Gen. Kenan Evren: No Atatürk

The story begins at the dawn of the twentieth century, when Turkish army officers, then the most well-educated, forward-looking people in the Ottoman Empire, overthrew centuries of rule by Muslim sultans. There isn’t space to talk about that in detail here, but you can sneak a peek at a chapter from my forthcoming book to get the full story. Ultimately the military, led by the extraordinary Kemal Mustafa Atatürk, established a secular republic, in a revolution more sweeping (and less bloody) than anything that occurred in America, France, Russia, or China. Not without intense resistance, though, from the Muslim God experts displaced from power, who forced Atatürk to put down a number of armed revolts. When his successor allowed free elections in 1950, a party dominated by imams took power, and promptly began whittling away at the provisions of Atatürk’s secular constitution for their own benefit.

Gas lines, 1973

1. The constitutional frameworks of the Islamic countries should be restructured according to Islamic principles and the Arabic language should be spread among the people.

2. Civil laws should be replaced by the Sharia.

3. Women should obey Islamic restrictions.

4. Necessary economic and political steps should be taken to establish modern Islamic states based on the Sharia.

5. At every level of educational training, Islam should be taught as a mandatory subject.

6. The five principles of Islam should be memorized by all primary school students.

7. Secondary school students must learn the entire Koran.

8. In order to promote these goals, Islamic educational institutions must be established in each country.

9. In order to recreate Islamic unity, all Muslim states should first recognize and accept their Islamic attributes and then establish a confederation under the guidance of a commonly elected Caliph.

Saudi oil money began pouring into Turkey. If the shining example of Atatürk’s achievement could be smashed, humanist reformers in other Muslim-majority countries would be marginalized. Some of the money went to capitalize Islamist entrepreneurs; some went directly to Turkey’s religious political party; some went to illegal groups associated with that party, sporting colorful names like the Rapid Freedom Fighters of Islamic Revolution, the Global Brotherhood Front Suicide Squad of Sharia, the Fighters of the Universal Islamic War of Liberation, and the Sharia Liberation Army of the World.

One predictable result of this cash influx was that the religious party grew in electoral strength, becoming a partner in a series of unstable coalition governments. Another predictable result was that political violence soared, especially because the Soviet Union was simultaneously funding its own underground groups. Thousands of political assassinations occurred in Turkey from 1975 to 1980, including parliament members, professors, journalists, and even a former prime minister. By 1980, the assassination pace reached over 20 per day. The combination of the lunacy of Sharia finance and the loss of personal security laid waste to the Turkish economy, which began to experience triple-digit inflation.

Meanwhile, the Muslim World League initiative was having stunning success in other countries. Pakistan turned to radical Islam in early 1979, when General Zia ul-Haq seized power in a coup and imposed Sharia law, which remains in place today. A few months later came the Ayatollah Khomeini’s theocratic revolution in Turkey’s neighbor Iran, which also remains in place today.

Turkey’s military leaders, who saw themselves as the custodians of Atatürk’s revolution, were gravely concerned. In December 1979, they wrote a letter to the president, warning bluntly that:

Our nation no longer has the patience for people who sing the communist international instead of our national anthem; who invite the sharia; who want to bring all sorts of fascism by replacing the democratic regime; and who want anarchy, destruction, and separatism by misusing freedoms that are provided by our Constitution.

The straw that broke the camel’s back came in September, 1980, at a mass rally to protest Israel’s announcement that Jerusalem would become its capital. Backers of the religious party openly called for the destruction of the secular Turkish state, shouting slogans such as “Sharia will come, brutality will end,” “Sovereignty belongs to Allah,” “The Constitution is the Koran,” “Secularism is atheism,” “Government with Allah’s rules,” “We are ready for jihad,” and “Sharia or death.” The Islamists refused to sing the national anthem, instead declaring “We want the call of prayer, we do not sing this anthem.” A few days later, a military junta led by Gen. Kenan Evren took away democracy by seizing control of the state from its duly elected officials.

The Affront to Democracy

Winston Churchill smugly observed in 1947 that “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Maybe so. The point to be made, though, is that “democracy” covers a pretty broad spectrum of possibilities, some of which are not really any better than other forms of government.

Suppose the people voted, and those responsible for counting the ballots simply lied about the results. Would that be a good form of government? Of course not; it would be fraud. One step further: suppose there were two otherwise evenly matched candidates, and one candidate prevails by spreading false information that his opponent was a serial child molester. Anything admirable about that? Again, no. Now go one step further: picture the same two evenly matched candidates, and one of them succeeds in using revered God experts to spread the message that God is on his side, and against the other guy. If you want to get in good with God, you’d better vote the right way. Is that a lot different from the first two cases? It’s still fraud, isn’t it? And it happens all the time, not only in the Muslim-majority world but right here in the United States. Which presidential candidate is it who boasts that “We do what we do because God is with us”? (Hint: he kicked off his re-election campaign yesterday.)

Atatürk understood this. He tried, twice, to have free elections in Turkey with a robust but loyal opposition. He abandoned both efforts when he saw that opposition being hijacked by God experts intent on having one election to get back into power, and then staying there permanently to carry out God’s will. Instead, he installed rules in Turkey’s constitution that in their current form state that “No one shall be allowed to exploit or abuse religion or religious feelings, or things held sacred by religion, in any manner whatsoever, for the purpose of personal or political influence, or for even partially basing the fundamental social, economic, political and legal order of the state on religious tenets.” That’s a sound rule that eliminates a huge impediment to real democracy – but only if it’s enforced.

Turkey’s military and judicial authorities in 1980 and at other times have used their muscle to enforce this rule. Unfortunately, though, Evren was no Atatürk. Once in power, he discovered that he rather liked Saudi money, so long as he could channel it into what he thought would be a “moderate” Islam that he could control. He was ruthless in cracking down on the communist element of Turkey’s instability (which helped him attract American money as well), but he oversaw a massive program of mosque construction and reintroduction of Islam into public education that would have enraged Atatürk.

