Annie Laurie has a small knit hat that she wears during the cooler months, and she is very attached to it. Well, it could be better attached, because she keeps losing it. But like a cat, the hat keeps coming back with another life. I once found it in our driveway. It was missing for a whole week last winter, and when we went to the radio station to record another episode of Freethought Radio, Annie Laurie asked Lisa, the receptionist, if anyone might have spotted a small puce hat.
“Oh, I might have seen something like that in the bushes by the parking lot,” Lisa said. Annie Laurie must have dropped it getting into the car the week before. It had stormed in the meantime, and the hat must have blown across the parking lot. Lisa took her to the spot, where she dug the hat out of the snow, to Annie Laurie’s surprise and relief.
A couple of months later she lost the hat again, sometime between a lunch visit with her mother and later that evening when we both returned to her mother’s independent-living apartment to play Scrabble. As we were leaving the building that night, Annie Laurie was lamenting the loss of her favorite hat. “I asked at the front desk if anyone has seen a small puce hat, and nobody has.” The moment she said that, I pointed to a small object someone had placed on the ledge she had walked past just outside the building.
“That’s it!” she said. “How many lives does my hat have?”
A small puce hat?
The word “puce” has never crossed my lips. It has never crossed my mind, until now. I see it as a kinda darkish hat, and if I were forced to describe it, I would say it is dull purple, maybe a dusty plum color, though I don’t think I have ever said the word “plum” as a color. In my mind, that hat is just “a color,” I don’t know. I am surprised not only that Annie Laurie would find a word for it, but that others would know what she means.
It is no secret that Annie Laurie has a finer sense of color and style than I do. Maybe it is a girl/guy thing, but I do hear men talking like her. I am impressed when fashion designers, interior decorators, and artists speak about their craft.
In college, I went on a date with a student named Patty. When I showed up at her dorm room, she opened the door, looked at me, and said, “I’m not going out with you like that!”
I looked at my clothes and said, “What?” Having dressed up for the evening, I was wearing burgundy polyester slacks and a bright-red long-sleeved dress shirt.
“Those colors are horrible!” she said. “Go back and change.”
I slunk back to my dorm room, now acutely self-conscious, entering the building through the back door instead of the front where I had just exited in full view of the world. My face probably matched my clothes. I still have trouble locating the word “burgundy” in my brain, as a color. The shirt was maybe scarlet, cardinal, or tomato, but all I can remember is red. Never mind that even if the pants and shirt had matched, that would not have been exactly classy.
I do often need Annie Laurie’s fashion advice. Sometimes I protest that I’m just way ahead of the times for her, but I have to concede she is usually right when it comes to color and style.
On the other hand, I have a highly fine-tuned sense of music. Pun intended. Like an aural fashion designer, I can usually tell you exactly what is happening in a piece of music and why it is beautiful. It’s not just mechanical training. Those harmonies are like colors, not that I see actual colors, but that I identify the chords, progressions, modes, and relations of the melodic notes in a “musically knowing” way. (I did once “see” music in color, one Saturday morning in a hypnopompic state as I was gradually awakened by a music alarm radio. It was wonderful, but only lasted about a minute. I have always wished I could repeat that experience.)
I hear the chords by feeling them, much like we sense colors. Other jazz players tell me I have a great ear. Now, make yourself read the rest of this paragraph, even if you don’t follow it. I can immediately “see” the IV chord (subdominant), the II chord (dominant of the dominant, if major), a sharp eleven on a dominant seventh, a flatted ninth on the III-7 chord (mediant), a subtonic with the fifth in the bass, a minor chord with a major seventh, the sharp 6th of the Dorian and sharp 4th of the Lydian mode, the 13th as a melodic passing or neighboring tone between 5 and 7—and so on, with hundreds of subtle combinations effortlessly “visible” to my ear. I don’t have to state those exact words while hearing the music, any more than you have to describe the precise grammar while reading a sentence, although you could if you wanted to. I can hear/feel the counterpoint of the bass line. (If there is a next life, I will come back as a bassist.) And after all that—if the music is not too “out there” or atonal—I can usually place or transpose that into any one of the twelve tonalities, a skill that many singers appreciate when they ask me to play in a different key to fit their voice.
If that paragraph seems opaque or pretentious to you, then you know how I feel when people talk about fashion. When I say those things to Annie Laurie, she sometimes shrugs, as I sometimes roll my eyes when she asks for my opinion about an outfit she is considering purchasing.
Of course, Annie Laurie hears what I hear, and I see what she sees, so neither of us is missing anything. She enjoys music no less than I do. She is not deaf, and I am not blind. We are just attuned in different ways. We “see” the world differently. We have given ourselves a vocabulary for what we perceive. I hear the dominant seventh and she sees puce.
