Sweet Home, America

(Click on the box to see the whole thing, if necessary.) Oddly enough, for such a hip, urban, secular guy (I don't care what you think, I was describing me), I'm originally from Alabama, the Heart of Dixie, as was my mother and a bunch of ancestors before me. Where the magnolias bloom and the oil-soaked waves gently lap the shore in Mobile. However, I've been in California since the age of six months or so (with a brief timeout in Denver, CO), so I don't retain much in the way of Southernness. Goes to show the power of acculturation; I've got all these wacky ideas most closely associated with Northern California, which for many people in the USA may as well be an alternate universe. We think differently out here, that's for sure, and the gap widens as time passes.

Changes occur to the whole country over time, of course. I'm old enough to descry significant changes in American culture which have occurred over my lifetime, brief as it's been. Sometimes such moments of recognition happen when I'm reading a book written during my time here on Earth but from a significantly different era, such as the Fifties or Sixties. These can be good sources of comparison, more reliable than a contemporary book written about the same era, because a modern writer is influenced by his immediate environment. I have a lot of old books around the house which have somehow managed to survive my periodic purges, which take the form of (a) throwing away (recycling), (b) lending and never seeing again, and (c) donating to the local public library. I found one the other day by Richard Feynman called The Meaning of It All, actually a transcribed series of lectures (the John Danz Lectures) given in April, 1963, which Professor Feynman gave at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Feynman's reference to the "meaning of it all" should be taken literally: that's what he was talking about, life's meaning. In his characteristic no-nonsense, colloquial, simple (yet profoundly deep) way, Feynman spoke about the effect of science education on belief in God. Feynam was an atheist, but he had no difficulty accepting religious belief in others. He did share some of the attitudes of the modern "atheist movement" (Dawkins, Hitchens, Sam Harris), but he didn't get too worked up about it. He saw religion's pernicious qualities, its tendency to encourage dogmatic irrationality, pogroms, the Inquisition, religious wars, et cetera, but he was not on a crusade. It's amusing to wonder whether he would have the same equanimity now.

Anyway, in his usual brilliant way, Feynman describes what happens to the thinking of an intelligent person when he encounters formal scientific education at the college level. He first learns the advantage of doubt and skepticism in general, as necessary for scientific thinking. The tentative nature of theory and hypothesis, epistemological uncertainty in general. This creates a scientific "attitude" of questioning everything, even religious beliefs. The student then learns about the actual structure of the Universe, the speck of dust on which humans live, our similarity to animals (and to plants, such as the benzene ring found in chlorophyll, the benzene ring found in hemoglobin), the fact that our speck of dust orbits one star among billions of such stars in our own galaxy, and that our galaxy, the Milky Way, is one of many billions of galaxies in the known Universe...and the student begins to wonder, wasn't this a rather complicated arrangement for Somebody to put together if the whole thing is just about humans? Doesn't the religious view make more sense as the anthropocentric (not that Feynman would ever use such a ten dollar word) conceit of primitives who didn't know about all this other stuff?

I didn't know exactly what was going on in my own mind when I traveled that journey myself, but that describes pretty well how it all happened I think. Feynman concluded part of the lectures by saying, "There was another tremendous argument when it was found likely that man descended from the animals. Most religions have retreated once again from the metaphysical position that it wasn't true."

April, 1963. I think it's important to note the month, because all of us who were alive and cognizant of what was going on at the time remember what happened about 7 months later. That was a watershed in American history. I don't think the country was ever the same after the Kennedy assassination. In some ways, I think the whole Kennedy conspiracy industry is an unconscious revolt at the idea it can be explained as the act of one madman, because the effects were too momentous. A pall hung over the nation, a pall that has never really lifted. Before Kennedy died, the country was in its stride; after...not so much.

I think Richard Feynman might be surprised to see the rise of Obscurantism in modern American society. When you analyze the Pew Poll above, you come away with the dismal realization that today, 2010, only about 26% of all Americans actually subscribe to the sunny generalization in Feynman's lecture. 74% of Americans do not believe in a straight-up, secular, scientific belief in human evolution occurring through random mutation and adaptation. States want to outlaw its teaching in schools, or "supplement" it with education in Intelligent Design or Creationism. A sea change has occurred in America since April, 1963, and I don't know how to describe it exactly, but it is definitely a movement away from the scientific Enlightenment that Richard Feynman was talking about. It is a rejection of (or reflects the inadequacy of) American education in general, and a popular movement toward superstition and myth. History counsels us that such things usually don't end particularly well.