Evren today

If Evren had shown a little more Atatürk steel in dealing with Turkey’s God experts in the years after 1980, do you think he’d be on trial today?

For hundreds of years after the Spanish conquest of Hernán Cortés, Mexico was ruled by a coterie of priests and soldiers, who sucked as much wealth as they could out of the land for the benefit of the other priests and soldiers who ruled mother Spain. That ended when independence arrived in 1821. The new republican government systematically began returning the land and wealth the church had expropriated to the Mexican people, and regulating the exorbitant fees the church charged the peasants for services like baptism and burial. Naturally, the church opposed all this, and collaborated joyously in the brief restoration of foreign monarchy under the Emperor Maximilian in 1862. But the Mexican people, most of whom seem to be only nominally Catholic, quickly reinstalled a secular government under Benito Juarez, one of the most outstanding leaders any nation ever had.

The church hasn’t endured for this many centuries by giving up easily, though. In 1913 it financed the overthrow of Mexico’s secular government by a brutal military dictator, who later conspired with German diplomats to try to bring Mexico into World War I. The Mexican people didn’t care for this fellow either, and after years of bloody struggle a secular government was re-established in 1920, with a humanistic constitution providing for free and mandatory secular schools, civil marriage, exclusion of foreign-born clergy, broadened ownership of land, collective bargaining, and vastly increased rights for women.

Catholic God experts hated all this, especially the provisions on education. The church is well aware of how weak its argument is among people who are able to think for themselves, and ever since the 4^th century has stressed the importance of brainwashing impressionable children. Squeezing the teaching of magic out of the schools would cripple the church’s hope of ever staging a comeback in Mexico.

In 1926, Mexico’s bishops (with the enthusiastic support of the pope) went on the offensive. In order to “re-establish religious liberty” (the same catch-phrase being used today in the church’s struggle against contraceptive coverage in healthcare plans), they decreed that no more masses or sacraments could be offered to the faithful until the government knuckled under. Simultaneously, powerful Catholic lay organizations demanded a boycott of tax payments, and pressured Catholic educators to stop teaching children in evil public schools. The government responded with an unreasonably harsh crackdown. The result was predictable: in August of that year, 400 armed Catholics in Guadalajara engaged in a shootout with federal troops, which only ended when the rebels ran out of ammunition.

Soon large portions of the country were engulfed in civil war. The Catholic rebels were called the “Cristeros,” a shortened form of Cristo el Rey, or Christ the King. Since Christ was unlikely to appear to rule in person, the Cristeros felt that a church-approved dictator or divine right monarch would be the next best thing. This was no minor skirmish; the government side suffered more casualties than America did in Vietnam, and the Catholic side, with two priests at the helm, may have fared even worse. Brutality and torture were common on both sides.

Unquestionably, some elements on the government side went to indefensible extremes in the struggle to keep Mexico free of religious domination. The governor of Veracruz limited the number of priests to one per one hundred thousand population, and the governor of Tabasco, who named his first-born son Satan, organized “Red Shirt” thugs to burn religious images and terrorize the devout. Would these excesses have happened had the church not kept up a hundred year struggle to restore the hegemony it enjoyed in colonial times, limiting itself to serving those who freely chose to accept its teachings? Only in an alternate universe could we truly know the answer, but I seriously doubt it.

After two years of bitter warfare, former Mexican president Álvaro Obregón was re-elected on a pledge to work out a compromise to end the slaughter. But the day before he was to be inaugurated, he was assassinated by a devout Catholic, and the combat continued. Finally, in 1929, American ambassador Dwight Morrow brokered a truce in which the bishops called off the sacrament strike and the government agreed to suspend enforcement of the more extreme anticlerical measures. The government would not back down on secular education, though, and used the respite from Catholic military campaigns to proliferate religion-free schools in rural Mexico. This infuriated the pope, who issued a major encyclical at the end of the year condemning Catholic participation in secular education:

How grave therefore is the error of those who separate things so closely united, and who think that they can produce good citizens by ways and methods other than those which make for the formation of good Christians. For, let human prudence say what it likes and reason as it pleases, it is impossible to produce true temporal peace and tranquility by things repugnant or opposed to the peace and happiness of eternity.

The result was continued Catholic disruption of “peace and tranquility” throughout the 1930s, largely directed at teachers in the newly established schools. Hundreds of teachers were butchered. Many of the corpses had their ears cut off, presumably because of their refusal to hear God’s word.

The enduring Catholic alliance with Mexico’s wealthiest classes continued through the 1930s as well. The government’s campaign for land reform was frustrated in many areas by priests who persuaded peasants that accepting land from subdivided estates would send them straight to hell, where they could share quarters with others who had committed the grave sin of joining a labor union.

Angels at the foot of Cristo el Rey hold an earthly crown and a crown of thorns

One of the few sensible points being made by the Catholic hierarchy in its effort to win special treatment under the new healthcare law is that the law gives other religious groups, like the Amish, special treatment. Therefore, it is discriminatory not to give special treatment to Catholics, who don’t want to provide contraception in their healthcare plans. As Sister Mary Ann Walsh, spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops put it:

The government allows other religions to live out their beliefs. The Amish and Christian Scientists have a conscientious objection to health insurance, and so the law exempts them from buying it. The government acknowledges the right of these religious groups to live out their religious convictions in US society. Why are beliefs of Catholics and others dismissed?

She has her facts straight, at least for the Amish. The Obama healthcare law passed by Congress has a section providing a “religious exemption” from the mandate that all individuals be covered by health insurance. The exemption doesn’t mention the Amish by name, but it cross-references Internal Revenue Code Section 1402(g), which allows self-employed persons who are “members of certain religious faiths” to opt out of paying Social Security and Medicare taxes. This privilege is available to a God believer who “is conscientiously opposed to acceptance of the benefits of any private or public insurance which makes payments in the event of death, disability, old-age, or retirement or makes payments toward the cost of, or provides services for, medical care (including the benefits of any insurance system established by the Social Security Act),” and who agrees to forego receiving any Social Security benefits.