I would guess that most of the difference comes from culture and training, but certainly some of it is due to genetic variation. Some scientists suspect there are a few women who were born with four-color cones in their retinas instead of the usual three cones. They can perceive hundreds more shades and combinations of colors. Maybe they are seeing fifty shades of puce.
I am not a wine drinker. I am not a drinker at all. Maybe twice a year Annie Laurie and I will share a glass of champagne, as a symbolic celebration of an event. On the few occasions I have sipped wine, it tastes like, well, like wine. I can’t discriminate. What does bouquet or balanced taste mean? How can wine be brilliant or broad, flowery or noble? What is the difference between spicy and fruity? I’m sure those words mean something special to connoisseurs and that I am missing out on a very real enjoyment in life. Scott, the webmaster at the Freedom From Religion Foundation, is a beer/ale expert who knows all the microbreweries in the area (and many around the world) and can describe hundreds of different tastes with precise explanations. To me, beer is beer. (Well, the first and only glass I had was more than thirty years ago.) Am I “taste blind”? The only thing wine does is put me to sleep.
Human characteristics vary across the population. Even without training, some people naturally have a better sense of style, color, taste, smell, and music. Same with sports, math, language, science, engineering, and all other activities in our species. Each of us falls somewhere on the bell curve of variety. But even if there is nothing wrong with our brains or my senses—even if we have no genetic or pathological defects—we can still be “brain blind.”
In his book Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb distinguishes between genetic color blindness and “cultural color blindness.” Genetic color blindness is a physical disability. Cultural color blindness is a lack of names for the finer shades of light frequency that we do not recognize.
The ancient Greeks, Taleb tells us, did not have the word “blue.” William Gladstone, the former prime minister of England, did an exhaustive analysis of Homer’s writings and discovered that they were pale by comparison with later literature, with less color words than modern writings. Homer called the sea “wine dark.” The Greeks saw blue, of course, but they didn’t “see” blue—just like I don’t “see” puce. They didn’t give it a name. Some cultures do not identify all colors, or the same colors, with names. Linguist Guy Deutscher notices that in the evolution of language, blue is always the last color to be named.
Linguist Daniel Everett, in his book Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes— in which he tells his story of being a missionary to the Pirahã tribe in the Amazon only to end up being converted to atheism like his happy hosts—describes the Pirahã language as lacking names for colors. Instead of green, they say “like a leaf.” We do the same in English with words like “orange,” “peach,” and “cherry” for particular colors or shades, but for us those are names. For the Pirahã, they are descriptions. They don’t have words for even the basic colors of yellow, red, green, or blue.
Blue is at the faster end (shorter wave length) of the spectrum of light visible to humans. Red, on the other end, is slower (hence the famous redshift of light as stars move away from us), with a wavelength about twice as long. Perhaps blue, being small and swift, is tougher for the cones in our retinas to handle, or more likely to be filtered out as parts of the eye degrade when we age.
My Granddad Barker, a member of the Delaware Indian (Lenape) tribe, had trouble with blue when he aged. I sometimes watched him as he labored over his loom creating native beadwork, often humming a melody from his childhood. Grandma, who was quarter Cherokee, had to keep reorganizing his beads in little plastic boxes because he would often get them mixed up. I have a hatband he made for me—a zigzag blue river with a red border on a white background—and right in the middle of the river is a naughty green bead. That hatband has real sentimental value for me. I love that little mistake—that’s my Granddad! (It is getting harder for me to spot that lone bead, so what does that tell you about my eyes?)
Neurologist Oliver Sacks, in his book Island of the Colorblind, describes a whole group of people who live in a black-and-white world. They are physically unable to see color.
But genetic or aging defects wouldn’t explain why an entire civilization would lack words for certain colors. I think Taleb is right when he suggests that culture and training can fine-tune our attentiveness, helping us “see” what we see, just like I am trying to learn that not all reds go together.
It’s not just vision. We also sometimes don’t “hear” what we hear. On a recent episode of Freethought Radio, I introduced our guest, whose name is Dawn.
“You mean Dawn,” Annie Laurie interrupted, “not Don.”
“That’s what I said,” I replied, not hearing the difference.
It turns out that this is a regional variation. I was born and raised in California, and Annie Laurie is from the Midwest. Dawn, our guest on that show, confirmed that there is a difference. Originally from Chicago, where she said her name with the deeper “aw” sound, she has since moved to Oregon where most people call her “Don.” Those two women can hear the difference, and I suppose I can too, but I don’t hear two distinct vowels. I hear regional accents of the same sound. On the other hand, Annie Laurie pronounces Oregon like “Oregawn” instead of “Oregun,” as they say it in the state. The city of Oregon, Wisconsin, is indeed pronounced like Annie Laurie says it. I have to admit that Annie Laurie’s perception of that vowel sound is more refined than mine. But you should hear how she tries to pronounce Spanish, not hearing the shades of “d” or “b,” or the pure sound of “e.”