So Gog & Magog walk into a bar...

I caught the segment on Real Time with Bill Maher Friday night where Sam Harris, arch-atheist and general nemesis of the Pious Majority, talked calmly to Bill about his non-belief. Harris is the author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, two of the seminal texts of the New Atheism movement (of which Maher himself, and such writers as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens might also be called leaders).

Harris declines to call himself an "atheist," because he contends atheism is a concept without any content. Rather (though he didn't say it in exactly these words), a lack of belief in religious ideas about gods and whatnot flows naturally from a more general approach to epistemology. We don't, for example, call someone who doesn't believe in astrology an "a-astrologist" (however impossible it might be to pronounce such a term); we're content with the idea that astrology is a superstition (the astronomical silliness of which has been demonstrated by such thinkers as Isaac Asimov), and that no "counter" term is needed for those who don't believe it. It's only the more general acceptance of organized religion (particularly Christianity in this country, where some 80% of the population believe in myths such as the Second Coming) that gives rise to a special name for not buying into a general delusion.

As a prosaic example of how such thinking works, which I'm making up right now: suppose you become intensely interested in the phenomenon of disappearing socks. I've given this matter some thought from time to time, and even done some research. You've probably noticed the problem: over the course of many laundries, you find yourself with increasing numbers of unmatched socks. One reasonable explanation is that socks are among the smaller items routinely washed in washing machines, and they find their way into the drainage hose in the wash tub and disappear. Or they become trapped under the agitator. Or static cling conceals them (after drying) in the sleeves and pant legs of other clothing where they are lost. Of course, one can check out the plausibility of these theses by examining the washing machine to see whether the drainage aperture would permit this, lifting the agitator, and other tests.

A person inclined to superstition might explain the riddle by reference to a "Sock Gremlin" that steals socks and then would defy you to prove him/her wrong. And as proof would note the essence of the mystery: why only socks? This is akin, to my odd way of thinking, to the argument that the universe was designed by a human-like intelligence because of the peculiarities of its perfect "balancing," the complexities of its inter-workings, the perfect fit between its expansionary forces and the countervailing tendencies of collapse caused by gravity. You know the drill: the Argument by Declaration. The argument is "won" at the outset by the positing of a seemingly unanswerable (to the Believer) contention, which no amount of scientific investigation or thinking will be allowed to disturb.

My response, on the more important point of socks, is that I doubt it's really only socks that disappear. Such items as handkerchiefs, men's briefs and women's panties, which when saturated are similar in size to socks, probably also make their way up the tube, under the agitator, or become stuck by static electricity to other clothing. We notice it in the case of socks because they come in pairs - it's obvious when one is missing.

You might call this approach the application of intelligence and logic to reality. By a parity of reasoning, one might say that the existence of the universe, as explained by evolutionary and aleatory processes, can be understood as the result of its very "perfection:" if it didn't work this well, it wouldn't be here, and there would be no evolved intelligences walking around on one planet wondering where it all came from. And in no case do we have any right to suppose that there were not 3,374,287,890,278,458,382,902,983,876,458,429 previously failed universes which did not get it quite right and so did not last long enough to support evolution. Or that there are not currently a similar number of parallel universes where the physical laws are different and are either abiotic or support life forms we would have no way to understand. If such concepts make our heads hurt, and we recoil from the overwhelming images they suggest, it's only because our own limited brains are not really formidable enough to grasp such notions, a truth which has always suggested to me that an anthropomorphic-type god is probably a very unlikely candidate for a Creator of the Universe. I was thinking that as computer science progresses, we will probably be able to design computers which can comprehend such enormous complexity (their vastly superior computational speed, orders of magnitude faster than an organic brain, could do a much better job of handling the data. If you don't believe me and you're, say, just a fairly good chess player, try beating a good computer program. Sooooo humbling.) If we could then program the computer to explain what it knows in terms we can understand, we might get somewhere with these circular arguments.

So, as Sam said, there is nothing special about atheism - it's the natural result of thinking about religion in the same way you think about missing socks. Religious thinking, unfortunately, does have a profound effect on human behavior, as when adulterers are stoned in the Middle East or a U.S. President decides to invade Iraq because otherwise the Gog & Magog alliance (no joke) will get a leg up on the invasion of Israel, although you might read Ezekiel until your head explodes without ever finding the punch line.