What does Social Security have to do with religion, Amish or otherwise? According to the Supreme Court, in a case decided exactly 30 years ago last month, “The Amish believe that there is a religiously based obligation to provide for their fellow members the kind of assistance contemplated by the social security system … both payment and receipt of social security benefits is forbidden by the Amish faith.” As another author puts it, “to the Amish, insurance plans demonstrate a lack of faith in God’s plan.”

Despite this finding, the Court said it didn’t care what the Amish beliefs are: rules are rules, and Amish employers have to pay into the social security system for their employees just like other employers do. As the Court put it, “a comprehensive national social security system providing for voluntary participation would be almost a contradiction in terms.”

It’s misleading to say that the Amish are opposed to insurance. They are not. In fact, they pride themselves on taking care of members of their own community when old age or catastrophes prevent them from taking care of themselves. What they are really opposed to is paying for insurance where any of the benefits go to non-Amish, which is hard to distinguish from white people objecting to paying for insurance where the benefits might go to non-whites.

The Amish are also opposed to participating in a legal scheme with actual enforceable rights involved. Under their current special privileges, their bishops can excommunicate or “shun” anyone who doesn’t toe the line, which (among other things) means that person never gets any benefits when he or she needs them. Suppose an Amish fellow who opts out of Social Security dutifully pays to help others in his community for decades on end, then manages to tick off a local bishop, perhaps by expressing sympathy for humanists. Who takes care of his old age? Not Social Security, because he opted out. Not the Amish, because they don’t like him anymore. He’s just out of luck.

The Court’s opinion is worth quoting in the context of the current debate over giving Catholics a special exemption from the rule requiring commercial employers to provide contraceptive coverage:

When followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity. Granting an exemption from social security taxes to an employer operates to impose the employer’s religious faith on the employees.

Substitute “contraceptive coverage” for “social security taxes” in that paragraph, and it applies to today’s debate quite precisely.

Unfortunately, despite this Supreme Court case confirming that Amish Social Security exemptions are not legally required, Congress continues to provide such exemptions anyway, at least for the self-employed. You’ll have to explain to me why, because I don’t understand it. Is it because the Amish have beards? Hippies had beards, and Congress never did anything for them. My guess is that the Amish have a lot of other more mainstream religions lobbying on their behalf, precisely so that they in turn can say “The Amish get special treatment – why don’t we?”, as the Catholics are doing today. This is the same reason why mainstream religions support cults that do things like use illegal drugs and kill innocent animals in sacrifice rituals.

Justice Douglas

It is the future of the student, not the future of the parents, that is imperiled by today’s decision. If a parent keeps his child out of school beyond the grade school, then the child will be forever barred from entry into the new and amazing world of diversity that we have today. … If he is harnessed to the Amish way of life by those in authority over him, and if his education is truncated, his entire life may be stunted and deformed.

The rest of society suffers as well. What bright young Amish child might have discovered a cure for leukemia, or written a powerful novel, or become an effective teacher, if he or she had been allowed the same educational opportunities the state requires for others when it passed its compulsory education law? We’ll never know.

Social Security, health care, and education are big ticket items, but the Amish demand (and often receive) special privileges in small matters as well. They insist on using outhouses, even when their sewage pollutes their neighbors’ wells; they refuse to pay fines for doing so, because paying fines is against their religion. They refuse to turn over child molesters to the law, because they think their “shunning” treatment is all the punishment God demands. When Catholics do that, the world comes down on them like a ton of bricks; but the Amish are so darned cute, the press leaves them alone. The Amish insist on getting special exemptions from rules as mundane as building codes, including such ungodly ideas as smoke detectors; when they can’t get exemptions, they simply ignore the law. Some even refuse to put required triangular safety symbols on their slow-moving buggies, because the use of “worldly symbols” indicates a lack of trust in God, and because – I’m not making this up – the triangle symbolizes the Trinity, which they don’t believe in. So if you ever wreck your car smashing into an Amish buggy you didn’t see, remember that it’s your own fault, because you should have trusted more in God.

If adults, for religious or any other reason, want to live simply and forego the pleasures and pitfalls of the modern world, more power to them – so long as they let their children have the meaningful opportunity to decide for themselves how to live, and so long as they obey the same rules you and I do. In fact, seeking special exemptions is a peculiarly modern practice, perfected by an army of lawyers and K Street lobbyists. If the Amish truly want to live humbly, they should start following the law the way it’s written, without putting themselves on any prima donna pedestal.

Will Archbishop Dolan's rhetoric lead to more Catholic-inspired violence?

Archbishop Timothy Dolan, USCCB’s president, complains about a “drive to neuter religion,” intended to “push religion back into the sacristy.” He’s not claiming any violent assaults on worshipers, seizure of church property, criminalization of preaching, or discrimination against believers in housing or employment. What makes him see red is the government starting to treat Catholic organizations the same way it treats everyone else. The horror!

The bishops have two main complaints: laws allowing marriages of which they disapprove, and laws requiring healthcare plans to offer specified coverage, including contraceptives.

Marriage

Catholic God experts teach that sex for purposes other than procreation is sinful, thus ruling out all forms of homosexual sex. The logical next step is to rule out marriage between members of the same sex. Fine – if the church wants to tell people what it thinks God is against and urge them not to do it, it has every right to make that case. Duly elected and appointed government officials, though, in a growing number of jurisdictions, are changing laws to allow same-sex marriage for people willing to take their chances on the afterlife. With the right to marry comes the right to be treated like you are married, and the right to the same legal status as any docile Catholic in daily life.

“Conscience violation!” shrieks the church. Why? Catholic florists and caterers, they insist, must have the right to refuse to serve weddings they disapprove of. Catholic hoteliers must have the right to refuse accommodation to same-sex couples, who might perform unspeakable acts on their Catholic sheets. Catholic adoption agencies must have the right to refuse service to same-sex couples, and Catholic schools must have the right to expel children who commit the sin of having been adopted by people whose sexual habits are disdained by the church.