When I was learning Spanish in high school, I could not roll the letter “R” like my Hispanic friends could. I really wanted to master the language, so I spent months forcing myself to mechanically spit and stutter the letter. I remember many hours riding my bike around town, repeating the exercise, “Rr con rr cigarros. Rr con rr barril. Rápido ruedan las ruedas de los carros del ferrocarril.” At first I was just mangling my tongue, but eventually I got it, and it now rolls easily. On the other hand, many of my Hispanic friends have trouble with English vowels. The sentence, “Ship a cheap sheep chip,” sounds like repeating the same word to them.
I suppose our other senses are the same. Blind people report “seeing” the world through touch. Individuals certainly have different sensitivities of smell and taste.
I happen to have a rare and harmless condition called synesthesia. I see all letters and numbers in color. Most are blue, green, red, yellow, orange, and brown, though a few are black and gray, and a couple are shades of white. Some are different variants of the same color. “R” and “M” are green, but “R” is brighter, more sparkly. The letter “V” is a color that does not exist in reality, a kind of purple-brown—not like puce—sort of like a shiny copper penny with a violet reflection. But when I say that I “see” them, I don’t mean they actually change color on the page. Those colors are in the mind, in the same way that you “see” a yellow banana in a black-and-white movie.
So the human mind can see things it doesn’t see, and not see things it does see. This might explain much of what goes on with religion.
I think cultural color blindness is evident in religion. When I talk about my journey from evangelical preacher to atheist, I often say that fundamentalists have binary brains. Not all believers are that extreme, of course, but all fundamentalists are absolutists. To the righteous mind, there is no middle ground. Everything is right or wrong, true or false, good or evil. Jesus reportedly said, “I wish you were cold or hot. So then because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.” To the true believer, there is no warmth, no gray area. It is all black and white.
But now I think I can say it better: fundamentalists have polarized brains. The difference between black and white is not gray: it is a color spectrum. Their world is monochromatic, not black-and-white. They don’t perceive the rich colors of life within the rainbow.
The prophet Jeremiah complained that there are “foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes, and see not; which have ears, and hear not.” Jesus reportedly said, “Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear?” They admit that it is possible to perceive without perceiving, but I think they were writing about themselves. They are the ones who are spewing distasteful colors out of their mouths.
Think about sexuality. The bible says that “God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). It is assumed that Adam and Eve were heterosexual, because they were commanded to “replenish the earth.” Jesus made the same assumption: “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said ‘for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?” (This is also sexist, from the male point of view.) In the bible, anything outside of binary heterosexuality is condemned as an abomination. (See Leviticus 20:13, for example.)
To fundamentalist bible believers, there are only two sexual identities: men who love women, and women who love men. It’s not that they don’t know there are alternative sexual practices; they just don’t see them for what they are: varieties, or colors, in a spectrum of sexual inclinations. Just like in my mind there is no difference between “Dawn” and “Don,” to the fundamentalist, there is no such thing as a gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender person. People with alternate lifestyles are just different accents, or deviations of heterosexuals. Hence, they are deviant. They are “straights” who are crooked. Everybody must be biblically polarized, socially shoehorned into one-size-fits-all. Any identity that does not flip to one side of their toggle switch does not exist. This is a cultural color blindness resulting from religion, a failure to see the shades of reality we are looking at. Forcing homosexuals to live as heterosexuals is like me pretending that my garish red outfit was attractive. It is fitting that the gay community uses a rainbow as a symbol.
Think about geology. Instead of seeing the various strata at the Grand Canyon as revealing different ages in a history spanning billions of years, young-earth creationists are forced to view all the layers as instantly created on the first of six days of creation. The canyon was carved in less than forty days in a worldwide flood, they insist, instead of over about six million years. This is a different kind of flat-earth mentality. While modern geologists are able to tease out the ages of the rocks—the colors in the prism, so to speak—by looking at fossils and using other dating techniques, true believers are wed to a single creative event, allowing only an insignificant amount of change through sedimentation and erosion since the beginning of the world a few thousand years ago. The “Rock of Ages” erases the ages of rocks. They have eyes, and see not.
Think about evolution. The bible says, “God made the beasts of the earth after their kind,” and creationists interpret this to mean each species was formed independently. All of life is flat, started at the same moment, existing side-by-side, nothing related. How boring! When you can learn to see the beauty of evolution, the interconnectedness of all living things springing from the same ancestor, it opens up a whole four-dimensional spectrum. We can see ourselves in stereo, in context, as cousins to the other apes, as more distant relatives to every other species on the planet. Viewing biology as different shades within a larger biosphere transforms the pale two-dimensional flat-earth view of one-off specially created species into a wonderful multicolored sphere of interrelated organisms, a true “family of life.” When Darwin introduced us to evolution by natural selection, it was like giving new color names to what we were seeing but not seeing. It truly opened our minds. Of course, creationists have heard about fossils, biogeography, homology, and comparative genetics, but having ears to hear, they hear not.
