Author Archives: Scars upon the Earth

Hidden

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Treetop came home. Staghorn saw her dart furtively into the burrow under their leaf-tent, and lay down on the bed of leaves with her back to him. He knew she was hiding something. He did not want to talk to her though.

He sighed in frustration: Gods, she drives me crazy! Well, there’s no avoiding it. So he went over to where she was and squatted down.

Then he saw it. The tiny wolf cub latching on to her breast, suckling.

“What are you doing!” he spat, reaching for the cub. She slapped him away.

“Shhh!” she hushed. “If they see her, they’ll try to kill her.”

“I want to kill it too! Give it to me!” Staghorn demanded.

“No!” She pushed him away. “The cub is mine. I have lost my baby now. I love her, and I want to keep her.”

Staghorn could not believe what Treetop was saying. His mind spun. Has anyone ever tried to keep a wolf cub? He could not remember anyone doing that.

“Are you insane? No one has ever kept a wolf cub. No one ever will. The wolf is our enemy. The wolf kills our people. We have to kill them. If you raise this wolf, it will simply turn on us and kill us too.” Staghorn shook his head.

“I don’t care. I want to keep it and I will. If you love me, you will help me hide her.” She kept her back to him.

He thought to himself: “That’s it. I cannot stand her any longer.” He turned to walk away.

But he knew: He could not live without her. This was just another one of those things that drove him crazy about her. But when he thought about it, how she would not bend to his will, how he wanted to mate with her then!!

Gods! It was annoying. But if it wasn’t Treetop, it would be some other cross woman.

“Alright. You can keep it. For now. But how will you hide it?” he asked.

“Stop calling her ‘it’!” She insisted. “I don’t know. I need you to help me. Say that I am sick. Bring me food. I will keep her here with me and feed her. After a few days, maybe we will think of something.”

And so it was. They kept the little thing, who eventually he started to call “her”. And then an amazing thing happened. When he lay in the burrow with Treetop, spooning with her, watching her feed that tiny cub, he began to hate her a bit less. Gradually, she opened her eyes and began to gaze into his. He saw his soul in there, sometimes.

He found himself after a few days hopelessly in love with her too. He knew, crazy as it sounded, that if someone tried to kill this cub, he would have to kill him.

Hated

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ClosedFist hated wolves.

Everyone he had ever known, ever cared about, had been killed by wolves. He knew they would kill him eventually. The moment the wolves took him often haunted his dreams. He feared that moment more than anything.

This is the way he thought: The people of the tribe did fine, mostly. We could find food very well. The land where we live is good and keeps us fed. We make our leaf tents, and burrow under them. We sleep with our women and make our babies.

Life is good, mostly.

If it wasn’t for the wolves. The wolves are always there. So many! Impossible to escape from them, either. They run much faster than we do.

Often he wondered why it was that the gods decided to make people walk and run on two legs, when the wolves and other beasts have four. It is so much faster to run on four legs!

But then we would not have hands. And hands are wonderful! We make our spears, our flint tools. Sometimes if the year is good, and we take some game, we can make leather. We take the skin, dry it by the fire, and all the men take turns pissing on it. Then we take the fat from the meat and rub it on the skin until it becomes soft.

BuckHoof had taken some leather and cut it with the flint tools into long strips. Then he twisted it together. He was trying tangling the pieces together in all sorts of ways. ClosedFist did not understand the purpose of the thing that BuckHoof was trying to do, but it was interesting. BuckHoof called it rope.

So, maybe hands are good. We get to make things, do things which other beasts cannot.

But wolves still kill us all, eventually. Except Oroco. The people kept him alive. He remembers the old stories, from the priest who came before him. That was important to the village. We need to remember the old stories to know how we should live now.

So we keep Oroco in the center of the village, away from where wolves would come.

But Oroco was the only one. Everyone else always died from wolves. There were no exceptions that ClosedFist could remember.

ClosedFist

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ClosedFist was Staghorn’s friend. He knew this was his function.

He was there with Staghorn, always. What Staghorn wanted, that was what they got.

Staghorn was simply the most important man in the village.

But, of course, Oroco was the chief. He always would be, until he died.

He was old now, though. Although hale and in good health, he was stiff and tired a lot. He slept, mostly.

They brought him food. All of the tribe looked after him.