Here’s a fact you didn’t know. When you think about the organization calling itself “Catholic Charities,” do you picture an outfit that receives donations from the church and individual Catholics, using them to do good in the community? I always did, until I learned that an astonishing 62% of its funding comes from various levels of government, and only 3% comes from Catholic diocese funds controlled by the bishops doing the complaining. Truth in advertising would call for a change in Catholic Charities’ name, to something like “Taxpayer Funded Program to Make the Catholic Church Look Good.” A mouthful, I’ll admit; I’m open to suggestions for an accurate name that would yield a clever acronym. In any case, when whatever-you-call-it decided to stop helping all orphans altogether in order to make its political point against adoption by gay parents, the bishops pleaded for public sympathy for their injured consciences.

The Catholic argument is identical to that used by white supremacists, religious and otherwise, who demanded the right to refuse to serve black people during the Jim Crow era. There are people who earnestly believe in the inferiority of the black race, and that it is God’s plan for the races to live separately. That’s why, they say, God put blacks on one continent and whites on another. Their belief is every bit as sincere as the Catholic belief that homosexual activity is immoral. Maybe the segregationists, or the Catholics, or even both, are right. But when duly constituted governments accountable to the people take a contrary view, then the same laws need to apply to everybody the same way. That’s what my conscience says, and my conscience is as good as theirs is.

Contraceptives

The new healthcare law requires insurance plans to offer at least minimum levels of coverage of basic medical needs, thus allowing consumers to compare apples to apples when they shop for insurance. Included on the list of minimum requirements is coverage for contraceptives, used by an enormous proportion of women in their child-bearing years. This, according to the bishops, is an attack on religious liberty, because it forces people who don’t approve of the use of contraceptives to pay premiums for the benefit of those who do.

I help pay for a lot of things I don’t approve of. Ethanol subsidies. The war in Afghanistan. An embassy in the Vatican. Weapons for Israel. John Boehner’s salary. Your list is probably different, but I’m sure there a lot of things you help pay for that you don’t approve of, either. Neither of us like it, but we know we’re part of a bigger group, and it’s not possible to make everybody in the group happy all the time. So we don’t demand special treatment, or an individual reduction in our tax payments for programs we don’t like, because we know government couldn’t function if everyone paid only for the things they like.

No one is requiring any Catholic to use contraceptives. The church has every right to teach that contraceptive use is immoral and to urge people to forego it in their own personal lives. No one is trying to suppress its right to make its case. When the church demands special privileges to allow its members to avoid paying for things that affect only people other than themselves, just because God is on their side, that’s different.

The same contraceptive issue arises in HIV prevention and other international development programs. One of the simplest, cheapest ways to prevent the spread of HIV is to encourage the use of condoms – a far easier task than encouraging people not to have sex at all. So, the U.S. Agency for International Development requires distribution of condoms in HIV prevention programs run by contractors using government money, just like any other organization that promotes techniques that work over techniques that don’t. Those who don’t follow the rules don’t get contracts. The bishops cry foul, whimpering that since the Catholic aid programs are the only ones mulish enough to resist distribution of condoms, this is “anti-Catholic discrimination,” “an unprecedented intrusion by the federal government into the precincts of religion.” This is no more anti-Catholic than it is anti-Semitic for a cop to give a speeding ticket to a driver who turns out to be a Jew. There’s one set of rules, they’re based on empirical data and common sense, and they need to apply the same to everyone regardless of religion. If Catholics’ conscience forbids them from distributing condoms, then they shouldn’t do it. But they shouldn’t get the contract, either. Jesus managed nicely without ever getting any government contracts.

Civil disobedience?

Brugger: 'We won't do it.'

We need to stand up and say confidently and resolutely to Kathleen Sebelius, her thugs at HHS and her puppet-master in the White House: Your view is false and untrue; it radically violates human good and is destructive of communal integrity. Forcing persons wrongfully to cooperate in actions they judge to be evil is evil. And no president, king or emperor rightly demands others to do what is evil. We won’t do it.

I’m not quite sure what he means by “We won’t do it,” but it sounds like he’s saying that Catholic employers should refuse to offer the type of health insurance mandated by law, or perhaps that Catholics should refuse to pay the portion of their premiums calculated to fund services the hierarchy doesn’t like.

This is not the first time Catholics have made such a threat. In the mid-20^th century, the issue was schools. Catholic parents were required on pain of eternal damnation to send their children to a Catholic school, if one was available. In some dioceses, the sin of violating this rule was so grave that it could not be forgiven by an ordinary priest in the confessional, but required a special appeal to the bishop for absolution. The problem was that Catholic parents also had to pay taxes to support public schools, which they could not use because doing so would violate their religious obligation – just like they are now being asked to pay for contraceptives they are not supposed to use themselves.

A pamphlet issued by the Jesuit priest Paul L. Blakely, S.J., sounded a lot like Mr. Brugger:

Our first duty to the public school is not to pay taxes for its maintenance. … Justice cannot oblige the support of a system which we are forbidden in conscience to use, or a system which we conscientiously hold to be bad in principle and bad in its ultimate consequences.

Catholic violence in Caraquet, New Brunswick, 1875

Will today’s overheated Catholic rhetoric end in violence? Of course not. It couldn’t happen here. Any more than it could happen in, say, 1875 New Brunswick.

The central story of The Swerve is the discovery by an ex-Papal bureaucrat of a long lost Roman manuscript called De Rerum Natura, or “The Nature of Things.” Greenblatt’s recounting of how and why the book resurfaced in the 15^th century is fascinating, but for me what’s far more important is the text of The Nature of Things itself, and the light it sheds on pre-Christian humanism.