With God on Our Side

Masterpiece Theatre recently aired a conspicuously brilliant episode entitled "God on Trial."  It was set, as all too often, in Auschwitz, or more specifically and accurately in Birkenau, which is where the real methodical Nazi killing took place. The drama is intercut with scenes of visitors to the modern day museums which now stand where Auschwitz-Birkenau were located.  One of the visitors is an old man. 

Birkenau was the combination work camp and murder factory run by Germans in the south of Poland.  I have visited Auschwitz and Birkenau.  The evil of the places seeps into your bones. For a long time after visiting I was in a kind of daze, and afflicted by a malaise akin to a physical sickness.  I suppose that anyone who can do so should visit Auschwitz once, but it comes with this caveat: you will never look upon your fellow human beings in quite the same way again.  The simple truth is that Homo sapiens, as a species, is capable of evil on a scale that dwarfs any other force in the history of our planet Earth.  It is not even reasonable or fair to claim that humans can be "bestial," because other beasts do not carry on like humans when on a murderous rampage.  The true horror of the Third Reich was the application of cold human intelligence, that most evolved of all human traits, to the systematic extermination of other human beings.

In destroying its German Jewry, Germany destroyed itself, of course.  The Nazis were indiscriminate in their choice of annihilation: doctors, lawyers, judges, physicists, artists, composers, writers, rabbis, the educated elite of German society.  All dehumanized and spared or killed on the basis of superficial physical attributes: could they do menial work for a short duration before starving or freezing to death?  The Jewish prisoners in the long house in "God on Trial" have just been through the initial evaluation process.  Stripped naked and shorn of their hair, they have trotted down the length of a room where a "doctor" waited at a small table.  This judge of their fitness, distracted and indifferent, indicated whether the prisoner was to go left or right.  Those to the left were condemned.  All of the men return to the long house and wait, their assignments now clear.  New arrivals wearing regular clothes are pushed into the long house to wait with them, then they too are put through the process of "selection."  

To pass the time while they wait for the "selected" to be led away to their deaths, they decide to put God on trial.  Among them are lawyers, theologians, physicists, and a judge -- brilliant men who have been deprived of their wives, children, possessions and dignity.  Yet they can still argue and reason, their minds are still their own.  And so they posit the question: did God break His covenant with his Chosen People?  Is God guilty of breach of contract with the Jews?

In their delirious pain and fear, the arguments advanced have a stark and terrifying immediacy.  There is no time for trivial ruminations or cavils.  Some, of course, are bitter about God's betrayal: how could He permit His own people to be rounded up and shipped like cattle to death camps?  How could He countenance the Holocaust, the murder of innocent children, the destruction of a culture?  Others do their best to remain philosophical and "objective:"  God moves in mysterious ways, this is a trying of Jewish faith in God, much as God tested Abraham with Isaac. Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the Temple and in so doing acted as an "agent" of God; wasn't Hitler in the same role? In the end one can be assured that Hitler and the Nazis will be destroyed by God's wrath, and those among them awaiting death must see themselves as martyrs in this dramatic confrontation of Good and Evil.  A physicist notes the existence of the billions of stars in the Milky Way, the billions of suns with planetary systems, and argues for the extreme unlikelihood that God actually designed all of the Universe with just the fate of one people on one small planet in mind, that it is all a case of human presumption to imagine that God is real or created any of this.  These condemned Jews are alone, and it is the folly of believing in any God at all which has contributed to their helplessness.

It is left to Akiba, one rabbi with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Torah and the singular odyssey of the Israelites to place all in perspective and to provide the answer which none of the others either could refute, or under the exigent circumstances of the imminent arrival of the Nazi killers, had time to refute.  Akiba, calling on the great knowledge of other rabbis and scholars in the long house, takes the prisoners through the many instances of God's retributive justice: the Great Flood and the annihilation of almost all humankind. The Ten Plagues and then the killing of the first born of the Egyptians. Not Pharoah, but the innocent children of his kingdom.  Of the mass killing by King Saul and his legions, and how Saul had "killed his thousands," but King David was greater because he had killed "tens of thousands."  Of the brutal and horrific massacres of the Ammonites, close relatives of the Israelites.  The thousands of enemies of the Israelites who were forced to lie on the field of battle where one was spared and two chosen for death.  Of David's lust for Bathsheeba, and his manipulation of her husband into death in a distant battle.  Of the parting of the Red Sea, how God had not only made passage safe for the Israelites, but timed the inundation of the soldiers who pursued them for maximum destructive effect.  

