuality is wrong” translates to, “My tribe tells me that homosexuality is wrong.”

A totem is the symbol or embodiment of solidarity of a clan or social group.

It is only a small jump from this view to a hatred of other tribes, whose gods tell them something else. Almost by definition, other tribes’ differences can be seen as the work of the devil, and must therefore be eliminated. God not only gives me permission to kill members of other tribes, but He (i.e. my tribe) proclaims the obligation for me to kill them.

Donald Trump recently put this tribal morality into understandable language. While describing Hispanic immigrants as rapists and murderers, he said that he welcomed immigrants from ‘nice’ countries. Of course, we know what that means.

In fact, Trump understands this very well. That scene where he crossed the street of rioters and held up an upside-down Bible was symbolic of the tribe, even though Trump has never read the Bible, nor does he have any idea what it says. Similarly, his sale of patriotic Bibles is a clear link of the religious symbol of the Bible to the tribal values of white superiority.

In the biblical Battle of Jericho, Jahweh commanded His Israelites to kill every man, woman, and child in the city, as well as every animal they found. How’s that for tribalism?

So Christian values like loving your neighbor apply only to your own tribe. The old phrase ‘Southern hospitality’ applies to hospitality to white people of your tribe, but not to non-white outsiders.  One of my favorite stories is about American missionaries in Africa who set up a mission school several decades ago. One African student at their school was so intelligent, that the missionaries got him a scholarship to a prestigious American university. When in America, he went to visit the Southern church that had provided his education, but he was denied entry because he was black.

When you look at American Evangelism through this tribal lens, it all starts to make sense and hang together. It explains, for example, the close relationship between Evangelicals and Politics, in which one’s political positions are simply those of the tribe, and are not to be questioned. Even ‘the facts’ are subject to tribal ‘relative truth’.

To the Evangelicals, Jesus and the Bible are just symbols of the tribe. It doesn’t really matter what Jesus said or what the Bible says. They don’t exactly hate Jesus; rather, Jesus’ teachings are irrelevant to the current tribal values.

Some Thoughts on Good and Evil

In 1987, in Detroit, an airplane crashed, killing some 148 passengers and six crew. However, in the wreckage, a lone infant was found alive. Overnight, the world media were filled with expressions of “God is Great!”, “God is all-merciful,”, “Praise God.”  

Wait a minute! Almighty, all-loving, all-knowing God just murdered 154 people in cold blood. I’m not hearing any criticisms of God. It must be part of his all-loving plan for us. “God is good — all the time.”

I think that even religious people don’t really believe this malarky. Rather, people see an overwhelming background of evil and suffering as the default condition. Once in a while, God creates a miracle and does something good. The existence of any small good at all is cause for praise and celebration. One good amidst a hundred evils is proof of God’s existence.

This psychology of a default evil is not too far from the Buddhist doctrine that “All life is suffering.”

I had a daughter who died of cancer at the age of seven. Family members prayed for her survival, to no avail. She might have survived if God had answered their prayers, but He chose not to intervene, so she died. Again, suffering was the default condition, so the family were not unduly shaken by God’s inaction. Their faith was not changed, and they continued to pray for an array of other divine interventions. God was still good, all the time.

Incidentally, there have been a host of scientific studies on the effects of prayer on healing. Some have been positive, while most have shown no effect. Some even demonstrate that patients who know they are being prayed for suffer even adverse outcomes. Never mind, miracle healings do occur, and with no other rational explanations, people naturally ascribe them to divine interventions.

A long time ago, I saw a movie called something like “The Debate”, about two Jews — maybe brothers — who somehow escaped the Nazi concentration camps and met years later. One had renounced his fate, after seeing the horrors that God had permitted. [Remember that old Emerson, Lake, and Palmer line, “Why did He lose, six million Jews?”?] The other had become a devout rabbi. When the apostate brother asked him how he could have become a rabbi after witnessing and escaping the horrors, he replied, “The Holocaust proved that there is right and wrong in this world.” In some Hegelian way, the existence of evil implies the existence of good.

The bottom line is, “God chooses.” A soldier who gets ‘foxhole religion’ sees the guy next to him have his head blown off while he remains alive. Why does God choose for one soldier to live while the other dies?

If I pray to God to help me be admitted to University X, that means someone else will be denied admission. Does God believe in affirmative action?

I’m often amused by high school football games, where before the game, team A huddles for the ‘team prayer’, basically asking God to help them beat the shit out of team B. Simultaneously (and known to team A), team B across the field is asking God to help them beat the shit out of team A. Does each team think that they can out-pray the competition?

The football prayer illustrates not only that we believe God can take sides, but that we can influence that choice by praying fervently enough. This leads to a slippery slope, as follows:

Suppose I pray to God to help me win a tennis match. This is equivalent to asking God to help my opponent lose the match. That is asking God for a negative outcome, or ‘evil’, if you will. Once you start asking God for negatives: “God, make my opponent lose this match”, you might as well ask for specifics: “God, make my opponent break his leg.” From there it is only a short step to issuing curses on people. Just as we ask God, before our meal, to ‘bless’ our food (whatever the heck that means), we might as well ask him to curse the food of our political opponents.

No, the arrogance of trying to manipulate God into choosing our side doesn’t make much sense to me. As Jim Morrison (The Doors, Soft Parade) put it: “YOU CANNOT petition the Lord with prayer!” If God, once in a while, performs some unsolicited miracle (seemingly either bad or good in our eyes), that is His business, not ours to question.