A similar stereo effect happened to me when I went to Brazil. Knowing Spanish, I had a head start learning Portuguese because the two languages are descended from a common ancestor. I might be almost half fluent in Brazilian Portuguese now, though they tell me I have a Mexican accent. I love the voices of Bossa Nova and Samba singers—you can sail a ship through those Amazon-wide vowels—and I’m afraid I will never sound like that. But as far as the language goes, I find it fascinating to be looking at two cousins descended from their Latin grandparent, spotting the similarities and the differences.
A light turned on when I learned that the Portuguese word for “almost” is quasi. Of course, since we use “quasi-” in English, I can see that it comes from the Latin. But it surprised me when I realized that the Spanish word casi is from the same root. All these years I have been saying casi as if it were a stand-alone “special creation” from the Spanish language, not seeing the connection. Now with the binocular vision from the related species of Portuguese, I can see the family resemblance, the common ancestor, and the descent with variation. This is just like “seeing” that the human race is not a stand-alone species but a cousin to the other apes, all showing descent with modification. It is a real enhancement when what was two-dimensional comes alive, when a cartoon becomes flesh and blood, when gray scale changes to color, when painting turns to sculpture, when mono turns to stereo, when light turns to prism.
Richard Dawkins, in The Extended Phenotype, talks about this shift in perspective as we look at the natural world. He compares it to staring at a drawing of a Necker Cube, where your mind sees a box in one orientation and then surprisingly shifts to the other orientation. Nothing actually changes on the paper—it all happens in your mind—but it feels like something has changed. Two people can be looking at the same facts but “seeing” something entirely different. Fundamentalist creationists perceive a two-dimensional drawing with little depth or meaning, while evolutionary biologists see a three-dimensional image, actually four-dimensional when you consider time.
Think about abortion. Fundamentalist “pro-lifers” view an individual person like they view an individual species, with no evolution leading up to its creation. A human being, like the human race, appears on the stage as a full person, they imagine. Adam was formed as a grown man, not a boy, child, baby, or fetus. To the true believer, there is no such thing as a half-developed person, just like there can be no half-soul. It is black or white, absolute, colorless. While the gestating human actually moves through a spectrum of developmental stages—in many of which the human is indistinguishable from other mammals—the religious anti-abortionists view the whole scenario not as a process but as an instantly completed creation, all involving a fully human person. The sperm contacts the egg and Presto, “You” are created. A zygote, blastocyst, embryo, or fetus is the same as a breathing baby in their polarized brains.
But the rest of us, including many cultures not hampered by a misogynist faith, are able to understand that personhood is not a thing that begins at conception. It arrives somewhere later in the growth of a human organism. An embryo is not a person. A stem cell is not a person. As comedian Bill Maher pointed out in one of his hilarious monologues,1 you can freeze a stem cell indefinitely, which is something you definitely cannot do with a baby. Even the bible, which equates life with breath, actually seems to agree with modern American law, which acknowledges that a human life begins at viability. I don’t know of any fundamentalists who add nine months to their age. But many believers, being religiously colorblind, can only conceive of “life” (a full person) as black or white, red or blue, all or nothing. Those of us who affirm a woman’s freedom to decide her own reproductive future equate a human life with personhood, seeing the earlier stages of development within a spectrum leading up to a precious baby whose arrival and existence we do cherish. Personhood is blue, while a zygote is red, with a prism in the middle.
Think about Christianity itself. It is certainly not monochromatic. Even in the early years, there were different flavors of churches and theologies. The early Gnostics, who may have been the first Christians and whose footprints we see in the Logos in the opening verse of the Gospel of John, were not the same as the Ebionites, the Marcionites, or the Pauline Christians. When Constantine came along in the fourth century and crudely hacked Christianity into an official shape by the force of state violence, he polarized the religion into orthodox and unorthodox, black and white, red and blue, insiders and outsiders, “cold or hot.” That began a long period of history often called the Dark Ages, a fitting name for color blindness, a coerced conformity to established dogma and ritual.
It wasn’t until more than a millennium later that the Enlightenment—another appropriate name—began to tease out scientific truth from dogma. Isaac Newton, one of the early Enlightenment thinkers, is the person who actually taught us about the properties of light, showing that white light is really a combination of the rainbow colors that represent different frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. That momentous revelation was preceded by a similar “unweaving of the rainbow” within the church itself, the Protestant Reformation. The One True Faith splintered into many smaller faiths, an astonishing prism of colors—denominations and theologies—emanating from the Protestant kaleidoscope.