The Pope today speaks often of Europe’s “Christian roots,” as though before Christianity arrived Europe was a kind of caveman chaos. In a 2008 message, for example, Benedict XVI proclaimed that:

Contemporary Europe, peering into the third millennium, is the fruit of two millennia of civilization. … Europe appears to us today as a precious fabric, whose weave is made up of the principles and values of the Gospel … though unfortunately many Europeans seem to forget Europe’s Christian roots, the latter are alive and should trace the path and nourish the hope of millions of citizens who share the same values.

So before the “two millennia of civilization,” there was what? Last September, he told the German Bundestag that “The conviction that there is a Creator God is what gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea of equality of all before the law, the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person and the awareness of one’s responsibility for one’s actions.” So before Christianity, human rights, equality before the law, human dignity, and responsibility for one’s actions had not yet been invented.

The Nature of Things puts the lie to this. It was written around 50 years before Christ by a Roman poet named Lucretius, of whose life we know almost nothing. What we do know from reading The Nature of Things is that Lucretius was a devotee of the Greek philosopher Epicurus, who had lived over two centuries earlier: “the man in genius who o’er-topped the human race.” Epicurus was a dyed-in-the-wool humanist, who put man and his happiness at the center of his world. He did not deny the possibility of Gods, but didn’t regard them as important; if they existed, they were so far above us that they couldn’t possibly care about what happens here on earth, any more than we care about the affairs of paramecia. So forget about fearing the Gods, he argued, and live your life in a way that maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain.

This does not mean leading a life of unrestrained debauchery. On the contrary, Epicurus and his followers spent a lot of time working out what truly produces the most happiness in the long run. They concluded that pleasure maximization not only means planning at least a bit further ahead than the next glass of wine, but even involves matters beyond physical sensation, such as friendship, family, and contentment of the mind. Decent treatment of others also plays a role, because otherwise one could have no expectation of decent treatment for oneself, resulting in a most unpleasant state of uncertainty and fear. Some even demonstrated the conundrum that a certain degree of asceticism could help maximize ultimate pleasure; toning down the level of desires made them easier to satisfy. “To accustom one’s self, therefore, to simple and inexpensive habits is a great ingredient in the perfecting of health, and makes a man free from hesitation with respect to the necessary uses of life.”

Lucretius focused less on the ethics of Epicurus and more on the Epicurean explanation of the natural world – i.e., on “the nature of things.” As Lucretius described it, everything in the world, even the human soul, consists of tiny indivisible particles. Everything that occurs is the result of these particles colliding and interacting with one another, with no supernatural purpose or plan behind their motions. This doesn’t mean a deterministic world where everything is preordained by the physics of particle bounces; according to Lucretius, particles have a slight degree of unpredictableness to their actions, which he called a “swerve,” somewhat akin to free will. (Quantum physics theories today have vaguely similar notions of unpredictability about subatomic particles, but don’t expect me to explain them for you.)

Lucretius builds from the particles concept to a general explanation of everything, from optics to sex to volcanos. Many of his theories we know today to be wrong; volcanos are not really caused by subterranean winds. Others are closer to the mark: “The moon she possibly doth shine because strook by the rays of the sun.” He even hinted at Darwinian natural selection, observing that certain species of “monsters” died out because they didn’t have what it takes to survive and propagate.

For Lucretius, the pursuit of material knowledge was part of pleasure maximization, by removing unpleasant fear of the unknown:

For just as children tremble and fear all in the viewless dark, so even we at times dread in the light so many things that be no whit more fearsome than what children feign, shuddering, will be upon them in the dark. This terror, then, this darkness of the mind, not sunrise with its flaring spokes of light, nor glittering arrows of morning sun disperse, but only nature’s aspect and her law.

Ascribing natural causes to natural phenomena led Lucretius to far greater peace of mind than living in fear of the wrath of unpredictable Gods, from whom no form of prayer or sacrifice seemed to produce reliable results. Besides, he argued, if a power greater than us had fashioned the world, it would have made a better job of it: “In no wise the nature of all things for us was fashioned by a power divine – so great the faults it stands encumbered with.”

As Greenblatt points out, scientific knowledge in the era before the Pope tells us civilization began grew at an impressive rate. Euclid gave us geometry, Archimedes discovered pi and laid the foundation for calculus. Galen made immense contributions to the systematic study of medicine, Alexandrian astronomers described a spherical earth that revolved about the sun, engineers advanced practical uses of hydraulics and pneumatics. Lucretius marveled that “Even now some arts are being still refined, still increased: now unto ships is being added many a new device.”

Augustine of Hippo, who brought us the Dark Age

There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of Curiosity. It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.

Augustine insisted that there is no need to be “dismayed if Christians are ignorant about the properties and the number of the basic elements of nature, or about the motion, order, and deviations of the stars, the map of the heavens, the kinds and nature of animals, plants, stones, springs, rivers, and mountains. … For the Christian, it is enough to believe that the cause of all created things . . . is . . the goodness of the Creator.”

By the brute force of Roman emperors, Augustine’s worldview prevailed, and that of Lucretius and Epicurus became a thought-crime. That’s why The Nature of Things disappeared for a thousand years, and why only the decadence of Papal court intrigue that Greenblatt so vividly recounts allowed it to resurface. Next time you hear a God expert declaim about western civilization’s “Christian roots,” think about old pre-Christian Lucretius, the fellow who warned us about the priests of his own time:

With civic blood a fortune they amass. They double their riches, greedy heapers-up of corpse on corpse, they have a cruel laugh for the sad burial of a brother-born.

The plan now is to go monthly, with an article appearing the first Sunday of each month, starting January 1. I’m not 100% certain a monthly format will work, but I hope it will. There might be a little less emphasis on the event anniversaries and a little more emphasis on the “equal protection” aspects of current news items, highlighting the ways in which God experts are treated better than the rest of us. Thanks to the readers, double thanks to the commenters, and let’s hope the monthly format will free up your time to read MY BOOK, which will be coming out sometime in the middle of next year.