At the end of this explication, Akiba prepares the ground for his conclusion with a simple observation: the Nazis who came to take him away wore belt buckles inscribed with the legend "Gott mit Uns."  God with Us.  And who could really say He was not?  So at the end of his closing argument, Akiba, this rabbi of great piety and deep erudition, electrifies his rapt audience with another simple observation: It was not that God was good; He had simply been "on our side." And now He was on someone else's side, and the Jews in that long house selected for gassing knew what it was like to be an Egyptian first-born, or an Ammonite, or a Philistine, or a soldier drowned by the closing waters of the Red Sea.

The drama ends in present time, with visitors leaving Birkenau and reboarding buses to take them away.  The old man tells a young woman that the prisoners, in fact, found that God was guilty.  He had breached his covenant with the Israelites and the Jewish people.  In their extremes of terror and desolation, who knows why men would resort to a moot court to question their own faith?  Out of bitterness and despair?  Of course that goes a long way toward explaining everything.  Yet Akiba, to my way of thinking, unlocked the door to a simple truth.  A wrathful, jealous, destructive and partisan God may be a fickle ally in one's hour of greatest need.  Maybe what we have called "God" in the blood-soaked histories of Judeo-Christian holy books is a rationalization for our very own worst instincts, for our own intolerance and murderous proclivities and insatiable greed.  Perhaps God did not create Man; maybe Man created God as a personification of his own evil shadow.

Bill Maher's "Religulous"

I think Bill Maher probably owes a debt of gratitude to Michael Moore for devising the concept of the auteur-political documentary, distinguished by the direct involvement of the filmmaker in the Q&A sessions making up the bulk of the movie.  Maher's "Religulous" is better than Moore's agitprop movies because Maher has a sharper focus and a keener wit than Moore, and does not engage in the kind of emotional bathos Moore typically uses to win over his audience.  Bill Maher doesn't really use emotional content at all; his movie about religion, and about its clear and present danger to human survival, is aimed "more at the head than the heart," as Boris reviews the short drama about VD during the Napeolonic wars in "Love & Death." (Obscure reference for the cognoscenti only.)  While the professional reviewers attack Maher for his insensitive badgering of the pious, Bill is obviously angry at the overwhelming of political life in America and elsewhere by religious doctrine and he lets fly. To hilarious effect.

And so he travels the world insulting people of all faiths and creeds.  It's very, very funny, but the "cruelty" arises not from Bill's lack of piety but from his willingness to say exactly what you're thinking when he says it, no matter where he is.  He can be in a makeshift chapel at a truck stop in the Deep South and challenge burly truckers to debate the claims of inerrancy in the Bible, never mincing his words and never pandering.  In a conversation with a Muslim in Amsterdam, he can take on the claim that the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for writing "The Satanic Verses" did not chill free speech by telling the oh-so-gentle Muslim, "What you're really saying is, write something we don't like and we'll kill you," and then daring his interlocutor to prove otherwise.  In Florida he talks to a religious zealot, a "converted gay," who works to convert other gays to heterosexuality on the theory that homosexuality is (a) sinful and (b) subject to choice, since it's not genetic.  The preacher enthusiastically talks about a gay man and lesbian whom he converted so successfully they married and had children.  Bill then says they must have had a typically heterosexual marriage, with no sex.  Then Maher points out that if he saw this obviously gay "gay reformer" in a bar, he would instantly know he was gay, and the guy just smiles, knowing he was nailed.  They hug as they part ways and Bill asks him if he got an erection.

On and on, in a  bravura performance.  If you're religious, don't bother to see it since you'll dislike the tone and content intensely.  If you're "agnostic," like Bill, you won't learn anything new but you might be entertained.  Bill ends his movie with an apocaplyptic scenario, as he stands on the hill in Megiddo in Israel, where Armageddon is prophesied to occur.  He appeals to our rationality to overcome the dark forces of organized religion.

He's wasting his breath and he knows it.  But it makes for an interesting documentary and an opportunity to travel with him to England, Denmark, the Vatican, Israel, and all through the Deep South.  Maher notes that 16% of the American populace is agnostic and atheistic and wonders why they're not a more powerful interest group.  Among 24 nations of modern culture and civilization, the United States ranks 23rd in secularism, just ahead of Turkey.  I don't know what criteria are used to determine whether a nation is god-besotted, but that sounds about right.  It's nuts here, that's for sure.