When I left Christianity, it wasn’t a sudden giant leap from fundamentalism to atheism. I first moved through a period of migration across that Protestant spectrum (Catholics also now have a spectrum, though not as wide), taking four or five years, starting at the extreme red side of evangelical absolutism and gradually adjusting my views, little by little, liberal by liberal, until I moved to the blue side. I realized early in that process that there is no one Christianity. There may be as many Christianities as there are Christians. Of course, I didn’t park my thoughts at the liberal blue side of the Protestant continuum. I like to say that I threw out all the bath water and found there is no baby there. But another way to picture it is that I moved from red through orange, yellow, green, to blue and violet (and maybe puce), finally stepping away from the individual stripes, jumping out of the rainbow into the fullness of white light—Enlightenment—where I can look back and see the prism for what it is. If you are in the rainbow, you can’t see the rainbow. Every color in the faith—especially near the slower red frequencies—thinks it is light while the others are dark. They are religiously colorblind.
Think about comparative religion. Once when I was debating a young-earth creationist, I began my opening statement like this:
In the beginning was the Turtle. The Turtle was swimming across an endless body of water. One day it dove to the bottom and brought up a lump of mud. When the mud baked in the sun, it became dry land. The land expanded into a vast area where trees grew. One day the Rabbit started kicking a blood clot by one of the trees until it formed into a human being.
I explained that this is one version of a Native American creation myth, not unlike some of the tales told by my own Lenape ancestors. (My family is from the Turtle Clan of the tribe.) Humans were telling similar stories on the American continent 12,000 to 15,000 years ago, which, if you believe my opponent, was 9,000 years before the earth was created. I told the audience that I thought that was a charming and enjoyable story, and they nodded.
“How many of you think there really was a Turtle at the beginning?” I asked. No hands went up.
Then I asked how many believed the creation myth of a later group of people, the Bronze Age Israelites, including the earth being created from a watery void, Adam being formed from the mud, Eve being taken from his rib, a talking snake, a talking donkey, a jealous genocidal war god named Yahweh (“my name is Jealous”), the Nile River turning to blood, and food falling from the sky. Most of the hands went up in that audience. They think the Turtle is false but the talking snake is true. They are polarized. They can’t see outside their own color.
All human groups have invented meaningful fables, but their fable is actual truth, they proclaim. The vast array of colorful creation myths collapses into “us versus them.” Truth versus lies. Some believers do appreciate the varieties of religious belief in anthropology; they just see them all as quaint but false, “out there,” while their belief is the one true faith. They can’t see themselves as part of the fabric, or their color as part of a spectrum, or their religion as having evolved from earlier antecedents. In the previous chapter, I talked about how law has ancestors, but the same is true with religion. If you can step back and see that your religion is just one cousin from a grandparent (as Christianity and Islam are descended mainly from Judaism), and also realize that the grandparent is a cousin to other religions descended from even earlier ancestors, you can perceive your faith not as a blunt stand-alone creation, but as a small part of a larger array. Your worldview becomes enriched. Gregory Riley does a nice job of illustrating the family tree (or branching river system) of world faiths in his book The River of God.2
Former minister John Loftus suggests that the way to gain perspective, to think outside the box, is to take the “outsider test.”3 Look at your own religion as an outsider might see it. Look at your own beliefs the same way you look at the beliefs of others: from a distance. If you can’t do that, you are religiously colorblind.
Think about ethics. Most of us, including believers, act as if we embrace situational ethics in our daily lives, but most religions teach that there are absolute moral laws that must be followed no matter what, by command of a dictator. For example, since the Ten Commandments prohibit bearing “false witness” against a neighbor, most Christians think it is always wrong to tell a lie. Not just wrong, but sinful—a character flaw. However, while it is true that honesty is generally a good principle for social harmony, telling a lie is not always immoral. We do have laws against perjury, false advertising, contractual misrepresentation, impersonating an officer, identity theft, and so on, but it is generally not illegal to tell a lie.
Suppose a woman came to your front door, bruised and bleeding, saying that her husband is trying to kill her. You take her into your home, tend to her wounds, give her a place to stay for a while. Later, her husband comes banging on your door, shouting, “Do you know where my wife is?!” What do you do? As a good moral person, do you tell him the truth? I think all of us know that in that particular situation, the most moral thing to do is lie to that man. Otherwise, we risk greater harm to the woman. Telling that lie is not a sin: it is a good act of which you should be proud. But some Christians have told me that although they would indeed lie to the husband, they would feel bad about it and would later ask God for forgiveness. In their polarized brains, telling a lie is always sinful. Morality is absolute. Such colorblind moral thinking influences all ethical issues with which society is struggling, including stem-cell research, birth control, abortion, gay marriage, doctor-assisted suicide, war, state-church separation, teaching evolution, protecting the environment, animal rights, and global climate change. A religiously polarized brain cannot see that an ethical decision is often a compromise, a lesser of two evils, a contextual assessment of the relative merits of consequences, a practical matter. Fundamentalist believers require that there always be “One Right Answer,” a code of Absolute Morality, when most of our lives are lived in the gray area—or the spectrum—of situational ethics. Sometimes there is no “right answer,” as I showed in chapter 2 where reason and instinct sometimes conflict. As a result of polarized thinking, fundamentalists will often make horribly blunt ethical decisions. Holy war, opposition to birth control, killing abortion doctors, denying medical treatment to one’s children (because the bible says prayer will heal the sick), corporal punishment, death penalty, opposition to science education, refusal to divorce an abusive spouse, and destruction of the environment (because this world is merely a stepping stone to eternity) are some examples.