He was the most respected man in the village, and obviously he was still the priest.

But he was not the most important. That was Staghorn.

Staghorn was simply the most useful man in the village. He was the best at everything. He was always catching game. They would be out on a stalk together, just the too of them, daring the wolves to attack, driving them off with spear thrusts until they tired of the chase.

Then, they would hunt together.

But always, it was Staghorn who would find the food. Sometimes even a pig! They had been the chiefs together that night. They had brought back a male boar – with tusks! How they had feasted!

They ate the cooked pig flesh, roasted right in the fire, until their bellies bulged.

He was Staghorn’s friend. He was OK with that. He was the second most important man in the village that way.

Staghorn

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Staghorn was enraged.

He sat in front of his tent, where he and Treetop slept, with is closest friend, ally, and second-in-command, ClosedFist. His head in his hands, between his knees, he trembled.

ClosedFist knew not to try to touch him now.

It was the wolf, he knew that. The wolf had taken MonkeyHand, his son. So many people they had lost to wolves!

He remembered them all. AngryMan had gone into the forest. He had not returned. They found his gnawed corpse later, strewn through the forest.

He had wept. He wished he could weep now. Maybe later he would grieve.

Too many. Too many gone. Always, it was wolves.

But Treetop! He could not help himself: He hated her, a bit, for her betrayal, her disobedience in following the hunting party earlier tonight.

But he knew. His problem was simple: He loved her. It was the true love, the once-in-a-lifetime love. And his love for her was because of this very thing.

He loved her because she disobeyed. He could not imagine being with a woman who would obey him. He would not respect her! She needed to have her own mind, to tell him what she wanted.

He knew it was not a good thing, that he was like this. But there it was. He could not help it. He loved her.

He remembered when he first saw her, when she was just a small child. He was a very young man then, only fourteen summers or so. He was smitten with her. He noticed quickly how strong willed she was. She was always in trouble.

Later, when her breast began to form, he found himself staring at her. She soon noticed his attention. It turned out that she loved him too. Once she understood, finally, that she was the kind of woman he wanted, they had mated, and had been together ever since.

Now he knew that small hatred, the hatred of betrayal, for his beloved. Treetop would always bear some shame for this. He would never mention it to her again. He knew it would only anger her, and he had nothing to say. There was nothing to say that would change anything.

The problems is wolves. What to do about the wolves.

Treetop

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Treetop was pissed. Her man, River Monkey, had snubbed her, shouting at her to stay put. Going on and on about the prattle that Oroco spouts: Protect the open womb. Protect the baby.

So it’s too dangerous for her to go out with the hunting party? We’ll see about that.

She picked up her baby, MonkeyHand, and stuffed him brusquely into the leather pouch that River Monkey had given her, and strapped him on her back. By now, MonkeyHand knew not to cry: She would simply smother him if he did. He hated that, so he stayed quiet as she left the tent, and started following the men.

Such noise they were making! She sniffed derisively as she followed silently behind them. They were completely unaware of her, of course. No one could move through the forest better than Treetop, with her long, gangly legs. She was a woman of 19 summers with a man of her own now. Likely to be chief someday too!

River Monkey spotted the wolf as it began its kill run. It was moving in from the North, coming fast, hunting something, but not them. Then suddenly his heart was filled with fear as he saw Treetop take off running with MonkeyHand, their baby son, strapped to her back. He shouted for the men to follow, and took off after her.

Stupid! Treetop knew she was stupid! She was so busy in her own mind criticizing the men, that she had missed the wolf, and now she was being hunted. And she had the baby!

She felt more than saw the wolf pounce on her and MonkeyHand. She went down hard. She heard the sickening sound of the crunch of bone, as the wolf grabbed MonkeyHand by the head and shook him.

She heard Staghorn come in with his spear and end the wolf with a thrust through the heart. Then she reached down and picked up her dying infant son. She held him and watched as he struggled to breath, but she knew it was no good. Broken neck. Within a few seconds, he was gone.

He was gone. She felt the blow physically, as she fell to her knees sobbing hysterically. She looked up and met the eyes of her man, as she held her infant son’s body.

That moment was searing. She saw in his face the rage, the fury, at her defiance. And she knew that it was her fault that MonkeyHand was dead. She was wrong all along, and should have obeyed. Yet she also knew that is was not her nature to obey.