Letitia Dunbar-Harrison, the librarian who threatened the God experts of County Mayo

That last item doesn’t sound so exciting, does it? Well, it was, especially for those of us interested in the power that God experts have wielded over the centuries (and still do today). For the librarian in question was a Protestant, County Mayo was mostly Catholic, and the war of wills between politicians who thought that librarians ought to be hired on their library skills versus those who thought they ought to be hired based on which band of God experts they followed was fought all the way to the national parliament.

Ireland had only been independent for a decade in December, 1931; the Anglo-Irish Treaty that led to the establishment of the Irish Free State was signed 90 years ago this Tuesday. The southern portion of the island was overwhelmingly Catholic, and one of the great obstacles to Irish independence from Great Britain ever since the Wolfe Tone uprising of 1798 had been a fear for what would happen to Ireland’s Protestant minority if the Catholics ever took the upper hand.

Post-independence events proved that this concern was not just British propaganda. Witness the case of Miss Letitia Dunbar-Harrison, a Protestant from Dublin, and an honors graduate of Trinity College. In July, 1930, she was assigned by the central government to the post of chief librarian of the Carnegie Library in Castlebar, with advisory functions covering the whole of County Mayo.

Attending Trinity College was a mortal sin

The local branch of Catholic Action, the political arm of the Catholic Church, sprang into action to protest the outrage. Rev. Denis O’Connor, chairman of the library committee, took the lead:

A Protestant young lady … has been appointed as our library adviser. Her culture and philosophy are, on many vital questions, diametrically opposed to Catholic principles and Catholic ideas, and therefore we, as Catholics, cannot be guided by her in selecting the literature that we need.

The tactic used was a tax strike: Catholics were commanded to stop paying local rates until the outrage was resolved. Archbishop Gilmartin encouraged the boycott:

It is gratifying to see how the representatives of our Catholic people are unwilling to subsidize libraries not under Catholic control. Not to speak of those who are alien to our faith, it is not every Catholic who is fit to be in charge of a public library for Catholic readers. Such an onerous position should be assigned to an educated Catholic who would be as remarkable for his loyalty to his religion as for his literary and intellectual attainments.

Public libraries were a particular sore spot for the Church, because they were the principal source of ideas in competition with God’s truth. There was no internet, no television, and no radio; there was the pulpit and little else. In Catholic-controlled Quebec, there was no library donated by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie corresponding to the one in County Mayo, because the local government was successful in keeping it out. As a Catholic pamphleteer in Quebec put it in 1890, a public library is “a pestilential spot … where the public goes to poison itself.” It wasn’t until 1959, when Catholic strongman Maurice Duplessis finally died, that Quebec enacted a law establishing public libraries.

Catholic Ireland rivaled the Soviet Union as the censorship capital of the world. The Irish Constitution itself proclaimed that “The State recognizes the special position of the Holy Catholic and Roman Church as the guardian of the faith professed by the great majority of the citizens … The publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter is an offence which shall be punishable in accordance with law.”

Banned in Ireland

Eamon de Valera

If there were two qualified people who had to deal with a Catholic community, and if one was a Catholic and the other a Protestant, I would unhesitatingly vote for the Catholic. Let us be clear and let us know where we are. … Do not try to force upon a Catholic community a librarian in the quality, so to speak, of a teacher to whom they object. You have the result that the whole library system has been nullified and rendered naught as far as Mayo is concerned. … It is a fundamental teaching, a fundamental matter for Catholics. Every Catholic Deputy in the House knows I am speaking the truth.

After a lot more histrionics, the Catholics prevailed. Eighty years ago this month, the government offered Miss Dunbar-Harrison a transfer to the Military Library in Dublin, which she accepted. She changed her first name as well as her last when she married a Protestant minister, and later gave up on fighting the bigotry of the Republic of Ireland altogether by moving to Ulster. She was far from alone in this decision: approximately half of Ireland’s Protestants fled the country, mostly to the north, by 1950.

As for librarians, when Blanshard wrote in 1953, the Irish Republic did not have a single Protestant county librarian. Today, of course, God expert pressure on librarians is a thing of the past. Or is it? Just what books was Mayor Sarah Palin concerned about when she tried to fire the librarian back in Wasilla?

South Africa’s 17^th century white settlers were Dutch and French Calvinists who believed that God had pre-determined which souls would be saved and which would be condemned to hell, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. By a short logical leap, they decided that God had predetermined the fate of entire races, as well. In particular, God had chosen to favor the white Afrikaaner race, as they now called themselves, and to condemn the blacks who filled the land the Afrikaaners sought for themselves; God’s plan was for blacks to be slaves. After the British took power and abolished slavery early in the 19^th century, the Afrikaaners responded by uprooting themselves and marching further inland, beyond the reach of British power, in what became known as the “Great Trek.” As one diarist explained:

It is not so much their freedom that drove us to such lengths, as their being placed on an equal footing with Christians, contrary to the laws of God and the natural distinction of race and religion, so that it was intolerable for any decent Christian to bow down beneath such a yoke; wherefore we rather withdrew in order thus to preserve our doctrines in purity.

By the early 20^th century, after realizing they could not defeat the British militarily, the Afrikaaners turned to democratic means (among the whites who were permitted to vote) to implement God’s racial ideas. After decades of struggle, a Calvinist-dominated party took power in the elections of 1948 on a platform of “apartheid,” or total separation of the races. Black people, who comprised 80% of the population, were to be restricted to 13% of the land. Blacks temporarily allowed in white territories to work in white-owned factories and mines were barred from all social intercourse with whites; a “Bantu Education Bill,” derided as “education for serfdom,” perpetuated the divide by spending 15 times as much per pupil on whites as on blacks. Black resistance to apartheid was methodically crushed with overwhelming force. As important as the bludgeons and tear gas, though, was the psychological campaign waged by white God experts and propagandists to persuade the majority blacks that they truly were inferior, and that the apartheid laws were thus the natural way of things. After the Sharpville massacre of 1960 and the trials that followed, black resistance to apartheid was largely broken.