I think “religious morality” is an oxymoron. Morality is morality, and qualifying it with the word “religious” does not strengthen it. It weakens it. (The same is true with the phrase “alternative medicine.” Medicine is medicine. Sometimes “alternative medicine” actually works, and when it does we call it “medicine.”) As I mention in the previous chapter, “religious morality” reduces human behavior to a monochromatic one-size-fits-all orthodoxy that is actually more dangerous than the broader humanistic principle of reducing harm. I think religion actually compromises moral judgment.
During my debate with Dinesh D’Souza at the University of Wisconsin, I announced that I would prove to that audience that religion actually compromises moral judgment. First, I told them this story:
Suppose I break into the home of a loving Christian family. This mother, father, and two children are faithful church attenders who read the bible and pray every day. They are generous, good people who help others and witness for their faith in Jesus. I tie them up and shoot the dog. I drown their cat in the bathtub. Then I set the house on fire and they all die. When the police ask me, “Why did you do it?” I reply: “No reason. The Devil made me do it.”
I said to the audience, “Raise your hands if you think I am a moral monster.” Every hand in that room of 1,500 people went up. Then I told them a morally equivalent story:
In the biblical Book of Job we read about a good “blameless and upright” family man who was faithful in worship yet endured horrible torture at the hand of the God he loved. Satan, with God’s explicit permission, caused a huge wind to blow down a wall and kill Job’s ten children. All of his thousands of animals were killed. (The bible doesn’t say if he had a dog or a cat.) In Job 2:3 we find these words: “The LORD said to Satan, ‘Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil. He still persists in his integrity, although you incited me against him, to destroy him for no reason.’” So the police ask God, “Why did you do it,” and God replies: “No reason. The Devil made me do it.”
Then I said to the audience, “Raise your hands if you think the God of the bible is a moral monster.” Less than half the hands shot up.
That is proof that hundreds of people in that room had eyes to see, but saw not. The same crime by two different actors for the same reason is judged morally wrong when committed by only one of the actors. This is a psychological bias induced by religion. It is “looking the other way,” deliberately excusing the actions of a family member or other person you admire or love. It is what allows ministers and priests to get away with abusing children right under the noses of their parishioners who can’t imagine their beloved leader would do anything wrong—or if it looks wrong, there must be a good reason for it. If your hand raised for both situations, you are able to make objective moral judgments. If you did not raise your hand for the second example, you are religiously colorblind and morally compromised.
Think about truth. Most fundamentalists demand that truth claims be absolute. In true polarized fashion, Jesus reportedly said, “All you need to say is simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.” Christians are required to think that any answer between the extremes comes from Satan! This might look like a simplistic or stubborn attitude, but it is much more dangerous. That polarized mind-set has got people killed.
John Calvin actually had his co-reformer Michael Servetus executed because he dared to challenge his absolute interpretation of the bible. Both men were opponents of the autocracy and legalism of Roman Catholicism and broke away from that “one true church.” Protestants were protesters, after all. You might think this rebellious attitude would liberalize their thinking, and for some Protestants it did. But while Servetus continued to move in a flexible direction, free to think and question, Calvin made one hop away from Catholicism and then locked himself in place again. After Calvin wrote his Institutes of the Christian Religion, his Protestant theology became engraved in stone, turning into the new “one true faith.” He could hardly admit error after that, so when good-hearted, trusting Servetus pointed out that Calvin had made a mistake about the biblical doctrine of the Trinity, he found himself arrested, wrongly convicted of blasphemy and heresy, and burned at the stake while Calvin watched. The killers used green wood for the fire so that his death would be prolonged, his own “heretical” book lashed to his body to go up in flames with him.
Servetus was murdered because of the misplacement of a preposition. His view of the nature of God was a different hue from Calvin’s. Servetus had discovered that the New Testament does not actually teach the concept of the Trinity. (Hence, the birth of modern Unitarianism where the deity is not “God in three persons” but simply “one God.”) There is only one verse in the bible that explicitly mentions the triune nature of God in three persons: “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one” (1 John 5:7). This is known as the Johannine Comma, because, as Servetus learned, it did not appear in any preceding Greek manuscripts of the biblical text. That verse had been interpolated into the more recent Latin Vulgate translation by the Catholic Church. Servetus eagerly brought this textual and doctrinal error to Calvin’s attention, naively imagining he would welcome another opportunity to correct the fallacies of Catholicism. However, while rejecting Catholic orthodoxy, Calvin could not abandon the doctrine of a triune God. Since the Trinity was affirmed in Calvin’s Institutes, and since truth is absolute, Servetus’ “freethinking” attitude was deemed blasphemous (not to mention that his friend was challenging his authority and credibility). Servetus had gone too far: he was proposing the heretical idea that opinions should be based on facts.