Desperately she looked into her man’s eyes and searched for some love, some forgiveness. And then she found it there. She knew that he was beyond anger, beyond words, for her stupidity. But she also knew that he still loved her. In that she found some small comfort.

And that was when they heard it: A soft scuffling, scratching and whimpering sound. Nearby they found the den, filled with five newborn cubs.

She reached out and grabbed his arm and said: “She was defending her cubs. We would have done the same.”

River Monkey turned and gazed at the female mother wolf, lying dead on the ground with his spear through her heart. He walked over and roughly pulled out his spear. Grinding his teeth he said: “We have lost enough of our people to wolves. I am not in the mood to forgive this one. Pebble! Kill those cubs. Let’s get out of here.”

She collapsed onto the forest ground and began to grieve. Dimly she heard the men’s spears pounding as they beat the cubs to death. And then the men, sensing that she needed to be alone with her son, began to withdraw.

She lay there on the ground alone for a long time, how long she did not know. She was lost in grief, self pity, remorse, and guilt. She wanted to undo what she had done. She wanted her son back. But she knew there was no going back now. What was done was done.

Gradually, she became aware of another sound, coming from the den. Reluctantly, she went to the den, and there she found a sixth cub, a female, lying hidden in the back, behind a rock. She was quite unharmed and helpless, her eyes still closed.

She hated this cub. With all her might she wanted to rip her throat out with her own teeth. Or she could simply leave her there to starve. That would be crueler anyway.

But as she looked at the small, tiny, newborn cub, she began to pity her. She realized, again, that the mother wolf was protecting her den. She understood that. Finally, she found that she could not bring herself to kill the tiny creature.

But what to do? Without a mother to feed and protect her, this cub would die very quickly. The solution was right there on Treetop’s chest: Her breasts were still full of milk.

Impulsively, not realizing what she was doing, she put the cub on her breast. The cub nuzzled, latched on and began to feed hungrily. Holding the cub in her arms as she fed, she made her way back to the tribe.

Treetop never knew it, but that one decision, the choice to nurture and feed that wolf cub, is the most important single thing that has ever happened on this world.

Like-A-Wolf

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I am beginning a series of blog posts that will read much like a novel, with each blog post reading like a chapter. I call this book “Like-A-Wolf”.

The basic subject is the domestication of the dog. I regard the invention of the dog (I use the term “invention” very carefully – more on that later), as the most important single event in the evolution of human culture, for reasons which will become clear.

Sooo, why do I say “invent”?

First, many of the organisms which we consume as agricultural products are human inventions. Wheat for example. The ancestor of wheat is very different from the organism which we know today. We selective bred wheat to be what we wanted: A sweet, large seed grain with specific properties.

In a similar manner, dogs were effectively selectively bred by paleolithic humans. The mutation which makes dogs different from wolves is known as empathy. As Jeremy Rifkin points out in his post The Empathic Civilization, empathy, is the most powerful aspect of our consciousness, and really defines us as humans. We have a form of hardware in our brains which enables empathy, called mirror neurons. This causes our brain neurons to fire when we see suffering in exactly the same manner as the organism which is experiencing the suffering. Hence we “feel the pain” of an organism we observe suffering.

Other organisms on the planet do not generally have empathy. Wolves, for example, have a psychology which is very similar to what in human psychology is referred to as a psychopath: Basically an insatiable killing machine. Wolves normally have empathy during the period up to adolescence. (All mammals have some form of empathy when being suckled by their mother, as that is required in order to live effectively in a den of other cubs. An insatiable killing machine would not work in that context.) Once a wolf goes through adolescence, however, the psychopath mentality eventually takes over, and the wolf ceases to make eye contact, and becomes devoid of empathy.

Once in a while, though, a wolf is born with an interesting mutation: It is permanently capable of empathy. We refer to this as “tame”. The normal fate for this cub would be to be killed by the other wolves in the pack after it goes through puberty. Empathy is definitely not an adaptive trait for surviving in a wolf pack.

What happened then is very interesting: A woman made the choice to suckle a wolf cub. (I weave this idea into the story, in which a 19 year old girl who recently lost a baby and has full breasts finds a wolf cub and decides to suckle it.)

Hence the “invention” term: Many human inventions are not intentional, but rather accidental. What makes them inventions is the human aspect. Undoubtedly, there were wolves being  born with this mutation. But a human never decided to nurture one until this point.