Steve Biko

The first logical conclusion to be drawn from Biko’s premise was that blacks needed to break away from the white liberal dominated political organizations that sought to alleviate apartheid, and form their own opposition instead. This caused much consternation among the liberals, and accusations that Biko was as racist as the Calvinist oppressors. Biko insisted, though, that:

As long as blacks are suffering from inferiority complex – a result of 300 years of deliberate oppression, denigration and derision – they will be useless as co-architects of a normal society where man is nothing else but man for his own sake. Hence what is necessary as a prelude to anything else that may come is a very strong grass-roots build-up of black consciousness such that blacks can learn to assert themselves and stake their rightful claim.

Black Consciousness was nonviolent, though not on supernatural Gandhian grounds. Biko believed violence and confrontational civil disobedience were inexpedient because they wouldn’t work; and they were unnecessary if the 80% would come to believe in its own human worth. “We are not interested in armed struggle. We have stated clearly in our own documents that we are not interested either in confrontation methods, by that meaning demonstrations which lead to definite breaking of existing laws, such that there is reaction from the System, what you call the System.” Instead, it was a movement of self-help, of black-run community improvement projects and clinics. As Biko put it succinctly: “Black man, you are on your own.”

The simple idea of “Black Consciousness” began to spread like wildfire among South Africa’s black students. The government deliberately allowed this to happen, in part because it fit with the Calvinist theology of “separateness,” and in part because it was so delightful watching the do-gooder white liberals squirm. Soon, though, authorities realized that they were making a colossal mistake, and that they had better annihilate Black Consciousness because Biko was right: Black Consciousness and apartheid could not co-exist.

Biko was “banned,” which meant that he could not publish articles, be quoted in the press, travel outside his home town, or even meet with more than one person at a time. Still, he managed to get the word out, and both student unrest and strikes by black workers intensified. In 1975, Biko was arrested and imprisoned for 137 days without being charged with a crime or tried. The same year, the government launched a lengthy prosecution of nine activists, in what the Rand Daily Mail called a trial of Black Consciousness itself. Defendants were not accused of committing or encouraging violence, but of promoting an idea that would undermine the state. Biko himself was not a defendant, because as a “banned” person he could not write for the publications at issue. But as the key witness for what the Black Consciousness idea was all about, Biko’s testimony gave him a forum to publicize his ideas he would not have otherwise enjoyed:

I believe that inevitably this government will listen to black opinion. In my view this government is not necessarily set on a Hitlerised course. I think it is buying time. From their interpretation of the situation at the moment, the situation is such that they can continue. … but I believe that as the voice which says “No” grows, [the Prime Minister] is going to listen, he is going to begin to accommodate the feelings of black people, and this is where the bargaining starts.

Soweto riots

The convicted defendants spent many years in jail. Biko himself was arrested three times in the following 8 months; during his third detention, he was beaten to death. His murder marked the turning point in world opinion toward South Africa. Two months later, the United Nations imposed an arms embargo; other countries and institutions began adding their own pressure, including ultimately the United States. When South Africa’s principal Calvinist church organization finally reversed course in 1986 and came out in opposition to apartheid, the moral underpinnings of the entire structure crumbled, as did the system itself shortly thereafter.

The tune was a little older that; it began life earlier in the 19^th century as Say, Brothers, Will You Meet Us On Canaan’s Happy Shore. When the Civil War broke out in April, 1861, Union soldiers picked up on it, changing the opening words to the irreverent John Brown’s Body Lies A’mouldering in the Grave, which caught on quickly among the ranks. John Brown, you may recall, was the God expert abolitionist who had done as much as anyone to prevent America from ending slavery in the orderly, peaceful fashion of the other American republics and colonies. He was executed after a failed attempt to incite a slave insurrection at Harper’s Ferry in 1859. According to one story, the lyrics were dreamed up by a soldier whose name was also John Brown, responding to the joke he kept hearing from his buddies that “I thought John Brown was dead!” Some soldiers who sang the catchy tune thought they were nobly carrying on the work of “the” John Brown, whose soul marched with them; others no doubt had a less sanguine view, more along the lines of “Brown’s dead already – so what the hell am I doing here, getting ready to fill my own moldy grave?”

In any event, Union bigwigs were uncomfortable hearing their men dwell so incessantly on the “good chance of getting killed” aspect of their service, and thus sought a more uplifting song that would be as invigorating to march to without being quite so morbid. When Julia Ward Howe, the wife of a prominent abolitionist editor, accompanied her husband on a visit to President Lincoln and a review of troops stationed in Arlington, Virginia on November 18, 1861, a minister who accompanied her group suggested that if she found the lyrics unseemly, perhaps she could write some better ones.

Julia Ward Howe

I went to bed that night as usual, and slept, according to my wont, quite soundly. I awoke in the gray of the morning twilight; and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind. Having thought out all the stanzas, I said to myself, “I must get up and write these verses down, lest I fall asleep again and forget them.” So, with a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen which I remembered to have used the day before. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper.

The resulting opus was a marvelous mixture of God, blood, and guts:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.”

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.

He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave,
So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time His slave,
Our God is marching on.

Subtle, it wasn’t. We’re fighting for God, our enemies are fighting for “the serpent.” Retreating would be defiance of God’s command. Dying in God’s cause is a fine thing, because it makes you like Jesus. For the well-read, there were also lots of Biblical allusions to make themselves feel smart. Revelation 19:15, for example, is the source for combining the images of a sword and a winepress. The “righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps” related to the writing on the wall behind the lampstand in Daniel, which foretold the destruction of Babylon.

After Howe’s lyrics were published in the Atlantic Monthly a few months later, they became an instant hit, and the unofficial theme song for the entire Union war effort. Many others have followed in Howe’s footsteps by appropriating the same tune, from labor’s Solidarity Forever, for the Union Makes Us Strong to my personal favorite, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Burning of the School.