The main issue was the nature of Jesus. In trinitarian thinking, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are God, and have always been God. In unitarian thinking, Jesus only came into existence when he was born a human, when “the word became flesh.” To unitarians, Jesus was just a man, the “son of God” (also called “the son of man”) while he lived on earth. Servetus called him “Jesus, the son of the eternal God.” Calvin called him “Jesus, the eternal son of God.” See the difference? Does the rearrangement of a preposition and adjective merit the death penalty?
Calvin could have stopped the execution at any moment, and most historians think he would have done so if Servetus had recanted and apologized for his “error.” But in the final moments of his agony, Servetus bravely called out, “Jesus, son of the eternal God, have mercy on me!” Hearing those words, Calvin, watching from a second floor, shut the window and let him die.4
John Calvin suffered from religious color blindness. (Not to mention arrogance, hatred, and malice.) There was only one way to look at the world. His way. He could not see that Servetus was indeed a friend—a smart friend with his own interpretation, a different frequency within the spectrum of Protestantism. In Calvin’s mind, there was no prism, no latitude, no shades of gray, no hues of color. The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony brought Calvin’s monochromatic rigidness with them to the American continent, and the United States is still dealing with that calcified mind-set to this day.
Fundamentalists have a desperate need to agree with each other 100 percent. To feel confident and unthreatened, the religiously colorblind need to know that all the members of their group are seeing the same color. “I appeal to you, brothers and sisters,” Paul wrote, “in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought” (1 Corinthians 1:10). He didn’t explain how to choose the person who makes the decision that everyone else should agree with. He only suggested that those who don’t go along with the crowd, those who think for themselves, should be kicked out of the group. “If your thoughts are not my thoughts, they are goodbye thoughts.”
Fundamentalists need truth to be absolute. They are extremely uncomfortable with uncertainty or estimates of truth. They think truth is an object. Jesus said, “I am the truth.” But a person cannot be the truth. Truth is not a thing. Truth is simply a measure of how well a statement matches reality. The only thing that can be true or false is a statement, a proposition. Reality is not truth: reality is reality. If the sky is blue and I say, “The sky is blue,” then there is a strong correspondence between my statement and reality, so my statement would be true. If I say, “The sky is orange with black polka dots,” there is a very low correspondence, so my statement would be false. Of course, the sky is always changing color (it is sometimes orange), and is dark during the night, so “the sky is blue” is a true statement that has to be qualified. It is not absolute.
In science and history, truth is always a matter of probability, not 100 percent certainty. Scientists talk about needing 95 percent confidence, or 98 percent confidence before claiming something is a fact, and even then it is qualified with a small amount of uncertainty. History is the weakest of the sciences, so weak that some do not consider it a science at all. Historians use words like “very unlikely,” or “almost certainly,” or “probably not,” or “if the records are to be trusted,” or “nearly universally rejected by scholars.” Did Homer exist as an actual historical person? Maybe yes, maybe no. The Iliad and The Odyssey exist, so it is conceivable there was one person, possibly named Homer, who could not see blue, who wrote them. But some scholars think the poetry as we know it was a later compilation from earlier oral sources, edited, redacted, interpolated, and that even the earlier sources may have been compilations of poems from one or more persons. If by Homer we mean “a person or persons who wrote those earliest poems,” then yes, Homer existed. But if we mean a specific person in history whose name was Homer who wrote the epics as we know them, then we have to back off and say “probably,” or “probably not,” depending on which scholarship we consult. However, if historians were fundamentalists, they would have to say “definitely yes” or “absolutely not,” disallowing uncertainty. Fortunately, most historians are not colorblind.