Once that happened, the paleolithic tribe where that occurred would quickly discover that they had a devastating weapon. Not only could a pack of domesticate wolves be used by a human hunting party against all kinds of game. (Paleolithic humans after the invention of the dog were able to bring down all kinds of big game, up to and including wooly mammoth, and at that point become the dominant species on the planet.) Dogs enabled humans to capture and domesticate the goat, sheep, horse, cow, donkey, and so forth. The dog was first, though. Effectively the neolithic experiment (i.e. the invention of agriculture) begins with the dog, which was the first domesticated animal.

Eventually, the dog was used as a weapon against neighboring tribes, with devastating effect. That resulted in the rise of the first neolithic empire, the invention of slavery, and all the rest.

We are who we are  because of the domestication of the dog.

Diane Rehm has a Bad Day

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As many of my faithful readers know, I am an avid NPR listener. One of my favorites has always been the Diane Rehm show. Lately, I was listening and happened to hear her show entitled Trends in Teenage Drug Use, on the recent study by NIDA (National Institute on Drug Abuse). Her guest was Dr. Nora Volkow, the director of NIDA.

Generally, Diane makes a valiant attempt to provide balanced reporting of her subject. Alas, on this day, from what I could tell, Diane did not show up. The guest was allowed to make a lot of hay, with no adult supervision to be found.

There were so many poor examples of bias on this guest, that I kind of don’t know where to start, so I’ll just jump in. Let’s start with the NIDA study itself. I have searched for the NIDA study which is discussed on the show, but cannot find it on the web. If any readers have access to this, please send me a link. I would love to read the actual study itself instead of relying on what Dr. Volkow says about it. But I’ll start there. The gist of the study is that the following trends exist among teens in the US:

  • Consumption of cannabis (commonly referred to as marijuana) is increasing.
  • Consumption of alcohol is declining.
  • Consumption of prescription drugs is declining.
  • Consumption of nicotine is declining.

Now, first of all, I could have told the NIDA folks that! Cannabis is in the process of exploding in our culture. 20 states have now legalized cannabis, and several more are poised to do so shortly. We are quickly going to be in a situation where the majority of the US states have legalized cannabis.

Given that, yes, of course cannabis consumption is increasing in our culture. That’s not just happening among teens, though. It is happening across all age groups other than small children (even some of whom are consuming cannabinoids to treat some severe medical problems: more on this later).

As so well documented by Martin Lee in his excellent book Smoke Signals, in jurisdiction after jurisdiction in which cannabis becomes legal, the experience is very consistent: when the population switches to cannabis, the consumption of other inebriants drops dramatically.

Now, you may be asking, why is that good news? Simple. Cannabis is by far the least dangerous and least harmful inebriant we have access to in our culture. Far safer than either alcohol or nicotine. The dirty little secret among the drug folks is that alcohol and nicotine are both far more dangerous than either opiates or cocaine in terms of long term health effects! But cannabis is the benchmark for a safe inebriant. It has no fatal overdose level. No one has ever been killed as a result of overdosing on cannabis.

Likewise, the long-term effects of cannabis use are arguably relatively benign, especially compared to other inebriants.

Which gets back to Diane’s guest, Dr. Volkow, who spent copious amounts of time decrying the increase in cannabis use among teens, while never even mentioning the decline in the other inebriants. And Diane let her get away with it! What about discussing comparative risk? Dr. Volkow argued that long term cannabis use is associated with lower IQ in teens. (I seriously doubt the credibility of that study, as indicated by my own local NPR station’s coverage of it: Another item which Dr. Volkow conveniently failed to mention.) Even then, what about the effect on IQ, cognitive function, etc., of long term alcohol use among teens (which is depressingly common in our culture)?

Again, comparative risk. Compared to alcohol and nicotine, cannabis is far less dangerous, in so many ways.

Take driving. In many areas of the world where cannabis has become legal, the rate of traffic fatalities declined. (Yes you are safer driving high on pot, than you are driving drunk. No kidding. Arguably, you may be safer driving slightly high than you are driving straight. More on that later as well.)

Another one: Domestic violence. Yeah, no kidding. Folks get along better and quit fighting so much when they switch from alcohol (which ignites and inflames violent tendencies) to cannabis (which calms them down).