Lots of people that Bill interviews around the world think we're near the End of Days.  Maher sees it as a self-fulfilling prophecy, since the inclination to think it's almost over tends to lead to indifference to things we might do to ameliorate the crisis.  I look on things somewhat differently from Bill, lacking his belief in the primacy of the intellect or rationality in such matters.  I think things look like End Times because human consciousness is formed most conclusively by the environment we live in: overpopulation, pollution, degradation, desertification of land and oceans, global warming.  These things work on us, dismay us, make us crazy.  Things look apocaplyptic because we're destroying the very planet on which we live and making it uncomfortable and aesthetically ruined as we go about it.  And in the vast thronging multitude, the Earth's six billion people, we find many, many religious people, perhaps always in about the same historical proportion, but the conditions of life and their sheer numbers (and the destructive technology they can access) exacerbate the peril, maybe past the breaking point.

Maher notes that 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences are either atheistic or agnostic (I don't know why Bill persists in that dichotomy; as Richard Feynman demonstrated beyond all doubt in a brilliant essay, there's no real difference.  An agnostic is an atheist who's having trouble coming to terms with the finality).  That makes sense.  Just as it takes a leap of faith to believe, it takes a leap of imagination not to believe.  Bertrand Russell in his 1927 essay, "Why I Am Not A Christian," (Google and enjoy - breathtaking) laid out the basic atheist arguments, the answers to the "proof" of a god.  For example: as to the "First Cause" argument, that if there is a world, then something or someone made it, since everything has a cause.  Thus, argues Bertrand, something had to have made God.  If the answer is that God always "just was," then Russell answers that the same argument can be made for the world: it always "just was" too, and it's no more unlikely than the Creationist story.  

There's no comeback to that.  God is the result of human psychological projection: since when we see something like a chair or house, we know that someone made it, our tendency toward the concrete (something like the use of "manipulables" in Montessori schooling) sets the limit of our ability to think about things.  We assume that a world in which humans live was made by a human-like intelligence.  What a coincidence!  Or - could it be we're looking through the wrong end of the telescope?

A certain kind of mind (I won't say "more intelligent") grasps what Russell is driving at.  And some people have minds, or personalities, which manage to live without hope, and are content with the basic absurdity of human existence.  It's the only thing we can really know, the essential meaninglessness of life, and we want to live according to what we really know because it feels better.  And we feel safer in a world of rationality than we do in one where religious irrationality rules mankind.  None of that is going to help convert anyone from one way of thinking to another, but a movie as grim and hopeless as Maher's (whether he realizes it's that way or not) needs to end with some hortatory uplift, so he gave it a shot.  Not in this world, Bill, but it's nice to have a spokesman.

Santo, Ma Non Troppo

I'm concerned about the alacrity with which the Vatican is pursuing the canonization of John Paul II. It appears that Benedict and the Cardinals are falling prey to that modern malaise of cheapening time-honored awards of distinction by succumbing to society's inability to delay gratification. You see it everywhere these days, from the habit of awarding Oscars for life-time achievement to directors still in the active phase of their careers to the recent spectacle of the near-canonization of Ronald Reagan, where his celebrants counted on a mass collective amnesia to make us forget Reagan had wood chips where the human brain is supposed to be. People just can't wait anymore. Everything is rushed, even in something as timeless as religion, thus robbing even sainthood of its divine luster.

"Santo subito!" the delirious crowds outside St. Peter's Basilica shout. JP2 needs sainthood, right now, say his Catholic fans. The Vatican hastens to comply. They're putting the finishing touches on an "investigation" of his life, something you think they might have worked on, you know, before he became Pope. But you can't be too careful when you're talking about making someone a saint, which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as "a person officially recognized, esp. by canonization, as being entitled to public veneration and capable of interceding for people on Earth." They don't want JP2 up there in the Sanctified Hall of Fame and then discover some bastard son living in the suburbs of Krakow, or maybe a previously overlooked letter from JP2 to an SS commandant letting him know where the local shul is meeting. That would never do. But when they take extraordinary steps like waiving the "five-year requirement" (that's where it does sound like a Hall of Fame) and beating the bushes for miracles, they invite this kind of disaster. They've got one miracle in the hopper already. Sister Marie Simon-Pierre of France (really now: Sister Mary Simon Peter - was that ordered up from central casting or what?) claims her Parkinson's cleared up two months after John Paul II, also a Parkinson's sufferer, expired. They need one more, since there can hardly be any doubt about that first one. I mean, come on: Sister Marie's Parkinson's clears up two months after JP2, who just happened to have the same disease, died? If you've got a problem with that, I don't want to hear about it, and neither do the Cardinals.