Howe is far from the only songwriter to associate God with military carnage. Just ten years later, across the Atlantic, Arthur Sullivan (who later teamed up with W. S. Gilbert on lighter fare) composed the melody for Onward Christian Soldiers, assuring listeners that “Christ, the royal Master, leads against the foe; forward into battle see his banners go!”

Christians are not alone in this. Mormon hymnal #258 urges “Hark! the sound of battle sounding loudly and clear; Come join the ranks! Come join the ranks! We are waiting now for soldiers; who’ll volunteer?” The Jewish Psalms, originally meant to be sung, proclaim:

People of Babylon, you are sentenced to be destroyed. Happy are those who pay you back for what you have done to us. Happy are those who grab your babies and smash them against the rocks.

Why such a strong link between God and violence? Here’s my theory. Most wars don’t make much sense, except for a handful of big shots who profit from them. If there is no persuasive rational reason to persuade young men to risk their necks on your behalf, then you need to try some irrational reasons. “God wants you to do it!” is a time-tested, terrific justification for going out and getting shot. Putting God on your team also serves to dampen the soldier’s common-sense fear of death with the fraudulent promise of an afterlife. One Confederate wrote that “Christians make the best soldiers, as they would not fear the consequences after death as others would.” Another reassured his wife in 1862 that “when we lay all upon this altar of our country, the God of Nations will give us a permanent happy existence. How near akin is patriotism to religion!” A Pennsylvania soldier was more succinct: “Religion is what makes brave soldiers.” It’s little wonder that the chairman of the Military Commission in the Confederate House of Representatives testified near the end of the war that “The clergy have done more for our cause, than any other class … Not even the bayonets have done more.”

God’s truth marching on sufficiently inspired both sides in the Civil War to produce over 600,000 dead young men. In a world where religion had lost most of its influence – say, western Europe over the last 60 years – how easy would it be to replicate that feat?

What does Romney really think about miscegenation?

Which is perfectly ok. Mormonism is no more bizarre than Christianity, Islam, or Judaism – it’s just newer. I wouldn’t disqualify Romney based on his supernatural beliefs – even though his bigotry would disqualify me. “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom,” he proclaimed in 2007. “Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.” He went on to condemn humanists in bitter terms:

It’s as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America — the religion of secularism. They are wrong. … We are a nation ‘under God’ and in God, we do indeed trust. We should acknowledge the Creator as did the Founders in ceremony and word. He should remain on our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our history.

That’s still not a disqualifier; humanists get the same middle finger from Obama, who insists that religious faith is “fundamental to human progress.”

There is one big Romney religious scandal that really ought to be a disqualifier, though – unless he’s big enough to issue an apology.

Young Mitt Romney in France

During Romney’s missionary period, standard Mormon doctrine concerning race was exemplified by the Juvenile Instructor, a publication for Mormon children: “We will first inquire into the results of the approbation or displeasure of God upon a people, starting with the belief that a black skin is a mark of the curse of heaven placed upon some portions of mankind. . . We understand that when God made man in his own image and pronounced him very good, that he made him white.”

Mormonism teaches that souls exist long before the humans with which they are associated are born into the world. The official Mormon doctrine was that souls who had sinned against God before physical birth were punished by being born with dark skin. Mormon President Joseph Fielding Smith described this in 1935:

Millions of souls have come into this world cursed with a black skin and have been denied the privilege of priesthood and the fullness of the blessings of the Gospel. These are the descendants of Cain. Moreover, they have been made to feel their inferiority and have been separated from the rest of mankind from the beginning.

Bruce McConkie, the leading modern-day Mormon theologian, wrote in 1958 that “The present status of the negro rests purely and simply on the foundation of pre-existence. Along with all races and peoples he is receiving here what he merits as a result of the long pre-mortal probation in the presence of the Lord.”

When the Supreme Court began ending school segregation in 1954, the Mormon church was appalled. Apostle Mark Petersen stated that:

I think the Lord segregated the Negro, and who is man to change that segregation? It reminds me of the scripture on marriage, ‘what God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.’ Only here we have the reverse of the thing – what God hath separated, let not man bring together again.

Brigham Young

Mormon doctrine was especially vehement on the evils of miscegenation. Brigham Young, the Mormon leader after Joseph Smith:

Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so.

Won’t it be juicy to watch Romney run against the world’s most famous miscegenation product?

The relative darkness of the skin of American Indians, at least in comparison with that of the Mormons, was also related to their sins, according to the Book of Mormon that Romney tried to plaster all over France. “And it came to pass that I beheld, after they had dwindled in unbelief they became a dark, and loathsome, and a filthy people, full of idleness and all manner of abominations.” [I Nephi 12:23].

There was hope for the coloring of Indians who converted to the true faith, though. Spencer W. Kimball noted in 1960 that:

I saw a striking contrast in the progress of the Indian people today . . . they are fast becoming a white and delightsome people. . . . For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised. . . . The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation. At one meeting a father and mother and their sixteen-year-old daughter were present, the little member girl – sixteen – sitting between the dark father and mother, and it was evident she was several shades lighter than her parents on the same reservation, in the same hogan, subject to the same sun and wind and weather. . . These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness.

Kimball was rewarded for his powers of observation by becoming the 12^th LDS president in 1973, five years after Romney returned from France. Not until five years later did another LDS president have a “revelation” to allow black males into its priesthood, without officially changing Mormon teaching on the “pre-birth” evil of black souls.

Romney with future Mormon president Howard Hunter

People make mistakes, especially young people who have been brainwashed by elders claiming to speak for God. Mistakes can be forgiven, but only for people who acknowledge that what they did was wrong and resolve not to do it again. So is Mitt Romney ever going to apologize, not for being Mormon, but for spreading vicious and disgusting teachings on race? Unlike Joseph Smith, I don’t claim to be able to predict the future. I do know, though, that the title of the campaign book Romney published earlier this year is No Apology.