Another one: Crime. Yes, oddly, the folks who opposed legalizing cannabis did so partially on the basis of an argument that cannabis use would cause crime to increase. Not so. All forms of violent crime decline when cannabis becomes legal in a particular area.

You get the idea: Alcohol is much worse for you and for society than cannabis. Yes, that should be no surprise. Dr. Joyclyn Elders (former Surgeon General under President Clinton) knew that and said so on the record way back in the 1990’s. There have been so many studies on that score that it should be no longer controversial at all.

Ok, I’ll hit you with one more example of Dr. Volkow’s bias and then we’ll call it good: The idea that cannabis of today is so much worse for you, because it’s so much stronger.

This one is just patently ridiculous. Anyone who has tried cannabis knows how silly this is. Cannabis simply does not work that way.

Technically, cannabis is a bi-phasic drug. That means it has two distinctly different effects: One at a low dose, and one at a high dose. It is similar in this respect to nicotine. We don’t usually deal with folks who overdose on nicotine, though. (And trust me, that ain’t pretty!)

At low doses, THC produces the following effects:

  • Euphoria
  • Increased appetite
  • Increased sex drive
  • Senses are more pronounced
  • Reaction time is faster
  • All cognitive functions are better, other than the time sense
  • Increased energy

When someone overdoses on THC, the effects are quite different:

  • Severe anxiety
  • Vertigo
  • Nausea
  • Passing out

Unlike nicotine (which can absolutely kill you if you overdose), THC will not kill you at any dose. However, anyone who has experienced a THC overdose (and this is very common early in someone’s consumption of the drug) will tell you how unpleasant a THC overdose is. Certainly, no one in their right mind would intentionally overdose on THC. It is simply too unpleasant.

Which gets back to the idea that it is somehow evil and bad that folks selectively bred cannabis to produce larger amounts of relevant cannabinoids (one of which is THC). Nonsense. That simply means that you would need to consume less cannabis to produce an appropriate dose. That does not mean (as Dr. Volkow obviously implied) that the new stuff will blast you into the stratosphere. Cannabis is self-regulating in that manner, which may be one of the reasons it is so much safer than alcohol. Alcohol has only one effect, and that effect continues to operate, quite well thank you very much, until you succumb to the sedating effects and simply pass out.

I did attempt to post these comments on Diane’s website, but annoyingly, she decided to moderate me. So here you go, Diane. I will not be silent.

I am a Postchristian

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I have discovered that I am a postchristian. Wikipedia defines postchristianity this way:

Postchristianity is the decline of Christianity.

I would accept that definition as long as the decline occurs not only within human societies (as the wikipedia article indicates) but also within my own heart. I read the article and recognized the state of my own heart: I am what you become once you decide the Christianity is bullshit.

I do not say that Jesus is bullshit. Jesus may be the real McCoy. I don’t know. At the very least, Jesus was a terrific guy, at least from what we can tell from the biblical record. Way, way ahead of his time. And a genuine improvement over the other apocalyptic prophets of the time.

My experience has not been so much with Jesus as with his followers. I have become a reluctant critic of the American style of Evangelical Christianity, which I have come to believe is simply a form of capitalism at this point. And the product is essentially a form of entertainment. A religious buzz, nothing more.

Now, having said that, others are apparently figuring this out as well. There is a postchristian church. And it is exploding, largely at the expense of the more traditional Protestant churches.

I encountered one such church last Sunday, and as I write this, my wife and I intend to go there again tomorrow. This is Unity Center of Peace in Chapel Hill. I had a nice conversation with Rosemary, the (oh, I don’t know what to call her: Head Pastor?) at Unity. Seems they welcome all comers. Persons of all faiths or no faith at all. Their statement of faith says that they welcome unbelievers. I replied: “Great! I am an unbeliever. Thanks for welcoming me.”

There does appear to be a mildly delusional, but otherwise quite pleasant, gospel, which I refer to as the “interfaith gospel”. I will blog on that later.

Dark Verses

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I recently ran across this blog, which I found quite engaging. The author (named Tracy as I will refer to her in this post) claims to promote a state of being “radically free”, and generally, I would say she is on a good path towards that goal.