Although: maybe they've done enough to fast-track JP's installation and ought to take their time. Delve into this Sister Marie thing a little more penetratingly, and make sure she's on the level. Publicity seekers are everywhere, and surely if the last decade or so has taught us anything, it's that Catholics sometimes yield to the most human of vices. Cynical as it may seem, a thorough investigation could reveal some alternative interpretations, such as: Sister Marie never had Parkinson's; it's a notoriously difficult disease to diagnose and is often confused with other motor neuron maladies. Or: maybe the L-Dopa kicked in. Or: maybe the idea of JP2 interceding on her behalf gave her a temporary dopamine rush that got her motor neurons working again. Uncharitably, this last might be called a placebo effect. Maybe her disease, blessedly, is in a state of remission. Sticking with the five-year rule would allow us to make sure, and not have to go through the embarrassing process of canceling the miracle and opening up the application process again.

But I must admit it: JP2, as one of his first gigs on the Other Side, may have put in a good word for Marie Soeur. I mean, why the hell not? In which case, His Holiness is halfway home. Given the standards of rigorous proof required, the Cardinals will soon shake another miracle out of those voluminous sleeves. I still think, all things considered, that the honor would mean more, the canonization would be more Canonical, if they waited the five years and looked for miracles with a little more star power. You know, as they say in the Biz, "legs." I'm dubious, of course, that such a salutary course will be followed, that the Cardinals will set the tempo at allegro, ma non troppo. Santo, molto prestissimo, it is. A world hungry for heroes, even mythological ones, demands no less.

Godless Liberal(s) Invade(s) Congress

"Secular groups Monday applauded a public acknowledgment by Rep. Pete Stark that he does not believe in a supreme being, making the Fremont Democrat the first member of Congress — and the highest-ranking elected official in the U.S. — to publicly acknowledge not believing in God." Los Angeles Times, March 13, 2007.

Well, there goes the neighborhood. Also, my own cover story for not running for office. In The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, he makes the point that a higher percentage of Americans voice their unqualified opposition to an atheistic candidate for President than for any other defining characteristic in a standard survey. Americans who have no qualms about voting for a woman or a minority for President draw the line at voting in a heathen. In Dawkins's view, in other words, a substantial majority of Americans demand that the President, first and foremost, be delusional. Certainly no one promoting deism in politics could have much to complain about in the last 7 years.

If Pete Stark is the "highest-ranking elected official" in the U.S. to renounce belief in God, then I suppose that none of the other 434 Representatives and none of the 100 Senators has ever done likewise. Thus, we're at the point where either (1) not one of the other nonbelieving 534 members of Congress has the courage to proclaim his/her apostasy, seeing it as political suicide; or (2) there is no such person; they all believe in God.

I was recently in a conversation about such beliefs where I was described as an agnostic, and I found myself saying, "beyond that." "Atheist?" she asked. "Beyond that too," I responded immediately. I wonder what I meant. Maybe something along these lines: If you tell me that thunderclaps are caused by Thor throwing his hammer while being carted around in the sky in a chariot drawn by his two goats, I will, of course, honor your belief and nod gravely in the way that my politically correct, respectful generation tends to respond to declarations of arrant nonsense. We're so-o-o nice and afraid of giving offense. If, however, you ask me whether I share this "belief," I will think (though probably not say) that the question is simply not meaningful. There aren't "two sides" to this "question." You believe something nuts and I don't think about it.

I liked Steven Weinberg's response to a religious group who asked him to participate in a "constructive dialogue" with religious thinkers. He declined, saying he maybe believed in a dialogue, but not a "constructive dialogue." Weinberg, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist probably best known for uncovering the cause of Reality (barely an exaggeration), has the right idea, if you ask me. What can science learn from religion, other than the importance of science as an escape from obscurantism? I don't see much difference between positing the idea of a god creating the Universe with lightning bolt-like conjurations and Thor throwing his Mjolnir and making the dogs run under the bed. The Biblical God is an update of the Nordic Thor; modern religion simply retreats before the advance of science by making God murkier and more ethereal, and doing away with the vaudeville routines of burning bushes and parting seas.

I suppose, if I'm running for President, I can finesse the point by telling the truth and saying I find the question of belief meaningless, along the lines of the above meandering explanation. I doubt it will work. Americans are intolerant of vacillation on matters of belief. They much prefer a straightforward declaration of lunacy.