The same is true with the existence of the historical Jesus. As I write in Godless, I think the probability of the existence of a historical person named Jesus, the founder of Christianity, is very low. I don’t think it is zero, but I definitely think it is below 50 percent—maybe I would put it around 20 percent or 30 percent. Although I might be wrong, I am comfortable calling Jesus a myth. Bart Ehrman disagrees.5 Ehrman is also a former preacher, like me, now a nonbeliever, and a biblical scholar who wrote Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. He thinks it is higher than 50 percent, but even he admits it is not absolutely certain. I don’t know what probability Bart would pick, but suppose I think it is 42 percent and he thinks it is 58 percent. Those two positions are not so far apart, but if we were forced to bluntly round it up or down, like a fundamentalist, then I would have to say “no” and he would have to say “yes.” However, we don’t have to round it off. We can accept the uncertainty, and remain flexible as we learn more. We can argue for our respective positions. In the future, I might raise my assessment or Bart might lower his. Of course, neither of us thinks in actual numbers, like a statistician, but that is possible to do. Some historians are using Bayes’s Theorem to calculate more focused probabilities.6
Just to be clear, neither Ehrman nor I think Jesus as portrayed in the New Testament actually existed. There is a difference between the historical Jesus and the literary Jesus.7 Perhaps there was a historical self-proclaimed messiah named Yeshua the Christ after whom the Gospels were based (there were others, such as Judas the Christ and Theudas the Christ), but the supernatural miracle-working cartoon character precisely depicted in the Gospels did not exist. In that case, the New Testament is a kind of historical fiction. Since fundamentalist Christians claim to worship the Jesus of the New Testament, dismissing the existence of the literary Christ is the same as doubting that their Lord and Savior ever lived at all. Unable to think in shades of color, some of them claim I am a fundamentalist atheist who is saying Jesus never existed. I am not saying that at all. They fail to perceive the color difference between the historical Jesus and the New Testament Jesus. All I am saying is that the probability of the historical Jesus is very low (so I am open to adjusting my assessment), but the probability of the New Testament Jesus is so extremely low that we can safely round it down to zero, at least in informal conversation. If you don’t understand the distinction, or the process, then you are religiously colorblind.
Paul Bunyan might be a useful comparison. It is possible that there indeed existed a large Canadian lumberjack named Paul Bunyan who fought with the French against the British in the early nineteenth century. We don’t know, but we can’t rule it out. We have a story, after all. However, the story was written down much later than the actual events. We also notice that the legend of a towering logger who dug the Great Lakes as a watering hole for his gigantic blue ox looks very much like a fable. The exaggerated fable might have been based on actual core events, but I think you would agree that the probability of the existence of the literary Paul Bunyan character (as portrayed in the story) is very close to zero, and that the probability of the existence of the historical Paul Bunyan is higher, perhaps 15 percent or 30 percent. In neither case do we have absolute certainty. It is possible that the entire tale is a myth. If you can live with that, then you can handle uncertainty. If you can’t live with that same process of comparing probabilities between the core historical Jesus and the later story of the wonder-working New Testament Jesus, then you are religiously colorblind. You have magically turned faith into fact, water into wine.
Truth is rarely black and white. (I wanted to write “never black and white,” but that statement would be absolute. I need to allow that I might be wrong.) Forcing truth to be absolute is like making the rainbow a solid color, which is no rainbow at all.
The next time you talk with a true believer, remember that fundamentalists are religiously colorblind. That’s what it means to be a fundamentalist. That includes the founder of Christianity. Jesus, if he existed, called himself “the Truth,” and said, “He that is not with me is against me.” He didn’t understand neutrality. If you are not with him, that does not mean you are against him. You might not have enough information to decide one way or the other, waiting to make up your mind. You might prefer to think for yourself, not bringing “every thought into captivity,” considering some of his teachings to be good, and others bad. You might see him in context, a product of an earlier era of magical thinking when gods and saviors popped up like dandelions, an honest (or not) preacher with a messiah complex and a handful of sometimes-useful platitudes. You might disagree with him entirely but grant him and his followers the freedom to believe as they choose. That doesn’t mean you are “against him.” You might admire much of his teachings but think perhaps some (or most) of those words were put into his mouth by the writers. But Jesus himself, if he existed and really said what the text reports, didn’t grasp probability, subtlety, or tolerance. He and his orthodox followers are unable to see blue, like the ancient Greeks, or puce, like the modern author of this book. Understand them, don’t bully them; they are differently abled.
When you are conversing with a fundamentalist, it might seem like you are both talking a foreign language. You might say “tolerance for all lifestyles,” but they will hear “evil!” You may ponder the probabilities of the historicity of Jesus, but they will hear “Christ denier!” You might try to show that morality is situational and relative, and they will shout “reprobate!” You might affirm the right of women to control their reproductive future, and they will scream “baby killer!” They are the ones with the perceptual problem, not you.
Finally, think about purpose. To claim there is “a purpose of life” is to pound it flat. It’s like saying all songs must be played in one key, all art painted in one color, and all sculptures carved from the same stone. That is true nihilism. There are many purposes in life, which makes life interesting, beautiful, challenging, sometimes fun, sometimes heartbreaking. To believe there is just one “purpose of life” is to deny the joyful dimensions of our existence. It turns us into robots. To live as a slave is dreary and depressing; to live free is bright and exciting. Both have their challenges, but only freedom gives you the chance to truly live and grow, to taste the varieties of experience, to hear the rich harmonies and see all the colors of the rainbow.