But she still continues to engage in one (in my opinion) form of delusion: She continues to maintain that the bible is the Word of God, or “revealed truth” as I like to call it. This particular Christian dogma takes many forms. In its most extreme fundamentalist form (which Tracy obviously rejects), the bible is to be read literally, as a historical document.

While Tracy certainly does not hold to that view, she does tend to quote the bible in support of her position. I call this “bible bashing”.

Bible bashing occurs when a person regards the bible as authoritative for human living, and the expression of divine will. I no longer hold that view, and I believe a careful and systematic study of the bible will reveal what I have discovered: The bible as we know it is a work of human culture. A collection of literature, nothing more.

How do I know this? Easy. First, I look at the 85% of the bible that almost all Christians (and Jews for that matter) tend to ignore. I call these the “dark verses” (hence the title of this post). These are the verses that show the character and nature of the god described in the bible. Which is a pretty poor character in my view, and I think most reasonable folks would agree.

Take a story that Christians love: The story of the flood, Noah, and so forth, which is contained in Genesis 6-9. This is a story which I personally taught to my children as  a bedtime story. My wife and I even decorated our children’s bedrooms with pictures of the ark, animals, and so forth.

Let’s get real. This is a terrible story. In this story, the god of the universe, the creator of all the stars, galaxies, and so forth, decides that he is annoyed with mankind, because they are engaging in all sorts of behavior of which he disapproves. (No explanation is ever given as to why this particular god has an opinion about things like foods, sexuality, what day we should rest, etc.) Anyway, because mankind has failed to measure up to his standard, he has a simple solution: Wipe them all out.

Imagine the young mother at that moment, holding her newborn infant in her arms while god causes the waters to rise. She struggles to keep her baby above the surface of the waters. Eventually, she is overwhelmed, and her baby falls into the water and is drowned as well.

Now, several questions are patently obvious:

  • Would you worship a god who would kill an innocent infant in cold blood for the purported crimes or his or her mother, or other adults in his or her culture? I mean come on here! Supposedly, one of the basic tenets of Christianity is redemption which is a beautiful idea. The gist is that all humans are capable of being fundamentally good, if simply given a chance. Everyone has the potential to be redeemed. Not this baby apparently. At least not in god’s eyes. He or she never gets a chance to prove what kind of life he or she would have had. In my mind that god is a monster, a genocidal maniac who makes Hitler look like an alter boy.
  • What are the crimes of which this culture is guilty, and which is connotated to justify mass genocide? Homosexual practices for one. Does anyone in our current culture maintain that because of homosexuality that our culture deserves to be wiped out? (If so, I would suggest that you are a bit out of step with modern values.)
  • Oh and the other crime: Worshipping the detestable gods of their religion. Which I have pointed out before is simply code: Religious documents of all stripes invariably refer to the practitioners of another religion as wicked idolaters. That’s right before they decide that these folks deserve to be killed.

Many other examples could be chosen. I have pointed out all of the incredibly cruel, misogynistic, bigoted and just plain stupid things in the Old Testament law. And the New Testament (especially the later books like the Pastoral Epistles and the Book of Revelation) are little better. Even the gospels do not escape from the issue of dark verses.

I will not belabor the point further. My real purpose in this blog post is to beseech all of my fellow humans: For the sake of the planet, for the sake of human suffering, please, please, pretty please, drop the silly pretension that your particular religious text (whether it is the bible, the Quran, the Vedas, the Gita, or whatever) is the revealed truth. It is simply not possible for all of these books to be faxed from heaven: They are wildly inconsistent, after all. (The bible is even internally inconsistent, which is also true of many of the other texts which claim the status of revealed truth).

As long as there are millions of believers who maintain that their particular book is the revealed truth, and yours is the work of demons, we are all going to remain stuck in a persistent state of being assholes who bash each other over the head with these books. Can we stop doing this now, please?

Perfect Sinless Life = Genocidal Maniac

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I have blogged previously on the idea that the concept of sin causes religious folks to behave in various evil and irrational ways. Thus, I identify the concept of sin as the “enemy” in terms of religion. That is, sin is the part of religion that does the most damage to human society and increases suffering, war, and the like.

In the post, I will examine an interesting discovery that I made recently: Especially when we are talking about a major Western religion (i.e. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), a person who lives a perfect, sinless life (from the perspective of that religion) is frequently also found to be a genocidal maniac who commits numerous war crimes.

This seems counter-intuitive because these folks look so good, at least from outward appearances. And there is absolutely no doubt (at least not within their own circle) concerning their sincerity.

A few examples would suffice. I have previously called out good old King Josiah, arguably the first truly monotheistic Jewish king. (I believe that Solomon, for example, was a standard, run-of-the-mill pagan who simply worshiped Yahweh as a pagan god.) Josiah is held up by many Christians as the ideal godly person within the Old Testament canon. He truly worshipped God!

And, again, looking at it from the perspective of either Rabbinic Judaism or Christianity, Josiah looks really good: He did embrace utterly the way of the law of Elohim. And he was revered for this reason during his own time, at least from what we can tell from the biblical record.

That record, as well as extra-biblical sources, also tell a darker story: Josiah was one of the most maniacal mass murderers in ancient times. He was responsible for eradicating massive numbers of his own subjects for the simple (and in our minds unacceptable) reason that they practiced a different religion from his. And he is actually praised in the bible for doing this! (See: 2 Kings 23:4-10).

And, of course, all of this genocidal activity is fully justified, because it was blessed by God. In this respect, Josiah is depressingly similar to other figures of the OT who get treated with great deference by Christians. These include Elijah, who massacred the worshippers of Baal (a very common practice at the time, apparently), and of course Joshua, who wiped out entire tribes of Canaanites, Hittites, etc., during the invasion of the Land of Canaan as described in the Book of Joshua. Typically, the tribe of Israel was instructed by Joshua to “kill everything that breaths”, and, again, this was all justified by divine blessing. See for example, this ridiculous excuse for a website in which the slaughter of innocent children is condoned because of the “wicked idolatry” of the people of Canaan. (Isn’t it interesting that in every religious text, pretty much without exception, the practitioners of another faith are referred to as “wicked idolaters” or some other similar fluff, right before we decide that it would be a great idea to kill them?)

Moving into the Christian era, the New Testament is devoid of any genocidal maniacs, which is pleasant to be honest. However, we don’t get too far into the Christian era before we have the rise of despicable creatures like Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria. Cyril was actually declared a saint by the Roman Catholic Church, despite his genocidal persecution of Jews and pagans, as well as the murder of Hypatia, an innocent prominent woman for the sole reason that she was an agnostic, and led a school of Neo-Platonic philosophy. His shock troops, the notorious Parabalani, were probably the first true terrorists in the world. Certainly, the murder of Hypatia, an innocent civilian by any measure, is the textbook definition of terrorism. The sainthood of Cyril undoubtedly states where the Roman Catholic Church stood on these actions.

Later Christians were no better. Another example from the 15th century would be Tomas de Torquemada, who I have blogged on previously. Torquemada was the original Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition. Far from the deranged monster that is frequently depicted in film and print, Torquemada was a very charming and admirable person who convinced almost everyone he knew of his utter and complete devotion to God. Why? He truly was sincere! Torquemada simply took literally and idea that many Christians pay lip service to, but do not behave as if they believe: Hell is real and far worse than anything we experience in this life. Thus, to Torquemada, torturing someone to death in an attempt to get them to repent and accept the true religion was not only justifiable: He was actually doing that person a favor!

Yet another would include Sir Thomas More. While More certainly lived an exemplary life, at least within the context of his Roman Catholic religion, he personally imprisoned Protestants for heresy and ordered the execution by burning of six Protestants. Their crime: Heresy due to their being Protestant. In More’s mind, nothing else was required in order to justify their agonizing death. More even regarded their death as being a requirement of God.

Protestants do not fare well either. As this site points out, many Protestants have committed terrible atrocities against Catholics, on the sole cause that they were Catholic. Again, no crime other than practicing a religion other than my own is needed to justify the death sentence for these people.

It boggles the mind. I think I am making an important point here though: Frequently I hear Christians argue in favor of Christianity by stating that the behavior of prominent Christians throughout history is so refined, so representative of the nature and purpose of God. Not. It turns out that Christians are just like everybody else: Christians have behaved in a manner equally as despicable and reprehensible as any other group in human history. Certainly, there are very admirable Christians who are not genocidal maniacs. Mother Teresa comes to mind. Also St. Francis of Asisi. But do not be fooled by these positive examples. A perfect, sinless life within a religious context is sometimes the gateway into something far darker.